Psalms Lesson 15

Psalm 32:1-5

 

In Psalm 32 we are faced again with an individual declarative praise Psalm.  We’ll briefly review the parts of an individual praise Psalm.  The first part is proclamation and the proclamation section of an individual praise Psalm is always in the first person.  Pay attention to that because tonight we see a modification of that in that the whole doctrinal point in interpreting Psalm 32 that hinges on this knowledge.  But generally speaking individual declarative praise Psalms have a sort “I will” praise statement.  Examples of this were Psalm 18:1; Psalm 30:1, and this is an announcement that the vow of praise that is mentioned in the individual lament Psalm is now being paid; it’s now going to be paid. 

 

The second part to an individual declarative praise Psalm is an introductory summary and this is one of the most important subsection of all the Psalms for your understanding, because it’s this section that in a nutshell summarizes all true worship.  And basically the introductory statement is very, very simple, all it is it states that God intervenes and God delivers.  It’s that simple.  God intervenes and God delivers.  And that’s the heart of praise.  Praise is not going around and saying “praise the Lord, praise the Lord” or some goofy statement.  Praising God means to announce a real intervention into history by Him. 

 

The main section is made up of several parts.  The first one is a looking back and the looking back obviously goes back to the lament.  If this was cast as the individual lament type of Psalm it was in the middle of the problem it was looking forward to deliverance instead of it being this kind of Psalm that is after the problem, after the deliverance; now to go back to the lament you have to look back because the problem is gone.  So the looking back is the first part of this.  Then there’s a report of deliverance and the report of deliverance is an announcement of how God… the details of how He answered, how He heard and how He delivered.  Then there’s the vow of praise in which the same vow of praise that began the proclamation is then repeated and we said that this shows that praise is to continue; it is to be not once and for all, it is to be repetitive, over and over and over and over and over.  So that the idea then is that the proclamation is a giving of the praise but the praise is put or fixed into a song form that can be sung over and over and over again. 

 

Now two parts of the vow of praise, actually there’s another part that comes in here, in that in these Psalms you tend to go into a descriptive praise.  Remember the difference between descriptive praise and declarative praise, which is the title of the whole thing.  Declarative praise means you declare a specific act of God; descriptive praise means that you describe God’s character.  The declarative is a point, it’s about a point action; the descriptive praise is about God’s eternal character.  The descriptive praise follows from the declarative praise.  In other words, the declarative praise, God did this; the descriptive praise would be therefore God is this kind of God.  So when the psalmist draws theological conclusions about God’s being and His character we are in the middle of descriptive praise.  When he’s simply reporting historical events then we’re dealing with declarative praise.  There is an alternate that I haven’t mentioned which we’ll discover in Psalm 32.

 

Let’s go to Psalm 32 and take my word that Psalm 32 is an individual declarative Psalm.  But no sooner do you start looking at Psalm 32 than you certainly have some problems in seeing why this Psalm is an individual declarative Psalm.  So let’s conduct a form analysis of the Psalm, as we always do first, and then we’ll outline it and then we’ll exegete it and go through it in that order.  Can anyone find any of the parts of an individual declarative praise Psalm in Psalm 32 as you read it.  Don’t necessarily try to get the first part, just look and see if you can find any parts.  Can you find any of those parts in this Psalm?  [someone says something]  The introductory summary would be verses 3-4, “When I kept silence, my bones became 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.”  All right, we have one candidate for the introductory summary.  Anybody else?

 

[someone says something]  Okay, we’ll put 1-2 up here and then 3-4 as a looking back.  Anybody else?  [someone says something]  For the moment we’ll put the vow praise and descriptive praise in that whole thing, just jump it together into one thing; verses 6-7, 10-11.  All right, anybody else have some contributions to make.  Let’s put it this way, what do you think is one of the problems you’re encountering here with Psalm 32, this thing just doesn’t fit the categories just right, what is it about this Psalm that’s hard, that causes trouble.  [someone says something]  What translation do you have?  The New Scofield, they have translated “Maschil” as instruction?  Oh, very good for them. 

