It has been asserted that Psalm 51 has been read or recited or sung, in whole or in part, more often in public and private worship and devotions than any other Scripture. I don’t know how you would prove that, but I suspect it’s either this one or Psalm 23. This is one of the seven penitential psalms, and the greatest of the seven. The superscription tells us it was written by David at one of the unhappiest hinge points in the history of God’s people.
To really understand this psalm, we need to understand that context; let’s begin with a quick recap. The story begins—I’m paraphrasing a little here—“In the spring of the year when kings go out to war, David stayed home.” In other words, it begins with David shirking his responsibility—to his troops and their leaders, to his nation, and to his calling and anointing from God. In the ancient world, one of the main responsibilities of a king was to be the warleader for his people; this was in part because they figured that’s what they had a king for, in part because success on the battlefield was how you showed you deserved to be king, and in part because, even now, successful generals who aren’t kings often try to change that situation.
So, David is home, and he shouldn’t be. As is often the case when you’re playing hooky, it leaves him in a spirit of restless self-indulgence. He takes an afternoon nap, then goes up on the roof, pacing and prowling around like a tiger in a zoo. It’s a position unbecoming to a king, and he uses it to do something even more unbecoming—since he’s standing on the highest point in the city, he can look down into the homes of his people. He’s a peeping Tom with a crown. And yes, I said into—the houses were rectangular structures with rooms around a central, unroofed courtyard which offered privacy . . . but not from the king on the roof of the palace.
In one home nearby, he sees a woman bathing. She’s just finished her period and is purifying herself as the Scriptures required. She’s in the courtyard of her own home, where it ought to be safe for her to be naked, but it isn’t. She’s beautiful, so he wants her, so he takes her. Let’s not call a spade a bloody shovel here: this is adulterous rape. David has a wife (more than one, in fact), and she, as he will learn, has a husband. He doesn’t care. He sends his minions to take her and bring her to him, and then he takes what he wants. The text doesn’t tell us what she wants because David doesn’t care what she wants. God does, but David doesn’t. The power differential here is extreme; the coercion is absolute. Whatever peace she may have made with it, she had no choice in the matter. Whether she cooperated or fought, what was going to happen was going to happen regardless.
Bathsheba is only named once in 2 Samuel 11, when the servants David sends to identify the woman come back to report. She’s never referenced by name otherwise because David doesn’t care who she is, he only cares that she’s a woman he wants. Thing is, that report makes it very clear David should care who she is. He shouldn’t violate any woman, but least of all this one. You see that report told him three things. One, she’s the wife of Uriah the Hittite, a member of the Thirty, the elite unit of David’s army. Think US Special Forces. Two, she’s the daughter of Eliam, another member of the Thirty. Three, Eliam’s father, her grandfather, is Ahithophel, David’s wisest and most trusted counselor. If there was any family in Israel to whom David owed a debt of gratitude and respect, it was this one. If David is so lost to what is right and good as to violate a woman in this way, he should still be aware enough of his responsibilities as king not to do it to this woman—and he does it anyway. This is the wife, daughter, and granddaughter David rapes, knowing full well he’s doing so.
Now, David lived before a lot of the Bible was written, but he had the five books of Moses; he should have remembered Moses warning the tribes of Gad and Reuben in Numbers 32, “Be sure your sin will find you out.” That happens in short order—in just a few weeks, in fact, when Bathsheba sends him a two-word message: “I’m pregnant.” David kicks into coverup mode. Plan A: get Uriah to sleep with his wife so the baby can be passed off as his. Uriah refuses to do so while his fellow soldiers are in the field, both foiling the coverup and rubbing the king’s face in his own sin. Plan B: instruct his general, Joab, to get Uriah killed in the heat of battle. Joab cooperates, Uriah is dead, David takes Bathsheba again—as his wife—after she completes her period of mourning for Uriah, and David figures it’s mission accomplished. Then God sends a message by his prophet Nathan: “Remember me?”
David has his guard up and has been growing a shell around his heart, but Nathan uses a story to get past all that, leaving the king totally defenseless in the face of his sin; he is shattered by repentance. We see that in 2 Samuel 12, and we see it in Psalm 51. He pleads for compassion, throwing himself on the mercy of God. He grounds his plea solely on an appeal to God’s ḥesed—his covenant love and faithfulness, his “Never Stopping, Never Giving Up, Unbreaking, Always and Forever Love,” to use Sally Lloyd-Jones’s phrase; not only does he offer no defense for himself, he pleads guilty on all counts.
