BIBLIOTHECA SACRA 92 (1935): 26-38
Copyright © 1935 by
Department of
Semitics, Old
Testament and Archaeology
A STUDY OF PSALM 51
David, whether as shepherd, warrior,
king or psalmist,
presents a life in keeping with his name.
Christian ap-
praisal affirms that he who was
"ever a lover of David" had
a well-placed affection. We love him as we see
him first,
ruddy and of open countenance, stand wonderingly
amidst
his brethren as the holy anointing oil proclaimed
him God's
chosen king. We love him as we hear his confession of
faith
to Saul. "The Lord that delivered me out of
the paw of the
lion, and out of the paw of the bear, he will
deliver me out of
the hand of the Philistine." We love him as we
listen to
his battle hymn of triumph as king, for he has
fought a
good fight, his arm ever strengthened and his heart
ever en-
couraged by the Lord. Something
in this song particularly
attracts our attention. It is the claim that his
rise to abso-
lute power has been accomplished without the loss of
his
integrity. "The Lord rewardeth
me according to my right-
eousness: according to the cleanness of my hands does he
recompense me. For I have kept the ways of the
Lord, and
have not wickedly departed from my God. For all his judg-
ments are before me, and as
for his statutes, I do not depart
from them. And I have been perfect toward him, and I
have kept myself from my iniquity. And the Lord hath
recompensed me according to my righteousness;
according
to my cleanness before his eyes" (II Sam. 22
:21-25) . Will
he retain his integrity?
History has demonstrated that it is
easier for men,
whether as individuals or nations, to fight
their way to emi-
nence than to retain this
position. David the king, now pos-
sessing absolute power over the
realm, faced a test more se-
vere than the sorest battle.
In a day of rest and relaxation,
it became easy to act for sinful and selfish
pleasure and
A Study of Psalm 51 27
thereby undo the example of a lifetime. The act
with its
succeeding complications calls for no defence: it has none.
But
when, after a time, Nathan the prophet came in and
skilfully aroused David's
indignation by the story of the
rich man who robbed his poor neighbor of his
cherished
pet, and then openly accused the king—who is not
amazed
at David's attitude and awed into profounder
respect for
Jesse's son? Here is true greatness,
the more so when we
reflect that for the lowly as well as the high,
confession of
wrong-doing crosses the grain of pride and wounds
it.
Whereas
the lowly man has no escape and must swallow his
pride, the high has his devices and he will employ
them to
the limit to extricate himself. Behold a man, a
king, an ab-
solute monarch, pushing aside all defense and saying sim-
ply, "I have sinned." The classic
statement of Margoliouth
sets the uniqueness of the act in fine relief.
"When David
is rebuked for the crime, he yields the point
without argu-
ment; he is told that he has
done wrong, and he receives
the prophet in a prophet's name. When has this been
done
—before or since? Mary Queen of Scots
would declare that
she was above the law; Charles I would have thrown
over
Bathsheba;
James II would have hired witnesses to swear
away her character; Mohammed would have produced a
revelation authorizing both crimes; Charles II
would have
publicly abrogated the seventh commandment; Queen
Eliza-
beth would have suspended
Nathan. Who has ever acknowl-
edged an error of any magnitude, if it has been in
his power
to maintain that he was right? . . . Cain's
plan—that of si-
lencing the accuser, and Adam's
plan—that of shifting the
responsibility, seem to exhaust the
range of human ex-
pedients when an error is
brought home. He who escaped
from both, though semustulatus, was a ‘man after
God's
own heart.’"1
Sin, though it be
a universal malady, never ceases to be
intensely personal. Certainly the psalm which torrented
forth from David's stricken heart is as intimate a
disclosure
1 D.
28 Bibliotheca
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as any known to man. We should not have expected
to be
auditors while the penitent breathed out his soul
to God. It
is but one more token of a frank and lovable
spirit that he
gave it without reservation into the custody of the
chief
Musician,
so that it might bless the world and become the
vehicle of confession for erring saints in all
ages. Is this
not in line with the economy of God's providence?
