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Expositor's Bible Commentary Psalm 90:1 A Prayer of Moses the man of God. Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations. Psalm 90:1-17 THE sad and stately music of this great psalm befits the dirge of a world. How artificial and poor, beside its restrained emotion and majestic simplicity, do even the most deeply felt strains of other poets on the same themes sound! It preaches man’s mortality in immortal words. In its awestruck yet trustful gaze on God’s eternal being, in its lofty sadness, in its archaic directness, in its grand images so clearly cut and so briefly expressed, in its emphatic recognition of sin as the occasion of death, and in its clinging to the eternal God who can fill fleeting days with ringing gladness, the psalm utters once for all the deepest thoughts of devout men. Like the God whom it hymns it has been "for generation after generation" an asylum. The question of its authorship has a literary interest, but little more. The arguments against the Mosaic authorship, apart from those derived from the as yet unsettled questions in regard to the Pentateuch, are weak. The favourite one, adduced by Cheyne after Hupfeld and others, is that the duration of human life was greater, according to the history, in Moses’ time than seventy years; but the prolonged lives of certain conspicuous persons in that period do not warrant a conclusion as to the average length of life; and the generation that fell in the wilderness can clearly not have lived beyond the psalmist’s limit. The characteristic Mosaic tone in regarding death as the wages of sin, the massive simplicity and the entire absence of dependence on other parts of the Psalter which separate this psalm from almost all the others of the fourth part, are strongly favourable to the correctness of the superscription. Further, the section Psalm 90:7-12 is distinctly historical, and is best understood as referring not to mankind in general, but to Israel; and no period is so likely to have suggested such a strain of thought as that when the penalty of sin was laid upon the people, and they were condemned to find graves in the wilderness. But however the question of authorship may be settled, the psalm is "not of an age, but for all time." It falls into three parts, of which the two former contain six verses each, while the last has but five. In the first section ( Psalm 90:1-6 ), the transitoriness of men is set over against the eternity of God; in the second, ( Psalm 90:7-12 ) that transitoriness is traced to its reason, namely sin; and in the third ( Psalm 90:13-17 ), prayer that God would visit His servants is built upon both His eternity and their fleeting days. The short Psalm 90:1 blends both the thoughts which are expanded in the following verses, while in it the singer breathes awed contemplation of the eternal God as the dwelling place or asylum of generations that follow each other, swift and unremembered, as the waves that break on some lonely shore. God is invoked as "Lord," the sovereign ruler, the name which connotes His elevation and authority. But, though lofty, He is not inaccessible. As some ancestral home shelters generation after generation of a family, and in its solid strength stands unmoved, while one after another of its somewhile tenants is borne forth to his grave, and the descendants sit in the halls where centuries before their ancestors sat. God is the home of all who find any real home amidst the fluctuating nothings of this shadowy world. The contrast of His eternity and our transiency is not bitter, though it may hush us into wisdom, if we begin with the trust that He is the abiding abode of short-lived man. For this use of dwelling place compare Deuteronomy 33:27 . What God has been to successive generations results from what He is in Himself before all generations. So Psalm 90:2 soars to the contemplation of His absolute eternity, stretching boundless on either side of "this bank and shoal of time"-"From everlasting to everlasting Thou art God"; and in that name is proclaimed His self-derived strength, which, being eternal, is neither derived from nor diminished by time, that first gives to and then withdraws from, all creatures their feeble power. The remarkable expressions for the coming forth of the material world from the abyss of Deity regard creation as a birth. The Hebrew text reads in Psalm 90:2 b as above, "Thou gavest birth to"; but a very small change in a single vowel gives the possibly preferable reading which preserves the parallelism of a passive verb in both clauses, "Or the earth and the world were brought forth." The poet turns now to the other member of his antithesis. Over against God’s eternal Being is set the succession of man’s generations, which has been already referred to in Psalm 90:1 . This thought of successiveness is lost unless Psalm 90:3 b is understood as the creative fiat which replaces by a new generation those who have been turned back to dust. Death and life, decay and ever-springing growth, are in continual alternation. The leaves, which are men, drop; the buds swell and open. The ever-knitted web is being ever run down and woven together again. It is a dreary sight, unless one can say with our psalm, "Thou turnest Thou sayest, Return." Then one understands that it is not aimless or futile. If a living Person is behind the transiencies of human life, these are still pathetic and awe kindling, but not bewildering. In Psalm 90:3 a there is clear allusion to Genesis 3:19 . The word rendered "dust" may be an adjective taken as neuter -that which is crushed, i.e. dust; or, as others suppose, a substantive -crushing; but is probably best understood in the former sense. The psalm significantly uses the word for man which connotes frailty, and in b the expression "sons of man" which suggests birth. The psalmist rises still higher in Psalm 90:4 . It is much to say that God’s Being is endless, but it is more to say that He is raised above Time, and that none of the terms in which men describe duration have any meaning for Him. A thousand years, which to a man seem so long, are to Him dwindled to nothing, in comparison with the eternity of His being. As Peter has said, the converse must also be true, and "one day be with the Lord as a thousand years." He can crowd a fulness of action into narrow limits. Moments can do the work of centuries. The longest and shortest measures of time are absolutely equivalent, for both are entirely inapplicable, to His timeless Being. But what has this great thought to do here, and how is the "For" justified? It may be that the psalmist is supporting the representation