Psalms 51:7-9

His Prayer For Forgiveness And For The Removal Of His Sins (Psalms 51:7).

David now turns to the question of how his sins can be removed from him. He recognises that outward ritual would be irrelevant (‘you do not desire sacrifice, or else I would give it' - Psalms 51:16). There was no prescription for murder and adultery within the cult. That only knew of execution as the way of dealing with them. What David required was the activity of God Himself in removing his sin.

Psalms 51:7

‘Purify me with hyssop, and I will be clean,

Launder me, and I will be whiter than snow.

Make me to hear joy and gladness,

That the bones which you have broken may rejoice.

Hide your face from my sins,

And blot out all my iniquities.

‘Purify me with hyssop, and I shall be clean.' David uses the language of the cult when he refers to being ‘purified with hyssop'. Hyssop was a common plant that grew on walls and was used as a means of sprinkling water and blood in the cult (see Exodus 12:22; Leviticus 14:4 ff.; Numbers 19:6 ff., Numbers 19:18 ff.). David, in effect, is calling on God to do the same for him. Let Him, as it were, acting as his priest, purify him through the blood of sprinkling (compare 1 Peter 1:2). In mind may have been the water of purification, water containing sacrificial ashes (Numbers 19:18). But David is probably rising above the cult to the activity of God Himself (compare Psalms 51:16). He knew that there was no cosy way out for what he had done. He had sinned ‘with a high hand'. All depended on God to act. His sins were such that only the direct action of God could deal with them. It was an unconscious prophecy that one day God would provide a means of cleansing separate from the cult.

‘Launder me, and I shall be whiter than snow.' That this goes far beyond the cult comes out in the description. He wants God to act directly in laundering him. He wants his heart laundering. And he wants to be ‘whiter than snow'. A similar picture is used in Isaiah 1:16, ‘bathe yourselves, make yourselves clean, put away the evil of your doings from before My eyes, cease to do evil, learn to do well -- though your sins be as scarlet they will be  as white as snow.' The difference lies in the fact that in Isaiah it was people who had to do it by changing the course of their lives, whilst here David recognises that for him only God can do it. But even in Isaiah there is no reference to the cult, for he has previously dismissed the cult as achieving nothing (Isaiah 1:11), and in doing so he has ignored cult washing of clothes and cleansing altogether. Thus they do not appear to have been in Isaiah's mind. The same is probably true of David here. He is thinking of the launderer as providing his metaphor, not the cult. But he certainly wants the evil of his doings to be put away from before God's eyes (Psalms 51:4 b, Psalms 51:9), which he recognises can only be achieved by God's activity.

‘Make me to hear joy and gladness, that the bones which you have broken may rejoice.' Having been faced up to his sins David became aware that something of the joy and gladness that he had once known had been lost. Outwardly his religious life continued the same, but he was aware that for some time the inward joy and gladness had been missing (it could hardly have been otherwise). And that had been accentuated once he was faced up with his guilt. So now, in his hope of forgiveness and cleansing, and of the renewing of his spiritual life (Psalms 51:10), he prays that his former joy in God might be restored (compare Psalms 51:12). He wants to hear his inner self rejoicing in God. The breaking of the bones is not literal. The bones were seen as representing the man within. And that man within had been broken. It had been crushed and had lost the joy of God's presence. He wanted to be restored to God's favour. Paradoxically, as he will point out later, the remedy for his broken bones is a broken heart (Psalms 51:17).

‘Hide your face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities.' He asks God to hide away His face from his sins, in other words not to look on them, to treat them as something that does not come before His gaze. We can compare the words of Hezekiah, ‘you have cast all my sins behind your back' (Isaiah 38:17). Indeed, he wants them ‘blotted out' (compare Psalms 51:1; Isaiah 43:25; Isaiah 44:22), in the same way as He had blotted out Amalek from men's memory (Exodus 17:14; Deuteronomy 25:19), had blotted man out at the Flood (Genesis 6:7; Genesis 7:4; Genesis 7:23), and would blot out sinners from His book (Exodus 32:33; Deuteronomy 9:14; Deuteronomy 29:20), from the book of the living (Psalms 69:28). He wanted his sins to be no more.