The Bible Study Hour

Guest (Male): You can't hide your sin from God. He sees all and knows all. Today on the Bible Study Hour with Dr. James Boice, we'll study Psalm 38, where David is physically sick and realizing that his illness is a direct result of his actions. Although David's body is weak, he knows that God won't forsake him, and he's waiting on the promises of his Savior's grace and mercy.

Welcome to the Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically. Have you ever felt the weight of sin, as though the consequences of sin are just too much to bear? Let's listen together as David, sick with the effects of his own sin, turns to God in desperation and learns to wait on him. If you have your Bible handy, turn to Psalm 38.

Dr. James Boice: We're going to turn to Psalm 38 and we're going to study it together. Now, this psalm is usually listed among the so-called penitential psalms. There are seven of them. They are called penitential psalms because in them, at one place or another, the psalmist confesses his sin and asks for forgiveness. This psalm does that in verses three through five and also later on in verse 18.

And yet it's not very aptly described as a penitential psalm. The psalmist doesn't elaborate upon his sin. He doesn't express a sense of God's response and forgiveness, as some of the other psalms do. This is actually what the scholars would call a lament growing out of sickness, or what we would simply call a prayer. Here's a man who is sick and who traces his sickness to sin. That's why sin comes into the picture, and he is simply calling out to God in his anguish. It becomes a pattern for the kind of thing we can do when we are likewise afflicted.

A couple of preliminary matters that are worth dealing with. Let me get them out of the way first. Number one: Is the psalm by David? It says it is there in the title, but scholars don't always like those titles. They like to second-guess the authors, and that's what they do here, quite a number of them. If you study the literature on the psalms, they will suggest that this wasn't by David. The only real reason for their saying that, of course, is that we don't have any description historically in the historical portions of the Old Testament of David having gone through a sickness like this.

This is a rather extreme thing. If we are to take his language literally, we'll see it as we go along. We don't have any record of that. The fault with that kind of argument is that it supposes that the historical portions of the Old Testament are obliged to tell us every time David got sick, or at least if he got seriously sick. There's no reason why they should. I've pointed out before, because we come to this again and again in the Psalter, people speaking out of sickness, that sickness was very common in the ancient world.

It's common enough today, but we have medicines to deal with it, and normally we handle it that way. People would get a cold and develop a fever and die in the ancient world because they didn't have any way to treat it. So people were quite often sick, quite badly, much of the time. It sort of was a commonplace thing. There's no reason to give any particular account of it unless in the historical books it had some bearing upon the history that's being unfolded. It doesn't seem that that was the case here. So there's no reason why a sickness like this on the part of David should be mentioned. So there's no reason to question that it's by David. It certainly could have been about him as well as anybody else.

And then the second question: How do we look at this psalm in terms of an outline? I think outlines help us. We think that way. It's sometimes hard to outline the psalms. How do we outline this one? Well, it begins with a prayer asking God not to rebuke him in his anger, and it ends with a prayer, "Oh Lord, do not forsake me. Come quickly to help me." In between, it describes his condition. That could be divided up a little further. He talks about his physical condition first, and then he talks about the way he's treated in his sickness by friends on the one hand and by enemies on the other. The friends reject him and the enemies taunt him. They use it as an occasion to get at him. So that's one way of looking at the psalm, a perfectly valid way of outlining it.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon, in his monumental study of the psalms, has an interesting suggestion, however. I think it's helpful because as I've studied the psalm, it seems to indicate to me the actual emotional flow of the psalm itself. Spurgeon points out that verses one and then 21 and 22 at the end are not the only prayers. You also have one in verse nine: "All my longings lie open before you, O Lord. My sighing is not hidden from you." And another one in verse 15: "I wait for you, O Lord. You will answer, O Lord my God." Those prayers divide up the material, and they do it in such a way that each time he prays, he seems to be more settled in his mind.

