My case is bad. Lord, be my advocate.
My sin is red: I’m under God’s arrest.

In these lines Taylor casts repentance in the language of a courtroom: the speaker’s “case” is hopeless, sin is the incriminating evidence (“red,” echoing Isaiah’s scarlet sins), and God is both judge and arresting authority. The plea “be my advocate” invokes the Christian doctrine of Christ as intercessor, suggesting that only divine advocacy can answer divine justice. The compression of legal and devotional imagery is characteristic of Puritan poetics, where intense self-scrutiny and the fear of condemnation are countered by a desperate reliance on grace. The effect is to dramatize spiritual crisis as a legal emergency requiring immediate, supernatural defense.