Third Presbyterian Sunday Morning Bible Study - July 11, 2021

Below is the Bible Study written by Jim Rudiger for his Sunday School Class which meets at Third Presbyterian Church, Norfolk, Virginia. It's based on Psalm 90:1-12.

What advice did your parents give about living in this world when you grew up?  

“Neither a borrower or a lender be.”  I was raised by my grandmother and she had been raised that way.  She wasn’t on Social Security and didn’t have a retirement income.  She depended on my uncles and aunts who lived at the same house to pay the bills.  So she didn’t have any money to lend and she was too proud to borrow anything.  The worst thing for her was to be in debt.  The bottom line was don’t buy it if you don’t have the money in your pocket to pay for it.

Get a good job.  For my grandmother the best job I could ever hope to get was to be a teller in a bank.  Why a bank teller, you ask?  Because they wore suits, a white shirt and a tie everyday.  Another thing was they didn't have dirt under their finger nails.  The main thing was that everybody respected them.  She would be so proud to go to the bank and see all of the people wanting to talk to me while I sat behind a big desk wetting the point on my pencil.

Pick your friends carefully.  She said people will think good of you if you have friends who are good.  This was particularly true when it came to picking a wife.  She had to be a “good girl.”  She never went into detail about what a “good girl” was, but, it sure wasn’t a “floozey”, another kind of girl she also failed to elaborate on.

And, finally, always vote for Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  Mr Roosevelt had been president for so long and had beaten the depression, so, it was my patriotic duty to keep him in office.  

How much did you your folk's advice?  I fell down on the lender part, but, I steered clear of credit card debt.  I let her down on the job thing.  Being a teller just wasn’t what I was cut out for.  As far as picking friends, I was lucky that all the guys I hung with in school didn’t get into trouble, so, I passed on that one.  And I married a “good girl.”  She would have liked that.  I couldn’t grow up and vote for Mr. Roosevelt’s seventh term, because he was dead.  I think she would have given me a little room on that one.

Did you pass on any advice to your kids?  I recycled a lot of it, but, they were like me, they took some and they left some.  But, none of them are bank tellers.

In today’s study, the psalmist deals with an honest view of life as folks get older.  You might recognize some themes and words.  That's because the popular hymn by Isaac Watts,  “O God, Our Help In Ages Past” is based on Psalm 90.  This psalm is introduced as “A prayer of Moses, the man of God.”  This is the only psalm attributed to Moses.  Did Moses really write this psalm?  Not according to most theologians.  They think it was written during the Babylonian Exile.  If Moses didn’t write it, why did they say he did?  The theologians think that saying that Moses wrote this psalm was a way of encouraging the Israelites as they arrived in Babylon.  Look at what they had lost.  They had lost their country, the Temple and a king descended from David.  On the other hand Moses was around when there was no country for the Israelites or Temple or even King David.  But, God was with Moses.  So, losing all of those things doesn’t mean that God is lost too.  Also, Moses had his own losses too.  He led them to the promised land but died before he could enter it himself.  To put it bluntly, Moses came up short by missing the Promised Land.  Now, if Moses came up short, but was still special to God, then the Israelites coming up short by being carted off to Babylon wasn’t the end of the world either.  Without Moses, God led the people into the promised land.  It was done on God’s time, not in human time.  And, in God’s time, he will lead the people back to Jerusalem.

Now, lets get into our study.

Psalm 90:1 Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations.  2 Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God.

God has been our what?  Our dwelling place.  God has been called a lot of other things in the Bible.  What are some of the things God is called?  Lord.  Father.  Shepherd.  King.  These all seem appropriate for God, but, “a dwelling place”?  The word used here is also used as “refuge.”  What is a dwelling place?  A home.  A home is something that is safe for us.  Even in our childhood games, “home” was a safe place and a good place to be.  So, the psalmist is describing God as that safe familiar place to be.  God sure had been that for Israel.  He had protected and preserved Israel through a lot of difficult times.  Through a lot of generations.

“Before the mountains were brought forth.”  “As old as the mountains.”  I hear that a lot since reaching 87.  Mountains have been around for a long time, millions and millions of years.  Ever since the plates of the earth got an itch  and forced up wrinkles in the earth’s crust, we have had the mountains.  But, God was there before those wrinkles took place.  Before the eruptions caused the crust to swell.  Before the plates ever crashed into one another, God was there.  Not only was God there before the forming of the mountains, he will be there when the mountains fall and erode into the sea.  What the psalmist is saying is that God preceded everything that exists even the most enduring things like mountains and extends back into time to it’s very beginning and forward in time to the ending.  God is from everlasting to everlasting.  That’s a pretty impressive life span isn’t it?

Psalm 90:3 You turn us back to dust, and say, "Turn back, you mortals."  4 For a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past, or like a watch in the night. 5 You sweep them away; they are like a dream, like grass that is renewed in the morning;  6 in the morning it flourishes and is renewed; in the evening it fades and withers.

