Psalm 90, and Then a Few Comments on the SBC

Greetings, and welcome to The Dividing Line on a Thursday afternoon, third program of the week. Keeping you company during the, I think, soon-to-be-over crisis. In light of a certain article that came out today, I'll just be brief.

I can't say much about this. I'm honest. I'll just be honest with you. We can't, you may be saying, why haven't you talked more about this? Real simple. You can't reason with people who are panicked, and there are a bunch of my brothers and sisters who are panicked, and I, they, you try to reason, and all you get is emotion back, and there's nothing you can do about that.

I, of all people, really struggle dealing with people who are primarily emotionally driven, and so I just, I've decided that it's best to try to stay out of that. I've said some things on social media, get attacked immediately.

Just point out to you that an article came out today that is extremely important because one of the primary authors of the primary document that caused governmental panic across the Western, well, across the entire globe, the one out of England, one of the primary authors of that has come out and said, whoops, I was wrong.

Evidently, the virus was here earlier than we thought it was, and that changes all the numbers, and I had people, I had people tweeting this to me over the past couple of weeks because it was saying between half a million and 2 .2 million deaths.

He's gone from the low end at half a million to 20 ,000, and if you want to know if you're a panic person, you go, that's 20 ,000 too many, because you're allowing your emotions to cloud your thinking.

As I said, globally, every second, almost two people die. 2 .8 million per year in the United States alone, and the reasons for their deaths, the causes, are many, and it is well known that this particular virus opens up the options for other viruses, other things to take place and cause mortality.

The point is there is, it's orders of magnitude drop in the numbers from the guy who was one of the primary authors of the primary document that caused the governmental panic around the world. This should be, I haven't looked, I haven't turned a TV on for a while, this should be the lead story everywhere.

I can guarantee you it's not, and if you want to know why, start looking at the list of people who made millions and billions of dollars off of our great-grandchildren yesterday in the halls of Congress.

When I think of how many hours throughout their entire lives my as-yet-to-be-born great-grandchildren will have to work to pay off what was done yesterday, I weep. But I also recognize that there are people who will have other people murdered for 10 ,000 bucks.

How many people will you get rid of for 10 billion bucks? Good question. Anyway, but as I said, can't talk about things like that. Can't. Shouldn't have done that. Because my experience, I just said to somebody on Twitter, there is no human emotion that drives reason from the stage faster than panic.

And that's what we just saw take place, have been seeing it, and anyone who has tried to dare say anything to try to calm it down, you're unloving, you're hateful, you want to kill my grandmother, and my aunt who has this side of the other thing, and there's just no reasoning.

There's no reasoning going on. You can't do anything. You want to get in trouble, too? I don't know if you want to do this. I really wasn't gonna do this. No, no, let me go on. Okay, very well. Shouldn't have done what I did.

Shouldn't have done what I did. Shouldn't have mentioned it, but I did. I apologize. The day will come, I hope and pray, within the next six months, we might be able to discuss this in a meaningful fashion.

It'll be post damage. Damage has been done, but it still needs to be talked about. But maybe, maybe down the road, when the emotions on one side, don't end one side, subside. The 90th Psalm. I want to look at the 90th Psalm today, if you would be willing to.

However you use that, I mean, if you've got your Bible nearby, or phone, computer, whatever it might be, I want to take some time to look at the 90th Psalm today. There are a couple other things to look at, and then we might have time to open up the phones later in the program.

But, 90th Psalm, I have beat my head against the table, trying to figure out how to change the highlight color in this program. And I can't. So every time, I mean, I can do stuff like this, and that's readable.

But as soon as I go, as soon as I try to outline it like that, so it stays, then it disappears. And so,.

I'll keep looking, but I can't find anything. I saw Accordance respond to a guy this morning.

Oh, I know, I know. If I contacted Accordance, I just didn't want to bother them.

They've always been... But they're all sitting at home at their computers now anyway, so they got nothing to do, right?

