EXPLANATORY NOTES AND QUAINT SAYINGS (3)

Verse 5.—“Behold I was shapen in iniquity,” etc. He said not, “Behold, this evil have I done,” but “Behold I was conceived in sin,” etc. He says not, “Behold, I, David,” a king, that have received such-and-such mercies from God, who would have given me more (as God told him), who had that entire communion with him, and graces from him, I, even I, have done this evil. No; he keeps it in till he came to this, and then his heart could hold no longer: “Oh, behold I was conceived in sin.” His debasement was at his auge here. And to whom is it he uttered this behold? What, to man? No; his meaning is not to call on men, q.d., O ye sons of men, behold! That is but his secondary aim, arising out of his having penned it, and delivered it unto the church; but when he uttered it, it was to God, or rather afore God, and yet not as calling on God to behold, for that needed not. David had elsewhere said, “God looked down,” etc., “and beheld the sons of men,” when speaking of this very corruption. He therefore knew God beheld it sufficiently; but he utters it afore God, or, as spoken of himself between God and himself, thereby to express his own astonishment and amazement at the sight and conviction of this corruption, and at the sight of what a monster he saw himself to be in the sight of God in respect of this sin. It was a behold of astonishment at himself, as before the great and holy God; and therefore it was he seconds and follows it with another behold made unto God: “Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts.” And it is as if he had said in both, Oh, how am I in every way overwhelmed, whilst with one eye cast on myself I see how infinitely corrupt I am in the very constitution of my nature; and with the other eye I behold and consider what an infinite holy God thou art in thy nature and being, and what an holiness it is which thou requirest. I am utterly overwhelmed in the intuition of both these, and able to behold no more, nor look up unto thee, O holy God!—Thomas Goodwin.

Verse 5.—“Behold, I was shapen in iniquity,” etc. We are not to suppose that David here reflects upon his parents as the medium of transmitting to him the elements of moral evil; and that by the introduction of the doctrine of original sin he intended to extenuate the enormity of his own crimes. On the contrary, we are to regard him as afflicting himself by the humbling consideration that his very nature was fallen, that his transgressions flowed from a heart naturally at enmity with God; that he was not a sinner by accident, but by a depravity of purpose extending to the inmost desires and purposes of the soul; that there was “a law in his members, warring against the law of his mind, and bringing him into captivity to the law of sin and death” (Rom. vii. 23); and that he was one of a race of guilty beings, none of whom could plead an exemption from an evil heart of unbelief, ready at all times to depart from the living God. Till we see sin in the fountain of the heart, we shall never truly mourn over it in the life and conversation.—John Morison.

Verse 5.—“Behold, I was shapen in iniquity.” He is not low enough down yet, he must come lower. It is not enough for him to confess that the water is filthy at the pool; he goes back to the source, and confesses that the whole river is polluted up to its head. The source is unclean; the very spring wells forth foul waters.—Thomas Alexander.

Verse 5.—“I was shapen in iniquity.” I shall not easily be persuaded to think that parents, who are sinners themselves and too much under the influence of bad affections and passions, will be very likely to produce children without transmitting to them some of those disorders and corruptions of nature with which they themselves are infected. And if this be a difficulty, I would beg leave to observe that it is a difficulty which affects natural as well as revealed religion. Since we must take human nature as it is, and if it be really in a state of disorder and corruption, and cannot be otherwise, considering the common law of its production, the difficulty must have been as ancient as the first man that was born; and therefore can be no objection against the truth of revelation, but it must be equally so against natural religion, which must equally allow the thing, if it be in reality a fact, with revelation itself.—Samuel Chandler.

