Our text this morning is taken from Psalm 130. That's found on page 614 in the Bibles that are before you. And as you are turning there, I just want to say thank you to the consistory for inviting me to fill the pulpit today. It is always a joy and a privilege to be able to bring God's word to this congregation. And of course, I don't want to belabor it, but want to bring you greetings from a few different directions.
Westminster Seminary, California, where I teach, is so blessed by our support, our love that we have from you, your prayers. And as we look to begin a new semester in just a couple of weeks, we would ask you to be mindful in your prayers. Do pray for us. There are students who've moved in in the village, students about to begin, students who are trying to survive summer Greek. And so please pray for them. Pray for us as we begin another cycle of the academic year. Pray that we would be faithful. Pray that amidst all of the work and all the study, we would not lose sight of the privilege it is to spend time understanding, seeking to understand, to interpret, and to apply God's word to God's people. So pray for us in that.
Also want to bring you greetings from Misión Villanueva, where many of you know I serve as associate pastor, and we're so grateful for you. Pastor Juan, who may be here today, he was thinking of trying to come. We are incredibly grateful for your support, your faithful love and prayers for us, and so I would just ask you, and maybe even challenge you, to think about how you could pray for us, perhaps once each week, maybe on a Monday morning, as you come before the Lord in prayer. Remember us at Mision Vila Nueva as we try to establish and to grow this Spanish-speaking church with those who speak Spanish in our community, who so desperately need the gospel, but also desperately need to learn how to grow and to be established in their families and to understand God's word and what that means for the longevity of the ministry here. Because what we would love to see is that church established so that for many years to come, the people in our community who speak Spanish could hear the gospel proclaimed clearly. So please do pray for us at Misión Vida Nueva.
And then lastly, as a family, thank you for your prayers for us. Thank you for your prayers for Kathy over the last weeks and all the love and support. She's doing much better. If you haven't seen her, you can say hi to her after the service. But we are so grateful as a family. What we do in our ministry here would not be possible. It's not an overstatement: without the love and support of this congregation, So thank you very much.
Well, we're looking at Psalm 130 this morning. And Dr. Vanny was surprised to see that we were in the Old Testament and not the New Testament this morning. But I hope I'm allowed to range widely across the Bible. And those of you who were here last Sunday evening know that from Reverend John Bales, we heard another psalm, Psalm 121. And both of these psalms, Psalm 121 and Psalm 130, are part of this section of the psalms known as the Psalms of Ascent. And three times a year for the great festivals in the Old Testament, the people of God, as they were able, would go up to Jerusalem. Go up because they would travel from various directions up to that hill there to worship their Lord. And these psalms were given and collected for them to recite, to pray, to sing as they would go up to Jerusalem. And thus they were called the Psalms of Ascent.
But whereas Psalm 121 from Reverend Bales began with us looking up to the heights, I lift my eyes to the hills, our psalm this morning, Psalm 130, begins in a very different place. It is a cry from the depths. And down through church history, this particular Psalm 130 has a rich there's a rich story of how this psalm has been used by God's church. Very early on, we understand, in church history, not only was Psalm 30 part of that collection in the Psalms of Ascent, but it was also associated with other psalms spread throughout the Psalter that dealt with the topics of repentance and God's grace. And these came to be known as the seven penitential psalms.
In fact, the earliest mention of this grouping of psalms is in the biography of St. Augustine, who lived at the end of the fourth century. And his biographer and friend, Posidius, another bishop, tells us this story: that When Augustine was sick and lay dying at the end of his life, sometimes his friends would come in to visit him, but he made a special request. He asked that these psalms, these penitential psalms, would be copied out, probably on sheets of parchment and hung up on the walls of his room around his bed, so that as he lay there he could be reminded of God's word, that he could read those, that he could pray those. And Posidius tells us that often Augustine would read those and he would weep. Why would he weep? Well, he would weep because he was reminded by them of his own sin, his need for repentance, and of God's overflowing grace to him in Christ.
And that's what I pray you will understand from this Psalm 130 this morning: that it would stir you up to repentance, that you might realize your sin, your need to repent, that you would, with the psalmist, cry out to God for mercy, but that overall you would be reminded, Christian brothers and sisters, of the abundant, the plentiful redemption and grace that is found in Jesus Christ. That's the purpose of this psalm.
