Biblestudy: The Purposes of Aging

A Positive View of Old Age
#1748bs
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 17-Feb-24; 64 minutes 2024-02-17

description: (hide)

Modern society, the one we live in right now, can correctly be called a youth culture. Everything is for the youth. We are fixated on being young and staying young. Millions of people around the world, a lot in this country, strive to emulate the beauty of young people, the perfect young model that they see on a magazine cover or on TV. Most of our advertising, as you probably know, is aimed for that key demographic of 18 to 25. And so we get an imbalance in our society when the youth, the ones that are doing all the running around and all the stuff that they do on media and such, and the rest of the people, middle-agers, old people, and even even little kids, are disproportionately shown.

But we have products like, this is an old one, I guess it is still around, Oil of Olay, Rogaine, Retin-A, Hair Club for Men. There are all kinds of makeups and hair dyes and various facial surgeries and body sculpting that all give people a false hope of staving off the inevitable, that inevitable process of aging.

You know, at some point, if it is not any of these things that people do from the outside, they also decide to do things on the inside. And then so they suddenly become very interested in healthy living. They scour the Internet to find what they should be eating and how they should be exercising. And actually today, it is more of when you will starve yourself to your optimal mobility throughout the day and how much you should eat and all these other things.

All this is done so we can hold off aging just as long as possible. Because let us be clear, let us be honest with ourselves, society, and some of us who still need to overcome society, looks upon aging as a curse. When that first gray hair or wrinkle appears in the mirror, it is as if suddenly your death knell has sounded. "Oh no! I'm old." Some people go into severe depression.

Men, as stalwart as they might try to be, have what is commonly called "a midlife crisis" at about that time in which they futilely try to recapture the energy, the vigor of their youth. Some go to great lengths when they feel this. They go so far as to dump their fortyish wives (not 40 wives, but at the age of 40) so they could take up with some young, vivacious, healthy college student, buy a sports car, wear stylish clothing, go live on a boat somewhere, take these extravagant vacations to Europe and Tahiti and various other places so they could look young and cool and energetic.

And so it comes down to an attitude. It is not just men, it is women too. They say, "Why age gracefully if you don't have to?" "Why age gracefully if you do not have to age at all?" And so they use whatever surgery or device or idea, philosophy, whatever, to stay young.

But have you ever considered that this is the way God made us? This is the way God meant for it to be. Aging is a fact of life. It is the process of mankind. He is the one who causes us to be born and to mature, and age and die. That is the process of a person's life. There is a lot more that usually goes on there, but it is a process of, we could say, growth. Most do not look at it that way. They see it as a process of decline.

This life cycle, as He put it into humanity, is part of His plan for us. So there must be a greater good in aging than we may have realized. It is like the old Star Trek thing. "Resistance is futile." You will age and ultimately, you will die.

So I would like to look briefly at a few of the, I will call them, divine purposes of aging so that we can look at aging a lot more positively than our culture does. And this is especially important for us in the church of God because the church is aging. Now in this room, we have a good variety of ages from the very little to the very old, and that is great. That is the way it is supposed to be. That is how communities work. You have all the various ages working together to bring out the best, hopefully, in everyone. But there are other parts of the church that are very old; that the only people who come to services are over 50 or even over 60. It is just a bunch of old people there. There must be a purpose for that.

And so we need to take a look at what God says about aging so that we can have a more positive outlook on our lives as we get wrinkled, get gray, stoop over, and all those other things, or maybe just lose your hair altogether. Because you really should not feel like your life is over. You should not feel that because you are old, you have nothing to contribute. You should not feel like trip and fall and your days are done. It is not that way, not from God's perspective. He has great respect for the aged among us that do as He wants them to do and fulfill the roles that He has given them.

Let us go to Ecclesiastes 3, verse 2 and just start there. We are going to go quickly through a couple of scriptures (or a small handful) just to establish this baseline that there is a process or a progress of life. First, this one in Ecclesiastes 3. Solomon says,

Ecclesiastes 3:2 A time to be born, and a time to die.

