Psalms 90

Book 4. (Psalms 90:1-17; Psalms 91:1-16; Psalms 92:1-15; Psalms 93:1-5; Psalms 94:1-23; Psalms 95:1-11; Psalms 96:1-13; Psalms 97:1-12; Psalms 98:1-9; Psalms 99:1-9; Psalms 100:1-5; Psalms 101:1-8; Psalms 102:1-28; Psalms 103:1-22; Psalms 104:1-35; Psalms 105:1-45; Psalms 106:1-48.)The failed first man replaced by the Second, and the world established under His hand. The fourth book of the Psalms corresponds in this way with the book of Numbers; and it opens manifestly with a strain of the wilderness, a prayer of Israel’s divinely-appointed leader, and in which is heard the lament over the generation dying there, but expanded and interpreted for us as a broad general lesson as to man’s condition; sad enough, but most profitable to be learned. From this, however, as its starting-point it goes on to very different themes. Failed man does not occupy us, as he does not where his judgment is realized aright, but Another displaces him, and the results begin to be put before us from the next psalm on. The earth has found a new Adam, in glorious contrast to the first; and, put into His hand, it bursts out into the glad spring-time of eternal summer. Man is recovered to God, and the bond that unites him is one that cannot now be severed. In the most beautiful way is this mediatorial link put before us. In the first subdivision of the book it is His spiritual perfection; abiding in Him from whom all others have departed, and this bringing in for Him the Creator, and making all nature subject to Him; which thus comes into sabbatic joy and is established in its new Head: “the world also is established that it cannot be moved.” Thus the breach with God being removed, in the second subdivision Jehovah, banished by man’s sin; comes back to it, to fill it with blessing. He reigns gloriously, amid universal gladness. But this is evidently not as yet the complete view; and therefore we begin again in the third subdivision of the book. Here, in the first psalm (the 101st) the Ruler of the earth for God is seen and the character of His righteous rule. But where is He to be found? In the next psalm, the time of blessing is looked at as at hand, Jehovah ready to appear in glory, and build up Zion; and execute His purposes of blessing for the earth. But He who sees all this, and with his heart full of it, is Himself under the hand of God, nay, His wrath. His days are shortened, and (quite after the manner of the ninetieth psalm with which we began) He contrasts His brief years coming to their end with the eternity of God.

He seems one involved Himself in the ruin of the old creation; and, if He be the King of Zion; with no hope of filling that place. His voice comes to a close with this appeal to the Eternal. We wait for the answer: an astonishing one it is. This suffering, dying Man is Himself the Eternal: God and man are one in Him; all creation is in His hand, and the children of His servants serve Him in all their generations. So the 103rd psalm follows with its song of forgiveness and redemption; the mercy of Jehovah being from age to age on them that fear Him; and the next psalm celebrates Him as Creator also. The last two psalms of the book close it with Israel’s praise and heartfelt confession of their past, now cleared away. Subdivision 1. (Psalms 90:1-17; Psalms 91:1-16; Psalms 92:1-15; Psalms 93:1-5.)Christ the uniting-bond of Creator and creation. The first subdivision has already been sufficiently characterized. Christ is here seen as the perfect and unfallen Man; the uniting bond of Creator and creation. In it we have the personal link; the second being the actual salvation of the earth by Jehovah coming back to it again, the renewal of relationship thus with it, and in a more manifest and glorious way than ever.

Psalms 90:1-17

The first man. A prayer of Moses, the man of God. The preface to this is necessarily the picture of man as fallen away from God -the first man; as Adam’s seed may be most justly called, if Christ be in His day but a Second. The history of the world has fully proved this fall, and the broad fact of death being upon all the race has put God’s seal upon it. It is this last upon which Moses naturally dwells as the most concise and clearest argument. It is what the law also has demonstrated by experiment, conclusively, in saying, “the man that doeth these things shall live in them,” and “the soul that sinneth, it shall die.” The current views of the law have removed all this from the field of practical observation and common knowledge into the unseen future, so that men may dream and speculate upon it as they list. God’s purpose is that it should be present, definite certainty, that “by the deeds of the law shall no flesh be justified.” The very effectiveness with which it gives this has been by the strange perversion of unbelief made an argument against its having a meaning which is too plain to be the right one!

