Psalm 32 | The Grace of Forgiveness

If you are visiting with us today, we want to welcome you.

As you can see on the front of your bulletin, our vision statement begins with declaring God's word.

That is a vital part of our Sunday morning gatherings as God's people.

But today is also a day in which we celebrate what Christ has done for us on the cross.

And we're going to do that a little bit later by participating together in the Lord's table.

On these Sundays, for a few months, we are looking at a handful of psalms that identify particular aspects of God's grace.

We begin by learning about the grace of God's righteousness in Psalm 143.

And then we looked at Psalm 130 to see the grace of redemption.

And this morning, as we look at Psalm 32, we will get a glimpse of the grace of God's forgiveness.

So if you have your Bible, I encourage you to follow along with me as I read for us, Psalm 32.

This is a maskle, it says, of David.

Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.

Blessed is the one against whom Yahweh counts no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit.

For when I kept silent my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long.

For day and night your hand was heavy upon me, my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.

I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover my iniquity.

I said I will confess my transgressions to Yahweh, and you forgave the iniquity of my sin.

Therefore, let everyone who is godly offer prayer to you at a time when you may be found, for surely in the rush of great waters they shall not reach him.

You are a hiding place for me.

You preserve me from trouble, you surround me with shouts of deliverance.

I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go.

I will counsel you with my eye upon you.

Be not like a horse or a mule without understanding, which must be curbed with a bit and bridle, or it will not stay near you.

Many are the sorrows of the wicked, but steadfast love surrounds the one who trusts in Yahweh.

Be glad in Yahweh and rejoice, O righteous, and shout for joy all you upright in heart.

Lord Jesus, we long to receive your word this morning.

But even more than that to receive what it communicates to us.

Help us to see, to understand, to comprehend, but even more to apply to our own hearts and souls and minds the grace of forgiveness that comes only from you.

We ask this because of our Lord Jesus Christ and what he's done for us.

Amen.

In the early hours of Friday, january first, nineteen eighty-two, seventeen-year-old Kevin Tannell made one of the biggest decisions of his life.

It was at a New Year's Eve party near Washington, D.C., where he became very intoxicated.

His friends urged him not to drive, but he insisted to them nothing's gonna happen.

Everything's gonna be okay.

But on the road he lost control of his car, crashing into another vehicle, instantly killing 18-year-old Susan Herzog.

Kevin pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and drunk driving, and was sentenced to three years probation and one year of community service.

Susan's parents, understandably, didn't feel that that was sufficient punishment.

So they sued him in civil court for one and a half million dollars.

In today's dollars, it would be almost four million dollars.

But in a strange twist, after meeting Kevin, Susan's parents offered to settle out of court.

The terms of the agreement were the full cash value of his parents' life insurance policy, along with one strange condition.

The settlement required that Kevin send them a check for one dollar made out to the deceased Susan Herzog every Friday for the next eighteen years.

One every year that Susan had been alive.

Now to Kevin, the penalty seemed like he'd been let off easy.

But soon the burden of guilt proved to be too much for him to bear.

He tried to present the Herzog family with two boxes of pre-written checks dated each week through 2001, one year longer than was required.

But the couple refused to accept them.

After seven endless years of his weekly ritual, Kevin began to miss a few payments.

So the Herzogs took him back to court.

Standing before Judge Jack Stevens, a teary Tanell, admitted that the agonizing guilt he felt each time he filled in Susan's name had become simply unbearable.

You get to a point, he said, where you kind of snap and you say it hurts too much.

I used to, like, lie in bed, and and if I heard noises, I I used to think that Susan was going to come visit me.

Kevin spent thirty days in jail, and Susan's dad, Lou, said Susan's death is there every waking moment.

But every time we don't get a check, there's only one thing that comes to mind.

He doesn't remember.

The third dogs argue that their insistence is not vindictive retribution.

Susan's mother, Patty, explained, we do want him to remember, but that doesn't mean that we don't want him to accept it and get on with his life.

Well, Kevin Tanell slowly pieced his life back together and has spoken out often against drunk driving.

But that's not my reason for telling you the story.

