According to Abundant Mercy

Please turn in your Bibles to Psalm 51. Psalm 51. That can be found on page 474, if you're using the Pew Bible. Now, just to give you a heads up on what to anticipate for the preaching over the next few months, I do intend, if you've noticed, there's kind of been a cycle where we've been doing Luke, another chapter in Luke, and then continuing that series on motivations for good works, and then something else in between.

We just did a something else in between, as we did a series on AI. I do intend to go back to good works, and then Luke, et cetera, but have very much wanted to focus on some of the heart of the gospel issues, and so we'll be starting a series here on Psalm 51 just this week, and next week, we will be looking at the first two verses, and I'll bring it up later, probably, in between these series that we're going through, but hopefully that gives you some help as to what you should be anticipating.

We will do Psalm 51, verse two, again, next week, and then go on back to motivations for good works, particularly those things that are related to the duties that we have before God. Okay, Psalm 51 beginning in verse, well, in verse zero.

So if you did not know, in the Hebrew Bible, in the Hebrew Bible, the superscription actually counts as verse one, and all the verse numbers in English Bibles tend to be one off whenever there is a superscription.

Okay, so we will start with the Hebrew verse one, which is the, which is in our Bibles unnumbered. To the choir master, a Psalm, please stand. Yes, thank you. To the choir master, a Psalm of David, when Nathan the prophet went to him after he had gone in to Bathsheba.

Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love, according to your abundant mercy. Blot out my transgressions, wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin, for I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me.

Against you, you only have I sinned, and done what is evil in your sight, so that you may be justified in your words, and blameless in your judgment. Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.

Behold, you delight in truth and the inward being, and you teach me wisdom in the secret heart. Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean. Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. Let me hear joy and gladness.

Let the bones that you have broken rejoice. Hide your face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from your presence, and take not your Holy Spirit from me.

Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and uphold me with a willing spirit. Then I will teach transgressors your ways, and sinners will return to you. Deliver me from blood guiltiness, O God, O God of my salvation, and my tongue will sing aloud of your righteousness.

O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare your praise, for you will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it. You will not be pleased with a burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart, O God.

You will not despise. Do good to Zion in your good pleasure. Build up the walls of Jerusalem. Then you will delight in right sacrifices, in burnt offerings, and whole burnt offerings. Then bulls will be offered on your altar.

Amen. You may be seated. Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for your tender mercies once again. We ask that we would understand those more deeply as we look to your word today in this excellent psalm.

David’s Sin and the Superscription of Psalm 51

We pray that in it we would see the goodness of Jesus Christ, the one through whom we have mercy. In his name we pray, amen. So as I mentioned, the first verse of this psalm is the superscription. Now you will find in your Bible, at different chapter breaks and other things, versions will put in subtitles for the chapter describing them.

Those are not scripture. Those are just things that the editors are adding to help you keep track of where we are in the narrative and to summarize things. But the superscription here, to the choir master, et cetera, is part of holy scripture.

To the choir master, Psalm of David, when Nathan the prophet went to him after he had gone in to Bathsheba. This is a Psalm of David. He is the one writing it, and he is the one publishing it, that all might hear of his repentance from sin and his turning to the Lord.

And why? So that they might understand the mercy of the Lord. What happened? If you have not read the passage or maybe need a refresher, what happened is that David, instead of going off to war at the time when kings went off to war, he should have in the spring been going around and conquering the enemies of the land that God had told him to conquer in the land of Canaan that was given as the promised land.

He instead stayed home, and as he was up on his roof, he saw Bathsheba washing, and he saw that she was beautiful, called her over, he slept with her, and she was the wife of one man, Uriah. Uriah was not just any man.

When I was growing up and I heard this story, it all seemed like a very great sin to me, sleeping with a man's wife, and then later on what he does is he sends Uriah to the front of the battle, up to the wall, and then has the forces be pulled back away from him so that he would be destroyed, and so he essentially murders him.

That all seemed bad enough, but Uriah is actually mentioned elsewhere in scripture. He is one of David's mighty men. David had a number of people who were close friends to him who were exceptionally strong in battle and had made great sacrifices for David.

