A Psalm of David for the Chief Musician
The Book of Psalms is the innermost sanctuary, the thrice Holy Place of the sanctuary of the Bible. In the rest of the Bible we receive instruction from God on the way to draw near to Him. In the Book of Psalms, God sets open the door of His secret dwelling-place, and He shows to us how His believing people come to Him, speak with Him, and enjoy fellowship with Him. There we see the throne of grace surrounded with suppliants, and we learn to pray. There is the grace of God manifested in the most glorious way.
To use another similitude, it is with the Book of Psalms as it is with the lowest class of an infant school. In the higher classes, which are all somewhat advanced, the teacher says what they have to learn. They must know how to help themselves, and have need of his help only from time to time. But with the youngest class, which is learning the; A, B, C,’ a different method is taken. Every letter must be pronounced before them, and, indeed, singly dictated to them. The teacher must put the sounds for them into their mouth, until they learn to pronounce and
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know them for themselves. It is in this way that the Lord God deals with us in the Psalms. He comes as the Faithful One, still nearer to us than in the rest of the Bible. He bows still more tenderly to our weakness. He Himself puts into our mouth the very words with which we may come to Him. He is aware that we do not know how and what we should pray for; therefore He comes and tells us for what we ought to pray. And when we take these words of His into our mouth, and continue to express them with the desire to understand them in order that we may feel and pray as it is there expressed, then He gives us His blessing, and His Spirit makes the words living and powerful in our souls. Precious Psalms, in which God’s Holy Spirit Himself teaches us to pray.
This book will become yet more precious to you when you consider in what way the Lord God has dictated to you the words in order that you may pray after them. Has He sent to us from His high heaven directions for prayer as if He had ordained them there for us? No: in that case they would not be truly human, nor would they be adapted to our condition upon the earth. No: the Holy Spirit has taught us to speak truly in the language of men, with the feelings of men, and from the heart of men. The Lord has taken men of like passions with ourselves, and sinners such as we are, in every possible condition of need and misery. He has taught them by His Holy Spirit to utter these prayers, and to commit them to writing; and now He offers them to us as a Prayer-Book adapted to our need. Adapted to our need, I say, because they come from His Spirit, and are therefore divine; and yet just as genuinely human, because they come also from those who are our flesh and blood, and are in everything like ourselves. That, too, is the reason why the Book of Psalms has been so precious to all sinners who are anxious about salvation, and has also proved such a blessing to them: the reason, too, why it will become precious to you, my readers, if you earnestly desire to seek after God. In other books of the Bible much is presented to you about sin and conversion, and the conflict and blessedness of believers. But here you may see and hear these believers themselves. In the Book of Psalms you. have the key of their inner chamber. There you may see them in their intercourse with God. There you hear how one confesses sin and entreats forgiveness; how another praises God for His grace, and pours out his heart before Him. There you may kneel down alongside them and pray along with them. Your heart will become inflamed by their repentance and their faith.
But what do I say? It is not only the inner chamber of believers that is open to you in the Psalms; it is the innermost recesses of the heart. In solitude with God and in the light of His countenance, they lay all their misery naked before Him; and there you may see as in a mirror what wretchedness there must be in your own heart of which you still know so little. The whole hidden conflict arising from the sense of
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guilt, as well as conversion and faith, is there presented to you in living and visible form. There you may see how it goes with a soul who is under the working of God’s Grace. Never shall you learn to know sin, especially your own sin, aright until you have learned to agree with the deep confession of the suppliants of the Psalms. And never shall you learn to glory in God and rejoice in His grace, so much as when you have learned to give praise and thanks with the poets of the Psalms.
It is for this reason, also, that souls desirous of salvation have at all times very deeply loved the Psalms, and that many of the most eminent of the saints of God have declared that the Psalms become to them, the longer they use them, the more precious and the more glorious, and that there is no means of grace more rich and stable than the right use of the Psalms.
