View Psalms 39 in the note window.
David relates the struggle which had been in his breast, ver. 1 - 3.
He meditates on man's frailty and mortality, ver. 4 - 6.
He prays for pardon, deliverance from trouble, and respite from death,
ver. 7 - 13.
To the chief musician, even to Jeduthun, A psalm of David.
Title of the psalm. Jeduthun - One of the three chief masters of the
sacred musick, (1Ch 16:41,42).
1: I said - I fully resolved. Take heed - To order all my actions
right, and particularly to govern my tongue.
2: Dumb - Two words put together, expressing the same thing, to
aggravate or increase it. I held - I forbear to speak, what I justly
might, lest I should break forth into some indecent expressions.
Stirred - My silence did not assuage my grief, but increase it.
4: My end - Make me sensible of the shortness and uncertainly of
life, and the near approach of death.
5: Before thee - If compared with thee, and with thy everlasting
duration.
6: Vain shew - Heb. in a shadow or image; in an imaginary
rather than a real life: in the pursuit of vain imaginations, in which
there is nothing solid or satisfactory: man in and his life, and all his
happiness in this world, are rather appearances and dreams, than truths
and realities. Disquieted - Heb. They make a noise, bustling, or
tumult, with unwearied industry seeking for riches, and troubling and
vexing both themselves and others in the pursuit of them.
7: Mow Lord - Seeing this life and all its enjoyments are so vain
and short. My hope - I will seek for happiness no where but in God.
10: Remove - Take off the judgment which thou hast inflicted upon me.
I am - Help me before I am utterly lost.
11: Beauty - His comeliness and all his excellencies or felicities.
Moth - As a moth consumeth a garment, to which God compares himself and
his judgments, secretly and insensibly consuming a people, (Isa 51:8).
12: A stranger - I am only in my journey or passage to my real home,
which is in the other world.
13: No more - Among the living, or in this world.
