Psalm 130 — Out of the Depths

FRANK EDWARDS: Psalm one thirty, one of the pilgrim songs we've been walking through, and today I want you to hear every word of it before either of us says a thing about it.

LINDA BROWN: A song of ascents. Out of the depths I cry to You, O LORD! O Lord, hear my voice; let Your ears be attentive to my plea for mercy. If You, O LORD, kept track of iniquities, then who, O Lord, could stand? But with You there is forgiveness, so that You may be feared. I wait for the LORD; my soul does wait, and in His word I put my hope. My soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen wait for the morning... more than watchmen wait for the morning. O Israel, put your hope in the LORD, for with the LORD is loving devotion, and with Him is redemption in abundance. And He will redeem Israel from all iniquity.

FRANK EDWARDS: "Who could stand." That question, in the middle of what you just read, is asking you to picture a courtroom where God keeps the file open on every person in it... and then to count how many are still on their feet when the reading is done. The psalmist has counted. His answer is nobody. Not the pilgrim next to him, not the priest at the gate, not himself. If God kept the record, the room is empty.

LINDA BROWN: Welcome to Dig Deeper, and that is a heavy place to start a morning. Frank Edwards, Linda Brown, Psalm one thirty today, and I'll be honest, the line I want to hold onto is the one about watchmen waiting for the morning, twice, because it sounds beautiful and I have no idea yet what it means. But you started with the courtroom, so start there. Where is this man when he opens his mouth?

FRANK EDWARDS: Underwater. That's the picture, and it's a more specific one than "in trouble." The Hebrew word behind "depths" is ma'amaqqim, and it means the deep places of the sea, the open water where your feet find nothing and the swell closes over your head. Israel was never comfortable with that water. For them the great deep was the place of chaos, the thing God had to hold back at creation, the place you did not come back from. So when he says "out of the depths," he is not saying he's had a hard week. He is saying he has gone under and he cannot touch bottom. The ancient church heard that immediately. This is one of the seven psalms they came to call penitential, prayers of grief over sin, and in Latin they knew this one simply as the De Profundis, "from the depths," after its first line. They prayed it at deathbeds. They prayed it in mourning. It was the psalm you reached for when you could not pretend the water was shallow anymore. And the thing pulling him under, in this psalm, has a name. What do you think he says it is?

LINDA BROWN: Sin, you're going to tell me, and I want to push on that a little before I let you, because the text doesn't say what he did. There's no confession in here, no "I stole, I lied." A deathbed prayer... [laughs] that's cheerful, by the way. But a person at the bottom could be grieving, could be sick, could be broke. Why is this a guilt psalm and not just a "help me" psalm?

FRANK EDWARDS: Because of what he asks for, and because of what he's afraid of. He doesn't ask for rescue from an enemy or healing from a disease. He asks for mercy, verse two, "my plea for mercy." And then the fear he names in verse three is not that God won't hear him. It's that God will. "If You kept track of iniquities." The verb there is a bookkeeping word. It's what a steward does with accounts, mark it down, keep the tally, carry the balance forward. His nightmare is a God with a ledger. That is what's drowning him. Not the circumstances of his life, the record of it. And he doesn't argue with the ledger. That's what I find so honest here. He does not say "but You'd find some good in me." He asks the question and lets it hang: who could stand? And the answer is silence, because there is no answer. Every proud defense a person ever mounts before God dies right there in that pause. And then, verse four, one word turns the psalm around. "But with You there is forgiveness."

FRANK EDWARDS: And then he does something I think most of us read straight past. He says what forgiveness is for. [short pause] "So that You may be feared." Not "so that you may be relieved." Not "so that you may relax." Forgiven... so that you may be afraid of Him.

LINDA BROWN: That is backwards. I mean it, that's backwards. Fear is what I feel before the verdict comes in. Once the judge says "you're free," the fear is the part that leaves. If I'm forgiven, the one emotion I should not have anymore is being scared of the person who forgave me. So either the word means something different, or the psalmist is confused.

