He fulfilled all righteousness
and he washed us from our sins. And so the clean heart and the
right spirit that God gives enables us by faith to rely on the Lord
Jesus Christ as our righteousness before God and as the one who
has washed us from our sins. And so that's the evidence of
the clean heart. That's the evidence of a right
spirit. And when we sin, we experience the loss of comfort and a sense
of God's presence and our fellowship with Him and all that comes with
that guilt, that sense of felt guilt in our conscience. And
the only way we can be brought back is if God mercifully applies
to us afresh the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. And so, What
does that look like? Well, it looks like God repeating
to us and renewing to us the truth of the gospel that our
salvation is in the Lord Jesus Christ, that the cleansing of
our sin is in his precious blood, that our justification, our righteousness
before God is because in his obedience, in shedding his blood,
God has clothed us, as it were, with skins, as he did with Adam
and Eve in Genesis 321. He clothes us with the righteousness
of Christ. That reapplication and renewing
in us that Christ is our all, that is the work of God. We can't
make that happen. But he uses his word, and it
is the word of God in the very beginning when we are born of
God, and it's the word of God throughout our walk in this life. And that action, that activity
of God in the heart of the believer is the work of the Spirit of
God, and that's called walking by the Spirit in Romans chapter
8. It's looking to Christ in 1 John chapter 1, it's walking
in the light, it's confessing our sin and our sins, and it's
relying on the Lord Jesus Christ in all of that. The contrast,
the opposite of that, would be if we were to trust in ourselves
in some way, in part, or in whole, to think that we have to remove
our sin, we have to make atonement, we have to make up for the wrong
that we've done, and we have to set things right, we have
to do the right thing in order to have peace with God. But the
right thing, as Jesus told those people in John chapter six, the
work of God is that you believe on him whom he has sent. And
that's Christ. And so I bring all that up here
in this verse because David is praying that the Lord would forgive
his sin, blot out his transgressions, that he would hide his face from
his sins as he says in verse nine. But here he's saying to
create this clean heart and right spirit in him. It's a clean heart
and a right spirit that knows with God-given persuasion that
Christ is my all. And this knowledge is a persuasion
of confidence in Christ. It's a forsaking and an abandoning
of all expectation of finding confidence or finding reason
for confidence in myself. Now, that's called the comfort
of God. When David committed this sin,
it was a horrible sin. He calls it iniquity, and iniquity
means perversity, crookedness, a special kind of transgression
that's bad. And we see it mostly in holy
things. Well, David was given by God
this authority to have rule over all of the people of Israel,
and he abused his power. He had also the light that God
had shown him. He was a man, God said, after
his own heart. So he had the light of the knowledge of God
in his own experience. And yet he did this, and it wasn't
just a little sin, it was murder, it was adultery, it was cover
up, it was all that. And so he feels a tremendous
guilt because of the heinousness, the greatness of the evil of
his sin against God here. And you and I both, as we know
in the way that God works in our hearts to comfort us in spite
of our sin by directing us to the Lord Jesus Christ, you know
that that's God's work and we're dependent upon him. And we know
the result of that is that we're given this persuasion from God,
from scripture, but God gives it, he applies it to us. is persuasion
that we can trust Jesus Christ to do for us what he does for
sinners, because we're sinners and we're nothing, we can't make
any other claim. We have no greater commendation
than that we are in need of him to save us from our sins. That's
our only plea, is that we're sinners and that Christ came
into the world to save sinners and he actually accomplished
what he came to do. And so that's a clean heart and
a right spirit and this causes us to then have fellowship with
God. If we walk in the light as he
is in the light, we have fellowship with one another and the blood
of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sin. All right, so I mentioned
those things. Ezekiel chapter 36 is the place
where God promises, a new heart also will I give you and a new
spirit will I put within you. I will take away the stony heart
out of your flesh. I will give you a heart of flesh.
