Psalm 90:2

Psalm 90 is the only psalm that bears the name of Moses, and it opens the fourth book of the Psalms, Psalms 90 to 106. Its title calls him “the man of God”, a name that marks him as a prophet who stood between God and Israel. It is called a prayer, so from its first word, “Lord”, the whole psalm is spoken to God directly. It is likely one of the oldest psalms we have, and its language has often been compared with Moses’ words in Deuteronomy.

The psalm most likely comes from the forty years in the wilderness, when Moses led Israel from camp to camp with no land of their own. The rebellion that began those years is told in Numbers 14. Because of it, the LORD said that a whole generation would die in the desert, and it did (Numbers 14:29–35). That setting explains why so much of this psalm is about death, human frailty and God’s judgment on sin.

Moses knew God’s presence closely. He met him at the burning bush (Exodus 3:1–6), on Mount Sinai (Exodus 19:16–20), and again and again in the Tent of Meeting (Exodus 33:7–11). So the man who says “thou hast been our dwelling place” had spent his life on the move, and had found his home in God.

Moses addresses God as “Lord”, ʼĂdônây, an emphatic form of the word for lord or master that is used as a name of God. It owns him as master and ruler over all creation and every generation, so the prayer begins in reverence and submission. Yet the next words are warm and personal: “thou hast been our dwelling place.”

The word for dwelling place, mâʻôwn, means a dwelling or habitation, a place of refuge and rest. It is used of God’s own dwelling in the Tabernacle or Temple, of people’s homes, and even of the lair of animals. Moses uses it of God himself. For Israel in the wilderness, with a generation dying around them, safety, rest and belonging were found in God’s presence and his unchanging character. A homeless people had been living in God all along.

“Thou hast been” looks back over history. God had already been this home to the fathers of Israel and to Moses’ own generation, and what he has been he can be trusted to remain. Scripture says the same elsewhere: “The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms” (Deuteronomy 33:27), and another psalm speaks of the one who has made “the LORD, which is my refuge, even the most High, thy habitation” (Psalm 91:9).

The word for generations, dôwr, means a generation, one group of people following another, and also a period or age. By saying that God has been his people’s home “in all generations”, Moses stretches that home over the whole of history, from Israel’s ancestors through his own day and on into the future. People are born and die, one generation after another, and God stays the same through every one of them, as he says himself: “For I am the LORD, I change not” (Malachi 3:6). Another psalm sets “everlasting” and “to all generations” side by side for how long God’s mercy and truth last (Psalm 100:5).

Verse 2 gives the reason God can be his people’s home in every generation: he was there before anything else was. Moses names the mountains first. They were the oldest and firmest things people knew, pictures of strength and permanence, and here even they have a beginning. The nations round about often made gods of the powers of nature, and this verse puts the mountains among the things God made.

Both verbs come from birth. “Brought forth” is yâlad, the ordinary word for bearing a child or begetting. “Formed” is chûwl, which means to writhe or travail as in labour, and so to bring forth (it can also mean to dance). Moses speaks of the earth’s beginning as a birth, in human terms we can grasp, and God is the one who brings it to birth. Even the most ancient features of the land had a definite origin, and it depended wholly on God, who was already there. The world came into being by his deliberate act.

“The earth and the world” joins two Hebrew words, ʼerets and têbêl, which overlap in meaning: the land under our feet and the whole inhabited world. With the mountains, they stand for the whole of creation, and God was before all of it. Isaiah calls him “the everlasting God, the LORD, the Creator of the ends of the earth” (Isaiah 40:28).

The Hebrew phrase is min ‘ôlām wə‘ad ‘ôlām, “from everlasting and up to everlasting”. The word ʻôwlâm means a long duration, reaching beyond what anyone can measure, and it can look back into the past or forward into the future. The small word ʻad means “as far as” or “up to”. Joined, they reach as far back and as far forward as words can go, so God’s existence is without beginning and without end. Time itself is something he made, and he is its Lord.

The verse then ends very simply: “thou art God.” The word here is ʼêl. The one who was there before the mountains, and who will be there when every generation has passed, is the one true God, supreme and unchanging. This is why the refuge of verse 1 holds. Because he is everlasting, his promises are steadfast, his character is constant and his purposes stand.

The rest of Psalm 90 is set against these two verses. Its long middle, Psalm 90:3–11, laments how short human life is. It begins with man’s frailty (Psalm 90:3–6). To God “a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night” (Psalm 90:4), and our lives are like a passing dream or the grass that fades by evening (Psalm 90:5–6). Then Moses traces that frailty to God’s wrath against sin (Psalm 90:7–11). Even a full life comes to threescore years and ten (Psalm 90:10).

The psalm ends with a prayer for wisdom, for mercy, and for God to establish the work of his people’s hands (Psalm 90:12–17). That prayer opens with the line this whole meditation leads to: “So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom” (Psalm 90:12).

So the first two verses are the anchor for everything that follows. Moses can look honestly at death, wrath and the brevity of life because he has first said who God is and what God has been to his people. Seen beside God’s eternity, our days are few, and that makes them precious. The psalm sets our short lives inside God’s everlasting purposes and teaches us to ask him for wisdom in how we spend them.

The New Testament shows the Son present before the mountains were born. John writes, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” and “All things were made by him” (John 1:1–3). Paul says of Christ, “he is before all things, and by him all things consist” (Colossians 1:16–17). The unchanging God of this psalm is the same in Christ: “Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever” (Hebrews 13:8). He is the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending (Revelation 1:8, Revelation 22:13).

The dwelling place of verse 1 also comes to us in him. God lived among his people in the Tabernacle in the wilderness, and “the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14), literally pitching his tent with us. He is Emmanuel, “God with us” (Matthew 1:23), and “in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily” (Colossians 2:9). He promised to go and prepare a place for his followers, so that where he is they may be also (John 14:2–3). At the end, John hears the words “the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them” (Revelation 21:3). In Christ the eternal God is the home of his people in every generation, and for ever.

Everything else we lean on belongs to one generation: the economy, our health, our work and achievements, even the people we love. God has been the home of his people through every generation since Moses and long before him. To take him as your dwelling place is to find your rest, your security and your sense of who you are in him, whatever season of life you are in.

The God who was there before the mountains is also the God Moses calls “our” dwelling place. The Creator of the earth and the world is great beyond our understanding, and he has made himself a home for people whose lives are as short as grass. That is a reason to worship him, and a reason to trust him with every one of our numbered days.