He must
allow evil its deadly effect on the race, once it has
entered
the world, yet out of it he makes good to grow. On
the
dark side, the wrath of men is made to praise Him,
and on
the bright side His people come to know the power
and ful-
ness of the divine salvation. As we look back over
our own
lives, do we not see how wonderfully the perfecting
mystery
of grace has reached out to incorporate our very
sins, mak-
ing them contribute
something to our spiritual development
and usefulness?
David's sense of justice, too,
dictated the publishing of
the psalm. His sin, though carried out with a
measure of
secrecy (II Sam 12:13), had become known and
furnished
occasion for the enemies of the Lord to blaspheme
(vs. 14).
It
is reasonable that confession should be as public as the sin.
The heading indicates the occasion
which gave rise to
the psalm: "When Nathan the prophet came unto
him, after
he had gone in unto Bathsheba." The word rwxk is occa-
sionally used to express time,
in which case it might be ren-
dered "as soon as"
more accurately than "after." An ex-
ample is found in II Sam. 12:21. But there is a certain
awkwardness in so translating it in the verse under consid-
eration, since approximately a
year intervened between
David's sin and Nathan's appearance. The existence of the
child proves this. So we prefer the more common
meaning
of the word in question—"as" or
"according as," which
shifts the center of thought from time to manner. Nathan
came in to David as he had gone in to Bathsheba, unre-
quested and with a mission that brought serious conse-
quences. It is true that this
interpretation is hardly in line
with the analogy of other headings which describe
the cir-
A Study of Psalm 51 29
cumstances of composition, but it
may well be that the word
was chosen so as to suggest both thoughts to the
reader.
We cannot fail to note that the
prophet long delayed his
coming. His courage when he did come suggests that the
delay was in no wise due to timidity. Scripture sets
the mat-
ter at rest for us by
stating that the Lord sent Nathan (II
Sam.
12:1). Why was he not sent at once? The answer
must be that the interval was needed to teach David
the
depths of misery that underlie sin which is not
confessed
and put away. He himself tells us what wrack he
suffered.
"When
I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roar-
ing all the day long. For day and night thy hand was heavy
upon me: my moisture is turned into the drought of
sum-
mer" (Ps. 32:3, 4).
David learned eventually that it is a
false notion of manliness which leads a sinner to
bear his
conscience-load defiantly rather than
cast it upon his Savior.
But
there is more. The Lord deliberately waited until the
child was born, then sent His servant to announce its
death.
David
loved the child, but God would not allow him to look
longer upon and so root his life more deeply in that
which
reminded him of his sin. God's chastening must
remove all
the profit and pleasure derived from sin. Then and
then
alone will the soul be chaste. How marvelous is the
sequel!
When
the lessons were learned and the tears dried away,
God
gave another son; once again he sent his prophet, this
time to tell of the Lord's love for the babe and to
give him
a name memorializing that love, a name that
contained
David's
own and so served to memorialize him also (II Sam.
12:25).
A rigid analysis of the psalm is
difficult, because under
the stress of great emotional upheaval, David
intermingled
and repeated the petitions which clamored for
utterance.
However,
we may discern four leading thoughts that con-
stitute the framework. These
are his desire for forgive-
ness, for cleansing, for restoration of joy, and for
the spirit-
ual welfare of the nation.
It is natural that the more deeply
one has sinned, the
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more fervent and persistent will be his prayer for
pardon.
At
first sight, David appears to give but limited attention
to this phase of his need. Only three verses, one,
nine, and
fourteen, have strictly to do with it. The
explanation lies
in the fact that God had already spoken the sweet
word of
forgiveness. The moment David confessed his guilt to
Nathan,
he received the comforting assurance, "The Lord
also hath put away thy sin; thou shalt
not die" (II Sam.
12:13).
