Psalm 130
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.
Good morning, good morning brothers and sisters, my name is Chris Gaiman, I'm one of the elders here, I completely forgot what I was going to say. Last week I was here and started a series in the book of Psalms, started in Psalm 103, a psalm of praise, and we looked at God's goodness, his forgiveness and kindness to us and our praise, our response of praise to him in that. This week, we're going to be looking at a psalm of repentance, a psalm that brings our sins to God.
So last week, we were focusing heavily on the character and nature of God in that sermon. And in this way, you know, the psalms are just so helpful to us. They give us language, and they instruct us how to praise the Lord. But the psalms are also helpful to us in other ways. And what I found to be so helpful to me in my life in the Psalms is giving me the language to deal with my sin, giving me the language of repentance. If you've ever read some of the Puritans, some of you have, maybe think John Owen and the mortification of sin.
You know that this guy will just like dissect you down. He'll just dissect all the motivations of your heart. I remember the first time I was reading Owen and he said something and I thought to myself, yeah, but what about this, this, and this? And his next line was like, you are now thinking, yeah, but what about this, this, and this? And I was like, touche, good job there. He dissected me. He showed me my motivations. And the Psalms do that with us as well. They get down into our hearts and our minds and our souls.
And they're honest with us about our need for God, especially in the realm of repentance. And that's what we're going to be looking at this morning from a short Psalm, Psalm 130 today. Let's read that Psalm and dive in. Psalm 130, a psalm, a song of a sense. Father, may the words of my mouth and the meditation of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, you who are our rock and our redeemer.
The main idea that I want to look at with you from this psalm this morning is this. Every human who has ever lived, and that includes every human in this room, every human who has ever lived is utterly hopeless in their sin unless the Lord redeems. Every human who has ever lived is utterly hopeless in their sin unless the Lord redeems. So repent, trust his word, and wait. So repent, trust his word, and wait.
I'm going to break this down into four points. If you look at the psalm, you can see that in your ESV Bibles, for example, you would see that they're broken down in two verse chunks. So verses 1 and 2, 3 and 4, 5 and 6, and 7 and 8. And that's perfectly how they're divided even in the Hebrew. And so we're going to take them in those four sections. We'll have four points to this sermon. The first point will be a cry for help. The second point will be a true admission. The third point is wait for the Lord. And the fourth point is assure redemption.
A cry for help, a true admission, wait for the Lord, assure redemption. What am I going for this morning? What am I trying to accomplish this morning? Well, if last week was praise to God because of his forgiveness, what I want to look at today is just honestly bringing our sins to God and trusting him with them. Now, why do I say that? Well, if you look at that pre-script there, you saw it there, a song of ascents. This is a song of ascents. Now, what is a song of ascents? Well, historically, the Jews, as they would travel up to Jerusalem for, say, the feasts or to perform the sacrifices, they would sing songs of ascents going up to Jerusalem. Jerusalem's on a mountain, and so you ascend the mountain, you go up the mountain. You can see, if you just flip the page back that the songs of ascent start in 120, and they go all the way to Psalm 134. So there's a bunch of them. They're all very short, but they deal with all sorts of different themes. They deal with the themes of, say, deliverance or yearning for Jerusalem, protection from enemies, cries for
help, unity, all sorts of themes that are going on that they would be thinking about as they head up to Jerusalem. It's almost like when my family goes to Pennsylvania, the rest of my family's in Pennsylvania. So when we hit West Virginia, we put on country roads. West Virginia, we sing the song with the kids. On the way back, when we're eight miles from Louisville, we put on that great bluegrass song, Eight More Miles to Louisville. If you don't know it, you need to look it up. It's fantastic. There's even a rock song called Back to Indiana, because we live in Indiana, so I put that on. It's reminding us of who we are and what we're going back to, and that's what the Song of Ascents are doing. You would sing these songs as you would be going up to Jerusalem. So I want you to imagine for a second that you're an Israelite and you're heading up to Jerusalem for the feasts, for the sacrifices. There's a lot of good things that would be on your mind. Even these songs would be on your mind. But one thing that will necessarily be on your mind is your own sin.
