I suspect many of you have some access to the news whether it is by television, the newspaper, or even by the internet, you probably caught wind of the tragic news story that came out of Colorado the other day. Apparently, there was a midnight showing at a movie theater outside of Denver that was showing the Dark Knight Rises, the new Batman movie. Apparently, the movie started at about midnight and about 20 minutes into the movie, a man came in through the exit door and let off a couple of gas canisters and began to fire into the crowd. At last count, I believe 12 people died and about 58 or so are still injured because of it. We are familiar with these tragedies. Unfortunately, they are all too often, especially in the Colorado area. We think back on Columbine and that sort of thing. The questions that come out of it are usually two questions: How could somebody do such a thing? And the second question is what can we do to prevent something like from happening again? You get all sorts of opinions. As far as how could we have prevented this? The answer is we don’t know. You have a young man who doesn’t fit the typical profile of somebody coming and just randomly shooting at people. He was a medical student, I guess an honors medical student, and the only prior brush with the law was I guess a minor traffic ticket. How would you prevent something like that? The answer for most people is we just don’t know. What can we do to prevent it from happening again? The easiest answer seems to be we need to have tighter gun-control laws. We need to make sure that we have more security around public places such as movie theaters, airports, and that sort of thing.
The Christian has a different response. I know it might sound a little bit cliché and by no means disrespect for what happened out there, but the Christians answer is different. As far as how could something like this have happened? The answer is we live in a fallen, broken, corrupt world where sin and evil exist. The other question is what can we do to prevent it from happening, and the answer hasn’t changed for 2,000 years. It is continue to carry the gospel into the world. What I would call the message of reconciliation. The message of God’s unfailing love, the gift of forgiveness, and the blessing that comes to those who are forgiven. Hopefully, we see that in today’s Psalm. We are going to look at Psalm 32.
But before we go there, I want to give you a little bit of refresher. We have been going through the Psalms during the summer and called the series the Summer in the Psalms. Last week, we looked at Psalm 51. We decided that Psalm 51 kind of fits into the category of Psalms called confession. Confessional Psalms. It involves specifically David’s confession to God regarding his affair with Bathsheba. I don’t have time to go through that story that is found in 2 Samuel 11 but some of the highlights are that David was supposed to be at war out fighting battles with his men, but instead he was hanging back on a rooftop of the palace and looking at things that he shouldn’t have been looking at. Low and behold, he sees Bathsheba who is bathing out there. He invites her in and then has a relationship with her. She gets pregnant. So then he has a problem on his hands. It is not just the pregnancy but the fact that Bathsheba was no ordinary woman. She was married to one of his soldiers. A soldier named Uriah. This doesn’t look too good on King David’s record so he needs to do something. He decides to initiate a cover-up. The cover-up involved several different schemes, but the one that seems to have been effective was the idea of sending Uriah out to the front lines. He had one of his soldiers place Uriah in the front lines which means that he would have been in the first group of men going into a city and most likely those men are going to be attacked and are going to die. Sure enough, Uriah was in the front lines and got killed. The word got back to Bathsheba. She went into a state of mourning. In order to complete the entire cover-up, David decided to invite her into the palace and from the public’s eye it looked like David was doing a very kind and benevolent thing. He was inviting this widow woman into his palace. For all intents and purposes, the cover-up succeeded. He had kept the whole affair out of the public’s eye.
Although he was able to keep it out of the public’s eye, he was not able to keep it out of God’s eye. That becomes very clear in the last line of 2 Samuel 11. It says “But the thing David had done displeased the Lord.” We talked about last week how, in that one incident, David had violated at least five of the Ten Commandments. So I am sure it displeased the Lord. But I think it was more the Lord was disappointed in David. David was a man who was considered someone who walked with God. God has actually given him his Holy Spirit. One of the few men in the Old Testament that walked intimately with God was David. David knew this. David knew that he displeased God. The fear David had was not of the wrath of God, but he was fearful that God would somehow remove his spirit from David. That intimate communion would be lost.
So what does David do back in Psalm 51, he throws himself on the mercy of God. He understands God’s character. He says Lord have mercy on me. He appealed to his unfailing love and his compassion. He knew God. He knew God was a God of compassion. He knew God was a God of love. But he also knew that he had to confess with God first. Before he confessed to anybody else, he needed to first go before God. Because as we saw in Psalm 51, ultimately all sin is first and foremost a sin against God. It says in Psalm 51 “Against you, you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight.” David knew that that was a sin first and foremost against God. In Psalm 51, we have the Psalm of the confession of David. In Psalm 32, we have the result of the confession which is the forgiveness that comes from God and the blessing that follows. I am going to read through Psalm 32 and then we will go back and look at a few different passages here. Reading from Psalm 32:1. (Scripture read here.)