of Psalm 90:2 , God’s eternity, rather than that of Psalm 90:3 , man’s transiency; but, seeing that this verse is followed by one which strikes the same note as Psalm 90:3 , it is more probable that here, too, the dominant thought is the brevity of human life. It never seems so short, as when measured against God’s timeless existence. So, the underlying thought of Psalm 90:3 , namely, the brevity of man’s time, which is there illustrated by the picture of the endless flux of generations, is here confirmed by the thought that all measures of time dwindle to equal insignificance with Him. The psalmist next takes his stand on the border moment between today and yesterday. How short looks the day that is gliding away into the past! "A watch in the night" is still shorter to our consciousness, for it passes over us unnoted. The passing of mortal life has hitherto been contemplated in immediate connection with God’s permanence, and the psalmist’s tone has been a wonderful blending of melancholy and trust. But in Psalm 90:5 the sadder side of his contemplations becomes predominant. Frail man, frail because sinful, is his theme. The figures which set forth man’s mortality are grand in their unelaborated brevity. They are like some of Michaelangelo’s solemn statues. "Thou floodest them away"-bold metaphor, suggesting the rush of a mighty stream, bearing on its tawny bosom crops, household goods, and corpses, and hurrying with its spoils to the sea. "They become a sleep." Some would take this to mean falling into the sleep of death; others would regard life as compared to a sleep-"for before we are rightly conscious of being alive, we cease to live" (Luther, quoted by Cheyne); while others find the point of comparison in the disappearance, without leaving a trace behind, of the noisy generations, sunk at once into silence, and "occupying no more space on the scroll of Time than a night’s sleep" (so Kay). It is tempting to attach "in the morning" to "a sleep," but the recurrence of the expression in Psalm 90:7 points to the retention of the present division of clauses, according to which the springing grass greets the eye at dawn, as if created by a night’s rain. The word rendered "springs afresh" is taken in two opposite meanings, being by some rendered passes away, and by others as above. Both meanings come from the same radical notion of change, but the latter is evidently the more natural and picturesque here, as preserving, untroubled by any intrusion of an opposite thought, the cheerful picture of the pastures rejoicing, in the morning sunshine, and so making more impressive the sudden, sad change wrought by evening, when all the fresh green blades and bright flowers lie turned already into brown hay by the mower’s scythe and the fierce sunbeams. "So passeth, in the passing of an hour, Of mortal life, the leaf, the bud, the flower." The central portion of the psalm ( Psalm 90:7-12 ) narrows the circle of the poet’s vision to Israel, and brings out the connection between death and sin. The transition from truths of universal application is marked by the use of we and us, while the past tenses indicate that the psalm is recounting history. That transitoriness assumes a still more tragic aspect, when regarded as the result of the collision of God’s "wrath" with frail man. How can such stubble but be wasted into ashes by such fire? And yet this is the same psalmist who has just discerned that the unchanging Lord is the dwelling place of all generations. The change from the previous thought of the eternal God as the dwelling place of frail men is very marked in this section, in which the destructive anger of God is in view. But the singer felt no contradiction between the two thoughts, and there is none. We do not understand the full blessedness of believing that God is our asylum, till we understand that He is our asylum from all that is destructive in Himself; nor do we know the significance of the universal experience of decay and death, till we learn that it is not the result of our finite being, but of sin. That one note sounds on in solemn persistence through these verses, therein echoing the characteristic Mosaic lesson, and corresponding with the history of the people in the desert. In Psalm 90:7 the cause of their wasting away is declared to be God’s wrath, which has scattered them as in panic. { Psalm 48:5 } The occasion of that lightning flash of anger is confessed in Psalm 90:8 to be the sins which, however hidden, stand revealed before God. The expression, for "the light of Thy face" is slightly different from the usual one, a word being employed which means a luminary, and is used in Genesis 1:1-31 for the heavenly bodies The ordinary phrase is always used as expressing favour and blessing; but there is an illumination, as from an all-revealing light, which flashes into all dark corners of human experience, and "there is nothing hid from the heat thereof." Sin smitten by that light must die. Therefore, in Psalm 90:9 , the consequence of its falling on Israel’s transgressions is set forth. Their days vanish as mists before the sun, or as darkness glides out of the sky in the morning. Their noisy years are but as a murmur, scarce breaking the deep silence, and forgotten as soon as faintly heard. The psalmist sums up his sad contemplations in Psalm 90:10 , in which life is regarded as not only rigidly circumscribed within a poor seventy or, at most, eighty years, but as being, by reason of its transitoriness, unsatisfying and burdensome. The "pride" which is but trouble and vanity is that which John calls "the pride of life," the objects which, apart from God, men desire to win, and glory in possessing. The self-gratulation would be less ridiculous or tragic, if the things which evoke it lasted longer, or we lasted longer to possess them. But seeing that. they swiftly pass and we fly too, surely it is but "trouble" to fight for what is "vanity" when won, and what melts away so surely and soon. Plainly, then, things being so, man’s wisdom is to seek to know two things-the power of God’s anger, and the measure of his own days. But alas for human levity and bondage to sense, how few look beyond the external, or lay to heart the solemn truth that God’s wrath is inevitably operative against sin, and bow few have any such just conception of it as to lead to reverential awe, proportioned to the Divine character which should evoke it! Ignorance and inoperative knowledge divide mankind between them, and but a small remnant have let the truth plough deep into their inmost being and plant there holy fear of God. Therefore, the psalmist prays for himself and his people, as knowing the temptations