I. Observe the very forcible expression which is given here to the thought of life common to both verses. (1) "Every man walketh in a vain show." The force of the expression which the Psalmist employs is correctly given in the margin, "in an image," or "in a shadow." The phrase is equivalent to saying, he walks in the character or likeness of a shadow, or, as we should say, he walks as a shadow. That is to say, the whole outward life and activity of every man is represented as fleeting and unsubstantial, like the reflection of a cloud, which darkens leagues of the mountain's side in a moment, and ere a man can say, Behold! is gone again for ever. (2) Look at the other image employed in the other clause of our text to express the same idea: "I am a stranger and sojourner, as all my fathers were." The phrase has a history. In that most pathetic narrative of an old-world sorrow long since calmed and consoled, when "Abraham stood up from before his dead" and craved a burying-place for his Sarah from the sons of Heth, his first plea was, "I am a stranger and a sojourner with you." He was a foreigner, not naturalised. And such is our relation to all this visible frame of things in which we dwell.
II. Let me point, in the second place, to the gloomy, aimless hollowness which that thought apart from God infuses into life. Shadow is opposed to substance, to that which is real, as well as that which is enduring. No matter how you may get on in the world, though you may fulfil every dream with which you began in your youth, you will certainly find that without Christ for your Brother and Saviour, God for your Friend, and heaven for your hope, life, with all its fulness, is empty. The crested waves seem heaped together as they recede from the eye till they reach the horizon, where miles of storm are seen but as a line of spray. So when a man looks back upon his life, if it have been a godless one, be sure of this, that it will be a dark and cheerless retrospect over a tossing waste, with a white rim of wandering, barren foam vexed by tempest.
III. Note, finally, how our other text in its significant words gives us the blessedness which springs from this same thought when it is looked at in connection with God: "I am a stranger with Thee,and a sojourner." (1) A stranger with Thee then we are the guests of the King. (2) A stranger with Thee then we have a constant Companion and an abiding presence. (3) Strangers with Thee then we may carry our thoughts forward to the time when we shall go to our true home, nor wander any longer in the land that is not ours.
A. Maclaren, Sermons Preached in Manchester, 3rd series, p. 15.