Don't you want God to do that? Don't you want your life here and what you do here to have meaning? Don't you want to be a blessing to others? I am sure you do. But I remind you that the only way that can happen is if God establishes your work. May he do that so that others who come after you will be blessed because of you, and so, when you die and appear before God the Father, you will hear him say, "Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master's happiness” (Matt. 25:21, 23)!
The third section of Psalm 90 (vv. 7-12) recognizes that man's greatest problem is not just his frailty, that is, that he exists for only a short bit of time and is then no more. It is that he is also a sinner and is subject to the just wrath of God. In fact, it is sin that is the cause of his death and misery. Moses must have been thinking of the fall of Adam and Eve when he wrote this (remembering that he also wrote Genesis 3), as well as of his own sin in striking the rock and of God's judgment which kept him from the promised land.
In contrast with the stability and eternity of God, Moses directs our attention next to the weakness of man and to the brevity of his earthly life (vv. 3-6). In the dry, arid climate of the near east a night rain will often cause a carpet of green grass to spring up in the morning on the otherwise brown hills. But the blazing daytime sun will frequently also scorch it out by nightfall. Moses is saying that our lives are like that.
We come now to Psalm 90 itself, a psalm that, like Numbers 20, is a reflection on human mortality and the brevity of life, plus quiet confidence in God who is the steadfast hope of the righteous. This psalm is probably the greatest passage in the Bible contrasting the grandeur of God with man's frailty.
Psalm 90 is the only psalm in the Psalter that is attributed to Moses, but it is not the only piece of poetry Moses wrote. There are two other "songs of Moses" in the Bible. One of them was the hymn the Jews sang after their deliverance from Egypt and the drowning of Pharaoh and his army in the Red Sea (Exod. 15:1-18). The other was the song Moses recited to the people before his ascension of Mount Nebo, where he died (Deut. 32:1-43). The first song is pure praise, a joyful celebration. The second is a reminder of Israel's past rebellion against God and of God's resulting judgments. Psalm 90, the song we are to study now, is the most sober and also the most personal of these poetic compositions.
