1 Lord, a dwelling-place hast Thou been for us
In generation after generation.
2 Before the mountains were born,
Or Thou gavest birth to the earth and the world,
Even from everlasting, Thou art God.
3 Thou turnest frail man back to dust,
And sayest, "Return, ye sons of man."
4 For a thousand years in Thine eyes are as yesterday when it was
passing,
And a watch in the night.
5 Thou dost flood them away, a sleep do they become,
In the morning they are like grass [which] springs afresh.
6 In the morning it blooms and springs afresh,
By evening it is cut down and withers.
7 For we are wasted away in Thine anger,
And by Thy wrath have we been panic-struck.
8 Thou hast set our iniquities before Thee,
Our secret [sins] in the radiance of Thy face.
9 For all our days have vanished in Thy wrath,
We have spent our years as a murmur.
10 The days of our years--in them are seventy years,
Or if [we are] in strength, eighty years,
And their pride is [but] trouble and vanity,
For it is passed swiftly, and we fly away.
11 Who knows the power of Thine anger,
And of Thy wrath according to the [due] fear of Thee?
12 To number our days--thus teach us,
That we may win ourselves a heart of wisdom.
13 Return, Jehovah; how long?
And have compassion upon Thy servants.
14 Satisfy us in the morning [with] Thy loving-kindness,
And we shall ring out joyful cries and be glad all our days.
15 Gladden us according to the days [when] Thou hast afflicted us,
The years [when] we have seen adversity.
16 To Thy servants let Thy working be manifested,
And Thy majesty upon their children.
17 And let the graciousness of the Lord our God be upon us,
And the work of our hands establish upon us,
Yea, the work of our hands establish it.
The sad and stately music of this great psalm befits the dirge of a
world. How artificial and poor, beside its restrained emotion and
majestic simplicity, do even the most deeply felt strains of other
poets on the same themes sound! It preaches man's mortality in immortal
words. In its awestruck yet trustful gaze on God's eternal being, in
its lofty sadness, in its archaic directness, in its grand images so
clearly cut and so briefly expressed, in its emphatic recognition of
sin as the occasion of death, and in its clinging to the eternal God
who can fill fleeting days with ringing gladness, the psalm utters once
for all the deepest thoughts of devout men. Like the God whom it hymns,
it has been "for generation after generation" an asylum.
The question of its authorship has a literary interest, but little
more. The arguments against the Mosaic authorship, apart from
those derived from the as yet unsettled questions in regard to the
Pentateuch, are weak. The favourite one, adduced by Cheyne after
Hupfeld and others, is that the duration of human life was greater,
according to the history, in Moses' time than seventy years; but
the prolonged lives of certain conspicuous persons in that period
do not warrant a conclusion as to the average length of life; and
the generation that fell in the wilderness can clearly not have
lived beyond the psalmist's limit. The characteristic Mosaic tone in
regarding death as the wages of sin, the massive simplicity and the
entire absence of dependence on other parts of the Psalter, which
separate this psalm from almost all the others of the Fourth Book, are
strongly favourable to the correctness of the superscription. Further,
the section vv. 7-12 is distinctly historical, and is best understood
as referring not to mankind in general, but to Israel; and no period
is so likely to have suggested such a strain of thought as that when
the penalty of sin was laid upon the people, and they were condemned to
find graves in the wilderness. But however the question of authorship
may be settled, the psalm is "not of an age, but for all time."
It falls into three parts, of which the two former contain six
verses each, while the last has but five. In the first section (vv.
1-6), the transitoriness of men is set over against the eternity of
God; in the second, (vv. 7-12) that transitoriness is traced to its
reason, namely sin; and in the third, prayer that God would visit His
servants is built upon both His eternity and their fleeting days.
The short ver. 1 blends both the thoughts which are expanded in the
following verses, while in it the singer breathes awed contemplation
of the eternal God as the dwelling-place or asylum of generations
that follow each other, swift and unremembered, as the waves that
break on some lonely shore. God is invoked as "Lord," the sovereign
ruler, the name which connotes His elevation and authority. But,
though lofty, He is not inaccessible. As some ancestral home shelters
generation after generation of a family, and in its solid strength
stands unmoved, while one after another of its somewhile tenants is
borne forth to his grave, and the descendants sit in the halls where
centuries before their ancestors sat, God is the home of all who find
any real home amidst the fluctuating nothings of this shadowy world.