In fact, you are, after all, needing to go to offer sacrifices for it. You're about to experience, say, the Day of Atonement where an animal is slaughtered for the sins of your whole nation. So you're going to be dwelling on your sin. I just recently finished reading the book of Leviticus in my Bible reading for the year. And I'm reminded on top of that the book of Leviticus is long and tedious. But I'm reminded on top of that that the book of Leviticus is just bloody. It's just really bloody. Like if you were to walk up the steps of the Temple Mount and look across the Temple Mount, you would just see blood everywhere.
and it's all to remind the people, this is what sin deserves. We deserve death for sin. I deserve death for my sin. And so you'd be thinking about this on your way up to Jerusalem, and in God's providence and kindness, he gives you a song. He gives you a song to deal with that, to think through that. A song that meets you where your sin has taken you, in the realm of despair, the realm of the depths, and that's exactly where we start. Point number one, a cry for help.
Out of the depths, I cry to you. Our psalm's author states, starts this brief penitential prayer by an admission of where he currently dwells. He dwells in what he calls the depths. Now, we need to rightly understand what the depths are and how they function really throughout all of scripture to truly appreciate just how sweet this psalm is to us and to our pilgrim who's heading up to Jerusalem. So what are the depths? What is this getting at? Well, the first thing to know about the depths is just to understand the imagery. And to understand that, you really go all the way back to the first page of the Bible, in the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth. He created the earth, and we're told that the earth is just basically a ball covered in a massive sea, so it's just all water, and it's pitch black dark. That's what the world is before God starts speaking into it to transform it and change it. There really would be nothing more terrifying than if you woke up tomorrow morning and you were in water. So you'd be like, what is
going on? And then you open your eyes and it's pitch black. You wouldn't know which way to swim. You wouldn't know where to go. You weren't made to dwell in the water. You weren't made to dwell in darkness. You were made for land. You were made for light. And so the word of God pierces into this early creation and brings the land up and brings light to the world. Well, that idea of the sea, that idea of the world being covered by the sea, comes to be known as the depths throughout scripture. The depths. And the depths are chaotic. Like monsters live down there. Leviathan himself lives in the depths. You don't know what's down there. You can only see the top.
If you've ever, you know, swam in the ocean and gotten an eerie feeling that something might be watching you, you know this. I was at the beach a couple months ago with my family. I swam out deep into the water. I couldn't see the bottom, and I just started feeling like, is something watching me? Are those, like, sharks from Finding Nemo? They're just like, fish are friends, not food. But he's kind of chubby. He looks good. You know, I'm like, I don't want to be here. And so I just, I hightailed it and started kicking back to the shore. You don't know what's down there. There's things down the depths, but even worse, things that go down to the depths never seem to return. If you've ever been on a boat and dropped something, it doesn't matter what it is, something incredibly valuable, maybe like a wedding ring, cell phone, or something, you just see it flicker, and it's now in the depths. There's nothing you can do to get it out of the depths. That's what the sea is. That's what the depths are in the Bible.
It swallows whole persons, boats, even nations. Pharaoh's army was swallowed by the depths, according to Exodus 15. The world was covered by a flood. The deep opened, and a flood covered the world in judgment. Even people in the Bible descend to the depths. Jonah descended to the depths in chapter 2 of the book of Jonah. And so this imagery shows us throughout the Bible, and especially the Psalms, this despair. So listen, for example, to David in Psalm 69.