And as we trace the psalm further on in church history from Augustine onwards, it was given a kind of, it took a wrong turn along the way. By the time we get into the medieval church, no longer are we simply talking about repentance, but these psalms were associated with the so-called false sacrament of penance. That is, there came a point at which you were supposed to, if you were really sorry for your sins, pray the words of these psalms, psalms like Psalm 6, Psalm 32, 51, Psalm 130, Psalm 143. And if you were sorry enough and you prayed them with enough fervor and emotion and prayed them enough times, maybe God would sense that you were really sorry and forgive you. This was how penance worked: that you had to do this as a work of satisfaction.
But then comes Martin Luther, a familiar figure, and he, in reading these psalms, in lecturing on these psalms at the beginning of his career, writes a commentary on these very psalms of repentance, including Psalm 130. And in 1517, that same year that he would post the 95 theses that we all hear about, he writes and publishes his very first work, which is a commentary on these psalms. And we begin to see how deeply these psalms, psalms like 130, shape and influence Luther in his understanding of his own sin. What do you do with that sin when you understand it? How do you cry out to God for mercy? And who is God to you in Christ when you cry out to him?
And so Luther was determined to take these psalms and work them more properly into the life of the church. And so he did a few things. First of all, he began to bring back that false idea of penance as a work to earn God's forgiveness. And he said, "No, this is about repentance. It's not about something that I do. It's about my posture before God, admitting my sin and crying out to him for mercy, acknowledging that I cannot do anything to save myself from my sins."
And Luther did something else. He began to work so that the Psalms could be translated into the language of the people. Not Latin, but German the German of his day, and not just translated, but set in singable meter. And we have a letter in 1523, just a few years after Luther's commentary, that he writes to one of his friends and he says, "Look, I need some help. Please help me to set these to music. I'm not that good of a musician." I think Luther was better than he let on. But he asks for help. But he says in the letter, "But oh, you don't have to worry about Psalm 130. Why? Because I've already done that one. I've already translated that and put it to music."
And in fact, you may know this: that we have in our Trinity Psalter hymnal Luther's own version of Psalm 130. But it's not a very singable version anymore. So we're not going to sing that particular one. I'm told by, you know, music historians and that sort of thing, that it fit the music of the time and the mood perfectly. But it's not easy to sing anymore. So we will sing in a little while here. We will sing a version of Psalm 130, but it's not Luther's. But Luther kicked that. up. Why? So that the people, singing in their own language, could begin to internalize the truth of this psalm. So that the Holy Spirit could call it to mind and work on them from the inside, as it were, with this Psalm 130.
So, people of God, let's take a look at these verses. It's eight short verses. It naturally divides itself into four parts, little pairs, doublets: verses one and two, three and four, etc. And as we look at these verses of Psalm 130, I want you to sense how it moves us from a place of distress to a place of hope. How it takes you from groaning to an understanding of God's grace His abundant grace poured out for you. His plentiful redemption.
Let's begin with verse 1. Verse 1 begins famously: "Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. O Lord, hear my voice." It's an anguished cry on the lips of the sinner. It's a cry from the deep. With one word in Hebrew, a very efficient language, it takes three words in English: "from the deep." The psalm begins. And immediately with that word, he draws us with himself into a place that we all know. This is not a pleasant place. It's a place of deep waters. It's a place of danger. It's a pressurized place of threat, of feeling trapped.
The psalmist's choice of words here has powerful echoes in other places in the Old Testament that help us understand what he means. It's the same thing he talks about in Psalm 69: the waters, the floodwaters coming up to the neck, sweeping over the head, that feeling of danger, of drowning. It's the same kind of language used to describe Jonah's experience in the belly of the great fish. The same kind of language in Isaiah, chapter 51, verse 10, where the swirling waters of judgment are looming on either side of Israel as they cross through the Red Sea. Floodwaters, Exodus waters. That's the sense with which this psalm begins. From the depths, that's where we cry out to the Lord. From a place of great distance, of suffocation, of feeling the distress.
