The Book of Psalms

Word Study

"mine end," Hebrew qitzi (קִצִּי), my limit, my end. David prays a strange prayer. Not "make me to live longer," but "make me to know mine end" -- teach me my own mortality. He is asking for the wisdom to reckon honestly with death, not to deny it.

"measure of my days," middat yamai (מִדַּת יָמַי), the length of my life. He asks God to let him feel the shortness of his life. It is the language of measuring, as though a man's years could be laid out and their total taken.

"frail," chadel (חָדֵל), fleeting, transient, ceasing. The purpose of the prayer is "that I may know how frail I am." The word means passing, transient, a thing that ceases -- not merely weak, but bound to stop.

Explanation

Watch how this prayer breaks loose. The psalm opens with David clamping his mouth shut before the wicked, "I will keep my mouth with a bridle" (v1); but the effort backfires, "my heart was hot within me, while I was musing the fire burned: then spake I with my tongue" (v3). The dam bursts. And what pours out when it finally gives way is not the tirade against the wicked he had been swallowing, but this: a request to be taught his own death. That is a striking turn. Suppressing his anger at others drove him inward, and inward he found, not a grievance, but a grave. It is the same wisdom Moses prayed for, "teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom" (Psalm 90:12). We ask God to lengthen our days; the wiser prayer is that He would teach us how few they are, for only the man who has measured his life will spend it well.

Gospel Focus

"That I may know how frail I am", the honest reckoning with death that David sought is answered, and disarmed, in Jesus Christ. Scripture presses the same lesson: "what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away" (James 4:14). To know our frailty is the beginning of wisdom, for it drives us to the only One who has conquered death. And Christ has done exactly that: He "abolished death, and hath brought life and immortality to light through the gospel" (2 Timothy 1:10). The frailty David feared, Jesus took into Himself, for He shared our flesh and blood and died our death, "that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death" (Hebrews 2:14). So the believer can pray to know his end without terror, because his end is not the grave but the risen Christ. Numbering our days is not morbid but clarifying: it strips away the illusions that a vapour can be trusted, and sends us to lay hold of the eternal life God gives in His Son.

Word Study

"handbreadth," Hebrew tefachot (טְפָחוֹת), the width of the hand, the smallest ordinary measure. David reaches for the tiniest measuring stick he knows: the width of a hand. Set against the eternity of God, his whole life is a handbreadth, and even that is "as nothing."

"mine age," cheldi (חֶלְדִּי), my lifetime. What is being measured is not a season but the whole of his lifetime. The entire span, laid alongside God, comes to a hand's width.

"best state," nitzav (נִצָּב), firmly standing, established. The verdict is passed on man not at his weakest but at his strongest -- "every man at his best state", firmly standing, established, at the height of his powers.

"vanity," hevel (הֶבֶל), a breath, a vapour. "Verily every man at his best state is altogether vanity." The word hevel is the word of Ecclesiastes, "vanity of vanities" -- not evil, but vapour, a wisp of breath that shows for a moment and is gone.

Explanation

Weigh the exact phrase: not every man at his weakest, but "every man at his best state." The word nitzav means firmly standing, established, a man at the peak of his powers, his strongest and most settled. That is the moment the psalm calls vapour. It would be easy to admit that the sick and the dying are frail; David says the picture of health at the height of his prime is a breath. And he uses the Ecclesiastes word, hevel, which does not mean worthless but insubstantial, a puff of vapour on a cold morning, real for an instant, then gone. This is the great leveller: it is not our failures that expose our mortality but our finest hours, for the strongest breath is still only a breath. A "Selah" is set here, a pause to let the thought land, before the psalm can move to hope.

Gospel Focus

"Every man at his best state is altogether vanity", man is vapour, but the Word of God endures for ever, and in Jesus Christ the fleeting creature is joined to the eternal. "All flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away: but the word of the Lord endureth for ever" (1 Peter 1:24-25). The vapour of our life finds permanence only by being hidden in the One who does not pass: "your life is hid with Christ in God" (Colossians 3:3). Christ Himself entered our vapour, taking frail flesh and a life that could be cut off, and yet He is "the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever" (Hebrews 13:8); the eternal God clothed Himself in a handbreadth of days to lift us out of vanity into life that does not end. So the honest verdict that all is vapour is not the last word for the believer. Our brief breath, joined to the risen Christ, is caught up into His endless life, and what was vapour is made, in Him, eternal.

Word Study

"and now," Hebrew ve'attah (וְעַתָּה), a decisive turn. "And now" marks the hinge of the psalm. Having seen that life is a handbreadth and man a vapour, David turns from the reckoning to what follows from it.

"wait," qivviti (קִוִּיתִי), look for, expect. He asks the only sensible question: "what wait I for?" If everything under the sun is passing, what is worth looking for and expecting?

"hope," tocheleth (תּוֹחַלְתִּי), expectation, waiting hope. And he answers in four words: "my hope is in thee." The word is not a wish but an expectation, a hope that waits because it is sure of its object.

"in thee," lekha (לְךָ). Everything else has proved to be vapour; God alone is solid, and so the whole weight of the psalm's expectation is set on Him.

Explanation

Notice how differently David responds to mortality than the man in the verse just before. In verse 6 the world's answer to the brevity of life is to grasp: man "heapeth up riches, and knoweth not who shall gather them", frantic accumulation in the face of death, the very folly Jesus later named in the rich fool who filled his barns the night his soul was required of him (Luke 12:20). David draws the opposite conclusion from the same fact. If life is a vapour, then piling up more vapour is madness; the only rational thing is to anchor to something that does not pass. So the discovery that all is vanity does not end in despair, nor in the hedonism of "eat and drink, for tomorrow we die," but in worship: "my hope is in thee." The shortness of life, rightly seen, is not a reason to clutch the world harder but to loosen our grip on it entirely and take hold of God.

Gospel Focus

"My hope is in thee", this hope is fixed and made sure for us in Jesus Christ, who is Himself our hope. The New Testament names Him so directly: "Lord Jesus Christ, which is our hope" (1 Timothy 1:1), and "Christ in you, the hope of glory" (Colossians 1:27). Against a world of vapour, the believer's hope is "an anchor of the soul, both sure and stedfast," which enters "into that within the veil," fastened to the risen Christ Himself (Hebrews 6:19). This is why the shortness of life need not dismay the Christian: our hope does not rest on the handbreadth of our own days but on the everlasting life of the One who conquered death. We are "begotten... again unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead" (1 Peter 1:3), to an inheritance that does not fade. So Psalm 39 charts the wisest journey a soul can take: through the honest reckoning that all is vapour, past the folly of heaping up what we cannot keep, to the one hope that holds, "my hope is in thee", the Lord Jesus Christ, in whom our brief life is anchored to eternity.