August 31, 2017

Tom Lowe

 

PSALM 90

(A Prayer of Moses the Man of God, A Congregational Psalm )

Title: LIFE AT ITS BEST IS VERY BRIEF

Psalm 90 (KJV)

1 Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations.

Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.

Thou turnest man to destruction; and sayest, Return, ye children of men.

For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night.

Thou carriest them away as with a flood; they are as a sleep: in the morning they are like grass which groweth up.

In the morning it flourisheth, and groweth up; in the evening it is cut down, and withereth.

For we are consumed by thine anger, and by thy wrath are we troubled.

Thou hast set our iniquities before thee, our secret sins in the light of thy countenance.

For all our days are passed away in thy wrath: we spend our years as a tale that is told.

10 The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.

11 Who knoweth the power of thine anger? even according to thy fear, so is thy wrath.

12 So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.

13 Return, O Lord, how long? and let it repent thee concerning thy servants.

14 O satisfy us early with thy mercy; that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.

15 Make us glad according to the days wherein thou hast afflicted us, and the years wherein we have seen evil.

16 Let thy work appear unto thy servants, and thy glory unto their children.

17 And let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us: and establish thou the work of our hands upon us; yea, the work of our hands establish thou it.

 

Introduction to Psalm 90

Next to the book of Job, Psalm 90 is most likely the oldest piece of writing in the Bible.  This psalm and probably the anonymous one which follows were written by Moses in the wilderness on the way from Egypt to Canaan and near the end of their wanderings.  The imagery is all borrowed from the desert march: the desert streams, which soon dry-up; the night-watches in the camp; the short-lived growth of the grass before it is blasted by the “khamsin,” or desert wind (5).  The melancholy strain is due to the incessant funerals and the aimlessness of the desert marches.  Psalm 90 stands apart from all the rest as the oldest psalm in history, one of the grandest psalms ever penned and the first great masterpiece of the Hebrew hymnbook.

The fourth book of psalms begins with Psalm 90, and its songs are songs of the wilderness.  It corresponds in time and teaching with the book of Numbers.

Israel had come up to Kadesh-barnea.  The spies had been sent into Canaan, and ten had brought back a negative report.  The land, they said, was a dreadful place, full of great, fenced cities and inhabited by giants, the dreadful sons of the Anakim.{1] Two men brought back a minority report.  It is a good land, they said, a land flowing with milk and honey.  As for the foe; once you get your eye on God, who cares for giants?  The majority ruled, fear drove out faith, the tribes elected not even to attempt to conquer Canaan, and God allowed them to suffer the consequences of their choice.  Everyone over 20 years of age would perish in the wilderness.  The terror by night, the arrow by day, the pestilence in the darkness, the destruction at noonday, the lion, and the adder would all take their toll.  It was the sentence of death on a whole generation.  The wilderness way gave place to the wilderness wanderings.  Instead of the Promised Land, it would be the desert sand.  Instead of the conquest of Canaan, there would be woe in the wilderness.

From then on Israel marched, but she marched without point or purpose.  The Israelites simply moved from place to place, leaving behind them a trail of bones in desolate graves deep in the sand.  They wandered for forty years, a year for every day the spies were in Canaan.  God held over the unbelieving people a sandglass of forty years during which every man and woman of the older generation would perish.

 

VERSES 1-6: it all comes down to perspective.

Commentary

1 Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations.

The psalm begins with the name of God, Adonai, “the Sovereign Lord.” The name speaks of God in His government, God in His sovereign relationship to earth.  What a tremendous God we have!  He controls all the factors of space and time.  Nothing can slip by Him.  Let us keep that perspective in mind.

He is a TENDER God!  Moses said, “Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place.” The word translated “dwelling place” literally means “den.” God is our den!  In most houses I’d rather be invited into the den than into the living room.  Often the living room is cold and formal, whereas the den is warm and cozy.  Moses when he thought of God thought of a den.  He thought of God as a TENDER GOD, but One in whose loving arms a person could really be at home.

