Create in Me a Clean Heart
1 For the Chief Musician. A Psalm by David, when Nathan the prophet came to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba. Have mercy on me, God, according to your loving kindness. According to the multitude of your tender mercies, blot out my transgressions. 2 Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity. Cleanse me from my sin. 3 For I know my transgressions. My sin is constantly before me. 4 Against you, and you only, I have sinned, and done that which is evil in your sight, so you may be proved right when you speak, and justified when you judge. 5 Behold, I was born in iniquity. My mother conceived me in sin. 6 Behold, you desire truth in the inward parts. You teach me wisdom in the inmost place. 7 Purify me with hyssop, and I will be clean. Wash me, and I will be whiter than snow. 8 Let me hear joy and gladness, that the bones which you have broken may rejoice. 9 Hide your face from my sins, and blot out all of my iniquities. 10 Create in me a clean heart, O God. Renew a right spirit within me. 11 Don’t throw me from your presence, and don’t take your Holy Spirit from me. 12 Restore to me the joy of your salvation. Uphold me with a willing spirit. 13 Then I will teach transgressors your ways. Sinners will be converted to you. 14 Deliver me from the guilt of bloodshed, O God, the God of my salvation. My tongue will sing aloud of your righteousness. 15 Lord, open my lips. My mouth will declare your praise. 16 For you don’t delight in sacrifice, or else I would give it. You have no pleasure in burnt offering. 17 The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit. O God, you will not despise a broken and contrite heart. 18 Do well in your good pleasure to Zion. Build the walls of Jerusalem. 19 Then you will delight in the sacrifices of righteousness, in burnt offerings and in whole burnt offerings. Then they will offer bulls on your altar.
The most complete confession in Scripture, made by a man who had committed adultery and arranged a murder to cover it.
For the Chief Musician. A Psalm by David, when Nathan the prophet came to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba. Have mercy on me, God, according to your loving kindness. According to the multitude of your tender mercies, blot out my transgressions.
The heading names the occasion without softening it. Behind this psalm are an adultery, an attempted deception, a murder arranged by letter, and roughly a year of silence before a prophet walked in and told a story about a lamb 2 Samuel 12:7.
For the Chief Musician. A Psalm by David, when Nathan the prophet came to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba. Have mercy on me, God, according to your loving kindness. According to the multitude of your tender mercies, blot out my transgressions.
The standard is named in the first line and it is not proportion. He does not ask for what he deserves or for a reduced sentence; the measure requested is God's own loving kindness, which is the only measure under which this could go well.
Three verbs follow: blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity. Cleanse me from my sin Psalms 51:1–2. Erasing a record, scrubbing a garment, and the ritual word for declaring something fit to approach God. Three different pictures of the same need.
Against you, and you only, I have sinned, and done that which is evil in your sight, so you may be proved right when you speak, and justified when you judge.
The hardest line, given that a woman was used and a man was killed. It is not a claim that Uriah was unharmed. It is a statement about what sin ultimately is: the offense against a neighbor is real and is prosecutable in a human court, and what makes it sin rather than merely crime is that it is committed against God. David had already been told he despised the commandment of Yahweh 2 Samuel 12:9, and this is him agreeing.
Behold, I was born in iniquity. My mother conceived me in sin.
He is not blaming his parents or offering an excuse — the psalm has just accepted full responsibility. He is saying that the adultery was not an aberration in an otherwise sound man but the surfacing of something that goes all the way down, and the discovery has ruined any hope of self-repair.
Purify me with hyssop, and I will be clean. Wash me, and I will be whiter than snow.
Hyssop is the brush used to apply blood at the Passover Exodus 12:22 and in the cleansing of a leper. He asks to be treated as the unclean were treated, by a rite he cannot perform for himself.
Create in me a clean heart, O God. Renew a right spirit within me.
The verb is the one used in the first sentence of Genesis, and in Scripture it never has a human subject. He is not asking for his heart to be cleaned but for one to be made, from nothing, which is an admission that the old one is past repair.
Restore to me the joy of your salvation. Uphold me with a willing spirit.
Not the salvation — the joy of it. He knows what he still has and what he has lost.
The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit. O God, you will not despise a broken and contrite heart.
A king with unlimited access to the altar says that the offering God wants is the one thing he can bring — and it is the thing he brought.
settled What this mark means