sermon: Psalm 51 (Part Two): Psalm 51:1-4
David's Confession
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 29-Mar-25; Sermon #1810; 71 minutes
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I want to expand on an observation that I made in my last sermon on the background of Psalm 51. You will remember that we focused on II Samuel 11 and 12. Chapter 11 contains David's adultery with Bathsheba and his conspiracy with Joab to murder Uriah the Hittite under the cover of battle with the Ammonites, and then chapter 12 relates Nathan's visit to David many months later, 9 months later because the baby was already born. And his job was to wake David up to his spiritual peril and reveal God's displeasure with him because of his many sins.
We saw that these incidents and others in the last two decades, essentially, of his reign, paint David in a very poor light. He was not the same person, it seems, as he was earlier in his reign. He seemed to have been slipping spiritually. Making moral and theological mistakes. He was trusting himself and his advisors rather than trusting God and seeking His will in these matters. He was essentially doing his own will, going his own way, ruling as he thought the nation needed to be ruled.
And so this perspective on David brings into question what God meant when He called David a man after His own heart. That is the little observation I made in my last sermon and I kind of rushed through it to go on to something else, but I want to look at it a little more deeply today. So let us go to I Samuel 13 and we will read verses 11 through 14.
Now, before this, in the earlier parts of the chapter, Samuel and Saul had a deal. They had made an appointment to meet and Samuel was supposed to come after seven days, but he was delayed. He was not coming and Saul was looking around. He was facing the Philistines in this battle, and he was watching his army melt away. He had gathered a large force of Israelites to fight this battle, but you know how people are when they face danger. Some of them turn tail, they go away. Things were not happening fast enough for them and so his army was beginning to shrink.
So, Saul's foolish solution was to offer a burnt offering himself. That is what Samuel was coming to do. But the only problem here is that Saul was not a priest. Saul could not offer a burnt offering in this case. He had presumptuously performed a sacred act that was not his to do. That is very important to God. When God gives you an assignment, He wants you to stick with that. He had assigned Saul to be commander over the people, to be king. He had not given him the right to be a priest, but Saul presumptuously took that upon himself.
I Samuel 13:11-14 And Samuel said, "What have you done?" And Saul said, "When I saw that the people were scattered from me, and that you did not come within the days appointed, and that the Philistines gathered together at Michmash, then I said, 'The Philistines will now come down on me at Gilgal, and I have not made supplication to the Lord.' Therefore I felt compelled, and offered a burnt offering." And Samuel said to Saul, "You have done foolishly. You have not kept the commandment of the Lord your God, which He commanded you. For now the Lord would have established your kingdom over Israel forever. But now your kingdom shall not continue. The Lord has sought for Himself a man after His own heart, and the Lord has commanded him to be commander over His people, because you have not kept what the Lord commanded you."
He did not stay in his lane. He did not do what he had said he would do through Samuel. So, God said, "I've had enough. Saul, you've been constantly disobeying. You always want to do your own thing, and so I've had enough. I'm going to choose another." So God says He had sought a man after His own heart.
The traditional understanding of this phrase is that David had a quality of heart that he shared with God. And I am not saying that is wrong. I am just saying it may not be exactly what the text actually says. David was committed to God's way. He was faithful to His law in most cases. We know from his psalms that he left that he loved God dearly and we know (as Ronny mentioned earlier) that he always seemed to repent thoroughly when it was brought to his attention what he had done wrong. These are all fine things for a man to have. But was that actually what God meant when He said, "I have sought a man after My own heart"?
Now, a slew of explanations have been brought forward over the centuries, but they always run into the fact that David, like all of us, like every single one of us, was horribly flawed. And that makes you scratch your head a little bit. What was it about his heart that God thought was so great? "Because the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked," like Jeremiah 17:9 says.
