'... Blot out my transgressions. 2. Wash me throughly from mine
iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.'--PSALM li. 1, 2.
A whole year had elapsed between David's crime and David's penitence. It
had been a year of guilty satisfaction not worth the having; of sullen
hardening of heart against God and all His appeals. The thirty-second
Psalm tells us how _happy_ David had been during that twelvemonth, of
which he says, 'My bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long.
For day and night Thy hand was heavy on me.' Then came Nathan with his
apologue, and with that dark threatening that 'the sword should never
depart from his house,' the fulfilment of which became a well-head of
sorrow to the king for the rest of his days, and gave a yet deeper
poignancy of anguish to the crime of his spoiled favourite Absalom. The
stern words had their effect. The frost that had bound his soul melted
all away, and he confessed his sin, and was forgiven then and there. 'I
have sinned against the Lord' is the confession as recorded in the
historical books; and, says Nathan, 'The Lord hath made to pass from
thee the iniquity of thy sin.' Immediately, as would appear from the
narrative, that very same day, the child of Bathsheba and David was
smitten with fatal disease, and died in a week. And it is _after_ all
these events--the threatening, the penitence, the pardon, the
punishment--that he comes to God, who had so freely forgiven, and
likewise so sorely smitten him, and wails out these prayers: 'Blot out
my transgressions, wash me from mine iniquity, cleanse me from my sin.'
One almost shrinks from taking as the text of a sermon words like these,
in which a broken and contrite spirit groans for deliverance, and which
are, besides, hallowed by the thought of the thousands who have since
found them the best expression of their sacredest emotions. But I would
fain try not to lose the feeling that breathes through the words, while
seeking for the thoughts which are in them, and hope that the light
which they throw upon the solemn subjects of guilt and forgiveness may
not be for any of us a mere cold light.
I. Looking then at this triad of petitions, they teach us first how
David thought of his sin.
You will observe the reiteration of the same earnest cry in all these
clauses, and if you glance over the remainder of this psalm, you will
find that he asks for the gifts of God's Spirit, with a similar
threefold repetition. Now this characteristic of the whole psalm is
worth notice in the outset. It is not a mere piece of Hebrew
parallelism. The requirements of poetical form but partially explain it.
It is much more the earnestness of a soul that cannot be content with
once asking for the blessings and then passing on, but dwells upon them
with repeated supplication, not because it thinks that it shall be heard
for its 'much speaking,' but because it longs for them so eagerly.
And besides that, though the three clauses do express the same general
idea, they express it under various modifications, and must be all taken
together before we get the whole of the Psalmist's thought of sin.
Notice again that he speaks of his evil as 'transgressions' and as
'sin,' first using the plural and then the singular. He regards it first
as being broken up into a multitude of isolated acts, and then as being
all gathered together into one knot, as it were, so that it is one
thing. In one aspect it is 'my transgressions'--'that thing that I did
about Uriah, that thing that I did about Bathsheba, those other things
that these dragged after them.' One by one the acts of wrongdoing pass
before him. But he does not stop there. They are not merely a number of
deeds, but they have, deep down below, a common root from which they all
came--a centre in which they all inhere. And so he says, not only 'Blot
out my _transgressions_,' but 'Wash me from mine _iniquity_.' He does
not merely generalise, but he sees and he feels what you and I have to
feel, if we judge rightly of our evil actions, that we cannot take them
only in their plurality as so many separate deeds, but that we must
recognise them as coming from a common source, and we must lament before
God not only our 'sins' but our 'sin'--not only the outward acts of
transgression, but that alienation of heart from which they all come;
not only sin in its manifold manifestations as it comes out in the life,
but in its inward roots as it coils round our hearts. You are not to
confess acts alone, but let your contrition embrace the principle from
which they come.