 

One of the problems obviously is the proclamation; what’s wrong with this thing as it starts out from what we’re used to.   Usually in an individual declarative praise Psalm what would you expect to read in the first verse and what don’t you find here in this one?  It’s not in the first person, in place of the first person it’s already involved in announcing something.  Now one of the hints that you have is the heading, and when the Holy Spirit, it seems the Holy Spirit was very conservative when He wrote these Psalms about giving us information in the Psalm heading; most of the time He doesn’t bother.  But when He does give us a term I the heading we’d better find out quick what the term is all about.  It just turns out that this Psalm heading has a word called a “Maschil,” now if they haven’t translated it they’ve left it in this form, “Maschil.”  Now a Maschil is elsewhere translated as a parable, or a proverb.  Now, what does that suggest about this Psalm, if in the very title of it it is called a Maschil, meaning a proverb. 

 

[someone says something]  All right, you say that it’s something that David has used to instruct Solomon or somebody, but it’s primarily an instructive Psalm.  Now all praise is instructive but there are polls, there’s a polarity, in other words on one end of one side of the fence you have praise that is worshipful, that is just being given out for the sake of expressing enthusiasm for what God has done.  That’s on one side of the praise balance; on the other side, which is the side we’re seeing tonight we find the other dimension that’s wrapped up in praise and that is instruction.  So this Psalm, in the last part, does something that we’re going to find in some of these individual declarative praise Psalms and that is when you get down to the end, instead of this section, the vow of praise and descriptive praise, that whole section tends to coalesce into wisdom teaching. 

 

This should immediately show you something about the basis of Old Testament wisdom.  Is wisdom speculative in the Bible, like for example the way we think in the west, you go to Descartes, you go to some of the philosophers, they are men who think in an armchair and they speculate on what the nature of things are.  How is this wisdom that’s given to us in the Bible different from our normal western European way of thinking.  Their wisdom comes from where? Experience in history; their wisdom is not a speculative thing like European.  The wisdom of a Jew is the wisdom that has come out of historical experience with God.  And so therefore he’s not engaging on the “what if,” could God look like a Martian or might He look like somebody from Jupiter.  Now theoretically He might, but the matter of fact is when He appears He doesn’t.  So therefore He isn’t that way, and that’s how the Jew would answer it.  Could God do something; yeah, He could do something but He didn’t do it that way, He did it this way.  So similarly the lessons we’re learning here, Psalm 32 is basically structured to teach; it’s not just a song like Hannah sang to praise God; it’s that too, but it’s more than just praise, it involves a heavy emphasis on teaching. 

 

Now as you read through Psalm 32 what do you see there, what kind of a theme do you see that would suggest to you why this Psalm has become a wisdom type Psalm rather than just a simple praise Psalm?  What is it about Psalm 32 as you read it, the subject material, that would suggest to you why this Psalm was set up to instruct rather just to conduct worship with.  How could you summarize the overall thrust of thrust of Psalm 32; what is it about, what is it about that corresponds to something in our Christian life.  [someone says something]  All right, discipline but that’s not all that’s in Psalm 32; there’s the discipline, the hard times and what? Confession and forgiveness, it’s the whole cycle: discipline, confession and restoration.  So in one Psalm you’ve got the center of all spirituality. 

 

So Psalm 32, because it hits a sensitive area it has become and been used by the Holy Spirit as the general teaching Psalm.  Because of this we have a modification in the structure so that the proclamation has disappeared in this Psalm and whereas it’s true that verses 1-2 would be the place to look for the proclamation under normal conditions, in this particular case we’re going to have to say that the introductory summary and the proclamation have almost coalesced and transformed themselves into what we read in verses 1-2.  Verses 1-2 just don’t’ fit any of the categories for our analysis and because they don’t fit we don’t panic, we don’t get discouraged, we just learn something, that there’s something that the Holy Spirit wants us to catch because He has so severely modified the normal form of the Psalm.  The Holy Spirit has done a lot here to modify the whole thing. 

