It is not terribly strange to describe one’s life based upon where one is located. For years I was myself an Alaskan, with Texan, Seattleite, and Angeleno family. I suppose I am now a Virginian. The association is so pervasive that even while not having lived in Alaska for nearly seven years, I still think of myself as an Alaskan. But a place is a place, not a person. The very notion is absurd. So, when Moses says that his dwelling place is not a place, but a person, we should take notice. Here we have an opportunity to eavesdrop on a prayer that Moses makes to his dwelling place. I have never prayed to Alaska, which is an Aleut word for great land or great peninsula.
When we read a psalm we must reflect a great deal on the first one or two verses. In the case of Psalm 90, one verse is all we need to learn the message of the psalm, namely, that Moses finds his entire identity floating around in the character of God. Who God is, is who Moses is. John Calvin opens his Institutes of the Christian Religion with the contemplation that knowing God is essential to knowing oneself: “without knowledge of God there is no knowledge of self” (37). In Psalm 90 Moses is clear that his life, and the life of his generation, and the life of every generation, has been lived somehow within the boundaries of God’s own character.
In at least eleven verses, from verse 2 to verse 12, Moses eloquently reflects upon the nature of who God is. May I suggest that you imagine for a moment how old Moses must be at this time? He writes like an old man (if I may be forgiven this discourtesy). If you merely scan these verses quickly, you cannot help but hear the mention of thousands of years, morning and evening, agricultural seasons of death, reference to all our days, years of life, the numbering of our days, on and on. So rambles the agéd Moses as he describes the character of God. God, apparently, is older than Moses, certainly older than the 70 or 80 years allotted to humankind.
For a man who has seen a lot, he hasn’t gone far. Perhaps you know people who never left their hometown. They live in the same city in which they were born, occasionally and unintentionally, driving by the hospital where they were born, their first playground, the school where they attended kindergarten, their childhood home. Imagine the 70 or 80 years of verse 10 all being spent within a two mile radius. The poet, Moses, tells us that he never left the dwelling place of God’s character. His self was always surrounded by God’s self. His self never roamed free or worked remotely from the care and provision of who God is.
And so we join him in praying, “Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations.”
John F. Jones
King's Cross Senior Pastor
