January 30th, 2025
118. Contrition in Psalm 51:17
I have been taught that contrition is an important term for describing sorrow over sin. It seems that the EHV does not use this term. Why?
The question can be answered by looking at Psalm 51:17 in the EHV.
17The sacrifices God wants are a broken spirit.A broken and crushed heart, O God, you will not despise.
Many other translations have the words contrite or sorrowful where the EHV has crushed.
Contrite is defined as “feeling or showing sorrow and remorse for improper or objectionable behavior, actions, etc." Contrition is a term that has a prominent place in the Catholic sacrament of Confession or Penance.
In verse 17 (Hebrew v 19) the condition of the contrite heart is described by three passive verbs, broken, broken, crushed. Contrition or sorrow are indeed emotions which the repentant sinner feels, but we do not create contrition by our own efforts. Contrition is not something we do to ourselves. It is not an emotion which we are called on to work up in ourselves. Contrition is something that is done to us by God’s law, which smashes us like a hammer (Jeremiah 23:29). When we have been broken and crushed by God’s law, we have true contrition. Luther warned against the “manufactured contrition” that was often present in the sacrament of Confession. The same warning applies to the manufactured contrition that may be present in some of today’s revivals, in which emotions are stirred up by following a certain emotional program. Contrition is not measured by counting the tears, but by the inner sorrow we feel because our sins have offended God and harmed our neighbor.
The Keil Delitzsch commentary offers this observation: “The inward part of a man is said to be broken and crushed when his sinful nature is broken, his ungodly self slain, his impenetrable hardness softened, his haughty vainglorying brought low,—in short, when he is in himself become as nothing, and when God is everything to him."
(Carl Keil and Franz Delitzsch, Commentary on the Old Testament, vol. 5 (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1996), 370, alt.)
Contrition is a fine traditional term for sorrow over sin, but in Psalm 51:17 we prefer the translation crushed because it is more literal to the Hebrew and because it puts more emphasis on the role of God’s law in producing repentance in the sinner.