From Everlasting To Everlasting

This is the only psalm in the whole book whose heading names Moses, and that detail changes how I read it. By tradition Moses’ long life fell into roughly equal stretches: years in Egypt, years away in Midian, and the wilderness years leading a frightened, complaining people. The book of Acts records those spans as forty, forty and forty (Acts 7:23, 30, 36), though the Pentateuch itself does not pause to count them out that neatly.

What I do trust completely is that Moses had watched a whole generation die before reaching the land they had been promised (Numbers 14:29 to 35). So when he opens his mouth here he is not theorising about time. He is a man well used to grief and to funerals. A few verses on, he asks God to teach us to number our days (Psalm 90:12). Yet notice where he starts. Not with death, but with God before anything was. He steadies himself on the oldest fact there is before he dares to look squarely at the shortest one. That order is not accidental, and I think it is meant to teach us something about where to put our feet first.

It is easy to read the word ‘everlasting’ and only think forwards, as if the point were that God will never stop. But Moses says ‘from everlasting to everlasting’, and that first everlasting looks the other way. God did not begin. Before the mountains were born, before the earth was given any shape, he simply was. The Hebrew is striking here: it uses the language of birth for the mountains, as though even the oldest hills were brought into being while God was already there.

There is a quiet logic in the order of the verse, too. Moses moves from the mountains to the earth to the world, and only then lands on the words ‘you are God’. He clears away every old, solid thing we might lean on until nothing is left standing but God himself. And notice the tense. Not ‘you were God’ once, long ago, but ‘you are God’. His eternity is not a far-off past that has nothing to do with me. It presses right up against the present moment I am living in. He is God now with the same settledness he had before the first mountain ever rose.

This way of thinking about God runs all through Scripture, and it tends to surface when people are at the end of their strength. Isaiah, speaking to exiles who felt forgotten, calls God the everlasting One who never grows faint or weary (Isaiah 40:28). Another psalm sets God’s permanence against a wearing-out creation: the heavens perish and are changed like a worn garment, but God remains and his years have no end (Psalm 102:25 to 27).

That second passage is the very one the letter to the Hebrews takes up and applies directly to Jesus (Hebrews 1:10 to 12). So the eternity Moses prays about is not a vague attribute floating above us. It has a face. The One who was before the mountains is the One who calls himself the Alpha and the Omega (Revelation 1:8). I find that the God I am asked to trust with my few uncertain years is the very God who has no edges at all, the One without beginning who nonetheless stepped into time to meet me inside it. That is a long way from a cold idea about infinity.

I have sat with people in hospital side rooms who suddenly grasped, in a way they never had before, how few their days were. And I have felt the smaller versions of it myself: a birthday that lands harder than I expected, a friend’s funeral, an old photograph where the children are suddenly taller than the last time I looked properly. The honest response is not to pretend any of that stops stinging. Moses does not pretend. He weighs the shortness of life and names it.

What helps me is that he weighs it against something rather than nothing. The comfort here is not that my life is long, because it plainly is not. It is that the God I belong to is. When I cannot hold on to the years, he holds on to me, and he was holding the whole world before I arrived and will go on holding it after I am gone. That takes the weight off my own grip. I do not have to be the permanent thing in my family or my work. On the days when everything feels like it is slipping, I am learning to stop grabbing and simply lean back into the oldest, steadiest fact there is.

Two verses on, Moses sets two clocks side by side. To God, he says, a thousand years go by like yesterday once it is over, or like a single watch in the night (Psalm 90:4). A whole millennium, the kind of span that swallows empires, is to the eternal One no more than a short stretch of sleep. Then he turns the other clock towards us. Our years come to seventy, or eighty if we are strong, and even those are mostly trouble before they are gone (Psalm 90:10).

I used to find that contrast crushing, as if it were meant to shrink me to nothing. Sit with it longer, though, and something kinder shows through. Moses is not mocking how small we are. He is telling me which clock to trust. I panic over a delayed answer, a slow year, a season that drags. The God who counts a thousand years as one short night is not flustered by any of it. My waiting is real, but it is held inside a patience far older and steadier than mine.

You might expect Moses to follow all this with a shrug. If my life is a vanishing breath against an eternal God, why should a single day count? Yet he reaches the opposite conclusion. Teach us to number our days, he prays, so that we might grow wise in heart (Psalm 90:12). The shortness is not an excuse to drift. It is the reason to live awake.

