Psalm 90:12-17 Commentary

The Lectionary has us picking up just the tail end of Psalm 90 this week.  It is a curious poem.  It opens with a lyric consideration of how God had been his people’s dwelling place—their home—from generation to generation.  But then in the middle section there is a shift in tone as a rather fearsome consideration of sins and iniquities is laid out.  The psalmist seems to quake in his boots at the thought of how readily God is able to see every sin we ever committed.

But if there is one thing that unifies this psalm it is the fleetingness of human existence.  Life goes by in the blink of an eye it seems.  Whether we get swept away by the wrath of God over our sinfulness or we just flat out get swept away by the winds of life, either way or both ways or any other way the years allotted to us come and go with astonishing (and sobering) swiftness.

As we begin this lection in verse 12, we hear a call to gain a heart of wisdom by becoming aware that we each have a finite number of days during which to live out our lives.  The psalm indicates that being well aware of that is not a grim thing but something that leads to wisdom, to a better way of living out what you know is a span of time with an endpoint.  This seems to be something unique to human beings on this planet.  Although we cannot know what goes on in the minds of animals, an awareness of their own mortality does not seem to be a prominent feature to these creatures.

For the psalmist, having a temporal awareness can lead us to live better lives than if we ignore this fact about ourselves.  If we repress this awareness of death, shove it aside or tamp it down in our hearts and minds, we will not lead as fulfilling an existence as we would with a healthy awareness of our mortality.  Mostly in these final verses of Psalm 90 the poet begs God to be good to his people.  The psalmist wants to wake up each morning basking in the goodness and in the blessings of God that alone can bring a degree of satisfaction and happiness and peace in this life.  With the blessing of God resting on us, we can sing, we can have joy.  Yes, life is short and all-too-soon it comes to an end but in the meantime, better to be serving God, singing to God, and experiencing the shalom of God’s love than to not have any of that going on.

Then in the well-known closing of Psalm 90 there is a request for God to “establish” our work and the things we produce.  Yes, everything in this poem speaks to the fleetingness of life.  Nothing lasts forever.  No one lives forever save for God alone.  But we don’t here quite arrive at the near despair of Ecclesiastes that looks at even what we generate through toil and labor and sweat and hard work but then just shrugs at that output as being of no value whatsoever.  Our work is not dismissed here as transient bubbles that pop into non-existence in a heartbeat.  No, if God can somehow establish our work—if what we do has the imprimatur of God’s approval and blessing on it—then it matters after all.  It somehow will endure.  It will somehow survive at least in the heart and the memory of Almighty God no matter what happens to the works of our hands on this earth.

In recent months my family has been passing through a time of loss.  Most significantly was the late-summer death of my father but not long after that the death of a beloved pet dog we had cherished for fifteen years.  As many people have testified to me over time, among the thoughts that come to us when we lose the generation of our parents is the knowledge that now we’re next.  And the work we have done?  Does it matter?

It reminds me of a recurring theme in Marilynne Robinson’s epistolary novel Gilead.  Rev. John Ames knows his life is ebbing toward its close but among the novel’s many musings by Ames, one thought keeps coming back to him: What to do with all those boxes of his old sermons in the attic?  Are they worth anything?  Should he burden his wife with figuring out what to do with all of them after he is gone?  And layered into all that was also the question of whether or to what extent that lifetime of preaching did any good or made any difference.  In the end Rev. Ames seems to come to the conclusion that he will request the boxes of sermons be burned but to make some kind of last bit of usefulness out of them, he will suggest it be done at a youth group meeting so the kids can toast weenies and marshmallows over the homiletical blaze!  That way the sermons will have accomplished at least a little something in the end that provided pleasure!

But probably on a deeper level Ames like all of us can know that when we do our work faithfully—whether it is something overtly spiritual like preaching or something that is not at all apparently spiritual like helping to turn out cars on a factory assembly line or baking cupcakes—when we do it faithfully and seek the establishing blessing of God on it all, it does endure, it does make a difference.  Maybe in this life we will never see the effect our work and our very lives had on others.  And perhaps some day the full significance of each of us will be revealed to us by God in the kingdom.

For now, though, we do our level best to seek out the blessings of God on our lives and on the work to which God has called us.  Life is short.  Too short most all of us feel.  The years even have a cruel way of speeding up the older one gets.  So we seek God’s face and God’s glory and the favor of our God.  Even so not every question we may have about life’s swift passage will get answered, not every mystery of our existence will be cleared up.  But as Psalm 90 reminds us, it is the proper posture for the people of God.

Illustration Idea

In English literature and particularly poetry there has long been a tradition of what is called a memento mori, or literally a reminder of death.  Especially poems about our mortality were intended to do what Psalm 90 aims for: gaining a proper and healthy perspective on who we are, gaining a heart of wisdom.  A colleague of mine and his wife purchased their burial plot some years ago.  Every now and then they go to that cemetery and look at that small piece of the earth where their mortal remains will be buried one day.  But they do this not as some macabre or grim exercise but to be reminded of their mortality.  But in being so reminded they celebrate once again the hope of the resurrection that we all share through Christ Jesus our Lord.  Such a reminder of death is not a downer.  It is a celebration of the Gospel!  It is a way to hold up what the Reformed Confession of The Heidelberg Catechism calls “our only comfort in life and in death.”

Note: the CEP website also has commentaries on Psalm 22:1-15:

Leonard Vander Zee from 2018: https://cepreaching.org/commentary/2018-10-08/psalm-221-15/

Doug Bratt from 2015: https://cepreaching.org/commentary/2015-10-05/psalm-221-15-2/