Psalm 51 with R. C. Sproul, “God’s Just Judgment”, 4

Psalm 51 and the Spirit of Repentance

If we continue now with our study of the biblical doctrine of repentance, we will continue with our examination of Psalm 51, the Psalm of David, after he had been confronted by Nathan the prophet for his sin with Bathsheba.

In our last session, we looked at the first three verses, and we ended with an allusion to verse 3, For I acknowledge my transgressions, and my sin is always before me. When we move now to verse 4, we get to my favorite part of the entire psalm, and what I think is the most essential aspect of understanding the proper spirit and attitude of repentance.

David’s Sin Against God and Others

So let's look at verses 4, the whole of verse 4, Against you and you only have I sinned, and done this evil in your sight, that you may be found just when you speak, and blameless when you judge. Now there's something here that may cause some consternation in us when we read David's saying, Against thee and thee only have I sinned, and done this evil in your sight, but because the reality of the matter is that David had not only sinned against God with this transgression, but just think of the people who were involved in this wickedness.

David sinned against Bathsheba by enticing her into this adulterous relationship, and in so doing, David sinned against his own wives and against his own children, against his whole family. And not only did he sin against them and against Bathsheba, but he obviously sinned against Uriah and his entire household.

He sinned against Uriah's parents if they were still living, or any of his siblings that may have still been around when they had to mourn the death of Uriah. But again, beyond that, David sinned against every one of his soldiers in his army, because he's the commander-in-chief of the armies of Israel, and when the commander-in-chief, for his own private and personal vested interest, puts one of his soldiers at the front line in order to have him killed, he violates every soldier under his command.

But even beyond that, David is not only the military commander of Israel, he's the king, and as the king, he is accountable before God to rule under what's called in the Old Testament the king's law. The king is supposed to manifest and exhibit the righteous reign of God.

He is appointed as a deputy king under the reign of Yahweh, and his duty is to act in such a way as a regent to say that the way I behave is the way God behaves. And so the people put their trust in their king, and the king now violates their personal trust.

Remember, King David was not the chief leader of contemporary America. In our country today, we say it doesn't matter what the personal integrity or behavior of our president is. As long as he's a capable administrator, as long as the economy's going fine, he can behave in as sinful a manner as possible, and that's fine.

We've seen that. But that wasn't the way it was in Israel. David's personal behavior, his immorality reflected on the whole nation. And so from one perspective, it's simply not true that David's sin was only a violation of God because he violated all these other people.

I remember once being involved in a counseling case in the church where a woman in the church became involved in an adulterous relationship with another person. And I remember as a result of that case, I had sixteen people make counseling appointments with me.

Her husband, the other guy's wife, the children, the in-laws, friends who felt so violated by this relationship that they had a crisis in their lives that required counseling. And people think that when they're engaged in this kind of relationship, it's personal, it's private, it's not something that affects anybody except the immediate people engaged.

That's not the case. But here's David eliminating all of these people that he's injured, and he says, against thee and thee only have I sinned. Now this could be construed as a departure from authentic repentance, an attempt of the person to minimize their guilt in repentance, which is something that we frequently do.

Even when we acknowledge our sin, we want to say it's not a big deal. During the Watergate hearings, and right after Richard Nixon resigned the presidency of the United States over the Watergate scandal, I was in Washington, D .C. and had the opportunity to have lunch in the Senate dining room with one of the Senators of the United States.

And I remember as we were leaving the lunch on an elevator, he looked at me and he said, do you know, if President Nixon would have said to the people of America, I violated your trust, I did not tell the truth, please forgive me, he said, I think he would still be President today.

But instead, he stood before the people and he said, I made a mistake, but I'm not a crook. That was simply not acceptable to the people of the United States at that period in American history. It would be now, obviously, but now they wouldn't even admit to making a mistake.

But there's a big difference between saying, I made a mistake and I sinned. See when I sin, I want to call it a mistake. When you sin, I want to call it a sin. But we tend to minimize the severity of our own guilt.

And we could read this section of the psalm as that what David is doing here. It's only against you, I only sinned against you God. No. Remember, this psalm is not written simply by David in the flesh, but it is written under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost.