Now, just in those few words, he encapsulates all of life. There is a beginning and there is an end. There is a lot that goes on in between and a lot of growth that has to happen. But we have to face the facts that this is the way God made it for human beings.

Let us go back to the end of the book into the book of Hebrews, chapter 9, verse 27. Another scripture many of you probably know by heart, or nearly so. And this is:

Hebrews 9:27 And as it is appointed for men to die once, but after this the judgment.

This adds another wrinkle to this idea of aging and that is that you are going to age and die. But that period between the time you were born and the time you die is a period of judgment. And once all of that is over, then there is going to be a judgment about your life, which implies then that we need to use our lives in the best way possible so that our judgment is good. We do not want to misuse the days of our lives in a way that will cause God to judge us for bad. That would be not good. Right? I do not think we want God to judge us in that way.

Let us go to the book of Psalms, in chapter 90. We will read a half a dozen verses here. This is a psalm of Moses.

Psalm 90:1-2 Lord, You have been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever You had formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, You are God.

This is one part of an argument here that he is making. He is trying to make a comparison between God and us and he starts out with, God, You are forever, You are everlasting. There is no end of Your days. And if we would go through the next few verses, we find out that our life, on the other hand, this is the contrast, our lives just go (*snap!) quick, real quick.

Psalm 90:9-12 For all our days have passed away in Your wrath; we finish our years like a sigh. [That is how it seems like here. Here we are going, going, going all of our years. We have got all this energy and then they pass with a sigh. We are so tired.] The days of our lives are seventy years; and if by reason of strength, they are eighty years, yet their boast is only labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut off and we fly away. [We die.] Who knows the power of Your anger? For as the fear of You, so is Your wrath. So teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.

Here we have Moses in this psalm comparing God's eternal life with our pitiful lifespan. It is not only short but it is full of pain, full of sorrow, full of exhaustion, and the trials that we go through and the problems that we have. And he says, we go through this in a mere 70 years, maybe 80 years if we happen to have good health or have taken care of ourselves, or we have strong genes. You know, through no fault of our own or nothing that accrues to us really like a pat on the back or whatever, but we just happen to have a body that will last for 80 years instead of 70.

What Moses does here is he uses this contrast, this fact, to beseech God to help us to prioritize properly so that by the time we get to those last days, we have gained a heart of wisdom, as he puts it. We have made the right changes. We have learned the right things, we have grown and matured so that we have a heart like His. He has a heart of wisdom.

And so he is beseeching God to help us to use our time properly so that we can have the same kind of character that He has. That when faced with problems, we would act and do what He would do. Because remember, wisdom is all about doing what you know and understand to be good. It is that next practical step that we employ so that we come out with the best results. It is that skill in living (my dad used to call it that) that we employ so that good things happen rather than bad. So this is the wisdom of God that we are supposed to be growing in throughout our lives, not the wisdom of men.

Now notice what Solomon says in Ecclesiastes. We will start in chapter 11, verse 9, because again, Solomon here, like Moses, gives us a contrast.

Ecclesiastes 11:9-10 Rejoice, O young man, in your youth, and let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth; walk in the ways of your heart, and in the sight of your eyes, but know that for all these [that is, your actions, enjoying yourself when you are young] God will bring you into judgment. [You see, the judgment begins early in life so we need to be aware of that.] Therefore remove sorrow from your heart, and put away evil from your flesh [He is saying, do not grieve yourself by your wrong actions. Get that sorrow away from you. From your very earliest days, you need to be doing what God wants you to do.], for childhood and youth are vanity.

They go just like that (*snap!) again. They only happen for a short while and then they are gone. They are like that puff of smoke that dissipates in just a few seconds. Now, let us go into chapter 12.

Ecclesiastes 12:1 Remember now your Creator in the days of your youth [notice this is the transition point right here], before the difficult days come, and the years draw near when you say, "I have no pleasure in them."

