Okay. I’d like to read a couple of verses from Psalm 90, and maybe just one verse to begin with. Psalm 90:1. This is a prayer of Moses, a man of God.
Lord, You have been our dwelling place in all generations.
Let’s pray together.
Lord, we come to You, and we pray that You would hear our prayer, hear our hearts: to know You, to walk with You, to hide with You during this time, Lord; just to experience the comfort that comes from Your discipline and from Your presence. Lord, we worship You together. In Jesus’ name, amen.
So, I have in mind to go through Psalm 90, but in light of a familiar verse in Psalm 23:4. David, now the sheep—because in Psalm 23 he says, “The Lord is my shepherd”—David says:
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil; for Thou art with me;
Thy rod and Thy staff, they comfort me.
As he’s going through this valley of the shadow of death, it’s like there’s a mountain of death looming over, maybe another mountain on the other side of Hades—just overpowering, overwhelming—and a shadow is created. It’s a very fearful thing. All of the evils around: not only immoral evils, but the type of evils that would kill you, the type of evils that would hurt you—disasters, pestilences, wars, and other things.
In that type of valley, in that type of darkness, “I will fear no evil, for You are with me.” So that’s the secret of having no fear in a time of darkness: the Shepherd Himself is there with you, leading you through that path of righteousness for His name’s sake, on purpose.
But there’s another part of that verse that is not as commonly talked about or thought about, maybe: “Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.” The Lord’s presence is there. The Shepherd is there with us in the time when we’re in the valley and the shadow of darkness is there. We have no fear in the presence of the Lord Himself.
But then He’s doing something. As He’s leading on with His staff, He’s also using His rod to discipline and keep us on the path. So I’d just like to use that concept of the rod and the staff that comfort us—the comfort of the rod and the comfort of the staff—and bring out what I think is a perfect illustration in the Scriptures. It comes from Psalm 90 and Psalm 91.
These two psalms, written by Moses, especially talk about the experience the Israelites had in the wilderness. In their experience in the wilderness, they went through the valley of the shadow of death more than we would realize.
This psalm actually says that it is “a prayer of Moses, the man of God.” When you read it, you notice that he is reflecting back on experiences that have happened. They’re at the end of their wilderness journey. Moses is still alive, and there is kind of a psalm to encapsulate the heart’s prayer that the Israelites discovered—those that fell in the wilderness, those that died, and even those that were raised up and continued on to go to the promised land. They learned so much, and they were dealt with so much.
Psalm 90 really depicts for us the rod of God, the discipline of God, and the comfort that comes from that. Psalm 91 shows us His staff and the comfort that comes from His staff as He leads us through. Both are talking about the same experience through the wilderness.
But you could say Psalm 90 is looking at the majority of the Israelites and the discipline that came upon them, while Psalm 91 is especially from the perspective of Joshua and Caleb—maybe the other Israelites who were being raised up as well. But uniquely, it is the situation going on with Joshua and Caleb.
So for this time, we just want to look at Psalm 90 itself. We read this first verse:
Lord, You have been our dwelling place through all generations.
Now, this is one of the raw experiences that the Israelites had gone through, and a comfort had come from it. A discovery came from the presence of the Lord with them in the wilderness: they discovered that the Lord Himself is their dwelling place, their home.
He says, “Through all generations.” You can go back to the generation of Abraham, but even further back. If you look at the generations all the way to the beginning of humanity, Adam’s home was the Garden of Eden, but he lost it. In the Garden of Eden, it was home because God’s presence was there. God placed him there. God built that home with him.
Then, through sin, they lost that home, and they went on to wander. In the next generation, with Cain killing his brother, he lost even his place with his parents. He became a wanderer and really did not find a place.
Throughout the time from there, it just got worse and worse, to the point where only eight people were left, and they had no home. They were just on a boat in a flood with Noah. All homes were destroyed, but the Lord’s presence was with them on the ark.
As they landed, corruption quickly crept into mankind as they began to multiply on the earth. You get to the spot of the large city, the Tower of Babel, being created by humanity. As they tried on their own to make a name for themselves and make the ultimate home, the Lord stopped it and scattered them. Out of that came seventy nations.
As these nations and languages divided all the people, they spread out throughout the earth. Then the Lord grabbed a man, Abraham, and made a unique nation out of him. That’s why the seventy nations are called nations, or Gentiles, and from this one man, Abraham, the Lord made a people—His own people, the Israelites.