to inconsiderate disregard and to inadequate feeling of God’s opposition to sin, that His power would take untaught hearts in hand and teach them this-to count their days. Then we shall bring home, as from a ripened harvest field, the. best fruit which life can yield, "a heart of wisdom," which, having learned the power of God’s anger, and the humber of our days, turns itself to the eternal dwelling place, and no more is sad, when it sees life ebbing away, or the generations moving in unbroken succession into the darkness. The third part ( Psalm 90:13-17 ) gathers all the previous meditations into a prayer, which is peculiarly appropriate to Israel in the wilderness, but has deep meaning for all God’s servants. We note the invocation of God by the covenant name "Jehovah," as contrasted with the "Lord," of Psalm 90:1 . The psalmist, draws nearer to God, and feels the closer bond of which that name is the pledge. His prayer is the more urgent, by reason of the brevity of life. So short is his time that he cannot afford to let God delay in coming to him and to his fellows. "How long?" comes pathetically from lips which have been declaring that their time of speech is so short. This is not impatience, but wistful yearning, which, even while it yearns, leaves God to settle His own time, and, while it submits, still longs. Night has wrapped Israel, but the psalmist’s faith "awakes the morning," and he prays that its beams may soon dawn and Israel be satisfied with the longed for lovingkindness; {compare Psalm 30:5 } for life at its longest is but brief, and he would fain have what remains of it be lit with sunshine from God’s face. The only thing that will secure life-long gladness is a heart satisfied with the experience of God’s love. That will make morning in mirk midnight; that will take all the sorrow out of the transiency of life. The days which are filled with God are long enough to satisfy us; and they who have Him for their own will be "full of days," whatever the number of these may be. The psalmist believes that God’s justice has in store for His servants joys and blessings proportioned to the duration of their trials. He is not thinking of any future beyond the grave; but his prayer is a prophecy, which is often fulfilled even in this life and always hereafter. Sorrows rightly borne here are factors determining the glory that shall follow. There is a proportion between the years of affliction and the millenniums of glory. But the final prayer, based upon all these thoughts of God’s eternity and man’s transitoriness, is not for blessedness, but for vision and Divine favour on work done for Him. The deepest longing of the devout heart should be for the manifestation to itself and others of God’s work. The psalmist is not only asking that God would put forth His acts in interposition for himself and his fellow servants, but also that the full glory of these far-reaching deeds may be disclosed to their understandings as well as experienced in their lives. And since he knows that "through the ages an increasing purpose runs," he prays that coming generations may see even more glorious displays of Divine power than his contemporaries have done. How the sadness of the thought of fleeting generations succeeded by new ones vanishes when we think of them all as, in turn, spectators and possessors of God’s "work"! But in that great work we are not to be mere spectators. Fleeting as our days are, they are ennobled by our being permitted to be God’s tools; and if "the work of our hands" is the reflex or carrying on of His working we can confidently ask that, though we the workers have to pass, it may be "established." "In our embers may be" something that doth live," and that life will not all die which has done the will of God, but it and its doer will "endure forever." Only there must be the descent upon us of "the graciousness" of God before there can flow from us "deeds which breed not shame," but outlast the perishable earth and follow their doers into the eternal dwelling place. The psalmist’s closing prayer reaches further than he knew. Lives on which the favour of God has come down like a dove, and in which His will has been done, are not flooded away, nor do they die into silence like a whisper, but carry in themselves the seeds of immortality, and are akin to the eternity of God. The Expositor's Bible Text Courtesy of BibleSupport.com . Used by Permission.

Lord, Thou hast been our dwelling-place in all generations. Psalm 90 The prayer of Moses T. W. Chambers, D.D. The propriety of the title is confirmed by the psalm's unique simplicity and grandeur; its appropriateness to his times and circumstances at the close of the error in the wilderness; its resemblance to the law in urging the connection between sin and death; its similarity of diction to the poetical portions of the Pentateuch ( Exodus 15 ; Deuteronomy 32:1 ; Deuteronomy 33 ), without the slightest trace of imitation or quotation; its marked unlikeness to the psalms of David, and still more to those of later date; and finally the proved impossibility of plausibly assigning it to any other age or author. I. THE GREAT CONTRAST (vers. 1-6). The poet says what God has been, but he implies what He still was, and would continue to be. His Divine being reaches from an unlimited past to an unlimited future. Far otherwise is it with man's days. He has no independent existence. The Being who made him turns him back to the dust from which he came ( Genesis 3:19 ), and when He say, Return, there is none to refuse obedience. He whose existence is timeless endures, but men soon perish. He swoops them away as with a driving storm which carries everything before it. Their life consequently is as unsubstantial as a dream. II. DEATH IS THE WAGES OF SIN (vers. 7-12). The psalmist is a stranger to the fond notion that man is the victim of circumstances; that he deserves compassion rather than penalty. His brief life and swift death may seem mysterious, but they are not an accident. Like the flower he does not simply fade away, but is cut down. Various instrumental agencies may be employed to terminate man's existence, but the real cause is God's wrath against sin. How must iniquity take on a dreadful hue when contrasted with the unsullied purity of heaven, the resplendent glory of the Holy One of Israel? This dark shadow extends over the whole of life, and not only its close. "All our days" bear the same stamp, and even when they stretch out into years, still they fly away "as a thought," a comparison used by Homer and Theognis, yet without the underlying thought of Moses that the flight is retributive (ver.10). The best comment on this sad