1 For the music director, a psalm of David, written when Nathan the prophet confronted him after David’s affair with Bathsheba.

Have mercy on me, O God, because of your loyal love.
Because of your great compassion, wipe away my rebellious acts.

2 Wash away my wrongdoing.

Cleanse me of my sin.

3 For I am aware of my rebellious acts;

I am forever conscious of my sin.

4 Against you—you above all—I have sinned;

I have done what is evil in your sight.
So you are just when you confront me;
you are right when you condemn me.

5 Look, I was guilty of sin from birth,
a sinner the moment my mother conceived me.

6 Look, you desire integrity in the inner man;
you want me to possess wisdom.

7 Cleanse me with hyssop and I will be pure;
wash me and I will be whiter than snow.

8 Grant me the ultimate joy of being forgiven.
May the bones you crushed rejoice.

9 Hide your face from my sins.
Wipe away all my guilt.

10 Create for me a pure heart, O God.
Renew a resolute spirit within me.

11 Do not reject me.
Do not take your Holy Spirit away from me.

12 Let me again experience the joy of your deliverance.
Sustain me by giving me the desire to obey.

13 Then I will teach rebels your merciful ways,
and sinners will turn to you.

14 Rescue me from the guilt of murder, O God, the God who delivers me.
Then my tongue will shout for joy because of your righteousness.

15 O Lord, give me the words.
Then my mouth will praise you.

16 Certainly you do not want a sacrifice or else I would offer it;
you do not desire a burnt sacrifice.

17 The sacrifice God desires is a humble spirit—
O God, a humble and repentant heart you will not reject.

18 Because you favour Zion, do what is good for her.
Fortify the walls of Jerusalem.

19 Then you will accept the proper sacrifices, burnt sacrifices and whole offerings;
then bulls will be sacrificed on your altar (Psalm 51, NET).

Throughout this course of study through the influential chapters of the Bible, I’ve come back to the theme of continuity between Old and New Testaments a few times. Here is another instance of this. The Old Testament is often caricatured as being about a judgemental God lording over people and waiting to smite them while the New is often caricatured as featuring a hippie-like Jesus who changes the message and tells people that it’s just all about love, man. Both of these caricatures profoundly ignore both the extent to which Jesus is unflinching in his judgement of the evils he witnessed and confronted and the extent to which God in the Old Testament is a long-suffering, merciful, patient deity.

In this psalm, David also admits that the sacrifice system that Israel had been given was not about killing animals to slake God’s bloodlust. Instead, the death was to be a reminder of the seriousness of sin, and the sinner’s deserving of a death. A sacrifice was made because the debt could not be paid, but the killing was not the thing that God really required. What God wanted to see was repentance. This word is one of the most important to Christian theology. All lower case ‘o’ orthodox forms of Christianity recognize the importance of confession of sin and repentance, literally a turning away, from it as necessary steps the believer must take and that God cannot do on one’s behalf.

The stories referred to in the preamble in verse 1 of this psalm are found in 2 Samuel 11 and 12. They are truly wretched stories. David has just brought the ark of the covenant into his newly conquered capital city, Jerusalem. He had recently vanquished the last armies of Saul and Saul’s family who had been clinging to a throne that had been taken away from them, though David had also found a means to express mercy and love to Saul’s descendants, especially to Mephibosheth, the grandson of Saul and the son of Jonathan, David’s best friend from his days as one of Saul’s courtiers.

He had also just met with God through the prophet Nathan who had related to David that David’s goal of building a house for God, a temple, would be completed by his son, not by him, because God was wanting to build David’s house, a house that would rule eternally, a promise we Christians recognize as coming to fruition in Jesus’s enthronement as Lord over all creation in his crucifixion and his resurrection. David was at the height of his power and his effectiveness as king.