I would like you to think about Kevin's story from the perspective of sin.

See, Kevin committed a crime, and through the prosecution of that crime, he was overcome with the guilt of what he had done.

So much so that he failed to fulfill the obligations of his agreed-upon settlement.

Susan Herzog's parents, on the other hand, extended a form of forgiveness by settling outside of court and asking that Kevin perform what to them was a very small act to remind him of their daughter.

That's a version of our society's therapeutic forgiveness.

We forgive, but only in a way that makes us feel better.

And if it comes with a dose of pain for those that we forgive, that's even better, right?

But that is not forgiveness from a biblical perspective.

How would we feel if God treated our sin similarly?

What if we lived our lives in a kind of purgatory?

A place where we are constantly beaten down with the guilt of our sin through reminders of our sin on a constant and regular basis standing before a holy God?

What if guilt from our sin never went away?

What if God desired to continually remind us of our guilt so that it was painfully and constantly fresh in our hearts, souls, and minds?

Some of us might not want to keep on living.

Kevin's story is sad and painful.

And it's far too common.

And we feel the emotion and the sorrow of the parents.

And I think we can get a sense of the guilt that Kevin bore as well.

But our struggle this morning is to put ourselves as though we were standing in Kevin's shoes before an infinitely holy God from whom we desperately need forgiveness.

The first two verses of this psalm highlight the wretchedness of sin.

Drunk driving that kills another human being is absolutely horrible.

And we feel that in Kevin's story.

We need to feel a similar horror toward our own sin.

The psalmist here does that for us by using three different words for sin transgression, sin, and iniquity.

Taken separately, transgression is the crossing of a line, the passing over of a boundary.

Sin is missing the marks, not meeting a standard, and iniquity is a word that emphasizes the guilt that comes from wrongdoing.

But the psalmist may not have intended us to overly emphasize what each of those individual words implies.

Instead, taken together, they point to the totality of our sin.

They encompass all kinds of sin, all manner of sin, all patterns of sin, intentional sin, unintentional sin, because we stand before a holy God, the judge of all the earth, guilty of going beyond his command, guilty of failing to uphold his standards, and we bear all the weight of the guilt that we have earned.

There's no escape.

There's no convincing the judge that we are innocent because we are fully responsible and we bear the weight of our eternal guilt because our sin is against an eternal God.

But that God is also a God of grace, isn't he?

And we are reminded of that in a wonderful way.

The psalmist here pairs each of the three words of sin with a different word for forgiveness.

Forgiven, covered, and does not count.

The guilty covet those three words.

To have our sin forgiven, to have it covered and not counted against us is freeing for the guilty.

I think that's why David says, blessed is for the first time since Psalm 1.

We don't see those words after Psalm 1 until Psalm 32.

In Psalm 1, the blessing comes from avoiding sin.

Blessed is the one who does not walk, who walks not, the ESV says, in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers, but his delight is in the law of Yahweh, and on his law he meditates day and night.

There is blessing in avoiding sin, blessing that comes from God.

But in the 32nd Psalm, the blessing comes not by avoiding sin, but through God forgiving sin.

We will never understand how great that blessing is until, like Kevin Tinnell, we grasp the wretchedness of our sin.

But once we do that, once we wrestle with the weight and the guilt of our sin that we have earned, and then we begin to experience the blessing of forgiveness that far outweighs our sin, then as verse 11 says, we can begin to rejoice and shout for joy.

But sometimes that weight feels more than we can bear.

I struggle to grasp the weight of guilt that Kevin experienced week after week after week.

Mentally I get it.

I understand that that can compound.

But experientially it's more difficult.

I felt guilt, even great guilt.

It's terrible.

Sometimes it's like a rock in the pit of your stomach that you just can't get rid of.

Sometimes it's a terror that overcomes your whole being until it makes you physically sick.

And that's where the psalmist was.

Some think that David wrote this song after he was confronted by the prophet Nathan about his sin with Bathsheba.

We can't know that.

He doesn't tell us that.

But it very well could have been something similar to the guilt that would come from adultery and murder.