There's one story about how these mighty men had gone, and when David said, I am thirsty, not expecting anyone to do anything about it, they went in and took water from the enemy's camp just so that David could have some water to drink.

That is how loyal David's mighty men were to him, and he takes one of his closest friends, his most loyal general, essentially, turns on him, sleeps with his wife, tries to deceive him by having him come home to sleep with his wife so he would not find out that the child was actually from David, and then when he refuses to do so, ends up putting him on the front lines of battle to have him killed.

Nathan, the prophet, confronts David. You notice in the superscription, it says when Nathan, the prophet, went to him, Nathan knew of the sin and actively rebuked David for this sin, telling him the story of a man who had one little ewe lamb that was then killed by someone else, and David was very incensed by this, and Nathan told him, you are the man.

David was guilty, and he was guilty of a very great sin, and so David, recognizing his sin, recognizing the depths of his sin and misery, responds this way to the Lord. We are just looking at the first three lines of verse one here.

Mercy According to God’s Steadfast Love

Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love, according to your abundant mercy. He makes the plea. Have mercy on me. He wants God's mercy. David has done wrong. What justice would demand in this case is the death of David, not only the death of David in a physical sense for having murdered, for having slept with a man's wife, but even just a general death of spirit, just a lack of life, of vitality in his very soul, such that he had to have no joy.

He would only have misery, and so what he asked for instead is mercy, that God would remove that penalty, that he would forgive. Forgiveness is a clearing of a debt, this debt that David owes to have all his vitality taken from him, and he asked for God to forgive, for God to be merciful in his state of misery.

And on what basis does David ask? This is the focus for us today. What basis does he ask? According to your steadfast love, according to your abundant mercy. David anticipates mercy from God because God himself is merciful.

This is who God is. In Exodus 34, as God reveals himself to Moses, it says, 34 verse six, the Lord passed before him and proclaimed, the Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.

One of the greatest ways that God had revealed himself to his people, this moment where he tells Moses that he's going to pass before him. And so God in some way gives Moses this visible representation even of his glory shining before him.

And what are the words that attend this revelation of who God is, this thing that he would have us know? The very first thing, the Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.

The thing that God would have Moses know as he reveals himself, the one of the greatest ways that he had ever revealed himself to his people, Israel. And this is what David pleads on the basis of, on the basis of God's very own character, that he is merciful, that he has steadfast love.

This is important for you to understand. This is important for you to know the mercy of God because it's by that mercy that you would know his love. And it's by that love that you would have the vitality that attends all the joy and the happiness that God's creatures should have.

Apart from that, they are not what they meant them to be, that he meant them to be. But with that vitality, with that love, that can only be had for sinful creatures through mercy, we need that mercy in order to have that vitality, in order to, through his love, experience joy.

If you think about our relationship just with ourself and by with ourself, I really mean with God, day to day as you live before the face of God, what is it that makes that a good experience, a happy and blessed experience?

It is the love of God. Perfect love casts out fear. There is no fear with love. Okay, fear and judgment, those things all come without God's love, but with love, it just casts away fear, it casts away all the judgment.

In order that you would have the vitality that you should have. And then as you think about your relationship with other people, so your relationship with God on the one hand and then your relationship with people on the other, what is it that would make those relationships happy and blessed?

Well, is it not once again, the love of God shining forth from the individual? As Jesus told Peter, that those who are forgiven little, love little. If you do not know the mercy of God, your relationships will not have the vitality that they ought to have because you will not have the forgiving spirit, the loving spirit that you ought to have because you will not have the abundant supply of love and mercy that comes from God.

As God is kind to all his creatures while they walk on this earth, there is some kind of love and some kind of mercy that even unbelievers have, but it is not the abundant love and abundant mercy that believers have that are overflowing from them as God has shown the mercy in his son.

To have vitality, either alone in your walk with the Lord or as you interact with others, requires the mercy of God. And you must know the mercy of God in order to experience the mercy of God. First, very simply, we need God's mercy.

