Church: Reformed Baptist Church of Franconia | Text: Psalm 32 | Date: April 28, 2024 | Speaker: Fred Zaspel

Open your Bibles with me, if you will, please, to Psalm 32, the 32nd Psalm. We are continuing our series of expositions through the Psalms. We’re not going to cover each of the Psalms, but we are examining quite a few of them today. Psalm 32. The song selections for today that we have sung have fit very well with the theme of this familiar and wonderful Psalm. I’ll begin reading with verse one.

This is a Maskil of David. “Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man against whom the Lord counts no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit. When I kept silence, my bones wasted away through my groaning all the day long. For day and night, your hand was heavy upon me. My strength was dried up by the heat of summer. Selah. I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover my iniquity. I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,’ and you forgave the iniquity of my sin. Selah. Therefore, let everyone who is godly offer prayer to you at a time when you may be found. 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. Selah. 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 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 the Lord. Be glad in the Lord and rejoice, O righteous, and shout for joy all you upright in heart.”

Let’s bow together for prayer. Our Father, we thank you for your word. What a rich, wonderful treasure this is. We rejoice in the great things that we learn of your grace and your love. We marvel at what we learn of your greatness, your transcendence, your majesty, and your sovereign rule. And we marvel that such a God could be so gracious and loving towards sinners. We thank you for this book of the Psalms that you’ve given to us, which expresses our worship attached to virtually every emotion that we have. And we thank you particularly for the theme of this Psalm. It reminds us of the salvation that we have in Christ, the wonderful forgiveness of sins, and the joy that we can have through Jesus Christ. We pray that you’ll open our eyes and our hearts to it this morning and help us to go from here refreshed in the gospel of Christ, we pray in his name. Amen.

Psalm 32 is a psalm of individual grateful praise. You’ll remember there are different classifications of the psalms that we’ve looked at. There were hymns or psalms of general praise where the psalmist lifts up praise to God for his greatness, his attributes, his majesty, and his rule—his rule over the earth, his rule over history, and things like that. These are hymns of praise. A psalm of grateful praise is individually focused, and it’s focused on the psalmist himself thanking God or praising God in thanks for what He has done for him personally or individually. These are often a complement of some kind to the lament psalms. You remember, at the heart of a lament psalm is a petition. He’s lamenting because he’s in some distress and trouble of some kind, and at the heart of the lament is a petition, a plea to God to ask for His help. These psalms of individual grateful praise, then, are the complement to that. They look back to the occasion when the help was given, and then they offer praise to God for answering that prayer. That is explicitly the case in Psalm 32.

You might remember the backstory to this. It’s 2 Samuel chapter 11 and 12. In 2 Samuel chapter 11, we have David’s infamous sin with Bathsheba. He commits adultery. He commits murder to cover it up. He deceives the nation. He deceives everyone around him. He sins against everyone within reach. And finally, after a year of hiding it all, God sends the prophet Nathan; that’s 2 Samuel chapter 12. The prophet Nathan comes to David and confronts him with his sin. He tells him, you remember, the parable of the rich man and the poor man—the poor man with only one sheep and the rich man who had plenty of sheep and went and took the poor man’s only sheep and slaughtered that to serve a guest. David was enraged over it and said, “That man will restore fourfold.” And then Nathan says to David, “You are the man.” In confronting David with his sin, David then repents of his sin. Immediately, he breaks. He’s not like some of the kings of Israel who, when the prophets confronted them with their sin, would attack and try to destroy the prophet. Instead, David breaks and he bows before the Lord in repentance. In 2 Samuel 12, verse 13, David said to Nathan the prophet, “I have sinned against the Lord.” And then Nathan said to David, “The Lord has put away your sin.”

Now, in Psalm 51, that you’re probably familiar with as well, David expresses his repentance. He petitions God for forgiveness. That is a lament psalm. The distress that he is under in Psalm 51, though, is not external; it’s internal. It’s his own sin, and it’s external only in the sense that it is God now who is opposed to him because of his sin. And so in Psalm 51, he expresses at length his repentance before God because of the sin that he had committed and asks God for forgiveness. “Have mercy on me, O God.” We will get to that when we get to Psalm 51. “Have mercy on me, O God. Blot out my transgressions. Wash me. Cleanse me from my sin.” That’s Psalm 51, expressing his confession, his repentance of sin, lamenting his sin, pleading to God for forgiveness.

