Psalms 88:5
5 Free among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, whom thou rememberest no more: and they are cut off from thy hand.
‘FREE AMONG THE DEAD’
‘Free among the dead.’
The freedom of which the author of this psalm writes so despairingly must have been, for him at least, a freedom of isolation, of solitariness, of exile and expulsion, rather than of release, independence, and joy.
I. We are all conscious of the possibility of a freedom which should have nothing in it either of comfort or honour.—(1) ‘Free among the dead’ will have no cheerful sound if it be taken to mean, as probably the Psalmist meant it, cast out of the sight of God, forsaken by the Divine superintendence, left to shift for himself in a world of shadowy forms and unsubstantial existences. Such freedom would be worse than any bondage. (2) There is a freedom, akin to the former, which is the loss of all employment and society, some one else filling your place and discharging your duties because an incurable sickness has stricken you, and that idleness which is the paradise of the dunce or the fool is put upon you, without and against your will, for the welfare of others, by the visitation of God. If this was the freedom of the dead as nature or fancy painted it to the Psalmist, can we wonder that he used it as the synonym rather of misery than of repose?
II. Read now in the light of Jesus Christ, what shall the text become?—(1) ‘He that is dead is freed from sin.’ Free among the dead is, first and above all, free from sin. (2) Jesus Christ said, ‘I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how am I straitened till it be accomplished.’ The word ‘straitened’ is the direct opposite of this ‘free among the dead.’ Freedom among the dead was His emancipation from the ‘straitness’ of earth. We, too, may make the words our comfort as we think of the departed, and our hope in the anticipation of a state which shall be our own.
—Dean Vaughan.
Illustration
‘As long as the assurance of immortality was not held fast by the soul, and the resurrection of the dead was not revealed to the Church, so long were death and the under-world not only the last but also the worst of enemies. And therefore in those times of old the prayers of believers were not poured forth for worldly treasures, earthly good, and carnal delight, but for the preservation and improvement of life, during their earthly pilgrimage, and for the manifestation of God’s glory within the sphere of the temporal, since they knew not how man could praise Him after death. The deliverance of the believer’s life, therefore, and the preservation of Israel, were not matters of individual interest and selfish desire; but the perpetuity of the Church in the world, and the salvation of the believer, were bound up with a righteous concern for God’s honour and His acknowledgment among men.’