Praise the Lord, my soul, and forget not all His benefits—who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases …The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love…He does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities. Psalm 103:2, 3, 8, 10.
Psalm 103 is the best picture we have of what God is really like. Have you ever been in a situation when you knew you needed help? In order to get that help, you must inconvenience someone who is already busy. Asking them to do something for you will make more work for them and could even make them angry. You hold your breath, and prepare for conflict.
But when you ask, the person is happy to help you. It’s like they have been waiting for you to come to them. They show you favor and go above and beyond to meet your need and to support you.
This is what is happening in Psalm 103. The poet, who is King David, realizes he needs help. He has sin that he wants to have forgiven. He has sickness he would like to have healed. He feels oppressed and in need of justice. He’s in a situation that he can’t get out of on his own.
He believes that God has every right to be angry with him, to accuse him of wrong, and to repay him with a form of revenge. But God didn’t do that to him. Instead of anger, blame, and malice, David received forgiveness, healing, and mercy. David fully realizes that God did not treat him as he deserved. God shows compassion. He is slow to get angry, and offers His love instead.
This psalm is David remembering God’s great and undeserved goodness to him. “Praise the Lord, O my soul.” God could have rejected me and condemned me. But instead he healed me and forgave me. “Don’t forget, O my soul, what a loving and gracious father you have.” David knows he deserves much worse than what God gave him, and he is praising God for being so good.
Charles Spurgeon calls this psalm an entire Bible all in itself, and that it can stand as its own hymnbook. This is because it gives voice to the thankfulness of sinners that the Lord is a God of mercy and grace. It recites what Israel learned about the ways of God. The Lord has not dealt with them according to their sin.
The psalm is a remembering of God’s nature. The attribute of God’s steadfast love is repeated as the theme. Verses 8 through 12 are a quotation from Exodus where God makes a proclamation of his own name and character to Moses when the Israelites in the wilderness had committed the terrible sin of making and worshiping the golden calf. This passage described the Lord as a God who forgives iniquity, transgression, and sin. This phrase is sometimes called one of the most important theological statements in the Bible.
The proclamation’s theology is what the psalm is about, which is the Lord’s abounding steadfast love. It is so much greater and lasting than his anger at sin, and it is the hope of forgiveness.