NIV Psalm 88:1 A song. A psalm of the Sons of Korah. For the director of music. According to mahalath leannoth. A maskil of Heman the Ezrahite.
O LORD, the God who saves me, day and night I cry out before you.
2 May my prayer come before you; turn your ear to my cry.
3 For my soul is full of trouble and my life draws near the grave.
4 I am counted among those who go down to the pit; I am like a man without strength.
5 I am set apart with the dead, like the slain who lie in the grave, whom you remember no more, who are cut off from your care.
6 You have put me in the lowest pit, in the darkest depths.
7 Your wrath lies heavily upon me; you have overwhelmed me with all your waves. Selah
8 You have taken from me my closest friends and have made me repulsive to them. I am confined and cannot escape;
9 my eyes are dim with grief. I call to you, O LORD, every day; I spread out my hands to you.
10 Do you show your wonders to the dead? Do those who are dead rise up and praise you? Selah
11 Is your love declared in the grave, your faithfulness in Destruction?
12 Are your wonders known in the place of darkness, or your righteous deeds in the land of oblivion?
13 But I cry to you for help, O LORD; in the morning my prayer comes before you.
14 Why, O LORD, do you reject me and hide your face from me?
15 From my youth I have been afflicted and close to death; I have suffered your terrors and am in despair.
16 Your wrath has swept over me; your terrors have destroyed me.
17 All day long they surround me like a flood; they have completely engulfed me.
18 You have taken my companions and loved ones from me; the darkness is my closest friend.
Picking up from where we previously left off--
3 For my soul is full of trouble and my life draws near the grave.
4 I am counted among those who go down to the pit; I am like a man without strength.
5 I am set apart with the dead, like the slain who lie in the grave, whom you remember no more, who are cut off from your care.
6 You have put me in the lowest pit, in the darkest depths.
These verses define the time frame in the life of Jesus to which the entirety of Psalm 88 points. It has been said by commentators that of all the psalms, this psalm is unique in the unmitigated intensity and duration of its lament--that is, from beginning to end--without hope, without light at the proverbial end of the tunnel. (1)
Once again, we are reminded of Christ's cry from the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Mark 15:34)
Verse 3 would appear to be from the cross itself, just before death.
In verse 4a, the soldiers and bystanders have totally given up on Him as coming through this alive. They count, or reckon Him, as being dead. There was indeed counting, or reckoning, at Skull Hill that day, since there were three being crucified.
In verse 4b, there is nothing the man Jesus can do. He has no strength to save Himself from death. Indeed, hecklers molested Him with their jeers, recorded for us in the gospels--
Matthew 27:39-40 Those who passed by hurled insults at him, shaking their heads and saying, "You who are going to destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself! Come down from the cross, if you are the Son of God!"
But the psalmist in 88:4b says, "I am like a man without strength." No, Jesus did not come down from the cross.
In verse 5a-b, we see Jesus being set apart with the dead, removed from the cross, wrapped in grave clothes.
5a-b I am set apart with the dead, like the slain who lie in the grave,...
5c...who are cut off from your care.
Verse 5c is very typical of the Old Testament attitude towards the dead. An immediate afterlife is not a strong theme in the Old Testament. Job's glorious statement below is in part made so glorious because it is a quick, extremely direct and unusual parting of the clouds for an ever-so-brief look at what lies beyond the grave in heaven.
Job 19:26 And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God;
But generally, in the Old Testament, the dead are dead. They are in a category all by themselves, separated and apart from those who are still alive, just as Psalm 88:5 says.
[Interlinear Hebrew] 5 free among the dead, as pierced ones lying in the grave, whom You remember no more; yea, by Your hand they are cut off. (2)
Note: The verb "pierced" in the verse above is in large quantities of Old Testament scripture translated as "slain", as in our text here in Psalm 88. But, when we think about it, we can see why the Hebrew verb for "slain" is actually "pierced"--use of spears and swords were the most common means of fighting in Old Testament days. Enemies were slain by piercing them with a sword or spear. Jesus, however, was crucified on a cross, not killed with a spear (although His dead body was later pierced through by a Roman soldier to verify that He was already dead). The hands and feet of our Lord were pierced, however, by the nails of the cross. Indirectly, it was these piercings that led to His death.
The word "free" in the interlinear version above doesn't signify what we today think of as the positive value "freedom". Rather, it signifies the concept of not having any ties, neither to friends and relatives among the living, nor to God Himself. The very next clause, "...whom You remember no more..." (5b) confirms this sense of the verb "free".
6 You have put me in the lowest pit, in the darkest depths.
Verse 6 seems to speak both of the metaphorical pit, the land of the dead, from which men do not return, and the actual pit, the hewn out cave in the rock in which Joseph of Arimathea placed the dead body of Jesus--
Mark 15:46 So Joseph bought some linen cloth, took down the body, wrapped it in the linen, and placed it in a tomb cut out of rock. Then he rolled a stone against the entrance of the tomb.
Jesus the man was very, very dead.
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Father, I am so very, very sorry for my sin. I know how I myself feel when I perceive myself to be cut off from You, from Your care and keeping of me. Sometimes I feel very close to You, but other times, I feel so very, very far away. Those times are so frightening to me, so very cold. Lord, this psalm tells me that Your Son felt Himself to be completely cut off from You. If that feeling is so bad for me, I can only imagine how excruciatingly painful it must have been for Your Son to feel that way, He being Your very special Son, one and only Son of God, at the same time being also very God of very God. Forgive me, O God Three in One, for my sin, and thank You for the death of Christ upon the cross. In Christ, Christina
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(1) Neale and Littledale, found in The Treasury of David, Volume Two, Part 2, Psalm the Eighty-Eighth, page 9, Hendrickson Publishers; "This Psalm stands alone in all the Psalter for the unrelieved gloom, the hopeless sorrow of its tone. Even the very saddest of the others, and the Lamentations themselves, admit some variations of key, some strains of hopefulness; here only all is darkness to the close."
(2) The Interlinear Hebrew-Greek-English Bible, Second Edition, copyright 1985, by Jay P. Green, Sr.
--to be continued
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