1. O Lord God
of my salvation. This is a hopeful title by which to
address the Lord, and it has about it the only ray of comfortable light which
shines throughout the psalm. The writer has salvation, he is sure of that, and
God is the sole author of it. While a person can see God as his Saviour, it is
not altogether midnight with him. I have cried day and night before thee.
His distress had not blown out the sparks of his prayer, but quickened them
till they burned perpetually like a furnace at full blast. His prayer was
personal; it was intensely earnest, so that it was correctly described as a
cry, such as children utter to move the pity of their parents; and it was
unceasing—neither the business of the day nor the weariness of the night had
silenced it; surely such intreaties could not be in vain. It is a good thing
that sickness will not let us rest if we spend our restlessness in prayer. Evil
is transformed to good when it drives us to prayer. Before thee is a
remarkable intimation that the psalmist’s cries had an aim and a direction
towards the Lord, and were not the mere clamors of nature, but the groanings of
a gracious heart towards Jehovah, the God of salvation.
2. Let my prayer come before thee. Admit it to an audience; let it speak with thee. Though it
be my prayer, and therefore very imperfect, yet deny it not thy
gracious consideration. Incline thine ear unto my cry. There may be
obstacles which impede the upward flight of our prayers—let us intreat the Lord
to remove them; and there may also be offenses which prevent the Lord from
giving favorable regard to our requests—let us implore him to put these out of
the way.
3. For my soul is full of troubles. Trouble in the soul is the soul of trouble. And my life
draweth nigh unto the grave. All his life was going, spiritual, mental,
bodily. Some of us can enter into this experience, for many a time have we
traversed this valley of death-shade, and dwelt in it by the month together.
Really to die and be with Christ will be a gala day’s enjoyment compared with
our misery when a worse than physical death has cast its dreadful shadow over
us. Are good people ever permitted to suffer thus? Indeed they are; and some of
them are even all their lifetime subject to bondage. O Lord, let none of thy
mourners imagine that a strange thing has happened unto him, but rejoice as he
sees the footprints of brethren who have trodden this desert before.
4. I am counted with them that go down into the pit. My weakness is so great that both by myself and others I am
considered as good as dead. If those about me have not ordered my coffin they
have at least conversed about my sepulchre, discussed my estate, and reckoned
their share of it. I am as a man that hath no strength. My constitution
is broken up; I can scarce crawl about my sick room, my mind is even weaker
than my body, and my faith weakest of all. The sons and daughters of sorrow
will need but little explanation of these sentences; they are to such tried
ones as household words.
5. Free among the dead.
Unbound from all that links a person with life, a freeman of the city of the
sepulchre, I seem no more one of earth’s drudges. Like the slain that lie in
the grave, whom thou rememberest no more. He felt as if he were as utterly
forgotten as those whose carcasses are left to rot on the battlefield. It is
all very well for those who are in robust health and full of spirits to blame
those whose lives are sicklied o’er with the pale cast of melancholy, but the
evil is as real as a gaping wound, and all the more hard to bear because it
lies so much in the region of the soul that to the inexperienced it appears to
be a mere matter of fancy and diseased imagination. Never ridicule the nervous
and hypochondriacal; their pain is real; though much of the evil lies in the
imagination, it is not imaginary. And they are cut off from thy hand. He
mourned that the hand of the Lord had gone out against him, and that he was
divided from the great author of his life. Men’s blows are trifles, but God’s
smitings are terrible to a gracious heart.
6. What a
collection of forcible metaphors, each one expressive of the utmost grief. The
flesh can bear only a certain number of wounds and no more, but the soul can
bleed in ten thousand ways, and die over and over again each hour. It is
grievous to the good man to see the Lord whom he loves laying him in the
sepulchre of despondency; evil from so good a hand seems evil indeed, and yet
if faith could but be allowed to speak she would remind the depressed spirit
that it is better to fall into the hand of the Lord than into the hands of man,
and moreover she would tell the despondent heart that God never placed a Joseph
in a pit without drawing him up again to fill a throne: that he never caused a
horror of great darkness to fall upon an Abraham without revealing his covenant
to him. Alas, when under deep depression the mind forgets all this; it is only
conscious of its unutterable misery. It is an unspeakable consolation that our
Lord Jesus knows this experience, right well, having, with the exception of the
sin, felt it all and more than all in Gethsemane when he was exceedingly
sorrowful even unto death.
7. Thy wrath lieth hard upon me. Dreadful plight this, the worst in which a man can be
found. Joy or peace, or even numbness of indifference, there can be none to one
who is loaded with this most tremendous of burdens. And thou hast afflicted
me with all thy waves, or “all thy breakers.” He pictures God’s wrath as
breaking over him like those waves of the sea which swell, and rage, and dash
with fury upon the shore. It appeared impossible for him to suffer more; he had
exhausted the methods of adversity and endured all its waves. So have we
imagined, and yet it is not really quite so bad. God has other and more
terrible waves which, if he chose to let them forth, would sweep us into the
infernal abyss, whence hope has long since been banished. Selah. There
was need to rest. Even lamentation must have its pauses.