And now Psalm 32, although it comes earlier in our canon, is written after the fact, and it looks back on that. He reflects now with joy on the forgiveness that God gave in response to his confession, and he offers God praise for the forgiveness that he has received. So Psalm 32 is numbered among the so-called penitential psalms. It’s not a penitential psalm because it expresses his penitence or his repentance—in fact, he doesn’t express repentance in this psalm—but it’s numbered among the penitential psalms because it reflects on that time of unconfessed sin. It reflects on the time of the agony of his unconfessed sin that he felt. And it also reflects on the confession that he made and then on the forgiveness that God gave in response to that confession. And here, then, he expresses the joy of forgiveness and he also expresses a resolve to teach others the ways of God with repentant sinners.

All right, we have 11 verses then to work our way through.

The Testimony Of The Forgiven King

In verses 1 to 5, we have the testimony of the forgiven king. Here he reflects back on what was transpiring in his life after this time of sin that’s recorded in 2 Samuel 11 and 12. In verses 1 and 2, we have his opening exclamation of grateful praise. “Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man against whom the Lord counts no iniquity.”

Now, first of all, notice here how David characterizes his sin. We’re reflecting back on 2 Samuel 11 now. Keep in mind what he had done: committing adultery with Bathsheba, concocting this scheme to have her husband murdered out on the battlefield to cover up his sin, getting by with it all, it seems. And he designates—he uses three designations here to characterize his sin in verse one: transgression and sin, and then in verse two, iniquity. Now, in other translations, you’ll have that a little bit different, but that’s how we have it here in the ESV: transgressions, sin, and iniquity.

Transgression—that word connotes a defiance, a rebellion. It pictures our sin in relation to God. So picture here a man with his fist raised to God in defiance of what God has commanded. Sin—the general word that’s used at the end of verse one—is a miss, a falling short. I think we should call it a disqualifying offense. It’s our sin in relation to God’s law. God has required we do this; we have fallen far short of it, we’ve missed the mark, and we have failed. It’s a culpable offense, a disqualifying offense. And then, verse two, iniquity. The word iniquity connotes something that’s twisted, something that’s corrupt. It’s also used in the sense of guilt, but it’s our sin as it relates to us—our sin as an inward perversion, a depravity.

So here’s the character of David’s sin and the character of our every sin as well, whether it’s adultery, murder, slander, or greed—you name it. Here’s the character of our sin: it is a rebellion, it’s a disqualifying offense, but the problem is not just external. Our sins have stemmed from an internal twistedness of our souls. The reason you tell that lie, the reason you look at that pornography, the reason that you slander is because there’s something on the inside that’s just twisted and it’s wrong and it’s perverse. So David looks back at his sin and he says, “This was open defiance against God. It was a complete failure for which I am culpable. But lying beneath and behind it all, there’s a twistedness of my heart and a taintedness of my soul that has predisposed me to my sin.”

This is the doctrine of original sin. We will see it even more specifically when David brings it up again in Psalm 51. We have this original bent to sin. It has become one of the marks of our age that we are convinced more and more that we are basically good—that people are basically good. Fascinating thing to me. It’s just one of those fascinating things, marks of our culture, that I could ever imagine. As things get so much worse all of the time, in every measurable way, we are convinced more and more that people are basically good. The scriptures tell us we’re born in sin with this predisposition to sin. This, by the way, is why we speak of and insist on the doctrine of total depravity. And the term does not mean that every person is as bad as he could possibly be. But what it means is that we are as bad off as we could possibly be, because in our souls and in ourselves and the inmost being, what we are is bent towards sin and away from God.

This is what requires the doctrine of regeneration—that God renews our souls and makes us something new and makes us holy. This is the promise of the new covenant: that God will so work in our souls that He will, to use the Old Testament metaphor, take out that stony heart and put in a heart of flesh—a moldable one that will respond to God. And so God does that in salvation, but then even after we are saved in this life, the remains of sin are still there. We still struggle against sin, and one day in glory—this is the doctrine of glorification—all that will be gone. But in this life, we struggle against this bent towards sinning. We sang that this morning: “Take away our love to sinning.” One day that will come. But in this life, even the regenerate struggle with the remains of sin. That’s this iniquity in verse two.