Yeah, but if they're not listening here, then why should I bother? Just put it on Twitter. They watch Twitter, apparently. Yeah, anyway. By the way, before I dive into this, the big... The one thing that has taken the place of the NCAA tournament in all of our experiences...

Thank you. The Adherent Apologetics brackets are down to the sweet 16, and I am up against William Lane Craig. And so if you are in Twitter, look it up. A, Apologetics, Adherent Apologetics, and vote.

I need your vote to get into the 8. If I get into the 8, I'll probably be up against Michael Brown. And if Mike and I are up against each other on Sunday and Monday, then I'm certainly willing, if we can, to work something out on Monday, doing a special program to where I can join Michael on Line of Fire, and he can join me, and we can have some fun with this.

He had his graphics people putting cool stuff up when he was taking on Mike Winger. And he's gonna get through, because Sean McDowell has decided to throw all this support behind Michael so he can come after me.

So, and I'm like, hey, I was voting for Sean McDowell in the previous rounds. I mean, come on, that's not fair. But, you know, politics are politics, and so we'll see what happens. But I've got to get past William Lane Craig first.

I've got a commanding lead at the moment. But that's partly, let's just be honest, that's partly because certain people who've been involved in the brackets either don't do Twitter or will not condescend to having fun on Twitter.

And so, I didn't have too much trouble in the last round. And if you, especially if you want to see a me versus Jeff Durbin battle, the only way that can possibly happen is in the finale. But I have to get past William Lane Craig, Michael Brown, and then somebody else to get into the finals.

And Jeff has to get by a bunch of folks, too.

So, there you go. I have to comment on this. I really think... Yeah, we won't get into a whole lot of trouble for this. I really think, I mean, when I grew up, these kind of brackets were double elimination.

Well, there is a consolation round. And so, there should be a double elimination.

There's a consolation thing, but you can't win it from the consolation side.

Well, that's the thing in double elimination. If you win twice, you can win the whole thing, you know.

No, that's not how it works. You either make it or you don't. So, that's how it goes. That's how it goes. That's on Twitter. Adherent Apologetics, look it up and give us your support. Again, if you want to see something on Monday involving Michael and I, then that's what we got to do.

So, we can have some fun with it. We can have some fun with it. All right, the 90th Psalm. What a text. Please notice, this is, as you see in the prologue in the Greek Septuagint, Prayer of Moses, the man of God.

And so, here you have Moses. Now, I hate to have to do this, to have to mention this, but if you're a new Christian, if you're a Christian who has not done a lot of background reading and things like that, you need to be warned that if you go to your local Christian bookstore, I'm not sure many of those even exist anymore, you go online, you buy stuff from Amazon, whatever, commentaries, if you were to buy a commentary on the Psalter written in the past 150 years, you are probably going to run into, right at the start, the idea that Moses had nothing to do with this, that this is some unknown author ascribing this to Moses, and this is based upon the idea that, especially the Old Testament Revelation is a cobbled together book of extremely contradictory materials written maybe as late, maybe as far back as 600 years before Christ, maybe a lot much closer than that, that almost nothing in the Old Testament is what it says it was in actuality.

And, you know, people are stunned by that when they first read it, if they've not heard it, not been warned about it, and not recognized that it's coming from a particular worldview. If you approach the Bible as if it is a production of the minds of men, rather than, and please note this, rather than, as Pierre described it, men speaking from God as they're carried along by the Holy Spirit.

It is men speaking, they're speaking in a particular context, they're speaking in a particular language, there's no question about that, but they're speaking from God as they're being carried along by the Holy Spirit, and naturalistic interpretation and commentary cannot allow that supernatural element.

That's not allowed at the at the table. And so, since you can't provide some kind of historical documentation that there was a written record of a prayer of Moses that lasted for over 2 ,000 years before being codified in the writing of the 90th Psalm, and of course, you couldn't prove that for anything on that level, given the antiquity of the Old Testament text, then you have to adopt another perspective of it, and that is, it has nothing to do with Moses.

