This is the only psalm that carries the name of Moses, and its position matters as much as its author. It opens the fourth book of the Psalter, right after Psalm 89's unanswered cry over the apparent collapse of David's throne. The Psalter reaches back past the whole monarchy to the man who knew God before any king existed, and Moses relocates hope onto the one dwelling place that never fell.
1"Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations." Kingdoms rise and fall, and thrones get dragged in the dust as the previous psalm described, but this dwelling place has never needed rebuilding. 2"from everlasting to everlasting you are God." Every measure of time a person can reach, the mountains and the earth itself, did not exist yet when this God already was God.
Against that backdrop human life is measured honestly. 3"You return man to dust." 4"a thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday." Then an image that has outlived every generation since. 6"in the evening it fades and withers." One day holds the whole shape of a human life, green at dawn and withered by dusk.
Moses will not let this brevity pass as ordinary decay. Our days pass away under God's wrath, and a creature made to live was never meant to crumble back into dust. Death is not a neutral fact. Then the plainest accounting in Scripture. 10"The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty." No monument built by human hands was ever going to outlast the wrath this psalm describes.
Then the request: 12"teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom." The word behind "number" carries the sense of weighing or evaluating rightly, reckoning what each day is worth and not only how many remain. Wisdom, on the psalm's own logic, begins where mortality is taken seriously and no longer quietly denied.
Then the appeal. 13"Return, O LORD! How long?" It is the same cry that closed Psalm 89 without an answer, aimed now at the God who was Israel's dwelling place long before any throne existed to fail. 14"Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love." Morning carries weight here. It is the hour the grass flourished before its evening withering, and now it is the hour God's steadfast love is asked to arrive fresh, a mercy new enough to answer an old grief each time it comes due.
The psalm closes with a request for the work of the hands. 17"establish the work of our hands upon us." Moses asks that whatever his seventy or eighty years produce would last, established and not swept away like the grass and the flood. The New Testament answers further than Moses could have guessed, promising that labor in the Lord is not in vain (1 Corinthians 15:58), a hope reaching past the grave the psalm describes so plainly.
Count your days this morning the way he asks. Weigh one of them, and ask what it is worth to the one who has been your dwelling place.
Prayer
Father, you have been our dwelling place in every generation, before any throne we have leaned on existed and long after each has fallen. Teach us to number our days by weighing them, so that wisdom takes root in us. Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, and establish the work of our hands, so that whatever brief years we are given are built into something that lasts. In Jesus' name, amen.