He doesn’t waste any time; Moses’ first solemn words express the mood of trust: “Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations.”  They portray the Lord as one in whom His people have had their dwelling, their abiding spiritual home, and protecting shelter from generation to generation across the long centuries of Israel’s existence.  Let us live in Him.  Satan cannot enter to drag us forth (1 John 4:16{4]).

This verse is a very proper preface to this Psalm, for it intimates that all the following miseries were not to be imputed to God, but unto themselves, who by their own sins had brought these misfortunes upon themselves. 

 

Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.

 

He is a Timeless God!  Life is certainly very brief, but not for God; He is “from everlasting to everlasting,” from eternity to eternity, from the infinite past to the infinite future.  But in contrast to the always-existing God is the impermanence of humanity.  Human lives are brief.  The longest recorded life is Methuselah’s—a 969-year span (Genesis 5:27{7]). 

Let us keep these perspectives in mind; God is a sovereign God, tremendous, tender, and timeless.  But He is not so great and vast that He is removed and cold.  He invites us to come and find our den in Him!

Perhaps the thought has already occurred to you, that in verse 2 there is an echo of a myth, already out-of-date even for the Israelite poet, according to which the mountains were said to be “born” out of the womb of Mother Earth, a myth to which the author of the book of Job also refers (15:7{2]).  Before the mountains were born and before the world had been brought into being, God WAS and, as far into the distant future as the human mind can conceive, WILL BE.

“Thou hadst formed the earth and the world” means the entire earth is His creation.

 

Thou turnest man to destruction; and sayest, Return, ye children of men.

“Thou turnest man to destruction”—In opposition to the eternity of God is the fleeting life of men.  It seems long to us when we compare it with our days; but how short, when compared with the eternity of Him who looks on a thousand years as a brief night-watch!  (2 Peter 3:8{5]).  But as for man, his case is far different, his time is short; and though he was made to be a happy creature, and should have been immortal, yet, for his sin God made him to be mortal and miserable.

Here can be seen the sympathy of God.  He returns man to the dust, and then He returns the dust back to man!  Death is a dark and dreadful reality, but for the believer there is something beyond—resurrection!  God’s sympathy sees the tyranny the tomb has over us, but it is a conquered tomb.  Moses did not have as much light upon that subject as we who stand on the resurrection side of Calvary.

“Return, ye children of men” is given two different interpretations.  Most versions and commentators regard this as an explanation of the clause preceding it, that man is bidden to return to the dust, from which his body came.  Some, however, regard this as an injunction to return to God in repentance: “You bring mankind to a state of contrition, saying, ‘Repent, offspring of man.’”

When God is threatening to “turn man to destruction,” to bring them to death, and they have received a sentence of death within themselves, sometimes He wonderfully restores them, and says, as the old translation has it, Again thou sayest, Return to life and health again.  For God kills and makes alive again, brings down to the grave and brings up.

 

For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch{3] in the night.

“A thousand years”—how long a time it seems to us.  The United States does not have a quarter that much history.  A thousand years ago in England William the conqueror had not yet landed his Norman adventurers on Britain’s shores.  To God a thousand years is but a single evening, a watch{3], the third part of a single day.

God watches us hurrying through our little span of life, our three score years and 10.  His sympathy goes out to us because of the tyranny time has over us.  He has engineered us for eternity, yet we are prisoners of time.  We keep in mind, then, the perspective of the sovereignty of God and the perspective of the sympathy of God.

 

5 Thou carriest them away as with a flood; they are as a sleep: in the morning they are like grass which groweth up.

6 In the morning it flourisheth, and groweth up; in the evening it is cut down, and withereth.

This is another perspective we must not forget.  Moses brings God’s judgment sharply into focus.  That judgment is fresh in Moses’ mind, for he has just heard God pass righteous sentence on a whole generation.  It was a generation which had been purchased by blood and saved by a strong hand and an outstretched arm.  It was a generation which had experienced nothing but the grace, goodness, and greatness of God all the way from bondage in Egypt to the borders of Canaan.  Yet it was a generation which did nothing every step of the way but criticize and complain, doubt and disobey.  Now, the patience of God is exhausted, the righteous sentence has gone forth and the judgment of God has fallen.  Moses cannot forget that.  It is a perspective to keep in mind.