But the nature of David’s sin is not his focus. This is not a lament psalm. This is a psalm of grateful praise. His focus here is what God in grace had done for him despite his sin. Verses one and two again: “Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man against whom the Lord counts no iniquity.” So we have these three words for sin matched by three words or three metaphors for forgiveness. The first one, verse one: forgiven—taken away, borne away. We have something like this in Psalm 103, verse 12: “As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us,” taking them away as though they belong to us no more. The next one, verse one: our sin is covered—hidden from view as though God can’t see it anymore. We have something similar to that in Micah chapter 7, verse 19: “You’ll cast all of our sins into the depths of the sea.” So they’re buried as though they’re hidden from the sight of the omniscient God. So sins are forgiven; sins are covered. God doesn’t see them; He’s blind to them is the idea.

And then verse 2: “Blessed is the man against whom the Lord counts no iniquity.” It’s an accounting term. This is what God does not do: He does not count the sin. He doesn’t charge it against us. He doesn’t hold us accountable for it. The offense is not put on the books. There is an illustration of this in 2 Samuel chapter 19. You remember after the Absalom rebellion, David had to flee Jerusalem. Shimei should have been loyal to David; he wasn’t, and he did some things that were disloyal to David. David is now coming back to the city, and Shimei meets him at the city. This doesn’t look good for Shimei. And Shimei says to him in 2 Samuel 19 and verse 19, “Do not count me guilty.” That’s the word here. “Do not hold me guilty. Don’t count it against me.”

Now David is saying here, “I have sinned in these terrible ways. I’ve defied God. I’ve made offenses that are disqualifying; they stem from a twistedness of my soul, but God has taken it away, He’s covered it, and He just doesn’t count it against me.” David is apparently thinking here in terms of the Day of Atonement in Leviticus chapter 16—a major, major passage in the Bible, the great annual holiday of the people of Israel in their worship calendar. That day was marked by two sin offerings. One was a young bullock that was offered for the high priest. He would lay his hands on the animal, confess his sins, and offer that. And the other sin offering consisted of two goats. One was offered to the Lord; one was the scapegoat. And the high priest then would slaughter both the bullock and the goat that was brought for the Lord. He would take a basin of blood, collect the blood, take it to the most holy place, and sprinkle, first of all, the blood of the bullock on the mercy seat to make atonement for the priest himself, for the high priest. Then he would come back and get the blood of the goat that was for the Lord, and he would take that into the most holy place, sprinkle it on the mercy seat to make atonement for the people of Israel. Then he would come back with another basin of blood. He would mix the blood together, go to the brazen altar, and sprinkle that on the altar to make atonement for the people of Israel.

And then there was this scapegoat, and they would take it out into the wilderness and the sins of the people were confessed over the animal. He’s slapped on the backside and he runs off into the wilderness alone, carrying the sin. Leviticus 16:22: “He will bear on itself all their iniquities into a barren region.” So that’s Israel’s sin being taken away, being removed from them. And in this way, David said, just as Israel’s sin was taken away, so my sins have been taken away. And in this way, they are not counted against me. Instead, my sins are counted to the goat, and he bears them away into the wilderness.

Now, in the Old Testament setting, of course, the Day of Atonement answers the very important question: how can a holy God dwell in the midst of a sinful people? That’s the big question. God has entered into covenant relationship with the people of Israel. He’s promised to be their God. He’s laid stipulations on them. How can He dwell in their midst when they, in fact, are a sinful people? And so this elaborate structure of worship was enacted where these sacrifices are offered to appease God, and that is how, with the sins taken away and God appeased, God could dwell in the midst of a sinful people.

Now, of course, all of that is prospective. The Old Testament sacrificial system simply established the structures through which we can understand the gospel—how we can understand what was required for us to be saved, what is required for God to accept a sinner. And no Christian can read through any of that without his mind running immediately to the gospel. In the Old Testament and the New Testament alike, sin is a capital offense. It’s rebellion against God. God is a righteous God. He cannot just let sin go unanswered. He’s a God of justice, and justice must be served. He can’t just let it go. Of course, the New Testament writers picked this up, particularly and most memorably in Hebrews chapter 10, which makes the point explicitly: no animal is worthy of taking away a human’s sin. No animal could actually take the place of a human in making sacrifice of an animal. God cannot be pleased with that. It’s just not enough.

