Life from God’s Perspective

Psalm 90 is a rich and wonderful psalm attributed to Moses. And here, even at the start of the psalm, the ancient title, Moses is styled as the man of God. And it could be said that he was a man of God because he was a servant of God, God’s man. He was called the man of God five times in the Old Testament, from Deuteronomy to Ezra. That title would later be used much more exclusively to refer to the prophets, who also enjoyed a special relationship with God’s people as his servants and his mouthpiece to the people. Moses’ calling and ministry was unparalleled until Jesus Christ’s ministry.

From infancy, his life was marked by a special providence that he himself would later recognize, even refusing to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter. From a humble state, he was selected and commissioned pardon me, commissioned for a seemingly impossible task, that of leading the nation of Israel out of bondage in Egypt. God’s hand was upon him, and he was shaped by God for extraordinary use, among which was his 40-year leadership of the nation of Israel through the wilderness. He was the national hero of the Jewish people, a God-ordained leader, the communicator of God’s law, the foundational author of the Bible, the first five books, Pentateuch.

And so there is perhaps no more appropriate individual to write Psalm 90 than the great patriarch Moses himself. It was Moses who was tasked with leading the nation out of captivity in Egypt. It was Moses who surely witnessed people die before they were even out of Egypt. Those not fit for such an arduous journey. It was Moses who watched scores and hundreds and thousands die over the course of that 40 years of wandering the barren desert. an entire generation because of their lack of faith and rebellion. This was due to God’s curse of judgment upon the nation of Israel. The Israelites brought it on themselves, as Moses himself records in Numbers 14.

Just listen. Just a few lines. The Lord spoke to Moses and Aaron, saying, how long shall I bear with this evil congregation who are grumbling against me? I have heard the complaints of the sons of Israel, which they are making against me. Say to them, as I live, says the Lord, just as you have spoken in my hearing, so I will surely do to you. Your corpses will fall in this wilderness, even all your numbered men, according to your complete number from twenty years old and upward, who have grumbled against me. Surely you shall not come into the land which I swore to settle you, except Caleb of Jephunneh and Joshua the son of Nun. Two men. All told, the number of Israelites who died was likely in the millions. It was Moses who witnessed thousands die at once in an instantaneous judgment of God.

And Moses witnessed it all. And it was Moses who, even himself, standing at the threshold of the promised land, was prohibited from entering and died in the desert. Yet, despite this terrible curse, Moses paused to reflect on the monumental sweep of those 40 years of wandering. With all of the shifts and upheavals of the relationship between God and his people, Moses had come to know God as well as any man ever has. And Moses had also come to grips with the reality of the nature of sinful mankind. Who better to write this incredible psalm, Psalm 90, than Moses? If God’s people would please turn to Psalm 90. And beginning in verse one, Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were born or you gave birth to the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, you are God.

You turn man back into dust and say, return, O children of men, for a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it passes by, or as a watch in the night. You have swept them away like a flood. They fall asleep. In the morning they are like grass which sprouts anew. In the morning it flourishes and sprouts anew. Toward evening it fades and withers away.

For we have been consumed by your anger and your wrath. By your wrath we have been dismayed. You have placed our iniquities before you, our secret sins, in the light of your presence. For all our days have declined in your fury, we have finished our years like a sigh. As for the days of our life, they contain 70 years, or if due to strength, 80 years, yet their pride is but labor and sorrow. For soon it is gone and we fly away. Who understands the power of your anger? and your fury according to the fear that is due you.

Teach us to number our days that we may present to you a heart of wisdom. Do return, oh Lord, how long will it be? Be sorry for your servants. Oh, satisfy us in the morning with your loving kindness that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days. Make us glad according to the days you have afflicted us and the years we have seen evil. Let your work appear to your servants and your majesty to their children. Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us and confirm for us the work of our hands. Yes, confirm the work of our hands.