The contrast of His eternity and our transiency is not bitter, though
it may hush us into wisdom, if we begin with the trust that He is the
abiding abode of short-lived man. For this use of _dwelling-place_
compare Deut. xxxiii. 27.
What God has been to successive generations results from what He is in
Himself before all generations. So ver. 2 soars to the contemplation
of His absolute eternity, stretching boundless on either side of "this
bank and shoal of time"--"From everlasting to everlasting Thou art
God"; and in that name is proclaimed His self-derived strength, which,
being eternal, is neither derived from nor diminished by time, that
first gives to, and then withdraws from, all creatures their feeble
power. The remarkable expressions for the coming forth of the material
world from the abyss of Deity regard creation as a birth. The Hebrew
text reads in ver. 2_b_ as above, "Thou gavest birth to"; but a very
small change in a single vowel gives the possibly preferable reading
which preserves the parallelism of a passive verb in both clauses, "Or
the earth and the world were brought forth."
The poet turns now to the other member of his antithesis. Over
against God's eternal Being is set the succession of man's
generations, which has been already referred to in ver. 1. This
thought of successiveness is lost unless ver. 3_b_ is understood as
the creative fiat which replaces by a new generation those who have
been turned back to dust. Death and life, decay and ever-springing
growth, are in continual alternation. The leaves, which are men,
drop; the buds swell and open. The ever-knitted web is being ever
run down and woven together again. It is a dreary sight, unless one
can say with our psalm, "_Thou_ turnest.... _Thou_ sayest, Return."
Then one understands that it is not aimless or futile. If a living
Person is behind the transiencies of human life, these are still
pathetic and awe-kindling, but not bewildering. In ver. 3_a_ there is
clear allusion to Gen. iii. 19. The word rendered "dust" may be an
adjective taken as neuter = _that which is crushed_, _i.e._ dust; or,
as others suppose, a substantive = _crushing_; but is probably best
understood in the former sense. The psalm significantly uses the word
for _man_ which connotes frailty, and in _b_ the expression "sons of
man" which suggests birth.
The psalmist rises still higher in ver. 4. It is much to say that
God's Being is endless, but it is more to say that He is raised above
Time, and that none of the terms in which men describe duration have
any meaning for Him. A thousand years, which to a man seem so long,
are to Him dwindled to nothing, in comparison with the eternity
of His Being. As Peter has said, the converse must also be true,
and "one day be with the Lord as a thousand years." He can crowd a
fulness of action into narrow limits. Moments can do the work of
centuries. The longest and shortest measures of time are absolutely
equivalent, for both are entirely inapplicable, to His timeless
Being. But what has this great thought to do here, and how is the
"For" justified? It may be that the psalmist is supporting the
representation of ver. 2, God's eternity, rather than that of ver.
3, man's transiency; but, seeing that this verse is followed by one
which strikes the same note as ver. 3, it is more probable that here,
too, the dominant thought is the brevity of human life. It never
seems so short, as when measured against God's timeless existence.
So, the underlying thought of ver. 3, namely, the brevity of man's
time, which is there illustrated by the picture of the endless flux
of generations, is here confirmed by the thought that all measures of
time dwindle to equal insignificance with Him.
The psalmist next takes his stand on the border-moment between to-day
and yesterday. How short looks the day that is gliding away into the
past! "A watch in the night" is still shorter to our consciousness,
for it passes over us unnoted.
