Termination Dust: 2 of 5

Thoughts on Psalm 90 and September

If Alaskan “termination dust” has a strange sound to southern ears, the reality of another termination dust should not. Both hemispheres know the truth of what Moses recorded elsewhere: “you are dust, and to dust you shall return” (Gen. 3:19). God is eternal. You and I are not. People die. And not only do they die, but it is God Himself who ends their lives (v. 3). To acknowledge this in abstract terms is easy. On the personal level it is excruciating. Even as people who believe the Bible, our minds and hearts will wrestle with this problem until our own turn comes. Yet until then we are not left without at least a partial explanation of why God speaks, as it were, and the bodies of people we love return to dust.

It is not only that God can end people’s lives because He is “Lord” (v. 1) and Creator. (Though as such, He has the right to end what He started.) But the text seems to hint that death also has to do with the Divine perspective on time: God turns men back into dust because in His sight even a thousand years are as if already gone. When Grandma passed away last September, we could have wished for just a little more time. This is understandable and right. But how much more? Three days? Ten months? A thousand years? Even a millennium, when properly understood, is but the vapor of exhaled breath on a chilly Montevideo morning.

There is, however, a clearer reason for which God brings people’s lives to an end. It is a reason that takes up a fair amount of space in this psalm.