Psalm 90:10

Psalm 90 is headed “A Prayer of Moses the man of God”. It is the only psalm given to Moses, and it is likely the oldest in the book. It opens with God as the dwelling place of his people in every generation, God “from everlasting to everlasting” (Psalm 90:1–2). Then it turns to us. God turns man back to dust, a thousand years in his sight are like yesterday or a watch in the night, and our lives are like a dream, or grass that flourishes in the morning and withers by evening (Psalm 90:3–6).

Verses 7–11 give the reason for that frailty. The word “For” that opens verse 7 joins the two together: we wither because we live under God’s anger against our sin. The prayer these verses lead to follows in Psalm 90:12–17, where Moses asks God to teach us to number our days, to return and have compassion, to satisfy us early with his mercy, and to establish the work of our hands.

“For we are consumed by thine anger, and by thy wrath are we troubled.” Moses speaks as “we”. He places himself among the people under judgment.

The verb for “consumed”, kâlâh, means to end, cease, be finished or perish, and it can also mean to complete or consume. Our lives come to their end under God’s anger. The shortness of life is God’s judgment at work, the response of his holiness to human sin.

The word for “anger”, ʼaph, properly means the nose or nostril, and Hebrew uses it for anger from the flaring nostrils and hard breathing of someone enraged. The word for “wrath” in this verse, chêmâh, means heat or rage, and it comes from a root meaning “to be hot”. The verb for “troubled”, bâhal, means to tremble inwardly, to be suddenly alarmed or dismayed. The second line of the verse says the first again in other words, as Hebrew poetry often does, and it adds the terror within to the perishing without. Under God’s anger we come to an end, and under his wrath we are shaken.

This anger is holy. It is God’s righteous and settled opposition to sin, and Scripture speaks of it from beginning to end. Paul writes, “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men” (Romans 1:18). The letter to the Hebrews says, “For our God is a consuming fire” (Hebrews 12:29), and Nahum asks, “Who can stand before his indignation? and who can abide in the fierceness of his anger?” (Nahum 1:6). The God who consumes is also the God who restores, and the same Moses who confesses this anger goes on to ask God to satisfy his people with mercy and to establish the work of their hands.

“Thou hast set our iniquities before thee” describes something God does. He places our sins in his own view and brings them into account. The word for “iniquities”, ʻâvôn, means perversity or moral evil, the twisting of what is right, and it carries the guilt of the wrongdoing, a guilt that needs atonement.

“Our secret sins” uses the verb ʻâlam, to veil from sight or conceal. The KJV adds “sins” in italics to make the sense plain. These are the wrongs hidden from other people, and sometimes from ourselves: thoughts, motives and desires, and deeds done in private. Jesus taught that sin starts in the heart: “For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies” (Matthew 15:19). Jeremiah says, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9). We hide things from others and from ourselves, but God knows them all.

“In the light of thy countenance” is a picture of God’s presence. The word for “countenance”, pânîym, is the face, and from the face it comes to mean the presence of someone. It is plural in form but always used as a singular. A king’s face could show his favour or his anger, and here God’s face is a pure light that shows up everything it shines on. John writes that “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5). Proverbs says, “The eyes of the LORD are in every place, beholding the evil and the good” (Proverbs 15:3). Jesus said that “there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known” (Luke 12:2), and Hebrews says that “all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do” (Hebrews 4:13).

That is why the confession of sin matters so much. Our sins already stand in God’s light, and it is when we own them there that his forgiveness is received and treasured.

“For all our days are passed away in thy wrath.” The verb behind “passed away”, pânâh, means to turn or to face, and it is used of a day that passes. Here the days pass under God’s wrath. The word for “wrath” in this verse, ʻebrâh, means an outburst of passion, anger or rage. The words “all our days” cover the whole of life. For the generation in the wilderness it was literally true, since their years were spent waiting to die in the desert.

“We spend our years” uses kâlâh, the same verb as “consumed” in verse 7. Our years are used up and brought to an end. Verse 7 says that we are consumed, and verse 9 says that our years are.

“The days of our years are threescore years and ten”, that is, seventy years, “and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years”, which is eighty. Moses gives the usual length of a full life, with a further ten years for those who are strong. The word for “strength”, gᵉbûwrâh, means force, valour or might. Scripture uses it of people, of nations, even of a horse, as well as of God. Here it is the bodily vigour that carries someone past seventy.