Then why should he pray at all for something that
the Lord had already granted? Every child of God knows.
Sin
is such a grievous thing that even when we have the
clear word of forgiveness, our deliverance seems
beyond
credence. "My sin is ever before me."
The omission of
any plea for forgiveness in Psalm 32 is a clear
indication
that its composition came after that of Psalm 51.
There is
an atmosphere of calm and peace which is in
contrast with
the disturbed state that belonged to the early
stage of con-
fession. So completely was
David able to enter into the en-
joyment of pardoning grace that
he could describe the for-
given man with the same term he had once used of the
un-
contaminated. Both are blessed (Ps.
32:1; 1:1).
The particular manner in which David
besought the Lord
to deal with his sins—"blot out my
transgressions," shows
his consciousness of the polluting power of sin.
There was
an awful awareness of a stain that nothing under
heaven
could remove. The plea for riddance of this stain is
the
great burden of his cry. "Wash me thoroughly
from mine
iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin." This
word "wash"
is used to denote the washing of soiled garments
rather than
for bodily ablution. It occurs again in the seventh
verse.
"Purge
me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: wash me, and
I
shall be whiter than snow." Since the hyssop was used in
the ceremony of cleansing the leper (Lev. 14:49,
52), it may
be that David was thinking of himself in terms of
such a
creature, spotted and unclean, unfit for the
society of his
fellow-men. If God will do this great thing, His
erring child
will be clean, that is, bright and clear. The word
is used
A Study of Psalm 51 31
in Ex. 24:10 of the clear, unsullied expanse of
heaven.
David's
high faith in the power of God to renew him is seen
in the declaration that he will come out whiter
than the
snow. A remarkable parallel to David's experience is
found
in Dan. 11:35, relative to a trying time in the
history of
the nation. "And some of them of understanding
shall fall,
to try them, and to purge, and to make them white,
even to
the time of the end: because it is yet for a time
appointed."
Whiter
than snow! How it speaks to us of divine purity.
The
story is told of a pastor who loved to visit one of the
poor of his flock, a woman who took in washing for a
living.
One
day he passed along and noticed her hanging out the
washing, so he stepped into the yard for a
moment's chat.
Knowing
her well, he ventured to remark that the clothes
did not seem as white as usual. She gave him a
reproving
look, then said, "My clothes are always white,
but today you
see them against a background of new-fallen snow
and they
look dirty; nothing can stand against the whiteness
of the
Almighty." The writer once
listened to a native evangelist
in the heart of
was God's standard of holiness to man's. He said
that the
foreigners who come to
claimed to be white men, but that they were
wrong, since
the white man lived in
in the audience grew solemn with mystery and
expectation.
Then
he said, "In
of our foreign friends alongside him and see for
yourself
which is the white man."
Between the second and seventh
verses, which we have
considered, lies a section in which the psalmist
turns to in-
trospection in a thorough-going
manner. "For I acknowl-
edge my transgressions: and my sin is ever before
me."
This
was the abnormal thing, to have sin, as a thick cloud,
thrusting itself between the soul and God, so that
when he
looked away to God, there it was, ever before him,
where the
Lord
should have been (Ps. 16:8). Yet he must win his way
through to God, for there alone can his case be
tried.
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"Against
thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil
in thy sight: that thou mightest
be justified when thou
speakest, and be clear when thou
judgest." Here we have
the only adequate doctrine of the final bearing of
sin. It
transcends the human relation; it strikes at the
throne of
God. Nathan charged David on this same high plane
when
he delivered his rebuke. "Wherefore hast thou
despised the
commandment of the Lord, to do evil in His sight? thou
hast killed Uriah the
Hittite with the sword, and hast taken
his wife to be thy wife, and hast slain him with
the sword
of the children of Ammon.