You can see as we study this whether you find that to be true, but I think it is. He begins asking God not to rebuke him in his anger or discipline him in his wrath. He then goes on in verses two to eight to describe his sickness, the thing that's bothering him. In verse nine, he prays, saying all these things are open and known to you. I detect a certain settling in that prayer from the opening. Then he goes on to talk about how his friends and companions and neighbors have treated him. He mentions those who are his enemies just a bit. In verse 15, he says, "Now I'm waiting for you, O Lord, and you will answer, O Lord my God." Isn't that a progression?

And then finally at the end, after he talks about his enemies again and presents arguments in the closing section as to why God should hear him and answer his prayer, he has an expression of faith because as you read those verses, you understand he really does believe that God is not going to forsake him and he will come quickly to help him. Why? The last line tells us: "O Lord my savior." He knows that that's what God is like. Now, that's the way I would look at it.

So let's do it in each of those sections. First of all, we have the prayer in verse one. The interesting thing about this prayer in verse one is that it's identical in the English and almost identical in the Hebrew to the sixth psalm, verse one. Now, the sixth psalm is another one of the penitential psalms. It's the first. This one we're looking at is the third. The others are Psalms 32, 51, 102, 130, and 143. You look at this sixth psalm, verse one, and there's that verse again: "O Lord, do not rebuke me in your anger or discipline me in your wrath."

Now, what's he praying about when he says that? Is he saying, "Lord, I don't want to be chastened. I don't want you to rebuke me. I don't want you to chastise me or discipline me for my sin"? He's not saying that at all. The emphasis is upon the words "in your anger" and "in your wrath." He understands that his sin merits the discipline of God. He's not asking to be spared that, but he doesn't want to be punished in anger or punished in wrath.

The reason we know that is that when we go back to the sixth psalm, we find that what he prays for there in verse two, immediately following verse one, which is the same as what we find here, is that God will show him mercy. "Be merciful to me, Lord, for I am faint." And again, he repeats it further on down in the psalm in verse nine: "The Lord has heard my cry for mercy." You see, that's quite a different thing. To pray for God to spare us something that we deserve is no honest prayer, but to pray for mercy, that is always proper, because mercy is not something that we deserve. It's entirely apart from our deserts. It's based purely in the character of God, who loves to show mercy. He doesn't always do it in every situation, but he loves to show mercy. And so we can always come to God and ask for mercy.

If we were to take these two psalms, Psalm 38 and Psalm 6, and put them in some order, I would suggest that probably Psalm 38 was written first and Psalm 6 was written second, because although they describe what seems to be the same situation in the life of David, the second is longer, the first is shorter. The second one elaborates upon the sickness a little more. It tells a little more about the enemies taunting him. But all of those elements are also present in the first psalm. They seem to describe the same situation. The only real difference is that in this one toward the end, David is still asking God for help. And at the very end of Psalm 6, he says that God has answered him.

Now, isn't that interesting? Here is a psalm in which he prayed for mercy, looking to God to be his comfort and his help. He confesses that God is his savior. And in Psalm 6, which we have a reason to believe was written later as I've just indicated, he says, "God has heard me and he's answered me. In other words, he's a merciful God." Now, David could do that. We can do that too.

The second section is when he begins to describe his illness. And the striking thing about his description here is that he traces it to his sin. He does it in verse three. The words that are most characteristic are "because of." Verse three: "Because of your wrath, there is no health in my body." The next line: "My bones have no soundness because of my sin." And verse five: "My wounds fester and are loathsome because of my sinful folly."

Now, we need to put that in perspective because although David is saying here very clearly that what he was suffering is a result of his sin, that does not mean that every time a person gets sick, God's punishing them. As a matter of fact, it is quite often, maybe the majority of the cases, quite another thing. It's interesting to study what the Bible teaches about suffering because it puts it in categories, and it's helpful to know them. Sometimes things come into our lives just because it's a fallen world.

Every time you get a cold, you don't have to say, "What did I do wrong?" Maybe you did do something wrong. You hung around somebody who had a cold when you shouldn't have done it or something like that. But it's a world that's filled with sickness. Or if you're hanging a picture and you hit your thumb with a hammer, you don't say, "God, why are you doing this to me?" You just weren't so good at hanging the picture. Some things that come into our lives are like that.