I will put my spirit within you. I will cause you to walk in my
statutes and you shall keep my judgments and do them. All of
the I wills are God's work, therefore God has to do this. And all of
them have to do with His Spirit given to us, and the Spirit of
God in us does what? He lifts up Christ to us and
gives us faith in Him. It's what Jesus said in John
chapter three, everyone who looked to the serpent uplifted by Moses
on the pole lived. So everyone believing Christ
crucified has eternal life. The one who was cursed for us
because he was made sin for us by God. All right. So I want
to go on now. that the judgments in Ezekiel
36, just in passing, that we keep, we cannot keep the judgments
of God. We can't keep his statutes ourselves. How many times in a day have
you ever kept one, one time in one way, the law of God? I think
if you, If you think that you have, then it shows that we have
not yet had a renewed spirit and a right spirit put within
us. Because a new spirit and a right spirit, a new heart,
causes us to see that we're guilty and helpless in our sin, and
that when we were that way, God commended His love toward us,
Christ died for the ungodly, and God reconciled us to Himself
by the death of His Son. If God did that for us through
Christ, then we can't do anything. We can't fulfill the law, but
looking to Christ, we do We also look to Christ to wash us from
our sins and so we, as it were, are offering, in looking to Christ,
the same thing Christ offered. We're saying nothing else can
be offered and no one else can offer himself but the Lord Jesus
Christ. And that's exactly what faith
does. And then faith comes to God on that basis. All right,
that's the work of God in us. He says in verse 11, cast me
not away from thy presence and take not thy Holy Spirit from
me. Now our sin against God makes us feel as though God has cast
us off because, remember how Adam felt when he heard the voice
of the Lord God walking in the cool of the garden, he hid. And that's what happens. Our
sin separates us from God. It says in Isaiah 59, your iniquities
have separated between you and your God and your sins have hit
his face from you and he will not hear you. That's the nature
of sin, it separates us. But the good news is that Christ
brought us near. In Ephesians chapter 2 it says,
you were all these things. You were alienated, you were
strangers from the covenants of promise, but we are now brought
nigh by the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. Brought near. Brought
near to God. And a lot could be said about
that, but God has reconciled us to himself by the death of
his son. Just remember that from Romans
5, 10, and you'll understand what it means to be brought near,
reconciled. Christ is called the King of
righteousness and the King of peace. King of righteousness
because he's the one who fulfilled all righteousness and peace because
he gives the peace resulting from His righteousness being
fulfilled in His own blood, He gives that peace to His people.
He established our peace with God. He brought us near. So near
that we are the sons of God. So near that we are as near to
God as He. And then notice in this verse
where he says, cast me not away from His presence. God doesn't
change His mind. And this is something we have
a hard time understanding because we only think, it's hard for
us to think that God is anything other than like ourselves. We
change our minds, we can't help it. From one moment to the next,
we have different opinions about things. And if you were to characterize
modern science, or even science over all the history of this
earth, the one thing you could say about science is that it
changes. Scientists are the oddest creatures. They are boasting in their knowledge,
and yet they're constantly admitting that they're getting a different
opinion about things. Science is unstable like water. Only the Lord Jesus Christ is
unchanging. God doesn't change. And so when
David says here, cast me not away and don't take your Holy
Spirit from me, It's not that God would, because God changes,
and I like this. We read this last week in Hosea
11.9. God is not a man. Therefore,
He's not going to visit upon His people His wrath. He's taking
it away. He Himself took it away. And
he says that also in Numbers 23, 19, Balaam was saying, God
is not a man that he should lie, neither the son of man that he
should repent. And in Romans 11, 29, it says, the gifts and
callings of God are without repentance. All these things teach us God
doesn't change. His love towards his people is
eternal. It has no beginning. It has no
end. It is as early as he himself
and as enduring and as unchanging as God is because God is love. and He is towards His people.
He has love towards them in Christ, and so His love can never be
taken away from them. Nothing can separate them from
His love. His love is stronger than death. All these things
Scripture teaches us God is not going to take His Spirit. But
sin causes us to feel that way. that we wonder, have I ever had
the spirit of God? It seems I can't believe. Don't
take your spirit from me. So these prayers naturally arise
out of this fear. But God teaches us to pray this
way, to not cast us as away and to not take his spirit because
that is who God is, to not do that. So the prayer is consistent
with who God is and his will and his purpose. And so isn't
it comforting, isn't it comforting when we find ourselves having
been taught of God, under the correction of God, then to take
back to Him the lesson He has taught us from His Word, using
His own words as the thoughts of our own heart, that He would
take away our sins for Christ's sake and receive us graciously,
as we read in Hosea chapter 14, verses 1, 2 and following. And
so David here is really praying God's own thoughts to not cast
away from his presence and not take his Holy Spirit away from
his people. All right, look at verse 12.