confession is the statement of Goethe made near the close of his long life. "Men have always regarded me as one especially favoured by fortune Yet after all it has been nothing but pains and toil." But besides this there is no permanence. An end does come, must come, even to the longest term of years. As the man of God looks over the record of the forty years' error, he cries out, "who knoweth," who regards and feels "the force of Thine anger"? Who has such a conception of it as befits a becoming reverence for God? The implication is that there is none. Hence the devout entreaty, "So teach us," etc. Such is the power of sin, the seductive influence of a worldly mind, that we shall not know the link between God's wrath and our own mortality unless we get instruction from above. III. PRAYER FOR THE RETURN OF GOD'S FAVOUR (vers. 13-17). Here Moses returns to the starting point of the psalm. Whither should the contemplation of mortality as related to sin, and of Divine wrath against .sin, cause us to turn but to God, our eternal home? The loss of His favour is, as usual, represented as His absence, and hence the entreaty for His return. The fervour of this request is well set forth by the abbreviated question, "How long?" i . e . How long wilt Thou retain Thine anger? Calvin s letters show that this "Domine quousque" was his favourite ejaculation in his times of suffering and anxiety. The literal version of the other member of the couplet is, "Let it repent thee concerning," i . e . so change Thy dealing with them as if Thou didst repent of afflicting them — a bold form of speech used by Moses elsewhere ( Exodus 32:12 ; Deuteronomy 32:36 ). The next verse asks to be sated, abundantly supplied, with the lovingkindness of Jehovah in the morning, i.e. early, speedily; and the object of this prayer is stated to be that the offerers may have reason to sing for joy and be glad during the whole remainder of their lives. But if this be true of the Old Testament, that an early experience of grace gladdens all one's subsequent course, much more must it be of the New Testament with its fuller light, better covenant and larger promises. The next couplet is an affecting reminder of past trials, which are here made to be the measure of future blessings. The desire is that former sorrows may be compensated by proportionate enjoyments in time to come. The weary sojourn in the desert, where each halting-place was a graveyard and their march was marked by the tombs they left behind them, they desire to forget in the enjoyment of a permanent home in a land flowing with milk and honey. The same request is renewed in asking for the manifestation of God's work, that is, His gracious care for His chosen, the course of His providential dealings on their behalf. A beautiful and suggestive variation of this wish is given in the next clause where the term "work" is exchanged for "majesty," intimating ( Romans 9:23 ) that the glory of God shines conspicuously in His grace. This display of the sum of the Divine perfections is asked on behalf of the children of generations yet unborn, God being the God not only of His people, but of their seed and their seed's seed ( Isaiah 59:2 ). The closing verse of the psalm comprehends both the Divine and the human side of the work given to God's people. First, the psalmist prays for the beauty of Jehovah, that is, all that which renders Him an object of affection, His wondrous graciousness, to be revealed to them in the way of experience. But this, so far from superseding rather implies their own activity. Hence the next petition mentions "the work of our hands," a favourite Mosaic phrase for all that we do or undertake, which God is requested to establish, i . e . to confirm and bring to a favourable issue. The repetition of the words is not merely a rhetorical beauty, but an expression of the importance, the necessity of such Divine aid. ( T. W. Chambers, D.D. ) The psalm of the wanderings F. B. Meyer, B.A. Throughout this psalm two threads are twisted, the one sombre with gloom, the other bright with golden light. We will not dwell on the former. There is plenty of that already in the lives of most of us. Suffice it to say that to Moses the plaintive chords of sorrow appears to have been composed of three notes — the rapid flight of the ages, the anger of God incurred by sin, and the afflictions which beset human life. But opposite to these the aged lawgiver gives three thoughts, on which he rested his soul. I. GOD. What great thoughts Moses had of God. 1. As Creator. To God he ascribes the birth of the mountains, which in their grandest aspects and in magnificent confusion were heaped in that Sinaitic peninsula. To God also he ascribes the moulding touch which shaped the universe of matter, and gave form to the earth. What though seas and rivers, glacier action and earthquake, were his graving tools, yet the maker and former of all things was God. 2. As eternal. He is not only God, El, the strong. He is Lord, Jehovah, the I AM. And he labours hard to give us some true conception of His everlastingness. He speaks of the eighty years of human life as being, in comparison with it, short and soon; much in the same way as we should describe the duration of an insect's life, which passes through all the stages of existence from youth to age, between dawn and sunset in comparison with the life of man. He recites the generations of mankind, and describes their passing in to God like guests into a hostelry, their life to His being brief and transitory as a night-sojourn when compared with the permanence of the building in which it is spent. He goes back through the long process of creation, and says that God comprehends it in the extent of his being as a very little thing. 