An Appeal For Forgiveness And Cleansing (Psalms 51:1-2).
The Psalm commences with an appeal to God for forgiveness and cleansing. In these verses David throws himself on the mercy of God, in recognition that only in God's supreme compassion is there any hope for him. He knew that he had committed the sins of adultery and murder, which in earlier times would have resulted in his execution. He knew that for these sins there was no pardon. And yet such is his intense faith that he is convinced that God will pardon him, not because he deserves it, not because of who he is, not through the cultic ritual, but because of God's great compassion and mercy.
‘Show your grace towards me, O God,
According to your covenant love,
According to the abundance of your tender compassions,
Blot out my transgressions (rebellions),
Launder me thoroughly from my iniquity,
And cleanse me from my sin.
‘Show your grace towards me.' Often translated as ‘have mercy on me' the Hebrew is better translated as ‘show your grace, your unmerited love and favour, towards me'. The emphasis is not on his own need for forgiveness, but on the greatness of God's undeserved love and favour. He knows that without that he is undone, for he is a defector. He has rebelled against God and thwarted His Law.
He is aware that nothing can excuse what he has done. No sacrifice can atone for it, no way of atonement is provided. He had sinned ‘with a high hand'. His only hope lay in what God is as the One Who is ‘a God full of compassion and gracious, slow to anger and plenteous in mercy and truth, Who keeps mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin' (Exodus 34:6-7).
As one who is within the covenant he points to God's chesed, His love revealed in the covenant, a sovereign love to those wholly undeserving. He points to the huge number of His tender compassions. And on the basis of this he calls for God to blot out every trace of his acts of rebellion, to thoroughly wash him from his depraved and filthy conduct, and to cleanse him from having turned in the wrong way and missed the mark. He is totally honest. He realises that it is his only hope. Nothing can ameliorate what he has done. He knows that there are no excuses. No sacrifice can avail. He deserves immediate execution. It is total and heartfelt repentance. He is throwing himself utterly on God's mercy.
‘Blot out my acts of rebellion.' He wants his record made clean, so that nothing stands against his name that can be brought against him in the future. He knows that strictly speaking adultery and murder are not forgivable sins. His only hope is for the record of them to be totally removed (compare Psalms 51:9).
‘Launder me thoroughly from my depraved and filthy conduct'. This is not a reference to cultic washings. The word is never used of the washing of the person in the cult, but of the washing of the person's clothes, and it never availed for the cleansing of sin. Such washings were regularly followed by the words ‘and shall not be clean until the evening'. The washing was preparatory, removing earthly stains from the clothes so that it was possible to wait on a pure God. But it was the time spent waiting on God that cleansed. It has more to do with Jeremiah 2:22; Jeremiah 4:14 where the principle of laundering is applied to the person. In Jeremiah 2:22 it would not avail, but in Jeremiah 4:14 it was seemingly to be effective, and was by their evil thoughts being removed from them. David is thus using a metaphor concerning his need to be laundered clean, taken from daily life and not from the cult.
‘Cleanse me from my sin.' This verb is more closely connected with cult cleansing, especially with regard to the cleansing of leprosy, but the water there did not physically cleanse the leprosy, it was for cultic ‘cleansing' once the leprosy was healed or seen as harmless. David, however, would know that for his sins the cult was ineffective. So here, where David was not wanting cultic cleansing (which was not possible for murder and adultery) but full, deep inner cleansing of his life, we are probably to see it as parallel in idea to the previous reference to the laundering of his life. The cult is far from his mind. He wants removal of his filthiness of heart. He has more in mind the royal bath house.