This is authentic repentance, not false repentance. So what is David saying here? What David is understanding is even he clearly understood that sin involves violation of people on the horizontal level.

But he understood the biblical principle that where there is no law, there can be no transgression because the very definition of sin is a transgression of the law of God. So that ultimately, sin is not sin unless it is against God, unless it transgresses His law.

So then the ultimate sense, even if I injure you in an apparently insignificant way on that horizontal level, I am now offending God in the vertical plane of life. And David is saying, saying, God, I realize that in the final analysis where I have really offended is not just against Bathsheba, not just against Uriah, not just here in this human arena of human relationships, but where I have been most guilty is in sinning against you.

And so when he says against thee and thee only, he's speaking hyperbolically. He's making that point that he recognizes that his wickedness and his guilt goes to the highest court, to the supreme tribunal of God, because in this broken human relationship he's offended the holiness of God.

And so that's where he, that's where he places his emphasis in this act of repentance. Now, I said this segment is my favorite. It is in the second part of verse 4 that I find what I call the essence of true repentance, that you may be found just when you speak and blameless when you judge.

Just and the Justifier in the Cross of Christ

Now, that's a little bit awkward in its expression here, and I've seen other translations render it in different ways, and they all seem to be awkward. This is the text that Paul cites in Romans when he talks about the merciful work of God in effecting our justification, where Paul is excited when he says that in the drama of the cross and in the drama of our redemption, God remains both just and the justifier, that in our redemption, in our salvation, God never, ever, ever, ever compromises His righteousness.

You know, we say to ourselves we should be long-suffering and patient with other people's sins because we're sinners, and we are called to forgive others as we hope they will forgive us, and we understand that to err is human, to forgive divine, and we often will say let Him who is without sin cast the first stone.

Well, that's an allusion, of course, to the story in John where the Pharisees catch this woman in adultery and drag her before Jesus in public shame and try to trap Jesus into making a decision between Roman law and the Mosaic law and so on, and that's when Jesus tells them, He writes in the ground and says, let the one who is without sin cast the first stone, and they all drop their stones and walk away.

But we often overlook the point that there was one in that crowd who under those terms had the right to cast the stone because there was one in that crowd who was without sin, and it was Christ Himself.

And when the men all walked away, Jesus said to the woman, where are those who condemn thee? And she looks around and sees that they've all disappeared, and she says, no man, Lord. And Jesus said, neither do I condemn thee.

Go and sin no more. But we need to remember that Jesus had every right to condemn that woman. She had violated the law of God, and He was without sin, and He chooses instead of exercising justice against her, He grants her mercy.

But when God does that, He doesn't negotiate His justice. What Paul tells us in Romans is the ground of our pardon rests in the work of Christ, where God requires two things from Jesus. He requires on the first hand, on the first side, that Jesus pay the penalty due our sins.

On the cross we have the most vivid example of God's justice in all of history, where He really does unleash the fullness of His wrath against Christ once Christ has willingly taken upon Himself by imputation our sin.

God punishes that sin. God doesn't just say, well, that's okay. You know, boys will be boys. We'll slide over it. God will not ever compromise His righteousness. And at the same time, God requires from Christ in order to qualify for the cross in the first place that He be the Lamb without blemish, that He live a life of perfect obedience, perfect righteousness before the Father without compromise.

God doesn't bend the rules. God doesn't grade Jesus on a curve. He requires perfection so that His law and that His justice may be maintained. And so what you see in the drama of redemption is the most perfect expression of God's justice you will ever see.

And then at the same time, that His justice is fulfilled for us by someone else is the most vivid display of His mercy that we could ever have. So in the cross and in our justification, we see both justice and mercy being displayed.

And when Paul reaches back to the Old Testament as he's explaining all of that in the book of Romans, he comes back to verse 4 of Psalm 51 and reminds the people that David says here that you may be found just when you speak and blameless when you judge.

Mercy, Grace, and the Last Judgment

What's he really saying here? What he's saying is, God, I'm begging You for mercy, I'm appealing to Your chesed, Your loving kindness, Your steadfast love, and the multitude of Your tender mercies. I'm asking not for justice but for grace, because I know that if You were to apply to me the strict rule of Your justice, I would perish.

