Psalm 130:1-8 Out of the depths have I cried to you, O LORD.… I. THE CRY FROM THE DEPTHS. 1. The depths are the place for us all. 2. Unless you have cried to God out of these depths, you have never cried to Him at all. The beginning of all true personal religion lies in the sense of my own sin and my lost condition. If a man does not think much about sin, he does not think much about a Divine Saviour. 3. You want nothing more than a cry to get you out of the depths. There is no way for you up out of the pit but to cry to God, and that will bring a rope down. Nay, rather, the rope is there. Your grasping the rope and your cry are one. "Ask, and ye shall receive!" God has let down the fulness of His forgiving love in Jesus Christ our Lord, and all that we need is the call, which is likewise faith, which accepts while it desires, and desires in its acceptance; and then we are lifted up "out of the horrible pit and the miry clay," and our feet are set upon a rock, and our goings established. II. A DARK FEAR AND A BRIGHT ASSURANCE. The man's prayer is, as it were, blown back into his throat by the thought, "If Thou, Lord, shouldst mark iniquities, O Lord t who shall stand?" And then — as if he would not be swept away from his confidence even by this great blast of cold air from out of the north, that comes like ice and threatens to chill his hope to death — "But," says he, "there is forgiveness with Thee, that Thou mightest be feared." So these two halves represent the struggle in the man's mind. They are like a sky, one half of which is piled with thunder-clouds, and the other serenely blue. It needs, first of all, that the heart should have tremblingly entertained the contrary hypothesis, in order that the heart should spring to the relief and the gladness of the counter truth. It must first have felt the shudder of the thought, "If Thou, Lord, shouldst mark iniquities" in order to come to the gladness of the thought, "But there is forgiveness with Thee!" And that forgiveness lies at the root of all true godliness. No man reverences, and loves, and draws near to God so rapturously, so humbly, as the man that has learned pardon through Jesus Christ. III. THE PERMANENT, PEACEFUL ATTITUDE OF THE SPIRIT THAT HAS TASTED THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF FORGIVING LOVE — A CONTINUAL DEPENDENCE UPON GOD, Like a man that has just recovered from some illness, but still leans upon the care, and feels his need of seeing the face of that skilful physician that has helped him through, there will be still, and always, the necessity for the continual application of that pardoning love. But they that have tasted that the Lord is gracious can sit very quietly at His feet and trust themselves to His kindly dealings, resting their souls upon His strong word, and looking for the fuller communication of light from Himself. "More than they that watch for the morning." That is beautiful! The consciousness of sin was the dark night. The coming of His forgiving love flushed all the eastern heaven with diffused brightness that grew into perfect day. And so the man waits quietly for the dawn, and his whole soul is one absorbing desire that God may dwell with him, and brighten and gladden him. IV. THE PERSONAL EXPERIENCE BECOMES GENERAL, AND AN EVANGEL, A CALL UPON THE MAN'S LIPS TO ALL HIS BRETHREN. "Let Israel hope in the Lord." There was no room for anything in his heart when he began this psalm except his own self in his misery, and that Great One high above him there. There is nothing which isolates a man so awfully as a consciousness of sin and of his relation to God. But there is nothing that so knits him to all his fellows, and brings him into such wide-reaching bonds of amity and benevolence, as the sense of God's forgiving mercy for his own soul. So the call bursts from the lips of the pardoned man, inviting all to taste the experience and exercise the trust which have made him glad: "Let Israel hope in the Lord." And then look at the broad Gospel that he has attained to know and to preach. "For with the Lord there is mercy, and with Him is redemption." Not only forgiveness, but redemption — and that from every form of sin. It is "plenteous" — multiplied. Our Lord has taught us to what a sum that Divine multiplication amounts. Net once, nor twice, but "seventy times seven" is the prescribed measure of human forgiveness, and shall men be more placable than God! (A. Maclaren, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: {A Song of degrees.} Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O LORD. |
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