 

Now if the Holy Spirit has gone to this length to modify the structure of the Psalm there’s obviously something He wants, He wants to catch our attention. There’s something in these two verses that should catch our attention.  When we come to the Psalm we expect David to say “I will praise the Lord, the Lord heard me and He answered me,” but when we come to verses 1-2 what do we see, “Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. [2] Blessed is the man to whom the LORD imputeth not iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no guile.”  Of all these categories, what of these words that I’ve used in the outline, what does the content of verses 1-2 look like to you. Does it look like a report of deliverance?  Does it look like declarative praise?  Or does it look like descriptive praise.  Let’s just figure out what kind of a thing does this look like?  A declarative perhaps, or a descriptive praise? 

 

Doesn’t it tend to be more descriptive; a descriptive praise is about God’s character, rather than a specific incident.  Isn’t the truth of verse 1-2 a general truth?  Isn’t it a generalization.  Well, immediately if the Psalm starts out with a generalization what David has already done is he has boiled down, not just his experience that you would usually find in an introductory summary, instead of boiling down and summarizing his experience what David does for us in this Psalm is boil down and summarize the lesson from his experience.  So again we read in the heading, the “Maschil,” the first two verses follow up the theme of teaching, David emphasizes not his experience but he goes further than that and he goes almost into descriptive praise. 

 

Now later on when we learn what a descriptive praise Psalm looks like you would swear that this starts off like a descriptive praise Psalm, but what is it in the Psalm that finally tells you this is not a descriptive praise Psalm in its entirety.  It starts off looking like it’s got descriptive praise, but what is it as  you read down through here that tells you definitely this is not a descriptive praise Psalm, it’s declarative.  [someone says something]  All right, the first person narration beginning in verse 3.  There’s a specific incident in David’s life to that tells you this isn’t just descriptive praise.  It goes back to a declarative point.

 

Okay, if we take verses 1-2 and say all right, let’s forget the first two categories, they’ve kind of been jammed together into this wisdom type Psalm, let’s forget verses 1-2, now can we line up… is everyone following what we’ve got up here.  Verses 3-4 obviously look like they’re looking back, the details are looking back.  The reason why verses 3-4 would not be an introductory summary is because if they were then we would expect to find looking back somewhere else in the Psalm which we don’t find.  So verses 3-4 are the looking back.  Then verse 5 is the report of deliverance, “I acknowledged my sin unto Thee,” and finally at the end of verse 5, “and You forgave the iniquity of my sin.”  Then verses 6-7 is a vow of praise, “For this shall every one that is godly pray unto thee…. Verse , “Thou art my hiding place,” etc. etc.  Then verses 8-9 we have a little problem there, but then verse 10 obviously is praise as verse 11 is. 

 

Let’s go through and see how to outline this. After we’ve done our form analysis let’s do our outline.  This is the way I’ve outlined it, I don’t think there will be too much dissent except over a certain section here.  I’ve taken the first two verses as one part and summarized it by repeating the content of verses 1-2, that God’s gracious restoration produces blessing.  So all I’ve done there is summarize the content of verses 1-2; nothing profound.  Verses 3-5 I have put together because in these… you could put verses 6-7 with them, the more I look at this the more I tended to put verses 6-7 with it but this is the debatable one, whether you want to run 6-7 with verses 3-5 or whether you want to bring it into the next section which would be verses 8-11, the praise section. 

 

Let’s go through the first two verses, God’s gracious restoration produces blessing; and let’s go through this word by word, verse by verse.  “Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven,” now of course the first verse in the Hebrew is “A Psalm of David, a Maschil,” we’ve already defined that, we needn’t go back to it.  The word “Blessed” is a word which has a picture behind it. This is the word that Jesus picks up and uses in the Sermon on the Mount.  Jesus Christ is using the word the same way it’s used here.  Now do you understand how Jesus is using the word “Blessed” in the Sermon on the Mount?  He’s not just saying “happy,” there’s an entire picture behind this and it comes out of the original languages because this word, it’s a participle here actually, and it means happiness or prosperity but more than just happiness it means happiness because you are moving along the path.  What I’m trying to get you away from is that the word “Blessed” doesn’t mean static, something static, like a platonic sense, the ideal.   That’s not the flavor of the word; the word is “Blessed” is this person who’s moving in this direction.  There’s a dynamic character behind this word “Blessed.” 

