Our text is Psalm 90 today. You will notice that the version we just sang is not just a paraphrase, but an abridgment. There's a lot of richness in this psalm. And I might also say, as we go to this word, you may suspect, as you look at this evening's text that Dr. Godfell will be preaching, that we colluded since he's going to go on to Psalm 91. Someone infinitely wiser than either of us made this plan. We sent our materials to your church secretary about within an hour of each other and I only knew now, not that I didn't talk to my president, but I only knew now what psalm he was going to choose. We did not plan this, but obviously the Lord did. Psalm 90 this morning, Psalm 91 this evening, as we look especially toward the turn of a new year in the coming week. Hear now God's word. This is, as the title says, a prayer of Moses, the man of God. Likely then the oldest psalm in the collection of the 150 psalms, the prayer of Moses, the man of God. And this is God's word to us as well as we overhear Moses praying to the Lord on behalf of his people and on behalf of all God's people. Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world from everlasting to everlasting, you are God. You return man to dust and say, return, O children of man, For a thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night. You sweep them away as with a flood. They are like a dream, like grass that is renewed in the morning. In the morning it flourishes and is renewed. In the evening it fades and withers. For we are brought to an end by your anger, by your wrath. We are dismayed. You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sins, in the light of your presence. For all our days pass away under your wrath. We bring our years to an end like a sigh. The years of our life are 70, or even by reason of strength, 80. Yet their span is but toil and trouble. They are soon gone, and we fly away. Who considers the power of your anger and your wrath according to the fear of you? So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom. Return, O Lord, how long? Have pity on your servants. Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love that we may rejoice and be glad all our days. Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us And for as many years as we have seen evil, let your work be shown to your servants and your glorious power to their children. Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us and establish the work of our hands upon us. Yes, establish the work of our hands. This is God's word. Let's ask him to write it into our hearts. Father, now we have been hearing a prayer prayed by your servant Moses. Send your spirit to write these words into our hearts to give us hope in the midst of very brief and often troubled lives as we find our true and eternal home in you. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, preaching between Christmas and New Year's always puts a certain dilemma before the preacher. You give us one more Christmas sermon, or an anticipation of a New Year's sermon, or ignore the whole thing. We're going to look toward the new year. It's time to change our calendars again. For those of us who still write checks, I know some of you do it all online, but we're going to have to retrain ourselves to put 2015 in that line item. And it's the time for looking back. looking back over to the past year, and trying to glimpse ahead into the coming year. As you look back over 2014, what do you see? What does it look like to you? Are you just relieved to have made it through the year? Maybe it was a brutal year, financially, health-wise, and you're just relieved that you are on the verge of another old year service and the beginning of a new year. Or maybe 2014 was a sweet year, and you look back with great nostalgia, memories of graduations or weddings or births, family reunions perhaps. And then as you try to glimpse ahead, we cannot, of course, we can't look into the future, but as we look at 2015, is it with hope, the better times maybe just around the corner, or is it with the fear that harsher challenges are ahead, or with a resignation that the troubles that presently dog you at the end of this year are not going to be evaporated once you put the 2014 calendar away and hang the 2015 on your wall. We want to hope that things will be better. Maybe the close conjunction that God's providence has worked out between when we celebrate the birth of Christ, a really new beginning in the history of the world, and our annual renewal of years, maybe that fosters that sense of hope. You see it actually even in the rest of the world. There's that, I'm sure you heard it in the mall, if you went to the mall, that marvelously secular Christmas carol that promises from now on our troubles will be far away. Really? Just like that? From now on our troubles will be far away? But the poet Alexander Pope was right. Hope springs eternal in the human breast. We want to hope. We want to think that things will be better. And so sometimes in popular culture, the promises, like that song says, that it's going to be all better in the future. Or like Little Orphan Annie sings, tomorrow the sun will come out. The sun will come out tomorrow. Sounds hopeful. Sounds comforting. But you know that problems are deeper than that. And sometimes that kind of sunny, shallow optimism is not comforting. It's really cruel because you know how hard life is. I don't want to be a Scrooge or a Grinch who stole Christmas joy here, but we need to get real. And that's where Psalm 90 is such a great help to us. It's God's word. It gives hope, but it doesn't do so by whitewashing the