The Solid Joys of Full Forgiveness Text: Psalm 32:1-2
Introduction: The Ache of Hidden Sins
We live in a world that is drowning in guilt, and yet a world that has forgotten the vocabulary for it. Our therapeutic age has replaced words like sin, transgression, and iniquity with words like trauma, dysfunction, and poor choices. We have tried to manage our guilt, to psychologize it, to medicate it, and to rename it, but we cannot escape it. This is because guilt is not primarily a psychological problem; it is a legal and spiritual reality. It is an objective debt owed to a holy God. And as David will show us in the verses that follow our text, unconfessed sin is a crushing weight. It is a sickness in the bones, a drought in the soul, a constant, low-grade divine pressure that saps all strength and joy.
Many Christians live in this state. They are saved, yes, but they are miserable. They live under the heavy hand of God, not because He is angry with them in a final, judicial sense, but because He is a good Father who disciplines His children. He will not let them get away with playing games. He loves them too much to let them live a lie. The central business of the Christian life, after the initial business of justification, is the ongoing business of confession and forgiveness. It is learning to live in the open, under the waterfall of grace, with no guile, no masks, and no hidden accounts.
This psalm is a Maskil, which means it is a psalm of instruction. After the agony of his sin with Bathsheba and the subsequent cover-up, after being broken by the prophet Nathan, David has learned the hard lesson. And having learned it, he now turns to teach us. He does not begin with the misery of his sin, though he will get there. He begins with the sheer, unadulterated joy of being forgiven. He begins at the end of the story, with the verdict. He wants us to know, before anything else, what true, objective, God-given happiness looks like. It is not found in self-esteem, or in success, or in getting your own way. It is found in having your slate wiped clean by the living God.
These two verses are the very heart of the gospel. The Apostle Paul leans upon them with all his weight in Romans 4 to explain the doctrine of justification by faith alone. This is not just David's personal testimony; it is the bedrock of our standing before God.
The Text
Of David. A Maskil.
How blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, Whose sin is covered!
How blessed is the man whose iniquity Yahweh will not take into account, And in whose spirit there is no deceit!
(Psalm 32:1-2 LSB)
The Triple-Barreled Diagnosis and the Triple-Barreled Cure (v. 1)
David begins with an explosion of joy. The word for "blessed" here is ashre, and it is in the plural. We could translate it as, "Oh, the blessednesses!" It is a declaration of profound, multi-faceted happiness and well-being. And what is the source of this supreme happiness? It is a comprehensive, top-to-bottom forgiveness.
"How blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, Whose sin is covered!" (Psalm 32:1)
Notice that David uses three different words for our moral failures in these two verses, and he matches them with three different words for God's gracious remedy. He is being thorough. He wants to make sure we understand that God's solution is not a band-aid; it is a complete cure that addresses every aspect of our disease.
First, he speaks of "transgression" (pesha). This word means rebellion. It is not an accidental slip; it is a willful defiance of God's authority. It is shaking your fist at the heavens and declaring your own autonomy. It is treason. And what is the remedy for this rebellion? It is "forgiven." The Hebrew word here means "lifted off" or "carried away." This is a beautiful picture. Think of Christian in Pilgrim's Progress. He has a great burden on his back, the burden of his sin, and he cannot get rid of it. But when he comes to the cross, the burden tumbles from his back and rolls away into the empty tomb, never to be seen again. This is what God does with our high-handed rebellion. He lifts the crushing weight of it from our shoulders and carries it away.
Second, David speaks of "sin" (chattath). This word means "to miss the mark." It is the picture of an archer aiming for a target and falling short. God's standard is perfection, and we all fall short of the glory of God (Rom. 3:23). This covers all our failures, our weaknesses, our shortcomings. And what is the remedy for this sin? It is "covered." This imagery takes us straight to the Day of Atonement. The mercy seat on the Ark of the Covenant was the place where the blood of the sacrifice was sprinkled, covering the tablets of the Law that were inside. The blood of the substitute covered the evidence of the people's failure. God provides a just covering for our sin through propitiation. He does not ignore our sin; He deals with it through a substitutionary sacrifice. He covers it with the blood of another. Of course, for us, that other is Christ.