That is a great Psalm. It is a phenomenal Psalm. It is considered a Psalm of confession like Psalm 51, but some would consider it a Psalm of instruction and a Psalm of wisdom. You may recall last week when I talked about the whole idea of a superscription. It is the little line that appears above the line. In that superscription includes information about the author, often some information about the particular situation that prompted the writing, or it may just contain some information about the classification of the Psalm, which is true for this. It says a Psalm of David, a Maskil, which basically means instruction or wisdom. A little side note, the Psalms were meant to be sung in the congregation in the temple setting. This is instruction to the music director that this is a Psalm of instruction. I know some people like to sing the old hymns, and I think there is good reason for that because the hymns I think contain a lot of instruction there. A lot of theology that we can’t get by just sitting and listening to a sermon. The Psalms were considered teaching tools. They were Psalms of instructions. In this case, what David wanted to teach was the blessedness, the happiness that comes, from someone who confesses their sins up to God. He starts out by saying “Blessed is he whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man whose sin the Lord does not count against him and whose spirit has no deceit.” The idea of transgressions being forgiven. It is the idea of being lifted up. Pulled right off them. The idea of this whole sin being covered up is the idea of a blanket or something being laid over or our sins being blotted out so when the Lord looks down, he cannot see that sin. The idea of sin not being counted against him is kind of an accounting term. It is as if God has this big ledger up here and he is keeping records of wrongs. We have this debt in God’s book and out of the blue he decides to cancel that debt. He writes it right off the books. Of course, David is feeling blessed. He is feeling at peace. He goes on to say “in whose spirit is no deceit”. What he is saying is the blessed guy has no reason to lie to God anymore. He is an open book from this point. He is sincere. He is sincere because he doesn’t want to fall back into the wretched state that he was in before he confessed to the Lord.
We see that as we begin to look more into verse 3 and following. We see “When I kept silent my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me. My strength was sapped as in the heat of summer.” This is the picture of a man with some major pain going on. It is almost a picture of a man with extreme arthritis. An elderly man with brittle bones and extreme arthritis and the pain is there day and night, over and over again. It is also the picture of the heavy hand of God. The right hand of God would be considered the hand that would give out discipline or wrath. David is feeling this heavy weight upon himself. He goes on to say “My strength was sapped as in the heat of the summer.” Lately, it has been in the 90s and 100s around here. When you are outside you just feel drained and sapped of strength. That is what basically we have going on here. I say that all the while not knowing is David talking about something physical, is he talking about something emotional, is he talking about something spiritual, or possibly a combination of all three.
As a side note, I don’t want to imply that any sort of physical ailment is associated with some sort of sin. But we know that David was dealing with unconfessed sin. What is happening here is there are parts of his whole being that are being impacted by his failure to confess. Theologians talk about people being made up of three parts: spirit, soul, and body. The body obviously is the part that connects to the world. The soul is considered the seat of the personality that may include the mind, the will, and the emotions. The spirit is the part of us that connects to God. It is a convenient way of thinking about it. Obviously, we don’t know for sure. Some would say we just have two parts. We just have spirit and soul that are one and the body. It doesn’t matter, but it is a way of thinking about it. The idea is when one of those three parts are out of whack in some sort, what happens is the other parts become affected by it. This is nothing new because think about it. When you are feeling physically exhausted and you are overworked, pretty soon you can’t think. That is why they say get a good night’s rest before you take this test or do this thing or that thing because you need your rest. The lack of physical strength drains your mental state. Then you have people that for some reason sleep all the time because they just feel like they can’t even get out of bed. Oftentimes, it has nothing to do with the physical. There is something emotional going on. Maybe the person is dealing with some sort of depression or anxiety or something going on in their minds. The physical is the result of something emotional going on. Then you have the spiritual that is impacted too. I think about when people are really down and depressed, a lot of times you can find the root in the spiritual life. Personally, if I am feeling down or I am feeling blue, I know that probably I haven’t been in my quiet time. I haven’t prayed to God. I haven’t worshipped God. I find there is a direct connection there. That is what is going on here.
