Psalm 90In many ways this Psalm is like so many of the others. It begins with some praise of God. In this case it's how He has been and will be a dwelling place for His people. It ends with some requests for blessings from God, things like wisdom, compassion, and rejoicing. So, the first and last parts of our Psalm sound very familiar. It's the middle of the Psalm that doesn't fit so well. Talk of sin and anger and death can be a little jarring. The Psalm would be so much more pleasant if we could just skip over the middle. But who reads the first chapter of a murder mystery and then skips to the last few pages to found out who did it? Working from the beginning of the novel through the middle helps to make more sense of the end. Likewise, here. We can't just skip over this middle section. We need to deal with what it says also to really appreciate the blessings at the end. And that's what we're going to do.
So, let's start at the beginning, at the very beginning of the Psalm. Let's start with the heading. The heading of the Psalm is important. I don't mean the title that the translators added, but the heading. In the Hebrew Bible the heading of the Psalm is considered the first verse of the Psalm. So, what does the heading of the Psalm say? 'A Prayer of Moses, the man of God.' That actually helps a lot. For one thing it gives us a context for the Psalm. Moses wrote it. And that helps us to see that it is about his experience in the wilderness leading Israel, the people of God. So, he writes, 'Lord, You have been our dwelling place in all generations.' I recently finished reading through Numbers. Toward the end is a list of the different places where Israel camped during their forty years in the desert. There were something like forty places. So, picture yourself packing up your stuff, throwing it into a U-Haul and moving it all to some new place, on average, once every year. And when one of your new neighbors would ask you, 'Where are you from?', what would you say? Where's 'Home' in a situation like that? 'Lord, YOU have been our dwelling place in all generations. Our sense of home is found in You.' Moses is writing out of his experience of being in the desert.
Moses next takes a look at the past that leads up to where he is. This helps to set the stage. Listen. 'You return man to dust and say, "Return, O children of man!" For a thousand years in Your sight are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night. You sweep them away as with a flood; they are like a dream, like grass that is renewed in the morning: in the morning it flourishes and is renewed; in the evening it fades and withers.' In the phrase, 'children of man' the Hebrew word for 'man' is 'Adam'. Here, Moses reflects on Adam and those who followed him. They lived. And then, they died. They returned to the dust just as God had said. The comment about one thousand years fits. Bible trivia: Who is the oldest man in the Bible and how old was he when he died? Methuselah died at 969 years or, if you round it off, one thousand years. Moses points to the longest-living person that he knew. To us, a thousand years seems like a long time, but Moses writes that to God it's like a midnight shift. Moses is talking about how life is so short. All these lived for a time and then they were swept away, returned to dust and were gone. 'The busy tribes of flesh and blood, with all their lives and cares, are carried downward by Your flood and lost in following years.' This is the state of all people everywhere who live such brief lives – and then die. This is the heritage that Adam has bestowed on all his children. This is the result of sin.
In the next section of the Psalm Moses turns his gaze. Now, he focuses on one particular group that has received this heritage of Adam. He no longer writes about 'they' and 'them'. Now, it's 'we' and 'our'. Now, he writes about the situation that he and the rest of Israel find themselves in while they roam the desert. Listen. 'For we are brought to an end by Your anger; by Your wrath we are dismayed. You have set our iniquities before You, our secret sins in the light of Your presence. For all our days pass away under Your wrath; we bring our years to an end like a sigh. The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away.' What do you remember about those forty years that Moses endured trying to lead Israel through the desert? One thing that stands out is that there was lots of sin. Another thing that stands out is that there was lots of anger, God's anger at Israel's sin. And that led to lots of death. There was Korah's rebellion. He's the fellow who basically said to Moses, 'So, who died and left you in charge?' Then, there were those complaints from the people about God's gift of food, the manna. 'We wouldn't feed this stuff to our dogs.' Then, there was the crowing event when Israel refused to enter the Promised Land though God commanded it. 'Are you crazy? We could never beat those guys!' These things led to anger, lots of anger. God had the earth open up and swallow Korah and all those who were with him. He sent poisonous snakes among those who complained about the manna and many of them died. And the refusal to conquer the land resulted in forty years of wandering in the desert until a whole generation died. Lots of sin. Lots of anger. Lots of death.