Tet why should I speak of men? Think of the Son of God. It is He who has taught us the use of the Psalms, and sanctified them to us. When in the heaviest stress of His conflict He Himself has to lament, 6 My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me? ’ was that not a word of the Twenty-second Psalm written to meet His condition? And, when dying, He cried, ‘Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit,’ was that not a word from another Psalm? And if the man Christ Jesus had need of the words of the Psalms to comfort and strengthen Himself in prayer to His Father, how much more must you, my friend, and I have our poor hearts prepared by these divine prayers to draw near aright to God.
The blessing arising from the use of these words, then, is great and sure — ‘The word is nigh thee, saith the Lord, in thy mouth and in thy heart.’ God has in His grace so adapted the Word to us that wherever any one takes these words into his lips and uses them, and then at once ponders them and expresses them, there a way is prepared for the Word to enter from the mouth into the heart. Through the gateway of the mouth the Word comes into the heart. Tou shall experience that the words of God are the living seed which germinates and shoots out roots, and springs upward and bears fruit. Your heart is the soil: you have only to open it, and you will experience that it is indeed the word of God which worketh mightily in you who believe.
My reader, I speak to you as one anxious to be saved. I invite you to meditate with me on the Fifty-first Psalm. Let us learn to pray this Psalm together. Let us ponder it verse by verse, learning it by heart and receiving it into our spirit, as well as uttering it before God upon our knees. For David this Psalm was the wav out of the depths of sin to the blessedness of forgiveness, to a rich experience of the grace of God. This Psalm can also bring you and me into this blessing. This Psalm will do it for us, if we use
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and follow it faithfully. Reader, for God’s sake, for your own soul’s sake, I entreat you, prepare yourself with all earnestness to learn by heart and to pray this Psalm. The blessing which it will bring you is inconceivably great.
II.
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For the Chief Musician. A Psalm of David: when Nathan the prophet came unto him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba.
TX the Psalter of David we find psalms of different kinds. There are psalms of thanksgiving for praising and thanking the Lord; there are psalms of instruction to teach ns one portion or another of divine truth; there are supplicatory psalms in which God’s help is entreated in the midst of distress or sorrow; and there are penitential psalms in which, after confession of sin and guilt, entreaty is made for forgiveness and redemption.
The Fifty-first is one of the seven Penitential Psalms, and, indeed, the chief among them. To understand it aright, we must especially attend to the position in which David stood when he wrote it. The superscription above the Psalm tells us this. David had fallen very deeply into sin. He had committed adultery with Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah. Even this was not all. He had tried to conceal his sin; and when he did not succeed in this, he had Uriah put to death. Even this was not the worst element in his case. Had he but really felt and confessed his sin, all
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might have been well; but for well-nigh a whole year he continued hardened. It was only after the birth of his child, when God sent the prophet Nathan unto him, that he came to a true sense of his sin. Nathan had drawn from him a sentence of condemnation against a rich man who had robbed a poor man of his only pet lamb. It was only after the king had uttered the sentence, and Nathan had exclaimed, “Thou art the man,’ that he humbled himself, and acknowledged, CI have sinned against the Lord.’
The prophet had thereupon announced to him in the name of God: ‘The Lord has taken away thy sin. Thou shalt not die.’ This, however, was not enough for David. So amazed was he now at the sight of what he had done, that he went to the Lord in deep self-abasement to confess his sin and entreat from God to bestow upon him. by His Holy Spirit, His divine grace for the forgiveness of sin and renewal of his heart. It was at this juncture the Psalm was written, that is, ’ when the prophet Nathan came unto him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba.’
The reason, then, why I would fain have you learn to understand and take home to your heart this Psalm is, because I think that its lessons are so necessary and, indeed, indispensable. We are taught in our Catechism that there are three elements in the spiritual life which we must know if we would live and die as saved souls. These three elements are. How great our sin and misery is; how we can be delivered from them; and how we should live in thankfulness to God for this deliverance. And nowhere shall we find these great lessons concerning misery, deliverance, and thankfulness more clearly explained than in this Psalm. Let us pray God to open our hearts to them, and to imprint them deep in our spirit.