Further, in all the petitions we see that the idea of his own single
responsibility for the whole thing is uppermost in David's mind. It is
_my_ transgression, it is _mine_ iniquity, and _my_ sin. He has not
learned to say with Adam of old, and with some so-called wise thinkers
to-day: 'I was tempted, and I could not help it.' He does not talk about
'circumstances,' and say that they share the blame with him. He takes it
all to himself. 'It was _I_ did it. True, I was tempted, but it was my
soul that made the occasion a temptation. True, the circumstances led me
astray, but they would not have led me astray if I had been right, and
_where_ as well as _what_ I ought to be.' It is a solemn moment when
that thought first rises in its revealing power to throw light into the
dark places of our souls. But it is likewise a blessed moment, and
without it we are scarcely aware of ourselves. Conscience quickens
consciousness. The sense of transgression is the first thing that gives
to many a man the full sense of his own individuality. There is nothing
that makes us feel how awful and incommunicable is that mysterious
personality by which every one of us lives alone after all
companionship, so much as the contemplation of our relations to God's
law. 'Every man shall bear his own burden.' 'Circumstances,' yes;
'bodily organisation,' yes; 'temperament,' yes; 'the maxims of society,'
'the conventionalities of the time,' yes,--all these things have
something to do with shaping our single deeds and with influencing our
character; but after we have made all allowances for these influences
which affect _me_, let us ask the philosophers who bring them forward as
diminishing or perhaps annihilating responsibility, 'And what about that
_me_ which these things influence?' After all, let me remember that the
deed is _mine_, and that every one of us shall, as Paul puts it, give
account of _himself_ unto God.
Passing from that, let me point for one moment to another set of ideas
that are involved in these petitions. The three words which the Psalmist
employs for sin give prominence to different aspects of it.
'Transgression' is not the same as 'iniquity,' and 'iniquity' is not the
same as 'sin.' They are not aimless, useless synonyms, but they have
each a separate thought in them. The word rendered 'transgression'
literally means rebellion, a breaking away from and setting oneself
against lawful authority. That translated 'iniquity' literally means
that which is twisted, bent. The word in the original for 'sin'
literally means missing a mark, an aim. And this threefold view of sin
is no discovery of David's, but is the lesson which the whole Old
Testament system had laboured to print deep on the national
consciousness. That lesson, taught by law and ceremonial, by
denunciation and remonstrance, by chastisement and deliverance, the
penitent king has learned. To all men's wrongdoings these descriptions
apply, but most of all to his. Sin is ever, and his sin especially is,
rebellion, the deflection of the life from the straight line which God's
law draws so clearly and firmly, and hence a missing the aim.
Think how profound and living is the consciousness of sin which lies in
calling it _rebellion_. It is not merely, then, that we go against some
abstract propriety, or break some impersonal law of nature when we do
wrong, but that we rebel against a rightful Sovereign. In a special
sense this was true of the Jew, whose nation stood under the government
of a divine king, so that sin was treason, and breaches of the law acts
of rebellion against God. But it is as true of us all. Our theory of
morals will be miserably defective, and our practice will be still more
defective, unless we have learned that morality is but the garment of
religion, that the definition of virtue is obedience to God, and that
the true sin in sin is not the yielding to impulses that belong to our
nature, but the assertion in the act of yielding, of our independence of
God and of our opposition to His will. And all this has application to
David's sin. He was God's viceroy and representative, and he sets to his
people the example of revolt, and lifts the standard of rebellion. It is
as if the ruler of a province declared war against the central authority
of which he was the creature, and used against it the very magazines and
weapons with which it had intrusted him. He had rebelled, and in an
eminent degree, as Nathan said to him, given to the enemies of God
occasion to blaspheme.
Not less profound and suggestive is that other name for sin, that which
is twisted, or bent, mine 'iniquity.' It is the same metaphor which lies
in our own word 'wrong,' that which is wrung or warped from the straight
line of right. To that line, drawn by God's law, our lives should run
parallel, bending neither to the right hand nor to the left. But instead
of the firm directness of such a line, our lives show wavering
deformity, and are like the tremulous strokes in a child's copy-book.
David had the pattern before him, and by its side his unsteady purpose,
his passionate lust, had traced this wretched scrawl. The path on which
he should have trodden was a straight course to God, unbending like one
of these conquering Roman roads, that will turn aside for neither
mountain nor ravine, nor stream nor bog. If it had been thus straight,
it would have reached its goal. Journeying on that way of holiness, he
would have found, and we shall find, that on it no ravenous beast shall
meet us, but with songs and everlasting joy upon their lips the happy
pilgrims draw ever nearer to God, obtaining joy and gladness in all the
march, until at last 'sorrow and sighing shall flee away.' But instead
of this he had made for himself a crooked path, and had lost his road
and his peace in the mazes of wandering ways. 'The labour of the foolish
wearieth every one of them, because he knoweth not how to come to the
city.'