He says, Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation and uphold
me with thy free spirit. Now free here means willing. And the one who makes us willing
is the one who was exalted to the right hand of God to be a
prince and a savior to give repentance to Israel and the forgiveness
of sins. Remember Acts 5 verse 31. So
Christ makes us willing, and this is what is said in Psalm
110, where he says, Thy people shall be willing in the day of
thy power. Christ, in that verse, is said
to have the due of his youth. He's always young. His mercies
are always new to us. His power is always almighty
towards us for our salvation. He has, as it says in Hebrews
chapter 7, no beginning of days nor end of life. And He abides
a high priest continually, both by the virtue of His endless
life and also by the virtue of God's oath and by the virtue
of His holiness. He's never going to change and
therefore We have an eternal high priest who is able to save
us to the uttermost. He will restore us. He will give
us the joy of his salvation, and he will uphold us with his
willing spirit to always be independent upon Christ, living as those
who trust him. Now this is very important and
we'll have a lot more to say about that perhaps on Sunday,
trusting the Lord Jesus Christ. But look at verse 13. David says,
then when the Lord does this, when he restores to me the joy
of his salvation, then will I teach transgressors thy ways and sinners
shall be converted unto thee. It turns out that only someone
who has been saved by grace, and this is very important, only
someone who has been saved by grace can teach sinners to look
to Christ. Of course, the Lord Jesus Christ,
by His Spirit, teaches us this, and He says, look unto me and
be ye saved, all the ends of the earth, in Isaiah 45, verse
22. And in so many other places,
He tells His people to look to Him. because He is God and there's
no Savior beside Him. No one else can save but Him,
but our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. But in terms of men teaching
men, as David says he will do here, it requires a sinner to
teach another sinner where to look. A beggar tells beggars
where to go for bread. And a leper tells other lepers
where he received cleansing of his leprosy and so on. The blind
tell other blind men. And so we're given this high
privilege to carry this gospel that made us glad because we
could never be more glad than to find our salvation to be entirely
worked out for us by the Lord Jesus Christ. And that the one
who saved us is the Almighty, the all-merciful God who took
our nature, bore our sins, and endured the curse of God's wrath
against Him for our sins. That causes us to trust Him.
Who else could we trust but Him? Who else would we want to trust
but Him? And so this is the lesson that
we've learned, and so we can teach it. If we haven't learned
it, we can't teach it. But if we've been saved by grace,
then we can tell others that the Lord did this. The blind
man, when he was asked, who made you? You know, tell us what Jesus
did to you. How did you get to see? He said,
I don't know. One thing I know, I was blind,
but now I see. So, the Lord did this. And this
is echoed in 2 Corinthians chapter 4, where he says, Paul says,
we preach not ourselves. That's what a sinner saved by
grace does. We preach not ourselves, but
Christ Jesus the Lord. and ourselves your servants for
Jesus' sake. You see, that's what a sinner
does. We don't talk about, like John the Baptist, we don't want
to increase. We want, in the eyes of God's
people, we want Christ to increase. Now, in verse 14 of Psalm 51,
it says, deliver me from blood guiltiness, O God, thou God of
my salvation, and my tongue shall sing aloud of thy righteousness.
This verse is stupendous. I don't think there's a verse
more surprising than this truth in all of scripture. Read this
carefully with me. It says, deliver me from the
guilt of murder, blood guiltiness, O God, thou God of my salvation. And here's what will happen when
the Lord does that. My tongue shall sing aloud of
thy righteousness. How bold it is that David would
even suggest that God would deliver him from the guilt of his murder. That in itself is extreme boldness,
isn't it? That he would even have the thought
that he could ask God to deliver him from his guilt of murdering
Uriah. We have to let that set in. But
more than that, he goes on, he says, oh God, thou God of my
salvation, because this is what salvation is, is delivering us
from the guilt of murder. He says, and my tongue shall
sing aloud of thy righteousness. Who would have thought? How could
it have even entered into the heart of man? that God who is
holy and cannot look upon sin could deliver a murderer from
the guilt of his sin, and that would be righteousness for God
in doing that. Well, it's because all that God
does is righteous. And this shows to us the almighty
power of the Lord Jesus Christ that he could do what God requires
to be done in order to take away the guilt of the sins of his
people. And it would be righteousness
in doing it. Isn't that amazing? This was
spoken under the inspiration, obviously, of the Spirit of God.
