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.

• 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.