¹⁴O satisfy us in the morning with Your lovingkindness, that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days. ¹⁵Make us glad according to the days You have afflicted us, and the years we have seen evil.

How do you talk about God’s existence before there was ever any creation, to begin with? Philosophers and scientists describe the concept of time, in some sense, as the measure of change. If that is a useable definition, how do we apply that to God before anything came into existence? Unchangeableness is inherent to His very being. Moses, the author of Psalm 90 (see verse 0), satisfied His contemplation of such things when he wrote: “You gave birth to the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, You are God” (Ps. 90:2).

Before creation, there was only God. There was no measurement called time, because there was no change – that is, until God created, and then time began, and the progress or sequence of before and after could be measured. That is why the psalmist could write about God’s perspective on time: “For a thousand years in Your sight Are like yesterday when it passes by, or as a watch in the night” (Ps. 90:4). The apostle Peter alludes to this verse when he later writes: “With the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years like one day” (2 Peter 3:8). And it is why Jesus could say, “Before Abraham was born, I am” (John 8:58).

This is not just a theological truth reserved for academics to tease their brains with, but it provides us with a secure assurance for our lives. That is why the psalm begins with “Lord, You have been our dwelling place in all generations.” The incarnate God is the “same yesterday and today and forever.” (Heb. 13:8), and we live and dwell “in” Him, as it were. We rest in His protection and security—and this is true for all believers at every stage of the history of creation.

This truth about God contrasts our natural state of mortality; our lives come and go quickly (vss. 3-6). And not only our mortality but our morality renders us completely inferior and undeserving of dwelling with the self-existing and unchangeable Creator God (vss. 7-9). The result is that at the end of our natural state, we will say, in words akin to Solomon’s Ecclesiastes:

We have finished our years like a sigh. As for the days of our life, they contain seventy years, or if due to strength, eighty years; yet their pride is but labor and sorrow; for soon it is gone and we fly away. (Ps. 90:9b-10)

Moses, though, doesn’t wallow in the depressiveness of the natural state but responds with a prayer, “So teach us to number our days, that we may present You a heart of wisdom” (vs. 12). Lest we think this be a sub-spiritual perspective because it relies on OT wisdom, we read similarly in the apostle Paul’s writings:

Therefore be careful how you walk, not as unwise men but as wise, making the most of your time, because the days are evil. (Eph 5:15–16)

Moses may have written this psalm after the Israelites resorted to worshiping the Egyptian idol, a golden calf, fearing Moses died on Mt. Sinai, and therefore God also abandoned them (Exodus 32-33). God became very angry with them and threatened to not go with them into the Promised Land (Exodus 33)—that is, until Moses interceded for them. An alternative view places the context as occurring toward the end of the 40 years of wandering in the Sinai desert.

We can see the question of whether God would relent and go ahead with Israel in Moses’ plea in the final section of this psalm: “Do return, O Lord; how long will it be? And be sorry for Your servants” (vs. 13). His confidence, though, arises out of a desire for intimacy with God. The Lord, who is eternally existent, is the satisfaction Moses desires and the joyful lyrics he wants to sing. This trumps even the evil the Israelites have experienced, for God has promised His ”lovingkindness” (vs. 14), that is, a love and commitment to Israel based on the covenant God had already made with them.

So he concludes:

Let Your work appear to Your servants and Your majesty to their children. Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us; and confirm for us the work of our hands; yes, confirm the work of our hands. (Ps. 90:16–17)

His desire goes to a new level beyond guilt and forgiveness. He wants for himself and all his fellow Jews and their descendants to know and experience God’s wonderful works and majesty, and to bask in the saturation of God’s grace on them.

Lord, with Moses, I want to rest on and in Your lovingkindness and refuse to wallow in my spiritual failures.