The Universality and Gravity of Sin

We are sinners. What is sin? It's really interesting the way that people talk about sin. A lot of times people use it only for those greatest kinds of offenses, but sin, that word sin, is intentionally used to describe even the smallest kinds of offenses.

A sin is a missing of the mark. A sin offering in the Old Testament, there are these different offerings. There's the guilt offering, the sin offering, there's the burnt offering. Why are there all these different offerings and what is the sin offering?

They have to do with different degrees of sins, how high handed they are against the Lord and how unknown they are, how ignorant someone might be in them. The sin offering is kind of like the lowest sort of offering as far as what it refers to.

It refers to even those things that one might be ignorant of. And so do not think of sin as just being the most intentional, malicious things that one might do. It refers to all things and all sins before him, all transgressions of his law deserve death.

That is what they all deserve. When I was a child, I used to think of sin as something that was fairly, what's the word that I'm looking for? Not punctuated, maybe, that it's something that you do occasionally, right?

It's okay, well, last week I sinned this way, this week I may have sinned that way. And I thought to myself, okay, everybody's a sinner, everybody sinned, but maybe if I tried really hard, I could just completely stop sinning altogether.

And every time I would try that, I would notice that not much time would pass that, oh, I've sinned again. Turns out this is just not possible, that while we are walking in this life, we will continue sinning against the Lord because of that indwelling corruption, even those who have been saved by Jesus Christ have that indwelling corruption, though it be more and more mortified, be more and more killed, we continue to sin.

We are, and this is not just a small thing, this is a great thing. When you measure sin, what you measure it by is known in theology as aggravations, aggravations of sin. Now, there are different things that make some sins greater than other sins.

You think about David and his great sin. He is a leader of the people. Uriah is a man who was very close to him, who had been very loyal to him. He is not doing the duty that he's supposed to do. There's all kinds of things that are adding aggravations to the sin.

And if you think about your own sin, all the aggravations involved, the more that you understand it, the more you realize that your sin is not so small. You are one who has been given revelation from God far beyond anything the Old Testament saints enjoyed.

You have been given the New Testament and the clarity that comes with that. And then as long as you have had that, the degree to which you have not taken advantage of that truth, it's a very culpable ignorance, the degree to which you have means that you sin knowingly, there are all kinds of things that indicate that your sin, especially at this era, especially at this time, especially even in this place where you have easy access to so much and God has blessed you with so much, this being a very prosperous area, these are sins that stand highly against those who would sin against him.

There are so many things that make our sins very great, but God gives this passage as a comfort to his people so that we would know that even the greatest kinds of sins can receive the mercy of God. Even the greatest, the most heinous sorts of things can receive the mercy of God.

People will justify their sin in all sorts of different ways. They will just live in denial. They will pretend as though they're really not a bad person. They're a good person. You ask most people what they think of themselves and they'll say, they're a good person.

Most people don't think of themselves as needing any sort of mercy. The person who does not think they need mercy will not find mercy. Jesus said that he did not come to heal those who are well, he came to heal those who are sick.

Only those who recognize that they are sick before him will receive his healing. Only those who recognize their need of forgiveness will receive it. People will do all sorts of things. They'll self-affirm and tell themselves they're a good person.

They will compare themselves to others. And notice who they compare themselves to. It's always a very selective, always a very selective comparison to others who are much badder than them. They can always think of someone who's worse than they are.

And then they'll compare themselves not only to other peers, but they'll compare themselves to other generations. And notice the way that people compare themselves to other generations. They don't look at the virtues of that generation and compare, they often look at the great sins of that generation and compare.

Well, that generation was very ignorant and they were so involved in the slave trade and they did such and such and such. And they totally ignore, they look at all the vices, ignore all the virtues, compare themselves and assuage their consciences.

And that is how they deal with guilt. But it is not a true cure for guilt because it does not take away sin. Or they'll justify their sin, claiming to be victims, calling themselves victims. And they'll say that, well, it's because of these circumstances that this has happened.

It's just because of who God made me to be. And they'll blame it on God. They'll say, it's this woman that you gave me, Lord, like Adam did about Eve. They'll blame all their different circumstances. They will go to a therapist who will tell them that the problem is not them.