Verse 5.—Infants are no innocents, being born with original sin; the first sheet wherein they are wrapped is woven of sin, shame, blood, and filth. Ezek. xvi. 4, etc. They are said to sin as they were in the loins of Adam, just as Levi is said to pay tithes to Melchisedek, even in the loins of his forefather Abraham (Heb. vii. 9, 10); otherwise infants would not die, for death is the wages of sin (Rom. vi. 23); and the reign of death is procured by the reign of sin, which hath reigned over all mankind except Christ. All are sinners, infected with the guilt and filth of sin; the rot (according to the vulgar saying) overrunneth the whole flock. Hence David reflects upon original sin as the cause of all his actuals, saying, “Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me.” Thus man’s malady begins betimes, even in our conception: this subtle serpent sowed his tares very early, so that we are all “born in sin.” John ix. 34.—Christopher Ness’s “Divine Legacy,” 1700.

Verse 5.—Notwithstanding all that Grotius and others have said to the contrary, I believe David to speak here of what is commonly called original sin; the propensity to evil which every man brings into the world with him, and which is the fruitful source whence all transgression proceeds.—Adam Clarke.

Verse 6.—“Behold.” Before he entereth on any of the parts of the verse he useth the particle of admiration, “Behold;” which he never useth but in some remarkable manner, thereby the more to raise us up to the contemplation of such great matters to be told.—Archibald Symson.

Verse 6.—“Thou desirest truth in the inward parts.” Thou lovest truth, not shadows or images, but realities; thou lovest truth in the inward parts, inside truth, a true heart, a pure conscience: he is a Christian who is one inwardly. Rom. ii. 29.—John Ball.

Verse 6.—“Truth in the inward parts.” A great French pear is called le bon Chretien, the good Christian, because they say it is never rotten at the core.—George Swinnock.

Verse 6.—“In the hidden part thou shalt make me to know wisdom.” Piscator, in his annotations on this Psalm, puts this sense upon it, that David should bless God for having made him to know this special wisdom in this hidden thing or matter, and had brought the knowledge thereof home, as a point of saving wisdom, to the hidden man of his heart, so as to see fully and clearly this native corruption as the cause of all sin, and on that account to cause him to lay it to heart.—Thomas Goodwin.

Verse 6.—“In the hidden part thou shalt make me to know wisdom.” It is one thing to be wise headed and wise tongued, and another to be wise hearted, and therefore in Scripture nothing more ordinary than to set forth wisdom that is true indeed by the heart. God himself is said to be wise of heart. Foolish creatures are like Ephraim, “a silly dove without heart.” They may have head enough, notion enough, flashing light, appearing to others enough, but they are without a heart; they have not the great work there, a new head and an old heart, a full head and an empty heart, a light and burning profession, and a dark, dead, and cold heart; he that takes up in such a condition is a fool and an errant fool.—John Murcot, 1657.

Verse 6.—“And in the hidden part thou shalt make me to know wisdom.” Some read it, “In the hidden part thou hadst made me to know wisdom;” that thou hadst done, but I have fallen from my high state, marred thy handiwork. “By one plunge into lust I have fallen and fouled myself.”—Arthur Jackson.

Verse 6.—The copulative particle which connects the two clauses, implies the correspondence between the revelation of the divine will on the one part and the desire and prayer of the penitent heart on the other. “Thou desirest truth in the inward parts: and in the hidden part thou shalt make me to know wisdom.” “What I want thou hast promised to give.” Repentance and faith are the gifts of God, and the awakened mind is conscious that they are so.—Thomas T. Biddulph.

Verses 6-8.—The right conviction of sin comprehends its being acknowledged not only in our works, but also in our entire being.—Augustus F. Tholuck.

Verse 7.—“Purge me with hyssop.” Do I well to prescribe to God with that he shall purge me, as though I knew all God’s medicines as well as himself? and which is worse, I to prescribe and he to administer? But excuse me, O my soul, it is not I that prescribe it to God, it is God that prescribes it to me; for hyssop is his own receipt, and one of the ingredients prescribed by himself to make the water of separation for curing the leprosy.... I must confess I was glad at heart when I first heard hyssop spoken of; to think I should be purged so gently, and with a thing that may so easily be had, for hyssop grows in every garden; and then I thought I might go fetch it thence and purge myself, but now I perceive this is not the hyssop of which Solomon writ when he writ from the cedar to the hyssop; but this hyssop is rather the herb grace, which never grew in garden but in that of Paradise, and which none can fetch thence unless God himself deliver it. The truth is, this hyssop was sometimes a cedar; the highest of all trees became the lowest of all shrubs, only to be made this hyssop for us: for Christ indeed is the true hyssop, and his blood the juice of hyssop that only can purge away my sins.—Sir Richard Baker.