What kind of distress is the psalmist thinking of? Well, John Calvin customarily thinks very clearly about this, and he says, "We've really got two things to consider. First of all, it's the distress of the miseries of this life," and that's true. How many times in the Christian life do we face circumstances that bring us to our knees? Sorrow, persecution, problems that we just don't know how to solve, that kind of general distress in the Christian life. That's included here as well. When you feel that kind of feeling, you can cry out to the Lord.
But, says Calvin, "There's something even more particular the psalmist has in mind. That's the distress of knowing that you have sinned and knowing that you stand guilty before a holy God that sense that God sees you and you are sensible now. You have a conviction, a deep conviction of your sin, of how you have broken his commands, of how you deserve nothing but his judgment. That's the bullseye of this psalm: that sense of conviction of sin. It's a place of objective moral danger from which the psalmist cries out.
And so I want you to consider this morning in your own life how relevant this psalm is for us. What a wonderful gift this psalm is for us. There are some of you here, perhaps, whom the Lord needs to make more sensible of your sin before him. And as you read his law, as you consider his holiness, he wants, by his word and by his spirit, to open your eyes to make you sensitive to this sinful estate you have before him. But for many of you here this morning, you need to know that when you have that sensibility of sin, this is your recourse. This is the great truth of God's word: that you can cry out to him for mercy, that you don't have to hide your face in shame, that you don't have to wallow in that knowledge of your sinfulness as if you're helpless. You can cry out to him for mercy.
"Oh Lord, hear my voice."
And when you do, what happens? Verse two, "Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleas for mercy."
What do we find when we cry out to the Lord? We don't find him to be like a dad with his phone out, scrolling, checking email, checking the latest scores, while the child is tugging on the sleeve trying to get the dad's attention. That's not how our God is when we cry out to him for mercy. Instead, he's all ears. He's attentive to the cries of his people. Because of the Lord Jesus Christ, our advocate, every time we turn to the Lord, every time we cry out to him, he hears us. He hears us. He gives us his full attention, and he listens to our cry for deliverance and for mercy.
And so we move on to verses three and four, and we see there an awful thought, an awful thought, but it's transformed into a beautiful truth. Do you see it? It's there even in the first words of verse 3.
"If and then verse 4. But, if you, O Lord, verse 3, "should mark iniquities, what a terrible thought. The psalmist says, "If you, Lord, were the kind of God who would constantly watch over, constantly go back to the record of my sins, keep my sins in your book so that you could always open up and turn to them and see all the things that I if that was what you were like, that you always kept my sins before you, oh Lord, who could stand?"
Answer: no one. None of us could stand, could we, if that was what the Lord was like to us.
But, verse 4, that beautiful gospel word of contrast, With you there is forgiveness. With the Lord, because of Jesus Christ, there's forgiveness. And so instead of keeping a ledger of my sins to bring out as evidence in the courtroom against me, because of the blood of Christ, that ledger is wiped clean. All of my sins cleaned and pardoned, and the only thing written there is pardon and forgiveness and plentiful redemption because of Jesus Christ.
"With you, O Lord, there is forgiveness."
Why? Look at the end of verse 4. There's a purpose. Yes, it's wonderful the Lord forgives us, but one of the great purposes of his redemptive work in our lives is "that you may be feared." The Lord wants us to know his forgiveness and his grace and to turn with grateful hearts and to praise him, to reverence him, to worship him.
In the next little section, verses five and six, the cry of lament modulates. If it were Mrs. Lund on the organ, there would be a key change. It goes from a minor key towards a major key. It doesn't resolve entirely yet, but there's a move here from anguish and distress to hope. Why? Because once we know that the Lord pays attention to our cries for mercy, once we know that he is a Lord who forgives sin and does not remember our sins, then we can have hope. And our hope is anchored in the promises of God's word.
Look at verses five and six. It kind of slows us down with repetition. Three times: "I wait for the Lord. My soul waits. My soul waits."
What are we waiting for? How are we waiting? We're waiting because we know that although we have forgiveness of our sins, we still struggle with sin daily, and we won't put off sin until that final day when we stand before the Lord in his very presence. We know that our death is simply an entrance into God's presence and into that life when we will never struggle with sin any longer, but for now we struggle. And so we wait. We wait in this time of tension, but we wait with hope.
What else do we wait for? We wait for the Lord's final redemption and his return, because he has promised to come back for us, and he's promised to complete the good work that he has begun in us. And so our cry of distress can change to a cry, to a posture of patient waiting, of hopeful watching.
