For Sermon Central researchers: I have posted a series of 15 sermons on the Psalms. In recent personal studies I have found the psalms to be richer and more thought-provoking than I had fully appreciated. I had too often swept swiftly through psalms without slowing down to inquire as thoroughly as I might have into the depths of meaning and feeling that are expressed by the psalmists. Upon deeper examination and reflection, I find the psalms to be highly relevant to Christians in every age. My most recent foray into the psalms led me to present a series of studies of selected psalms in a class environment.
In my classes I did not examine every psalm, or every verse of the ones I did. Rather, I presented selected psalms that I believe to be representative of the collection in the book of Psalms. The studies were held in a class environment suitable for pauses for questions and discussion, and to pose “thought questions” where the meanings are not readily apparent, as is often the case in poetry. My notes include suggested points for such pauses, and I have not removed them in Sermon Central posts.
I developed the material with the view in mind that the series may be well used as sermons. There is an introductory sermon that describes what psalms are (whether they are in the 150-chapter book or elsewhere) and explains my approach to the series. The psalms I selected were presented in no particular order in the classes; however, I suggest that anyone using this material as a series begin with the introductory sermon and follow it with Psalms 1 and 2 in that order, as the first two psalms function as a pair. Beyond that, the selected psalms may be presented in any order.
To get as much enjoyment as we could from our study, I did some of the reading from the KJV, which I believe is the most beautiful of the English bible translations. For clarity we also used other versions, mainly ESV, which I have used for several years and the one I have come to prefer.
PSALM 90
The title, A Psalm of Moses, the Man of God, attributes this psalm to Moses; however, the authorship is somewhat in dispute. It’s not my purpose to settle that dispute today beyond merely mentioning that it exists. For what my opinion may be worth, I’m of the belief because of the content that Moses wrote it. If that’s true, it’s possibly the oldest psalm.
Moses is one of a handful of predominant figures in the bible…among them Adam, Noah, Abraham, Jacob (Israel), Moses, David, Elijah (perhaps fittingly representing all the writing prophets), and in the New Testament, Elijah again, in whose spirit John the Baptist came, Jesus the cornerstone, and the apostles – especially 4 of them – Peter, James, and John and Paul who wrote most of the New Testament.
Here we have the opportunity to go into the mind of Moses and share his stream of thought of God. In addition to being a song, the psalm is a prayer from beginning to end. Moses address the content of this psalm to God.
I’m reading Psalm 90 in the KJV because it contains such majestic and stirring thoughts and to me, the KJV more fittingly conveys its grandeur than more modern versions. I’ll read other passages from the ESV.
Our dwelling place
Psalm 90:1-2 KJV - 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.
How is God a place?
Let’s look at another psalm, this one by David:
Psalm 15:1 “Lord, who shall abide in thy tabernacle? who shall dwell in thy holy hill?”
The first verse of Psalm 15 appears to be the poetic form where the second line of a pair does not simply repeat the first, but clarifies it or – as in this verse – expands it.
The remaining verses in Psalm 15 proceed to describe the one who is to abide and the Lord’s tabernacle, and the same shall dwell in God’s holy hill (Zion).
We all have dwelling places. Our dwelling place is our HOME. Home is a sanctuary, a place of refuge and safety. That is true in all generations.
Firstly, let’s recognize that neither our “dwelling place,” nor that of the people who originally sang these words refers to the temple at Jerusalem. It didn’t exist until 500 years after Moses, who never entered Canaan. The temple certainly didn’t exist in “all generations.”
Nor did Moses more broadly refer to the land of Canaan. Keep in mind that for about 400 years the Israelites were not in the land that was promised to them, but they knew God had promised it to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, a promise that had not yet been realized. But now this generation was being led to Canaan for the realization of that promise. And with the exception of two faithful spies, the entire generation of Israelites that left Egypt would never enter Canaan. Moses would not have said “Thou has been…in all generations” if the dwelling place he referred to was Canaan.