All of it is prospective, and of course, it points to Jesus. It’s the whole reason for the incarnation of Christ—that He would come and be the sinner’s substitute. All of our sin was confessed over Him, and He goes to the cross bearing the sin of His people. As representative of His people, He carries away all their sins, and in that way, our sin is not counted to us because it was counted instead to Christ. Paul picks this up in Romans chapters three and four, and he deals with it explicitly. In fact, in Romans chapter four, verses four and following, Paul cites David’s words in Psalm 32, verses one and two. And he expounds at some length there that our confidence before God does not lie in anything about us. It lies in what Christ has done in our behalf. It’s not in some pretentious hope that we have somehow done enough, or imagining that God would lower the bar or not require all that His justice requires Him to require. Our hope is that Christ has stood in our place and taken our sin, and He was counted as a sinner in our place.

And all of that, then, is what is entailed in verses one and two. And so as we read verses one and two, they ought to be read really with exclamation points behind them. “Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven!” Exclamation point. “Whose sin is covered!” Exclamation point. Can you believe it? “Blessed is the man to whom the Lord does not count sin!” Can you believe it? Imagine it: adultery, murder—not counted by a holy and just God.

Now, the last part of verse two introduces a marvelous irony. It’s an irony that carries us through verse five. “Blessed is the man against whom the Lord counts no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit.” No deceit or no guile points us back to the previous year of David. Deceiving is exactly what David had done over the last year—deceiving himself: “Everything’s all right. I’ve covered it.” Deceiving everyone else: “He’s the good, godly king you thought he was.” And as if he could, deceiving God. All the while pretending that he was okay, going through the motions of worship. And now suddenly, verse three speaks of all of this—when he kept silent with regard to his sin. Now there’s no holding back. During that time, he kept silent with regard to his sin, but now it’s all out in the open. He’s confessed it frankly before God, and in fact, even publicly, writing these Psalms for the people of God to sing with him.

So when David says, “I confessed my sin, I owned up to it entirely,” it was when he opened up entirely, when he owned up to it—it was then that he found the sin was not counted against him. And that’s our testimony exactly. “I confessed my sin frankly, and what I found was when I confessed my sin frankly, God took it away and He did not count it against me.” The Lord Jesus has stepped in our place and He’s put our sin on His account and He has answered for it. And so now you and I—this is the oddest thing to the world—we frankly acknowledge ourselves, this is the irony of it, we frankly acknowledge ourselves to be miserable sinners, and at the same time we rejoice in the knowledge of full acceptance. Isn’t that amazing? Our whole testimony is that this had nothing to do with me at all. All I did was sin and Jesus did the rest. My sin was counted to Him; His righteousness was counted to me. And I’m accepted before God, and all I contributed to the transaction was the sin.

And so verses one and two: it’s the repentant sinner, not just the sinner, it is the repentant sinner who is blessed. It is the sinner who acknowledges his sin. We have something of this in 1 John chapter one, verse nine: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” Well, David had spent that previous year hiding his sin. Verses three to five, he reflects on that previous year and he said it was just agonizing. Verse 2: “Blessed is the man in whose spirit there is no deceit.” That is, he’s come clean now with his sin. He’s acknowledged it. That’s the fundamental requirement of forgiveness.

Now verses 3 and 4: “When I kept silence,” that is, when I refused to confess my sin, “when I kept silence, my bones wasted away through my groaning all the day long. For day and night, your hand was heavy upon me. My strength was dried up by the heat of summer.” So there was this extended period of time when David was not honest before God with regard to his sin. He kept silent. And in verses 3 and 4, he said it was agonizing. “When I kept silent, my bones were wasting away.” It was like being parched in the summer’s heat—this inward turmoil of unconfessed sin. He refused to come clean before God. He felt the disapproval of God. He was objectively guilty before God, and subjectively he felt it as well. Day and night, he says, “God’s hand was heavy on me.” When a Christian holds back from God about his sin, he knows it. You’ve been there. You try to salvage your pride, you try to hold back, and not until you bow before the Lord God in humble confession of sin do you find the release that David speaks of here.

So for an entire year, then, after his sin, David had kept it covered. Well, then, of course, God sends the prophet Nathan to him in 2 Samuel chapter 12. He tells him that parable about the rich man and the poor man—the rich man taking the poor man’s sheep—confronting David with the point of the parable: “You’re the man.” And then we find David’s response, and he summarizes it for us here in verse five: “I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover my iniquity. I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord.'” Notice here, again, three expressions to describe his confession: “I acknowledged my sin,” verse five; “I did not cover my iniquity”; “I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord.'”

