2 Samuel Lesson 61

Doctrine of Confession - Psalm 51:1-12

We are at that point of David’s life where out of fellowship he confesses and is restored and the pattern of his confession is given in Psalm 51. I have recently totally revised Psalm 51 having studied it a lot more carefully than I had before and have seen features in here that now explain a lot of things that I’ve encountered trying to help Christians who have difficulty. And there will be some points that are new. So let’s go back and start with the outline of the Psalm once again because I’m afraid if I don’t do what I’m doing you’re going to be confused when we get done.

There are five parts of the Psalm and there are also five points to the doctrine. And they don’t coincide, so watch out when we say we’ve covered this section of the Psalm or this doctrine, we’re talking about two different things. First let’s look at the five points to the Psalm. The first part of the Psalm, verses 1-2; the second part is verses 3-6; [the third part is verses 7-12] and the best way to note this is probably just put a little horizontal line between these verses so when you read it you’ll mentally break the Psalm up in these parts. The fourth part is verses 13-17 and the last part is verses 18-19. Those are the five parts of the Psalm.

This Psalm is a confession Psalm or a rebound Psalm and this Psalm therefore is basic material that we all use every day of our lives as Christians, and it’s that time when we’re going back and going over the basics and so this is an opportunity to catch up, check out whether you’re functioning by these basic points or not. You might even make a check list when you have completed Psalm 51, a 3 x 5 card or something and carry it around with you until you’re used to going through the procedure. There’s nothing wrong with check lists; check lists are devised for situations where you just normally forget until you get a procedure down. And this is one procedure that barring everything else you ought to have down. There’s only one thing more important than confession and that’s how to believe in Jesus Christ, the content of the gospel. So this material is just basic stuff and every Christian should know it.

There are going to be four doctrinal points that we will fill in as we go through this evening; we’ll only reach the first three but don’t confuse them; I’ll be discussing doctrinal points, sometimes they coincide with the part of the Psalm, sometimes they don’t, so watch out. The first two verses, “Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy loving-kindness; according unto the multitude of Thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions. [2] Wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.” Now the heading on Psalm 51, and every translation should have a short explanation, usually put in fine print; that should not be in fine print, that is just as much part of the Hebrew text as verse 1. In fact, in the Masoretic text and the way it’s been broken down in modern editions, that section in fine print is verse 1, so that it’s part of the text. It relates to the Bathsheba incident, 2 Samuel 11-12.

Now again to understand how David got out of fellowship will help us understand the doctrine of confession. As I go through the doctrine of confession I will also be doing something else tonight, and since we’ve gone through Creation, the fall, we’re going through the flood, now we’re going to start applying those, and all the time you’ve wondered what it’s for, tonight you’re going to see what it’s for, because now you will be able to see things in this Psalm and will be able to lock it in your mentality so that you can use it much more easily and much more quickly than you have before. The long range objective of the family training Framework literature is simply to provide mental pegs in your minds as well as in your children’s minds so this doctrine will fit and can be recalled quickly.

The Bathsheba incident was an incident at the end of a long chain of events in David’s life. So David, we found, got out of fellowship for a long time. He had been out of fellowship long enough in this pre-Bathsheba time period so that he was developing weeds in his soul, in the ground of his soul. And these weeds we are calling minor thought learned behavior patterns. That is, David’s lifestyle had changed; it was not that David sinned once. It was that David sinned once and was out of fellowship. He was not noticeably out of fellowship, but after a while this thing began to snowball and finally bang, something spectacular happened. But just because something spectacular happened with Bathsheba and Uriah must not mislead you when you consider David’s life. And it must not mislead you when you consider your life. Don’t wait until there’s an explosion; explosions build up on the Christian life for a long time before they pop off.

For example, think of the illustration of temporary insanity. You’ve read in the newspapers how somebody will go blow somebody’s head off and say oh, I was temporarily insane and use this to say I’m not responsible. Scripturally there is no basis for irresponsibility under conditions of temporary insanity. And you can have all the cop outs and everything else and that doesn’t excuse you. You can blame it on Satan, you can blame it on something else, but God blames it on you and blames it on me. Temporary insanity is our doing. We have done it, we are responsible.

Now in this period what has happened to David, he has developed a characteristic of boredom. He is sleeping in the afternoon; the David who earlier in the Psalms had said he got up early every morning. He’s bored with the will of God in his life. Boredom represents negative volition. You may never have thought this, but boredom actually is a defiance of God’s providence. Boredom is a manifestation to you that you are not giving thanks fro what God has done for you. If you were alert to God’s will, if you were alert to the great needs of people around you, if you were alert to the great issues of our time, you would ask the question, Lord, where is enough time to do all the things that need to be done. It would be precisely opposite than boredom. Boredom is a sin pattern, it is a sin style. And it results from lack of thanksgiving to God. I am bored with God’s grace is literally what boredom is.

David suffers from a pattern of boredom. And how shall we say he got into this. We don’t know, the text doesn’t really tell us how David got into this pattern of boredom. But I’ll hazard a guess that probably as king he began to be hacked off with the kinds of people that he had in his administration. The job as king didn’t turn out to be all flowers, like he thought it would. And so he was on negative volition, God, why did You put me on this throne, this isn’t pleasurable and joyful, to be in this situation with all the pressures of the office on my shoulders. I am not thankful for it, and this resulted in boredom, sort of like what John Kennedy once quipped to Barry Goldwater the year after he was in his presidency, Goldwater was in his office talking to him and Kennedy quipped, (quote) “what a lousy job this has turned out to be” (end quote). And this probably is the line of most leaders. I’m sure Nixon has said it more than once this year and I’m sure many people in high office think this way. And David was no exception, David had a sin nature like everyone else, and therefore David had somehow, through one of these systems, got himself out of fellowship and he developed this –R learned behavior pattern of boredom.

