I wonder….If our society is so sophisticated that we are supposed to be beyond our need for God, why do we have so many depressed and suicidal people in our population? And if Freud was correct that all of our guilt can be tied to repression, why is it that our society of tolerance and acceptance has a higher percentage of people who need psychological help than earlier eras, even though there is less need for repression than in Freud’s day?
Believe it or not, there is an answer to those questions. There is one cause that is probably the single most prevalent cause of depression, fatigue, and psychosomatic illness in the United States today. There is one cause for the root of hostility that leads to violence and crimes against persons and property. Yet, it is more often spoken of as a disease, a behavior, an idiosyncrasy, a crime or a habit than by its real name. Yes, like Dr. Karl Menninger, the founder of the world-famous Menninger Institute, I’m talking about a subject that is rarely identified by its proper identifier. In his 1973 bestseller, Whatever Became of Sin?, the famous psychologist spoke of how humans are uncomfortable with the idea of sin, so we try to get rid of it via projection (“It’s really someone else’s fault!”), denial (“I don’t have a problem!”), or self-punishment (“If you really knew how bad I am, you wouldn’t…”).
Yes, today I want to say that SIN really exists. SIN isn’t something that leaders in the church made up in order to maintain control over their congregations. Now, I’m not saying that church leaders haven’t distorted the definitions of sins in order to serve their own purposes, but SIN as rebellion against God is a constant. God commanded us to avoid certain attitudes and actions because they are ultimately self-destructive. So, when we try to go against God, we hurt ourselves.
Now, the fact is that you have a sin problem and I have a sin problem. The good news is that mental health and the sense of physical, social and spiritual well-being that comes with mental health is immediately available. But don’t take my word for it. Take the word of a person who had a real SIN problem. Take the word of a murderer, an adulterer, and a liar. Take the word of a person who should have and, at various times did, experience a great deal of guilt. Take King David.
The Hebrew superscription of Psalm 32 indicates that the psalm was either written by or written for (commissioned by) King David after his experience with Bathsheba where he got her pregnant and had her husband murdered as a failed attempt to cover up his sin. Yet, according to Psalm 32, he managed to find a solution to his SIN problem. Even though most of us will never commit the two dramatic sins of murder and adultery that he committed, the same solution to the SIN problem is available to us. Let’s read the passage.
(Read Psalm 32)
In the first two verse of the psalm, the Bible uses four different words for SIN and repeats the word “Blessed” twice. We don’t use the word, “blessed,” much anymore outside of the church context. Sometimes, I hear it in the African-American community when church-going folks say, “Have a blessed day!” But, in general, we don’t use this word.
To “bless” or to be “blessed” in the Old Testament didn’t merely mean to say some good words. To “bless” meant to offer something tangible, some good service, experience, or gift. To be “blessed” meant to receive some tangible, good service, experience, or gift. So, we could really translate this word as: “well-off,” “successful,” “healthy,” or “to be congratulated” as opposed to the archaic “blessed” or the oversimplified “happy” of many modern translations. In short, I think the psalm means that the mental health and the sense of physical, social and spiritual well-being that I spoke about earlier is clearly available.
This word for mental, physical, and spiritual health (“blessed”) begins each of the two lines found in Psalm 32:1. So, we know that the two phrases that follow each of the introductory “blessed” terms must go together. Some scholars think these means that both phrases mean exactly the same thing—what they call synonymous parallelism. But I notice that the two phrases usually considered to mean the same things sort of form the flip-side of each other. If we interpret them in this way, we would have SIN as action in the first phrase of each line and SIN as inaction or potential in the second phrases.
Before you write me off as an intellectual kook, try to hear me out. The first phrase in the verse says, literally, “Well-off is the one who has rebellion lifted off.” There are a couple of key ideas here. First, the word used for sin is the word that is best translated as “rebellion” or “transgression.” It is a word that comes from the world of international diplomacy. It is the word that would be used for breaking treaties, provoking war, or stabbing nations and kings in the back. In short, it is deliberately breaking a treaty or contract. It is going over the line. It is doing what one knows to be wrong.
We’ve all done something that we knew was wrong. Somehow, even as we did it, we thought that we could get away with it or we wouldn’t be affected by it. We weren’t even as honest with ourselves as the late comedian’s (Red Skeltons’) character, the “Mean Widdle Kid.” That character would say, “If I dood it, I dit a whippin’! I dood it, anyway.” At least, that character knew that there were consequences to what he was going to do. Many people think that they can have certain substances without becoming physically or psychologically addicted. Many people think that they can act ruthlessly in business without being affected by it. They think SIN doesn’t have “real” price.