To bring this home I need to make sure that you understand who these folks were. The people that Moses was leading and writing about had different labels applied to them. They were Israel, the people of God, the children of Jacob. But they were also the Church, the saved, the saints of God. You might even call them the Christians of their day. And that changes things, doesn't it? Moses isn't writing about some odd, distant group, 'them' over there. He's writing about 'us'. God was angry with His Church, with 'us'. Lots of people today have a hard time with this notion of God's anger. And it is especially hard for some Christians when they hear about God's anger being directed at the Church, at Christians. The assumption is that God just doesn't get angry at the Church. And that produces all kinds of odd ways of understanding the Bible. But we have a whole Old Testament filled with places where God gets angry at His people. And how else can we understand those forty years? Remember that Moses himself felt the heat of God's anger. Everything was going okay at the burning bush until Moses told God, 'No, send someone else.' And God got angry. Of course, at this point the common reply goes something like this. 'But that was the Old Testament. Once we get to the New Testament, God doesn't get angry anymore, at least not at Christians, not at the Church.' Well, I wonder what Ananias and Sapphira would say to that? Or likewise the Christians in Corinth whose sin at the Lord's Supper resulted in many of that Church becoming weak and ill and some even dying. God's anger at sin isn't limited to one section of the Bible. So, you see, Moses was writing about the Church of his day, and what he wrote still speaks to the Church of our day.
Now, many look at this middle section of our Psalm and say, 'But that is so dark, so grim, so bleak. How can a Christian be joyful if this is what God is like, if God gets angry?' Now, that's the right question. Let's pursue it and see what we find. Listen again. 'For we are brought to an end by Your anger; by Your wrath we are dismayed. You have set our iniquities before You, our secret sins in the light of Your presence. For all our days pass away under Your wrath; we bring our years to an end like a sigh. The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away.' Is that dark? I'd say so. But is it hype or is it reality? Isn't it what Moses saw? You could say that the forty years in the desert was a time when the Church learned many important lessons, lessons about holiness and sin. And that would be right. But it was also forty years of watching a lot of people die. So, here is Moses seeing this and reflecting on it. He has witnessed God's anger. He has heard God say in no uncertain terms that no one of that first generation would enter the Promised Land. And so, the years would pass. This is dark. But it reflects what is real. It is, after all, in the Bible.
Now we're ready for the end of the Psalm. And now, this part of the Psalm will make much more sense. Moses sees the darkness, and he responds to it. But note that he responds to it as a Godly pastor. His response is prayer. He prays for himself and for his congregation. 'Who considers the power of Your anger, and Your wrath according to the fear of You? So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.' Let me translate that a bit. 'Lord, a mature piety would understand that our sin is so wrong that Your holiness
has to confront it. But we don't understand that – not nearly as well as we need to. So, teach us, Lord. Teach us, so that we'll get it. Teach us so that we'll become wise, so that we'll know You, the Holy One of Israel.' Moses humbly admits to his need and his Church's need, and he appeals to his God to meet that need.
Then he moves on. 'Relent, O Lord! How long will it be? Have compassion on Your servants. Satisfy us in the morning with Your unfailing love,that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days. Make us glad for as many days as You have afflicted us, for as many years as we have seen trouble.' How bold! Having freely admitted how right God has been to be angry at their sin, he goes on to ask the Father for blessings. He asks for compassion. He ask that they might experience God's covenant love to the full so that they might sing for joy and be glad. He even asks to be blessed with happiness to the same extent that they were cursed with trouble. Do you see what these things are? These are the blessings of the Gospel. Moses expresses a bold faith here. Understand what he has done in this Psalm. He's spent some time meditating on sin and its consequences, on
his sin and
Israel's. He agrees with God that such sin
needs to be exposed and
needs to be confronted by the holy anger of God. He and Israel
had to experience the troubles of the desert. It was sad, and it was dark, and it was necessary. But Moses doesn't remain in the darkness. Having learned lessons in the darkness he turns to the Father in faith. He appeals to Him as the God of unfailing covenant love. He cries out to Him as the Savior of the Church. And he prays wisely. The lessons are being learned. And because they are, it is good and right to pray to be able to move on to rejoicing and more. It's good and right to pray that they – and we – might take the next step in enjoying what it means that we have a Savior. Here, we have an example of something that David wrote in another Psalm. 'For his anger is but for a moment, and his favor is for a lifetime. Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning.' This is something worth meditating on. Moses did, and he saw his God and himself more clearly as a result.
Then Moses ends his prayer with this. 'Let Your work be shown to Your servants, and Your glorious power to their children. Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us, and establish the work of our hands upon us; yes, establish the work of our hands!' This is an apt ending to the Psalm because it is what Moses has been aiming at from the beginning. The work that he desires the people to be shown is God's work of redemption. Moses asks that the Church be able to see God do more of His work of changing hearts, of making His people holy. This is the glorious power of the Gospel: confronting sin, bringing change and then moving us on to rejoicing. And as that happens the result will be a people who respond with their own work of serving their God who has loved them so.
I've placed a lot before you. Some of what I've said might sound unfamiliar. You might want to get a copy of the sermon and read it over. Let me pick just one thing to emphasize. The boldness of Moses' requests at the end stands out all the more because we didn't skip the middle of the Psalm. We didn't avoid the dark part. Pondering our sin in the context of God's holiness makes turning to Jesus in repentance and faith that much more powerful and beautiful. Tasting the bitterness God's holy reaction against sin makes the blessings of the Gospel that much sweeter.