“Praise be to God.” "Live!" "Live well!" “Be healthy.” "Grow big.” “May you live 100 years."
These are various blessings from around the world given when people sneeze. Sneezing is a surprisingly wild topic. Historically, some have thought sneezing was the body expelling evil spirits. Other times, during a plague for example, a sneeze was the first sign of deadly sickness. You sneeze in the morning and you might be dead by the evening. In the face of these bad realities people issue blessings. But how do you know you are blessed? I rarely say “bless you” after a sneeze only to find someone drop to their knees in joyous tears that they have just been blessed by God. How do we know, after all, that we are blessed by the one, true, living God? Ps. 32 gives us the pathway to assurance of blessing.
David starts where we all want to be: Blessed. “Blessed is the one….Blessed is the man…”. I don’t care who are, you want blessed. But the question is, how does David know when he or someone else is blessed? That is precisely what rest of the Psalm is going to show us and it starts in a very different place: For 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 dried up as by the heat of summer. David’s here feeling the effects of sin. He feels his bones wasting away, he’s groaning all day, he feels God’s hand of heavy judgment. He feels weak under judgment, like baking in a desert. He knows his guilt deep in his bones. This is not just intellectual assent to guilt. This is knowing that his guilt must be dealt with or else.
Furthermore, this is the result of what David says in verse 3: “For when I kept silent…” David has been trying to cover and deal with his own sin by himself. He has been silent before God about it. He wants to have nothing to confess at all. But he’s unable to handle his sin. God’s Law in the Bible and on his conscience would not relent. He couldn’t get away from the palpable sense that he was a guilty sinner worthy of cursing, not blessing. There is no internal conflict like this, to worry about your status before God, to wonder if you are welcome, accepted, and justified before Him.
Here is how this plagues Christians. We are plagued sometimes by one question: Am I really saved? How do I have assurance of my salvation? Am I blessed by God or cursed? Does “Blessed is the one…Blessed is the man…” describe me? Can I have confidence before the Lord? Can I have joy and gladness? Or should I fear and tremble before God? When left unanswered we feel like David, like our bones are wasting away, we feel deep inward groaning all day long. We sense divine heaviness. We lose energy, we feel weak. It’s hard to pray. God isn’t our hiding place. Often this question comes from within. We think, “I have sinned so bad, I wonder if I’m saved at all?” Often this question comes from others: “How could you sin like that? Are you sure you’re not a false convert?”
The way we answer this question of assurance will send us in two wildly different directions. It will change our life one way or another. There are two main roads and one well traveled by those looking desperately for good news. Here is how this road goes:
First, we wonder how to know we are saved? The answer is to find the mark(s) of salvation. So, we take inventory and look. But then we wonder what the marks of salvation are. The answer: Christian maturity. Ok, but then we need to define Christian maturity. It is then defined as “obedience”. So, we think, the opposite of obedience is sin. We conclude that we don’t want to find sin in our lives. To find sin is immaturity and thus my salvation is questionable if I find sin. But then we wonder, how much obedience passes the test? I know I won’t find perfection but how much obedience do I need to find? The answer: progressive patterns of obedience. You need to find a pattern of less and less sin and more and more obedience. And here is where the road stops. If you find a pattern of less and less sin, then you are allowed to have assurance. If you don’t, you have a questionable salvation at best.
So, we start looking inward. We start looking at ourselves frantically, obsessively, and constantly. We try to find any obedience and faithfulness. But then a new question arises. Is 1 moment of obedience enough? What about 2? What about 86 moments? Well, moments aren’t enough. We need a progressive pattern of less and less sin. So, we want to find that when I was 14 I had this much sin, and that decreased at 15, then that decreased more at 20…at 67 and so on. But a problem arises. Maybe I found 42 instances of obedience but I can’t tell if I’m actually progressing over time. I seem stuck in the same place with the same struggle. I can’t find sins that are completely gone. And even if in this process we find progressive patterns, we start to feel arrogant, which is a big problem. We think, “I didn’t know I was so prideful about obedience! Oh no, I’ve discovered new sin not less sin! And if I’m prideful about this, how much of my other obedience is tainted by the sin of pride?!” And the vicious cycle continues.
