Sermon Tone Analysis
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Psalm 90 (ESV) — A Prayer of Moses, the man of God. 1 Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations.
2 Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God.
3 You return man to dust and say, “Return, O children of man!” 4 For a thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night.
5 You sweep them away as with a flood; they are like a dream, like grass that is renewed in the morning: 6 in the morning it flourishes and is renewed; in the evening it fades and withers.
7 For we are brought to an end by your anger; by your wrath we are dismayed.
8 You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of your presence.
9 For all our days pass away under your wrath; we bring our years to an end like a sigh.
10 The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away.
11 Who considers the power of your anger, and your wrath according to the fear of you?
12 So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.
13 Return, O Lord! How long?
Have pity on your servants!
14 Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.
15 Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us, and for as many years as we have seen evil.
16 Let your work be shown to your servants, and your glorious power to their children.
17 Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us, and establish the work of our hands upon us; yes, establish the work of our hands!
Do you pray?
I am sure that most of you do.
Who do you pray to?
You say that you pray to God.
What is this God like that you say you pray to?
At this point people often stop, think, and then give a tentive answer.
Some would say that the god to whom they pray is the divine energy that fills the universe.
Others would say that the god to whom they pray is an unknown, unknowable higher power.
Others would say, we pray to the God of the Bible.
As a Christian I join you in praying to the God of the Bible.
So what is the God of the Bible like to whom you pray?
At this point many of us stumble one more time.
We know we are to pray to God, but we do not know the God to whom we pray very well at all.
This is extremely important.
I remember one time asking a worker in a store to give me some information about an item, only to discover that the person didn’t work there, but was a fellow shopper like me.
How embarrassing!
Those of you new to the job are not quite sure what you can ask for or receive from your supervisor.
The longer you work, the more informed you are about them, the better you are able to know the boundaries that exist with that person.
The more we know God, the greater confidence we have in our relationship with him.
The writer of the book of Hebrews speaks of this when he writes,
In other words, our theology influences our prayer life.
What we know about God helps us determine what we will pray and how we will pray.
We know we should pray according to his will.
That is not new to us.
We rarely ask someone for something if we know the answer is a definite “no.”
We have great confidence to ask for something if the person is pretty likely to say “yes.”
There are people I know that I would never ask for $20 to help me out and others that, if I needed it, would be the first I would ask.
But what is God’s will?
The more we know God, the more we have a clearer answer to that question.
This morning I would like to illustrate this truth from the life of Moses.
Psalm 90 opens with words of praise, most familiar to us in the paraphrased form given them by Isaac Watts:
O God, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,
Our shelter from the stormy blast,
And our eternal home.
We are not sure who or when this Psalm was written.
Scholars debate whether the inscriptions are part of the sacred text.
For purposes of this message, I am going to assume that they accurately portray the author and context of the Psalms.
This Psalm is described as “A Prayer of Moses, the man of God.”
The title indicates the author, but gives no hints as to when it was written.
The beauty of a Psalm like this is that its scope is high enough and broad enough that it could cover many situations in Moses’ life.
For example, he could have written this before the Exodus.
He could have written this at Kadesh-Barnea during the wanderings in the wilderness.
Many scholars believe that this was written four months after the Israelites leave Egypt and were camped near Mt.
Sinai.
You remember the story.
Moses goes up into the mountain and is gone for forty days.
God gives him the Ten Commandments.
As Moses returns he finds Israel has already broken the first commandment.
They built a golden calf out of jewelry gathered from the people and are giving the calf credit for bringing them out of Egypt.
We pick up the story in Exodus 32.
This exchange between Moses and God may have been the inspiration for Moses’ prayer in Psalm 90.
This Psalm has a lot in it!
I want to go through this Psalm and look at what Moses knew about God, his theology, and see how it affected his prayer.
When we think about Israel in Moses’ time, we look at nomads in the desert.
Any career military people can identify.
The Jewish people started in Iraq, traveled to the present land of Israel, wandered around as nomads herding sheep and goats, traveled to Egypt and stayed there, first as honored guests and then as slaves for 400 years.
Egypt was never thought of as home.
Now in Psalm 90 they are wandering in the Sinai desert.
What is the one constant in their history?
The Lord is their dwelling place.
He is their refuge.
Just like many people will say that home for them was where their mother was, whereever that might be, so Israel dwelt in the promises of God.
Moses identifies God has the creator.
Two themes are given in the Bible.
God was the creator of heaven and earth.
He was the God who brought them out of Egypt.
This signifies his great power.
Theologians refer to God’s power as omnipotent.
Moses also identifies God as eternal.
He existed before the formation of the world and he will be around into the indefinite future.
This is in stark contrast to us.
We did not create, we are created beings.
We start as dust and we will return to dust.
The fact that we are not eternal is in one sense the design of God.
Sin keeps us from eternal life.
God is the one who determines the end of man.
The wages of sin is death.
The human race does not respect her creator.
She is in opposition to the eternal God.
God does not like his creation turning against him.
Moses knew that God was all knowing.
Theologically we call this omniscience.
He also is everywhere.
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