Now therefore the sword shall
never depart from thine
house; because thou hast despised
me, and hast taken the wife of Uriah
the Hittite to be thy
wife" (II Sam. 12:9, 10). There would be less
sinning if
men realized fully that their offences would reach
to the
very heavens. Hengstenberg
comments, “This manner of
considering sin, which everywhere discovers itself
where
there is true knowledge of sin, must infinitely
heighten the
pain connected with it.”2 How great is
the anguish wrung
out of the soul when one understands that he has
grieved
the Highest and Best, the One who is dearer than
life itself,
the One who has reposed confidence in His earthly
child for
a life testimony in harmony with his high
calling. Yet even
this grief is not without its balm, as the
aforementioned
writer observes. “What besides immediately serves to
deepen the pain connected with sin, has also at the
same
time a consolatory aspect. If David had sinned
against God
alone, it is with him also alone that he has to do in
regard
to forgiveness, and therefore he must not consume
himself
in inconsolable grief that he cannot make
restitution to
Uriah, who has been long sleeping in his grave, or
seek for-
giveness from hire.”3
Some uncertainty gathers around the
connection in
thought between David's having sinned against
God alone
and the subsequent statement—"that thou mightest be justi-
2 E. W. Hengstenberg, Commentary
on the Psalms, Vol. II, p. 194.
3 Ibid.
A Study of
Psalm 51 33
fied when thou speakest, and be clear when thou judgest."
The
conjunction Nfml means "in order
that" or "to the end
that." It seems that David intends to link his
sin to the
divine purpose in such a way as to make it the occasion
for
the manifestation of the righteous judgment of God.
To
quote Hengstenberg once
more, "If we will only grant to
the declarations of Scripture, and the facts of
experience,
their due weight, we shall be obliged to lay aside
the aver-
sion of imputing to God
every kind of participation in sin,
which has also in many other passages given rise to mani-
festly false expositions. The
sin, indeed, belongs to man.
At
any moment he may become free from it by repentance.
But
if he does not repent, the forms in which it is to appear
are no longer in his power, they are subject to
God's disposal,
and God determines them as it pleases him, as it
suits the
plan of his government of the world, for his own
glory, and
at the same time also, so long as the sinner is
not absolutely
hopeless, with a view to his salvation."4
Whatever interpretation be put upon
these words, they
cannot possibly be thought of as an effort on David's
part to
excuse himself by shifting the responsibility to God
and
making himself a puppet in His hands. The same must
surely be said of the following statement, for when
David
declared, "Behold, I was shapen
in iniquity; and in sin did
my mother conceive me," he is not casting
about for a human
scapegoat in case his effort to lay the blame on
God miscar-
ries. That would be totally
unlike the David we know. The
writer recalls a Sunday morning twelve to fifteen
years ago,
when in a Bible class for young men, the teacher
dwelt at
some length upon this verse; at the end of the period,
a
young man who was visiting the class came forward and
took serious exception to this passage of Scripture.
Loving
his own mother dearly, he could not bear to think
that in
bringing him into the world she had been
implicated in sin.
His
fears were groundless. No sin attaches to the mother
in the sense of wrong-doing. But the nature of sin
which
4 Ibid.
34 Bibliotheca
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is in her, common to all the race, is communicated
to the
child in the very beginning of his existence.
The connection with the sixth verse
is on the following
order. God insists on truth in the inward parts.
Outward
conduct means something, but of far greater
import is the
well-spring of conduct—the inner life. He is not
pleased,
of course, with the man who openly turns aside to
sin, but
He
is also not satisfied with one who claims to be living the
victorious life and is yet smothering wrong desires
to keep
them from finding expression. God must have truth in
the
inward parts; but David cannot produce it. At the very
fountain-head of life, when as yet it
was altogether hidden
from the sight of men in his mother's womb, there
was the
taint of sin. He can no more alter that than he can
undo
the wrong he has committed. Where, then, can he
turn?
Where
is there hope? "O wretched man that I am! who
shall deliver me from the body of this death?"
