My Hiding Place - Psalm 32:6-7 Series

Psalm 32:6 Therefore let everyone who is godly pray to you while you may be found; surely when the flood of mighty waters rise, they shall not reach him. 7 You are my hiding place; you preserve me from trouble; you surround me with shouts of deliverance. Selah.

Introduction

About eight or nine years ago I made a decision to devote the rest of my life learning as much as I possibly can about the attributes of God. If the most important thing is loving God, and loving requires knowing, then I want to know everything I possibly can about what God is like. So I went through the psalms and wrote down every attribute I could find - 378 of them. (Actually it's more than that, but I grouped a lot of them into categories, so 378 categories.) I don't understand why, in the rare occasion that you do find a book on the attributes of God, they usually only list a dozen or two. An attribute of God is anything that is true about God, and the Bible tells us a lot more than two dozen true things about God.

Another thing I don't understand is, if they are going to reduce the list down to just two dozen - why do they always include some that are mentioned only a few times in the Bible and leave out others that are emphasized over and over and over? For example, one of the most frequently mentioned attributes of God I have never seen in any list of attributes, namely, that God is a hiding place or refuge. There are 39 different chapters devoted to describing God as refuge just in the book of Psalms. And God is described as a shelter or hiding place or refuge dozens and dozens of times. Is it important that we know that God is omnipresent (that He exists in all places all the time)? Sure. It is mentioned in Scripture, and all it takes for something to be important is for it to be mentioned a single time in the Bible. So yes, that is important. But how much more exercised is the heart of God over making sure we think of Him as a refuge and fully understand what that means? He really wants to make sure we understand that. And so even after the many times God has already brought it up in Scripture, it comes up yet again here in the psalm we have been studying the past few weeks, Psalm 32.

6 Therefore let everyone who is godly pray to you while you may be found; surely when the flood of mighty waters rise, they shall not reach him. 7 You are my hiding place; you preserve me from trouble; you surround me with shouts of deliverance.

Hiding Place Needed

The Flood (Chastisement)

So the first thing we see there is our need for a hiding place. We need a hiding place because of the flood of mighty waters. That is the threat. Mighty waters was an idiom that referred to an overwhelming catastrophe or a disaster far beyond human ability to handle. And the word flood was used to refer to a disaster that swallows you up without warning or any chance of escape. In that part of the world they had these narrow canyons called wadis. And in a hard rain they could go from being a dry river bed to a wall of water crashing down through the wadi. And those flash floods could sweep away entire armies. This is the only place in the Bible that I could find where both figures of speech are used together. Not just mighty waters, and not just a flood, but a flood of mighty waters. Mixing those two phrases together gives the idea of the ultimate catastrophe.

So what is this catastrophe? It is the bit and bridle in verse 9. It is God's rod of severe discipline for sin. It is what David went through in verses 3-4 - the painful ordeal that God sends to bring a stubborn, mule-like heart to repentance. When God brings out the rod, it is like a 50 foot wall of water coming around the corner and you are in the bottom of the canyon with sheer walls. That is the picture.

Not Just Hardship - Estrangement

And it is very important to understand that there is a lot more to that flood than just hardship. There is a lot more to it than just the earthly consequences of sin. Suppose someone goes out and gets drunk, and there are all kinds of consequences. He gets a DUI, he loses his job, his wife is angry, his reputation is ruined - all kinds of natural consequences. That is not the flood. That is just some of the little ripples along the shoreline of the flood. The main part of the flood has to do with alienation and estrangement from God - having God be upset with you, God being grieved and displeased with you, so that He turns His face away from you. That is the flood.