Here's where in throwing himself upon the mercy of the court, in a very real sense David shuts his mouth. Again, the basic metaphor that we find in the New Testament for the last judgment is that when God reads the indictment of people's sins to them, there's no hue and cry, there's no protest, no one stands at the judgment seat of God and cries, that's not fair, but every tongue is stopped, every mouth is stopped, every tongue is reduced to silence on the last day, because the evidence that God amasses is so overwhelming that people see the absolute futility of trying to protest.

And this is what David is saying here, if You want to send me to hell, I could have no complaints, that whatever You say here, You are perfectly just to say it, and I acknowledge, O God, that You have every right to do with me what is pleasing to You.

That's the broken and contrite heart. That's what it means to be truly repentant. That's what it means to have a godly sorrow that is authentic in repentance, when you acknowledge before God not only that you're guilty, not only do you confess your transgression, not only do you plead for His mercy to be given to you and His pardon, but you acknowledge that He has every right to punish you absolutely by His justice.

That you, he says, may be found just when you speak and blameless when you judge. I can't think of too many sins, if there are any, more egregious than to blaspheme God by accusing God of being unjust.

That's why it frightens me when I'm engaged in conversations all the time with the people who are struggling with the biblical doctrine of election, where people's protest again and again against it is, that's not fair.

Where if they would read Romans 9, and the apostle says there, is there unrighteousness in God, and what's his answer? By no means, God forbid, but it's when we think God owes us something that we protest against His mercy and His justice.

David doesn't do that. David realizes that his only hope in life and death is the mercy and the grace of God. Then he goes on to say, behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin my mother conceived me.

Original Sin and Accountability

Now here, David appeals to original sin, but again he's not doing what I hear people do all the time. People say, what kind of a God is it who allows people to be born in a state of sin? They're born fallen and corrupt.

They're sinners because they have a sin nature, and they're doing what comes naturally because God has imputed to us the guilt of Adam, and I wasn't there in the garden, and I protested. How can God hold me responsible for sinning when I'm born with a sinful nature?

Now again, when David reminds God that he was born in sin, that he was conceived in sin in his mother's womb, he doesn't mean by that that it was a sin for his mother and father to have been engaged in sexual intercourse in order to procreate the earth, as some people think.

That's not what he's saying here. He's saying that when I was conceived, I was already fallen, that my sin nature was already there in the fertilized egg. Sin is not something that befell me when I was six years old or five months after I was born.

I was conceived in that state, and when I was born, I was DOA. I was spiritually dead on arrival. I came into this world as a corrupt person. Now he does not say, therefore, it's your fault that I have committed sin.

He is not appealing to original sin here to minimize his guilt, but what he is doing is something extraordinary that, to me, reveals the integrity of David's prayer and the authenticity of his repentance.

He is confessing his guilt for the circumstances of his own conception. He is saying, God, it is perfectly just of You to have me conceived in sin and born in sin, because I know I fell in Adam, and the children of Adam can never pass the buck and say it's only because of Adam or because of God that I am a sinner.

No, if Adam perfectly represented me in that probation in the Garden of Eden by God's appointment, then never were we more perfectly and righteously judged than when we were judged in Adam. And so I can't dodge this bullet by appealing to, well, I have a fallen nature and it's not my fault I have a fallen nature, because the mystery of original sin, as Paul develops it in Romans 5 in the New Testament, is that God holds us guilty and accountable for what our perfect representative did in our behalf in the Garden of Eden.

So see, what David is doing here is he's confessing his accountability not only for the actual sin, but also for his original sin or his fallen condition out of which the actual sin emerged. And so he's saying to God, God, forgive me not only for my sins, but forgive me for being a sinner, because we're not sinners because we sin, but rather we sin because we're sinners.

And we need to confess our guilt not only for our actions, but for that sin nature that we all have out of which our sins flow. The fruit is corrupt because the tree is corrupt, and we need to repent not only for bearing corrupt fruit, but for being corrupt trees.