Out of this gloom of utter
hopelessness there rises a mag-
nificent appeal. "Create in
me a clean heart, O God; and
renew a right spirit within me." What is
impossible with
man is possible with God. The Hebrews reserved the
word
"create" for a divine operation, whether in the realm of
matter or spirit. The English version hardly does
justice
to the original. David did not ask for a creation
that should
take place within him, where the hidden depths could
never
furnish material for such a change. The Hebrew
expression
ylxrb is literally,
"create for me." It carries the thought of
a divinely ordered and prepared gift brought to
David and
bestowed on him, a special bounty provided for
his need.
The companion prayer is for the
renewal of a right (fixed
or steadfast) spirit within him. In the days of
his youth,
David
had consistently stayed himself upon His God. But
recent failure had shaken all confidence, and he feels
the
need of a fixing of his life purpose so that he will
never
again turn out of the way.
The prayer continues. "Cast me
not away from thy
presence; and take not thy Holy Spirit from
me." We need
A Study of Psalm 51 35
care in expounding this verse, for both the context
and the
historical background must contribute to the
understanding
of it. The petition follows one which has in view
the stabi-
lizing of his character. It
was a serious matter for a king,
normally revered and followed by his people, to
be unde-
pendable. And with that thought,
there rises before his
mind, like a spectre, the
figure of Saul sitting uneasily on
this throne, his fingers tightened about his
javelin, his face
clouded and morose as the evil spirit swept in
to take com-
mand where once the Spirit
of God had ruled. David knew
something of the horror of rejection, for time and
again
he had summoned all the soothing charms of song
and lyre
in order to quiet the restless and unhappy Saul.
Must he
share Saul's fate? Must he lose his favored position
as the
anointed of the Lord? It is an error to think of
the removal
of the Spirit as equivalent to the loss of
salvation. The
Spirit
came upon David when he was anointed by Samuel
(I
Sam. 16:13); but he knew the Lord before that, as a mere
lad among the sheep. The taking away of the Spirit
would
indicate that God's choice had fallen upon
another.
That David had no fear of losing his
salvation is evi-
denced in the succeeding
verse. "Restore unto me the joy
of thy salvation." This can hardly be a
pleonasm for sal-
vation itself. The word for
joy—NvWW, speaks of exultation
and exuberant feeling. It is sometimes translated
"mirth."
The
verb is found in Ps. 19:5, where the sun is likened to a
bridegroom coming forth from his canopied couch,
rejoicing
as a strong man to run a race. David would fain
dance
once more before the Lord for sheer joy. In fact, he
has
already prayed that such gladness may be his
portion that
the bones which the Lord has broken may rejoice
(vs. 8).
Bone
is the strength of the human body. When the bone
structure is crushed, the body is crippled and
helpless. So
real has been the chastening through which David had
passed that he cannot rise up to praise and adore his
God.
But
he has hope that when the Lord has freed him from
the dreadful sense of guilt, the higher powers of
the soul
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will be released for their wonted service. The
sinner has
reached the end of his own resources when he
cries, "O Lord,
open thou my lips; and my mouth shall show forth thy
praise." When one is under a cloud, it is far
better to be
still than to venture upon a praise that must be only
half-
hearted. But let God release the prisoner from
the toils of
his groaning, and there will be a new song
ascending to
heaven. And this song of praise is pleasing to God,
for it
glorifies Him (Ps. 50:23).
Such praise, rising up out of a
contrite heart, means
more than any amount of sacrifice which is offered
in cold
detachment as a formal religious duty. Note that in
the
seventeenth verse it is said, "The sacrifices
of God are a
broken spirit"—not "broken spirits."
The one heart that
makes itself an altar is the equivalent of all
sacrifice. Yet
even this fact does not void the sacrifices, as the
nineteenth
verse demonstrates, for the reason that they must
continue
until their work is done, until they have culminated
in the
death of the Lamb of God.