Therefore, what does this mean to you spiritually speaking.  It means that your blessing can’t be carried on so to speak, you don’t get it once for all and then you kind of… it become permanent baggage.  It’s something that is experienced moment by moment, and you can lose it in a moment; you can gain it in a moment, but it is something that goes on with time.  So “Blessed” has this idea of moving along a path.  You might translate it in a paraphrase by saying, “moving in the path of spiritual prosperity... moving in the path of spiritual prosperity.  You see, there’s a connection of motion with the thing.  This can be show, if you doubt my analysis of this, because the root form of this word “Blessed” occurs in Proverbs 4:14 [Enter not into the path of the wicked, and go not in the way of evil men.”] and 9:6 [Forsake the foolish, and live, and go in the way of understand­ing.”] and move naturally is the content of the word there. 

 

“Blessed is the man whose transgression is forgiven,” and the “transgression” means.. it’s a word for mental attitude rebellion, “whose sin is covered.”  Now both the word “forgiven” and “covered” refer to the final restoration and I want you to notice the subjective result of forgive­ness.  The word “blessed” is not just referring to the objective blessings of the believer; it’s talking about subjective, psychologically, how the person feels.  And so he’s saying “Blessed is he who is restored,” he who is restored. 

 

Verse 2, “Blessed is the man unto whom the LORD imputes not iniquity,” there is an occurrence of the word “impute.”  So don’t ever buy the line that Paul was the first one to come up with the doctrine of imputation.  The doctrine of imputation is all through the Old Testament.  Paul did not make up the doctrine of imputation; here it is with David.  The Lord does not credit iniquity, the idea of “impute” means credit to your account.  Now throughout Scripture you run into the doctrine of imputation so you might as well be clear what the word means.  In fact, if you’re not clear on what the word means you cannot live the Christian life in a consistent way.  Here’s why. 

 

A person becomes a Christian, positive volition at the point of gospel hearing, they are put in union with Christ; part of being in union with Christ is that credited to your account is Christ’s perfect righteousness.  This means that there is no lack of perfect legal righteousness on your credit account.  You may be a stinker, but as far as God is concerned, you are perfectly righteous­ness, legally, in His sight, from the point of salvation.  And this also means that you don’t have to hold onto your salvation with your fingernails; this destroys conditional salvation.  This spells out eternal security because that righteousness has been once and for all credited to my account and no one can take it off my account.  Now this should lead to a confidence in the Christian life.  This doesn’t mean lack of discipline.  But it does mean that God is not imputing iniquity. 

 

However, here we have two ways this word is used; actually one way is in the background and this is the legal sense, that God is legally crediting to the man righteousness.  Now that happens to you when you accept Christ as your Savior.  The second way credit can be used is in an experiential sense.  And that is that you can have a little matter before the Lord that the Lord wants cleared up, and He is crediting your temporal account with this little issue, and He will continue to credit your temporal account before Him with this issue until this issue is taken care of, whatever that issue may happen to be in your life.  But the crediting that is mentioned here is the second one. David is talking about the fact that as a believer he had legal righteousness with God but what he didn’t have at this point was an experiential enjoyment of it, and he didn’t because God was angry with him. 

[2b] “…and in whose spirit there is no guile,” and notice this “in his spirit” shows you that the human spirit can be guilty; the human spirit here is something that can be guilty and this is one whose spirit has been cleansed.  Where does the cleansing occur?  Have you ever thought of this, when you say God cleanses from your sins?  Do you just use that word as a vocabulary word because it sounds nice to say it over and over again, God cleansed me.  Doesn’t the word “cleanse” when it means individual personal restoration, doesn’t it mean something happened somewhere inside you?  The Scripture say it definitely does, and that is your spirit can be guilty and the imagery, if you could see your human spirit, the imagery that the Bible says it would look like if we could see it would be that it gets dirty; that the human spirit gets dirty.  This is why Jesus talks about washing the feet; everywhere in Scripture guilt is always looked upon as dirt.  The problem is that no bath ever removes this kind of dirt and therefore the human spirit can only be cleansed by God’s grace.  And this is why he’s saying blessed be the one who the Lord doesn’t credit guiltiness with.  Notice it’s synonymous, the Lord credits guilt, the spirit is dirty.  The idea is that if you can see your spirit it would be dirty, and it’s going to continue to be dirty until the Lord forgives you and when the Lord forgives you then the spirit is clean.  It’s that simple an issue. 

