Church: Reformed Baptist Church of Franconia | Text: Psalm 51 | Date: August 11, 2024 | Speaker: Fred Zaspel

The Historical Setting of David’s Sin

Our subject today in Psalm 51 is the penitent king. You’ll see in the superscript that this is a Psalm of David, when Nathan the prophet went to him after he had gone in to Bathsheba.

“Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love. According to your abundant mercy, blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin. For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me. Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you may be justified in your words and blameless in your judgment. Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me. Behold, you delight in truth, in the inward being, and you teach me wisdom in the secret heart. Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean. Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. Let me hear joy and gladness. Let the bones that you have broken rejoice. Hide your face from my sins and blot out my iniquities. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from your presence and take not your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation and uphold me with a willing spirit. Then I will teach transgressors your ways, and sinners will return to you. Deliver me from blood guiltiness, O God, O God of my salvation, and my tongue will sing aloud of your righteousness. O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare your praise. For you will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it. You will not be pleased with a burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise. Do good to Zion in your good pleasure. Build up the walls of Jerusalem. Then will you delight in right sacrifices, in burnt offerings and whole burnt offerings. Then bulls will be offered on your altar.”

And then the postscript: he hands it off to the choirmaster. Let’s bow together for prayer.

Our Father, we come to a very sobering passage in your word, a passage that confronts us with our sin, but also a passage that teaches us what repentance is and what forgiveness is and where to find it. So we pray that you will teach us through it. Teach us our need of Jesus. We pray that you will help us through this to be reminded of the great value of our Lord Jesus Christ. Give us a firmer and more focused faith on him. We pray in his name, amen.

Psalm 51 is one of those 14 psalms that provide a historical setting in the superscript. And David tells us here this was written in the aftermath of his infamous sin against Bathsheba and against her husband Uriah. This is recorded for us in 2 Samuel chapter 11 and 12. You’re familiar with the story, I’m sure, but to understand the psalm David tells us right up front, we need to have that chapter of David’s life well in mind.

So just for review of that, it is 2 Samuel chapter 11 and then the response of Nathan the prophet in 2 Samuel chapter 12. It’s a time when we are told, 2 Samuel 11, verse one, it is a time when kings go forth to battle. But David stayed home; he sent instead his commander Joab to lead the army against the battle at Rabbah, Amman. This is Amman, Jordan, where King Abdullah reigns today. From the palace of the roof, while he is home in Jerusalem, he sees a woman bathing. She could have been more careful, I suppose, but the scriptures put the blame squarely on David, where it belongs. He inquired about her when he saw her. He sent for her, and had an adulterous affair with her.

Turns out it was the wife of one of his great soldiers, Uriah, a valiant soldier, a faithful soldier. We’ll see more of that as the story develops. But he’s the king. He can do what he wants. He can have her if he wants. He inquires about her, sends for her, brings her in, and they have their fling. She goes home. The affair is over, that was that, and no one knows. Sometime later, she sends a note back to David through a messenger informing him that she is pregnant. Clearly it is not her husband; he is not there.

So David immediately launches this scheme to cover up his sin, and he writes to Joab at the front of the battle. Under the guise of seeking for a report of the battle, he says, “Send Uriah home to give me a report.” So Uriah comes home. “Tell me about the battle, how’d it go?” and he tells him, gives him his report. “Okay, fine, now you go home. Go home to your wife.”

Uriah, being the kind of man that he was, doesn’t go home. He stays at the palace doors, sleeps there where the guards sleep. David hears about it. Uriah didn’t go home last night to be with his wife, and that just won’t work for David’s scheme. And so David brings Uriah in and says, “I hear you didn’t go home last night.” “No,” he said, “I won’t.” He said, “It’s not right that I should have luxuries like that while my brothers are out on the battlefield.”

Okay. David brings him in for dinner that evening and makes him drunk, gets him good and drunk, and then says, “Okay, now go home to your wife.” And again, Uriah sleeps at the door where the guards are and he doesn’t go home. So David still has to cover up his sin, and so he writes up a note for Joab and sends it by the hand of Uriah. And in that note, he writes, “I want you to rush up against the city gates of Amman. And as the battle is at its hottest point, I want you to back away and leave Uriah at the front to be slain.”

