Psalm 90

Numbering Our Days

2005 is now past. A year is gone. 365 days, 8,766 hours, 525,949 minutes, 31,556,926 seconds. Scads of time! As we look at the beginning of a year, it seems like forever. All kinds of time, an endless supply.

Want to consider the real value of time?

Ask a student who failed about the value of one year.

Ask a mother who gave birth to a premature baby about the value of one month.

Ask lovers waiting to meet about the value of one hour.

Ask the person who just avoided an accident about the value of one second.[1]

But 2005 is past. It was a tough year.

·     We began reeling from the South Asian tsunami. Then we had a visit from those terrible twins, Katrina and Rita slamming the Gulf coast. Then Wilma crossed Florida.

·     As if those natural disasters weren’t enough, public-health officials are chirping about Avian Flu. Flu viruses mutate. If this one does manage to change its genetic code, we’re in for a deadly surprise: a global epidemic, perhaps worse than the Spanish Flu of 1918 that killed hundreds of thousands.[2]

·     The best and worst of humanity played on our screens nightly from Baghdad to New Orleans.  

But true to form we ring out the old year with merriment. Dick Clark was back for his 34^th ball dropping in Times Square, having taken a year off from a stroke. Yet, with the frivolity of New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Day reflections should bring sobriety, especially as we contemplate our lives in light of the past year, considering the year now upon us. How should we proceed ahead? What should characterize a prudent attitude about this upcoming year? We often do so by comparisons.

·     I might compare with how I am doing on December 31 as compared to 364 days before. I’ll look and see how my investments have done. Have I at least beaten the cost of living?

·     Job advancement, family enlargement, romantic engagements – if any progress then all is well

·     I might compare myself with others. Christmas letters are good for that. I’ve kept one in my file for some 16 years in which the writer walks through a litany of car problems, cancer diagnoses, a plane crash, hurricanes, earthquakes and spiritual battles. 1989 was a difficult year for Janet and me, but I kept the letter as a reminder that there are those I know who’ve had it worse.

 
But Scripture calls us to compare ourselves not against ourselves or against others, but against the only unchanging guide for our existence: God. Obviously, at first, such a comparison will sting, but it is only there that we can find the hope and help to get through not just a new year, but our entire life.

Psalm 90 is a great place for reflection. At first, may seem to some too morose, melancholy. Who wants to go to church to be depressed? I can do that well enough at home with my own family! Psalm 90 paints a sobering picture of life, but also one of hope as it points us how to live. READ Psalm 90

Verse 12 is the hinge to the passage, placing in perspective how we are to view our lives in light of the past and future, in light of the God who made us for himself.

Moses’ request of God is that we be taught to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.

Rather than living in the past or always looking to the future, we are to recognize the tenuous nature of our lives. Number our days. How do we exactly do that? How can I know how many days I have left on earth? In a moment of morbidity, I went to the website DeathClock.com.

They ask you for some basic information: year of birth, gender, body mass index, outlook on life, then with the click of the button up comes a little window that tells you how long you have left. For me – I have 851,756,740 …39…38 seconds left. Seems like a long time, but that is really 14,199,000 minutes, 236,650 hours, 9,860 days, 27 years.[3]

But that is not what Moses means by number our days, for not one of us knows the day of our death. Rather our text tells us how to number our days, a simple comparison between me and God: a sobering, but ultimately helpful analysis. For when we rightly consider who we are and who God is, we find in Him the only source for our help and hope.

God’s eternality and our finality         1-6

If we are going to number our days we must first take into account that God is God and I am not. Moses begins with the big picture – God is, always was and always will be. This is the first mark of comparison we must make. The nature of God of is to be. The nature of man is but a vapor.

God’s eternality

This psalm mirrors the opening chapters of Moses’ first book, Genesis, in which Moses begins at the beginning, with God who created heaven and earth. Before anything else, God existed without beginning and without end. While we are to number our days, this is something God does not do. He stands outside of time, unaffected as we are by its passage.

 
Man’s finality

With words that go back Genesis 3, where God tells Adam “for you are dust, and to dust you shall return” we are reminded of how frail we really are. For as much as we think we control our own destiny, we can not stop death. Generations to come will dust us from dining room tables.

 
With a series of illustrations, we are given a sobering reminder of life, that the number of years we possess are not very significant when we compare ourselves to God.