That order matters to me. Eternity does not make my few years meaningless. It makes them precious. A day I will never get back, lived under a God who does not pass away, is worth weighing carefully. And Moses does not stop at sober counting. He ends the psalm asking God to make the work of our hands last (Psalm 90:17). My days are brief, but they are not thrown away. Handed to the everlasting One, even small and ordinary work can be caught up into something that outlives me. So I am learning to hold today loosely and seriously at once: loosely, because it is not mine to keep, and seriously, because the One who keeps it is.

I have watched this verse dragged into the young earth argument more times than I can count, propped up as though ‘before the mountains were born, before you had formed the earth’ handed somebody a date for a layer of rock. It does not. Moses is not doing geology here, or chronology either. He is worshipping, in a very particular way: naming what is older than the oldest thing you can point at. Whatever age the mountains turn out to be, the verse works exactly as it did, because the comparison was never the earth measured against a number. It is Creator against created. Make it ammunition and you have taken a prayer, turned it into a chess piece, and asked Moses a question he never asked.

The gentler misuse is the fridge magnet. ‘From everlasting to everlasting’ lifted out clean, set in a nice font, hung somewhere sunny, while the psalm it came from spends more of its verses on wrath and dust than on reassurance. The line is still true on the magnet. It is just doing about a tenth of the work Moses gave it.

Preach the psalm rather than the verse and you cannot stop at verse 2, tempting as that is. Verse 1 gives belonging, verse 2 gives the God we belong to, and then comes our shortness: dust, and grass that springs up in the morning and is withered by evening (Psalm 90:5 to 6). Most talks I have heard get that far and stop, because that is where it still feels bearable.

Fewer go on into verses 7 to 11, where Moses says our days are consumed in God’s anger and our secret sins are set in the light of his presence (Psalm 90:8). That is the hinge of the whole thing. Moses is not merely sad that life is short. He has a reason for why it feels so heavy, and he lays it at the door of sin and judgement before he asks God for a single thing. I have skipped that stretch on a Sunday morning and knew perfectly well I was doing it, and the comfort I offered afterwards came cheap. Give verses 7 to 11 five honest minutes and let the room sit in it. Verse 2 lands very differently on people who have just been told the truth about themselves.

I would put this verse early in a service: a call to worship, or the whole psalm read at a watchnight or New Year gathering, when a congregation is already standing at the edge of one stretch of time looking into the next. It earns its keep there, because everyone in the room is counting anyway. A baptism works too, or the retirement of someone who has served for decades. Anywhere the point is continuity across generations rather than one life lasting, since verse 1 calls God our dwelling place for all generations, plural, the whole church and not just me.

Where I would not reach for it is the afternoon of a diagnosis, or the raw week after a funeral. I have tried it and watched it land like a change of subject. The person in that chair does not need a fact about eternity handed over as a solution. They need somebody still sitting there at nine o’clock when the tea has gone cold. Give it a fortnight. The verse will keep. It is older than the mountains.

Psalm 89 spends most of its length celebrating one thing: the oath God swore to David that his throne would stand for ever. Then it turns. The last stretch asks where that former faithfulness has gone, and it closes sounding almost like an accusation flung at heaven, a covenant sworn as everlasting now looking anything but. That is the final word of Book Three of the Psalter.

Whoever gathered the Psalms into five books then opened Book Four not with another king, another oath, another attempt to patch up the promise Psalm 89 is grieving, but with the oldest voice in the whole collection. Moses, dead centuries before there was a throne to fall. I cannot prove that arrangement was deliberate and I am not going to pretend everyone agrees it was. But read the two psalms back to back and verse 2 stops being only a private comfort for one tired traveller. It starts to sound like the answer the whole book gives to a national catastrophe. The crown failed. The city fell. The covenant felt broken. So the collection reaches back past all of it, past Israel’s entire royal history, for the one thing that was never staked on a king keeping his word.

I think about that whenever a church I love goes through a genuinely bad patch: a split, a scandal, a slow closing. The instinct is to find a new plan, something to put where the broken thing was. Book Four does not do that. It reaches backwards, past the broken thing, to the God who was never riding on it in the first place.

Having said everything this psalm says about a God with no beginning and no end, Moses turns round and asks the one question eternity does not answer. He begs God to relent, and then wants to know how long (Psalm 90:13). Four verses from the end of his own prayer, he is still waiting.

