PSALM 90 - A Room Full of Morning Glories

Introduction

How many of you have ever heard of Mary Philippi? You may not have any idea who she is, but our church would not be the same without her—her daughter arranged to dedicate this stained glass window—the one with David’s harp on it—back when this building was being constructed back in 1917. If you go around the sanctuary you will see that each of the windows were either sponsored by a particular fellowship group or family in the church—the two large windows are erected in memory of Pastor George Prentice, who died of the Spanish flu during the church’s construction, and in honor of Rev. Joseph Breen, who was the pastor at Bethel when the church was dedicated.

If you look closely at the various pieces of furniture and other items in and around the church, you’ll often see plaques or tags indicating that item has been donated by someone in particular or placed in memory of a loved one. Now, this sort of thing can get out of hand if it is motivated by sinful pride or vainglory (think Harriet Olsen in Little House on the Prairie offering to donate the new church bell—and the plaque naming them as the donors!)

In itself, though, I don’t think it is a bad thing to desire to be remembered, to have your contributions and labor for God and His people be significant for the future. One of the great kindnesses of God towards us here at Bethel is that we are privileged to worship in the same place for over one hundred years—generations of faithful Christians have sat where you are sitting, have worshipped and prayed and ministered to one another here in this very room for over a century. That is a blessed heritage indeed.

But at the same time, it is an ever-present reminder of how quickly life passes, isn’t it? To see names memorialized on windows that we’ve never heard of and know nothing about—Mary Philipi was evidently so thoroughly and intimately a part of Bethel Baptist Church that a window was dedicated to her, and a hundred years later none of us remember anything about her.

As the names on the windows and the bookplates in the old hymnals demonstrate, we naturally want to be remembered; we want our lives to matter, to have there be a difference in the world whether we ever existed at all. And this is a God-given trait, after all—God created mankind to image His glory on earth; to exercise dominion and create and beautify and fill this world with His image bearers and extend His rule throughout Creation: We were made for significance.

But we live in a world that has been corrupted and marred by our First Parents’ rebellion against God in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve traded the immortality promised by the Tree of Life for disease, corruption and death that has reigned in this world ever since. And that corruption and death and decay means that it is impossible for us to achieve in this world the legacy and remembrance that we long for. For every famous name that is remembered down through the centuries, millions more are born, live and die in utter obscurity, swallowed up by the passage of time as if they had never even existed.

Who here in this room has accomplished everything you thought you would have by this point in your life? How many broken dreams are represented here? How much regret over choices you made that scarred you in ways that you wish you could take back? How often do you wish you had those years back again, thinking of all the things you would do over—do better—so that you would build a legacy that lasts. How much of what you have sought to build and create and establish has endured? And how many times has it all fallen apart, how many times has your strength and energy and diligence gone into work that has wound up all in vain?

This is where Psalm 90 speaks to us this morning. This psalm is attributed to Moses, and you can hear the lament of the brevity of life and futility of work in these verses:

Psalm 90:9–10 (LSB)

For all our days have declined in Your fury; We have finished our years like a sigh. As for the days of our life, they contain seventy years, Or if due to might, eighty years, Yet their pride is but labor and wickedness; For soon it is gone and we fly away.

You’ll notice at the top of this psalm that we have moved into Book IV—the “fourth movement” as it were, in the cantata of the Psalms. Book III, you’ll remember, was a collection of laments over the apparent failure of YHWH’s covenant to His people and to His anointed. Psalm 89 ended that section with a hymn of delight in the lovingkindnesses of God—that His faithful covenant love would not fail His people, even though all around them seemed dark.

Psalm 90 represents a key turning point in the unfolding of the Psalms as a whole. Book IV is all about getting back to the basics—reaffirming the foundational principles of what it means to live in blessedness. These principles were first introduced in Psalms 1-2, and we will see these same ideas repeated throughout Book IV: (1) the LORD reigns, (2) He has determined the destiny of both the wicked and the righteous, and therefore (3) take refuge in the LORD.

