Psalms 90:10

Then comes the repeated statement of man's emptiness. The experience has now shrunk from near a thousand years to seventy or eighty. In that span man's pride, if it lasts that long, ends in hard labour. Soon cut off indeed, we fly away.

Seventy years were the ordinary measure of his days. This, we may notice, applied especially to the people among whom Moses moved in the wilderness. That word covered everyone counted from twenty years old and upward: "Your dead bodies shall fall in this wilderness" (Num. 14:29). So those who were in their prime at thirty when they left Egypt cannot have lived beyond seventy, apart from Caleb and Joshua. It is remarkable that God used a man who lived to a hundred and twenty to declare seventy to be man's days. When he died at that age he was still full of vigour.

Long afterwards — and there was wisdom in the arrangement — when man's age began to be shortened to its present limit, God made a written revelation. Faith sees divine wisdom where unbelief mocks. Do you not see? At the very point where Scripture says man's age was shortened to seventy years (Ps. 90), God first used Moses, the man of God, to write this word down.

It may be that through strength our years are stretched beyond the allotted span of seventy, but even then, the strength we are proud of, and the years we boast in, will only bring labour and emptiness.

God may give some the strength to live 80 years, yet the extra years come with "toil and trouble." In other words, nothing here encourages us to wish for a longer life. That is especially true for someone redeemed by the blood of Christ, who is glad at the prospect of entering the Lord's presence. At any rate, "they are soon gone, and we fly away." Some do live past 100, but however long life is, it is still short!

But why is man so frail, so mortal? Because he has fallen under God's displeasure. It is not an unreasonable accident that he is in this state. He was not created this way. It is simply and only that anger and wrath from God rest on him. This is a hard saying, but a true one. It is the only explanation of the sad condition man is in.

We are only the weak, dying children of Adam, and we gain much by simply recognising that fact. As long as we do not count our days correctly, we imagine ourselves to be something other than what we are. Then we give our hearts to pleasure or money-making or sport or a hundred and one things of little importance. When we count our days correctly and see the state we are in, we give our hearts to wisdom. And the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord. But we have to ask God to teach us this, for we will not do it on our own.

The conclusion, then, is this. If we are living up to the height of our heavenly calling, we will not regret the swift flight of years. Nor will we grieve at the prospect of death, if the Lord delays. If we are not on guard, we can soon sink to the level of the Jewish saint when the close of a year reminds us of times and seasons. May the Lord help us instead to live in His presence, and to have Himself filling our hearts, so that, dying daily, we are already living beyond death the life of heaven.