Dust, Floods, and Cut Grass Text: Psalm 90:3-6
Introduction: The Only Dwelling Place
This psalm, attributed to Moses, is a prayer born in the wilderness. It is a stark and unflinching meditation on the vast chasm between God's eternality and man's frailty. We moderns, particularly in the West, have dedicated ourselves to the project of forgetting this distinction. We insulate ourselves with technology, distract ourselves with entertainment, and delude ourselves with the notion that we are the masters of our own fate. We live as though death were a surprise, an unfortunate accident, rather than the one appointment every single one of us will keep.
Moses, leading a generation of rebels through the desert, had no such illusions. He was watching an entire generation die off. The sentence of God was being carried out before his eyes, day after day, funeral after funeral. He understood that to rightly number our days, which is to say, to live wisely, we must first come to grips with who God is and who we are in relation to Him. He is the everlasting God, our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were formed, from everlasting to everlasting, He is God. We, on the other hand, are dust. And unless we understand the second point, we cannot take any true comfort in the first.
The world tells you to find your meaning in your fleeting experiences, to "live your truth" in the few moments you have. But this is like trying to build a house on a wisp of fog. Moses grounds us in reality. Our only stability, our only home, is not in this transient life, but in the eternal God Himself. These verses we consider today are a bucket of cold, clear water to the face. They are designed to wake us up from our self-important stupor, to remind us of our creaturely limits, so that we might flee to the only one who has no limits.
The Text
You turn man back into dust
And say, “Return, O sons of men.”
For a thousand years in Your sight
Are like yesterday when it passes by,
Or as a watch in the night.
You have swept them away like a flood, they fall asleep;
In the morning they are like grass which sprouts anew.
In the morning it blossoms and sprouts anew;
Toward evening it withers away and dries up.
(Psalm 90:3-6 LSB)
The Divine Decree of Dissolution (v. 3)
We begin with the stark reality of our origin and our end.
"You turn man back into dust And say, 'Return, O sons of men.'" (Psalm 90:3)
Notice the active agent here. "You turn man back into dust." Death is not an impersonal force of nature. It is not a biological accident. It is a divine decree. This is God's doing. This is a direct echo of the curse pronounced in the Garden after the fall. "For you are dust, and to dust you shall return" (Genesis 3:19). Our mortality is not a feature of our original design; it is a judicial sentence because of our sin. God formed Adam from the dust, and because of Adam's rebellion, God sentences his sons to return to it.
The word for "dust" here can also mean "crushed particles." It is a picture of complete disintegration. This is the ultimate end of all human pride, all human ambition, all human empire-building apart from God. It all gets crushed back to dust. The pyramids, the skyscrapers, the monuments to our own greatness, all of it is destined for the dustbin of history under the sovereign decree of God.
And God speaks this decree: "Return, O sons of men." Just as God spoke and created the world, His word also un-creates. His word is performative. When He says "Return," we return. There is no appeal, no negotiation. This establishes the absolute sovereignty of God over life and death. We do not hold the lease on our own lives. We are tenants, and the landlord can evict us at any moment He chooses. This is not meant to be terrifying for the believer, but rather clarifying. It strips away our pretensions of autonomy and forces us to find our security not in our own grip on life, but in His gracious grip on us.
God's Perspective on Time (v. 4)
Moses then contrasts our fleeting existence with God's eternal nature by considering time itself.
"For a thousand years in Your sight Are like yesterday when it passes by, Or as a watch in the night." (Psalm 90:4)
This is one of the most profound statements in all of Scripture on the nature of time from the divine perspective. We are creatures of time; it is the medium in which we exist. We measure it, we are bound by it, and we are constantly running out of it. But God is not in time. Time is His creature. He dwells in eternity.
Moses uses two illustrations to help our finite minds grasp this. First, a thousand years, a millennium, the longest stretch of time we can readily conceive, is to God like "yesterday when it passes by." Think about your yesterday. It's gone. It was here, and now it is a memory, a fleeting thought. That is what a thousand years of human history is to the eternal God. The rise and fall of the Roman Empire is like a yesterday to Him. All our frantic activity, our wars and our politics, our discoveries and our dramas, are a blip on His eternal screen.
