This fragile grass

My husband is a substitute teacher, and one recent snowy day he went to the tiny rural school at Palisades, about a 40-minute drive from here. It’s at the end of a narrow coulee carved long ago in the Ice Age. Part of the coulee has been scrubbed of sagebrush for alfalfa fields and orchards. Coming home from teaching, he passed dozens of deer foraging where they could. Going back up there the other day, we counted probably five dozen, chewing what they could out of the frozen turf.

I’d been thinking a lot about Psalm 90 recently, and those hungry deer reminded me of verse 5: “You sweep men away in the sleep of death; they are like the new grass of the morning—though in the morning it springs up new, by evening it is dry and withered.”

Talk about a downer verse! A little background may help. This is the only song by Moses included in the book of Psalms. Though he wrote other songs (like the epic one in Deuteronomy 32), this one must have been significant enough to pick for an ancient hymnal largely featuring the songs of King David.

We’re not told when he wrote it, but I imagine it was near the end of his life as the Israelites finished forty years of wandering before entering the Promised Land. Moses wouldn’t go with them, a consequence of dishonoring God with a temper tantrum at Meribah (Numbers 20). Plus, as judgment on unbelief and cowardice after spies checked out Canaan, all but two who left Egypt (the believing spies, Joshua and Caleb) would miss out on the Promised Land. Thousands of graves dotted the landscape of their wanderings around the Sinai. Now only descendants remained.

If I were in Moses’ sandals, I probably would have said this, too: “All our days pass away under your wrath: we finish our years with a moan” (v. 9).

Psalm 90 has been on my mind in part because of people we care about “finishing their years.” In some cases, it’s been when they’re too young¸ like a talented violinist who befriended my daughter at college. She married a widower with child, had two more children with him, and is now gone in her thirties—of colon cancer. A friend our age is slipping away with ALS. Another couple we know nearly lost their son to a dying heart until a heart transplant gave him extra years. He married, and last week his wife (age 36) had her life turned upside down by strokes.

Three weeks ago I helped an older friend with Alzheimer’s navigate the curb to a car; her funeral is Friday. This week someone died as a result of an accident barely a block away in early December. I remember coming home at dusk after my walk and seeing the red lights of emergency vehicles just beyond my street. A 79-year-old man who lived alone in a little cottage was struck when he jay-walked across the street. He was walking home from the grocery store, as he had done hundreds of times—sometimes nodding to my “hi” when we passed. The police markers of where he landed reminded me how life can change in an instant. I could sing a duet with Moses: “Relent, O Lord! How long will it be? Have compassion on your servants!” (v. 13).

Psalm 90 has this discouraging “you-live-and-then-you-die” tone to it—unless you hear the “Hallelujah Chorus” ringing behind stanzas like this: “Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love, that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days” (v. 14). In this I hear echoes of the Westminster confession: “The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.”

Moses would have had a different song if he knew what we now know: that Jesus changes things. And that includes death. Our earthly bodies may be as grass, vulnerable to the day’s heat and dryness (or to the nibbling of starved deer). But Christ has “destroyed death and has brought life and immorality to light through the gospel” (2 Timothy 1:10). We have the assurance that “to live is Christ and to die is gain” (Philippians 1:21) and being with Him in Heaven will be better by far (v. 23).

Moses almost got it all correct. “May the favor of the Lord our God rest upon us,” he wrote (90:17)—and indeed it does, for those who believe in Christ, and who express that through growing love and service in His name, for however many days allotted on this planet. And then, for God’s children—better by far!