And it says that if God, God, his covenant God, thou God of
my salvation, deliver him from the guilt of his murder of Uriah,
that he will sing aloud of God's righteousness. And this is amazing
grace. So that our salvation in Christ,
our salvation by God that is in Christ, displays, it commends,
it's God's resume, it sets forth, it calls to our highest regard
and our greatest notice the righteousness of God, that He would deliver
sinners from their crimes against Himself and His own law and do
so by the blood of His Son. That's amazing, and so that's
what David is saying here. God delivering us from the guilt
of murder. How? How does God do this? Because
he didn't deliver his son, but delivered him up for us all,
Romans 8, 32. That's how he made his son an
offering for sin. The other thing it shows us here
is that as The wages of sin is death, and David committed murder. He was guilty and therefore deserved
to die. But what happened? Did David
die for his sin? No, God put it away. But who
died was the Lord Jesus Christ. He died. the wages of sin came
upon him, and the wage for David's sin was death to the Lord Jesus
Christ. He was a substitute. He bore
our sins, for the transgression of my people was he stricken."
Isaiah 53, verse 8. So Christ shed his blood for
the perfect and complete salvation of sinners, not only that but
in doing that he makes them righteous and he sets forth God's uncompromising
righteousness in his own blood. That's amazing. It also shows
us something that is that causes us to be very sober-minded is
this, is that because Christ died for our sins, our sins put
him to death. We crucified him by our sins. All right, look at verse 15. He says, O Lord, open thou my
lips, and my mouth shall show forth thy praise. We praise God
when he saves us from our sins by Jesus Christ. Remember Revelation
chapter five, verse nine, And they sing the song of the redeemed. And they say, thou hast redeemed
us by thy blood out of every kindred, tongue, people, and
nation. and has made us kings and priests
to God. That's what those who are around
the throne and the 24 elders are saying. The 24 elders, those
who surround the throne of God and the Lamb are the redeemed
of the Lord, and they're singing this song in heaven. So in heaven,
we sing this song, but David is praying here that he would
also sing this song show forth God's praise in this way on earth. So both in heaven and on earth,
we who believe Christ, who are forgiven by the shed blood of
his Son, we sing praise to God. All right, this is our great
privilege and our great joy to be able to sing the praises of
our Redeemer. Verse 16 says, for thou desirest
not sacrifice, else would I give it. Thou delightest not in burnt
offering. So God doesn't desire any sacrifice
from men. Now, what David said here must
have come as a shock to all of the Levites and the entire Levitical
priesthood. God doesn't desire sacrifice? What are we doing then, sacrificing
all these animals and birds and things, if God doesn't want sacrifice? Well, they didn't understand,
if that came as a shock to them, that they didn't understand that
those sacrifices were shadows, and the shadows pointed to the
sacrifice of Christ. So God does not desire a sacrifice
from any man. He desires the sacrifice that
Christ made when he offered himself in sacrifice to God for the sins
of his people. He and God alone, him sacrificing
himself to God and offering a sin offering, a burnt offering for
the sins of his people to take away their sins. Now, God didn't
desire a sacrifice from us. He provided it. Remember Genesis
22, verse 8? My son, Abraham, told Isaac,
God will provide himself the lamb. And so Christ offered himself. And every believer is taught
by God's grace only this. We don't bring a sacrifice. We
trust Christ. We trust him only. And this is
the only consistent way that we can worship God by trusting
Christ, the one who offered himself, the one God provided. This is
what God did. This is what the Father speaks
of. This is what the Lord Jesus Christ
accomplished, and this is what the Holy Spirit tells us. Verse
17 says, the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken
and a contrite heart, O God, thou will not despise. Now, as
I said, as God produces in us a heart of faith in Christ and
in Him crucified, and He does also not despise the sinner who
comes to God and looks to Christ. But just as in this psalm, remember
