Psalms 90:8–9

Moses does not stop at this point however: he traces the matter back one further step. Why is man under the Divine displeasure? Why does wrath lie upon him? He gives us the answer in verse 8. That is it! Sin lies at the root of the mischief; and even if men sin in secret, it does no good. All stands out clear and distinct in the light of God's face.

The cause of it is His anger, which is consuming us, His hot wrath, which distresses us. But why such anger? It is not the blind heat of passion. It is judgment that weighs everything in the fairest scales, with knowledge from which nothing can escape.

God knows your most secret sin. As He sees when you shut your door to pray, and will reward your sincerity, so when you do it to sin in secret, He will reward your hypocrisy. The word tells you of an informer inside your own heart — conscience. It goes along with you and witnesses all your carefully laid plots. What it sees, it writes down, for it is a court of record… Consult the word. You will find that God usually has shamed in this world the very people who promised themselves the most secrecy in their sinning. So Gehazi played his part cleverly enough… yet this man is found out. For the clothes he got from Naaman by a lie, the Lord gave him another garment for his sin: leprosy.

Sins against grace are more serious than sins committed in ignorance of grace, and God deals with them accordingly. So Amos says: "You only have I known of all the families of the earth; therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities." This is God's government of those in near relationship to Himself. Moses wrote Psalm 90. He had seen Israel's evil ways in the wilderness, and also the Lord's governmental chastening of the people… We must hold these two truths together in the soul to keep a proper balance.

Psalm 90 is in a special way Israel's cry for mercy and restoration in the last days after their long affliction… Faith lays hold of both the ways and the purposes of God in dealing with His people. For Israel it is felt as wrath, because they do not yet know reconciliation. We know it is love, but the truth of the dealing is the same, and we can apply it.

We have obvious sins and uncleannesses, and we are unaware of most of them. Even so, Christ has opened the way for us into the very glory of God. He has gone there before us with His own most precious blood. Now we can draw near with confidence… We can say the words of Psalm 90:8 without fear. We can say them because we know Christ is in the presence of God for us. His precious blood is in the very light of the glory of God on our behalf. The sins which reached to heaven have been covered, blotted out by that sprinkled blood.

Seventy years were the ordinary measure of man's days. This was true in a particular way of the people among whom Moses moved in the wilderness. Everyone counted from twenty years old and upward came under that word, "your dead bodies shall fall in this wilderness" (Num. 14:29). So those who were in their prime at thirty when they left Egypt cannot have lived past seventy. Caleb and Joshua were the exceptions. It is remarkable that God used a man who lived to one hundred and twenty to declare seventy to be man's days. Moses was still full of strength when he died at that age.

But why is man so frail, so mortal? Because he has fallen under the divine displeasure. It is not an unreasonable accident that he is in this plight. He was not created like this. It is simply and only that anger and wrath from God lie upon him. This is a hard saying, but a true one. It is the only explanation of man's sad state.

The cause of it is His anger, which is consuming us, His hot wrath, which distresses us. But why such anger? It is not the blind heat of passion. It is careful judgment, weighing things in the most even balance. "You have set our iniquities before You," and, with knowledge from which nothing can escape, "our secret sins in the light of Your presence." So all our days pass away in overflowing wrath, which rests on us with steady persistence. "We spend our days as a thought" — or, rather, "a moan."

In the ninetieth you have what man is alone: "we bring our years to an end like a sigh." Man is born, he lives, his days are few and full of trouble, and he dies. All he can ask is, "So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom." When you come to the ninety-first, you have a beautiful contrast. It is not the first man, but the second. It is the one who "dwells in the shelter of the Most High" and "abides in the shadow of the Almighty."

We are only the feeble, dying children of Adam, and we gain much by recognising that fact. As long as we do not count our days properly, we imagine ourselves to be something other than what we are. Then we give our hearts to pleasure or money-making or sport or a hundred and one small things. When we count our days properly and realise the plight we are in, we give our hearts to wisdom. And the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord. But we have to pray to God to teach us to do this, for we will not do it by ourselves.

The conclusion, then, is this. If we are living at the height of our heavenly calling, we will not regret how fast the years fly. Nor will we grieve at the prospect of death, if the Lord delays. But if we are not on our guard, the close of a year, with its reminder of times and seasons, may sink us to the level of the Old Testament believer. May the Lord help us instead to live so much in His presence, and to have Himself so filling our hearts, that "dying daily" we are already living beyond death the life of heaven.