He says, save me, O God, for the waters have come up to my neck. I sink in the miry depths where there is no foothold. I have come into the deep waters, the floods engulf me. I am worn out calling for help. My throat is parched, my eyes fail, looking for my God. The imagery of the depths in the scripture leads us to the conclusion that the depths is the realm of utter hopelessness, ultimately death. itself. Secondly, on the depths, a distinction should probably be made in our particular passage between the depths and maybe what we would call depression in our world today. Now, there's some overlap that can be shown, and the way out of the depths is the same as the way out of depression that's crying out, but these are not exactly the same thing in this psalm. The difference between the two is that most depression that you have in your life and that I have in my life is there not because we're believing the truth, but because we're believing lies. Our circumstances
are hard or something, and so we start to believe lies about ourselves and others and the circumstances themselves. God isn't in control. My circumstances are too difficult. Nobody loves or cares about me. My temptations are unique and unconquerable. Now, obviously, those things are hard, and the church has compassion for those who struggle in that particular way, and you should talk to others if you're depressed in those ways. But at the end of the day, those things just simply aren't true. God is in control, right? But we let those thoughts circle in our minds until depression and hopelessness sink in. This psalmist is not in the depths because he's believing lies. This psalmist is in the depths because he believes the truth. He believes that he is a sinner, and this is what he deserves. He is down in the depths because of his sin.
Thirdly, the massive problem with the depths is that it stifles all notion of self-help. They are a place of total and complete desperation. To descend to the depths, to be in the depths, is to be utterly and completely helpless. It is drowning. It's the last gulp of a convulsing body as water fills the lungs, it's the dimming of eyes, the panic and desperation, that if something does not change right now, like right now, my eyes will close for the last time, my mind will go dark, my warm beating heart will stop. It doesn't matter how much I kick, it doesn't matter how much I flail, if anything is going to change my situation, it will have to be something or someone else that reaches down into the depths and yanks me out.
I need intervention, and I need it right now. That's the depths. It's interesting, isn't it, then, that this psalmist, who seems to be a good God-fearing Jew, one who actually loves his God, still has moments where he is in the depths and crying out for deliverance. If you're a Christian, you probably know this place. You've probably been to this place. you know the sleepless night wrestling with the weight and guilt of your sin.
You know what it is at times to just feel absolutely crushed by hopelessness because of your sin. This is a great reason why you should love and read the Psalms. I think sometimes we can see the Christian life as victory on top of victory. Sometimes we walk into church and we look around and say, I'm probably the only person here who's struggling and everybody else just seems to be living in victory. And yet actual experience of Christians is waves of good times, followed by waves of bad times. We can sometimes be completely surprised by how deeply sin still affects our lives.
And we recognize in those moments afresh that if there is any hope to be found, it must be found in the intervention of God to our circumstances. And so our psalmist does exactly that. He turns to God. He cries out to the Lord in his anguish, in his helplessness, in his despair, he cries out to the Lord. You see there at the end of verse one and verse two, he says, oh Lord, oh Lord, hear my voice. You might notice that the Lords there are a little different. The first Lord is all caps, L-O-R-D, they're all capitalized. The second Lord is a lowercase Lord. That first Lord is just the covenantal name of God. It's Yahweh. It's the name that God revealed to Moses in the burning bush. I am who I am. He's the God who makes promises and keeps them with the people. He covenants with them. That second Lord is just the Hebrew word Adonai. It just means master.
It just means Lord, master, the one whom I follow. He cries out to the one who makes promises to him and to the one who leads him in life. There's a part of me that thinks he's just throwing out any name he can think of, like a child who skins their knee and just says, mommy, daddy, mom, dad, anybody, anybody, pay attention, help me. If anyone can rescue me from the depths, the psalmist thinks it has to be the Lord, it has to be the covenant God, it has to be his master that can do that. Why does he think that? Why does he think that the Lord can do that for him? Well, it's just because he really knows his Bible well. He's read the stories of old. He knows that the word of the Lord spoke into this creation story and land came up and light came in. He would agree with Isaiah 51.10, for example, that God is the Lord of even the depths. Isaiah 51.10 says, Lord, wasn't it you who dried up the sea, the waters of the great deep? Wasn't it you who made the depths
of the sea away for the redeemed to pass over? The psalmist here knows that God has in the past cut into the depths, has split the waters apart, and has redeemed and rescued his people out of the depths themselves. He knows this, and so he does the only thing he can do. He cries out from the depths. The Psalms, like here, are filled with this language of crying out.
