A Life Well Lived

Pastor Melinda Song
27 & 28 January 2024

As we come to the last service of the first month of the year, we are going to turn again to Psalm 90 and the title for this message is A Life Well Lived.

Psalm 90 (NIV84)
A prayer of Moses the man of God.
¹ Lord, you have been our dwelling place
throughout all generations.
² Before the mountains were born
or you brought forth the earth and the world,
from everlasting to everlasting you are God.
³ You turn men back to dust,
saying, “Return to dust, O sons of men.”
⁴ For a thousand years in your sight
are like a day that has just gone by,
or like a watch in the night.
⁵ You sweep men away in the sleep of death;
they are like the new grass of the morning—
⁶ though in the morning it springs up new,
by evening it is dry and withered.
⁷ We are consumed by your anger
and terrified by your indignation.
⁸ You have set our iniquities before you,
our secret sins in the light of your presence.
⁹ All our days pass away under your wrath;
we finish our years with a moan.
¹⁰ The length of our days is seventy years—
or eighty, if we have the strength;
yet their span is but trouble and sorrow,
for they quickly pass, and we fly away.
¹¹ Who knows the power of your anger?
For your wrath is as great as the fear that is due you.
¹² Teach us to number our days aright,
that we may gain a heart of wisdom.
¹³ Relent, O Lord! How long will it be?
Have compassion on your servants.
¹⁴ Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love,
that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days.
¹⁵ Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us,
for as many years as we have seen trouble.
¹⁶ May your deeds be shown to your servants,
your splendor to their children.
¹⁷ May the favor of the Lord our God rest upon us;
establish the work of our hands for us—
yes, establish the work of our hands.

Let me give you some trivia on the book of Psalms. The Book of Psalms has the most number of chapters, but it is not the longest book in the Bible. Going by word count in the original languages, the longest books are:

• Jeremiah (33,002 words)
• Genesis (32,046 words)
• Psalms (30,147 words)

Psalms has more contributors than any other book of the Bible, with King David writing 73 of the 150 psalms. They were written over a span of a thousand years in Israel’s history and must have been compiled and put together in their present form shortly after the captivity ended, about 537 B.C.

They are not organised chronologically with Psalm 90, the one we are looking at is the oldest. This is the only psalm attributed to Moses and most commentators conclude that it was very likely written in the latter stages of Moses’ life. This is evident by the constant mention of death.

Moses saw an entire generation of people die during their 40-year wilderness journey. Numbers 1:46 tells us that there were 603,550 men over the age of 20 who were able to go to war. Conservative estimates put the number at over 1 million people who died during the wilderness journey, which means that on average, there were 25,000 deaths per year, 2,000 deaths per month, 480 deaths per week with  68 funerals day to conduct every day.

Thus Moses had particular insight into…

THE ETERNAL GOD & TRANSITORY MAN (v. 1-6)

¹ Lord, you have been our dwelling place throughout all generations.

We often think of God dwelling in the midst of us but here God is our dwelling place! We also think of a dwelling place as something tangible and concrete but when Moses speaks of the Lord as our dwelling place, he’s talking about a relationship, not a particular location. It’s where your heart is, where your passions lie – which may be different from where you are at the moment.

ILLUSTRATION: Recently, Pam blogged on how she left Penang for KL as a teenager at the age of 17 and her subsequent return to Penang after 18 years as a wife and a mother of two. She concluded her post with these words: Penang is my base, KL is my escape and family is my home.   

For a nomadic people wandering through that vast and howling wilderness, verse 1 is the perfect confession of faith for they depended fully and solely on God for provision and protection. Israel may have been homeless and landless, but they had a “dwelling place” – God who was with them and leading the way. The idea is similar to what Paul expressed to the Greek philosophers in Acts 17:28 when he told them that in God “we live and move and exist.”

Moses adds that this is something that has been true “throughout all generations.” The fact that man exists in “generations” introduces the idea that the life of man is finite. Life has been passed down from parents to their children who become parents with children of their own even while their parents continue to age and eventually die. Man’s life is limited, but God is not, as seen in verse 2.

² Before the mountains were born
or you brought forth the earth and the world,
from everlasting to everlasting you are God.

Mountains are representative of that which is permanent and has been around for the longest time. But God who created them and formed earth has always existed. He is self-existent, self-sufficient and self-sustaining. He is eternal.

“From everlasting to everlasting” is an ancient expression that essentially says “as far as you can go out of sight in one direction to as far as you go in the other direction” … that is how long God has existed. There is no end that can be seen, because there is no end.

