The Weight of Our Days: Life Under the Gaze of God Text: Psalm 90:7-11
Introduction: A Generation Allergic to Wrath
We live in a soft age, a sentimental age. Our generation has constructed for itself a god made of marshmallows and good intentions, a deity who would never be so rude as to get angry. The modern god is a celestial therapist whose only job is to affirm our choices, however foolish, and to soothe our anxieties, however self-inflicted. The concept of divine wrath is treated as a primitive embarrassment, a relic from a less enlightened time, something to be explained away by academics in skinny jeans.
But the God of the Bible is not safe; He is good, but He is not safe. He is a consuming fire. And this psalm, a prayer of Moses the man of God, is a bucket of ice water thrown on the sleepy face of our therapeutic age. Moses, who spoke with God face to face, as a man speaks to his friend, had no illusions about the terror of God's holiness. He understood that the central problem of human existence is not our low self-esteem, but our high-handed rebellion against the God who made us. He knew that our fleeting, troubled lives could only be understood in the light of God's holy displeasure with our sin.
This psalm is a hard word, but it is a necessary one. It is medicine, not candy. It diagnoses the human condition with brutal honesty. We are frail, we are fleeting, and we are sinners. And because we are sinners, we live our lives under the shadow of a holy wrath. To deny this is to live in a fantasy world. It is to build your house on the sand, right before the hurricane of God's judgment makes landfall. Moses is not trying to depress us; he is trying to sober us up. He wants us to feel the weight of our days so that we might flee to the only one who can give them meaning and deliver us from the wrath to come. Until we understand the bad news that Moses lays out here, the good news of the gospel will seem like a triviality.
So we must have the courage to look unflinchingly at what the man of God says here. We must understand that our mortality, our troubles, and our anxieties are not random cosmic accidents. They are the direct result of living as rebels in a world governed by a holy King.
The Text
For we have been consumed by Your anger And by Your wrath we have been dismayed.
You have set our iniquities before You, Our secret sins in the light of Your presence.
For all our days have declined in Your fury; We have finished our years like a sigh.
As for the days of our life, they contain seventy years, Or if due to might, eighty years, Yet their pride is but labor and wickedness; For soon it is gone and we fly away.
Who knows the power of Your anger And Your fury, according to the fear that is due You?
(Psalm 90:7-11 LSB)
Consumed and Dismayed (v. 7)
Moses begins this section by connecting the dots between God's disposition and our condition.
"For we have been consumed by Your anger And by Your wrath we have been dismayed." (Psalm 90:7)
The word "for" links what follows to what came before. In the previous verses, Moses described our lives as being swept away like a flood, like grass that withers in a day. Now he tells us why. This is not the neutral process of nature. This is a judicial sentence. Our lives are consumed, eaten up, because of the anger of God. Our constant state of anxiety and turmoil, being "dismayed," is a direct result of His wrath.
Let us be very clear. God's anger is not like our anger. It is not a petty, irritable fit. It is not an uncontrolled outburst. Divine wrath is the settled, holy, righteous opposition of God's entire being to all that is evil. It is the necessary reaction of a perfectly good and just God to cosmic treason. A god who was not angry at sin would not be a good god; he would be a moral monster, indifferent to the difference between righteousness and rebellion, justice and atrocity. A judge who smiles benignly at both the rapist and his victim is not a loving judge; he is a corrupt one. God's wrath is the fire of His holiness, and we, being sinful, are combustible.
The Public Display of Secret Sins (v. 8)
Moses then explains the grounds of this anger. It is not arbitrary. It is based on a meticulous and complete record of our lives.
"You have set our iniquities before You, Our secret sins in the light of Your presence." (Psalm 90:8)
We are masters of the cover-up. We live our lives curating a public image, hiding the nasty bits. We have public sins, which are bad enough, but then we have our secret sins. These are the sins of the heart, the sins of the imagination, the sins committed in the dark when we think no one is looking. These are the lusts, the envies, the bitter thoughts, the proud ambitions that we carefully conceal from our neighbors, our spouses, even ourselves. We think they are safely locked away in the vault of our minds.
Moses tells us this is a delusion. God takes our iniquities, all of them, and sets them out "before You." He arranges them for inspection. But it is worse than that. He takes our "secret sins," the ones we are most ashamed of, and places them "in the light of Your presence." The Hebrew word for presence is "countenance" or "face." God takes our filthy, hidden thoughts and places them in the blazing, noon-day glory of His holy face. Nothing is hidden. The darkness is as light to Him. Every corner of our hearts is floodlit. The God we have to do with is omniscient. He sees everything, and He forgets nothing. This is a terrifying thought for a sinner, and we are all sinners.
