V1-2 Out of the depths I cry to you LORD. Lord hear my voice. Let your ears be attentive to my cry for mercy.
The psalmist cries out of the depths – a vivid metaphor for how he feels. Many of us will have felt like this at some point – maybe you feel like it today: like you are at the bottom of the sea, in over your head, overwhelmed by the weight of the dark waters pressing down on you, oppressed by the sense of suffering, despair and depression. And yet, from these depths, the psalmist cries out to God – he looks up and desperately calls out to God: Lord hear me!
Sometimes it is only when we reach these depths that we really recognise we can’t do it on our own, and it is only then that we truly call out to God from our inner most being. And when we do, how amazing it is to know that God really does hear us – he knows, he sees, and nothing is outside of his control.
V3 If you LORD kept a record of sins, Lord who could stand?
As we recently studied in Romans 3, no one is righteous, not even one, and if God were to judge us according to what we deserve, none of us could stand before him. But the thing is, the Bible says that God does keep a record of everything we do and say, and the dead will be judged according to what they have done (Rev 20v12-13). When it comes to sin, we are well and truly out of our depth. And the more we realise how awful sin is, the more we see how deep the depths really are. But, amazingly, God offers us forgiveness:
V4 But with you there is forgiveness, so that we can, with reverence, serve you
Forgiveness is at the heart of God’s nature. In the OT we see again and again how God has mercy and compassion on his people, forgiving them for their repeated rebellion and rejection of him. Yet we also see that his nature is to be just, so he cannot ignore sin – and it is only at the cross that we see how God can be both perfectly just and righteous when it comes to sin and yet also have mercy and offer us the free gift of forgiveness. The psalmist says that is only through this forgiveness that we can have a restored relationship with God so that we can serve him – it is only as his people, in a right relationship with him, that we can please him, love him and worship him with our lives.
V5 I wait for the LORD, my whole being waits, and in his word I put my hope. I wait for the Lord more than watchman wait for the morning, more than watchman wait for the morning.
This beautiful poetic repetition conveys an intense sense of longing – the psalmist waits for the Lord with his whole being – with his deepest thoughts, with his heart and soul, his whole self. And he doesn’t wait for an event or an action, but for the Lord himself. And while he waits, he puts his hope in God’s word – which is always true, always faithful and never changes. It’s so easy to lose hope when things go wrong or when we feel far from God – it’s so reassuring that the hope we have doesn’t depend on whether we’re feeling it today, on our emotions – if we put our hope in God’s unchanging word then we can pray like the psalmist in sure and certain expectation. Even when it feels like the long, dark night will never end - we can know for sure that it will - just as the night watchman knows the morning will come, we know that Jesus will come to take us home to be with him forever, where there will be no more despair or pain, only unending joy.
V7-8 Israel, put your hope in the LORD, for with the LORD is unfailing love and with him is full redemption. He himself will redeem Israel.
Isn’t this psalm amazing! It was written hundreds of years before Jesus, but so clearly looks forward to his coming and teaches us the gospel – that we are all sinners, unable to stand before God, yet because of his great love, God himself came to earth to take the punishment we deserve and redeem his people. And with him is full redemption.
Martin Luther called psalm 130 a ‘Pauline psalm’ because just as Paul teaches us in Romans, it tells us that we are saved not by anything we have done, but by God’s grace alone because of his great love. It has often been set to music, including by Martin Luther himself, who said ‘let us sing it in derision of the devil’! It also had a powerful effect on the evangelist John Wesley, who in a lesser known part of his famous conversion story, heard it sung in St Paul’s Cathedral and found himself greatly moved. That very evening he attended a reading of Martin Luther’s preface to the book of Romans at a chapel on Aldersgate street, where he understood and believed the gospel for the first time.
As Christians we have even more certainty of God’s salvation that his people in the OT. We have the wonderful privilege to be able to look back and see that in Jesus’ death, just as God promised he would, he himself redeemed us, paying the price that we should have paid. But although we have been saved, we still wait for the consummation of our salvation – and as we wait, let’s pray that the Holy Spirit will teach us to put our hope in God’s word and to long for the Lord Jesus with the whole of our being in confident expectation. Let us put our hope in the Lord, for with him is unfailing love and with him is full redemption – for he himself has redeemed us.
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