We hear in this Psalm one of the cries of Him who cried to Him that was able to save Him from death (Heb. 5:7). It was uttered, it may be, some moment between His being seized in the garden and His cross. For then all had forsaken Him, and He Himself could not go forth (Psa. 88:8,17-18). The sentence of death was then eminently in Him, though all through life He had been a dying one (Psa. 88:3) or “dying daily,” as the Apostle speaks. But “free among the dead” He especially was during this interval. And then for three hours of darkness, closed by the shedding of His blood or life, He was sustaining the judgment of sin from the bruising hand of a righteous God. For we observe, that through life, the sorrows of Jesus came from man because He was righteous. But at last He was under the bruising of God, because He was made sin for us. And during the three hours of darkness, He was where no kindly ray of the Divine countenance could enter, for it was sin which occupied the place, the victim who was “made sin for us,” and God could only retire and leave it all in darkness.
Jesus here pleads (see also Psa. 6:5; 30:9; 115:17) to be delivered from death, on the ground that the dead could not praise God, nor the grave declare Him. For God is not the God of the dead but of the living. “The living, the living, he shall praise thee,” says Hezekiah, instructed of the Spirit to open his lips as one consciously in resurrection. And so Jesus cries for deliverance on this most blessed plea, that God is known not in death but in life. “I shall not die but live, and declare the works of the Lord.”