Psalm 39:4-7
‘Lord, make me to know my end and the measure of my days…, so that I may know how frail I am! Behold, You have made my days like a handbreadth, and my age is nothing before You…. Every man at his best state, is altogether vanity!… Every man walks in a vain show (or “image”)…. And now, Lord, what am I waiting for? My hope is in You!’ Psalm 39:4-7.
Calvin comments David indicates he is “a mortal man whose life is frail…. ‘God…, at least make me to know how long You have appointed me to live!… Is…my life…but a moment?… Why do You accumulate upon my head such a load of miseries, as if I had yet many ages to live?’…
“‘Behold, You have made my days like a handbreath!’ A handbreadth is the measure of four fingers…, a very small measure…. The life of man flies away swiftly, and the end of it…touches the beginning…. Let us count the number of the years, which still remain to me on Earth!…
“Some render the word chedel ‘mundane’ — and others, ‘temporal’; that is to say, that which endures only for a time. If the world ‘mundane’ is adopted, the sense will be: ‘Show me whether You will prolong my life to the end of the world’…
It may…properly be taken for an age…. But in my judgment, the translation (‘handbreadth’) which I have followed, is much more appropriate….
“He says that ‘his age is…nothing before God’…. It is not a thing unknown to him how transitory and passing the life of man is…. David…does not continue to indulge in rash…lamentations but, lifting up his soul in the exercise of faith, he attains heavenly consolation!
‘Surely, man walks in a shadow (or a “vain show”)’…. He means that there is nothing substantial in man…. David simply declares of every man individually what Paul extends to the whole world, when he says: ‘The fashion of this world passes away!’ (First Corinthians 7:31)….
The appearance of strength which displays itself in them for a time, soon passes away…. They are only a shadow… Worldly men…admit not that they are mortal, much less do they consider that their life is bounded by the narrow limits of a handbreadth!…
“‘Now, O Lord, what do I wait for? My hope is toward You!’… Let us learn to press forward, and make still further progress — in order that, being as it were dead, we may be quickened by God!”
Finally, Calvin states in his Psychopannychia: “They (the soul-sleeping Anabaptists) insist on making David our opponent…. He says (Psalm 39:11) that man, if the Lord withdraws His mercy from him, falls away…. We teach that he is supported by the kindness and power of God!”
My age is as nothing before God. Yet I keep hoping upon Him! Do you?
