Twenty Years That Have Passed
It seems like just yesterday.
One of the most famous verses of poetry in the Bible concerns the experience of time passing:
For a thousand years in Your eyes
are like yesterday that has passed
and like a watch of the night.
In the poetic movement of this verse, two temporal perspectives are juxtaposed. The first is the human perspective, for the speaking voice is human, uttering a psalm of prayer to God. (The psalm superscription identifies the speaker as Moses.) To human eyes, “a thousand years” is an enormous amount of time, far longer than a lifetime.