Moreover, some things are for the glory of God. The great illustration of that is the story of Job in the Old Testament, given precisely for that reason—the most extensive portion of all the Bible that deals with the purpose of God in suffering. A whole book given over to that theme. And the significance of it is that in the first chapter, God gives a testimony on behalf of Job. He does it in the face of Satan. He says, "Have you considered my servant Job? There is none like him in all the earth, a righteous man who loves God and abhors evil." You see, God's own testimony that Job was a righteous man, and yet all these terrible tragedies come into his life.

So it wouldn't have been right for Job to say, "Because of my sin, there's no health in my body" or "My wounds fester and are loathsome because of my sinful folly." That's what his friends wanted to tell him. His friends came and said, "Well, you know, it's a moral world. We believe in God. All things have a purpose. And therefore, if you're suffering, it must be because you did something. And if you're suffering badly, you must have done something very bad. What you have to do is probe around and find out what it is."

And Job contends with them because he knows that he's not a perfect man, of course, but he hasn't done anything that merits what he's going through. You have to get to the very end of the story to find out that what God is doing is glorifying himself in Job's conduct. Satan had said, "You know, your people only love you because you take care of them. If you take away what they have or you take away their health, they'll curse you to your face." But when that happened in the case of Job, Job didn't do it. Job said, "Naked came I from my mother's womb, and naked will I return to God. The Lord gives, the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord." And he glorified God in his suffering.

There's another illustration of that in the New Testament, unless for some reason we think that the Testaments are different. When Jesus and the disciples were making their way out of the temple area on one occasion, there was a blind man by the temple gate. Obviously, he went there to beg because everybody passed in and out and he figured that the best time to get money from them was when they were coming out of church. That's why we have so many people beg around here. They figure people go to church ought to be generous, and that's where that man was.

And the disciples saw him, and they made the same kind of connection that Job's friends made and sometimes our friends will make when we go through hard times. They'll say, "It's your fault, you've done something." And that's what they said here. They asked the Lord, they said, "Look, it's a moral world, some connection. Tell us who sinned that this came upon him? Was it this man or was it his parents?"

Now, the man was born blind. It's hard to imagine how he sinned in order to get the blindness, unless they believed in pre-existence, or maybe God punished him knowing that he was going to sin later, got him before he actually did it. I don't know what their thinking was at that point, but that's the question they asked. And Jesus answered very clearly. He said, "Neither this man nor his parents sinned. That's not the purpose of this, but that the glory of God might be made manifest." And that glory was displayed by Jesus Christ, the Son of God, healing him, restoring his sight. And it becomes a great story there in John's Gospel. The man becomes a great testimony to the grace of God. But you see, that's a way of saying that man was born blind and he suffered blindness all those years in order that in God's own time, Jesus Christ might come and restore his sight. Now, you see that puts quite a different perspective on suffering.

And yet, you see here, David is saying that it's because of my sin. So how do we deal with it? Well, let me suggest that whenever we go through some particularly strong setback or illness or perhaps other things that come into our lives, a couple of questions we ought to ask. And here they are. Number one: Have I gotten off the track of obedience to God, and is God sending this into my life in order to bring it to my mind so I can confess it and get right with him? I don't think we have to be too introspective about that. There are certain kinds of people who are exceedingly introspective, and all you have to do is suggest that what's in their life might be the result of something bad they've done, and they will spend the next twelve months trying to analyze what it is.

Generally speaking, I think that's a mistake, because if God is bringing something into our lives in order to correct a sin and bring us to the point of confession, generally speaking, we'll know what that is. God isn't devious. He doesn't play games. He doesn't say, "Now, I'm doing this, and you guess what it is. What was my purpose in doing that? See if you can find out. I'm going to keep it hidden." That isn't what he's doing. If he brings something like that into our lives because of sin, he makes it very clear what the connection is. And I would be very surprised if you've lived any time with the Lord that you don't have examples from your own experience like that—things that have happened to you that you know that God was calling you up short to say, "Look, I just want to remind you that I am still the Lord of your life and you're getting out of line there, get back in line." So whenever sickness comes into our lives, that's one thing we ought to pray. Now, people do get sick, and it doesn't necessarily mean that at all, but we certainly ought to ask that question.

