Hope for Tomorrow
Scripture Reading: Psalm 90; Isaiah 41-42; Ephesians 5
Let your work be shown to your servants, and your glorious power to their children. Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us, and establish the work of our hand upon us; yes, establish the work of our hands! – Psalm 90:16-17 -
Psalm 90 has a melancholy tone to it. It speaks of wrath, death, and human failure. What started out so well, the Hebrew people marching out of Egypt under the cloud and fire of God’s glory, had gone badly in the desert of unbelief.
Moses, thought acknowledging all of this, was still a man of hope and faith. The present generations failure was not to be the end of the story. Nor was it the only part of the story.
In faith he believed the plan and purposes of God would carry on through the lives of their children. The father’s failure and unbelief did not carve unbelief into the stone hearts of their children. The next generation would see the work of God. The children would know God’s glorious power.
And they did. At the Jordan and Jericho, they had their own moment to stand and watch as God worked once again as He had done before in Egypt and the Red Sea.
While we should pray for and strive to set a good example of faith and holiness, our failure does not doom our children. Pray that they would have a fresh encounter with Christ, and a revival of faith where they see for themselves the glorious power of God.
Further, while there is much to mourn in the unbelief of Moses’ generation, it was not all a lost cause. They were, after all, the people who slew the lamb’s and put the blood over the doorposts of their homes; averting death and finding life. They were the one’s who stood still and saw the deliverance of God at the Red Sea; who walked across on dry ground while Pharaoh’s armies were drowned.
Moses ends with asking God to remember their acts of faith and let those works of faith be established. He wants his life and the lives of those who came out of Egypt with him to not be wasted or lived in vain. He is not denying their failure and their unbelief that doomed them to die in the desert. He is merely asking that what faith they had and the works that came from it would bear fruit in the lives of the next generation.
We would do well to join him in that kind of praying.