That is when you get old, if you did not catch it. "Oh, I hate this life. I get up, I could barely walk my feet hurt so much. I go to the bathroom 15 times a night! I get no sleep and everything is just a drag." That is what he is talking about. When we get old and we have no pleasure from life anymore. It just seems to be one injury and illness and weakness right after another. Notice how he describes being old:

Ecclesiastes 12:2 While the sun and the light, the moon and the stars, are not darkened, and clouds do not return after the rain.

Remember, he is comparing youth to old age here. He is telling you while you still see light, while you are still seeing things optimistically, that is when you need to act—when you are young.

Ecclesiastes 12:3 In the day when the keepers of the house tremble, . . .

The keepers of the house is a symbol for one's arms. And you look at any old person, probably after 75 or 80, you will see the tremble. That is what he is talking about. The trembling of the arms when you get weak or just because of age your limbs begin to tremble a little bit. It is part of aging.

Ecclesiastes 12:3 . . . and the strong men bow down; . . .

These are essentially your legs. When your legs do not have any strength anymore and you just start bowing down automatically because they cannot hold you up as well.

Ecclesiastes 12:3 . . . when the grinders cease because they are few, . . .

This is talking about your teeth, when your grinders start falling out. We have dentistry today that makes this a little bit better, but losing one's teeth is a terrible experience.

Ecclesiastes 12:3-4 . . . and those that look through the windows grow dim [obviously your eyes, you do not see as well as you get old]; when the doors are shut in the streets, . . .

This is probably referring to the lips and the jaws, it is hard to use your mouth in the way that you would like. Mostly the jaws, I think, would be more of that.

Ecclesiastes 12:4 . . . and the sound of grinding is low; . . .

This has to do with being able to chew your food. You know, grinders he used as teeth, but this is the grinding, the sound of grinding is low because your teeth just do not work like they used to.

Ecclesiastes 12:4 . . . when one rises at the sound of a bird, . . .

I have been doing this lately, waking up at five o'clock. I mean, Beth does that routinely. It is just part of her internal alarm clock and she gets up and she is gone and she does her thing. But boy, when I get up that early it is like, shoot those stupid birds.

Ecclesiastes 12:4 . . . and all the daughters of music are brought low.

This has to do with your hearing; that you cannot hear certain pitches or notes anymore, or it just becomes very vague. Or you get tinnitus or something and you just cannot hear the way you used to when you were young.

Ecclesiastes 12:5 Also they are afraid of heights, . . .

Old people are known for getting vertigo and do not want to scale anything more than their bed because they might get might get an imbalance and fall.

Ecclesiastes 12:5 . . . and of the terrors of the way; . . .

This has to do with becoming fearful of traveling because you do not want to get very far from home base where you are comfortable and have all the things you need to keep going.

Ecclesiastes 12:5 . . . when the almond trees blossoms, . . .

This is kind of funny that he left it for this long, but this is just almond trees bloom white and so this is your hair. Your hair goes white when you get old.

Ecclesiastes 12:5 . . . and the grasshopper is a burden [How much does a grasshopper weigh, an ounce? You cannot pick it up because it just seems heavy.], and desire fails.

You might think this is a sexual thing and it may have sexual connotations, but it is talking about all kinds of appetites. You just do not have the appetite for doing this or eating that or experiencing this other thing. It is just you do not care anymore.

Ecclesiastes 12:5-8 For man goes to his eternal home, and the mourners go about the streets. [then he pounds his point home] Remember your Creator before the silver cord is loosed, or the golden bowl is broken, or the pitcher shattered at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the well. [these are all metaphors for death] Then the dust will return to the earth as it was, and the spirit will return to God who gave it. "Vanity of vanities," says the Preacher, "all is vanity."