You see sin starts out in one small area of life, say in this area it’s David’s job. This is how it works. It starts out as one little cell, that’s the initial act of sin, I am not thankful for God in this area of my life: my job. Now what happens? If that sin isn’t dealt with it starts growing and begins to move into other areas. Now David had six or seven women, he had plenty of sex, but David was bored with sex; this is one of those things that got him in trouble with sex, he was bored here. It spread down into the area of the military; David was always excited to be in a battle but that was boring to him. So what you have is a sin that is not dealt with and gradually spreads to every area of his life until we have a life dominating behavior pattern. Now it’s gotten serious; it takes time for life dominating patterns to develop. But the fact that this life dominating pattern of mental attitude boredom developed in a wonderful believer, should warn us that no how many accomplishments we have for the Lord we are never insured against this kind of activity. We are never guaranteed by the Holy Spirit that we cannot develop these patterns, patterns of boredom or patterns of something else that’s come in.

Now as a result David has become depressed. Probably all during the time when he was bored and he had minus thanksgiving, if you can spot it, that’s the place to spot it, the first evidence of mental attitude sin against God was a lack of thanksgiving, but my experience and the experience of many believers that I talk with is that most of us just don’t spot it this early, we have to let it hang a little while before we see the evidence. But lack of thanksgiving is the first place it shows up and then finally it spreads out. Probably during this time David had his little great groups that got together, what was wrong with the way Yahweh was leading the nation and so on.

So this is all in the background of the Bathsheba incident. Now the incident occurs. The incident is an illustration of something you can relate to your divine viewpoint framework. You’ve learned four events: creation, fall and flood. Now if you have a sin problem, here’s a practical illustration because if you master the mental technique here this is the way you can handle your life. Now here we have a situation where everything went wrong. David is rocking along and then bang, what happened. David’s got a problem; it doesn’t become obvious until the explosion. He had a problem all during this past period but it didn’t become obvious until the explosion.

Now the explosion has occurred, now we’ve got to analyze what went wrong. Which part of the divine viewpoint framework do you go to to find out the information necessary to deal with this kind of a problem. Obviously, you go to the fall, because that event teaches us and reveals to us the whole psychology of sin. If you go to the fall, you should also know where in your Bible you go to pick up this material, it is Genesis 3-4. And you also recall certain things in Genesis 3-4 and let’s just mentally go through that fall because we’re going to pick them all up in Psalm 51. So here’s where you’re going back, plugging into the divine viewpoint framework, getting oriented and then moving on to analyze the personal problem at hand.

The first thing you remember about Genesis 3-4 is that you have a questioning of God’s authority. God really doesn’t know what He’s talking about, that’s the first thing you notice. All right, with David, do you see the parallel, over here David is questioning God, he is saying now look, I really don’t think God knows what He’s doing by way of blessing me, he’s given me a lousy job as king, a lot of people around here are having problems and I just can’t seem to keep the lid on everything; every time I get everything organized something blows lose over here and I’m getting tired of this kind of thing. So David is questioning what God is doing in his life, in a negative sense.

The second thing you observe about Genesis 3-4 and that fall event is that after the negative volition, after the act you have operation cover-up, fig leaves. And so here we have a human viewpoint attempt to solve the mess. Now David, we have already seen, has used cover-ups. All right, do you see why it’s so important to master the simple stories, you can take that story and apply it in a thousand different ways. Here you’ve got the fall. How did he show fig leaves? Simple, David was naked in the sense that he was guilty before men and he knew that the word was going to get out. So what did he do? He tried to get Bathsheba to have sex with her husband to cover it up; when he couldn’t do that he had her husband murdered along with many, many fine soldiers in his unit. So David has exercised cover-up. Now this shouldn’t surprise you, you should say look at this David, things are falling into place, and so when you have a problem and you see this thing, instead of getting shocked by what’s happening in your life, relax, just go back and look, why it’s all falling into place, boom, boom, boom, here’s my fig leaves. So cover-up, that’s one characteristic.

Another characteristic that occurred in this incident of the fall is blame-shifting. Remember what happened when God said to the man, why did you eat? Well, it’s the woman’s fault you gave her, you know that thing You gave me. Why did the woman eat? It was the serpent’s fault, you know the serpent You put in the Garden God. So blame-shifting, that’s another corollary to human sin, always someone else’s fault. In this case we don’t know exactly what David used to blame-shift but we can presuppose that David’s been blame-shifting. We don’t see evidences in Psalm 51 where he quit it but nevertheless, blame-shifting, BS, that’s what it is, blame-shifting went on.

Now the next thing in the story of Genesis 3-4, just visualize in your mind the story, it is a simple story to master; a child can master that story but once a child has mastered that story he has recall of very important doctrine. So after we have the blame-shifting you go to Genesis 4 and recall the Cain/Abel incident, and you recall from that incident, after Cain was rejected he was depressed. So you see another feature of sin is that depression is the result of it. And so Cain was depressed and what did God tell Cain to do. Let’s look at Genesis 4 because He gives the solution to depression. In verse 6 God recognizes Cain as depressed, and he comes and asks him a question in verse 6, “And the LORD said unto Cain, Why are you angry? And why has your countenance fallen?” That’s an idiom for depression, why are you depressed? Verse , “If you do well,” that is obey My word, then “shalt thou not be accepted?” In other words, it’ll solve both your anger and it’ll solve your depression. But please notice God doesn’t say to Cain wait until I give you a feeling, or wait until I take your depression away before you obey. No, that’s not part of the deal; He tells Cain you obey the Word of God whether you’re depressed or not, and then after you obey your depression will leave. That’s a promise that God gives to break the depression cycle, obedience to God’s Word.

