John Calvin Commentary Psalms 25:7

"Remember not the sins of my youth, nor my transgressions: According to thy lovingkindness remember thou me, For thy goodness` sake, O Jehovah." — Psalms 25:7 (ASV)

Remember not the sins of my youth. As our sins are like a wall between us and God, which prevents Him from hearing our prayers or stretching out His hand to help us, David now removes this obstruction. It is indeed true, in general, that people pray in a wrong way, and in vain, unless they begin by seeking the forgiveness of their sins.

There is no hope of obtaining any favor from God unless He is reconciled to us. How will He love us unless He first freely reconciles us to Himself? The right and proper order of prayer therefore is, as I have said, to ask, at the very outset, that God would pardon our sins.

David here acknowledges, in explicit terms, that he cannot in any other way partake of the grace of God than by having his sins blotted out. Therefore, in order that God may be mindful of His mercy towards us, it is necessary that He forget our sins, the very sight of which turns away His favor from us.

In the meantime, the Psalmist confirms more clearly by this what I have already said: that although the wicked acted towards him with cruelty and persecuted him unjustly, yet he ascribed to his own sins all the misery which he endured. For why would he ask for the forgiveness of his sins, by turning to the mercy of God, if not because he acknowledged that by the cruel treatment he received from his enemies, he only suffered the punishment which he justly merited?

He has, therefore, acted wisely in turning his thoughts to the first cause of his misery, so that he might find the true remedy. Thus he teaches us by his example that when any outward affliction presses upon us, we must entreat God not only to deliver us from it, but also to blot out our sins, by which we have provoked His displeasure and subjected ourselves to His chastening rod.

If we act otherwise, we will follow the example of unskilled physicians who, overlooking the cause of the disease, only seek to alleviate the pain and apply merely superficial remedies for the cure. Moreover, David makes confession not only of some slight offenses, as hypocrites usually do (who, by confessing their guilt in a general and perfunctory manner, either seek some subterfuge or else extenuate the enormity of their sin), but he traces back his sins even to his very childhood and considers in how many ways he had provoked the wrath of God against him.

When he mentions the sins he had committed in his youth, he does not mean by this that he had no remembrance of any of the sins he had committed in his later years; rather, it is to show that he considered himself worthy of all the greater condemnation.

In the first place, considering that he had not begun only recently to commit sin, but that he had for a long time heaped up sin upon sin, he bows himself, if we may so speak, under the accumulated load. In the second place, he intimates that if God should deal with him according to the rigor of law, not only the sins of yesterday, or of a few days, would come into judgment against him, but all the instances in which he had offended, even from his infancy, might now with justice be laid to his charge.

Therefore, whenever God terrifies us by His judgments and the signs of His wrath, let us call to mind not only the sins we have recently committed, but also all the transgressions of our past life, which provide grounds for renewed shame and renewed lamentation.

Besides, in order to express more fully that he supplicates a free pardon, he pleads before God only on the ground of His mere good pleasure; and therefore he says, According to thy compassion do thou remember me. When God casts our sins into oblivion, this leads Him to behold us with fatherly regard.

David can discover no other cause to account for this paternal regard of God, except that He is good; and hence it follows that there is nothing to induce God to receive us into His favor but His own good pleasure. When God is said to remember us according to His mercy, we implicitly understand that there are two entirely opposite ways of remembering: one when He visits sinners in His wrath, and the other when He again manifests His favor to those whom He seemed for a time to disregard.