1 Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.
2 Blessed is the man unto whom the Lord imputeth not iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no guile.
3 When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long.
4 For day and night thy hand was heavy upon me: my moisture is turned into the drought of summer. Selah.
5 I acknowledge my sin unto thee, and mine iniquity have I not hid. I said, I will confess my transgressions unto the Lord; and thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin. Selah.
6 For this shall every one that is godly pray unto thee in a time when thou mayest be found: surely in the floods of great waters they shall not come nigh unto him.
7 Thou art my hiding place; thou shalt preserve me from trouble; thou shalt compass me about with songs of deliverance. Selah.
8 I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go: I will guide thee with mine eye.
9 Be ye not as the horse, or as the mule, which have no understanding: whose mouth must be held in with bit and bridle, lest they come near unto thee.
10 Many sorrows shall be to the wicked: but he that trusteth in the Lord, mercy shall compass him about.
11 Be glad in the Lord, and rejoice, ye righteous: and shout for joy, all ye that are upright in heart.
Introduction
“Oh, what a relief it is!” says the TV commercial. The psalmist says the same thing. The commercial is talking about a digestive disorder. The psalmist is talking about the forgiveness of sins.
The essence of these words were spoken by David in Psalm 32. This psalm is a sequel to Psalm 51 in which he confesses his sin with Bathsheba. Here he describes the blessings that come with the forgiveness of sin, encourages us to seek the Lord’s deliverance rather than stubbornly refuse to follow him, and finally extols us to rejoice in the Lord.
The psalm begins, “Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven.” The word blessed means “incredibly happy.” In this statement David uses four words to describe the wrong he had done: transgression, sin, iniquity, and guile.
The word transgress means “to do what is forbidden.” The word sin means “to fail to do what is required.” The word iniquity means “to pervert that which is good.” The word guile means “to project what is false.”
We have all done all of these things. Culture demands a certain amount of this. For example, we often greet people, “Hello, how are you doing today?” when we really don’t care how they are doing. It is just one of the cultural niceties of life.
Like most pastors, I make a practice of standing at the front door of the church at the close of the worship services and greeting the people as they leave. In one church I pastored, I had a member who was a hypochondriac. She delighted in telling everyone about her infirmities. When I greeted her, “Hello, how are you today?” she would always stop and tell me—and it was always bad. I soon learned how to deal with her. When I saw her approaching, I would put a broad smile on my face, take her by the hand, and pull her gently past me saying all the while, “My, you sure look good today.”
In both instances I was projecting that which was false. Some of that is a part of life. But the real problem comes when we express false feelings to God. That’s what David was doing. He had been playing the hypocrite before both God and man.
For more than a year David tried to conceal his sin. But inwardly it was tearing him apart. He said that when he didn’t declare his sin his body wasted away (verses 3-4). David’s sin was having a devastating effect upon him. He was growing old before his time; he was under great emotional pressure; and his vitality was being drained from him like the sun can sap your energy on a hot day, or a burning fever can drain your energy from you.
Physically, emotionally, and spiritually David was suffering. Guilt affects the whole of man—ask any physician or Christian psychiatrist. As Cecil Osborn has pointed out in his book, The Art of Understanding Yourself, there is a tension between the need to reveal and the need to conceal.
When David was confronted by Nathan the prophet, he realized that there was no use in pretending any longer. He could cease his hypocrisy. That’s when he acknowledged his sin and stopped trying to hide his past.
When David confessed his sins, he experienced the forgiveness and cleansing that he describes in the beginning of this psalm. David uses three words, each with a different shade of meaning to show how wonderfully and completely God dealt with his sin. He uses the words forgive, cover, and impute.
The word forgive means “to lift, to take away.” When David confessed his sin, it was as if a great weight had been lifted from him. The word cover means “to hide.” His sin was haunting him no longer. It was as if God had placed a covering over it. The word impute means “to cancel a debt.” God erased the marks against David from the ledger of life when he confessed. He was held accountable for them no longer. He was forgiven.
As he suddenly realized that he was forgiven, that he could stop pretending, that the great burden of guilt had been lifted from him, he said, “Oh, what a relief it is.”
Having described for us the incredible joy that comes from forgiveness, David seeks to encourage us from his own experience. Someone has said, “A fool learns from his own mistakes. A wise man learns from the mistakes of others.” David wants us to learn from his mistakes.
There are three lessons for us in the reminder of this psalm.
1. God is on to us. First, if we will confess to the Lord he will forgive us (verses 6-7). This truth is out of the crucible of David’s own experience. He had learned the hard way to not to try to conceal his sin. He urges us to quickly confess and forsake our wrong so that God can forgive us.