And then here's the second one. Because often it isn't that, probably generally it isn't that. We should ask this question. We should say, "Is God sending this into my life in order to rub off some rough edges and develop more of the character of Jesus Christ within me?" Generally, we don't develop much character when times are good. It's when times are bad that character's developed. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in his Harvard address in the '70s, said that of the suffering of the Russian people during all those long years under communism. He said, "That's why I don't commend American society as it currently exists to my own. The suffering we've gone through has developed a depth of spiritual character that is sadly lacking in the West."

And he's absolutely true. So when things like that come into our lives, we have to say, "Is God using this to develop character in me?" One thing he might be developing is a sensitivity to others who are suffering. When we're young and healthy and very few things ever go wrong with us, we're not terribly sensitive to other people. But as you get older, you begin to develop aches and pains, and you realize that most people are not feeling very good a lot of the time, and it gives you an ability to understand some of the cantankerous moods they have or the difficulty they have in responding in certain situations. Well, that kind of character is developed.

And then thirdly, and I deliberately make it thirdly, we should say, "Is God sending this into my life as a special opportunity to glorify his name?" The reason I put that thirdly is that if you have these categories in mind, it's very easy to jump to that first and not ask the other important questions. "Oh yes, well, God sending this so I can glorify his name." And maybe what he's trying to do is bring something to our mind that we're doing wrong. You have to go through the process. Nevertheless, having done that, God often does send things, difficulty, into our lives so we can demonstrate the difference that it makes simply to be a Christian—the trust in a sovereign God who is loving and who is able to work and give us grace in such situations as well as when times are good.

At any rate, here is David talking about his sin, and he's ready to confess it and confess it openly. Now we come to the second prayer, and that's verse nine: "All my longings lie open before you, O Lord. My sighing is not hidden from you." Here he's saying that all that he's going through is known to God. You know, we say in one of our collects, often used in the Episcopal Church, "All things are open before the eyes of him with whom we have to do." Generally, that's said in the context of a confession of sin. All our sins, all our secret transgressions, all our evil thoughts, all our jealousies, all our selfishness—all of this lies open before the eyes of him with whom we have to do. We have to remember that. There's no sense covering up our sin with God.

But there's another sense in which having all things open before the eyes of him with whom we have to do is comforting. Certainly, to know that our sin is known is to disturb us and bring us to the point of confession. But it is also true that the things we suffer are known to God and open before his eyes. You see, there's no pain that you suffer that is not known to God. There is no distress of soul, no anguish of spirit that you've undergone that is not known to God. There's no slight that you've received from someone else, there's no abuse that you've endured, there's no slander, no prejudice, no hurt that you've gone through that is not known to Jesus Christ. So you see, to remind yourself of that, as David does in verse nine, is probably the first step to getting our mind off ourselves and onto God and receiving the kind of help and blessing that he intends for us. Isn't it comforting to be able to say, "All my longings lie open before you, O Lord. My sighing is not hidden from you"?

Verses 10 through 14 begin to talk about how he has been treated during the time of his illness. And the point here is that his friends and companions are avoiding him and his neighbors stay away. Psychologists tell us that there is a certain mechanism involved in human thinking in this respect. Why people avoid hospitals, feel uncomfortable around those who are ill, try to stay away from those who are seriously afflicted? Generally, psychologists say it's because we perceive ourselves to be mortal and imagine ourselves in the same condition, and we don't want to think about those things, so we avoid it. It's just a classic pattern of avoidance.

That's probably what was happening here. It's interesting that it's David, King David, who's praying this. You would say, "Well, look, the king certainly had friends. The king certainly had companions and neighbors. Everybody always clusters around people who are important and flatters them and all of that." But here is even David, you see, saying that this is what he experienced. Now, I want to put it to you this way: that although that is the way the world operates, Christians should be exactly the opposite. And if even David suffered that kind of alienation, you can be very sure that people you know who are sick suffer that kind of alienation and feel it as well. You say, "Oh, but Mrs. Smith, she's just been sick for a long time." Yes, that's right. And probably is feeling that people have been avoiding her for a long time. Because it's uncomfortable to go visit the sick, and not just a question of time, but it's somewhat disturbing. And you can be certain that there are people that used to be close to that person you know who is suffering, who are avoiding her or avoiding him because of that.