We need to be very clear here. We are told not to cover our own sins (Prov. 28:13). When we try to cover our sin, we are like Adam and Eve, stitching together flimsy fig leaves of excuse and denial. That is a fatal mistake. But our sin must be covered. The good news is that God is the one who provides the covering. You must bring your sin out into the open before God so that He can cover it justly with the righteousness of His Son.
The Great Transaction and the Honest Heart (v. 2)
The declaration of blessedness continues in the second verse, bringing us to the heart of the matter: the doctrine of imputation.
"How blessed is the man whose iniquity Yahweh will not take into account, And in whose spirit there is no deceit!" (Psalm 32:2 LSB)
The third word for our moral failure is "iniquity" (avon). This word carries the idea of crookedness, perversion, or twisting. It refers to the corruption of our nature. It is not just about the rebellious acts we commit or the standards we fail to meet; it is about the bent and twisted state of our hearts. It is our constitutional deformity.
And what is God's remedy for this deep-seated crookedness? He "will not take it into account." This is a bookkeeping term. The Hebrew word is chashab, which means to reckon, to impute, or to credit to someone's account. This is the great exchange of the gospel. God does not reckon our iniquity to our account. As Paul says, quoting this very verse, "Blessed is the man whose sin the Lord will never count against him" (Romans 4:8). Why not? Because God did count our sin against someone else. He imputed our iniquity to Christ's account. "He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us" (2 Cor. 5:21). Our debt was transferred to Him.
But that is only half of the transaction. Not only is our sin not imputed to us, but Christ's perfect righteousness is imputed to us. This is the ground of our justification. God looks at the believer, and He doesn't see our twisted iniquity. He sees the perfect, unblemished righteousness of His own Son, which has been credited to our account. Justification is not that God makes us righteous internally and then accepts us. No, justification is a legal declaration. God declares us righteous in His sight, not because of anything in us, but solely because of the righteousness of Christ imputed to us and received by faith alone.
This is why this blessedness is so profound. It is not a feeling. It is a verdict. It is a legal status. The man who is blessed is the one whose celestial rap sheet is stamped with one glorious word: FORGIVEN. His account is settled. The debt is paid in full.
But there is a condition attached, and we must not miss it. This blessedness belongs to the one "in whose spirit there is no deceit." The word is guile. This does not mean sinless perfection. David, of all people, knew he was not sinless. It means honesty. It means a lack of hypocrisy. It is the opposite of the man who tries to cover his own sin. The man with no guile is the man who has stopped pretending, stopped making excuses, stopped blame-shifting. He comes to God with open hands, acknowledging the truth of his transgression, his sin, and his iniquity. He agrees with God's diagnosis.
This is the ticket. Honesty before God is the ticket. Jesus pointed to this very quality in Nathanael, "Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no deceit!" (John 1:47). This is the man who is ready to receive grace. Grace cannot be given to the man who thinks he has it all together. Forgiveness cannot be given to the man who insists he has done nothing wrong. The blessing of non-imputation is for the man who is done with all the workarounds, all the posturing, all the religious games. He comes to God as he is, a guilty sinner, and casts himself entirely on the mercy of God in Christ.
The Gospel According to David
So what David is teaching us, and what Paul confirms for us, is the very essence of our salvation. Our sin is a multi-faceted problem. It is rebellion, it is failure, and it is corruption. But God's grace is a multi-faceted solution. He lifts our rebellion off of us. He covers our failures with the blood of Christ. And He refuses to count our corrupted state against us, instead counting Christ's perfection to us.
This is a joy that is solid, objective, and indestructible. It does not depend on our feelings, which can fluctuate wildly. It depends on the finished work of Jesus Christ and the legal declaration of God the Father. When you feel the weight of your sin, when you are tempted to despair, you must not look inward to your own sincerity or outward to your own performance. You must look to the cross. You must look to the divine accounting. Your transgression has been carried away. Your sin has been covered. Your iniquity has not been imputed to you.
Therefore, the only reasonable response is to live as one in whose spirit there is no guile. Let us be a people who are quick to confess, who deal honestly with our sins before God and one another. We do not confess in order to be forgiven, as though our confession were a work that earned God's favor. We confess because we are forgiven. We run to the throne of grace with confidence, not because we are good, but because He is good, and His mercy endures forever. The blessed man is the forgiven man, and the forgiven man is the honest man. Let us walk in that blessedness, that forgiveness, and that honesty, all for the glory of God.