3. But the thought that helps us most is the conception of God as the dwelling-place, the asylum, the home of the soul. Moses needed it, if ever a man did. II. GLADNESS-MAKING MERCY. As Moses reviewed the desert pilgrimage it seemed one long line of transgression, each halting-place marked by its special graves, the monuments of some sad outbreak. He pined for gladness; he knew that there was gladness in the heart of the blessed God, enough to make him glad, and not him alone but all who were weary and heavy laden throughout the precincts of the camp; and having confessed their sins he now turned to God his exceeding joy and said, "Make us glad." And his demand for gladness was not a small one. He asked that it might be according to the days in which they had been affiliated and the years in which they had seen evil. It was a great request, but not unreasonable, for days and years of sorrow often give us capacity for receiving blessing. Let us, too, ask Him to put gladness into our hearts. Let us believe that it will honour and please Him if we dare to lay claim to blessedness, such as He alone can give, and when He gives does so with full measure, pressed down, and running over. The plea must be made to His mercy. We have no claim on any other attribute of God. And beyond that we must ask Him to satisfy us. We have sought satisfaction in all beside: in health and flow of spirits, in success and friendship, in books and affairs; but we have found it nowhere, and we shall never find it unless in Himself. III. WORK, OR CO-OPERATION BETWEEN GOD AND MAN. Moses' complaint about the shortness of life indicates that he was no idler. The days were not long enough for all he had to do, and therefore life seemed to pass so quickly through his hands. Amid all that made him sad, he found solace in the thought that what he did would last. The leaves fall, but each, ere it finds a grave in the damp autumn soil, has done something to the tree that bore it, which will be a permanent gain for summers yet unborn. The preacher dies, but his words have furnished impulses to souls which have become part of their texture and will be part for ever. The workman finds a nameless grave beneath the shadow of the great unfinished minister, but the fabric rises still and will rise; his work will be part of it for ever, a joy and beauty for coming generations. But after all our work in itself is not sufficient to resist the disintegrating forces of time, which, more than all else, tries and tests its quality. And, therefore, we need to ask that God's work may become manifest through ours. In my work let Thine appear; through my weak endeavours may that hand achieve which made the worlds and built cosmos out of chaos. "Let Thy work appear." And in asking that God's work may appear, we make. a request which involves His glory. The one cannot appear without the other, so that in all coming time children and children's children may behold it, and as that glory shines upon their faces it must transform and transfigure them so that the beauty of the Lord our God will be upon them. ( F. B. Meyer, B.A. ) God our home R. Rainy, D.D. There was a tradition among the Jews, although these traditions are not altogether trustworthy, that Moses, the man of God, wrote this psalm or prayer. And it has always been felt that the psalm seemed to have some special connection with, or reference to, the experience and the impressions of the children of Israel in the days that they were doomed to wander up and down in the wilderness without being allowed to enter into the promised land. And there is much in the psalm that corroborates that view. It is the psalm of a generation of men who felt themselves to be wasting away under God's wrath, consumed by His anger. They are spending their years as a tale that is told. The vanity and emptiness of life are pressed home upon them with great severity. At the same time, it is not a psalm of mere wailing and lamentation. There is the exercise of faith in it, not only in the first verse, but in the appeal to God to come and dwell with them as their case requires, and make them experience His mercy. Now, if we are to take this idea, and see.how far it will carry us through this psalm, we must remember this, that when the children of Israel were leaving Egypt they were very much exercised about the hope of a habitation. They were leaving one habitation — the land of Egypt. It was a house of bondage; still, a house is a house, even if it be a house of bondage, and it is wonderful how men often shrink from breaking up some accustomed state of things, not discerning well what is to replace it. But the objections of the Egyptian rulers and the hesitations of the people were mightily overcome, and by and by they found themselves on that famous march through the wilderness towards the land which God had sworn to give them for an inheritance. It was to be their habitation, and it was not only to be their habitation, but also God's habitation. The value of it was that He was to dwell in it with them, watching over them; and accordingly at the Red Sea they sang: "Thou shalt bring them in, and plant them in the mountain of Thine inheritance, in the place, O Lord, which Thou hast made for Thee to dwell in." Many thoughts about this wonderful habitation, many expectations about what it should prove to be, must have been in their minds. By and by there fell out that rebellion upon the report of the spies, which carried away the people as will a flood. One or two stood out against it, but the general cry of the people was to go back to Egypt. They despaired of that promised land, of that goodly inheritance. I think it would be a mistake for us to take it for granted that all those who had joined in this defection, all those who were involved in this unbelieving revolt from God, wore even then mere carnal and unbelieving men. It may have been the case that some of them were men and women who had some good thing in them towards the Lord God of Israel. It is not such a rare thing, unfortunately, it is not such a surprising thing, to find persons Who have the root of the matter in them and are believers, carried away by a stream of defection and by a sentiment of unbelief, as if they could not stand against it. And certainly we may suppose, when we look to the ends that God has in chastening, which is not for our destruction but for our salvation, that among those who were visited by this great disappointment some were brought to faith by the very chastening which was inflicted upon them. That agrees with the ends which God has in chastening. We are told that the people mourned greatly. They strove, as it were, to reverse the sentence which could not be reversed; but I should be disposed to believe that there might be among them persons who either were or came to be men of desire and men of faith towards the Lord God of their fathers. But if we are to open our minds to an idea of that kind, then what a tremendous disappointment fell upon those who belonged to this class, and how difficult it must have been for them to know what to say or do. As to the mere unbelievers, they were disappointed, of course; but they would perhaps turn to the ordinary avocations of the camp in the wilderness, prepared to make the best of it until the end of their pilgrimage had come. But those who had any trust in God and any longing for the experience of God's favour, how must it have been with them? All hope was over now of that habitation to which they had set out to go. No more dwelling with God in the land of which their fathers told them. Their