Psalms 51

New American Standard Bible: 1995 Update Psalm 51

1 Be gracious to me, O God, according to Your lovingkindness;

According to the greatness of Your compassion blot out my transgressions.

2 Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity

And cleanse me from my sin.

3 For I know my transgressions,

And my sin is ever before me.

4 Against You, You only, I have sinned

And done what is evil in Your sight,

So that You are justified when You speak

And blameless when You judge.

5 Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity,

And in sin my mother conceived me.

6 Behold, You desire truth in the innermost being,

And in the hidden part You will make me know wisdom.

7 Purify me with hyssop, and I shall be clean;

Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.

8 Make me to hear joy and gladness,

Let the bones which You have broken rejoice.

9 Hide Your face from my sins

And blot out all my iniquities.

10 Create in me a clean heart, O God,

And renew a steadfast spirit within me.

11 Do not cast me away from Your presence

And do not take Your Holy Spirit from me.

12 Restore to me the joy of Your salvation

And sustain me with a willing spirit.

13 Then I will teach transgressors Your ways,

And sinners will be converted to You.

14 Deliver me from bloodguiltiness, O God, the God of my salvation;

Then my tongue will joyfully sing of Your righteousness.

15 O Lord, aopen my lips,

That my mouth may declare Your praise.

16 For You do not delight in sacrifice, otherwise I would give it;

You are not pleased with burnt offering.

17 The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit;

A broken and a contrite heart, O God, You will not despise.

18 By Your favor do good to Zion;

bBuild the walls of Jerusalem.

19 Then You will delight in arighteous sacrifices,

In burnt offering and whole burnt offering;

Then young bulls will be offered on Your altar.

Humanity’s Tragedy

The 2 great tragedies of human life are sin and death. We walk everywhere in the shadow of our guilt and into the night of our death. We are all sinners, all of us, and we dies, all of us. What we do between birth and death is what matters.

We are concerned today with the first of these 2 tragedies. I see sin as a human tragedy. It is like a disease that has infected all of humankind, it making all of sick.

You can document sin more easily than any other theological truth. You don’t have ti have a Bible or a bon theology. The newspaper can tell you.

It might be even be said that the Bible man has only 2 theological concerns involving himself: sin and salvation. We find ourselves in sin and suffers its painful consequences.

And what God does for us is that He graciously offers salvation from sin. Besides Jesus this is what the Bible is all about.

God obviously takes sin seriously in the Bible. We can’t speak of of salvation until we know how lost we are. We can’t tell of healing unless we know how sick we are.

At some point we have to define sin. Now that can’t be our definition of sin, because we have a tendency to minimize and quantify and marginalize sin so it fits into what we want to do.

Sin is a theological term which has to do with our relationship with God. Sin is against God. Thats one of the reasons we try to make it fit into our lifestyles so we tell ourselves that it is not against God when we know full well that it is.

I may break a moral law, injure a person, myself or nature, and I may see these as being only remotely related to God. Yet, they sin against God.

is one of the great penitential psalms. Penitential is a pretty big word so I had to look it up so I could understand the full context of the found the words related to it to hem in the meaning: apologetic, compunctious, conscience-stricken, contrite, mournful, penitent, regretful, repentant, rueful, sad, sorrowful, sorry, attritional, chastened.

Many scholars believe it was written by David in one of the most agonizing moments of his life. After he had commited adultery with Bathsheba and sent Uriah, her husband, to the battlefield where he was killed.

Yet he never said, “I have commited sin against Bathsheba”, of I have commited sin against Uriah”. Rather he cried out, “Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done what is evil in thy sight.

When we break a moral law: Again I think it not robbery to define moral law so we don’t plug in our own definition. Moral Law: a general rule of right living especially : such a rule or group of rules conceived as universal and unchanging and as having the sanction of God's will, of conscience, of man's moral nature, or of natural justice as revealed to human reason.

So when I break amoral law and God says, “That is My law. You have sinned against Me”. I hurt a person, and God says “He or she was My child you have sinned against Me”. I injure myself myself and say to God: I didn’t hurt anybody else. I injured only my self. God’s response will be quick and He will say”Your life belongs to me, you are My child. It is a sin against Me”. I make nature sick with pollution and God says “Nature is My creation You have sinned against Me”.

Now let’s be specific I want to mention 4 ways of defining sin:

Sin is deviation from God’s purpose for our lives. It is missing the mark. We are like an arrow deflected from its mark. Sin is standing, on the corner of life, and taking, the wrong road. We get headed wrong. We turn form God’s objective to our own objective. Our basic concern now is not all sins, just sin. We isolate this one sin and make it small and insignificant in our own minds but to God it is still sin.

Sin is rebellion. We chafe under God’s authority and want to be free of it. You see we see other have the time of their life. Living their best life now and we want the same thing they have. So we rebel against God, but not in our own mind, because we have now rationalize it to ourselves as not rebellion. What we did was we set up our own authority. In some basic sense we mutiny taking up arms agains God. The result is in our rebellion we become alienated against God.

Sin is transgression. We break God’s laws which are not only written in a holy book, but are grounded in the universe. God has built His ethical nature into the moral structure of the universe. These moral and spiritual laws are rooted and grounded in our DNA. We all know right from wrong. We really don’t need anyone to tell us when we have don wrong . We can feel it.

Sin is disobedience. We flout God’s authority and disobey Him. Our problem is not so much that of ignorance as it is of willful pride that drives us to take things into our own hands. We know better than we do. We knowingly and deliberately disobey God.