Sermon Text: Psalm 32:1-7
Date: March 10, 2024
Event: The Fourth Sunday in Lent, Year B
Psalm 32:1–7 (EHV)
How blessed is the person
whose rebellion is forgiven,
whose sin is covered.
2How blessed is the person
whose guilt the Lord does not charge against him,
in whose spirit there is no deceit.
3When I kept silent,
my bones wasted away as I groaned all day long.
4For day and night your hand was heavy on me.
My moisture was dried up by the droughts of summer.
5I acknowledged my sin to you,
and I did not cover up my guilt.
I said, “I will confess my rebellion to the Lord,”
and you forgave the guilt of my sin.
6Because of this, let everyone who receives favor pray to you
at a time when you may be found.
Surely when the mighty waters overflow,
they will not reach him.
7You are my hiding place.
You will protect me from distress.
You will surround me with shouts of deliverance.
Forgiveness Is Relief
We’ve spent a lot of time over the past several weeks talking about the difficulties in the life of a Christian and how painful those can be (yet always knowing we have the Lord’s help in all of them!). However, we’ve spent precious little time talking about the joy and relief when those things are taken away, so let’s focus on that this morning, especially concerning the forgiveness of sins.
You know the peace that can come from pain or trouble going away, right? The aspirin you took starts to take effect, and your pounding headache begins to subside. Ahhhh… The financial matter gets cleared up, and you don’t owe some large sum of money you cannot pay. Ahhh… You finally get that essay written and turned in for class, and that thing over your head is now done. Ahhh…
In our psalm for this morning, Psalm 32, David references relief that comes from God. But much more significant than relief from a headache, a school assignment, or even a pressing financial issue is the relief of the forgiveness of sins. Not only does this bring relief in the moment, but it also brings relief for eternity.
Now, David will talk about some of the difficult things that God does to get us to repentance and to a state where he can comfort us with the forgiveness of sins. And in those moments, we can start to feel like God is a mean, angry judge who hates us. To help head off that notion at the pass, David begins this psalm by reminding us who God is, how he desires to deal with us, and how good that is: How blessed is the person whose rebellion is forgiven, whose sin is covered. How blessed is the person whose guilt the Lord does not charge against him, in whose spirit there is no deceit.
There is forgiveness with God, and it is the greatest blessing. God does not remain angry forever but forgives our rebellion, covers our sins, removes our guilt, and gives us a spirit of truth and peace. This is who God is; this is his true nature and his goals for us. It’s just that, sometimes, God has to put us through the wringer to get us to this point.
David goes on: When I kept silent, my bones wasted away as I groaned all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy on me. My moisture was dried up by the droughts of summer. This sounds pretty bad, but maybe familiar to you. David is describing the physical effects that guilt can have on us—bones wasting away, groaning all the time, feeling like God’s hand is pressing us down, and our vitality feeling dried up like sand in a desert.
David may very well be referencing his time of silence and the associated trouble when he remained silent about his sin involving Bathsheba. Very briefly, as king of Israel, David didn’t go with his army to war in the springtime, as was the pattern for kings then. Instead, he stayed home and let the army leaders handle the strategizing and the fighting. But while at home, outside in his palace, he sees a woman bathing across the way. Lust ignites in his heart, and he has this married woman, Bathsheba, brought to him, and he sleeps with her. The result of this is that Bathsheba becomes pregnant. There’s no hiding this sin now, unless…
David recalls Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah, from the front lines of battle in the hope that he will spend some time in Jerusalem, spend a few evenings with his wife, and then assume that the child she will bear is his. David did not count on Uriah being so upright that he wouldn’t even entertain the notion of going to the comforts of home while his fellow soldiers were still living out on the battlefield. David even got him drunk but still couldn’t convince him to go home to his wife. So, David does the only thing he can think of to end this problem he created: he sends Uriah back with a sealed message to the commander that Uriah is to be placed where the fighting is fiercest, and then the other soldiers are to back away from him so that he would die at the hand of the enemy.
See how the sin snowballs? David doesn’t fulfill his responsibilities to go to war with his army, so he’s home when he probably shouldn’t be and sees a woman he shouldn’t have seen. He lets that lust control his actions so that he gets this poor woman pregnant, and then he tries to deceive her husband to cover his sin. When that doesn’t work, he resorts to murder.
And all of that is not the worst of it. The worst is that David lived in a state of denial about this sin. He tried to ignore it; he tried to pretend it didn’t happen or it wasn’t that bad. He tried to live life as if everything was fine. After all, he was the king. Can’t the king do what he wants?