The passing of mortal life has hitherto been contemplated in immediate
connection with God's permanence, and the psalmist's tone has been
a wonderful blending of melancholy and trust. But in ver. 5 the
sadder side of his contemplations becomes predominant. Frail man,
frail because sinful, is his theme. The figures which set forth man's
mortality are grand in their unelaborated brevity. They are like some
of Michael Angelo's solemn statues. "Thou floodest them away"--a bold
metaphor, suggesting the rush of a mighty stream, bearing on its tawny
bosom crops, household goods, and corpses, and hurrying with its spoils
to the sea. "They become a sleep." Some would take this to mean falling
into the sleep of death; others would regard life as compared to a
sleep--"for before we are rightly conscious of being alive, we cease
to live" (Luther, quoted by Cheyne); while others find the point of
comparison in the disappearance, without leaving a trace behind, of
the noisy generations, sunk at once into silence, and "occupying no
more space on the scroll of Time than a night's sleep" (so Kay). It is
tempting to attach "in the morning" to "a sleep," but the recurrence
of the expression in ver. 7 points to the retention of the present
division of clauses, according to which the springing grass greets
the eye at dawn, as if created by a night's rain. The word rendered
"springs afresh" is taken in two opposite meanings, being by some
rendered _passes away_, and by others as above. Both meanings come from
the same radical notion of change, but the latter is evidently the
more natural and picturesque here, as preserving, untroubled by any
intrusion of an opposite thought, the cheerful picture of the pastures
rejoicing in the morning sunshine, and so making more impressive the
sudden, sad change wrought by evening, when all the fresh green blades
and bright flowers lie turned already into brown hay by the mower's
scythe and the fierce sunbeams.
"So passeth, in the passing of an hour,
Of mortal life, the leaf, the bud, the flower."
The central portion of the psalm (vv. 7-12) narrows the circle of
the poet's vision to Israel, and brings out the connection between
death and sin. The transition from truths of universal application is
marked by the use of _we_ and _us_, while the past tenses indicate
that the psalm is recounting history. That transitoriness assumes
a still more tragic aspect, when regarded as the result of the
collision of God's "wrath" with frail man. How can such stubble but
be wasted into ashes by such fire? And yet this is the same psalmist
who has just discerned that the unchanging Lord is the dwelling-place
of all generations. The change from the previous thought of the
eternal God as the dwelling-place of frail men is very marked in this
section, in which the destructive anger of God is in view. But the
singer felt no contradiction between the two thoughts, and there is
none. We do not understand the full blessedness of believing that God
is our asylum, till we understand that He is our asylum from all that
is destructive in Himself; nor do we know the significance of the
universal experience of decay and death, till we learn that it is not
the result of our finite being, but of sin.
That one note sounds on in solemn persistence through these verses,
therein echoing the characteristic Mosaic lesson, and corresponding
with the history of the people in the desert. In ver. 7 the cause
of their wasting away is declared to be God's wrath, which has
scattered them as in panic (Psalm xlviii. 5). The occasion of that
lightning flash of anger is confessed in ver. 8 to be the sins
which, however hidden, stand revealed before God. The expression for
"the light of Thy face" is slightly different from the usual one,
a word being employed which means a luminary, and is used in Gen.
i. for the heavenly bodies. The ordinary phrase is always used as
expressing favour and blessing; but there is an illumination, as from
an all-revealing light, which flashes into all dark corners of human
experience, and "there is nothing hid from the heat thereof." Sin
smitten by that light must die. Therefore, in ver. 9, the consequence
of its falling on Israel's transgressions is set forth. Their days
vanish as mists before the sun, or as darkness glides out of the
sky in the morning. Their noisy years are but as a murmur, scarce
breaking the deep silence, and forgotten as soon as faintly heard.
The psalmist sums up his sad contemplations in ver. 10, in which
life is regarded as not only rigidly circumscribed within a poor
seventy or, at most, eighty years, but as being, by reason of its
transitoriness, unsatisfying and burdensome. The "pride" which is
but trouble and vanity is that which John calls "the pride of life,"
the objects which, apart from God, men desire to win, and glory in
possessing. The self-gratulation would be less ridiculous or tragic,
if the things which evoke it lasted longer, or we lasted longer to
possess them. But seeing that they swiftly pass and we fly too,
surely it is but "trouble" to fight for what is "vanity" when won,
and what melts away so surely and soon.
Plainly, then, things being so, man's wisdom is to seek to know two
things--the power of God's anger, and the measure of his own days.