And so as we go through this psalm this morning we will see that it addresses our fallen condition along these lines. The message of Psalm 90 for us this morning is

Your EVERLASTING God is the only sure REFUGE for your FRAGILE life

This is how Moses begins this psalm—with the everlasting God as our refuge:

Psalm 90:1–2 (LSB)

Lord, You have been our dwelling place from generation to generation. Before the mountains were born Or You brought forth the earth and the world, Even from everlasting to everlasting, You are God.

Israel has been lamenting through all of Book III of the Psalms that God has appeared to forsake them; His covenant appears to have failed; His anointed seems to have been dethroned and stripped of his authority. And so the way to respond to this sad state of affairs is to get back to the basics. When the wall of your house is starting to bow in, what do you do? You go back and fix the foundation! Book IV is all about reaffirming the essential truths of who God is, who we are, and what He has promised.

Your everlasting God is the only sure refuge for your fragile life—the first thing that we must come to understand is

I. Our FRAILTY in light of His ETERNITY (Psalm 90:1-6)

Look at verses 3-4 as Moses describes our frailty and God’s everlasting nature:

Psalm 90:3–4 (LSB)

You turn man back into dust And say, “Return, O sons of men.” For a thousand years in Your sight Are like yesterday when it passes by, Or as a watch in the night.

You and I are made of dust, and as soon as He gives the word, we collapse back into dust like Peter Parker at the end of Infinity War. But not God--

He is UNTOUCHED by TIME (vv. 3-4)

To God, a thousand years is like a day marked off on the calendar—it does not affect Him, it does not slow Him down. As Peter says in his second letter:

2 Peter 3:8 (LSB)

But do not let this one fact escape your notice, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years like one day.

Consider a time period of a thousand years—do you know what historical events happened in the year 1024? Duke Conrad II was crowned as the King of Germany in Mainz Cathedral. (And if you respond with “Who?” then that’s my point!)

You and I are absolutely bound by time—a thousand years from now, there will be no trace of your existence anywhere on this earth! Everyone who knew you, everything you ever accomplished, all of the great life achievements that you are so proud of will be utterly lost in the mists of ancient history! We don’t even know who Mary Philipi is, and she lived only a hundred years ago!

Everything that you believe is so monstrously important and consequential in this world right now—all of the talking heads on TV and online running around like so many political Chicken Littles that the sky is falling— “This is the most crucial election that has ever been held in the history of Western Civilization!”—I guarantee you that five hundred years from now (if Christ has not returned by then) schoolchildren will be struggling to remember who is who between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. The average person on the street will not remember Kamala Harris’ name. A thousand years will wash all memory of you and everyone and everything you ever knew out of the consciousness of this world—nobody will remember you, but God is and always will be utterly untouched by time.

Psalm 90 calls us to understand our frailty in light of God’s eternity—He is untouched by time, but we are utterly fragile:

Psalm 90:5–6 (LSB)

You have swept them away like a flood, they fall asleep; In the morning they are like grass which sprouts anew. In the morning it blossoms and sprouts anew; Toward evening it withers away and dries up.

Beloved, in light of God’s unmoving permanence and unalterable eternal nature,

We are a ROOM full of MORNING GLORIES (vv. 5-6; cp. Isa. 40:23-24)

When I was growing up, we raised a lot of sweet corn. And one of the things I remember about going out early in the morning to pick corn for the day was the trailing morning glories that would wind their vines up the cornstalks and wrap around the ears and stalks together—sometimes so much so that you had to break the stems off before you could pick it. They were a beautiful purple and white blossom, opening up first thing in the morning as we walked through the fields—but they were fragile. If we went back in the afternoon to pick more corn, those morning glories were withered away—just like our life:

Psalm 90:6 (LSB)

In the morning it blossoms and sprouts anew; Toward evening it withers away and dries up.

Beloved, what are we in light of God’s permanence but a room full of morning glories? Some of us are in the first bloom of youth and fresh vigor, others are withering and fading. But there are none of us here today—perhaps the youngest of us, but not many—who will be here in one hundred years, let alone a thousand.

If Moses was the author of this Psalm, then he may have been thinking about a very specific instance of man’s frailty when he wrote in Verse 5 that God has “swept men away like a flood”—the way He swept all of Pharaoh’s mighty army into the Red Sea as they pursued the children of Israel out of Egypt.