children should go in; the very bones of Joseph should go in; but they were to be shut out. Indeed, one would say that they would turn to the duties that fell upon them in connection with daily life, unable to speak to any man the thoughts that were in them. It was so hard the feeling that all was over; and yet the deep longing in the heart protesting against its being all over. Yes, and yet, when we come to think of it, we may see how such souls were visited, and how they found their way to God through that experience. We may see how God brought good out of evil and light out of darkness. For still they were under God's care; still the manna was supplied to them and still the waters ran to satisfy their thirst. Still in the midst of their tents one tent arose which was God's tent, who was dwelling in the midst of them. He was providing for them, caring for them, and they could go to Him in His tabernacle with their vows and their free-will offerings; and no doubt in the month Abib they would draw together and remember that they were God's firstborn whom He had brought out of the land of Egypt with a mighty hand and with a stretched-out arm. To those who had no care about God, all that would be nothing, but it might be a great deal to these who were ready to say with Jonah, "I am cast out of Thy sight, yet I will look again towards Thy holy temple." For what did it come to, after all? That God was their dwelling-place even now. In His shadow they dwelt, His food they ate, His protection was extended to them, and if He chastened them, might they not remember that as a man chastenteth his own son, so the Lord God chasteneth them? And if they were enabled to get so far, if they were enabled to look upward out of that desolate condition of theirs and to claim a relation to God in which He was their dwelling-place, then they would not only be able to look upward, but to look forward too. I dare say it was one of the thoughts in their hearts, when they set their faces to go out of Egypt to that promised land, that when they came to die, as die they must, their tombs would be in that land on which God looked from the one year's end to the other. That was over now; there was nothing for them now but to leave their bones lying anywhere, wherever they might drop in the wilderness. Yet even so, they might believe that God's promise would hold and that God's goodness would not fail, and that when the great days of the fulfilling should come, they also, wherever their nameless grave might be, should not be altogether forgotten or left out of the blessedness of His people. And if God was their dwelling-place, how natural that their prayer should take this course of appealing to God to make them feel their interest in Him, to make them feel God's interest in them. The pledges that they had once looked to see fulfilled had been swept away, and they stood face to face with God, and if they were to live a life of faith in God they required help. "O satisfy us early with Thy mercy, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days. Make us glad according to the days wherein Thou hast afflicted us, and the years wherein we have seen evil. Let Thy work appear unto Thy servants, and Thy glory unto their children." How that sentence on their lives expressed the vanity of their lives, they could make nothing of them; they would lead to no result. "And let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us; and establish Thou the work of our hands upon us; yea, the work of our hands establish Thou it." We also are passing through our pilgrimage to the land which God has set before us, and in the case of many of us our experiences are very different from those of which we have been thinking in connection with this psalm. But there are others of us whose experience prepares them to join in some of the reflections and especially in some of the prayers of this psalm. Perhaps there are some who cannot see the use of their lives. Their expectations in life have been crossed; sorrows have come where they hoped to have prosperous and progressive times. They have difficulty in understanding any Divine purpose in their lives, or any human purpose that a person could follow out with cheerfulness, with a sense of accomplishment and success. And they are apt to feel that God is not thinking about them. Such persons deserve the sympathy of all those who have not been so tried as they have been. Perhaps there have been circumstances in their lives, temptations and failures that lead them to feel that this failure of their lives, this want of an outlook and an upward prospect before them, has been duo to their own sin, and their own foolishness, which has perplexed their heart, and which has brought upon them the experiences which often do follow sin and folly — and it may be so. But it is true that you need a dwelling-place, and so also it is true that through these many experiences of yours you may be enabled to find your way to the faith that God is your dwelling-place; that He has not been forsaking you, but has been sweeping away treasures that were too lightly contemplated, and too lightly held, to make room for His coming in Himself into your lives, with a new manifestation of His grace, with a new sense of your own sin and unworthiness, and at the same time a new experience of His goodness. We have all homes, or have had homes, and what idea do we associate with the home, the dwelling-place to which we naturally belong? First of all the idea is of protection. A little child feels sure of protection in its own home, and it is right; there are people there who would die rather than let it come to harm. Then there is provision — wants met; forethought exercised that we may be provided for. Then there is a sense of peace, a sense of familiar surroundings, of being at home, at peace with all that is around you. There is also a sense of enjoyment, a sense of love and gladness that make a cheerful and happy place. We need this, and in a measure it comes to us in our own homes, but they may pass away. They are to teach us that we need the true home, and the Lord must be our dwelling-place, in whom is protection — "He that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep"; in whom there is provision, "Bread shall be given him; his waters shall be sure." And then there is gladness. Some of us, perhaps, cannot realize true, simple, childlike gladness in connection with religious faith or experience, but that is not because there is any doubt about the gladness, but because we are not far enough on. And, therefore, if I speak to any who find a difficulty in the experiences of their life is recognizing the Divine