Psalms Book 4 (Psalms 90-106)Sample

The horror of standing before the eternal holy God

Psalm 90 heads up the collection and is a profound cry for help in the face of the Lord’s wrath at sin. When we look at its ‘partner-opposite,’ Psalm 106, the final psalm, we find a long, detailed historical recitation of the sin of the Lord’s people as they repeatedly and continuously break God’s covenant law. Both psalms address the same issue from different perspectives, and together, they bookend the sequence and set the tone for the whole collection.

Psalm 90 is entitled, ‘A prayer of Moses, the man of God.’ It is truly one of the most astonishing passages in the whole Bible. The fundamental issue is that Moses had an anger problem. He killed an Egyptian. He fought with shepherds. He was furious with Pharaoh. He was often angry with the Israelites, and later in the desert, the Lord barred Moses from entering the promised land because he lost his temper and hit the rock in a way that dishonoured the Lord. In Psalm 90, we touch something in Moses’ heart of the horror and pitiful pleading at the brevity of human life in the face of the everlasting, eternal holiness of the Lord the Creator.

Psalm 106, the final psalm, does something very similar. It is a long, detailed recitation of the history of the Lord’s people and how, again and again, they not only failed to obey his covenant but completely rejected him.

The psalm reaches a crescendo in a horrifying description of what they did …

… they sacrificed their sons and their daughters to false gods.

… They shed innocent blood, the blood of their sons and daughters, whom they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan, and the land was desecrated by their blood.

… They defiled themselves by what they did; by their deeds they prostituted themselves.’ V37-39.

Is it possible to imagine such a thing? Killing your own little baby in child sacrifice to a pagan idol. The idea is utterly unthinkable.

We touch something of the final words of Mr. Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s book ‘The heart of darkness’, … ‘the horror, the horror …’

These two psalms set the question: How will God respond? How will he come to us? Will he even take any notice? And if he does come, do we want to meet him? In the pitiful wretchedness of our human sin and failure, is it not a very dangerous thing to approach the everlasting, eternal, holy God?