Commentaries:
Barnes' Notes
They cried - They cried out for help, for mercy, for life. In modern language, "they begged for quarter." They acknowledged that they were vanquished, and entreated that their lives might be spared.
But there was none to save them - To preserve their lives. No help appeared from their own countrymen; they found no mercy in me or my followers; and God did not interpose to deliver them.
Even unto the Lord - As a last resort. People appeal to everything else for help before they will appeal to God; often when they come to Him it is by constraint, and not willingly; if the danger should leave them, they would cease to call upon Him. Hence, since there is no real sincerity in their calling upon God - no real regard for his honor or his commands - their cries are not heard, and they perish. The course of things with a sinner, however, is often such that, despairing of salvation in any other way, and seeing that this is the only true way, he comes with a heart broken, contrite, penitent, and then God never turns away from the cry. No sinner, though as a last resort, who comes to God in real sincerity, will ever be rejected.
But he answered them not - He did not put forth his power to save them from my sword; to keep them alive when they were thus vanquished. Had they cried unto him to save their souls, he would undoubtedly have done it; but their cry was for life - for the divine help to save them from the sword of the conqueror. There might have been many reasons why God should not interpose to save them from the regular consequences of valor when they had been in the wrong and had begun the war; but there would have been no reason why he should not interpose if they had called upon him to save them from their sins. There may be many reasons why God should not save sinners from the temporal judgments due to their sins - the intemperate from the diseases, the poverty, and the wretchedness consequent on that vice - or the licentious from the woes and sorrows caused by such a course of life; but there is no reason, in any case, why God should not save from the eternal consequences of sin, if the sinner cries sincerely and earnestly for mercy.
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