And I can go through the Old Testament (I will just leave out the New Testament right now), but you think, well, the three most righteous men, Noah, Job, and Daniel, seemed like morally and ethically and theologically, they were head and shoulders above David at certain points of his life. What about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? What about Joseph and Moses and Joshua? How about Samuel himself? Hezekiah, Josiah. Let us go to after the return, or at least in that period, what about Ezra and Nehemiah and Mordecai? And we have not even mentioned the women of faith that are there in the Bible too. We could throw Esther and Ruth and several others in there, Miriam. They were all flawed human beings but they are all built up in the Bible as examples of faith. All of them—maybe this is just because we know more about David and his flaws—but they all seem more faithful and morally upright than David at certain points of his life. And especially his spiritual state at the time of this great sin.
So what does "after His own heart" mean. Now we have to get a little bit into Hebrew grammar here. It will not be too hard. But the phrase "after His own heart" could modify the word man, a man after His own heart. You could read that right out of the Hebrew and probably be correct. But if you were coming at the text cold, did not know anything, and you were translating, you could also just as easily modify this phrase with the opening phrase. That is, "the Lord has sought for Himself." So what we are dealing with here is what we call in English a misplaced modifier. Where do you put the modifying phrase, prepositional phrase "after his own heart"? Is it that after His own heart, He sought for Himself a man? Or is it that God sought for Himself a man after His own heart? See how it changes the meaning?
In other words, the verse could just as easily read, "The Lord, in accordance with His own heart, has sought a man and commanded him to be commander over His people." Another possible rendition is, "The Lord has sought a man of His own choosing." This is the one I mentioned in my last sermon. The Lord has sought a man of his own choosing. What this translation does is it emphasizes God's unilateral decision. He did not consult anybody else. He did not take anybody's advice. He chose David because he was the man God wanted. We could call this God's election, or selection, of David.
Now, why is this particular alternative to be preferred? Well, it is the context; we often say context is key. You have to know your Bible a bit to understand this, but it makes sense once you think about it. What led to this point in the story? We are still here in I Samuel 13. What led to this? The section actually really begins in chapter 8. And you know what I Samuel chapter 8 is? It is Israel coming to Samuel and saying we want a king like all the other nations. We want a king to go out and lead our troops into battle. And so Samuel says, "No, that shouldn't be," and God says, Let them have a king. But tell them what's going to happen." And so the rest of chapter 8 is a litany of things that this king will do to take away their money and their servants and their sons and everything the king will demand. And it will be a great burden to the people of Israel.
In chapter 9, then, you have Saul being chosen as king. It is interesting in chapter 9, verses 15 and 16 (I will not read it), but God tells Samuel there to anoint Saul as commander of the people because the people demanded a king. He says, "OK, they asked for a king. I'm going to give them a king. I'm going to give them a king like they wanted, like all the other nations." So what did they get? God found a man from the tribe of Benjamin, who was tall and strong and good looking, he had a regal bearing, a real warrior type, and He said, "Here's your choice. This is what you wanted." But when Saul fails, as he does here in I Samuel 13, God says, "All right, you had your choice, now I'm going to give you a king of My choosing. I have from My own heart chosen this person."
Let us go to I Samuel 16, a couple of pages over, starting in verse 7. Remember Samuel was going to Jesse's house and he was to anoint one of his sons and did not know which one it was, so he had to go through all the sons of Jesse. And here in verse 7, God sets them up for this.
I Samuel 16:7 But the Lord said to Samuel, "Do not look at his appearance or at the height of his stature [What was it about Saul that had gotten everybody's attention? This tall, head-and-shoulders above everybody, good looking young man.], because I have refused him. For the Lord does not see as man sees; for man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart."
Let us drop down to verse 10.
I Samuel 16:10-13 Thus Jesse made seven of his sons pass before Samuel. And Samuel said to Jesse, "The Lord [notice, the Lord] has not chosen these." And Samuel said to Jesse, "Are all the young men here?" Then he said, "There remains yet the youngest, and there he is, keeping the sheep." [You can see him on that far hill there.] And Samuel said to Jesse, "Send and bring him. For we will not sit down till he comes here." [He must have had an inkling that this was the one.] So he sent and brought him in. Now he was ruddy, with bright eyes, and good looking. And the Lord said, "Arise, anoint him, for this is the one.' Then Samuel took the horn of oil and anointed him in the midst of his brothers; and the Spirit of the Lord came upon David from that day forward. So Samuel arose and went to Ramah.