With this man Abraham, the Lord called him to a place, to a city, and to a house. Abraham, in his heart, had seen, as it says in Hebrews, what was coming in eternity. He saw an eternal home. He knew that the Lord was his home, but he dwelt in tents the whole time.
Then Abraham died living in tents. His son Isaac also lived in tents. Jacob also lived in tents, and toward the end of his life he was brought over to Egypt, even leaving the land that had been promised to them. He left that and lost that aspect of his home, and he went into Egypt, where the way had been prepared for them by Joseph.
But very quickly, even though they settled in a nice spot and had their own homes, flocks, and business, the Egyptians took over. They took their homes away from them, took their property away from them, and they became property of Egypt. So the Israelites lost all their homes, and they all grew up as slaves.
The generation that Moses led out of Egypt had never had their own homes. They had lived as slaves; they had been property themselves. Then they were redeemed by the Lord, and they came out into the wilderness. The Lord gave the instructions of the law, made them His people, and brought them into covenant.
Another large aspect of what the Lord does in Exodus—a part that we commonly maybe skip through—is that He describes and has them build a tent for Himself. Then the Lord lives with them. They are all in tents, traveling through the wilderness, but the Lord is there with them.
He Himself is not making a large permanent home right at that time, but He is in a tent; He is tabernacling with them. Pretty quickly, they end up messing up, so they are going to be in the wilderness and die there. However, they go through those forty years in multiple stages.
Forty-two times, they stop and set up camp, and they set up their tents. Whether it is at the waters of Marah, the bitterness, or they go to the springs of Elim, they have either difficult circumstances in the land where they stop, or they have a wonderful place to live with palm trees and everything. Whatever it is, it is not permanent.
The only permanent thing with them in the wilderness is this tabernacle of God that has the glory and presence of God Himself. As the cloud and fire begin to move away from that campsite, even though they had settled some, even though they had set up and were comfortable for a moment—maybe they had been there for a year—as soon as He goes, their home goes with them.
One thing they were discovering this whole time is that their home is God Himself. Everything else is temporary. Everything they build and set up, however they get established, is just for a moment. But the one thing that is not temporary, that lasts for eternity, is God Himself.
It is a discovery through the discipline of God. The reason they were going through forty-two stages through the wilderness was His rod disciplining them, dealing with them, showing them the waste that comes when they rebel against God. In all their sins, He was disciplining them. But out of that discipline came comfort. His rod and staff comfort us.
Even though they were being disciplined, even though it seemed like, “What are we doing? We never get to set up and establish. I never get to grow my garden as I want. My flocks have to move again, and this grass is good.” Even though things are difficult, out of that comes the comfort of a discovery: one thing does not change. We are in the presence of the Lord. He is our home.
He never stops. He never changes. He never leaves us nor forsakes us. Our home is in God Himself. That is a real discovery, and it lasts forever.
In the very end, as they perished in the wilderness and are with the Lord in paradise, in the future, as the Lord finishes what He is doing, they end up in the New Jerusalem—in the permanent, eternal home, which is the home in God Himself. In that New Jerusalem, they are also built as part of His home. His home is in them, and their home is in Him.
During the time of the waste and discipline in the wilderness, that was the discovery made. It is the discovery Abraham discovered. It is the discovery that men in past generations understood when they began to call on the name of the Lord. It is what Noah understood in the ark. Even though all his home was lost and everyone’s houses were destroyed in the flood, his home, even in the boat, was in God Himself. That was enough. That is permanent, and that is solid.
Another lesson from the comfort of the Lord is found in Psalm 90:2:
Before the mountains were brought forth,
Or ever Thou hadst formed the earth and the world,
Even from everlasting to everlasting, Thou art God.
Here is an eternal aspect of God. Even before creation, from eternity to eternity, there is God. We want to contrast this with what happens next. In Psalm 90:3–4:
Thou turnest man to destruction;
And sayest, Return, ye children of men.
For a thousand years in Thy sight
Are but as yesterday when it is past,
And as a watch in the night.
Here we have this comparison, and it is a real raw, comforting experience that they discovered. They discovered that man just goes back to the dust, while God is for eternity. But it is a problem. It is not a normal thing.
We use this Scripture, or the Scripture in Genesis, after the fall of man. God had made man from dust and breathed into him the breath of life. But now, because of sin, he would return to dust. His body would perish, decay, and return to dust. This is not a good thing. It is not a God thing. It is not an on-purpose thing from eternity’s viewpoint. It is because of sin.