God is eternal, but man by comparison is transient. Here today, gone tomorrow.

³ You turn men back to dust,
saying, “Return to dust, O sons of men.”

Man’s beginning is dust and so is His end (Genesis 2:7 & 3:19). Man has a beginning and and end but God is eternal.

⁴ For a thousand years in your sight
are like a day that has just gone by,
or like a watch in the night.
⁵ You sweep men away in the sleep of death;
they are like the new grass of the morning—
⁶ though in the morning it springs up new,
by evening it is dry and withered.

A thousand years is nothing to God. 2 Peter 3:8 says that, “with the Lord one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day.”

To God a thousand years seem to be only a few hours. A “watch” was the four hour period a guard would be on duty. Or like grass in the desert that springs up in the morning and dies in  the evening. James tells us that our life is like a vapour that appears for a little time and then vanishes (James 4:14).

Not only is life short, verse even the evidence of that life having been present is also removed. “You sweep men away in the sleep of death;” The NKJV says God “carry them away like a flood.”

The flooding Moses had in mind was the flash floods of the desert regions. The desert river and stream beds would be dry most of the year giving the illusion of being a safe place. Yet a rain storm up in the mountains could turn the very place into a raging torrent in just a few minutes and that flood would carry away everything in its path leaving no evidence is left of what was there.

The same is true for people.

ILLUSTRATION: In the wind-swept plains of Pasargadae in modern Iran stands a simple monument, reputed to be the burial place of the world ruler Cyrus the Great of Persia. At the height of his power, he ruled over an empire stretching from modern-day Turkey to the Indus River in India encompassing 127 provinces, stretching over 2800 miles. According to ancient historians, Alexander the Great visited the small monument and paid it honour… on it was written: O man, whoever you are and wherever you come from, for I know you will come, I am Cyrus who won the Persians their empire. Do not therefore grudge me this little earth that covers my body.

However, the winds of time have erased the inscription and it no longer exists.

If so great an emperor is scarcely remembered and his tomb so vulnerable, how much more the countless billions of average human beings.

After talking about the eternity of God and the brevity of human life, Moses addresses…

THE HOLINESS OF GOD AND THE BROKENNESS OF THIS WORLD (v. 7-12)

⁸ You have set our iniquities before you,
our secret sins in the light of your presence.

Verses 8 give us the reason for man’s limited life – SIN! Death is a curse resulting from our sin and because of God’s righteous character, His justice demands that He must judge sin.

⁷ We are consumed by your anger
and terrified by your indignation.
⁹ All our days pass away under your wrath;
we finish our years with a moan.
¹¹ Who knows the power of your anger?

For your wrath is as great as the fear that is due you.

In these verses Moses highlight a quality of God’s character rarely discussed–His wrath.

Here is a good definition of God’s wrath: God’s wrath is his steady, unrelenting, unremitting, uncompromising antagonism to evil in all its forms and manifestations. His wrath is how he justly deals with sin.

We tend to emphasise God’s benevolence not his holiness. But the Bible tells us that our God is a consuming fire. Through Christ he is forgiving, but he is not lenient. God is terrifyingly awesome and there is a great fierceness to his wrath; his holiness requires it and justice demands it.

Very often we read John 3:16 and stop there without ever reading to the end of the chapter which says, Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him (John 3:36).

Because of sin, God in His mercy puts a limit to the length of human life.

¹⁰ The length of our days is seventy years—
or eighty, if we have the strength;
yet their span is but trouble and sorrow,
for they quickly pass, and we fly away.

With better health care, our life expectancy has been on the rise for the past century, but 70-80 years is so inconsequential in length when contrasted with eternity.

What also remains the same is that even the best of years will be filled with the common troubles and sorrows of life in a broken and sinful world. And all too soon they are gone,  and we fly away. So in the light of the omnipotence, sovereignty, immortality, and eternality of God and in light of our fallen, sinful, rebellious opposition to God, Moses prayed…

¹² Teach us to number our days aright,
that we may gain a heart of wisdom.

To “number our days” means seeing and using each day as a precious gift. For example, if you only have only a few days on vacation in a foreign land, you’d be careful about how you spend those days. 

The same is true for our days on earth. How many days do we have? None of us knows. I’ve been alive 24,648 days counting today but I don’t know how many days I have left. How would we live out our lives if we did know? If we did know, would that change the purpose and meaning of our lives?