In some way, you could say the Psalms can break down into two compartments. Lord, help, and thank you, Lord, for helping. It kind of sums up almost all of the Psalter. It's one of the reasons that we should, again, love them so much. The Psalms wrestle with ourselves and our lives and our difficulties and our sins. And they encourage us, when these things overwhelm, to cry out to God. Here we see Him crying out, God, I beg you, hear my voice, open your ears, I'm pleading, I'm begging, I need you, God, if you don't answer, I have nothing. In fact, what we realize here is crying out is really the only tool that we have in our sin.
You can't cover it, you can't bury it, you can't pretend it didn't happen. All we have is, God, help, help me, I have nothing else. You know, Christians, brothers, sisters, you don't need to be strong. You just need a strong God who can cut into the depths and rescue you. You just need a strong God who can redeem a life from the pit. So maybe you're here this morning and you're in the depths. Maybe you walked in this morning and you are deeply aware of your own sin, of your own plight.
Well, the psalmist tells you what to do. You cry out. Shed off your pride. Shed off the things that would prevent you from crying out. and just cry out to the Lord. Just confess your sins and come to him. Out of the depths, the psalmist cries to the Lord. Well, that leads him to the next stanza, which is our point number two, a true admission. So why, again, is our psalmist in the depths, to go back to this point?
Well, in this section, he tells us why. It's not because of suffering in his life. It's not because of the curse. We have psalms for that. it's because specifically of his sin. The author is acutely aware that he is in the depths because he realizes that his sin has brought him there. Verse 3 of Psalm 130, If you, O Lord, shall mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand? That verse has to be one of the most simple and honest assessments of all of humanity found in all of world literature.
It's so simple, and yet it's so clear. If God were to mark iniquities, If we were to mark sins, if we were to be held to account for our actions, who would be able to stand? Who would the Lord acquit? Who would the Lord let off? Let me address you this morning, maybe if you're here and you're not a Christian and you're wondering what Christians think about the world or something like this. There's a lot of good reasons for you to become a Christian, to come to God. There's philosophical arguments, arguments from the complexity of creation or purpose or does something come from nothing.
These are all fine arguments and you can look into them. There's historical arguments. Jesus historically actually got up from the dead. You have to deal with that. If a guy says, I'm going to die and then three days later get back up and then he does it, you should probably think about that. You should probably deal with that and think about that and repent and come to him. But I want to present to you another angle, another maybe argument here this morning. For me personally, and I commend you to consider this, one of the main reasons that I find Christianity and the Bible so compelling is that the Bible just refuses to treat me with cake gloves.
In other words, the Bible just refuses to lie to me about myself. In my 38 some odd years, I've read some other religious texts, I've read plenty of modern pop psychology, I've been disappointed. I've delved into all sorts of podcasts and thinking, and over and over and over again, I encountered the same thing. They all said the same thing. You are capable of good. You just have to deal with maybe some bad things that you do, but you're not bad. You're not categorically bad. You just have to find the right path.
You have to conjure up your inner happy divine self. You have to realize your unique snowflake can glisten in the sun. And then you'd just be good to go. You'd be happy in life. And honestly, none of that, none of that even begins to get through to me because I have met myself in the depths. I've seen the motivations of my heart. I've seen my own sinful desires. I've ran those sinful desires in my minds to their ends. And what I have found and what you would find is that we are sinners. We are wretches. So in agreement with Jesus, say in the Sermon on the Mount, your anger, my anger, would turn to murder. There's wars happening in the Middle East that the foundation of the disagreement was just brothers not getting along.
Your lust, my lust, would turn to adultery and abandoning family and destroying lives. Our envy would turn to theft. Our lies would turn to a lonely life built on a mountain of deceit. Everybody thinks we're great, but nobody knows you. This is who we are. We are sinners. We are rebels against God. This is you and me. We would have gladly cried out, crucify him as Christ hung on the cross. We hate God in our sin. And the Bible is the only book that I have found that confronts and deals with that level of sin. Nobody else does. Nothing else does.
They cover over. They soothe over. They suppress. They lie. And so I'm inviting you this morning to consider, to ponder this. Could it be the case that all the religions of the world and the popular thinking of modern thought are all saying, if you, O Lord, would mark iniquities, I got a shot. I have a chance. Just give me a minute. Just give me another go. Let me prove myself. I'll figure it out. It's all folly. It's all so deceitful. It's all only more and more hopeless for the person who has honestly met themselves and sees who they are.
