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.
C. J. Vaughan, Temple Sermons,p. 288.