Today’s Passage: Psalm 130
This is a song of ascents, one of the psalms the pilgrims sang as they climbed the road up to Jerusalem, and it begins down in the low places. A voice cries out from the depths, and it asks an honest question: if the LORD kept a record of our sins, who among us could ever stand before Him? No one could, and the psalm knows it. But then comes the word that changes everything, that with Him there is forgiveness. From there the song opens out into plenteous redemption and a promise that holds, that He will redeem His people from all their iniquity. This is the same gospel David sang in Psalm 32, not a second and lesser one, and we need not stand and wonder whether this forgiveness will finally hold. With the LORD is redemption in abundance.
As you read, hold this: Out of the depths I cry. With You there is forgiveness.
Psalm 130:1-2 (BSB)
A song of ascents. ¹ Out of the depths I cry to You, O LORD! ² O Lord, hear my voice; let Your ears be attentive to my plea for mercy.
Context On the road, and from the depths
The heading over this psalm is spare, just the words a song of ascents, with no author’s name attached to it. These were the songs the pilgrims sang as they made their way uphill to worship. The church has long kept this one among the old penitential psalms as well, because confession is what opens it and confession is what shapes everything that follows. We do not need much said about the road or the history to find our way in. The meal here is the cry and the forgiveness.
Out of the depths, the psalm says, and it never tells us which depths. No illness is named here, and no enemy either. The phrase is left unlocated on purpose, and that is exactly why it has traveled so far and fit itself to so many lives. Verse 2 asks for only one thing, that the LORD would hear this voice and let His ears be attentive to it. Everything else in the psalm leans its weight on that single request.
Psalm 130:3-4 (BSB)
³ If You, O LORD, kept track of iniquities, then who, O Lord, could stand? ⁴ But with You there is forgiveness, so that You may be feared.
The question in verse 3 expects only one answer, and the answer is no one at all. Verse 4 does not soften that verdict in the slightest. Instead it lays down the one fact that changes everything that comes after it, that with the LORD there is forgiveness. And then it adds a purpose we might never have guessed, so that You may be feared. Forgiveness does not shrink our reverence for God. It is the very thing that grows it.
This is the same gospel that David sang in Psalm 32 and that Paul later preached straight out of that psalm: blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, righteousness credited to him apart from any works of his own. It is not a new way of being made right with God, and it is not a ritual that earns the standing. It is simply this, that with the LORD there is forgiveness.
Psalm 130:5-6 (BSB)
⁵ I wait for the LORD; my soul does wait, and in His word I put my hope. ⁶ My soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen wait for the morning—more than watchmen wait for the morning.
Word study Wait, then wait again
Verse 5 reaches for the word קָוָה (qavah), Strong’s H6960, and uses it twice over, I wait and my soul waits, before it turns to יָחַל (yachal), H3176, for the hope that is tied to His word. Verse 6 does not reuse those verbs at all. What it repeats instead is a picture, the watchmen, שֹׁמְרִים (shomerim), from shamar, H8104. The line is stated once and then stated again, word for word, the only full repetition anywhere in the psalm.
A watchman never wonders whether the morning will come, for he knows well that it will. What he does not know is how much of the night is still left to stand through, and that is exactly where the waiting lives. This is not the anxious hope that God might possibly answer. It is the settled waiting of someone who already knows how the story ends and yet still has to live out the long hours until it does.
Psalm 130:7-8 (BSB)
⁷ O Israel, put your hope in the LORD, for with the LORD is loving devotion, and with Him is redemption in abundance. ⁸ And He will redeem Israel from all iniquity.
Study notes Redemption in abundance
Here the address shifts outward, from one voice to all of O Israel. What a single soul had laid hold of, a whole people is now told to hope in as well: loving devotion, and redemption in abundance. Verse 8 comes as a promise rather than a request. He will redeem Israel from all iniquity, and that little word all is the one to linger over.
"In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace." Ephesians 1:7 (BSB)
The riches of His grace, and redemption in abundance: the two phrases are saying the same thing. The believer whom God redeems, God also keeps. That is one true sentence and not a second gospel, nor is it a matter left open for debate. The voice that opened this psalm out of the depths ends by handing that same confidence to everyone who will ever pray these words after him.
Out of the depths I cry. With You there is forgiveness.