A Prayer in the Wilderness.

New Year’s this year.

New Year’s Eve is one of those days. You either love it or hate it, and this year it almost seems overwhelming. A preacher could feel a sense of panic trying to preach on a night like tonight. For starters, New Year’s Eve isn’t a particularly Christian observance. Most people are thinking about parties or the lack of them, significant others, or the lack of them, and resolutions or the lack of them. God gets lost in the mix. If the thoughts in your mind veer toward “none of the above,” chances are you’re thinking about the year that was and comparing it to a dumpster fire or some such thing. And now, there’s supposed to be a sermon that sums it all up. Maybe this past year was too big to be preached on, if that’s what a New Year’s Eve sermon is supposed to be all about, or… maybe not. You see, there is a passage in the Bible that hits home at some of the most deeply sorrowful points in life. That passage is Psalm 90, and it’s a Psalm that is reserved almost exclusively for funerals. It’s not a Psalm like the 23rd Psalm that is beautiful and poetic. It’s not one people like to hear so much. And, to be honest, plenty a preacher has cringed at the reading of it. This chunk of Scripture is a little too raw and a little too real, but it’s a good thing we have it, because, in a way, Psalm 90 is bigger than our grief and bigger than any dumpster fire of a year could ever be.

In addition to being reserved for funerals, the 90th Psalm is unique in another respect. It’s the only Psalm that is attributed to Moses in the superscription, that little description that you see in your Bible after the chapter number for each Psalm. Since Moses wrote it, and he never got to enter the promised land, you know that the 90th Psalm was written during the years of Israel’s wilderness wandering. It is a prayer in the wilderness. With all that’s happened this past year, and all of our wilderness wanderings of trying to figure out how to navigate through life. It’s time we make this prayer our own.

It is a question of time.

And time is a mystery. Our whole life seems like such a long time, but the reality that is expressed in the 90th Psalm is that life is all too short.

You’ve heard five-year-old child talk about their whole life as if it was practically the length of the Pleistocene Epoch. But if you’ve lived many a decade, you know that five years goes by awfully quickly.

So, here we have Moses, and he starts out with a beautiful hymn of praise in Psalm 90:1. It’s as comforting as homemade bread machine bread on a cold winter’s day.

“Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God.” (Psalm 90:1–2, ESV)

So far so good. A dwelling place is a good thing, like a home, a place of refuge and safety. But nestled within that thought, there is something that catches the corner of your mind. If God is our refuge, there must be something that we need refuge from, and if there are all these generations, how come they come and go so quickly that you can just lump them all together like that. God is called Adonai here in the Hebrew, and that’s a name that is used with a view toward God having a special, personal relationship with us. It’s a word that talks about God’s responsibility toward His servant people. Moses is bracing us for a heavy load that we have to carry in the next verses. The problem IS time. God is eternal, and we are not, and God has decreed that we will die, that our life will come to an end, and the reason for this is God’s righteous anger, God’s wrath on account of sin. It makes us cringe and squirm even to think of it. How is it even possible to have a special relationship with God, when we’re bound by our own mortality and He’s eternal? What good is life, if you have pain and misery and then you die and are forgotten? Moses compares not just one single life, but generations of lives to grass that is green in the morning, but by the end of the day it dries up and dies. What started out as a Psalm of praise turns out to be a lament on the brevity, the transience, the evanescence of life itself. As you read the verses of Psalm 90, time itself seems to be a curse. Life is full of misery, but time is short. Can’t we just skip to Psalm 23 where it talks about goodness and mercy following us all the days of our life? Not so fast! Right now, we find ourselves in the wilderness, and this is our prayer, a prayer that must be prayed.

What is time to God?

After all, we’re praying to Him, so what is the meaning of time to God? Is it as unimportant as it seems, since to him a thousand years is akin to a day? The startling answer is no. Time matters to God! It shouldn’t, really, but it does! For God tells desires that we number our days. Here, we find ourselves in the wilderness, feeling just about as miserable and insignificant and temporary and downright invisible as a person can feel, and Moses has us praying like this:

“So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.” (Psalm 90:12, ESV)

You know, for being an eternal God who doesn’t have to care about time, God sure spends a lot of time counting. He kept track of all the years of Adam’s life, and the generations after him. We can read about that in Genesis, the first book of Moses. The Bible is filled with years that were counted. Look, even in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, we see the human genealogies of Jesus written down in detail. And, indeed, in Jesus, God entered time and became mortal. This is something that is worth paying attention to. We’ve already talked about the verse from Galatians last Sunday :