For somebody who's actually in the depths, that stuff doesn't work. That's a motivational poster at work for cancer. It doesn't do anything. When you know you need redemption, when you know you need help, when you know you need salvation, it counts for nothing. So I want to invite you this morning to just call out that lie. Call it out for what it is. The Bible is the only book in the world that doesn't lie to you about who you are. You will not stand. if God marks iniquities. You will be judged. I have six children, and five of them are excuse making machines. The sixth one is not, because she can't talk yet. But the other five are excuse making machines. And so there's times where I'm just like, son, I just saw you do this. Did you do this? And he'll be like, well, no, no, no, no, not well. Not well. Did you do this? Well, he, no, no, no, no, no. Did you do this? Yes, daddy. Okay. Why? Why did you do this?
Well, he, I know he, but why did you, why did you do this? I did it, dad, because I wanted to. I did it because the desires of my heart are sinful. There are none righteous, no, not one. So don't listen to any voice that tells you differently, and don't listen to any voice that gives you a man-made list of things to do to be right with God. No, rather instead, follow the Bible's teaching on your own sinfulness, your own helplessness. In other words, if you're willing to follow the Bible into the depths of the realization of human depravity and sinfulness, you'll begin to realize why the psalmist must cry out. And then, maybe, just maybe, you'll begin to realize the glories of a God who can pierce the depths and save sinners. If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities. Oh Lord, who could stand? The psalmist follows that up by one of the greatest lines in the Bible. But with you, so simple once again, but with you there is forgiveness that you may be feared.
So imagine our pilgrims, again, ascending to Jerusalem. They're dwelling on their status before God based on their deeds, and that leads them to conclude that God is their only hope. And then this psalm breaks in a shaft of light to pierce through the depths. With God, there's forgiveness. Literally, it reads, with God, forgiveness. With God, forgiveness. What the psalmist wants to come into your minds when you think about God is that he is a forgiving God.
He is a kind God. The verse before, no one can stand, sums up the whole problem with the world. This verse, God forgives. It's so short, but it packs such a punch. All of humanity can be condemned. The hope of all humanity can be presented in two short verses. God forgives sinners. With God is forgiveness. The God who you cannot stand before is the same God who at the very mention of his name, the word forgiveness should be like a knee-jerk reaction in your mind. Is that a knee-jerk reaction in your mind, Christian, when you hear the name of God?
Especially in the midst of your sin. You hear the name of God and you think, this God forgives. This God loves. And then the psalmist tells us that God's forgiveness comes that God would be feared. I have found this line to be so helpful to me over the years. Because I think I'm probably like you. I expect the line to say that he forgives, that he may be praised, that he may be thanked, that he may be honored. Think maybe even Psalm 103 last week, which was the point of that psalm.
But here we're told that the Lord forgives so that he would be feared. God doesn't rescue and save and redeem and forgive to just let his people waddle back into sin. No, he does these things so that we might fear the Lord. Now, like I mentioned last week, fear of the Lord is just taking God seriously. It's just giving God the weight that he deserves. It's reading the word and saying, amen, I agree over and over and over again. that's what fear of the Lord is. So how does forgiveness get you there? How does forgiveness get you to the fear of the Lord? Well, if we're following the logic of the psalm, we would see it.
If our plight is this bad, if what we deserve is judgment from God, and then suddenly we lift our eyes and we realize that God has not only forgiven, but adopted, pierced through the depths, and saved us, and made promises to us, not only would you want to thank him, but wouldn't you also want to follow him? Like, wouldn't you want to turn from what was destroying you and follow and embrace and fear the one who has saved you? In many ways, Psalm 130 verses 1 to 4 just map just about perfectly under the book of Romans chapters 1 to 6. Romans 1 to 3, we read a section of it this morning, is all about our sinfulness before the Lord. That corresponds very cleanly to the first three verses of Psalm 130 here. Then Paul turns in Romans 4 to 5 to talk about God justifying sinners and forgiving them and uniting them to Christ, which is like with you there is forgiveness.
