Psalm 130 Commentary

As we near the conclusion already of the 2026 Season of Lent, this Year A psalm selection serves up something that is quintessentially Lenten in nature.  The entirety of this fairly short song deals with two linked realities: Our human need to be forgiven of our sins and God’s divine penchant to be a forgiving God.  Although there are plenty examples in the Bible—most particularly of course in the Old Testament—of God’s expressing anger over sin and evil and God’s promising to punish sin and evil, Psalm 130 is one of many Bible passages that makes it clear that those divine reactions to sin are not God’s foremost desire.

What God really wants to do—and is depicted as being eager to do—is forgive.  God wants a relationship with the human beings made in the divine image.  The fellowship God had with Adam and Eve prior to the Fall into sin displays how God wants things to be.  Sin interrupts that fellowship.  Sin and evil fracture our ability to be close to a holy God.  So what is to be done?  The sin that blocks our access to God needs to be removed like an obstacle from a roadway.  Or to change up the imagery: forgiveness builds a bridge across the chasm that sin opens up between our holy God and our all-too-often unholy words, thoughts, and actions.  Forgiveness puts things back to right and since between God and humanity that is the way God wants it to be, God forgives over and over.

Psalm 130:3 takes note of the necessity of that “over and over” reality by admitting that if God kept a record of sins—of anybody’s sins presumably—no one could stand in God’s presence.  There’s just too many of them.  There’s a sense in which this is the ultimate cosmic game of whack-a-mole, though it’s not a game of course.  But you get the idea.  Despite our best efforts and despite the fact that a lot of people do grow more holy over time, do get better at mastering sins that had once mastered them, even so, sin keeps popping up all over in our lives.  Thankfully, however, God seems never to tire of extending his forgiving grace and mercy.

This psalmist of course displays the attitude and posture needed to tap into that vast ocean of forgiving grace within the heart of God.  This songwriter feels the pang of unconfessed and unforgiven sin in his heart and desires to get rid of that gnawing sense of guilt and shame.  The psalmist pines for grace, yearns for forgiveness, watches for God to show up once more in his life with the earnestness of night watchmen who are eager to see the first hints of a new day dawning so their long night of uncertainty and danger in the darkness can come to an end.  Whenever we display this kind of spiritual posture and desire, God will come through for us every time.

But as the song concludes, the psalmist turns to Israel and begs them to do as he has done and will continue to do.  “Put your hope in Yahweh, O Israel, hope in God because when you do, God will put away your sins and redeem you.”  This plea is needed because, sadly enough but as we all know, not all people sense that their sins are an issue to be dealt with.  Some may deny they have anything seriously amiss with them morally in the first place.  Or even if they know they don’t always do things right, maybe they don’t believe there is any God out there who cares one way or the other.

The sociologist Christian Smith became well known in recent years for his uncovering of what he has labeled a “Moral Therapeutic Deism” that is quite common among many, especially younger, people today.  This is a belief system founded on the idea that yes, there is a God out there somewhere in the cosmic ether but this God is not close enough to be paying any attention to the ins and outs of our little lives.  And anyway perhaps this remote God is like the proverbial kindly old man upstairs who figures that so long as we don’t do anything too bad and if we just generally let our good deeds edge out and outnumber our bad deeds, we’ll all be fine.  God grades on the curve perhaps.  If a person thinks this way, they’d never get into a twist over their sins the way the writer of Psalm 130 did.  That’s all just so unnecessary.  It’s even vaguely neurotic.

One suspects the author of the 130^th psalm would have plenty to say about such patterns of thought.  There is much to correct here theologically.  Because the Bible does tell us God pays plenty close attention because God wants to be close to us.  As Psalm 8 would remind us, we may indeed be leading puny lives compared to the scale of the universe but the real wonder of Israel’s God is that he pays attention to us in our littleness.  God cheers us on in our lives.  God cares for the marginalized and the invisible people on the fringes of society.  And God does care about things like holiness and sinfulness and desires to see us living happily within the boundary lines that God set up in this his good creation.

But the writer of this psalm would point something else out too: if you live according to the tenets of Moral Therapeutic Deism or its historical equivalents in different historical eras, you are depriving yourself not just of God’s forgiveness but of the joy that pervades Psalm 130.  You are denying yourself the freedom from guilt and uncertainty that God’s always hyper-abundant mercy makes possible for us when we know we’ve been put back on a right and solid footing with no less than Almighty God.

But why wouldn’t we want such joy to flood our souls?  O Israel, O everybody: put your hope in the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ whose death and resurrection spell forgiveness and new life for us all.

[Note: For the Year A Season of Lent and leading up to Easter, CEP has, in addition to these weekly sermon commentaries, a special Lent and Easter Resource Page with links to whole sermons, commentary on Lenten texts, and more.]

Illustration Idea

Near the end of J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” novels and in the final film version, Harry encounters the former (and deceased) Hogwarts Headmaster Albus Dumbledore in some afterlife liminal space in Harry’s mind after he had been apparently—but not in actuality—killed by the evil Lord Voldemort.  As they talk, Dumbledore at one point utters a line to the effect, “Words are, in my not so humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic, capable of both inflicting injury and remedying it.”  We all sense the truth of that line.

We’ve seen how our words can cut into someone when we spew out something awful in the midst of a heated argument.  Early in my marriage my wife came from the supermarket one day bubbling with enthusiasm for the fresh sweet corn she’d bought.  I immediately blurted out we didn’t need that and already had some.  She visibly deflated like a balloon.  I felt horrible at the time and in my mind I return to it often as a reminder to be more careful with my words (though I have failed that sometimes too).  Then again we’ve seen new life enter into someone’s heart and life when we spoke a tender word of healing and hope.  In a heartbeat a sad face suddenly begins quite literally to beam.

Our human words are that powerful.  Magic indeed.  But consider how this all gets magnified with the words of our God in Christ.  When Jesus told people he and his Father had forgiven them, people sprinted from those words with visible joy.  God’s Word gives us nothing short of life abundant.  Psalm 130 is a celebration of this fact.