Another very solemn and terrible thought of what sin is, lies in that
final word for it, which means 'missing an aim.' How strikingly that
puts a truth which siren voices are constantly trying to sing us out of
believing! Every sin is a blunder as well as a crime. And that for two
reasons, because, first, God has made us for Himself, and to take
anything besides for our life's end or our heart's portion is to divert
ourselves from our true destiny; and because, second, that being so,
every attempt to win satisfaction or delight by such a course is and
must be a failure. Sin misses the aim if we think of our proper
destination. Sin misses its own aim of happiness. A man never gets what
he hoped for by doing wrong, or, if he seem to do so, he gets something
more that spoils it all. He pursues after the fleeing form that seems so
fair, and when he reaches her side, and lifts her veil, eager to embrace
the tempter, a hideous skeleton grins and gibbers at him. The siren
voices sing to you from the smiling island, and their white arms and
golden harps and the flowery grass draw you from the wet boat and the
weary oar; but when a man lands he sees the fair form end in a slimy
fish, and she slays him and gnaws his bones. 'He knows not that the dead
are there, and that her guests are in the depths of hell.' Yes! every
sin is a mistake, and the epitaph for the sinner is 'Thou fool!'
II. These petitions also show us, in the second place, How David thinks
of forgiveness.
As the words for sin expressed a threefold view of the burden from which
the Psalmist seeks deliverance, so the triple prayer, in like manner,
sets forth that blessing under three aspects. It is not merely pardon
for which he asks. He is making no sharp dogmatic distinction between
forgiveness and cleansing.
The two things run into each other in his prayer, as they do, thank God!
in our own experience, the one being inseparable, in fact, from the
other. It is absolute deliverance from the power of sin, in all forms of
that power, whether as guilt or as habit, for which he cries so
piteously; and his accumulative petitions are so exhaustive, not because
he is coldly examining his sin, but because he is intensely feeling the
manifold burden of his great evil.
That first petition conceives of the divine dealing with sin as being
the erasure of a writing, perhaps of an indictment. There is a special
significance in the use of the word here, because it is also employed in
the description of the Levitical ceremonial of the ordeal, where a curse
was written on a scroll and blotted out by the priest. But apart from
that the metaphor is a natural and suggestive one. Our sin stands
written against us. The long gloomy indictment has been penned by our
own hands. Our past is a blurred manuscript, full of false things and
bad things. We have to spread the writing before God, and ask Him to
remove the stained characters from its surface, that once was fair and
unsoiled.
Ah, brethren! some people tell us that the past is irrevocable, that the
thing once done can never be undone, that the life's diary written by
our own hands can never be cancelled. The melancholy theory of some
thinkers and teachers is summed up in the words, infinitely sad and
despairing when so used, 'What I have written I have written.' Thank
God! we know better than that. We know who blots out the handwriting
'that is against us, nailing it to His Cross.' We know that of God's
great mercy our future may 'copy fair our past,' and the past may be all
obliterated and removed. And as sometimes you will find in an old
monkish library the fair vellum that once bore lascivious stories of
ancient heathens and pagan deities turned into the manuscript in which a
saint has penned his Contemplations, an Augustine his Confessions, or a
Jerome his Translations, so our souls may become palimpsests. The old
wicked heathen characters that we have traced there may be blotted out,
and covered over by the writing of that divine Spirit who has said, 'I
will put My laws into their minds, and write them in their hearts.' As
you run your pen through the finished pages of your last year's diaries,
as you seal them up and pack them away, and begin a new page in a clean
book on the first of January, so it is possible for every one of us to
do with our lives. Notwithstanding all the influence of habit,
notwithstanding all the obstinacy of long-indulged modes of thought and
action, notwithstanding all the depressing effect of frequent attempts
and frequent failures, we may break ourselves off from all that is
sinful in our past lives, and begin afresh, saying, 'God helping me! I
will write another sort of biography for myself for the days that are to
come.'