As a side note, I worked for a boss back in the 90s. He was a great guy and at least on the surface a good Christian man. Unfortunately, he was greedy. He decided to embezzle about $300,000 from the company. He did this over three years. He kept quiet. He kept silent about that. He was able to keep it covered up. After we exposed him, which I was the one, unfortunately, who had to do it, looking back we saw the signs that something wasn’t right in his life. He was going through a lot of emotional ailments. He was very emotional. But we also found some physical ailments. His vision began to change. He went through apparently three changes of contact lens prescriptions over three months. You see it in the eyes. They say the eyes are the window of the soul. If something is going on in your eyes, it might be something going on deep in the soul.
So what you have here in David, we have a picture of David in this wretched state. This state where he is feeling physically drained. His bones are brittle. He is feeling a lot of pain, a lot of agony, and he is feeling the heavy hand of God. Then something changes just like that. He goes on to say “Then I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity. I said I will confess my transgressions to the Lord.” Just like that there was a whole change. The key word is Then. “Then I acknowledged my sin to you.” He goes on and talks about iniquity and transgressions. You may recall from last week how we talked about these are just different terms that are variations really on the word sin. Sin, like I said before, is kind of an archery term that means you missed the mark. So when we talk about sin, we talk about God has his laws and the way of doing things out there, and when we go to the left or the right and we miss the mark, we sin. Then you have the idea of iniquity which is the idea of a twisting or a perversion of a truth for the purpose of evil gain. It is a deception, a lie. Then you have transgressions which are flat out just willful rebellion. God says don’t do this and you say I am going to do it anyway. What David is doing here is he is saying I want to get it all out there. I want to get everything out there in front of you. I want to confess everything, my sins, my transgressions, my iniquities. I want it out there.
We don’t know how long this took. We don’t even know what the time frame was, but we do know that then something extremely remarkable happened. He goes on to say “And you forgave the guilt of my sin.” We have been Christians in church so long that we forget just how phenomenal this is. The setting is like a courtroom setting. It is like David coming in and saying I committed adultery. I committed at a minimum manslaughter, I have committed conspiracy to commit manslaughter, I have lied, and all this stuff he is laying before the judge and saying I confess this all. Go ahead and hit me with the punishment. Then the judge says you aren’t guilty. Your sins are forgiven. When have you ever seen that happen? Never. You are not going to see it where somebody confesses totally their sins to all these sort of grievous things and then the judge comes up and says not guilty. That is what is so amazing about this particular story. It would be difficult to imagine what David is feeling at the time. He did a horrible thing with the sin of Bathsheba. There was some point there where he felt relief. I was thinking about if you watch a TV show or the news and there is somebody there on trial and waiting for the verdict. Everybody around them is just holding their breath. They are waiting to hear from the judge what the jury said. He gives those two words: not guilty. You are relieved. You see people collapse in joy. That is what I think is going on here. David was so thrilled. There was a point that he just felt this release from this burden that he had been carrying for at least a year. It is clear to see from this Psalm that this was a cathartic, healing thing for David very much so.
So much so that he decided I have to start telling people about this. I am so excited about this. So he goes on to say “Therefore, let everyone who is Godly pray to you while you may be found.” The idea of Godly is translated different ways. Some translations say “Let everyone who is seeking God find him, pray to him while he can still be found.” So he is saying this happened to me, therefore it can happen to you, so pray to God, and confess your sins while there is still an opportunity. Then he goes on and talks about if you do that then the mighty waters, when they rise, they will not reach you. We are talking about not just those calm streams in the desert. We are talking about flood waters. That is what he is talking about here. He is saying those flood waters won’t mess with you. Because you know the consequences of sin a lot of earthly things are happening, but you will be protected from them. You will be protected from them. In fact, he goes on to say that God will be the hiding place. He says “You are my hiding place. You will protect me from trouble and surround me with songs of deliverance.” What is interesting here is the one who David hid from, God, is now the one who David hides in and finds his shelter and finds that protection. In the midst of the protection, he is singing songs of deliverance. It is like you have the great choir of all the people that ever walked before David that have felt the freedom and deliverance from knowing that their sins are forgiven. That is what is going on here. David just wants to share this stuff. He wants to go out and teach others about it.
