The Bible Study Hour

Dr. James Boice: The entire life of a Christian should be marked by repentance, but our hearts often deceive us into believing that we are somehow righteous in ourselves. It’s at times like these we need to hear God's judgment on our perceived virtue and be set straight.

Guest (Male): Welcome to the Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically. Nothing we do as believers is ever entirely apart from sin. That being the case, we shouldn't see repentance as merely a single act. We should instead see repentance as an ongoing need in our lives.

Let’s join Dr. Boice as he examines Psalm 143 and the heart and mind of David as he confessed his helpless state and sought God's aid and mercy.

Dr. James Boice: Psalm 143 is the last of the psalms in the Psalter that have been identified as penitential in the liturgical tradition of the church. The others are Psalms 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, and 130, making seven of them in all. It's easy to see why the others are called penitential because in each one of them the psalmist, whoever he may be, confesses personal sin and asks God for forgiveness for his sin.

At first glance, it's not so easy to see why this one, Psalm 143, is penitential, and some cynical writers have even suggested that it's only because the church liturgy requires series of sevens, either for the seven days of the week or the seven weeks in Lent or something like that.

And yet I think that's too superficial a reaction. It is true that the only verse in this Psalm which explicitly acknowledges wrongdoing is verse two. It says, "No one living is righteous before you." That’s a way of saying what Paul does in Romans 3:23: "All have sinned."

And it's only in verse one that the Psalm explicitly asks for mercy. Aside from that opening, the Psalm is mostly about David's enemies and the problems that he finds himself in at this particular point and his request for deliverance from these enemies. That's where the Psalm ends.

And yet, as I say, I don't think that it's wrong to regard this as a penitential psalm, and for a number of reasons. First, although these opening verses are in the form of a general confession of sin rather than a personal one—David does not say here, "I have sinned," and they don't mention what he did, they're not explicit—nevertheless, they do hit on the chief problem for anyone who really is seeking mercy from God. And that is that God is righteous and we're not.

Moreover, God is the judge of all the universe and as a righteous judge of the universe, he has to do what's right. And since we are sinners, it means that he has to judge sin. The big question, the question of all human existence, indeed the great question of creation itself, is how can sinners come into a right relationship with God? Or, to put it from the other side, how can God forgive people who are unrighteous?

Oh, you can understand how we might say, "I don't care, forget it, it's all right." But God is responsible for justice. How can he forgive sinners and be just at the same time? The answer, of course, is through the work of Jesus Christ.

It's exactly the problem Paul raises in the third chapter of Romans when he says how can God be both just and the justifier of the ungodly? And it's that he justifies the ungodly who believe in Jesus Christ, so he punishes their sin in Jesus.

And then, I think this is a penitential Psalm for another reason. That is because it gives instruction. The flow of thought has a way of telling us the areas in which we should be penitential or should ask for forgiveness. It's true that we begin by asking God for mercy, which is what the first two verses of this Psalm do, but that's not the whole of Christianity.

It's true we need forgiveness for our sins, we need to trust Jesus Christ as our savior, but at that point, we need to go on, and so David does. And what you find in the continuation of the Psalm is that he first describes his dangerous condition—he's in trouble.

Secondly, he reminds himself of God's past work. Third, he seeks God's guidance so that he might know what he should do. And last of all, he asks for God's persevering grace so he might continue to live and serve him. So it's a way of saying that repentance should characterize our entire relationship with God throughout our entire lifetimes.

Now, what I want to suggest is that this understanding of repentance as something that affects all of life needs to be recovered in the evangelical church today. Because what has happened in the evangelical church today in the Western world, particularly in America, is that we have become in many ways very much like the church of the Middle Ages before the Reformation, which is a way of saying we need a new Reformation.

Let me explain it this way. In April of last year, the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals held a meeting for evangelical leaders in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and out of that came the Cambridge Declaration. One of the papers that was presented at this conference was by Sinclair Ferguson, a professor at Westminster Seminary who often worships with us when he's here in Philadelphia, and it was on repentance.