This is life encapsulated. And so he says, you do not want to turn to God in your old age. I mean, if that is when God calls you, yes, you do it. But he says, it is so much better to learn the way of God when you are young and you can apply yourself; you can study and you have all those experiences that happen throughout life to learn God's way of wisdom that Moses talked about. And so maybe you do wake up at 5 a.m. or 4:30? You have a great time to study and you do, but when you are old it does not stick as well as it used to. You will forget things easier. And of course, if you are just sitting at home, you do not have a whole lot of experiences to put God's way into practice and learn all those things that God wants one of His children to learn.

So it is far better, he is saying here, to turn to God when you are young so that you can learn as much as possible, have the longest time to be converted, and to learn all those lessons and grow in that character because it will benefit you greatly in the age to come.

But some of us are stuck being old and trying to learn God's way as elderly people. But that does not mean there is no hope. That does not mean that one is washed up and cannot learn. Solomon is just saying that it is better younger because the younger person has energy and strength and a quick mind, and the ability to serve and do all these things that older people may not have as much of.

So, what we get here, though, is the idea that God wants us to always be learning. It is better to start when we are young, but if we are old when this happens, when God calls us, or maybe God has called us when we were younger but we did not have the zeal for it as much as we should have, or we went away and came back and now we have to learn things when we are older, then we should apply ourselves. But because we are older, we have to apply ourselves differently because we are in a different time of life. We cannot do young things anymore. We cannot learn those things.

Most of us do not end up getting married when we are old and having children when we are old. Only Sarah and Abraham did that, it seems. And those are big areas where God teaches us a lot of wisdom. So when we are old, we have to apply God's way a little bit differently, not wrongly, just differently because we are old. We cannot do the things that we could do when we were young.

Let us go now to Proverbs the 20th chapter.

Proverbs 20:29 The glory of young men is their strength, and the splendor of old men is their gray head.

That is great. So the distinguishing quality or the distinguishing asset of the young is their strength, their physical abilities, their energy. But as we age, our assets shift to different places. For the elderly, their prime advantage lies in the gray hair we despise so much. "I wish I had my full head of brown hair." Well, there are dyes for that. I guess you could do that, but it does not change the fact that you are old, that you actually have gray hair, and you have certain diminished capacities. But gray hair is one of the biblical symbols of experience and hopefully, of wisdom, good counsel, and level-headedness.

It should be all those things. It should be a sign that this person has lasted long enough because he had common sense. At least he has common sense. It should be a sign that the person with gray hair or white hair has discernment because he has gone through so many experiences that now he can pinpoint things much more accurately than someone who is young who has not gone through certain experiences before and is just guessing. But the old person knows because of the experiences that he has had. But on the other hand, there is no fool like an old fool.

Ecclesiastes 4:13 Better is a poor and wise youth than an old and foolish king who will be admonished no more.

This is the flip side of the gray hair being the strength of the old person. God is saying here that an old person who does not use his accumulated experiences, and wisdom, and discernment, and common sense, but does other things, will not seek counsel or what have you, is a fool. So just because one has gray or white hair it does not mean automatically that that person is wise.

And I think it is getting to be that way more in this day. We see a lot of old people that, what are they thinking prancing about on a rock concert stage when they are 80? I am just waiting for one of those guys to just have a heart attack and die on stage. But, you know, they keep themselves up pretty well. I do not know how they do it, must be drugs.

But it is a fact that old people should be respectable and one should be able to look at an old person and say, that person may have good advice for me that I could use in my life that might help steer me in a better direction.

Let us go to I Kings chapter 12. Let us just see a little story. This is a a prime example of older people fulfilling their roles. But in this case the younger people did not heed, which is very sad. This is a story of Rehoboam after Solomon died.

This is saying that when Solomon died, that they sent and called him, he is talking about Jeroboam. Because there was a problem here, Rehoboam versus Jeroboam. Jeroboam was not the heir, he was the former prime minister of Solomon, who most of Israel wanted to be the next king. But Rehoboam was the son and heir of Solomon.

I Kings 12:3-4 Then Jeroboam and the whole congregation of Israel came and spoke to Rehoboam, saying, "Your father made our yoke heavy; now therefore, lighten the burdensome service of your father, and his heavy yoke which he put on us, and we will serve you."

