We have given as a title to our
message this evening the words Through Blessedness for
Testing Times that we are passing through trying
and testing times, I think is self-evident
to all of us and one needs nothing
whatsoever to elucidate that fact.
It is part of a wonder of the
message of the Gospel that it is possible
by the grace of God, in the very
midst of the most trying and exacting circumstances
of life and of death, to know blessedness,
true blessedness, lasting bliss and it is to
this I want to turn tonight.
I have been captivated over these recent days
with the very remarkable words of the psalm
we read earlier, Psalm 32 and I would
like to read again as the basis of
our message tonight the first two verses of
this very wonderful psalm.
You remember that this is the second psalm
that begins with the word blessed and both
psalms, this and the first of the psalms
remind us of the words of our Lord
in the Beatitudes in the New Testament.
The Bible has so much to say about
the blessed life.
Well now, verses 1 and 2 in Psalm
32 Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven,
whose sin is covered.
Blessed is the man unto whom the Lord
imputeth not iniquity, and in whose spirit there
is no guide.
Surely, the sweetest word of all sweet words
in the Christian vocabulary is this word forgiveness.
And I have no doubt whatsoever, as we
make mention of it all of us will
be thinking of certain aspects at any rate
of what forgiveness is.
The word is in and of itself most
eloquent.
We would all know, I suppose, what it
means.
The remarkable thing in this context is this.
The psalmist has a feeling that you can't
really describe what forgiveness means by merely using
one word.
Whichever word you use, no one word is
capable of plumbing the depths and expounding the
hidden glories of this wondrous gift of God
to sinful men.
And so he heaps word upon word, thought
upon thought.
And in these first two verses, for example,
he brings at least three words together in
order to describe the one and the same
experience of the blessedness which lies at the
heart of this experience that we speak of
as forgiveness.
The only other thing I want to say
by way of introduction is this.
No man can speak or write about forgiveness
if he himself is not forgiven.
And so the person who is here expounding
the theme of forgiveness is essentially a forgiven
man.
If you want to know what forgiveness is,
you don't go to the professor in his
professorial chair unless, of course, he is a
forgiven professor.
If you want to know what forgiveness is,
you don't go to the scientist in his
laboratory unless, of course, he is a forgiven
sinner.
Neither, for that matter, do you go to
the minister who occupies a pulpit unless he
too is a forgiven sinner.
It is only the man who has tasted
and has seen for himself the greatness and
the grace of God in his pardoning mercy.
It is only the man that has drunk
of the well that can really talk about
this.
And so we turn to a man tonight
who is much forgiven.
He's forgiven much, and he loves much, and
he sings so much.
And it's all because he has tasted of
the sweetness of this thing that bears the
name forgiveness.
Now I want to look at this passage
tonight, looking perhaps at three things in order.
First of all, we must consider the blight
of sin that makes forgiveness necessary.
Secondly, at the bliss that pardon brings.
And then we shall consider how the boon
is bestowed, and who does it, and how
can we receive it.
Now, first of all, we look at the
blight of sin that makes forgiveness a necessity.
The psalmist describes this hideous thing called sin.
He describes it in these first two verses
from three points of view.
You see, pardon is a necessity.
But what makes pardon a necessity is the
fact, the universal fact of human sin.
And so in order to portray human sin,
the psalmist, as it were, takes his camera
and he looks at the hideous thing from
three different angles.
It's the same thing, it's the same phenomenon,
it's the same reality that he's describing, but
he wants us to see it from at
least three different angles.
I don't know how you feel when you
do a thing like this, but I tell
you, for my part it's most humbling.
Because you see, I see here, not a
reflection of you, but a reflection of myself.
For this is a mirror that shows up
the sin of every human heart.
For whatever this man has to say about
sin here, I believe that the Holy Spirit
will tell you as he tells me, something
of this is found in us, all of
us, by nature.
Now let's look at it.
First of all, says the psalmist, sin in
its relation to God, sin is called transgression.
Blessed, so he begins, blessed is he whose
transgression is forgiven.
Now, what does he mean?
The word that is here used in English,
this word transgression, has in the Hebrew tongue
the concept of a breakaway.
