Ps. 90.7 (closer than we are to ourselves)

So we are consumed / by your anger
and overwhelmed / by your wrath.
You set our waywardness / before you,
our hidden sins / in the light of your face. 

There is a tendency to regard these verses as representing a sharp break, or turn, with the previous verses. Whereas the first few verses focused on the nature of Yhwh’s dominance and mastery over time, and creation and man’s relation thereto, these verses focus on morality, sin and wrath. There is justification for this. Verses 2-6 referred to humanity, whereas now the ‘object’ is “we” and “us”. Whereas all of humanity is ephemeral in comparison with Yhwh, “we” are consumed by his wrath. Further, there is perhaps the interesting observation that verses 2-6 only refer to “God” and do not refer to him by his name, “Yhwh”. We should recall in this regard that verse 1, where the “our” was present, Yhwh was mentioned. In the section inaugurated by verse 7, when the ‘we’ comes back, Yhwh’s name likewise comes back. There are other important differences that we will address as they arise. But there are important similarities as well. For example, man’s death is completely out of his control; it is something ordained by God (“You say to humans, “Turn back you mortals!”). Here, man’s sins, have a similar type of inescapable quality to them. Yhwh is the one who “puts them before himself”. More important, even the “hidden sins” (those that they cannot detect) are “in the light of your face”. The reality of man’s waywardness and sin is seemingly as ‘fixed’ as man’s mortality, even though it (man’s sin) is not caused by God;  it is “our waywardness” and “our hidden sins”. The point is that in this section man is as unalterably in the presence of Yhwh as creation, man and time are in the verse section. Finally, there is a clear sense in this section, as in the first, that Yhwh is so much “more” than man, or ‘us’. Yhwh utterly dwarfs his creation and his creatures; here, his wrath likewise is unable to comprehended. 

All of this begins to shed light on what I think is a central point of this section of the psalm. In the first section, Yhwh’s relation to his creation was a purely ‘external’ relation. It focuses on how creation’s ‘nature’ compares (or, better, doesn’t compare) to Yhwh’s ‘nature’. As we saw, Yhwh is always-already ‘greater’ than any aspect of his creation (either of created things (mountains), living things (man), and time itself); he is both ‘prior’ and ‘after’ (from ‘everlasting to everlasting’; vs. 2). At this point in the psalm, what we now witness is that Yhwh is also ‘always-already’ greater internally. In other words, Yhwh is ‘closer to us that we are to ourselves’; he knows the ‘heart’ of man in just as supreme a fashion as he utterly dominates his creation. No matter how much man might perceive of his own heart, it is Yhwh who knows what is ‘hidden’. No matter how ‘dark’ man is to himself (how ‘hidden’), to Yhwh he not only knows it but “places it before himself in the light of his face”. As much as man is a stranger-to-himself, he is known by Yhwh, and more. This reality points us toward a deeper dimension of Yhwh’s wrath in that it seems to originate from behind this ‘veil’ that man is unable to pierce within himself. Although man’s sinfulness is utterly and completely transparent to Yhwh, it is darkness to man. Yet, this sinfulness is what most deeply affects man in that it causes Yhwh’s wrath to “consume” them and to “overwhelm” them. Although man causes this ‘flame’ that consumes him, he is unable to extinguish it. There is a lot more we could say about this but we will need to flesh it out in the following verses.