How Confession Heals the Soul

Transcript

how confession heals the soul thoughts on Psalm 32 this is going to be based on Psalm 32 which is a a prayer of David for forgiveness and we're going to look carefully at it and its use in Romans 4 Paul quotes this Psalm in Romans 4 and we're going to be talking extensively about that uh usage there

so let's take a look at the psalm here's a a book I have which is not the original it's a reproduction but in the late 19th century a British architect named Owen Jones uh created this beautifully Illustrated uh uh Book of Psalms assaulter

with these in I guess they're Engravings prints

uh Psalm 32 blessed is he whose unrighteousness is Forgiven and whose sin is covered

that's the title page for psalm 32. then he has all 150 Psalms are similarly printed out and decorated and they're set out in the the old 18th century orthography Steve

could I ask you to read that or

sure I'll be happy to yeah

okay

so this is uh starting in the second first David the first verse is the title to the psalm and this is following actually the Hebrew numbering where the the title of each Psalm is the first verse okay so we start the second which would be our first verse in our English versions great psalm 32. blessed is the man unto whom the Lord imputeth no sin and in whose Spirit there is no guile

for while I held my tongue my bones consumed away through my daily complaining

for thy hand is heavy upon me day and night and my Mo my moisture is like the drought in summer I will acknowledge my sin unto thee and mine unrighteousness have I not hid I said I will confess my sins unto the Lord and so thou forgavest the wickedness of my sin

for this shall everyone that is Godly make his prayer unto thee in a time when thou mayest be found but in the great water floods they shall not come nigh him

thou art a place to hide me in Thou shalt preserve me from trouble Thou shalt Compass me about with songs of Deliverance

I will inform thee and teach thee in the way wherein Thou shalt go and I will guide thee with mine eye

be not like to horse and mule which have no understanding whose mouths must be held with bit and bridle lest they fall upon thee great plagues remain for the ungodly but whoso putteth his trust in the Lord Mercy embraceth him on every side

be glad O.E righteous and rejoice in the Lord and be joyful all ye that are true of heart

thank you

so in this psalm we're going to look at the the beginning and then the end of it and find out what happens in in between because there's a huge shift a shift in mood a shift in Attitude uh say an emotional shift this is what I would call the healing of the Soul

at the beginning here

David writes when I kept silence 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

and then at the end of the psalm he is saying be glad in the Lord and be Joy so righteous and Shout for Joy all you upright in heart so what's happened between this statement here which is a statement of of despair uh of physical and emotional distress

and here

which is clearly a 180 degrees away from where I was well I think we we saw that in the middle the turning point where he says

his confession I acknowledge my sin to you and did not cover my iniquity I said I will confess my transgressions to the Lord and you forgave the iniquity of my sin

it was his confession but this is where we're I this is what caught my attention to why I'm or when

a little deeper into the subject thinking about this well how does that happen how does that confession have such power

when and here's who's

when the fact is

God already knows this I acknowledge and I sent you and did not cover my iniquity

there's nothing really happening here let's say on God's side as if as if

God didn't know as if David were hiding if if this were between two people but this is explicitly uh about David God if we're between two people you might say well I gotta I gotta come clean I gotta tell you something Steve you know I I was the guy that let all the air out of your tires you know or something like that uh

okay yeah I knew you just didn't want me to get that far ahead of you so you lowered my air pressure so you could keep up with me on that big okay

you know between GP but between a human and God there's there's nothing that we're telling God

that could register that type of shift simply because there's no new information at least on God's side there may be something happening on our side but on God's side it's there is uh

has to be something in my mind there has to be something more to what confession might entail

so that you could have

this shift as we were when I kept silent to be glad and rejoice by bones wasting away to shouting for Joy that's the huge shift and there's there's something going on here it does have to do with confession

and I think if we take as we are going to do now for the next half an hour or so is take take a pretty uh careful look what is happening here in the psalm and also in Romans 4 that will get us back to the point where we say okay if we understand confession in forgiveness in that light uh I can see how it's such a healing a healing thing to do now you may have noticed here

