umb
misery of unrepented sin.

Although the psalm is one long cry for pardon and restoration, one can
discern an order and progress in its petitions--the order, not of an
artificial reproduction of a past mood of mind, but the instinctive
order in which the emotion of contrite desire will ever pour itself
forth. In the psalm all begins, as all begins in fact, with the
grounding of the cry for favour on "Thy loving-kindness," "the multitude
of Thy tender mercies;" the one plea that avails with God, whose love is
its own motive and its own measure, whose past acts are the standard for
all His future, whose compassions, in their innumerable numbers, are
more than the sum of our transgressions, though these be "more than the
hairs of our head." Beginning with God's mercy, the penitent soul can
learn to look next upon its own sin in all its aspects of evil. The
depth and intensity of the psalmist's loathing of self is wonderfully
expressed in his words for his crime. He speaks of his "transgressions"
and of his "sin." Looked at in one way, he sees the separate acts of
which he had been guilty--lust, fraud, treachery, murder: looked at in
another, he sees them all knotted together, in one inextricable tangle
of forked, hissing tongues, like the serpent locks that coil and twist
round a Gorgon head. No sin dwells alone; the separate acts have a
common root, and the whole is matted together like the green growth on a
stagnant pond, so that, by whatever filament it is grasped, the whole
mass is drawn towards you. And a profound insight into the essence and
character of sin lies in the accumulated synonyms. It is
"transgression," or, as the word might be rendered, "rebellion"--not the
mere breach of an impersonal law, not merely an infraction of "the
constitution of our nature"--but the rising of a subject will against
its true king, disobedience to a person as well as contravention of a
standard. It is "iniquity"--perversion or distortion--a word which
expresses the same metaphor as is found in many languages, namely,
crookedness as descriptive of deeds which depart from the perfect line
of right. It is "sin," _i.e._, "missing one's aim;" in which profound
word is contained the truth that all sin is a blunder, shooting wide of
the true goal, if regard be had to the end of our being, and not less
wide if regard be had to our happiness. It ever misses the mark; and the
epitaph might be written over every sinner who seeks pleasure