Because I’ve Just Numbered 40 {bonus}

With a recent birthday, I’m not old, but youth has long receded. Inside and out, I find I am a different texture, a different consistency, than I used to be. Though most of my children were born in my twenties, my thirties was the decade when the full number had arrived and were all dependent. The years of tight togetherness. There will be no other decade of my life like it. As one of the kids said, (echoing Ecclesiastes), “there’s a time for everything”. Time past has gone quickly and it won’t come back. Stuck in a spent moment, life could be perpetual grief. With the new number on my days and my recent writing about limited and temporary motherhood, I have had Psalm 90 on repeat.

Psalm 90 is the kind of psalm you don’t want to read on a birthday. It’s brutal, but the sober crust peels back, giving consolation. We can’t learn the comforts without wisdom and wisdom can’t be gained without the unsettling truth.

Our destination is dust. Our life is grass, springing up bright in the morning and witherered by nightfall. I’m conscious of my short shadow lengthening eastward. Our days are numbered and the sooner we respect that fact—the countability of our life—the closer to wisdom we get. This numbering is something God needs to teach us. Halfway through the psalm, it’s the first request Moses makes in this prayer,

“Teach us to number our days,
that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” Psalm 90:12

Numbering traces out the finite. It marks the boundaries. It orders and sequences. Numbering is a concession to temporariness, something only relevant to creatures confined to time and space. Numbering our days means we are recognising that an end is coming. It isn’t just knowing our limits, but honouring God’s limitlessness.

Moses shows us how unlike God we are. From the beginning of this psalm he marvels,

“Before the mountains were born
    or you brought forth the whole world,
    from everlasting to everlasting you are God.

You turn people back to dust,
    saying, “Return to dust, you mortals.”
A thousand years in your sight
    are like a day that has just gone by,
    or like a watch in the night.
Yet you sweep people away in the sleep of death—” (vv.2-5)

God is unnumbered, without beginning or end, from everlasting to everlasting. The mountains precede us and will outlast us. God was before these monuments; more than that, he brought them into being. In complete contrast, we are like the grass which springs up on the slopes of those mountains, spent in a day, swept away in the nighttime of death.

“Yet you sweep people away in the sleep of death—
they are like the new grass of the morning:
In the morning it springs up new,
but by evening it is dry and withered.” vv.5-6

Our sum of years—70 or 80—are like a day. God’s day is like a thousand years. It’s poetry, don’t try to solve it mathematically.

“We are consumed by your anger
and terrified by your indignation.
You have set our iniquities before you,
our secret sins in the light of your presence.
All our days pass away under your wrath;
we finish our years with a moan.
Our days may come to seventy years,
or eighty, if our strength endures;
yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow,
for they quickly pass, and we fly away.
If only we knew the power of your anger!
Your wrath is as great as the fear that is your due.” (vv.7-11)

Numbering our days will show us life is smaller than we thought. And our sin is larger. Our problem isn’t just that we’re dead before we know it; it’s that God sees right to the depths of our being and knows the secret sins which we don’t. We have a quantitative problem (the days are few) and a qualitative problem (our sinful nature makes us natural enemies to the holy God). Knowing both are part of the numbering which leads to wisdom.

Numbering our days, has something to do with the fear that is due to God. Which makes sense, given, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction.” (Proverbs 1:7). Folly pretends that things aren’t all that bad and that God isn’t all that good. Wisdom labels the problem accurately. We have accrued a debt we cannot pay in a very short time. Because of that debt, the short years are full of groaning.

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But then, instead of cowering away, wisdom makes bold requests of the everlasting God. Moses gives us the words to pray. :

relent

“Relent, Lord! How long will it be?
Have compassion on your servants.” (v.13)

satisfy

“Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love,
that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days.” (v.14.)

gladden

“Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us,
for as many years as we have seen trouble.” (v.15)

let us and our children see

“May your deeds be shown to your servants,
your splendor to their children.” (v.16)

favour us

“May the favor of the Lord our God rest on us;” (v.17a)

establish the work of our hands

“establish the work of our hands for us—
yes, establish the work of our hands.” (v.17b)

Psalm 90 was a prayer given by Moses, when God’s people lived for decades in tents. They had no fixed dwelling, in a wilderness where bread had to fall from heaven and water had to come from a rock. Without the Land-owner providing, they would have died long before their fourscore. Right back to their origins in Abraham, these people didn’t have a home. God was it. The God who made and owns a world full of homes withheld theirs so they could learn that he is the safe dwelling place.

The first students of this psalm knew more about their coming death than we do. Along with Moses, most of these people knew they would die in the wilderness. God had already told them: because they didn’t believe God would do what he said he would; because that unbelief led to disobedience; because they had grumbled against the LORD—even after seeing his glory—not one of them would enter the dwellings of Canaan. It was their children who would go into the land. There’s something more to think about there. How is it that these withering lives could count the eternal God as their dwelling place? It wouldn’t have been surprising if they had lost that privilege when they forfeited their inheritance of a physical dwelling place. There’s a mystery of grace, judgement, consequence, community and covenant all knit together. The answer is a very long story spanning history. I dare not try to unravel it.

Ultimately, Jesus answers Moses’ prayer. He is the great achiever of God’s greatest deeds. He’s Emmanuel, God with us; tabernacled in the flesh, dwelling among us to bring us into his dwelling with the Father. In Jesus, God comes to his people and made a home for them and with them. He’s the God who enfleshed himself in the brevity of numbered days. He died but didn’t go to dust. Risen again, he is the everlasting God and he’s leading a host of grassy people to share in his endless, established inheritance. He’s preparing a place for us and he has given his Spirit to dwell in us as a deposit, guaranteeing the dwelling to come. The sober ache which comes with the years is perhaps, ultimately, a longing for our dwelling with God. A Home.

There is mercy in the way motherhood doesn’t let us ignore how fast and withering life is, how displaced we are. That brittle grass feeling is not a sign that we need to cut toxic duties out of life. It’s a feeling which belongs to all of us, inescapable, but not unresolvable. That alarming trick of time forces our sense of number. The longevity and permanence come as we are shown God’s great deeds and as we come to see his splendour. We pray and live that our children would too. We come into our dwelling place, through Jesus. If any work of our hands outlasts us, it will only be because our King (once dead but alive forevermore), will establish it. We get to ask and look forward to him doing so.

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A Comparison, by William Cowper (1730-1800)

The lapse of time and rivers is the same,

Both speed their journey with a restless stream;

The silent pace, with which they steal away,

No wealth can bribe, no prayers persuade to stay;

Alike irrevocable both when past,

And a wide ocean swallows both at last.

Though each resemble each in every part,

A difference strikes at length the musing heart;

Streams never flow in vain; where streams abound,

How laughs the land with various plenty crown’d!

But time, that should enrich the nobler mind,

Neglected, leaves a dreary waste behind.