'Iniquities prevail against me: as for our transgressions, Thou
shalt purge them away.'--PSALM. lxv. 3.
There is an intended contrast in these two clauses more pointed and
emphatic in the original than in our Bible, between man's impotence and
God's power in the face of the fact of sin. The words of the first
clause might be translated, with perhaps a little increase of vividness,
'iniquities are too strong for me'; and the 'Thou' of the next clause is
emphatically expressed in the original, 'as for our transgressions'
(which we cannot touch), '_Thou_ shalt purge them away.' Despair of self
is the mother of confidence in God; and no man has learned the
blessedness and the sweetness of God's power to cleanse, who has not
learned the impotence of his own feeble attempts to overcome his
transgression. The very heart of Christianity is redemption. There are a
great many ways of looking at Christ's mission and Christ's work, but I
venture to say that they are all inadequate unless they start with this
as the fundamental thought, and that only he who has learned by serious
reflection and bitter personal experience the gravity and the
hopelessness of the fact of the bondage of sin, rightly understands the
meaning and the brightness of the Gospel of Christ. The angel voice that
told us His name, and based His name upon His characteristic work, went
deeper into the 'philosophy' of Christianity than many a modern thinker,
when it said, 'Thou shalt call His name Jesus, because He shall save His
people from their sins.' So here we have the hopelessness and misery of
man's vain struggles, and side by side with these the joyful confidence
in the divine victory. We have the problem and the solution, the barrier
and the overleaping of it; man's impotence and the omnipotence of God's
mercy. My iniquities are too strong for me, but Thou art too strong for
them. As for our transgressions, of which I cannot purge the stain, with
all my tears and with all my work, 'Thou shalt purge them away.' Note,
then, these two--first, the cry of despair; second, the ringing note of
confidence.