Welcome to the Welling for your spiritual health, your well-being, and your overflowing.
As we’ve entered a new year and a new decade, it’s still young. I’m going through an exposition of Psalm 90, the psalm which focuses on time, the psalm which speaks about the eternal God, that has an essential reality of all divinity. If He wasn’t eternal, none of the other attributes would count at all.
From there, he’s gone to humans as we are. All people are mortal, We are vanishing like grass which comes up in the morning and is withered by the evening. But in this essential description of humanity, he narrows down to God’s people.
If you look from verses 7 on to verse 11, turn with me to Psalm 90 and follow that with me either on your device or hard copy with a notebook. He talks about God’s people, not only all humanity. If you notice from verses 7 to 11, there are a lot of first-person plural pronouns–“we,” “us,” “we,” “our.”
Verse 7: “We have been consumed by Your anger. And by Your wrath, we have been dismayed.” We have sensed that kind of an environment at this time.
I remember landing in Botswana in the middle of March 2020. I was picked up by a member of the Parliament. The first question was, Brother Ramesh, is this the end times? I said, The entire season from the coming of the Lord Jesus is known as the end times, the latter days.
And then he asked, Is this God’s judgment upon us? My initial thought was if God was judging us, none of us would be alive. We’d all be gone.
But guess what? There is a theology of pestilence in the Bible. We don’t have exhaustive knowledge of what God is doing, but we have some objective knowledge that God is just. And as a result, His wrath is on the human race, which needs to be oppressed.
Here, the psalm is speaking about God’s anger. Look at verse eight. “You have placed our iniquities before You.” God cannot handle sin. Sin, even the smallest and the most secret of our sins, they generate God’s anger, because it says, “Our secret sins are seen well in the light of Your presence.”
Now, there are small sins and bigger sins that we commit. We know that, for example, when the Lord Jesus looked at Judas and said, “He who has committed Me to you, Pilate, committed the greater sin.” There is a greater sin, talking about Judas. There are definitely sins which have greater consequences.
We have experienced it in so many ways. We hide and hide sin. And when it comes up, it blows up everything that’s been built. Look at verse nine. “For all our days have declined in Your fury.”
This could be from the very beginning of the human race, when people had longevity because of good genes. And as sin began to multiply and seeded itself in the human constitution, our lives became shorter. We live times of decline. And that’s part of God’s fury. We finish our years like a sigh.
My mother-in-law, I call her my “mother-in-love,” she’s my favorite mother-in-law because I only have one. She is 93 years of age, and today has not been a good day. As I record this, she has broken five ribs. She doesn’t think she is getting the care that she needs in her physical therapy place.
And it’s a sigh. It’s hard to breathe. It’s hard to talk. She’s finishing her years. I don’t know when your years are going to finish or my years are going to finish. But I hope we can finish without struggle, without shame, without shrinking back, without sorrow. But they will definitely be with a sigh.
Verse 10: “Because the days of our life may contain 70 years,” that was a very long life. And if by reason of strength, God gives us 80 years, we push and push and get another 10 out of it. Even then, those extra years, the pride of those extra years, are but labor and sorrow.
Isn’t that true about you and me? I’m not yet there, but one of my great desires is that when life happens and death comes around, that it will be without sorrow, with dignity, without shame, without pain and struggle, but with the rapidity to it that we will finish life. For soon, it is gone, and we fly away.
Verse 11: “Who understands the power of Your anger, Your fury according to the fear that is due You?” When I speak to pre-Christ friends, they don’t like the concept of God’s wrath. Neither do I. But they do really like the concept that God is just. Who wants a God who is unjust, like the corrupt systems and judicial situations of the world?
But if God is just, there has to be anger. Wrath is not an attribute of God. Justice is. As a result, it overflows into anger, His anger against sin, which will be settled by the Lord Jesus when He took God’s wrath on Himself and became the propitiation and the satisfaction, the expiation of the sins of the whole world so that today, we don’t have to live under God’s wrath.
We’ll come to the next section as we engage the eternal in outliving our life, though we cannot outlast our life.