The discovery they had in the wilderness especially was that they just returned to dust. Day after day, they were seeing people die. Sometimes, in large numbers, people were perishing. If you think of perhaps a couple million people coming out of Egypt, basically most of them were perishing in the wilderness during this time.
You have a large number of people over forty years passing away and being buried at all these different stages. Sometimes they died for different reasons. Sometimes it was a direct connection to their sin that had just happened. From some sin, poisonous snakes came out, and they ended up dying until the bronze serpent was lifted up. They looked on the bronze serpent on the pole that was lifted up, and they were healed from their poison.
Sometimes, with rebellion, the ground opened up and some were swallowed up and brought into Sheol itself, into the place of the dead, alive. They went out to battle early on without the Lord, and they perished.
Time after time, whether it was a direct connection to their sin or a connection to their general sin in the first part of their journey, they tempted or rebelled against the Lord ten times. Finally, it came to the point when He had brought them to the land where they should go, and they rejected God’s command. They were afraid of the giants, and the Lord put a stop right there.
It was a sin unto death. It was the end of their ability, while they were alive, to go into the promised land. Because of their choices of sin, they were destined to wander around in the wilderness and return to dust there. That is the rod of God.
But there is comfort in this rod. First, though, they had to realize the reason for this rod. Let me skip over to Psalm 90:10:
The days of our years are threescore years and ten;
And if by reason of strength they be fourscore years,
Yet is their pride labor and sorrow;
For it is soon cut off, and we fly away.
In my archaic translation, “threescore years and ten” is seventy years, or eighty years if you are strong. Basically, it is a discovery: wow, we are dying very young. Some were dying much younger than that, but he is saying that, in general, people are passing away. They are not living long.
God is from eternity to eternity, before creation was. But for us, it is like just a moment. We are like grass that just flies away. It is so temporary. They had reason to be shocked at this time span of dying at seventy or eighty years old.
Moses lived to be one hundred and twenty and was possibly an exception, but he was also a transitional type of person. His father lived into his one-hundreds, and his grandfather in his one-hundreds. Before him, if you go back to Abraham, it is one hundred and seventy-five. Go way back in time to Adam, and it is nine hundred and thirty years; Noah, nine hundred and fifty years; and Methuselah, nine hundred and sixty-nine years.
Man was not meant to die so young. Actually, mankind was not even meant to die at all. From eternity to eternity is God, and He destined mankind to enter into eternity. We were not called just to go right back to dust. We were not called just for a moment. God put an eternal spot inside of us.
In the Garden of Eden with Adam, He placed the tree of life there, and if man would take of it, he would spend eternity with God. Man would enter into that eternity and receive eternal life and enjoy eternity.
But now, in this realization, with the discipline of God, they realize that because of sin, all mankind, ever since Adam, has been dying. Gradually, that sin worked through mankind, especially after the flood, to the point of Moses. Basically, from Moses on, people did not live that long. It is just like a moment.
Now, as it says in 2 Peter 3, with the Lord a day is like a thousand years. In the Lord’s time mindset, a day is like a thousand years of man. It is true, because He is from eternity to eternity. Even if you were to live a thousand years—which no one quite made—it would be just like a day. Just one good day. That’s it.
We think of a thousand years as so long, but actually we are only living a very short time period right now. This realization came upon them: how temporary, how vain, all of this is.
There is still a problem that has to be worked out with us. Though we might realize how short our lives are, it takes the discipline of God to truly realize it.
Yet is their pride labor and sorrow;
For it is soon cut off, and we fly away.
The pride in our hearts makes us feel as if we have a lot of time, until we enter into the valley of the shadow of death, until some reality sets in, and we see death upon us or upon mankind. Then we see how short our lives are. Otherwise, our pride hides us from the reality that we are returning to dust and that something is wrong.
The sin in our hearts keeps us in this wrong mindset. We build our storehouses, but the Lord will tell us, “You fool, the next day you’re going to die, and this will just be handed over to others.” You may have worked your whole life for something so important to you, and in one day, it is all gone.
You may feel that this is something wonderful that you can hand over to others and that it is going to impact everything. But before the Lord, if it is just us, if it is just by ourselves, it is only for a moment and it is not going to count. It is all vanity. It is not going to matter.