But the psalm speaks differently. When King David committed adultery and covered it over with murder, rebellion weighed on him. Not only did he lose the child in childbirth, but he was confronted by God’s prophet. And I believe that Nathan was merely informing the king of what was common knowledge. But the good news is that this murderer still found forgiveness. His rebellion was LIFTED from him.
The second phrase uses a more generic word for SIN. This word is used both for sins that you do and for sins where you don’t do what you should. As such, I like to think of this word for SIN as being the closest to the Old English word from which we get the English word for SIN. That word is SINNE. It wasn’t originally a theological term. It was an archery term. It was called out by the peasants stationed down close to archery targets when the arrows fell short of the bull’s-eye. It meant that the archer had missed the target.
I think that’s a great way of understanding this generic term for SIN in the Old Testament. It means that we didn’t attain the level that we should have. It means that our aim may have been off such that we did the wrong thing. It means that we used too much or too little effort in trying to hit the “bull’s-eye” of being what God intended for us to be.
And I think we’ve all experienced that sense of coming up short in life or finding that we had the wrong priorities. It doesn’t make us feel very good about ourselves. It offers its own weight of accusation and disappointment. But the good news is that these feelings of inadequacy and unworthiness don’t have to be the last word on the subject. The second phrase tells us that, in the same way the one with her/his rebellion lifted off is blessed, the one whose generic sin has been “covered” is well-off.
What is this idea of “covering” or “hiding” sin? It means that there are circumstances where God will refuse to see our sin. I like to picture that as being like the technique used in video and film. It’s called the chromakey technique and requires filming in front of a blue or green screen. Then, the technicians “key out” or remove all of the blue or green in the image (essentially, they filter out the blue or green). As a result, anything blue or green will become invisible and you can composite any other image you’d like behind you. A friend of mine once took some chromakey stills of a video we did in front of a green screen and put me on the planet Mars. The picture looked real.
In fact, this week a friend sent me to a You Tube video where the weatherman had forgotten that his green tie would be “keyed out.” He was halfway through his weather report when he realized that he was wearing part of his weather map around his neck. You couldn’t see his tie, you only saw the weather map where the tie had been.
Anyway, we are “well-off” when our shortcomings are “keyed out” by the blood of Jesus. God no longer looks at what we have failed to do or what we did wrong. God sees the sacrifice of Jesus as the Son. Wouldn’t you like to have your record of failures and missed opportunities erased? It’s entirely possible, but our text hasn’t yet given us the secret.
When we get to the second set of phrases, we are told that one is well-off or healthy when one’s “iniquities” are not reckoned (or “counted”). The root idea of this word for sin is the idea of something becoming “twisted.” It’s a nice verbal picture of two types of sinning. It could mean twisting something in the sense of perverting something or it could mean meandering on and off the path on which we should be treading. Either way, we are twisted from what God wants and expects from us, what God knows to be the best path, the right path, to that positive relationship with Him and with each other.
Yet, the text says that our perversion and/or our meandering doesn’t have to be counted against us. The verb used here is an accounting term like balancing the books and entering in the ledger. It’s the same verb we read in Genesis 15 where Abram believed God and it was accounted/reckoned/entered in the ledger for him as righteousness.
I once read a marvelous story about a country doctor in Scotland who had a very poor practice. Although his patients would pay him in eggs, chickens, vegetables at harvest, and meat at slaughtering time, his huge ledger book would contain many names, symptoms, treatments, and prescriptions, but a lot of empty boxes or columns where nothing was paid. Once per year, the doctor would go through his book and write “Forgiven” wherever he knew the patients would never be able to pay.
When the doctor died and his heirs received all of his material possessions, they brooded over the ledger book and all of the “Forgiven” debts. Eventually, they tried to take some of the patients to court. But according to the story, the old Scottish judge said that there was no way that any court in Scotland could possibly find for the heirs when the physical evidence of the ledger was so eloquent with its message of “Forgiven, Forgiven, Forgiven” on every page. THAT is iniquities NOT reckoned.
Finally, the last phrase has to do with potential SIN. Little children often shout at each other on the playground, “You are what you say!” The reality is very much that we are what we think. We usually think it before we do it. The reason Jesus warned us against lusting in our hearts and why the commandments speak about coveting anything is that thought life leads to real life. The person with no deceit, no evil thought life inside, is truly well-off, healthy, and happy.
