Chapter One Hundred Fifteen

In great distress from heavy circumstances, I said that man is deceit (1–2), and therefore I resorted only to Your, O Lord, help. What can I repay You for Your benefits? I will offer You libations and fulfill my vows (3–5). The death of the saints is precious in Your sight. You have loosed my bonds, delivered me from destruction, for which I will praise You in the house of the Lord (6–10).

Psalm 115:1. I believed, and therefore I spoke: I am greatly afflicted. Psalm 115:2. I said in my haste: all mankind is false. The complaint of the writer about his affliction before the Lord serves as an indicator of his deep faith. In his “haste” (more accurately rendered—in his frenzy), in the heavy restrictive circumstances of his life, when he saw help from nowhere but encountered only opposition and deceptions from people, he said that “all mankind is false,” that is, that reliance on human help is not only deceptive, but that people even live by deliberate and conscious deceptions of others. It is quite possible that the writer here makes an allusion to the intrigues of the Samaritans before the Persian court. This helplessness of the writer by his own strength to emerge from heavy circumstances prompted him to turn in prayer to God for help, being an expression of his faith that only the Lord alone is true and only in Him can one find protection.

Psalm 115:4. I will take the cup of salvation and call upon the name of the Lord. “The cup of salvation”—a thanksgiving cup, which the Hebrews would drink at the Passover meal (then three cups were drunk: the cup of bitterness, the cup of joy, and the cup of blessing). Here is meant not the Passover cup of blessing, that is, not the postponement of the offering of thanksgiving to God until the Passover festival, but the setting apart of a special thanksgiving cup at present, similar to that which was drunk at Passover.

Psalm 115:6. Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints! “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints!” The Lord prizes the death of the saints, sends it when it is needed, and therefore delivers the righteous from the heavy and apparently hopeless situation into which they fall (Ps 114:3). This is the meaning of this expression according to the context of the speech and by parallel with Ps 114. This is not opposed to the usual understanding that the Lord loves the righteous and prizes them at their death, that is, the Lord upon death receives the righteous to Himself and rewards them. Here then lies a clear teaching about the afterlife reward and the immortality of the human soul.