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Sermon: Psalm 51 (Part Three): Psalm 51:5-12
David's Prayer for Restoration
#1811
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 05-Apr-25; 82 minutes
2025-04-05
summary: Physical filth parallels the more hideous filth of sin. As physical filth repulses the senses, sin ought to repulse the spirit. David's heart-felt repentance in Psalm 51:5-12 corresponds with the profound human condition of total immersion in sin and the critical need for divine cleansing. As David acknowledges sin from the time of his conception and birth, he begs Almighty God for inward truth and wisdom, creating within him a clean heart and a steadfast spirit. His deepest fear is losing God's presence, leading him to fervently seek restoration, joy, and divine support to live faithfully. Psalm 51 has served as a profound model for repentance—confessing sin, asking for mercy, and seeking God's renewing Holy Spirit for a clean and unwavering heart. Psalm 51 contradicts the antinomian Protestant doctrine of eternal security, as David fears of losing his salvation, emphasizing the importance of faithful obedience and the need for God's help to sustain his (and our) walk toward God's Kingdom. Receiving God's Spirit is only the beginning; using it, as difficult as the process may seem, is our assignment for the rest of our lives.
transcript:
Many of you know who Mike Rowe is. He was the affable host of the long-running and popular show "Dirty Jobs," which ran from 2005 to 2012. And he is still around. He has quite a popular following. He does his blogs and interviews and such. But in "Dirty Jobs," in each episode he would take on a dirty job. His producers would contact somebody who had a dirty job to do and he joined the crew or do it himself. And he ended up doing some highly unconventional, disgusting, and often hazardous types of occupations. For instance he did (and I hope have your sick bags next to you) bat guano collecting, roadkill cleanup, sewer inspections, recycling sorting, pig farming, worm dung farming, chimney sweeping, monkey caretaking, bug breeding, leech trapping, and maggot farming, just to name a few. Of course, when he did it, he would suit up in protective gear for all those dirty jobs. They put on coveralls, gloves, masks, hard hats, whatever was necessary for the job for health and safety. But many of his jobs were just simply disgusting, and you and I would not find ourselves or would not want to be anywhere near any of those jobs. He would go places and do things that most of us would never go to or do voluntarily. And all of them were hazardous in one way or another. Either they were dangerous situations where you had to be very careful. Or if some of what he was working in got through any of his protective gear, they could potentially cause sickness or disease. Now, most of his jobs that he ended up doing over the course of those seven years or so were physically filthy jobs, foul smelling (we could not get that through the TV), but occasionally you would get Mike Rowe's reaction to some of these things. And for us, they were revolting, revolting to the human mind. They were just jobs that the ordinary person would just shudder and maybe even shut down because they would not want to do anything that awful, that dirty. I bring this to you because the Bible frequently compares sin to dirt, to filth, to uncleanness that contaminates us. It does not contaminate us necessarily physically, although sin can cause disease and those sorts of things. But you get the idea from the Bible that sin should make us feel dirty. It should make us feel filthy and unclean. Now, unclean is one of those biblical words that very much defines what God means when we think of sin. It is something that defiles. Sin, like Mike Rowe's dirty jobs, should make our skin crawl and disgust us, and we should not want to be anywhere near them or do any of those things. It should make us want to take a shower—our own sin, that is—to wash ourselves or to have ourselves cleansed with a very hard-hitting broad wave of water where it just washes us and cleanse us completely of the spiritual contamination that we brought on ourselves. We should, after a few years, maybe it should not even take that long, have a revulsion to sin, to the thought of doing sinful things, just as we are repelled by contact with mud and excrement and bugs and garbage and sludge and bogs and all those icky things that we think of when we think of being filthy. We should run from it actually, fearing its touch, fearing its contamination, and its short and long term effects upon us, especially spiritually. Let us go to Isaiah 64. This is perhaps the best known scripture, at least in the church of God, on sin equaling filth. It is sin and filth being parallel. Isaiah 64:6 [you probably have at least part of this verse memorized] But we are all like an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are like filthy rags; we all fade as a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away. Of course, it is the first half of this verse that we key in on. And like I said, it is the best known verse, I think, about sin and filth being comparable. So it compares sin to two different abhorrent things. Probably when it says "like an unclean thing," that the first thing that the writer (here it is Isaiah) was thinking about was leprosy. Remember, lepers in that time were supposed to go about saying "unclean, unclean" to let the people know that they should not come near and contract the disease. The other thing that it compares to is menstrual rags. That is what filthy rags mean. They they have softened it a bit, but this is exactly what is meant here. And both are defined as unclean elsewhere in Scripture. Both are, to the human mind, disgusting contagions that upon contact may indeed cause illness or even death. I heard years ago that there was, and I do not know if this is true, maybe I am passing on medical rumor, but they said that a lot of the venereal diseases, the sexual diseases started with men and women having intercourse during her menstrual cycle. I do not know, like I said, how true that is. Those things go back millennia and they have just infected the whole world. But they definitely