But then Paul in Romans chapter 6 says, well, if grace is that great, should we just sin and get more grace? Like if it's all going to be covered anyway, shouldn't we just do it? And Paul like smacks us and says, no, don't even think like that. You're a new creation. You're a new person. And that is what the end of verse 4 is getting at. God has saved you so that you would fear the Lord. There's a reason why Luther called Psalm 130 a Pauline psalm. It matches so well under the book of Romans. In other words, if the Lord's forgiveness leads you to just excuse or license sin, then honestly you haven't the foggiest idea what he has done for you, and you haven't the foggiest idea of how much he loves you and forgives you for your sin. Christian, God saved you so that you would not grovel your way towards sin, but so that you would fear the Lord. That you wouldn't return to sin like a dog does to its own vomit, but that you would live free. That you'd be amazed at God and his salvation, and then give your life to him, trusting, obeying, loving, and fearing
the Lord. It could be, perhaps, why certain sins in your life plague you so much is because you just haven't come to grips yet with just how forgiven you actually are for that sin. You might still be thinking that you got to get cleaned up for the forgiveness to really take effect. But what if full forgiveness has actually taken effect? What if there really isn't anything that can happen that can remove that forgiveness? Wouldn't that mean that you're actually free?
like 100% free. And wouldn't that mean that you also can freely confess your sins to God and to others? Wouldn't that mean that you can drag your sin into the light? Your sin cannot ultimately condemn you. So why bury it? It can't do anything to condemn you. So fear the Lord and live in the community of the church, confessing your sins to one another so that you wouldn't be hardened by its deceitfulness. Church, I've been praying for you this past week that even this afternoon, some of you would actually trust God with your sins, that you would repent and trust God with your sins, that you would fear the Lord and that you would drag it into the light.
If there's a title that could be given over Third Avenue Baptist Church, if some guy writes a history of Third Avenue, you know, 500 years from now, I would love if he just said Third Avenue Baptist Church was a place where the people trusted God with their sins. Will that be hard? Yeah, it's always hard to confess sin. But brother, sister, you can trust God. He's forgiven you so that he may be feared. That leads us to point number three, waiting on the Lord. The psalmist turns from this amazing idea that God forgives us so that we would fear him and shifts his focus to an incredible image of a watchman waiting on the Lord.
I wait for the Lord. My soul waits. In his word, I hope. My soul waits for the Lord more than watchman for the morning, more than watchman for the morning. Notice there that three times he is said to wait on the Lord. And then twice he uses this image of a watchman. Okay, so what's this watchman image? What's going on here? Well, we don't really have this in our world today, But when this psalm was written, you would build your city in a plane or maybe on a mountain or something.
And then if you had the resources, you would build a wall around it. But if you had a wall or not, you still, you always, you build a watchtower, right? And at nighttime, you take some guy and you throw him up in that watchtower. And his job throughout the night, it was to peer into the darkness as best as he could. It was to look and see if there was any threats out there against the city and this people that he loved. And so he would peer and he'd be like, is that a flicker of light out there? Is that a fire or something? Could that be an enemy? And did I just hear like a horse neigh or did I hear somebody talking or whispering out there?
His whole job was to try to identify and eliminate threats against his city. He was a watchman. That's what he did. Well, if you're a watchman, what is the thing that you want more than anything else? What is the thing that drives you through the night? It's the dawn. It's the first breaking of light that would come. up over the hills, and suddenly that plain in front of you is just, is clear to see. And you can see there's no enemies out there. We've survived through another night. There's no threats against us. That's what a watchman yearns for. He yearns for the dawn. He yearns for the morning when he can finally see again. The psalmist here uses this image to describe the life of one who has been forgiven. What is the psalmist waiting for? It's not forgiveness. Forgiveness has been given. He's not waiting for forgiveness. No, like the watchman, the psalmist is waiting for the dawn. He's waiting, as he says, for the Lord, and he's trusting in the word. He's putting
his hope in the word. He is waiting to see all the fulfillment of the promises of the word of God for him and for his people in his word I hope this psalmist is banking everything everything that he has on the word of God and the coming of the Lord and he's waiting for it for all of it to dawn true waiting and watching that's the Christian life right there we are waiting and watching people we've been forgiven and now we are waiting and watching and waiting by the way is not moping. Waiting is not complaining. A watchman is not called by the people to stand on the wall and complain and whine the entire night. Just waiting. No. Waiting is not to be miserable. It's to be expectant. It's to know the promises of God that the dawn is coming.