is in this one I think this is verse seven uh

you may have noticed that there are these three different words that David uses

to express his uh

his shortcomings his problems he calls it his sin his iniquity and his transgressions and then he repeats this in a different where he used these together the iniquity of my sin so there's five words here and if you can see that they form a uh a small chiasmus sin iniquity transgression iniquity and sin you have that there too that's neat

uh I call this the Unholy Trinity

if you know any Hebrew have it the transgression the Pisha

and iniquity alone

are those three words I'm going to look at them in two different lights one

uh will come out more at the end of the class

but for now I mean I'd like to consider in this in this at least in the case of the Psalms in a Poetic Case we might consider this uh like Lock Stock and Barrel the whole thing my sin transgressive my iniquity the three ways of saying uh kind of the same thing or the whole package of all all the things that are bad and wrong wronged about me are encompassed in these uh three words

they occur together uh

a lot of places the most notable one is Psalm 51 which is strongly parallel to Psalm 32 it is also Psalm of David and the heading of Psalm 51 explicitly tells us what this sin is Psalm 32 does not indicate what David had in mind what was his troubles at that point Psalm 51 it says uh when Nathan came came into him about the matter of Bathsheba

in that Psalm are these two words that excuse me these three words occur a total of 12 times transgression Thrice in six-fold in iniquity another three times

Exodus 34 the god declaring his character forgiving iniquity and transgressions and sins Leviticus and the uh the scapegoat when Aaron puts his hands and sends the goat all off into the Wilderness carrying with it what the iniquities of the children of Israel all the Transmissions all their sins

so I think in these these areas

uh

it's

the words have the separate nuance and I'm going to get to that later but for now just consider this thing this is the poetic or an idiomatic way of saying the whole the whole problem

a few more passages where they occur together or here here and here uh

thank Bill link for helping me find all these which is kind of neat thing he did they all curved fairly close together the one we want to look at is the one in Romans chapter 4 where Psalm 32 it's not really a separate citation it's it's coming back to Psalm 32. but it's quoted in Romans so that's where we're headed next so if you do have a a Bible in front of you turn to Romans 4 because we're going to spend some time here and uh

take five different looks that this passage the passage we're looking at is Romans chapter four verses 3 through 11. and we're going to take five passes through this I'm going to show you the same text here in five different ways highlighting five different features

of that we're looking at

in here with five different key words or elements there's just uh

what you see here is just text and I'm going to say so five different looks at here and we're going to see that this is more than just text and there's a huge surprise at the end too there's just something that is so obviously wrong or out of place or weird uh

but I think sometimes our familiarity with things like this we don't see it so here we are Romans 4. for what the scriptures say Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness now to the one who works his wages are not counted as a gift but this is due and to one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly his faith is counted as righteousness Justice David also speaks of the blessing of the one to whom God counts righteousness apart from works

and here's the quote

blessed are those whose Lawless needs are forgiven whose sins are covered blessed is the man again soon the Lord will not count sin and that's the first two verses of the beginning of Psalm 32. is this blessing then only for the circumcised or also for the uncircumcised for we say that Faith was counted to Abraham as righteousness how then was it counted to him or when was it was it before or after he was circumcised it was not after but before

he received the sign of circumcision as a seal of the righteousness that he had by faith he might say he already had by faith while he was still uncircumcised the purpose was to make him the father of all who believe without being circumcised so that the righteousness would be counted to them as well

so this part of Romans Paul uh is demonstrating a kind of a legal precedence that Abraham was as it said in Genesis 15 that Abraham believed God God counted him as righteous that happened before two two things it had precedence over two events one was Abraham's own circumcision and number two was the giving of the law

that are presidents it's the point Paul is making we're not going to be concerned with the part about this circumcision the part that Abraham was still an uncircumcised Gentile when God counted faithful but that's what Paul is getting at here

what we're going to look at here is

the

quote of Psalm 32 in this context so

we'll take this screen here that's just the text as we see it but by the way I think we all know this but in case uh this maybe someone here is fairly new to this uh to due to the faith or whatever now to the one who works this should be understood is the one who relies in works of the law

that's what that's a shorthand way of saying the one who works is the one who lives under the law who thinks they can earn righteousness by doing the right kinds of stuff if you do that then what you get are your wages because you earned it it's not a gift it's what you earned but we can't earn that so he says no it's really Faith okay so here's the next thing we're going to do

is drop out uh just highlight the five statements that Paul makes

within this argument the pulse making there are five statements that we want to look at one Abraham believed God it was counted him as righteousness two

the one who does not work that the one who does not rely on the law but believes

him who justifies the ungodly his faith is countered his righteousness that's a second statement about that

number three David also speaks of one to whom God counts righteousness apart from works that's his third statement fourth is almost a repetition of what he said earlier Faith was counted to Abraham's righteousness and an extension of that was the purpose was to him making the father of all all here in this contest being Jew and Gentile because

