Ministries
Resources
Habakkuk 3:6:
6He stood, and measured the earth: he beheld, and drove asunder the nations; and the everlasting mountains were scattered, the perpetual hills did bow: his ways are everlasting.
With the completion of the year another limit is set upon your life and upon the number of your days.
A new year is brought into the allotted span of your life. In the year that is past, and so it remained throughout all those months, all those weeks, all those days. But now it is ended. It is gone and will never return. Now you pass into a new year, and involuntarily you ask what this year will bring you and yours. Whether this year will outlive you, or whether you will outlive it. And this of itself prompts you, at the threshold of this year, to look up to your Father in heaven, to ask little but to trust much, to lay the hand upon the mouth, and, quietly as the weaned child, to await what God will bring upon you, and upon your dear ones.
"The courses of the age are his," declares the prophet (Habakkuk 3:6, Dutch Version). God counts and reckons with centuries, as the dial of your clock, with hours and minutes. You are the little one in need of help, who counts with tenths of a second; your God bathes Himself in eternity with millions of time-periods at once. There is no comparison conceivable between your reckoning of time and the time-reckoning of God. With God it is the ever welling, the always bubbling up, the perennially bountiful, overflowing fountain of the eternal; with you it is the dripping of the moments, audible to you in the tick of the seconds. How unbearably long sometimes, when you must wait, five single minutes seem.
Never must this more than gigantic difference between you and your God be lost from sight; a difference that stretches so far that it is absolutely impossible for us to make plain to our understanding the relation between our time and the eternity of our God, though we know that this relation must be there, and is. Surely, if you die happily in Christ, you, too, shall one day enter upon this eternity, in order to enjoy therein great things eternally; but yet, even this shall never be to you the eternity of your God. Though presently you live eternally, you have had a beginning, but your God never. "Before the mountains were brought forth, yea, from eternity to eternity, thou art God" (Psalm 90). And this never applies to man.
But however inconceivably great this difference is between you who live by hours, and your God to Whom the courses of the age belong, such is the grace of your Lord, that He breaks the period of your life-time, from the cradle to the grave, into parts of years, and into parts of days, and into parts of hours and minutes, and thereby imparts to your otherwise so short life, a breadth, a lengthening of duration and a richness of scope, which makes you bathe yourself in the little pond of the brief years of your life as in an ocean.
Time and its division into years and days has not been invented by you; it has been ordained for you by your God. "And the evening and the morning were the first day" is the creation word, whereby this entire order and division of time was appointed in your behalf, before man had yet appeared on this earth. Sun and moon and the rotation of the earth and the pulsation of the blood in your veins, have been disposed with the view of dissolving your life into minutes and seconds. And it is through this wondrous means, wonderful in its simple design, that the grace and the loving kindness of your God has created, in behalf of you and because of you, a wealth of life in the past, now in the present, and before long in the future, whereby your life, which by itself is so short, becomes almost immeasurably long and great, both in retrospect and prospect.
Even that one year that now again lies behind you seemed so long to you that only a few of its more significant days are clearly remembered, and the new year that begins makes an impression as though it could never end.
Yea, and what is more, not only has your God Whose ways are everlasting, richly divided your life and thereby mightily enlarged it in your idea, but He entered and continually enters into this your minutely divided life with His faithfulness and Fatherly care.
From week to week, and from day to day, His compassion and His love are over you, new every morning and glistening with new brightness every evening. From hour to hour He goes before you on the way. And all along to the very subdivisions of your hours into minutes and seconds, the pulsation of your blood in your heart is His work. He takes notice of every sigh that from your heart goes up toward Him.
He is the Father of the everlasting ages, Who from sheer grace, for the sake of enrichment, divides the life of His child even to its minutest parts, and enters into every one of these parts and subdivisions with His grace to protect you.
But if God Himself thus divides your life, and enters into every part of it with His grace, it is incumbent upon you, on the other hand, from this temporarily divided life to reach out after the courses of the age, and lift up yourself to the eternal.
In Revelation 10:6 we read, that the angel, who stood by the sea, lifted up his hand to heaven, and "sware by him, who liveth for ever and ever, that there should be time no longer."
Time is a form of existence that is given us by grace, but it is unreal; eternity alone is real. In eternity alone our destiny lies, and from the viewpoint of eternity alone can your existence, your future, your destiny be understood.
Whatever year of your life you may consider, it is never understood by itself. Before God, your whole life, with all its years, is one plan, one design, one whole. This plan, this design did not begin just with your birth but traces its lines backwards to the life of your parents and grandparents. And, likewise, in looking forward, this plan does not end with your death but extends across death and the grave into the everlasting ages of eternity. Even though you live here seventy or eighty years, this part of your life which you live on earth shrinks almost into nothing, when you put it alongside of the thousands and tens of thousands of years that await you in eternity. Your whole life on earth is nothing but the starting of the line to the first station in order after that to begin the real journey through your field of eternal life.