Jeroboam and the people come and say, "Look, the only reason we are in revolt here is because your father taxed us too much and he put us to work like slaves. If you get rid of those things, we will be happy to serve you, Rehoboam."

I Kings 12:5-7 So he [Rehoboam] said to them, "Depart for three days, then come back to me." And the people departed. Then King Rehoboam consulted the elders who stood before his father Solomon while he still lived, and he said, "How do you advise me to answer these people?" [so he went to the old men] And they spoke to him, saying, "If you will be a servant to these people today, and serve them, and answer them, and speak good words to them, then they will be your servants forever."

Easy, give in to their demands. Tell them you are not going to be as hard as your father was on them. Lighten the load, they will gobble it up, they will serve you.

I Kings 12:8-11 But he [Rehoboam] rejected the counsel which the elders gave him, and consulted the young men who had grown up with him, who stood before him. And he said to them, "What counsel do you give? How should we answer this people who have spoken to me saying, 'Lighten the yoke which your father put on us'?" Then the young men who had grown up with him spoke to him, saying, "Thus you should speak to this people who have spoken to you, saying, 'Your father made our yoke heavy, but you will make it lighter on us'—thus, you shall say to them, "My little finger shall be thicker than my father's waist! And now, whereas my father laid a heavy yoke on you, I will add to your yoke; my father chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scourges!"

Do I want to go any farther here? I do not need to. You know the story probably. That Rehoboam took the young men's advice and civil war broke out. He did not listen to the elders, the old men. So they were rebuffed by Rehoboam.

And this is actually many times par for the course. An older person's advice will often come across to the youth as no good and they will reject it because what do youth do? We just saw the Proverb. Proverbs said they rely on their strength, they are going to be big and mean and bold. And so the conciliatory message of the old people who have learned through a lot of experience, who know people better than young people do, well, that is rejected because the young men do not want to appear weak.

I mean, back then there was a generation gap too. That is not a modern thing. The generation gap has been happening since Cain, I think. It is just the way it is. Young people do not understand old people, they do not agree, and that is where conflict comes into the picture a lot of time.

But the wisdom of age must be present and known so the young, because it is going to be their job, can pick up the pieces after they have made a botch of things. That is why the old person needs to be consulted because they will give the wisdom that they think is right. And then the young people go and do their own thing and screw everything up monumentally. And who do they have to come to to figure out how to make it work again? The old people with wisdom.

And so that is what happened with Rehoboam. He had to get a very severe spanking by the rest of Israel, and God was in all that too. And he ended up having an okay rule after this, but he only had Judah, Levi, and a bit of Benjamin. So that is the way that worked out.

Let us go to Psalm 78, verses 5 through 8, the first part of this long psalm by Asaph. He is writing here about a directive that God gave Israel.

Psalm 78:5-8 For He established a testimony in Jacob, and appointed a law in Israel, which He commanded our fathers, that they should make them known to their children; that the generation to come might know them, the children who would be born, that they may arise and declare them to their children, that they may set their hope in God, and not forget the works of God, but keep His commandments; and may not be like their fathers, a stubborn and rebellious generation, a generation that did not set its heart aright, and whose spirit was not faithful to God.

Asaph gives a slightly different spin to what we just saw in I Kings 12. Here he puts it as a law, a directive from God, that the elders among us are to pass on the law of God, pass on their experiences with God, pass on their own experiences, pass on their wisdom, to the younger generations. And then the younger generations, when they finally move into that position themselves, they are supposed to do the same thing and pass them on to the next generations, so that you have this continual supply of God's words and the wisdom that people have learned from experiencing life under God's words and under God's will.