Abraham or actually Abram at the time was an uncircumcised Gentile when God accepted his faith

so there's our five statements

now if you notice some repetition or notice some

say oh hmm I've seen some patterns here well you're right so there's a what I call transitions he's Shifting the subject of each of these statements uh first one is about Abraham

the second one is a general statement to one who does not work that is one who lives by faith not by law

the third statement is about David he interjects here's a quote from the psalm of top topical Psalm psalm 32. now it's David is the subject here

for statement comes back to Abraham again

and the fifth statement is another general statement all who believe that is Jew and Gentile so we have here's the five statements that Paul makes inside of the context or in this section of Romans transferring the subject to Abraham to a general statement about people than to David back then to Abraham and another general statement okay now I'm gonna next slide's gonna I think this is gonna be our fourth uh pass of this I'm going to highlight some more key words in here and we're going to see even more patterns

there that's beautiful absolutely beautiful what's really beautiful is what's is like seeing the hidden text and what Paul just wrote so we have the red highlighted Words which is the subject of each statement

this yellow orange color is the faith word Abraham believed

one who does not work but believes him Faith there faith and believe here and of course in in Greek these are faith and belief are those from the same same root unlike in English we tend to not use the word belief

as a a noun for faith we or the verb uh we used to believes in faith but anyway there you have it and I looked at the blue ones

counted as righteousness counted as righteousness counts righteousness counted as righteousness righteousness would be counted to them so there's five statements about people whether it's Abraham David or a general uh populist of people of Faith all who believe here

this is how we are righteous before God

it's believing God it's not through doing works of law it is our trust that God is our trust that God is our creator and and all the things that are involved with believing in that the God we believe in

his promises and everything else

now one more and you maybe you saw this one coming already

this is a type of chiastic structure that's called chiasmus with alternation meaning

Abraham is the first element but it's not the lasting these first two function as a two-part unit because it's Abraham who believed as an example or in everybody else who is like Abraham there's a subset or we would say we are counted along with Abraham and then down here it's Faith was counted to Abraham to make him the father of all who believe so these two A and B here are repeated in that same order here A and B the key element here Steve when you said is that the middle elements often the key and here certainly is or at least it's something that's that's different because here's where he puts in psalm 32. so we have these five statements about belief

being counted as Faith excuse me belief being counted as right God accepts our faith as righteousness whether it's Abraham whether it's David or us we could say that's great company to be in now

before I go further

does anybody see here I said earlier there's a surprise coming this is where it is

and if you don't see it it's not because you don't know it's because I think it's just familiarity with something like this makes it hard to to notice something's really odd here this is organized

this is beautiful but there's something that is just completely peculiar about this setup here

there's a we say an expositional elephant in the room

David's faith is missing

David's faith you are about 75 of the way there yeah

I don't have another quarter you don't have the other quarter okay it doesn't say anything about David's Faith here

but let me ask you this question then you'll get it

what is the subject of Psalm 32 is about forgiveness right

what was Paul's General argument

here

it was about Abraham's faith in God's promises

so what the question is what does Psalm 32 have to do with with the argument at hand the argument was

was Abraham believing God this is Genesis 15. God showed him outside and took him outside on the hill look up the sky so shall your CD Abraham believed in God when he said leave her Abraham believed God when he said you'll have seed your seed will inherit the land everything

that Abraham the God spoke Abraham believed and trusted God

but there's nothing in the Abraham account that has anything to do with forgiveness

and there's nothing in Psalm 32 that has really anything to do with David's faith you see it now

