We're in a series called Summer Psalms.
Psalm 32.
Please open your Bibles.
And if you don't have a Bible, please
bring one next time, because we're going to
look at this in detail.
And what we want to find out from
Psalm 32 is how not to be a
mule.
Which didn't turn up in that nice translation,
because it's too corny, I'm sure, but it's
in here anyway.
And let's read it, and you watch and
see if you can detect how not to
be a mule.
How blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven,
whose sin is covered.
How blessed is the man to whom the
Lord does not impute iniquity, and in whose
spirit there is no deceit.
When I kept silent about my sin, my
body wasted away through my groaning all day
long.
For day and night thy hand was heavy
upon me, and my vitality was drained away
as with the fever heat of summer.
I acknowledged my sin to thee, and my
iniquity I did not hide.
I said, I will confess my transgression to
the Lord, and thou didst forgive the guilt
of my sin.
Therefore, let everyone who is godly pray to
thee in a time when thou mayest be
found.
Surely in a flood of great waters they
shall not reach him.
Thou art my hiding place.
Thou dost preserve me from trouble.
Thou dost surround me with songs of deliverance.
I will instruct you and teach you in
the way which you should go.
I will counsel you with my eye upon
you.
Do not be as the horse or as
the mule, which have no understanding, whose trappings
include bit and bridle to hold them in
check, otherwise they will not come near you.
Many are the sorrows of the wicked, but
he who trusts in the Lord, loving kindness
shall surround him.
Be glad in the Lord and rejoice, you
righteous ones, and shout for joy all you
who are upright in heart.
Now last Sunday we looked at Psalm 127
and only took two verses, but tonight what
I'd like to do is take the whole
psalm and try to understand the argument as
a whole, and not miss anything, at least
in a summary fashion, and then at the
end focus in on what I think moved
David primarily to write this psalm.
The first five verses, you notice, form a
very distinct unit.
They have to do with one thing, namely
being forgiven and confessing our sin.
And I think the main point in verses
one to five comes in verses one and
two, and the main point would simply be
the person who's forgiven is in a very,
very happy condition.
Then in verses three through five, we're told
how David moves into that condition of happiness.
First, negatively, what not to do in verses
three and four, and then positively what to
do in verse five.
Negatively, don't conceal the fact that you're a
sinner.
Don't hide your transgression from the Lord and
try to deceive Him.
Positively, in verse five, acknowledge your sin and
confess it to the Lord.
So the main point of verses one to
five evidently is you'll be in a very
happy, blessed condition if you don't conceal your
sin, but rather confess it to the Lord.
Then verse six, the first half of verse
six, is an inference that David draws from
this good news that he's learned about from
his own experience in verses one to five.
And the inference is simply this.
Therefore, or if this is so, let everyone
who is godly pray to you, Lord, in
a time when you may be found.
If such blessedness can be had through confessing
our sins in prayer, then for goodness sakes,
let's all pray.
That's what six A draws as an inference.
Then in verse six B, that's the second
half of verse six, surely in a flood
of great waters and verse seven, there seems
to be a shift of focus or concern
away from forgiveness and confession to the protection
God gives His people.
Surely in a flood of great waters they
shall not reach Him that is the godly.
You are my hiding place.
You preserve me from trouble.
You surround me with songs of deliverance.
It looks as if he's changed focus a
little bit away from his concern with his
sin and its forgiveness over to God's protection.
But I think the shift is probably not
as great in David's mind as it looks
at first.
Probably what David intends for us to understand
is this.
When he says blessed is the man whose
sin is forgiven in verses one and two,
probably in his mind, part of that blessing
is not merely the tremendous joy of having
a clean conscience and knowing that God is
for you, but also the blessings that flow
to the person who's forgiven, including things like
protection described in verse six and verse seven.
In other words, the blessing that comes to
the man who prays and confesses his sin
is both negative.
God will not impute iniquity to him and
positive.
God will protect him.
It's not just what God won't do impute
iniquity to him.
It's what God will do, namely protect him.
God is not merely not against him.
He is very, very much for him.
So I think the second half of verses
six and seven function as an added incentive
to the first half of verse six.
Namely, let everyone who is godly pray to
thee in a time when thou may be
found, because if forgiveness and protection flow from
the prayer of confession, then surely we ought
all to be about the business of praying
at a time when God may be found.
Now we come to verse eight in our
survey.
God takes the pen, as it were, in
verse eight.
You find that again and again in the
Psalms.
All of a sudden you're reading along and
David is talking and boom, God is talking,
which is something you might expect in a
psalm, which is being guided by God's own
inspiring will.
Well, as it were, God takes the pen
here and says, I will instruct you and
teach you in the way which you should
go.
I will counsel you with my eye upon
you.
