Psalm 32 - The Gift Of Forgiveness Series

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.