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The Psalmist's cry was for a physical deliverance from mortal danger — probably from a violent death at the hands of his enemies. With little or no straining of the words they may be turned into a prayer against the peril of moral and spiritual death. Under the emblem of death, virtuous and pious souls in all ages have been wont to depict a torpor, coldness, and inactivity of the moral and spiritual faculties. We dare not affirm that spiritual death is, like physical death, a final condition.

1. Moral death. The main point in bringing up children is to give moral life, so that at maturity conscience may be in them a living power. You must not only give your child rules of conduct, you must teach him likewise to hate evil and to love goodness. For moral death in the young man or woman there is but one remedy — the opening, lightening of the eyes. Another form of moral death is discoverable in those of maturer years, whose whole morality consists in simple imitation of others by habit, and in ruling the life by the ordinary customs and opinions of one's own little circle. Hundreds and thousands of quite respectable people are destitute of moral life. The essential conditions of moral life are absent. Such temptations as may come to then, are resisted from motives of self-indulgence rather than of self-denial and self-conquest. The worship of ease and respectability has gradually brought them into a state of moral torpor, indifference, and inactivity — has brought upon them, in fact, the sleep of death. Close akin to this is another form of moral death, into which some sink who once knew the nobility and the blessedness of the moral life. They began their worldly career not only innocent, but good, longing and striving to be good; but through adverse circumstances, through the pressure of the struggle for existence, they have been led to follow the evil example of the multitude, to copy their small dishonesties and their petty deceits in the matter of business, and to cease to have scruples in doing things and conniving at things which in their early days they shrank from as wicked. They become morally weaker from day to day, and at last the sleep of death comes over their hearts and consciences, and moral activity or heroic virtue is for them no longer possible. It is forgetfulness of God that most of all brings on this dreadful torpor. For the great mass of people, as they are, I can affirm, without fear of contradiction, that a religious life, a life of earnest prayer to God, is absolutely indispensable to a life of true and lofty morality.

2. Spiritual death. Moral death is widespread, even among respectable citizens. Spiritual death is equally prevalent among professedly religious people. Torpor, indifference, and inactivity of soul towards God is, I fear, the rule rather than the exception. And this is due to ignorance rather than to baseness, to a darkness which only the light of God can dispel. Spiritual death may be brought on by such means as these: by falseness in the creed detected, but not rejected; by superstition; by an unfounded fear of God; by undue regard for the mere externals of religious observances; by ignorance of what is really essential to true religion. These may be called the intellectual agents of spiritual disease and death. But there are other agents which are practical, such as being over-engrossed in worldly pursuits, giving up regular habits of prayer, seeking too eagerly the pleasures and indulgences of the flesh. We need a knowledge of the truth, which only God can give us, and which is much more than intellectual accuracy and consistency in our creed. The sleep of death may creel, over us when exhausted by the eternal problems which we make for ourselves, or find already made in our search after God.

(Charles Voysey, M. A.)

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KJV: Consider and hear me, O LORD my God: lighten mine eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death;

WEB: Behold, and answer me, Yahweh, my God. Give light to my eyes, lest I sleep in death;