Now he gives a further warning and this explains that if you do not deal with your depression and if you do not start positive volition to the Word of God, then you are really going to be in trouble because “sin crouches at the door,” meaning the sin nature is going to be let loose in a more potent form than it has up to this point. So God has a warning, and we have dubbed this the tiger in the tank. So we have the tiger in the tank which is going to be released; God warns us, and there’s only one thing that can cut this thing off and that’s get back to a pattern of obedience whether you feel like it or not.

Now that’s from the story, that’s the divine viewpoint framework, that’s the event, that’s Genesis 4:3-4. Now let’s come over, taking what we have learned from the divine viewpoint framework as a system for analysis, now come to David’s personal life. We have already seen his blame shifting, we are going to see his depression, David was very depressed for many months, probably over a year, so at least one year went by when David was depressed. The warning of the tiger in the thank obviously came to pass with the Bathsheba incident. See, he was depressed before the incident, he was disobedient before the incident and he could have broken out of this, if he had chosen to obey, but he didn’t, so sin crouches at the door; you know not what you have inside, and it blew loose.

Now let’s come to Psalm 51:1-2. This is why David says, “Have mercy upon me,” David recognizes what has happened and from this, we have looked at David’s life, we have looked at in the light of the event of the divine viewpoint framework, we’ve associated it with the story in our minds, so now we have a basis to understand David. You probably don’t realize all you’ve just learned about David. If David were to come to you now after what we have just done, you would understand him tremendously. All that would be necessary if you were to talk to David, to give exhortation to David, would be to find some of the specifics, but you wouldn’t be at a loss to know what generally is his problem; generally his problem is just what we have seen. And all that would be necessary would be to say now David, where are you depressed, what are you depressed about? How often do you go brooding, and when you do brood what do you usually think about. These are the kinds of questions we’d want to ask David. And at least we’d know what kind of questions to ask him because first we had that framework.

Now we come to the first point of the doctrine of confession, verses 1-2, and this is point number one in the doctrine. Verses 1-2 form part one of the Psalm but they also teach point one of the doctrine of confession. Before you can confess you must be convinced of the sinful act itself; there must be conviction of specific sin; underline the word “specific.” There must be conviction over specific sin, and there obviously must be a desire to overcome, plus a desire to change, to do something. Now what does that tell you that the Holy Spirit has already done? What has the Holy Spirit already done before confession to get this first point? Obviously the Holy Spirit has stopped operation cover-up, hasn’t He? In order to get to this place, first the cover-up had to be seen for what it is. Now we don’t know how that was done, we know that Nathan had a lot to do with it and we’re going to see how Nathan did it later, but this is why I’m taking you through Psalm 51 before we go back to Nathan. Nathan had all these dynamics down before he had David.

But the cover-up had stopped, so on to this first point of confession, before we can confess our sins the first thing that has to happen somehow, and we don’t do it, believe me, this is the hand of heaven, the Holy Spirit working in our life, the Holy Spirit must destroy cover-up. And He has many ways of doing this. This is why, those of you who do not believe in eternal security, or think that you can lose salvation, have a very narrow view of the Holy Spirit. You see the Holy Spirit, if you are regenerate and in Christ is at work in your life even when you are out of fellowship… even when you are out of fellowship! And that means that when you are out of fellowship the Holy Spirit is moving to destroy and rip off the cover-up. That’s His first point of operation.

How does the Holy Spirit rip off cover-ups? We could use one basic word for it, He [can’t understand word, sounds like: swarts] you and He [same word] me, every time we try to cover up something that should be dealt with by some gimmick, we will always be [sounds like: swarted]; we’ll always meet resistance, the thing will fall through, cave in, flunk, wash out, flunk, something will happen. And that’s how the Holy Spirit works in your life and if you pay attention you can see how He does this. You can write a spiritual autobiography of watching how the Holy Spirit rips your cover-up off, and this we know from Scripture. It’s not guessing what the Holy Spirit is going to do, it’s knowing what the Holy Spirit is going to do.

He says, “Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy loving-kindness,” I explained that last time, this is His covenant love, it’s positional truth, but the thing to notice is David’s [can’t understand word, sounds like: sorrow-ness] in verse 1-2; notice how many times he speaks of sin, he uses the three Hebrew nouns that are used over and over in Scripture to look at sin from different perspectives. One of these nouns is the word “to miss the mark;” that’s what one of them means. “Miss the mark” emphasizes the departure of your act from the canon of Scripture. So one of the things that cover-up, this rip-off is going to show and produce is an awareness specifically of where we are not meeting the standards of the Word of God. And to footnote this a moment, this should show you how you can help the Holy Spirit do His job. Now I don’t mean this in the Arminian sense of the term, but you can help the Holy Spirit have an easier time and the result is it will make it a lot easier on you. If when you’re having trouble you will fight your way to the Bible, pick it up and read anywhere, from Genesis to Revelation, just get into it and open it and read it, even if it’s only a verse or two. Every time you can fight and struggle to pick the thing up and look at it and read it you’re providing material to produce this kind of conviction; you are exposing the film so the Holy Spirit can develop it.

