Sermon Text: Psalm 19:9-14
Date: July 23, 2023
Event: The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost, Year A [Proper 11]
Psalm 19:9–14 (EHV)
The fear of the Lord is pure.
It stands forever.
The just decrees of the Lord are truth.
They are altogether righteous.
10They are more desirable than gold,
even better than much pure gold.
They are sweeter than honey,
even honey dripping from the honeycomb.
11Yes, by them your servant is warned.
In keeping them there is great reward.
12Who can recognize his own errors?
Declare me innocent of hidden sins.
13Restrain your servant also from deliberate sins.
Do not let them rule over me.
Then I will be blameless.
Then I will be innocent of great rebellion.
14May the speech from my mouth
and the thoughts in my heart be pleasing to you,
O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer.
I Will Be Blameless…?
Trying to escape guilt is a life-long endeavor for many people. Perhaps they feel bad about the things that they did years ago. Perhaps they feel bad about the good things they left undone. Regardless, feeling that you have messed up and can’t do anything about it is not pleasant. And we can work and work and work to try to find relief from that guilty feeling without any success.
If we use Jesus’ parable about the wheat and the weeds as a guide for our thinking, perhaps we struggle with the feeling of wondering, “Am I the wheat or am I a weed? Am I destined for the harvest or am I destined for the fire?” As we zero in on God’s words through David’s psalm here this morning, I pray that we will find peace in God’s work for us and his guidance for our lives.
If you were to read through the book of Psalms in order, you would find that Psalm 19 stands out from those around it. Before and after, we have many psalms by David that plead to God for help and deliverance. But Psalm 19 is different. Psalm 19 in whole is a psalm of praise to God. This arrangement is a good reminder for our prayer lives—God is certainly there to listen to and answer our prayers, hear our cries for help and grant that help that he knows is best. But we also do well to remember to thank God for the blessings he gives—even in (or perhaps especially in) times of other great difficulties.
But we don’t always handle difficulties so well, do we? I mean, let’s be honest, we don’t always handle good times so well either. Look at your life. You don’t have to go back far. How was this week? How was yesterday? How was this morning before church? If we’re honest, probably not great, right? Whether it was familiar sins that have plagued you for many years or something totally new and novel that you came up with freshly, we can all identify where we’ve been unkind and uncharitable to others, where we’ve been selfish or greedy, where lust has taken control, or where our thoughts and desires went down paths that were not appropriate. Whether these things actively hurt someone else or were just in our heads or our hearts, they were sins against God—the God who demands perfection.
And that realization can make David’s joy at the beginning of our reading feel like barbs tearing into our hearts and flesh: The fear of the Lord is pure. It stands forever. The just decrees of the Lord are truth. They are altogether righteous. They are more desirable than gold, even better than much pure gold. They are sweeter than honey, even honey dripping from the honeycomb. Yes, by them your servant is warned. In keeping them there is great reward. Ok, yes, I get it—fearing or respecting God is good. God’s laws are right and desirable to keep. They are honey-sweet to those who love them. There is great reward in keeping them.
That’s great, except that’s not me. That’s not you. Part of us agrees with David’s words here, but another part of us hates these things. Our sinful natures scream at God and accuse him of wrongdoing when he set his standards. That sinful nature hates God and defies him and scorns any praise there is for him—especially his law.
So, that’s where we are. We are fighting against God. Our sinful nature is furious with our Creator and wants to just rage at him until our last breath. And that rage—that sin—brings consequences, brings punishment, brings hell. Jesus said it in the Gospel—the weeds are thrown into the fire. Sin makes you and me weeds. It makes us worthless. We are to be cast out at the time of the harvest, never to be brought into God’s barn.
But, as we walk through these verses from Psalm 19, we do well to pay attention to the subject of many of the verbs for us to understand some things about David’s song. Consider just vv. 12-13: Declare me innocent of hidden sins. Restrain your servant also from deliberate sins. Do not let them rule over me. This is not the human being resolutely setting off to do right, to accomplish his forgiveness, or to resist temptation. No, this is God declaring innocence, this is God restraining deliberate sin, and pleading to God to not allow sin to rule over us.
Why? Because all of this is beyond our ability to do. I can’t make myself forgiven. I can’t fully restrain sin in my life. I can’t decide to be “good” and just have it happen. I know that you; you know that. That is our lived experience day in and day out, today. Sin has been here, it is here, and it will be here.
So then, how can David boldly say: Then I will be blameless. Then I will be innocent of great rebellion? How will he, a sinner, be blameless and innocent? After all, David was as guilty as guilty could be, just like us. But we cannot lose sight of the fact that this status of “blameless” and “innocent” is not something that we make happen; that change is God’s work, God’s declaration. That declaration of innocence is what we call justification. God looks at the adulterer and murderer David, he looks at you and all the things you’ve done wrong, he looks at me and all of my innumerable failings, and he says of us, “Not guilty,” which means no punishment for sin is placed on us at all.
But how? Is God senile and forgetful? Hardly. Has God decided he was too harsh and changed his plans? No, he is perfectly consistent. So, if God, who is consistent and does not change, has declared us innocent despite being worthless weeds, something had to happen to change everything. And that “something” is Jesus.
God declared that we deserved hell and surely, we did, but he was not willing to allow us to go with no hope. His love for us was so great that Jesus came to be our substitute. The life we should have lived, Jesus lived for us—perfect in thought, word, and action. The punishment that should have been on us for our sins—being abandoned by God in hell—was brought down on Jesus while he died on the cross. God has not chosen to just ignore our sins or say they are not a big deal or forget that they happened. He knows they happened, and he demands punishment for them, it’s just that he punished Jesus instead of you, me, or David. Jesus is the stable Rock on which we build; he is our Redeemer, the one who has bought us back from sin, death, and hell to be with him forever in heaven.
This, then, brings so much clarity to David’s words in this psalm because David is writing from the perspective of a believer, giving thanks to God for his mercy. When he speaks about loving God’s commands and being rewarded for keeping them, he is not advocating for an unbeliever to do good things to make God happy with him or her. Nor is this David campaigning for a works-righteousness mindset that seeks to earn God’s forgiveness by doing good things. Rather, this psalm speaks with the attitude of a believer who knows that he or she already has God’s mercy because that is what he has promised and done. The one speaking these words trusts their Savior—whether it was the Savior who was yet to come from David’s perspective or the one who has already accomplished his work from our perspective.
You are sinful, yet blameless. You are guilty, yet innocent. These contradictory truths find resolution in your Savior Jesus who lived and died to save you, who rose from the dead to prove his conquest and decimation of sin. And as a result of that, your faith, your new self, wants to keep God’s commands to thank him, knowing the gift he has freely given! Only after God has worked faith in your heart to trust your Savior Jesus and all that he did to save you can God’s decrees be known as truth and righteous. Only then can they be seen as more desirable than gold and sweeter than honey.
That is not to say that sin will be absent in your life or mine. It won’t be. We will wish it was gone rather than loving it. We will hate the parts of us that make us look like weeds in God’s field—but we will rejoice to know that he has made us wheat. We are blameless—not because of what we have done, but because of what Jesus has done for us. Thanks be to God! Amen.
