Psalm 51 with R. C. Sproul, “Coram Deo: A Fearful and Joyful Experience”, 6

Psalm 51, David’s Shame, and the Gaze of God

I'm sure that every one of us has seen photos in the newspaper of somebody who is being brought into the station house by the police under arrest, and as the camera snaps their picture you'll see that they'll be covering their face with their hand or with their hat or with a newspaper, or you'll see on television as the police lead them into the police station they'll be concealing themselves from the camera.

Because as human beings we do not want to have our sins exposed to public scrutiny. We don't want to be made a spectacle of in our guilt. This is one of the problems that we saw when the Pharisees dragged the woman caught in adultery and made her a public disgrace before Jesus.

This is what's involved in David's plea in verse 9 of Psalm 51, when he cries out to God, hide your face from my sins and blot out all my iniquities. Now this is the second time that he's asked God to blot out his transgressions.

In the very first verse he asked God to treat him according to the multitude of his tender mercies and to blot out his transgressions, and we looked at that in the sense of his desire to have the record erased, to have it expunged so that the record of his sin would no longer be held against David.

But here he's using this term blot out in a slightly different nuance, and it's related to the first part of the sentence where he says, hide your face from me. Now I could get off on a real tangent here for a long time into some philosophical things that you may find a little bit tedious, but one of the most important voices for atheism in the twentieth century was the French existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.

And in his most important work, Being and Nothingness, Sartre gave an unusual argument against the existence of God, and the argument went like this. He said that one thing we know for sure about human beings is that we are subjects.

We are people who think, who make decisions, and have feelings. And the human person would be destroyed if that person lost his or her subjectivity, and we lose our subjectivity or our subjectivity is threatened when people want to reduce us to objects.

And he makes the… he tells about people going into an art gallery and sitting on a bench and staring for hours at a masterpiece on the wall. As I'm now staring at this photograph that our producer, Scott Smith, took in Rothenburg, Germany of a church door, and the shadow just happened to be the shadow of the cross on that door, and you sit here and you stare at that picture, and you begin to see the subtle nuances that are there.

But we reduce that to an object under our gaze. You can stare at monkeys in the zoo, but if you walk down the street and fix your eyes on a passerby and just start to stare at them, you will be greeted with hostility.

You might get your face slapped, or somebody might even call the police, because we have an understanding in our culture that you don't hold the gaze of a person beyond a couple of seconds, or that stare becomes a threatening gesture.

And so Sartre takes this to the view of God, and he says the Christian view of God has God peering down from heaven and in His omniscience reducing every person to an object beneath His gaze, which Sartre says is dehumanizing.

And when I read that in Sartre, I think what a shame that he's never, ever experienced the benevolent gaze of God, and his only thinking with respect to God is that God's gaze will reduce a person not only to an object, but to an object under judgment.

Mary, the Magnificat, and Wanting to See the Face of God

Now, you see both sides in the prayers of David. On another occasion, David says to God, search me and know me. See if there's any wicked way within me. On the one hand, David has this deep desire for God to notice him, to look at him.

We think of the Magnificat in the New Testament when Mary, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, sings her psalm of praise, my soul doth magnify the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my Savior. And in the context of the Magnificat, part of what she's rejoicing about is what?

He has regarded the lowest state of His handmaiden. He's saying, God has noticed me. Why would God even be aware of me? Who am I that I would attract the gaze of God? And so Mary delights in the idea that God is looking at her.

But we have this conflict of feelings within us. On the one hand, we want to behold the face of God. That is our greatest hope, that we shall see Him face to face, that we live coram Deo, in His presence and before His face.

And yet, when we are overcome with our own guilt, the last thing we want to see is the face of God. Just like Adam and Eve, we run for the trees. We look for a safe place. We call for the mountains to fall upon us, the hills to hide us, so that we will not be exposed to the gaze of God.

I think one of the most poignant moments in all of biblical history is that moment after Peter denies Jesus publicly three times, and suddenly he sees Jesus is being led across the courtyard to judgment, and all it says in the Scripture is that Jesus' eyes fell upon Peter.

They lock eyes. Can you imagine the shame of Simon Peter when he sees Jesus staring at him after he has just said, I don't know the man? Here is where Peter would be saying with David, hide your face from me.

Don't look at me. I know that your eyes are too holy to even behold iniquity, and I am so ashamed of myself now that I don't want to be under your gaze. Now that's repentance. That's when you really feel that rotten about yourself that you want to avoid the gaze of God.

Hide your face from my sins. Blot out all my iniquities. And then he goes on in verse 10. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Again, he keeps coming back to this business of the center of his being, that he knows that the problem lies deep within himself, in the heart.