 

[someone says something]  Oh yes, it would have to include the conviction of the Holy Spirit because you wouldn’t have awareness that it was dirty, or you might have awareness that it was dirty but the idea is that the Holy Spirit is definitely involved in the conviction work, both internally and externally. 

 

Now beginning in verse 3 and running through verse 5 I’ve made a second section and that is: when David responded to God’s grace he was immediately restored.  The emphasis in verses 3-4 is the immediacy of the restoration… the immediacy of the restoration. When David responds to God’s grace he’s restored.  Now I want you to look carefully at verses 3-5 because verses 3-5 whether you are aware of it or not, actually reveal to us certain psychological principles about the human being.  And these are psychological principles that ought to be looked at very, very carefully, particularly by those of you who have been exposed to all sorts of human viewpoint in this area, i.e. there’s such a thing as so-called mental illness. 

 

Now apart from organic problems, it may come as a shock to some of you, the Bible doesn’t recognize there is such a thing as mental illness.  From the Biblical point of view there isn’t any such animal existing.  Mental illness is a modern term for something else, but there’s no such thing as mental illness in Scripture.  The Bible never characterizes it… and there’s a reason, because if you call what you call mental illness, what you are really saying in effect is that the person so afflicted has no responsibility in the matter, that I have mental illness like I catch a cold, and when you have labeled it as mental illness you may turn something that is originally responsible into something that is not responsible, and so the person so afflicted, therefore is just a victim of his circumstances, is totally passive and has no say about it.

 

But I want you to notice that when the Bible describes, in verses 3-4, it is describing neurosis; in fact one could even say that verses 3-4 is describing psychosis, but at least we’ll say that David is describing his own neurotic experiences.  David is neurotic in verses 3-4 and he doesn’t say I got a germ and it made mentally ill.  He is going to label and connect the so-called mental illness with an act of his own volition.  Now this may sound cruel if you haven’t ever heard this before, but as I’ve said again and again, this is not being cruel, this is being very good, being very gentle, in fact, being very encouraging, because if it really is true that the person who is mentally, the person who is neurotic, if it’s really the case that he did something to get that way, the corollary is that he can do something to get unfixed and get back to the way he was before.  So it’s good news to the mentally ill to learn that they are responsible for their own mental illness and therefore they can do something about it.

 

So let’s look at verse 3, “When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my moaning all the day long.”  Now do you suppose interpreting this verb “silence” that David means that he crawled in his closet and didn’t talk to anybody?  What would be some of your thoughts?  Who is he silent about?  Could some of you suggest an interpretation for the verb “silence,” “When I kept silence.”  Primarily it’s silence before God; here’s the way it looks.  Let’s get our little chart here.  Primarily what’s happening is that his conscience is convicting and he’s rejecting his conscience; his defense mechanisms are going into operation; his mind doesn’t want to hear his conscience and so there­fore he invents all sorts of things, and we’re not told what kind of defense mechanisms he used here.  Any one, he might have used fantasy, he might have used rationalization, isolation, isolation probably did occur here for reasons which I’ll show you in a minute, suppression, projection, blaming somebody else, and so on, it wasn’t my fault. Well, whatever the defense mechanism was used it was saying no, no, no, no, no, and resisting the effect and the weight of the conscience.

 

Now if this would persist “when I kept silence,” and if David is fighting against the conscience, his own conscience, the conscience of himself, what do you think sometimes happens in a neurotic state, if this goes on very much further, as far as this keeping silence goes?  All right, the conscience begins to get fogged over, but the person will develop a trait here which carries the silence before God out into society, he becomes silent before men.  In other words, this can result in a withdrawal from other people. Why?  Because other men too have a conscience.  I don’t care who the person is or how gross they may be, ultimately they know what and you know what and I know what it is to feel condemned before other men.  And the way you feel this way is often when you think, my God, if they knew about that, wouldn’t I have a black eye or something, and thank God so and so doesn’t know about that part of my background.  Now when you say that or feel that you are feeling the affect of condemnation before men. 