The first consciousness of sin ought to lead to the confession of sin. The tendency is to cover, to conceal our sin. The scripture warns, “He that covereth his sins shall not prosper: but whoso confesseth and forsaketh them shall have mercy” (Proverbs 28:13).
Before God will forgive us of our sins and deliver us from them, we must undeceive ourselves. Self-deception about our own sinfulness is one of life’s most common mistakes (1 John 1:10). Augustine said, “The beginning of wisdom is to know yourself to be a sinner.” It is only when we face up to our own wrongdoing that God will forgive and remove it.
When you confess to God, you don’t pass on to him information he didn’t have before. God has been on to you and to me for a long time. He simply wants us to realize our wrong, be sorry for it, and turn from it.
2. Don’t be like a donkey. Second, obey the Lord and he will lead you (verses 8-9). The Lord wants to lead us in the paths of righteousness (Psalm 23:3). He does not want to drive us to righteousness, but to lead us gently with his eye. Your eyes can be very expressive. They can say a great deal.
For example, you can roll your eyes back as if to say, “Oh, no.” You can cut them to first one side and then the other as if to say, “Is anybody listening?” You can open them wide open as if to say, “Watch out.” Or you can wink your eye and communicate all kinds of messages. Though God seeks to lead us gently, we do not have to follow him. We can stubbornly refuse to obey. David urges in this psalm, “Be ye not as the horse, or as the mule, which have no understanding.”
It is an interesting study to see how often God uses animals in the Bible to teach us. He says, “Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise” (Proverbs 6:6). An ant is an example of industry, of hard work. Ants can lift fifty times their own weight. If I could do that, I could lift ten thousand pounds. And they work tirelessly. We are told to learn from the rabbit who, though feeble, builds his home in the rocks. Weak and defenseless against larger and more vicious animals, it must use wisdom in building his home in a safe place. This creature that still lives in Israel today is held up for us as an example of wisdom. Jesus also said, “Behold the birds of the air.” The birds teach us to trust God for our daily bread. In addition, he advised, “Be as wise as serpents and as harmless as doves.”
The Bible says, “Be ye not as the horse, or as the mule, which have no understanding: whose mouth must be held in with bit and bridle, lest they come near unto thee” (Psalm 32:9). In this verse we are told not to be like a mule. What trait does a mule most characterize? Stubbornness. We are here being warned against stubbornly refusing to obey the Lord. One of my heroes is Alonzo Stagg. He coached the University of Chicago until he was 70 years of age. He then moved to the College of the Pacific where he coached for another 14 years until he was 84 years old. When he retired from the College of the Pacific he joined his son’s coaching staff for another six years—until he was 90. Then he coached one more year, as a junior college assistant, finally retiring at the age of 91.
Early in his life, Alonzo Stagg, a devout Presbyterian, felt called into the ministry. But feeling that he was unsuited for the pulpit, he went into coaching. He said, “My ministry is the young men of America.” As a Christian, Coach Stagg never used profanity. The worst word he ever used was “jackass”—another name for a mule.
If a player messed up he would call him that. If he really messed up he would call him a “double jackass.” If he really, really did bad, he called him a “triple jackass.” And when there was extreme profanation he would call him, “the king of the jackasses.” His players said, “He never left the practice field with humans on it. He always left the entire squad grazing.”
Sarah Churchill wrote in Keep on Dancing, “My father Winston Churchill said to me that we had to a large extent succeeded in the civilized world in erasing the lion and the tiger from the human soul. But we had not succeeded in removing the donkey.” Proverbs 3:5-6 tells us, “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.”
3. The way to blessings. Third, trust in the Lord and he will bless you (verse 10). David declares that the wicked have many sorrows. The writer of Proverbs agrees. He tells us that “the way of the transgressor is hard.”
Robert Louis Stevenson in his book The Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has Mr. Hyde say, “If I am the chief of sinners, I am also the chief of sufferers.” Sin brings sorrow but trust in the Lord brings mercy. David was a living example of this. He closes by exhorting, “Be glad In the Lord, and rejoice, ye righteous: and shout for joy, all ye that are upright in heart.”
Years ago, a man was sharing his conversion experience with me. As he told about the former pastor who had led him to Christ, he said, “He taught me two great lessons in life. First, the Christian life is fun. Second, the Christian life is hard.” This is one of the paradoxes of the Christian life. It is a mixture of agony and ecstasy. There are struggles and hardships. There are temptations and trials. But there is also the incredible joy of forgiveness.
This is what David has experienced and what he wants us to experience also. David wrote this psalm as a model of what might happen in your life also. We know, from our vantage point, that the forgiveness he describes here has been made possible through the death of Jesus upon the cross. He died so that the weight of sin and guilt might be lifted from our shoulders. His blood becomes a covering for our sin. He died in our place and thus paid the debt for us. Through faith and trust in him, the forgiveness David describes can be yours today.