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.