The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.
Moses opens by anchoring the people to God's covenant favor before he addresses their misery and judgment. He means to say: yes, you die like all men, yes, God punishes sin, but He has adopted you, and that peculiar grace is your true dwelling place through all generations.
AI summary
Commenting on Psalm 90:1-17
The days of our years are threescore years and ten. Moses himself lived longer than this, but his was the exception not the rule: in his day life had come to be very much the same in duration as it is with us. This is brevity itself compared with the men of the elder time; it is nothing when contrasted with eternity.
Moses had, in the foregoing verses, lamented the frailty of human life in general; the children of men are as a sleep and as the grass. But here he teaches the people of Israel to confess before God that righteous sentence of death which they were under in a special manner, and which by their sins they had brought upon themselves.
Commenting on Psalm 90:7-11