To our ears, though, his statement in verse 4 is startling: “Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight.” Umm, David is guilty of adultery, rape, murder, and arguably treason—how is his sin only against God? He violates Bathsheba, Uriah, their family, Joab, and even his own character and integrity. But here’s the thing: “only” is hyperbole, but it points to the important reality that each of these is a violation against God as well. If you hurt my wife or my children, I will take that personally. I will take that as you hurting me, not because I think it’s about me but because I love them that much and therefore take them that seriously. If that’s so for me, limited and sinful as I am, how much more for an infinite God with an infinite capacity to love? We make excuses for our sins against others because we take each other lightly, but God does not take any of us lightly and will not let us do so. To understand that his sin is against God first and foremost is not to minimize his sin against Bathsheba and everyone else but to maximize it, because it forces him to take them and their lives as seriously as God does; it is also to accept that God’s right to judge is perfect and unchallengeable and his judgments are perfectly justified.
In the face of this, David’s plea is abject and total. His sinful acts are inexcusable, unbearable, and entirely his own; they are only the fruit of the evil in his heart, which is entirely his own. Worst of all, his existence is marked and marred by sin from the very beginning. As Old Testament scholar Derek Kidner puts it, sin is “the very element he lives in.” He is desperately in need of deliverance, not from his enemies but from himself. He spends this psalm in a pit of horror at his sin. His heart is false: he needs God to make it true. He is a fool who needs God to teach him wisdom. Morally and spiritually, he is crying out “Leper outcast unclean!” He needs his leprous soul purged of sin and made clean, washed whiter than snow; he needs to be restored to human society that he may be welcomed home with rejoicing. He has been crushed by his sin and shame and guilt: he needs God to re-knit his bones, so he can join in the dancing.
His plea reaches its peak in verses 10-11 as he implores God to renew him instead of rejecting him. He saw God remove his spirit from Saul after Saul’s grave disobedience, and realizes he could suffer the same fate. His heart is so vile, it cannot be repaired, only recreated. His spirit has come loose from its moorings, leaving him adrift, and needs to be restored and reconnected to God. That did not happen for Saul, because God rejected him, and so we have the heart-rending cry of verse 11—our English translations soften the violence of this language: “Don’t hurl me away from you!” It’s the verb you’d use if you suddenly found yourself holding a live grenade, or some utterly disgusting piece of trash. “Don’t throw me away! Don’t strip your spirit away from me! Please, don’t reject me like you rejected Saul.” David acknowledges he’s gotten all caught up in himself, in his prosperity and power, and has lost his joy in God’s salvation and his delight in doing God’s will; he begs God to give him back what he has abandoned, in part so he can teach other sinners the way home to God.
David knows there’s nothing he can do to earn that mercy. He could go to the temple and do all the sacrifices, but to what end? He’s not actually declaring the sacrifices totally null and void, but he is saying that by themselves, they mean nothing; verses 16-17 are a classic Jewish idiom, where “not this but that” means “this is worthless without that.” Without the inward sacrifice of the self to God in repentance and submission, our outward sacrifices are hateful to him. The things that we do are symptoms; the inward reality from which they arise matters most.
That points us to a core truth about this psalm: all the way through, David’s concern is not just his sins but his sin. As despicable, inexcusable, and horrifying as his actions were, the vilest thing and the greatest problem was the heart reality which birthed them. There are two things we need to say very carefully and understand very clearly here. First, God is not on about behavior control, and Christianity is not about making you more moral. That is a thing that will happen as you grow closer to God, yes; on the other hand, plenty of people also become more moral—in certain obvious ways—even as their hearts grow cold and hard, far from the light of the Son. We cannot, any of us, look down on anyone for how they are behaving, because even if our behavior is better, that doesn’t make us any better. This is because, second, that same heart reality is in us, and it is every bit as dark and vile. The impotence of most of the American church in the face of the challenges hurled at it by the culture is rooted in the refusal by a great many American churchgoers to believe this truth.
We must, we must, we must recognize that each and every one of us is gravely sinful, and each and every one of us is locked in a fight to the death with ourselves, with the sin that lurks in our hearts. If we don’t see that, it doesn’t mean we’re holy, it means we’ve already surrendered. What David did was horrific almost beyond comprehension, and yet Scripture calls him a man after God’s own heart—why? Because he bent his head to God and let himself be broken by repentance. When he was shown the horror of his actions, he saw them, and he saw through them to the vileness that gave them birth, and instead of fleeing from God at that point, he fled to him, flung himself at God’s feet, and begged to be shown mercy and to be made new.
In John 21, we see Peter similarly, if more understatedly, shattered by his sin. He had betrayed Jesus—sure, he hadn’t betrayed him as badly as Judas had, handing him over to be killed, but he’d publicly denied him, and that’s still a betrayal. His despair isn’t as great as Judas’s had been, either, but just because he hasn’t killed himself doesn’t mean he sees a way to keep living. Yes, Jesus is alive again, and yes, that’s reason to rejoice—but it also proves Peter didn’t just betray his closest friend, he betrayed the Messiah, and how can you get any worse than that? Every time he looks at Jesus, he sees the one he denied, publicly, three times, and the rooster crows again in the back of his mind. Jesus is alive again; but nothing can go back to the way it was.