Once again, Calvin, I think, captures this really nicely. He says, "What are we supposed to be like when we understand Psalm 130? We're supposed to be those with a quiet mind and with a passionate hope. a quiet mind,
And a passionate hope. And while we don't want to jump too quickly beyond this psalm's horizon, Augustine, as he studied this psalm, said he was reminded of that ultimate hope of resurrection. Because what is the image of waiting here? "Waiting like the watchman for the morning, like the watchman for the morning."
Why that repetition? Well, that repetition drives home to us both the longing, the intensity of a watchman on the city walls, that last watch of the night just before dawn, who can't wait for the sun to come up because it means what? Light and safety. It means he can go home and go to bed and take his rest. And that dawn of the morning, Augustine said, reminds us that we are waiting, waiting like watchmen for the morning, waiting for that day of resurrection when we rise to be with the Lord.
So finally, verses 7 and 8. Verses 7 and 8 repeat that note of hope, don't they? "Oh Israel, hope in the Lord," and they ground it for us in a great truth: "For with the Lord there is steadfast love, and with him is plentiful redemption."
If this were a piece of music, a musical composition, which it may well have been when the psalmist penned it, this is the crescendo. This is the climax, the high point of the psalm right here. This is that point in the song when it soars and after which it comes into land. And what is that crescendo? "For because with the Lord there is steadfast love and plentiful redemption."
More literally, we might say: "abundantly, plentifully with him is redemption." This redemption is a glorious, exodus-like redemption that sets us free. It's a redemption that completely cleanses us from our sin. It's a redemption that fits us to stand in God's presence because of the righteousness of Christ, our Savior. It is a complete redemption because the work of our Savior is complete. That's the high point of this psalm.
Do you see why Augustine loved it so much? Do you see why Luther loved this psalm and wanted us to sing and memorize this psalm? The plentiful, abundant, overflowing redemption of our God. It's, as Jesus says at the beginning of John's gospel, or as John says rather, of Jesus, that in Christ Jesus we find fullness, the fullness of God that we all receive in Christ from grace to grace, overflowing abundantly for God's people.
And so do you see, brothers and sisters, how far we've come in just eight short verses? From a point of being very low in the depths, to being raised up with confidence and hope before the Lord. From a point of groaning and distress, to a point of understanding this precious grace that we have from our Lord Jesus Christ.
Well, we've heard about Luther turning this into a psalm that was singable, but I want to leave you with just one last image of this psalm and how it's been rendered into song. This is by a contemporary composer by the name of Arvo Pert. He's from Estonia. And Arvo Pert put this psalm to music. It's not very singable. We're not going to sing it, not least because it's in Latin and only Dr. Bishop and Dr. Godfrey and Dr. Clark and maybe one or two others of you would be able to sing it. We all want to be able to sing it together. So we won't sing Pert's version, but the way he shapes it is the reason why I want to close and leave you with this, because the shape of the psalm is reflected in the shape of his composition, and it helps us to hold it together in our minds and in our hearts.
In parts composition, it begins in verses one and two with a single deep bass voice. Maybe Mark Memelar standing there and singing in a deep bass voice, and it's just one voice. It's plaintive. It's alone. And you can hear the distress. And then in verses 3 to 4, a second voice joins in harmony. And then in verses 5 and 6, a third voice is woven in, and you begin to get a little change in the tone of the music. And by the time you reach verse 7, right at the exactly correct point in the psalm, it climaxes and then it comes to rest. And what is that climax? "Plentiful redemption. Plentiful redemption."
That, Christian believer, is who your God is to you in Jesus Christ. So cry out to him in your distress, especially when you know your sin. Turn to him with cries for mercy, and you will find him to be full of plentiful redemption because of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Let's pray to the Lord together.
O Lord our God, we thank you for your word. We humble ourselves before you and we ask that you would impress it upon our hearts. We praise you that you are indeed a God who is full of steadfast love and mercy. And we pray that you would grant us a faith that cries out to you, a faith that clings to you, a faith that hopes in you, and that waits patiently for your plentiful redemption and for the dawn of that resurrection day. And we pray this in Christ's name. Amen.