now David was in denial. He was in hiding in hypocrisy
over this great perversity that he had done until God touched
his heart through Nathan the prophet. Through the word of
God, God arrested him. He first brought him low. He
made him feel the guilt and shame of his sin in the presence of
God, and then he directed him to the Lord Jesus Christ. This
is the way God works. The sacrifices of God are a broken
spirit. God himself produces that broken
spirit, and that broken and contrite heart is the work of God. God
doesn't despise his own work, does he? For a sinner to be brought
low and look to Christ only is for God to do the work of salvation
in the heart of a man or a woman. A truly broken heart has only
one place to look, and that's the Lord Jesus Christ. If we
look somewhere other than Christ, our heart is not broken and we
are proud. And that was the pride in Romans chapter 10 spoken of
where they refused to submit to the righteousness of God because
they refused to trust Christ. All right. Verse 18, he says,
Do good in thy good pleasure unto Zion. Build thou the walls
of Jerusalem. Now, Here we see that believing
sinners like David, when they pray for God to blot out their
sins and to give them a heart to trust Christ and to come to
God by Him, they also want God and they ask God to do all that
seems good to Him. Remember Hebrews chapter two,
verse 10, it says, it pleased him for whom are all things and
by whom are all things in bringing many sons to glory to make the
captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings. How did God
bring many sons to glory? He made Christ perfect as their
savior through sufferings, through his sufferings. That was God's
doing. It seemed good to God to do that. Now, Thinking about that, that
that is what seemed good to God, that pleased God to do that,
what would we want more in everything in our life than that God would
do what pleases Him, what seems good to Him in everything? If
that's what He did, offering up His Son in order to bring
many sons to glory, we can't mess it up. He will succeed. He will bring us to glory because
Christ actually did justify his people and made them holy by
his own shed blood. It can't fail. Christ outside
of our own experience. brought us to God in His own
shed blood and He will bring us to glory. And so this prayer
here then follows this confession of sin and the request from God,
the supplication to cover his sin and to give him a heart that
looks to Christ only in that. and to worship God in that. It
also asks God to do all of his good pleasure to Zion and build
the walls of Jerusalem. Now, Zion is the mountain on
which Jerusalem was built, and Zion represents, and Jerusalem
also, the kingdom of God and of Christ. It's the church built
on the Lord Jesus Christ. Hebrews chapter 12 teaches this. He says, you're not come to the
mount. that might be touched and that burn with fire and all
those things. But you are come unto Mount Zion
and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem. OK, so Hebrews 12 obviously is
closing the whole revelation of the new covenant in Christ's
blood. And the result of that is not
Jerusalem or Zion on Earth, but Jerusalem in heaven. the people
of God, the city of the living God, the spirits of just men
made perfect and Christ dwelling in them and where the blood was
shed. OK, so that's the Zion, that's
the Jerusalem and the walls, according to Isaiah 26, are the
walls of salvation. And so we have every reason to
trust God, don't we, in his saving work, to trust him in this saving
work. It says in Isaiah 26, in that
day shall this song be sung in the land of Judah. We have a
strong city. Salvation will God appoint for
walls and bulwarks. Salvation. Not that God would
build physical walls to save us, but salvation in Christ is
our wall. That is our shield. So the Lord
himself. And then he says in verse 2 of
Isaiah 26, Open ye the gates that the righteous nation which
keepeth the truth may enter in. Thou wilt keep him in perfect
peace, whose mind is stayed on thee, because he trusteth in
thee. What a blessed thing that is.
The one trusting Christ is in perfect peace. God did that.
Then in verse 19 of Psalm 51, it says, Then shalt thou be pleased
with the sacrifices of righteousness, with burnt offering and whole
burnt offering, then shall they offer bullocks upon thine altar.