1. But if death be that which has come in through sin; then life -immortal existence here -is the alternative; and for this man was originally created. It was necessarily conditional upon his continuing with God in the uprightness which he had at the beginning. Dependent he was, and must remain; for without this no creature-blessing is possible. “In God we live and move and have our being,” and the recognition of this is uprightness for us. This is the key to the statement with which the psalm here begins. “Lord, Thou hast been a habitation for us, in all generations”: not, as in the common version; “our habitation”; for, alas, man has not profited by that which God has kept ever open to him. Paradise indeed has vanished from the earth, but the door of the Father’s house, which he has left, -for naturally, God being the “Father of spirits,” “we are also His offspring” (Hebrews 12:9; Acts 17:28), -has never been closed against him. “The Lord” -not here Jehovah, but the Ruler of the earth and men -is always the Lord of life and He is the Mighty and Eternal One: “Before the mountains were brought forth, or Thou hadst formed the earth and the world, and from age to age, Thou art, O Mighty” (El). Here then is abundant resource, the Fountain of life ever open; the link with eternity in the Eternal God Himself, never distant from His creatures. How has it availed for man? how, after all, has he profited by it?
2. The answer is plain: it is no matter of speculation. Once, and but once, in the days before the flood, a man had walked with God 365 years of life, and then; without seeing death, been removed to heaven to walk with Him there. That life of Enoch, on which the shadow of death had never fallen, might suffice to show the possibility. Practically it might be left out in such an estimate as this: the answer remains really unaffected, or made the more solemn only by that possibility unavailed of: Thou makest frail man (Enosh) return to dust and sayest, Return; ye children of men." So God had to decide. It was His will, yet not of His will. And there remained but as contrast with His feeble creatures, that eternity of His into which they entered not: the thousand years that transcended even the life of a Methuselah, in His sight as but the remembrance of the past yesterday “and in its darkness of shadow, only “as a watch in the night.” But however brief, there is a long lesson in that brevity, and in that shadowed life, which is from God. The psalmist is pondering it before Him, and cannot let it go. “Thou carriest them away as with a flood” -” -“washest them away,” literally -no doubt it is of the deluge he is thinking: manifest judgment, and yet generalized here, as the lot of every one, though he go singly. “They are asleep”: what is appointed for man’s refreshment, though a sign of his frailty and dependence, yet but an incident, becomes, as it were, the whole thing. They themselves are that -a sleep without awaking! The images of nature over which he was once appointed lord, nay, of the grass under his feet, become images in which he may see himself. now leveled to the general condition of that which was his kingdom only. and subject to him. Like grass which groweth up: -in the morning it flourisheth and groweth up by the evening it is cut down and withereth."
3. Such then is, very obviously, man’s condition: too obviously, it might be thought, to need the comment. But this is not ended yet; and the reason of it is now dwelt upon; and owned to God. The cause of it is His anger, which is consuming us, His hot wrath, which distresses us. But why such anger? Ah, it is not the unreasoning glow of passion; but discriminating judgment that weighs things in the evenest balances. “Thou hast set our iniquities before Thee:” and, with knowledge from which nothing can escape, “our secret sins in the light of Thy countenance.” Thus in the full realization of what is here -“all our days pass away in Thine overflowing wrath:” upon us with that steady persistence under which a Job might plead, “How long wilt Thou not look away from me?” and the psalmist, “Look away from me, that I may recover strength.” “We spend our days as a thought”: perhaps, rather, “a moan.” Then comes the reiterated statement of man’s vanity, the experience, now shrunk from near a thousand to seventy or eighty years, in which man’s pride, if it last so long, goes out in travail. Soon cut off indeed, we fly away.
4. But this experience has, therefore, its practical use, to which the rest of the psalm is devoted and here it turns from contemplation and confession into prayer. “Who knoweth,” the psalmist asks, “the power of Thine anger?” One might think He had pressed it heavily upon man but how could He do less? look, after all, at the folly that is bound up in man’s heart! He only strives to banish thought, “kill time,” put away conviction; do Satan’s work for him as completely as possible. And yet no thought can exceed the truth of God’s anger against sin: even according to the fear of Thee is Thine overflowing wrath." Let us not shun, then, the reality of things, he asks: let us profit by it: “so make us to number our days, that we may acquire a heart of wisdom.” Here is the “beginning of wisdom” for here is the “fear of the Lord,” which is that. Here the soul finds the need it has of Him, turns to Him, seeks to have Him turn to it: and so the psalmist: “Return; Jehovah” -not simply “Lord” now, but the nearer name of covenant-goodness, -“and let it repent Thee concerning Thy servants.” For as soon as man repents, God has declared that He will repent of the evil that He thought to do to them (Jeremiah 18:8); and the story of Jonah and Nineveh is a precious illustration of His mercies in this way. But to avert His judgment is comparatively a little thing. The heart truly touched longs after Himself. How can a creature be satisfied apart from his Creator? “Satisfy us with Thy loving-kindness in the morning, that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days.” This joy in God, how rarely is it to be found after this fashion! our days come generally clad in much soberer apparel than is implied in this. And yet this is not less than we may all of us possess, and should possess. Nay, the soul taught of God in His wondrous ways of grace, claims compensation even for the affliction it has known before. “Make us glad according to the days Thou hast afflicted us, and for the years in which we have seen evil.” Think of compensation from a judge for just judgment inflicted! But rather it is a Father’s heart that is free to show itself in wiping off the tears that for a time were salutary. It was a discipline which he prays now may be effectual, the “work appear,” and His “glory” shine out after the storm is passed aye, and even “upon the children” afterwards. The last verse closes with the prayer for perfect blessing, “the beauty of Jehovah our God upon us,” nay, “the work of our hands” established, too. And this he is emphatic about: for “whoso keepeth His word, in him verily is the love of God perfected” (1 John 2:5). The glory of God is indeed accomplished in finding not only a free way for His love to show itself, but fruit also from the reconciled heart, upon which He can put the seal of His own approbation.