And not to understand this plainly and clearly, is the great cause of the discouragement that overtakes so many people, time and again, as they journey through this short earthly life.
A year of your life can never be understood by itself. Every year of your life must be viewed in connection with your whole life here, and with your whole life in the hereafter, because it stands so, and not otherwise, before God, and is so, and not otherwise, to be explained.
He Who fashions, forms and prepares you for eternity is the Lord. In His fashioning of your heart, in the forming of your person, in His preparation of your spirit within you for eternity, the courses of the age are His. Not what would provide you pleasure and love for the moment is the standard here; but what, in the course of the ages, you are to become, governs His plan of your life and existence.
On this long way, He leads you now through darkness and depth, then again through sunshine on the mountains of His holiness, but His plan, His design regarding you always goes through. And not what would smile on you this year, but what must happen to you in order to carry out His eternal plan concerning you, determines and decides what this year shall bring you. And why it must be so and not otherwise you can not understand now, but will hereafter.
He who forgets this, has no peace; but he who with his whole soul enters into this doing of his God, rests, whatever comes, in his Father's faithfulness.
If, now, caught within the narrow bounds of time, you continue to reckon by the day, by the week, and your heart becomes bitter every time that that day things go wrong or bring nothing but disappointment, then you become the prey of irresolution and gloom. Then it becomes one unbroken recital of complaint, a steady wail and lament; and the habit of seeing all things black overmasters you. Then there is no courage of faith, no inspiration to work out your destiny, no uplifting joy in God. Thence it comes that thousands upon thousands become either coldly indifferent, or continue the weary struggle with dejection and disheartenment till the end of their days. And he who so lives, what is he other than a play-ball before the wind of the day, and how far he sinks below his dignity as man! For does not the Prophet say (Ecclesiastes 3:2) that "God hath set eternity in the heart?" And "eternity in the heart," what else can it mean, than that God created in us the capacity to lift ourselves up from this whirling of the flakes of time around us, to the fixedness of the eternal ?
With this "eternity in the heart," let every child of God, therefore, bravely face the newly-opening year. He knows that he worships a God Whose are the everlasting ages, and that therefore God designs and also directs his life only in keeping with what eternity shall one day demand. He prays that it may be peace and joy, for after happiness his heart thirsts. But if this year he must go through a period when God puts him in the smelting furnace, or makes finer cuttings on the diamond of his soul, then, though tears make his eyes glisten, he will nobly bear up in exaltation of faith; for then it is certain that he is in need of this, that it can not be otherwise, and that, if it did go otherwise, his life would be a failure forever.
To have to undergo a painful operation is hard, and yet the sick one willingly submits, and in the end pays large sums of money to the operator, because he knows, that this drastic treatment alone could save him.
And just like this, God's child stands before his Father in heaven. Not he, but God alone, must know what is indispensable and necessary for him this year, and what, in view of his permanent fashioning, this year must bring him. And should it be the case that this year such a Divine operation proves to be necessary, he will not murmur and complain, but willingly submit himself to God, yea, though the waves of sorrow should go over him, he will nevertheless rejoice in his God, knowing that what He doeth, must be done, both for the sake of His honor and for his own highest good.
* * * * * * *This devotional classic offers 110 meditations on a single thought from Psalm 73: "As for me, it is good to be near to God." The author states, "The fellowship of being near unto God must become reality ... it must permeate and give color to our feeling, our perceptions, our sensations, our thinking, our imagining, our willing, our acting, our speaking. It must not stand as a foreign factor in our life, but it must be the passion that breathes throughout our whole existence."
The meditations reflect the blending of spiritual vigor with doctrinal loyalty so consistently expressed in the life of Abraham Kuyper. These are devotions with true substance, avoiding the extremes about which Kuyper adds a word of caution: "Stress in creedal confession, without drinking from the Living Fountain, runs dry in barren orthodoxy, just as truly as spiritual emotion, without clearness in confessional standards, makes one sink in the bog of sickly mysticism."
Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) was a Dutch political leader and Calvinist theologian. Elected to parliament in 1874, he became Prime Minister in 1901 and served in that capacity until 1905. As a theologian, he revived a systematic, orthodox Calvinism. He founded the Free Reformed Church and the Free University of Amsterdam. His other works include Principles of Sacred Theology, Lectures on Calvinism, and The Work of the Holy Spirit
Further information about Abraham Kuyper's life can be seen in the translator's "Biographical Note"; further information about To Be Near Unto God can be Abraham Kuyper's "Preface" to that book.
© 2025 The Orthodox Presbyterian Church
