Introduction

We’re dealing today with the pained issue of unresolved guilt.

We’re doing this as part of a short series about the relevancy … rather than the commonly perceived irrelevancy … of a Biblical, Christian faith.

Christianity is at so many points derided and rejected in our culture when it in fact holds the means for the resolution of so many of the ills which that rejecting society loudly complains of.

And today we’re illustrating that at just this one point, with the help of ancient experience … the experience of David in Psalm 32.

So, once we’ve learned from the title of the Psalm that this is a composition of David we’re told it is a ‘maskil’.

maskil is a Hebrew term מַשְׂכִּיל (maskil) whose meaning is a bit uncertain but it is derived from a verb meaning “to be prudent; to be wise.” 

You get it commonly in the titles of Psalms (for example psalms 32, 42, 44, 45, 52-55, 74, 78, 88, 89, and 142).

But the thing is, this is being handed to us as a ‘Wisdom Psalm’ … a song about the way of wisdom.

And that seems to be important for understanding what’s going on – we are being given an example to show us the way of the wise.

Not the high-fallutin’ intellectual necessarily.

But the wise.

And, perhaps for the benefit of those who lose their concentration and drift off when they’re confronted with a big slab of Hebrew script, David immediately states his big, wise over-riding principle.

He gets it in quick.

         1) The massive great over-riding principle, vv. 1-2

Vv. 1-2: “Blessed is the one

    whose transgressions are forgiven,

    whose sins are covered.

2 Blessed is the one

    whose sin the Lord does not count against them

    and in whose spirit is no deceit.”

‘THAT’s what you need to know’, says David.

‘THAT’s what you’ve GOT to remember.’

There is no denial of the reality or the nature of sin here.

The choice of words is careful.

The Hebrew word here means transgression.

Now that is a personal sort of expression really … you transgress AGAINST someone else.

And in this sort of context in scripture this is particularly transgression against God.

And there’s the crucial but (obviously unstated) elephant in the room.

The guilt that arises in our behaviour, which often seems directed at others around us, is fundamentally a violation not of THEIR law … they have no more authority to make the rules than you or me!

No.

The ‘rules’ to govern our conduct towards one another can’t be the rules WE make for other people because we’d all make up our own rules just to suit our ego and what we’d start defining as OUR ‘needs’. 

You can see (can’t you?) that we’d soon end up offending and being offended by other people we need to relate to who were doing exactly the same, developing their OWN set of rules for our conduct and life in relationship.

Life in society, would rapidly come to a catastrophic end!

No.

David ‘gets’ that.

David’s entire underlying assumption as he deals with this issue of transgression and sin is that it is the Lord Himself, the true Law-Giver Who has been offended against as we’ve violated the rules He created to make human life and relations worked properly.

Does it now make more sense when we read Psalm 51:4?

“Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight; so you are right in your verdict and justified when you judge.”

When we transgress another human being’s ‘human rights’, well those rights were given them as part of their identity by God when he made us … so it is against the image of God and against HIS plan for humanity that we’ve transgressed.

When we have committed some act of violence and vandalism towards His creation … well what we have violated is the Creator’s plan and His blue-print for the world He has made.

It is against His plan and His purpose for His Creation … human, animal and material that our transgression (our crossing the line) and our sin (our falling short of his standard AND our rebellion against His purpose) has kicked out.

So, whilst we do need to confess our faults to one another and sort things out, it is against God … Who reveals His plans and purposes to us both in our conscience and in His Word (see Romans 1-3) …that we have sinned, violating His standards and giving rise to both our guilt and the shame it makes us feel.

And it is in terms of re-orientating our relationship with GOD that David therefore writes:

“Blessed is the one

    whose transgressions are forgiven,

    whose sins are covered.

2 Blessed is the one

    whose sin the Lord does not count against them

    and in whose spirit is no deceit.”

Who do we need to forgive our sin?

Primarily only God has been offended against … the offence against our neighbour is secondary to that … and therefore it is getting to the place where GOD doesn’t hold our sin against us is the big issue: “Blessed is the one

    whose sin the Lord does not count against them …

But the verse doesn’t end there because the key to getting to that point is at the end of v. 2

This comes to the person: “in whose spirit is no deceit.”

Now there’s the voice of a man who knows in his own experience what he is talking about.

He knows in his own experience that the classic human response to being caught out in guilt and sin is to lie about it, to try to cover it up.

I suspect you know EXACTLY what it is that I’m talking about, and I have to tell you that if you do, then so do I!

Let’s get back to the origins of this sort of thing and I’ll show you what I mean … you remember what happened between God, Cain and Abel?

Genesis 4:6-13

“Then the Lord said to Cain, “Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? 7 If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it.”

8 Now Cain said to his brother Abel, “Let’s go out to the field.” While they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him.

9 Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?”

