leadeth to repentance; "Godly sorrow;" not "the sorrow of the world," which leads only to the chambers of the dead. May that blessed Saviour, who was "raised to be a Prince and a Saviour to give repentance and forgiveness of sins," vouchsafe to us true repentance. May that Holy Spirit, whose influences upon us are the effect and purchase of that Saviour's blood, be poured out upon us! and coming from Jesus lead us to Jesus, and enable us to find in him both pardon and peace. David's misery then leads him to throw himself upon the mercy of God; or rather the Holy Spirit makes his misery the means of leading him to do so. It is upon our wretchedness he works. It was upon the wretchedness of the poor prodigal he wrought, upon his temporal wretchedness, which is but an emblem of spiritual distress. Spiritual distress indeed will appear every where. The king's palace cannot keep it out.. No king was greater than David. But human efforts are vain. When the dart is from the hand of the Lord, nothing but the Lord's hand can remove it; and when the wound is from him, he alone can bind it up, or mollify the sore. Saul had recourse to his music. But no music, no feasting, no dancing, can keep the still small voice of God from penetrating into the inmost recesses of the heart; it will whisper, and it will be heard. In the midst of laughter, the heart will be sorrowful; and if, for a moment, the voice be drowned, and the alarm forgotten, tenfold greater will be the reaction. O think of this you who have 3 Acts v. 31. 4 Prov. xiv. 13. tried to stifle these feelings! what have been your after horrors, in the still silence and retirement of your chambers! But David threw himself upon GOD. Whom have I in heaven but thee, and who is there on earth to whom I can go in comparison of thee? He goes to God as a God of mercy. He neither thinks of mentioning his own past conduct, (and who had exerted himself more for the cause of truth and the glory of God?) nor does he speak of his future purposes of amendment. He goes as a poor broken-hearted sinner, and makes mercy his only plea. And what a blessed thing it is that our God is a God of mercy; that this is his attribute; that "his property is always to have mercy;" that "to him belong mercies and forgivenesses;" that his is not only the power to manifest them, but the will to confer them. Well indeed might the psalmist speak of them by the term he has used, as "loving kindnesses," as "the multitude of tender mercies," infinite in value, unbounded in number! And yet what did he know of God as a God of mercy in comparison with what we know? The psalmist indeed knew much, but surely not so much as we, under the fuller light of extended revelation. He had not seen the crowning mercies of God in the gift of his Son. He had not heard that declaration of the apostle, of "the breadth, and length, and depth, and height" of the love of Christ, in which every term that denotes greatness is employed; for the purpose of coming to this conclusion, that it is 4 Ps. lxxiii. 25. 6 Ps. li. 1. 7 5 Dan. ix. 9. immeasurable, unfathomable, "that it passeth knowledge." Yes, my brethren, if we would contemplate God as a God of mercy, we must see him "in the face of Jesus Christ." It is there that "mercy is rejoicing against judgment:" it is there that we see, not an angry God appeased, as some misrepresent the scheme of salvation; but a tender and a merciful God, a God who is "rich in mercy," reconciling his justice and his truth with his mercy, to save you and me from destruction; that poor sinful rebellious worms, as we are, should not perish, but should have everlasting life; giving his only-begotten Son to die for us. O what a God! In every sense we may say, that grace hath abounded with him. May we, to whom he has committed the "word of reconciliation," "that God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing unto them their trespasses," go forth with it in all its fulness! May we set it before you in all its magnitude and all its freeness! May we beseech you "by the mercies of God;' may we entreat, nay implore you, in Christ's name, to be reconciled! And may that Holy Spirit, whose word this gospel is, wherewith we are "put in trust,” bring it home to your hearts, and lead you to throw yourselves upon the mercy of God, and cause you to up the same petition for forgiveness, which we now proceed to consider in the case of David. offer II. We observe, then, that he ASKS FOR PARDON in this expression, "Blot out my transgressions." He here considers transgressions in the light of James ii. 13. 7 2 Cor. iv. 6. 9 Rom. v. 20. 1 2 Cor. v. 18, 19. debts. I need not tell you, sins are frequently represented in scripture as debts to the divine justice. Thus in our Lord's Prayer, he has taught us to ask God to "forgive us our debts." These are here figuratively spoken of, as if they were written in a book; and accordingly, in the account of the judgment of the great day, we read, that "the dead, small and great, shall stand before God, and the books be opened; and the dead be judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works."3 When, therefore, David here asks to have his transgressions blotted out, he means, in other words, to have his transgressions entirely and totally forgiven. This then is the first and most essential feature of forgiveness, that it is entire. It is not forgiveness if it be not complete. God neither forgives us partially nor conditionally. When I say that he does not forgive us partially, I mean that he keeps no reserve in his own hands, to hold over us in terror. And when I say that he does not forgive us conditionally, I mean that he does not so forgive us, as if the old transgression was to be taken into account on any repetition of our sin. Nothing can be more strong than the assurance to this effect in scripture. There is not only that passage which gives rise to these observations, "the blotting out of our transgressions," but many more of a similar import. Thus Isaiah speaks of it: "I have blotted out as a thick cloud thy transgressions, and as a cloud thy sins."+ Hezekiah in his prayer, says, "Thou hast cast all my 2 Matt. vi. 12. 3 Rev. xx. 12. 4 Isa. xliv. 22. sins behind thy back." The prophet Micah speaks of God's casting all the sins of his people into the 6 depths of the sea. Jeremiah says, that "when the iniquity of Israel shall be sought for, there shall be none, and the sins of Judah shall not be found;" and in Jeremiah it is again said, "I will forgive their iniquity, and their sins I will remember no more." And the scape goat, on whom the sins of the people were laid (the type of Christ) was turned loose, and carried off into the wilderness the sins of the people. Now the meaning of all these passages is very plain. I would not say that they express the actual forgetfulness of God of our sins, which would be an impossibility. God, strictly speaking, can forget nothing, and the corrective dispensations which may be necessary to amend the sinner, and which come in the purest love, imply his recollection of their transgressions. But they assuredly do express this; that in so far as judgment is concerned, they are as though they had never been. The expression which the psalmist in this chapter couples with that of blotting out his transgressions exactly explains this; "Hide thy face from my sins."" And this is what I conceive we are to understand; not that God cannot, but that he will not see them; that he has therefore cast them behind his back, with the determination of not regarding them; that he has cast them into the depths of the sea, as a pledge and assurance to us that they shall not be permitted to 5 Isa. xxxviii. 17. 6 Micah vii. 19. 7 Jer. 1. 20. 8 Jer. xxxi. 34. 9 Ps. li. 9. |