·    A thousand years, the benchmark of time, is but a day. The longest life recorded, that of Methuselah, 969 years, doesn’t equal of day to God.

·    Shorter still is the watch in the night, the 3 hours in the lifeless period when nothing stirs.

Between a minute and a million of years there is some proportion, but between time and eternity there is none.

·    We witnessed this year the power of the tides obliterating all in its path. The Thai beach resorts and the Gulf shore casinos crushed by the waves, stripping all in its wake.

·    A dream which seems vivid becomes a hazy recollection when the alarm sounds. Can you tell me all that you dreamt last night, last week?

·    Desert grass is vibrant when nourished by the morning dew, but in hours the scorching sun withers it away.

Moses’ words are similar to T.S. Elliot's poem, "The Hollow Man:

“This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with a whimper."

 
We don’t want to think. We’d much prefer to go our sunny way, assuming that life will continue pretty much as it always has. The ancient Hindu writing, the Mahabarata, poses the question:

“Of all the world’s wonders, which is the most wonderful?” The answer: “That no man, though he sees others dying all around him, believes he himself will die.”[4]

The conclusion we must draw as we compare ourselves to God is: Life is short

Since life is short we must know that one day we will stand before God as our maker. Just because a new year is upon us does not mean that there will be an endless parade of annual celebrations.

Ray Charles, who died a year and a half ago, once said: 

"Live every day like it's your last, 'cause one day you're gonna be right."

 
As we face a new year, remembering those family and friends who were with us just one a year ago and are now gone, we must be wise. If in God’s providence, sickness and death has not touched you this year, don’t secretly imagine that you are immune to its hand.

Without becoming cold to the pain of this world, we must not become undone by the tragedies that will face everyone in this room. When we mourn we must not be overcome by a shock that we have not cured every disease, stemmed every aliment and kept death so far away that it will never harm us. This Christmas there was an empty chair where a loved one sat the year before. There is silence where there was laughter. Be wise and consider this is part of life.

When we count our days and know that life is short we are driven from this world as our home and to seek refuge in God as our dwelling place as he has been for all generations.

Wisdom does not send us to despair or callowness, but to God’s embrace.

See 1 Peter 1:17 – we are exiles here

 
But this is not the only comparison. Why does life so often feels, to quote philosopher Thomas Hobbes, “nasty, brutish and short”? It is because of the next comparison.

Our life is short and sour because we are sinners living under the righteous judgment of God.

The next section of the psalm (7-11) recognizes that man’s greatest problem is not just his frailty – that is, he exists for only a short bit of time and is then no more. It is not just that we are the fruit fly which dies in a month in comparison to the Galapagos Land Tortoise who lives to be 200. There is a moral category that must be taken into account.

The ultimate reason for our shortened days is not because of genetic code or a cycle of life moving us to a new stage. We die because we are sinners. Ultimately, we all die because of sin.

We spend a lifetime ignoring the inevitable process of aging through wise regimens of diet and exercise or superficial makeovers so that it matters not whether we are good or feel good so long as we look good. But even Dick Clark can’t stop the process of death.

In the same way we anesthetize our souls, stopping our ears from the truth that death and sin are connected. That we can neither stop the clock nor hide our sins from God. No spiritual makeover will set us aright with God. We can not heal our own souls.

Verse 8 makes it plain that God is very active in this process. He sets our sins before him. There is nothing we can do to hide even those secret sins, those sins which no one else would ever know, from God.

 
But not only is life shortened by sin, it is also soured by pain and sadness

So, if you live anything like a normal life, sorrow and heartache visit you sooner or later, and certainly by the time you reach fifty—whether through your parents, spouse, children, friends, boss, job, the stock market, the random roll of the genetic dice, plain old bad luck (a.k.a. divine providence) or from what Wendell Berry once called our "irremediable ignorance" you will experience sorrow. "Life is difficult," wrote M. Scott Peck in one of the most famous first sentences ever (The Road Less Traveled) ; he too was recently "swept away in the sleep of death" on September 25 from pancreatic and liver cancer at the age of 69.

While some may resist the analysis of the Psalmist as too gloomy and overly pessimistic, and instead throttle full speed ahead as if nothing had changed. Displaced desires, reversion to superficial pursuits, social affectations, sublimation through obsessive work, escapism through play, cutting and running, and the old stand-by denial are all strategies people employ to avoid the obvious, that my banal, ordinary life is speeding toward completion, and that with what the Psalmist describes as "labor, sorrow and a moan."[5]

 
Conclusion: Life is under judgment

It is not just enough to say life is short. Make every day count. Carpe deim goes only so far. What is important is to know that life is short because of sin and then there is judgment.