Isaiah said the same thing as he prophesied against the wicked rulers of his day:

Isaiah 40:23–24 (LSB)

It is He who reduces rulers to nothing, Who makes the judges of the earth utterly formless. Scarcely have they been planted; Scarcely have they been sown; Scarcely has their stem taken root in the earth, But He merely blows on them, and they wither, And the storm carries them away like stubble.

Christian, in light of God’s eternity, is there any form of human power or authority or government or plan or purpose that can stand in any way against Him? How can this truth not cause us the deepest, most reverent humility before our eternal God? All that you have accomplished in your life; all that you hope to accomplish—all that you set your hand to do for your family, your career, your church, your nation, your world—none of it will remain unless it remains in Him!

Your everlasting God is the only sure refuge for your fragile life. See here in Psalm 90 our frailty in light of His eternity—and in verses 7-12 we see

II. Our PERIL in light of His HOLINESS (Psalm 90:7-12)

Look with me at verses 7-9:

Psalm 90:7–9 (LSB)

For we have been consumed by Your anger And by Your wrath we have been dismayed. You have set our iniquities before You, Our secret sins in the light of Your presence. For all our days have declined in Your fury; We have finished our years like a sigh.

We read in Exodus 32 of the fearsome judgment of God on Israel in their worship of the golden calf—three thousand killed by the sword and a plague unleashed on the people by the hand of YHWH (Ex. 32:28, 35). So Moses’ psalm about the peril of his people in light of the holiness of God is a fitting psalm for Book IV—an acknowledgment that the suffering Israel has endured as the covenant has broken down is a result of their own rebelliousness. Going back to the basics, restoring the foundations of a right relationship with God means acknowledging that

There is no HIDING PLACE for our SIN (vv. 7-10)

The lament of Book III over the desolation of Israel and the humiliation of the anointed king gives way in Book IV to the acknowledgement that our sins will always find us out. Moses’ words are clear here—that God sets our iniquities before Him—the sins we thought were secret are brought into the light of His holy, righteous presence. Is it any wonder then, that our lives fade away and we come to the end of our days with a whimper? The death sentence of corruption that we earned for ourselves in Adam’s sin means that we are doomed to wear out—joints creak, bones break, muscles stop growing, tumors start growing, minds begin fading and memories fail. And in light of the sinfulness of our race, we deserve every bit of it. Psalm 90 bring us face to face with our peril in light of the holiness of God--

Our days are NUMBERED before His FURY (vv. 11-12)

Psalm 90:11–12 (LSB)

Who knows the power of Your anger And Your fury, according to the fear that is due You? So teach us to number our days, That we may present to You a heart of wisdom.

Moses came face to face with the anger of God many times in his life—after their sin of idolatry in Exodus 32, God said to him:

Exodus 32:9–10 (LSB)

And Yahweh said to Moses, “I have seen this people, and behold, they are a stiff-necked people. “Now then let Me alone, that My anger may burn against them and that I may consume them; and I will make you a great nation.”

Moses had come face-to-face with the anger of God; he knew the terror of standing before Him in His fury, seeing His burning anger over the sin of His people against Him. He writes it here in this psalm to open our eyes to the seriousness of our sin. We somehow like to think that God just winks at sin, or that it doesn’t really bother Him like it used to in the Old Testament. But Moses writes here to warn us—Moses who had to plead with God in Exodus not to destroy His own people for their sin. He prays that God would “teach us to number our days” in light of His anger over sin. Moses prayer is that we present to God “a heart of wisdom”—and the Scriptures are clear that “the fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom” (Prov. 1:7).

Beloved, this is the message of the song of Moses: We are nothing more than a room full of morning glories in light of God’s eternal nature. We are ravaged by time and sin and the corruption of this fallen world. Scarcely do we sprout and we are swept away, living our lives in toil cursed by the Fall with bodies poisoned by death and disease. The anger of God over our sin lies heavy on us, and the weight of His fury presses us down into the grave. Moses was a man who was repeatedly confronted by the oppressiveness of God’s eternality and holiness; it is impossible not to be deeply changed by such encounters. Moses knew himself (and his people) to be utterly frail in light of God’s eternal nature; he knew the extent of our peril in the light of God’s holiness. And so he concludes this psalm with the only hope that a room full of morning glories can have before such a God--

III. Our REPENTANCE in light of His FAITHFULNESS (Psalm 90:13-17)

Psalm 90:13 (LSB)

Return, O Yahweh; how long will it be? And be sorry for Your slaves.