In fact, he goes on to say “I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go. I will counsel you and watch over you.” This is when I have to give a little bit of discussion on because basically this particular verse causes a lot of people confusion. Some scholars would suggest that these particular words, I will instruct you and teach you, is actually God speaking to David. Some think that it is David speaking to others like other people in the temple area, other worshippers. As I read the commentaries, I got both opinions, so I thought I would put it out to some of the men in the Wednesday night group and I got the same sort of thing. It was mixed. I finally realized that I think it is both. What one man suggested is that he felt that it was God speaking to David because here David had this great sin just occur, felt the freedom, but he is probably feeling a little fragile like he will mess up again. God is saying settle down David. I will instruct you and I will teach you where you should go and I will counsel you and I will watch over you. Who does that sound like? It sounds like the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is a teacher and a counselor walking alongside David. So he is telling David don’t worry. If you just stick close to me, everything will be fine. I will teach you and I will instruct you and I will counsel you, and hopefully avoid this thing from happening again. But I also think that this verse is really King David talking to the congregation or the temple people or the followers of God because even though David has a lot to learn, he has so much more to teach. He has a ton to teach because he has been in those dark nights of the soul wrestling with God. Feeling the pain. Feeling the brittle bones. Feeling the strength sapped from him. Feeling just confused and angry and upset and fear. He is sitting in this dark classroom basically of self and I tell you what God is teaching him all sorts of things. If any of you have ever been in any sort of a dark night of the soul whether it is because of your sin, the sin of somebody else, maybe a death, a grief, whatever it is, you know that that is the place where God teaches you the most. When you are in the middle of a situation like that, grab a pen, grab a journal, and start writing. God will give you stuff so fast that you can’t even keep up with it. But he doesn’t give you that stuff so you can hold onto it yourself and keep it on the shelf that somebody can look at 20, 30, 40 years down the road. He says use it now. Teach it. Take it out and give it to somebody else. What David is doing here is he is taking on the role of teacher, of discipler.
It reminded me of one of my favorite passages that comes out of the gospel of Luke 22:31. Jesus knew that Peter as going to deny him so out of the blue at the dinner table, he says “Simon, Simon, Satan has asked permission to sift you like wheat.” In other words to separate you, to mess with your mind big time. But he goes on to say “But I have prayed for you, Simon, that your faith would not fail and when you return (when you come back to your senses), then go and help your brother or your sister.” That is what he is doing here. David is so excited about the great turnaround that he was able to experience he says I am going to go out and tell people. I want to tell people about God’s unfailing love. I want to tell them about his compassion, and I want to tell them about the gift of forgiveness that is available to every single human. The gift of forgiveness that enables the people to turn back to him. To be reconciled back to him. In fact, there is a verse in Psalm 51 that kind of confirms that this is what it is about. This is in Psalm 51, assuming he will be forgiven, he says “Then I will teach transgressors your ways and sinners will turn back to you.” Turn back. What he is talking about here is reconciliation. We talked about a gap between man and God and that gap is created because of sin. When the sins are forgiven, the gap closes. We are reconciled back to God. Reconciled is an accounting term. When you get your bank statement and you reconcile it. You fill out the back and say this is what I have in my checkbook, this is what the bank has, and hopefully you can reconcile the two, which means create the harmony, create the sense of agreement. That is what is going on here. You have David wanting to reconcile those sinners back to God. David has taken his own personal experienced. He experienced the dark night. He experienced all this stuff, but he experienced the joy that came through the forgiveness so he is an evangelist out there. He is ready to just start preaching to the world and bringing the sinners back home to God. Bringing all the prodigals back home and restoring them back into relationship with God. What is cool about this is this was like 3,000 years before Jesus walked this earth. Before Paul or any of the apostles walked this earth. He was preaching a ministry of reconciliation. He didn’t even know it. This is awesome.
