Bible verse wall art
Psalm 90: our dwelling place in all generations
The oldest voice in the Psalter, if its title is taken at its word. Psalm 90 sets the brevity of a human life against the eternity of God, and finds a home in the contrast.
Psalm 90 print
Psalm 90 · King James Version
1 Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations.
A prayer of Moses
Psalm 90 is the only psalm headed “A Prayer of Moses the man of God”. It opens the fourth of the five books of Psalms, and its tone suits a man who led a people through forty years in the desert and buried a whole generation there. There is no king, no Temple, no Jerusalem in it. Only God, the mountains, and the passing of time.
What does Psalm 90:1 mean?
“Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations.” For a people who lived in tents and moved from camp to camp, a dwelling place was not a given. The psalm says that their real home was never a location. It was God himself, and he had been that home to their parents and grandparents before them, back to Abraham.
Verse 2 explains why this home will last: “Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.” The oldest thing anyone can see, the mountains, is younger than he is.
Numbering our days
The middle of the psalm is sobering. “For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night” (90:4), a line picked up in 2 Peter 3:8. Human life is like grass that flourishes in the morning and withers by evening. “The days of our years are threescore years and ten” (90:10), seventy years, perhaps eighty.
The response is not despair but a prayer for wisdom: “So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom” (90:12). The psalm closes asking God to establish the work of our hands, so that a short life still leaves something that lasts.
Funerals, hymns and family homes
The Book of Common Prayer appointed Psalm 90 for the burial of the dead, and it is still read at many funerals. Isaac Watts paraphrased it in the hymn “O God, Our Help in Ages Past”, sung at memorials and national services. Verse 1, on its own, is also a blessing for a home: a family gathered around a table or a fire, living under a roof that stands for a far older shelter. It suits a housewarming, a family reunion or the house where grandparents raised their children.