And so Uriah takes the note; David seals the note. Uriah unwittingly takes his own death warrant and takes it to Joab. Joab does what David has told him to do. The army backs away from the gates when the battle was the most fierce and Uriah is slain. Joab now sends a letter back to David and tells David what has been done and he informs him Uriah is dead.

Well, the plan seemed to work. What appears to be a tragedy of war was David’s calculated murder of a loyal soldier, but it seemed to work because his sin now was hidden from others. Bathsheba fulfills her time of mourning, returns to the palace, David marries her, a child is born, it seems to be his, no one knows the better, and all is fine. A boy is born. It was doubtless a cheerful event for them.

But the account in chapter 11 ends with these words, 2 Samuel 11 verse 27: “But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord.” Someone knew about it after all, and it was God. And so we find in chapter 12 then that God tells his prophet Nathan about the whole thing and he sends Nathan the prophet to go see David to confront him about his sin. Nathan tells David, you remember that famous parable—he didn’t present it as a parable. He just says, “There was this rich man in your kingdom. He had lots of flocks and herds, a very wealthy man. And there’s another man in your kingdom that lived nearby, and he didn’t have any flocks or herds or anything. He had one little ewe lamb. That’s all he had. And it was like to him a daughter. It was his pet. It would eat at his table. It would eat from his bowls. It was his pet. And the rich man then had a visitor come, and he wanted to put on a feast for him. Instead of taking one of his own sheep, he goes over and steals this poor man’s only sheep, slaughters it, has a great big feast for the guests to celebrate, and the poor man is left without the only sheep that he had.”

And David was almost in a rage over it. How could a man abuse his privilege so much? David says, “This man shall restore fourfold.” And then you remember, of course, Nathan looks to David and says, “David, you are the man.” In verse 9 of chapter 12, Nathan the prophet says to David, “Why have you despised the word of the Lord to do what is evil in his sight? You have struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword and have taken his wife to be your wife and have killed him with the sword of the Ammonites.” Notice the blame is laid squarely on David. You have killed him with the sword of the Ammonites. He has despised the word of the Lord—the word of the Lord that David despised doubtless is the word of the Lord prohibiting adultery and prohibiting murder. Both of those are capital offenses deserving the death penalty.

Well, as the superscript implies, when David was confronted, he owned up to his sin without any reservation. His immediate response is recorded for us in 2 Samuel 12, verse 13, where he says to Nathan, “I have sinned against the Lord.” He takes full responsibility for his sin. There are no excuses. He comes clean. He confesses his sin. He’s guilty, and he knows it. And now he’s under a sentence of death from the Lord.

But David was a deeply flawed man. And at the same time, David did have a heart that was for God. And when he was confronted with his sin, he did not hold back. He confessed it frankly and placed himself at God’s mercy. Psalm 51 now is David’s confession: the record of his confession of that sin with Bathsheba and his plea for mercy. You might remember some time back we were in Psalm 32. That was written in the aftermath of this event as well, but Psalm 32 records David’s joy of the forgiveness that he received upon his repentance. So Psalm 51 now is his confession, his repentance of sin, and his plea for mercy.

A Threefold Petition

It is a lament psalm, typical of lament psalms. We start out with an initial petition. “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love, according to your abundant mercy. Blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin.”

Now notice here we have—we’ll have to spend a little bit of time here in these first two verses—we have three threes in these verses. You see what David has done. He has a threefold description of sin. He lists three attributes of God that he keeps in focus in his confession. And then he has a threefold petition.

So first of all, the threefold description of sin. You’ll see that in verses one and two. In verse one, he speaks of his transgression. In verse 2, he speaks of iniquity and his sin: his transgression, his iniquity, and his sin. This is the primary terminology of sin in the Old Testament, and each of them connotes some kind of a deviation from an expected standard, a standard of behavior to which he’s responsible and accountable.

Verse 1, at the end of the verse: “my transgression. Blot out my transgressions.” Transgression—that word has the idea of rebellion, defiance, stepping over the line, defying God’s law, rebelling against him. Verse 2 speaks of his iniquity. “Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity.” That word has the idea of being twisted, perverted, twisted out of the right way. And it also entails the notion of guilt. And then at the end of the verse, “my sin”—that’s the generic term for sin that’s always used. It has to do with falling short of an expected mark, falling short of a standard of behavior.

