Psalm 39

Meditation (vs. 1-3a)--I think the key to this section is found in the first part of verse 3:  "While I was musing..."  David wasn't speaking, he was thinking.  "I will restrain my mouth...I was mute with silence, I held my peace" (vs. 1-2).  He was grieving for some reason (v. 2), and grief that burned in his heart (v. 3).  He appeared to be meditating on life itself.

The results of his meditation (vs. 3b-6)--David finally speaks up, talking to the Lord, and indeed, he is considering the futility of life.  He speaks of the frailty (v. 4), the brevity (v. 5), and the vanity of this earthly existence.  "Certainly every man at his best state is but vapor" (v. 5).  It's a good lesson for all of us to learn.  It doesn't matter if a man "heaps up riches" (v. 6); somebody else will enjoy them--he "does not know who will gather them." 

The heavy hand of the Lord (vs. 7-13)--And even though our only hope is in the Lord (v. 7), it does seem, at times, that even He is against us.  At times like that, we are most aware of our sins (v. 8). "Remove Your plague from me; I am consumed by the blow of Your hand" (v. 10).  Jehovah rebukes us and man's "beauty melt[s] away like a moth."  Again, "surely every man is vapor" (v. 11).  David asks the Lord to deliver him from his transgressions, and to not make him a reproach (v. 8).  Even when David had nothing to say, "it was You who did it" (v. 9).  Once more we see how involved in his life David believes the Lord to be.  All that happens to him he attributes to God.  The king had a very strong sense of God's abiding presence.  Sometimes David felt that God was close, but in this psalm, "I am a stranger with You, a sojourner, as all my fathers were" (v. 12).  So he pleads for God to hear his prayer and see his tears, though he wants Him to "remove Your gaze from me, that I may regain strength, before I go away and am no more" (v. 13).  Whatever the current circumstances were, they caused David to examine life in general, realize its brevity and vanity, and that God can make our lives difficult, but only He can deliver us (v. 8).