8. Thou hast put away mine acquaintance far from me. If ever we need friends it is in the dreary hour of
despondency and the weary time of bodily sickness. Thou hast made me an
abomination unto them. They turned from him as though he had become
loathsome and contaminating, and this because of something which the Lord had
done to him; therefore, he brings his complaint to the prime mover in his
trouble. I am shut up, and I cannot come forth. He was a prisoner in his
room, and felt like a condemned criminal in his cell. When God shuts friends
out, and shuts us in to pine away alone, it is no wonder if we water our couch
with tears.
9. Mine eye mourneth by reason of affliction. Tears in showers are a blessing, and work our good; but in
floods they become destructive and injurious. Lord, I have called daily upon thee. He prayed still,
though no answer came to dry his eyes. Nothing can make a true believer cease
praying; it is a part of his nature, and pray he must. I have stretched out
my hands unto thee. As a little child stretches out its hands to its mother
while it cries.
10. Wilt thou show wonders to the dead? While I live thou canst in me display the glories of thy
grace, but when I have passed into the unknown land, how canst thou illustrate
in me thy love? Shall the dead arise and praise thee? True, the souls of
departed saints render glory to God, but the dejected psalmist’s thoughts do
not mount to heaven but survey the gloomy grave: he stays on this side of
eternity, where in the grave he sees no wonders and hears no songs. Selah.
At the mouth of the tomb he sits down to meditate, and then returns to his
theme.
11. Shall thy lovingkindness be declared in the grave? The dead know nothing, and therefore can declare nothing. Or
thy faithfulness in destruction? If the Lord let his servant die before the
divine promise was fulfilled, it would be quite impossible for his faithfulness
to be proclaimed. The poet is dealing with this life only; if a believer were
deserted and permitted to die in despair, there could come no voice from his
grave to inform mankind that the Lord had rectified his wrongs and relieved him
of his trials.
12. Shall thy wonders be known in the dark? If not here permitted to prove the goodness of Jehovah, how
could the singer do so in the land of darkness and deathshade? And thy
righteousness in the land of forgetfulness? Where memory and love are lost,
what witness to the divine holiness can be borne? If the believer dies
unblessed, how will God’s honor be preserved?
13. But unto thee have I cried, O Lord. I have
continued to pray for help to thee, even though thou hast so long delayed to
answer. A true-born child of God may be known by his continuing to cry; a
hypocrite is great at a spurt, but the genuine believer holds on till he wins
his suit. And in the morning shall my prayer prevent thee. He intended
to begin to pray before the sun was up. If the Lord is pleased to delay, he has
a right to do as he wills, but we must not therefore become tardy in
supplication.
14. Lord, why
castest thou off my soul? Hast thou
not aforetime chosen me? Can thy beloveds become thy cast-offs? Why hidest
thou thy face from me? Wilt thou not so much as look upon me? Canst thou
not afford me a solitary smile? We may put these questions to the Lord. It is
not undue familiarity, but holy boldness. It may help us to remove the evil
which provokes the Lord to jealousy, if we seriously beg him to show us
wherefore he contends with us. He cannot act towards us in other than a right
and gracious manner; therefore for every stroke of his rod there is a
sufficient reason in the judgment of his loving heart; let us try to learn that
reason and profit by it.
15. I am afflicted and ready to die from my youth up. His affliction had now lasted so long that he could hardly
remember when it commenced. There are holy men and women whose lives are a long
apprenticeship to patience, and these deserve our sympathy and our
reverence—for since the Saviour became the acquaintance of grief, sorrow has
become honorable in believers’ eyes.
While I suffer thy terrors I am distracted. God’s terrors had become more overwhelming and had driven
the man to despair. He could not judge and weigh his own condition in a calm
and rational manner. Sickness alone will thus distract the mind; and when a
sense of divine anger is added thereto, it is not to be wondered at if reason
finds it hard to hold the reins. How near akin to madness the soul-depression
sometimes may be, it is not our province to decide; but we speak what we do
know when we say that a featherweight might be sufficient to turn the scale at
times. You who yet retain your reason, thank God that the devil himself cannot
add that feather while the Lord stands by to adjust all things.
16. Thy fierce wrath goeth over us. No punitive anger ever falls upon the saved one, for Jesus
shields him from it all; but a father’s anger may fall upon his dearest child,
because he loves it. Thy terrors have cut me off. They have made me feel
like a leper separated from the congregation of thy people. Blessed be God,
this is the sufferer’s idea and not the very truth, for the Lord will neither
cast off nor cut off his people.
17. They came round about me daily like water. Such is the permeating power of spiritual distress, there
is no shutting it out. They compassed me about together. He was like the
deer in the hunt, when the dogs are all around and at his throat. And yet he
was a man greatly beloved of heaven!
18. Lover and friend hast thou put far from me. Even when they are near me bodily, they are so unable to
swim with me in such deep waters that they stand like people far away on the
shore while I am buffeted with the billows; alas, the dearest lover of all is
afraid of such a distracted one. The Lord Jesus knew the meaning of this when
in his passion. Lonely sorrow falls to the lot of not a few; let them not
repine, but enter herein into close communion with that dearest lover and
friend who is never far from his tried ones. And mine acquaintance into
darkness, or better still, “my acquaintance is darkness.” I am familiar
only with sadness; all else has vanished. I am a child crying alone in the
dark. Will the Heavenly Father leave his child there?
We have not attempted to interpret this psalm concerning our
Lord, but we fully believe that where the members are, the Head is to be seen
preeminently.
Excerpt from:
The Treasury of David
By Charles H Spurgeon