Another one of these nouns is the word “rebellion” and this emphasizes the attitude of personal sin, the attitude involved, the rebelliousness, the defiance of God. Now this is hard to see sometimes unless you see the Word and perspective on it. And then finally the other word that is used for sin here means the effects of sin, the destructive effects of sin.

So by repeating the word “sin” under three different nouns, what do you suppose David is doing for us right here? He’s showing us that he evidently had been under tremendous conviction by the Holy Spirit. He approaches sin from the direction of the violation of the Word, he approaches it from the standpoint of its effects and he approaches it from the standpoint of his attitude toward God; he triangulates the whole thing and pinpoints it. How do we know he pinpointed it? What in all three instances in verses 1-2 precede those nouns? Notice the little word, it precedes the noun every time the noun occurs. It’s the personal pronoun, “my.” So that shows you that the Holy Spirit has pinned it down to something specific, no doubt in his mind.

So David is now ready to confess. He would not have been ready to confess if this had not been true. How long had David been out of it? Well, he was out of it all nine months we can tell, during Bathsheba’s pregnancy and he was out of it before that long enough to get into compound carnality. So let’s just guess that he was probably out of it for a year and a half at least; for 18 months or so David was out of fellowship; he was in a state of continual depression. Now for 18 months he refused to acknowledge the existence of this personal sin. He was always blaming it on somebody else, he had the depression but you know, pills take care of that, and so he always used some cover-up, and then he found out the pills don’t take care of that, they only hide it. So he began to say, listen, I must really have a problem, and then finally he learned of the problem. So look, all these months went by, a tremendously long time, and only at the end of that period was he ready to admit the existence of this specific point act of sin.

Now, let’s move to the next section of the Psalm, verses 3-6. In this section we have two points of doctrine; that’s why I told you watch out that you don’t get the sections mixed with the points of doctrine. Verses 3-6 will have points 2 and 3 of the doctrine of confession imbedded in here, four verses, two points of doctrine. Verses 3-6 give us David’s confession of his act and his need for a deep change. There are two things David is confessing, and here is where I think I’ve made an advance over the last time I taught Psalm 51. The first thing he is confessing is the point act, he confesses it, specifically, but he does more than just confess the point act; he is going to go on and he is going to acknowledge the deep need for change. That too is part of his confession.

Now let’s look at verses 3-4 because there is where we have the second point of doctrine and that is that David confesses his act, that’s the confession proper. “For I acknowledge my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me. [4] Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight, that You might be justified when You speak, and be clear when You judge.” “For” is the connective and “for” tells us that this shows why David could be aware of his sin in verses 1-2, “for” relates back to those two verses. Remember the first point of the doctrine of confession, you have to be aware and convinced of the specific act of sin first. How was David aware of it? Here’s how, verse 3. “For I” and it says in the King James “acknowledge,” in the Hebrew it is the word yadah, and yadah is simply the verb to know.

Now this is interesting because if you have done any study in psychology you’ll immediately see there’s something wrong with this verse. This verse is directly opposite to most psychological models of trouble people, because mostly trouble people are said to not really know their problem. They’re unaware, they’re not personally aware of their problem. But the Bible says oh no, that’s not the problem at all. The problem is not awareness, the problem is whether you’re suppressing the awareness of whether you’re submitting to it because your conscience is constantly at work.

In the Bible we have several parts and we’ll run into these terms so let’s review them. We have conscience, we have mind, we have feelings or emotions. The mind may try to blot out the conscience and this is a truth that’s going to come up in this Psalm, and it’s a truth, it’s something that I didn’t teach before but I’ve seen so much evidence of it and now see it to be in the text that I’d better teach it. With our minds we are able to turn off the conscience, but there is a way that God has of bypassing your mind and mine, and that is by the conscience’s effect on feeling. And so the conscience can trigger off feelings of depression, feelings of frustration and make you feel absolutely miserable, but you will convince yourself oh, everything’s fine, everything’s fine, you need a pill, this kind of thing, because we are experts at wiping out the link between the conscience and the mind. But the other link the secondary link goes between the conscience and the feeling. So God has a backup system that He puts into action when we knock the primary system, kind of a fail-safe system operating here.

Let’s watch how it worked in David’s case, David said I know my transgressions. Now when he says yadah, yadah does not mean that he’s intellectually aware of them so much as it just simply means he is aware of them, by either the primary system or the secondary system. He is somehow aware of them. Later on you will see remarks that he makes that tells us that most of the way he was aware was the secondary way. David had wiped out the primary system of alert through the mind, so much that God had to rely almost completely on the secondary system. “I know my transgressions, by sin is always in front of me.” So that tells us something, that it is not true that a troubled person does not know their problem. A troubled person all too well knows their problem and they’re not dealing with their problem.

Then in verse 4 is the confession proper, “Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight,” it’s a specific thing. He’s confessing the act of sin that is the issue at the moment, and he says, “that,” purpose clause, “that You may be justified when You speak, and be clear when You judge.” Now we are introduced to something very interesting and you’d miss it if you don’t have the divine viewpoint framework of looking at this. What was the thing in the story of Adam and Eve after the cover-up? God came to them and what was the next thing? Blame-shifting. Now before David could get to the first point of the doctrine of confession he had to get rid of the cover-ups. The Holy Spirit wiped the cover-ups off the board. The Holy Spirit frustrated every activity to make up for his sin. Every activity, total frustration. Now here at the second point of confession we have the opposite again; The Holy Spirit has knocked out blame-shifting. See, he couldn’t make that statement in verse 4 if he was still involved in blame-shifting. So blame-shifting has stopped.

