Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 1492
Delivered on Lord’s-Day Morning, August 31, 1879
“Who forgives all your iniquities.” Psalm 103:3.
I am a firm believer, not only in the Inspiration of the Psalms, themselves, but also in the correctness of their order. I believe that Paul was right when he called a certain Psalm, “the Second Psalm,” and that those are wrong who so disarrange the book as to make it the sixteenth. Anything to certain radicals in theology is better than the established order— they change for change sake! Many attempts have been made to arrange the Psalms chronologically and critics have shifted them about at their pleasure, according to this theory or that. Their wisdom is utter folly! The Psalms as they stand have an order most appropriate and instructive.
If time permitted I could illustrate this in many ways, but for this present it is more in the line of my discourse to observe that we could not have understood so well the 103rd Psalm if we had not first read the thirty-second. You remember how the 32nd begins? “Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man unto whom the Lord imputes not iniquity.” The pardoned man is blessed and then he blesses God. First the full, deep, effective blessing comes to him freely from the Lord and then he reflects the blessing and exclaims in joyful gratitude, “Bless the Lord, O my Soul.”
First, we are blessed with the pardon of sin and then we bless God for the pardon of sin. The Divine blessing enters our hearts loaded with good things. We gladly receive the heavenly messenger and then it begins to sing like a minstrel at a feast, nor does it long sing alone for all that is within the house of our manhood arouses itself to join in the strain and never is better music made this side the heavenly places than when all that is in us is stirred up to magnify and bless God’s holy name! Our text is one stanza of the never-ending “song of loves.”
In the verse before us the most wonderful point, to my mind, is the attribute of God which David selects for special praise—“All that is within me bless His holy name.” You might have expected to read, “gracious name,” or, “merciful name,” but you find it written “holy name.” Indeed, this is the emphatic point of the wonder of forgiven sin, that a holy God should pass it by! If God could wink at iniquity; if there were something in His Nature which rendered sin tolerable to Him, it would be a slight thing that He should allow it to go unpunished. But because He is a holy God—righteous, just and pure—who cannot look upon iniquity, whose fury burns against evil, therefore it becomes wonderful even to amazement that He should forgive our iniquities!
To accomplish this wonder, the miracle of the Cross was worked by unspeakable love. O man, you have but to gain a true idea of that holiness which is like a consuming fire, that holiness which even angels cannot gaze upon, but of which they sing, “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Hosts”—you have but to gain a glimpse of that unutterable perfection and you will abhor yourself in dust and ashes—and then you will marvel to think that the Thrice Holy One should have spared your guilty soul! How abhorrent is your depravity in His sight and yet He does not smite you! What are you but a mass of pollution? And yet the Infinitely Pure has considered you in love! What are you but a sink of impurity? And yet the All-perfect One has looked upon you in compassion!
Do you believe in Him and accept His dear Son? Then Grace has looked upon you! Before the glance of Omnipotent Love, your sin shall disappear and your iniquity shall forever vanish! O blessed deed of boundless mercy! If, indeed, the royal pardon has been sent to us from the court of Heaven, we may right heartily say, “Bless the Lord, O my Soul, and all that is within me bless His holy name, who forgives all your iniquities.” In these latter days, among the other wonderful things which have been developed, we have been enriched by a school of thinkers who kick against the doctrine of Justification by Faith and rebel against the idea of the Atonement and the forgiveness of sin.
The meager gospel which they proclaim to us poor fallen wretches is this—If you do wrong, there is no help for it. You will have to reap the consequences. If you do right you will, of course, bring your hearts into a healthier condition and you will be happy in proportion. But if you do wrong there is no hope for you—there will certainly come upon you the result of evil and you will suffer till you work yourself right. “Do not flatter yourself,” they say, “with any idea of Grace and mercy interposing—there is either no God, or if there is one, He will take no notice of your prayers, but will let you develop in your own way. The fictions of substitution, imputation and pardon are mere delusions, or pious subterfuges unworthy of rational men.”