Psalm 90 is a story of frustration and despair. The writer is crying out to God for patience and love – and bemoaning the difficult situation he finds himself in. Things are tough and not getting a lot better, so God has turned His back on them a bit and they are experiencing a part of God’s character they don’t like – His holiness. He cannot tolerate sin and when it happens, He responds differently than we would like. “You keep track of all our sins; every misdeed since we were children is entered in your books”. That is a sobering thought. For some, that will be a very long list. So what is sin? Sin is when we miss the mark. It is when we violate God’s law. It can be when we fail to do what we know is the right thing to do. There can be sins of commission (where we chose to disobey by an act of our will) and sins of omission (where we fail to do what we know we should). To be honest, it is pretty easy to sin. Not only is it our human nature, we have a coach and team rooting for us to fall down in this area of obedience – the enemy and his warriors. So sin is not foreign to any of us. In fact, scripture tells us that each of us will sin.
But the writer gives us a couple of tips to working on our problem. “Teach us to live wisely and well”. We need to seek God to work on how we live. It is not His desire that we sin. In fact, He wrote the book on how we should live. It then boils down to our choices moment by moment to live obediently to His will. Unfortunately we won’t make it through life without falling into sin. And scripture is clear that the price that has to be paid for sin is death. God cannot avoid that – His character will not allow Him to just turn His back. So He devised the answer to our sin problem. He sent His only Son to the Cross to be a sacrifice for sin – to be a way our sin can be covered by His blood – and we can be set free. That is really our only choice to overcome the problem we face in our lives. We either deal with sin through a relationship with Jesus, or we face the eternal consequences. The much better choice is Jesus. With a personal relationship where we accept His death as a cover for our sin, we can repent and be set free from the penalty of our problem. But we have to make that decision and make Him our Savior and Lord. Are you ready for that judgment day? What have you done with Jesus?