“Yet is their strength labour and sorrow.” Even the strongest years are hard. The word for “labour”, ʻâmâl, means toil, wearing effort and worry, and it covers both the work and the grief that comes with it. The word for “sorrow”, ʼâven, means trouble, affliction, nothingness or vanity, and elsewhere it can mean wickedness. Here it is the pain and emptiness that come with this life. A longer life adds more years of the same struggle. This toil goes back to the curse on the ground after Adam’s sin, when God said, “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground” (Genesis 3:17–19). The Preacher says the same: “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?” (Ecclesiastes 1:2–3). Paul traces death itself to sin: “by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin” (Romans 5:12).

“For it is soon cut off, and we fly away.” The words behind “soon cut off”, gûwz and chîysh, describe a swift end. The verb for “fly away”, ʻûwph, means to fly or fly away, and it can also mean to brandish or to faint. Life is over quickly and we are gone, like a bird in flight. Isaiah uses the picture of grass: “The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever” (Isaiah 40:6–8).

“Who knoweth the power of thine anger?” asks a question that expects the answer “no one”. The word for “power”, ‘oz, means strength, might or intensity. The word for “anger”, ʼaph, is the same word as in verse 7. The full force of God’s anger is past our grasp. People treat sin lightly and underestimate God’s judgment, and so they give little thought to what follows from his displeasure. Hebrews says, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Hebrews 10:31).

God’s wrath and his love belong together because both come from who he is, perfectly holy and perfectly good. “God is love” (1 John 4:8), and a God who loves what he has made stands against the sin that ruins it. His wrath is his settled and just opposition to all that is evil, and it is always right. Scripture shows him as loving and just, merciful and holy, all at once.

The cross shows both together. God set forth Christ as a propitiation through faith in his blood, “that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus” (Romans 3:21–26). Because he loves us, God provided the way to escape his own righteous wrath, and his mercy is all the clearer against the wrath that sin deserves.

The anger that consumes us in verse 7 fell on the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29). “For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” (2 Corinthians 5:21). Isaiah wrote, “he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities” and “the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isaiah 53:5–6), and “it pleased the LORD to bruise him” (Isaiah 53:10). John calls Christ “the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world” (1 John 2:2). So the question of verse 11, “Who knoweth the power of thine anger?”, has its answer at the cross, where that power fell on God’s own Son. “He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life”, and the wrath of God abides on the one who refuses him (John 3:36).

The secret sins of verse 8 stand in God’s light, and Christ came into that light as “the light of the world” (John 8:12). God sent his Son into the world to save it (John 3:17). Christ was tempted in every way as we are, “yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15), even in his thoughts and motives. The sins that lie open before God are forgiven to those who believe, and “if we walk in the light, as he is in the light … the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin” (1 John 1:7).

The short life of verses 9 and 10 meets Christ too. He took on flesh and blood and shared our labour and sorrow to the point of death, so that through death he might destroy the one who had the power of death and deliver those who all their lifetime were in bondage through fear of death (Hebrews 2:14–15). He rose again, and he says, “I am the resurrection, and the life” (John 11:25–26). God “so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son” so that whoever believes in him should have everlasting life (John 3:16). Peter speaks of “a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” and “an inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away” (1 Peter 1:3–5). In that city God “shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow” (Revelation 21:4). Jesus promised his grieving disciples, “your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you” (John 16:22), and in our weakness the Lord says, “my strength is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9).

The fear of verse 11 is changed for those in Christ. “There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). Our fear becomes grateful awe for the God who “spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all” (Romans 8:32), and we “serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear” (Hebrews 12:28).

These verses give us the truth about death. Our lives are short and full of toil because we are sinners before a holy God, and Moses says so plainly, counting himself among the “we”. That truth is the ground of his next request: “So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom” (Psalm 90:12). Knowing that our years end like a sigh is where that wisdom begins, together with the fear of the LORD that verse 11 names.

They also show us who God is. He sees every hidden sin, his anger against sin is real, and its power is past our knowing. He is also the God Moses turns to for mercy in the very next breath, and the God who in Christ bore the wrath these verses describe. The honest confession of Psalm 90:7–11 opens onto that hope.