And here there's been another shift.
No longer is he talking merely about the
protection that God gives, but now about the
direction God gives.
Not just what God guards us from, but
what he leads us to.
And so this is a third blessing that
comes from those or to those who pray
when God may be found.
Forgiveness for our sin, protection for our lives
and direction for our lives.
It just wouldn't be a complete blessing, would
it, if all God did was guard us
from dangers?
Because then we just stand there, wouldn't know
where to turn, wouldn't know what to do
or where to go.
So in order for the blessing to be
complete, God not only has to keep us
shielded from harm, but also lead us in
the direction that we should go.
Protection with direction, care with counsel is the
complete blessing that we look for.
So the main point in verses one through
eight, I think, is still verse six, the
first half.
Therefore, everyone who is godly, pray, let him
pray to thee in a time when thou
mayest be found.
And all of the rest is incentive, the
incentive of forgiveness, protection and direction.
Now, up to this point in the psalm,
verse six, the first half is the only
imperative we've seen, it's the only command that
we've run into.
But now in verse nine, we encounter our
second command or our second imperative.
And it's my understanding of David's intention here
that verse nine is the counterpart of the
first half of verse six.
That is, verse nine is really saying the
same thing as the first half of verse
six, only it's saying it in a negative
way.
And verse six, A, said it in a
positive way.
Do not be like the horse or the
mule which have no understanding, whose trappings include
bit and bridle to hold them in check.
Otherwise, they will not come near you.
Don't be that way.
Instead, I think, instead, come to God freely
in prayer.
Don't have to be drugged with bit and
bridle.
Now, maybe we should try to picture God's
people as a farmyard.
OK?
We're all animals in the farmyard.
I don't think this metaphor is in the
Bible anywhere, but we'll imagine all of us
are animals in God's animal farm.
Now, there's one beast in this animal farm
that gives God an awful time, and it's
the mule.
He is stupid and he is stubborn, and
you cannot tell which is the cause of
the other.
Sometimes it seems like his stupidity is making
him stubborn, and sometimes it looks the other
way around.
Now, what God likes to do is to
protect these animals and guide them.
You've got this barn where they can all
have shelter and where they can take refuge.
And the way he likes to get them
into the barn is by giving them all
a name.
And then calling them by name so that
they freely come and walk into the barn
when he calls them by name.
The mule will not respond to that kind
of enticement.
He is without understanding, according to verse 9.
So, God gets in his pickup truck, drives
out in the field with the bit and
bridle, gets out, and puts the bit in
his mouth and the bridle over his head
and ties it around the back of the
truck, and pulls him, stiff-legged, heel dug
in, into the barn to keep him safe.
Poor dumb beast.
Now, that's not the way God wants to
get his animals into the barn.
And that mule better watch out, because one
of these days it's going to be too
late.
He's going to get clobbered with hail and
struck by lightning, and when he comes running,
the barn door is going to be closed,
like the parable says.
Therefore, don't be like the mule.
But instead, let everyone come to God in
prayer freely and often at a time when
he may be found.
So, the way not to be a mule,
it seems to me, is to humble ourselves,
unlike the mule, come to God in prayer,
confess the fact that we, in fact, are
sinners, and accept, like needy little chicks instead
of mules, the direction of God in his
protection in his barn.
Now, the main reason that I think verse
9 is really the negative counterpart to the
first half of verse 6 is that I
see in verses 3 and 4 a description
of David the mule, before the bit and
the bridle had done their work.
See if you agree.
David sinned.
When I kept silent, that is about my
sin, my body wasted away through my groaning
all day long.
Now, there he is out in the field,
in the middle of the field, stubborn, stiff
-legged, heels drug in.
I am not going to go into that
barn where all those crummy little critters are,
those little chicks running around under my feet
singing songs of deliverance as if there's some
great benefit to be in somebody else's barn.
No way.
I can handle my own behavior.
I can take the consequences.
I am not going to bow my kneel
and acknowledge I've sinned.
And if I've sinned, I'll take whatever's coming.
That's David the mule.
So, here comes God in his pickup truck.
Verse 4, day and night, thy hand was
heavy upon me.
My moisture was turned into the drought of
summer.
When David acted like a mule, God put
the bridle of suffering on him and drug
him into the barn, because he loved him.
A guilty conscience is a gift of God
to an unrepentant person.
And not just a guilty conscience, but all
those horrible agonies that go with it, and
you've experienced those.
If we have a guilty conscience and do
not get it right with God, it's not
just our conscience that hurts, our whole body
bears the brunt of that kind of mule
-like behavior.
The main point, therefore, of verses 1 to
9, I think, is, let everyone who is
godly come to God in prayer in a
time when he may be found.
