Psalms 88:15 - Exposition

I am afflicted and ready to die from my youth up . This is a new point. The psalmist's afflictions have not come upon him recently. He does not merely mean, as some have supposed, that, like other men, as soon as he was born he began to die, but speaks of something, if not absolutely peculiar to himself, yet at any rate rare and abnormal—a long continuance in a dying state, such as could only have been brought about by some terribly severe malady. While I suffer thy terrors I am distracted ; literally, I have endured thy terrors ; I am exhausted. (On the endurance of God's "terrors," see Job 6:4 ; Job 9:34 ; Job 13:21 .) The natural result would be a state, not of distraction, but of exhaustion. (So Kay, and substantially Professor Cheyne.)