Ferguson discussed the errors of the Middle Ages against which Luther was reacting and he argued that at least five features of that old medieval Christianity are noticeable today in contemporary evangelicalism. And let me just review them. First of all, repentance has been increasingly seen as a single act severed from a lifelong restoration of godliness.

Number two, the canon or the rule for Christian living has increasingly been sought in a spirit-inspired living voice within the church rather than in the spirit's voice heard in scripture. Thirdly, the divine presence was brought to the church by individuals with sacred powers deposited within them and communicated by physical means.

Number four, the worship of God is increasingly presented as a spectator event of visual and sensory power rather than a verbal event in which you're engaged in a deep soul dialogue with the triune God. And finally, number five, the success of ministry is measured by crowds and cathedrals rather than by the preaching of the cross, by the quality of Christians' lives, and by faithfulness.

Now, if we put these insights into the need for repentance—and we need it in each of those areas—into our reflection on Psalm 143, what we need to say is that repentance needs to be present in every single one of the items that's mentioned in the Psalm. I listed them earlier. David's dangerous condition: he needs to repent of that because it's his sin that's got him into the trouble.

His remembrance of God's past works, which he remembers inadequately as we ourselves also remember inadequately. His plea to God for guidance and his desire for God's persevering grace to live and serve him. Repentance has to be a part of each one of those matters because nothing we do as Christians is ever entirely apart from sin. Martin Luther said on one occasion, I think wisely and not at all facetiously, "I have learned that even my repentance needs to be repented of."

Now, let's look at the Psalm with that in mind. First of all, verses one and two, the first stanza, a cry for mercy. Verse one asks for mercy, verse two explains why, and it's because the writer, like all men and women, is unrighteous—he sins constantly.

Now as I said, or at least alluded earlier, some commentators regard this as a weak confession because it's neither personal nor specific. David does not say, "I have sinned," he does that in other psalms, nor does he say, "This is what I've done," as some of the other psalms do.

That's true enough, but this Psalm is profound in other ways. For one thing, it acknowledges the universality of sin. This is what Romans 3:20 says, "No one will be declared righteous in his sight by observing the law, rather through the law we become conscious of sin."

Or again, Paul certainly knew the psalms and was drawing on them, wrote in Galatians, second chapter, verse 16, "By the law no one will be justified." There's none righteous, no, not one. Now that's no small matter. The reason it's not a small matter is that it is very difficult for us to come to that persuasion.

We may say it because we're taught it, it's part of the creed, "Oh yes, we're all sinners," but we don't actually believe it. What we really think is that we're righteous. And so we have to hear God's judgment on our righteousness to be straightened out.

God said through Isaiah in the 64th chapter, verse six, "All our righteous acts"—not our bad acts, our righteous acts, the things that we think we are best at and most deserve commendation from God—"all our righteous acts are like filthy rags." So if we're going to be saved by God, it can't be on the basis of our righteousness. It has to be on the basis of a righteousness not our own, what Martin Luther called an alien righteousness, a righteousness from outside of us. It has to be on the basis of the righteousness of Jesus Christ.

And then just looking at those verses again, there's this great insight: David is appealing for mercy on the basis of God's faithfulness and righteousness. Do you see that? Faithfulness and righteousness.

We say how can that be? How can David appeal for mercy on the basis of God's righteousness because the problem is that he's not righteous and if God is righteous, God has to judge him for his sin and punish him? How can God be merciful?

Well, the answer is found in the word "faithful" because the word "faithful" throws us back on the promises of God. God is faithful to his promise. And what God has promised to do is send a savior. It's there from the very beginning of the Bible, first mentioned in the third chapter of Genesis, but all the way through the Old Testament.

It's what Jesus Christ expounded to the Emmaus disciples, doing it from the entire Old Testament. God has promised to send a savior, and so on the basis of his faithfulness to his promises, David appeals for mercy.