Once again, the person whose viewpoint on this I value the most is a person by the name of Jesus, because he rose from the dead, and because of that, I take his perspective on things, and he never expressed the kind of hesitancy, naturalism, humanism, that much of modern scholarship does when looking at the text of Scripture.

And so, just be aware of that, if you, you know, what happens is sometimes you'll work through a text of Scripture, and somebody go, man, that's, I want to do some more work in that, and then they go off and run into this kind of stuff, and it ruins everything for them.

So, this is considered to be a prayer of Moses, the man of God, and it certainly would reflect what someone as wise as Moses, and who suffered as much as Moses did, the type of conclusions that they would come to.

Interestingly enough, it does not start off with using the name Yahweh. When it says Lord, please notice that even in the English, it's small o, small r, small d. It's Adonai, and that's different than Yahweh.

So, Lord, you have been our dwelling place from generation to generation. Now, we say in all generations in English, you can see the, in Hebrew, and that's, I don't know if anybody can see that. People really don't need to see me that much.

So, in Hebrew, you have dor, repeated twice. Ador, wador, and in the Septuagint, genea, chi, genea. So, this is a very standardized Hebrew form from generation, generation, in other words, all generations, Lord, you have been our dwelling place.

So, he is the one who, for the people of God, is their place of dwelling throughout all time, generation, generation. And then, having said that, before the mountains, and then this term is from the root, Yalad, which is the standard term to be born, to to give birth, and you can see in the Septuagint, geneathenai, to be born.

Standard term of the birth of anyone. So, here you have a personification of the creation. And so, before the mountains were born, or you gave birth to the earth and the world. So, Eretz is the standard term for earth.

But Tevel is like, well, over here in the Septuagint, oikumene, that's where we get economy, the indwelt world. So, the earth and the world. So, before the mountains were born, or you gave birth to the earth and the world, these are obviously, this is not the idea that Yahweh has a womb.

This is a poetic description of creation itself, and it is, there may be some apologetic context to this, because of the fact that in many of the ancient religions, the gods themselves came from creation, from some disturbance in creation, or something like that.

And so, God has made the source here. But the point is that before creation itself, before anything, the most basic elements of the universe around us came into existence, me olam, from everlasting, ad olam, to everlasting, you are El, you are God.

So, from everlasting to everlasting, you are God. There are some people who would say that Hebrew cannot express the idea of eternity, but it can, and it does, right here. The whole point is, in these words, is that from everlasting to everlasting, you are God, not you will become God, or you are God.

It is a direct statement of the reality of God's existence, and it is interesting, apah tu ayonas, heos tu ayonas. So, the Greek Septuagint tends to be very literal to the Hebrew in certain parts of the Tanakh, not in all.

But from the age unto the age, you are. It doesn't say you are God, but that's the that's the antecedent, you are God. Statement of the eternality of God in contrast to the created nature of the creation itself.

But, you turn man, man, unto dust, back. It's literally, it's to turn back, it's to, the Hebrew is to return. So, you return man back to dust. So, it's a reminder of man's created nature. Now, notice something in the Septuagint though, very, very interesting in the Septuagint.

You return man, ais tapinosin. You've, you may have, if you've heard me speak on the Carmen Christi, you've seen that, that's a Greek term before. Tapinosafrune means humility of mind, to humiliation.

So, here you have a interpretive translation of dust in the sense of, if you're, so instead of the idea that man is made out of dust, so you return man to dust, the Septuagint is interpreting this as humiliation that is lying in the dust.

You return man to the dust. So, there you see what you might call a dynamic equivalency translation on the part of the Septuagint at this particular point. And you say, return sons of man. And so, as you have in most Hebrew poetry, you have a form of parallelism where the thought in the first phrase is, is repeated and strengthened in the second, happens a lot in the Greek Septuagint.

Well, in the Old Testament, sorry. For a thousand years in your eyes, in your sight is, as a day, when it passes, it goes beyond when it passes, or as a watch in the night. So, the night was divided up into several watches that might feel like a long time for you, but there were several of them in the night.