it's an odd way if I were giving an exhortation about trusting God

in about if you believe God and if God says you know I promise you your seed will be like this I promise you you'll inherit the land I promise you you'll have a resurrection and to prove that let me quote to you from Psalm 32 just as David also speaks of the blessing of the one to whom God's counts right says depart from works that's not in psalm 32. there's nothing in Psalm 32 that

where David says I cannot earn your salvation

please accept my faith

so what we see here is

an inter a

blocking of two ideas here's the Abraham belief statement this is Genesis 15. God takes Abraham outside says look at the sky and count the Stars if indeed you can count them then he said to him so shall your Offspring be Abram believed in the Lord and He credited it to him

that's always a hard thing for me to say we counted it reckoned is righteousness accepted that Abraham's belief you know Abraham's standing up on the hillside looking at this marvelous

unlike polluted Sky you can imagine what it might have looked like without any artificial lights any place and he looks up and sees the Milky Way and everything and God says your seed will be like this and Abraham says I yeah I I believe you

so that's what Abrams was about

it's not about I'm not saying God never forgave her Abram it's just not in the text it's not about forgiveness nothing that's about forgiveness in the in that text

so that leaves this question so how does Psalm 32 fit in Romans 4. Paul obviously is inspired he knows what he's doing he's a an accomplished uh person in scripture to say the least

but he's putting something that's really a tangential to his argument in here

well as I just said forgiveness is not a feature of

the patriarchal it's

sure they made a lot of mistakes Abraham Isaac and Jacob but there's no place in here where forgiveness per se is something that they had faith in

God made a lot of promises but that wasn't it wasn't about that likewise Psalm 32 is not about faith at all it's about I will confess my sins and then we're okay but this doesn't say that by faith I I I I I trust that you will forgive me even though it seems likely that Psalm 32 was about David's Monumental sins

so Paul's merging two concepts here and here's where we're now getting I think to a a larger understanding of what confession uh might entail that it can be more than telling God what God already knows

if they're saying a melding of faith and forgiveness Paul is here couples

Abraham's trust in God's promises with David's experience

of God's forgiveness that experience where David said my bones were dried up and now I'm shouting for Joy he's putting these two it's a different both important the biblical ideas but he's he literally stuck David inside of Abraham never the David part was the core the center of the two statements about Abraham and about the rest of believers

so now we can look at Abraham who has always been the example of justification by faith

faith in believing God's promises about the land and the seed we can also say it includes his faith in God's forgiveness

so also David says David's experience

was Abraham's

and likewise if we look at David as the example of God's forgiveness because it was the colossally bad behavior with uh

stealing

Bathsheba committing adultery murdering her ex-husband I mean that's bad

I can't come close to that in anything I've ever done so so Dave was a great example of forgiveness and now by sticking it into Romans 4 we can see

that forgiveness is an Act of Faith when we pray for forgiveness we are

exemplifying our faith and trust that God will forgive us

this is just to me I find this amazingly I call it totally slick move because it's it's it's there we've read it hundreds of times

and you're so easy to pass over and say well look what Paul just did he took two extremely important Bible ideas

without any Fanfare without saying oh by the way this all he just says and so also David he quotes from Psalm 32. he pulls this entirely uh to different a Bible subject and puts it right in the middle of discussion of Abraham's justification by faith

now do we have time for this where are we we're good

I'm good okay there's one more part to this that really ties us all together uh any comments questions so far this would be good time to pause for a minute is everybody with me does anybody not see what I think is just so amazing here

okay so what's this play on words so go back to the text here in Romans 4. and

in the uh

the the highlighted words here is this we're going to focus on for a moment

and watch again the context

what the scripture say Abraham believed God who has counted him his righteousness to one who works and his wages are not counted as a gift but this is due to be singular and the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly his faith is counted as righteousness just as David also speaks to the blessings and then he goes to David he says one who does not trust works but believes in him who justifies the ungodly

that I just said that Abraham believed God in his counting his righteousness

and now he's saying that he justifies the ungodly does that seem like an appropriate

way to talk about Abraham

says Abraham believe God and then to anyone who believes in him who justifies the ungodly well that doesn't seem

quite quite nice there but okay let's let's follow this and see where we're going I wouldn't call Abraham ungodly