So sin, then, is not just a colossal failure. It is a failure for which David is culpable, and he acknowledges that. It’s defiance. It’s rebellion. He has incurred guilt. Now what’s significant here, and we’ll see more of this as we go along, is that David, from the outset, makes no excuses for his sin. And it’s important to see that as we work through the psalm. David makes no attempt to hide his guilt any longer. He’s been doing that for a year. Now it’s just all out and before God, without any reservation, no mitigating of the offense. He just calls his sin what it is. It’s rebellion. It’s defiance. It is iniquity, twisting out of the right way. It renders me guilty, and it’s a colossal failure.

All right, so we have a threefold description of sin. Then we have three attributes of God that he keeps in focus. Now you’ll see here, verse one again: “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love, according to your abundant mercy, blot out my transgressions.” So we have mercy, steadfast love, and mercy.

The two words for mercy are different words in the original. The first one, the first part of verse one, has to do with God’s pity, his favor to the needy. Take pity on me. Steadfast love—that’s the term that we find so often in the Psalter. It combines the idea of God’s affection and his devoted loyalty. Affection of love, but a devoted loyalty that he will always do for the person what he’s promised to do. He’s faithful to him in that sense. So, mercy (that is pity or favor to the needy), God’s steadfast love (his affection, his devoted loyalty), and then the next mercy at the end of the verse: “according to your abundant mercy.” This is sometimes translated as his tender mercies; it has to do with God’s compassion.

You might remember where these terms first crop up. You remember in Exodus, Moses asks God to show him his glory. “I want to see you. Show me your glory.” And remember, Moses has to hide in the rock, and God passes by. “You can’t see my glory.” But he sees sort of the after-trailing effects of God’s hindsight glory as he passes by. And God says, “I will declare my name to you.” Moses says, “Let me see your glory,” and God says, “I’ll declare my name to you.” And as the Lord passed by—this is Exodus 34, verses 6 and 7—as the Lord passed before him, he proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful, gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.” So God has revealed himself as characterized by these attributes, and now David appeals to those attributes as he calls for mercy.

Now it’s interesting because in lament psalms often, and we’ve seen this already, David will protest his innocence. “This suffering is undeserved. Vindicate me.” He can’t do that in this lament. He has sinned. He’s the guilty one. He has no rights to claim whatever. He’s got no bargaining chips of any kind. He’s guilty. His only hope is that God will be merciful, compassionate, take pity, and that God will be devoted to him in affection.

Now, it’s also characteristic of the lament psalms that we’ve seen that there’s a confidence section in the psalm, where the psalmist will express his trust in God in a confident kind of way, where he knows that God will bring the deliverance that he’s asking for. He can’t do that in this psalm. He’s guilty, he deserves death, he has nothing to plea, he can’t presume that God will forgive, and so he asks for mercy.

And that brings us then to the threefold petition in verses 1 and 2. I said it’s a threefold petition. Formally, technically, there are four here: Have mercy, blot out, wash me, and cleanse me. There are four of them. We could actually say there’s only one: “Have mercy.” And what does that mean? Have mercy in these three ways: Blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity. Cleanse me from my sin. So however you want to say it—a single petition that entails all of this, a threefold petition, however you want to say it—he’s asking for mercy from God and that that mercy be shown in these ways: blot out my transgressions, wash me from my iniquity, cleanse me from my sin.

So he begins with, “Have mercy on me.” And that’s the dominant idea that carries him through. Then, “according to your abundant mercy, blot out my transgression.” Now this is a judicial request. Formally, the term would be pardon. “Give me pardon. Forgive me from my sin.” That’s the proper term. But here he gives a figurative expression of that: “Blot out my transgressions.”

So the idea is that God has been keeping a record book. That notion crops up in scripture several times. We have it in Daniel; we have it at the end of the Bible in the book of Revelation, at the judgment scene where the books are brought open. God keeps a record book. And David is referring to that and he says, “Blot out my transgression, wipe the slate clean, erase my sins, delete them, make it so that they’ve never been.” Again in verse 2, “Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity.” So David wants more than judicial forgiveness. He recognizes that he needs transformation. He needs cleansing. “My sin has made me unclean. I need moral cleansing. I need to be made something different from what I am right now.”