And you say, "Well, what about righteousness?" Righteousness comes to us because of Jesus Christ. In other words, it's because of God's faithfulness that he satisfies his righteous demands in the death of the savior on our behalf. Paul writes about it in 1 Corinthians 5:21, "God made him"—that is Jesus—"who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God."

Now, I ask the question, did David understand all that when he wrote verse one? And here's one of those places that I have to say I don't know. I don't know how much David understood, but what I do know is that what he wrote is exactly what the apostle John later wrote in his first letter when he said, "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness."

Faithful and just in 1 John 1:9 is exactly the same thing as faithfulness and righteousness in Psalm 143. So both of these verses, this strong verse in the Old Testament and this strong verse in the New Testament, teach us that we are saved righteously only on the basis of the death of Jesus Christ.

Now stanza two. Verses three and four unfold the circumstances in which David is asking God for mercy, and it should be familiar to us now because we can hardly read a psalm of David's anywhere in the Psalter in which he doesn't mention enemies. He's always beset by enemies.

In this case, it seems to be a single enemy who pursues him, crushes him to the ground, makes him dwell in darkness like those long dead. Since this follows immediately upon David's confession of sin and his prayer in verse two, "Do not bring your servant into judgment," it must be a recognition that the problems he's facing and describing are due in part at least in this case to God's judgment on him for his sin. So he's repenting of them.

Now what David acknowledges in verse four is that his enemy has succeeded to the extent that he has been crushed by his relentless opposition. "My spirit grows faint within me, my heart within me is dismayed."

In the third stanza, David puts himself under an important spiritual discipline, which is to remember God's acts on his behalf and on behalf of other people in former days. He uses three verbs to describe what he does: "I remember," "I meditate," and "I consider."

Now this verse is a very short recapitulation of what we find drawn out at great length in other psalms. There are entire set of psalms in the Psalter in which the author rehearses at length God's mighty deeds. Some involve his deeds in creation, how he made the heavens and the earth and displayed his wonders in the world we know.

They have to do with God's mighty works in delivering the people from Egypt and giving them the law at Sinai and bringing them into their promised land. David doesn't spell that out at great length here as we have it in Psalm 136 or 104 or 105 and others, but he is saying the same thing.

He's saying first of all he remembers how God had been with him previously, and he meditates on that deliverance, and he considers or reasons from that past experience to the present. Do you see why I call this an important spiritual discipline? It's one that we need to recover.

We need to begin to think in a biblical way and it goes like this: God has helped me in the past, he saved me through Jesus Christ, I have many experiences of his grace, God is always the same, he doesn't change, his feelings toward me don't vary, therefore if God has helped me in the past, he certainly will help me in the present. And so as he reflects on these things, he finds that his faith is strengthened.

Notice verse six: "I spread out my hands to you, my soul thirsts for you like a parched land." That's like the beginning of Psalms 42 and 63, the second of which is also by David. And it's an important sentence because it says that David here, as he prays, is not only concerned about what God can do for him.

He doesn't come in prayer just to get something from God, though God does do things for him and he does get things from God, but rather what it says is that he's thirsting for God himself, which is far better. "My soul thirsts for you like a parched land." And the question is, do you thirst for God himself? And if not, which is generally the case, this too is something that needs to be repented of.

The next section, stanza four. Here David turns to God in direct appeal, and what he's asking for here chiefly is guidance. He's in trouble, he doesn't know what to do, and so he says, "What should I do?" This is the progression I see.

First of all, "Bring me word of your unfailing love." David needs revelation. Secondly, "Show me the way I should go." David needs direction. Third, "Teach me to do your will." David needs motivation.

In other words, it's not enough merely to know God's will; what David knows is that he also has to have the motivation to do it—he needs to do it. Most of us will pray and ask for God's will—that's sort of a common question among Christians—"Oh God, I want you to show me what job I should take, who I should marry, where I should go, how I should handle this particular problem."

We pray that way, we pray the prayer of verse eight, "Show me the way I should go," but we don't very often pray the prayer of verse 10, "Teach me to do your will, for you are my God."