Creation, Regeneration, and the Heart of Flesh

And he said, God, don't just blot out my sins. Don't just pardon my sins. Don't just forgive my sins, but change me, fix me, because the problem is coming from my heart, and there's something corrupt in my heart.

I need heart surgery here, and I want you to create in me a clean heart. And the word he uses is the Hebrew word that is used to describe the creative act of God in the very first chapter of Genesis, the work of creation itself, where God brings something out of nothing and life out of death.

Now, I don't think that David here is asking God to regenerate him. I think that David is already a regenerate man, because I think regeneration is a necessary prerequisite for this kind of repentance.

This kind of repentance doesn't come out of the flesh. This kind of repentance doesn't come out of a heart of stone. But even those of us who have been born anew by the power of the Holy Spirit still sin, and we still have that corruption lingering in our hearts, and we plead out to God in our repentance to renew that Spirit that He has given us in our rebirth in the first place and ask that God's creative activity, which is what He does in regeneration.

The way, again, the Bible speaks of regeneration is what? One, it speaks of God's quickening us from death, from spiritual death. In the Old Testament it says that what God does is changes a heart of stone into a heart of flesh.

Now, there's a little bit of confusion there, because when the New Testament speaks about our flesh, that's a negative term, and it's talking about our fallen, corrupt nature. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and the flesh profits nothing.

But in the Old Testament, the image there is the distinction not between flesh and spirit as it is in the New Testament, but in the Old Testament it's between flesh and stone. Prior to rebirth, your heart is calcified, it's reified, it is a thing without life, without pulsing, and without movement.

It's inert like a stone. And when God awakens you by His Spirit, that which was stone now begins to pulsate. It begins to beat. It becomes pliable and alive as a beating heart. That's what David is referring to, and he's asking God for a new visitation, as it were, of His soul, create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.

We can gloss over the word steadfast. We looked again in the first verse where we said that one of the most important words in the Old Testament is found there in the text, the word chesed, which is translated steadfast love or a loyal love.

And isn't that our problem as Christians? Inconsistency. That we have periodicies of love and affection towards God, but we lack that steadfast day by day, moment by moment, consistent pattern of obedience to Him.

And this is what David is asking for, not just vignettes of obedience here and there, but he's saying, God, give me a spirit that's steadfast. Renew my spirit so that I can be consistently walking as a godly person.

That's his plea here. And then he says in verse 11, do not cast me away from your presence, and do not take your Holy Spirit from me. Now, I think we have to understand verse 11 in light of verse 4, the second part.

If you recall when we looked at verse 4 earlier on in this course, I mentioned that that was my favorite portion of the psalm, that when David says that you may be found just when you speak and blameless when you judge, that Paul quotes this portion of the psalm in Romans when he's dealing with the doctrine of justification.

It is expressing here how David in his repentance acknowledges that his only hope is the mercy of God, the grace of God, and he acknowledges that if God would deal with him according to justice rather than according to mercy, that he couldn't complain about it.

That if you would cast me aside, if you would send me out into the outer darkness, if you would send me to hell right now, O God, I could have no complaints about it because you're perfectly just to do that.

That's what he said in verse 4, but now he's saying here in verse 11, please don't do that. You'd have every right to cast me away from your presence, but don't do it. I couldn't take that. It's one thing for me to lose my kingship, for me to lose my family, for me to lose my wealth, but if I lose you, I lose everything.

This is what the confession, the Heidelberg Catechism is talking about when it says that Christ is our only hope in life and in death. Take that away, and we are a people without hope. And again, for the Jew, the presence of God is the single most important element of their redemption.

As I've mentioned many times, that the Jewish, the Hebrew benediction, may the Lord bless you and keep you, keep you, preserve you. May the Lord make His face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you.

May the Lord lift up the light of His countenance upon you and give you peace. That's what it means to experience the blessing of God, to be brought into close proximity to His presence, and to experience the ultimate felicity is to look into His face.

That's why the vision of God, what we call the beatific vision, is the highest future hope that the Christian has looking forward to heaven, that we will see Him as He is. We will look right into His face, that which was denied Adam after the fall, that which was denied Moses on the mountain, where God said, My face will not be seen.

He will give to us on the other side. And for the Jew, blessedness was measured in direct proportion to the proximity of the person to God. And the opposite of the blessing was the curse, which was to be sent outside the camp, to be sent out into the outer darkness, outside of the intensive presence of God.

I mean, they understood that you couldn't get anywhere and really escape. I mean, David said, If I send you to hell, thou art there. If I send you to heaven, you're there. Where should I flee from my presence?