problems in this world. It's to us as much as it is to Moses' generation. And Moses doesn't whitewash the hard truth that the passing of time brings, often loss as well as gain. Instead, he invites us to find our eternal home. in the creator who rules and sustains the universe, whose steadfast love, did you hear that toward the end of the psalm? That's crucial. We're going to focus in on that eventually. His steadfast love gives you real security as you entrust your fleeting, fragile lives to his almighty safekeeping. If anyone had a perspective on the passing of generations, it would be Moses, right? In the prime of life, at the age of 40, Moses decided that it was time for him to take up his task of delivering his people from slavery in Egypt. But he decided to do it by violence, and that was not God's way, and it wasn't God's timing. So for the next 40 years, you may recall, Moses spent time tending sheep for his father-in-law in the Sinai desert. 40 years being groomed for greatness as the son of Pharaoh's daughter in the court of Egypt. 40 years learning God's lessons of humility, chasing sheep across the desert. And finally, as a spry 80-year-old, Moses had finally learned enough humility and a little trust in God, and he was ready now to be usable to set God's people free. Of course, that's not the end of the story, is it? For the next 40 years, after the Exodus, Moses led the people through the desert and watched as his contemporaries, his generation, died one after another for their doubt and unbelief. They'd walked through walls of water, escaping slavery, but then they doubted that God could bring them into the land he'd promised, And so they died. We're not sure when Moses wrote this song. One theory is that he wrote it in response to three traumatic events that we read in Numbers 20. The death of his sister Miriam, Moses' own impatience and disobedience in striking a rock rather than speaking to the rock as God commanded him to. And that would lead to Moses himself eventually not entering the land, but dying within eyesight of the land. And then finally the death of his brother Aaron. That's possible. Or it could be that he wrote it even later in those four decades of wilderness wandering as a kind of an epitaph on that whole generation. Whenever he wrote it, it gives us a vivid picture of how impermanent, how transient our lives are and points us away from ourselves to the true and the living God. It's a prayer. It really comes in three movements. First, in verses 1 and 2, Moses calls us to look away from the shifting sands of our own experience and to focus on the creator who remains strong and vibrantly alive from before time began and all the way to beyond the point where he brings history to its climax. And then verses 3 through 11, Moses focuses back on ourselves. He forces us to face the reality of how fragile and frustrating and fleeting our lives really are. So different from our mighty maker. And he shows the diagnosis, why it is that there's so much loss and sorrow in our experience. And then finally, verses 12 through 17, he makes requests for us all. He asks that God would make us wise. He asks that God would return in steadfast love to do a work that would turn our sorrow into joy and gladness. and that God would even make our own work worthwhile. So God's greatness and eternity, our transience, and then God intervening in steadfast love to give us hope. That's the movement. And let's look at those a little bit more in detail. First verses 1 and 2. God is the everlasting home for homeless transience like this. Those opening verses really preview everything that we're going to see because Moses starts by talking about all generations, reminding us that one generation follows another, follows another, follows another. That, of course, is one of the main themes of Moses' first book in the Bible, the book of Genesis. If you read through the book of Genesis, you come upon those lists of names that structure the book of Genesis. Names of fathers, names of sons, ages, and deaths. They're all over in Genesis, chapter 5 and 10 and 11 and 25 and 36 and 37. A challenge for us when we read them out loud. But always the refrain, and he died, and he died, and he died. On the other hand, God is from everlasting to everlasting. And he's a dwelling place. He's a dwelling place for us. He's a safe place, not just a place to live like tents, as Israel had lived in tents for 40 years, but a solid, secure place. It's a term that elsewhere in the Bible refers to God's dwelling in heaven or God's dwelling with Israel in the tabernacle built at God's direction through Moses or even a cave or a lair where a lion protects its young. It's a safe place. Moses used that same term in Deuteronomy 33, another of Moses' songs. The eternal God is your dwelling place, and underneath are the everlasting arms. He's solid. He's secure. He's older than the hills, older than the created order that he put into existence. And this everlasting God, Moses says, is our dwelling place. We long for that. We long for the stability of a home that lasts a long time. Now and then, we hear or we read about somebody who is raising her own children in the same house that her grandmother was born in. And that strikes a chord with us. Isn't that great? To have those kind of deep roots. Many of us don't. Some of you may, but I suspect many of you don't. I know many of you traveled from the Netherlands to land in this place. Even my wife and I were Americans by birth. But in our 44 years of marriage, I counted we lived in eight residences, some apartments, some homes, in three different states. I