Psalm 90 is one of the oldest Psalms that we have, and it presents a broad and informed perspective of life, even human life, but from God’s perspective. It is, at the same time, deeply emotional and richly theological. It is written by one who had firsthand experience of seeing the vaporous nature of mankind and the eternality and unchangeableness of Almighty God. God is everlasting.

Man is transitory. It is not sad. It’s realistic and therefore reflective. It’s not a dirge, as several inaccurately labeled it. Instead, it is a sober review of the frail humanity before the Almighty. It is Moses’ pensive anthology of the birth of a nation, God’s people.

It is in almost every line, We can picture Moses taking it all in from a high mountain vantage point. The psalm of Moses. The only one that we know was written by him is a familiar passage read at funerals or memorials. Without even a hint of grumbling throughout this psalm, it provides normalcy and closure to the brevity of our earthly lives. It unquestioningly affirms God in the fullness of His character. Eternal, sovereign, righteous, gracious.

Psalm breaks into two nearly even portions. What I would call the reflective or the contemplative portion, verses one through 10, where Moses considers God as he is, and he considers humanity as they are. The second portion, verses 11 through 17, is Moses’ determinative portion.

Moses has meditated enough. He’s seen God for who he is and humanity. He’s meditated enough and he moves to a subsequent prayer to God in light of things as they are. You would track back to verse one. We want to begin with this contemplative portion. As we begin to look at life from God’s perspective, the lessons drawn as Moses observes God and man. And the first portion of this contemplative section is a meditation on God himself.

Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. Moses, who first met God alone on that lofty mountain, begins appropriately with a threefold declaration of God’s character. First, he says that he is salvation itself. Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. He pictures God as his people’s dwelling, just as he does in Psalm 26, eight, I love the habitation of your house, the place where your glory dwells. This was initially circumstantial for Israel. They had no temple. They didn’t even have a tabernacle. Israel had no temple during their wilderness wanderings, but the idea of God being their security, That idea grew.

The idea of God being their refuge, David speaks of God as the one whom God’s people take refuge from Psalm 37, 40. And the unnamed author of Psalm 71 says, in you, O Lord, I have taken refuge. Be to me a rock of habitation. giving it that added nuance of a shelter, a place of solace, a place of rest and protection. Prophet Ezekiel calls God sanctuary, a sanctuary for his people. God is himself salvation to his people, ultimately their eternal dwelling place.

One of my heroes of the faith, Isaac Watts, penned a little hymn. Oh God, our help in ages past. You’re probably familiar with it. One 19th century pastor referred to it as the greatest hymn ever written in the English language. Verse one of that hymn goes like this. Oh God, our help in ages past. Our hope for years to come. our shelter from the stormy blast, and our eternal home. Beautifully written.

So the first thing that we learn about God from Moses’ vantage point is that he is salvation itself. Secondly, in verse two, Moses recognizes that God is eternal. And he does so with three statements of proof. before the mountains were born, or you gave birth to the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, you are God. God was. He was in existence prior to creation. From everlasting to everlasting, forever to forever. As we look, especially here in Colorado, the grandness of the mountains, we can hardly conceive of the mountains not even existing.

Jacob, in his address to the 12 tribes of Israel, Genesis 49, referred to them as the everlasting hills. But Moses takes it even further when he says, he mentions the earth and the world were not even created yet. Prophet Isaiah echoed this in 4028 in his declaration of God’s greatness when he queried, do you not know? Have you not heard?

The Lord is the everlasting God, the creator of the ends of the earth. Nothing in all the world had yet been created, and yet God was. Moses’ point here is the eternality of God. There’s never been a time, even a moment, when God did not exist. And the thrilling implication of this, from everlasting to everlasting, is that God not only always was, He always will be. Watts captured this as well, when he said, before the hills in order stood, or earth received her frame, from everlasting thou art God, to endless years the same. Moses’ third recognition of God’s nature, verses three and four, is that God is outside of time. It’s a concept we can’t even begin to wrap our minds around. Time has no bearing or influence on God. In contrast, it is not so with mankind. Verse three, you turn man back into dust and say, return, O children of men. Men are born and then they die. They’re born under a stopwatch, a ticking clock. Not so God.