And then the last part of verse 2, “cleanse me from my sin.” Purify me. What he probably has in view here is unfitness—his ceremonial uncleanness for temple worship. He probably has some reference to his conscience as well. Always accusing. Always accusing. He makes reference to that in Psalm 32, that all through this year when he remained unrepentant, his conscience was accusing. God’s hand was heavy on him. He’s asking God to cleanse him, not only morally, but to clean his conscience as well. Do this in a way that wipes the slate clean.

A petition, as you know, is the heart of a lament psalm, and usually in the lament psalm, David is pleading for deliverance from his enemies, that God will destroy the enemies and save him from destruction, or sometimes it’s to deliver him from sickness. But here his petition is, “Deliver me from my sin.” And so he says, “Have mercy on me.” And that is every sinner’s only hope: that God will have mercy. We sung of that wonderfully today.

David’s Confession

All right, verses 1 and 2, we have his initial petition. Then verses 3 to 6, we have his confession. This is his lament, his confession of sin. In verses 3 and 4, he focuses on the sins that he committed. Notice the thoroughness of his confession. And this, I’m certain, is one of the reasons this psalm is given to us in the scripture: to teach and to give us a model of what repentance looks like. Notice the thoroughness of his confession. He frankly acknowledges his sin. He takes full responsibility for it.

Verse 3: “I know my transgressions. My sin is ever before me. Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight.” That is, I’m the guilty one here. It’s all on me. I have no excuses. Verse 3 picks up on that: “I know I have transgressed. I’ve flouted your law.” Verse 3 again: “My sin is ever before me,” that is, it’s always staring me in the face, accusing me. I have nothing to answer it. Verse 4: “My sin is against you, it’s evil in your sight.” We’ll see more of that in a minute. And again in verse 4, in fact, if you condemn me, you will be entirely justified in doing it.

So here’s the first mark of genuine repentance. There’s no holding back, no excuses, no saving a face, no mitigating circumstances. He bows helpless and broken before God, and all he can plead is mercy. God is not fooled by half-hearted repentance. If when you sin, you go to God in such a way that you’re going to save face and maintain your self-respect, hold your breath. Save it. It’s a sham. God sees it. He sees it for what it is.

You go to God as you go to others sometimes when you confess your sin. “Well, I’ve been under a lot of stress lately. What my husband did, what my wife did, or the situation at work… I know I shouldn’t have said this, but…” If you come to God as a victim, pleading your circumstances, that would be an insult to God who knows better. And the mark of sincerity and repentance is that we come to God as David does here, owning our responsibility, owning our guilt, claiming no rights, pleading only mercy.

Verse 4 actually drives that very point. David here highlights the true nature of his sins. “Against you, you only, have I sinned.” That’s a fascinating thing to say at a time like this, isn’t it? God only? David hadn’t sinned against anyone else? David had sinned against Bathsheba. David had sinned against Bathsheba’s family. He had sinned against Uriah. He had sinned against Uriah’s family. He had sinned against Joab. He had sinned against the army. And with that, he had sinned against the entire nation. You can’t find anybody he hadn’t sinned against. And yet he says, “You, against you only, I have sinned.” And David saw that the true evil of his actions does not lie on the horizontal or human level. The true evil of his actions is that he had sinned against, first of all, against the God of heaven. He had transgressed his law and what matters most to David now at this point is just this: Will God forgive me?

Verses five and six, David probes even more deeply. He confesses now his innate sinfulness. “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin my mother conceived me. Behold, you delight in truth in the inward being, and you teach me wisdom in the secret heart.” Now here David exposes root issues. “I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin my mother conceived me.” David is not blaming his mother for his sin. “In sin, my mother conceived me.” What David is saying is that my problem is not only that I have sinned; my problem is that inwardly, I am morally twisted. And in fact, ever since my birth—no, ever since my conception—I have been a developing sinner.

My sins that I have done have not arisen out of a vacuum. My sins can be explained only and truly in terms of my own perverse heart. It wasn’t Bathsheba’s fault. It certainly wasn’t Uriah’s fault. This was my fault through and through. I myself am the real problem. The reason I have sinned is because I myself am sinful. This is the contradiction of human nature. We’re created in God’s image. We have his thumbprint on us. And as it were, we understand right and wrong. We have a conscience. We understand accountability. And yet there is something on the inside of us that drives us against it all. And we prefer our sin. We want our sin.