Verse 7.—“Purge me with hyssop.” תְּחַטְּאֵנִי. Properly, expiate my sin with hyssop. The Psalmist alludes to the purification from the leprosy (Levit. xiv. 52), or from the touch of a dead body (Num. xix. 19), both of which were to be done by the sprinkling of water and other things with hyssop.—Samuel Chandler.

Verse 7.—“Hyssop.” The lasaf or asaf, the caper plant, the bright green creeper which climbs out of the fissures of the rocks in the Sinaitic valleys, has been identified on grounds of great probability with the “hyssop” or ezob of Scripture; and thus explains whence came the green branches used, even in the desert, for sprinkling the water over the tents of the Israelites.—Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, in “Sinai and Palestine.” 1864.

Verse 7.—“Hyssop.” Between twenty and thirty different plants have been proposed, but no one of them comes so near the above requirements as the caper plant (Capparis spinosa). It grows “out of the wall;” its stalks supply both bunch and rod admirably fitted for the ends indicated; and it has ever been esteemed in the East as possessing cleansing properties.—John Duns, D.D., in “Biblical Natural Science.”

Verse 7.—“Hyssop.” What a pity that Solomon’s botany is lost, in which he spoke of trees, from the cedar that is in Lebanon to the hyssop that springeth out of the wall! The cedar we know, but what is the “hyssop” of the royal botanist? Mr. B——, French consul of this city [Sidon], and an enthusiastic botanist, exhibited to me two varieties of hyssop; one, called zatar by the Arabs, having the fragrance of thyme, with a hot pungent taste, and long, slender stems. A bunch of these would answer very well for sprinkling the paschal and sacrificial blood on the lintel and posts of the doors, and over the persons and houses cleansed from the leprosy. Mr. B——, however, thinks that a very small green plant, like a moss which covers old walls in damp places, is the “hyssop” of Solomon. This I doubt. The other kind also springs out of walls, those of the gardens especially, and was much more likely to attract the attention of the royal student.—W. M. Thomson, D.D., in “The Land and the Book.”

Verse 7.—The paraphrase of this verse in the Chaldee is: “Thou wilt sprinkle me like the priest, which sprinkleth the unclean with the purifying waters, with hyssop, with the ashes of an heifer, and I shall be clean.”—John Morison.

Verse 7.—“I shall be whiter than snow.” But how is this possible? All the dyers upon earth cannot dye a red into white; and how, then, is it possible that my sins which are as red as scarlet should ever be made as white as snow? Indeed such retrogradation is no work of human art; it must be only his doing who brought the sun ten degrees back in the dial of Ahaz: for God hath a nitre of grace that can bring not only the redness of scarlet sins, but even the blackness of deadly sins, into its native purity and whiteness again. But say it be possible, yet what need is there of so great a whiteness, as to be “whiter than snow”? seeing snow is not as paries dealbatus, a painted wall, white without and foul within; but it is white, intus et in cute, within and without, throughout and all over; and what eye so curious but such a whiteness may content? Yet such a whiteness will not serve, for I may be as white as snow and yet a leper still; as it is said of Gehazi that “he went from Elisha a leper as white as snow;” it must be therefore whiter than snow. And such a whiteness it is that God’s washing works upon us, makes within us; for no snow is so white in the eyes of men as a soul cleansed from sin is in the sight of God. And yet, a whiter whiteness than this too; for being purged from sin we shall, induere stolam album, put on the white robe; and this is a whiteness as much whiter than snow as angelical whiteness is more than elemental.—Sir Richard Baker.