How Many Years Should We Expect to Live?
The most common, but incorrect, answer is that we should expect to live 70 years, and 80 years if our strength holds (Psalm 90:10). This cannot be true in context, because Moses, who wrote Psalm 90, lived to be 120. So we know that Moses was not making a statement about the maximum lifespan allowed by God!
Many sinners live past 90 or even 100. Obviously, this verse does not say that you can only expect to live a maximum of 80 years. If that were true, God would be saying that the godly should live shorter lives than sinners, which would contradict a large number of other promises.
Read the context of this verse, and you’ll discover what it is really saying:
Psalm 90:5-11:
Thou carriest them away as with a flood; they are as a sleep: in the morning they are like grass which groweth up.
In the morning it flourisheth and groweth up; in the evening it is cut down, and withereth.
For we are consumed by thine anger, and by thy wrath we are troubled.
Thou hast set our iniquities before thee, our secret sins in the light of thy countenance.
For all our days are passed away in thy wrath: we spend our years as a tale that is told.
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.
Who knoweth the power of thine anger? even according to thy fear, so is thy wrath.
This psalm is not a statement by God of the maximum allotted lifespan of his people! It is a lament over the sorry state of Israel in the wilderness and the wrath of God that had been poured out on the people. Moses was lamenting that people were only living 70 to 80 years. Since this is a lament, the implication is that the godly should live longer than the backslidden Israelites, who lived only 70-80 years because of their poor spiritual health.
Read the context again. Moses was lamenting that our lives were like grass that grows up and dies quickly. So he was saying that living only 70-80 years is to die prematurely. We can see how a man who lived to be 120 without losing his eyesight or his strength (Deuteronomy 34:7) would state this!
So don’t ever repeat or believe the worn-out lie that once you hit 70 or 80, you’re living on borrowed time. You don’t have to borrow those years from God. How would you pay Him back? You can’t borrow time anyway. If you could, some bank would be making a lot of money on time loans. If you needed more time to pay back your loan, you’d have to borrow even more time and enrich the bank even more.
So the question remains, what is the proper lifespan for the believer? We know that it must be more than 80 years based on the evidence above.
Here is the next verse that would come to mind:
Genesis 6:3:
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.
At first, this would appear to put an absolute 120-year limit on man’s life. However, that interpretation would make Scripture contradict itself, which it cannot do. Abraham was born after God made this statement and he lived to be 175 (Genesis 25:7). We know that others lived more than 120 years after God made this statement, including Sarah (127 – Genesis 23:1), Ishmael (137 – Genesis 25:17), Isaac (180 – Genesis 35:28), Jacob (147 – Genesis 47:28), Kohath (133 – Exodus 6:18), Amram (137 – Exodus 6:20), Aaron (123 – Numbers 33:39), Jehoiada (130 – 2 Chronicles 24:15) and Job (140 years after his trials – Job 42:16). So Genesis 6:3 cannot be taken to absolutely limit man’s lifespan to 120 years!
One famous Bible commentator concluded that man in Genesis 6:3 is literally the man or Adam, and that this was a statement to Adam and not to man in general. In other words, Adam was being given 120 more years. Let’s do some math from Genesis 5 and see if this makes sense. Adam lived a total of 939 years. He begat Seth when he was 130. Seth was 105 when he begat Enos, who was 90 when he begat Cainan. Cainan was 70 when he begat Mahaleleel, who was 65 when he begat Jared. (I hope I’m not boring you too badly; we need to do some math to prove a point.) Jared was 162 when he begat Enoch, who was 65 when he begat Methuselah. Methuselah was 187 when he begat Lamech, and Lamech was 182 when he begat Noah. So Noah was born when Adam would have been 130+105+90+70+65+162+65+187+182 years old. As you can verify, that comes out to 1056 years old, which proves that Adam was already dead before Noah was born. Since Noah was born at the end of Genesis 5 and is talked about in Genesis 6, this statement by God was apparently made during Noah’s lifetime (Genesis 6:8: “But Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD”). If so, it could not possibly have been made to Adam himself, because Adam was not on the earth at that point.
Now note that Noah, who walked with God, lived to be 950 years old (Genesis 7:6 with Genesis 9:28). So this statement did not even limit Noah’s life. Noah was already 500 years old at the end of Genesis 5 (Genesis 5:32), and he was 600 when he went into the ark. If anything, Genesis 6:3 is another curse because “the wickedness of man was great in the earth and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (Genesis 6:5). So if there was a 120-year limit, it was for the wicked, not for God’s covenant people! Even if you take it as an average, that’s a lot longer than people today are living, so it would be a vast improvement!
Another explanation that is accepted in some circles is that the 120-year limit referred to a one-time span of how long mankind would continue to live before the flood wiped out humanity except for the 8 people on the ark. Let’s see if this is plausible. Noah was 500 years old at the end of Genesis (Genesis 5:32) before God made the statement above in Genesis 6:3. When the rain started falling, Noah was 599 (in his 600th year). So this would only work if Noah’s age of 500 were an approximation instead of an exact age, which to some extent it must be, seeing that he could not have had all 3 children at the exact age of 500. However, a 20-year discrepancy seems a little much to me, though some other people obviously don’t think so.
The only alternative I see left is that the 120-year limit was for the wicked, but there are certainly stories of people who are probably not Christians living longer than that in some parts of the world, so the “hard-limit” idea is hard to support. But I don’t think that this was intended as a literal hard limit so that someone has to die the very second he turns 120. I would see it more as a general number, similar to the general number of 500 years for Noah’s age when he had 3 children, that would apply only to those operating outside of God’s blessing. We’ve already seen that people who had God’s blessing did live longer.
I wouldn’t consider it worth getting into an argument with anyone who reaches a different conclusion than I do on this particular topic. My main concern is that you understand that 120 years cannot be the upper limit for a person operating under God’s blessing, as there were people who exceeded that after the statement in Genesis 6:3.
So what should we take away from all this? There is no stated age at which you must die. God does say, “With long life will I satisfy him, and shew him my salvation” (Psalm 91:16). What is long life? I don’t know, but God says that you will be satisfied with it, which is really all that matters. In other words, God will let the man who serves Him live as long as He wants to. When you are satisfied, you can go on to glory. You can stay here until you are satisfied. If you’re not satisfied that you have fully completed your course on the earth that God has given you, stay here until you have. Don’t let sickness evict you from your body before you finish your work on earth! At some point, you will be able to say, like Paul, that you have accomplished everything that God wanted you to accomplish. You won’t have anything left on any kind of bucket list. At that point, there wouldn’t be much point in hanging around here.
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