“I don’t know,” he replied. “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

10 The Lord said, “What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground. 11 Now you are under a curse and driven from the ground, which opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. 12 When you work the ground, it will no longer yield its crops for you. You will be a restless wanderer on the earth.”

13 Cain said to the Lord, “My punishment is more than I can bear.’”

Can you see what’s been going on there?

When challenged about his guilt Cain just refused the shame … and look where it got him: 

“My punishment is more than I can bear.’”

David knows himself what it’s like to walk Cain’s road, because he writes here in 

Psalm 32:3-4

“When I kept silent,
    my bones wasted away
    through my groaning all day long.
4 For day and night
    your hand was heavy on me;
my strength was sapped
    as in the heat of summer.”

         •        2) Guilt’s experience of backing off from God, vv. 3-4

There’s guilt’s experience in backing of from God … the shame saps your strength and wastes you away.

And your psychology affects your physical health and personality too.

I was travelling back from Machynlleth at least a decade ago and the pain got so much I had to drop into Bronglais hospital Aberystwyth, which is a great rural General Hospital in my experience, where a doctor whose help I won’t forget told me that the worst pain is bone pain.

It felt like it that day!

But they helped me greatly and then my life could carry on, and eventually I drove on home.

When David tried to keep silent and keep his guilt and shame covered, it was like an all-consuming pain in his bones.

When he denied his sin’s reality … ‘no, I’m fine, I’ll keep driving on as if there’s nothing to see here’ … he not only exemplified our culture’s denial and defiance of God, he discovered for himself the pain that causes, a pain so many in our culture now bear, and actually perpetuate both by medicalising it (when their problem isn’t YET medical) and by turning to quack self-help gurus.

We have reason to be thankful that David’s Wisdom Psalm doesn’t stop there … look at v. 5, because there’s a clear way out of guilt’s ghastly entanglement.

You’ve got to get back, says David here, honestly to the one you have sinned against.

         •        3) Guilt’s experience of taking itself to God, v. 5

“Then I acknowledged my sin to you
    and did not cover up my iniquity.
I said, “I will confess
    my transgressions to the Lord.”
And you forgave
    the guilt of my sin.”

Could that transaction be any more straightforward?

There’s what was causing David his painful trouble … he calls it what it is, this is all about ‘the guilt of my sin’.

You know, calling it what it is seems more than half the battle for humans.

‘I have the trauma of the aftermath of my transgressions here’, says David.

‘I have a burden of iniquity here and I FEEL it’, says David.

‘I have the guilt of my sin rotting my bones and sapping my strength, as if I’m going down with heat stroke … absolutely a life-threatening condition’, says David.

I confess, I confess, I confess … I confess it to the thrice-Holy God against you, and you only, have I sinned.

‘And you, blessed assurance’ says David. ‘you FORGAVE me … how does THAT work? … the awful GUILT of my sins.’

OK then David, how DOES that work?

We’re dealing here, remember, with God.

The eternal God … which doesn’t mean only that He stretches backwards through time.

It means that He isn’t burdened at ALL with the space-time continuum.

What is that?

I suppose you could say it’s the parameters of what humanity can easily measure.

It was Einstein who showed that time and space are inextricably mixed. 

Each readily observable event, he said, requires three space dimensions and a time. 

That’s how we can measure it.

And that’s why he said time and space taken together form the space-time continuum. 

He spoke of four 'dimensions': three for space and one for time to relate to the material creation.

Fair enough.

Now, I do have a child-like understanding of String Theory … I know physicists post-Einstein have for some time been telling us that the space-time continuum  has no operational meaning for measuring and understanding things below the “Planck scale,” roughly 10-33 centimeters and 10-43seconds. 

I get that this explains why to measure the position of a subatomic particle with higher resolution than that, we must use radiation of smaller wavelength.

And I recognise that there exists the mind-bending possibility that many more dimensions exist out there, so string theory has been suggesting for over 50 years that the universe operates not with three but 10 dimensions.

So it might be best to see God not as just existing beyond space and time, but existing before, after and also throughout ALL of the spiritual and material creation and therefore He transcends created time.

Why have I dragged you through all that?

I’ve done that because it explains what David’s saying in v. 5: “you forgave
    the guilt of my sin.”

How could God do that?

In order to grasp what’s going om here (and this is pretty cool) let’s put a date to David.

You might think that’s tricky because Scripture doesn’t use our regular calendar and quite understandably doesn’t say when David lived.

But based off a carved stone record called the Tel Dan Stele which mentions ‘the house of David’, Biblical scholars reckon he flourished around 1,000 BC. 

For our purpose here, I think you’ll see that’s good enough.

Because whilst that’s about a thousand years before Christ died, what matters is that our sin is forgiven by the One against Whom, Whom only, we have sinned.

And He, the Creator God, is not the least bit constrained by space and time, by string theory or any more than fifteen dimensions that anyone might care to theorise.

So He isn’t the least bit constrained by the time lapse between David’s confession of his sin before God and the sacrifice for all his faithful (though sinful) people’s sins … on calvary’s hill.