“when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman...” (Galatians 4:4, ESV)

And it’s true. The eternal Son of God counted His days. He remembered every Sabbath. He fulfilled every feast. And then, when the time came he felt nails pierce through his flesh for six full hours in time until he gave up his last breath. So, Jesus was born in time, died in time, was buried in time, and rose in time. Jesus has even redeemed your life in time. And that is truly a miracle, because God knows how you spend your time. He sees each and every time you sin. He can count your sins, one by one, even the sins you are completely unaware of, he knows. Still, with Moses we pray in the midst of the wilderness of our sin, and we ask for forgiveness. We ask for help. We plead for God to be our God, and for his mercy, and we do so as the seconds tick ever closer to the last second, the time of our death. It isn’t so very far away, but neither is God.

We’re Rescued in Time!

You see, verse 12 of Psalm 90 is at the end of our text, but it is right in the middle of the Psalm. It is the hinge, the turning point. Earlier, Moses spoke of being returned to dust, but in the second half of the Psalm, he prays for God to return to us! He prays for God to satisfy us. He prays for God to make us glad.

We believe our time matters even if we’re older. We don’t with Moses pray “Make us glad” because we’re young (Ps 90:15). Moses lived 120 years. We don’t know when he wrote this psalm. But I’d like for you to put yourselves in Moses’ shoes during a certain time of his life. In Numbers 13–14, God is ready to send his people into the Promised Land. But they fail to fear, love, and trust in him. Instead, they fear the Canaanites, and they reject the Promised Land, praying to go back to Egypt. So God punishes them thusly: everyone who’s over twenty years old at that time will die before he or she ever enters Canaan. That means for the next forty years all those older Hebrews will simply be waiting to die so that their children can receive their promise.

All the older generations whom God brought out of Egypt will never have a roof over their heads; they will never taste the milk and honey that flows; they will never step foot in the land God has worked so hard to give them. Imagine that. Put yourselves in their shoes. You know you’re going to die in the next forty years, and you know the rest of your life will be spent in a poor, stinking desert. Forty terrible years?

Knowing that was the plight of the Hebrews, listen in on verses 14–16 of Psalm 90 again:

“Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days. Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us, and for as many years as we have seen evil. Let your work be shown to your servants, and your glorious power to their children.”

This is the perfect prayer for the older Hebrews wandering in the wilderness. They have nothing to look forward to in this life. Even though they know there is no earthly home for them, still they know God promises to give their children the land they rejected. And in that land of Canaan, outside a city—later named Jerusalem—Christ will hang on the cross, having entered time for us, to answer us for all our prayers in the wilderness.

Whether Moses wrote that prayer at the beginning of the wilderness wandering or not, it certainly applies to his life then. And it certainly applies to us now. Even though 2020 was a dumpster fire, we can still be glad. Even if all our days feel like they’re cursed and we see evil each and every day in the world, we can still be glad. God is with us. We have God. We are loved. God is our dwelling place through Christ Jesus, and we are baptized into Christ.

He has made us glad!

Whether we lost a loved one this year or felt the sting of divorce or lost a job or suffered through with Covid, or had to endure loneliness, increased burden, and distancing, the Lord is our dwelling place. God hears our prayers and never departs from us. He dwells with us still.

Martin Luther called these kinds of toil tentatio; that’s Latin for affliction or suffering. But this tentatio is part of the Christian life on earth. And this affliction, this toil, isn’t something that’s useless. It’s actually useful. Because with suffering, we see our dependence and our need for God. Each and every affliction is an opportunity to pray and trust in God, to turn back to him for everything. And he’s there. Immanuel: God with us. Our home and salvation despite anything and everything that afflicts us this year and the next.

I can’t stress that enough, that the most important thing we have as we enter into 2021, is that we have God and His love.

There’s another wilderness Psalm. It was written when King David was in the wilderness of Judah. It’s Psalm 63, and it goes like this.

“Because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you. So I will bless you as long as I live; in your name I will lift up my hands.” (Psalm 63:3–4, ESV)

So I’ll leave you with this little prayer, this little song, for New Year’s Eve, to fill you with hope and strength and joy, even here, especially here at the end of 2020! Amen.

Sing “Thy Loving Kindness”