1 I said, I will guard my ways, that I sin not with my tongue;
I will put a muzzle on my mouth
So long as the wicked is before me.
2 I made myself dumb in still submission,
I kept silence joylessly,
And my sorrow was stirred.
3 My heart was hot within me;
While I mused the fire blazed up;
I spake with my tongue.
4 Make me, Jehovah, to know my end,
And the measure of my days, what it is;
Let me know how fleeting I am.
5 Behold, as handbreadths hast Thou made my days,
And my lifetime is as nothing before Thee;
Surely nothing but a breath is every man, stand he ever so firm.
Selah.
6 Surely every man goes about like a shadow;
Surely for a breath do they make [such a stir];
He heaps up [goods] and knows not who will gather them.
7 And now what wait I for, Lord?
My hope--to Thee it goes.
8 From all my transgressions deliver me;
Make me not a reproach of the fool.
9 I make myself dumb, I open not my mouth,
For Thou hast done [it].
10 Remove Thy stroke from me;
I am wasted by the assault of Thy hand.
11 When with rebukes for iniquity Thou correctest a man,
Like a moth Thou frayest away his gracefulness;
Surely every man is [but] a breath. Selah.
12 Hear my prayer, Jehovah, and give ear to my cry;
At my weeping be not silent:
For I am a guest with Thee,
And a sojourner like all my fathers.
13 Look away from me, that I may brighten up,
Before I go hence and be no more.
Protracted suffering, recognised as chastisement for sin, had wasted
the psalmist's strength. It had been borne for a while in silence,
but the rush of emotion had burst the floodgates. The psalm does not
repeat the words which forced themselves from the hot heart, but
preserves for us the calmer flow which followed. It falls into four
parts, the first three of which contain three verses each, and the
fourth is expanded into four, divided into two couples.
In the first part (vv. 1-3) the frustrated resolve of silence is
recorded. Its motive was fear of sinning in speech "while the wicked
is before me." That phrase is often explained as meaning that the
sight of the prosperity of the godless in contrast with his own
sorrows tempted the singer to break out into arraigning God's
providence, and that he schooled himself to look at their insolent
ease unmurmuringly. But the psalm has no other references to other
men's flourishing condition; and it is more in accordance with its
tone to suppose that his own pains, and not their pleasures, prompted
to the withheld words. The presence of "the wicked" imposed on his
devout heart silence as a duty. We do not complain of a friend's
conduct in the hearing of his enemies. God's servants have to watch
their speech about Him when godless ears are listening, lest hasty
words should give occasion for malicious glee or blasphemy. So, for
God's honour, the psalmist put restraint on himself. The word rendered
"bridle" in ver. 2 by the A.V. and R.V. is better taken as muzzle,
for a muzzle closes the lips, and a bridle does not. The resolution
thus energetically expressed was vigorously carried out: "I made
myself dumb in still submission; I kept silence." And what came of
it? "My sorrow was stirred." Grief suppressed is increased, as all
the world knows. The closing words of ver. 2 _b_ (lit. _apart from
good_) are obscure, and very variously understood, some regarding
them as an elliptical form of "from good and bad," and expressing
completeness of silence; others taking "the good" to mean "the law, or
the praise of God, or good-fortune, or such words as would serve to
protect the singer from slanders." "But the preposition here employed,
when it follows a verb meaning silence, does not introduce that
concerning which silence is kept, but a negative result of silence"
(Hupfeld). The meaning, then, is best given by some such paraphrase
as "joylessly" or "and I had no comfort" (R.V.). The hidden sorrow
gnawed beneath the cloak like a fire in a hollow tree; it burned
fiercely unseen, and ate its way at last into sight. Locked lips
make hearts hotter. Repression of utterance only feeds the fire, and
sooner or later the "muzzle" is torn off, and pent-up feeling breaks
into speech, often the wilder for the violence done to nature by the
attempt to deny it its way. The psalmist's motive was right, and in a
measure his silence was so; but his resolve did not at first go deep
enough. It is the heart, not the mouth, that has to be silenced. To
build a dam across a torrent without diminishing the sources that
supply its waters only increases weight and pressure, and ensures a
muddy flood when it bursts.