imagine some of you could beat that record by a long shot. This is not where I grew up. And we have that longing for roots. But whether you're one of those rare folks who live in the house that your parents built or whether you're a transient like the rest of us, we all long for welcome and security. That's why the Hallmark card commercials play on our emotions as they do as the holidays were advancing in recent weeks. Now Moses, if it's toward the end of the wilderness wanderings, Moses may well be preparing the younger generation to go into the promised land, to leave tents behind and begin to move into settled houses. But he wants them to remember that their security is not in the real estate and not in the structures that the Canaanites have built. Their security, their home, is in the Lord, their God. And he ties us so closely to our creator. He is willing to be our dwelling place. And that's surprising because Moses is about to show us how unlikely it might seem for the eternal, holy, everlasting God to be willing to be a home to people like you and me and the ancient Israelites. Now he is willing. There's an answer to that question. How can this great, holy, almighty, everlasting God be our home? There's an answer to that question, but first we need to hear how bad our bad news is so we can appreciate how good God's good news is. And that's the second movement of the psalm, the bad news. We pass through life as swiftly as sand might slip through our fingers because we have defied the very Lord of life, the Lord of years, verses 3 through 11. Look at 5 and 6 with me if you have your Bible open there. Moses is painting pictures here, sketching out drawings of what our lives are like. You sweep them away as with a flood. What might some of those folks think of when they think about people swept away as with a flood? Maybe the Egyptian armies, when they were just children, the Egyptian armies swept away by the flood of the Red Sea waters after Israel had walked through on dry land. Here one moment, gone the next. They're like a dream. Just that picture. You know when you've had a wild nightmare at night, time seems to have stood still, it may have seemed to have lasted days or weeks, and you wake up and it was only four minutes since you fell asleep the last time? How brief that is? That's our lives. Like grass, renewed in the morning, in the morning it flourishes, it's renewed, and in the evening it fades and withers. It's a good time to preach that verse, because right now we've had a couple of rainstorms, and everything's green. But we know the brown time's coming, and it won't be long until things are dry again. And we'll be concerned about Santa Ana winds and every spark that could spark a fire. See, Moses is painting the picture of how brief our life is. And, of course, he's not the only one that God says this through. In Isaiah, Isaiah 40, we read, All flesh is grass and its beauty like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades when the breath of the Lord blows on it. Surely the people are grass. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God lasts forever. Or in the New Testament, James says, what is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. My wife went to our early service this morning, and we wondered whether there would be frost on her windshield. Well, sure enough, there was. It didn't take much to get it off, but if she'd waited another hour, it would have been gone, or at least it would have been due. It's so brief. That's our life. That's our life. Samuel Beckett, not a good source of theology. Irish, existentialist, atheist, poet, playwright of the last century. In his grim play, Waiting for Godot, he really captures what Moses is showing us here in three lines. He says, they give birth astride a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more. How's that for a commentary on human life? Beckett has no hope to offer. Moses does. But Beckett has understood the bad news about how brief life is. We often don't think about that very often. But it's true. And actually, the news gets worse than that. If you look at verses 9 and 10, Moses says, Not only is our life very brief, but as long as it lasts, it's not so pleasant. All our days pass away under your wrath. We bring our years to an end like a sigh. Our years of our life are 70, even by reason of strength, 80. Yet their span is but toil and trouble. They are soon gone, and we fly away. We end our years with a sigh, a groan, a gasp. T.S. Eliot. I'm an English major. Forgive me these allusions, but, you know, one more. T.S. Eliot started life as an atheist and ended it as a Christian. But in his poem, The Hollow Men, he portrayed at the very end what it's like to live without God. He said, this is how the world ends. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper. I think whimper is a good substitute here for sigh as a translation or groan. It's that last gasp of weakness. And, of course, Moses says that even if it lasts a while, 70, 80 years, maybe a little longer, sometimes much shorter than that, even if we last, the life that we live is full of toil and trouble. Life is miserable, and it runs out too soon. Sort of like if you invite somebody, an awkward relative, over to Christmas dinner and they spend the whole time complaining about the taste of the food and then complaining that there wasn't enough of it? What's up with that? Moses says, life is like that. It's miserable and there's not enough of it. Life in this world. Why does it have to be this way? Why is it that life is both brief and often troubled? After all, our bodies are designed by