Verse of the day · September 22
What does it mean to ask God to establish the work of our hands?
Men condemned to die in the wilderness made one request of God, and made it twice.
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And let the beauty of the LORD our God be upon us: and establish thou the work of our hands upon us; yea, the work of our hands establish thou it.
Psalm 90:17
Israel was camped on the edge of the land it had been promised, and had just refused to go in. Twelve men had been sent ahead to look the country over, and ten of them came back saying the cities were walled and the people were giants, and that beside them the Israelites had felt like grasshoppers. That night the whole camp wept, said they wished they had died in Egypt, complained that their wives and children would end up as plunder, and talked of choosing a new leader and going back. God took them at their word. Everyone over twenty would die in this wilderness. Forty years of it, one year for each of the forty days the spies had spent in the land. And the children they had said would be taken were the ones who would go in instead. Only two men of that generation were spared: the two spies who had said go. Moses, who was leading them, was not one of them. He would die outside the land as well, years later, looking across at it.
The psalm that comes out of that camp, the one this verse closes, is a prayer Moses wrote for the whole camp to pray, and much of it is arithmetic. A thousand years are nothing to God; a man's life is grass, green in the morning and cut down by evening; seventy years, eighty if he is strong, and even the strong years are labour and sorrow. The people praying it now had a fixed number of years left, and knew it. Teach us to count our days, they ask, so that we take the few we have seriously.
Then the prayer asks for four things. That the counting would make them wise. That God's anger would turn away from them, even though the sentence itself would not be reversed. That he would fill the days they had left with enough of his mercy to make them glad, as many glad days as there had been hard ones. And last, for the work. That one takes two verses. The first asks that God's own work would be seen by them, and his glory by their children. The second is the verse for today: that his favour would rest on them, and that what they themselves were building would go on without them. That last piece, the work of their hands, they say twice, back to back.
It asks first for the beauty of the Lord to be on them, and the word beauty there means his favour resting on a people so that it shows. It is a request to be smiled on, and for the smile to show: God's own goodness, his holiness, visible in what they said and did, their faces bright with it. They ask it as people who will never see the land. If the glory of God was going to be seen in the land by their children, then let his beauty at least be seen in the camp, on them, on the way to the graves they had been promised.
Then it asks for the work of their hands to be established, made to stand. It is asked twice, and the repeating is not decoration; it is how much they wanted it. The psalm never says what the work was. Some old Jewish readers took it as the tabernacle, the tent where God was worshipped in the wilderness, which their own hands had built. Or take it wider: the business Moses had been given was to bring these people into shape as a nation, in their laws, their habits, their worship, and that was his work. Whatever their hands were on, the request was the same: let it last.
God's work and their work sit side by side in those two verses, and the prayer asks God to take up the work of his servants and make it his own, his own work, his own glory, his own beauty. Nothing Moses had built would last unless it was also God's work. That did not excuse anyone from working; but when they had done everything they could, the outcome was still God's to give, and they asked him for it. Establish the work, the prayer says, and what that comes to is establish us in it: keep the workers steady while they do it. The plainest way to say what they were asking is this: let what we do be real, and last after we are in the grave. They were content to sow if their children would reap.
The request about the work was answered, and so was the one about God's anger. The anger did turn, and the turning is in the very next chapter: the next word God spoke to them after the sentence was a set of laws for the offerings they would make in the land, which he would not have given to a people he meant to throw away. Then the generation that prayed it died in the wilderness as sentenced, the years wearing away with almost nothing recorded of them. Their children went in, on the promise made to Abraham, not on anything they had done. And that second generation, raised under their parents' sentence, has been called the most devoted to God of any generation Israel ever had. Long afterwards God looked back on that generation's walk through the desert, through the prophet Jeremiah, as the kindness of Israel's youth, the love of a young bride: they had followed him through a land where nothing was sown.
So the handover from parents to children was in the prayer before it happened; God had already said it would be so, and they prayed it back to him. The people praying it asked for God's glory to be shown to their children, and then died as they had been told they would. The work of their hands stood, and it stood in their children: the nation Moses had been shaping out of them was the one that went into the land. The generation that asked for it was gone before it stood. They had asked for exactly that.
Drawn from Matthew Henry, John Gill, Albert Barnes, Adam Clarke and Charles Spurgeon. How these teachings are made