Teach Us to Number Our Days
in the morning it springs up new, but by evening it fades and withers. Psalm 90:6 · Berean Standard Bible
Grass springs up green and fresh at dawn, but by evening it's dried out and dead. That's the picture of a human lifetime—it's that quick and that complete.
After the image of being swept away in sleep, now you see the full cycle of morning glory fading to evening decay. Someone listening to this would feel the weight of how fast everything goes, and that weight is exactly what should shift their priorities.
Moses, continuing the grass metaphor
Jesus will use similar language about earthly wealth and status. The point isn't that life is meaningless—it's that what lasts isn't what looks impressive in the morning. What matters is what endures beyond the evening.
Like grass that grows fresh in morning but withers by evening, human life blooms and then decays with equal speed and finality.
The verse sustains the botanical metaphor through the full cycle of a single day—חָדַשׁ (chadash, 'renewed') in the morning, but יָבֵשׁ (yavesh, 'withers') by evening. The concreteness of this imagery made it particularly potent in monastic literature, where daily offices marked the hours' passage. Augustine's Confessions and later Reformation meditations on mortality (particularly in Luther's reflections on memento mori) drew heavily on this compressed temporal arc.
The psalmist completes the simile begun in verse 5, using pastoral observation to articulate existential truth.
This telescoping of a lifetime into a single day's vegetative cycle becomes the Reformation's favorite image for human transience; it appears repeatedly in Calvin's Institutes and in the poetry of the metaphysical tradition.
4For in Your sight a thousand years are but a day that passes, or a watch of the night.
5You sweep them away in their sleep; they are like the new grass of the morning—
6in the morning it springs up new, but by evening it fades and withers.
7For we are consumed by Your anger and terrified by Your wrath.
8You have set our iniquities before You, our secret sins in the light of Your presence.
Read all of Psalm 90 — The oldest psalm, attributed to Moses. A meditation on time and what makes every day precious.
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