Now, when God makes us know the Lord Jesus Christ and our salvation
in Him, that it is by His precious blood, and we see that by faith.
we bring to God and come to God by Christ alone, we don't think
of coming any other way, that's what faith does, then God is
pleased with our offering. It says in this verse, look at
it again, then shalt thou be pleased with the sacrifices of
righteousness with burnt offering, whole burnt offerings, then shall
they offer bullocks upon thine altar. But faith doesn't offer
an animal, does it? Faith looks to Christ who offered
himself. So just like Jesus told us in
John chapter six, that unless we eat the flesh of the son of
man and drink his blood, we have no life in us. So the same imagery
of offering these animals in the Old Testament is fulfilled
in faith. When we look to Christ, who offered
himself, then that is the fulfillment in our own hearts of the offering
of Jesus Christ for us. God has given to us to agree
with him, not only about ourselves and our sin, but about our righteousness
and about the cleansing of our sin, that Christ is all of our
righteousness and all of our justification before God. So
I wanna point that out. And notice that this is the final
note of a sinner, a song that was given by the spirit of God
himself concerning Christ and God's will and God's work and
God's glory. It shows here in this last verse
that and in the verse that preceded is verse 18 about Jerusalem and
Zion, that the entire church of God is praising God. It opens up and spends the first
17 verses with David praying as a single man. an individual. But here we see this is the church
of God. So the psalm is expanding now
to include all of God's people in its scope. So the confession
here of David is the same prayer, the same posture, the same faith
that God gives all of his people, that conviction of sin that we
in ourselves have sinned so grievously and perversely before God that
we're guilty of murder, the murder of the Lord Jesus Christ on the
cross because of our sin. And then unless God takes our
sin away, it will be ever before him. He will not give us his
spirit, but he did take it away in the Lord Jesus Christ. He
is all of our hope. And that is the contrite heart
God gives to us. So we see this expanding now
of it across the entire church. But I want to point out one more
thing in this psalm, and that is that the Lord Jesus Christ
is seen in this psalm. Now, obviously, he's seen in
the psalm because he's the one David is pleading, when he pleads
that God would blot out his transgressions, he would forgive and take away,
he would put away his sins from before God's face. That clearly
is seeing Christ in this psalm. But there's something else here,
and I wanna point this out to you here. As a sinner, I'm talking
to you and me as people who have sinned and have believed on the
Lord Jesus Christ and are trusting him to forgive us of our sins. Don't you know that when you
sin against God and you're confessing your sins, you wonder if you've
ever really confessed your sins as they ought to be confessed?
Do you ever think that way? Psalm 51 is David confessing
his sins. It's David's prayer. And we know
it's scripture, and therefore it's breathed out by the Spirit
of God. There's nothing that hurts worse. When I say hurts, I'm using that
pain, that burden, that shame, that feeling of guilt before
God in our souls than sin causes. The guilt of sin is the greatest
pain a person can feel before God, I believe. So there's nothing
worse than that. Nothing more painful to a believer
than when God touches us concerning our own sin, as he did David,
to know that our sin is against God, and that is our guilt, and
that brings pain. And that guilt of knowing that
we've sinned against God brings great pain. As Psalm 2511 says,
for thy namesake, O Lord, pardon mine iniquity, for it is great. And the weight of the guilt of
our own sin is proportional in our minds and in our souls to
the debt we owe God, like a man who owed 10,000 talents and can't
pay one, not one cent of it all. But David's sin, as it was, as
I pointed out earlier, is perverse, but the measure of his sin is
not the measure of the feeling of our sin. And that's something
that I want to try to get us to see here. that the measure
of the evil of our sin is the measure that God places on it.
