The Reality of Death and The Gift of Life

One of the most important and pervasive messages of Psalm 90:1-12 is that life is short. Death is near at hand. The psalm goes to great lengths to express that truth: our lives are like grass that “fades and withers” (90:6); “our years come to an end like a sigh” (90:9); our days “are soon gone, and we fly away” (90:10). That message may at first seem negative. It may seem even more depressing that our human limits are a sign of God’s wrath. Indeed, Psalm 90:1-12 may seem to run counter to the New Testament’s hopeful word that in Christ death has lost its sting (1 Corinthians 15:55). But in fact this psalm is entirely consistent with the message of resurrection. What it really says is that life and eternity belong to God, not to us. The emphasis on death is also closely tied to the awareness that we are sinful creatures. As verse 8 says, our sins are set before God. They are a sure sign of our limitations, our finitude. Therefore, our lives—and our resurrection—come from the Creator and giver of life. Psalm 90’s focus on death reins us in and reminds us that we live because God holds us in life.
This ironic portrayal of the righteous and the wicked in the Psalms—which is implied in Psalm 90—has important implications for how we live. As the Psalms testify, those who refuse to admit their human limits (and refuse to confess their sins) inevitably act violently towards others. They take advantage of others because they believe they are entitled to more of the world than they really are (see again Psalm 36:3-4). But those who acknowledge that they live within the sovereignty of God are more willing to promote the well-being of others, as God intends. In other words, the perspective on human limitation Psalm 90 gives is not intended just to “put us in our place” in relation to God. It also helps us to live rightly towards other human beings.

If the main message of Psalm 90 is that God is eternal and we are not, then the wisdom of the psalm is in knowing how to react to that reality. The psalm’s main “advice” comes in verse 12: “teach us to count our days.” This line certainly does not mean to focus on how few days we have. Such a negative focus would rob us of the joy available to us in our days, however brief they may be. The context of the psalm also argues against the notion that we can count on longevity. Verse 10 declares that human life is short even for those who are physically sound. The wisdom of “counting our days” seems rather to be in recognizing that each day is a gift.
Time.” The song emphasizes loving and cherishing each moment. We should love “the time it takes to watch the sunrise” and even the time it takes waiting in line, driving a child to school, any time we have we should find in it an opportunity to cherish the gifts of God. Our time, our lives, are surely such gifts.
If Psalm 90 is taken seriously as a prayer of Moses, it might lead us to think of and relate to Israel’s existence in the wilderness. Relying on God to provide manna, they had to live by faith each day. With this in mind, Psalm 90:12 might be translated “teach us to live day by day.” The point of this advice, and the point of Israel’s living on manna in the desert, is that life with God must be lived by faith. Living by faith means we recognize that God, who is eternal, watches over us and holds our future. Living by any other view of the world will lead us either to squander our days because we think they are unlimited or to fret over the brevity of life as though we could change it.
Understood this way, Psalm 90:1-12 gives very much the same perspective Jesus gave his disciples when he told them not to worry about tomorrow (Matthew 6:25-34). His point, of course, was not that we should avoid planning for the future nor that we should shirk our responsibilities. Rather, we must recognize that none of our preparation for or worry about the future will add a day to our lives. Instead of fretting over such things, Jesus insisted that with the time we have we strive for the kingdom of God (Matthew 6:33). Such striving shows that we know what to do with our lives. We know truly how to “count our days.”