Ps. 51.3-4 (owning and knowing rebellion)

For / I know well / my rebellious acts
and my sin / is ever before me.
Against none / other than you / have I sinned
before your eyes / I did that which is evil. 

If the previous two verses focused on the action of God in the bestowal of mercy, these turn to actions of David. One of them has already been made clear in the opening—David owns his sin (“my acts of rebellion”, “my waywardness”, “my sin”, “my rebellious acts” and “my sin”). Whereas what God ‘owns’ are his “loyal-love” (“your loyal-love”) and ‘abundant mercies’ (“your abundant mercies”), David owns an intentional and deliberate act of rebellion against God. The repeated emphasis on ownership highlights the fact that, for David, there is absolutely no excuse; he does not appeal to anything else (unlike Adam, he does not blame his Eve/Bathsheba). This tracks an aspect of David that is prevalent in other psalms: his intense sense of honor does not allow him to do anything other than completely own and face his rebellion. Likewise, his rebellion is not merely ‘owned’ but also known; and, not only known but “known well”. David stands ‘face-to-face’ with his sin (it is ‘ever before me’). His sin is not merely an object to him, but something that, in the act of ‘knowing’, has penetrated him in a profound manner. One can possess many things but not know them. David’s guilt does not prevent him from turning to his rebellion and ‘knowing it’. His possession of his sin, in other words, is not quarantined off from his innermost act of knowledge.  This penetration of knowledge (‘my sin is ever before me’) is, interestingly enough, a type of divine acknowledgment: “Against none other than you have I sinned, before your eyes I did that which is evil.” The fact that David permits his own sin to remain in front of him, that he will intimately identify himself with his sin, means he is approaching it as closely as possible to the way that it appears to God. To God, David’s sin is not merely an object either (not merely a ‘stain’ or a block to be ‘blotted out’). It is this, but it is also this intimate wound, this “guilt”, that can be ‘known well’. The deeper David descends into a perception of his own sin the closer he moves to God’s vision of it as well.