Because the contrite heart, which prays and is
not mule-like, experiences God's forgiveness, gets God's
protection, and receives God's direction or counsel for
life.
That's the whole argument of the psalm, except
for verses 10 and 11.
Maybe they deserve a brief comment.
Verse 10 is simply a restatement, it seems
to me, of verse 7.
You can even see the word surround.
I put a big circle around the word
surround with songs of deliverance in verse 7,
and surround with loving kindness in verse 10.
In other words, here again is the promise
of protection.
Many of the sorrows of the wicked, but
those who trust in the Lord, are surrounded
by the love of God.
Verse 11 is a little different.
Be glad in the Lord and rejoice, you
righteous ones, and shout for joy, all you
upright in heart.
I think that is the climax of the
whole psalm.
That's the result, but maybe we should say
this.
That's the third imperative.
That's the third command that we've seen in
the psalm.
The first one was 6a, pray.
The next one was verse 9, don't be
like a mule.
And the last one is be glad or
shout for joy.
I think that verse 11, this command, relates
to the command in verse 6 both as
cause and effect.
It seems like this, this is the way
it works in my experience anyway.
When we come to God in prayer, and
experience the benefits of a clean conscience, and
guidance for life, and protection, it makes us
glad in the Lord.
So prayer becomes the cause of the effect
of gladness.
But doesn't it work just the other way?
When we are delighting in God and experiencing
Him in joy, aren't we drawn often to
approach Him, and to talk to Him, and
to pray to Him?
And so joy becomes a cause to the
effect of prayer.
And the image I get is of a
spiral that's moving into heaven.
Joy causes me to pray more.
Prayer leads me into the benefits of God,
which cause me to rejoice in Him more.
And it's like a spiral that leads us
ever more deeply into an experience of God's
fellowship, of forgiveness, and protection, and counsel, and
gladness.
That's the whole argument of Psalm 32 as
far as I can tell.
Verse 6, it seems to me, is the
main point.
And all the rest is incentive to get
us to pray, so that we can experience
the cleansing and forgiveness of verses 1 to
5, the protection of 6b to 7, the
counsel of verse 8, and the joy of
verse 11.
Now, evidently though, the main thing that moved
David to write this psalm was his experience
of finding forgiveness, through becoming un-mule-like
after God had bridled him and taught him
a lesson, and confessing his sins.
So I want to focus there for a
few minutes here at the end.
And three questions came to my mind as
I meditated on verses 1 to 5, and
they were these.
One, what is the prerequisite of experiencing the
forgiveness described in verses 1 and 2?
Second, why is it that this prerequisite is
necessary?
And third, what's so blessed about having our
transgressions forgiven?
First, the prerequisite.
The answer is very clear from verse 2
and verse 5, when you put them together.
The prerequisite is, from verse 5, you have
to acknowledge and confess your sin.
But I want to add something to that
from the last line of verse 2.
You have to have a spirit in which
there is no deceit.
So I put it like this.
It's confession or acknowledgement of our sin to
the Lord from a spirit free of deceit.
Now, when you put those two together, a
very precise definition of confession emerges.
And it's a little different, perhaps, than you
might expect just reading verse 5 by itself.
Confession to God, I think, is not merely
admitting our sin, but rather rejecting our sin
as repulsive.
Admitting our sin as real and rejecting our
sin as repulsive.
There's deceit in the spirit of the person
who admits with his mind that he has
sinned, but feels no revulsion for that sin
in his heart.
Sins like a bad temper, an irritability, hypercritical
attitude, gossiping, a lukewarm love for Jesus, dishonesty
on tax forms, failure to discipline your children
like you should, etc., etc.
The reason it's deceit to come to God
saying, yes, I've sinned, I've sinned, with your
mind, and feeling no revulsion in your heart
is because sin is repulsive in the eyes
of God.
And if you claim to be confessing sin
before God and feel no revulsion in your
heart, you're not really confessing sin for what
sin is.
So the prerequisite is not merely saying, yes,
God, we're all sinners, I've sinned, take it
off my back.
It is really hating your sinning and being
eager to reject it as repulsive.
Second, why is it that God requires that
as a prerequisite for forgiveness?
Why can't God, in his infinite grace, just
wipe everybody's slate clean?
Why does there have to be, in every
individual case, the prerequisite of confession?
That's what I pondered longest on Saturday, and
here's what I came up with.
Every sin is an insult to God.
It's a slap in God's face.
We have to understand that if we're going
to understand the dynamics of forgiveness and confession.
When two people offer you advice, and they
are opposite pieces of advice, mutually exclusive, and
they stake their character on the value of
their advice, and you choose one and reject
the other, you defame the character of the
other person.
It's inevitable.
You may not want to, but you do
it.