Does the psalm proceed to recount what its author said when he broke
silence? It may appear so at first sight. On the other hand, the calm
prayer which follows, beginning with ver. 4, is not of the character
of the wild and whirling words which were suppressed for fear of
sinning, nor does the fierce fire of which the psalm has been speaking
flame in it. It seems, therefore, more probable that those first
utterances, in which the overcharged heart relieved itself, and which
were tinged with complaint and impatience, are not preserved, and did
not deserve to be, and that the pathetic, meditative petitions of
the rest of the psalm succeeded them, as after the first rush of the
restrained torrent comes a stiller flow. Such a prayer might well have
been offered "while the wicked is before me," and might have been laid
to heart by them. Its thoughts are as a cool hand laid on the singer's
hot heart. They damp the fire burning in him. There is no surer remedy
for inordinate sensibility to outward sorrows than fixed convictions
of life's brevity and illusoriness; and these are the two thoughts
which the prayer casts into sweet, sad music.
It deals with commonplaces of thought, which poets and moralists
have been singing and preaching since the world began, in different
tones and with discordant applications, sometimes with fierce revolt
against the inevitable, sometimes with paralysing consciousness of
it, sometimes using these truths as arguments for base pleasures and
aims, sometimes toying with them as occasions for cheap sentiment and
artificial pathos, sometimes urging them as motives for strenuous
toil. But of all the voices which have ever sung or prophesied of
life's short span and shadowy activities, none is nobler, saner,
healthier, and calmer than this psalmist's. The stately words in
which he proclaimed the transiency of all earthly things are not
transient. They are "nothing but a breath," but they have outlasted
much that seemed solid, and their music will sound as long as man
is on his march through time. Our "days" have a "measure"; they
are a limited period, and the Measurer is God. But this fleeting
creature man has an obstinate fancy of his permanence, which is not
all bad indeed--since without it there would be little continuity of
purpose or concentration of effort--but may easily run to extremes
and hide the fact that there is an end. Therefore the prayer for
Divine illumination is needed, that we may not be ignorant of that
which we know well enough, if we would bethink ourselves. The solemn
convictions of ver. 5 are won by the petitions of ver. 4. He who asks
God to make him know his end has already gone far towards knowing
it. If he seeks to estimate the "measure" of his days, he will soon
come to the clear conviction that it is only the narrow space that
may be covered by one or two breadths of a hand. So do noisy years
shrink when heaven's chronology is applied to them. A lifetime looks
long, but set against God's eternal years, it shrivels to an all but
imperceptible point, having position, but not magnitude.
The thought of brevity naturally draws after it that of illusoriness.
Just because life is so frail does it assume the appearance of being
futile. Both ideas are blended in the metaphors of "a breath" and "a
shadow." There is a solemn earnestness in the threefold "surely,"
confirming each clause of the seer's insight into earth's hollowness.
How emphatically he puts it in the almost pleonastic language,
"Surely nothing but a breath is every man, stand he ever so firm."
The truth proclaimed is undeniably certain. It covers the whole
ground of earthly life, and it includes the most prosperous and
firmly established. "A breath" is the very emblem of transiency and
of unsubstantiality. Every solid body can be melted and made gaseous
vapour, if heat enough is applied. They who habitually bring human
life "before Thee" dissolve into vapour the solid-seeming illusions
which cheat others, and save their own lives from being but a breath
by clearly recognising that they are.
The Selah at the end of ver. 4 does not here seem to mark a logical
pause in thought nor to coincide with the strophe division, but
emphasises by some long-drawn, sad notes the teaching of the words.
The thought runs on unbroken, and ver. 6 is closely linked to ver.
5 by the repeated "surely" and "breath" as well as in subject. The
figure changes from breath to "shadow," literally "image," meaning not
a sculptured likeness, but an _eidolon_, or unsubstantial apparition.
"The glories of our birth and state
Are shadows, not substantial things";
and all the movements of men coming and going in the world are but
like a dance of shadows. As they are a breath, so are their aims.
All their hubbub and activity is but like the bustle of ants on
their hill--immense energy and toil, and nothing coming of it all.
If any doubt remained as to the correctness of this judgment of the
aimlessness of man's toil, one fact would confirm the psalmist's
sentence, viz., that the most successful man labours to amass, and has
to leave his piles for another whom he does not know, to gather into
his storehouses and to scatter by his prodigality. There may be an
allusion in the words to harvesting work. The sheaves are piled up,
but in whose barn are they to be housed? Surely, if the grower and
reaper is not the ultimate owner, his toil has been for a breath.
