"Nevertheless, do not let this one fact escape you, beloved,
that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and
a thousand years as one day."
II Peter 3:8
Illustration by Gustave Dore
PSALM 90
*A Prayer of Moses, the man of God
Lord, You have been our dwelling place and our refuge
in all generations (says Moses).
Before the mountains were brought forth or ever You had
formed and given birth to the earth and the world, even from
everlasting to everlasting, You are God.
You turn man back to dust and corruption, and say,
Return,O sons of the earthborn (to the earth)!
For a thousand years in Your sight are but yesterday
when it is past, or as a watch in the night.
You carry away (these disobedient people, doomed to die
within forty years) as with a flood; they are as a sleep
(vague and forgotten as soon as they are gone).
In the morning they are like grass which grows up-
In the morning it flourishes and springs up;
in the evening it is mown down and withers.
For we (the Israelites in the wilderness) are consumed
by Your anger, and by Your wrath are we troubled,
overwhelmed, and frightened away.
Our iniquities, our secret heart and its sins (which we would
so like to conceal even from ourselves), You have set in
the (revealing) light of Your countenance.
For all our days (out here in this wilderness, says Moses)
pass away in Your wrath; we spend our years as a tale that
is told (for we adults know we are doomed to die soon,
without reaching Canaan).
(Numbers 14:26-35).
The days of our years are three-score years and ten
(seventy years)-or even, if by reason of strength, four-score
years (eighty years); yet is their pride (in additional years)
only labor and sorrow, for it is soon gone, and we fly away.
Who knows the power of Your anger?
(Who worthily connects this brevity of life with Your recognition of sin?)
And Your wrath, who connects it with reverent and worshipful fear
that is due You?
So teach us to number our days, that we may get us a heart of wisdom.
Turn, O Lord, (from Your fierce anger) How long-? Revoke Your
sentence and be compassionate and at ease towards Your servants.
O satisfy us with Your mercy and loving-kindness in the morning
(now, before we are older), that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.
Make us glad in proportion to the days in which You have afflicted
us and to the years in which we have suffered evil.
Let Your work (the signs of Your power) be revealed to
Your servants, and Your glorious majesty to their children.
And let the beauty and delightfulness and the favor of
the Lord our God be upon us; confirm and establish the
work of our hands-yes, the work of our hands,
confirm and establish it.
*This psalm is credited to Moses, who is interceding with God
to remove the curse which made it necessary for every Israelite over twenty years of age
(when they rebelled against God at Kadesh-Barnea) to die before reaching the promised land.
(Numbers 14:26-35).
Moses says some of them are dying at seventy years of age. This number has often been
mistaken as a set span of life for all mankind. It was not intended to refer to anyone except
those Israelites under the curse during that particular forty years. Seventy years never
has been the average span of life for humanity. When Jacob, the father of the
twelve tribes, had reached 130 years (Genesis 47:9) he complained that he had
not attained to the years of his immediate ancestors.
In fact, Moses himself lived to be 120 years old, Aaron 123, Miriam several
years older, and Joshua 110 years of age. Note as well that in the Millennium
a person dying at 100 will still be thought a child. (Isaiah 65:20)
-The Amplified Bible
A view from Mt. Nebo of the vast Kadesh-Barnea wilderness
where Israel wandered for forty years.
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