And at his height, he did something that showed how low even the high and mighty can be. While at home in his palace, looking over his city, he spied the wife of one of his chosen soldiers, a man who had originally been a Hittite called Uriah, bathing on a rooftop, sent for her, and ended up conceiving a child with her. When word got back to him that she’d been impregnated, he tried to cover up his indiscretion by giving Uriah leave so that he’d come home and be with his wife and let David’s sin just disappear into history. Uriah, unwittingly rebuking David, repeatedly refuses to take the comforts of home when his comrades are still out enduring the hardships of their campaign, behaves righteously, and David sends him back to the frontlines carrying orders to Joab, the general, to have Uriah put in a position to be killed by their enemy. It’s so gross! Uriah, loyal and upright man that he was, dutifully takes his death warrant to his officer and, sure enough, ends up dead at the hands of their enemies. David mourns, and Bathsheba mourns for the appropriate amount of time, but then David takes Bathsheba into his household as a wife.

This morally catastrophic behaviour would be just another Tuesday for most monarchs in world history, but David was supposed to be different. He was God’s chosen one to sit on the throne. He had been shown time and again the provision of God, the mercy of God, and had faithfully extended that mercy, even to his enemies. David was different, but now he was acting like any other power-corrupted king in world history. Still, this failure would have gone unnoticed, but for what God does next through that prophet Nathan.

God sends the prophet Nathan in to tell David a story. Chapter 12 of 2 Samuel is well worth a thorough reading on its own for the subtlety and wisdom with which Nathan delivers his challenge to a man who could destroy him without much thought. But this week, our focus is on David’s response which is expressed at the end of Nathan’s story, and David clearly took it to heart as he wrote this spectacular poem/prayer of repentance to express his moral anguish and which God has now given us as a guide for how to approach the issue of our own sin.

David, acting in his carnality and allowing power to corrupt his decision-making, acted like any other king. But his repentance shows that his heart really was set on the things above. Even in his authority, he ultimately recognized that his kingly authority was a gift from One with all authority; David is the Old Testament king who most chases after God’s heart. And so, he repents.

Things aren’t just made better for David. Nathan tells him that he and Bathsheba will lose the child and they do. David’s other children cause a series of catastrophes inside his kingdom, and he loses many of them to infighting and rebellion. But God redeems even this terrible situation; we end up seeing Bathsheba in the bloodline of Jesus himself as Solomon, her next son, ends up becoming the king following David.

As I look through Psalm 51 today, I wonder how much the apostle Paul meditated on it. David identifies his lowness as a sinner and his inability to forget what he’d done. He also recognized that God could take away the punishment, the forever guilt, that mercy was actually on the table if he demonstrated his contrition. God, David notes, doesn’t love the sacrifice. He loves when people turn to Him earnestly. All those silly prayers we see in the movies, “O God, if you’ll just save me from this problem (that I probably created), I’ll never ________ again!” aren’t any good. God doesn’t want you to just sacrifice. He wants your heart.

A couple weeks back, we looked at Genesis 3 and considered how the sin of Satan and of Adam and Eve was ultimately trying to take a short cut around God, to get the good life without reference to Him. In David’s story, we’re shown another picture of this. We see a guy trying to take a shortcut to some sort of self-satisfaction, and we see the immense disaster that this is. But we also see what working through it looks like. The apostle Paul calls himself the “chief of sinners” in 1 Timothy, but also recognizes that the call on his life was to do as David, previously a chief of sinners himself, did. David recommitted to declaring, proclaiming, God’s righteousness, His merciful ways, that He’s a God who delivers. Likewise, Paul, once chief among sinners, can say with a straight face to Timothy, follow me as I follow Christ. What a turn around!

I pray this week that you recognize your story in this continuum. You may not be a king, but you’re chief of something in your life, and if you’re more than half a second old, I’d feel confident betting that you’ve sinned, probably pretty terribly. Each one of our consciences is (or should be) filled with calamitous decision making, regret, words we can’t take back, images we can’t unsee, deeds we can’t undo. But God’s heart for us is to turn to Him, to stop taking shortcuts to what we think will satisfy us, to commit to the right way, even if it’s the hard way, to repent from the path of least resistance. Let’s join David and Paul in that repentance. Let’s really yearn for God’s righteousness. Listen to me, the chief of sinners, telling you about God’s love and mercy even for me, His commitment to giving us cleansing from our guilt, purity in our hearts, resolution in our spirits, and the power and comfort of the Holy Spirit to let us know that we’re not rejected, that we are His beloved children. I pray this week that you let God turn your mourning over your ruined life into dancing for His redemption and restoration.