So what we see here is God's choice. The one that He wanted. And He gave him His Spirit, and David used it, unlike Saul. You can say while he was ecstatic there among the prophets, he was kind of using it, but he never used it in the right ways. But David had a heart that would use it. God looked on David's heart and saw a person, an individual that He could work with. David would yield to God.
As we know, but he was not perfect, not by any means. We proved that in the last sermon. He did not have God's heart. He had a heart that could be worked with, but he did not have God's heart, not then. Because you know when you are first called, you do not have a perfect heart. And over the years, you still do not have a perfect heart. You develop it with God's help. God gives you His Spirit to cleanse the heart as much as possible of all the bad things that we have made habits over the years. Now legally and spiritually, He does clean our hearts. But we still have human nature that keeps coming back. And so we work all the way through our lives to make our hearts more godly, but we never truly are successful. We never scrub them absolutely clean and put all the great character in it. But we are promised that when we come up in the resurrection, we will.
And that is the same with David. David was an imperfect man with the Holy Spirit being converted throughout his whole life. But he never actually succeeded, if you will, in having a heart just like God's. So that is why the alternative is actually a better way to look at it. That God from His own heart chose the man that He could work with. He did not ask the people for any help. He did not want a king that the people would want. He wanted a man who had a heart that could be converted. And that is what He got, because He chose it. Because He looks on the heart and He can see what what can be developed there.
Now just as a final point on this choosing between these alternatives. The chronicles of other nations, like Babylon, actually use the same phraseology, "a king of his own heart." You can find it in some of their cuneiform writings. And they use it to describe their god's choice of kings. That Marduk of his own heart chose Nebuchadnezzar to be king. It is even used a time or two of the king's appointment of a vassal king. That of his own heart, Nebuchadnezzar chose this person to be the vassal king of a certain region. So it was something that was used commonly in the Middle East at the time. These phrases all mean "an ultimate authority's unilateral choice or selection of an underling, in which he made the choice himself." So out of his own heart, he chose X, whatever the person's name might have been. So the heart element in the phrase has little or nothing to do with the appointee's character.
But even so, when the true God is involved, it indirectly suggests that His choice has or will express character traits that please Him. Because He is choosing a person that He can change, He can work with.
That is enough of that trying to explain what I meant by an offhand comment that I made last time so that we can have an understanding of why commentators have come to that opinion. So we will begin our study of the text of Psalm 51 today. We should get through about one-third of the chapter. This means if I only get a third done and third done next time and a third done on the fourth part, I will have a four part series here when I wanted to have just three. But we will see how it goes in the next sermon, how far I get.
We will actually be covering quite a lot today. These subjects are what we will be hitting: God's mercy, sin, cleansing, guilt, the magnitude of sin, and changing the inner man. I mean, that is a lot; sermons could easily be given on each one of those subjects, but we are just going to take it as David writes it in the psalm. We are going to get a little bit of a running start here. We will go back into Psalm 50 and see the choice God gives the sinner because this sets up Psalm 51, as I mentioned last time. So we are going to start in Psalm 50, verse 16 and reread this because what God is doing here is He is setting up a choice, a decision, and the sinner has to make the choice of which way he is going to go. And then God says, depending on which way they choose to go, He will deal with them appropriately.
Psalm 50:16-17 But to the wicked God says: "What right have you to declare My statues, or take My covenant in your mouth, seeing you hate instruction and cast My words behind you?"
You do not care. You are just blowing it off. So why are you trying to come back at Me using My words? It does not work that way.
Psalm 50:18-21 "When you saw a thief, you consented with him, and have been a partaker with adulterers. You give your mouth to evil, and your tongues frame deceit. You sit and speak against your brother.; you slander your own mother's son. These things you have done, and I kept silent; . . .