And so there is supposed to be this continual teaching of the older generations to the younger generations of the way of God so that they could keep on being God's people, so they could keep their identity as God's people, and to keep the character of God's people as God wants it to be shown. You know, those long, boring, and oft-heard stories that your grandparents told you. Well, that is kind of what he is talking about here. As young people, we do not appreciate them; that grandma tells you about the time she met grandpa and it was love at first sight and on and on and on. And you are like, "Grandma, I've got to go to baseball practice," but she keeps telling you and the next time you see her, she tells you the same thing. It is because this is almost ingrained in humanity. God may not have had to actually put this injunction for His people to do that because that is what old people tend to do. They tend to talk about their lives and their experiences and things they learned and so forth.

But these things that we hear from our parents and grandparents have a beneficial purpose as long as they are in God's way. Because what they do, these stories, they give the young a sense of history, a sense of place, a sense of purpose, even in the grand scheme of things. It helps to give the young people perspective, certainly about time. Rush Limbaugh used to say that every generation begins history with itself. It is a very selfish thing that we do. We do not like to look back at former generations and what they did. The Left in this country want to erase all history and say they know better and tell us what to do, when Conservatives, on the other hand, say, "Look, this is what happened in the time of King Charles the First and continue to do this, you're going to end up like England was in the Civil War." That does not matter to young people because their history begins with themselves.

And so God says here, "No, we have to give perspective, history going backward as many generations as we can so that we can give an idea of ourselves in a vast scheme of time and plan that God is working out. Now with our human grandparents that may only be a couple of generations back and with just about any generation that may be three generations is as far as you could go with eyewitness accounts.

But those people, back three generations, heard stories from two or three generations before them. And if those things are properly passed down within a family, it gives a great sense of where a person belongs, a great sense of history. And this is all the better when it is coupled with God's Word and an understanding of God's plan.

One of the things it does, it makes you feel small and that is a wonderful thing for a person in God's church to know that this has been going on for generations and generations and you are only a small part of it. And so it gives you a bit of humility to know that God has been working for a long time to bring things to pass for your benefit. It should be very humbling.

And then, when things come up in the church or in the world, when you have this perspective of history because you have had grandparents and whatever, giving you this sense of history through their own own stories, when these things happen, we have a starting point. We can understand that these have happened before. I mean, just remember the George Santayana quote that, if we do not remember history, we are condemned to repeat it. If you do not have a sense of history, you are going to repeat it because you are going to treat it as the first time this ever happened. But if you have a historical perspective, you could say no, this is what they did back then. This is how they solved the problem. This will keep us from the bad results that they had. It does not always work but at least you have the perspective of what is needed to be done. And that is wisdom. Wisdom can be passed down from generation to generation and it is better that way than learning it firsthand through disaster.

Let us go to Titus the second chapter. This is Paul's letter to Titus about how to be a pastor. And remember in those sermons I gave, the Cretans were tough people. They had their problems and they were a fairly new church. So Titus was given the project, if you will, the job of getting these people up to speed and in community with one another so that they could function as a church, as a unified church. And so all hands had to be on deck.

We are going to read the first five verses here. But as we begin, I want you to understand that what Paul is telling Titus to tell the people is act your age. Let us read it.

Titus 2:1-5 But as for you [Titus], speak the things which are proper for sound doctrine: that the older men be sober, reverent, temperate, sound in faith, in love, in patience; the older women likewise, that they be reverent in behavior, not slanderers, not given to much wine, teachers of good things—that they admonish the young women to love their husbands, to love their children, to be discreet, chaste, homemakers, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be blasphemed.

And then he talks to the young men and then later he talks to the servants among them, the slaves, the bond slaves. Many people in the church of God have either ignored or do not know of these responsibilities. And it has, in many ways, held the church back in its life and in its growth. So Paul tells these various groups within the church how they should act, what they should do, how they should be, how they should present themselves to others in the congregation. What's your job? Just because of how old you are, what part of life you are in. And once you pass into this stage of life, this is what is expected of you in the church.

So the elders among us, starting with the men here. The older men are to be sober. This does not mean that they are drunks and they need to be sober. That is not exactly what he means. The word means sensible. Remember, I said that the old people should have a bunch of common sense. That is kind of what this means. Sensible, clear of mind, that they can see things that are happening and have clear, sensible advice because of their experiences that they have had, they can be sensible about things that come up. And when somebody asks them a question, some young person, they can give them some very wise, sensible advice.

