1 Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord.
The image of the depths is the major symbol of this psalm, which brings us right back to the very first moments of creation. In the beginning, we encounter darkness over the face of the deep. Over the succeeding days, God brings in light to answer the darkness, he brings dry ground up from the depths, and at last, from the dry ground itself, he forms man.
The depths are a disordered, chaotic realm, where nothing firm or stable can be built. For man to return to the depths is essentially to be uncreated.
On the surface of the earth is God’s light, so that man can enjoy it and live by it; but in the depths of the sea, man is separated from that light. Therefore, the sea is often associated with the underworld of Sheol—that is, Hades, Hell, the Abyss, the realm of Death. For example, compare Deuteronomy 30:13 (“Who shall go over the sea for us, and bring it unto us?”) with Paul’s paraphrase of that same passage in Romans 10:7 (“Who shall descend into the deep [lit. the Abyss]?”).
And so, there we find the psalmist, way in over his head. Perhaps God has exiled him to the depths as a judgment for some other sin, or the psalmist's sin was in trying to escape from God's sight. Either way, he cannot now swim his way back up the dry ground, and he is cut off from the shining light of the Lord's countenance. The righteous cannot live happily in unconfessed sin any more than man can live happily at the bottom of the sea.
But God is able to call up things from the dead and bring them to life again. This is the psalmist’s only hope, and so he calls to God.
Being heard by the Lord
2 Lord, hear my voice: let thine ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications
The psalmist cries out to God and begs him to hear his voice. Consider the geography of this psalm: the Lord is in his holy temple in heaven, but this man is not even on the earth below; he is down under the earth in Sheol, far away from God. Can the God in the highest heavens hear the weak and desperate cries of a man down in the depths?
It should strike us as a daring move for this man in the depths of Sheol to call upon God to hear him. Hearing is not simply about receiving sensory data via the ear, but is about heeding the words that come to you, and taking them to heart. To have his Word heard and heeded is what the Lord demanded of his covenant people (“Hear, O Israel…”: Deut. 6:4). But now, to the Holy One of Israel, the soul of the psalmist cries out: “Hear me!”
There is an inherent daringness to faith. God calls us to do things that we would not dare to do had he not told us to do them, and to address him in ways that we should not dare to address him had he not made a covenant with us. We approach the throne of grace with boldness, and yet not with presumption, because he has invited us to make that approach and to make it in that way.
The psalmist is not pleading to be heard on the basis of his own righteousness or anything in himself, and he has absolutely nothing to hope in other than that God is merciful and gracious, abounding in steadfast covenant love towards his people (vv. 7-8). The psalmist appeals to the covenant that God has made with Israel.
Forgiveness and fear
3 If thou, Lord, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand? 4 But there is forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest be feared.
The word translated "mark" in the King James Version is the word for “keep”, which suggests guarding over or keeping safe. The Lord is Israel’s keeper who neither slumbers nor sleeps (Ps. 121) and he keeps covenant with his people. He stays up all night, guarding over Israel—but he does not keep their sins. If the Lord had determined to keep guard over Israel’s sins, who could stand? There is no-one who does not sin, as Solomon says. But God passes by the transgression of his people.
The Lord’s not-keeping of Israel’s sins is not his ignorance of them, nor is it an indifference to their plight, but is rather it is an active forgetting of their sins. Forgiveness of sins involves a formal, judicial forgetting, just as a judge, in making a judgment, can determine not to know some inadmissible evidence. So also God determined that after the exile, he would remember Israel’s sins no more.
The Lord forgives us in order that we might fear him. When God forgives us, we are freed from the fear of condemnation or of punishment. Nonetheless, we are forgiven in order that we might live before God’s face in reverence and awe. Our awe of God’s greatness is not reduced by his forgiveness, but is strangely increased by it.
Waiting for the Word
5 I wait for the Lord, my soul doth wait, and in his word do I hope. 6 My soul [waiteth] for the Lord more than they that watch for the morning: I say, more than they that watch for the morning.
The psalmist tells us three times in verse 5 that he, his very soul, waits or hopes for the Lord. Waiting and hoping are synonyms in this psalm, which reminds us that waiting is not merely our passively letting time pass by, but our eager anticipation of God’s action towards us in the future.
In verse 6, the word “waits” is not actually present after "my soul". Robert Alter notes the poetic effect of this: the anticipated verb is "choked off”, and so the unfinished sentence evokes a feeling of waiting for a resolution (Alter, 303). The psalm's content is alluded to in its very form.
But what is the psalmist waiting for? He is waiting for the Lord himself to come to him. Remember the geography: the Lord will have to come from heaven above, to the earth beneath, and then to the waters under the earth. Notice also the parallelism: to wait for the Lord is the same thing as to wait for his Word. The Word is with God, and the Word is God, as John would later teach.
The soul of the penitent sinner needs the Word of the Lord to come to them from outside themselves. This should inform our liturgy of confession. It does not fully suffice for the congregation simply to pray that God would forgive them. Like the psalmist, our cry from the depths should be answered with the Word of assurance, spoken to us extra nos by the minister of the Gospel: Your sins are forgiven through Christ.
Evening, then morning
The psalmist’s movement in this psalm is a spatial movement from Sheol below up to the dry earth, and also a temporal movement from evening to morning. This again alludes to Genesis: God's creative works were a drawing-up of dry earth from Sheol, but we should note also the temporal movements. Each day repeats a movement from darkness to light, and the week of creation overall is a movement from darkness over the deep to ever-growing degrees of light.
The psalmist waits for the Lord, like a watchman waits for the morning to arrive. He repeats this affirmation, as if to confirm his first statement with a second witness.
Having confessed his sins while down in the depths, the psalmist waits: he waits for the Day of the Lord, when God's word would come to him and declare that the former days are forgotten. This is God's covenant promise to his people, and the psalmist waits patiently on reliance. Yet a little while, and the coming one will come.
Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary (Vol. 3: The Writings)