cause very bad problems to people over time and of course, people have died from those things quite often. Now, the best action that a person could take when coming across those things is just to avoid them altogether. Avoid all contact, and if we do come into contact with them though, God says we must be cleansed. We must be purified. Of course, He wants us much more to be purified spiritually than physically, but it is an instruction, a command that we should do on both levels. Let us go to I John 1. We are moving into the idea of being cleansed and the apostle here gives us a very good summary of the process. So we will start in verse 5 and we will go all the way into chapter 2, verse 2. I John 1:5 This is the message which we have heard from Him and declare to you, that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all. He sets up that God is perfectly good, holy, righteous. He is full of light. There is nothing defiling in Him at all. I John 1:6 If we say that we have fellowship with Him, and walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. He is saying here, talking to God's people, they should have fellowship with Him, that is what we are trying to do. We are supposed to be in constant communion with God. But if we walk in darkness actually, if we are defiling ourselves through sin, we are lying to ourselves about our relationship with God. And we are not practicing the truth. When we are walking in darkness, when we are constantly being defiled by sin, we are not walking with God. Now he gets positive though in verse 7, I John 1:7 But if we walk in the light as He is in the light [trying to imitate Him in every way], we have fellowship with one another [we are walking together toward the Kingdom of God], and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin. So when we are going along with God, when we are walking His way, the righteousness of Christ, the blood of Christ, is covering us. I John 1:8 If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. Now, this brings in a bit of reality. Yes, we do sin. We sin actually quite a lot. We are human beings who are not perfect by any means, and we miss the mark often. We are not hitting the target. The target is God's perfect life, the life of Jesus Christ from which He committed no sin. But it seems like from the first sight in the morning when we wake up, we are (I do not know, it just feels this way) not coming up to snuff. We are not hitting the standard. And I think people can get a little bit depressed by thinking about that. But if we are trying, if we are moving forward with God, if we are constantly seeking His help and seeking His forgiveness, then verse 7 comes back into the picture. "And the blood of Christ. . . cleanses us from all sin." And that is a wonderful thing that we can go before God and ask for His forgiveness at any time. His door is always open and He is always willing to forgive our sins. I John 1:9 If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. He does not want us to stay contaminated. He does not want us to wallow in sin at all. He is there just waiting for us to seek the forgiveness that He is, like it says, "faithful and just" to give. I John 1:10 If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His word is not in us. Well, that is kind of what verse 8 has told us. I John 2:1 My little children, these things I write to you, that you may not sin. He is sending this to us through Scripture so that we can avoid sin, that we do not sin, that we do not practice sin, that we avoid the contamination as much as possible. I John 2:1-2 And if anyone sins [because he knows we are all human], we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. And He Himself is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the whole world [ultimately]. So we can lean on the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. We can go before God and ask for His forgiveness at any time, and He is, like I said, just waiting to give it to us because He wants us to be holy. He wants us to continue to be holy and righteous. He wants us to walk forward in the same spiritual perfection as He and His Son do. Because, as we will see later in the sermon here, that is all for the good. That state is the best state we could be in as we walk toward the Kingdom with Him. If we are walking in sin, we are being dragged down. But if we are in constant communication with the Father and using the example of Christ and the power that He gives us, we have all sorts of advantages. And we will see in the life of David that he wanted those advantages and he was kicking himself that he had put himself in such a position where he had been spiritually shackled for months or years. And he realized with what Nathan had told him that he needed to change that situation as quickly as possible. So, by God's grace we are forgiven our filthy acts and our aberrant way of life and they are borne away, which the Day of Atonement shows this in great detail in the second goat on which the sins are placed. And the sin-bearer goes out into the wilderness and out of sight. So when this happens, when Christ, whose blood cleanses us from all sin, and Christ, who is the bearer of sin, takes them away as far as the east is from the west, then we are at peace with the Father and with the Son. And when we throw in the idea of the New Covenant here, we have what we are going to be looking at or what we are going to be celebrating in the Passover. Because the Passover symbols are a meal. They are more like a peace offering where we are together with our God and our High Priest, and we are peacefully sitting down to a meal together. We are having fellowship with Him, communion. That is why it is the Eucharist, as Catholics say. That is why taking the bread and the wine is called communion. Because they understand that that is what it really means. It pictures that oneness that we have through the New Covenant, through the blood of Christ, through His body that we are part of. Let us go to James now. James 1, and we will pick up verses 21 through 27. Now think of this in terms of the Passover and Unleavened Bread, particularly the latter. James writes here, James 1:21-27 Therefore lay aside all filthiness and overflow of wickedness, and