As crazy as he was, the old geezer known as Polonius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet understood the relationship of thinking to action. He knew that if one lies to oneself, one will lie to anyone (and vice-versa). In Act I and Scene iii, he said:
”To thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.” (I,iii,78-80)).
But let’s look at the flip-side of having one’s rebellion lifted off, one’s shortcomings covered, one’s twistedness not counted, and no deceit inside is guilt, fear of discovery, depression, illness, and fatigue. Now, we know this is important because the Hebrew text uses the word that is pronounced “key.” It means “because,” “for,” or “that.” The word almost always indicates the key phrase or important turning point in Hebrew prophecy and poetry.
Psalm 32 says, “BECAUSE, when I was silent, my limbs wasted away from my roaring (like a wild beast) all day.” There was a price to silence. It caused fatigue or illness (wasting away) and misery (roaring). And if we read on, we see that “BECAUSE” leading off the next line, too. “BECAUSE” it says, “night and day Your (God’s) hand was heavy on me, my energy was diminished like a summer drought.” Just as when we don’t feel like doing anything when we’re depressed, that’s what happens when we feel guilty. We feel like God is working against us (He is, for our own good!) and that what we are doing doesn’t matter. Life doesn’t seem worth it; it’s more burden than blessing.
The psalmist says that his sin has transformed him negatively and that his silence has made things even worse. I picture this as being a lot like the Gollum in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. He started as a pleasant, delightful little hobbit—a creature filled with the joy of life and one of the friendliest creatures in the world that Tolkien created. But when he discovered the ring of ultimate power, he was so worried about losing it that he shut himself off from companionship, from the light of day, and interaction with anyone. He turned into a misshapen monster instead of a delightful creature.
When we sin, we become so worried that others are going to do the same to us or that we’re going to be caught that we never enjoy the forbidden fruit whether it’s power, sensuality, wealth, or reputation. Yet, that’s not the end of the story. There is a way to have the sin lifted off, covered, not counted, and deceit non-existent.
It all starts with confession. Confession means to agree with God about the destructive nature of SIN. Just as any cure begins with an acknowledgement of the problem, so does forgiveness begin with an admission that we’ve done wrong and it’s not good for us. We live in a society where no one wants to admit personal responsibility. We steal because we’re poor. We defraud because everyone else is doing it or society forces us to do it. We commit sexual sin because we have low self-esteem or feel unloved. We are dishonest because everything is relative and there is no “truth.” We have faults because they were genetically encoded. We act self-destructively because of our parents, our friends, or our friends and colleagues.
But if that’s what we believe, we’re all victims. We’re all victims so nothing counts and nothing matters. We can delude ourselves into thinking that there’s nothing inherently sinful about what we do, but the consequence of that is that if we’re such victims that we do doesn’t matter, we can’t do anything heroic or worthwhile either. But when we admit not only our SIN but how dangerous it is, God can start to work with us. God lifts off the guilt of our sin.
Now, the last half of the psalm is built on the foundation of the first few verses. IF a person confesses her/his SIN, life’s chaos won’t drown him/her (the waters won’t overtake). IF a person confesses his/her SIN, God provides a shelter/fortress/hiding place to protect her/him from danger. IF a person confesses SIN, God surrounds that person with favor (well-being, a sense of purpose, and a certainty of eventual victory).
So, the psalmist warns his hearers/readers that God can teach them the right way the easy way or the hard way. “Don’t be like a senseless horse or [stubborn] mule” says the psalmist. Instead we are challenged to be guided by the psalmist’s eye, even as he is guided by God’s eye (sort of like “Be imitators of me as I am of Christ”). We are to look in the same direction as the psalmist and, by extension, the same direction as God. We not only “say the same as God” with regard to SIN, but also with regard to LIFE.
The psalmist urges us not to need a bit and bridle like a horse that needs to be neck-reined. Rather, we need to submit to the subtle direction of the Master. Imagine a cowboy trying to work some cattle. Would he really be able to work the cattle if he were constantly tugging on the reins? Of course not! That’s why a good working horse will respond to the rider’s knees and possible verbal signals from the rider. It keeps the hands free to use a rope. In the same way, if we’re going to be useful for God, we need to catch those subtle signals from the Lord. And we can’t catch them if we aren’t practicing confession and receiving forgiveness on a regular basis.