Let’s see if we can make a list of all the things that God has created.  We’ll break them up into three groups: air, land and sea.  Air: stars, moon, sun, clouds, birds, rain.  Land: mountains, trees, grass, cows, dogs, humans.  Sea: oceans, fish, crabs, whales.  Look at all of the things on the list.  And right here is one little entry - humans.  What does this one little word, that represents all of us, stack up when you see all of the other things that represents other parts of God’s creation?   What does it lead you to think about human beings in the grand scheme of things?  Insignificant.

Part of being human is that it will come to an end.  The oldest person alive right now is about 115 years.  And that is old.  But, compare that to those mountains we were talking about and it is a drop in the bucket.  We try not to think about, but, all of us are going to leave this life. The psalmist is taking a reality check in these verses.  He is telling us to face the facts about living.  Even at it’s best, it is brief.  He reminds us that God will turn us back to - what?  Dust.  I don’t know if I like that description, but, it agrees with what is written in Genesis.  Genesis 3:19 tells us that “you are dust and to dust you will return.”  Funerals used to always end with what statement?  “Ashes to ashes and dust to dust”. So, how do we handle dust?  With respect.  After all, it could be somebody coming or going. 

Just to stress how fleeting our time on this earth is, the psalmist compares time as God experiences it to time as we experience it.  And there is no comparison.  Think back ten years.  How old were you?  What could you do then that you can’t do now?  What loved ones are no longer here?  Thinking back ten years, it seems to have come and gone so fast, but, during the living of it, it sometimes seemed to drag.  When I was young and couldn’t wait for Christmas morning, I’d tell my grandmother, “I wish tomorrow was Christmas.” She would warn me not to wish away my life.  She knew because she close to the end of her time.When you are young you have all the time in the world and you can waste time on foolish things because you don’t see an end to it.  Growing older just means we can get a driving license or have enough money to order fries with our hamburger.  As we grow older time is more precious as we try to hoard it.

That is our feelings about time.  But, God’s time is so much different.  The eighty seven years I have been here is like a second ticking off of God’s clock.  The psalmist says it is like a watch in the night.  This has nothing to do with trying to read your wrist watch when the sun is down and the lights are out.  In the time that the psalmist wrote this song, the twenty four hour day was divided into two twelve hour periods.  Basically, twelve hours of daylight and twelve hours of night time.  The night consisted of three watches of four hours each.  They figured after four hours at night the person watching the sheep would be ready to doze off any minute.  But think if your were on a four hour shift in the middle of the night.  Nothing to do.  Not much to see on TV.  Don’t you think the time would seem to go painfully slow?  But, compared to God’s time, it was like the blink of an eye.

Our life is so fleeting, so short, that it is like a dream that slipped from our memory when we woke up.  God sweeps all of those dreams away too quickly.  In the hymn we were talking about, Isaac Watts writes: “Time, like an ever rolling stream, bears all who breathe away; they fly forgotten, as a dream dies at the opening of the day.”

Human life is like grass fed by the morning dew, all fresh with blades supple and green.  The sun comes up and at noon the grass is burned, their blades dried and crisp.  We have already gone through some of that.  Remember back when you were young.  You played all day - running and jumping.  You never got tired and it seemed that you were going to play like that forever.  Your energy was inexhaustible.  Now I get tired just bending over and tying my shoe laces.  And I don’t even remember when the transition from me having all that energy to me now took place.

Did you have plans when you were young?  All the things you wanted to accomplish?   Even now we have plans for the future.  Retirement.  Trips.  Knowing that time is getting shorter doesn’t stop us from planning.  Sometimes the planning is like the “bucket list” in the movie a few years ago.  Things you want to do before your time is up.  The reality of it is that the shortness of human life means that we won’t do all the things we plan to do.  I’m running out of time to get a convertible or learn to juggle or to dance like Gene Kelly.  If we made all of the right choices about what we ate, exercising and getting enough sleep, the odds are that there still won’t be enough time to get everything done that is on our bucket list.  Maybe, we spend too much of our life on this earth doing the things we think are urgent and not enough time on those things that have truly lasting value.

When we compare what humans are in this life to what God sees as life, we come away feeling pretty discouraged.  And in some ways thinking, “It’s just not fair.”  If you have that unfair feeling now, lets see what the next verses say to us.

Psalm 90:7 For we are consumed by your anger; by your wrath we are overwhelmed.  8 You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of your countenance.  9 For all our days pass away under your wrath; our years come to an end like a sigh.  10 the days of our life are seventy years or perhaps eighty, if we are strong; even then their span is only toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away.  11 Who considers the power of your anger?  Your wrath is as great as the fear that is due you.  12 So teach us to count our days that we may gain a wise heart.

All right.  We have dealt with life being too short.  Now, the psalmist brings up another thing to deal with.  What consumes us?  God’s wrath.  What is the wrath that the psalmist is talking about?  God isn’t going to beat us on the head with a stick or anything.  But, when he sees what we do, - our actions - what will God do?  He will judge our actions and they ain't going to make him happy.  What actions will stick in his craw?  Our sins.  So, what the psalmist is telling us is that we are living under God’s judgement because part of the human condition involves sin and that is something that God has problems with.