Let us move on to the next one. He says they are to be reverent, reverent in behavior, it says here. Now, this word can also be mean respectable or dignified. It can also be thought of as honorable or worthy of honor. They should carry themselves in a way, as an example, to be worthy of the respect that they give, that their behavior is within bounds, that is, always sensible and clear-minded, that they show themselves as a reverent example of how to live, how to behave, how to speak with people, how to act within the group.

He says that they are to be temperate. This word means self-controlled. They are to have control over their tongue, over their behavior, over their spending, over whatever it happens to be. They are to be controlled as an example to the younger among them. So they are supposed to be moderate, they are supposed to be sound-minded. When you see an older person on the extremes of things, it is very disturbing, at least it is to me. And he is saying, "No. People should be able to come up to you and engage with you and not be worried about you being weird in one way or another." That is kind of what it means about being moderate. That you are able to get along with everybody because you are not doing something extreme and strange. This also could be translated as sound-minded. So crazy old men, crazy old women, in the church should make sure they are not crazy.

He also says here that they should be sound or whole, healthy, balanced, another way of putting it, in faith, love, and patience. So they are to be examples of these things in the church, in the congregation, faithful, loving, patient, enduring people. Rocks of the congregation that people can look to and say, "Wow, when I get older, I wanna be like him or her because they are so solid."

So even as our bodies become less healthy, less strong, we should be striving as we get older to make our spiritual virtues more healthy, more strong, an anchor for the younger people within the congregation. Paul is telling Titus here, "Tell those people that they should not let their virtues wane with age. As a matter of fact, they should get stronger, they should wax, they should get better. They should be examples of the character that God has been instilling in them all these years."

Let us go on to the older women. The older women have similar responsibilities. They are to, like the men, be reverent. Here, the word is a little bit different though. This reverent means holy and sacred. They should be doing things and saying things that befit holiness. The word actually means "appropriate for the temple." So these holy women, these older women, should be just examples of what a holy person should be like.

Another way to put it, maybe this will help some people, is that he says, "Older women should live up to their consecrated state." God has made us holy; He has made us separate; He has set us apart for all these good works and such. Older women need to live up to that as an example and for themselves as well, as they get closer to their death and their marriage to Jesus Christ as part of the church. So this is both reverent in their behavior and in their demeanor.

Second, he says they should not be slanderers. Now, this goes back to the typical old woman gossip. You know, we see it caricatured in a lot of places that old women do not have anything to do. They are not running their house. They are just sitting on the porch in their rocking chair and they are constantly gossiping about what is happening in the neighborhood, what is happening in the church. The word is actually diabolos. They should not be devilish, if you will, accusers. That is the same word where Satan is called the accuser of the brethren—diabolos. Accusers, faultfinders, criticizers, like the Devil is.

So the older women are encouraged not to talk about what is happening in people's lives and spreading sins around through gossip, through rumor. Because it is a state that they could fall in because of their lack of duties, you might say. They have given those duties off to younger women in the household or they are set up by themselves and they do not have that anymore, any kind of major responsibilities, so to fill the time they just talk. And in much talk there is sin, the Proverbs say. So if you're going to talk, talk about godly things, talk about right things, not about other people and their sins.

Next one. It says they should stay away from the schnapps. That is actually not it. It is in the German Bible, right? No. It says "not enslaved to wine." It means that, I guess among the Cretans a lot of the old women became lushes for the same reasons. They did not have a lot to occupy their time. And so they gave in to these various appetites like drinking a lot. And that is not a good look for an old woman. And so he said, "Don't let these things like wine or what have you influence the way you behave, the way you come across to others. You need to be dignified." Remember the first one? They need to live up to their consecrated state.

Next one. They should be known as teachers of good things. That kind of encapsulates all of these that he has so far gone over. So they need to be teachers in word and by example, to especially the younger women. That is what he gets to next: "that they admonish the young women to love their husbands, to love their children, to be discreet, chaste, homemakers, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be blasphemed."

