Psalm 39:4 Life's brevity

Psalm 39:4 Show me, O LORD, my life's end and the number of my days; let me know how fleeting is my life.

Psalm 39 seems to follow on in much the same vein as the previous psalm. Like many other psalms it is For the director of music. It is also A psalm of David. Between those phrases, however comes the almost unique For Jeduthun (see also Psalm 77). There was more than one Jeduthun but each of them appears to have been involved in the Temple worship. There are several things to consider in this psalm but if we focus just on verse 4 there is plenty to consider there. It is the first of three verses in the psalm that consider the brevity of life (see also verses 5 and 6). The words themselves are prompted by the situation David finds himself in - he is in deep anguish because of his enemies but eager not to say anything rash or unhelpful let alone blasphemous. He uses several metaphors to describe the brevity of life - it is a mere hand breadth in length, it is but a breath and in verse 6a he says Man is a mere phantom as he goes to and fro. Nevertheless, David's hope is in the Lord and he waits for deliverance from him. What he wants the Lord to do first, however, is to impress upon him the threefold fact that he will soon die, that his earthly life is limited and that life passes by very quickly. We should be praying such prayers too. It is too easy, especially when things are going well for us, to forget about death, to assume that life on earth goes on forever and to forget just how quickly it is all over. We must pray that the Lord will keep us from acting so foolishly and always give us a sense of the nearness and certainty of death, the brevity of life and how soon it will be over.