In the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus cried out to God the Father. He prayed, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death” (Matthew 26:38). Presumably, what caused Him such grief was the terrifying prospect of being abandoned by God because He was bearing the sins of the world (see 27:46).

God heard His prayer, sending an angel to strengthen Him (see Luke 22:43; Hebrews 5:7), but Jesus would bear this torment alone. His friends couldn’t stay awake as He prayed, and at the first sight of danger they all ran away. Left alone, Jesus knowingly walked into a trap laid for Him by his enemies. All that Jesus suffered was foreshadowed in the life of David as he describes it in Psalm 142.

The psalm begins with David bringing his complaint to God (vv. 1–2). As the psalm progresses, it becomes clear that there is no-one else to whom he can turn (v. 4). All his friends have abandoned him. Here is an important principle for us when we feel troubled or wronged. Where do we turn? Very often we turn first to someone else. We want to unburden ourselves and have someone listen to us. We search for a sympathetic ear. But it’s striking that David first goes to the Lord.

No-one is more on our side than the Lord, assuming our suffering is unjust. No-one but God knows all about our problem and has the strength to do something about it. Like David and the Lord Jesus, we should first cry out to Him.

David likens his suffering to being locked up in prison (v. 7). That can often be how we feel, too. We feel trapped in our crisis, with no way out. For Jesus also, the time between His death and resurrection was like being locked up in a prison. “But God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him,” as the apostle Peter said (Acts 2:24).

In this life, God may not always bring us the kind of freedom from suffering that we long for. But we can rejoice in the greater freedoms we enjoy—the chains of sin and the fear of death that once bound us have been broken by the death of Jesus (see Romans 8:2).

Finally, David looks forward to the day when, finally free from the threats of his enemies, “the righteous will gather about me” (Psalm 142:7). Similarly, having been set free from the chains of death, Jesus immediately met with His friends. Psalm 142, like so many psalms, speaks of the experience of David and our own life experience. But above all, it points us to the greater David, Jesus, who endured all this suffering for us.