receive with meekness the implanted word [the logos], which is able to save your souls. But be doers of the word [logos], and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word [logos] and not a doer, he is like a man observing his natural face in a mirror; for he observes himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was. But he who looks into the perfect law of liberty and continues in it, and is not a forgetful hearer but a doer of the work, this one will be blessed in what he does. If anyone among you thinks he is religious, and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his own heart, this one's religion is useless. Pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their trouble, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world. Now, without naming it, the apostle James provides the meaning for the Feast of Unleavened Bread here. He does not go into the normal symbols of Unleavened Bread. But what he talks about is being delivered by God to live a clean life, to live a certain way of life that is going to please God. We could say, throwing the symbols of the Feast of Unleavened Bread in here, that we have been delivered by God to live an unleavened life before God in imitation of the life of Christ. And we learned this through eating the flesh of the Son of God, as He put it in John 6. You know, He talks about eating His flesh and drinking His blood. That is why I emphasized the "logos" there. Because Jesus Christ is the implanted Word. Did He not say that He would come and live in us? I mean, that is implantation if you ask me, but there is also the implantation of the revealed Word, the Bible, the instructions of God. And in both ways, by having Jesus Christ in us and by having the revealed Word of God guiding us, we have the tools with the Holy Spirit to live the life of Christ and to have the mind of Christ. So we have been cleansed through the blood of Christ and now with that cleansing, we have to move forward toward the Kingdom. We have to start walking. We have to be a doer, as James put it. We cannot just sit on the revelation and think that it is going to change us. That is not how it works. We cannot just accept the Holy Spirit and then sit on the couch spiritually and do nothing. That is not how it works. James tells us here, we have got to do. We have got to act. We have got to live the unleavened life. Like I said, we have to move forward toward the Promised Land, that is, the Kingdom of God, always growing in righteousness. Never lay down the oars, always surge forward. And we do this through gaining knowledge and understanding and wisdom through the Word of God. There is always more that we can understand. We are never going to exhaust the Word of God. I just kind of get down, get depressed when people say that they have heard every sermon. There is nothing that they could be taught. And that is a sign to me that they have stopped. That they are resting on the oars, that they are not growing anymore. And you would be surprised how many people I have heard say that. "Oh, I've been around for 40, 50, 60 years. There's nothing anybody can teach me." But I think Jesus Christ would say, "Okay, what about this?" And lay a big hand across their face. "Hey, wake up! Get going. You're stalling. Actually, you're moving backward." So never think that you have exhausted the Word of God and what He could teach you. There is always more. Now, I do want to mention here before we leave James that he says that our religion, our work, the Christian life is two-pronged. The first is in terms of, we think of them as good works, helping others in their need. He talks about the orphans and the widows. Those are just examples of helping others. It could be many other things. Those are just a good way of using shorthand for what we need to do, helping others. The second one is living righteously even in a world of sin. He says, "to keep oneself unspotted from the world." So, there are two ways that we go about living or worshipping in this life. The first is being full of agape love, helping others in their need, and then the second is more inward, that we do our best to avoid the contamination of this world's sins. Because we have come out of this world, we are still too close to this world, we have to live in this world, work in this world, communicate with people in this world. We cannot help it. We cannot go to the top of a mountain or do like the monks or anything like that. We have to live in this world so our job is to keep us unspotted from the world, even while living in it. Being able to say no. Being a witness for God by doing what is right, even under the pressures of this world to make us do wrong. I bring this up because David's prayer of repentance follows a similar two-pronged approach, this approach of helping others in their need and living righteously in a world of sin. Now, the first half of Psalm 51 is about the second part: cleansing him from sin and keeping him from sin. And the second part of Psalm 51 is about staying clean and helping others. So today we are going to continue in our study of Psalm 51, starting in verse 5. And I hope to cover the next third of the chapter in the now very short time that I have. So this means that this series will have four parts. I expect I will give the Part Four on the Last Day of Unleavened Bread. Let us go back to Psalm 51 and pick up where we left off there in verse 5. Psalm 51:5-6 [David says] Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin my mother conceived me. Behold, You desire truth in the inward parts, and in the hidden part You will make me to know wisdom. Now, one commentator that I checked said that he felt that verse 5 may be the most misinterpreted verse in the Psalms. I do not know if that is true, but in his estimation it was. Many Catholics and Protestants point to verse 5 as proof of the doctrine of original sin. And that they usually couple with Romans 5:12 through the end of the chapter about Adam versus Christ, and Adam brought sin and Christ brought life, but that is not here. The doctrine of original sin basically states that our depraved nature is inborn in humans due to Adam's sin in Eden. In a way, they are saying that it is part of our DNA. It is just a