Learning How to Live from Death

If you are like many people who try to get your life back in shape, by now you would have done your end-of-year reflection and built a list of resolutions or some sort of action items organized and set to put into action (with some anxiety whether or not inertia will soon kick in).

What I found very convicting recently was the way Moses reflected his life as a spiritual father of the Israelites. In Psalm 90 he was enabled to face his life forward by looking forward. In fact, he stated that the significance of his fleeting life when he pondered about death. Sound too morbid?

We know that Moses led approximately 2 million Israelites out of bondage in Egypt to usher them into the promised land. Their disobedience to God however has stopped them from entering the land. Moses was the man who dealt with death of one generation among these people in the wilderness. Number 1 tells us about the census of every man who were able to go to war. According to verse 45-46 "So all those listed of the people of Israel, by their fathers' houses, from twenty years old and upward, every man able to go to war in Israel — all those listed were 603,550."

If you include the women and children as well, there must be are least 1.2 million people who died during those 40 years. And if you do the math, that averaged 30,000 every year, or about 82 per day! Tragically however we read in Numbers (e.g., 16:49; 25:9) that in certain days there far more people who were killed due to their sins.

Can you imagine how Moses looked with his own eyes body after body falling to the ground? Can you try to comprehend what could have been in his mind when he had to lead mass funerals for his people?

He knew however that these deaths was the consequence of their sins which were met with God’s wrath. This should remind us that death is never a natural part of the life cycle, as the secular values teach us to believe. It entered this world as God’s direct judgment on the sin of the human race (Gen. 2:17; 3:19).

The reality of death and sin that confronted Moses propelled him to reflect deeply on how his (and our) fleeing life can have meaning? Thankfully he was not driven to despair and cynicism in his reflection. Instead, he was driven to worship and prayer, and his prayer came to us today in the form of Psalm 90.

Moses reminded us that life is futile if we do not truly know this eternal God as our personal dwelling place. Life is futile if we are outside Christ as we will be under God’s condemnation for our sins. Understanding this background makes me appreciate more his famous line: "So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom" (90:12).