the creator to be wonderfully self-repairing and self-replenishing. Wounds heal, bones knit back together, white blood cells combat infection often. Cells die, but new cells develop. Medical breakthroughs help along the healing process that the creator himself provides. So why can't that go on forever? Some of our medical researchers think they can make it go on forever. But it doesn't last forever. And it doesn't last forever, not because our bodies are kind of defective with planned obsolescence built into them, but as Moses says, because we are a race of rebels against the Lord of life. The first hint of the problem is in verse 3. You return man to dust. you say, return, O children of man, or we might translate, O children of Adam. If you're looking at an ESV, you see that in the footnote. He's reminding us of what he had written in the third chapter of Genesis, when he recorded the result of Adam and Eve's rebellion and fall into sin. When God said to Adam, because you listened to the voice of your wife and ate the tree, of the tree which I commanded you shall not eat from it. In pain you shall eat of the ground all the days of your life till you return to the ground. For out of it you were taken. You are dust and to dust you shall return. There's the echo. What Moses is saying here. God said it long ago. We return to the dust because we've rebelled. And we've all rebelled. We're the children of Adam. It's not just those ancient Israelites. it's you and me we've rebelled from our father Adam on so verses 7 and 9 and 11 all speak of God's anger and God's wrath and verse 8 really shows us why God is wrathful against the children of Adam verse 8 you have set our iniquities before you our secret sins in the light of your presence We've violated God's law. What we've said and done and thought and wanted, we've violated God's law. And even if we've thought we kept it all hidden deep down inside of us, our secret sins are disposed to God's light as well. When the word came out that Sony's various emails had been hacked and executives were embarrassed, to say the least, you may have breathed a sigh of relief. I'm glad it was Sony and not my e-mails. But remember, the God before whom we have to do knows the secret thoughts, not only what's put on the Internet or put in an e-mail, but the thoughts of our hearts. There's sin there. And that's why we need rescue. That's why we need for God to come. That's why Moses leads us to the prayer that closes the psalm. It's a threefold prayer. First, Father, just make us wise. Verse 12, so teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom. Make us wise enough to count our days. In other words, spare us from the stupidity of imagining that we have minutes and hours and days and years to waste in useless distractions. That we can just afford to fritter away our moments in mental and emotional junk food. Stuff that may fill us up, but never satisfies. Moses says we need a dose of reality. Taking 2014, that calendar off the wall, putting 2015 up there, should remind us. It's like the obituary of last year. It should remind us that our days are numbered. But, you know, we need more than good sense. That would just leave us kind of where Samuel Beckett was. Realizing how brief our life was, but without hope. And so Moses moves from the prayer for wisdom to know how brief our life is to a prayer for God to return. Earlier he had said, God, you return us to the dust as you said you would. Now he says, God, would you return? Would you come back into the lives, into the experience of your people? Verse 13, how long? That shows Moses is thinking in terms of a God who controls history, who is moving history to his purpose, to his plan, to his agenda. How long? How long will it be until that future time comes when you turn your wrath away from your wayward people? from Adam's children? How long will it be until you break into history to do something great, as you did when you brought Israel from slavery to freedom through the Red Sea? Actually, by the sea, Moses sang another song. We read in Exodus 15. He said to the Lord, You have led in your steadfast love the people whom you've redeemed. You've guided them by your strength to your holy abode what a day of hope that was as israel walked out of slavery and into freedom because of god's steadfast love because he was leading them to his holy abode but obviously you know how the story unfolds from that point on they get to mount sinai moses is receiving the words of the law as we heard earlier in our service and as he's receiving the words of the law on the top of the mountain, at the foot of the mountain, the people are worshiping a golden calf. And it looks as if God makes it sound as if this people that he just rescued from slavery, he's going to wipe out in an instant. But Moses pleads, Moses prays, and God relents. And he even gives Moses a glimpse of the back of his glory as the Lord announces his name, his identity. The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin. That's what Moses is pleading for now. As he says in verse 14, satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love that we may rejoice and be glad all our days. As we get up in the morning ready for breakfast, satisfy us with your faithful mercy, your steadfast love, so that we can break our fast and start feasting at the dawn of a new day, so that your pity replaces your wrath, so that our gladness replaces our affliction, so that life replaces death. Do this, Lord. He's praying. He says, let the work, your work, be shown to your servants and your power to their children. He's saying, the day is going