If you want a picture, you can imagine
a regiment of soldiers marching down the street
outside and a soldier breaks out of rank
and he runs away somewhere.
Now that's the notion that we have in
this word, transgression.
It's somebody breaking rank, tearing himself loose from
a bondage that is legitimate.
And so he is doing the illegitimate thing.
It's a man in revolt.
It's a man who raises up a standard
of revolt and says, I will not go
the way I ought, I'll go my own
way.
And this of course is what sin is
in the first place.
It is the setting up of a standard
of revolt against God.
It is a man saying, I'll go my
own way, I'll think my own thoughts, I'll
decide for myself what's right and what's wrong,
and I'll simply go my own sweet way.
You see, that's sin.
Man was not made to go his own
way, neither is he sustained from day to
day and year to year to go his
own way.
Man was made and man is sustained to
go God's way.
And when any man says, I go my
own way, he is a sinner.
And apart from the forgiveness of God, he's
a lost sinner, for he's out of God's
way.
That's what Isaiah meant when he said in
that very remarkable chapter 53, all we like
sheep have gone astray.
We've turned every man to his own way,
his own way of thinking, his own way
of living.
We have our own standards, we decide what
we are going to do.
Men and women in Knox Church, Toronto, that
is sin of the deepest dye.
And whatever form it takes, it is the
raising of a standard of rebellion against Almighty
God, and that makes it the cardinal iniquity
it is.
That's the blight of sin photographed, as it
were, from one particular angle.
Now come with me to the next.
Viewed from the vantage point of the true
end of life, that same deadly thing is
now called sin.
This is the name we usually use, this
is the word we normally employ.
Sin.
Did you notice what he says?
Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose
sin is covered.
Now, this word really conveys an entirely different
thought.
Related, of course, it's describing the same basic
thing, the same basic phenomenon, but it describes
it really as a blunder.
I am told, on the very highest authority,
that the basic notion behind the Hebrew word
here is that of a blunder.
A vital, a terrifying mistake.
The biggest blunder of your life.
Now, folk normally describe this blunder in terms
of missing the mark.
And, of course, they do so rightly, because
this is the picture.
You have a target, and you're aiming an
arrow, or you're going to shoot.
And you're aiming at the bull's eye, and
you miss it.
And that's precisely what this word sin means.
What God meant us to do, we either
come short, or we manage to miss it
somehow or other.
But we do not hit the bull's eye.
We do not hit the target.
We miss it.
We make a blunder, and we come short
of the glory of God.
I remember on one occasion making a pastoral
call to a home.
I think they had some boys in from
the neighborhood playing with their two boys in
the garage which was on the side.
Do you say garage in Canada now?
Wait a minute.
Well, you know what I mean.
And here they'd been playing, and when I
arrived on the scene, they'd been playing a
game of darts.
I'm sure you play darts here.
And I had a word with the boys
as I was going into the house.
And I noticed they were taking the dart
board down from the inside of the garage
door.
And to my great consternation, I could see
a ring of marks all around the place
where the board had been.
And I thought to myself, well, does your
father know what's going on here?
But you see, it illustrates exactly the meaning
of this word.
Every miss left a mark.
David, Israel's king, looked back over his life.
And he saw the marks he had left
behind him.
Bathsheba, he saw her stained and marked.
Uriah, her husband, murdered and slaughtered.
Children in his own house.
He saw the stains and the marks and
the consequences of his own sin upon them.
You see, this is what sin does.
It leaves a mark.
David speaks then of transgression, and he speaks
of sin.
And thirdly, photographed from the third angle, that
same hideous phenomenon already called transgression and sin
now appears, as David tells us, as iniquity.
Listen to his words again.
Blessed is the man, he says, unto whom
the Lord imputeth not iniquity.
Now once again, this is a different concept
of sin, but it's the same reality.
It's the same thing.
What does this word mean?
Scholars will divide.
And when scholars divide, preachers must be very
careful.
One thing is quite clear.
It means this, it means guilt.
It means that when I sin, I make
myself liable to penalty.
But there are certain scholars at any rate
who insist that it means more than that.
I'm not going into the technicalities, the pulpit
is not the place for that.
And there are good reasons, I believe, for
going beyond that and saying it also means
this.
