- Name 42 of 70Our Dwelling Place
- HebrewMa'on
- In plain wordsOur home, the place where we live
- Where to find itPsalm 90:1, a prayer of Moses
Our dwelling place is the name Moses gave the Lord at the start of Psalm 90: Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations
(Psalm 90:1). It means God is our home. Not the One who owns the house, but the house itself, the place His people have lived in safety from one generation to the next.
A homeless man writes about home
The heading over Psalm 90 calls it a prayer of Moses, "the man of God." No other psalm in the whole book is credited to him. That matters, because the opening line makes the most sense when you remember what kind of life Moses lived.
He was born when Pharaoh had ordered Hebrew baby boys killed. His mother hid him for three months, and when she could not hide him any longer, she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch
and set him in the reeds by the Nile (Exodus 2:3). His first bed was a floating basket.
He grew up in Pharaoh's palace, a Hebrew raised as an Egyptian. As a grown man he killed an Egyptian who was beating a Hebrew slave, and he ran for his life to Midian. There he married and had a son, and the name he chose tells you how he felt. He called the boy Gershom, for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land
(Exodus 2:22).
At eighty he went back to Egypt to face Pharaoh (Exodus 7:7). After the Exodus, the people refused to enter the Promised Land, and God said they would wander in the wilderness forty years
(Numbers 14:33). So Moses spent his last forty years in tents, packing up camp again and again. His sister Miriam died on the journey, and so did his brother Aaron. At the very end, God showed him the land from a mountaintop and told him, thou shalt not go over thither
(Deuteronomy 34:4). He died at 120 without ever owning a house in it.
This is the man who opens his prayer by saying, in effect, "Lord, You have always been our home."
What the word ma'on tells us
The Hebrew word behind "dwelling place" is ma'on. It is an ordinary word for the place where something lives. Lexicons, the standard Hebrew dictionaries, list three kinds of homes it can describe: God's holy home (heaven, or the tabernacle and temple), a person's house, and an animal's den or lair. From that idea of a safe home it also came to mean a retreat, a place of shelter you can run to.
Think about a fox going back to its den at night. It does not visit the den. The den is where it lives. Moses took that plain, everyday word and used it for God. The people of Israel had camped in hundreds of places, but the one place they had truly lived, all along, was in God.
The first word of the verse is worth noticing too. The King James prints it "Lord" with only a capital L, which signals the Hebrew Adonai, a title that means Master. A servant who never had a home of his own calls his Master his home.
The verse ends with the words "in all generations." The Hebrew says it by repeating the word for generation, something like "in generation and generation." Picture a long line of grandparents, parents and children, all living under one roof. That roof is the Lord.
Short lives and an everlasting God
Psalm 90 is honest about how short life is. That honesty is what makes the opening line so strong. Right after calling God our home, Moses sets God's age beside ours:
Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.
Psalm 90:2
The mountains feel ancient to us. God was already God before any of them rose up. "From everlasting to everlasting" means with no beginning and no end.
For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night.
Psalm 90:4
A watch was one shift of guard duty during the night, a few hours. To God, a thousand years pass like that. People, Moses says a few lines later, are like grass that grows up in the morning and is dry by evening (Psalm 90:5 and 6).
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.
Psalm 90:10
A score is twenty, so threescore and ten is seventy, and fourscore is eighty. Even a long life goes by fast. That is exactly why we need a home that does not pass away with us.
So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.
Psalm 90:12
This is the turn in the psalm. Counting our days is not meant to make us gloomy. It is meant to make us wise, so that we spend the time we have on what lasts.
Moses said it again at the end
Near the end of his life Moses gave a final blessing to the tribes of Israel. In it he reached for the same picture of God as a home. The word translated "refuge" here is me'onah, a form of ma'on:
The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms: and he shall thrust out the enemy from before thee; and shall say, Destroy them.
Deuteronomy 33:27
It is a picture of a home with arms. When you lean back, you are held. The very next psalm uses ma'on itself, the same word as Psalm 90:1: thou hast made the LORD, which is my refuge, even the most High, thy habitation
(Psalm 91:9). Notice the word "made." God is open as a home, but each person has to move in.
Living at home with God today
Many people know what it feels like to have a house and still not have a home. Maybe you have moved so many times you stopped unpacking. Maybe home was not a safe place. Maybe you were adopted, or you live far from family, or you are the only one in your house who follows Jesus. Moses understood all of that. He belonged nowhere on the map, and he found out he had belonged to God the whole time.
Houses can be sold, lost in a storm or emptied when the kids grow up. Anyone who has cleaned out a parent's house after a funeral knows the feeling: the building is still standing, but the home is gone. This name points to a home that cannot be taken from you.
It also changes how you think about God. A place you visit once a week is not your home. Home is where you eat, rest, talk and come back to at the end of every day. Here are a few ways to live that out:
- Read all of Psalm 90 slowly. It is only seventeen verses long.
- Count it out: if you are given seventy or eighty years, how many do you have left? Ask God what wise use of them looks like.
- Talk to God in ordinary moments, on the bus, at the sink, before a test, the way you would talk to someone in the next room.
- If you know someone who has no safe place to live, find one real way to help. Calling God our home never excuses leaving people out in the cold.
The prayer ends by asking God to establish thou the work of our hands upon us
(Psalm 90:17). Short lives can still build something that lasts, when they are lived at home in God.
Our Dwelling Place is name 42 of the 70 in the book. The next name, Thy Keeper, comes from a song pilgrims sang on the road. You can also browse more Hebrew names of God.