So, obviously, it's not an extremely lengthy period of time. The point is that God is eternal. While as mankind is turned back into the dust, and as mankind is commanded by God, return, for God, a thousand years in your sight, is like yesterday when it passes by, or as a watch in the night.

And it is interesting that in our experience of time, our experience of the present is significantly slower than our experience of the past. In other words, when you think of yesterday in comparison to today, you automatically start forgetting much of what happened in the day before, and so your experience, your remembrance of how long it was, is compressed.

The point here is God is eternal. Mankind is not. We pass very, very quickly. In light of that, then, it gets pretty personal here, you have swept them away like a—well, let's go back here. You have swept them away like a flood.

They fall asleep, and the morning they're like grass or sprouts anew. So, notice how much shorter that is in Hebrew. We use all sorts of helping words. We have like, and a, and you can express pronouns by pronominal suffixes, and all the rest of that type of stuff.

So, in some ways, some of these ancient languages take up less space. than than their English counterparts do. But the point is that mankind is swept away. He cannot—when a flood comes—you ever seen videos where you have the raging flood coming, and some silly—well, we have to do this all the time here in Arizona.

We have these flash floods during the monsoon, and people are dumb enough thinking their vehicles are impervious, or way too much, of trying to drive through washes. And not only has water picked the vehicle up, but the rushing water is an incredibly powerful thing, and it just drags people away.

Just, you cannot stand against it. And so, you have swept them away like a flood. They fall asleep, and the morning they're like grass or sprouts anew. And so, it's the temporary nature of man is being emphasized here.

The brevity of human life and experience is being is being laid out for us. In the morning, it flourishes and sprouts up, but toward evening, it fades and withers away. So, that's actually a really good example of Hebrew poetry here.

Six words providing a contrast. In the morning, flourishes, sprouts anew, new life coming up. Now, we're not quite as used to this here in the desert, but those of you who live in places that have, like, water, you you've seen stuff like this, and we do get it sometimes when we've had some storms.

We'll have these desert flowers that will bloom, but then if it gets really hot during the day, they're history. So, in the morning, it flourishes and sprouts anew. Toward evening, it fades and withers away.

We hardly even notice these things. These things hardly even catch our attention. The point being the brevity, the transitory nature of human life. So, for we have been in your anger consumed, and by your wrath, we have been dismayed.

And so, here's the term anger or gay in the Greek septuagint. And so, we have been consumed, we have been, like, placed into the desert in your wrath, would be some of what the septuagint would say, and in your anger, your thumos, we have been placed into trouble, is how the septuagint renders this.

And so, there is a recognition. I saw. In fact, maybe I can bring this up if I put it in Dropbox, but, oh, yeah. It was Jonathan Merritt, who was waxing exceptionally emotional, as he tends to do, and was basically saying that if you read the Bible in an absurdly literal fashion and actually believe that God's wrath is being expressed in our day, then he'd like whatever the atheists are ordering.

He's not gonna believe that there's anything to be learned from a pandemic. You can't learn anything from floods or tsunamis or volcanoes, hurricanes, all that evidently is outside of God's control, and he's teaching us nothing.

We have nothing that we can learn. And of course, you then look at Scripture, and you read something like this, and you go, but the biblical writers plainly saw God behind all of this. They saw him behind plagues, that he used plagues to chastise the people of Israel.

And someone like a Jonathan Merritt, someone who is into the left spectrum of things, you need to understand, they don't believe any of that ever happened. If you go to Union Theological Seminary, if you go to places like that, you need to understand, everything in the Bible, with almost no exceptions, is pure fiction to them.

They're just stories. And if you don't like the story, then you certainly don't have to believe it happened. And you can come up with whatever moral of the story you want, just to make you comfortable, because there's no objective element to Revelation.

