Church Write-Up: Two Stories and Psalm 90

Some items from church this morning:

A. The pastor told a story about when he was 21. He was earning money to go to seminary and was working at an ice cream place. His position was management-track, but he started out merely as an employee. As an employee, he got to know the other employees who were younger than him, and they saw him as a big brother. When the ownership of the company changed and he became a manager, however, they stopped seeing him as a big brother, treating him instead as the boss. They learned that he would go to seminary, and that only amplified the problem, for they saw him as too holy for them to be themselves around. The pastor said that many of us are like that with God: we may see God as a friend and a confidant, but we may also feel that God is too distant, too holy, for us to have a relationship with him.

B. Another story the pastor told was about a Concordia basketball game. One of the Concordia basketball players, who was going to seminary, was blowing his top on the field. A mentor to students went up to him and gently whispered in his ear, “Remember who you are.” His point was that the student was a seminarian and should be an example to others. As the pastor said, there is a “law-edge” to this. But the pastor said that we should also remember “whose we are.” This story stands out to me on account of the week that I had. I am glad, on these sorts of weeks, that people do not know that I am a Christian, for I would be giving them a bad impression of what Christians are like.

C. The Sunday school class was about Psalm 90. The Psalm is about human ephemerality in the face of divine eternity. The human ephemerality—-the finitude and the suffering that accompanies it—-is due to divine judgment on the human race and on creation. In the midst of this, however, is God’s love and mercy, and we can take refuge in that. Something that stood out to me this morning was how, from what the pastor was saying, it seems that Christians are experiencing different dispensations at once. We still suffer God’s wrath because we suffer and die. We still have to deal with God’s law because it informs us when we are going something wrong, tries to restrain us, and tells us what we deserve. But God’s mercy, grace, and love also exist for Christians. The pastor talked about eternity and how it may be more of a realm than endless time: Jesus reigns in eternity, while earth still trudges along in sin and under wrath. Yet, in the service, the pastor was saying that Jesus’s ascension, in a sense, makes him even more present in creation.

D. I was curious about Psalm 90:10, which places the human lifespan at 70-80 years. How can that be, when life expectancy was low back then? You look at the lives of the kings of Israel and Judah, and many of them die at age 40. I looked at some commentaries. The Word Biblical Commentary states: “Traditionally understood as a statement of the typical life expectancy of human beings, which seems unrealistic by normal patterns of life in the ancient world. Conditional clauses in 10a and 10b seem more plausible. The subject of the verse is clearly the ephemerality of even a long human life, as 10c and 10d make clear.” That could be. I wonder, though, if the long ages that are attributed to the patriarchs, and even to Moses, may be relevant. Back in the nebulous old days, the thinking went, people lived for a long time; that may not have been true, but that is what they thought. The Psalm, in this context, may be a Mosaic pseudepigrapha. I looked at an old post that I wrote about Psalm 90 and found this about the 70-80 years: “Another approach is to apply Psalm 90 to God’s punishment of Israel in the wilderness—-God’s declaration that she will wander forty years in the wilderness, and that only her children will enter the Promised Land. In this scenario, the Psalmist’s declaration in v 10 that people live seventy or eighty years is Moses reflecting on how the wilderness generation will die without entering the Promised Land. According to this logic, much of the wilderness generation was around the age of 30 when it was cursed—-the time of adulthood—-and it died forty years later, at age 70. Moreover, according to Mowinckel, the scribe who attributed Psalm 90 to Moses thought that v 16’s prayer for the children related to the children inheriting the Promised Land.”