Here is the honest cost of the word “everlasting”, and it took me years to let myself say it out loud. A being with no end is never in a hurry. But sit in a chair beside someone whose week is running out, someone waiting on a scan result or a call that has not come, and do the sum. God’s patience costs him nothing at all. Not one thing. It is costing the person in that chair everything they have left. The same unhurriedness that holds Moses steady is, from where she is sitting, the reason nobody has come yet. That asymmetry is the part I still cannot get to lie flat at midnight, and I have stopped expecting the psalm to help me with it.

What it does instead is refuse to tidy itself up. Moses gets no answer inside his own prayer. He finishes still asking, and whoever preserved the psalm let the ragged edge stand rather than sanding it into something quotable. I trust it more for that, not less. A prayer that ends unresolved was written by somebody who had actually prayed one.

There is one other place where Scripture reaches for this exact picture, the world before it had any shape, and there it is not offered as comfort at all. Job has spent chapters demanding an explanation, and God finally answers out of the whirlwind by asking where Job was when the earth’s foundations were laid, who fixed its measurements, who was about when the morning stars sang (Job 38:4 to 7). Same picture Moses uses. Wildly different temperature.

Moses volunteers the fact, kneeling, having called God his dwelling place one verse earlier. Job has it put to him as a question he cannot begin to answer, a man who has been shouting for a hearing, who finally gets one, and is handed something far bigger than the explanation he came for. Set the two side by side and this is what unsettles me: the truth that God was there before the mountains does not arrive at a fixed emotional temperature. It steadies Moses. It flattens Job. I suspect that is because Moses comes to it already trusting and Job comes to it still arguing his case, and I am not willing to say either man is reading it wrongly.

Which of the two you meet on a given morning has less to do with the fact than with what you carried into the room. I have used this verse the way Job heard it, as though God’s endlessness were a remark about my own smallness, on days when what I actually needed was to come at it the way Moses did, on my knees rather than up on my hind legs.

Sit a child down with this verse and sooner or later you get the question adults have quietly trained themselves out of asking aloud. But what was there before God, then? It is the right question, and there is no clever answer to dodge it with. The honest reply is that “before” is itself one of the things God made, along with the mountains and the earth and the world. No clock was running. Nothing was waiting. There was no empty stretch for God to sit through until he decided to begin, because a stretch is a made thing too.

I say that to children and I mean every word of it for the adults sitting near them, nodding along as though they had it filed. This is the one corner of the Bible where feeling out of your depth is the correct response and not a sign you have missed a step. Grown-ups have not privately got this sorted while the eight year olds flounder. Nobody has stood at the edge of “no beginning” and felt steady on their feet. So I would far rather a child went home slightly dizzy, knowing the dizziness was the honest part, than went home thinking they had grasped a thing nobody grasps this side of eternity. Moses does not explain it either, I notice. He says it, and then he gets on with praying, which may be the only sane thing anyone has ever done with it.

Isaac Watts published his reworked Psalms in 1719, and his Psalm 90 is the one everybody still knows: “Our God, Our Help in Ages Past”, later smoothed to “O God” by John Wesley. He did not lift verse 2 and leave the rest to fend for itself. He rewrote the whole psalm into something a congregation could actually sing. “Before the hills in order stood, or earth received her frame, from everlasting thou art God, to endless years the same” is Watts’s wording rather than Moses’, but you can hear him working straight down our verse and then refusing to stop there. A few lines on he reaches for the psalm’s other clock too, the grass and the morning, the very contrast Moses draws out later.

That hymn has done extraordinary work since. It turns up at funerals, at Remembrance services, at the turning of the year, in any room where people need to say something true about permanence while nothing visible around them is permanent at all. I find that genuinely moving. A prayer out of the wilderness, from a man who knew the smell of a fresh grave, ends up three thousand-odd years later in the mouths of congregations burying their own dead in a language he never heard spoken. Watts changed the metre. He changed the words. The thing Moses was reaching for needed no updating whatsoever, which is more or less the psalm proving its own point in public, century after century.

• What am I quietly treating as permanent, the thing I lean my whole weight on, that is in truth as temporary as a mountain?
• If God was God before the world was formed and will be God long after, what does that do to the particular fear I carried into today?
• Moses asks God to teach us to number our days. Am I willing to look honestly at how short my life really is, or do I keep glancing away?
• Where do I most need to loosen my grip and let the eternal One do the holding instead of me?

If you would like to keep sitting with this, you might read more from this book over in the Psalms, or find verses for the days when life feels fragile at Bible verses for how you feel.