How did that line of thinking and action work for David? When I kept silent, my bones wasted away as I groaned all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy on me. You’ve perhaps experienced something similar, the physical blech that comes with guilt. The upset stomach, the aches and pains, the just miserable state of being. It’s truly amazing how spiritual and emotional can physically affect us.
But David says that this is for a purpose. God wasn’t pressing David down to be mean to him but to draw him out of his self-imposed prison of unrepentance. Ignoring sin doesn’t make it go away; in fact, very often, it just makes you feel worse.
Have you been where David had been, holding on to a sin you loved and wanted to keep doing or perhaps hated but tried to ignore rather than deal with it? Maybe that happened to you in the past; maybe that’s a struggle within you right now. There are a variety of reasons that we might not want to own up to the fact that sins we’ve committed are bad, but holding that in never does any good. It leaves us a wreck. Bones wasting away…
Why does God want us to confess our sins? Why does he place his hand on us when unrepentance takes hold? Because he loves us. Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen a few different ways that God will deal with hardship, but allowing trouble like this because he loves us might feel a bit far-fetched in the moment.
But it’s true! God’s goal is to bring us to repentance and acknowledge that the sin is bad and that we don’t want to do it anymore. He wants to get us to that state not to make us stew in our guilt but because he wants to jump in and offer the relief of forgiveness. He allows our life in the moment to be painful and difficult so that the sin we’re holding onto doesn’t lead to hell—which happens when sin is left unchecked.
God sent the prophet Nathan to King David with an unenviable task: speak the law to David to bring him to repentance. Nathan and David were friends. I can’t even imagine the frog that would have been in Nathan’s throat or the butterflies in his stomach as he went to approach David about his sin. Would their friendship survive this discussion? Would Nathan himself survive, or would David have him killed in a storm of fury?
But Nathan goes as God commanded, and using a parable and direct confrontation, he calls David on the carpet. He speaks God’s law to David just as God had told him to. Adulterer! Deceiver! Murderer! And you can almost see David's thin walls break down. He’s barely been keeping it together the past several months, trying to bear up under the weight of this God-inflicted guilt, trying desperately to ignore the sins he had committed, and here comes Nathan taking a sledgehammer to the supports propping him up. David’s response isn’t anger and rage; it isn’t to threaten Nathan or to order him to leave. David’s response is simple: “I have sinned against the Lord.” And Nathan, in that moment, has the greatest privilege and joy to announce to David, “The Lord himself has put away your sin. You will not die” (2 Samuel 12:13).
And just like that, as far as God is concerned, it is done. There’s no making up for the sin; there’s not much to be done, given Uriah has been dead for many months. There is also fallout and personal tragedy for David and Bathsheba due to this sin. But the ultimate consequence, the punishment this sin deserved, the eternal death in hell David should have faced? All of that was gone. I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover up my guilt. I said, “I will confess my rebellion to the Lord,” and you forgave the guilt of my sin.
God has no desire to be against us or at war with us. He loves us and wants us with him. But for us to be with him forever, he has to deal with this sin that separates us from him. And that, in its most basic form, is the mission that Jesus set out to accomplish, the mission he described in our Gospel for this morning: “God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him” (John 3:16-17).
See what your God has done for you, how greatly he loves you, that he would save you from your sins, give you that forgiveness, and even die for you because that is what it costs. He did so willingly, and he provided for you completely.
I think v. 7 of Psalm 32 is fascinating in this regard. David says, “You are my hiding place. You will protect me from distress. You will surround me with shouts of deliverance.” Consider how he had just recently described God’s hand as heavy on him. Knowing his forgiveness, God is no longer pressing down on him but is protecting him. God’s hands envelop and guard David as he forgives David’s sins.
That’s where you and I are, for Jesus’ sake. Not separated from God, not pressed down by him, but protected. Bring your sin to him; confess it in your prayers. If it’s especially troublesome, bring it to your pastor or another trusted Christian friend or family member so they can give you the same assurance Nathan gave David: “The Lord himself has put away your sin.” He put away that sin through his death on the cross. He saved the world he loved when he was nailed to that tree. He saved me. He saved you.
Today and every day for the rest of your life, find relief in God’s free and complete forgiveness for you. How blessed you are, my dear brothers and sisters, because your rebellion is forgiven, your sin is covered, and the Lord does not charge your guilt against you. Thanks be to God! Amen.