Let’s look at the word “dwelling,” and its root word “dwell.”
Strong’s Hebrws dictionary defines “abide” as “to live somewhere as a “client” or “sojourner” as one might turn aside from the way for a night’s lodging.” “Dwell” on the other hand, means to reside or permanently stay (literally or figuratively): - abide, continue, (cause to, make to) dwell (-er), have habitation, inhabit, lay, place, (cause to) remain, rest, set (up).
It is one thing to say that God has a dwelling place, or that we dwell where God dwells, or that God dwells where we dwell. It is still another thing to say that God provides a dwelling place, literally and figuratively.
But it is another thing to say that the place where we dwell IS GOD.
Do you see the difference? To say that God IS Moses’ dwelling place – and ours – is to say that we do not only dwell with God, but IN God.
Is this expression stylistic or poetic, or are we to probe for the meaning on a different level?
Discuss
How can our minds grasp that where we dwell IS GOD?
Is God a place, as Moses says?
“Our dwelling place” is not a matter of location or geography. It is a matter of condition.
To be “in Christ” is to be “in God,” for Christ said to his disciples in John 17:20-21
I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.
“In Christ” is a persistent doctrine and a great theme of the New Testament. In one form or another, the expression occurs well over 200 times-- “in Christ,” “in him,” “in the Lord,” or “in the Lord Jesus,” or other variations meaning “in Christ.”
Here are a handful from the hundreds of New Testament occurrence of this great theme:
Righteousness of God in him
Made alive in Christ
Promises of God find their “Yes” in him
Life in Christ
Redemption in Christ
Hope in Christ
Sanctification in Christ
Rooted and built up in him
Eternal purpose in Christ
Peace in Christ
Walk in him
Raised up together in Christ
Perseverance in Christ
Riches in Christ
Free in Christ Jesus
Fitly framed together in Christ
Enriched in him
No condemnation for those who are in Christ
In him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily
All things united in him
Complete in Christ
All things are summed up in Christ
In him you are being built into a dwelling place for God
Eternal life in Christ
Augustus Toplady wrote the words of this song:
Rock of ages, cleft for me –
Let me hide myself in thee.
I believe that idea is the key to understanding what Moses meant.
I also believe that grasping that divine truth it is a challenge to the mortal mind.
The psalm has several familiar snippets:
v2 - …from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.
“Everlasting to everlasting” is a concept the human mind struggles to grasp. We’ll compare the time dimension to the same idea in a spatial dimension, because we can’t see time. We can see things that occupy space, and the distance between those things. Within our galaxy (the Milky Way) is the star Betelgeuse (I talked about this in the series on the sermon on the mount). In the constellation Orion, Betelgeuse is Orion’s right shoulder. Betelgeuse is 7500 to 14,000 times brighter than our sun! It is about the width of the orbit of Jupiter around the sun, so its width could contain the orbits of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, and the much larger orbit of Jupiter.
One might ask, “Why doesn’t Betelgeuse look bigger and brighter than the sun?”
Because it is so far away.
Betelgeuse’s light that you see tonight left the star 642.5 years ago, about 1377 AD, traveling 186,000 miles/second. The light that will reach your eyes tonight had been hurrying on its way to earth 115 years when Columbus came to America. For comparison, the light from Sirius, the brightest star (also known as the “dog star”) takes about 8.6 years to reach the earth. Yet to the naked eye, the two stars appear to be about the same distance from the earth.
Betelgeuse is one of an estimated 100 billion stars in the Milky Way. The Milky Way is the cloudy band that we see in the night sky where stars are barely – if at all – distinguishable from one another. As far away as Betelgeuse is from earth, that distance of is .6% of the width of our galaxy. A little over half of one percent! And our galaxy is one of many!