He was watching. But He did not say, "Uh uh! No, no, you shouldn't do this." No lightning strike. He just let them, these wicked people, do their thing. And because of that, God goes on,
Psalm 50:21 . . . you thought that I was altogether like you; . . .
They assumed that He was good with it. That He tolerated it. But all He was doing was being patient and watching their sins mount. He was just not intervening.
Psalm 50:21 . . . but I will reprove you, . . .
It is not that He was not going to say anything; He was just waiting. He would ultimately do something and this is it,
Psalm 50:21 "I will reprove you, and set them in order before your eyes."
So He is saying, "I'm going to get your attention. I'm going to give you the third degree. And I'm going to tell you, give you a list of all these terrible things that you have done." Because He has been taking notes. He has been writing in His book, you might say. "Huh, she did that again, okay." "He did this, he did that." So He says, I am going to lay it all out for you like a lawyer in a case. And you are going to see that the judge can do nothing but call you guilty for all these wicked things. So He says,
Psalm 50:22-23 Now consider this, you who forget God [Remember what He said back in verses 16 and 17.], lest I tear you in pieces, and there be none to deliver [because He is the judge, remember?]: Whoever offers praise glorifies Me, and to him who orders his conduct aright I will show the salvation of God."
And so he says, Look, not all is lost here, even though your sins reach up into the heavens, and God has noted them and they are a very black stain. Good can come out of this. Salvation can still happen, deliverance. But you have to choose. You can choose to continue to be sinful and not change, or you can choose to praise God, glorifying Him for His mercy and lovingkindness and grace that He gives so freely. And God will respond with good things.
That is the choice. Reject Him, accept Him. Think you did nothing wrong or think that you are full of sin and say, "Okay, God, I reject you" on the one hand, or "God, I need your forgiveness." Whatever choice we make, God will act appropriately. And if we repent and admit our sin, He is very quick and willing to give us for forgiveness all the way to salvation, ultimate salvation.
So this is the choice that comes up for David and it leads immediately into Psalm 51 here. The structure of Psalm 51 is fairly straightforward, but it is a little irregular. It begins with a plea for mercy in verses 1 and 2 and it is followed, then, by a confession of sin from verses 3 to 6. Then after that, starting in verse 7 and going down through verse 12, there is a second plea for mercy. And then after that in verses 13 to 15 David makes a vow—a vow to change, a vow to do better, a vow to to help others to go up on the same course of repentance and growth. And then he takes a couple of verses, verses 16 and 17, to speak a bit about the nature of sacrifice. What is sacrifice all about? And then finally, you have the last two verses, verses 18 and 19, which is a prayer for Zion. A lot of commentators think that those two verses were added on. I have not made up my mind yet, but it does not matter. It is here in the Bible, the authorized version that we have, so it works well enough. I know that the New King James version and others separate these paragraphs a little bit differently, but I am going to go with the one I just gave you.
Psalm 51:1-2 Have mercy upon me, O God, according to Your lovingkindness; according to the multitude of Your tender mercies, blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sins.
Now, I have five points to give you about these two verses. I will take them together as a whole.
What I want you to note, normally when we pray, we pray after the Model Prayer in Matthew 6:9, "Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be Your name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done." We have this very long salutation where we say God's name, we make sure He understands that we are speaking to Him, we give Him glory and praise, we say these other things as ways of showing God that we love Him and that sort of thing.
Well, David does not do that. He starts in immediately with, "Have mercy upon me, O God." That is the only way he addresses God as, O God. He does not spend a lot of time recounting God's name, He does not try to impress people or God with his knowledge of God's titles, or he does not get flowery at all. He is in no way trying to impress God here. He just gets right to the point. He has a serious problem, and skips all those details in a salutation that are more formal and all that. He just goes straight to the point here, and there is a reason for that.
He has just become aware of just how terrible and serious his sin is and this abrupt opening that we have in Psalm 51 indicates that David is in a hurry. He is in a hurry to be freed from his guilt. He is in a hurry to have the assurance of God's forgiveness. He does not want to wait an extra minute that it would take to address God by His former titles. Because it has all come crashing down upon him about how horrible a person he actually is and how terrible are the things that he had done. He did not want to wait another second in that condition. He wanted to be freed from the guilt that he felt.