See here how Moses appeals for the first time to the Covenant that God had made with His people—notice that this is the first time that the Covenant Name of God, YHWH appears in this psalm (represented by LORD in all-caps in some translations). The only hope a room full of morning glories have before this God is that He will

RETURN to the COVENANT He has SEALED (v. 13)

See the covenant language that Moses fills this one short verse with: He appeals to God as YHWH, the covenant-keeping, great I AM, Who swore by His own holiness that He would never break His covenant to show lovingkindness (His steadfast faithful covenant love) to His slaves (the people of His own possession; the people who are tied to Him with covenant bonds unlike any other). Moses appealed to that very thing in Exodus 32 when God threatened to wipe out Israel for their sin:

Exodus 32:13–14 (LSB)

“Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, Your servants to whom You swore by Yourself, and You said to them, ‘I will multiply your seed as the stars of the heavens, and all this land of which I have spoken I will give to your seed, and they shall inherit it forever.’” So Yahweh relented concerning the harm which He said He would do to His people.

Here again, as Book IV of the Psalms opens, Moses calls us back to the foundations—the unbreakable covenant He has made with the people of His possession, sealed by the blood of the sacrifice. Our only hope is that He will return to the covenant that He has sealed, and that we will

TRUST in the MEDIATOR He has SENT (vv. 14-17; cp. Deut. 32:4)

Moses interceded for Israel when God’s wrath burned against them for their sin—and here at the beginning of Book IV of the Psalms Moses’ psalm is an appeal to YHWH to deliver His people out of the desolation of their sin and grant them the joy of their salvation again:

Psalm 90:14–15 (LSB)

O satisfy us in the morning with Your lovingkindness, That we may sing for joy and be glad all our days. Make us glad according to the days You have afflicted us, And the years we have seen evil.

In verse 16 Moses prays that God would let His people see Him work His perfect righteousness and faithfulness for them--

Psalm 90:16 (LSB)

Let Your work appear to Your slaves And Your majesty to their sons.

Moses writes in Deuteronomy 32:4 that God’s work is perfect and just and faithful and without injustice and righteous and upright. Moses prayed that God’s people would see Him work His perfect lovingkindness and mercy and justice on their behalf. To take a fragile, fading, sinful, rebellious and worthless people who deserve His wrath and fury on one hand, and His promise to show mercy and lovingkindness to those same people forever on the other hand.

This is the mightiest of all His works, isn’t it? To simultaneously uphold His holiness by punishing sin and keep the oath He swore by His holiness to show lovingkindness and mercy? To reconcile His wrath against His people and His mercy to those same people—this is the unsearchable glory of YHWH God’s work—Moses asked that He show that work to His people; they only saw the barest glimpse of it as they watched the blood sacrifices in the Tabernacle that atoned for their sin. They saw His work carried out by priests and Levites who themselves struggled under the weight of their own sin and the ravages of time; fading like morning glories even as they foreshadowed with the blood of bulls and goats the Great Work of YHWH that would someday atone for sin once and for all.

Moses prayed that God’s mighty work of reconciling His wrath and His love would be shown to his people—and in Jesus Christ, that prayer has been answered! On the Cross, the wrath of God and the love of God met as Jesus struggled for His last breath, as the weight of all of God’s fury pressed Him down into the grave; as His body groaned under the curse of sin in agonies of blinding pain that cannot be expressed in mortal words. Look to Calvary and behold the Work of God in the death of Jesus, the only mediator between God and man, who gave Himself as a ransom for all, becoming sin for us so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him (1 Tim. 2:5-6; 2 Cor. 5:21).

And so fly to Jesus Christ as the only refuge for your fragile soul! In Him eternity meets fragility, wrath meets peace, mortality takes on immortality, sin and shame meet righteousness and holiness. It is only in Him that the final verse of Moses’ prayer in Psalm 90 is made real in your life:

Psalm 90:17 (LSB)

Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us; And establish for us the work of our hands; Establish the work of our hands.