The first lesson is this: how terrible the might, the power, and wretchedness of sin are. Think but for a moment who David was: the man after God’s own heart; ‘the man who was exalted on high; the anointed of the God of Jacob; and the sweet Psalmist of Israel ’ (2 Sam. xxiii. 2). Think of the wonders God had wrought by him and had manifested toward him. In what deep trials he had been purified; how highly God had honored him, and how gloriously he had praised God; and yet see what became of him whenever God abandoned him for a moment and gave him over to the bent of his own heart. Into what fearful sin has he fallen, and how long does he remain hardened in it? Nothing but the Word of God by the prophet can bring him to an awakening.
I fear that there are many amongst us who do not know their sins, and have but imperfect ideas of them. The thought fills me with great sorrow; for, until they know their sins, they cannot really come to confession of guilt or the experience of mercy. They shall die in their sin. When it is too late — in eternity itself, they will see what sin was. And that is the reason why L as a servant of the Lord, come to you with this Psalm. I would fain set before you the sin of David, and, like Nathan, say to you, ‘Thou art the
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man.’ I would show you, if indeed, perhaps, you do not yet know it, how corrupt the nature of man is; and how your heart, respectably as you may live in external things, is, nevertheless, the source of all sin, and makes you capable of all sin, if God does not keep you; and especially I would fain show you how fearful the power of sin is to blind a man. You do not know your sin until the Spirit of God teaches you to know it. You do not know the real nature, the abominableness and the curse of sin, until God makes it known to you; and therefore, I entreat you, come with me, listen to the prayer of David, a man of God. You shall learn what you do not yet know of sin and its fearful misery.
And there you will further learn what a glorious redemption is to he found with God. Meagre thoughts about sin and the confession of sin lead one to think little of mercy and the redeeming power of God. It is supposed to be something that is self-evident, and that may be very easily taken for granted, that one should obtain forgiveness and enter into heaven; but in this Psalm you will learn something different. You will see that great things must be done in you. David feels that he must be washed by God from his sin, and that his transgressions must be wholly blotted out. He asks further that he may be entirely purified within, and may be renewed in heart, and that the Spirit of God may dwell in him always.
My reader, come with me and you will hear from David what must take place in you before you can be saved. You must be washed in Jesus* blood, and be born again by His Spirit. And this Psalm will teach you that this glorious redemption is prepared for you; that however sinful and helpless you may feel, you have access in prayer to a God who can and will work all of this in you.. The prayer of David is indeed designed by the Spirit of God to teach yon how you must come to God, and what yon may certainly expect and receive from God.
And then you will also further learn what a thankful life that of the redeemed soul is. You will understand in this Psalm how gloriously one who is partaker of the redemption of God feels himself knit to God. It becomes his one desire to praise and to serve this God. It is a joy to him to make known to others what God has done for him, and that not as a burden which is laid upon him, but as a work of love of which his heart has need, and for which the grace of God gives the power. You will also understand how grace will sanctify, not only the hidden life of the heart, but the outward life and conversation and walk; so that the redeemed soul may be known for the honor of God as one who through God has become an entirely new man. And you will also especially see how all this is wrought by grace, and given to a sinner of like feelings with you and in the same misery with you. Yea, in this Psalm you will see a man first confessing his sin in the deepest misery and anxiety, then under the working of the grace of God receiving redemption, and finally glorifying God as a redeemed and emancipated soul.
Beloved reader, this way you must also tread if you would be saved. And I long for your salvation. Therefore it is that I call you to join me in the study of this Psalm, in order that you may see how God saves a soul. Be not afraid of the earnest words which we shall speak to you about sin. The man who is not consciously a sinner and an ungodly soul, Christ will never save. Be not afraid concerning the difficulty of the way of salvation; you shall at length see how God will do everything of which you have need. Be not afraid concerning the high holiness and the life full of thanksgiving in which you must walk. You will see that God demands nothing which He does not first bestow, and that the service to which He calls you is a blessed and joyful service of willing love, love which is awakened by His love shed abroad in the heart.
Gracious God, may we truly learn all this.