The problem is their father or their mother or some kind of circumstance that they are under. And they will keep paying money in order to have these lies told to them in order that they can deal with this problem of guilt.

But you know what? It's just this never ending hole of therapy. And that's the way that people talk about it too. They talk about it as this thing that you're just always supposed to be doing. You're always supposed to be getting the therapy.

Why is that? It's typically because what you're getting in that therapy is something that does not actually solve the problem. What it does is just suppress the problem a little, hide it, mask it over.

And as that masking wears away, you just need a little bit more and a little bit more. And it never actually deals with the problem. And this is pervasive in a way that I think I was not even aware of until very recently.

You look at the situation that's going on with Lindsay Clancy. If you're not aware, there's a mother who strangled her two children. And many people, primarily women, are defending her because, well, she had postpartum depression.

That all her circumstances justify her sin. She's the real victim. This is something where there's just no question about it. She's confessing to the sin itself, but the sin is okay. And thousands, maybe many more, I don't know the order of magnitude, are defending this publicly because their own sense of justification before God hangs in the balance.

If this woman has to be responsible for her own actions despite her circumstances, then I have to be responsible for my own actions despite my circumstances. And we can't have that. And so people are wrapped up in defending sin, defending this woman from a charge of being guilty, though the sin has been confessed to, because they themselves stand guilty before God and must have a way of dealing with that guilt.

But it does not solve the problem at all. And this is why we have so many of the problems that we have in society. Think about the greatest problems that people have that so many people are, quote, unquote, trying to bring awareness to, right?

You think about the different movements. What is it? It's about, I saw one person mention recently that, I forget what it was. It was something saying that, somebody was saying that we need more awareness about mental health.

And someone sarcastically said, boy, you know, that really is something that we aren't talking enough about, mental health. People talk about it all the time. And why are they talking about it all the time?

Because there is a ton of depression, because there is a ton of anxiety. There are so many manifold problems that are perplexing mankind because man does not want to deal with it the way that God would have him deal with it.

Joylessness, anxiety are spiritual problems that need to be taken before the Lord. And so though the body may have some involvement in this, you need to get sleep and things like that. It's the Lord who gives his beloved sleep.

And the more you understand the mercy of God, the more of these problems just go away. If you know that God loves you, what place is there for depression? The God of the universe, the only one who matters.

You care about your own view of yourself. You care about others' view of yourself. What does any of that matter? If the God of the universe who gave all things their meaning loves you and you have his mercy, boy, none of that matters.

You can be joyful. Let me tell you something quickly about the philosophy of meaning. If you've ever heard the term existentialism, that's the idea that existence precedes essence. Okay, that means that things just kind of exist and then they get their meaning.

Okay, so they exist. And then as people ascribe meaning to them, they receive their meaning. Essentialism, which is the Christian view, is the idea that all things have their meaning before they even exist because God is the one who has given them meaning.

Okay, your meaning is found not in yourself, not what anybody thinks, it's found in God. And that meaning has existed even before you have existed. If you understand his purpose, you can experience the goodness of God.

This is true for anxiety. If the God of the universe is caring for you and will make sure that you have your needs met in the exact measure that you should, in a measure that is not what you understand it to be, but in the measure that he understands it to be, well, you can just rest.

There's no reason for anxiety. So many problems that the world faces is just because the overwhelming burden of guilt and different ways of dealing with it, different ways of acting out to try to address it, and they do not take it to the Lord.

But if you take it to the Lord, there is healing. Why? Because if we are a people who need to receive mercy, thanks be to God, because he is a God who desires to give mercy. That is what it says here.

According to your steadfast love, according to your abundant mercy, God is a God of love. This is one of his attributes. Okay, his attributes are those things that are just inherent to who he is. And they are things that are, in a lot of ways, necessary.

Okay, God couldn't really be otherwise than who he is. That is why, if you look at Greek philosophers who have examined the nature of God before, even the first century when the New Testament came around, they came to many of the same conclusions that Christians come to.