permanent part of human nature and it just gets passed on from each person to their children and then the grandchildren and it is all throughout the world. But in context, that is, in the context of verses 3 and 4 where he is saying that he acknowledges his transgression and understands that he has only sinned before God, David is expressing just how pervasive sin is in him. This is personal to him. He is not talking about the rest of the world. He is talking about his personal sin, his life, the things that have happened to him from the time of his conception. He says, "I've been surrounded by sin all my life. My mother was a sinner. And, hey, I sinned just as soon as possible." All human beings are prone to sin. It is part of our fleshly nature. We are not necessarily neutral when we come out into this world because we have flesh. Our flesh is inherently selfish because it has these drives for self-preservation and those sorts of things. So we are going to get for ourselves. Rather, we will get for ourselves before we give to others. We are always going to take care of number one and so we have that slight bent toward ourselves. And selfishness is not the way of God. He is a giver. He looks on other people first. And so we have this natural bent towards sin, but it is not inborn. And I guess personality plays a little bit of a part in all this, but deep down, basically everybody is selfish. So, human beings are prone to sin, and David was no different. This is what he is actually saying here. His sin goes back to the roots of his existence. Not that it is in his DNA, but just personally and socially he can say that he has always been surrounded by sin. It is the human condition, as I said. What he is describing here is what we can just basically say is man's way. Man's way is a way of sin. It is the way of humanity. Now, verse 6 describes the opposite. It is God's way. "Behold, You desire truth in the inward parts, and in the hidden part You will make me to know wisdom." So what is he saying here? He desires truth in the inner man and so he asks God to teach his heart wisdom. Now, He uses the word "truth" here. We encountered this word last time in Exodus 34:6. It is emet there and here it is truth. But it can also mean faithfulness, trustworthiness, constancy, and truth in the sense of being reliable. You can count on the truth. It is not going to lead you astray. So the truth is something that we need so we know the right way to go and we can count on it. The instruction, the truth is sure. It is not going to bring us out in a different place. If we do end up going in a different place than where truth points, it is our fault because the truth is true, it is reliable. So he is asking God to give him the reliable instruction that he needs to get where God wants him to go. He is asking God for reliable instruction in the right way to live, which he knows comes from God's trustworthy Word. That comes by revelation. All this book that we have in front of us comes by revelation. It was revealed bit by bit over a period of a couple thousand years, to various men who wrote it down, and this has come down to us, it has been transmitted, but it has been kept pure in its revelation. And then along with the revelation is the application. The application is made possible by God's Spirit. This is why people without God's Spirit have a very difficult time applying God's Word. They can read it and they can have great thoughts about it. But how many commentators do you know that were God's people? They do not seem to apply it. They may have wonderful thoughts on particular areas of Scripture and write things that just open your mind to God's way of life. Even about things like the Sabbath. But they do not keep it. They do not keep the holy days. They do not match revelation with application and so they miss a lot of things too because they do not have the Spirit of God. They just have a very deep intellect. And their thinking processes on things are true and right. But in the same book that they say something that just blows your mind for how it makes you understand God's Word more, they give you total lies and things that will definitely take you off the Way. So we have to be careful about that when we read commentaries and other things like that because just like everything in this world, it is a mix of truth and error, and that is the difference. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil that Adam and Eve chose gives us a mixed bag. But the Tree of Life, which is instruction in the way of God that leads to life—eternal life—has all truth. It is totally reliable. And in combination with God's Spirit, it will work to accompany us to the Kingdom of God. So we have got to have the mindset, then, as we get God's Spirit, receive God's Spirit, that we are going to rely on the Tree of Life and not the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. So, David concludes that the only way he can turn from his horrid condition of sinfulness to a condition of righteousness or a condition of pleasing God, is for God to change his heart. That is the only way it will happen. He needs to have God change that hidden inward place where the true person resides. And this is repeated (we will get to it hopefully today) in verse 10. So he has to have God's working with him to change him, to change his heart, to change his innermost being. And then it is his job to apply the instruction. This is where we begin. He has reached this point in verses 5 and 6 where he confesses that he has been surrounded by sin and it has made a big impact on his life. He has terrible bad habits. It has just been his way of life, and he is really realizing in verse 6 that God wants him to get out of that way of life and go God's way. And he is only going to do this if he takes God's instruction after being forgiven and runs with it. Let it change his heart fully. Not just forgiveness, but a complete transformation. Now, verse 7. We will read all the way through verse 12 because this is basically a section. Psalm 51:7-12 Purge me [he says, after coming to this conclusion] with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. Make me to hear joy and gladness, that the bones which You have broken may rejoice. Hide Your