A Life Lived Under Fury (v. 9-10)
The consequence of this total exposure is a life defined by brevity and sorrow.
"For all our days have declined in Your fury; We have finished our years like a sigh. As for the days of our life, they contain seventy years, Or if due to might, eighty years, Yet their pride is but labor and wickedness; For soon it is gone and we fly away." (Psalm 90:9-10)
Our days "decline" or turn away under God's fury. This is not just a bad mood on God's part. This is the atmosphere we breathe as fallen creatures. Our whole existence is lived out under this pressure. And what is the sum of it all? We finish our years "like a sigh." Or as some translations have it, "like a murmur," or "a tale that is told." It is a vapor. A brief, melancholy sound, and then it is over. Think of your life. All the struggles, the ambitions, the worries, the fleeting joys. In the end, it amounts to a sigh.
Moses gives us the math. We get seventy years, maybe eighty if we are strong. This was a striking statement in his day, when men before the flood lived for centuries. The curse of sin has radically shortened our lives. But even this extended lifespan is not something to boast in. Its "pride," its best part, is "but labor and wickedness." The Hebrew is "toil and sorrow." Even on our best days, life is hard work, shot through with grief and sin. And it is over in a flash. "Soon it is gone and we fly away." We are like a bird startled from a branch, here one moment and gone the next, leaving nothing behind but empty air.
The Question No One Asks (v. 11)
Moses concludes this meditation with a devastating rhetorical question.
"Who knows the power of Your anger And Your fury, according to the fear that is due You?" (Psalm 90:11)
This is the heart of the matter. Who really gets it? Who truly understands the sheer, terrifying power of God's anger? The answer is, nobody. We do not take it seriously. We domesticate God. We trivialize our sin. We whistle past the graveyard. Moses says that the reality of God's fury should correspond to the "fear that is due You." In other words, if we truly understood the holiness of God and the depth of our sin, we would be rightly terrified. Our problem is not that we fear God too much, but that we do not fear Him nearly enough.
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. This is what Moses is driving at. Until you have a right estimation of the problem, you will never seek the solution. Until you know the power of His anger, you will never appreciate the power of His grace. Our culture does not know the power of His anger, and so it does not fear Him. And because it does not fear Him, it is drowning in foolishness. It calls evil good and good evil, and it cannot understand why its seventy years are full of nothing but labor and sorrow.
The Only Place of Refuge
Now, this is a bleak picture. If the psalm ended here, we would be left in despair. But thank God, it does not. This entire meditation is the necessary groundwork for the petition that follows: "So teach us to number our days, that we may get a heart of wisdom." A heart of wisdom begins with the fear of the Lord. It begins by agreeing with Moses about our condition.
But for us, who live on this side of the cross, this passage has an even sharper focus. Where can we see the full power of God's anger? Where was His fury against sin displayed most clearly? Not in the flood, not in the plagues on Egypt, not even in the fires of Hell. The greatest display of the wrath of God in the history of the universe was at Calvary.
On the cross, God took all our iniquities, all our secret sins, and He did not just set them in the light of His countenance. He set them upon His only begotten Son. Jesus Christ, the beloved Son, became the focal point of all the fury that our sin deserved. He was consumed by the anger of God so that we would not have to be. He was dismayed by the wrath of God, crying out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" so that we might be welcomed. His life was finished with a sigh, so that our lives could end in a song.
Who knows the power of God's anger? Jesus does. He drank that cup to the dregs. And because He did, the fear that is due to God can become, for us, a filial, reverent, loving fear. For those in Christ, God's anger has been fully satisfied. There is now no condemnation. We can look at our secret sins, now nailed to His cross, and know that they have been paid for. We can look at the brevity of our lives, our seventy or eighty years of labor and sorrow, and know that they are being worked together for our good, preparing for us an eternal weight of glory.
So do not be afraid of this text. Let it do its work. Let it strip you of your pride. Let it expose your self-righteousness. Let it make you feel the weight of your days. And then let it drive you, as it drove Moses, to the only place of refuge, the only dwelling place in all generations, which is God Himself, made available to us through the shed blood of His Son, Jesus Christ.