So at this point, David feels extremely dirty, slimy even, contaminated, corrupt, despicable. In a word, he felt guilty as sin, as we like to say. Because he was, and he had been sitting in his own filth, if you will, for 9 or 10 months and he wants to be clean again. It is like a shuddery, slimy feeling, "Oh, I'm just such a terrible person!" Or as Paul says later, who is going to free me from this? "I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord." at the end of Romans 7. So that is how David felt here and so he plunges immediately into the heart of the matter, that he was a sinful man and he needed mercy right away—mercy and forgiveness.
Now, I did mention just a minute ago that David uses the name of God as Elohim, and that is the only name that he calls God throughout this psalm. It is always Elohim. Remember last time I gave a quick synopsis of Book Two of the Psalms, and I mentioned in that synopsis that the Book Two psalms use Elohim more than five times more than Yahweh. It is a very Elohim-centric part of the Psalms, if you will, and by doing this, the authors emphasize God as Creator, using His power, omniscience, and providence to fashion us into His image. Remember, He is a creator, He is still creating, and so David addresses Him by His Creator name, if you will. God; in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth and when He finished on Day 6, He was not actually done. He just changed His course a little and began creating spiritual sons and daughters. And that of course is ongoing.
So, here in Psalm 51, the use of the name Elohim highlights God's power to deliver and forgive, and, in David's lowly state, resume the spiritual creation of David in God's image. He was calling on all God's power to right the ship, the ship of David, king of Israel into the Kingdom. And no one else could do it. So he calls upon the great, powerful Elohim, who knows all and can provide grace and redemption, unlike any other being in the universe. He stands above all others by far in His abilities to do these things. That is, deliver, forgive, and create. (That was #2, by the way.)
Thirdly, as we have gone through many of the psalms, we know that the Psalms are full of parallelism. So that oftentimes a verse is a couplet and the two elements within the couplet are parallel. What we have in the first two verses of Psalm 51 are parallel couplets. But the first is inverted. It reads backwards in the second one. You know, it is A, B and then B, A, if you will. And the second verse is a standard A, B, A, B. This indicates, to me at least, that he is speaking of two primary closely related concepts, one in each verse. The first one, the first verse is about forgiveness. And the second verse is about cleansing.
Now, we know that these are very closely related concepts, but he kind of splits them out so we can see them a little better. The first about forgiveness is illustrated by God's grace, an unmerited act of abundant mercy, love, and compassion. That is how he was going to be forgiven, and it all went back to the character of God and His grace, mercy, love, and compassion. The second, verse 2, is illustrated by the idea of purification. A thorough washing or a washing out of sin, if you will, leaving the person cleansed and pure.
He splits it up into two so that we can get a better picture of the process. So God gives grace and He gives cleansing and we know that this is through belief in Christ's sacrifice and the great works that have been done by Jesus Christ to allow this all to occur now. David at the time had an inkling that he would have a descendant that God would use. Remember, that had already been told to him in I II Samuel 7, but he was looking forward to that, whereas we look back at a finished set of deeds that Jesus did.
The fourth thing we can pull out of these two verses is something I have already mentioned. That David names three attributes of God and they are all in the first verse. These are the words mercy, lovingkindness, and tender mercies. They are three different words, Hebrew words.
The first, mercy, is hanan, and that connotes showing unmerited favor or grace. So that is, "Have mercy upon me," have grace upon me, show me Your favor which I do not deserve. And then it says, "according to Your lovingkindness." That is the second word, that is hesed, which is unfailing love, kindness, and goodness. So he is saying, "according to Your unfailing love, I would like to be forgiven." And then there is the word or the phrase, tender mercies. That is rahamim. This is a very interesting word. It is the plural of the Hebrew word rahem, and rahem means womb, like a woman's womb. And it is two wombs, it is plural. It is actually wombs, not womb. It is intensive plural, I think they call it. It is very similar to Lord of Lords, King of Kings, Holy of Holies, Song of Songs. It is like a super womb, if you will. And it implies profound inward compassion, like a mother's love for her child or a compassion for her child, doubled, tripled, multiplied exponentially, if you will. And David is saying God has that inward compassion that is beyond understanding.