In his dull gray despair, Peter sees nothing to do but go back to his old life, so he announces he’s going fishing. That was night-shift work, because the productive times to fish were the hours after dusk and the hours before dawn—but the other disciples decide to go along anyway. For James and John and Andrew, of course, that was their old life, too, but not for the rest of them; but while they aren’t struggling like Peter is, they’re just as much at a loss for what to do next. Peter gives them a direction to follow, so they take it.
Jesus, however, hijacks Peter’s fishing trip to accomplish Peter’s restoration. It is in fact a threefold restoration for a threefold denial. The first time, Jesus asks, “Simon, do you really love me more than any of my other disciples do?” That had been his boast; does he still believe that? Of course, as Jesus knows full well, Peter has abandoned that bit of hubris. Peter affirms his love for Jesus, but he drops the comparison; he does not claim to love Jesus more than anyone else does. He doesn’t try to prove his love for Jesus from his actions, either—which is a good thing, since he can’t—he appeals to Jesus’ knowledge of him. However defective his actions have been, he knows he loves Jesus, and so he knows Jesus knows that, too.
Jesus repeats the question twice more, dropping the comparison because Peter has dropped it. All three times, Peter says, “Yes,” and each time Jesus responds, “Take care of my sheep.” It’s worded three different ways because John likes to vary his word use, but the general idea is the same each time. You may also know that there are two different Greek words for “love” used in this passage, and some people have thought that’s significant, but it probably isn’t. Not only is that sort of variation characteristic of John, Jesus and Peter were speaking Aramaic, and in Aramaic it would have been all the same word. If something else in the text supported the idea that the variation is meaningful rather than a matter of literary style, that would be different, but there is nothing. When Jesus asks a third time, “Do you love me?” Peter’s not grieved because Jesus used a different word for “love,” he’s grieved because Jesus feels the need to ask a third time. In response, he strengthens his answer: “Lord, you know everything—you don’t need to keep asking, you already know I love you.” Once Peter has offered Jesus one affirmation of his love for each denial in the temple courtyard, Jesus tells him he will die for his faith—which is potent reassurance that he will be faithful to the end—and says, “Follow me.”
I want you to notice something important about these two passages: no one earns anything. David doesn’t earn God’s forgiveness. He doesn’t try to. He simply casts himself utterly on the mercy of God, pleading, “Don’t throw me away!” And while his relationship with God is restored, God does not protect him from the consequences of his sin. His personal life will be a series of disasters until the day he dies, his family will tear itself apart, and the downstream consequences of that will ultimately tear the nation apart. Similarly, Peter doesn’t earn Jesus’ restoration. In fact, he doesn’t even ask for it. Not only does he not make any claims for himself, he abandons one he has previously made. He doesn’t point to any demonstrations of his love for Jesus, recognizing he has nothing meaningful to point to. Instead, he tells Jesus, “I know it doesn’t look like I love you, but you know I do because you know everything.”
Their restoration is entirely God’s mercy, entirely unearned; which is how it has to be. Even our repentance is God’s gift to us, not a work by which we earn salvation. That is simply the reality of the human soul. We can’t receive mercy we don’t want, even if it’s shown to us. We can’t accept forgiveness for our sin if we don’t believe we need it. We can’t be reconciled to someone if we are the ones refusing to reconcile. None of it has anything to do with earning anything at all; none of it has anything to do with being good enough. Of course you’re not good enough. I’m not good enough. None of us are. That’s why we’re here.
The Christian counselor and writer Dr. David Powlison wrote a brilliant essay some years ago titled “Idols of the Heart and ‘Vanity Fair’”; there’s a lot of wisdom and insight in it, and one insight in particular I keep coming back to:
The gospel is better than unconditional love. The gospel says, “God accepts you just as Christ is. God has ‘contraconditional’ love for you.” Christ bears the curse you deserve. Christ is fully pleasing to the Father and gives you his own perfect goodness. Christ reigns in power, making you the Father’s child and coming close to you to begin to change what is unacceptable to God about you. God never accepts me “as I am.” He accepts me “as I am in Jesus Christ.” The center of gravity is different. The true gospel does not allow God’s love to be sucked into the vortex of the soul’s lust for acceptability and worth in and of itself. Rather, it radically decenters people—what the Bible calls “fear of the Lord” and “faith”—to look outside themselves.
Our acceptability isn’t about us, it’s about Jesus. On the one hand, there is no food for pride in that, and so the temptation to legalism keeps pulling at us. On the other, it means our acceptance is rock-solid sure, because God accepts you, and me, and all of us, as we are in Jesus Christ—and that will never change, because he will never change. I don’t have to be good enough, and you don’t have to be good enough. Jesus is good enough, and that’s all that matters.
“Repentance” © 2008 flickr user vince42. License: Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic. Image has been cropped to fit.