face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Do not cast me away from Your presence, and do not take Your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of Your salvation, and uphold me with Your generous Spirit. These hang together, these six verses, 7 through 12, in the structure of Psalm 51. It is a second plea for mercy in the first coupled verses here. And then the second part, let us just call it, David's prayer for restoration. So you have these two things. He is asking for cleanliness here. He is asking to be cleaned up and he is asking for restoration. So David prays for God's forgiveness in verses 7 and 9. He asked for in verse 8, a renewal of joy. And then he asked for full restoration to God's favor with the focus on God working in him through His Spirit. That is verses 10 through 12. Now, let us take each verse as it comes. Verse 7 is another standard parallel couplet, where the first and second halves mirror each other. "Purge me with hyssop" and "wash me" are equated, and "clean" and "whiter than snow" are also equated. Isaiah uses a similar metaphor in Isaiah 1. Let us just read that quickly. Isaiah 1:16-18 [This is God speaking. He says] "Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean; put away the evil of your doings from before My eyes. Cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, reprove the oppressor, defend the fatherless, plead for the widow. [Sounds like James.] Come now, and let us reason together," says the Lord, "though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall be as wool." Wool is normally white when it is sheared off the sheep and cleaned. I just wanted to mention here that on Friday the Berean had a bit snippet of an article that focused on this. I would encourage you to read that. I will not go into it a great deal here, but that was on April 4th. You can go into the Berean archives and look that up if you did not read it. Now what David does here back in Psalm 51:7, is that he is using the language of ritual washing. Remember, this is the Old Testament Tabernacle and later the Temple would be there for people to make themselves clean by doing certain things so that they would become ritually clean. David compares himself here to someone unclean. He is a leper or he is one defiled by something unclean, like a corpse. If you want to go look at that one, that is in Numbers 19:18. That a person who touched a corpse would be unclean. And what he is doing here is he is asking these things of God because he sees God as his priest. He is the one that he would confess his uncleanness to. And He is the one, then, that would cleanse him from his defilement. If you would look in Leviticus 14:4-7, you will see there that lepers had to present themselves before the priest for purification. In Luke 5:12-14, this is what Jesus told the leper that he healed to do. In that ceremony of purification, the priest, satisfied that the leper had met all the requirements for purification, would take a bunch of hyssop (and hyssop is an aromatic plant similar to marjoram or perhaps thyme), and he would dip that in water and sprinkle that water on the person as an act, a ritual act of cleansing. And then he would declare the formerly unclean person to be clean. Now, David, in this verse, shows his awareness that the ritual was just an outward expression of the spiritual act of God. That is, his cleansing and forgiving spiritually. But he goes right past the physical priest and goes straight to God to remove his guilt and declare him clean. He wants to be made new. Let us go on to verse 8. "Make me to hear joy and gladness, that the bones which You have broken may rejoice." Here, David contrasts the purified state with this sinful state. Sin brings no joy. (Remember Casey when he struck out, no joy in Mudville.) David has said thus, that he has struck out in a bad way and there is no joy in his life. Just brokenness. And this brokenness, he says, is a result of God's displeasure with him, God's displeasure with the sin in him. And it can be seen in the automatic curses and effects that sin activates. We sin and these things come upon us. There is no way to stop it. When we sin, bad things just follow. It cannot produce good things and it is certainly not going to produce any joy. Real joy only comes through living in peace and goodness with God, walking side-by-side with Him. Or we might say, walking in His steps. Doing what is right. And this is the reason why joy is more than an emotion. More than just happiness or a good feeling. You know, our feelings can betray us. We can take what we call joy in evil things. But that is not joy, that is self-deception. Joy is being at one with God and doing the things that produce goodness. Joy is a fruit of God's Spirit at work. Not just that it is in you, but at work. It is at work in a person's godly life. It comes by resting in the Lord, you might say. Something that comes out of Psalm 37:7, which if you follow the course of the thought there in Psalm 37, it ends with the light in verse 11. So he is saying that when we are at peace with God, that is, there is no conflict with God, that we are walking with Him in goodness by His Spirit, that we have a certain stillness. We have quiet in our lives because there is cooperation and trust between us and God, and we have no reason to fear. If we have no fear, if we have no controversy with God, no conflict with God, you know what? We are probably experiencing joy. It is why God's elect will have joy forever in God's presence. Because not only are we in God's presence, but we are walking with Him without conflict. This is why when we get around to the book of Hebrews, it is called God's rest. When you have no conflict with anybody, you are at peace, and you are walking purposely forward in life. It is restful. There is no stress. And when God forgives us and we are back walking with Him in unity, we get a quick taste, small, quick taste of God's rest. Because we are in total communion with God. And that is what he is talking about here in verse 8. He is saying, "Right now, with my sin on me, I just feel horrible. Please forgive me so I can hear joy and gladness again. Because all I feel right now is brokenness, but I want to be able to walk in