But alas for human levity and bondage to sense, how few look beyond
the external, or lay to heart the solemn truth that God's wrath is
inevitably operative against sin, and how few have any such just
conception of it as to lead to reverential awe, proportioned to the
Divine character which should evoke it! Ignorance and inoperative
knowledge divide mankind between them, and but a small remnant have
let the truth plough deep into their inmost being and plant there
holy fear of God. Therefore, the psalmist prays for himself and his
people, as knowing the temptations to inconsiderate disregard and to
inadequate feeling of God's opposition to sin, that His power would
take untaught hearts in hand and teach them this--to count their
days. Then we shall bring home, as from a ripened harvest field,
the best fruit which life can yield, "a heart of wisdom," which,
having learned the power of God's anger, and the number of our days,
turns itself to the eternal dwelling-place, and no more is sad, when
it sees life ebbing away, or the generations moving in unbroken
succession into the darkness.
The third part (vv. 13-17) gathers all the previous meditations into
a prayer, which is peculiarly appropriate to Israel in the wilderness,
but has deep meaning for all God's servants. We note the invocation of
God by the covenant name "Jehovah," as contrasted with the "Lord" of
ver. 1. The psalmist draws nearer to God, and feels the closer bond of
which that name is the pledge. His prayer is the more urgent, by reason
of the brevity of life. So short is his time that he cannot afford to
let God delay in coming to him and to his fellows. "How long?" comes
pathetically from lips which have been declaring that their time of
speech is so short. This is not impatience, but wistful yearning,
which, even while it yearns, leaves God to settle His own time, and,
while it submits, still longs. Night has wrapped Israel, but the
psalmist's faith "awakes the morning," and he prays that its beams may
soon dawn and Israel be satisfied with the longed-for loving-kindness
(compare Psalm xxx. 5); for life at its longest is but brief, and he
would fain have what remains of it be lit with sunshine from God's
face. The only thing that will secure life-long gladness is a heart
satisfied with the experience of God's love. That will make morning in
mirk midnight; that will take all the sorrow out of the transiency of
life. The days which are filled with God are long enough to satisfy us;
and they who have Him for their own will be "full of days," whatever
the number of these may be.
The psalmist believes that God's justice has in store for His
servants joys and blessings proportioned to the duration of their
trials. He is not thinking of any future beyond the grave; but his
prayer is a prophecy, which is often fulfilled even in this life and
always hereafter. Sorrows rightly borne here are factors determining
the glory that shall follow. There is a proportion between the
years of affliction and the millenniums of glory. But the final
prayer, based upon all these thoughts of God's eternity and man's
transitoriness, is not for blessedness, but for vision and Divine
favour on work done for Him. The deepest longing of the devout heart
should be for the manifestation to itself and others of God's work.
The psalmist is not only asking that God would put forth His acts
in interposition for himself and his fellow-servants, but also that
the full glory of these far-reaching deeds may be disclosed to their
understandings as well as experienced in their lives. And since he
knows that "through the ages an increasing purpose runs," he prays
that coming generations may see even more glorious displays of Divine
power than his contemporaries have done. How the sadness of the
thought of fleeting generations succeeded by new ones vanishes when
we think of them all as, in turn, spectators and possessors of God's
"work"! But in that great work we are not to be mere spectators.
Fleeting as our days are, they are ennobled by our being permitted
to be God's tools; and if "the work of our hands" is the reflex or
carrying on of His working, we can confidently ask that, though we
the workers have to pass, it may be "established." "In our embers"
may be "something that doth live," and that life will not all die
which has done the will of God, but it and its doer will "endure for
ever." Only there must be the descent upon us of "the graciousness"
of God, before there can flow from us "deeds which breed not shame,"
but outlast the perishable earth and follow their doers into the
eternal dwelling-place. The psalmist's closing prayer reaches further
than he knew. Lives on which the favour of God has come down like a
dove, and in which His will has been done, are not flooded away, nor
do they die into silence like a whisper, but carry in themselves the
seeds of immortality, and are akin to the eternity of God.