It seems that Psalm 90, “A Psalm of Moses, the man of God,” is
irresistible to ministers preparing a funeral message. After all, our
minister’s handbooks all recommend it. The psalm does have some memorable
verses on God’s eternality and man’s mortality:
Lord, You have been our dwelling place in all
generations.
Before the mountains were born
Or You gave birth to the earth and the world,
Even from everlasting to everlasting, You are
God.
You turn man back into dust
And say, ‘Return, O children
of men.’
For a thousand years in Your sight are like yesterday when it passes by,
Or as a watch in the night. (Psalm 90:1-4)
I always think of Isaac Watts’s great hymn, O God, Our Help in Ages Past, when I
read those verses. Then there is that reality check about the nature of old
age:
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. (Psalm 90:10)
All of the above are quite appropriate at a funeral, when
everyone is forced to reflect upon the relative brevity of life. But there is
more to that psalm, and the diligent pastor is loath to take verses out of
context. That’s when we run into verses that disturb the atmosphere of comfort:
For we have been consumed by Your anger
And by Your wrath we have been dismayed.
You have placed our iniquities before You,
Our secret sins in the light of Your presence.
For all our days have declined in Your fury;
We have finished our years like a sigh.
(Psalm 90:7-9)
Who understands the power of Your anger
And Your fury, according to the fear that is
due You?
(Psalm 90:11)
Anger, wrath, fury? Hardly comforting to a grieving family!
And what about the unbelievers who inevitably attend the funeral of a staunch
Christian? Well, maybe they need to hear about God’s wrath, but is this the
right venue?
While pondering this psalm and its dubious use in funerals,
I thought of the historical context in which it was most likely written. It is
regrettable that this psalm is rarely expounded in all its fullness.
The first thing that ought to raise a question is why Moses,
of all people, a man who lived to be 120 years old, would declare that a man’s
years are seventy or eighty? When did Moses witness great numbers of people
dying by age seventy or eighty? The obvious answer is during Israel’s wandering
in the Sinai wilderness.
Israel had come to the southern border of the Promised Land,
but they were hesitant to enter. They wanted to send scouts, one from each
tribe, to spy out the land (Deuteronomy 1:22). All of those scouts except two,
Joshua and Caleb, brought back a bad report on the land God had promised to
give them. The negative report prevailed and the adult population refused to
enter the land. In consequence of this lack of faith and obedience, God’s
sentence was passed:
'None of the men who came up from Egypt, from
twenty years old and upward, shall see the land which I swore to Abraham, to
Isaac and to Jacob; for they did not follow Me fully, except Caleb the son of
Jephunneh the Kenizzite and Joshua the son of Nun, for they have followed the
LORD fully.' "So the LORD'S anger burned against Israel, and He made them
wander in the wilderness forty years, until the entire generation of those who
had done evil in the sight of the LORD was destroyed. (Numbers 32:11-13)
The total number of men twenty years old and older at that
time, minus Joshua and Caleb, was 603,548. That means that during the forty
years of wandering in the Sinai wilderness, the nation would average over 1,200
funerals a day! And that was only the men. In addition to judgments for
particular acts of rebellion, Moses witnessed the once hearty soldiers, all
once fit for war, aging and weakening. He observed that by age 70 most were
finished, but some were stronger and struggled on till 80, stooped and aching.
And this end was the judgment for their disobedience, their failure to believe
God. They were literally “consumed by (God’s) anger.”
Commentators have rightly seen a universal principle these
verses: death is God’s judgment for man’s rebellion in Eden. Verse 3 clearly
refers to Genesis 3:19 (though a different word for ‘dust’ is used): “You are
dust, and to dust you shall return.” Moses’s witnessing of death in the
wilderness caused him to reflect on that tragedy in the garden and its
universal consequences.
But the Bible makes a
distinction in the case of God’s redeemed saints:
Precious in the sight of the LORD Is the death
of His godly ones. (Psalm 116:15)
Therefore, being always of good courage, and
knowing that while we are at home in the body we are absent from the Lord-- for
we walk by faith, not by sight-- we are of good courage, I say, and prefer
rather to be absent from the body and to be at home with the Lord. (2 Corinthians 5:6-8)
For to me to live is Christ, and to die is
gain. If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me. Yet which
I shall choose I cannot tell. I am hard pressed between the two. My desire is
to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better. (Philippians 1:21-23)
Derek Kidner observed: “In an age which was readier than our
own to reflect on mortality and judgment, this psalm was an appointed reading
(with 1 Cor. 15) at the burial of the dead: a rehearsal of the facts of death
and life which, if it was harsh at such a moment, wounded to heal.”[1] Psalm
90 has been a part of both Jewish and Christian funerary liturgy for centuries.
Still, Psalm 90, Moses’s Funeral Psalm, needs to be presented in its context.
Though death is a universal result of sin having entered the world, it is not
God’s wrath that ushers one of his beloved saints into heavenly fellowship with
Him.