So those are the three words: hanan or mercy connoting grace, lovingkindness which is hesed, unfailing love, and rahamim, and that is tender mercies, which means profound inward compassion.
Now combining all three of these in the one verse, David asks for gracious mercy in accordance with God's unfailing love, kindness, and goodness, and His abundant heartfelt compassion. He is banking on God's character in these areas to give him forgiveness.
Let us go back to Exodus 34. This is the time when Moses said, "Show me Yourself, I want to see You." And God says, "You can see My back." And so, God has him stand in the cleft of the rock, and Moses can then see the back of Yahweh, the one we know as Jesus Christ, as He is going away from him. But what He does is speak on His names. He gives him a list of His names which describe His character.
Exodus 34:5-7 Then the Lord descended in the cloud and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the Lord. And the Lord passed before him and proclaimed, "The Lord [that is Yahweh], the Lord God [that is Yahweh Elohim], merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin [keep those words in mind], by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and the children's children to the third and fourth generation."
What do you know? The three words that we see in Psalm 51:1 are also in Exodus 35:6. As a matter of fact, I am strongly suspicious that this is exactly what David was thinking when he used these in his psalm. Because God promises here, the big thing here is that He will be merciful and gracious and loving, and He will, by His mercy, forgive sin.
Merciful, the word merciful here in verse 6, "The Lord, the Lord God, merciful," is the word rahum. Now, you did not hear that when I used it in Psalm 51:1. That is because it is singular. Remember, rahamim is plural. Rahum is the singular. And rahum does mean exactly what it means in Psalm 51:1, except it is not in the intensive.
Gracious, that is the next word there after the and, merciful and gracious, is hanan. That is the same as mercy in Psalm 51:1 which connotes unmerited favor or grace.
And then the third one is goodness, "abounding in goodness and truth." That is hesed.
The same three words are here as they were in Psalm 51:1. So, in effect, what David is doing there in Psalm 51 is proclaiming the name of the Lord back to God as God had said it to Moses, reminding Him of these attributes and His promise to forgive iniquity and transgression. "This is what you told Moses, God. Now I'm going to claim those promises and ask You to forgive me, to give me grace and mercy based on what You have revealed to us of Your character."
It is God's nature. That is what David is basically saying in this first verse. It is God's nature to have mercy and graciously pardon in love and compassion. So he is saying, "I remind You of Your holy righteous character and ask for forgiveness on those terms." Or maybe a more human way of putting it rather than all those words, "God, I count on You to be who You are, and forgive me."
The fifth point. David uses three different words for his sin in Psalm 51. One of them is at the end of the first verse, that is, transgressions. That is the Hebrew word pasha, and it means rebellion or revolt. The word iniquity is in verse 2. That is awon (the "w" is pronounced with a "v" sound) in Hebrew and it means deliberate offense, violation, waywardness, even wickedness. However, it is not sin that is inadvertent or ignorant. This is something that is done with full knowledge, full awareness. And then finally you have at the end of verse 2, the word sin itself, which is hattát. And that word is essentially the word for failure. It is also more expanded out. It is a violation of God's will. It does not matter how it is done, it is a violation of God's will by any means. So it can cover a very wide range of actions.
These three words then cover the full gamut of sin. He is admitting to God in the second verse that his sin was an act of rebellion against God. That it was an offense to God, a deliberate offense, if you will, and an abject failure on his part to do God's will. He is saying, "I'm as guilty as sin. I admit it, I own it, I am worthy of death. But I ask for forgiveness based on Your character." Of course David did not want death but merciful, gracious, loving forgiveness, so he asked then to be purged of this sin. As bad as it was, he wanted it away, he wanted it out. He wanted it cleansed away, down the drain. He wanted it to be completely forgiven and forgotten, utterly removed.