“I acknowledged my sin.” I owned up to it. No holding back. “I did not cover my iniquity.” No more saving face. No more pretending that everything is all right. “I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord.'” That is, he named them for what they were. I think what’s most significant here in verse five is that he tells us, “I did not cover my iniquity.” But do you remember that word in verse one? “Blessed is the man whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.” That is, when I finally uncovered my sin, I found that God would cover it. Augustine summarized this well: “He only has sins covered who does not cover them himself.” David says, “I finally confessed my sin—no more deceit, no more guile, no more excuses, no more pleading of circumstances, no more ‘Well, you don’t understand what I’ve been through,’ and no more of ‘Well, I never knew that,’ and ‘You didn’t know what he did to me.'” No more excuses. When finally I confessed my sin, I uncovered it before the Lord. Finally, I acknowledged my sin and, amazingly, He took it away.

You’ve heard me say it before, Martyn Lloyd-Jones was asked for a definition of a Christian. He famously remarked, “A Christian is one who’s been broken.” There’s a lot more to being a Christian than that, but he makes a really good point. A Christian is one who has come honest before God with regard to his sin. There’s no holding back. God won’t have you clinging to some imagined self-righteousness. We saw in Sunday school this morning we come helpless, acknowledging our sin, and we come broken before God for it. No excuses, no pleading of special circumstances. In the words of one of the Puritans, not until we take sides with God against ourselves do we find that sins can be released and not counted. And that brings us to the last line of verse 5, which is exactly the center line of the entire psalm: “And you forgave the iniquity of my sin.” That’s the message of Psalm 32. It is a psalm of grateful praise that God forgives repentant sinners.

The Prayer Of The Forgiven King

So David begins with his exclamation of praise. He reflects on the time when his sin was being covered. He reflects on how he acknowledged his sin, uncovered it himself, found that God would cover it for him and not count it against him. And now, verses 6 and 7, we have the prayer of the forgiven king. And here he addresses God in prayer, but the prayer is for God’s people.

Verse 6: There’s some question here—who actually is speaking? Is it God or David? It seems to me it is David who’s speaking. “Therefore, let everyone who is godly offer prayer to you at a time when you may be found. Surely in the rush of great waters, they shall not reach him. You are a hiding place for me.” And this is just a startling irony that is explainable only, finally, only in the gospel itself. Verse seven: the God from whom David was running, the God whose disapproval David had felt for the last year, the God who was David’s judge—in verse seven, he finds His hiding place. Isn’t that a marvelous irony? It is a message that rings through the entire Bible: that God will either be your refuge or He will be your judge. There’s one or the other. Confessing our sins before God, we find that God, our judge, will be our refuge. It’s a marvelous irony of the gospel, but in that great day, if we have covered our sins, God will uncover those sins in judgment. If we hide our sins, He’ll uncover them in judgment. If we uncover our sins today, then we will find that God will, in fact, cover them for us through Christ.

We get to verse seven at the end of the verse. David apparently sees himself as one of a throng of people who have found God as a refuge. “You are a hiding place for me. You preserve me from trouble. You surround me with shouts of deliverance.” That’s us. Shouts of deliverance. It’s precisely the note that marks our corporate meetings. That is what marked our meeting this morning. The Lord is our salvation—forgiven, redeemed. It’s exactly the note that marks our meetings. More on that as we come to verse 11.

The Instruction Of The Forgiven King

First of all, verses 8 to 10, we have now the instruction of the forgiven king. He wants to tell others what he has learned about God and about sin and about how God deals with sin. Verses 8 and 9: “I will instruct you and teach you in the way that you should go. I will counsel you with my eye. Be not like the horse or mule without understanding, which must be curbed with bit and bridle, or it will not stay near you.” That is, when you have sinned, don’t be like I was—like a stupid, stubborn mule who won’t be taught. Learn to bow before the Lord and repent of your sin humbly before God. There’s no reason to hide, there’s no need to hide, because what you will find is, verse 10: “Many are the sorrows of the wicked, but the steadfast love surrounds the one who trusts in the Lord.” God forgives repentant sinners.

And then we come to the climax of it in verse 11. Characteristically, the psalm of praise ends with a call to praise. He calls others to praise. “Be glad in the Lord and rejoice, O righteous, and shout for joy, all you upright in heart.” When you learn that God, who is your righteous judge, has made a righteous way for you to escape judgment—that God, who is your judge, has found a righteous way to accept you—what’s the appropriate response? You learn your transgressions have been forgiven, your sins covered, your iniquity not counted. What’s the appropriate response? Well, David says, “What I want to do is gather together with a whole bunch of forgiven sinners and shout.” Verse 11: “Be glad in the Lord and rejoice, O righteous; shout for joy, you upright in heart.”