FRANK EDWARDS: Neither, and the way to see it is to ask what kind of God could be taken lightly. A God who simply overlooks sin, who waves it off, who shrugs, that God gets smaller in your eyes every time He does it. You would learn to count on the shrug. You'd stop trembling in about a week. But a God who forgives at cost, who actually deals with the iniquity instead of ignoring it, who looks straight at the record and chooses to blot it, that God grows larger every time you think about it. The forgiveness is the awesome thing. Hosea says it almost the same way: Israel "will come trembling to the LORD and to His goodness." Trembling, at goodness. And the psalmist isn't inventing this. He's quoting. When God passed before Moses on the mountain and spoke His own name, the first thing He said about Himself was "compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in loving devotion, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin." That's Exodus thirty-four. Psalm one thirty is drinking from that well. The man in the water is not hoping God will turn out to be nicer than expected. He's holding God to a name God spoke over Himself.

LINDA BROWN: Forgiveness that costs Him something is the thing that makes Him fearsome, that is what you're saying? Because the cheap kind, the shrug, I could get comfortable with. The kind where He looks at the actual file and pays it down anyway... that one I don't know what to do with.

FRANK EDWARDS: Cheap. That's the right word for what he's ruling out, and it's why the psalm reaches for chesed at the end. "With the LORD is loving devotion." People hear that and think, fine, love, it's a word for love. It isn't quite. Chesed is love that has bound itself. It's the loyalty of someone who swore an oath and shows up because they swore it, whether or not they feel like it that morning, whether or not you deserve it that morning. Covenant love. It's the ground the psalmist is standing on when he says, verse five, "in His word I put my hope." He is not hoping in a mood. He's hoping in a commitment God made out loud.

LINDA BROWN: And that raises the waiting, which is the part I said I wanted. "I wait for the LORD, my soul does wait." A man is drowning, and his big move is to... wait? Waiting sounds like the least useful thing a person under water could possibly do.

FRANK EDWARDS: Waiting sounds passive in English. In Hebrew it's almost the opposite. The word is qavah, and the picture behind it is a cord pulled taut, a rope stretched tight toward something, straining. It's the same root behind Isaiah's line that "those who wait on the LORD will renew their strength." This waiting leans. It has its weight thrown forward. And then the psalmist gives the waiting a face, and this is the image I want to give you properly today, because we'll come back to it for the rest of this series. Jerusalem had no streetlights. When the sun went down the city went genuinely dark, and the night was divided into watches, shifts, three of them in the older Hebrew reckoning, sunset to late evening, the middle watch through the dead of night, and the morning watch running to dawn. Men were posted on the walls through every one of them. And at the temple the Levites had an added duty: to guard the courts and tend the lamps through the whole night, until the priests came for the morning sacrifice. Now put yourself in the middle watch. It's after midnight. The cold has settled into the stone. Your body is screaming for sleep and you are not allowed to give it any. Every shadow at the foot of the wall might be someone.

FRANK EDWARDS: And what is on that man's mind? Not the enemy, exactly. The east. He is watching the horizon for the first grey line, because that line means his shift is over, the gates can open, the fires get relit, the city comes back to life. Morning is not a poetic idea to him. Morning is release. It is the end of straining eyes and aching legs. That is the longing the psalmist ties to his own soul. "More than watchmen wait for the morning."

LINDA BROWN: Which brings up the repeat. He says it, and then he says it again, exactly the same words. Is that just the translation stuttering, or is he doing something?

FRANK EDWARDS: Doing something. Hebrew poetry repeats a line when it wants you to feel a thing rather than just read it. Say it once and it's information. Say it twice and it's a man telling you the truest thing he knows. And there's a second reason, which is simply that this is how waiting works. You do not wait once. You wait, and then you keep waiting, and the second line is the second hour on the wall. But notice what kind of hour it is. The watchman cannot make the sun rise one minute sooner. He has no power over the dawn at all. His whole job is to endure the dark until the light comes on its own... and yet he does not doubt it. Not once, in the entire history of that wall, did the morning fail to come.

LINDA BROWN: The morning is what has never once let a watchman down. And he ties his soul to that. Not to his feelings about the night... to the fact that the sky always, always goes grey.