So the second point in the doctrine of confession is we confess the responsibility for the act and blame-shifting. The first point was that we acknowledge the sin is there and we want to do something about it and we saw cover-up. And the second thing, after we stop the cover-up we’ve got to stop the blame-shifting. You see there’s a positive and a negative on this thing. You just don’t go charging into 1 John 1:9 without going through this procedure. It’s true, there’s only one thing involved and that’s 1 John 1:9, “if we confess our sins” concept. This is the 1 John 1:9 of the Old Testament. But notice the approach to 1 John 1:9 involves sort of a landing approach, landing procedures before you land. So the second point of our doctrine of confession, once again, confession of the responsibility for the act including stopping blame-shifting. Verse 4b, the last part, that purpose clause is how David stopped blame-shifting, “that God might be justified,” in other words, it is not God’s fault, I stop my accusing of God.

Now that tells us a lot about David. That is why I suggested earlier he got into this boredom thing. You see boredom is blaming God for the dull environment. That actually is blaming God because God has set you up into a situation where you can’t do anything except your own or sleep or something. That’s boredom; it’s a mental attitude sin. So boredom has been his pattern, he breaks out of it here by stop blame-shifting, putting this thing over on God’s hands, it’s all God’s fault, He gave me this cruddy job, and he stopped that and he said no, “Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned,” and I recognize now God that You are “justified when You speak, and You’re clear when you judge.” So that’s the second point.

Now verses 5-6, here we move into a very important thing and this is something I have not emphasized enough before, in fact I haven’t emphasized it at all. Verse 5, “Behold, I was shaped in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me. Behold, Thou desirest truth in the inward parts, and in the hidden part Thou shalt make me know wisdom.” Now let’s look at some of the words in verses 5-6. “I was shaped in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.” He goes all the way back. Now I just got through saying that David was only in trouble for fifteen months; David is 30+ in age. Verses 5-6 transport you back in time 30+ years. Now up to this point we’ve only dealt with fifteen months of his life, but now we’re introduced to years of his life, years and years are involved in verses 5-6.

Let’s look at something else that he says: he says in verse 6, You’re going to “make me to know wisdom.” Now what did we define wisdom to be from the Proverbs series? Wisdom is skill in living, and in order to have skill in living, you must develop learned behavior patterns. Why do you have to develop learned behavior patterns? What are learned behavior patterns? Let me ask you a question; if I were to single somebody out and say when you got up this morning which shoe did you put on first, the left one or right one. How many people could answer that question? That’s the kind of habit, every day. Why do we have habits? Because life is too complicated without habits. Can you imagine every time you wanted to start your car going through the procedure you went through when you were first learning to drive the car; it’d take you five minutes to just start the thing and now it’s nothing.

How do you characterize a learned behavior pattern. Three things about a learned behavior pattern, how you can spot them. First of all, most of them are entirely unconscious, you do not think when you’re acting in a learned behavior pattern. Another thing to watch a learned behavior pattern, it’s automatic, it’s an automatic response to a certain situation. You don’t have to say now I’m going to respond this way or I’m going to respond that way, it’s automatic. When you hit the seat of the car the ignition keys slides in the ignition, you turn it and move. You don’t think what am I going to do, you just do it; it’s automatic response to that kind of thing. Another feature about a learned behavior pattern besides this is it is comfortable, it is something that you have become comfortable with. For you to actively go against your learned behavior pattern it’s going to make you feel uncomfortable. That is what a learned behavior pattern is.

Why do we need learned behavior patterns, because life is too complicated, God has made us have learned behavior patterns, there’s nothing wrong with learned behavior patterns, you need them to exist. [tape turns] …there is no neutrality in life, so every learned behavior pattern you develop tends to –R or tends to + R, the habit patterns you develop are learned through practice in responding to situations. Let’s take a biography of a sequence. Suppose you’re faced with a certain kind of a situation, a new one, never faced it before in your life. Maybe it’s a child going off to school for the first time; maybe it’s going off to college for the first time, it’s a new situation, you never faced it before in your life. All right, you think about it the first time because you don’t have any behavior pattern to handle it, so you think about it, you think what am I going to do, how do I respond to this thing. So you develop a response to it. And then the next time it happens, and maybe the 55^th time it happens, boom, you’ve got a learned behavior pattern, you don’t think about it any more, you just respond that way. Now that’s the development of a behavior pattern; it is a learned behavior pattern, it doesn’t happen overnight.

This is going to tie back now to David’s thirty years. I said verses 5-6 depict his life, not just the fifteen months that he was in trouble. David goes back to review the concept of the sin nature that he has, and he understands something about this sin nature that all men from physical birth onward tend to develop –R learned behavior patterns, just like the soil tends to grow weeds instead of fruit. This analogy is made over and over again in the Bible, that just as the cursed ground will develop weeds and you don’t have to try, they just are there, the sin nature automatically tends to develop learned behavior patterns. For example, to show you that children from their physical birth are held guilty in God’s sight, turn to Psalm 58:3; here’s a passage that shows what is popularly known as the doctrine of original sin. It’s a bad term and I don’t use it but that’s the link if you want the terminology.

Psalm 58:3, “The wicked are estranged from the womb; they go astray as soon as they are born, speaking lies.” That means that a child, an infant, can actually start setting up –R learned behavior patterns before they become God-conscious. So here’s a baby, born, it may be four years before that baby attains God-consciousness. Already he may be programmed to act a certain way, not in the deterministic sense but he is learning patterns of response; he’s learning to throw fits, he learns if he throws a fit he can get his way, he has learned to manipulate his environment righteously or unrighteously. Then after he becomes God-conscious at age 4 or 5 the burden upon that child increases tremendously as to whether they’re going to have –R or +R; a child is rapidly learning tremendous feats of learned behavior patterns, far more in the early days of his life than are developed later as adults. So all during this time the sin nature wants to go the –R route and devise habit patterns that will naturally respond unrighteously.

