If each day you don’t face the futility of your own life, you’re not being honest with yourself.
Soon you will be dead. The wealth you earned, the possessions you collected, the work you accomplished, the reputation you attracted will all dissipate. Your grandchildren will remember you fairly well. The next generation may know a thing or two about you. But after that, not much will be left. And even if we come to terms with this emotionally, duty to others still dictates that we strive hard here and now to build these sand castles, to grasp for this mist. As a result, a sense of weariness and profound waste necessarily haunts the responsibly observant soul. How much more must this feeling of vain labor have plagued a generation whose lot was to fail, to wander, to end without a home, and to serve as a shadowy type for a deliverance yet to come?
Of course I’m speaking of the Wilderness Generation. Psalm 90 is the only psalm attributed to their tired leader – “Moses, the Man of God.” He had first-hand knowledge of momentous acts of God – both unparalleled judgement in the plagues of Egypt, and also unparalleled salvation at Passover and the Red Sea. He had spoken with God directly on numerous occasions, seen Him on the mountain top, and come down literally glowing from His presence. But experiencing such glories may have made his plight feel all the more futile in the long run. What Moses knew about the goodness, the holiness, and the power of God often seemed untranslatable to the stubborn flock he had been given. Time and time again, grumbling won out over holy remembrance and trust in the hearts of the people.
Psalm 90 begins and ends as a contemplation of time. During forty years in the desert, one has plenty of time to ponder the nature of generations, millennia, lifetimes, and days. And any serious contemplation of time leads straight to God. Moses claims this as his foundational statement for dealing with anything he’s thinking or feeling: God was here in the beginning. It’s only if our home is in Him that we have any stability with which to wade through the murky waters of life under the curse.
But when we contemplate God, who is our home, it’s not all butterflies and lollipops. We have to acknowledge that He is the Keeper of time and the Architect of history. That means that He is the one who numbers our days, who sweeps away our years, who makes our most meaningful moments on this earth seem like just a dream. It is right that He do so – we have sinned, and we must die. Though we look back through the blessed lens of Christ that makes our death the doorway to life, still we must not forget that physical death remains our just sentence. Not one of my subtle grumblings against God’s rule is unknown to Him. And even one such act of rebellion against the greatest Good is more than deserving of capital punishment. We dare not feel entitled to a healthy and comfortable eighty to ninety years! In reality, this “norm” is a merciful luxury from the hand of a patient God.
In the face of inevitable earthly demise and in the scope of thousands of years, our daily struggles can sometimes feel pointless, or even like a morbid joke. How will we respond to the brevity of life, the burden of our tasks, the seemingly relentless brokenness
Some people check out and focus solely on procuring emotional escape. They get busy literally amusing themselves to death. But for the sober-minded, that’s never really an option. The more gripping temptation for the realists among us is despair – a numbness full of dread that simply goes through the motions of each day. Is there a third option? Yes – Moses’ choice here: prayer.
Verses 12 through 17 reveal that prayer – the fruit of Moses’ meditation on life under the curse. He asks first that the God who numbers (limits) his days would help him to number (count) his own days, to give him the wisdom of keen open-eyed awareness regarding the limited nature of his time on this earth. From this perspective, he then sees what he needs most: “Return, O Lord!” Moses longs for the renewed visitation of YHWH’s gracious power upon His people. He knows that’s not deserved; any such “return” would be an expression of the Lord’s pity. But such transformative presence would then result in gladness – a key mark of the true people of God! YHWH’s lovingkindness produces a stubborn ability to rejoice, even when we know all too well that the death sentence has not been lifted. His lovingkindness changes grief over the afflicted and numbered nature of our lives into a gladness amid that affliction, precisely because these days are numbered and appointed by the One who is good and the One who is present.
Though the resurrection was still fairly veiled at that point in Redemptive History, Moses had hints (such as Enoch! – Genesis 5:24) that there was more for those who found their dwelling place in the eternal God. And that hope then propels us unto lives of purpose and productivity, all for His glory! “Only one life, ’twill soon be past; only what’s done for Christ will last.” Surely the prayer to “establish the work of our hands” becomes the cry of all who, by His grace, have had their focus turned away from their own plight to the cause of the Kingdom and the plight of others in this world.
Moses knew full-well that from a direct vantage point, his work simply would not be long established (see Deuteronomy 31:16). But in another sense, everything he did would be fulfilled in Jesus. “For I want you to know, brothers, that our fathers were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, and all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual Rock that followed them, and the Rock was Christ” 1 Corinthians 10:1-4. Moses’ plight was to serve as a type, that we would have a framework to understand the character and work of our Savior. To emphasize this connection, Jesus spent an emblematic forty days in the wilderness (Matthew 4), re-enacting and indeed overwriting the desert wanderings as the new and truly obedient Israel. Faced with temptation to take the easy way out, Jesus chose neither to blur the truth nor to numb himself with pleasure. And because we are found in Him as our covenant head, His Spirit can enable us to live boldly in the face of circumstantial barrenness – refusing to grumble against our Creator, or to compromise our prophetic role in this society.
So if each day you shut down, or become numb, or become frantically defiant against the futility of your life, then you’re also not being honest with yourself. You’re overlooking the God who entered the affliction and transformed death by dying (Revelation 14:13). So with Moses and with the saints under the altar, we don’t pretend or despair, but rather we cry out through the pain and weariness “Return, O Lord, how long?!” (Revelation 6:9-11). His presence is the only necessary help and hope, and the ultimate prize for the one who conquers (Revelation 3:11-12). He’s our help in ages past, our hope for years to come, our shelter from the stormy blast, and our eternal home.