We cannot erase these sad records from our past. The ink is indelible;
and besides all that we have visibly written in these terrible
autobiographies of ours, there is much that has sunk into the page,
there is many a 'secret fault,' the record of which will need the fire
of that last day to make it legible, Alas for those who learn the black
story of their own lives for the first time then! Learn it now, my
brother! and learn likewise that Christ can wipe it all clean off the
page, clean out of your nature, clean out of God's book. Cry to Him,
with the Psalmist, 'Blot out my transgressions!' and He will calm and
bless you with the ancient answer, 'I have blotted out as a thick cloud
thy transgressions, and as a cloud thy sins.'
Then there is another idea in the second of these prayers for
forgiveness: '_Wash me throughly_ from mine iniquity.' That phrase does
not need any explanation, except that the word expresses the antique way
of cleansing garments by treading and beating. David, then, here uses
the familiar symbol of a robe, to express the 'habit' of the soul, or,
as we say, the character. That robe is all splashed and stained. He
cries to God to make it a robe of righteousness and a garment of purity.
And mark that he thinks the method by which this will be accomplished is
a protracted and probably a painful one. He is not praying for a mere
declaration of pardon, he is not asking only for the one complete,
instantaneous act of forgiveness, but he is asking for a process of
purifying which will be long and hard. 'I am ready,' says he, in effect,
'to submit to any sort of discipline, if only I may be clean. Wash me,
beat me, tread me down, hammer me with mallets, dash me against stones,
rub me with smarting soap and caustic nitre--do anything, anything with
me, if only those foul spots melt away from the texture of my soul!' A
solemn prayer, my brethren! if we pray it aright, which will be answered
by many a sharp application of God's Spirit, by many a sorrow, by much
very painful work, both within our own souls and in our outward lives,
but which will be fulfilled at last in our being clothed like our Lord,
in garments which shine as the light.
We know, dear brethren! who has said, 'I counsel thee to buy of Me white
raiment, that the shame of thy nakedness may not appear.' And we know
well who were the great company before the throne of God, that had
'washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.'
'Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though
they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.' 'Wash me throughly
from mine iniquity.'
The deliverance from sin is still further expressed by that third
supplication, 'Cleanse me from my sin.' That is the technical word for
the priestly act of declaring ceremonial cleanness--the cessation of
ceremonial pollution, and for the other priestly act of making, as well
as declaring, clean from the stains of leprosy. And with allusion to
both of these uses, the Psalmist employs it here. That is to say, he
thinks of his guilt not only as a blotted past record which he has
written, not only as a garment spotted by the flesh which his spirit
wears, but he thinks of it too as inhering in himself, as a leprosy and
disease of his own personal nature. He thinks of it as being, like that,
incurable, fatal, twin sister to and precursor of death; and he thinks
of it as capable of being cleansed only by a sacerdotal act, only by the
great High Priest and by His finger being laid upon it. And we know who
it was that--when the leper, whom no man in Israel was allowed to touch
on pain of uncleanness, came to His feet--put out His hand in triumphant
consciousness of power, and touched him, and said, 'I _will_! be thou
clean.' Let this be thy prayer, 'Cleanse me from my sin'; and Christ
will answer, 'Thy leprosy hath departed from thee.'
III. These petitions likewise show us whence the Psalmist draws his
confidence for such a prayer.
'According to the multitude of Thy tender mercies, blot out my
transgressions.' His whole hope rests upon God's own character, as
revealed in the endless continuance of His acts of love. He knows the
number and the greatness of his sins, and the very depth of his
consciousness of sin helps him to a corresponding greatness in his
apprehension of God's mercy. As he says in another of his psalms,
'Innumerable evils have compassed me about; they are more than the hairs
of my head.... Many, O Lord my God! are Thy wonderful works.... They are
more than can be numbered.' This is the blessedness of all true
penitence, that the more profoundly it feels its own sore need and great
sinfulness, in that very proportion does it recognise the yet greater
mercy and all-sufficient grace of our loving God, and from the lowest
depths beholds the stars in the sky, which they who dwell amid the
surface-brightness of the noonday cannot discern.