So he draws us to imagine here not beautiful choirs, not vaulting choirs—I love beautiful choirs, but he’s not drawing us to imagine that here. What he’s drawing us to see is the Israelite throngs at the sanctuary, shouting at the tops of their voices, parading around with dancing, cheers of praise, rejoicing with an overwhelming sense that “God has not counted my sin.” David’s reflecting on the forgiveness that God has given. It’s like he’s stunned with it. Can this be true? Who’d have imagined? Who’d have imagined that this God against whom I have sinned has become my hiding place? Am I dreaming? Is this real?

You know, it’s no wonder people of God love to sing when we come together. We’ve got something to sing about. Seems too good to be true. The God of heaven against whom we’ve sinned has taken away sin, not counted it. Instead, He’s counted it to His Son and given us His righteousness. Who could have imagined such a thing? “How blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man to whom the Lord does not count iniquity.”

Maybe some of you have not experienced it yet, but there is no joy on earth like that of appeased guilt. There’s nothing to be compared to it. You recognize your sin. You know you’ve sinned. You feel it. You try to hide. You try to cover it. Put off that conscience. You struggle against it. God awakens your heart to it. And then you hear the good news. And you hear that God has given a real answer to sin, that you don’t have to pretend, that there’s a Savior who has come and made real answers to sin. And He stood in our place and He’s had our sin counted His and His righteousness counted ours. And it is the irony of gospel-informed worship that on the one hand, as I said earlier, we confess ourselves to be miserable sinners, and on the other hand, we’re marked by an exulting joy that the world knows nothing about. There’s no joy like that of appeased guilt—not pretended away, not guilt imagined to have gone away, but appeased guilt, guilt answered.

This is the failure of liberal Christianity and of all other religions. They can’t answer the real problem of sin. This is the heart of the Christian faith. Without a divine Savior, without a substitutionary atonement, there’s no real answer to sin and we’re left pretending with happy platitudes about God’s love and happy platitudes about our goodness and “we’re not that bad” and happy platitudes about sin that isn’t that serious. The gospel makes no attempt to hide or to downplay the hard questions, and in fact, the gospel forces us to see these questions and to face them square on. Your sin is infinitely serious. God is infinitely wrathful against sin. It’s just the truth. Then the Lord Jesus comes and He’s answered to God for our sins. And no longer do we have to pretend and hope that somehow we’ve done well enough, but He has willingly stepped in our place, answered to God for our sins. He has gone to the Father and said, “Just count their sins mine and give them my righteousness.” And He offers Himself in sacrifice to God for sin on our behalf. And we learn of it and it’s like we’re just spectators in the whole thing and we consider it and we either, verse 11, shout for joy or, if we’re too refined for that, we hold it in, in which case we’re just reduced to tears of joy.

This is the liberating joy we have in Jesus Christ. All the hard questions are answered. They’re not ignored. And on that first day, we went to Jesus. We went to God owning our sins, confessing our sins frankly. And what’d we find? We found our sins forgiven. Owning our sins and finding them removed. We didn’t go pretending. We didn’t go imagining that God would lower the bar. We didn’t go hoping that God would somehow think that we’ve tried hard enough. We went confessing our sins frankly before God and we found that He removed them in Christ. And every day since, we go to God owning our sins, confessing our unworthiness, and yet we go boldly in the name of Jesus who has answered for every one of them. And every day we say the same. Every Sunday we come together and we sing it: “Lord, I have nothing. Just Jesus. That’s all I have.” And we also remind Him in song, by the way, that You promised that You’d have us if we come through Him. And every day, though we, like David, must confess our sins, acknowledge them, uncover them before God—like David, every day we rejoice. “Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man to whom the Lord does not count iniquity.” Amen.

Let’s pray. Our Father, what glorious truths you’ve revealed to us in Christ. We thank you for him. Lord, encourage the hearts of your people today in Christ. If there are those here who do not know yet this joy that we’re talking about, that David expresses, O Lord, open their hearts, draw them to Christ, that they may rejoice with us in the greatness and the treasures we have in him. In his name we pray, amen.