I just attended my fortieth high school reunion. It feels a bit surreal to write that. Forty years have passed already? It’s another reminder of my recent reflections: our lives are very brief, briefer than we’d like to think.
I remember graduation day like it was yesterday: all of us a mere seventeen or eighteen years old, and most of us feeling a flush of euphoria as we stood together for a moment at that milestone, on the very brink of adulthood, full of hopes and dreams.
Now most of us are older than our parents were when we graduated high school — in fact, a significant number of us are grandparents — which made our reunion somewhat bizarre to experience. Photos of us from our high school years played on the monitors in the venue as we reconnected with old friends and acquaintances, all of us now with thinning, graying hair and our bodies showing the tolls that gravity, solar radiation, and changing metabolisms have taken as we’re rapidly approaching our culture’s retirement age.
But those aren’t the only tolls we’ve paid. We’ve also experienced, in different ways and to differing extents, the universal reality that Moses spoke of when he wrote,
The years of our life are seventy,
or even by reason of strength eighty;
yet their span is but toil and trouble. (Psalm 90:10)
We’ve discovered that life not only passes faster than we expected; it’s also harder than we expected.
I know this all sounds a bit depressing. But our hope has to be real hope if it’s going to sustain us through real life, not the illusory hope of the mirage-like dreams my classmates and I likely had when we graduated. Real hope is only realized when we come to terms with the dismaying reality we all face in this age. Truly facing it is what forges in us “a heart of wisdom” (Psalm 90:12), the kind of heart that Psalm 90 teaches how to cultivate.
Why We Are Dismayed
It’s actually heartening that Moses, one of the godliest people to walk the earth, one who grounded his hope in God and his promises, was dismayed by his experience and observation of life — just like we often are. But in this psalm, he doesn’t take a shortcut to hope. His real hope is grounded in the reality of the human condition. Which is why we first hear him lament the end we all face: death.
Dismayed by the Dread of Death
Moses cuts right to the chase when he says,
You return man to dust
and say, “Return, O children of man!” (Psalm 90:3)
We all dread death. We dread it for myriad reasons, but underneath all others is a primal root reason: death is God’s judgment on sinful humanity, and we intuitively know God’s judgment is dreadful. When Moses prays, “You return man to dust,” we can see he’s in touch with reality because he’s quoting God’s words back to him:
You [shall] return to the ground,
for out of it you were taken;
for you are dust,
and to dust you shall return. (Genesis 3:19)
Perhaps you and I will be among those alive when Jesus returns, and we will experience our mortal bodies being “swallowed up by life” (2 Corinthians 5:4). I imagine every saint since Jesus’s resurrection has hoped and prayed for that experience. But there is wisdom to be gained from pondering the significant likelihood that someday soon — bewilderingly soon — God will say to us, “Return, O child of man.”
Dismayed by God’s Anger
Then Moses delves into the core of our dread of the judgment of death:
For we are brought to an end by your anger;
by your wrath we are dismayed.
You have set our iniquities before you,
our secret sins in the light of your presence.
For all our days pass away under your wrath;
we bring our years to an end like a sigh.
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.
Who considers the power of your anger,
and your wrath according to the fear of you? (Psalm 90:7–11)
For those of us living on this side of Jesus’s substitutionary work on the cross, these words can sound confusing and disturbing. Didn’t Jesus pay it all for us? And if so, in what way are we still under God’s wrath? Here is where we, as believers, find the ground for real hope.
Hope in Our Dismay
Moses’s description of our dismay over our toil and trouble reminds us of the mysterious experience of living in the already–not yet kingdom of God. For when Jesus died, he did pay the full price for the sins of all saints past, present, and future.
God put forward [Jesus] as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins [of former saints]. It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. (Romans 3:25–26)
Jesus’s death “delivers us from the wrath to come” (1 Thessalonians 1:10), so that when we “appear before the judgment seat of Christ” (2 Corinthians 5:10) we will not stand condemned (Romans 8:1). Rather, we receive “the free gift [of] eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 6:23).
But in this age, until Jesus returns, we still endure the wretched experience of living in a body where sin dwells in our members (Romans 7:23–25). We still suffer the toil and trouble of living in a world subjected to futility, along with the groaning that comes with it (Romans 8:20). And we still suffer the dreadful experience of the death of our bodies. In other words, we still experience the same kind of dismaying sorrows Moses lamented.
But for those who have ears to hear, there is gospel in this profoundly sober part of Moses’s prayer. When he prays, “Who considers the power of your anger, and your wrath according to the fear of you?” (Psalm 90:11), the answer is that the believing saint does. For those who trust in Jesus, our fallen bodies, our toil and trouble, and our approaching death cause us to consider the reality of God’s judgment and see that they all point to the gospel hope — the same hope Moses had, even if he saw it only in copies and shadows (Hebrews 8:5).
For believing saints, these sorrows cause us to lay up our treasures in heaven (Matthew 6:20), to fight our remaining sin with all our might (Romans 6:12), to sojourn as “strangers and exiles on the earth” (Hebrews 11:13), to share with others the hope we have (1 Peter 3:15), and to ultimately view death, however we may dread experiencing it, as gain (Philippians 1:21).
Teach Us to Number Our Days
On that happy June evening in 1984 when my classmates and I celebrated our high school graduation, not only did we not comprehend how fast our lives would pass; we didn’t comprehend how difficult our lives would be. We know much better now.
But that doesn’t mean we all have cultivated a heart of wisdom. Not all my classmates have a hope grounded in the sobering explanation of why our days are so brief and so full of trouble. Not all have considered the power of God’s anger and his wrath according to the fear of him. O God, have mercy! Open their eyes that they may consider these things and be delivered from the wrath to come!
But for those of us who have put our hope in God, it is good for our souls to continue to consider these things seriously — even, with Moses, to the point of lament. Because feeling the weight of our fleeting days and troubled lives can teach us to number our days and so teach our hearts wisdom. It also can teach us to feel more fully the joy that is set before us (Hebrews 12:2) and to be filled “with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit [we] may abound in hope” (Romans 15:13).