Number Our Days

Teach Us to Number Our Days. It is a divine ability to reckon, comprehensively and decisively, the true situation. Humanity simply cannot find the edges of its own reality, not to mention make numbered determinations upon reality. God alone can and does. “He determines the number of the stars; he gives to all of them their names” (Psa. 147:4). For us, the backstory and the future ramifications of every experience extend far beyond our line of sight in each direction. Men and women remain in the metaphysical realm as boys and girls remain in the physical realm—we simply do not know what is dangerous versus what is beneficial, what hastens death versus what fosters life. We lack the capacity to make a proper accounting of our own selves, to number our days. Left to ourselves, we fundamentally lack wisdom.

This finitude was displayed in the primordial temptation and our original sin. Satan hissed with the serpent’s forked tongue, “’For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’ So, when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate” (Gen. 3:5-6).

By no means was it coincidental that Moses, who narrated Genesis, used some of the keywords from the Garden in a totally different light in Psalm 90:12. “So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.” Adam and Eve stridently reached outside of their relationship with God for the ability to determine what is good and what is evil. God is wise, and since they had a relationship with God, they had wisdom through God. Satan tempts us to lunge for knowledge and wisdom apart from God; to become autonomous.

Moses’ prayer in Psalm 90 seeks the undoing of the deed in the Garden. “Teach us to number our days,” could be translated, “Cause us to know the determined edges of our days.” Or define our days! It is an admission of incapacity. Moses cannot (and should not try to) attain this knowledge. He asks for it through a relationship with God, not instead of a relationship with God. To the same God who numbers the stars and gives them each a name, Moses approaches in terms of his own allotted time on Earth. Cause us to know that you, O Lord, have appointed our times and our seasons. Inside that relational knowledge built on faith, God causes us to enter into wisdom. By steering us into himself, God is effectively steering us into wisdom. Our search for wisdom ends with knowing Christ, just as surely as our appetite for wisdom begins with knowing “Christ, who became to us wisdom from God” (1 Cor. 1:30).