This is a particularly rich Psalm. Not “rich” like expensive, but more like highly nutritious spiritual food. Reformer Martin Luther counted Psalm 130 as one of his four favorite Psalms. “They teach us that forgiveness of sins is granted without the law and without works.” It’s a Gospel in miniature. But to get the most out of it, we need to put on our Bible Word Nerd caps.
The first thing to note is that the psalmist is crying out from the depths. Crying out is not a memo to God. It is loudly screaming for attention. And that scream is coming from the depths – the same word that described Jonah praying from the belly of the great fish while he was choking on seaweed. This is a place of desperation. Desperate for mercy. Mercy is something you only need when you have no way to help yourself and the one you are asking from has no obligation to help.
In verse 3 the psalmist confesses that God alone is holy and righteous and we are not either. In our age of moral relativism, our default has become, “Well, I’m not that bad!” and we have lowered the bar for bad all the way down to reasoning such as, “I’m not Hitler!” That shows that we don’t understand a basic fact that everyone will spend eternity either in God’s presence or with Satan in Hell. That’s not God being unfair, it is simply recognizing that – like a moth who longs to get close to the light of a flame – no sin can survive in the presence of absolute holiness. And does God mark iniquity? Short answer – yes! (see Revelation 20:12 – 13). And only that same Holy God has the right to judge. Verse 4 speaks of forgiveness and feared, so only that same Holy God has the right to judge who is guilty or forgiven. Romans 3:23 reminds us that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Fear is a very appropriate human response to these truths but in the Hebrew, the word translated feared can also mean worshipped. Worship is not flattery, it is recognition of what is true about the one you are worshipping.
Now verse 5 is important because that recognition of God’s power to forgive leads us to hope in His word. What is God’s Word? It is the written Word of God but it is also the Son of God. The Apostle John writes, “In the beginning was the Word . . . and the Word was God.” Verses 5 and 6 repeat the word wait three times. In Hebrew poetry repetition is the device to emphasize the importance of something, so the psalmist wants us to understand that Jesus is the key to the forgiveness we so desperately need. Only the sinless son of God who was completely Holy God and fully human could pay the required cost of washing away our sins by His blood shed on a cross.
Finally, in verses 7 and 8, we have the words redemption and redeem which introduce a concept both foreign and essential to our understanding. In Leviticus 25:47–55, we learn that to be saved is not just a Marvel superhero snatching someone out of the fire. It is to be purchased out of slavery at a cost. In the Old Testament life was very tenuous. Hard working people could suffer calamitous losses of their crops, land, family members and their ability to earn a living through no fault of their own. In order to survive they would often have to submit to being slaves. God’s law recognized that there was a profound injustice in placing one of God’s image bearers in submission to another so Moses writes about the limits on the time someone could remain a slave and the cost of being set free. But since the enslaved individual often could not afford the cost of his freedom, the law appointed someone called the kinsman redeemer who could step in and pay the debt owed and thus purchase the kindred slave out of bondage. The final verse of the psalm reveals that the kinsman (a human being just like us) Jesus of Nazareth is the God who can redeem us from the eternal cost of our sins. He is the reason we can wait with hope.
I will close this with the words of what may well be the oldest book in our Bible – Job. At his most desperate depths – when the bottom fell out of his life for no good reason – he could still say with hope: “For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last He will stand upon the earth.”