And so, when Jesus makes reference to things that happened in the days of Moses, Jesus was just a man of his day. You know, he was just a first-century Jew, and so he would have been limited in his understanding.

And in fact, I've heard them in lectures saying this, that when you look at the Jesus of the New Testament, yes, he believes that all this stuff happened in the Old Testament, but that just demonstrates that he was limited to his day in his understanding.

This is what is taught in a large portion of theological education today, and ends up in the pew. And that's why those denominations that are infected with this disease are dying very, very quickly, and won't be around for many more decades.

And so they'll just do what they are doing, infect the SBC while you're at it. Boy, is that a mess. Okay. We have been consumed by your anger and by your wrath. We have been dismayed. We have been terrified by your wrath.

This is the people of God speaking. It's people of Israel speaking. And they recognize the wrath of God in what has come upon them. That God's wrath is a reality, and that it is just, and it is proper, and it is necessary to understand that if you try to edit the God of Scripture, you just end up with a warped picture of what you wish you yourself were.

That's all you end up with. That's all you can end up with. There is, it's a given in Paul's theology. The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the ungodliness and unrighteousness of men.

It's not will be revealed. It is being revealed. But there are few areas of biblical theology less believed by modern Christians than the wrath of God. Why do you think we have such a sticky, sentimental, powerless view of the cross?

It's because we don't have a God who has wrath. You may remember, I've told a story about the English theologian, I think it was C .H. Dodd, if I recall correctly, who supported the translation of the Greek term, halasmos, and halasterion, as expiation rather than propitiation, because expiation does not contain within it the idea of wrath.

Propitiation does. And he just hated the idea of God having wrath. And, this is very, very, very much how mankind is. It's not the God of the Bible, but that's where they are. So, you have placed our iniquities, our anomias, our rebellions against the law, anomias, you can see namas in there, our lawlessness before you, our secret sins in the light of your presence, before your face, literally, in the Greek Septuagint.

So, in other words, this is simply a statement, God has remembered our transgressions. And he promised in Deuteronomy 28 -29, blessings and cursings. So, when he brings judgment to bear, he's being righteous, he gave warning beforehand.

For all of our days have declined in your wrath, in your fury, we have finished our years with a sigh. With a sigh. And both the Septuagint and the Hebrew have the same understanding. Rejoicing, but with the sigh of sadness of those who have been, who have seen their days cut short.

Very similar terminology to what you'd see in the book of Lamentations, repeated over and over again after the destruction of Jerusalem, if you want to see how this works. As for the days of our life, they contain 70 years, and if due to strength, 80 years.

Funny how it's right around that same place today. Now, believe me, there have been many times between then and now when this was a dream. When this was a dream. It's interesting, I've never looked at it, I've never seen anybody even mention it.

But, I wonder what medieval interpreters did with a text like this. I wonder if there's anybody. This would be really interesting to know. And maybe there is somebody out there in this audience who does know.

Did anybody back then, say during the medieval period, when life expectancies were shorter, look at this and say, this is a demonstration of how close we're getting to the coming of Christ? Or, read something into it that they then invested with some kind of meaning?

I don't know, I think about things like that, maybe you do, I've just never seen it. I don't know. But, the point is, yeah, 70, 80 years. And yet, despite that, now we have a little bit of the language of the preacher, Ecclesiastes.

Yet their pride is but labor and sorrow. And, then it is gone, then it is quickly gone, and it just flits away, flies away. Now there's some interesting, the septuagint here, I'm not going to go into a lot of it, sort of seems to go its little bit of its own way.

So, instruction and discipline. Well, okay, well, no. No, they went a different way. Which makes me wonder if there's a different tradition underlying that particular part of... You notice, by the way, I forgot to mention this, this is the 89th Psalm in the Psalter, in the Septuagint.

Septuagint has a very different numbering system. Well, not very different, but it can be tough to find stuff in the Septuagint because they, it did number things differently. But the point again is, their pride is but labor and sorrow, for soon it is gone, we fly away.

