Our Days Are Numbered.....International Sunday School Lesson for November 14, 2010

Our Days Are Numbered…….International Sunday School Lesson for November 14, 2010

Commentary

by

Jed Greenough

Psalm 90:1-12 

A prayer of Moses the man of God.

   

 ¹ Lord, you have been our dwelling place
   throughout all generations.
² Before the mountains were born
   or you brought forth the whole world,
   from everlasting to everlasting you are God.

 ³ You turn people back to dust,
   saying, “Return to dust, you mortals.”
⁴ A thousand years in your sight
   are like a day that has just gone by,
   or like a watch in the night.
⁵ Yet you sweep people away in the sleep of death—
   they are like the new grass of the morning:
⁶ In the morning it springs up new,
   but by evening it is dry and withered.

 ⁷ We are consumed by your anger
   and terrified by your indignation.
⁸ You have set our iniquities before you,
   our secret sins in the light of your presence.
⁹ All our days pass away under your wrath;
   we finish our years with a moan.
¹⁰ Our days may come to seventy years,
   or eighty, if our strength endures;
yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow,
   for they quickly pass, and we fly away.
¹¹ If only we knew the power of your anger!
   Your wrath is as great as the fear that is your due.
¹² Teach us to number our days,
   that we may gain a heart of wisdom.

If you haven’t read it, you may want to go back to the archives and read the lesson from September 19^th of this year.  In that lesson entitled The Golden Calf we read how the people of Israel who had been blessed with so much, had quickly turned to idol worship during the absence of Moses while he was on the mountain with God.

Imagine the pain that Moses, who every day spent all his waking moments and no doubt many of his dreams as well thinking of how to best lead his people, must have felt in coming down the mountain and finding his people engaging in such evil.

God in his anger could have destroyed them but for Moses plea He did not.  God did not destroy them that day but as He says in Exodus 34, “He does not leave the guilty unpunished.”

For Israel that rebellion was not the only one.  God called them a stiff-necked people and they continued to live up to the name and Moses continued to intercede on their behalf.

Finally, their contempt reached a climax at Kadesh (Exodus 13-14) and God vowed that all the people over the age of 20, with a couple exceptions, would not enter the Promised Land but instead would suffer in the desert for 40 years. 

This then is the picture we can have in our mind’s eye when we go back and read today’s scripture again and think of the things that Moses saw being played out in the desert day after day over the course of 40 years.

Moses said, “You turn men back to dust.” And, “You sweep men away….they are like the new grass” that by the evening is “dry and withered.”  “We are consumed by your anger and terrified by your indignation.  You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of your presence.  All our days pass away under your wrath; we finish our years with a moan.”  And finally, “Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”

What do you remember most of your youth?  For most of us, youth is a time of joy and not so much being care-free as being free of care, if you follow me, they don’t even know what care is!

When we are young the world revolves around us so much that when we think about other people it is hard to wrap our minds around the fact that other people have lives too.

It isn’t until we have reached adulthood that most of us start seeing ourselves as one grain of sand on a beach of many and it is from that point on that we seek meaning for our lives.

In my own life the process has led to a regret of years that I didn’t realize that I have a responsibility to you and to all the others that I might reach with the news of God and what it is that He has in store for us. 

If we could somehow impart on the youth and even adults this need to “teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”!

Ecclesiastes 12:1 says, “Remember your Creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come.”

The days of trouble, the days when youth disappears and you realize that you are mortal.  With this realization comes a fear, and with that fear we do begin to gain a heart of wisdom.  The sooner we gain that heart the sooner we can make a difference.

What difference would you make?

Moses, I am sure you would agree, was a servant of God.

Israel, it could be said, was a nation of servants to God.

As you can tell from the weight you can sense in this psalm, much was expected of Moses as a servant in charge.

Now again consider yourself; consider Matthew 24: 45-51

⁴⁵ “Who then is the faithful and wise servant, whom the master has put in charge of the servants in his household to give them their food at the proper time? ⁴⁶ It will be good for that servant whose master finds him doing so when he returns. ⁴⁷ Truly I tell you, he will put him in charge of all his possessions. ⁴⁸ But suppose that servant is wicked and says to himself, ‘My master is staying away a long time,’ ⁴⁹ and he then begins to beat his fellow servants and to eat and drink with drunkards. ⁵⁰ The master of that servant will come on a day when he does not expect him and at an hour he is not aware of. ⁵¹ He will cut him to pieces and assign him a place with the hypocrites, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

We Christians, you and me, are like Moses. We are the servant in charge and our fellow men, like Israel, are our fellow servants.  We have been given a responsibility, a charge, if you will and if we were to write out our prayers, we should sense the weight of that responsibility as we can sense it in today’s psalm.

May God teach us to number our days so that we might all have the wisdom to see this responsibility.

For Discussion:

1. Not everyone with whom you study is at the same place with the fact that they are like grass that withers away.  Keeping in mind this disparity, discuss this fact with your class.
2. Since not all are ready to confront their mortality, is it important to try and impress it upon them?
3. Discuss how we can draw strength from comparing our mortality to God’s immortality.
4. Discuss the value of learning to number our days, i.e. How would you live if you knew you had 30 days left to live?
5. Despite Moses himself having to wander 40 years in the desert, discuss his reward.
6. If you agree with my teaching that we are “servants in charge” with a responsibility to our fellow servants, discuss this need “to give them their food at the proper time.”

(Next week the International Sunday School Lesson for November 14, 2010 will look at Psalm 91:1-6, 9-16)

Scripture taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 Biblica. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.