Moses underlines in this hymn the fact that God’s judgments are swift, sure, and solemn: “Thou carriest them away as with a flood; they are as a sleep: in the morning they are like grass which groweth up. In the morning it flourisheth, and groweth up; in the evening it is cut down, and withereth.” The grass that grows in the Jordan Valley and in the Dead Sea basin is just like that.  It seldom grows into a turf (sod).  It shoots up in the early spring with great promise and then just as swiftly gives up its seeds and dies, leaving no trace of its existence for the rest of the year except for a few straggling sun-scorched stems.  God is not to be trifled with.  It is a perspective to keep in mind.

It may seem to us that His judgments are delayed.  That is because we are creatures that never seem to have enough time in the day.  But to a God who writes off a thousand years of our time as if it were a mere hour in the night, what are 20 or 50 years?

That’s how it is with God’s judgments.  They are thundering down upon the world today, hurtling into the lives of godless, rebellious men, women, and young people, but we are far too limited in our perspective to be able to detect the speed with which God’s judgments are approaching.  Moses wants us, however, to keep the perspective in mind.  God’s judgments are swift, sure, and solemn.  God is loving, but He is not lax.  Moses urges upon us the right perspective.

 

VERSES 7-12: Moses drops the use of the third person and picks up the first person, and now he casts his verbs in the past tense.  He is speaking now of things taken right out of recent history, things with which the people who first sang this song were all too sadly familiar.  In this section he harps on two notes—man’s sin and God’s sentence.

 

For we are consumed by thine anger, and by thy wrath are we troubled.

Thou hast set our iniquities before thee, our secret sins in the light of thy countenance.

The brevity of life is accentuated by the fact that sin has brought it under the cloud of God’s wrath.  Iniquities and secret sins had brought the consuming anger and troubling wrath of a holy God.  There is no word corresponding to sins in the Hebrew of verse 8; and there is no such thing as secret sin“Secret sin is rather the inward sin of the heart unseen by man but known to God.” God not only knows the inequities of men’s lives but the hidden principles of sin within the soul.  God sees what we do, He hears what we say, and puts what we fondly imagine to be our secret sins right out in the open, there in the light of His countenance.  They stare Him in the face; they cry aloud for exposure and punishment.  And judged they will be—either in this life or in the life to come.  What a comfort to turn to the blood of Christ which cleanseth from all sin!

Moses senses within his people the constant disciplining pressure of God’s wrath because of their sins, those of which they know and those hidden even to their perpetrators.  Day after day is lived and draws to its close under the wrath of God, and the years of every individual’s life comes to a solemn end, comparable to a great sigh from a heavy heart.

 

For all our days are passed away in thy wrath [better, “Our days pass away under thy wrath”]: we spend our years as a tale that is told.

10 The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.

They are taught to look upon themselves as persons who are dying and persons who are soon to die, and not to think either of a long life or of a pleasant one, for the decrees made against them was irreversible. All their days are likely to be spent under Thy wrath and under the tokens of Thy displeasure; and, though they are not entirely deprived of the remainder of their years, yet they are likely to spend them “as a tale that is told.”  The thirty-eight years which remained after this were frittered away in the wilderness. They were not mentioned in the sacred history; for little or nothing is recorded of that which happened to them from the second year to the 40th.  After they came out of Egypt their time was squandered in aimless wandering, and that was not worthy to be the subject of history, but only of “a tale that is told.” All those years in the wilderness was devoted to passing time by telling stories, playing games, and such; all that while raising another generation.

