“Finding Refuge from Our Sin” (Psalm 32)

Last week as we began our series on the Psalms, we saw that the purpose of the Psalms is to guide us in the way of blessing. God invites us to a life of becoming like a tree planted by streams of water: resilient, strong, alive, fruitful, and he gives us the Psalms to train us to walk in that way of blessing. Specifically, the Psalms teach us that the way of blessing is found in taking refuge in the rule of God through Christ.

This morning we see a Psalm that explicitly continues to instruct us in the way of blessing. “Blessed is the one,” it begins. And as with before, this blessing continues to be about taking refuge in God. Verse 7 speaks of God being a hiding place; verse 10 talks about God surrounding us. This is refuge language. This Psalm tells us more about what it means to take refuge in the rule of God. “Blessed,” we are told, is the one whose transgression is forgiven.”

This Psalm is very personal, it’s a testimony. And so it may be helpful to start with the likely backstory to this Psalm of David. David is perhaps the closest Israel got to having a celebrity leader in the Old Testament, with his son Solomon being really the only other candidate. During David’s reign as king, he experienced unparalleled success as a military leader; he brought the nation together as a political figure, and he was also a revered religious figure, showing a deep faith towards God. From the perspective of his nation, he could do no wrong. He was adored.

And yet David used that power and reputation to do something truly terrible. At some point in his reign as king, he had his court officials summon Bathsheba, the wife of one of his best friends, into a private room with him, and then in this position of power, he violated her.

A few months later, he heard from Bathsheba that she was pregnant with his child. Now, I’m not sure David allowed himself to think too carefully about what he had done, but at least a part of him knew that what he had done was terrible, and he became afraid. Afraid of what would happen if this became known, afraid of the consequences for his action. He felt the need to hide, to protect himself, and so he did what so many people in power do in situations like this. He went into damage control mode, doing everything to cover it up. Eventually he chose to  have his friend killed rather than to have his sin exposed.

David took refuge, you might say, in his own actions by burying them as best as he could, by hiding.

We understand that impulse, don’t we? Do you know sometimes how if a young child does something they know is wrong—perhaps in their anger they take something from the table and throw it and break it. And then they look at you, and realize they’re in trouble, so they run away and hide. Have you ever seen a kid do something like that? Let me ask, what is their plan in this? What’s the end game here, just to hide forever? Obviously there is none—just a desire to hide from what they’ve done.

Now I don’t think this impulse really goes away as we grow up. Whenever we discover something wrong about ourselves, truly wrong, there’s an impulse within us to hide. I’m not just talking here about specific actions, although there are moments when we do something that we know is wrong, but to what we feel is wrong about ourselves. You know that there’s a person you should be: kinder, more generous, but you’re not. You know that there are things you should do, that you need to do, but you keep avoiding them. Or there are things you know you need to stop doing, but you keep going back to them. When it comes to God, If you’re like most people, you believe that there is a God in this world, but you don’t feel terribly secure in your standing with him. You’re not terribly sure the life you are living is the life he wants you to live.

Wherever we feel this wrongness, this sense of failure, our tendency still like that little kid is to hide. Not literally, of course. Sometimes we hide through action: we try to fix whatever is wrong, or compensate or hide it: we act, because we feel better acting than just sitting with a sense of failure. And when we can’t fix it, then we bury it, we send it deep to the ocean floor of our sous, we avoid thinking about it. We try to find safety, refuge, by hiding.

But David now realizes that this impulse to hide—it doesn’t work. When we follow that, we’re not really thinking. We don’t have a strategy or an end game. Verse 9: “Don’t be like a horse or mule without understanding,” the impulse to deal with our wrong by somehow hiding is like an animal that gallops away when it hears thunder. David can tell you that it doesn’t work. He now sees that while he thought he was hiding from others, he really ultimately was hiding the truth from himself, pretending that everything was okay. Pretending that nobody would see, nobody would know, when of course deep down he knew all along: God knows. 

Now, thankfully for him, David wasn’t able to stay in that place of hiding and self-deceit. His own body wouldn’t let him. “When I kept silent,” that is, when David sought to hide, to bury what he had done, “my bones wasted away through my groaning.” Something deep within him was so unsettled that it was like his whole body groaned. He physically ached. As much as he tried to hide himself from his problem, as much as he tried to forget what he had done, it’s like his body cried out in disagreement.

And David understands that it wasn’t just something inside of him. It was God himself. Verse 4: “Day and night your hand was heavy upon me.” Much as David was trying to forget what he had done and what it meant, God wouldn’t let him.

In the opening verses David uses a triad of words to describe his wrong; together they give us a sense of why his body was crying out even as he tried to forget.