I think we can see this actually better in the words "blot out" at the end of verse 1. This is a term used in writing. It essentially means obliterate, erase completely. Or for you techies it means delete, backspace. Because that is what he wanted. He wanted this off his record. Remember I said that God was there putting things in His book? What he is asking God to do at the end of verse 1 and verse 2 is to go back in His book with His eraser and mark out all those sins or, you know, use His rubber on the other end of His pencil and completely erase anything that was in God's book against him. So he wanted the record gotten rid of, forgotten, burned, whatever, totally erased, and he wanted himself to be thoroughly washed clean, inside and out, so that he would be cleansed of his sin. He was asking God for the full gamut of His ability to make him pure once again.
Remember I said this is about purification. He wanted to be pure because he felt just so nasty and awful, full of guilt. And he meant it. I mean, it was not just the feeling, it was he really knew that he had messed up terribly and his sin was ever before him. He could not get it out of his mind. And he wanted to be clear of it as soon as possible.
Let us flip over a few pages to Psalm 103, another psalm of David. Maybe this was written after. I do not know. But it is a very positive blessing of God, glorification of God, because he had experience with what God is said to do here.
Psalm 103:1-4 Bless the Lord, O my soul; and all that is within me, bless His holy name! [Is that not interesting, that he mentions the name of God just as he had done in Psalm 51.] Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits: who forgives all your iniquities, who heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from destruction, who crowns you with lovingkindness and tender mercies.
Recognize any of those words?
Psalm 103:8-18 The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in mercy. He will not always strive with us, nor will He keep His anger forever. He has not dealt with us according to our sins [Yeah, we deserve to be grease spots on the road.], nor punished us according to our iniquities. For as the heavens are high above the earth, so great is His mercy toward those who fear Him. As far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us. As a father pities his children, so the Lord pities those who fear Him. For he knows our frame; He remembers that we are dust. As for man, his days are like grass; as a flower of the field, so he flourishes. For the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place remembers it no more. But the mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear Him, and His righteousness to children's children, to such as keep His covenant, and to those who remember His commandments to do them.
That is the kicker there. We have to keep His covenant and remember to keep His commandments, but He promises to those people who do that He will give all of these wonderful benefits, among the greatest of which is forgiveness of sin. Not according to what we did does He deal with us.
By the way, I just thought I would mention this. This is thinking back to verse 13 here, "As a father pities his children, so the Lord pities those who fear Him." It made me think of the word Abraham. And if you break it down, it is Ab or Av and then raham. Right? Avraham. Literally that word means "father with a womb." Because it is the word raham that we saw in rahamim which is plural, but it is part of Abraham's name and that is why he is called the father of the faithful or the father of nations. Because out of him sprang all of these good things. And just thought I would mention that father of the faithful has this idea in his own name of God's tender compassion. Just thought I would throw that out there. It is one of those interesting things you learn along the way as you study.
Back to Psalm 51.
Psalm 51:3-4 For I acknowledge my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me. Against You, You only, have I sinned, and done this evil in Your sight—that You may be found just when You speak, and blameless when You judge.
This is David's confession of sin. Before it had been pleading for mercy, now he is confessing his sin. This is where he really owns up to his sin. The English translation does not show it, but the Hebrew emphasizes the word "I." It is actually repeated. So in this verse, it would be, "For I, I acknowledge my transgressions." So it is to show us that he truly recognizes and admits his rebellions and violations of God's will as shown in His law. He is telling God, "I get it. I messed up. I own these things. I shouldn't have done it." And in realizing how wrong he was in his deeds, they constantly plague him. "My sin is ever before me."
He cannot get those feelings of guilt and foolishness and disappointment with himself and contamination out of his mind. He wants to put in a pipe cleaner and clean himself out, but he cannot. He cannot clean himself up. No matter how he tries, only God can clean him up. So he is saying, "Look, I'm aware, deeply aware of what I've done. I've hit rock bottom here and I need Your forgiveness because I can't stand it. My skin crawls at my own depravity." He feels wretched constantly. Because he knew that he had disappointed God so much.
