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He Has Promised Us Long Life
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of our years are threescore years and ten;” that’s 70 years, “and if by reason of strength they be
fourscore years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.”
A number of people have taken this as being the maximum of life that anyone could expect to
live, about 70 years, or if you’re strong, you might make it to 80. They’ve taken that as the
scriptural approximate maximum one might expect to live. But I submit to you that this passage
was not given for that purpose. He is describing what is happening to the generation of Israelites
that are perishing in the wilderness. Look at this and look at the other passages, and see how they
fit together.
Reading in Numbers 14, we see they had tempted the Lord ten times by not believing Him, and
they said, “We’re all going to die out here,” and they kept saying that every time they turned
around. “We’re all going to die out here.” And when He told them to go up and take the land,
they didn’t. They sat in their tents and cried in unbelief. Finally, He said to them in Numbers
14:28-29, “As truly as I live, saith the L
ORD
, as ye have spoken in mine ears, so will I do to you:
Your carcasses shall fall in this wilderness; and all that were numbered of you, according to your
whole number, from twenty years old and upward, which have murmured against me.” He told
them, “All of you from 20 years old and older are going to die out here in this wilderness like
you said you were.” He said in verse 34, “After the number of the days in which ye searched the
land, even forty days, each day for a year, shall ye bear your iniquities, even forty years.” Well,
what is 40 and 20? Sixty. That was the youngest. So according to what Moses said here, anyone
older than that, when you add that amount of time to them, is dying between 70 and 80. In 40
years, that whole generation had died out. Is that the description of people obeying God and
pleasing God and living the full length of their time and being blessed? No, it is not.
Well, if 70 or 80 years is not the maximum the Scripture talks about, what is? In Genesis 6, we
are given a number in the Bible. How old is old? I’m about to tell you how old is old.
You might say, “I’m only 17, and I don’t care about this.” You will. Or maybe you remember
when 40 was old. It isn’t looking so old now, is it?
Genesis 6:3 says, “And the Lord said, My Spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also
is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.” God said the days of man shall be
120 years.
The New Living Translation says, “Then the L
ORD
said, My Spirit will not put up with humans
for such a long time, for they are only mortal flesh. In the future, they will live no more than 120
years.”
The New Century Version says a very similar thing. It says, “They will live only 120 years.”
Now, that sounds strange to us, but it didn’t to them. It was appalling to them because they had
been living almost a millennium. If you back up to chapter 5, just a few verses earlier, you’ll see
how long different ones of these individuals lived.
It says in verse 5 that Adam lived to be 930 years old.