The brevity of even the 70 and 80 years in comparison to God. If a thousand years is like yesterday, then 78 years is nothing, in comparison to God. So, the question is asked, who understands or knows?

Yeda, Gnosko, key theological terms in other contexts. Who knows the power of your wrath? The power of your wrath, your anger. And your fury. According to the fear that is due, according to the fabas, the fear of you, and your rage, your anger.

So, you've got power, you've got wrath, fear, anger, all wrapped up here in 89 -11. Who knows the power of your wrath? And from the fear of you, the anger of you, is literally what you have in the Greek Septuagint.

The Hebrew would indicate, and your fury, according to the fear that is due to you, that it is appropriate for creatures to show proper, not just respect, I know this is real common today, but fear of God.

You're talking about your creator, the one who holds you in his hands, against whom you sin daily. And yet we take that for granted in many ways and do not show him the fear that is due. So, in light of that, Manoth, to teach us our days so that we might know.

Number, I'm sorry, number our days so that we might know. So, yada being here in the sense of teaching. And the Greek, of course, is from which we, the same form from which we get arithmetic. Maths, as they say in England.

So, to number, to number, to have a proper appreciation. And this is, I think this is one thing, you've heard the old saying, youth is wasted on the young. Until you have decades under your belt, you truly struggle to have a perspective upon which to see eternity.

And nobody in this life ever has a fully sufficient basis. To see eternity. And to make decisions that are wise from an eternal perspective. And I know as I've studied church history, when you do encounter those bright lights who at a young age have such a wisdom and maturity, it's always joined with a recognition of how short their life is going to be.

It's always joined with it. And if you want to see immaturity, if you want to see people who are truly ignorant of God's presence around them, look at young people who are just wasting their lives, risking their lives.

Go watch young people on spring break. Doing stupid things, sinning openly, rebelling against God. No thought whatsoever of the fact that they could be taken out of this world in any second. No thought about tomorrow.

No view of eternity at all. Just animals. They act and view themselves like animals. Of course, that's what they've been taught in their university, too. But I can't think of a better verse to memorize, to have memorized than Psalm 90, verse 12.

Teach us to number our days that we may present to you a heart of wisdom. We may present to you or bring in or gain a heart of wisdom. Literally, the Greek septuagint says to bind, to bind the heart in wisdom.

It's literally, and the ones binding the heart in wisdom. Which is interesting. But the Hebrew word is a very basic, almost every, words like to have, to get, to go, these are basic words in a language that very frequently have a very, what's called, wide semantic domain.

There's lots of meanings that can be read into them. They're not specific. They have to be made specific through the use of other terms, context, things like that. So, the Numeric Standard is being a little bit interpretational by saying that we may present to you a heart of wisdom.

I like that understanding, but it is somewhat interpretational. The point is that we need God to teach us to recognize the brevity of our life, teach us to number our days. Because if we don't, we'll never truly be wise.

And here, to possess a heart of, it's literally the heart in wisdom, to bind the heart in wisdom. Because the heart is going to be, what's the beautiful hymn bind my wandering heart to thee? Come thou fount.

The heart is constantly being pulled by this desire and that desire. We want to have, believers want to have a heart of wisdom, a wise heart that is bound to that wisdom. That doesn't just experience it once a while, but is bound to it so that it does not wander, so it is not blown about by every wind and every experience that we have in life.

That type of heart is not going to be constantly going after the next new thing that comes along. There's going to be a steadfastness, a steadiness, a, yes, consistency to a heart that is a heart of wisdom.

A heart of wisdom. The rest of the psalm, and I didn't expect to go this long, is a prayer for restoration. And I can tell you right now, I did not look this up. And I never have. But I can tell you exactly what you'll find in most critical commentaries at this point.

I can tell you exactly. I've not looked it up. I'm just predicting. And I'm 99 certain that I'll be right. There will be many who will say that verses 13 and following are a later addition. Why? Because the preceding portion of the psalm seems to be rather consistent in and of itself.