All this is no fantastic pessimism. Still less is it an account of
what life must be. If any man's is nothing but toiling for a breath,
and if he himself is nothing but a breath, it is his own fault. They
who are joined to God have "in their embers something that doth
live"; and if they labour for Him, they do _not_ labour for vanity,
nor do they leave their possessions when they die. The psalmist has
no reference to a future life, but the immediately following strophe
shows that, though he knew that his days were few, he knew, too,
that, if his hope were set on God he was freed from the curse of
illusoriness and grasped no shadow, but the Living Substance, who
would make his life blessedly real and pour into it substantial good.
The effect of such convictions of life's brevity and emptiness should
be to throw the heart back on God. In the third part of the psalm
(vv. 7-9) a higher strain sounds. The singer turns from his dreary
thoughts, which might so easily become bitter ones, to lay hold on
God. What should earth's vanity teach but God's sufficiency? It does
not need the light of a future life to be flashed upon this mean,
swiftly vanishing present in order to see it "apparelled in celestial
light." Without that transforming conception, it is still possible to
make it great and real by bringing it into conscious connection with
God; and if hope and effort are set on Him amid all the smallnesses
and perishablenesses of the outer world, hope will not chase a shadow,
nor effort toil for very vanity. The psalmist sought to calm his hot
heart by the contemplation of his end, but that is a poor remedy for
perturbation and grief unless it leads to actual contact with the one
enduring Substance. It did so with him, and therefore "grief grew
calm," just because "hope was" not "dead." To preach the vanity of all
earthly things to heavy hearts is but pouring vinegar on nitre, unless
it is accompanied with the great antidote to all sad and depreciating
views of life: the thought that in it men may reach their hands beyond
the time-film that enmeshes them and grasp the unchanging God. This
psalm has no reference to life beyond the grave; but it finds in
present communion by waiting and hope, emancipation from the curse
of fleeting triviality which haunts every life separated from Him,
like that which the Christian hope of immortality gives. God is the
significant figure which gives value to the row of ciphers of which
every life is without Him made up. Blessed are they who are driven by
earth's vanity and drawn by God's fulness of love and power to fling
themselves into His arms and nestle there! The strong recoil of the
devout soul from a world which it has profoundly felt to be shadowy,
and its great venture of faith, which is not a venture after all,
were never more nobly or simply expressed than in that quiet "And
now"--things being so--"what wait I for? My hope"--in contrast with
the false directions which other men's takes--"to Thee it turns."
The burden is still on the psalmist's shoulders. His sufferings are not
ended, though his trust has taken the poison out of them. Therefore
his renewed grasp of God leads at once to prayer for deliverance from
his "transgressions," in which cry may be included both sins and their
chastisement. "The fool" is the name of a class, not of an individual,
and, as always in Scripture, denotes moral and religious obliquity, not
intellectual feebleness. The expression is substantially equivalent
to "the wicked" of ver. 1, and a similar motive to that which there
induced the psalmist to be silent is here urged as a plea with God for
the sufferer's deliverance. Taunts launched at a good man suffering will
glance off him and appear to reach his God.
Ver. 9 pleads as a reason for God's deliverance the psalmist's silence
under what he recognised as God's chastisement. The question arises
whether this is the same silence as is referred to in vv. 1, 2, and
many authorities take that view. But that silence was broken by a rush
of words from a hot heart, and, if the account of the connection in the
psalm given above is correct, by a subsequent more placid meditation and
prayer. It would be irrelevant to recur to it here, especially as a plea
with God. But there are two kinds of silence under His chastisements:
one which may have for its motive regard to His honour, but is none
the less tinged with rebellious thoughts, and brings no good to the
sufferer, and another which is silence of heart and will, not of lips
only, and soothes sorrow which the other only aggravated, and puts out
the fire which the other fanned. Submission to God's hand discerned
behind all visible causes is the blessed silence. "To lie still, let Him
strike home, and bless the rod," is best. And when that is attained, the
uses of chastisement are accomplished; and we may venture to ask God to
burn the rod. The desire to be freed from its blow is not inconsistent
with such submission. This prayer does not break the silence, though
it may seem to do so, for this is the privilege of hearts that love
God: that they can breathe desires to Him without His holding them
unsubmissive to His supreme will.
The last part (vv. 10-13) is somewhat abnormally long, and falls into
two parts separated by "Selah," which musical note does not here
coincide with the greater divisions. The two pairs of verses are
both petitions for removal of sickness, either real or figurative.
Their pleading persistence presents substantially the same prayer
and supports it by the same considerations of man's transiency.