so that's the verse we just read

and go back to Psalm 32. and right after the verse where it says David says that I will confess my sins to the Lord and

uh not cover my transgression so forth David says

therefore let everyone who is Godly

offer prayer to you at a time when you may be found

does this seem a little odd it seems odd to me or did it first

where he used the word ungodly to talk about Abraham but David talks about The Godly person when he's just talking about being the most hideous person of all these horrible crimes he committed he says everyone who's Godly should offer prayer prayer for confessions so

context of Psalm 32 is David asking for forgiveness his sin is unstated but okay here we have the Psalm 32 parallels 51 that hadn't specifies his sin

that's where we see the word Godly

however the word ungodly shows up in context of Abraham's complete trust in God to give him the promise seed Genesis 15. so what's Paul getting at here and David it's it seems Seems backwards it seems David should be saying the ungodly should pray to you because they need forgiveness

and the godly people like Abraham

their faith is accepted that these are turned

uh inverted they're they're reversed

so what's the story what what is this about say it's another another one the surprise that Paul has for us here uh

well one thing for sure is that

when he writes ungodly he is certainly alluding back to Psalm 32 to the word Godly in psalm 32. so let's go back to our Unholy Trinity and and put all these

ideas together

as I said earlier I think we might be able to assign

uh some Nuance we can take these all three collectively as uh as an idiomatic phrase to say the whole whole thing block stop and Barrel or fish line and no cook Line and Sinker that's how it goes oh

or it may be I'm really you know I wouldn't push this I'm not going to say this is a real type correspondence but transgression is probably has to do with breaking specific laws it's about what you do or what you don't do you transgress

sin the word for sin is likely mostly associated with what I value what I want in other words I really want Bathsheba it's the kind of lust that's the the thoughts that that lie behind the acts and I say value it's usually it's it's a negative value I really want something I shouldn't have something that's not good for me something that's not right that's the word the translated stem probably has that nuance and iniquity might be a more general term just talking about our nature our character in general we are just

Unholy people no matter how we are limited created beings so we could take all these three

and say we need

confession to heal us from all of these not just what we do wrong but all three parts need need forgiveness do what we do what we think and for our essential human

nature we we just have no standing before God regardless of anything else

confession is much less let's say it's not we don't get this big release by telling God what God already knows

and as if God were to say oh really you did oh

man that's bad but I'll forgive you thanks for letting me know no that that's that's now it is it's more of a large-scale recognition that I say it's more about telling ourselves

what we need to know about the sinner forgiver relationship it's about relationship with God and relationship with what I call an identity level function it's not about what we do it's about Who We Are

God is the Creator and the forgiver we are the created The Limited and the uh great example here is in the famous uh passage in Luke 18 with the Pharisee and the tax collector the Pharisee said I fast and I TI he's talked about what he does and the only mention he makes of who he is is who he isn't I'm not like these people I do this the tax collectors said what the mercile to meet a sinner he it's it's a an identity statement I am it's not I do sin or I think I am a sinner be merciful that's what I mean by a uh

identity relationship as we either we relate to people whether it's Human Relationships or human Divine it's it's Who We Are

to who God is and we have to know who we are and that's this

created limited uh people with Minds that just don't want to work right

so confession heals the soul finally getting to

the punch line here

confession heals the soul when we know that God accepts our faith and his forgiveness

that this merging of this ideas of faith and forgiveness in Romans 4 that has that dimension

when we trust God this is important because

he I'm sure you've heard this and maybe you felt this many times or thought this that you know I've been so bad God can't forgive me

that our faith is lacking because we don't know who God is in our nature it's limited but God's not saying be perfect he's saying trust me and I'll make you perfect that's my job I'll fix that later but you have to trust me that I know who you are and if you know who you are and we'll get to that kind of relationship with God to me

that's the confession to be merciful to me I am a sinner that's the healing of the Soul that's when David can say in Psalm 32 it's not in there

that's implicit from the beginning to the end of the psalm that he has realized that no matter how bad he was

that he still has faith

that God will accept him in his need he says I need to be right with you again but I have to acknowledge who I am before you and who you are

that's the kind of confession that heals the soul