And so it's a great opportunity for Christians to show something of the love of God. You know, when Jesus told that story of the separation of the sheep and the goats as one of the parables in Matthew's Gospel, chapter 25, just before his arrest and crucifixion, he spelled out the things that distinguished between the sheep and the goats, that is, between his own and the world. And one of the things that characterizes those who are his own is that they visit the sick. You see, he's saying that the separation is made in the judgment because that is one thing that betrays the true character of Jesus Christ within. So when we read a psalm like this in which David is talking about his sickness and saying, "Look, my friends have abandoned me," that's a challenge to us not to do that, but to act differently and visit those we know are ill. Certainly, it's what a congregation should do for those among its number who are sick.

Now we come to the third prayer, verse 15. And here David says he's waiting on the Lord. Now, sometimes it's hard to imagine why the psalms are in the order they are. Sometimes we can detect order, sometimes they seem to flow a little bit one from the other. But quite often, it's hard to tell that. It's a collection of hymns like our hymnbook. It could be there without any special order, though even our hymnbooks have some kind of order. Here, I think there is an obvious connection why Psalm 38 follows Psalm 37. When we were studying Psalm 37, you'll recall that the emphasis upon that was to wait on the Lord. That's what David said again and again. At the beginning, he says it in a variety of ways: "Trust in the Lord, delight in the Lord, commit your way unto the Lord, be still before the Lord." But when he gets to the end, "waiting" is what he's emphasizing, verse 34: "Wait for the Lord and keep his way." Now we get to Psalm 38, and David says that's exactly what he's doing.

David's a great model in that, you know, waiting on the Lord. We are very impatient. David didn't seem to have been impatient. You recall that he was just a boy, young man, when he was anointed by Samuel to be the next king, but Saul was the current king. Now, David didn't go about trying to achieve the throne for himself. God said you'll be king, and so he was content to wait for it. He became a hero in Israel, killed Goliath. He was a great warrior, but Saul got jealous. Eventually, Saul began to hound him, follow him around, try to get him, try to take his life. And David never tried to retaliate by getting back at Saul.

And finally, even when Saul was killed in a battle with the Philistines and his son Jonathan and his warriors, all in the same day, and it was obviously the moment for David to say, "Well, now the throne is mine, my enemy is gone, the old king is dead, long live King David." He didn't do that. He waited for an invitation. It came from his people in Hebron, and he ruled at Hebron for seven years before he became the King of Israel. Altogether, he ruled for 40 years, including the two, so seven years went by before he finally had a 33-year reign over the United Nation of Israel. You see a model of waiting. So when he says here, "I'm going to wait for the Lord," that's not idle talk on behalf of David. It's somebody who knew how to wait.

And what about us? Do we wait? Well, I don't know, maybe you're great at waiting. I'm not great at waiting. I said here when I was talking about the last psalm, how impatient we are today. That in the old days, you know, they said when you missed a stagecoach out in the West, you didn't worry about it because there'd be another one along next month. But today we get impatient if you miss a turn of the revolving door. I'm like that. I like things to go quickly and smoothly and efficiently, and I get very agitated when they don't. One thing I've learned, I'm trying to learn, is that you have to wait upon the Lord. Even when you lose your voice. You say, "Well, I can't preach the sermon tonight, I'll preach it next week." So that that's the kind of thing we have to learn. It's hard to learn, but David is a model for us.

Now, in this last section, he's talking about his enemies again. They're a problem for him, a serious one. This is not just a matter of his friends deserting him so he's personally hurt, but his enemies can take advantage of the situation and actually harm him and the kingdom. So when he begins to talk about those, he begins to bring arguments before God as to why God should answer. It's very clear in verses 16 and 17 because you have the word "for." It means "because." "I'm going to wait for you, O Lord, and you will answer." And the reason you're going to answer is this. It's an indirect way, you see, of telling God why he should. And so in verse 16 he gives a reason, and in verse 17 he gives a reason. And I think he gives a reason in the next three verses as well. So all together, you have five reasons why God should hear his prayer.