This is the doctrine of total depravity. It’s not that you’ve done every sin as the worst sin that you could possibly do. You’ve been held back at times from sins. But every faculty of your being is so tainted by sin that it directs you away from God. Not just that you’re as bad as you can possibly be, but you’re as bad off as you can possibly be. David recognizes this about himself even after regeneration. We may not like the term total depravity after we’ve come to Christ, we’ve been washed, we’ve been sanctified, we’ve been cleansed, and there’s a new bent. And now we are not dominated by sin like we were. We are dominated now by the Spirit. But the remains of sin are there, and the proclivity to sin is still there. “Prone to wander, Lord I feel it.” We sing that. There’s something about us that drives us to sin, and David recognizes this about himself, and he’s simply confessing, “My sin did not arise out of anything but me. This is my doing. I have no excuses. I have sinned, and I have sinned because I have a corrupt heart. I myself am the problem.”

Verse six: what God wants to see in us, what delights God, is truth in the inward being. And David confesses, “That’s exactly what I lack. That’s what I don’t have. I have been a miserable sinner.” To use the language of the church over the centuries, “I’ve been a miserable sinner. And I’ve been so from the very beginning.” No excuses. He doesn’t say, “Oh, it’s just who I am. I’m just being true to myself.” The problem is me. “I’m a sinner, and so I sinned, and my sin has left me culpable.”

So here’s the mark, then, of genuine repentance. David abhorred not only what he had done, but David abhorred the twistedness of his own soul. He recognized that he himself was a sinner, and he says, “This is my fault and only my fault from beginning to end.” In terms of one of the Puritan writers, in repentance, David took sides with God against himself. You sin against someone—you slander, you hurt their reputation, you disrupt a friendship, you mistreat your wife, your husband, your children—and you say, “I’m sorry I did that.” You haven’t gotten to the bottom of it till you go to God and recognize, “God, this sin was against you, against you only, and I have done it because there’s something about me that’s twisted. This is my fault.”

Create In Me A Clean Heart

So then we come to his petition, verses 7 through 12. In verses 7 to 9, there are 12 of these petitions, 12 imperatives, where he asks God for something. Verses 7 to 9, he has his overt acts of sin in view, and he asks for forgiveness.

“Purge me with hyssop and I shall be clean. Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow. Let me hear joy and gladness. Let the bones that you have broken rejoice. Hide your face from my sin. Blot out my iniquities.”

And then verses 10 to 12, he focuses not on his acts of sin, but on the innate sinfulness that he has just mentioned. And he asks for renewal. Verse 10: “Create in me a clean heart, O God. Renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from your presence. Take not your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and uphold me with a willing spirit.”

All right, verse seven, he mentions the hyssop: “Purge me with hyssop and I shall be clean.” Hyssop was a bushy plant that grows in that area. It was used for the sprinkling of blood and ceremonial cleansing. A man had become impure and unclean, unfit for worship at the temple. He had to go through ceremonial cleansing and the blood was applied with the hyssop. Verse 8, “Let me hear joy and gladness.” Now I have said in poetry you have to think on the expressions that he uses. Often he has a phrase that is obviously a metaphor of some kind, and here we have one. “Let me hear joy and gladness.” How do you hear joy? How do you hear gladness? What he’s referring to clearly is the word of forgiveness. Let me hear the word of the prophet. In 2 Samuel 12 verse 13, he hears that word: “The Lord has taken away your sin.” That’s the word that will bring him joy, and it’s the only word that will give him gladness. Only on hearing the word of forgiveness will he be able to be joyful again.

Then in verse 9, we have two metaphors: “Hide your face from my sin and blot out my iniquities.” My only hope, he says, is that you will just turn away from my sin as though you don’t see it. My only hope is that you just erase them, delete them, and remove them from my record as though they’ve never happened. The idea is, don’t punish me for my sin. Don’t hold me accountable for what I’ve done. Forgive me.

But David needs more than forgiveness. He needs moral transformation. That requires the work of the Spirit, and so we have in verse 10, “Create in me a clean heart, O God.” That is, I’m wrong on the inside, and I need you to fix it. Change me. Make me to be something other than what I am. Verse 11, “Cast me not away from your presence and take not your Holy Spirit from me.” David was the anointed king in Israel. He was enabled for his office by the anointing of the Spirit that was given him by the prophet. And David had seen in his predecessor Saul how he had sinned against God and how that anointing and the Spirit was taken from him. He says, “Don’t let that happen to me. Don’t let me sin away the office that I have and the function I have as king.” And so in verses seven through 12, David prays his petition: “Forgive me, and make me to be something different from what I am.”

