"Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God."
Whether or not you'd call yourself a homebody, you know what home is to you.
It's a place. You can give the address without thinking. You can put a point on the map when someone asks where you live. Being able to point at it is its own kind of stability. The home you can name is the home that holds you.
The man writing Psalm 90 had nowhere to point out as home.
Forty years of tents
Moses, a man well-acquainted with the wilderness, wrote about home in Psalm 90.
His people lived in tents and followed a moving pillar. They buried their dead in places they'd never come back to. The grandparents who walked out of Egypt were already gone. Two generations had been born in transit. There was no home anywhere in their collective experience, and there hadn't been for forty years.
A nation in tents is being told it has been at home all along.
The dwelling is past tense
Notice the tense. Moses uses the past in the very first line: "You have been our dwelling place."
The dwelling was already operating before he prayed about it. While they were waiting for a permanent home, the cloud was already covering them. While they were praying for a roof, the manna was already on the ground. The pillar that moved them, the cloud that covered them, the manna every morning: that was their structure.
Forty years of receiving the dwelling without having an address.
The rock comes first
It’s easy to read Psalm 90 and see the mortality material.
There’s grass that withers, a seventy-to-eighty year limit, and days that pass like a watch in the night. That's what strikes us about Psalm 90.
But Moses doesn't open with mortality. He opens with two verses about a God who was the dwelling before there were generations to dwell in. The mountains come later in the text. The earth comes later. The mortality comes later still.
The order makes an argument for what is most important. The rock comes first.
The eternity is the topic, and the brevity is informed by that eternity.
Still the same address
The dwelling that held the wilderness nation is still holding.
The pillar moved on. The tabernacle came down. The temples after them were built and burned. The line in Psalm 90 is making a structural claim about how things are, not a historical claim about how they were. "You have been" didn't expire when Moses died.
The address hasn't moved.
What if the home you've been searching for has been operating in every tent you've slept in, every place you’ve been in, and everywhere you still go?