Psalms 90

The oldest prayer in the book opens not with a complaint about death but with a confession of security: Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations (v. 1). It is a startling first word from a man who has spent forty years watching people die in a wilderness with no fixed home at all - tents struck and pitched, an entire generation buried in the sand. Where had they actually lived, in the deepest sense? Not in any place. In God. He had been their dwelling, their home, the one constant address across every move and every generation. The Hebrew word carries the sense of a habitation, a den, a refuge - the place a creature returns to and is safe. And Moses puts it in the perfect tense: thou hast been. This is not a hope for the future but a settled fact of the past, tested across the lifetimes of fathers and grandfathers. Before the psalm says a single word about how short life is, it plants its feet on what does not change. The security Moses names is not a place that cannot be taken away - he of all people knew places can be lost - but a Person who cannot. Everything else in the psalm is said from inside that shelter.

From the shelter of verse 1 Moses lifts his eyes to the sheer scale of the God he is sheltering in: Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God (v. 2). The mountains are the oldest, most permanent things a person can see - the very picture of what was always there and always will be. Moses reaches behind even them. Before the mountains, before the earth itself, before there was a world to measure time by, thou art God. Notice the tense again: not “thou wast God” in some distant past, but thou art - the eternal present of One who does not begin or end but simply is, on both sides of all created time. The phrase from everlasting to everlasting stretches the imagination past its breaking point in two directions at once, backward before the world and forward past its end. This is the measuring rod the rest of the psalm will lay against human life. You cannot feel how brief seventy years are until you have set them beside the One who was God before the mountains. Moses sets them there deliberately, and the smallness of the human span suddenly comes into focus.

Moses does not treat human frailty as a bare fact of biology. He traces it to something deeper: 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 (vv. 7-8). The shortness of life, in this psalm, is bound up with the brokenness of the relationship between the holy God and a sinful people. And the detail that lands hardest is secret sins. The things we keep hidden - from others, from ourselves - are not hidden from Him; they stand in the light of thy countenance, lit up by the face of God. There is nothing in a human life that escapes that light. This is sobering, but it is not said to crush. It is said to be honest, because a prayer that pretends our trouble has nothing to do with our sin would be a shallow prayer, and Moses is not shallow. He names the real weight of living before a holy God - and it is precisely this honesty that makes the cry for mercy in verses 13 and 14 ring true. You cannot ask to be satisfied with mercy until you have admitted you need it.

For the brevity of life Moses gathers image after image, and verse 9 supplies one of the most haunting: we spend our years as a tale that is told. A tale that is told is over almost as soon as it is begun - a story spoken into the air, finished, and gone, leaving only the memory of a sound. Some hear in the phrase a sigh, a single breath let out and done. Either way the point is the same: a human life has the duration of something said rather than something built. Set this beside the other pictures crowded into these verses - a flood that sweeps everything off, a sleep we wake from, grass green in the morning and cut down by night (vv. 5-6). None of them last. None of them leave a mark. This is the unsparing realism of the psalm, and it refuses every comfortable illusion that we are more permanent than we are. But notice that Moses is not merely lamenting; he is clearing the ground. Only a person who has stopped pretending their years are many is in a position to learn the one thing the psalm most wants to teach - what to do with the few years there are.

Everything in the psalm has been moving toward this one request, and when it arrives it turns the whole bleak meditation into wisdom: So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom (v. 12). Notice what Moses does not pray. He does not ask for more days - not for the seventy to become a hundred. He asks to be taught to number the days he has: to count them, to feel their limit, to live in clear-eyed awareness that they will end. This is the surprising turn at the centre of the psalm. We tend to think that facing our mortality would paralyse us, so we look away from it; Moses says the opposite - that an honest reckoning with how few our days are is the very thing that makes us wise. A person who believes the supply of days is endless squanders them; a person who has truly numbered them spends them with care, on what actually matters. And the phrase translated apply our hearts is, in the Hebrew, more like “bring a heart of wisdom in” - wisdom is something carried home, gained, brought into the life. To number your days is not to grow morbid. It is to grow wise.

Having faced mortality without flinching, the psalm turns - and the turn is a single word: Return, O LORD, how long? and let it repent thee concerning thy servants (v. 13). It is the same verb God spoke over dying man in verse 3, shuv, now flung back as a plea: the God who turns us to dust, turn back to us. How long? is the ancient cry of every sufferer who has waited past the point of patience - not a complaint that God has done wrong, but a longing for Him to act now. And then comes a phrase that startles: let it repent thee - not that God has sinned and must be sorry, but that He would relent, turn from the posture of judgment, move toward His servants in compassion. After eleven verses on wrath and the brevity it brings, Moses dares to ask the eternal God to change His bearing toward these few, short-lived people - to come near, to relent, to be moved. It is a bold prayer, and it rests on everything the psalm opened with: this God has been our dwelling place; surely the home of all generations will not stay far from His own.

The petitions now come quickly, and they ask for joy in the teeth of the very brevity the psalm has just described: 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 (vv. 14-15). Moses does not pray the affliction away; he prays for gladness measured to it - as many days of joy as there have been of sorrow, mercy poured in to balance the evil seen. And the timing word is tender: satisfy us early, in the morning, at the start of the day - the same morning when, a few verses back, the grass sprang up only to be cut down. Let the morning bring mercy, Moses prays, and not only mortality. There is no pretending here that life has been easy; he names the afflicting and the evil plainly. But he asks the eternal God to fill the short, hard span of human life with enough of His own mercy that the dominant note becomes not sorrow but gladness. A brief life is not, in this prayer, a reason for joylessness. It is a reason to ask for joy now, early, while the day lasts.