There were 603,000 men of war in Israel, men of 20 years old and upward, when the nation played the cowered at Kadesh-barnea.  That vast army was under the sentence of death.  If a man was 20, he died by the time he was 60; if he was 30, he died by the time he was 70; if he was 40, he died by the time he was 80—fourscore years.  This seems respectable, but it may be a little too long.  A study of Egyptian mummies has suggested that an Egyptian from the same approximate time period had an average life expectancy of forty to fifty years.  However, if a person’s years are filled with nothing but trouble and sorrow, then long life is nothing to Cherish.

The vast host tramped from place to place through the wilderness.  Alongside them marched death.  Not a man knew when or where he would strike.  The whole adult nation lived on death row.  Every man marched with a ghost by his side.  And, one by one, they fell and were buried in the shifting sand—and the camp moved relentlessly on and on.  The wilderness became one vast graveyard.

“Life is so short!” said Moses.  He himself, and Aaron his brother, Israel’s high priest, were both under the same sentence of death.  They were men living in the past.  Their tale was told, they had no future.  They could think about their redemption from Egypt, but they could never look forward to life in Canaan.  They had sinned once too often, and for them the grace of God had been replaced by the government of God.  Before the time of Moses it was common for men to live about 100 years, or nearly 150, but due to sin God decreed the new standard to be 70 or 80 years, which few exceed and multitudes never come near. However, Moses, Joshua, and Caleb were exempted from the “threescore years and ten” allotted for men to live—Joshua, for example, lived 120 years.

 

11 Who knoweth the power of thine anger? even according to thy fear, so is thy wrath.

12 So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.

With every living soul there comes a built-in time fuse.  Some fuses burn slowly, others more quickly.  Every birth signals the beginning of a countdown which, without variation, zeros in on a forced exit from this scene.  Yet daily we shrug our indifference, and each night we roll over and go to sleep, while our fuse continues to burn down.  Life on earth in a space-time dimension is a one-way, dead-end street.  Every day about 400,000 new people arrive on this planet, four or five every second.  Every day hundreds of thousands of people leave it for eternity, their time fuse burned out

With the children of Israel in the wilderness the maximum number of years was known (Numbers 13-14).  With us it is not known.  No wonder the Spirit of God urges us to “number our days” and “apply our hearts unto wisdom.”

For every unsaved person, of course, the first act of sanity is to accept Christ as Savior and make sure that the proper destination is reached when the exodus occurs. The unsaved person should get the great white throne in perspective.  For the believer, the first act of sanity is to get this life’s priorities adjusted in the light of the judgment seat of Christ.  But for the unbeliever there is only “the power of thine anger”—God’s wrath, which abides (John 3:36{6]) on those who refuse to believe is worse than those who have feared it most have ever conceived of it.  It cannot be said of God’s wrath, what is said of death, that the fear of it is worse than the thing itself.  Who knows how far the power of God’s anger can reach and how deeply it can wound.  The angels that sinned knew experimentally the power of God’s anger; damned sinners in hell know it; but which of us can fully comprehend or described it?

There was a man in Paul’s day by the name of Epaphroditus, whom Paul described as a courageous warrior.   When Paul was a prisoner in Rome this brave man came to Rome for the sole purpose of visiting Paul. The man was very sick, yet he did not spare himself even though he was sick unto death: “For the work of Christ he was nigh unto death, not regarding his life” (Philippians 2:30).  This verse has been translated like this: “On account of Christ’s work he was at death’s very door, playing as it were the gambler with his life.”

Sin will always be offensive to God, and people will continue to sin.  But rather than attempting to hide sin and provoke God’s anger, Moses entreats God both for instruction that will lead to accumulated wisdom and for divine compassion (13).  If human life is but a day in the time frame of God then let the morning began with God’s unfailing love that results in lasting joy and gladness (14).

Life is a sinful thing, a short thing, a serious thing.  Let us pay heed to the unknown length of fuse each one of us still has left.

