"Thou art the man!" Nathan had but just pointed his finger at the king and had made him to see the grievousness of his guilt, when David falls down before his God, crushed and overwhelmed, his heart filled to overflowing with anguish and shame; and now the Holy Spirit takes control of the pent-up floods and shapes his words into a prayer of contrition well pleasing to him who inspired it. Unto this day the Fifty-first Psalm gives expression to the deepest emotions and longings of the penitent heart. There the sinner may learn how to come and pour out his soul before God. They are good words to follow, for the fact that God himself inspired them is guaranty that God will accept and hear and answer them when they come from a sincere heart.

      This prayer gains further force and significance when we remember who it was that so humbled himself before God. Some young men, and men in the full noonday of their powers, hold openly or covertly to the opinion that religion is designed for the weak, women and children, and old or infirm people. They think it unmanly to abase oneself and to be tender of heart toward God. Yet this man was truly a man among men. He was as brave as [164] bravery itself; he feared no odds. As a shepherd lad he had fought the bear and the lion; as a stripling he threw his life in the balance and faced the giant, Goliath, who had defied the armies of Israel. No weakness was found in this man. He was a natural leader of men--bold, fearless, quick, able, and withal a gentleman, generous, noble-hearted. There will hardly be any of those who this day esteem themselves too much men to walk humbly before God that would quite measure up to this man's standard of manhood. Yet King David did not think it beneath his dignity to go down into the dust before Jehovah and to publish his penitence to the world.

      Throughout this psalm we note a doubleness of petition. Two things David wants, and neither one without the other would satisfy his heart's demand. The one is: "Blot out my transgressions." That means forgiveness. But that was not enough. If he afterwards remains the same David, what hope could he have that he would not fall into the same snare again? Plainly, his sin came out of his wrong and defiled heart; and having once fallen in such a way, the probability was stronger that he might do so again; for every sin that comes forth from a man also leaves its trace in the man and makes it easier the next time to do the same sin again. To blot out the record--that is not enough. So he joins it with a second petition: "Wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin"--not only the record, but the man, so that the man may be clean and may not commit the sin again. "Purge me, . . . wash me." "Hide thy face from my sins, and blot out all mine iniquities"--that is the one side; "Create in me a clean heart, . . . and renew a right spirit within me"--that is the other. And so utterly does David despair of even any possible renovation of his old self that he uses a very strong term--"create"--one which is never used except only where [165] God is the agent, and which means the bringing into existence of something which was not before--in this case a new heart; and in this he anticipates the new covenant, with its promise of a new heart, a new nature, the "Christ in you," "the new man that after God has been created in righteousness and holiness of truth" (Eph. 4:24). Now when God puts such petitions upon the penitent's lips, he will hear and answer them of a certainty.

      David does not, as many who like to relate their experience, dote and dwell on his sin and go into details to describe the horribleness of it until it sounds almost as if the man were boasting. He touches it with extreme delicacy. He is talking to God, not to make an impression on men. Moreover--and this is striking--there is not a shadow of excuse on his lips, not the least sign of an effort to make his guilt seem smaller or more pardonable, not an attempt to adduce a mitigating circumstance, no endeavor to compromise--nothing but stern facts, self-accusation, self-judgment. And that is ever the mark of genuine repentance. "Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done that which was evil in thy sight; that thou [whatever sentence thou pronounce upon me] mayest be justified when thou speakest, and be clear when thou judgest." For a sinner's excuse, in the last sifting, only clears him and condemns God. But David condemned himself and justified his God; for God does not ask for arguments or winding evasions and euphemisms; but he has desired truth, not only on the lips, but in the inward parts--straightforward, rugged, honest dealing with him who at any rate knows all things.

      What David suffered during the days when he walked in the shadow of his sin, before the prophet Nathan came to him, we can only conjecture from a few expressions in Ps. 32:3, 4, and in this psalm, where he prays for the joy and gladness he had lost, and that his bones, which God [166] had broken, might again rejoice. But God loved him. With a heavy hand did he make David to realize the awfulness of sin; fiercely he tore it from David's life and published it on him for all time; inexorably he let the chastisement follow him through all his life and posterity, and gladly, abundantly, he pardoned all his guilt and cleansed him. Behold, thus does God deal with the man he loves when he falls into sin. It was heroic treatment, but it is just one of the aspects of God's implacable love. And David knew it. Throughout the Fifty-first Psalm his plea and hope hangs upon the undying love and mercy of Jehovah his God.

[TAG 164-167]