VS. March 6, 2025 Devotional

PSALM 90:3, 5-6 | ³ You turn us back to dust, and say, ‘Turn back, you mortals.’

⁵ You sweep them away; they are like a dream, like grass that is renewed in the morning; ⁶ in the morning it flourishes and is renewed; in the evening it fades and withers.

The Psalmist can’t use math to illustrate human life’s fragility and brevity. Instead he employs metaphor. He employs an allusion to Adam’s curse in Genesis 3:19, in which God recounts his creation of Adam and Eve from the dust, and then announces that every life will be dust to dust, birth to death, growth to disintegration. Our lives are as insubstantial as forgotten dreams, that die, as the hymn writer Isaac Watts, “at the opening day.” We resemble, all too closely the vegetation that is green in the AM and withers away in the PM. One of the earlier deadly sins that did not make the classic list of Pope Gregory, was melancholy, or as we would say, depression. Mortality and fragility and brevity are real, and at first thought a driver of depression.

What answer does the Psalmist have for the potentially depressing reality of mortality?

Gracious God,

Help me to face my own mortality and not ignore the brevity and fragility of my life.

Amen.