And then the last part is a prayer for deliverance and blessing. Which I think a lot of people would say, see, couldn't let it be such a downer, so it had to be later on. Before we put it in there, let's spice it up a little bit and make it better.

I can just guarantee you that's probably what's there. And there's one other hint as to why that would be theorized. Like I said, I've not looked it up. But do return, O Yahweh. Yahweh has not appeared in the preceding portion of the psalm.

And so, in light of what's called the JEDP theory, Yahwist Eloist Deuteronomist Priestly theory, the Graf-Wilhausen hypothesis, this would be, since Yahweh didn't appear in the preceding part, appears here, that means it's added on.

Right? I mean, that's what you're taught in seminary. I was listening in seminary. Even when I didn't agree, I was listening. I wanted to understand what was being said. Here's the problem. This is the first place that Yahweh appears in the psalm.

And I think that it first appears here because this is God's covenant people asking for His covenant blessings based upon their repentance. Up to now, you have general statements that are true of humanity as a whole.

Now you have the covenant people of God saying, how long will it be? And be sorry for your servants, your avod. So, satisfy us in the morning with your loving kindness. Now we're talking about chesed.

There is your term right there. That is, notice the Greek septuagint is eleos, mercy. There are numerous Greek terms that are used. And you have to use numerous Greek terms because chesed is such a wide-ranging, beautiful word.

Anybody who tells you that the God of the Old Testament is not a loving and merciful God does not understand the term chesed. They don't understand it. We translate covenant faithfulness. It's normally translated in most of our English translations as loving kindness.

That's not the best translation, but we're sort of used to it. But even loving kindness is actually two words that are very similar to one another slapped together to try to cover a wide range, the wide range that chesed actually communicates to us.

And that goes with the use of the name Yahweh. Oh, Yahweh, return, satisfy us in the morning with your chesed, that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days. Make us glad according to the days you have afflicted us and the years we have seen evil.

Let your work appear to your servants and your majesty to their children, that the favor of the Lord our God be upon us and confirm for us the work of our hands. Yes, confirm the work of our hands. This is the people of God, the covenant people of God, praying to Yahweh and relying upon his chesed.

And so I think it belongs right where it is. Once you recognize the shift in the focus, but I can guarantee you, I could find somebody just in my commentaries I have here in the program that would take it the direction that they that I mentioned in saying that this is somehow a a later addition.

Teach us to number our days, we may present to you a heart of wisdom. Got plenty of time to be doing that right now. Um but these are words that are true to every generation. And these are words that are true for Christians during the plague, Justinian's plague, the bubonic plague.

This was true for Christians in periods of great prosperity and in times of great want, during times of war and times of peace. How much, just ask yourself, how much do you want to present to God a heart of wisdom?

If you're constantly suppressing the reality of your own mortality, the brevity of your life, that wisdom will always be hobbled. It will never be a wisdom that transcends this life. So how much do you want it?

I mean, there are a lot of people that will do incredible things that they really, really want. I feel really, really badly, I really do, for the Olympians who have been training and training and training for the Olympics.

I have a feeling the time for the Olympics is going to come and everything is just going to be, there's going to be no concerns about any diseases at all, but it's still not going to happen. It's been put off.

Once you pull the trigger, it's done. That's my feeling. We'll see if I'm right. But I feel sorry for them because, I mean, the training that those people go through for the Olympics, many of them are just heartbroken right now, just absolutely heartbroken.

So let me ask a simple question before I go on to another topic. How many of us as believers are ever heartbroken by how unwise we are before God all the time? Constantly having to ask Him, forgive me for having been so foolish, yet once again.

How much do we want it? Are we willing to be disciplined to obtain it? Is the question. Psalm 90, prayer of Moses. I'm glad we still have these words of wisdom. I'm sorry?

It's an interesting question. I'll read it for you. I've heard Chesed described as a conceptual counterpart to Agape as a revelation of God's love. Agape revealing that there's nothing we can do to earn the love of God.