STUDIES IN THE PSALMS No. 10

Psalm 32

March 21, 2004

We have said that there are three main categories of psalms in the Psalter. There are others, to be sure, that don’t fit neatly into these three categories, but the main categories seem to be those mentioned in 1 Chron. 16:4: petition, thanksgiving, and praise. We have looked at the petitionary psalms, also called lament psalms in modern Psalms scholarship. They have certain features or characteristics and we have learned what those are by looking at a number of psalms of that type. We have also looked at Psalm 8, a typical praise psalm. We have not yet looked at a representative psalm of thanksgiving or, as such psalms are also called, a psalm of acknowledgement. We said earlier that, often in lament or petitionary psalms, the psalmist promises the Lord that if he will hear the psalmist’s prayer and come to his aid, the psalmist will acknowledge that fact and thank the Lord publicly for what he has done. In other words, he will acknowledge the faithfulness and mercy of the Lord. For example, in Psalm 51, a lament or petitionary psalm, David cries out for God’s forgiveness. This is the psalm he wrote after being confronted with his sin against Uriah and his wife Bathsheba. And after pleading for forgiveness, David says this.

“Then I will teach transgressors your ways, and sinners will turn back to you.”

And he goes on.

“O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare your praise. You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it; you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise. In your good pleasure make Zion prosper; build up the walls of Jerusalem. Then there will be righteous sacrifices, whole burnt offerings to delight you; then bulls will be offered on your altar.”

In other words, David is promising that, if the Lord will hear his prayer and forgive his sins, he will both declare to the rooftops the Lord’s kindness to him and use his experience of sin and God’s mercy to teach others the great lessons of life. He will use his experience both to warn others of the harm that sin does and its offensiveness to God and to encourage others to believe in the compassion of God. And then he will make a public matter of God’s grace and mercy to him by offering sacrifices in the temple that everyone will know are his gifts of love to God for the mercy God had extended to him.

I mention Psalm 51 because, as you may know, it has long been thought that Psalm 32 is the payment of that very debt David obliged himself to repay in Psalm 51. Many have supposed that Ps. 32 also comes out of that sordid chapter in David’s life and is, in fact, his reflection on that experience: of sin, of a long period without repentance – at least nine months because, remember, the prophet Nathan does not come to confront him until after the baby David conceived with Bathsheba was born – and of confession and God’s forgiveness. Franz Delitzsch, the great 19th century German evangelical commentator on the Bible, took this view of Psalm 32.

“For a whole year after his adultery David was like one under sentence of condemnation. In the midst of this fearful anguish of soul he composed Ps. li., whereas Ps. xxxii. was composed after his deliverance from this state of mind. The former was written in the very midst of the penitential struggle; the latter after he had recovered his inward peace. [393]

Now, to be sure, the psalm does not actually say this. There is nothing in the title about the circumstances out of which it was written, the kind of information we are sometimes given in the psalm titles. Psalm 51 identifies itself as written in response to Nathan confronting David with his adultery and murder. Psalm 32 is silent as to the circumstances of its origin. It is possible that the psalm originates in another chapter of David’s life. We cannot be absolutely sure that it originates in that episode of David’s life. But there can be no doubting its perfect and immediate relevance to that time of terrible sin and great forgiveness and, all things being considered, I think it very likely that Delitzsch is right and that this psalm was written after the prayer of Ps. 51 was heard and answered. It is an acknowledgement psalm in any case because it speaks of a prayer of confession and for forgiveness that David had prayed and of God’s hearing his prayer.

Delitzsch is exactly right about the lesson or theme of this acknowledgment psalm.

“The theme of this Psalm is the precious treasure which [David] brought up out of that abyss of spiritual distress, viz. the doctrine of the blessedness of forgiveness, the sincere and unreserved confession of sin as the way to it, and the protection of God in every danger, together with joy in God, as its fruits.” [393]

Is it any wonder that this was Augustine’s favorite psalm!

Psalm 32

v.1 “Happy” is another way to translate the word translated “Blessed.” Forgiveness is described in two different ways: sins being lifted or taken away and sins being covered. The presence of the first makes clear that “covered” does not mean merely hiding what is still there. Rather it speaks of our sins being no longer visible to God.

v.2 Paul, as you remember, makes important use of this text in his exposition of justification by faith alone in Rom. 4:6-8. Now the metaphors of v. 1 are left behind and forgiveness is literally defined as God not counting our sins against us and, instead, as Paul understands, being treated as righteous in his sight. It is a gift to us in spite of our deserts. We own the sins, but God does not count them as ours. However, the condition for this is sincerity on our part, the sincerity of true faith in God. The deceit David speaks of would be the deceit that denies or hides one’s sin, extenuates or excuses it. So, there is no thought that forgiveness can be taken without any interest in or effort to live righteously before the Lord. This is David’s way of rejecting the idea that we can “sin so that grace may abound.” [Kidner]

v.5 David is speaking out of his own experience. “…his own experience has taught [him] that he who does not in confession pour out all his corruption before God, only tortures himself until he unburdens himself of his secret curse.” [Delitzsch, 395]

Augustine comments on the “I will confess…and you forgave…” “The voice is not yet in the mouth and the wound is healed in the heart.” So immediate is the Lord’s reply and the granting of forgiveness.

v.6 The second half of v. 6 inspired the lines in Wesley’s hymn, “Jesus, Lover of My Soul,”

‘While the nearer waters roll,

    While the tempest still is high;

Hide me, O my Saviour hide,

    ‘Til the storm of life is past.’

The mighty waters rising here, in all likelihood, are not so much the general trials and tribulations of life, but the dangers of God’s wrath and judgment because of our sin.

You will notice that the opportunity is at God’s disposal, not ours. When the Spirit convicts we must spring to confess. If we resist, we may find that the Lord does not return and we are left hard of heart and buried under our sin.

v.7 If David’s first impulse was to share his discovery, as he did in v. 6, now he turns to the Lord himself and expresses his confidence in the Lord his savior.

v.9 Commentators disagree as to whether vv. 8-9 are the Lord’s reply to David and to us (for the pronoun “you” is in the plural in v. 9), or, as is perhaps more likely, David now as the teacher of the lesson he has learned. He said in Ps. 51:15 that he would teach transgressors the Lord’s ways, and here he makes good on his promise. Either way, the lesson of v. 9 is, in effect, the same thing that David has himself already said in vv. 1-5 was the lesson of his own experience.

You might put into the margin next to v. 9 a reference to Prov. 29:1: “A man who remains stiff-necked after many rebukes will suddenly be destroyed – without remedy.”

v.10 There are many such statements as v. 10 in the OT but here it has the special character of a personal testimony.

v.11 A final expression of praise and joy for the goodness of the Lord.

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Psalm 32, historically, has been numbered among the seven penitential psalms, a somewhat artificial collection of psalms that includes 6, 25, 32, 38, 51, 130, 143. These are the psalms that Augustine is said to have had written on the wall beside and above his bed so that he could recite them as he lay dying. Some of the psalms have other things in them than confession of sin and other psalms have as much penitence in them as do these. Still, there is no doubt it is a psalm about sin, the confession of sin, and the forgiveness of sin. Luther is said to have been asked which were the best psalms and he is said to have replied psalmi paulini. Being asked then to name the Pauline psalms he listed: 32, 51, 130, and 143, in other words, the psalms having especially to do with sin and forgiveness.

The 32nd has left its mark on many a holy life, as have all the penitential psalms. Isaac Walton, the famous 17th century Anglican, at the very end of his biography of a Bishop Anderson, wrote:

“’Tis now too late to wish that my life may be like his, for I am in the eighty- fifth year of my age; but I humbly beseech Almighty God that my death may be, and I earnestly beg of every reader to say, Amen. ‘Blessed is the man unto whom the Lord imputeth not iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no guile.” [Ker, 59]

We come, of course, very near the heart of our faith and life as Christians in such a psalm as Ps. 32. After all, Christianity is a message about salvation from sin and Christ is our Savior in whom we trust precisely because he and he alone can deliver us from the guilt and the power of sin. Sin is our problem, Jesus Christ is our solution. Those convictions make us Christians.

Now, what is of first importance is that this is not the psalm of an unbeliever. This is not a sinner’s prayer in the sense of a prayer that might be used by someone who was entering the family of God for the first time. Nor is Ps. 51 such a prayer. [Collins, Syllabus, 57] This is the prayer of a believer in the middle of his believing life. What is more, as we have often pointed out, this is no longer the prayer of the individual who wrote it in the first instance, it is now, in the Psalter, the hymn and prayer of the church. It is a hymn, just as Ps. 51 became a hymn, for the use of believers in their worship together on the Lord’s Day.

This is not always easily understood at first. After all, why do Christians who have received the forgiveness of their sins still have to confess them to God and seek forgiveness for them. Would it not be the case, as some have thought, that to continue to ask for forgiveness would amount to an admission that one didn’t believe he had received it when he believed in Christ. Did not Paul say that being justified by faith we have peace with God and didn’t he say to those who have faith in Christ, “There is therefore no condemnation for the man who has faith in Christ Jesus”?

Well, it is no doubt true that forgiveness comes to the believer in Christ once and for all when first he or she is united to Christ by faith. That is very clear, emphatically clear in the Bible. But it is equally clear that believers must continue to confess their sins and seek the forgiveness of them from the Lord’s hand. After all we continue to sin.

1. The psalms themselves are evidence of this duty to confess and seek forgiveness. There are many confessions of sin in the Psalms, many pleas for forgiveness. Psalms 51 and 32 are representative of a number of psalms.

2. What is more, in the Psalms you find confessions even of long ago sins, sins that must have been confessed many times. Take, for example, Psalm 25:7 where David asks God “Remember not the sins of my youth and my rebellious ways…” Here is David, now the King of Israel, still bringing to mind and still asking forgiveness for sins committed when he was a boy or young man. He never got over those sins, never ceased being ashamed of them, never quit asking God to forgive them. No one can argue, however, that this meant that David did not have or did not appreciate having the full forgiveness of God. He did, as Ps. 32 and many other psalms clearly prove.

But, a tender conscience can rightly be troubled by the recollection of sins long since confessed and even long since forgiven. I remember a particularly poignant episode in the First World War. An English soldier, one private James Smith from Liverpool, was executed for desertion on the Western front. Among those who were ordered to take part in the firing squad was a private Richard Blundell, who knew Smith well. After the executioners’ volley had been fired, it was discovered that Smith was still alive. The officer in charge, who by tradition would then have shot Smith with his revolver, could not go through with it. Instead, he gave his revolver to Blundell and ordered him to fire the shot. Blundell did as he was ordered. As a reward for his action he was granted ten days’ home leave. It began that same day. Seventy-two years later, as Blundell lay dying, he repeated again and again, in the hearing of his son: ‘What a way to get leave, what a way to get leave.’” [Martin Gilbert, The First World War, 359] Such is a conscience and such, as is right, a Christian conscience in recollection of our sins. As surely as Peter knew he was forgiven, how many times do you suppose he apologized to God and to Christ in his prayers for having deserted the Lord so terribly in his hour of greatest need?

3. And it is the same when we come into the NT. Our Lord, in giving us a model prayer, the Lord’s Prayer, taught us that confession of our sin and pleading with him for forgiveness ought to be a part of our daily Christian life. “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.”

4. In 1 John we find the Apostle telling Christians that when we sin – which, of course, we all do every day, we should confess our sins to God in the confidence that he will forgive us and purify us.

A few weeks ago I had a sweet Christian lady complain to me about the confessions of sin that they use in their worship service in the church where I was preaching. She felt that they were not proper because they made it sound as if we weren’t already forgiven. But, while a Christian confession should have some distinctive marks – for example, it should be a prayer in Christ’s name, it should appeal to what we know of Christ’s work on our behalf, etc. – in the Bible the confessions of sin uttered by believing people are, in fact, uttered in such a way as to suggest that if God does not hear, they will not be forgiven the sins they have committed.

Now, how are we to understand this? There have been different suggestions. One that did not find much support was the proposal by the Reformed theologian of 18th century Holland, Wilhelmus à Brakel, that while our justification, our acquittal and vindication in God’s judgment, is, in principle, once for all, immediate, and perfect, it is in fact, pieced out to us, day by day, as we pray for forgiveness. So, in his view, our sins of today are not actually forgiven until we pray for forgiveness. To almost all Reformed theologians that understanding failed to do justice to the emphatic statements of Paul about our peace with God and their being no condemnation, or to the nature of justification itself as a declaration of forgiveness, acquittal, and righteousness once-for-all.

Better is the suggestion that in justification God is dealing with us as our judge and he does that but once, at the moment we believe in his Son. In the continuing forgiveness we receive from him as we ask for it day by day, God is dealing with us as our father. We can disturb our relationship with our father without ever worrying about being thrown out of the family! Our continued sinning as God’s children disturbs our relationship with our Father and our confession and his forgiveness mends that disturbed relationship. So one forgiveness is judicial and once for all; the other is relational and repetitive. I think that is a useful way to think about the distinction and the fact that forgiveness can be spoken of and is spoken of in the Bible as both a once-for-all grace and as a day-by-day grace.

But, now, there is something else here and I want to finish by drawing your attention to it. Seeking and receiving forgiveness from the hand and heart of our heavenly Father is, as David teaches here, a power in our lives. If you ask who it is that benefits most from our praying for forgiveness and our receiving it from God, the Bible’s answer is unquestionably that we do! This is for us much more than it is for God. It blesses us much more than it blesses God.

And how and why? Well, to be sure, the most important benefit is that God in fact forgives our sins and does not hold them against us, even as our heavenly Father and even in terms of their effect on our relationship with him. First and foremost we confess and pray for forgiveness to receive forgiveness. The forgiveness is more important than our feeling forgiven in the same way that being healthy is more important than feeling healthy at any moment. What is more, as this psalm clearly indicates, our conscience may very well trouble us and afflict us if we sin and have no sense of being forgiven. Confession and prayer for forgiveness is the path to a sense of peace with God, of his favor, and of the pleasure of being reminded of his love. But, to be sure, it is not always the case that we feel our sins so keenly or are so deeply troubled by them as David had been. If indeed Ps. 32 comes from the episode with Bathsheba and Uriah, the distress, the afflicted conscience David suffered from, the sense of distance from God and of God’s displeasure that he seems to be referring to in vv. 3-4 was not the normal experience of his daily life. Yet we are always sinning and always needing to confess our sins to God. That is entirely normal.

So there is another way in which confession and prayers for forgiveness benefit us psychologically and spiritually, perhaps the more ordinary, usual way. In the Bible it becomes clear in a hundred ways that our faith, what we believe, what we are convinced of, must be symbolized in our lives, must be given even a radical symbolization in our lives. It is not enough to believe in Jesus Christ, we must confess him before men. If we don’t, Jesus says, it is as if we didn’t believe in him at all. It is not enough that we should want to be holy and live a holy life for God’s sake, we must embody that desire in outward acts: e.g. fasting, vows, and, especially, weekly worship in God’s house with God’s people. You find this principle everywhere in the Bible. It is not enough to remember God’s mighty works. There must be feasts and celebrations.

It is a fundamental law of human life, by the way. This is what is going on in the gay marriage movement in our land right now. It is not enough to say that homosexuals can live openly together. They know that the acceptance, even the approval of their lifestyle must be radically symbolized. And what better way to symbolize it than to allow them to marry, to have the same status as has always been granted to husbands and wives. This radical symbolization is a principle of first importance in the living of our lives. Outward acts are what make a principle a living power in our lives. The hug, the holding hands, the kiss, the touch, the gift, radically symbolize the love of a man and woman and, in so doing make that love more powerful in our consciousness.

And that symbolization is featured here in the matter of confessing sin and seeking forgiveness. It is not enough simply to know that one has forgiveness in Christ. That forgiveness must be symbolized, embodied, made large in our experience and our consciousness. That is done by acts of symbolization, the more radical the better. I am using radical in its original sense. The word comes from radix, the Latin word for root. So radical symbolization is outward acts that take us down and connect us with the root of things, the true meaning of things, the living source of things. When all together we kneel to confess our sins in this sanctuary and to plead with our Father for their forgiveness, we are in this way of radical symbolization writing large over our lives our sin and God’s forgiveness. We are impressing it upon our hearts, confessing its great importance, and making it and insisting that it be a feature of our active consciousness. This will not be the case if we treat forgiveness as something received long ago and to be taken for granted over all the years that follow our beginning with Jesus Christ. We are seeking and receiving forgiveness, of course; that is the first thing, but we are also doing something that is very important to the shaping of our spiritual consciousness and conviction.

The means of laying that consciousness of our sin and the glory of God’s forgiveness in our hearts, the means approved and recommended in the Bible – whether in the great crises of our lives, as apparently was the origin of Ps. 32, or in the ordinary run of our daily existence, as is suggested by the Lord’s Prayer – is our confession and prayer for forgiveness. It is by confessing and praying, David says, that the power of these realities are felt in our lives. Those things may be felt more powerfully at certain times – when our sins are greater perhaps, certainly when our sense of God’s forgiveness is greater – but our consciousness of these realities is always deepened by these acts of confession and prayer to God for forgiveness. That is, we get the forgiveness itself because God has promised to give it to his children when they cry to him for it. But we also get the blessing and benefit of souls that are conscious of their own sinfulness (a consciousness that lies at the bottom of a great deal that is most important in the Christian life – humility and a sense of dependence upon God chief among them – ) and conscious of God’s mercy and grace to us.

What, after all, would you like to be fundamentally true in your own life? What would you like to be the defining characteristics of your daily life as a Christian? Well, should the answer not be this: I want to be and I want to be seen to be a man who knows his own sin and is humbled by it and made gentle and loving toward others as a result; I want to be a man who loves God for his mercy and is always enamored of Jesus Christ for the redemption that made my forgiveness possible; and I want to be a person on whose tongue is always to be found the praise, the happy and cheerful praise, of God my savior. I want to be a man living under a sweet constraint to serve the Lord in return for his love for me. Well, such a man was David in Ps. 32 and he got there, that spirit was formed in him through the confession of his sin and his prayer for God’s forgiveness.

It is not enough simply to know that you are a sinner. Everyone, even the vilest unbeliever, knows that to some degree. It is not enough to know that God forgives sins. Virtually everyone knows that to some degree. What is needed if these realities are to mark, shape, and control our lives is the power of that knowledge, the force of that truth. And, our hard hearts and our proud spirits being what they are, the only way that truth will have that kind of power and force over us is if we are constantly confessing it and giving voice to it and, especially, giving voice to it in that way that best inscribes it on our hearts and lays it in our conscience, viz. by speaking to God himself directly of these things and looking to him to ratify our prayer with the Spirit’s work within us.

There will be times when the force of that truth is terrible and powerful in our souls, a time such as described in Ps. 32. But we find nothing in this psalm that we don’t also find in other psalms in a much more prosaic and ordinary form. Only God can bring such an experience to pass as is described in Ps. 32. But every Christian can be faithful in the matter of constant attention to confessing his sins and seeking their forgiveness and the slow, steady impact of the latter may well be greater, over time, than the sudden, overwhelming impact of the former. Crises may be necessary, which is why God appoints them for us; but steady obedience will tell the tale.

I think very few of us realize how powerful confession to God and prayer to him for forgiveness really is and can be. If you are struggling with a sin, you are wanting to conquer it but finding little success; if you are demoralized by the power a certain sin still has in your heart and life, then there is nothing so important for you to do than simply, every day, without fail, to confess that sin to God and ask him to forgive you for it. Confess the most recent sins and the sins going way back; tell him that you know that your acts are sinful, that you have no intention of excusing yourself. What you did is wrong, is ugly, is utterly unworthy of a follower of Christ. Confess it by name, by time, by circumstance. When I did that, when I said that, O Lord my God, it was wrong, it was sinful, it was shameful. And then ask God to forgive you. No matter how many times you have asked before, ask again. Like David in Ps. 32 and like David in Ps. 25, confess your sins and ask for forgiveness, plead for it. That act must, absolutely must, if sincerely undertaken, quite apart from bring God’s forgiveness and his blessing, must, over time, change the way you think about your sins, deepen your disgust at yourself for them, and harden your determination to surmount them with God’s help. The largest problem you have with your pet sins is that you tolerate them so easily because you like them so much. And nothing lays the axe to the root of that toleration and that liking so well as constant confession and pleading for forgiveness, the radical symbolization that takes place when you say right out and honestly what those sins are and when you have to ask God to forgive you for committing them.

The very first thesis of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, the document that started the Reformation, was: “When our Lord and master Jesus Christ said ‘Repent ye!’ he called for the entire life of believers to be one of penitence.” Repentance is more than confession and prayer for forgiveness, but it begins there, it gains its power and momentum there, and without that beginning it will amount to little or nothing for it will be our own effort and not God’s work within us. He has shown us what to do. It is now ours to do it. And he has encouraged us by telling us that we will get very good things for doing confessing our sins and praying to God for forgiveness. He often promises us that we will have his blessing if only we will humble ourselves before him.

“He who conceals his sins does not prosper, but whoever

    confesses and renounces them finds mercy.” [Prov. 28:13]

Robert Murray McCheyne once said: “The most of God’s people are contented to be saved from the hell that is without. They are not so anxious to be saved from the hell that is within.” [McCheyne, Memoir and Remains, 339 cited in Collins, Syllabus, 57] Well, if you want to be delivered from that inner hell, whether the sins themselves or their consequences in your conscience, your inner life, and your fellowship with God, Ps. 32 is your guide, your marching orders, and, wonderfully, your encouragement to believe that confessing your sins to God and praying to him for forgiveness will, at the end of the day, have you also saying to others:

Rejoice in the Lord and be glad you righteous;

    Sing all you who are upright in heart.