A Vow Of Praise

Then verses 13 to 17, we have, again, this is typical of the lament psalms, his vow of praise. Lament psalms typically conclude with a vow to praise and an expression of trust. Something like, “When you deliver me, I will sing. When you deliver me, I will praise. When you deliver me, I’ll tell everyone about it.” That’s the sense of things here. But in this case, David cannot presume that God will give the deliverance and the forgiveness. And verses 13 to 15 have an “if-then” kind of sense to them.

If you forgive me, then I will, verse 13: “Then I will teach transgressors your ways, and sinners will return to you. Deliver me from blood guiltiness, O God, O God of my salvation, and my tongue will sing aloud of your righteousness. O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare your praise.”

Now when David says, “Deliver me from blood guiltiness,” he’s acknowledging on the one hand that he deserves only condemnation. But on the other hand, he’s asking for mercy—ill-deserved kindness. Deliver me from blood guiltiness. I deserve to die. I deserve condemnation. Deliver me from it. And then verse 15, he vows to praise. “Deliver me and I will declare your grace to all who will hear.”

We’ve seen this before in the lament psalms. We come to this section of the laments. It seems that a public setting is in view. Doubtless, it’s the temple. You remember in Moses’ law, he had provided for a thank offering to be given. And so in the background of these thanksgiving psalms offered at the temple with celebration and with a thank offering that is given, in the background to all of that is some desperate situation that the psalmist was in. He prayed and he asked God for deliverance. God brought the deliverance and now, according to the vow that he made at that point, he goes to the temple and has this celebration with everyone there and he offers his thanks offering. There’s public praise, there’s public singing, and there’s a thank offering that is offered.

Given the circumstances, here we have a murdered soldier. David the king has committed adultery with the wife of one of his soldiers. We have a son that is born out of wedlock. It hardly seems appropriate to go have a celebration at the temple. What’s needed, first of all, is something preliminary, and that’s verse 17. Although David anticipates those expressions of praise in verses 13 to 15, and although he anticipates the accompanying sacrifice in verses 16 and 17, he says what’s needed first is a broken spirit and a contrite heart. No holding back, no preserving of his self-esteem, but open, frank confession of his sin before God.

And in this public setting, there would be these thank offerings that are offered. And David says in verses 16 and 17, “You will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it. You will not be pleased with burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart. Oh God, you will not despise.” David is not rejecting Moses’ law and sacrificial system at all. He affirms it in verse 7. He affirms it again in verse 19. But in this particular situation, this thank-offering celebration and all, it’s just inappropriate. What God wants from me is not a celebration. I can’t presume that I can give it. What God wants from me is a broken heart over my sin. Truth on the inward parts. Apart from this, apart from brokenness over sin, God wants nothing from us. God will not forgive in such a way that you can go away saying anything but, “I have received ill-deserved mercy.”

Corporate Praise

And then we come to verses 18 and 19. We have the epilogue. Corporate praise. This is the characteristic conclusion and the wish of the laments.

“Do good to Zion in your good pleasure. Build up the walls of Jerusalem. Then will you delight in right sacrifices, in burnt offerings and whole burnt offerings. Then bulls will be offered on your altar.”

Do good to Zion. In other words, the prosperity of your people depends on their king. And if you don’t forgive me, what will come of them? David wants more than forgiveness. He wants blessing to continue in an uninterrupted way to the people of God in Israel. And if the king is restored, the kingdom will prosper also. The kingdom can be right only if the king himself is right and blessed of God.

What we read in 2 Samuel 12, we read in Psalm 32 from David himself: that God indeed forgave David. And in fact, the thoroughness of the forgiveness that God gives David is stunning. From this marriage with Bathsheba—yes, that son died. That son that was born died. But from that marriage came another son. His name is Solomon. And from Solomon, David’s greater son, Messiah. To take the words of Romans 5, in David’s case, where his sin abounded, God’s grace abounded much more. The king was made right and God’s kingdom prospered.