peace with You toward the Kingdom and that will give me joy." Verse 9, "Hide Your face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities." Actually, this is very similar to verse 1, where it says, "Have mercy upon me, O God, according to Your lovingkindness; according to the multitude of Your mercies, blot out my transgressions." And in one sense, we could say that this verse closes out his plea for forgiveness and confession in the psalm. He goes on to other things from this point. The first line here, "hide Your face from my sins" is a little difficult. Normally, when we see this, God is hiding His face from those who sin. Not just the sins, but from the people who sins. We see this in places where Israel has sinned a great deal and He hides his face from them. He will not hear their prayers. But here he is talking about hiding His face from the sin itself. If you want a verse or reference for that "hiding his face from those who sin," that is Isaiah 59:2. Now here, the image is a little bit different. David asked for God to hide His face from his sins, that is, he asked God not to regard them or mark them anymore. The only way that happens, though, is if the sins are covered or if the sins disappear. So what he is asking for here is for God to forgive his sins and carry them, bear them as far as the east is from the west, to blot them out of His Book where there is a record. And is that not what Jesus Christ did? He erased the record of our transgressions. That is exactly what David is asking Him to do here. He did not take away the law, He took away the sin. He took away the record of the sin. Remember, in verse 4, David had said that he had sinned arrogantly. He had sinned egregiously in God's sight, in God's presence. His sins, he says, were plain to God. But he is asking God here to forgive and forget his sin, to have them borne away, to remove them, as I said, as far as the east is from the west (as we see in Psalm 103:12), so that even God cannot see them anymore. They are covered, they are borne away like they never existed. This idea, then, parallels what he talked about in terms of blotting out his sin, obliterating them or erasing them so that, as I said, they are no longer legible in God's Book. They cannot be recreated and brought back to you later or brought back against you later. They are simply, as we using a computer would say, they are deleted, which we saw when we went through this verse 1 last time. Let us go on to verse 10. One of the most famous verses from this psalm, "Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me." Now, this begins a mini-section we might say, verses 10 through 12, within the larger section of verses, 7 through 12. And this focuses on God's Spirit and His work in creating through it. David's request is for a clean heart, a pure heart. Which is ironic actually when you think about it, when considering that most people think he already had God's heart. But David is telling us in this particular verse that he did not have God's heart. If he did have God's heart, it would have been clean. But he is asking for God to create a clean heart in him. So we learn that God's heart must be created in His children, His elect. That creation process is the spiritual work of God after one of His elect is called. God starts a new project with each one of us, but it is the same project that He starts with all of us, and that is, He continues His creation. Not a physical creation, but a spiritual one that repairs the damage of taking the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil—which we all do throughout our lives—and reorienting us to the Tree of Life, and that journey which will end up as being in the resurrection to spirit being children of God in reality. Now I want to go to Ezekiel 11 and several other places in the book of Ezekiel, where such language is being used about having a new heart. So we will start in Ezekiel 11, verse 17 and we will read to verse 20. Now these scriptures that I am taking you to all have to do with God restoring Israel and changing them, but it works with spiritual Israel as well. We are forerunners to what God is going to do with Israel once Christ returns, but here we get an illustration of what He is going to do to the whole nation once He calls them back. Ezekiel 11:17-20 Therefore say, 'Thus says the Lord God: "I will gather you from the peoples, assemble you from the countries where you have been scattered, and I will give you the land of Israel."' And they will go there, and they will take away all its detestable things and all its abominations from there. Then I will give them one heart, and I will put a new spirit within them, and take the stony heart out of their flesh, and give them a heart of flesh, that they may walk in My statues and keep My judgments and do them; and they shall be My people, and I will be their God." Notice what happens here. They repent; they take away the idols. They do not do those things anymore, and then God gives them a new spirit, and this new spirit begins working on them, changing their heart from a stony human heart to a heart of flesh, one that is malleable, one that is beating in time, if you will, with God's heart. And then after that starts to happen, "they may walk in My statutes and keep My judgments and do them." Same way it works under the New Covenant, right? That we really cannot use the Holy Spirit and walk. . . Let me put it this way. Before we get the Holy Spirit, we cannot walk in His ways. We cannot do His statutes and judgments. But once that happens, once He gives it to us and we start making use of it, then we can. It is hard. Nobody would deny that who has tried it. But it is possible now. Let us go on to the next one. Chapter 18, starting in verse 30. Ezekiel 18:30-31 "Therefore, I will judge you, O house of Israel, every one according to his ways," says the Lord God. "Repent and turn from all your transgressions, so that iniquity will not be your ruin. Cast away from you all the transgressions which you have committed, and get yourselves a new heart and a new spirit. For why should you die, O house of Israel?" This is more of a plea from God for them to repent and start this process. But notice, He says it starts with a repentance and then