Psalms 39

Psalms 39:1-13

Man’s frailty seen in the light of divine government. To the chief musician, to Jeduthun: a psalm of David. The closing psalm of this threefold series is most general in its character. It shows us sin as the cause, under divine government, of the frailty and vanity of human life and the heart of the righteous, exercised by this, coming to realize and acquiesce in it with all its humiliation. Thus, spite of its gloomy theme, it is for Jeduthun, the praise-giver," that the psalm is appointed, and this is so according to rule that all the strangeness has passed out of it. The psalm divides naturally into two parts, the first of which is an Ecclesiastes dirge over the misery of man’s “short space,” while the second gives the judgment of its cause, the recognition of God’s chastening because of sin, and that His “looking away” from man is his only hope. This, of course, is a very partial view of things; but the exclusion of the evangelic treatment of this -of which the psalmist, as we have seen, cannot be thought so ignorant as might appear -only brings more prominently into sight the matter which occupies him, which is, in fact, the evil and not the good; although it be true, and what is sought in it, that the complete judgment of the evil is itself a good, and allows the ever-ready grace to come freely in. The next psalm returns to Christ, and to His work of propitiation.

1. The sorrow into which he is plunged provokes the psalmist to thoughts that are so full of question, that in the presence of the wicked, ever fretting against God, he is afraid to utter them for fear of sin. He muzzles himself, therefore, and is dumb, even as to good, for he dare not trust himself. But the fire in his heart breaks out at last, and he cannot refrain. He speaks, but to the Lord alone. He cries, then, to know his end, his days that are measured, and yet he knows not the measure. Alarmed at his frailty, he is alarmed also at how little he realizes his frailty. His days are handbreadths merely, and God has given them their limit, a short space which is really nothing before the Eternal. It is the common condition of man: take the most stable, what is he? a puff of air -a breath.
   Then the unreality this gives to things, even while they last! vain disquietude; vain heaping up of what has presently to be left to others, he knows not whom. This is a trite story; but we are too certainly actors in it to allow its triteness to abate its interest for us. \
2. He turns once more to the Lord, to express the hope he has in Him. He has no expectation elsewhere, but here at once the remembrance of his sins confronts him; he needs deliverance from these he prays that on this account he may not be made the reproach of the fool -the impious -with whom, spite of all, he is not. Conscious of the chastening hand upon him, he was dumb, his mouth stopped, for he could not open it against God. Yet he can make supplication for the removal of the stroke, the blow of His hand under which he is being consumed. And such is man’s condition: his beauty ephemeral as the moth, but as the correction of perversity: for, with his Father’s goods on his hand, he uses them to enjoy himself away from Him, and thus must find the famine in order to be brought back. Every man is therefore but a breath. Now he breaks out into prayer again, turning his condition into an argument for the pity of the Merciful One. A “stranger” had careful provision made for him in Israel; and a “sojourner,” like David’s Moabitish ancestress, could reckon upon the shelter of the wings of the God of Israel. “I,” too, he cries, “am a stranger with Thee, and a sojourner, like all my fathers.” A stranger and sojourner is the guest of God, and to prove the largeness of His hospitality. But he goes further than this, and in a prayer that seems at first to be contradictory to it. “Look away from me,” he says, “that I may recover strength,” (or, more literally, “brighten up,”) before I go hence and be no more." But why “look away”? Certainly not that he wants God to forget him, but the contrary; but he is conscious of his sinfulness, which is the cause of all the sorrow and evil of his life; if a holy God is to look at that, what hope can there be for him? Surely none; and he and sin are so identified, God must look away from him -must not regard him -that he may have peace or comfort at all. The psalmist can elsewhere supplement this thought with what is necessary to explain it rightly. He can say, “Look upon the face of Thine Anointed” -Thy Christ (Psalms 84:9); and thus it is that, according to the gospel paradox, God, can regard us, just as not regarding us. Here, as already said, it is the very purpose of the psalm to give expression to the sense of the evil in us: we shall have no difficulty in fitting to it then the compensating and glorious truth. Repentance and faith are but the opposite sides of all real conversion. With the back on self, the glory of Christ is ever manifest.