And so David finishes his psalm, and then he hands it off to the choirmaster for the congregation to sing. I love joyful songs. They are my favorite, of course. But lament over sin is never out of date. And singing laments is always appropriate as well. Pleas to God for our forgiveness is a daily need. And so David hands his psalm to the choirmaster and says, “Let’s have the whole congregation sing this and ask God for forgiveness for our sins.”

Now, if you’ve read the New Testament at all, you know how to sing this psalm. It has Jesus written all over it. Verse seven: “Purge me with hyssop and I shall be clean.” We read in Hebrews chapter nine that hyssop, the branch that was used in the ceremonial cleansing, was prospective of the sacrifice of Christ offered for sin. Hyssop also points back to Exodus chapter 12, Passover. God brought his people out of Egypt. Hyssop was used to take the blood from the basin and put it on the doorposts the night before the Exodus. All of that is prospective of Jesus.

There’s a hint of this at the scenes of the cross as well. In John chapter 19, when Jesus said he was thirsty, they put sour wine on a hyssop branch and put it up to his lips. And there’s a hint again of Jesus fulfilling the typology of the hyssop.

Verse 14: “Deliver me from blood guiltiness, O God.” I deserve condemnation. Blood guilty. “Deliver me from blood guiltiness, O God, O God of my salvation, and my tongue will sing aloud of”—what? “Your righteousness.” Isn’t that fascinating? You would think, “You deliver me from blood guiltiness and I’ll sing aloud of your love and your compassion, your pity,” and all of that is wonderfully true. But what he focuses on is, “I’ll sing aloud of your righteousness.”

Now, how are you going to do that? How is a righteous God going to justify and forgive an unrighteous, rebellious sinner? It’s been called something of the riddle of the Old Testament. How do you do that? We find that cropping up once in a while in the Psalter in particular, that it is God’s righteousness that will be celebrated when he brings deliverance, which is just an ironic thing because it seems like it’s an unrighteous thing for a judge to pronounce a sinner to be righteous. How in the world can he do that?

And of course, it brings us to the very heart of the gospel: that Christ came in our place, took our sin, and God did not overlook the severity of our sin. He did not relax the standard. He did not let down the requirement of condemnation. But the glory of our salvation is that our substitute, the Lord Jesus, took our condemnation in our place. And God has found in Jesus a righteous way to justify sinners. It’s a glorious announcement in Romans chapter 4: God justifies the ungodly.

Verse 1: “Blot out my transgressions.” Justify me, forgive me. This is the blessing of justification. Justification entails both the accounting of righteousness and the forgiveness of sins. You might have heard justification defined as “just as if I had never sinned.” Justification: just as if I had never sinned. That’s really an inadequate definition of justification, but it is gloriously true and a glorious part of it that God treats us now as though we had never sinned because the amazing thing is that Christ in our place was made the sinner and was punished in our behalf.

David’s petition that God wash and cleanse him from his sin inevitably drives us forward and points us ahead to the Lord Jesus Christ, the one who took the adulterer’s and the murderer’s sin to himself, and the one in whose sacrifice alone the demands of divine justice can be satisfied. Forgiving and transforming sinners is just what Jesus does. Paul tells us of that in 1 Corinthians chapter 6. He lists different kinds of sinners: the unrighteous, sexually immoral, idolaters, adulterers, men who practice homosexuality, thieves, the greedy, drunkards, revilers, swindlers. And then he adds, “Such were some of you. Such were some of you. But you are washed. You are sanctified. You are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ by the Spirit of our God.”

That is the very message of the Bible. Yes, it is true. You are a great sinner and you must know that. But it is also true that Jesus is a greater Savior. And yes, repentance is required. But when you go to God in repentance, we find that he has provided the great Redeemer, who has accounted for all of our sin, and he provides for both the cleansing and the pardon that we so desperately need and can’t find without him.

We heard it read to us this morning. We sang it. Christ did not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. You think you’re pretty good. You think you can make it on your own. You can do that. But you can’t have the salvation Jesus brings. The wonderful irony of the gospel is, for the salvation that Jesus brings, only sinners qualify. As long as you protect yourself and you want to preserve your self-esteem and make excuse for your sin, God won’t have you. He’s not come for the righteous. We come to God in repentance for our sin. We find in Jesus a perfect Savior suited for all of our needs. For all of our Christian journey here, every day of our life, every day of our life is like the first day. We confess our sins to God, looking to Jesus to be for us all that God requires of us. Amen.