• Transgression, which is about relationship, the breach of trust. If you ever feel like you really hurt a close friend, you saw the shock on their face, you know how it feels when you have transgressed. David viscerally feels the rupture he has caused in his relationship with the God he loves.
• The word Sin is more about failure, falling short of what we know we should be. In the depths of his being, David feels revulsion, shame for his failure to be the person he knows he should be.
• Iniquity is more about guilt, about the penalty that a wrong act deserves—a debt, you might say, to God’s justice, that needs to be paid. Together with a sense of rupture in relationship and shame, David is also afraid of what he has done.

God’s hand is heavy upon him; he feels the rupture in the relationship, the shame at his failure, the guilt of what he had done. Even as he tries to hide himself his body groans. And if you think about it, that’s a good thing. Given what he has done, he should be afraid and feel shame and recognize the rupture in his relationship with God.

Perhaps this morning are feeling something like this. If you have tried to hide the reality of what you are from others and even from God, if you’ve tried to bury this troubling reality from your own sight and yet at the same time you feel an inner groaning, an unsettledness, an almost physical burden about these things, I want you to understand that this isn’t God cursing you. This is God showing his kindness to you. Because he is seeking to rescue you out of a refuge that ultimately is not safe.

I recently read a tragic story of a woman named Peggy Colson a recently-retired woman who lived in Matlacha, an island near Fort Meyers FL. As you might remember in September of last year, news started talking about Hurricane Ian forming off the coast of Florida. Different authorities began to encourage people along the coast to move to safer areas; Peggy considered leaving but chose not to. On September 27, warnings turned to mandatory calls for evacuation, Peggy’s brother Jim pleaded with Peggy to leave her home, but she continued to choose not to. Why? We might ask. Because she was too scared. She knew a threat was coming, and her instinct was to turn to what felt safest to her, what was most familiar to her. She wanted to take refuge in her own home, even though she herself knew that this was unwise.

The next morning, the storm began to pick up, Peggy began to seriously worry; she called 911, but they said they couldn’t help until the storm was past. She texted her brother, “The storm’s blown off the back door and the water’s coming in.” It was her last message to her brother—a few days later her body was found in the water near where her home had been.

What David is telling you; what God is telling you; what your very body and soul are telling you is that even though you might be afraid, the way of dealing with your own wrong is not through avoiding or hiding or burying—this is no more of a refuge than Peggy’s house was in a hurricane. You need to find a better refuge from your sin.

God is a Safe Refuge from Our Sin

And what this Psalm is meant to help us understand is that the place to take refuge from our sins is not in our own hiding, but in God.

And even as I say that, I want to just acknowledge that this goes against every natural intuition that you or I might have. Because if we think even a little bit, we’ll know that God is the person in the universe that we are most sure will not treat our wrong lightly. We might be able to spin who we are and what we have done to others, but God can see all of our falsity. And while others might be so caught up in their own sin that they don’t really recognize how wrong it is, God sees our wrong in all its awfulness, and God hates it. And so it feels to us that if there is one person that we should avoid more than any other, it’s God.

But the reality is the very opposite; the true refuge from the wrong we have done, the only safe place, is God himself.

Continuing in the Psalm, after burying and hiding and avoiding, eventually the pain was too great for David. Verse 5: “I acknowledged my sin to you and I did not cover my iniquity; I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord.” Here’s the turning point in the Psalm. David in desperation stops hiding and avoiding. Before God he becomes transparent about his shameful failure; he uncovers and exposes his guilt, and he directly acknowledges to God the way that he betrayed God and broke this relationship.

And what did God do in response? “And you forgave the iniquity of my sin.”

Verses 1 and 2 give a fuller description of what happened.

• David’s transgression is forgiven. The word here for forgive literally has the idea of lifting away. God has carried away from David this burden so that it no longer affects their relationship. It’s gone.
• The sin of his failure is covered, it’s no longer exposed. Where David had shame, God now has clothed him in beauty.
• The iniquity, the debt of David’s guilt is not counted against him—there is no remaining anger in God toward what he has done. It’s as if it’s all forgotten.

What David came to discover is that the very God he had sinned against was actually the place refuge he had been seeking when he was trying to hide—and not just for him, but for everyone else as well. In verse 6 he speaks for those who turn to God in confession: “surely in the rush of great waters, they shall not reach him.” If we were to imagine that hurricane again, David is saying that any who turn to God in prayer will not be swept away by the waters. “You,” he says in verse 7, are a hiding place for me. What a statement. All that time hiding from God, and now he realizes that God is the one he can hide in and actually find safety. “You,” David says, “preserve me from trouble, you surround me with shouts of deliverance.”