And so you wait and you watch for it. The Christian life is not meant to be lived wallowing in despair of the night, but in the sure hope of the dawn. Jesus is coming back. As sure as I am standing here preaching, as sure as the sun will rise tomorrow, as sure as God is eternal God, Jesus is coming back. And so we wait and we watch and we yearn for the dawn to come. Now, it's been a sweet thing that recently here at Third Avenue in the evenings, we've been asking for the Lord to return. We've been praying for the return of the Lord in our evening services.
Come, Lord Jesus, come. Why don't you pray like that more? Why don't I pray like that more? Why do we not wait and watch more? Well, I think if we're honest, as I was trying to be honest with myself in pondering this this past week, I came to realize again that I just put entirely too much weight and hope in the stuff of this world. I do more waiting and watching for material, temporary blessing than waiting and watching for the Lord. I put more hope in my circumstances changing than I put in hope in, than I put hope in eternity. Because, I mean, if we're honest, life can be hard. And at times we just want relief. But all of this should convict me, should convict you, and cause us to lift our eyes. Maybe it's the same for you. Maybe the world has captivated you, and you're expending all of your might for the temporary blessings of this life. Brother, sister, wait for the Lord. Watch for the Lord. Put your hope in his word. Put
your hope in his promises. Joy eternal is going to dawn for you. Christ will split the eastern sky. The dead in Christ will rise, and we will all be with the Lord. May God grant us eyes to see that as the most important thing. We're awaiting and watching people. That takes us to our final point, point four, a sure redemption. The psalmist started in the depths. He found the forgiveness of God, and he's now waiting on all the promises to reach their fulfillment. In many ways, this psalm of ascents is its own ascent in and of itself. It ascends out of the depths into praise of God.
He ends this psalm with a call to Israel to trust God. Again, like Psalm 103 last week, it starts deeply personal in the midst of our sin. And it ends corporate with a call to all of Israel to hope in the Lord. O Israel, hope in the Lord. For with the Lord there is steadfast love, and with him is plentiful redemption. And he will redeem Israel from all his inequities. He calls there at the very beginning Israel to hope in the Lord. It's a command.
It's a command based in all of this good news. The Lord forgives, so we wait and we watch, and we hope in the Lord. And therefore, he's calling all of God's people through all of time and space to also hope in the Lord, to put their trust in the Lord. Well, why? Well, the psalmist gives us two characteristics about God and one eternal promise about God. to bolster our hope in the Lord. First, he tells us that with the Lord, there is steadfast love. God has an unmovable love for his people. I spent some time on this last week in Psalm 103, so I won't spend as much time here, but I'll just say this. If you are one of God's people, if you are in Christ, you have a better shot of moving Mount Everest with a cheap hammer that you bought off of Amazon than you have of moving God's love for you. His love is steadfast. It's sure.