God is eternal, and he’s completely unaffected by time, and Moses captures that in two very expressive lines. A thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it passes by, or as a watch in the night. Mankind counts the years, the hours, the minutes, sometimes even the seconds for God. Those temporal measurements are meaningless. A thousand years to us is a long, long time. Fifteen lifetimes.

But Moses says here that even a thousand years, like yesterday, come and gone. Not even a consideration, like a watch in the night, a few rapidly fading hours. So Moses contemplates God himself, but he also contemplates humanity. In verses five through 10, glance there if you would, because suddenly without any introduction, Moses turns his attention to the contrasting picture of humanity. Couldn’t be any different. God is an eternal refuge unaffected by time. Mankind, however, is altogether different.

As God’s creation, we are fleeting, momentary, transitory. Moses graphically captures our temporary existence when he says that we are being swept away like a flood. This captures the helplessness of people. In the swift moving torrents of life, unable to withstand its current, it’s ferocious, it’s sudden, and it’s indiscriminate. It takes everyone. And when he mentions their sleep, they fall asleep, he’s referring to their eventual death. It’s inescapable.

Verses five and six, Moses introduces another striking image, that of the grass of the field. It’s an image that speaks of this unending cycle of birth and life and death and birth and life and death. Toward evening, it fades away. As one generation draws near to their inevitable end, with another generation following not far behind, still a third generation sprouts anew. It’s an unending loop. The figure of life and death is so appropriate, rather the figure of grass to express this idea of life and death is so appropriate, describing our temporal nature that numerous other biblical writers seize hold of this image.

King David uses the image in Psalm 37, of wrongdoers. They will wither quickly like grass. And again, in Psalm 103, of mankind in general, his days are like grass. Sobering. Isaiah reproduces the image in full in chapter 40, verses six through eight. The grass withers, the flower fades. Surely the people are grass.

The Apostle Peter quotes Isaiah. James presents a form of the illustration to speak of the rich man in the midst of his pursuits. It’s a plentifully used illustration. But the original illustration was written by Moses. For one who wandered the desert for 40 years, he knew of what he spoke.

Isaac Watts said it like this, time, like an ever rolling stream, bears all its sons away. They fly forgotten as a dream, dies at the opening day. When Moses attributes life’s end to being consumed by God’s anger, dismayed by your wrath, he isn’t talking about any specific event. There were those that suffered God’s judgment in the midst of the wilderness. But here he’s not talking about those things.

He’s rather talking about the penalty of death that Adam brought on the whole race. He’s referring to the fact that we are inherently sinful. since Adam’s fall, and Paul captures that truth in Romans 5, you might remember. Through one man, Adam, sin entered into the world and death through sin. And that sin had to be punished in keeping with God’s righteousness. Verses eight and nine take us, if you will, beside the bedside of a dying man. reconciling his sinfulness, closing his eyes with a final sigh. This is Moses’ third observation of humanity.

Mankind is fleeting, mankind is sinful, and we are dying. Every breath that we take is a gift from God. But there is no hiding our sins from God. There are no secret sins. Verse 10 functions like a retrospect of the whole process of these verses five through nine. A summary of the entire life process. Listen to this.

70 years or 80 years, that’s no guarantee. Moses is dealing now with averages. Take your vitamins, do your exercise, don’t play in traffic, and you might live to 80 or longer. But even in that, there’s little joy. Labor and sorrow, he calls it. There is no more of the boastful pride of life. Life in the end is painful. and difficult and declining. Death is coming. And the psalmist cleverly says, we fly away. It doesn’t mean that we sprout wings to take us to heaven. It’s a euphemism for dying. Now the man’s vigor is drained, and he breathes his last. That’s Moses’ contemplation of humanity. But with those facts at hand, Moses sees life from God’s perspective, and he makes a determination. The determinative portion is in verses 11 through 17. And the first thing that Moses does is to pray. Would you look at verses 11 and 12?

