By Martin Carey
“Out of the depths I cry to you, O LORD! O Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleas for mercy!” (Ps. 130:1,2).
The day is coming when we will stand before the Judge of the universe. We all have an appointment with death, God’s word tells us, and after that comes judgment (Hebrews 9:27). Some of us were taught to fear God’s judgment, while others have no fear at all. Many people believe that because God is a loving God, He really just wants people to be good. Thus, they reason, the decent folk have nothing to worry about on Judgment Day.
Those of us who were shaped by Adventist theology heard a great deal about our standing before God’s final judgment. Some will wonder, “Do I need to reach sinless perfection before that day?” Others wonder if their relationship with Christ was real and strong enough to keep them faithful enough.
In many Christian churches, Jesus is little more than our Good Buddy in the Sky who brings us the good life. Then there is that warm and fuzzy standard familiar to many with Adventist backgrounds, “safe to save,” and we are left to wonder how much sin God has to ignore to find any of us “safe.”
We may believe we are among the “safe” people, but God sees through our self-deception (Jer. 17:9). Standing in His presence, we would see that our positive self-regard would be evidence of our guilt.
King David had an overpowering sense of God’s justice and of his own unworthiness. In Psalm 130, he is sinking to the bottom once again, and he cries out for God’s mercy. We don’t know of what sin David was guilty right then, but in this psalm he is a drowning man, pleading for help. “Out of the depths” he cries to God.
The original language pictures someone cast into deep water and unable to swim. He feels the weight of his sin pulling him down, down away from the air and sunlight, away from life itself. There is no desperation like slowly drowning with no one to hear you cry. From the depths David cries out to the God who hears the desperate.
Why should a holy God listen to him? David knows that he hasn’t earned the favor of the most glorious being in the universe. He is asking his terrifying Judge, the one who knows all his secret thoughts, to be his savior. Only the Holy One can cleanse all his guilt and heal his soul. He is an awesome God of unimaginable extremes:
“I dwell in the high and holy place, and also with him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly, and to revive the heart of the contrite” (Is. 57:15).
Moses could not look on Him and live, yet the Lord described himself as “forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but [One] who will by no means clear the guilty” (Ex. 34:7).
Who can stand?
So, as David struggles with guilt and fear, he marvels,
“If you, O LORD, should mark iniquities,O Lord, who could stand?” (vs. 3)
Indeed, who can stand before Him to face an accurate and permanent record of all his behaviors and thoughts? Our very best deeds are nothing but filthy rags that defile whatever they touch (Is. 64:6). The best of us should fear to stand alone before God’s judgment bar, not because He is powerful and cruel, but because He is holy and just. By His standards, the whole world stands guilty before Him,
“For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin” (Rom. 3:19,20).
It is great news that we cannot stand on our merits before God. Those who trust in Christ will stand before Him and live only because He doesn’t mark their iniquities. Nor is He marking up the walls of the heavenly Most Holy Place with their sins, held there for evidence in the investigative judgment. That doctrine trivializes the infinite, final sacrifice Jesus made to pay for sin.
God does not forgive partially, waiting for us to give Him a reason to change His mind and un-forgive us. God never reverses His forgiveness of sins. He doesn’t “deal with us according to our sins,” for, “as far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us” (Ps. 103:12). That distance is intended to convey an infinite gap that is impossible to close. When He takes away our sins, they are gone for good, period.
There is no God like Him, One who delights in mercy (Mic. 7:18). He can show mercy because He has “passed over former sins” of those who trusted in Him throughout all the centuries. Because the blood of Jesus satisfied God’s justice, God can be both just, and the justifier of the sinner who has faith in Jesus (Rom. 3:26). Justifying sinners is a righteous thing because the blood of Jesus Christ the Righteous paid for those sins once for all, fully and permanently. “He has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself” (Heb. 9:26).
David could not know how costly it would be for the Son of God to pay for his sins, but he trusted in the vastness of God’s mercy.
“But with you there is forgiveness, that you may be feared” (Ps. 130:4).
He knew first-hand that God can even hear the prayer of an adulterer and murderer who approaches Him in humility and repentance. David had early glimpses of the New Covenant gospel of grace. With God’s forgiveness of sin we see His true glory, so we can come to Him in reverence and true worship.
Jesus didn’t “come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance” (Mk. 2:17). He came so that miserable wretches in gutters and jails who cannot help themselves—adulterers, thieves, murderers—the intolerable people, can receive mercy.
More amazingly, He can even save nice, respectable people who despair of themselves and repent. If the Spirit allows us to know what is really in our hearts, we will cry out from the depths to God for mercy as David did. God always hears prayers from that place. Out of the depths, we can rise into the warm light of grace, knowing the peace of trusting in Him.
“I wait for the LORD, my soul waits,and in his word I hope” (Ps. 130:5).
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