In the details of this common expectation, also, there is a remarkable
parallelism. Both describe the future to which they look as an awaking,
and both connect with it, though in different ways and using different
words, the metaphor of an image or likeness. In the one case, the future
is conceived as the Psalmist's awaking, and losing all the vain show of
this dreamland of life, while he is at rest in beholding the appearance,
and perhaps in receiving the likeness, of the one enduring Substance,
God. In the other, it is thought of as God's awaking, and putting to
shame the fleeting shadow of well-being with which godless men befool
themselves.

What this period of twofold awaking may be is a question on which good
men and thoughtful students of Scripture differ. Without entering on the
wide subject of the Jewish knowledge of a future state, it may be enough
for the present purpose to say that the language of both these Psalms
seems much too emphatic and high-pitched, to be fully satisfied by a
reference to anything in this life. It certainly looks as if the great
awaking which David puts in immediate contrast with the death of 'men of
this world,' and which solaced his heart with the confident expectation
of beholding God, of full satisfaction of all his being, and possibly
even of wearing the divine likeness, pointed onwards, however dimly, to
that 'within the veil.' And as for the other psalm, though the awaking
of God is, no doubt, a Scriptural phrase for His ending of any period of
probation and indulgence by an act of judgment, yet the strong words in
which the context describes this awaking, as the 'destruction' and the
'end' of the godless, make it most natural to take it as here referring
to the final close of the probation of life. That conclusion appears to
be strengthened by the contrast which in subsequent verses is drawn
between this 'end' of the worldling, and the poet's hopes for himself of
divine guidance in life, and afterwards of being taken (the same word as