Now let’s turn back to Psalm 51 and see why David is worried, why he is concerned with this at the point of confession. The truth of verse 5-6 will explain two phenomena of the Christian life, two phenomena that trouble believers. I don’t know of one believer including myself that hasn’t been troubled with at least one of these two problems. The first one we’ll call the kiss and make up syndrome. And that is when you confess your sin and go on and then bang you’re out, you do the same old thing, then you’re back in, then you’re out, then you’re back in, etc. So this is the kiss and make up syndrome where it goes like this, never a permanent change. And after a while you say why bother to confess, it doesn’t do any good, confession doesn’t work, God’s Word doesn’t work, it’s all God’s fault and all the rest of it. That’s this thing.

Another problem that Christians have that use 1 John 1:9, confess, is what we’ll call the residual guilt syndrome, and that is you confess your specific point X, you clear it before the Lord, walk away from the confession, still feel guilty. How come? Didn’t God forgive it? What’s the deal? Both of these syndromes, both of these characteristics are covered in this Psalm. And if Christian confession were done the way David does it here, both of these problems could be eliminated from our lives… both of them. Both of them do not have to be there, they represent defeat but they are unnecessary; no Christian needs to have these things in his life, if he makes use of what David’s teaching here.

What David is doing, and here’s the third point of the doctrine of confession, David is acknowledging a need for changing –R learned behavior patterns to positive learned behavior patterns. That’s what he’s trying to do here. The point that he’s struggling with is that he was shaped in iniquity from birth, for 30+ years he has had this sin nature, for 30+ years he struggled with this thing and he’s not so naïve to think that he just suddenly got in trouble with Bathsheba. That didn’t happen overnight, that is a product of 30 years of development of his sin nature. Now let’s trace it in David’s family. Each family has certain characteristics and this will help you also. The Bible does teach that environment shapes your sin style, in the sense that when you were born, say you can sin in 360 different ways; maybe some genetic, maybe some hereditary patterns, plus environment will say well, your probable direction of sin say will be off here 45 degrees. In other words, you will tend to sin more in this direction than somebody else in another direction. Environment and heredity give you a shape to your sin style, true. But, and this is the critical thing and if you don’t get this you’ll be in human viewpoint. Environment and heredity do not cause you to sin. Environment and heredity only outline if you are going to sin you’ll probably sin in that direction, but heredity and environment don’t force you to sin. All of us come from families. Every person here has come out of a family with a conglomerate of sin patterns. And you are going to sin in certain patterns that you have learned as a child, from birth upward. Every time you sin besides the second point of doctrinal confession, confession at point X, you should have the third point that there is needed in your life a change out of the patterns developed your physical birth and the time you sinned that time, that the prelude for that point X goes all the way back into your childhood. In other words, deep-seated learned behavior patterns are there and these patterns have to be changed.

How is David’s pattern? David’s family had a high libido, we can tell from history, Solomon and so on. They had a tremendous sex drive; they also had a tremendous emotional life. We’ve seen that in the text; maybe it was inherited, maybe it was environmentally determined, I don’t know but we can observe it in David’s family, the sons of Jesse have this pattern. That was David’s area of weakness, that was the thing when David got out of fellowship there is where he was going to have his trouble. So when David finally got out of fellowship and did get into trouble, now he looks back and he says now look, for 30+ years my emotional life has been, when I’ve been out of fellowship I’ve picked up these learned behavior patterns, and now finally the birds have come home to roost. Now I’ve got a learned behavior pattern that has to go. And this incident proves it, I could have gotten away with it up to now but it’s very clear, God has shown me in this act that now I have sinned in this area, and it’s not just an issue of the point act of sin; yes, I confess that but the thing that led to that act is underneath a tremendous –R learned behavior pattern in my emotional life. And because that pattern is there, when I get out of fellowship, whoooom, I’m in trouble.

See if David just confessed, verses 3-4, he would have the kiss and make up syndrome, because what would happen, if he stopped the confession at the end of verse 4, it would be this: David would rock along for a while, and mind his P’s and Q’s and maybe six months later it’d be somebody else taking a shower on the roof and David would have problems there. And then David would get back with it and go on and it’d be somebody else. It’s be kiss and make up the rest of his life. Would he be forgiven each time? Sure would. Did he confess his sin each time? Sure did. But had the underlying pattern changed? No it had not. And therefore the specific acts kept persisting; the kiss and make up pattern persisted in his life.

Now let’s go back to the other pattern, the guilt. Here David goes into the situation with Bathsheba. This Psalm proves that David was not free of his guilt by the end of verse 4, even though he confessed the act with Bathsheba and the act of murdering Uriah, he still had that gnawing deep sense of guilt. Why? Because it had come time in his life to deal with the pattern and the Holy Spirit was giving that guilt sensation, that was a godly guilt, a guilt that the Holy Spirit was trying to say now David, this has gone on long enough, this pattern has got to go. So the guilt that he experienced after confession was the tug of the Holy Spirit saying David, let’s get with it, let’s change. That was the voice of God in his heart speaking. So point three, then, of the doctrine of confession is David acknowledges a need for a deep change in learned behavior patterns.