We are left in a tailspin. After all, how do I measure being “fully surrendered”? How do I measure progressive patterns of obedience? King David, where does Bathsheba fit in your progressive pattern of obedience? Apostle Peter, where does being called Satan by Jesus, stiff arming the Gentiles, and denying Christ fit in the progressive pattern of your obedience? If we’re honest, in this process we discover the opposite. We are more sinful than we feared. We find what author Ron Julian says, “Even the most mature saints, in the golden years of their walk with God, can succumb in a flash to their petty, selfish, destructive tendencies.” We find what Heidelberg Catechism question 114 states, that in this life “…even the holiest men have only a small beginning of obedience…”
Traveling this road to find assurance of salvation leaves us, at best, unsure because this road wants you to be silent, like David in Ps. 32. It wants you to have little to no sin to confess. This road is so dangerous because we begin seeking to obey the Lord to feel assured of our salvation. We begin thinking, “If I obey, I am saved. I obey so that I’m saved.” We think things like, “I’m saved if….if I did the sinner’s prayer right, if my baptism worked, if I unlock the second baptism of the Holy Spirit…” This road subtly leads us into the heretical doctrine of salvation by self-righteousness.
If you’re on this road, I have good news for you. I have Ps. 32 for you. David was trying to have no sin to acknowledge and then the lights turned on. He wrote, “I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover my iniquity; I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord”. We are told that the mark of salvation is seeing less & less sin, having less to confess. But Ps. 32 says the mark of salvation is seeing sin and admitting it. We are told maturity is seeing less and less sin to confess. Ps. 32 says maturity is seeing your sin clearly and admitting it. In Ps. 32, this is a part of what it means to have no deceit, to be godly, to be righteous and upright. It means you are someone who admits you’re not godly, you’re not righteous, you’re not upright, and you’re someone who is trusting the LORD for grace.
David realizes that forgiveness comes through the admission of the need for forgiveness. How ironic is it of us to think that we will be assured of forgiveness when finally think we don’t need it anymore! Ron Julian states it so well when he writes, “Those who enter the kingdom of God will be those who admit that they have no right to be there.” 1 John 1 says, “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves…” In other words, “Say you have sin, don’t deceive yourself.” The path to assurance of your salvation is looking in the mirror and calling yourself a real, bona fide, thoroughbred sinner, knowing there is nothing you can do about it. “I acknowledge my sin to you…”
What happened when David did this? “I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover my iniquity; I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,” and you forgave the iniquity of my sin.” Forgiveness is only for those that need it. Grace is for real, bona fide sinners who can’t cover and atone for their sin (which is all of us, it’s just a matter if you admit it and turn to Christ for grace). If you have mountainous sins, ingrained, stubborn sins, that’s good you know. Forgiveness is for you, in Christ alone.
Verse 10 sums this all up: “Many are the sorrows of the wicked, but steadfast love surrounds the one who trusts in the Lord.” We expect to read: “Many are sorrows of wicked (disobedient) but love surrounds the obedient.” But what we read is: “steadfast love surrounds the one who trusts in the Lord.” The wicked here is isn’t merely a sinner. It’s someone not trusting in the LORD. It’s someone silent about their sin, covering it themselves. They don’t trust the Lord. They seek to deliver themselves. Their sorrows multiple as they languish under guilt and sin. What’s the opposite of the wickedness here? “I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover my iniquity…” The opposite of wickedness here is, “Lord, I’m a real, bona fide, sinner. All I have is You. I trust You.” And “steadfast love surrounds the one who trusts in the Lord.”
Blessed is the one who has no transgression? No. Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven. Blessed is the one who has no sin? No. Blessed is the one whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man who has no iniquity? No. Blessed is the man against whom the Lord counts no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit. Blessed are those who can say with the old hymn, “Well may the accurser roar of sins that I have done, I know them all and thousands more and Jehovah (the LORD) knoweth none.” Assurance is not found in you, in your righteousness. God’s Law will always find you unrighteous. Assurance of salvation is found in Heaven, in the free righteousness of Jesus for you, received through faith alone.
One day John Bunyan was walking, despairing of sin, wondering if he was right with God. And this sentence came to his mind that his righteousness was “in heaven”. He writes, “Thy righteousness is in heaven; I saw that it was not my good frame of heart that made my righteousness better, nor my bad frame that made my righteousness worse; for my righteousness was Jesus Christ Himself…my chains fell off…I went home rejoicing for the grace and love of God.”
Be assured of how sinful you are. Be assured, in the Christian life you will discover more sin not less. Call yourself a bona fide sinner repeatedly and look to Jesus again and again, where grace abounds all the more. Only when you are assured of your salvation will you run to God in prayer, hide in God, trust Him to preserve you, feel his deliverance, and follow him out of love for Him and for others (all of which is spoken of in this Psalm and rooted in assurance).
Jesus lived for sinners, died for sinners, and rose for sinners. His forgiveness, his grace, and his steadfast love and mercy is only for sinners and it’s always free. So, “Be glad in the Lord, and rejoice, O righteous, and shout for joy, all you upright in heart!”