Or these words could be the result of little sins piling up over time that suddenly become crashing down.

But whatever it was, David said, When I kept silent, my bones wasted away.

Because I'm groaning all day long.

Day and night he said, It feels like your hand is crushing me with this pressure.

My strength was dried up as the heat of summer.

He kept silent, meaning he didn't confess his sin.

Unconfessed sin makes a person a slave to the guilt.

Unconfessed sin makes us a slave to our guilt.

And as guilt piles up, it begins to impact a person's mind, body, and spirit.

David was physically sick from the guilt of his sin.

He recognized that it was a consequence of his unconfessed sin.

God, he said, was pressing down on him as though God was putting him in a vice and cranking it.

He couldn't escape the guilt.

He was like a dried-up plant, he says.

The blessed person from Psalm 1 is like a person that God has dug up, like a plant that God has dug up out of a desert and transplanted to be near a canal, a place that has constant running water.

But this is the opposite image.

Here, David feels as though he's a dry plant on a hot summer day, and that described him in the oppressive guilt of his unconfessed sin.

A couple of weeks ago, we purchased some flowers for a planter near our front door.

That afternoon, I I emptied some of the old dirt from the planter, replaced it with some fresh potting soil.

I carefully set the new flowers in place.

I think I only broke off a few stems.

I surrounded them with fresh soil, and then I gave them a really good drink.

That day was in the upper eighties or nineties, and the next day was as well.

But by evening of the day after I planted them, the flowers were already beginning to wilt from the heat and the lack of water.

Just the next day.

That is a picture of you and me when we do not confess our sin.

Unconfessed sin will have an effect, a debilitating effect on us.

Now that doesn't mean that all sickness, all depression, or any kind of physical or mental illness is automatically from unconfessed sin.

But it could be.

It's an option we must consider.

It was for David.

This image shows us the devastating potential of unconfessed sin in our lives.

In fact, in 1 Corinthians 11, in the passage that talks about taking communion, the apostle records that some of the people in Corinth were living in unrepentant sin, so much so that they were sick and some of them had died.

There are consequences, beloved, to unconfessed sin.

We sometimes confuse ourselves into believing that things will be better for us if we hide our sin.

Keeping it concealed, though, will not only be worse, but it will bring with it divine consequences.

But with God there's always hope, isn't there?

What was it that Paul said to end Romans 7 and begin Romans 8?

Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

There is hope.

Martin Luther is said to have called this psalm one of the Pauline Psalms.

He said that because forgiveness in Psalm 32 comes not by works but by grace through faith.

I acknowledged my sin to you, verse 5.

And I did not cover my iniquity.

And I said, I will confess my transgressions to Yahweh, and you forgave the iniquity of my sin.

David repeats here this list of sins from verses 1 and 2.

He doesn't do it in the same order, but he does use the exact same words.

No longer keeping silent about his sin, he acknowledged them to God.

He uncovered his sin before God instead of trying to hide it.

He's confessing, he's agreeing with God that he has crossed God's boundaries, that he has not upheld God's standards, and in God's grace, his confession led to forgiveness.

I tried to imagine how freeing it must have been for Kevin Tannell to send off the very last of those checks.

The closest I could come would be making the last payment on your mortgage.

But that doesn't even seem to come close to what Kevin Tannell must have experienced.

What must it have felt like to be free of that burden?

To be done with the guilt.

We must never forget how freeing it is to receive the grace of forgiveness.

I think sometimes as Christians we can get too used to it.

And the New Testament repeats all of this theology for us, doesn't it?

John tells us in 1 John 1, verse 9, if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us.

1 John 1:9

Not simply to forgive us, but to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

It is the character of God to forgive his people when they confess their sins.

It is the character of God to also, though, push down on his people when they seek to cover their sin, so that we might be moved to release it, to forgive to come to God for confession and repentance and receive the grace of forgiveness.

In fact, the grace of forgiveness is such a blessing that David says in verse 6 and 7 that it comes with the grace of finding God.

Therefore, let everyone who is godly offer prayer to you at a time when you may be found.

Our fellowship with God is Is hindered when we are hiding under the burden of our guilt.