Excerpts From “Ask an Astronomer” website:
No one is sure exactly how many galaxies there are in total—many millions for sure! To illustrate how many galaxies there are that are known, a single 2-year survey which finished in 2003 surveyed 250,000 galaxies in order to make a 3D map of the universe. And that's certainly not all known galaxies! So the exact number of known galaxies is constantly changing upward!
Now move this incomprehensible idea from the spatial dimension into the time dimension and you might get a faint idea what Moses means by “from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.”
Psalm 90:3-11 KJV - 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. 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. Who knoweth the power of thine anger? even according to thy fear, so is thy wrath.
There are millions of unmarked graves in the Arabian Peninsula. After their time at Sinai and other locations in the wilderness, the Israelites were in the wilderness of Paran. The Lord told them to send spies into the land where they were headed – for what reason I don’t know. No information the spies could report would be information otherwise unavailable to God.
But twelve spies were sent – one from each tribe. We have their names in Numbers 13.
Here’s the report of 10 of those spies. From excerpts in Numbers 14:27-29
We came to the land to which you sent us. It flows with milk and honey, and this is its fruit. However, the people who dwell in the land are strong, and the cities are fortified and very large. And besides, we saw the descendants of Anak there. The Amalekites dwell in the land of the Negeb. The Hittites, the Jebusites, and the Amorites dwell in the hill country. And the Canaanites dwell by the sea, and along the Jordan.
Skipping to verse 32:
The land, through which we have gone to spy it out, is a land that devours its inhabitants, and all the people that we saw in it are of great height. And there we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim), and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.
God’s response:
Numbers 14:27-33 - How long shall this wicked congregation grumble against me? I have heard the grumblings of the people of Israel, which they grumble against me. Say to them, ‘As I live, declares the Lord, what you have said in my hearing I will do to you: your dead bodies shall fall in this wilderness, and of all your number, listed in the census from twenty years old and upward, who have grumbled against me, not one shall come into the land where I swore that I would make you dwell, except Caleb the son of Jephunneh and Joshua the son of Nun. But your little ones, who you said would become a prey, I will bring in, and they shall know the land that you have rejected. But as for you, your dead bodies shall fall in this wilderness. And your children shall be shepherds in the wilderness forty years and shall suffer for your faithlessness, until the last of your dead bodies lies in the wilderness.
I agree with those commentators whose work I have read, that this is what Moses wrote about in Psalm 90. While we may not be able to explain every phrase and nuance in the psalm, we do know that the unfaithful spies’ report and the forty years in the wilderness is something Moses knew all about.
And there are some connections we can make. For example:
v4 – “…a thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday when it is past.”
"A thousand years ... as yesterday ... as a watch in the night." This contrasts the dying generations of mankind with the eternity of God. The Apostle Peter quoted this verse in 2 Peter 3:8, warning Christians not to forget it. It suggests that 40 years of waiting for the people of promise to enter the land of promise were insignificant in God’s time! God will do what he does, not on man’s concept of time, but his own, for he is not bound to time.
It would be impossible to make it any plainer that God's `days' or God's `years' cannot be restricted to the limitations of the human understanding of those terms. He is eternal, and unlike time, eternity cannot be chopped up into fragments as time can. If it were possible to divide infinity by 1000, each of the 1000 parts would be infinity.
In all of bible history it appears that God’s acts are more in a cause – effect framework than a clock and calendar. Yet God is aware of man’s time and its limitation. He knows perfectly when to supply a need, and he never reveals the ending at the beginning.
Vs5-6 "Thou carriest them away as a flood ... as a sleep."
Like the succeeding waves of the sea, the generations of men rise and fade away, much like time passes while we are asleep.
Earthly life is "like grass ... in the morning it flourisheth ... in the evening ... withereth." This simile is also used repeatedly in the New Testament.
• Christ used it in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6:30) But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?
