Psalm 32: You Surround Me With Shouts of Deliverance

October 9, 2008

Psalm 32 is a list of the benefits of being forgiven. The forgiven man is one “against whom the Lord counts no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit.” Calvin says, regarding a spirit without deceit, that it refers to hypocrites and “senseless despisers of God” who lie in their spirits regarding the sinfulness of their sin or the power of God to deliver them from it.

With that caveat, then, consider the benefits of being forgiven, as listed by the Psalmist:

(1. Deliverance from the oppression of sin, and the privilege of confession.

3 For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away
through my groaning all day long.
4 For day and night your hand was heavy upon me;
my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.
5 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.

Going against the grain of his inward moral law, abusing or silencing his conscience, the sin of a non-Christian is like nausea in his soul, like a sharp stone in his stomach, like a sore on the bottom of his foot. But when I think of the sin of the forgiven–I think of water on a pancake griddle. The way I test whether the griddle is ready to be washed in a sink or still too hot to touch is by dipping my fingers into the sink and flicking them at the surface. When the griddle’s still hot, the water bubbles up and evaporate almost immediately. That is like the sin of the forgiven: it bubbles up, disrupting the sensitive organ of a renewed conscience, and in short order it is thrown upon Christ. Sin can’t stick to one of the forgiven’s account any more than water can stay on a hot griddle.

(2. Refuge and community.

6 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.
7 You are a hiding place for me;
you preserve me from trouble;
you surround me with shouts of deliverance.

In God there is refuge–in this life He often does not clearly vanquish our worst enemies of sin and doubt and oppression, but He does offer us refuge from them by the perfect trust we can put in his loving-kindness regarding our engagement with them as The Forgiven. Moreover, we are accompanied in our trust by a community that bolsters itself by mutual faithfulness. As one of our favorite songs here at Dordt says regarding these “shouts of deliverance”:

It’s the song of the redeemed
Rising from the African plain
It’s the song of the forgiven
Drowning out the Amazon rain
The song of Asian believers
Filled with God’s holy fire
It’s every tribe, every tongue, every nation
A love song born of a grateful choir .

(5. Life-guidance from God.

8 I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go;
I will counsel you with my eye upon you.
9 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.

The law of God, which formerly oppressed us through our inability to keep it, or presented it to us as the hardness of God’s nature, becomes to The Forgiven a blessed rule. I have only recently become aware of the significance of the difference. It was one of those veil away moments–one of those moments when the eyes of my heart became aware of something that my intellectual eyes had already seen without comprehension. I remember asking myself, regarding Psalm 1, how it was possible for anyone to “delight in the law of the Lord”, when all I could do was be convicted by it. But I can see now, in light of the other benefits of being Forgiven, especially the griddle-effect, that the Law of God functions, for a Christian, as one of the greatest delights of life. When all the worldly ambitions and petty pursuits of self-centered unforgiveness are swept away through the redemption of Christ, what’s left to live for? Well–the Law of God, God’s ambition for us which has become our ambition for ourselves.

(5. Gladness in the love received.

10 Many are the sorrows of the wicked,
but steadfast love surrounds the one who trusts in the Lord.
11 Be glad in the Lord, and rejoice, O righteous,
and shout for joy, all you upright in heart!

With all the reasons the Psalmist has listed already, we can see why it is joy-provoking to be Forgiven. Forgiveness is not merely a relief from oppression–though it is that first–but it is an incorporation into the community and refuge of God and a replacement of vain ambitions with the Law of God transformed into the Guide of Life. We are not merely drawn from the City of Destruction, but given clothes of righteousness and traveling companions, and we are set upon a path to Zion.