This Psalm gives us what we may call the ascent of the soul from the depths to the heights.
I. We have the cry from the depths. The depths which the psalmist means are those into which the spirit feels itself going down, sick and giddy, when there comes the thought," I am a sinful man, O Lord, in the presence of Thy great purity." Out of these depths does he cry to God. (1) The depths are the place for us all. (2) Unless you have cried to God out of these depths, you have never cried to Him at all. (3) You want nothing more than a cry to draw you from the pit.
II. We have, next, a dark fear and a bright assurance (Psalms 130:3-4). These two halves represent the struggle in the man's mind. They are like a sky one half of which is piled with thunder-clouds and the other serenely blue. (1) To "mark" iniquities is to impute them to us. Here we have expressed the profound sense of the impossibility of any man's sustaining the righteous judgment of God. (2) "There is forgiveness with Thee," etc. No man ever comes to that confidence that has not sprung to it, as it were, by a rebound from the other thought. He must first have felt the shudder of the thought, "If Thou, Lord, shouldest mark iniquities," in order to come to the gladness of the thought, "But there is forgiveness with Thee."
III. "My soul waiteth for the Lord," etc. There is the permanent, peaceful attitude of the spirit that has tasted the consciousness of forgiving love a continual dependence upon God. The consciousness of sin was the dark night. The coming of God's forgiving love flushed all the eastern heaven with diffused brightness that grew into perfect day. And so the man waits quietly for the dawn, and his whole soul is one absorbing desire that God may dwell with him and brighten and gladden him.
IV. "Let Israel hope in the Lord." There is nothing which isolates a man so awfully as a consciousness of sin and of his relation to God; but there is nothing that so knits him to all his fellows, and brings him into such wide-reaching bonds of amity and benevolence, as the sense of God's forgiving mercy for his own soul. So the call bursts from the lips of the pardoned man, inviting all to taste the experience and exercise the trust which have made him glad.
A. Maclaren, A Year's Ministry,2nd series, p. 31 (see also Contemporary Pulpit,vol. i., p. 25, and Preacher's Monthly,vol. viii., p. 122).
References: Psalms 130 S. Cox, The Pilgrim Psalms,p. 217; Clergyman's Magazine,vol. xii., p. 83; H. C. G. Moule, Ibid.,vol. xvi., p. 87; C. Kingsley, Westminster Sermons,p. 262.Psalms 131:1. Preacher's Monthly,vol. vii., p. 100.