Let me say that again.

Our fellowship, our relationship with our God is hindered when we are trying to hide under the guilt, under the burden of our sin.

See, our nature as human beings is to protect ourselves, isn't it?

That means we don't open up.

We don't tell others about the messiness in our lives or the sin that we have indulged in.

And yet, when sin remains hidden and cloaked, God feels distant.

That's why God's ways feel counterintuitive.

God says, don't hide it.

Open up to me.

Agree with me that what you've done is wrong, that you failed to uphold my standards.

And when you stop trying to protect yourself and you open up to me, I will forgive you, I will protect you, and I will be your hiding place.

No longer will you have to hide under your sin.

I will be your hiding place.

When we are overcome with guilt, we feel the need to hide from others and from God.

But when our sins are forgiven, he becomes a place of preservation and protection.

He becomes our hiding place from judgment and guilt.

Now the emphasis here is not on the hiding place, but on the personal appropriation of God as my hiding place.

Couple hundred years ago, an author wrote, David does not say you are a hiding place, merely as one among many.

He does not say the hiding place, as in the only one, but you are my hiding place.

There lies all the excellency of the text.

He is mine.

I have embraced the offer of his salvation, says David.

I have applied to him in my own person.

I, a sinner, have taken shelter in his love and compassion.

I have placed myself under his wings.

I have covered myself with the robe of his righteousness, and now therefore I am safe.

Are you safe?

Earlier in the Psalms, the same author declared, Yahweh is my shepherd.

Is he your shepherd?

Is he your hiding place?

Have you confessed your sin to him to receive forgiveness by his grace so that you are free to run to him as your hiding place?

That grace can only be yours if you appropriate it to your life.

His forgiving grace can only be granted to you if by faith you come to him as your redeemer and your savior.

That's why the psalmist encourages us to not be stupid.

Yes, that's what he says.

Verse 9.

Like his son Solomon after him, David takes the opportunity to instruct us from his own experience.

He says, I've lived the sinful life, I have walked the sinful way.

And now I'm going to instruct you from my own experience.

He feels the sin.

He feels the shame and the guilt.

He sensed the distance from God.

And so he says to us, Don't be like the horse or the mule without understanding, which has to be curbed with a bit or a bridle, or it won't stay near you.

Don't be stubborn.

Don't be ignorant.

Don't refuse to learn from others.

Don't be so stubborn that God must teach you through the pain of your own experience.

Learn from this ancient king.

Learn from this ancient king that you need to come to the King of Kings, confessing your sin.

And when you do, there is delight in his surrounding care.

Like a loving father, God surrounds his confessing children with his lasting loyal love because they trust in him.

Those who don't trust in him have no hiding place.

They have no freedom from their guilt.

They have no hope, only sorrow.

Now I'm certain that none of us would choose sorrow and guilt over God's surrounding care and love.

None of us in our right minds would choose sorrow and pain and guilt over God's surrounding love.

So how is it that we receive that kind of love?

We receive it by confessing our sin rather than covering it up.

We receive it by acknowledging it before a holy God that we have broken his laws, and when we do that, we can be glad and rejoice in the righteousness that is ours by faith in him.

A righteousness that comes through the forgiveness of sins.

A forgiveness that is all of grace.

But there's one major question remaining unanswered.

How?

How?

How is it that God can forgive our sin?

How is it that God is able to remain holy and just and righteous and yet graciously forgive?

It clearly says he does, but how?

The answer is found in the last line of verse 5.

And you forgave the iniquity of my sin.

Remember that iniquity refers to the guilt that is incurred from our sin.

We are guilty, and there is a sense, a feeling even of guilt that comes with sin.

There's that burden, that pressure of knowing that we have done wrong.

But God forgives, it says.

David uses a word here for forgive that means to lift up.

It's the same word he uses in verse 1.

Blessed is the one whose transgression is lifted up.

At the end of verse 5, you lifted up the iniquity of my sin.

In Old Testament times, this word spoke of the guilt that we bear being lifted up off of us as though it was a burden taken off of us.