to come, Lord. When will it come? When you will intervene in steadfast love, when you will do a great work and our children will see it. Has Moses' prayer been answered? Oh, yes. Moses' prayer has been answered. The tide of history has turned. in the New Testament, Jesus tells us that Moses spoke about Jesus, about himself, and his redemptive mission. We hear that in Luke 24, John 5. But it's striking that in the Christmas story according to John, not one that we usually hear, but it's a wonderful Christmas story, John 1.14, there's an echo of Moses on Mount Sinai and God's promise of steadfast love. The word, who is God, became flesh and made his dwelling among us. And we saw his glory, glory as of the unique son of the father, full of grace and truth. Full of grace and truth is really John's kind of translation paraphrase of what we heard in Exodus 34. Abounding in steadfast love, full of grace, and faithfulness, full of truth. Jesus is the answer to Moses' prayer. If we have any question about that, we could compare what another psalmist says. Sounds very much like Moses, Psalm 102, where he says to the Lord, You laid the foundation of the earth long ago. The heavens are the work of your hands. They will perish, but you remain. They will pass away, but you are the same and your years never end. That Psalm 102 sounds very much like Moses' opening to Psalm 90, doesn't it? Those very words are quoted in the first chapter of the letter to the Hebrews as addressed to Jesus Christ. To Christ who came to be born in Bethlehem, our real human brother. Because the only way to rescue us from God's wrath and to raise us from the dust is for the living God himself, the one whom we've offended, to take our human nature, to live the God-glorifying, obedient life that we should have lived and never did, and then to endure the wrath and the curse that we deserve, and then to rise again from the dead. That's what Christmas is about. See, it's a Christmas and a New Year's sermon, isn't it? Because it's really Moses' prayer, return, O Lord, show your steadfast love that is fulfilled at Christmas. When the God who is from everlasting to everlasting God became a human being who could die, could die on a cross, could be swept away as in a flood, could be cut down like grass, could endure toil and trouble and end his years with a sigh, with a gasp, as he released his spirit hanging on the cross, having accomplished our salvation. Moses' prayer has been answered. Whatever 2015 holds, we can't predict it. Even the experts who think they can, can't predict it. But whatever it holds, we know it is, to drop a little Latin in, Anno Domini, A.D., the year of our Lord, just as 2014 has been. And if you trust in Christ, the eternal everlasting God who became our human brother and went through the miseries that Moses has profiled here in place of those who trust him, you can move into this next year, whatever it holds, with hope and with confidence, even with the prayer that Moses closes the psalm with, make our work worth it. I don't know what kind of job you do. I don't know how much it feels meaningless, except that you bring home a paycheck now and then. But Moses says, Father, because you have us in your hand, establish the work of our hands upon us, establish the work of our hands, because your favor rests upon us. Again, back to Genesis. A lot of commentary here in this psalm, back on Genesis. Remember in Genesis, when God addressed Adam, he said, your work is going to be frustrating. It's going to require sweat. And where you want strawberries, you're going to get brambles and weeds. But that's not the last word. God makes our work worthwhile. One student of scripture wrote about this last petition, something I think is right on target. He said, in the light of God's grace, God's eternity, too, is reflected in man's life and work. Seen in the light of God, what is effinescent becomes durable. What is miserable becomes glorious. What is meaningless becomes meaningful because everything is bathed in the light of eternity. Good comment. Better, since it's breathed out by the Holy Spirit of God, is the Apostle Paul's comment at the end of 1 Corinthians 15 where he's reminded us that Christ is the first fruits from the resurrection and that guarantees our hope for all eternity. Paul concludes this way. he says, therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain. Jesus' death and resurrection mean that Moses' ending prayer has been answered, is being answered, will be gloriously answered, and that the ways that we serve others day by day, home, workplace, school, those ways count for God's glory. He establishes those things as reflections of his son's grace for all eternity, for his honor, for his glory. Amen. Let's pray. Father, we bow before you, thanking you that you have told us truth, truth that we sometimes ignore about how brief our lives are and why our lives are brief. But thank you, Father, that you've not left us only with those dark and sobering truths, but you've also spoken the great truth of the gospel, that we have not only heard Moses pray, For you to return in steadfast love. To turn sorrow into gladness. But we have seen your answer to Moses' prayer. In the suffering and sorrow and then glorious resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ all for us. Father, as we face this new year, may your peace, which goes beyond our ability to understand or explain it. May your peace guard our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. and teach us to live thankfully, joyfully, obediently for your glory. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.