Spurgeon has a sermon some place where he talks about praying with reasons, giving reasons to God why he should answer. Now, that doesn't mean that we manipulate God or persuade him by telling him something he doesn't know. But when we give reasons, it helps us sort out our thinking, and it has a great benefit for us. And at any rate, that's what David is doing. His first reason is this: It's not right that his enemies should be allowed to gloat over his misfortune or boast when his foot slips. Now, they may be his enemies, but that doesn't excuse their conduct. And he may be a sinner and be punished for God by sickness for his sin, but that doesn't excuse their conduct either. And so he's saying in effect, isn't he, "Lord, I have transgressed your commandments and you've afflicted me as a result. It isn't right that these people should be allowed to triumph over me as they are doing." So that's his first argument.

Second argument is that his condition is desperate. His foot has already slipped and now he's about to fall. You see, it would be bad enough if David said, "I've only slipped for a moment," but he says, "It's worse than this, I'm about to fall." I think when he says "fall," what he really means is "I'm about to die." Because you go back to Psalm 6, you'll find that that's what he's talking about explicitly there. He's afraid he's going to be taken down to Sheol. So he says to God, "This is not just a period of temporary illness for me, you know, that I'll get over, give me a week of nice rest at home. I'm likely to die because of this." And so he puts that before God.

Number four, verse 19: He says that my enemies are numerous, and by contrast, I'm just one person. You see, what can one person do in circumstances like that? All of my enemies are piled up against me. I'm alone, even my friends have left me. How can I possibly survive unless you, Lord, are on my side? And yet, of course, God is on his side. One with God is a majority, and that's what he knew and was relying on. Finally, in verse 20, there's a last argument and it's this: He's been good to his enemies even though they're now being evil to him, and therefore their words are slanderous. And God should support him and should rebuke the kind of things that are being said.

Well, we come to the end, and I think we come to the end of this progress which we've noted throughout the psalm. You see, we may begin in a very troubled state of mind, but when we bring things to God, inevitably we find help and we find some consolation and comfort in the suffering. It doesn't mean that the suffering goes away or that we still don't have questions. Job obviously had questions for a long, long time. But when we lay it before God, there is a tendency for God so to work that our souls and spirits quiet down, and we're directed back to him who is our only source of health, comfort, and salvation. And that's what David says. "O Lord, do not forsake me. Be not far from me, O my God. Come quickly to help me, O Lord my savior."

That's a great line: "O Lord my savior." That's the theme of the Bible. Very end of the second chapter of Jonah, in that great prayer that Jonah uttered from the belly of the fish, Jonah says, "The Lord is my salvation" or "Salvation comes from the Lord." That's the name of Jesus. Jesus means—the angel gave the interpretation to Joseph—you'll call him Jesus because he will save his people from their sins. God is the savior, and if God is not the savior, there is no savior anywhere. That's the case. Your sickness has no meaning. You just live and you die, and that's the end of it, and who cares? But if God is the savior, then he's the one to whom we turn. He's the one that's given us life. He's given us such health as we have. He guides our destiny. And we can lay all these things before him. And when we do that, we find the comfort that the people of God have found, even in desperate sickness, down through all the many generations.

Let's pray. Our Father, we're thankful for this psalm in which David, even King David, expresses the anguish that he experienced as a result of his very serious illness. Not only suffering physically but psychologically in the desertion of his friends and mentally because he knew that in this case at least, his sickness was related to his sin. Our Father, we suffer many things ourselves, and those who hear this, many will not be in good health. Many will be facing very serious and alarming days ahead. But we ask for your special presence in their lives and comfort for them as they go through times of difficulty and that supernatural peace which is ours and which the Bible promises that passes all human understanding. Because we confess that whether in life or in death, in times of health and times of sickness, in plenty or in want, whatever it may be, you are our savior. And if you are not our savior, there is no help anywhere to be found. We thank you that you are what you are and we can come to you and find you to be as you have always been. For Jesus' sake, amen.

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