Psalm 90 - Redeeming The Time Series

How many of you have been following the Olympics? How many of you watched the opening ceremonies last week? What I liked about the opening ceremonies is how the British were able to creatively incorporate some of their royalty, their celebrities into the opening ceremony. If you watched the ceremony you might have seen Queen Elizabeth jump out of an airplane with Daniel Craig from 007. You might have watched Mr. Bean do his own rendition of Chariots of Fire. You might have watched David Beckham come down the Thames in a speedboat and deliver the Olympic torch. If you stayed up until the end you got to see Sir Paul McCartney singing and playing Hey Jude. Did anybody get to see that? That was awesome. I was sitting here watching that and I was thinking about the crowd and the kids swinging back and forth. I was thinking most of those kids weren’t even born when that song was made in 1968. Does anybody remember the 60s? Does anybody remember The Beatles? The Beatles were this popular group from England. It consisted of four men. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and George Harrison. I think Ringo was my favorite. I think he is going to outlive them all because they didn’t like Ringo but he is going to stick around the longest. Anyway, you look at the 60s and we see this song was 1968. I began to think how Paul McCartney has changed. To show you how much he has changed, I thought I would find a picture on the internet of Paul McCartney when he actually was a Beatle. A handsome young man. This is in the 60s. Then I thought to contrast it a little bit I am going to show you a more recent picture of Sir Paul and there he is. Paul looks like he has aged a bit. He has because Paul McCartney is 70 years old. I am a baby boomer so I like seeing all these old rockers performing the Super Bowl and the Olympics and that sort of thing, but really, at some point, these rockers have to put down the guitar picks. They have to put down their drum sticks and they might think about picking up the hearing aids and Pepto-Bismol and heading off to Happy Valley Villa with the retirement people. All kidding aside, time marches on. Time marches on not only for us but for celebrities and for everybody.

That is what we are going to look at today as we look at Psalm 90. Thinking about Psalm 90, the good news we see is that Moses lays out a strategy for reversing the effects of aging. We see that in Psalm 90. Before I get into it, I want to give you a quick rundown on where we have been. We are still in the summer of the Psalms. We looked at several Psalms but the summer is winding down so we will be winding down looking at the Psalms. Last week, we looked at Psalm 49. You may recall that that Psalm was about riches without understanding. The main idea in that was if you spend your entire life pursuing riches without a real understanding of riches, you are going to get to the end of you days and you are going say I spent all my life accumulating these things and now I have to leave them to somebody else. You can’t take that stuff with you. On the other hand, as we saw, if you invest a certain amount of your riches in things that do not perish, in other words if you invest a certain amount of riches in heavenly treasure, things that moths will not get at, rust will not get at, thieves will not break in and steal, when you cross over to the other side you may not be able to take your earthly things, but you are going to be able to take your heavenly things. In other words, your heavenly things are going to be there waiting for you. You are going to have treasures in heaven. We looked at treasure last week. We looked at possessions.

This week we are going to look at this idea of time. We are going to look at Psalm 90 because Moses teaches us a lot about time. A little context here. We know that Psalm 90 is a Psalm of Moses. You say how do you know? If you have the NIV Bible and look at the very top, remember we talked about the superscription. It is those little words at the top that tell you who the author is and sometimes they tell you the circumstance. In this case it just says the prayer of Moses, the man of God. Unfortunately, we don’t know the circumstance. You might remember a few weeks ago we looked at Psalm 51 which was a Psalm of David following his sin with Bathsheba so we knew the circumstances of David writing that Psalm. We really don’t know it here so we have to speculate. Even though we don’t know the exact circumstances that caused Moses to pen this Psalm, we do know quite a bit about Moses. We know that Moses was a man of God. A man of God called by God for a specific purpose. His purpose was to set the captives free. To free the Israelites from the hand of the wicked pharaoh. They had been in slavery for 400 years. God saw their plight and he sent Moses the deliverer to free the people. Moses went there and demanded of pharaoh to let my people go so that they might go out to the desert and continue to worship their God. After several attempts, finally the pharaoh allowed him to go. Moses went out and he came to the Red Sea. God opened the Red Sea and he got to the other side. We also know when they got to the other side, the people began to complain about things. We don’t have enough water. We don’t have enough food. We are tired. This and that. They became disobedient. So disobedient that God wiped out a certain portion of them and he wouldn’t allow a whole generation to go into the Promised Land, including Moses because Moses had sinned against God. Because he sinned against God, he was not able to go into the Promised Land. He was only able to see the Promised Land from a distance. Given that setting, we could get the idea that there were probably periods in Moses’ life where he was a bit down. He was feeling depressed. He was angry with God. He was angry with the people. Probably angry with himself feeling like a bit of a failure. With that context, we are going to read through the entire Psalm 90 to get an idea of why he wrote this Psalm and then we will go back and look at some practical tips on how we can get the most out of our time. So reading from Psalm 90 beginning at verse 1. We will be reading all the way down to 17. (Scripture read here.)