 

All right, so this silence before God, when the person has a dirty mind in this sense of the word, and I don’t mean that the way it’s usually used, when they have this kind of an unclean state this produces, besides chaos on the inside here, this produces a vacillation, an insecurity in front of other people.  A person who has an ultra clean conscience before God is perfectly relaxed, barring other problems he’s perfectly relaxed before people.  It doesn’t matter, he may be ill at ease because he doesn’t know what to do or something like that but I’m talking about the moral sense, he’s morally at ease with other people and he doesn’t have to retreat and he doesn’t have to feel inferior or superior.  He’s relaxed, and he can look people in the eye and say tough, God accepts me, if you don’t that’s your problem.  And that’s what I mean by being morally relaxed.  And that usually hacks off legalists.  I don’t know how you can be morally relaxed with legalists.  They are the hardest people to be morally relaxed with because they’re tense themselves and they make everybody else tense.   The funniest thing I ever had in this church is the other Sunday night when it was so funny to you, the funny part to me was when I was up here watching some of you, that really was funny.  You could look over this congregation from pew to pew and find out who were the relaxed people and who were the tense ones.  And it was just as clear as a book, you could just tell the way people reacted.  And right there you have a clear cut display of what legalism does; it prevents them from laughing and relaxing and enjoying life. 

 

“When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long.”  Now the word “roaring” here means moaning and the idea of his bones waxing old is physiological results of a guilty conscience.  Now most of you are aware of ulcers and things like this that can be due t this kind of thing but there are a lot of other ways you can tear your body to pieces by this kind of behavior.  And this verse is simply telling you, centuries before psychosomatic medicine, this verse is telling you that there is a psychological influence on your body, and if you want to tear your body apart, go ahead; the easiest way to do it is get a guilty conscience.

 

Verse 4, “For day and night Thy hand was heavy upon me,” notice in verse 4 it’s something personal, there’s a personal administration of the discipline.  “For day and night Thy hand was heavy upon me; my moisture was turned,” not “is turned” but “was” past tense, “was turned into the drought of summer,” and there again we have a physiological result.

 

But then in verse 5, “I acknowledged my sin unto Thee, and mine iniquity I did not hide.”  Now there’s the point where he confessed.  Now do you think up until verse 5 that he was aware of his sin.  Or do you suppose this was the kind of thing that he was out of fellowship and didn’t really know why he was out of fellowship.  [someone says something]  All right, there’s a parallel to this where we get some extra historical background.  Flip over to Psalm 51, he tells us quite clearly in Psalm 51 that he knew what the score was all along.   And by the way, what does this tell you about the modern idea that men have their problems because of conflicts of which they do not know?  And they must go to a professional counselor to have all sorts of crud from their background brought to the surface so they can understand who they are.  Doesn’t the Bible suggest to you that men do know what they are, that’s exactly the problem.  You don’t have to go to a psychiatrist to find out what you are; a person knows what they are, the problem is they don’t like what they are.  And this is the whole thrust of this Psalm.

 

Notice Psalm 51:3, now this word isn’t acknowledge, it’s the word “know.”  “I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me.”  Obviously David knew what he was, he didn’t have to search for his identity was, he knew what his identity was, that wasn’t his problem and that’s not the problem of the 20th century man.  And all this stuff about people searching for their identity is a bunch of bull.  They know what they are, and the Christian at this point has to come down very hard against the 20th century environment; there’s no such thing as a person doesn’t know their identity. They do know their identity and they’ve suppressed it and they hate it and they don’t like it but….

 

Going back to Psalm 32, why is it that David didn’t confess?  If he knew what he was why didn’t he do something about it?  Now all of us can speak from personal experience so don’t feel embarrassed.  Basically the answer is quite simple, it’s that he just didn’t want to.  See what I’m trying to get to you is that it’s not a question of lack of insight here; it’s totally a question of the volition; that’s what the question is, it’s a question of the volition, not the question in your mind.  Your mind does know what’s going on, it’s a question that you don’t want to, you know what’s going on.  You don’t want to do anything about it, you just don’t want to.  And that’s it. 