"A broken and a contrite heart,
0 God, thou wilt not
despise." In modern usage, "contrite"
has come to mean
"repentant" or "full of regret for sin." But
the word, like
that in the original, contains the thought of
bruising or
crushing. It is God's own task, frequently
resented at first
but cherished afterward, to take in hand that hard
and un-
profitable lump that sin has formed and pound it
small as
the dust, that from this lowly vantage point, where
He began
with man, He may again by the Potter's touch produce
a
man—a man remade.
So wonderful are the ways of God
that in the process of
cleansing and renewing His saints He not only
brings out
of the fires that refine a nobler specimen than
that which
entered in; He makes capital of it and uses it
to extend His
kingdom. David the restored is anxious to teach transgres-
sors the ways of God, so
that sinners may return to Him.
David
can tell them more than he ever knew before of the
destructive power of sin and of the richness of
God's mercy.
A Study of Psalm 51 37
A
glance at the life of Simon Peter confirms this truth.
Through
failure at the very time which self-confidence had
sought for itself to prove its loyalty to the Christ,
Simon
went down to the dust. But he came up again, sobered
and
strengthened, now a dependable
instrument for spiritual
work. Who can fail to see the wisdom back of Simon's
fall?
Out
of it came Peter the rock, upon which the early church
in its human organization could safely rest.
Whether they
were aware of it or not, it meant something to the
thousands
who heard him at Pentecost and were pricked in
their hearts
at having denied the Lord of life and glory, that
the man
who addressed them had passed that way himself.
God knew that David would sin and
fail Him, yet in ad-
vance of it He made a
covenant with David and bound Him-
self to continue David's seed and throne until, as
later
prophecy revealed, His own Son should come as
that Seed
and as King to sit upon that throne. This is the
same God
of all grace who has chosen us in Christ before
the founda-
tion of the world, before
the advent of sin, before our own
complete and utter failure to obey His holy will
became
apparent.
The great difference between the
natural and the super-
natural lies in their contrasted ability to
handle destructive
forces. It is said that nature loses nothing, that
when catas-
trophe pelts her bosom, she
merely concedes a loss in form,
not in matter. That may be so, but she cannot
restore: she
can only revise. When a tree falls, nature may turn
it into
peat or fertilize the soil, but the process involves
decay.
She
cannot set the tree in place again and give it a more
abundant life than it had before. David was as a
tree, a
mighty cedar of Lebanon, the greater its height the
more
impressive its fall, the more thunderous its
reverberations,
the more impossible its restoration. But what is
impossible
with nature and with man is possible with God.
Let all the household of faith take
heart, whether or no
they have sinned after the similitude of David's transgres-
sion. It may be that one
powerful factor which is hindering
38 Bibliotheca
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the revival of the church and the spread of the
gospel is the
presence within her of multitudes of people who
have stum-
bled and fallen and are a dead weight in any forward
move-
ment. Has the church been
aware that her first obligation
is to minister to these? Let them be told that
their wound
is not incurable. Let them learn that "before
honor is hu-
mility" and that if they
will confess their sins, God will be
faithful and righteous to forgive their sins, and
to cleanse
them from all unrighteousness.
It is a strange thing how we can
rejoice in the reclama-
tion of degraded sinners so
that the deeper one has gone
down the more glorious is his salvation, and at the
same
time treat our erring brethren in Christ as though
they no
longer belonged to the company of the elect. Is not restor-
ing grace as much a part of
the gospel as redeeming grace?
Let
us not fear that the door will be opened to license. David
the beloved, in spite of the bitter lessons learned
through his
first disobedience, sinned yet again, for he sought
to number
the people and thus delight himself in the
greatness of his
domain. He knew full well that there would have to be
some
judgment upon his sin, but he has learned one
thing. He
need not waste days and months before coming to God.
His
cry deserves to be written upon our hearts, for it
is at once
a magnifying of divine grace and a condemnation
of human
prudishness—"Let us fall now in the hands of
the Lord; for
his mercies are great: and let me not fall into the
hands of
man.”
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