Continuing our meditations on the Psalms during midweek Evening Prayer:
Psalm 6 is the first of the seven penitential psalms. Immediately striking is the psalmist’s concern about divine wrath directed towards himself. In Ps. 2, God’s anger was against the rebellious; but here, the psalmist himself fears God’s wrath: “O Lord, rebuke me not in your anger, nor discipline me in your wrath.”
God’s anger is not like ours. Our anger rises and falls based on mood swings or emotional reactions to external stimuli. But the wrath of God is not a divine temper tantrum. Instead, it is His deliberate, just response to mankind that persists in rebellion despite God’s constant love and care, and call to repentance. So the wrath of God is His action against the hard-hearted, the unrepentant; the anger of God comes against those who have refused His grace.
So what does it mean when we pray this psalm? It means that we recognize ourselves in that description. Know yourself, and you will know a stubborn, impenitent person with the capacity for a very hard heart. Praying this psalm is a prayer for deliverance from such a heart, and a prayer for preservation against being given over to our own stubborn pride.
Rom. 1 describes the wrath of God as being revealed: “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven.” The fact that it is revealed means we do not have to wonder or guess about it; it is manifest, evident. Against what is this wrath revealed? “Against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness.” Paul will go on in Romans to condemn every man, including himself, under that wrath.
In the end, that wrath culminates in God letting man go his own way: “Therefore God also gave them up to uncleanness, in the lusts of their hearts.” God’s wrath is carried out in man having his own way, where God lets him go, abandoning him to the folly of his own evil choices.
Know your own heart, and you will know what a fearful thing that is. It need not be a monumental, headline-grabbing sort of sin. It is the deliberateness of it, the willful rejection of the commandment of God, that leads to a hardened heart, and sets us on the path to be “given over.”
Sin has also entered our bodies. Sin weakens us. “Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am languishing; heal me, O Lord, for my bones are troubled.” Sin will eventually kill us. The doctor may assess the cause of death as heart disease, cancer, or a truck running us down; but the real cause of death is always sin. The death of a person ends his relationship with God: “For in death there is no remembrance of you; in Sheol who will give you praise?”
So Psalm 6 takes sin seriously. It results in death, and cuts us off from God. Our sins are not simply mistakes, “oopsies” that we can say a quick apology for and move on. Our sins are willful affronts to the God who made us and rules over us. Our sins require the shedding of blood. Look at the cross, and see the seriousness of your sins, what their cost is. But look at the cross as well, and see God’s love and patience with you, how He Himself has provided the answer to the prayer of the penitent. The death and resurrection of Jesus is God’s answer to our penitential psalms of lament. In the death of Jesus the wrath of God was revealed – not just revealed as punishment, but revealed as taken, assumed, imputed, so that we need not bear it, despite our deserving it. In the resurrection, we see the consequences of sin are overturned. Now, we await the consummation of our union with Christ begun at Baptism. We await it with a prayer that our hearts not become hardened along the way, that we remain in grace, and that at the last we will be set free from all sin’s tyranny and death’s misery.