it is getting a new heart and a new spirit. Those will keep us from dying spiritually, eternally, if we make use of them. Let us move forward to Ezekiel 36, starting in verse 24. Ezekiel 36:24-27 [He says, speaking of the second exodus of Israel] "For I will take you from among the nations, gather you out of all countries, and bring you into your own land. Then I will sprinkle clean water on you [remember what David was talking about], and you shall be clean. I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will keep My judgments and do them." So this is the third time in the book of Ezekiel where He shows the way it works. We have to repent. Actually, I should start earlier than that. God calls them out. God takes them from the place of ruin, from the place of death, from the place of sin, and He brings them into their own land. He causes them to repent, and then He gives them a new heart and a new spirit so that they can keep God's way, so they can walk with Him, so they can ultimately have eternal life. But without this change of heart, there is no way people can truly follow God. It is absolutely necessary. Only with God's Spirit can we be created in Christ's image. Or as Paul puts it in Ephesians 2:10, only through the grace of God can we become His workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works. Now, in I Corinthians 2:10-16, Paul writes about the Spirit of God teaching spiritual things, which he says are the things of God, something the natural man, the carnal man, cannot receive or understand. They are beyond comprehension for just the normal human mind still clogged with sin. The Spirit that God gives us helps us to make moral and spiritual godly judgments because it enables us to have the mind of Christ. That is where Paul ends up there at the end of that chapter, I Corinthians 2:16. There is something we need to understand, this is something that the Protestants get totally wrong. They do not understand this process. They think that if they confess their sins and they come up saying, "Jesus saved me. I've been saved. God's given me His Spirit," they are lying to themselves. But they go from there and do nothing. I may be being a little absolute in that statement, but generally, the teaching that they have been given is that they do not have to do anything. Because God Christ has done it all for them. And so a good majority of Protestants do not change at all. They get saved when they are 12 or whatever when they do their altar call, and then they do nothing. They rely on that one emotional time when they said they accepted Jesus Christ into their heart and do nothing. But what did Paul say at the end of Hebrews 5? Let us go back there. We will begin in verse 12 just to get the context, because the Hebrews had a problem. They had stopped, they were drifting. Remember back in chapter 2, they were drifting away. He says, Hebrews 5:12-14 For though by this time you ought to be teachers [they should not need instruction by now in any great way, they should by this many years be teaching others], you need someone to teach you again the first principles [the basics, the ABCs] of the oracles of God; and you have come to need milk and not solid food. [What had they done? They had stopped. They had stopped doing.] For everyone who partakes only of milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, for he is a babe. [They have remained toddlers, infants in the faith.] But solid food belongs to those who are of full age [meaning mature], that is [notice this], those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil. So yeah, we have been given the Holy Spirit of God. Christ resides in us. Right? But that does us very little good if we do not exercise it, if we do not use it. We remain immature babies in the faith if we are not using God's Spirit to grow, to become teachers, as he says there in Hebrews. To be someone others younger in the faith look to as an example of living the way of God. The mind of Christ is not grown in us unless we use it, unless we practice the logos that has been given to us, unless we are working on keeping ourselves unspotted from the world and helping those others who have need. We cannot be like the Protestants and count on our altar call, if you will, count on accepting Jesus Christ into our hearts. Because that is just the beginning. God wants us to do more. We cannot be passive as Christians. God wants us to be out in it, if you will. Not only practicing it for ourselves, but setting a good example to those who are in the church and to the people of the world as a witness. If we hide it, we are going to end up like the Hebrews, babies, unskilled in the word of righteousness, because we have not tried to do it. Or if we did, we stopped because maybe it was too hard. Maybe we got scared. Maybe we were standing out like a sore thumb. But those are just excuses. Those are just justifications for spiritual laziness. We must exercise the Spirit of God within us and grow. God wants to see maturity. Now, Psalm 51:10. Notice that David asked for God to create a clean heart in him and renew a steadfast, or hesed, spirit in him. That loving, loyal, faithful, covenant, abiding Spirit. Now God gave him His Spirit at David's anointing as king. That was back in I Samuel 16:13. And Jesus even mentions in Matthew 22:43, quoting one of the psalms of David, that he said in the Spirit. So He verifies that David had God's Spirit. But David here, at this very low ebb of his life, asked for God to renew His Spirit because it was dangerously low. It was on E, if you will. It was in the red zone. The Hebrew word behind renew here is hadas (ha-dosh actually). Hadas means to renew or restore or repair or reaffirm. Maybe reaffirm is one of the best ways we could think of what he is asking here. He is asking God to reaffirm that he is His child, to him, to David. He wants a spurt of spiritual energy. He wants his tank filled, if you will, because he had let it run low. So the Spirit had been there, which David acknowledges, but David also acknowledges by saying this that he had been stifling its work. It had not created a clean heart in David. Not for a while. David had neglected the work part. Remember what it says in Philippians 2:12-13? I think we