But he's talking about the redemptive presence of God. Just like this week we celebrated the Lord's Supper in our church, and our church believes in the real presence of Christ in the sacrament of the Lord's Supper.

We don't believe in the physical presence of Christ, but we believe in the real presence of Christ. And I said to the people, He's here, and we know He's here, can't see Him, but we know He's here because He said He would be, and He keeps His Word.

And so we need to be acutely conscious of His presence. But somebody would say, But isn't He present out in the parking lot? Yes. And isn't He present here every week? Yes. So what's the big deal of the Lord's Supper?

I said, Well, He's here for a different purpose. There's a different kind of presence of Christ when He gathers His people at His table. Just like I can be with you right now, and I'm enjoying fellowship with you, but there's another dimension when we go out to dinner, or if you come to my house, and we're now breaking bread together.

And so there are different ways in which the Bible understands the presence of God. And David is saying, Don't cast me out into that outer darkness. That's the worst thing that could befall me. And then he adds to that, And do not take your Holy Spirit from me.

The Holy Spirit, Kingship, and Old Testament Anointing

Now, this is a difficult text. We almost have to read David's mind here as to what he's referring to when he says, God, please don't take your Holy Spirit away from me. And here's where maybe being a theologian is a disadvantage reading the text, because I'm already convinced that once you are saved, you're always saved, and that God will preserve you to the end, that He who has begun a good work in you finishes us, and that if God regenerates you by His Spirit, He will never take that Holy Spirit away.

And is David afraid of the unthinkable here? Because David certainly is, as we said, a regenerate man. And he's not saying, God, please give me the Holy Spirit for the first time. He's saying, Don't take it away.

Is David afraid here that he's about to lose his salvation? Maybe. That's all I can give you is the maybe. Maybe. Because even though my theology says I can never lose my salvation, my sin argues against that.

When I am in sin and in a spirit of repentance, I wonder at times whether I'm even a Christian, and I'm afraid then emotionally that I'm going to lose my salvation because what I've done is so egregious to God.

Well, maybe that's the situation David's in. I don't think so, because there's another way in which David participates in the Holy Spirit in a special way in the Old Testament. Remember that the Old Testament, every believer has the Holy Spirit to be born again in the Old Testament just as in the New Testament.

You can't the old people in the Old Testament couldn't be believers without the Holy Ghost any more than we can. But also in the Old Testament there were gifts of the Spirit, the charismatic endowment of particular individuals for particular tasks, where the Spirit of the Lord would come upon the prophet so that the prophet could be an agent of revelation and speak the Word of God.

The Spirit of the Lord would come upon the judges and give them unique powers in times of crisis like Samson and Deborah and others of that Gideon and the like. The Spirit anointed the kings. Remember that when Saul became the king, he became king through the outward ceremony of being anointed by Samuel, and the anointing of oil was a symbol for the anointing of God the Holy Spirit upon Saul for his function as king.

But Saul was finally, in the final analysis, was sent an evil spirit from the Lord. And Saul lost the kingship. In a sense he lost his anointing to be king. He had his spirit removed from him. And now David has so disgraced his office as the king, I hear him crying out to God now saying, don't do to me what you did to Saul.

Don't take your Holy Spirit away from me because I can't function without it. For the Spirit of the Lord had anointed him to be king. Now again, I don't know for sure if that's what David was saying, but I suspect that's what he was concerned about then.

Restoration, Evangelism, and Forgiveness

And finally in verse 12 he says, restore to me the joy of your salvation and uphold me by your generous spirit, and then I will teach transgressors your ways and sinners shall be converted to you. Now, the biggest change in my activity after I was converted to Christ was that I could not meet a person that I didn't tell them about Jesus.

And when I went home for the first time after I became a Christian, I went to all my friends. I said, guys, listen, I've got to tell you what happened to me. And I expected them to all jump in the same boat with me when they looked at me like I was crazy.

They thought I had lost it, that I was a fanatic or something. And none of them responded positively. But when I reflect on that, what motivated me was not a sense after I had been converted that my buddies were awful guys that needed to repent.

It was true that they did need to repent, there's no question about that, but that wasn't what I was excited about. I had so much joy. I had found the pearl of great price, and I wanted all my friends to know about it.

Some people say that all evangelism is is one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread, because what motivates the spirit of evangelism in the church and among Christians is forgiveness. When I experience the forgiveness and the pardon of God, if I have any affection for anybody else, am I not going to want to communicate that to them?

And this is what David is saying, God, You forgive me, You restore me, then I will teach transgressors Your way. I will be an evangelist because that would be my natural response to the experience of Your grace.