Psalm 90 (1928 BCP)
Psalm 90 (1928 BCP), Domine, refugium, is appointed at Morning Prayer on the Eighteenth Day in the Psalter of the Book of Common Prayer (1928). The Psalm addresses the eternal God as the dwelling-place of a mortal people. It moves from God's permanence and human frailty, through confession and petition, to a prayer that God make the work of his servants endure.
Prayer Book Text and Daily Office Appointment
LORD, thou hast been our refuge, * from one generation to another. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever the earth and the world were made, * thou art God from everlasting, and world without end. Thou turnest man to destruction; * again thou sayest, Come again, ye children of men. For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, * and as a watch in the night.
The first verse calls God Israel's “refuge,” while the second refuses to measure him by created time. The Prayer Book's daily appointment places this confession at the beginning of the Psalm before its account of mortality. That order matters: the congregation names God's permanence not to escape its creatureliness, but in order to speak truthfully about it.
As soon as thou scatterest them they are even as a sleep; * and fade away suddenly like the grass. In the morning it is green, and groweth up; * but in the evening it is cut down, dried up, and withered. For we consume away in thy displeasure, * and are afraid at thy wrathful indignation. Thou hast set our misdeeds before thee; * and our secret sins in the light of thy countenance.
The grass image gives the Psalm's theology of time a moral seriousness. Human life is brief, but the Psalm does not make death a merely natural abstraction: “secret sins” are set in the light of God's countenance. In public worship this language forms confession without fatalism, because the same God before whom sin is exposed is already invoked as refuge.
Numbering Our Days
For when thou art angry all our days are gone: * we bring our years to an end, as it were a tale that is told. The days of our age are threescore years and ten; and though men be so strong that they come to fourscore years, * yet is their strength then but labour and sorrow; so soon passeth it away, and we are gone. But who regardeth the power of thy wrath? * or feareth aright thy indignation? So teach us to number our days, * that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.
“Threescore years and ten” is not offered as a timetable for every individual life. It belongs to a prayer that asks for a wise heart. To number one's days is therefore neither morbid calculation nor resignation; it is to receive finite life before God and to learn the fitting fear and obedience that finitude requires.
So teach us to number our days, * that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.
The Authorized Version's identical petition helps show that the Prayer Book has not converted the Psalm into a detached meditation on ageing. It remains a direct address to God: wisdom is requested, not claimed. The Daily Office repeatedly returns the Church to this form of dependence.
A Refuge through Changing Generations
As they had always been pilgrims and wanderers, so God was to them instead of a dwelling-place. No doubt, the condition of all men is unstable upon earth; but we know that Abraham and his posterity were, above all others, sojourners, and as it were exiles. Since, then, they wandered in the land of Canaan till they were brought into Egypt, where they lived only by sufferance from day to day, it was necessary for them to seek for themselves a dwelling-place under the shadow of God.
Calvin's reading is historically attentive: the “refuge” is not an escape from the world but God's shelter for a pilgrim people. That emphasis fits the Psalm's plural language—“our refuge,” “our misdeeds,” “teach us”—and helps explain why the Prayer Book gives it to a gathered congregation rather than only to private devotion. At Eighteenth-Day Morning Prayer, the plural is voiced by worshippers who receive their life and labour as a people dependent on God, rather than as separate attempts to master time.
God is here contrasted with created beings, who, as all know, are subject to continual changes, so that there is nothing stable under heaven. As, in a particular manner, nothing is fuller of vicissitude than human life, that men may not judge of the nature of God by their own fluctuating condition, he is here placed in a state of settled and undisturbed tranquillity.
This interpretation does not flatten the Psalm's contrast between Creator and creature. Rather, it draws out the liturgical consequence: those whose days pass may trust the God whose providence, truth, righteousness, and goodness do not fluctuate.
Turn, Satisfy, and Prosper
Turn thee again, O LORD, at the last, * and be gracious unto thy servants. O satisfy us with thy mercy, and that soon: * so shall we rejoice and be glad all the days of our life. Comfort us again now after the time that thou hast plagued us; * and for the years wherein we have suffered adversity. Show thy servants thy work, * and their children thy glory. And the glorious majesty of the LORD our God be upon us: * prosper thou the work of our hands upon us; O prosper thou our handy-work.
The final petition prevents Psalm 90 from ending in bare brevity. It asks God to turn, satisfy, comfort, reveal his work, and establish human work. The language of “thy servants” and “their children” makes the request generational: God's glory is to be shown to the children, while the people's labour is made fruitful only by his favour.
Behold then the eternity that is our refuge, that we may fly there from the mutability of time, there to remain for evermore.
Augustine's theological reading makes the Psalm's contrast a summons to seek in God the permanence that creatures lack. Read alongside the Prayer Book text, that claim is not an invitation to neglect the work of the hands. The Psalm first asks to “apply our hearts unto wisdom,” then asks that the glorious majesty of the Lord rest upon his servants and establish their handiwork. The movement from numbered days to entrusted work keeps contemplation and obedience together: the work may endure only because its prosperity is prayed for as gift rather than possessed as achievement.
See Also
References
- ↑ The Protestant Episcopal Church, The Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church (New York: The Church Pension Fund, 1928), The Psalter, Eighteenth Day, Morning Prayer, Psalm 90, Domine, refugium, verses 1–4; Society of Archbishop Justus transcription.
- ↑ The Protestant Episcopal Church, The Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church (New York: The Church Pension Fund, 1928), The Psalter, Eighteenth Day, Morning Prayer, Psalm 90, Domine, refugium, verses 5–8; Society of Archbishop Justus transcription.
- ↑ The Protestant Episcopal Church, The Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church (New York: The Church Pension Fund, 1928), The Psalter, Eighteenth Day, Morning Prayer, Psalm 90, Domine, refugium, verses 9–12; Society of Archbishop Justus transcription.
- ↑ The Holy Bible, Containing the Old and New Testaments, Authorized (King James) Version (Cambridge: University Press, 1769), Psalm 90:12; Project Gutenberg transcription.
- ↑ John Calvin, Commentary on the Book of Psalms, vol. 3, trans. James Anderson (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1849), Psalm 90:1; Christian Classics Ethereal Library transcription.
- ↑ John Calvin, Commentary on the Book of Psalms, vol. 3, trans. James Anderson (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1849), Psalm 90:2; Christian Classics Ethereal Library transcription.
- ↑ The Protestant Episcopal Church, The Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church (New York: The Church Pension Fund, 1928), The Psalter, Eighteenth Day, Morning Prayer, Psalm 90, Domine, refugium, verses 13–17; Society of Archbishop Justus transcription.
- ↑ Augustine of Hippo, Exposition on Psalm 90, section 3, trans. J. E. Tweed, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 8, ed. Philip Schaff (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1888); New Advent transcription.