It means that something that was once straight
has become tangled.
We had an accident in London on the
railway just a week or a fortnight ago.
Quite a number of people were killed.
And they tell me that the rails along
which the train went were so warped and
so twisted that you really couldn't recognize them
for what they were.
Now that is what some scholars say this
word means.
Life was meant to be a straight thing,
uncomplicated.
It came out from the hand of God
as something that was pure and uncomplicated and
straight.
But sin has mixed it all up.
It's become a tangled skein.
It's become like a thread that's all mixed
up.
You can make neither heads nor tails out
of it.
Let me put it to you like this.
The significance of it is this, that man
loves what he should hate and he hates
what he should love.
He goes where he shouldn't and he doesn't
go where he ought to go.
Everything's wrong, everything's topsy-turvy.
Life is so mixed up you can't make
sense of it.
That's sin, that's iniquity.
Transgression, sin, iniquity.
The blight that makes pardon a necessity, the
cause.
All have sinned and come short of the
glory of God.
Will you allow me to say this with
all the grace of my command?
I don't know you good people, but make
no bones about this.
It doesn't matter what kind of clothes you
wear.
It doesn't matter what kind of a college
you may have passed through.
It doesn't matter what title you bear.
In the sight of God, you and I,
we are both sinners.
Sin has marked us, we have rebelled, we
have the marks of sin in ourselves and
we have left the stain of our sin
upon others.
And we've got ourselves so mixed up that
we can't live very long without a psychiatrist's
help.
And we dare not die without the help
of God.
Now, I'm glad to be able to turn
from there.
If I had to stop there tonight, it
would be a most sad thing for me.
But it's the dark background, it's the back
cloth against which the gospel of Jesus Christ
has to be proclaimed.
The gospel is good news.
But it is good news to a world
that is dying because of sin and lost
because of sin.
Now come with me then to this wondrous
message.
The blessing that makes forgiveness so exceedingly precious.
Just as sin can be described from different
points of view, so also can God's forgiveness.
I'm reminded of a word of John Bunyan's
when I come to this passage.
John Bunyan once put it like this.
You know, his mind was so graphic and
so pictorial.
However gaping or deep the wound of sin,
says he, the plaster of God's grace is
able to cover it still.
Well said.
The wound of sin may be deep.
It may be a gash that is yearning.
And why?
But where sin abounded, grace did much more
abound and does.
So that if sin is capable of being
described in a threefold way, so is the
pardoning mercy of God.
And that is to what we come now.
Now look at it.
I don't know whether you good people like
to keep your eye on your Bibles.
You do so if you'd like to.
Because you see, this is not my word
tonight.
This is all before you if you have
a Bible in your hand.
Now look at this.
God's mercy is first described here by this
simple word, forgiveness.
Blessed is the man whose transgression is forgiven.
If you were to turn to a Hebrew
Bible and come to this particular word, you
would find that it's a very simple word
which means in the first place to fix
something up.
Now it's as simple as this.
If I threw, I won't do it of
course.
But if I threw this hymn book there
and it came and fell right in front
of me, and one of you good people
would come out to the pew and you
would pick it up and you would carry
it away.
That's exactly the word that we have here
for forgiveness.
Forgiveness means that God in Jesus Christ comes
to take sin and to carry it out
of the way.
He in the person of his anointed son
comes and he lays hold upon the hideous
thing, takes it upon himself and with his
mighty strength and overwhelming grace, he bears the
wretched thing out of the way.
Now if you want this put in New
Testament language, you have it in John chapter
1.
Many of you will remember the day, that
epochal day, when John the Baptist introduced our
Lord Jesus Christ to his disciples.
And he did so in these words.
Do you remember, he said, look he said,
all of you look, look he says, there
he is, behold.
Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away
the sin of the world.
And that's what this word forgiveness means.
God's forgiveness implies that he comes and he
lays hold upon the burden himself and he
in the omnipotence of his strength carries it
out of the way.
Oh how precious this is.
Your sin and mine does not simply give
us an ordinary burden or a heartache.
Your sin and mine involves us in being
under the curse and the judgment of a
holy God.
But in the wonder of God's grace, he
has come in his son to take it
away.