There comes this prayer out of all this discipline. After realizing the type of sin that we are in, let me go back to the realization of sin in Psalm 90:7–9:
For we are consumed in Thine anger,
And in Thy wrath are we troubled.
Thou hast set our iniquities before Thee,
Our secret sins in the light of Thy countenance.
For all our days are passed away in Thy wrath:
We bring our years to an end as a tale that is told.
This is the realization of our sins. This is repentance. This is when you discover that what you have been working for has all stopped; it is all not going to matter.
Sometimes it takes the valley of the shadow of death, with a little bit of rod, to be disciplined by God—or for Him to use the death around us—for us to discover how vain and pointless everything is that we have been working toward.
You lose your job, your company, your circumstance, or everything you thought were your plans for this next year or for this summer. They are all stopped. Everything stops, and you realize that everything is so temporary in the light of God’s eternity. Everything that I am walking in with my sins is so pointless and purposeless.
Then there comes this wonderful prayer in Psalm 90:12:
So teach us to number our days,
That we may acquire a wise heart.
Their days are numbered. You would say, like in Daniel, “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin”—your days are numbered; you are about to die. That is true. Their days were numbered in the sense that they only had that generation of years and then were going to die. But that is not what it is talking about when you are taught to number your days.
It does not mean, “I am now this age, and I am at the halfway point in my life. What have I done? The rest of my years are just going to be a waste.” Whatever age we are, a day can be numbered or a day can be wasted.
In the light of eternity, a day can matter for eternity if it is numbered, if it is numbered before God. The numbering before God is when we make God our home, when we experience His presence, when we are with the Lord in whatever we are doing.
If we are in a moment where it seems like, “I’m just wandering around in the wilderness right now. I’m not doing the things I think I should have been doing in my life. I’m just doing these menial things, or I’m just wasting away, it seems.” Take that moment and spend it with the Lord. That moment lasts for eternity, and the real things that matter are actually happening now.
The things that go from eternity to eternity are counting right now. Yes, our days are numbered in our physical bodies right now, but this is just a moment. The Lord will raise us from the dead and bring us into eternity with new bodies.
What matters in this time is that a moment is spent with the Lord, that a day is actually spent with the Lord. If we spend a day with the Lord, it is as if we are spending a thousand other years. A day with the Lord is like a thousand years of men.
You can really notice this. You can spend a lot of days by yourself, walking away from the Lord. But we have experienced maybe just a moment with the Lord, just five minutes with the Lord, and it is life-changing. It even changes other people’s lives.
If you can remember those moments where you know, “I’m with the Lord right now. This is the best moment in my life. This is what everything should be like,” that is a moment like a thousand years. If you spent a full day with those types of moments, it is like a thousand years. It is a moment that counts for eternity.
So in the discipline of God, realizing, “What have I been doing with my sins? All these things are vain. What have I been walking with?”—with the discipline of God comes His comfort. Here is the comfort: you can spend this moment, you can spend this day, walking together with the Lord.
Forget where you are right now. Forget what life circumstances have changed. Forget whether you feel, “I’m not doing what I should have been doing in my life, and I’ve wasted so many years.” What matters right now is a day with the Lord. That gets numbered.
If this day gets numbered, you just gained a thousand years. If you get this day to spend with the Lord, it really counts and it really matters. That is comforting.
If the Lord disciplines you, yes, it will hurt, and you realize. But when you bring your sins into His light and He washes you clean with the precious blood of Jesus, as you come back through to Him, He will take back all the years that the locust ate. He will bring your moments into eternity.
For example, think of getting something accomplished at home. Maybe you have a lot of yard work to do, and you bring your family that day, and you do a lot of the yard work that is needed. At the end of the day, you can look at what you have done: all the grass that was cut, the garden tended to, the flowers planted, and so on. It may look so nice.
But imagine doing that full day without being in a good relationship as husband and wife, or with the kids and parents. Everybody is bitter, selfish, and complaining. They are all just doing what they have to do. It is just a sad day. No one would say, “This was a wonderful day.” It is because the home was broken.
With us, our home is God Himself. If you take the same family, maybe it is a rainy day and a stormy day, and they have to stay huddled up inside, and maybe it seems like what they are doing does not accomplish much by way of fixing the yard or anything like that—but if there is the right home environment, the right relationship between husband and wife, children and parents, it is a day that matters.
It could even be remembered by the whole family. It is a day that counts in the lives of everyone there. When you have a day with the Lord, it not only counts for eternity, but it counts for the other people who are in your lives.
