Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 97 · April 7
How Frail I Am
“LORD, make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days, what it is: that I may know how frail I am.”
"LORD, make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days, what it is: that I may know how frail I am."
Just before he prayed that, David had been holding his tongue: "I was dumb with silence, I held my peace, even from good; and my sorrow was stirred. My heart was hot within me, while I was musing the fire burned: then spake I with my tongue." Dumb here means silent, unable to speak. He had kept quiet until it hurt, and the first thing he said when he finally spoke was a request to be shown how little time he has.
He asks for the measure of his days, and then he answers his own prayer in the next breath: "Behold, thou hast made my days as an handbreadth." A handbreadth is the width of a hand, about four fingers held up against the light.
Moses prays something similar in a psalm of his own, and he adds the reason: "So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom." We count our days so that we will spend them wisely.
James takes the same truth to a man with a business plan: "Go to now, ye that say, To day or to morrow we will go into such a city, and continue there a year, and buy and sell, and get gain: Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away." Psalm 39 has the same busy man in view two verses later: "he heapeth up riches, and knoweth not who shall gather them."
So the warning in this psalm reaches further than death arriving without notice. The danger is that you spend the whole handbreadth piling things up, staying very busy, and knowing this verse by heart while it changes nothing.
David does not pretend the answer was pleasant. The psalm closes, "O spare me, that I may recover strength, before I go hence, and be no more." Yet in the middle of it he found the one thing that does not vanish: "And now, Lord, what wait I for? my hope is in thee." A short life is safe when its hope rests in the God who lasts forever.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 97 is The Logic of Generosity (Romans 8:32).