Biblically, time is measured in opportunity… You run out of opportunity when you run out of time. We hear of smart, wealthy, healthy being cut down in the prime of life.

For the Christian, the passing of days is the passing of unique opportunities to serve Christ. For the non-Christian, the passing of time represents the squandering of opportunities to repent and trust Christ.

It is as Ephesians 5:15-17 states, “ Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, ¹⁶ making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil. ¹⁷ Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord’s will is.”

The reality is we do not have any assurance of tomorrow. We should not presume upon an uncertain future and thus procrastinate with respect to our present obligations and future blessings for at some point for all of us, time runs out.

We want to be wise with the use of our time that we might present to God a “heart of wisdom,” that is, a life lived well within His will.

So Moses concludes the Psalm with a prayer for God to change the times of our lives. He appeals to…

THE MERCY OF GOD AND THE BLESSEDNESS OF A RELATIONSHIP WITH HIM (v. 13-17).

¹³ Relent, O Lord! How long will it be?
Have compassion on your servants.

Moses appeals to the covenant God, Yahweh, to turn from his anger and act in compassion towards his sinful people. It is a cry for “God, save us!” This prayer, in keeping with the hope of the Scripture, looked forward to the Messiah, the Lord Jesus who is the Saviour of the world.

“Relent/Return, O Lord!” is like “Come Lord Jesus.” Ultimately, the solution for our ills and the brokenness of this world is not better policies, medical advancements or peace treaties. We need the One who can finally deal with sin and its effects. He is Jesus.

In response to the brevity of life and the brokenness of this world, we wait for Jesus, longing for his return. And while we wait, PTL! God transforms our fading existence.

¹⁴ Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love,
that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days.
¹⁵ Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us,
for as many years as we have seen trouble.

The “unfailing love”/“steadfast love”/ “mercy” here is the Hebrew word “hesed” – God’s covenant-keeping love towards us, His never-giving-up, always-and-forever faithful love that is better than everything in life. This is the unconditional love of God that does not change – in spite of what we might ever think, say or do.

Life is hard but is made sweet by a blessed relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ. He is the only one who satisfies and balances the sorrows of life with joy both now and forevermore.

Our psalm closes with a request of the Lord that shows how God can transform our lives into a glorious experience of his grace.

¹⁶ May your deeds be shown to your servants,
your splendor to their children.
¹⁷ May the favor of the Lord our God rest upon us;
establish the work of our hands for us—
yes, establish the work of our hands.

The most splendid deed God ever did, of course, was the sending of His Son Jesus Christ.  In the fullness of time, God broke into history in the person of Jesus, so that God’s people could be saved from their sins and God’s wrath turned away through his death on the cross. Through Jesus, God changed the times of our lives.  Now he commands us to redeem the times of our lives.

Because of God’s merciful deeds in the ministry of Christ, all of the passionate prayers of verses 13-17 become precious promises. This is the crowning contrast between what was seen as perishable in verses 3-12 and what the Lord can accomplish through his abiding presence in our lives through generations.

This is the heritage for our children, our churches, our communities and others that we love in a transitory world. We cannot guarantee our presence in their lives, but we can leave a spiritual heritage of the glorious power of God.

“the favor of the Lord our God rests upon us.” The word “favour” literally means “beauty, delight, splendour.” The prayer Moses is writing here is a prayer to God asking that our work for God, our efforts for God – and the lives that we live for God – would be joyful, beautiful, attractive and impressive as well as meaningful, enduring and eternally significant. Even if we are forgotten after a generation or two.

The cry, “establish the work of our hands” is a prayer for purpose and significance. Though brief and marred by brokenness, our lives are not destined to be meaningless. God can make the work that we do in this life matter for eternity. Here also is the assurance that our labor is not in vain.

The memory of Papa and Mama Song is almost gone but their work lives on. Their faith had a tremendous impact on many lives. The Lord has established the work of their hands.

CONCLUSION

Today as we comprehend the enormity of God’s eternity and the transience of our existence, may our hearts be encouraged that Jesus has turned this prayer into a promise.  

¹⁴ Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love,
that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days.
¹⁵ Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us,
for as many years as we have seen trouble.
¹⁶ May your deeds be shown to your servants,
your splendor to their children.
¹⁷ May the favor of the Lord our God rest upon us;
establish the work of our hands for us—
yes, establish the work of our hands.

Brothers and sisters, consider these things and let us live for the Lord and delight ourselves in him. In Christ, the work of our hands and the times of our lives are established by the grace of God.