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
God had brought Israel out of slavery in Egypt to the edge of the land he had sworn to give them, and there they refused to go in. Twelve men had been sent ahead, at the people's own asking and with God's leave, to look the country over, and ten of them came back saying the cities were walled and the people were giants, that beside them the Israelites had felt like grasshoppers, and that Israel could not beat them. Two of the twelve said go up anyway: the land was good, and God was with them. One of them had already told the camp they were well able to take it. 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 going back. What God called that was unbelief: after everything he had shown them in Egypt and in the wilderness, they still would not believe him. They had despised the land, and so they would not see it. 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, and one of them was the man the people followed after Moses died. Moses, who was leading them, was not one of them. Later in the wilderness he was told to speak to a rock so that it would give the camp water, and he struck it instead, asking the people whether it was for him and his brother to fetch them water out of it. God told him that because he had not trusted him, and had not given him the honour of it in front of them, he would not be the one who brought them in. Years afterwards he went up a mountain and was shown the whole country: this was the land God had sworn to Abraham, and to his son and his grandson after him, to give their descendants. He had seen it; he would not cross into it. He died there.
All of that was still ahead; on the day Moses told the camp the sentence, they mourned and said they had sinned, and then went up to take the land anyway, without God, and were beaten back. 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, and set as many glad days ahead of them as there had been hard days behind. 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. But 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 keep us steady in it, so that it may stand. 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. Whether they were given the wisdom they asked for, or the glad days, is not recorded. 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. Part of what the forty years were for was to raise them: children brought up under the marks of God's displeasure with their fathers, learning not to go the same way. 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