START WITH SCRIPTURE:
Psalm 130
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OBSERVE:
Psalm 130 is described as a “Song of Ascents.” These were Psalms sung by Israelite pilgrims as they climbed the temple mount in Jerusalem. This Psalm begins as a lamentation full of penitence, but ends with hope.
The Psalmist cries Out of the depths to the Lord. The metaphor here suggests imagery that is familiar to the avid Bible reader. The depths in this metaphor might be the depths of the sea, or perhaps the Pit, otherwise known as Sheol, the shadowy underworld of the dead.
What the metaphor suggests to us, though, are the depths of sorrow and grief. The Psalmist is expressing his deep sense of distance and estrangement from joy and from God. However, the first verses also express the Psalmist’s hope that the Lord will hear his cries.
In verses 3-4, we get a glimpse of the source of the Psalmist’s distress. He poses the question to Yahweh:
If you, Yah, kept a record of sins,
Lord, who could stand?
In one sense he is confessing his sin, but at the same time he is suggesting that in the face of God’s holiness no one could possibly be innocent.
And yet, he declares his confidence in the mercy of the Lord:
But there is forgiveness with you,
therefore you are feared.
This is an interesting statement. The Psalmist seems to suggest that because God is forgiving, therefore he is worshiped by those whom he forgives. Is this because of the forgiven sinner’s gratitude? Or is Yahweh’s forgiveness so magnanimous that the sinner is overwhelmed with awe?
The Psalmist then turns to his own personal aspiration in verses 5 and 6 — he is longing for God’s forgiveness and presence:
I wait for Yahweh.
My soul waits.
I hope in his word.
He yearns for God’s self-disclosure, as his next imagery suggests:
My soul longs for the Lord more than watchmen long for the morning;
more than watchmen for the morning.
The repetition of these key lines is a Hebrew poetic technique that denotes a sense of emphasis. The imagery of those watching for the morning may relate to the watchmen of the city who call out the hours, or to the Levites whose task it was to announce the sunrise on the Sabbath day or for a holy festival. In other words, this suggests a highly anticipated event. The Psalmist is eagerly and expectantly watching for the presence of the Lord and his mercy.
Finally, the Psalmist’s plea becomes corporate, imploring all Israel:
Israel, hope in Yahweh,
for with Yahweh there is loving kindness.
This Psalm begins with a sense of lamentation but ends with a strong statement of faith about the nature of God’s character, power, and forgiveness:
With him is abundant redemption.
He will redeem Israel from all their sins.
APPLY:
This Psalm suggests our paradoxical relationship with God. When we consider God’s holiness and power, we are filled with despair. Yet when we consider God’s loving kindness and his abundant redemption, we are filled with profound hope, even assurance.
There are many circumstances in which we might find ourselves crying to the Lord out of the depths of our own souls — illness, tragedy, the death of a loved one, a national catastrophe. Here, the lamentation appears to be about a sense of personal guilt.
The fact is, measured against God’s holiness who could stand? This is a consistent theme in Scripture, reemphasized in the New Testament as Paul reminds us in Romans 3:23:
all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
And yet, the power of God to redeem is also available to all who truly turn to the Lord in repentance, as the Psalmist calls upon the nation to do. For the Christian, this correlates with the Gospel’s solution to the universality of sin. Paul completes his thoughts from Romans 3:23. Though all have sinned they are now:
justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus; whom God sent to be an atoning sacrifice, through faith in his blood, for a demonstration of his righteousness through the passing over of prior sins, in God’s forbearance (Romans 3:24-25).
God answers our sin with his steadfast love and mercy, expressed in Christ.
This is a SONrise worth watching for! And we await his mercy and forgiveness with the same certainty with which the watchmen wait for the morning, assured that God will forgive us.
RESPOND:
As an entry for May 24, 1738, John Wesley wrote in his journal that he attended St Paul’s Cathedral in London. There he heard a choir sing the verses from Psalm 130:
Out of the deep have I called unto thee, O Lord: Lord, hear my voice. O let thine ears consider well the voice of my complaint. If thou, Lord, wilt be extreme to mark what is done amiss, O Lord, who may abide it? For there is mercy with thee; therefore shalt thou be feared. O Israel, trust in the Lord: For with the Lord there is mercy, and with him is plenteous redemption. And He shall redeem Israel from all his sins (Wesley’s Works).
At the time, John Wesley was experiencing what we might call a sense of alienation:
strange indifference, dullness, and coldness, and unusually frequent relapses into sin (Wesley’s Works).
And yet he was yearning for the assurance of faith that he saw in his new Moravian friends. When he was invited to a Moravian class meeting that evening, he really didn’t want to go. But he went anyway. And he was to write later that while someone was reading Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans (which focused on the great doctrine of justification by faith):
About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation: And an assurance was given me, that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.
Only those who have become acutely aware of the reality of their distance from God can fully appreciate the miracle of God’s steadfast love and the power of redemption.
From my own experience, the transition from the lowest depths to the highest of heights is like that of one passing from darkness to light.
Thanks be to God that we can cry out to God even from the depths of our soul, and in the worst of our human condition, and be confident that we are heard, forgiven, and redeemed!
Our Lord, hear my cries when I feel that I am in the depths, and raise me up through your steadfast love and mighty redemption. Amen.
PHOTOS:"Out Of the Depths130" by Hope Church North Park is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic license.
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