This psalm opens the Psalter’s fourth book, and it carries a heading no other psalm in the collection shares — “A Prayer of Moses, the man of God,” almost certainly the oldest psalm in the entire book, written centuries before David ever picked up a harp.
A study in Psalm 90 · Arthur Baldwin · StandUp4Jesus.Org · 12 min read
Our Dwelling Place In All Generations
“Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.”
Psalm 90:1-2
Moses calls God a “dwelling place” from someone who had spent forty years leading a people with no permanent home at all — wandering tents pitched and struck again and again, and yet a genuinely stable place to actually live, found in God rather than in any fixed address.
A Thousand Years In Thy Sight
“For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night. Thou carriest them away as with a flood; they are as a sleep: in the morning they are like grass which groweth up. In the morning it flourisheth, and groweth up; in the evening it is cut down, and withereth.”
Psalm 90:4-6
The contrast between an entire millennium and a single fading night watch is deliberately extreme — human perspective on time simply cannot supply the right scale for measuring how brief a human life actually is against God’s own eternity.
Threescore Years And Ten
“The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.”
Psalm 90:10
Moses himself, according to Deuteronomy, lived to a hundred twenty with undimmed eyes and unabated strength — so this verse is not a claim about his own experience specifically, but a general observation about ordinary human life, most of it genuinely bounded by seventy or eighty years.
So Teach Us To Number Our Days
“So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.”
Psalm 90:12
“Teach us to number” is a request for a skill, not merely information — Moses is not asking simply to be told the length of life is short. He wants that fact actually absorbed into daily wisdom, a truth translated into how the days are actually lived.
“‘Before the mountains were brought forth, Or ever Thou hadst formed the earth and the world, Even from everlasting to everlasting, Thou art God… So teach us to number our days, That we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.’”
Ellen G. White · Testimonies for the Church, vol. 8, p. 270
White quotes nearly the entire psalm in a discussion of God’s eternal nature, opening with the declaration that “the eternal God is thy dwelling place” from Deuteronomy 33 — the very same phrase Moses used to open this psalm, God’s permanence offered as the actual answer to human brevity.
Establish Thou The Work Of Our Hands
“O satisfy us early with thy mercy; that we may rejoice and be glad all our days. Make us glad according to the days wherein thou hast afflicted us, and the years wherein we have seen evil.”
Psalm 90:14-15
“According to the days wherein thou hast afflicted us” asks for joy proportioned exactly to past sorrow — not simply an equal measure of relief, but gladness large enough to actually answer everything the affliction cost.
“And let the beauty of the LORD our God be upon us: and establish thou the work of our hands upon us; yea, the work of our hands establish thou it.”
Psalm 90:17
The psalm’s final request is repeated twice in the very last line, as though Moses wanted to make sure it landed — that whatever brief, fragile work human hands manage to do in this short life might actually be made to last, established by someone whose own years never end.
