584_A forgiving, merciful redeemer (Psalm 130) Psalm 130 Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord! 2 O Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleas for mercy! 3 If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand? 4 But with you there is forgiveness, that you may be feared. 5 I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope; 6 my soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen for the morning, more than watchmen for the morning. 7 O Israel, hope in the Lord! For with the Lord there is steadfast love, and with him is plentiful redemption. 8 And he will redeem Israel from all his iniquities. A few years ago a well-known author told a story about accidentally sending an email to the wrong person. It was a short note—nothing dramatic—but within minutes he felt a strange dread. He had addressed a private message to an acquaintance he barely knew, and it contained a frustrated remark about a colleague they both had in common. “I wanted to unsend it,” he said later, “but life has no ‘undo’ button.” That night he hardly slept. The next morning he wrote a long apology. He admitted his fault, asked for forgiveness, and waited—embarrassed, exposed, and completely uncertain about what would happen. He had nothing to bargain with except an honest plea for mercy. That feeling of wishing there were a universal “undo” button touches something deep in the human experience. We all know what it means to say the wrong thing, make the wrong choice, hurt someone, or simply fall short of who we know we ought to be. Sometimes it is a private shame; other times it is a heavy, public failure. But the question is always the same: where do we turn when we’ve gone too far and we know it? Psalm 130 begins exactly there—at the bottom of the valley, where words choke out of a burdened heart. “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.” It is not a polished prayer, not a speech prepared for a religious ceremony. It is a plea from someone who has run out of excuses. The psalmist is not trying to impress God or negotiate with Him. He is simply asking to be heard: “Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleas for mercy!” The psalmist knows what we prefer to deny—that if God were to mark our iniquities, if He kept a strict record of every wrong thought, every wrong motive, every selfish act, no one could stand. We couldn’t argue our case. We couldn’t present our good deeds as payment. We could never demand blessings as if we had earned them. If we truly received wages for our sins, Scripture says the wage would be death, separation from God, and a life cut off from His presence. Jesus illustrated this perfectly in His parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector. One man stood in the temple boasting about his goodness,