Last week, I mentioned how when David was asking for mercy he goes on to say “Create in me a clean heart.” Do a heart transplant in me. Make something pure that was formerly impure. I want a pure, clean, heart. Do something new in me. That is what God did. I tied it back to what Paul speaks of in 2 Corinthians 5:17 where he goes on to say “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has gone, the new has come.” That is what happens to the believers today. That is what happens to somebody who turns back to God, accepts the free gift of salvation that comes through Christ, follows it through with baptism and comes on out to the other side. He or she is a brand new person. Really, the passages that apply today are the ones that follow. Paul goes on to say “All this is from God who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation. God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them.” Sound familiar? Not counting. Debt cancelled. Paul is saying God has given us this ministry of reconciliation. In fact, you could say the whole Bible is one long story of reconciliation. As I said before, don’t make the Bible complicated. It is not. We left the presence of God, and we are going back. Everything between Genesis and Revelation is the long story of people coming back to God, of being reconciled to God, of us stepping in there and becoming part of the fellowship of the redeemed. The people are out there singing the songs of deliverance. The only way that can happen is through Christ. He says this is through Christ. This is through the cross of Christ. Forgiveness was given because of the shed blood of Jesus Christ on the cross. That is how we get this. That is how we receive this reconciliation. But it doesn’t stop there. You have to take that good stuff, the freedom that comes because of Christ, the forgiveness of sins, the restoration back to God, now take it and do something with it. Take it out into the world. Take it out into the muck of the world and go out into it. Don’t be afraid because you are my ambassadors. He goes on to say that. He says “And he committed to use the message of reconciliation. We are, therefore, Christ ambassadors as though God were making his appeal through us.” This is what is really amazing because he is saying go be my ambassador. An ambassador is just someone who just represents another person in another country. Go out into this fallen, broken, corrupt world wherever you are called and share this message of reconciliation but don’t worry. It’s not all on you. It is as if God is making his appeal to the sinners through us. It is like God is down here reaching through us with the ministry of reconciliation into the world to draw sinners back home. Isn’t that amazing? Which says that we have to have an involvement in that. God has blessed us to be part of the ministry of reconciliation. Of bringing the sinners back home and restoring them back to the design that God created for them.
In closing, when we think about this tragedy that happened in Colorado we don’t know why someone would do such a thing. It was an honors medical student. How could you go through medical school and be insane? Maybe they will classify him as insane. Who knows. But he is alive and he is probably going to be alive for a long time unless he does something in prison or somebody gets to him, but he is going to be there and all our tax dollars are going to be spent sending psychiatrists and counselors and everybody in trying to probe the depths of his mind to figure it out. There will be books written about it. Somebody wanting to know what happened here? They will never know. But I can tell you with 100% certainty that, at a minimum, there was a disconnect between him and God. There was a disconnect between him and his creator. Maybe he never had the connection. Maybe he had the connection and it broke off. We don’t know that but all we know is that he had a God-shaped void in the depth of his soul and he left that void there. When you have a void, something is going to fill it. What began to fill it are probably the fears and the doubts and possibly his sin. Maybe he was an overachiever. Maybe he got all A’s in high school and then he got to college and graduate school and he couldn’t keep the A’s. Maybe he cheated on a test and felt so bad. We don’t know. All we know is those demons inside of him, call it whatever you want, there was something inside of him that just ate away at his soul, at his mind, intellect, and emotion and eventually found its way out. He eventually snapped and decided he was going to go and just start shooting people. I really think that is what is happening there. I am, by no means, someone who stands here and gives simple answers, but I suspect that if at some point in this young man’s life, maybe even in the last six months or a year, some other student would have come alongside this guy and befriended him and began to talk with him and began to just get involved in his life, maybe this guy would have opened up. Maybe it would be another Christian that would come alongside that experienced the joy that David had felt when he felt the relief, the forgiveness of sins and how he got his life together. If you have someone like that coming alongside this guy, who knows. He may have opened up and that would give this person the opportunity to be the minister of reconciliation. To tell him about the unfailing love of God for his creation. To tell him about the gift of forgiveness. To tell him about the ministry of reconciliation and God’s desire for all people to come back to him. Maybe, just maybe, had that happened, 12 people would be alive today. And I firmly believe that. The answer is not less guns and gun control or higher measures of security. It hasn’t worked. The only answer is the gospel of Jesus Christ. The ministry of reconciliation. This is an urgent thing. I really feel that there are so many things that are happening out there that we don’t know why they are happening, but what we don’t know is how many families would be saved, how many lives would be saved, how many finances would be saved, how many jobs would be saved, whatever it is that would have been saved had somebody come alongside a person and given them the gift of forgiveness. Would have come alongside them and shared with them the ministry of reconciliation. We have this charge. We have this commission. If we are the fellowship of the delivered, which I suspect some of you are, then we have a responsibility, not just to sit on that knowledge but to go out and come alongside somebody and share the love of God. Share the forgiveness of God. Share the reconciliation of God. Put them back on the right path. “We are, therefore, Christ ambassadors as though God were making his appeal to everybody in the world through us.” Let us pray.