Who understands the power of your anger and your fury according to the fear that is due you? Teach us to number our days that we may present to you a heart of wisdom. We might think what possible good could come from the dismal realities that Moses lays out in that first section, especially verses five through 10. Well, there’s plenty. And it comes in two waves, verses 11 and 12, and verses 13 through 17. In 11 and 12, Moses makes a very general plea for wisdom. Having fallen under the anger of God, his justifiable wrath, where can we turn? What can we do? Moses addresses this in verses 11 and 12.

Moses doesn’t take the time throughout this Psalm to quibble with God, to appeal his verdicts, to question his justice. God is justifiably angry with sin. Moses cannot and will not dispute that. According to this contemporary phrase, it is what it is. And Moses is content to work with things as they are. Any other approach is pointless. So, what Moses seeks is the ability to please God under the circumstance of the economy in which he finds himself.

Life as it is. And he asked that God would teach them to number their days. The word here basically means to allot or to count. So that the request is along the lines of informing us how few are the days that are allotted to us, how brief and how fleeting they are, how short life is. King David pleaded for the same insight. Psalm 39, Lord, Make me to know my end, and what is the extent of my days. Let me know how transient I am.

Behold, thou hast made my days as hand breaths, and my lifetime is nothing in thy sight. Surely every man at his best is a mere breath. Surely every man walks about as a phantom. Surely they make an uproar for nothing. He amasses riches and does not know who will gather them.

This is effectively the same request that Moses makes here in Psalm 90. And because our allotted days are so few, we are to make exceedingly careful use of them. One godly pastor of a bygone day said it this way, improve the time in time while time does last. For time is no time when time is past. The result of this corrected use of the limited and dwindling time that God has allotted to use is wisdom. The intelligent use of our days produces wisdom, and it creates a cycle of wanting to use every moment for God’s glory. The intelligent use of our days produces wisdom and godliness in reverence for God.

Well, that’s Moses’ plea. And then he makes a plea for blessings. Not just a general plea for wisdom, but he gets very specific. Would you look at verse 13? Do return, O Lord. How long will it be? Having uttered his plea for wisdom, Moses, our psalmist, goes to the throne of all grace to appeal to God for blessings. There are seven of them that he enumerates in very rapid fashion. This is a man who knows what he needs, and he knows who to ask, and he goes directly to the throne of grace and lays it before God. Number one, the first statement, verse 13, which verse I read, do return, O Lord.

Moses pleads for restoration. “‘Turn or return to us, your children.'” Moses uttered a similar prayer in real time in Exodus 32. In God’s wrathful response to the golden calf, Moses pleaded, “‘Turn from your burning anger “‘and change your mind about doing harm to your people.'” This is the child of God calling out to God in repentance, a plea for mercy.

In spirit, this is that same plea. David likewise prayed in Psalm 6, 4, return, O Lord, rescue my soul. Save me because of your loving kindness. Be reconciled to us, Lord, he prays. Secondly, the second statement of verse 13, Moses similarly prays here for mercy. Be sorry for your servants. Be to us the God of compassion that we know you to be. Third, in verse 14.

It is the companion of mercy or loving kindness for which Moses asks. It’s that word that is used nearly 250 times in the Old Testament to speak of God’s benevolent goodness. Moses employs the imagery of a night, a night of difficulty which gives way to a morning of God’s grace. Beautiful prayer.

Number four, the fourth thing for which Moses asks, verse 15, make us glad according to the days you have afflicted us. This gladness he seeks. the same word as translated as joy in the previous verse, is itself the product, the gift of God. Make us joyful. Bring us to the point where we forget all the difficulties of life and all that we’ve endured. Bring us full circle, he asks, that we might forget about the chastening. that we have received, number five. I would characterize this one as perspective. I think it’s at verse 16.