God's own revealed character, His faithfulness and persistency,
notwithstanding all our sins, in that mode of dealing with men which has
blessed all generations with His tender mercies--these were David's
pleas. And for us who have the perfect love of God perfectly expressed
in His Son, that same plea is incalculably strengthened, for we can say,
'According to Thy tender mercy in Thy dear Son, for the sake of Christ,
blot out my transgressions.' Is the depth of our desire, and is the
firmness of our confidence, proportioned to the increased clearness of
our knowledge of the love of our God? Does the Cross of Christ lead us
to as trustful a penitence as David had, to whom meditation on God's
providences and the shadows of the ancient covenant were chiefest
teachers of the multitude of His tender mercies?
Remember further that a comparison of the narrative in the historical
books seems to show, as I said, that this psalm followed Nathan's
declaration of the divine forgiveness, and that therefore these
petitions of our text are the echo and response to that declaration.
Thus we see that the revelation of God's love precedes, and is the cause
of, the truest penitence; that our prayer for forgiveness is properly
the appropriating, or the effort to appropriate, the divine promise of
forgiveness; and that the assurance of pardon, so far from making a man
think lightly of his sin, is the thing that drives it home to his
conscience, and first of all teaches him what it really is. As long as
you are tortured with thoughts of a possible hell because of guilt, as
long as you are troubled by the contemplation of consequences affecting
your happiness as ensuing upon your wrongdoing, so long there is a
foreign and disturbing element in even your deepest and truest
penitence. But when you know that God has forgiven--when you come to see
the 'multitude of Thy tender mercies,' when the fear of punishment has
passed out of your apprehension, then you are left with a heart at
leisure from dread, to look the fact and not the consequences in the
face, and to think of the moral nature, and not of the personal results,
of your sin. And so one of the old prophets, with profound truth, says,
'Thou shalt be ashamed and confounded, and never open thy mouth any more
because of thy sin, when I am pacified towards thee for all thou hast
done.'
Dear friends! the wheels of God's great mill may grind us small, without
our coming to know or to hate our sin. About His chastisements, about
the revelation of His wrath, that old saying is true to a great extent:
'If you bray a fool in a mortar, his folly will not depart from him.'
You may smite a man down, crush him, make his bones to creep with the
preaching of vengeance and of hell, and the result of it will often be,
if it be anything at all, what it was in the case of that poor wretched
Judas, who, because he only saw wrath, flung _himself_ into despair, and
was lost, not because he had betrayed Christ, but because he believed
that there was no forgiveness for the man that had betrayed.
But Love comes, and 'Love is Lord of all.' God's assurance, 'I have
forgiven,' the assurance that we do not need to plead with Him, to bribe
Him, to buy pardon by tears and amendment, but that it is already
provided for us--the blessed vision of an all-mighty love treasured in a
dying Saviour, the proclamation 'God was in Christ, reconciling the
world unto Himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them'--Oh! these
are the powers that break, or rather that melt, our hearts; these are
the keen weapons that wound to heal our hearts; these are the teachers
that teach a 'godly sorrow that needeth not to be repented of.' Think of
all the patient, pitying mercy of our Father, with which He has lingered
about our lives, and softly knocked at the door of our hearts! Think of
that unspeakable gift in which are wrapped up all His tender
mercies--the gift of Christ who died for us all! Let it smite upon your
heart with a rebuke mightier than all the thunders of law or terrors of
judgment. Let it unveil for you not only the depths of the love of God,
but the darkness of your own selfish rebellion from Him. Measure your
crooked lives by the perfect rightness of Christ's. Learn how you have
missed the aim which He reached, who could say, 'I delight to do Thy
will, O my God!' And let that same infinite love that teaches sin
announce frank forgiveness and prophesy perfect purity. Then, with heart
fixed upon Christ's Cross, let your cry for pardon be the echo of the
most sure promise of pardon which sounds from His dying lips; and as you
gaze on Him who died that we might be freed from all iniquity, ask Him
to blot out your transgressions, to wash you throughly from your
iniquity, and to cleanse you from your sins. Ask, for you cannot ask in
vain; ask earnestly, for you need it sorely; ask confidently, for He has
promised before you ask; but ask, for unless you do, you will not
receive. Ask, and the answer is sent already--'The blood of Jesus Christ
cleanseth from all sin.'