All right, when he said “I acknowledged my sin unto Thee, and mine iniquity have I not hidden.  I said,” and this is his resolve, “I will confess my transgressions unto the LORD, and You forgave the iniquity of my sin.”  Now you don’t catch this in the English translation but one of the fine little points in verse 5 and one of the great spiritual lessons of verse 5 is that where he says “I will confess my transgressions unto the Lord,” notice up until that clause in the middle of verse 5 it’s all first person.  Look, what is the subject of acknowledge?  I!  What is the subject of the verb hide or hid? I!  What is the subject of the verb said? I!  What is the subject of the verb confess? I!  And then suddenly you have a switch in the subject from “I” to “God.”  And the Hebrew is this way, “And You, You forgave.”  The subject is repeated twice, it’s repeated as a noun and it’s repeated as part of the verb.  So here you have the shift and David in his, looking out from his center of confession, “I do this, I do this, I do this,” and then suddenly, “You forgave.”  And notice he shows that the relief comes here.

 

Now let me also take a little jibe at another problem that 20th century psychology has going against itself and everybody else.  And that is it doesn’t matter whether you are forgiven; it matters whether you feel like you’re forgiven.  Now that’s a very important point; in the Bible these men aren’t concerned with whether they feel, if it’s just a case of whether I feel forgiveness or not, they couldn’t go along with this, just wouldn’t buy it.  They would have to know whether God had forgiven them, objectively, legally, morally, every way.  Then the person can be relaxed, but I’ve got to know that God forgives, and if I can’t know that God forgives I cannot experience true forgiveness, and really know that God forgives and not just say well I think He’s forgiven, or I feel like He’s forgiven, but I KNOW He has forgiven.  Now that, coming to that deliverance, which is the end of verse 5, that is the kind of deliverance that no one can give in this world. No minister can give this to you, no counselor can give this to you, no professional psychiatrist can give this to you, God alone can give and it comes by grace, and He doesn’t charge any fees.  It’s free, simply because if He did charge a fee you couldn’t pay the price. 

 

[someone says something]  It’s one of the synonyms that occurs in the Scripture, I don’t have my Hebrew text with me on what iniquity… which noun has been translated this, but if it’s the word that’s usually translated “iniquity” in the King James it tends to emphasize the aspect of the criminal element to sin. See each one of these nouns emphasize an aspect of sin. Transgression emphasizes the rebelliousness behind sin; the word iniquity emphasizes the nature of sin, it’s a crime against God. Each one of these nouns has a little thing; it’s a fascinating word study if you’d like to do that sometime it’s very simple to do, it’d take you some hours to do it, but you’d never forget it once you did it, and that is to sit down to a concordance and look up iniquity, transgress­ion and then look in the concordance every pace that it occurs and you’ll see that these words are used with a very narrow sense and once you’ve worked through that you’ll appreciate these words.

 

Verses 6-7, “For this shall every one that is godly pray unto Thee in a time when You may be found,” now “for this” obviously refers back to the forgiveness; “everyone that is godly prays unto Thee,” but notice this other strange phrase, “in a time when You may be found.”  Can any of you pick that up and apply it in the Christian life, this phrase, we will pray “in a time when You may be found,” as though there are times when He is not found. Is it just left to the individual believer?  Or does God Himself enter into this somehow?  What do you think?  [someone says something]  All right, when the Holy Spirit is working.  [someone says something]  Well, the thing here is that if you’re out of fellowship you haven’t made the confession yet, so this would have to be obviously in a time when you were out of fellowship; it would have to be a time when the Holy Spirit is convicting but doesn’t the Holy Spirit always convict when we’re out of fellowship? 

 

Let’s diagram this; there’s two sides of this phrase, God and the believer.  Now look, it literally does in a time of finding, but this is a good translation, “when You may be found,” the idea is something that we have stressed over and over and over again in this Psalm series, and that is that the believer’s relationship to God is a relationship to a personal God and there is a personal dimension to every area of your relationship to God.  You are not related to an infinite computer where you get plugged in the green light or you get plugged in the red light.  That’s not the picture; you are talking about relationship with a personal God, and therefore if you can say this, and understand, we’re not undermining the doctrine of God’s immutable, because God’s character is always the same, every morning when you get up there’s something different, not just in you but also in God, we’ll put it that way, because God is a person.  God does not change in His character, that’s immutable, but He changes as a person; a person doesn’t remain the same.  In other words, it’s not as though you wake up and there’s God, if you could see Him, looking at you with the same expression on His face at 8:00 o’clock in the morning that He looks at you at 8:00 o’clock at night, because as you move thorough time God, in His relationship with you, is still personal.