It's unmovable. It's unbreakable. It's not going anywhere. It is secure. And so the psalmist says, put your hope in the Lord. Secondly, he tells us that God has plentiful redemption for his people. If you don't know the word redemption, redemption is just a, it just means purchasing something back that was lost. It most clearly shows up in the Old Testament laws concerning redeeming of land or of persons. So if you had land, you hit some financial difficulty, so you sell off your land to somebody else, and a redeemer could come and buy that back. They could purchase that back, or maybe even you sell yourself into indentured servanthood, and a near kinsman redeemer could purchase you back from that. So the Old Testament laws have all this redemption language inside of it. The most beautiful Old Testament book, the book of Ruth, puts the law on the ground and shows us just how incredible redemption law is in real life. A man by the name of Boaz redeems two women,
Ruth and Naomi, out of deep pain and despair and loss. If you don't know that book, you should read it. It's amazing. Boaz, out of love and care for these women, pulls out all the stops to give them everything that he can. His redemption is plentiful. And if you read the book, you'll see it. But here, with all that in the background, the Old Testament law of redemption, even the stories of redemption, we're told here too that the Lord is a redeemer. He is the one who is willing to purchase a people out of the depths. And notice that our author tells us that God has plentiful plentiful redemption. I love that adjective. That's a great adjective. Not just redemption, but plentiful redemption. Or to say it another way, God isn't holding back on his redemption of his people. God isn't hedging bets on you, church. He's not hedging bets. When God goes in on redemption, he pushes all the chips to the center of the table. He gets out the deed to the
house, the car keys, the 401k. He puts it all in on his people. He puts everything down. In fact, for the sake of your redemption, God sent his only son. There is nothing that can convince you more of God's sure, steadfast love for you, his people, than that he sent his son. I mean, I guess the Bible could say that God like traded Jupiter for people or something. He had something else that he could give. And while that may be kind of him, it doesn't communicate love. It doesn't communicate the level of love that God has for you as sending his only son for your redemption. Christ on the cross is plentiful redemption. It is God not holding anything back. So Paul can say in St.
Philippians 2, Christ, who though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. See what that verse is saying? Put it in the language of Psalm 130. Christ himself descended into the depths for you. Christ himself took the curse of the depths for you. And when he was down there, he found you and he split it open and walked you out.
He gave up heaven for sinners and rebels. He took the punishment that you deserve by dying on the cross for your sins. It is plentiful redemption. And Hebrews 12 tells us that Jesus did it for joy. He did it because he wanted to. He did it because he loved you. There is, church, for you, a plentiful redemption. The psalmist ends this psalm with a future promise. He will, God will, redeem Israel from all his iniquities.
It's a reminder first that this psalm is about sin. We need redemption from sin. It's not just about suffering. It's about sin and what sin does to us. But the sweet thing about this promise is just, again, how solid it is. It's just so solid. I mean, it doesn't say that God has plentiful redemption, that he might redeem Israel from all his iniquities. That would crush us. he might, will he? Will he not? That's most religions of the world. You might make it, you might not. No, no, no, no. He will. That's a solid promise. It also doesn't say that God will redeem Israel from some of his iniquities. Again, how crushing would that be? Well, which ones? And what do I do with the ones that you're not paying redemption for? And how would I even know which ones they are? What do I do? It would crush us to have that line, that he only redeems from some of our iniquities? No, the author won't let it there. The author wants this promise to be unquestionable. He will from all. He will save you from all your iniquities. He absolutely will.
And he will take care that all the sins of Israel of his people are paid for and redeemed. His people will make it to the new heavens and the new earth. His love for us is that. Great. Trust those promises, brothers and sisters. Trust those promises. Trust them even as we come to communion. We're about to take the Lord's Supper here. This is a phenomenal psalm for the Lord's Supper. Because I trust, if you're like me, that when you come to the Lord's Supper, you're aware, like our pilgrim heading up to Jerusalem, you're aware of your sin. You're aware that you deserve the depths, you deserve punishment for your sin. And yet here the Lord's Supper sits, an open invitation to all of us that have repented and trusted in Christ, that with God there is forgiveness that he might be feared. Use the psalm even as you pray through the Lord's Supper this morning.
And then remember the last line, God will redeem you from all of your iniquities. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for this text. We thank you for Psalm 130. We thank you for this psalmist who wrote this psalm that helps us in the midst of our sin. Father, we agree with this psalm that if you, O Lord, would mark iniquities, we cannot stand. That we deserve the depths for our sin. That we deserve the punishment of God.
Father, we thank you that Christ is a good redeemer. We thank you that you sent him to take our place. and that you offer to us eternal life in him. So, Fathers, we even come to communion this morning. We pray that you would strengthen weak knees. For those of us who feel the weight of our sin, Father, we pray that you would show us again and renew our minds to know that we are forgiven and loved by you with an eternal love. We pray that you would do that good work in our hearts. We pray it all in Jesus' name, amen.