I want to pause, because I think sometimes there’s some confusion about what David means here. David is not saying that God removes him from all trouble, but rather that God preserves him. There’s an important difference. If you know David’s story, you will know that even after his confession to God, his sin still has consequences, consequences that will affect both his family life and his political reign. God never promises to remove the earthly consequences of our actions. To use a modern example, when a pastor is found to be involved in some terrible form of sexual abuse, if at some point in his life he truly confesses his sin and guilt to God and to others, he is indeed forgiven by God and can know that God is for him and will care for him. But he will still need to lose his job and likely even need to go to prison. Part of no longer hiding involves accepting all the consequences for what he had done; God does not promise to remove us from those consequences. What David speaks of here is God preserving him even as he experiences these troubles, of God delivering him through them. David knows that he can now face what he has done because God is his safe place, his refuge.  

Which is an extraordinary thing. David did something absolutely horrific, there is no other way of speaking of it. And yet he discovered that the very God who so deeply hates sin also is a God who chooses to be a refuge for sinners, he is a God who forgives. That was true for David. And it’s true for you and me as well.

In verse 6, David speaks of a time translated here as “time when you may be found;” but which could also be translated “the time of discovery.” There will be, David is saying, certain times in our lives, perhaps for a period of many days or maybe only for a short while, when what we have hidden will be uncovered. When truths about ourselves that we have sought to plunge to the bottom of our soul’s ocean will come to the surface. There are moments when God will make us aware of the reality about ourselves that we have tried to escape. It will feel like God’s hand is pressing down heavy on us as we are forced to confront how we have wronged God, how we have failed, how we are guilty. 

What David has discovered is that in that moment, the thing to do is not to flee from God, but to flee to God. “Offer a prayer to God in that time of discovery,” David tells us. Stop hiding from yourself and tell God the truth. Blessed, says David, is the one in whose spirit there is no deceit,” because they have brought it all to God.

I hope the simple point in David’s Psalm is becoming plain to you. Blessed is the one, our Psalm begins. Blessing here is not being promised to the one who does everything right. While that may be true, that is not the promise. Blessing comes to the one who has done all sorts of things wrong, even unspeakable things and yet who seeks refuge in the forgiveness of God by confessing to him.

Some of you right now are carrying unimaginably heavy burdens. You’re so tired, and yet you don’t know what to do. Some of you have been trying for so long to hide, to bury, to avoid, to ignore, and yet at times it feels like your guilt and shame are crushing you. If you’ve never brought these things to God. Or if you have, but you’ve forgotten and put them back on your shoulders, I want you to hear this. Your God is a safe place to flee to. Your God is a refuge, and he will always deliver you, even from your sin. When you stop hiding; if you choose to be honest to God and acknowledge all that you are ashamed of, all of your guilt, you will find safety in God.  

Last week, we considered how, before the Psalms are our songs, they are the songs of the Anointed One, the descendant of David, that is, of Jesus. This might feel like a strange Psalm to speak of as a song of Jesus, because we know that Jesus never had any sins to confess; he never tried to escape God and hide the truth. While that is true, we don’t need to imagine that when at the synagogue it came time to sing Psalm 32 Jesus just shut his mouth, watching others acknowledge sin. Jesus came to this earth to become one of us, to join with us in our sin-sick suffering and to lift us out. Jesus, the perfect one, chose to identify with us; he made our sin his sin. He passionately sang Psalm 32, not about him, but on behalf of us, confessing the sins of his people. And then he not only confessed, he bore our sins on his very body, carrying all of our sin our guilt or shame before God on the cross. In that moment of revulsion and groaning at the weight of sin, what did Jesus do? He turned to God for his refuge, “Into your hands I commit my spirit.” Three days later when God raised him from the dead, God was pronouncing him “Not guilty,” and not just him, but every single person who has placed their trust in him.

Here’s a remarkable thought. Whenever you confess your sins to God, you are never alone. Jesus is praying beside you, confessing with you, walking with you as you take refuge in God. And it is Jesus himself who sings to you the words of verse 10, what he knows to be true. “Many are the sorrows of the wicked.” Many are the sorrows of those who choose to hide themselves and protect themselves from their own sin. But, Jesus declares, steadfast love surrounds the one who trusts in the Lord. Steadfast love surrounds you when you takes refuge in God.

This is, if you haven’t recognized it already, an invitation to you. It doesn’t matter what you have done or who you are. It doesn’t matter even how imperfect your faith or your confession is. When you who flee to God, when you confess the wrong that you have done and the ways that you have failed, God will embrace you like a father hugging his child, he will surround you with his love. This is the way of blessing: blessed are all confess their sins and experience God’s forgiveness. Let’s do that now.