John Calvin Commentary Psalms 106:8

"Nevertheless he saved them for his name`s sake, That he might make his mighty power to be known." — Psalms 106:8 (ASV)

And saved them: The prophet here teaches what anyone could easily learn from the preceding sentence, that the Israelites were saved, not because they deserved it, but because God considered His own glory. With that obstacle removed, God continued to accomplish the deliverance He had begun, so that His holy name would not become an object of contempt among the nations.

Besides, we must not overlook the antithesis between the name of God and human merits, because God, out of concern for His own glory, can find no reason in us why He should be moved to save us. The immeasurable kindness of God, which, for the sake of such a perverse people, altered the usual order of nature, is more strikingly displayed by the subsequent account of the means by which they were preserved.

When he says that the sea was rebuked, he extols the power of God, at whose command and will the sea was dried up—the waters receded, so that a free passage was opened between the opposite heaps of waters. To magnify the miracle, he uses a comparison which, in all likelihood, was drawn from Isaiah; for in Isaiah 63:13, he says, “You have made Your people walk through the deeps, as a horse in the wilderness, that it might not stumble.” When the people walked through the sea as on a dry plain, the prophet informs us that this was done solely by the astonishing power of God.

It is quite possible that in the desert where the people wandered, there was many an abyss, the path was rugged, and many a hill and dale and ragged rock. But it cannot be doubted that the prophet extols the power of God in the passage through the sea, and enhances it with the consideration that the path through that deep sea was smooth.

Besides, he gives greater strength to the miracle by saying that their enemies were drowned; because, when the sea provided a free passage for the children of Israel, and yet covered and engulfed the Egyptians, so that not one of them escaped alive, from where did this instantaneous difference come, if not from God making a distinction between the one people and the other?