Why is that? Because just looking at the way that God has made the world, it is, and thinking about the logic of things, it is necessary that God be a certain way. It is necessary that he transcends space and time.

If he exists in space, if he exists in time, he's just a creature like us. Okay, so he must be eternal. He must be immense, which is meaning without measure. A lot of times people will say omnipresent, right?

He is immense, he is without measure. He's not measured by these dimensions of space. He must be just. Okay, our sense of human justice is coming from somewhere and it's not going to be a principle that's greater than our creator.

So therefore, it must be something that he has. He must be just. He even must be loving. Now, Greek philosophers don't have a way of accounting for that, but they understood it must be true because if people are loving and this is a good thing and God is good, he must be loving.

He must be love. As the Bible says, God is love. It's not just he is loving, but he is love. And they don't have a way of accounting for it because if you think about eternity past, right before there are any creatures made, who is he going to love?

Well, the Christian answer is there's the Trinity. The father loves the son, the son loves the spirit, the son loves the father, the father loves the spirit. All these different directions there is love.

God is actually eternally capable of love because of the Trinity. So they don't have a way of accounting for it, but they understand it must be true. Then you come to mercy. Now, mercy, properly speaking, is not an attribute of God because attributes are things that are true in eternity.

And who is God going to be merciful to apart from creatures who have sinned that he must be merciful to? Mercy is an aspect of God's love. Okay, so understanding that, if you think to yourself, you're some Greek philosopher trying to contemplate the nature of things, you haven't heard the Bible, you don't know about the nature of God, what are you going to answer if it's asked, is God merciful?

Now, maybe you look at the ways that people get away with their sin, et cetera, and you say, well, he must be merciful because of that. But if you just consider the necessity of the matter, God internal, an all-perfect being, what must a perfect being be?

Would you conclude that one who has, one who is loving, one who loves what is good, would have any measure of love in any kind of sense for one who is evil? That's not a conclusion you can just arrive at.

Apart from God demonstrating his mercy, we would have no idea that he is merciful. This is not like his other attributes where you could just think deep thoughts and arrive at them. This is something that was necessary for him to reveal of himself in a way that extends beyond the ways that he reveals his other attributes.

All his other attributes are revealed to us because he has given us reasoning natures that are able to think through these things. He's placed us in a world where we can contemplate the nature and existence of things and where we come from.

But mercy is something that is, it's so unnecessary in a sense, God not owing it to anyone, him being perfectly capable of creating a world where there was no sin or even not creating a world at all and never once showing mercy to anything.

The fact that he is merciful is something that he has revealed to man in a special way. And he has done so because he desires so in order that he might be glorified. Glory is, God's glory is part of what he is, it's another one of his attributes.

Okay, he is glorious. And so in order that we would know that glory, he has made that glory known in mercy. He wants his people to know him in order that he would be more glorified, not that his inherent glory changes, but as we experience him and know him, we glorify him or we're more aware of him being glorified.

And he has that to come about through demonstrating mercy. This is why it is evident on many of the pages of Scripture that the fall even came about because of God's plan. Now God hates all sin, but he ordained that the fall would come to pass.

He created Adam upright, but unstable, capable of sin. He permitted Satan to tempt him and he permitted all the conditions and even created Adam in such a way that there would be a fall. Why? In order that his mercy would be shown.

One kind of conversation that I have with those who would argue for what's known as Arminianism, which involves very, it's known as libertarian free will. We have free will, but if you imagine that free will is just this thing where all the options are equally available and in some kind of way where you could even act contrary to your own nature, where okay, you're a sinner, you could act contrary to sin or you're, or maybe even God is holy, but he could lie.

Bible says he can't lie. All right, not even God really has the kind of free will that many people demand for mankind. They demand that mankind have this range of possible choices that they would deny even to God.

It's really incredible and they command that that be just necessary, just a foundational principle, even though it's nowhere found in Scripture. Okay, people who argue for that, I've asked them often, it seems evident to me that God's whole purpose for glorifying himself is found in Jesus Christ in the glories of forgiveness happening through the cross and that that only would have happened if Adam had sinned.