Verses 7-12, the third section. Let’s review so you don’t have those parts messed up here; we’ve had the point of the doctrine in the first section of the Psalm; we’ve had the second and third points of the doctrine in the second section of the Psalm, and now in this section we’re going to get to point 4 of the doctrine of confession, verses 7-12. What does he say, let’s read it, get the whole cluster of verses together. “Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clear; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. [8] Make me hear joy and gladness, that the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice. [9] Hide Thy face from my sins, and blot out all mine iniquities. [10] Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. [11] Cast me not away from thy presence, and take not thy holy Spirit from me. [12] Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation, and uphold me with a willing spirit.”

Now all of that can be summarized under a fourth point. Here is a petition that David is making; in addition to his confession he is making a post-confession petition. What is the post-confession petition? The petition is for sanctification of –R learned behavior patterns into a +R learned behavior pattern; that becomes the point of a specific petition. He is praying, O God, let’s put it in concrete terms so you can see it. What is David’s problem? All right, let’s see it, David’s problem, mental attitude laziness at this point; David’s problem is his emotional life is all out of control. These are at least two patterns, he may have more, but at least he’s got these two patterns in his life. The Holy Spirit has said David, these have to go because if they don’t go next week you’re going to be in the same problem you are not; still be forgiven, still saved, yes, but you can still be miserable because you’re going to trip over the same rock, you haven’t taken the rock out of the way.

So here’s what David is going to do. And this fourth one is crucial. After he’s confessed, after he’s acknowledged a need for a change, he prays for a specific kind of change. What specific kind of change? He is going to pray for the Biblical opposite to his learned behavior pattern. Thus, if David is a lazy person, he wants to be a laboring person; if he is an emotional person he is going to pray that he will be a controlled person. In other words, he recognizes the learned behavior pattern that has caused his problem and he pits against it something from the Word of God that will collide with it 180 degrees, produce a head-on collision at this point. So it’s not just confessing his sin, he does more than that. He’s petitioning an opposite learned behavior pattern to come in here and head off the sinful one. Paul puts it “put off the old man and put on the new man,” that concept.

Let’s see how this comes out in the text now. Verse 7, “Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.” I want you to notice that’s involved, the “hyssop” is taken from Leviticus 14:4-8 and it’s an image of the priest who would deal with the lepers, a person who had leprosy. And the hyssop was something that he took and he would pronounce cleanliness on this leper. Now this is significant for the hyssop. The hyssop is a sign that he is welcomed back into the camp. You see, the leper would be excluded from the camp as long as he had leprosy, but the only way the leper could get back into the camp was to be pronounced clean by a priest and the priest did it with a hyssop. So the hyssop carries an imagery out of Leviticus 14, and the imagery is that David can come back and function in the camp. That is going to be the theme song… and there are lots of nuances in verses 7-12 for this service theme. Verses 7-12 have nothing to do with salvation. Verses 7-12 have to do with service, and he is petitioning that he can now function again as king.

Now what has happened is that God has made an issue out of these learned behavior patterns and David knows it. He knows that he cannot stay on that throne as king if this problem in his life isn’t dealt with right now. Not only is that act of sin to be dealt with but the learned behavior pattern has to go because it’s those two qualities that are going to make him the king of Israel. All of the petitions in verses 7-12 have to do with David becoming king once again in a functioning way. He is petitioning Lord, make me the man to be the king of Israel, I recognize at this point I’ve got these problems and if I don’t deal with them now they are going to fester and I’m going to have them to on the rest of my life, they’ve got to come out. The weeds have to be pulled up. And when he does so he says that “I shall be whiter than snow.” Notice it is a negative and a positive in verse 7; he doesn’t just look at the dirt, he is looking forward to what he can be after the dirt is gone, “whiter than snow,” it’s something positive, not something negative.

And then verse 8, a very, very important verse because verse 8 teaches us something about how the conscience gives us its signals. “Make me to hear joy and gladness, that the bones which You have broken may rejoice.” Now Dr. Seymour Diamond who was the President of the American Association for the study of headaches said this: that only 2% of chronic severe headaches are organic. Now those statistics are pretty powerful, coming from a man who’s devoted his entire life to research of the problem. In other words, chronic headaches that go on and on and on over and over, 90% chance they are due to a violated conscience. Now you can get an idea of how the drug industry in America has grown on the basis of sin. The drug industry makes money, I’m not blaming the drug industry, it’s the stupid people who buy the stuff. The headache remedies, now this is not talking about sinus headache or something like this, this is talking about chronic severe headaches, only 2% of them are brain tumors and stuff that definitely is organic. The rest of it has no organic basis whatsoever, none whatsoever. They’ve researched this thing, there just isn’t an organic base for it; they can’t find it. So the Bible gives us the answer; 98% of chronic headaches are due to sin.

Now this comes as a shocker because in America we, as mostly sons of Japheth, tend to be mentally oriented. Now watch how that’s a strength but it’s our undoing. Let’s go back to the diagram of the soul; here’s where we’re going to learn we have a weakness in our family among the families of the world. Japheth, and Japhetic peoples, tend always to emphasize the mind. When we get in trouble we go to the mind. The first thing, we start thinking about the problem. So if the conscience says no, or the conscience throws up a red light, where do we first pick it up? In our minds. Where do we first try to cover it up? In our minds. So we become great artists at covering it up in our minds. Now watch God’s sense of humor. The very tool and instrument that we are using to quench the conscience becomes the very tool and instrument that the conscience uses to produce a bad feeling, headache. In other words, the conscience backup system is now thrown into action and it says all right, if you’re not going to listen to the mind, you know what’s wrong and you’re not going to listen to what’s wrong, I’m going to make you feel bad. And so the conscience, we’ll visualize it as a judge, he just pushes a set of buttons, you’re going to feel depressed, boom, I’ll push depressed and I’ll push this, I’ll push this, I’ll push this. So you get this bad feeling. This is physically sensed.