So it's another area in which we need to repent, that is our sad lackluster following after the Almighty. We want God to give us pointers and then we want to retain the right to decide whether we're going to take God's advice or not, but we don't ask God for the ability actually to do what God commands.

And then we come to the end, the last verses, where David asks God to silence or destroy his enemies. This sounds like another one of those imprecatory passages in the psalms that are troubling to so many people that I've talked about before, but it isn't quite that because there's actually an order here.

Notice these important matters in order of importance: number one, "Preserve my life," number two, "Bring me out of trouble," number three, "Silence my enemies." And then, if that isn't enough, if something more is required in order that I might be preserved and kept alive to serve you, well then, "Destroy all my foes."

And the argument he gives here all have to do with God. This is how he's arguing to get God to be favorable. First, "Do it for your namesake," that is for your honor, not my honor. God has promised to keep his people and defend them, therefore preserve my life in order that everybody may know that you are the great God you really are.

We're always on strong ground when we can argue for God's honor rather than our own. Number two, "In your righteousness." This means justly and in accord with your very nature. God is utterly righteous, therefore in order that right might prevail and evil might be judged, deliver me and overturn the malice of my foes.

We're always on solid ground when we can ask for God's righteousness to be exalted in prayer. And then finally, "In your unfailing love." Because in the final analysis our hope is in the love of God. All that flows to us by way of his mercies comes because he set his love upon us.

And then in the very last line, as he did at the beginning, David refers to himself as God's servant: "I am your servant." What an honor that is to be a servant of the Most High God. And a responsibility, too.

Because the servant of the Most High God needs to serve faithfully knowing that even when he does his best, we are at best, as Jesus said on one occasion, unworthy servants. And so here, even at the very end of the Psalm, we find David repenting.

Now, at the beginning of this study, I mentioned the first of Martin Luther's 95 theses and I used it as a unifying note. Let me wrap this all up by going back to Luther. Among Luther's many sermons on the psalms are extensive sermons on the penitential psalms, and of course, there is a good and a long one on Psalm 143.

I read it in preparation for my own study and I was somewhat surprised, startled, to find as Luther worked his way through the Psalm that in every case, no matter what he referred to, he always saw it as speaking of God's grace which is revealed in the gospel of Jesus Christ.

For example, verse three, "The enemy persecutes my soul." Luther says that the wicked always persecute the pious who live only in the faith and righteousness of God. Or again, verse five, "I remember the days of old." Luther saw this as teaching that God has never sustained anyone through his own works, abilities, knowledge, or piety, but only through the gospel.

Or again, verse 11, "For thy namesake, O Lord, preserve my life." Luther wrote about this, God's name is honored when men declare that he gives life and righteousness by grace without merit on our part.

Well, as I read that, it seemed to me that however right his theology was, Luther was really reading that into the Psalm because the Psalm didn't actually say that. And I was about ready to put the book down and think it wouldn't be very helpful to me when I came upon these final comments.

Here's what Luther wrote: "Now someone might say to me, 'Can't you ever do anything but speak only about the righteousness, wisdom, and strength of God rather than of man? Always expounding scripture from the standpoint of God's righteousness and grace, always harping on the same old string, always singing the same old song?'"

That caught my attention because that's what I had been thinking. And then Luther went on. "To this I answer," said Luther, "let each one look to himself. But as for me, I confess whenever I found less in the scriptures than Christ I was never satisfied, but whenever I found more than Christ I never became poorer.

Therefore it seems to me to be true that God the Holy Spirit does not know and does not want to know anything besides Jesus Christ. For Christ is God's grace, mercy, righteousness, truth, wisdom, power, comfort, and salvation given to us by God without any merit on our part."

And then in the very final sentence, this great reformer talked about our sins and the need to weep over them, and then with humble awe to long earnestly for grace and mercy. Well, that may not be strict exposition, but it is the gospel and it's what Luther was talking about and the psalmist talked about when we're taught that the life, the entire life, of a Christian man or woman should be marked by repentance.

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