Good morning,
Praise the Lord for the beautiful day, and for this week that promises to be full of some of the "ten best days". Praise the Lord for this my birthday. Thank you for your prayerful thoughts and cards. I am blessed dearly and deeply.
The Psalm for yesterday's reading was Psalm 51. It is one of the few psalms where we are given its historical background. The inscription reads, "A Psalm of David when Nathan the prophet came to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba." That identifies clearly for us the incident out of which this psalm arose. It was the time when David became involved in the double sin of adultery and murder while he was king. He had walked with God for many years. He had gained a reputation as a prophet, a man who understood the deep things of God; and he had established himself as the long time spiritual leader of his people. Then suddenly, toward the end of his reign, he became involved in this terrible sin.
The interesting thing is that David himself records this sin for us. It must have been a painfully humiliating experience for the king. In Psalm 32 David records how he felt during that terrible time when he was trying to cover up his sin. He said, “When I kept things to myself, I felt weak deep inside me. I moaned all day long.” (Psalm 32:3, ). For about a year, he tried to live with a guilty conscience.
In Edgar Allen Poe’s story, “The Telltale Heart” the main character has committed murder and he buries the body of the victim in his basement. However, the murderer is unable to escape the haunting guilt of his deed. He begins to hear the heartbeat of his dead victim. A cold sweat pours over him as that heartbeat goes on and on, relentlessly, getting louder and louder. Eventually, it becomes clear that the pounding which drove the man mad was not in the grave below but in his own chest.
God sent a prophet to David. God loved this king; He loved him too much to let him go on covering up and thus damaging himself and his entire kingdom by this hidden sin. So God sent the prophet Nathan to David. When David was confronted, he acknowledged the terrible sin he had committed. He fell on his face before God and out of that experience of confession comes this beautiful fifty-first Psalm. “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.” (Psalm 51:10).
The concept of forgiveness, of being made right with God, is pictured in the Bible in many different ways, sometimes as a new birth, sometimes as the crossing out of a debt, sometimes as the breaking off of a heavy chain. The picture of forgiveness that David uses here is perhaps the most common picture throughout the word of God -- he describes it as a cleansing. “Create in me a clean heart, O God.” A few verses earlier, he wrote, “Wash me thoroughly from my sin, and cleanse me from my sin.” (Psalm 51:2). Then, in verse 7, “Purge me with hyssop and I shall be clean; Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.” (Psalm 51:7).
Sin is dirty. It’s filthy; it stains our lives. Isaiah put it this way: “But we are all like an unclean thing, and all our righteousness is like filthy rags…” (Isaiah 64:6).
There is the need for us to be cleansed. Thus David says, “Purge me, purify me, wash me.” The words he uses imply a thorough scrubbing. You can almost picture an old-time mother with her child at the sink scrubbing him until his skin literally shines and squeaks, getting behind the ears, getting rid of every bit of dirt.
It’s a common image in the Bible. In Ezekiel 36:25, God says to Judah, “I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols.”
“But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin.” (I John 1:7)
`“The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and a contrite heart -- These, O God, you will not despise.” (Psalm 51:17). David truly was contrite. To be contrite means more than to be aware of our spiritual condition. It means that our inner self is crushed with a sense of its guilt. It does not mean merely feeling bad or remorseful about sin. It means that we have a genuine and deep sorrow for our rebellion against God. You see, our tendency is to rationalize or explain or excuse or defend or justify our sin. A contrite heart does not seek to blame circumstances or other people or God for our own failure.
“For I acknowledge my transgressions, and my sin is always before me. Against You, You only, have I sinned, and done this evil in Your sight.” (Psalm 51:3-4a).
The most beautiful part of this story is that God did cleanse, forgive, restore, and renew David and he’s willing to do the same for any of us. “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new.” (2 Corinthians 5:17)
In Christ,
Brown
Two historian, one Chinese, one Jewish, are comparing notes.
Says the Chinese historian: "You know, we have the world's oldest culture. It goes back 4,000 years!"
"Sorry, we have that beat," the Jewish historian. "Our culture is 5,000 years old!"
The Chinese historian's mouth gapes. "Wow! Where did your people eat for 1,000 years?"
A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.
C. S. Lewis
Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.
C. S. Lewis
Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.
C. S. Lewis
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment