The Bible Study Hour

Guest (Male): Sin is all consuming, destructive, and condemning, but there's great news. We serve a forgiving and loving God, who covers every transgression, no matter the size or scope of our sin. This week on The Bible Study Hour, Dr. James Boice will take us through Psalm 32 and remind us that, when we turn to God, He will forgive us and lead us on the path of righteousness.

Welcome to The Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically. David knew firsthand the weight of wallowing in unconfessed sin. He also felt deeply the freedom that only comes through confessing our transgressions to a God who knows, forgives, and restores. If you have your Bible, turn to Psalm 32.

Dr. James Boice: I find that again and again, when I begin to introduce one of these Psalms that we've been studying now for some time, that I find myself saying this is one of the great Psalms of the Psalter. That's because they're all great Psalms in the Psalter, and when I've spent time studying it, I feel that it's perhaps the greatest one I've studied. Now, I look back on the others, I don't know how great they are, but I want you to know Psalm 32 is a great Psalm, one of the great Psalms in the Psalter, and I hope by the time I've finished that you'll see why and that it'll be one of the great Psalms for you personally.

And let me introduce it by telling you a few things about it. It's the second of the so-called penitential Psalms, that is, Psalms in which the speaker confesses his sin. The first is Psalm 6, the best known is Psalm 51, and there are a number of others. The Psalm might better be called, however, a Psalm of instruction, because that's what that word maskil that's in the title seems to mean.

The scholars of our day are uncertain about it, they don't translate it. Down at the bottom of the NIV it says "probably a literary or musical term," but if it means anything, if we're to try and translate it, it probably means instruction and identifies us as a Psalm of instruction because that's really what the Hebrew word for instruction is. It's used that way several times in the Book of Daniel, which is our best parallel. It's the first of 12 Psalms that bear that title, and they run the whole way through the Book of Psalms almost to the very end.

Now, it's a Psalm that should be taken in conjunction with Psalm 51. I said a moment ago that Psalm 51 is the great and best-known Psalm of repentance. It's the Psalm that we're told David composed after his great sin of adultery with Bathsheba and then covering up, or trying to cover up the adultery by having her husband Uriah killed. Psalm 51 seems to have been written immediately after that. The prophet Nathan came to David to confront him with his sin, and although he tried to cover it up for a considerable period of time, when Nathan exposed it, he confessed it. He confessed it openly and was restored. And it seems to be that at that point he wrote Psalm 51. Psalm 51 just breathes with the emotion of the moment.

Psalm 32 is talking about that sin, apparently, but it seems to be written later, that is, after a time of reflection, and if that's the case, it may well be itself the fulfillment of the vow that David takes in the 51st Psalm. You know the outline of the Psalm, you know that he confesses his sin and is aware of the forgiveness that he receives from God, and then he says, "So I'm going to go now and teach transgressors your way." In other words, that they might find the same forgiveness and the mercy of God that he had found.

Now, if teaching them God's way, the way of forgiveness, is what David determined to do, this Psalm would be an ideal expression of it. In other words, this Psalm is the maskil. It is the instruction based upon David's own experience. That's the way it's written. It certainly functioned that way. It functioned that way for the Apostle Paul because when he was writing the great Book of Romans, in which the doctrine of salvation by the grace of God apart from works is expounded more completely than at any other point in the scriptures, when he gets to the fourth chapter and wants to prove the doctrine from the Old Testament, he does it in part by quoting from this Psalm.

Paul quotes the first two verses, which say, "Blessed is he whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man whose sin the Lord does not count against him." That's what Paul uses as instruction to prove the doctrine that he unfolds in Romans. Saint Augustine loved the Psalm, it was one of his favorite Psalms, and according to the records, he had it inscribed on the wall next to his bed before he died because he wanted to meditate on it at the very end. He explained that he liked it because, as he said, the beginning of knowledge is to know yourself to be a sinner, and certainly that's what this Psalm does.

Now, it begins with a great beatitude. It begins on a jubilant note because it describes the blessedness of the one whose sin is forgiven. This is the second Psalm that begins this way. The other one that begins that way is Psalm 1, as you well know. It describes a blessedness of an individual too, but the blessedness or happiness or joy of the man of Psalm 32 is greater than the one who composed Psalm 1 because Psalm 1 describes the blessedness of the one who walks in the way of the righteous and doesn't sin, but we've all sinned.

And here in this Psalm, we find unfolded for our benefit the blessedness or joy of the one who has known the right way, departed from it, sinned, repented of it, and found God's forgiveness. There really is no joy on earth greater than that, and if you haven't known the joy of forgiven sin, you really are missing what God offers to us freely in the gospel. It's the greatest of all His gifts because it's wrapped up in Jesus Christ, who is His own son.

Now, these first verses are another example, a clear example of Hebrew parallelism. I've pointed out on other occasions that that's a chief characteristic of Hebrew poetry. Our poetry is based on meter and rhyme; that was not true of the Hebrew verse. It's a good thing because if it had been, it wouldn't translate well into other languages. God chose a language with poetic devices that can be carried over into other languages. We can't translate English verse into other languages, it doesn't work, but Hebrew can because you preserve the distinctly poetic quality, and the parallelism is one of them.

This is a threefold parallelism. He's describing the blessedness of a certain man whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered, and whose sin the Lord does not count against him. Now what he does there is give us three terms for sin, which are all-embracing, and then three terms describing what God does with it. I'd go so far as to say that if you understand those three terms, terms for sin, and if you understand those three terms that have to do with what God does with sin, you really understand the gospel.

Because although David in this Psalm portrays it in Old Testament imagery, that Old Testament imagery is fulfilled, as all the Old Testament imagery is, in Jesus Christ. And so you understand what God did in Christ to remove the sin of which we're guilty. Now let's look at each one of these words, each one is important. The first is that word transgression, a very common Hebrew word, pasha, and it really means a going away or a departure.

When you use it in terms of the relationship of a human being to God, it really means a rebellion, because our departure from God is a rebellion against Him and against His authority. Now that's what makes sin so dreadful, of course. It's bad enough that sin is a rebellion against the law of God and something which is harmful to other people and something that injures us, but above all, what makes it bad is that it's a rebellion against God.

That's why in the 51st Psalm, when David's confessing his sin, he can say to God, "Against you, you only have I sinned." It's not that he hadn't sinned against other people; he had sinned against as well as with Bathsheba, he had sinned against her husband, he sinned against the nation which suffered because of his transgression, but in the light of his sin against God, the other things faded into relative unimportance.

One of the great commentators, Alexander MacLaren, captured the force of this word when he said, "You don't understand the gravity of the most trivial wrong act when you think of it as a sin against the order of nature, which of course many of us do, or against the law written on your heart, or as the breach of the constitution of your own nature, or as a crime against your fellow man. You have not gotten to the bottom of the blackness until you see that it's a flat rebellion against God Himself."

Now that's what that first term conveys. And when David acknowledges it, he's acknowledging something very significant about his transgression. There's a second word for sin, it's the word hama, and it's a pretty exact equivalent in Hebrew to the well-known Greek word hamartia, which also means sin, and it refers to it in the same way. A hama or hamartia is a falling short of the mark, a coming short of a standard.

The Greek term was used in archery because it describes the person who sets out to shoot an arrow at a target, but he doesn't shoot it far enough, and so the arrow falls short and goes into the ground. To use that imagery, the law of God is the target, and all of us fall short of it, all of us miss it. And that's what that term describes. So the first describes a rebellion against God, and the second describes our falling short of His standard, which is the law.

And then there's a third term. It's hard to catch that in the English translation because in the New International Version, the word is translated "sin" just as the second word is translated "sin," but in Hebrew, it's actually a different term. It's a word which means corrupt or twisted or crooked, and it differs from the other terms because it describes how sin affects our own nature.

You see the differences this: the first term transgression describes our rebellion against God; in terms of our relationship to Him, we're rebels. And the second term describes our relationship to the law; in terms of the law, we fall short. And then here's the third term, and it describes sin in relation to ourselves. It's something which makes us crooked, twists us, makes us less than we should be, and makes us the kind of people that go about twisting other people and twisting other standards.

You see, you put those three terms together and you have a rather comprehensive picture of what sin is all about. Sin is not something trivial. We live in a day when people want to make it trivial, and of course they don't have any appreciation for forgiveness or mercy when it comes. We have to see that sin is not trivial. It's a sin against God, against His standard, against others and against ourselves.

Now those are the words for sin. Where's the blessedness then? Well, the blessedness is in the terms that David employs to show what God does with the sin of the one who confesses it. First of all, the sin is forgiven, according to verse one. That's an interesting word because the word forgiveness actually means to be lifted off and lifted off in order to be taken away. Borne away is the idea.

I don't know of any better picture of that than the one captured by John Bunyan in Pilgrim's Progress. If you know Pilgrim's Progress, you know how he describes the journey of this man who starts out not a Christian but becomes a Christian, burdened for his sin, seeking the way, pointed out to him the wicket gate and beyond that the hill, the hill of Calvary.

And as he makes his way through the gate and up the hill, he has many difficulties along the way, but as he makes his way up the hill, he comes to a cross. And as he comes up on the cross and looks at that, the great burden of sin that he's been carrying around on his back is loosened from off his shoulders and falls from his back and begins to tumble and continues to do so till it comes to the mouth of the sepulcher where it fell in and was seen no more, according to the way Bunyan wrote it.

But you see, that's a marvelous picture of what happens to sin when we come to Jesus Christ. It's lifted off of us. Haven't you felt, when you've been conscious of your sin, that it's a great burden? It is a burden. Sin is a dreadful thing to carry around. But when you come to the Lord Jesus Christ and confess it, it falls off. It's like a burden that goes away, tumbles down the hill, falls into the sepulcher, and you see it no more.

We sing it in hymns. One of them goes, "My sin, oh, the bliss of this glorious thought! My sin, not in part but the whole, is nailed to his cross, and I bear it no more. Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul!" Well, there's a second term. David says not only is it possible to have transgressions forgiven, it's possible to have the sins covered. Now that doesn't mean covered over in the sense of hidden from sight or ignored; it means covered over with the blood of the sacrifice.

This is a term that had a specific usage. You know, I've talked about it before, that on the Day of Atonement, the high priest brought the blood of the sacrifice that had been killed in the courtyard of the temple moments before into the Holy of Holies, the most holy place where there was the Ark of the Covenant with its mercy seat, and he sprinkled the blood there upon the mercy seat. Now that's a great picture, and it was meant to teach the people how sin could be dealt with.

God was understood to dwell in a symbolic way above the lid of the Ark. The lid was called the mercy seat. And as He dwelt there within the Holy of Holies of the temple—that's what made the Holy of Holies so holy—God looked down upon the Ark, and as He looked down upon the Ark, what He saw was the law which we've broken. The Ark held the law of Moses, the Ten Commandments.

Now you see, that's a picture of judgment. God looking down, He sees the law; He has to judge it. But you see, on the Day of Atonement, the high priest brought the blood and sprinkled it upon the mercy seat, so the blood of the innocent victim came between the Holy God and the broken law. In other words, the blood covered over the law. And because God saw that an innocent victim had suffered in the place of the one who was guilty, His wrath was turned aside.

Now you see, it's interesting that in the Greek language, the word for turning aside the wrath of God is the word that's used in the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Old Testament, to translate the mercy seat or covering. In other words, it was the place of propitiation; it's the place where the wrath of God was turned aside. And that same place in Hebrew was described by the word covering. It's where the covering was made.

Well, you see, when David said, "Blessed are those whose sins are covered," he's saying blessed are those who know that an innocent victim has died and that God Himself has accepted that in place of the sinner who should die himself or herself. Do you see what a powerful picture that is? Isn't that a wonderful thing to have the taking away and the covering over of sin described that way?

And yet there's a third term that David uses. This one's negative. The first two describe what God does, this one describes what God does not do. Blessed is the man whose sin the Lord does not count against him. Now that word "count" is a bookkeeping term and it's translated in the New Testament by the word "impute" or "reckon." Paul uses it a lot in Romans, and it's why he quotes these verses in Romans 4 because what he's trying to show in Romans is that God imputes our sin to Christ and punishes it there, and He imputes Christ's righteousness to us so that we stand before him not in our merit—because we have none—but in the righteousness of Christ.

Just as if God put our debt in Christ's books and put Christ's riches and treasure to our account. That's what that word "impute" means. You see, you take those terms and you put them together and you have a wonderful picture. On the one hand, those are the terms describing sin, transgression and sins and iniquities, and they portray how bad our situation is, how desperate it is in the sight of Holy God.

But then on the other hand, you have what God has done. God forgives on the basis of Christ's death. God covers over the sin and God does not impute it against us. All the sin on the one hand, but all of the sin forgiven on the other. I don't know of a greater message than that. That certainly does not exist among human beings. We try, some of us who are Christians, to emulate that, but we don't do it.

Somebody does a great wrong against us, we try to forgive, we forgive a part, we say, "Well, I'll forgive that, but I can never ever forget that; that's always going to stick in my mind." That's not the way it is with God. God forgives it all. All, whatever you may have done. Now you look at your own heart, you know the things that you've done. You may have done some terrible things.

David had committed adultery and murder, and the other characters in the Bible had done terrible things. You may have stolen a great deal of money. You may have cheated your partner in business. You may be a liar; you lie about everything, nobody can trust your word for even a moment. You may even have cursed God. Doesn't matter, you see. God stands ready to forgive it all. There's just no greater message than that.

God stands ready to forgive it and cover it and impute it to the record of Jesus Christ, who died in your place to bear it away. Now that's the message of the Psalm. Each of these stanzas has a special message to convey, and I've spent most time on the first part because that's the heart of it all. But there's a sense in which what follows now in verses 3 through 5 is also the Psalm's heart because this is David's own confession. You see, he begins with the beatitude: Blessed is the man who's been forgiven. But then lest we think he's just speaking off the wall, as we say, David explains in this second stanza that he is such a one.

He describes first of all what it was like when he had sinned and hadn't confessed it. We don't need to take a lot of time with that because it's self-explanatory. He describes it in physical terms. He said it's just as if my bones were wasting away. I just didn't preserve any strength at all. He said I found that my strength was being drawn out as it would be if I were exposed to the heat of the summer sun.

That's the way I found myself to be during those days, and the reason was clear: the hand of God was heavy upon me in judgment. We like to think that God would ignore our sin. We want him to ignore our sin, but he doesn't do it, you see. In that time of unconfessed sin, his hand was pressing down heavily upon David because he wanted to bring him back to the point of confession and forgiveness and restoration.

The key verse in that section is verse 5, and if the confession itself is the heart of the Psalm, then this is the very heart of David's experience. I want you to see several interesting things about verse 5. First of all, it's the longest verse in the Psalm. I think that's significant because it's a way of drawing attention to it. There are different ways of drawing attention; if you printed it in boldface type, you could do that in English. They didn't have the option of doing that in antiquity, so David simply wrote it longer, and it's right in the middle, so we'd look at it. So that's the first thing.

But there's a second thing that's interesting about it, and that is that this single verse contains each of the three terms for sin that we found in verses 1 and 2. There is iniquity and transgressions and sin. It's translated slightly differently, the term "iniquity" is in the New International Version, but it's the same three words that are used in the first two opening verses.

So David has talked there about the fullness, the scope of sin, and now in a personal way he's saying that when it came time to confess it, that's what he did. He confessed the scope of his sin. He didn't hold part back. He didn't say, "I'll confess this, but not that." He confessed it all. You see, all of it is there.

And then there's this. I think this is the most interesting thing of all. The forgiveness which you find in that verse follows immediately after the confession. That's deliberate, and there's no pause at all. It's not even in a different verse. It's right there, you see: I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity. I said, "I will confess my transgressions to the Lord," and you forgave my sin. Just like that.

You see, that's a great message. The first message, the message of the opening stanza, is that God will forgive any sin and all sin, no matter what it may be. You can't have sinned too much for the mercy of God. Here he tells us that God forgives us instantly. God doesn't say, "Well, I'm going to put you on probation for six months, and then we'll see at the end of that how you're doing, and if you're doing all right, I'll restore you to my favor." No, not that at all.

I noticed something that I think is interesting; you tell me if you agree. That word selah out in the margin. People aren't always quite sure what that means, but it seems to mean pause and reflect at this point. If that's what it does mean, look how it occurs. It occurs before verse 5 and after verse 5, that is, after David has described how heavy the hand of God was upon him, he pauses, and then he confesses his sin.

And then after God forgives it, he pauses because he's going to make an application. But notice there is no selah in the middle of the verse. No pause between the confession of the sin and the experience of forgiveness. As a matter of fact, he doesn't even say in the latter half of that that he has confessed it, though he does at the beginning, but rather he says, "I will confess it," and while he's saying "I will confess it," he's forgiven.

There's something like that in the story of the Prodigal Son. You know, the Prodigal Son ran away from the father, and when he got in such terrible straits, he realized God working in his heart that he'd done wrong. He recognized and confessed that he'd sinned against heaven and against his father. And he said, "I'll get up and I'll go back to my father, and I'll say I'm no longer worthy to be called your son; make me as one of your hired servants."

And he gets up and he goes, and when he sees his father, he begins. He says, "I've sinned against heaven and against you," and he's about to say, "I'm no longer worthy to be called your son; make me one of your hired servants," and the father doesn't even wait for the second half of the confession. He says, "Quick! Run and get a ring for his finger and sandals for his feet and the best robe and kill the fatted calf because we're going to have a feast. This son of mine who was dead is alive again; he was lost and is found."

That's a great insight, you see, into the heart of God. So if you've sinned, isn't it foolish to try and cover that up and pretend that nothing has really happened when actually it's established a tremendous breach between you and your Heavenly Father? Isn't it foolish to do that when the character of God is as it's described here, anxious, yearning to forgive your sin if you'll only confess it? Why not come to Him and confess it and find it to be immediate and complete, total? You forgave the guilt of my sin, says King David.

Well, having said that, he goes on in verse 6 to make an application in terms of an admonition to other people. It's the same sort of thing you find in Psalm 51. After he's experienced forgiveness, it's such a marvelous thing, he says, "Now I'm going to teach transgressors your ways," and probably that's what he's doing here. Verse 6 says, "Therefore..." Why therefore? Well, because of what he experienced, because of the character of God, because God forgives all sin if it's confessed and does so immediately.

Therefore, he says, because of that, "let everyone who is godly pray to you while you may be found." You see, he's talking about praying for forgiveness while it may be found. And he's not saying that it's the godly now, in the sense of those who are not sinners, who are praying for forgiveness, but those who show themselves to be godly by confessing their sin. That's what he's saying. Or he said prove yourself to be one of God's people by confessing the sin and do it while God may be found.

You see, there are two encouragements here. That's the first. There is a day of opportunity, is what he's saying. Bible says elsewhere, "Now is the day of salvation." Now is the day of God's grace. You can find God now. The day is coming, the day of judgment, when it'll be too late, and the scriptures warn us about that—not to postpone it till a time when it's too late and you perish in your sins. Now's the day of grace, you see.

So seek God while He may be found. Isaiah says the same thing in one of his chapters. "Seek the Lord while he may be found," is what Isaiah says. And so he says, seize the day of grace while you have the opportunity. And then he says something else. He says God is the hiding place for the penitent. Verse 7: "You are my hiding place; you will protect me from trouble and surround me with songs of deliverance."

What is that trouble? It could be understood in two ways. It could be understood as the troubles of this life. I think Charles Wesley must have understood it that way in his hymn "Jesus, Lover of My Soul," because he wrote it like this: "Jesus, lover of my soul, let me to thy bosom fly, while the nearer waters roll, while the tempest still is high. Hide me, oh my Savior, hide, till the storm of life is past; safe into thy haven guide, oh receive my soul at last." If that's what it means, it's a great promise. It says that the one who will come confessing sin will find not only forgiveness in God but a haven there as well.

And yet I think that probably David is thinking of something else. Not the storms of this life, but perhaps the storms of the judgment. Because after all, he's talking about sin and judgment and forgiveness. One of the commentators, Perowne, says of this, "He who thus seeks Jehovah while He may be found shall not be swept away when His judgments are let loose like a flood of waters upon the earth." And we sing that too. We sing, "Rock of Ages, cleft for me, let me hide myself in thee." That's what David has experienced and what he is urging upon us as he tries to teach us the ways of God.

Well, there's one last stanza, and it's a great promise. You see, we have the beatitude and then we have the confession and then we have the admonition and finally, at the end, we have a promise. If you'll come to God and find forgiveness of your sins, this is what He'll do. Verse 8. It's expressed as if God now was speaking for the very first time. And God is saying this: "I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will counsel you and watch over you." Four things: instruct and teach and counsel and watch over.

In the King James Version of the Bible, that was written in such a way that it sounds like God promising to give us guidance by His eye. It said, "I will guide you with mine eye." And people have often said, "Well, that means he has to catch our eye. We look to him, we see his eye, and by the direction of his eye we find out which way we should go." That's not a bad idea; you find it elsewhere in the Psalms, but it's probably not what this is teaching.

The New International Version probably does it right, and the picture is this: here's a person who needs to find the way, he needs to know the right path, he needs to get to a certain destination. And so here's a person who knows how to get there. He instructs him and teaches him how he should go. You go down this road for so much of a distance, and then you turn right, and if you go down there three miles, you turn left and so forth, and you'll get there.

And this person who is giving the instruction doesn't only give the instruction, but he says, "And while you're going down that road, I'm going to keep my eye on you because if I find that you're making a mistake or going off, I want to redirect you so you don't really get far away." You see, that's the picture. That's what God does with us. And that's a wonderful thing, isn't it? For this reason, the person who has sinned and been forgiven of the sin doesn't want to repeat the sin.

Doesn't want to fall into it again. And so what he or she needs is a guide to instruct them how to stay out of trouble in the future and counsel them how to live a righteous life and have someone who's going to watch over us and warn us if we're beginning to get off the path and keep us on the way of godliness. You see, we get to the end of this and you understand why I say this is a great Psalm because it really has to do with the work of God in guiding us from sin through the perils of this life to heaven.

If we're not willing to take that counsel, well, says David, verse 9, "you're like an ignorant animal that doesn't have any understanding." And if you persist in it, verse 10, "you're like the wicked who are going to experience many woes." But that's not what the righteous do. Those who are God's, walk in his way, they confess their sin and they find him to be everything he's promised that he will be.

And people who have found that, "rejoice in the Lord," they're "glad in the Lord," and they sing about the Lord. And they do something else too: they tell other people about it, which is what David is doing in the Psalm. Let's pray.

Our Father, we thank You for this Psalm which speaks so clearly about David's experience, an experience which has been that of all Your people down through all the ages and can be ours as well if we'll come to You confessing the transgressions which rise up like a barrier in Your sight. Father, we thank You that provision is made through Jesus Christ; we don't have to make it ourselves. All we have to do is avail ourselves of it.

So we pray that You'll use this Psalm to bring about that kind of confession in our hearts that we might experience forgiveness and, from the richness of that, be able to tell others what You have done for us and can do for them as well. Bless us, we pray, to that end, and grant that we might grow in holiness for Jesus' sake. Amen.

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