care and goodness, I would say to you, Is your case worse than the case of those men and women of whom I have been speaking? And if this was the very way in which God taught them what He was and what He could be to them, and enable them to say, "Lord, Thou art our dwelling-place," then should we not learn the same lesson; learn it when sorrows and perplexities and troubles come to us, to go to God for deliverance, and for a knowledge of what it is to yield ourselves to God, and our members as instruments of righteousness unto God. It is a sad business to think of those who are living in happy homes, in homes which have much happiness, and many elements of good about them, and yet have no outlook further; as if when by and by the materials of that earthly home fall away, they will pass out into eternity houseless and homeless. That will not do; we are very clearly told that if we are to find that blessedness we must seek it now. ( R. Rainy, D.D. ) Man and his Maker Homilist. I. IN THE SAFE GUARDIANSHIP OF GOD (ver. 1). 1. In other places God is represented as the dwelling-place of human souls ( Isaiah 4:6 ; Deuteronomy 33:27 ; Psalm 91:9 ). Human souls want a home, a place where they can rest in confidence, sheltered from the storm, protected from the burning rays, and shielded from every danger and every foe. 2. What a dwelling-place is God!(1) How safe! The combined armies of hell cannot enter it; the strongest storm in the universe cannot affect it.(2) How happy! In it there is everything to charm the imagination, gratify the love, delight the conscience, transport the whole soul in raptures of joy.(3) How accessible. Its doors are open to all. Untold millions have entered it, and yet there is room.(4) How enduring! The strongest castles rumble before the breath of time, and the material universe may be dissolved, but this "dwelling-place" will stand for ever. II. IN PHYSICAL CONTRAST TO GOD (vers. 2-6). Here is the Eternal in antithesis with man the evanescent, the absolute in contrast with man the dependent. 1. Man is mortal. Dust we are and to dust we must return. But this event occurs not by accident, or disease or fate. No. "Thou turnest man to destruction." There are no accidental deaths in the world. 2. Emblems of the brevity of human life.(1) A "watch." This, according to Hebrew chronology, was only one-third of the nocturnal season. Life is spoken of, not as a year or a month, but as a third part of a night, so brief it is.(2) "Sleep," "Sleep ceases," says Luther , "ere we can perceive it or mark it; before we are aware we have slept, sleep is gone." When the oldest man, as he is about passing away, looks back on his past life, the whole seems only as a vision of the night.(3) "Grass." What are men? Merchants, warriors, emperors, armies? Grass, nothing more. The wind passeth over them and they are gone. Oh, what is man to God? ( Homilist. ) The gate to God's acre M. R. Vincent, D.D. It is the oldest of stories, sung in this oldest of psalms; of human weakness, turning in dismay from the change and decay about it, to find refuge in the eternity of God. We are not suffered to waste time in the attempt to comprehend the abstract truth of God's eternity. We are lifted for the moment, in order that we may descend; suffered to grasp a few of the treasures of the Divine glory, that we may carry them back to glorify our earthly life. 1. This splendid thought of the Divine eternity is made to touch the shifting and inconstant character of our earthly state, by the single word "dwelling-place." I am a wanderer on earth, there is an eternal home for me; I am sick of confusion and change, there is eternal abiding in Him who is "the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever," and only a change "into the same image from glory to glory." 2. But a correct view of the eternity of God conveys warning as well as comfort. The more it is studied, the stronger is the contrast into which it throws the brevity and uncertainty of human life.(1) The eternal power of God convicts us of helplessness. Notice the sharp contrast. "From everlasting to everlasting, O God," Thy life is self-sustained — in Thine own power: man's life, that gift in which he so exults and on which he presumes to play "such fantastic tricks before high heaven," — that which flowers out in his pride and high endeavour, in his ambitions, plans, and grand enterprises, is a thing so little in his power, that Thou turnest him even unto the finest dust with a word; and, with another word, — "Return, ye children of men" — callest others into being to fill his place.(2) The eternal being of God is used to convict us of delusion. We measure life by false standards. The psalm brings us back to the true rule of measurement (vers. 4, 12). 3. These suggestions are enforced by the figures which follow. Each of them sets forth a truth of its own.(1) There is, first, the fact that man passes swiftly from life. "Thou carriest them away as with a flood." "Thou carriest men away from life, as a mountain torrent, rising in an hour, sweeps away the frail but that man has built."(2) Take the next figure: and to the same thought of the swift passage of life, we have added that of its unsubstantial, unreal character, and of man's unconsciousness of its passage. "They are as a sleep in the morning."(3) Again, look at the third image: the grass which flourisheth in the morning and is cut down at evening. Here still is the old key-note — the quick passing of the life; but with a new thought, namely, how the beauty and strength and aspiration of life are disregarded in the swift flight of time. It is cut down. Why this strong expression, as if it were not left to wither of itself, but were destroyed by violence? 