He is saying, do not be these other things, these bad things that I have warned you against. Put yourself in a position where you can give some of the wisdom of your experience to those who need that wisdom now. And in that society, and even in our own in many respects, it is the younger women, those who are going through things for the first time and may not know what to do. Or may have too many people in their ear telling them that they should do this and that of their peers. You get a lot of peers telling each other what to do and all the peers do not know what to do either. They are just mouthing off what they saw on the Internet. And so it is good advice for a young woman to go to an older woman and say, "How did you handle this?" And of course, Paul's examples are all from the family here and how to live with their husbands, how to raise their children, how to keep home, how to appear chaste and modest and those sorts of things.

So he says the older woman's job in the church is to train or teach or warn or cultivate the young women in their roles as wives and mothers, particularly. Helping them to order their lives in a godly way, hopefully from experience that they have gone through all these stages of their lives and they know what works and what does not work.

This does not mean that the young woman has to treat as gospel everything that the old woman says. But she should at least take them as serious advice that worked for that person and take that wisdom and apply it to their own lives as best they can. Things change over generations. We do things differently a little bit each generation, but it is good to know what the former generation did and why they were successful when you are not. And then you could make changes to that sort of thing.

All these things are to be done, Paul says, so that God's Word is not blasphemed, that God's Word is not evil spoken of, or that God's Word is not reproached. We do these things in the church, give this advice, to help people make sure they bring glory to God. That is the bottom line here. We want to do everything we can to please God and to bring Him glory. And if the older men and the older women can help the younger men and younger women live more godly lives and please God and show a good example to the world, we have all gained and it is a good thing, God will bless that.

We do not want to be hypocrites. We claim that we live by the Word of God and so it is a job of the older generation to make sure that the younger generation, and themselves of course, do not live as hypocrites, believing one thing and doing another or saying they believe one thing and doing another. So this is what God wants the old people to do in the church: to be paragons of virtue because they have gone through all these years learning God's way and being good examples in both word and deed and giving the advice that is necessary for the young people to grow and to have happy and pleasant lives.

Let us go back to the Psalms, Psalm 92. We will read three verses here starting in verse 12.

Psalm 92:12-15 The righteous shall flourish like a palm tree, he shall grow like a cedar in Lebanon. Those who are planted in the house of the Lord shall flourish in the courts of our God. They shall still bear fruit in old age; they shall be fresh [meaning vigorous] and flourishing, to declare that the Lord is upright; He is my rock, and there is no unrighteousness in Him.

So lots of old people have been planted in the church and they have a job. Their job is to bear fruit in their old age by being righteous, by showing what righteousness is, and by bringing glory to God. And this will, if this is a promise, if you want to take it that way, that they will be vigorous and flourishing even in their old age, which is a wonderful thing to think about; that you are still worth something in this society that thinks old age is horrible.

I have just scratched the surface of the purposes of aging. We do not have time to consider how aging humbles us. We used to be dynamic and now we are not quite so dynamic. We do not have time to consider how aging teaches us such things that we may not have learned when we were young, like compassion, proportion, appreciation, perseverance, and many other things besides that we find within the pages of our Bible. Because when we were young, we were just not ready for it. We tried to deny it. We just, like the proverb says, went in our strength and oftentimes we failed. But when we get older, we understand things a little better.

So contrary to society, aging is not all bad. Sure, it has its drawbacks. We cannot play flag football like we used to. But in the end, it is another God-given tool. Have you ever thought of aging as a tool? It is a tool to develop God's character in us because, like I said, there are things we can only learn when we are old where it is the best time to learn them.

Let us end in Proverbs 16, verse 31.

Proverbs 16:31 The silver-haired head is a crown of glory, if it is found in the way of righteousness.

So are we insignificant just because we are old? No way, according to God. The aged, in God's scheme of life, are just hitting their stride.

RTR/aws/drm