He staked his character on that advice, and
you've rejected it and said, he's not worthy
to be trusted as a counselor.
And that's what we do to God every
time we sin all day long.
It's an insult.
It's a slap in his face.
And that's what we have to see.
Now, forgiveness is always, in every setting, a
desire on the part of somebody to make
a relationship good that's been wrecked by somebody's
insult like that.
God's aim is to bring into being a
people who are in harmony with him, in
fellowship with him, in tune with him, in
union with him.
And we're always rupturing that relationship with our
slaps in his face as if his counsel
is not worth anything when we reject it
and sin.
Now, God is willing to forgive.
I mean, we'd be hopelessly lost if God
were not willing to forgive.
But this is the question that then came
to me.
Can there be fellowship between two parties when
one of those parties is perpetually bent on
insulting the other?
I don't think there can be.
Couldn't God just wipe the slate clean, even
though perpetually we went on and on and
on into eternity slapping his face?
Well, he might be able to, conceivably.
But for what end?
His whole goal would be shot.
There'd be no fellowship, no union, no harmony.
He wouldn't be glorified in our behavior, and
we wouldn't have the happiness of union with
him.
The only way that God can reach the
goal of glorifying his name and bringing us
into a joyful union with him is not
only to overlook our sins, but to change
sinners.
That's what God was doing with David then,
and that's what he's doing through Christ with
us who believe.
And I think that's why there has to
be a prerequisite for wiping the slate clean.
We have to turn from our sin with
repugnance because God is in the business not
merely of covering our sins, but of shaping
our characters.
God is not just interested in ignoring sin.
He's interested in getting rid of it once
and for all.
So the person who's going to be forgiven
is the person who hates his own sinning
and is on the way to becoming like
Christ.
And if that weren't God's way of dealing
with sin and providing forgiveness, there'd be no
hope of holiness in heaven, no hope of
a company of just men made perfect, no
hope of a glory of God unsullied by
the insults of men.
God must do it the way he's done
it, or there's no hope for man, and
his purposes have collapsed.
And now my final question is this.
What's so blessed about having our transgressions forgiven?
Almost a blasphemous question.
And yet a needed question in our day,
really needed, because there are people who say
they are forgiven with a very ho-hum
attitude, with very little sweetness of gratitude felt
in their heart.
Oh, how we need to cherish our forgiveness
more.
I'm convinced that until we fear sin and
its consequences more keenly, we will not prize
our pardon very intensely.
The degree to which we feel a sweet
gratitude for forgiveness is directly proportionate to the
degree that we feel dread at the alternative
of being forgiven.
And if you don't feel dread from time
to time at the prospect of not being
forgiven before a holy God, it's only to
be assumed that you won't feel very excited
or happy or sweetly grateful about being forgiven,
isn't it?
The horror of sin and the fearfulness of
hell are the only backdrop against which forgiveness
will shine with the infinite beauty that it
really has.
I thought of this image that helped me.
If you're on a little raft of sin
and you don't see the ten-story tidal
wave of the wrath of God bearing down
on you, then when the helicopter lifts you
out and pulls you in and scrapes your
shin, you won't kiss his feet.
You'll grumble that things weren't just the way
you'd like.
You've got to see the tidal wave coming
or you won't kiss the feet of the
pilot.
And I want us to cherish our forgiveness.
I want us to kiss the feet of
Jesus unashamedly.
I want big, strong, burly men who make
lots of money every year and who rule
lots of people in their firms to be
willing to get on their knees in tears
and kiss the feet of Jesus because they
were in such a dire plight.
The only reason to preach about sin is
to make us love forgiveness.
That's the only reason.
And we've been sold a bill of goods
in our day, people telling us we've been
talking about sin too much.
I haven't heard a message on sin in
a long time.
I haven't heard a message on hell in
ten years.
No wonder I'm not very afraid of it.
And no wonder I don't cherish my redemption
from it.
Here's the way to bring yourself to love
the forgiveness of God more.
Try this.
Sometime when you've got some leisure, compare.
This is an act of self-reflection and
self-examination.
Compare the affections, the emotions of your heart
towards all sorts of things in the we.
People, food, circumstance, and how high the affections
rise and how low they plummet.
Compare those affections with the affections you feel
when you reflect on the fact that you
are forgiven by God an infinite death and
rescued from hell and given an infinitely glorious
future.
And if your emotions are not as intense
on the latter point, repent.
And don't be like the mule.
Don't be like the mule, but repent and
run headlong to God in prayer, like verse
six says and like David did.
Because the contrite heart which prays will find
forgiveness and it will be sweet.
He will find protection from what God does
not want him to experience.
And he will find precious counsel for how
to get on in the day's activities.
And he will find himself being glad in
the Lord.