4. The question marks the transition to the next portion of the psalm, embraced in the next four verses. This matter of brief life and swift death is a mystery, is it also an accident? Then, as now, men were prone to say, "Man is to be pitied: man is the victim of circumstances: man is not guilty, but unfortunate: man is not depraved, but fettered: man deserves not punishment, but compassion: sin is no ground for wrath, but for tolerance." True it is that the Bible is an evangel of love, and pardon, and compassion; true that "like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear Him"; but also true that the Bible, from beginning to end, blazes like Sinai with God's hatred of sin, resounds with warnings of man's danger from sin, and sets forth as in letters of fire that man is responsible for sin, and liable to its penalties; true that history, and prophecy, and psalm, and gospel, and epistle are grouped round one definite purpose, to save him from the power, dominion, and consequences of sin. In view of these terrible facts, and of men's persistent blindness to the power of God's anger then, as now, is it strange that Moses prayed, is there not good cause for us to pray, "Teach us to number our days"? Whither shall a sinful, short-lived man flee, but to a holy and eternal God? Thither turns the prayer of these last five verses, and turns with hope and confidence. Man is the subject of God's wrath, but there is mercy with Him to satisfy him who flees from the wrath to come. Man is a pilgrim and a stranger, with no continuing city, but there is gladness and rejoicing in God for all his brief days. Man's beauty consumes as the moth, but "the beauty of the Lord our God" shall be upon him, and that beauty is immortal, untouched by time and change. Man's work is fragmentary, his plans often disconcerted, his grandest enterprises nipped in the bud by death, but God's touch upon human work imparts to it the fixedness of eternity; and if He establish the work of our hands, it shall abide though the world pass away and the lust thereof. He will make good the sufferings of sin by the joys of Holiness. ( M. R. Vincent, D.D. ) God a dwelling-place C. Bradley, M.A. I. THE ETERNITY OF GOD. 1. The existence of God never had a beginning. 2. The existence of God will never have an end; it stretches into futurity further than our minds can follow it or angels trace it; it is an everlasting life, a deep and mysterious stream which never began, and will never cease, to flow. II. IN WHAT RELATION THIS EVERLASTING BEING STANDS TO OURSELVES. We are reminded of the power by which He formed the earth and the worlds; we are reminded of the eternity in which He dwelt before there was a creature to know and adore Him; and for what end? — that a world of destitute sinners may be encouraged to consign themselves to His care and to trust in His love. He is "our dwelling-place," our refuge, our habitation, our home. 1. A refuge from dangers. 2. The seat of our comforts. 3. The place of our abode. III. WHAT FEELINGS THE CONTEMPLATION OF GOD IN THIS LIGHT OUGHT TO EXCITE. 1. Grateful acknowledgment. 2. Satisfaction. 3. Humility. 4. Confidence. 5. To the careless and ungodly — terror.Other enemies may be incensed against us, but while they are preparing to execute their purposes of wrath, "their breath goeth forth"; they die; and there is an end of their terror. But an avenging God never dies. The weapons of His indignation are as lasting as they are strong. ( C. Bradley, M.A. ) The glorious habitation I. EXPLANATION. 1. The dwelling-place of man is the place where he can unbend himself, and feel himself at home, and speak familiarly. With God you can be always at home; you need be under no restraint. The Christian at once gives God the key of his heart, and lets Him turn everything over. The more God lives in the Christian, the better the Christian loves Him; the oftener God comes to see him, the better he loves his God. And God loves His people all the more when they are familiar with Him. 2. Man's home is the place where his affections are centred. Christian man, is God your habitation in that sense? Have you given your whole soul to God? 3. My next remark is concerning the lease of this dwelling-place. Sometimes, you know, people get turned out of their houses, or their houses tumble down about their ears. It is never so with ours; God is our dwelling-place throughout all generations. Christian, your house is indeed a venerable house, and you have long dwelt there. You dwelt there in the person of Christ long before you were brought into this sinful world; and it is to be your

90:1-6 It is supposed that this psalm refers to the sentence passed on Israel in the wilderness, Nu 14. The favour and protection of God are the only sure rest and comfort of the soul in this evil world. Christ Jesus is the refuge and dwelling-place to which we may repair. We are dying creatures, all our comforts in the world are dying comforts, but God is an ever-living God, and believers find him so. When God, by sickness, or other afflictions, turns men to destruction, he thereby calls men to return unto him to repent of their sins, and live a new life. A thousand years are nothing to God's eternity: between a minute and a million of years there is some proportion; between time and eternity there is none. All the events of a thousand years, whether past or to come, are more present to the Eternal Mind, than what was done in the last hour is to us. And in the resurrection, the body and soul shall both return and be united again. Time passes unobserved by us, as with men asleep; and when it is past, it is as nothing. It is a short and quickly-passing life, as the waters of a flood. Man does but flourish as the grass, which, when the winter of old age comes, will wither; but he may be mown down by disease or disaster. 90:7-11 The afflictions of the saints often come from God's love; but the rebukes of sinners, and of believers for their sins, must be seen coming from the displeasure of God. Secret sins are known to God, and shall be reckoned for. See the folly of those who go about to cover their sins, for they cannot do so. Our years, when gone, can no more be recalled than the words that we have spoken. Our whole life is toilsome and troublesome; and perhaps, in the midst of the years we count upon, it is cut off. We are taught by all this to stand in awe. The angels that sinned know the power of God's anger; sinners in hell know it; but which of us can fully describe it? Few seriously consider it as they ought. Those who make a mock at sin, and make light of Christ, surely do not know the power of God's anger. Who among us can dwell with that devouring fire? 90:12-17 Those who would learn true wisdom, must pray for Divine instruction, must beg to be taught by the Holy Spirit; and for comfort and joy in the returns of God's favour. They pray for the mercy of God, for they pretend not to plead any merit of their own. His favour would be a full fountain of future joys. It would be a sufficient balance to former griefs. Let the grace of God in us produce the light of good works. And let Divine consolations put gladness into our hearts, and a lustre upon our countenances. The work of our hands, establish thou it; and, in order to that, establish us in it. Instead of wasting our precious, fleeting days in pursuing fancies, which leave the possessors for ever poor, let us seek the forgiveness of sins, and an inheritance in heaven. Let us pray that the work of the Holy Spirit may appear in converting our hearts, and that the beauty of holiness may be seen in our conduct.