God can only be “your God” when you trust in the Mediator He has sent. The favor of God can only rest on you when you confess your sin and frailty and idolatry and pride and trust in Christ’s death on the Cross for your forgiveness. And the work of your hands can only be established when they are done for Him! “Only one life / ‘Twill soon be past / Only what’s done for Christ will last”.

This one life you have been given—this fragile, fleeting morning glory of a life—will have no significance or meaning or lasting value apart from the eternal, righteous refuge you have in Jesus Christ. When the fragility of your life is pressed upon you by disease, when the weakness of your heart is revealed by the ravages of sin that so easily besets you, when the futility and frustration of this fading world undoes all of your labor and the work of your hands comes to nothing, when you look at your life and wonder what difference it ever made or whether you will have any legacy that lasts or even be remembered by generations to come, you have a great and eternal hope in God!

A hundred years from now, should Christ tarry, whatever people and whatever place remains here may not remember you any more than you remember poor Mary Philippi—but all that will matter (on that day and every day) is that you are known by Jesus Christ! For you who have taken refuge in Him as your dwelling place from generation to generation, nothing that you have done is in vain—nothing you have suffered will not be made right, nothing that has withered away and perished will not be raised back to imperishable life, no sin that has ever beset you will ever condemn you again! Do not fear the ravages of time or the fading of your life, do not despair over the never-ending battles with your remaining sin and corruption, do not grow weary in well-doing for your family, your church, your neighbor—the mighty work of God that reconciled you to Himself through Christ is sufficient to establish the work of your hands and make you the resting place of His favor through all of the fading days of this life and the imperishable days of the life to come.

And for you who are here apart from the favor of YHWH this morning because you have no share in Christ by faith—can’t you see here in God’s Word that there is no way for you to find meaning and purpose and peace and a good conscience apart from the work of Christ? This psalm confronts you with the fact that you are fading away even now. There is nothing ahead for you but the oblivion of the grave; the waves of the years will wash against the meager sand castle of your life’s work and accomplishments and achievements until there is not even a memory of you anywhere to be found in this world.

But let me plead with you this morning: The forgetfulness of future generations who never knew you are nothing when compared with the consequences of Christ’s words to you on the Last Day, “I never knew you...” Even if you were to pass into eternity the most famous and celebrated man or woman in all of human history, with your name on every tongue and your memory cherished in every heart of every single person alive, none of that will matter on the Day when you stand before Jesus Christ. Because to be forgotten by the One Who knows everything, to be cast out of the sight of the One Who sees everything, to be dropped out of the Hand of the One Who holds everything is to be utterly, completely and eternally outside of everything. To be consigned for all eternity to what Jesus cryptically refers to as “The Outer Darkness”—a place outside all places, a blackness and void so empty that it is filled only with the hopeless cries and convulsions of utter despair.

Friend, you know what that darkness is like; I daresay you have felt the faintest touches of that kind of black hopelessness at one time or another—the loneliness, the isolation, the weight of utter certainty that you have been forgotten in the dark. What you have felt at those moments awaits you in infinite measure one day, and that Day is closer now than it was when we began this service an hour ago. That Day is drawing nearer and nearer:

Psalm 90:10–11 (LSB)

As for the days of our life, they contain seventy years, Or if due to might, eighty years, Yet their pride is but labor and wickedness; For soon it is gone and we fly away. Who knows the power of Your anger And Your fury, according to the fear that is due You?

The only hope you have is to fly for refuge to the eternally holy God before you fly away under His wrath into the Dark. Come to Him in repentance, throw yourself on His mercy and plead with Him to wash you clean from your sin and “teach you to number your days so that you may present to Him a heart of wisdom” because of the work of your dear Savior, Jesus Christ!

BENEDICTION:

Jude 24–25 (LSB)

Now to Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory blameless with great joy, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, might, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION: Write down something you learned from this morning’s message that is new to you, or an insight that you had for the first time about the text? ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ Write down a question that you have about the passage that you want to study further or ask for help with: ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ Write down something that you need to do in your life this week in response to what God has shown you from His Word today: ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________

Additional Notes: ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________