But just as there is no escape from sin, there is no avoiding judgment. We must live each day in light of God’s demands for perfection. Hebrews 9:27 after death – judgment

The trouble is, as Moses asks rhetorically in v11: “who can consider your anger or your wrath according to the fear of you?” We can not comprehend how bad off we really are.

 
Before you put the knife to your throat hold on. At this point I know you are all grateful not to have invited me over for the New Years Eve Party. I’m worse than a bad hangover. If we stop here we will find ourselves on a treadmill, trying to please an unappeasable God.

We could feel like Tattoo, the basset hound from Tacoma, Washington, who went with his owner on an evening run. The trouble was, the owner was unaware that Tattoo was with him. You see, Tattoo’s owner put the leash on Tattoo, had a change of plans and decided to go somewhere else first. He accidentally shut Tattoo’s leash in the car door and took off down the street.

Police officer Terry Filbert noticed a passing vehicle with something that appeared to be dragging behind it. When he got closer he saw Tattoo. Officer Filbert finally chased the car and caused it to stop, and Tattoo was rescued—but not before the poor dog reached a speed of twenty miles per hour and rolled over several times. Poor Tattoo recovered, but has not asked to go for an evening walk for a long time.

We can feel like Tattoo, dragged behind the car of life, with God demanding a perfection we can not supply. But knowing life is short and under judgment is only part of numbering our days. The final part of this psalm tells us how to live.

Moses finds his hope not in himself, but in the God who gives him the days to life.

As we hinted at in v1, God’s eternality is not just a matter of the length of his existence, but is the place where we must hope. God is our dwelling         v1

The word dwelling place was used of a refuge or a home. It is a place of security, protection. Rather than fleeing the pain and realities of this life by denial, wisdom calls for us to flee to God who holds our life and find in him the help we need.

 
That this is wise is found in the truth that God has been this refuge not just for a few select, but for all generations. This is where the wise in the past found their hope.

At first glance it would seem odd to run the wrathful God for hope any more than the criminal runs to the police. But Moses knows that it is only there we have hope. The police only have the law to give, but God who gives us Law, also gives the answer to our breaking of the law – Christ.

 
Moses invites us to call on God not on the basis of our merit, but on the basis of his character – his steadfast love. The pity he seeks flows out of his character to love.

His wrath is real, but so is his compassion. It is in his loving kindness, hesed, the covenantal faithfulness to his promises to his people, that the answer to his wrath is found. What this Psalm is saying was well summarized on a barn in northern Indiana:

Life is short, death is sure. Sin is the cause, Christ is the cure.

It is when Christ is the cure to our ills, when his steadfast, unchanging love is poured out in our lives, the pain and misery of this life remains; yet, we will find delight in our lives as well. While there will be affliction, his will make us glad.

How will be this been seen – in the answer to the request in v16-17

God’s work will be shown not just to us, but to our children.

God’s favor will be upon us and our work will be established.

 
From this we can conclude that while our lives will be short and are under judgment that the good news of the gospel is that God and God alone will pour his love over us and establish the work we do.

While the world peddles hype with its distorted view of happiness, its preoccupation with pleasure, God gives us not hype, but hope.

Rather than dreaming what we can accomplish by ourselves and for ourselves, God promises to all those who look in faith to him that he establish what we do. We are his servants (13, 16) and our hands are to be busy, but the power is found only in God’s favor on us.

 
This is found only as we number our days – as we look at who we are and what we do through the lens who God is and what he has done.

What Moses calls us to see is what we have before us.

Where do God’s wrath and mercy meet? At the cross. There his wrath for our sin was poured out, but there also is his steadfast love so clearly seen. There the labor of my hands is established not on the basis of my law keeping, but what God the Son did to satisfy the demands of our heavenly Father.

As his body was broken and blood shed in my place, I have reason to be glad, to rejoice. I will number my days on the basis of Christ’s work in my place and there I will find wisdom.

 For the next 31, 520,000 seconds left in 2006, how will you live? 36,000 seconds are gone.

By faith, look to Christ, trusting that your sins were placed on him and he has given you his righteousness, so that God is your home for years to come.