The second illustration is even more striking: "a watch in the night." A watch in the night for a Roman soldier was about three or four hours. It was a short, forgettable shift in the darkness. This is not to say that God is indifferent to what happens in our lives. Rather, it is to say that He sees the whole story, from beginning to end, at once. He is not constrained by the slow, linear progression that we are. The Apostle Peter picks up this very verse to explain the apparent delay of Christ's return: "But do not let this one fact escape your notice, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years like one day" (2 Peter 3:8). God's timetable is not our timetable, because He is the author of the timetable.
The Frailty of Man Illustrated (v. 5-6)
Having established God's eternal sovereignty, Moses now returns to the condition of man, using two powerful metaphors: a flood and grass.
"You have swept them away like a flood, they fall asleep; In the morning they are like grass which sprouts anew. In the morning it blossoms and sprouts anew; Toward evening it withers away and dries up." (Psalm 90:5-6)
First, "You have swept them away like a flood." Again, God is the actor. The flood is a picture of sudden, overwhelming, and irresistible judgment. One moment life is proceeding as normal, the next, everything is washed away. This is how quickly our lives pass from the standpoint of eternity. We are here, and then we are gone. The phrase "they fall asleep" connects this to the idea of death being like sleep, a common biblical metaphor. But it is a sleep from which we are swept away into judgment.
The second metaphor is that of grass, which is one of the Bible's most common images for the brevity and fragility of human life. Isaiah uses it powerfully: "A voice says, 'Cry!' And I said, 'What shall I cry?' All flesh is grass, and all its loveliness is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades, because the breath of the LORD blows upon it; surely the people are grass" (Isaiah 40:6-7).
Notice the rhythm in the psalm. "In the morning it blossoms and sprouts anew." This is a picture of youth, of vitality, of potential. A young man feels invincible. The world is his oyster. He is full of plans and ambitions. But then comes the turn: "Toward evening it withers away and dries up." The scorching sun of trial, or sickness, or simply the passage of time, beats down, and the vibrant life is gone. It happens that fast. One day you are planning for retirement, and the next day your plans don't matter anymore. This is not morbid pessimism; it is biblical realism. It is the necessary diagnosis before we will ever seek the cure.
The Gospel in the Wilderness
So what do we do with this bleak assessment? If we are dust, if our lives are like a watch in the night, if we are like grass that withers, where is the hope? The hope is found by reading the whole psalm, and indeed, the whole Bible. This meditation on our frailty is designed to drive us out of ourselves and into the arms of our only hope: the eternal God who became a man of dust.
The Lord Jesus Christ is the eternal God, for whom a thousand years are as yesterday. Yet He willingly entered into our time-bound world. He took on our dusty frame. He, the Lord of life, submitted to the divine decree, "Return to dust." He was swept away by a flood of divine judgment on the cross, a judgment He did not deserve. He withered under the heat of God's wrath against our sin. He did all this to absorb the curse for us.
And because He did, the pattern is now gloriously reversed for those who are in Him. Yes, we return to the dust. But for the believer, the grave is not a final destination. It is a waiting room. Because Jesus rose from the dust, we too will be raised. As Paul says, "For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive" (1 Corinthians 15:22).
Our lives are still brief. We are still like grass. But here is the difference. Because of Christ, our brief, grassy lives can be offered up to the eternal God as a pleasing sacrifice. Our fleeting works, when done in faith, can have eternal significance. Moses prays later in this psalm, "establish the work of our hands upon us" (v. 17). This is an audacious prayer. He is asking the eternal God to give eternal weight to the momentary efforts of withering grass. And in Christ, God is pleased to answer that prayer. Our short lives, lived for His glory, are no longer a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing. They are a prelude to an eternity of joy in the presence of our dwelling place, the God who is from everlasting to everlasting.