But we tend to not think of our physical, in a very real way the sons of Japheth are not sensual. This is why it’s so hard for many people to understand the Song of Solomon. We have a lot of emphasis on sex, yes, but our civilization as a civilization is not a very sensual one in the sense of sensing and concentrating on body feelings. And thus we as a group tend to emphasize the mind. Therefore we tend to be almost ignorant of the fact that the conscience has this secondary system that’s at work here. And what’s it producing is psychosomatic effects that can be headache, they can be ulcers, colitis, it can go into these kinds of things, it can affect your whole GI tract, it can cause allergies, it can cause all sorts of things. These are psychosomatic effects. Now this doesn’t mean that everybody who has a problem in their GI tract has sin or something; I’m not saying that. I’m simply saying that those can be due. But if you take the ratios of the headache, the ratios are pretty convincing, aren’t they? 2 to 98 out of 100 people suffering from chronic headache, only 2% of them have tumors or something else that’s physically causing the problem, the rest of them are something else that’s causing the problem.

All right, here in this verse is where David encountered the problem, “make me to hear joy and gladness, that the bones which You have broken,” the bones stand for the body and the backup system of the conscience. This is the system that God has devised so when we won’t listen to Him in the mind that He’s going to get us in the body, but the conscience is going to have its say. You can’t destroy the conscience.

Then David goes on, he’s petitioning this, and he has a right to do this because he’s going to change the learned behavior pattern. Verse 9-12 represent four specific petitions and we’ll hurry through and look at these. Verse 9, “Hide thy face from my sins, and blot out all mine iniquities.” Notice he says “sins” plural, and “iniquities,” plural. Sins and iniquities refer to chains of sin, those are the chains of things that are involved in this learned behavior patterns. No longer has it become an issue of that point act, Bathsheba and Uriah are forgotten, they’re forgotten at verse 4, that’s beyond the thing, they’re no more an issue. What has become an issue now at verse 5 and following is change those patterns in your life that led to the problem David, and so this becomes a petition, “Hide thy face,” in other words, get rid of the enduring guilt. Hiding the face, blot out my iniquities, has to do with the sensation of guilt that he has in his body. David senses physically guilt. And it’s that residual guilt syndrome I just got through saying, he’s confessed his sin but he still feels guilty because that’s the Holy Spirit saying David, you’re the same person, you’re not changed, and come another situation you’re going to get in exactly the same trouble. That has got to go. So this is where he’s dealing with the guilt residue, in verse 9.

Now he doesn’t end at verse 9, if he just said okay God, get rid of the guilt, I want to feel better, he knows enough to know that that would be an illegitimate petition, doesn’t he? Why is the guilt there? Because the Holy Spirit wants to change me. So he makes the next petition.

Verse 10, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.” That is prayer for the motive to change these patterns. You see, David’s got a job ahead of him, 30+ years, the learned behavior pattern if you stacked it up as a pile of paper would be a tremendous stack, a tremendous mess. It all builds up, and from the human point of view it’s depressing to look at the pile of junk. How am I ever going to change that? This, “create in me a clean heart, and renew a right spirit within me.” He says Lord, I see the issue, I want to change, I want my basic patterns to change, but being grace oriented I know I can’t do it. It’s too frustrating, it’s too big, that I can make a petition that you give me the motive to change this, and so the clean heart and the right spirit.

Then verse 11, “Cast me not away from thy presence, and take not thy holy Spirit from me.” This is not talking about loss of salvation, the taking of the Holy Spirit refers to his office as king. In the Old Testament the Holy Spirit did not indwell every believer, the Holy Spirit was only the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in some people and it was temporary at that. So the Holy Spirit could be taken or He could be given. And He was given to the king. So what verse 11 is really saying is Lord, restore me to my calling. Now plug that in to how we started tonight. What was David’s problem before Bathsheba? Boredom with his job. You see what’s happened as a result of the Bathsheba crisis? He’s turned around, he’s realized his problem, he realizes that he can’t perform his job with this thing that has grown up over 30 years in his life, that has got to go, and he now wants not to be cast away. Don’t disqualify me from the office, I want to stay there, I want to do the job that I’ve been called to do.

Verse 12, “Restore not me the joy of Thy salvation, and uphold me with a willing spirit.” Again it’s a petition of a slightly different form for motive. Now beware of something, the petition ends at verse 12. These petitions do not mean David is passive. This does not mean David is going to sit back and say well, got this big problem and I’ve got to change, got to wait till God does it. That’s not the spirit of the Psalm. What David is praying for is God, keep me motivated so I can actively in my daily life conquer this thing, and replace –R learned behavior patterns with +R learned behavior patterns.

Now does that add a dimension to confession? Again, the four points that we have covered:

The first point of the doctrine of confession is that you must be aware of the sinful act itself; to do this you have to simultaneously stop covering it up.

The second point is that you confess the responsibility for that act and you stop blame-shifting.

The third point of the doctrine of confession is that you acknowledge the need for deep change in learned behavior patterns.

The fourth point is that you petition specifically for a positive change that will be exactly opposite to the negative behavior pattern; make the petition razor sharp so that you’re petitioning something that is biblically sound but exactly opposed to the previous pattern of life.

Next week we’ll continue with the fifth point of the doctrine of confession.