Do you see that?

I hope you do because it is truly wonderful.

NOTHING can constrain our gracious and INFINITE Creator God from forgiving the guilt of my sin.

And He does that when we take the guilt of our sin to our incarnate, crucified, resurrected and glorified God.

When we stop trying to hide to or ignore it and take it to Him.

When we’ve treated life like our toy to play with as we wish, when we’ve become distraught because of the way we have broken it, and we carry it tearfully wrecked with guilt, to our Saviour.

He was able to fix it for David, and He will fix it for you and me.

He can fix it IF …

(Here come the lessons to learn …)

         •        4) Lessons to learn, vv. 6-7

            a) Dealing with the immediate crisis

“Therefore let all the faithful pray to you
    while you may be found;
surely the rising of the mighty waters
    will not reach them.
7 You are my hiding place;
    you will protect me from trouble
    and surround me with songs of deliverance.”

Three themes seem to me to stand out here as we find in v. 6 the way to deal with the immediate crisis …           

            •           Faithfulness

Let all the faithful pray to you.

From Abraham’s day onward – long before David, because God operates outside space and time, remember?

From Abraham onward getting things right with God was ALWAYS about trusting everything in life to Him by faith.

Here is a promise that comes not out of guilt-wrecked records of performance, of compliance with the broken rules-based order in relationships, but by God’s grace.

From Eden onwards, because of His infinity, it was always the way back to God.

Let the FAITHFUL seek this course with their need to resolve the traumas of their guilt … turn to God with it.

            •           Turning to God

How do you turn to God?

Well, I’ll tell you now, it’s the opposite of what fallen humanity immediately did when they were found out …

When God came looking for Adam and for Eve in that Garden, the first thing their fresh guilt taught them was to run and hide from Him.

And when God challenged Cain about Abel, Cain tried to hide His guilt from God.

The problem was caused then and it is still caused in our world by denying the guilt that’s eating us, running from God and trying to hide from the consequences that come from this.

David says: “let all the faithful pray to you” in their guilt, and there’s how the wise deal with guilt’s immediate crisis.

But there’s one more thing in the immediate … do it while there’s still the opportunity.

            •           While there’s opportunity

That is my experience, writes David, so:

v. 6 “Therefore let all the faithful pray to you
    while you may be found;”

This is not a thing you can afford to play about with.

Guilt and shame must be dealt with immediately.

My mate Mike is a total engineer.

He’s in a wheelchair, but he’s still a total engineer, and to be honest with you he’s a quite amazing bloke.

So there he was one day sat at his dining room table, welding something to do with some means of transport he was constructing … and all I know is that a lithium-ion battery was somehow involved or quite close to the process.

Now, I imagine you can see where this is going?

His equally amazing wife was at hand to help with the inferno and I believe it was she who conveyed the (literally) flaming battery straight to a bucket of water in the garage, where the material consequences continued to burn for some months!

I hope they’ll forgive me for any inaccuracies in my reporting, but I’m giving you an example of a couple of things here … however skilful we are at what we’re doing, in a fallen world things do go wrong.

And when things DO go wrong they tend to have consequences.

What matters is the speed and determination with which we deal with those consequences, and both the ability and the reliability of the place that we go to for help in resolving our crisis.

(OK – behold now, I have told you a parable!)

So much for the immediate crisis, David has one final point here to make to us, beyond the immediate crisis if we handle it in this way … he has something to say t us about the place we should inhabit as our habitual place of rest.

            b) The place of rest

v. 7 “You are my hiding place;
    you will protect me from trouble
    and surround me with songs of deliverance.”

The faithful guilt-freed person’s place of rest is back in God’s presence.

Now it is EXACTLY what was lost by the guilt that humans had picked up in Eden.

Humanity sinned and for its unredeemed safety had to be driven from God’s presence.

And we’d be daft not to keep going back to our merciful and all-forgiving God with our fresh failures there.

The Christian life is not well-lived resting on a past experience of sin forgiven, but on the every day experience of refreshing our safety and salvation taking up the opportunity to wash away our sin in His presence.

And resting the weight of our life there.

Let’s come quickly then to a straightforward conclusion.

         Conclusion

OK, then.

So what is it that has happened here?

The psalmist recalled the agony he experienced prior to confessing his sins.

He affirmed that true happiness comes when our sins are forgiven. 

He then urged others not to be stubborn, but to turn to God while forgiveness is available.

And he stresses the importance of taking that route, because God shows mercy to those who are faithful and turn back to Him, but people who chose to ‘tough it out’ in their guilt without God experience nothing but repressed guilt and sorrow.

Not just taking it there but bringing it there, to our habitual place in His presence, day after day, rejoicing in fresh fellowship, fresh relationship, with the God Who lifts the burden of our guilt and takes us back.

And what the does for our human relationships can be quite incredible.