Biblion Bible Commentary
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Create in Me a Clean Heart
Psalms 51:1-19
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. · WEB
The most complete confession in Scripture, made by a man who had committed adultery and arranged a murder to cover it.
A Psalm by David, when Nathan the prophet came to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba Psalms 51:1.
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.
Have mercy on me, God, according to your loving kindness Psalms 51:1.
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 Psalms 51:4.
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 Psalms 51:5.
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 Psalms 51:7.
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 Psalms 51:10.
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 Psalms 51:12. 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 Psalms 51:17.
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.
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