 

VERSES 13-17: Life which has its perspectives right, which has its greatest problems solved, will be occupied in a definite direction, which is clearly seen in Moses’ prayer of supplication.

 

13 Return, O Lord, how long? and let it repent thee concerning thy servants.

The psalm ends with a prayer of supplication typical of the psalms of lament.  In view of God’s eternity and man’s short and sin-stained life, the poet pleads for God’s gracious favor. This prayer in its original context grew right out of the circumstances in which Moses and the children of Israel found themselves there in the wilderness.  Upon their refusal to go in and possess their possessions in Canaan, in spite of all the marvelous, miraculous proofs that God had given of His wisdom, love, and power, God’s wrath overflowed.  “How long,” he demanded of Moses, “will this people provoke Me?  And how long will it be before they believe Me, for all the signs which I have shed among them?  I will smite them with the pestilence, and disinherit them, and will make of thee a greater nation and mightier than they” (Numbers 14:11-12).  The Lord was about to turn loose upon the people the same avenging angel who had shortly before smitten the Egyptians.

Then Moses became an intercessor.  He pleaded for God to return and for Him to repent of the righteous wrath and judgment He was preparing to send.  At once there was fresh evidence of the moving of God both in judgment and in mercy.  And the Lord did return; He did shepherd the next generation into the Promised Land.  How we need to pray today for a fresh evidence of the moving of God.

“Let it repent thee” is a common form of the plea that God will change His manner of dealing with His now repentant people.  The Lord “is not a man, that he should repent” (1 Samuel 15:29) as a human being would need to repent of evil intended or done.  But God’s dealings with His people are conditioned by their obedience to His law.  For Him to “repent” would mean simply to turn from wrath to mercy.

 

14 O satisfy us early with thy mercy; that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.

15 Make us glad according to the days wherein thou hast afflicted us, and the years wherein we have seen evil.

“Satisfy us early” (14) is literally “in the morning.” The night is dark; may the dawn soon come.  The context suggests that God satisfy us early in life, and each morning too; in order “that we may….  Be glad all our days.”

The sandglass is there, the sands of time are sinking, but we must not be morbidly occupied with death.  We still have today.  We must look forward to tomorrow.  Above all, we must so know the mercy of God in our lives that each morning will hear us ringing out our joy in the Lord!  God’s disciplines with us are not intended to flatten us in despair.  They are designed to lead us on to such experiences of His loving kindness, mercy, and grace as will make us sing even in the midst of the fruits of our foolishness.

Verse 15 may refer to a specific traumatic time for the nation.  The exact nature of the trouble mentioned is not known, although under Moses’ rule, Israel offended God numerous times and suffered affliction as a result.  So Moses’ prayer is for God to replace their trouble with gladness―Our afflictions have been sharp and long, let not our prosperity be small and short.

 

16 Let thy work appear unto thy servants, and thy glory unto their children.

The future of Israel after Kadesh-barnea lay with the children.  It always does.  The children are the ones who have to step into our shoes and carry on the purposes of God.  God is intensely interested in our children.  We need to see God’s mighty arm made bare in their lives.  We need to pray that He will do His work in them.  They need to see His Glory for themselves.

As they look at us they see failure.  Our failures have brought us where we are, but God can overrule even our failures and show His glory through them.  Let us plead for a fresh expression of the might of God, for a work pointed by God directly into the hearts of our children and young people.  In Israel every child up to the age of nineteen was destined for the Promised Land in the sovereign purpose of God. Let us lay hold of something like that for our children.

Finally, let that great and glorious work of giving Thy people a complete deliverance, which Thou has long since designed and promised, be at last accomplished and manifested unto us, and in the sight of the world.  The people may have been unfaithful to God yet God has not failed to show His favor to Israel.  As the people remain aware of His actions on their behalf and teach their children about the splendor of God, life will take on new meaning as God blesses their work

 

17 And let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us: and establish thou the work of our hands upon us; yea, the work of our hands establish thou it.