 

Now here’s how it operates in this problem of confession and here would spell, make it a lot easier for some of you when you get in trouble this way, and that is, let’s take a persona that’s been out of fellowship, they went on negative volition at this point; they went out here and they got themselves all wrapped up with a whole bunch of stuff.  Now let’s say there are about 55 things and attitudes that are against the Word.  Now God doesn’t come to you with a shotgun and say hey kid, all 55, let’s go, you’ve got five minutes.  That’s not the way He comes to the believer.  He comes generally to us over one or two of these things.  And often time believers are confused at this point and they know that they did this thing back here, they remember oh yeah, I did this, we’ll say I smoked some pot or something, and then I chewed some bubble gum over here or something.  All right, I did something back here and I know it’s wrong because I know the Word of God, the Word of God says it’s wrong. 

 

Okay. So the believer, forgetting for a moment the personal-ness of his relationship with God, just charges right in and confesses that.  There’s only one problem, God isn’t interested in that right now, He’s interested in this right now.  He’s not interested in pot, He’s interested in bubble gum, for you, for some reason and this where God is free in His sovereignty to do this to the believer, right now He is making that a personal thing with you.  You say what’s the heck He got a hang-up with bubble gum for, pot’s a lot worse, you can get arrested for that, why bubble  gum?  I don’t know why, ask God, but for some reason in your personal experience at this moment He wants you to meet Him over here, not over here, and the fundamental rule about meeting God is you meet Him on His terms, not on your terms, because if you go to a conference table over here He won’t be there, He’s over at the other place waiting for you to come over there. 

 

And that’s the way confession is and this place or time of being found means to have the sensitivity to know where it is He’s after you, so to speak.  And this involves searching and this means you just don’t come waltzing in and confess something and just kind of bomb out of the room and that’s it; it’s not that automatic.  It would be good if it was buy my counseling experience tells me it isn’t this way; this is not the way our personal God works; He works in a personal way and He calls the location of the meeting, not us.  Now it’s very nice to recognize that we have a few things wrong here and a few things wrong here, fine.  But still that’s not what He is after at this point.  Now sometimes if you think about it you can tell why He’s after the bubble gum and not the pot because if you think about it for a moment usually He’s after something, which if you handle that this other one will take care of itself.  God has the most fantastic way of handling these things and if we just kind of bend with Him for a while, we get through it.  So that “time in which He was found” is a very important phrase in this Psalm and I’ve taken a lot of time on this because I want you to again see what we’ve seen so often, is that this relationship we have with our God is an extremely, extremely, extremely personal one. 

 

And the danger is as Christian we master spiritual principles which is good that we do that, but then after having mastered them we apply them as tough God isn’t personal, He’s just a machine; oh, I know a few formulas of the Christian life.  Fine, but still behind those is a personal God and His cards are always different every day, every single day.

 

[someone says something]  Very definitely, until you confess the one that He’s after, because generally what happens is He’s not even interested in those things, generally He’s not… now sometimes when you get a real thick case of this you have to go from one to the other and back down around, but generally speaking He’ll pick one out and make you go with that one and it seems like the others kind of get cleaned up in the process.  It’s 1 John 1:9, “If we confess our sins He is faithful and just to forgive us all our iniquities,” all the rest are just cleaned out of the way at that point.  And the reason is that He has made that the issue there.  Now as I say, I can’t tell why God makes this sin and not this sin the issue.  We know the principles He’s using, He wants to bring us into conformity with Christ, but why, you know in any given situation, He makes that one the issue, that’s hard to tell some times.  But you’ll know because you just know like you know when God answers prayer that that’s the thing He’s been dealing with you about. 

 

We’ll have to stop, and since we’re going to have to finish this Psalm next week, write your questions down while they’re fresh in your mind.