• James used it in James 1:10-11. Let the lowly brother boast in his exaltation, and the rich in his humiliation, because like a flower of the grass he will pass away. For the sun rises with its scorching heat and withers the grass; its flower falls, and its beauty perishes. So also will the rich man fade away in the midst of his pursuits.
• The Apostle Peter developed it in 1 Peter 1:24. All flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers, and the flower falls…
It would be difficult to imagine a simile more expressive of the fleeting, ephemeral nature of human life...than grass.
v10 - The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength, eighty. To God, those are equal.
At almost 81, I am personally beyond the “by reason of strength” milestone. Why am I alive?
I don’t know, but Moses too went far beyond fourscore years and was still strong when he died at 120 years of age. So it this isn’t intended as a limit on human life, what is it here for and what does it mean?
Discuss
In context, this is saying that whatever a lifespan – 70 or 80 on average – it is nothing compared to the eternity of God. Not only is life short, but it’s also full of trouble. As a song says, “This world is not my home, I’m just a-passing through.”
This life is temporary.
V11 "Who knoweth the power of thine anger ... thy wrath"
The implication of this verse is that people do not generally take the anger and wrath of God seriously enough.
The modern conception of God regards him as a rather overly-indulgent grandfather who pays little or no attention to sins that rage under his nose - that his wonderful loving grace and mercy will ignore and overlook anything that wicked men may do. But while God is indeed free and gracious with his forgiveness, and is patient and longsuffering toward us, he does detest sin, and there is a price to be paid for trampling on his grace.
What was the Israelite’s sin?
They didn’t trust God. They thought they had to defeat the giants themselves and believed couldn’t do it. With the exception of Joshua and Caleb, the people decided they wanted to go back to Egypt.
Back to Egypt is back to bondage – a figure of a rejection of God for lack of trust.
Might we sin the same way they did?
Discuss
Psalms 90:12-17 KJV So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom. Return, O Lord, how long? and let it repent thee concerning thy servants. O satisfy us early with thy mercy; that we may rejoice and be glad all our days. 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. 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.
V12 - "So teach us to number our days ... that we may get ... a heart of wisdom" (Psalms 90:12).
This is a prayer that God will teach men to live as dying men should live, always taking account of the brevity and uncertainty of life and of the inevitable accounting before God. What a contrast is this with the attitude of many wicked people who live exactly as if they expected to live here forever!
v13 - Return, O Lord! How long? Have pity on your servants!
This is a call by Moses for God to …what?… repent? Other translations say “have pity” or “be sorry” for your servants. The word in the original Hebrew is nacham (nah-kahm). It’s the same word Moses used in Genesis 6 in the time of Noah, where God repented that he had made man.
So on its face this seems to be a call by Moses for God to repent.
But James 1:17 says
Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.
It is a plea for a restoration of God's favor. To be sure, God does not "repent" in the human sense, but when the repentance and prayers of his people permit it, God indeed will restore them to favor.
v15 "Make us glad according to the days wherein thou hast afflicted us"
It is as if Moses is saying, "O God, let us at least have good times that are as long as the evil times we have suffered." The thought in this section is one of confidence in the Lord's kindness and power. The psalmist knows that it is only God's favor that renews the sense of gladness and truly prospers the works of men."
V17 "Let the favor of God be upon us ... establish the work of our hands"
This indicates that the works of righteous people shall indeed survive them and follow them even to the judgment of the great day. This must surely be what the psalmist meant by "establish the work of our hands." How glorious is the apostolic assurance that, "We know that our labor is not in vain in the Lord" (1 Corinthians 15:58).
Alexander MacLaren has a marvelous paragraph on this with which we wish to conclude this chapter.
Fleeting though our days are, they are ennobled by our being permitted to be God's "tools;" and although we the workers have to pass, our work may be established. That life will not die which has done the will of God. But we must walk in the favor of God, so that there can flow down from us deeds which breed not shame but shall outlast the perishable earth and follow their doers into the dwelling places of those eternal habitations.