If you work your whole life to have something to hand to other people, something to benefit other people, but you do it all without the Lord, it is all just vain anyway. The best thing you can hand to other people, the best inheritance you can give to your children and grandchildren, is a day spent with the Lord.
If you walk with the Lord in eternity, with a moment of eternity right now in the presence of the Lord, if you come clean with the Lord—those secret sins and secret faults washed clean by the blood of the Lord—everything you do will help the future generation.
That is the discovery the generation that perished in the wilderness had, and they were comforted. We think of them in all their failure, but actually, they came through. They raised their children up to learn the Lord, and those children entered into the promised land.
What they did in numbering their days counted for eternity. Those Israelites wasting away in the wilderness did not get to see the physical land of the promised land, but they experienced the reality of the ultimate promised land in the New Jerusalem. They touched something that counts for eternity.
In their repentance, in realizing that everybody was just falling away, they came to number their days, and that became their prayer. Those days began to count. For us today, everything, when it becomes numbered, really counts.
Then, in Psalm 90:14–15, he says:
O satisfy us early with Thy lovingkindness,
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.
In these wasted years, in this valley of the shadow of death, with the Lord’s presence, you do not fear the evil—even the evil that might take out a life. His rod is there, but it has actually comforted you. There comes a gladness, and there comes a satisfaction.
With the Israelites, early in the morning they would go out and get the manna. They would begin their day and spend their day eating that manna. Really, it was their day together with the Lord.
In Deuteronomy, Moses said that it was not that the Lord just gave you bread to feed you for the days, but it was to teach you day by day that man does not live on bread alone, but lives on every word from the Lord. That is what they discovered: He is their home, and in their home, He speaks to them.
As they were daily satisfied early in the morning, they spent their day with the Lord. Whatever is happening—whether we are under major discipline, under lockdown, or under anything like that—we spend our day with the Lord. It is a glad day. It is a satisfied day, because the Lord is with us.
Then it says, in Psalm 90:16–17:
Let Thy work appear unto Thy servants,
And Thy glory unto their children.
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.
Here, at the very end of this psalm, you have the Lord’s work: “Let Your work appear to us.” He has been disciplining and bringing them to the realization that, one, their home is the Lord Himself; and two, unless their days are numbered, they do not count for anything. They are vain and empty and will fade away. But when they are numbered, they count for eternity with the Lord, who is eternal.
With these discoveries, the heart’s cry is, “Lord, let Your work be manifested.” This is the work of God that He is working upon mankind, that He is doing to build the New Jerusalem. It is the work in us that is conforming us to the image of His beloved Son.
It is the work that He is working, like when it says, “Work out your salvation, because it is God who works in you, both the willing and the working.” The Lord is working in us.
Then He says, “Let our work be established.” As the Lord is working in us, there is a reaction that goes on, and we begin to do the Lord’s work—the eternal work that counts for eternity. We do the work in the moment that we share something of the Lord with others, in the moment that we do the dishes but it is in the presence of the Lord.
It is the work of our hands that counts for eternity. The Lord is conforming us to the image of Christ, and however we treat each other, whatever we are doing, and praying for one another—those works count forever. Our works get established because they are part of the work that He is doing.
This is the comfort that comes to us. The Lord has His rod upon all mankind. There is a wilderness experience. There is a valley of the shadow of death that we are entering through right now. I believe the whole world knows it right now.
With pestilence around, there is such a dark shadow everywhere, a hidden evil going around that you could easily be afraid of. But with the Lord as our home, resting in the Lord, we number this moment, and this moment counts for eternity.
Knowing that we could perish, knowing that many are perishing, if today counts for eternity, something matters. The Lord’s beauty will be upon us, and the glory of the Lord will be manifested. What matters for eternity is going to happen. That is the Lord’s comfort for us in this time.
Let’s pray together.
Oh, Lord, we come to You with our life circumstances and with joy in the Lord, knowing that You are with us, knowing that You have not left us. Even as we see Your rod of discipline, as You keep us on the right path, even if there is pain, even if there is loss and hurt, Lord, there is comfort in knowing that You are bringing us through to Your eternal purpose.
You care about that, Lord. We pray for those eternal things, and we pray for our moments today, that they would count for eternity. Lord, this day we set apart to spend with You, that it would be like a thousand years.
Lord, we thank You and worship You that with You, it is wonderful and it is eternal. In Jesus’ name, amen.