We've all experienced that weight of a backpack or having to carry a child or some weight that is heavy, and then that being released from us, and what a relief that is.

That's the idea that's present here.

It's a blessing to have guilt removed, isn't it?

It's freeing.

But how does God lift up the guilt of our sin off of us?

Well, I would like to suggest an answer to you.

And to get to that answer, I'd like to begin in Isaiah chapter 33.

Isaiah 33 · chapter mention

Isaiah 33 talks about Yahweh as Israel's king.

And in chapter 33 and verse 22, it says, For Yahweh is our judge.

Yahweh is our lawgiver.

Yahweh is our king.

He will save us.

It's interesting here that the lawgiver is also the judge, and the judge is also the king who will save them from the judge.

How will God save them?

Well, at the end of the chapter in verse 24, it says the people who dwell there will have their guilt lifted up.

God will save his people, he promised, by lifting up their guilt.

When Yahweh, the covenant God, is your judge, your king, your savior, the result is that your guilt is removed by God lifting it up off of you.

The burden is removed from you.

What does God do with that burden?

In the New Testament, the Apostle Paul said to the Corinthians, For our sake he made him that is Jesus to be sin, who knew no sin, so that in him we might be become the righteousness of God.

God the Son was made to be sin for our sake.

Peter said in 1 Peter chapter 2, verse 24, that Jesus bore our sins in his body on the tree.

1 Peter 2:24

Jesus bore our guilt.

The weight, the burden, the imprisonment of my guilt and your guilt was lifted up off of me and placed on someone else, placed on God the Son.

But someone was still bearing it.

Just because it was removed from me or removed from you does not mean that it was gone because it was placed on another person.

That's why I think in John chapter three, we are told, as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up.

So that whoever believes in him might have eternal life.

God the Son lifted up your guilt.

He took it upon himself and he bore it to a hill, where he was lifted up on a tree to take care of your guilt.

Hebrews chapter 2 speaks of Jesus being the propitiation or the satisfaction of our sins.

Hebrews 2 · chapter mention

How did he satisfy the wrath of God against our sin?

He did it by taking our guilt on himself and being lifted up.

That is how God lifts up our guilt from us.

And that is how he can grant us the grace of forgiveness.

What does the psalmist say?

Blessed is the one against whom Yahweh counts no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit.

Be glad in Yahweh, rejoice, O righteous, and shout for joy, all you upright in heart.

Who are those in whom is no deceit?

Who are the righteous and the upright in heart?

He's not speaking of those who are perfect, those who never sin.

He's speaking of the ones for whom Jesus bore the guilt as he was lifted up to die.

The ones who are forgiven by the grace of God as their guilt is lifted up on a tree.

They are the forgiven.

They are the ones in whom is no deceit.

They are the righteous, they are the upright in heart, and in that they are forgiven.

That for beforgiveness is a blessing, and in that blessing you can rejoice and shout for joy.

Let's pray together.

Lord Jesus, we confess our sin to you.

We all know in our own way how oppressive the burden of our guilt can be.

How we want to be free.

No matter what we do, how we work, how we try to amend things, how we try to make things right, the guilt does not go away.

It only comes off of us when we open up to you.

And we do that together corporately as your people now.

We come to you acknowledging to you that we we have sinned.

Like David, we have transgressed your command.

We have fallen short of the glory of God.

We do not want to bear the guilt.

So we confess to you, and in confessing to you, we receive the joy of your forgiveness.

We receive it because you have promised.

You have promised on your own name, on your own character, on your faithfulness, and your justice that you will forgive.

So we receive your forgiveness.

And by the washing of the blood of the Lamb shed for us, applying it to our lives through the Holy Spirit, we come and we bow before you cleansed, freed of our sin and our guilt.

Washed free.

And it's in that way then that we come together to to remember you being lifted up.

Lifted up on a cursed cross.

The innocent one now guilty.

The guiltless one now bearing the weight of my guilt.

Without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sin.

Lord Jesus, we give you praise and honor and glory.

That in your humility you would take our sin upon yourself to have your body broken and your blood shed.

So that we might be made right with God and be forgiven.

What grace there is.

Amen.