should read it just to help us to remember. Philippians 2:12 [Paul says] Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation in fear and trembling; . . . We have got to work. We have got to be active. We have got to pick up our shovel and start digging, if you will. We cannot just lean on it. Philippians 2:13 . . . for it is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure. We may have the will to do something, but if we actually do not put on our boots and go out to work, it is not going to have the right result. So it is He and us together working for the same goal. We both have work to do. Remember, we are walking side-by-side. It is a combo act. Yes, He is our supervisor telling us what to do and giving us strength to do it. We are the one down in the ditch digging. We are doing that work, He is doing other work, but we are both working toward the same goal, finish the same project. Back to Psalm 51. David had been letting God down. He had called out from work. He had been doing other things. He had not shown up. So, he had done several of what the New Testament says we can do to the Holy Spirit. The New Testament says that we can resist the Holy Spirit, we can grieve the Holy Spirit, we can lie to the Holy Spirit, we can insult the spirit of grace. We could quench it. Put it out! And David's sins had certainly done several of these things. He was ashamed. He was ashamed that he had let God down. And he was asking God, pleading for God to work with his heart, opening himself up to God's spiritual creation in him. I have a note here for II Corinthians 5:17. II Corinthians 5:17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new. He wanted reassurance that he was a new creation and being created by God's Spirit. Psalm 51:11 Do not cast me away from Your presence, and do not take Your Holy Spirit from me. This is how worried he was. This may refer to I Samuel 13:13-14; I Samuel 15:26; and I Samuel 16:14, where God rejected Saul and took His Spirit away from him. And in Saul's case, he sent a distressing spirit in its place. David saw the result firsthand of God taking away His Spirit from Saul. Because David was the one they called on to soothe Saul when he was in one of his moods, and later he got a spear chucked at him when Saul was in one of those moods. He knew the difference between someone who had God's Spirit and someone who did not. And he wanted desperately to have God's Spirit working with him. Now he also understood that having God's Spirit was the same as living in God's presence. Because the Spirit is God living in a person. Remember, Jesus had to tell His disciples there in John 14:15-20 and also verse 23, plainly how this works. I will not go there for lack of time, but He says pretty plainly that God comes to live in us by His Spirit. It makes its home with us, in us. Paul in I Corinthians 3:16 says that we become temples of His Spirit. Just like the Shekinah glory coming down and residing in the Tabernacle or in the Temple. That is what has happened to us without the big show. We have God living in us, not in a temple made of stone. So God living in us has total awareness of us, what we are thinking, what we are doing, what we are saying, what our motivations are. Because He is right here. And every sin that we do, we do in His presence. I think we really need to think more about the fact that God is in us and maybe use that as a spur when we are tempted. "I'm not going to put God through this. I love Him enough to keep sin away." So David had no wish for God to leave him. He knew that if that happened it would be the end of his chance for eternal life. So he pleads for another chance. He pleads for forgiveness. I think David understood what Paul (or whoever the author of Hebrews was) writes in Hebrews 6:4-6. That once you have been enlightened, once you have tasted the heavenly gift, if it is gone, there is no further sacrifice for sin. So he was saying, "God, I still have a little bit. Help me to fill the bucket, as it were, and move forward. I don't want to have a situation in my life where You're not there." Psalm 51:12 Restore to me the joy of Your salvation, and uphold me with Your generous Spirit. Mentioning joy here echoes verse 8. He is asking for the joy that accompanies God's deliverance from sin. The joy that comes from being clean. He knew that his salvation hung by a thread. That he was in great danger of leaving God altogether, at least before Nathan came and told him what kind of man he was. And he beseeches God to restore the joy that he had before, when he was fully aware of God and walking side-by-side with Him. Now, this is full of doctrine here, Psalm 51. These verses contradict the doctrine of eternal security. Because David knew that he could lose his salvation. He could lose it all by repeated sinfulness and rebellion against God. And that pained him, making him beg for forgiveness and restoration and continued work and activity by God through His Spirit. The second half of this verse, "uphold me with Your generous Spirit," is very interesting and satisfying and encouraging. It suggests that David had fallen so hard that he needed help staying on his feet. He could not do it by his own strength. There was no way that he could stand on his own. So he asked God to sustain him. Uphold me with Your generous Spirit. He needed God to help him keep standing. You know, that is what Paul tells us to do. And when he talks about in Ephesians 6 about taking on the whole armor of God, he says, if nothing else, stand. Stand fast, do not give up any ground. And David was saying, "I can't even do that. I'm so weak spiritually that I need Your generous Spirit to help me even do that." Now the ESV uses the word "willing" instead of generous, "uphold me by Your willing Spirit," and I kind of like that one better. What he is saying is that God's Spirit, God through His Spirit is always willing to help, always willing to strengthen, always willing to give us comfort, which includes the forgiveness of sin and the giving of gifts that will help us. Because He wants to give us what we need to endure in faithful obedience to Him and keep us walking forward toward the Kingdom of God—active, not passive.
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