You wouldn't give man mercy apart from him sinning and they will agree with this. They will say, yes, that is true. And I ask, did God just get lucky that Adam sinned? Did he put Adam in the garden and say, all right, don't sin, but if he did sin, boy, this would really show my glory.

God decreed that all this would come to pass in order that we might know his glory. It is an incredible thing. And he has demonstrated that mercy through sending his son. How do we know God? We know him fully through his mercy.

How do we know his mercy? We know that in Jesus Christ, the one who he gave that we might be saved, that we might have forgiveness of sins, him bearing the wrath that is owed to us and him also suffering in order that we might have a high priest who understands our weaknesses and the temptations that we have gone through in every way, yet he has done so without sin.

God’s Mercy Revealed in Christ

I'd like to read you more from that passage that I read you earlier in Exodus. Exodus 34. I'm gonna start at the beginning of the passage. This is the passage where God revealed himself to Moses and explained that he is merciful and he has steadfast love just like David is appealing to here.

The Lord said to Moses, cut for yourself two tablets of stone like the first and I will write on the tablets the words that were on the first tablets, which you broke. Be ready by the morning and come up in the morning to Mount Sinai and present yourself there to me on the top of the mountain.

No one shall come up with you and let no one be seen throughout all the mountain. Let no flocks or herds graze opposite that mountain. So Moses cut two tablets of stone like the first and he rose early in the morning and went up on Mount Sinai as the Lord had commanded him and he took in his hand two tablets of stone.

The Lord descended in the cloud and stood with him there and proclaimed the name of the Lord. The Lord passed before him and proclaimed the Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin.

But who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers and the children on the children's children to the third and fourth generation. Moses quickly bowed his head toward the earth and worshiped and he said, if now I have found favor in your sight, oh Lord, please let the Lord go in the midst of us for it is a stiff necked people and pardon our iniquity and our sin and take us for your inheritance.

What is the context of this passage about God being merciful and having steadfast love? It's not just love by itself, it's the law. It's God cutting out the law by which every man is condemned. It's the fact that God is one who by no means clears the guilty.

One who is perfectly just ensures that every last sin is punished. And how can it be that these things are true, that every last sin is punished, that God does not clear the guilty and yet he leads with his attribute of love and its aspect of mercy.

How can those go hand in hand? The answer is in Jesus Christ. He is just. Sin is paid for, it is punished, but the one who bears that punishment is Jesus Christ. David appeals to the steadfast love of God.

He appeals to God's mercy and how is that mercy accomplished? In time and space, it is accomplished in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. And this shows God's mercy. He is a merciful God. Not just that he is willing to give mercy and can give mercy, but might sometimes do so begrudgingly.

He desires to give mercy. And the whole reason that he made you a creature with the capacity to sin, to commit terrible crimes against him, to be a wretched person is not out of a hatred of his people.

It is rather out of a love for his people that they might know his mercy. Do you not see that he wants to give his mercy to his people? It's the whole reason he permitted sin to come into the world. And if you understand that, you can go to him eagerly knowing that he's coming to you eagerly.

Micah 7 .18 says, who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity and passing over transgression for the remnant of his inheritance. He does not retain his anger forever, but he delights in steadfast love. It's not just that he's willing to or because he's promised and bound himself, well, now he has to.

It was his whole purpose in ordaining sin would come into the world. It was his whole purpose, you beloved, that he would ordain that your sin come into the world. And if you are one who is not known the mercy of Jesus Christ, then it may be for you that he has ordained that your sin come into the world in order that you would know mercy.

Now it is always every last person's sin, regardless of whether they will come to him or they will not, is so that those on whom he shows mercy will greater know his mercy. That's what it tells us in Romans 9.

So we try to understand God's purposes for why he allows wickedness to continue. But if you recognize that his, the primary way that he is glorified is not people being demonstrations of his justice, but in people being demonstrations of his mercy.

And you really embrace that truth that God is loving, that he is merciful. And that if he has given Christ, how much more will he give all things? You will come eagerly and you will enjoy that mercy and honor him fully with that mercy in a way that you wouldn't otherwise.