Now this is a scary truth, folks.  God sees everything we do.  We can’t hide anything from him.  Because of his righteousness, God can’t turn away from our sin and pretend it didn’t happen.  He has to recognize it and make the necessary corrections.  If we look at it from God’s point of view, his wrath is brought on by his frustration that we keep doing things that fall far short of the things that God wants us to do.

What’s is our life span according to the Bible?  Three score and ten.  How many here are on borrowed time?  The psalmist gives us a little more time if we are strong.  The average life span in the psalmist’s day was less than fifty years.  But, the psalmist talks about living seventy or eighty years.  The point he is making is that back in his day if somebody lived to be really old, 70 or 80, it was short compared to time as God sees it.  In our day, he might have said if we lived to be 110 or 120 years old.  Even if we live to be really old, what does the psalmist say about the extra time we live?  It will be full of toil and trouble.  Not exactly an endorsement for living a long time.   After arthritis, balding and diets, do we really need more toil and trouble?  Now if you throw on top of all of that, God’s wrath, then the extra thirty or forty years will be a bummer.  We can’t do anything about the arthritis or diets, but we can do something about God’s wrath.  We just need to take a hold of our lives and stop sinning so much.  That’s one positive thing about growing older.  The sins aren’t as much fun anymore.  I'm still working and the other day, somebody asked me why I didn't retire.  I told them that I was too old to retire.  All the things I wanted to do when I retired I'm too old to do now.

After listing all the things that is really bothering him about growing old, the psalmist prays for God to help him out.  What does he ask God to do?  “Teach us to count our days that we may gain a wise heart.”  What does he means “to count our days?”  To recognize the time we have left.  "Wake up and smell the coffee" time.  There are some people who live like nothing is ever going to change.  The world will stay the same and so will they.  They live in denial.  They look for a doctor who can make him, not feel younger, but be younger.  A new pill.  A transplant.  I don’t mean to say that we have to be down in the mouth or put our hand over our heart ans say, “It’s the big one, Elizabeth.” when you feel a pain.  Just recognize that pills won't change what it has taken your body so long to build. 

After God helps us to count our days, what do we want him to do?  Give us a wise heart.  Does that mean going to college and getting a masters degree in matters of the heart?  This prayer has nothing to do with intellectual smarts.  A heart of wisdom is one that honestly looks at ourselves and kicks out all of our attempts at self deception or self justification.  Those two things get us into more trouble than all of the world’s enticements.  They delude us into believing that nobody will find out about our little sin or that we had to sin because we were forced into it by the circumstances.  One of those “devil made me do it” moments.  If our prayer is granted, then we can reflect on our death and from that, we can learn to live a better life until it comes.

To sum up what we have just learned from verses 7-12, what makes the human situation so difficult and frustrating?  We don’t have but a short time on earth.  That short time will be lived under God’s wrath because of our short comings and those short comings are the sins we seek out.  To tell you the truth, these verses are a downer, but, the psalmist doesn’t leave us in a funk.  The last five verses has a prayer asking God to ease off a little and give us a break.

In verse 3 God says that humans will return to the dust they came from.  Now the psalmists asks God to show compassion on humans.  He isn’t asking God to turn a blind eye to what we humans do, but, to show compassion because he is a God of steadfast love.  And this compassion will satisfy that attribute of God.

The psalmist moves on to address our concerns about growing old.  He asks for some relief from the sins we commit.  To remove the burden of feeling that we’re never going to measure up and there is no purpose in human life.  The feeling that nothing we do really matters.  Or that there is nothing we can do that will satisfy or give God joy.  Kind of hit the nail on the head didn’t he?

God does make a difference.  Because of God’s steadfast love, we won’t fear morning and the start of a new day.  Because of God’s faithfulness our days and years can and will bring happiness and not failure.  Because of God’s loyalty, our generation and all of the generations to follow will have a future worth living.  God answered the psalmist prayer by giving all of us humans his son to take away those sins and square our account with him.

The psalmist ends with the prayer to establish the works of our hands for us.  The psalmist wasn’t asking God that we be recognized as successful because of our efforts.  Superficial honors to be bestowed on us by the world.  He knows that the only things that are really permanent come from and through God.  The psalmist knew that with God’s blessing, the work of human hands here on earth can make a lasting difference.

I never got advice from my grandmother on dealing with old age.  I probably wouldn’t have known what to do with it anyway.  At eighty seven, gaining weight is easy, staying in shape is hard, and losing weight has become a denied wish.  Sometimes life seems good.  A lot of time it seems hard.  And the older we get, the clearer we see that it won’t get any better until we share that meal with the Lord.  So, we get rid of that bucket list.  As intelligent and finite creatures, we have to ask ourselves what will give our lives meaning and satisfaction?  This psalmist gives us that answer and it is centered around our relationship with the everlasting God.  That truth is expressed better than I can in the final verse of Isaac Watts’ hymn and that will be our closing prayer: “O God, our help in ages past, Our hope for years to come, be thou our Guard while life shall last, And our eternal home.” Amen.