Then he goes and says, "Against You, You only, have I sinned." And this contains a head scratcher for most of us because we know that David's actions certainly harmed Bathsheba, the baby that she bore, Uriah definitely, and others, many others. We could make a case that as the king of Israel, what David did in all of those sins, he wronged all Israel. He wronged us by bringing more sin into the world. So why does he emphatically say he had sinned only against God? "Against You, You only, have I sinned."
Now, we know that this concept had been in the Bible a long time or been in the thoughts of godly men, because Joseph says as early as Genesis 39:9, that sin is against God. He said that when fleeing from Potiphar's wife. Now David, then, takes that idea and uses it as a rhetorical device in this psalm to show the sheer magnitude of difference between sin against God and sin against people. He is saying there is such a gap in results or in destruction between sinning against God and sinning against a person.
What he is telling us here is that every sin is chiefly and fundamentally a desecration and breach of an individual's relationship with God, the number one relationship in a person's life. It is the most serious breach of relationship because the result hanging over the sinner's head is eternal separation if he does not repent. If there is any hope for life, especially eternal life, the sins' foremost offendee, God, must be appeased. And we do that by seeking forgiveness, confessing our sins, and repentance. And all of this, of course, comes under the umbrella of Christ's works on our behalf so that this is possible.
Now another perspective on this, that sin is only against God. Think of this: What is God? God is Creator. He is Provider. He is Lawgiver, and many, many other things. He wears many hats. He is the great Supreme Deity of the universe. No one is higher than He is. But what do we do when we sin? Our sin spoils His creation. Our sin misuses or mistreats what He provided. Our sin breaks His law. In some way, every sinful thing that we do damages something He set in place for our good. Or those sins expropriate something He has not given. Something that He in His love and mercy have withheld from us.
So whether it is destroying or damaging something that He has given or taking something that He has not given, we have offended Him. To use a very mild term, all these deeds show our disrespect for God. Because they are offenses against His good, righteous, and perfect nature. So we could say David's statement is correct in principle. That sin is only against God. Because the ramifications for the relationship with Him are so great that the others are fairly insignificant.
Yes, people are hurt by our sins. I am not denying that. Perhaps the easiest way to understand it is the way German theologian Herbert Haag put it. He contends that "sin in the biblical sense is only against God. We may hurt our fellow man, but we sin against God." He is arguing that the word sin and all that it implies should only be used in terms of iniquities against Him. Harming other people is a different subject altogether on a lesser plane. That is the way he explained it. Sin in the biblical sense is only against God. Other people receive harm or abuse from those actions, but not necessarily sin, if you understand the difference.
Our sins are rebellions, violations, offenses, and wickedness against God Himself, first and foremost, because we refuse to submit to His will (emphasis on His) and His commands (emphasis on His). We can say our sins or our harm we do to other people, in essence is collateral damage of the sin that we committed against God.
In the next phrase here, he says, "and done this evil in Your sight." David just reiterates how evil he was and how evil he saw himself to be. He says, "I did this sin or this series of sin in God's sight." He was in His presence, He was fully aware that God was watching. And this makes his sins all the more heinous. He calls himself by saying this, impudent. He was insolent in doing these sins. Imagine committing adultery, murder, and conspiracy while knowing full well the Judge was watching.
He tells us here that his sin was arrogant, not caring that God was watching while he did these sins. He was in effect, in his own mind, thumbing his nose at God. He was aware that God was holy and righteous, and He would not approve at all of what he was doing, but he did not care. Because David wanted to do his own will. He wanted to do what he wanted to do.
In the next two lines here, "that You may be found just when You speak, and blameless when You judge," he admits in these two lines that his sin was so grievous that God could pass whatever sentence He wished, and God would be justified in carrying it through. David had no defense, no excuses, no justifications for what he had done. He had sinned, he was guilty, He was absolutely totally at fault. He admits it straight out. And he says, "God, I deserve whatever You want to dish out."
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Sermon Topics
The Gospel