The Pattern of perfect resignation thrice "prayed, saying the
same words"; and His suffering followers may do the same, and yet
neither sin by impatience, nor weary the Judge by their continual
coming. The psalmist sees in his pains God's "stroke," and pleads
the effects already produced on him as a reason for cessation. He is
already "wasted by the assault of God's hand." One more buffet, and
he feels that he must die. It is bold for a sufferer to say to God,
"Hold! enough!" but all depends on the tone in which it is said. It
may be presumption, or it may be a child's free speech, not in the
least trenching on a Father's authority. The sufferer underrates his
capacity of endurance, and often thinks, "I can bear no straw more";
but yet he has to bear it. Yet the psalmist's cry rests upon a deep
truth: that God cannot mean to crush; therefore he goes on to a deeper
insight into the meaning of that "stroke." It is not the attack of an
enemy, but the "correction" of a friend.
If men regarded sorrows and sicknesses as rebukes for iniquity, they
would better understand why sinful life, separated from God, is so
fleeting. The characteristic ground tone of the Old Testament echoes
here, according to which "the wages of sin is death." The commonplace
of man's frailty receives a still more tragic colouring when thus
regarded as a consequence of his sin. The psalmist has learned it in
relation to his own sufferings, and, because he sees it so clearly,
he pleads that these may cease. He looks on his own wasted form; and
God's hand seems to him to have taken away all that made it or life
desirable and fair, as a moth would gnaw a garment. What a daring
figure to compare the mightiest with the feeblest, the Eternal with
the very type of evanescence!
The second subdivision of this part (vv. 12, 13) reiterates the
former with some difference of tone. There is a beautiful climax of
earnestness in the psalmist's appeal to God. His prayer swells into
crying, and that again melts into tears, which go straight to the
great Father's heart. Weeping eyes are never turned to heaven in vain;
the gates of mercy open wide when the hot drops touch them. But his
fervour of desire is not this suppliant's chief argument with God. His
meditation has won for him deeper insight into that transiency which
at first he had only laid like ice on his heart, to cool its feverish
heat. He sees now more clearly, by reason of his effort to turn away
his hope from earth and fix it on God, that his brief life has an
aspect in which its brevity is not only calming, but exalting, and
gives him a claim on God, whose guest he is while here, and with whom
he has guest-rights, whether his stay is longer or shorter. "The land
is mine, for ye are strangers and sojourners with me" (Lev. xxv. 23).
That which was true in a special way of Israel's tenure of the soil is
true for the individual, and true for ever. All men are God's guests;
and if we betake ourselves behind the curtains of His tent, we have
rights of shelter and sustenance. All the bitterness of the thought
of the brevity of life is sucked out of it by such a confidence. If
a man dwells with God, his Host will care for the needs, and not be
indifferent to the tears, of His guest. The long generations which
have come and gone like shadows are not a melancholy procession out
of nothing through vanity into nothing again, nor "disquieted in
vain," if they are conceived as each in turn lodging for a little
while in that same ancestral home which the present generation
inhabits. It has seen many sons succeeding their fathers as its
tenants, but its stately strength grows not old, and its gates are
open to-day as they have been in all generations.
The closing prayer in ver. 13 has a strange sound. "Look away from
me" is surely a singular petition, and the effect of God's averting
His face is not less singular. The psalmist thinks that it will be
his regaining cheerfulness and brightness, for he uses a word which
means to clear up or to brighten, as the sky becomes blue again after
storm. The light of God's face makes men's faces bright. "They cried
unto God, and were lightened," not because He looked away from them,
but because He regarded them. But the intended paradox gives the more
emphatic expression to the thought that the psalmist's pains came from
God's angry look, and it is that which he asks may be turned from
him. That mere negative withdrawal, however, would have no cheering
power, and is not conceivable as unaccompanied by the turning to the
suppliant of God's loving regard. The devout psalmist had no notion of
a neutral God, nor could he ever be contented with simple cessation of
the tokens of Divine displeasure. The ever-outflowing Divine activity
must reach every man. It may come in one or other of the two forms of
favour or of displeasure, but come it will; and each man can determine
which side of that pillar of fire and cloud is turned to him. On one
side is the red glare of anger, on the other the white lustre of love.
If the one is turned from, the other is turned to us.
Not less remarkable is the prospect of going away into non-being which
the last words of the psalm present as a piteous reason for a little
gleam of brightness being vouchsafed in this span-long life. There is
no vision here of life beyond the grave; but, though there is not,
the singer "throws himself into the arms of God." He does not seek
to solve the problem of life by bringing the future in to redress
the balance of good and evil. To him the solution lies in present
communion with a present God, in whose house he is a guest now, and
whose face will make his life bright, however short it may be.