Psalm 51:1-2

Now, I have five points to give you about these two verses. I will take them together as a whole.

What I want you to note, normally when we pray, we pray after the Model Prayer in Matthew 6:9, "Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be Your name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done." We have this very long salutation where we say God's name, we make sure He understands that we are speaking to Him, we give Him glory and praise, we say these other things as ways of showing God that we love Him and that sort of thing.

Well, David does not do that. He starts in immediately with, "Have mercy upon me, O God." That is the only way he addresses God as, O God. He does not spend a lot of time recounting God's name, He does not try to impress people or God with his knowledge of God's titles, or he does not get flowery at all. He is in no way trying to impress God here. He just gets right to the point. He has a serious problem, and skips all those details in a salutation that are more formal and all that. He just goes straight to the point here, and there is a reason for that.

He has just become aware of just how terrible and serious his sin is and this abrupt opening that we have in Psalm 51 indicates that David is in a hurry. He is in a hurry to be freed from his guilt. He is in a hurry to have the assurance of God's forgiveness. He does not want to wait an extra minute that it would take to address God by His former titles. Because it has all come crashing down upon him about how horrible a person he actually is and how terrible are the things that he had done. He did not want to wait another second in that condition. He wanted to be freed from the guilt that he felt.

So at this point, David feels extremely dirty, slimy even, contaminated, corrupt, despicable. In a word, he felt guilty as sin, as we like to say. Because he was, and he had been sitting in his own filth, if you will, for 9 or 10 months and he wants to be clean again. It is like a shuddery, slimy feeling, "Oh, I'm just such a terrible person!" Or as Paul says later, who is going to free me from this? "I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord." at the end of Romans 7. So that is how David felt here and so he plunges immediately into the heart of the matter, that he was a sinful man and he needed mercy right away—mercy and forgiveness.

Now, I did mention just a minute ago that David uses the name of God as Elohim, and that is the only name that he calls God throughout this psalm. It is always Elohim. Remember last time I gave a quick synopsis of Book Two of the Psalms, and I mentioned in that synopsis that the Book Two psalms use Elohim more than five times more than Yahweh. It is a very Elohim-centric part of the Psalms, if you will, and by doing this, the authors emphasize God as Creator, using His power, omniscience, and providence to fashion us into His image. Remember, He is a creator, He is still creating, and so David addresses Him by His Creator name, if you will. God; in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth and when He finished on Day 6, He was not actually done. He just changed His course a little and began creating spiritual sons and daughters. And that of course is ongoing.

So, here in Psalm 51, the use of the name Elohim highlights God's power to deliver and forgive, and, in David's lowly state, resume the spiritual creation of David in God's image. He was calling on all God's power to right the ship, the ship of David, king of Israel into the Kingdom. And no one else could do it. So he calls upon the great, powerful Elohim, who knows all and can provide grace and redemption, unlike any other being in the universe. He stands above all others by far in His abilities to do these things. That is, deliver, forgive, and create. (That was 2, by the way.)

Thirdly, as we have gone through many of the psalms, we know that the Psalms are full of parallelism. So that oftentimes a verse is a couplet and the two elements within the … . . .