We go back in thought to a certain slave hut on the Nile.  The Hebrew people are herded there in that Goshen ghetto under harsh conditions of slavery.  We creep into one of those huts.  Perhaps this very day Amram, the father of the little family which lives in this Hut, has been whipped and lashed by an Egyptian Guard.  There is a woman in this house, a dear, godly woman, the mother of three children.  Her name is Jochebed; it means “God my Glory.” She shines in that slave hut like the Shekinah Glory in the tabernacle.  She transforms that hut into a holy place, bringing a little of Heaven with her into that home.  No wonder that out of that home comes a Miriam, an Aaron, and a Moses!  That is what Moses is thinking of here: “Let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us!” He could pray that every tent in Israel might have a woman like Jochebed in it to bless the husband and father and be a benediction to the children.  Thus, indeed, would God establish the work of His people’s hands so that the rising generation would not repeat the sins and follies of the older, dying generation but would march boldly in to take possession of the promised land.

Let us borrow that prayer: “Let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us: and establish Thou the work of our hands.” The meaning is, “Prosper all the work we undertake.” Let us neither live nor labor in vain.

 

 Scripture and Special Notes:

[1} In the Bible we can find a large amount of stories regarding the Anakim and their "degenerated" offspring called the children of Anak, Emims and other names.
For instance, in The Bible we can read about King Og (the Giant):

Dt: 3:11: For only Og king of Bashan remained of the remnant of giants; behold his bedstead was a bedstead of iron; is it not in Rabbath of the children of Ammon? nine cubits was the length thereof, and four cubits the breadth of it, after the cubit of a man.

King Og was a "small" Giant because he needed the length of his bed to be 9 x 46 cm = 4.14 meters, so his real length would be about 4 meters. The Giant Anakim were the offspring of the Giant Nephilim from before the Flood. Some of the Scriptures in which they are mentioned are shown below:

Dt: 1:28: Whither shall we go up? our brethren have discouraged our heart, saying, The people is greater and taller than we; the cities are great and walled up to heaven; and moreover we have seen the sons of the Anakims there.
Dt: 2:10: The Emims dwelt therein in times past, a people great, and many, and tall, as the Anakims; Dt: 2:11: Which also were accounted giants, as the Anakims; but the Moabites called them Emims.
Dt. 2:21: A people great, and many, and tall, as the Anakims; but the Lord destroyed them before them; and they succeeded them, and dwelt in their stead:
Dt. 9:2: A people great and tall, the children of the Anakims, whom thou knowest, and of whom thou hast heard say, Who can stand before the children of Anak!
Jos. 11:21: And at that time came Joshua, and cut off the Anakims from the mountains, from Hebron, from Debir, from Anab, and from all the mountains of Judah, and from all the mountains of Israel: Joshua destroyed them utterly with their cities. Jos:11:22: There was none of the Anakims left in the land of the children of Israel: only in Gaza, in Gath, and in Ashdod, there remained.
Jos. 14:12: Now therefore give me this mountain, whereof the Lord spoke in that day; for thou heardest in that day how the Anakims were there, and that the cities were great and fenced: if so be the Lord will be with me, then I shall be able to drive them out, as the Lord said.
Jos. 14:15: And the name of Hebron before was Kirjatharba; which Arba was a great man among the Anakims. And the land had rest from war.

[2} “Art thou the first man that was born? or wast thou made before the hills?” (Job 15:2)

[3}  A “watch” in the Old Testament was approximately 4 hours.  The night was divided into three watches: (1) sunset until 10:00 PM; (2) 10:00 PM until 2:00 AM; and (3) 2:00 AM until sunrise.  In the New Testament, references to watches in the night may not conform to this schedule because the Romans scheduled four watches of three hours each.

[4} “And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him” (1 John 4:16).

[5} “But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day” (2 Peter 3:8).

[6} “He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him” (John 3:36).

[7} “And all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years: and he died.” (Genesis 5:27).