Commentary - Psalm 32:1-2

Bird's-eye view

Psalm 32 is one of the great penitential psalms, but it begins not with groaning but with explosive joy. David, having been through the crucible of conviction and the agony of unconfessed sin, now sings of the sheer, unadulterated bliss of being forgiven. This psalm is a Maskil, a teaching psalm, and the lesson is central to the entire Christian faith: true happiness is found not in sinless perfection, but in the complete and total forgiveness of our sins, which are many. David lays out a three-dimensional picture of this forgiveness, using three different words for our rebellion and three corresponding actions of God to remove it. This is the bedrock of the gospel. The Apostle Paul picks up these very verses in Romans 4 to explain the doctrine of justification by faith apart from works. In short, this psalm teaches us that the man who is truly happy is the man who has been found out by God, has owned up to his sin, and has been graciously, miraculously, and completely forgiven.

The structure of the psalm is straightforward. It begins with the declaration of blessedness (vv. 1-2), moves to a testimony of the misery of silence and the relief of confession (vv. 3-5), offers instruction and assurance to the godly (vv. 6-7), and concludes with God's own call to wisdom over brute stubbornness, contrasting the sorrows of the wicked with the steadfast love that surrounds the trusting believer (vv. 8-11). The opening verses set the theme for the whole: the foundation of our entire relationship with God is His gracious removal of our sin.

Outline

Context In Psalms

This is the second of the seven traditional penitential psalms (6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130, 143). While Psalm 51 is the raw cry of confession in the immediate aftermath of David's sin with Bathsheba, Psalm 32 feels like the settled reflection after the fact. The storm has passed, the air is clear, and David is now able to teach the lesson he learned in the darkness. The heading calls it a "Maskil," meaning an instruction or a teaching psalm. Having been forgiven much, David now fulfills his vow to "teach transgressors Your ways" (Ps 51:13). This psalm, then, is not just a personal testimony; it is a piece of formal instruction for the people of God on the fundamental mechanics of sin, confession, and forgiveness. It is a core curriculum text on the gospel according to David.

Key Issues

The Gospel in Three Dimensions

David does not give us a flat, one-dimensional understanding of our predicament. He uses three distinct Hebrew words to describe our sin, and in response, three distinct actions of God to deal with it. This is not mere poetic repetition. This is theological depth. Our sin is, first, transgression (pesha), which means rebellion, a willful crossing of a line. Second, it is sin (chata'ah), which means missing the mark, a failure to meet God's standard. Third, it is iniquity ('avon), which points to the twisting, the perversion, the crookedness of our nature.

And how does God deal with this three-fold problem? The rebellion is forgiven, which in Hebrew carries the sense of being "lifted off" or carried away. The burden is removed. The failure is covered, a picture drawn from the mercy seat on the Ark of the Covenant, where the blood of the sacrifice covered the sin of the people from God's sight. And the crookedness is not taken into account, or not imputed. God chooses not to write it down in His ledger. He doesn't count it against us. This threefold action is a complete and comprehensive salvation. God doesn't just deal with our rebellious acts, or our moral failures, or our twisted nature. He deals with all of it. This is the gospel, full and robust, preached centuries before Christ.

Verse by Verse Commentary

1 How blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, Whose sin is covered!

The psalm opens with an explosion of joy. The word for blessed here is in the plural in Hebrew, suggesting a multiplicity of blessings, an overflowing happiness. "Oh, the blessednesses of the man..." Who is this truly happy man? He is not the man who has never sinned. Such a man does not exist, save one. The happy man is the forgiven man. David begins with transgression, our active rebellion, our fist shaken in the face of heaven. And this rebellion is forgiven, which means it is lifted and carried away. Think of Christian in Pilgrim's Progress when the burden of sin rolls from his back at the foot of the cross. This is not just a feeling; it is a transaction. The guilt is gone. Then he moves to sin, the failure to be what we ought to be. This sin is covered. This is an image of propitiation. God provides a covering, a shelter from the wrath that our sin deserves. In the Old Testament, it was the blood on the mercy seat; for us, it is the blood of Christ Himself, who is our mercy seat. The blessed man is the one whose rebellion has been removed and whose failures have been hidden from the judicial eye of God.

2 How blessed is the man whose iniquity Yahweh will not take into account, And in whose spirit there is no deceit!

The declaration of blessedness continues, driving the point home. The third word for our fallenness is iniquity, the inherent crookedness of our hearts. And what does God do with this? He will not take it into account. The Hebrew word is logizomai in the Septuagint, the very same word Paul uses in Romans 4 for imputation. This is a glorious accounting term. God looks at the debt in our account, a debt we could never pay, and He refuses to count it. He stamps it "Paid in Full," not because it was no big deal, but because another has paid it. This is the heart of imputed righteousness. God does not reckon our sin to our account; instead, He reckons Christ's righteousness to our account. This is the great exchange. And what is the state of the man who receives this gift? His spirit is free from deceit. This is crucial. The man who receives a no-strings-attached, free-grace pardon is a man who has stopped lying. He has stopped making excuses, stopped pretending he's not that bad, stopped trying to cover his own sin. The absence of deceit is the evidence, not the cause, of his forgiveness. He is an honest man, and the first thing he is honest about is his own bankruptcy. This is the man Jesus described in Nathanael, "an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no deceit!" (John 1:47). He is the man who comes to God with empty hands and a true confession, and he is the only man who leaves full and blessed.

Application

The central application of these verses is that we must ground our spiritual lives in the objective reality of God's forgiveness in Christ, not in the shifting sands of our feelings or performance. The world, and our flesh, tells us that blessedness is found in achievement, in self-improvement, in being a good person. David, and the whole of Scripture, tells us this is a lie. Blessedness is found in being a bad person who has a good Savior. It is found in having your transgressions lifted, your sins covered, and your iniquities not counted against you.

This means we must be people of confession. The man "in whose spirit there is no deceit" is the man who practices regular, honest confession of sin. As John says, "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins" (1 John 1:9). Confession is simply agreeing with God about the state of our affairs. It is calling sin what He calls it. When we do this, we are not informing God of something He doesn't know. We are positioning ourselves to receive the grace He is eager to give. We are living in the reality of Psalm 32. To refuse to confess, to cover our own sin, is to live in the misery David describes in the following verses. It is to have our bones waste away. The path to joy, the path to the blessed life, is the path of open-faced honesty before the God who has, in Christ, already done everything necessary to forgive us completely.