And what is that measure? Well, we would say that the wages
of sin is death. So it's a very high, it's a high
offense against God because he requires the eternal death of
sinners. But it's more. Because the measure
of our sin and our guilt against God is the cross of Christ, isn't
it? Isn't that the measure of the
heinousness of our sin is what our sin, what God required for
our sin, that he would crucify his son? So that's the pain of
it. The other thing about sin is
not only is there nothing more painful or harmful than sin,
but there's nothing better than the forgiveness of sins. Remember
how Jesus told the man who was paralyzed, carried by four, he
said, Son, be of good cheer, thy sins be forgiven thee. Good
cheer? Is there anything of greater
cheer than to hear the Lord Jesus Christ say those words, your
sins are forgiven you? So just as sin is the most painful
thing, so the forgiveness of sins by God is the most glad
thing too. Even the feet of them that preach
the gospel is considered beautiful. Those that publish peace to Zion,
that tell Zion your God reigns because he conquered our enemies,
sin, death, hell, the devil, the curse of the law, his own
wrath has been taken away, he did it. He is our salvation,
so there's nothing better than the forgiveness of sins to a
sinner. But there's one more thing I
want to point out before we close this psalm, and that is this. The Lord Jesus Christ himself
was made sin for us. Now, we know that he is the wisdom
of God. We know that the Lord Jesus knows
our sin way more, way better than we know it ourselves, doesn't
He? As God, He knows how offensive our sins are. He's the wisdom
of God. He searches the hearts. He tries
the reins, the inner parts of man. He knows the holiness of
God. He's the wisdom of God. How much
then, how much more than He who was made sin would be able to
say, as is said in this psalm, all the things of the offense
that sin is to God and the crying and the weeping and the asking
of God to take away that sin. The Lord Jesus Christ was made
sin for us and the evil of our sins was put on him. He never
knew sin. He didn't commit sin. He never
thought sin. He never spoke anything that
was sinful. And yet he was made sin. He was made to feel the
guilt of our sins as his own guilt before God. He was made
to feel the filth and reproach of it. God allowed the most perverse
people on earth, the religious and the irreligious people, to
have their way with him in a company, in the greatest perversion of
justice, in pretense against God. And they accused him of
things he never did. And they put him to death for
things that they knew he was not guilty. And yet he was put
to death by God. God delivered him up. God didn't
spare his son. He who knew no sin was made sin
for us. So that's the other thing. And
then remember in Leviticus 16, the high priest laid his hands
on the head of the scapegoat. And I refer to this often because
it's so important. The Lord Jesus Christ is our
High Priest. The Lord Jesus Christ is the
Lamb of God. He, as the fulfillment of that
High Priest, actually transferred all of the sins of all of his
people upon his own head. And then he was sent out into
the land uninhabited, the land of forgetfulness, of forsaking.
My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me? So here we see that
he was made sin for us and he owned those sins. And that's
what Psalm 51 is, isn't it? David owning his sins. He says,
For I acknowledge my sin, my transgression, my sin is ever
before thee, that thou mightest be justified in thy sayings and
overcome when thou art judged. So the Lord Jesus Christ confessed
our sins as His own before God and did so in order that God
would be demonstrating His justice when He poured out His wrath
upon Him. And that shows us that He Himself bore our sins in His
own body on the tree, as it says in 1 Peter 2, verse 24. David felt tremendous guilt because
he sinned against God's great goodness towards him and against
God's great light that was given to him and against the position
God had placed him in when he abused his power as king and
did what he did and tried to cover it up as a hypocrite. But more than any man, the Lord
Jesus Christ knew what sin was when He confessed and owned our
sins and felt the shame and the weight of that guilt that was
made His. Who ever truly confessed sin
but the Lord Jesus Christ? And whoever truly was made contrite
in heart as He was?" Have you ever thought about that? Sometimes
we wonder, Can I actually confess my sins even as David did? Whoever
truly knew the holiness of God against whom we sinned as the
Lord Jesus Christ, and whoever was punished for sins and cursed
and allowed to be so humiliated by the devil and all of his kingdom
when Christ bore the weight and the guilt and the punishment
of our sins. So when you think about Psalm
51, Don't forget that in this psalm we see the Lord Jesus Christ
prominently set forth and God's righteousness in doing so. What
greater righteousness could there be than that God would pay the
full cost in order to deliver us from the guilt of our sins
when he himself in his own son willingly made himself what he
made himself to be sin for us who knew no sin that we might
be made the righteousness of God in him And don't trust in
your confession, don't trust in your sorrow, don't trust in
your tears. Trust the Lord Jesus Christ for
His confession and sorrow and tears and stripes and all the
things that He suffered for our sins. Because as our surety and
our substitute, our sins were dealt with in Him. And the confession
of our sins is merely the outworking of what he did when God blesses
us with a contrite spirit to look to Christ only. Let's pray. Father, we pray that you would
be pleased to give us this grace to know the way that you dealt
with sin. in our Savior, the Lord Jesus
Christ, that it was a personal thing. He loved the church and
gave himself for it. He did this. He loved me and
gave himself for me, and therefore my sins are taken away. I have
nothing to plead before God, nothing to hope in or trust,
and don't want anything but Him, given and offered and accepted
and enthroned in glory for all that He did. He truly put away
the sins of His people, and that's His name, Jesus, our Savior. In His name we pray, amen.