FRANK EDWARDS: Never let down. And more than never let down, God chose that, the surest thing in creation, and made it the shape of hope. That's what biblical hope looks like all the way through Scripture. Certain, but not immediate. Jeremiah, sitting in the rubble of Jerusalem in Lamentations, says almost this: "because of the loving devotion of the LORD we are not consumed... it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the LORD." Same chesed, same waiting. And for us the morning has a name. Malachi calls Him the Sun of Righteousness, rising with healing in His wings. What the dawn was to the man on the wall, the risen Christ is to the church. He came once, daylight breaking over a very long night, and He has said He is coming again.

LINDA BROWN: That's lovely inside a psalm. Now put it on a morning where the thing I'm waiting for does not come. The result is bad. The reply never arrives. The season doesn't lift, it gets worse. The watchman got his sunrise. What did I get, exactly, from all that leaning forward?

FRANK EDWARDS: You got the thing the psalm actually promised, which is not the thing you were waiting for, and I think we have to be honest that the psalmist is careful about this. Look at what he puts his hope in. Verse five: "in His word." Not in the outcome. The watchman doesn't get to choose the hour the sky turns, only whether he keeps his face to the east. And the psalm's morning is not "your circumstance changes." The morning is verses seven and eight: loving devotion, redemption in abundance, "He will redeem Israel from all iniquity." The thing he was drowning in, remember, was the record. That is what gets answered. And here's how you know he believes it. Listen to the pronouns. Verses one through six, every line is "I." "I cry." "My voice." "My soul waits." One man alone in the dark with God. And then verse seven turns around. "O Israel." He's no longer praying. He's preaching.

LINDA BROWN: The drowning man turns to the crowd. He goes under saying "me, me, me," and comes up saying "all of you." That's a strange thing to do if you're still not sure you've been heard.

FRANK EDWARDS: Strange unless he's certain. And I think that turn is where the theology of the psalm actually lives, because grace that is really received cannot stay private. The soul that has been pulled out of the water does not hoard the news, it turns and shouts to everyone still down there. Spurgeon put it plainly: "God has great things in store for his people, they ought to have large expectations." Redemption in abundance. Not a trickle, not just enough to cover the worst of it. And where does that abundance come from? Paul answers the psalmist's question for the whole human race in Romans three. All have sinned, none could stand, and yet "justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus." At the cross the ledger was not torn up. It was paid. Every line that would have sunk you was pressed onto Him instead. So in Christ the answer to "who could stand?" is... you do. You stand because He knelt.

LINDA BROWN: [short pause] There is a name I cannot shake. And I am keeping the record. I can tell you the balance. Which means I am holding verse three in one hand, begging Him not to count, and in the other hand I have a ledger with someone else's name on it, and I've kept it very carefully.

FRANK EDWARDS: Then you already know the moment this psalm is about, because it will come this week. You'll be at dinner, or halfway through a sentence with someone else, and that name will come up, and you will feel the old case rise in your chest, fully argued, ready to go again. That is the moment. That is the man on the wall deciding which way to face. And the psalm does not give you a technique for it. It gives you a fact. "With You there is forgiveness" was spoken over you first, before you had let go of anything. You are not releasing that person to earn one more drop of mercy. You are spending mercy that has already been spent on you.

LINDA BROWN: The cost is my record of being right. That's the thing I'd actually have to put down. Not the hurt so much as the case.

FRANK EDWARDS: The case is the only thing the psalm ever asks anyone to put down, and it is exactly the thing the psalmist put down first, in verse three, about himself. He stopped arguing his own file. So hold that next to your week. One man went under holding a record, and he came up preaching redemption to a whole nation, because somewhere in the middle watch he found out God was not keeping count. And now, Linda, the psalm hands the last word to Israel, so I'll hand it to you.

LINDA BROWN: Then take his words and not mine. "O Israel, put your hope in the LORD, for with the LORD is loving devotion, and with Him is redemption in abundance." Say that out loud today, to yourself in the car, or to the person you're afraid is still under water. The sky always goes grey. And if you're listening on your own, we're part of the Dig Deeper app, so search for Dig Deeper in your app store and we'll see you on the next step.