Let your work appear to your servants and your majesty to their children. Moses desires that the current body of God’s people would come to understand his way, that they would see God at work. It’s an important thing. And it’s important thing to pass it on to her children as well, that they would see the mysterious workings of God’s providence.

Number six, the first line of verse 17, let the favor of the Lord, of the Lord our God be upon us. Show your gracious countenance to us, as we saw in the previous Psalms. Let us have that face-to-face reaction to you. Show your gracious countenance in your glorious presence. Let it rest on your children.

These are good prayer requests. These are prayer requests that we could go home all week long and plead one for every day. The seventh and final request Moses makes, Confirm for us the work of our hands. He utters it twice for the sake of emphasis. He asks for the Lord’s affirmation. Bless what it is that I’m doing. Whatever it is that I’m doing, whatever you’ve called me to do, bless the work of our hands.

Now the sheer number of these requests, seven in all, Remind us of one very important principle. A principle that we often forget. We find it in Matthew chapter 7. Would you turn there? Matthew chapter 7. In Matthew chapter 7, once you’re there, scroll down to verse 7.

Ask. Ask and it will be given to you. Seek. Seek and you will find. Knock. Knock and it will be open to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. We would almost think that Moses was being greedy. Seven things you come to ask of the Lord? Those were seven incredible things. Seven very needful things. Verse nine, he takes into account the character of God, does Christ. What man is there among you who, when his son asks for a loaf, will give him a stone? The child wants a snack. We’re going to give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, he will not give him a snake, will he? If you then, being evil, sinful humanity, If you know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give what is good to those who ask Him? He brings into account the character and nature of God and just says, ask, seek, knock. It cultivates that relationship with Almighty God.

See, we have a tendency to forget that once we are restored to God by faith in Christ’s atonement for our sin on his cross, we have free access to what the writer of Hebrews calls the throne of grace. May I just remind you of this verse briefly? Therefore, since we have a high priest, Jesus Christ, who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession, not our confession of sins, our confession of faith. We believe him. Let us hold fast our confession, for we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses. You don’t have to be ashamed to go to God. Go to him in confession of your sin, and then ask, seek, knock.

We do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has been tempted in all things. That part I can never get my head wrapped around. All the things that we struggle with, Christ was tempted with, yet without sin. Not once. Therefore, because of that, because Christ endured these temptations without sin, therefore let us draw near with confidence. God expects you to come to him. Let us draw near with confidence to the throne of grace so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.

Moses knew it. Moses looked at the scope of humanity and he saw exactly what they needed. And it didn’t matter that there were seven, seven grand requests. Moses went before God. Because he knew he needed to ask. He needed to seek. And he needed to knock. Let’s do likewise.

Our gracious God, we humble ourselves before you at this rich psalm that your servant Moses penned, not only for his own benefit, for the benefit of the people he was shepherding, but for our benefit. These things were written for our instruction. Lord God, we thank you for the privilege that we have to ponder this incredible psalm. life from God’s perspective.

And Father, we who are believers, we know this and we know that we have a tendency to wander from you and to think that we’re unworthy of asking you a thing. Moses was a sinner, just like us. And Moses brought himself by God’s grace full circle, bow on his knees, to ask of you wisdom and these seven things, to be restored to you and to come to know your mercy and grace, to enjoy joy and the perspective that you are in control, sovereign over all things, showing us your kindness and affirming us and guiding us in our life. Lord God, if there are any here who do not know the Lord Jesus Christ, this whole thing is probably bewildering.

It’s not a matter of doing anything for the sake of our salvation. It is looking to God himself as the dwelling place, the salvation of humanity. He sent his son, the Lord Jesus, to die on the cross for that very purpose. And as sinful humanity, he is our only answer. And we either die without Christ or we live with him. We pray that you would do your work in the hearts of those who do not know the Savior. Pray these things in Jesus’ name.