So, even though what is said
about sinners is true of us, yet there's this great, great
blessing that's indescribable that God doesn't impute our sin
to us. Now, it doesn't strike us necessarily
as amazing until we think about it by God's grace and understand
the phenomena of this non-imputation of our sins to us. How can this
be? What is God saying here? Well,
how is it that God, who is the judge and cannot do wrong, his
nature will not allow him to compromise his truth and justice
and his righteousness? He will not allow him to do that.
He himself is opposed to that. And yet it says here, God does
not impute sin to sinners, those who are guilty of it. How can
that be? How can God, who is the judge,
be just and yet not impute, not charge us for the very sins that
we're guilty of? And that's the question that
only the gospel answers. So that's what raises our awe
and our amazement, our adoration of the blessedness that God has
described here. How blessed it is that God would
not impute to me my sin. There's nothing that rises to
this level of delight in our hearts that God has not imputed
our sins to us because he has imputed them to the Lord Jesus
Christ. And the reason that God can do
this is because our sins were lifted from us by him and they
were placed on, they were laid upon the Lord Jesus Christ. That's
what it means here in the first verse where he says, blessed
is he whose transgression is forgiven. The word forgiven here
means lifted up and born by another. They were born by God in Christ. So our sins were taken, they
were lifted from us. Not only did He bear them, but
He removed them from us and from before God's face. And that's
what it's talking about here. That man is truly blessed. That
God does not impute His sins to him. It said, we looked at
this a couple weeks ago, and I mentioned this to you, that
Shimei asked David not to impute his sin to him. Remember that?
He was guilty. He threw rocks at David. He cursed
David. He cursed his men and threw rocks
at them. And yet, he asked David not to
impute his sin to them. And that's the way we do. And
then in Psalm 103, it says this in verse 3 of Psalm 103, who
forgiveth all thine iniquities, who healeth all thy diseases. And in verse 12 of Psalm 103,
it says, as far as the east is from the west, so far has he
removed our transgressions from us. So that's the reason that
God does not impute our sins to us, because he imputed them
to the Lord Jesus Christ. And the Lord Jesus Christ bore
them as his own sins before God. And he suffered for them, and
he removed them. He, his own self, bear our sins
in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins,
should live unto righteousness, by whose stripes we were healed."
Now, that's from 1 Peter 2.24. So we see in that that the Lord
Jesus Christ himself was the one who took our sins from us.
He bore them. He took them away, He removed
them from before God's face, and God remembers them no more. He remembers our sins no more. He removed them as far as the
east is from the west, and He will not remember them any more.
Now in this text of scripture in verse one and two, it uses
three words to describe our sin. The first is transgression. He
says, blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven. And then he says,
whose sin is covered. And then he goes on and says,
blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not impute iniquity,
or imputeth not iniquity. So these three words describe
the totality of our sin. Transgression means breaking
God's law. It means doing what God tells
us not to do or not doing what God tells us to do. We do what
he prohibits and we fail to do what he requires of us. That's
transgression. And sin is what we are in our
very nature. Jesus said this in Mark chapter
seven. He said, From within, out of
the heart of man, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications,
murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness,
an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness. All these evil things
come from within and defile the man. So sin is not something
that we become because of our environment, which is the way
I naturally think of it. The reason I do the things that
I do is because someone led me to do them when I was young and
they infected me with these bad thoughts and these bad habits,
but it was from within. It wasn't anyone else's fault.
It was all my fault. And so it also says in Psalm
51 and verse 5, David said, in sin did my mother conceive me. It wasn't that his birth was
a sinful birth, but he was sinful as a result of his birth to his
mother and father who came, that sin came from Adam. that sinful
nature. In Romans 8, verse 7, it says,
the carnal mind is enmity against God. It is not subject to the
law of God and it cannot be. So that's what we are by nature.
We're sin. We're sin in every way. And at the flood, remember
what God said before the flood? He said this. God saw that the
wickedness of man was great in the earth and that every imagination
of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. That's a pretty... condemning
judgment by God on our condition, isn't it? Only evil continually. And then you would think that
since he destroyed all men on the earth except Noah and his
family in the flood, you would think that that sin problem would
have been removed, but it wasn't. It says in Genesis 8, verse 21,
after the flood, he says, I will not again curse the ground anymore
for man's sake, for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his
youth. Neither will I again smite any
more every living thing as I have done." So God knew, even after
the flood, that man, men, all men, were sinful in their thoughts,
in their imaginations, their thoughts were evil, and that
continually. So we would, you know, how you
sometimes say, well, if we looked up the word, you know, some word
in the dictionary, it'd have your picture beside it, trying
to insult somebody. We could say that about sin,
couldn't we? If we look up the word sin in
the dictionary, what would we find in the definition? a picture
of us, who we are in our very heart and nature. And that's
why it says here that it is a blessed thing for our transgression,
for our failure to keep God's requirements and our deliberate
offense in doing what God prohibits. That transgression is forgiven. Our sin is covered. That means
God covered it up. He doesn't see it. He has hidden
it under the Lord Jesus Christ's precious blood. And then it says
iniquity. And the word iniquity is often
used with respect to what God's people do in their attempts to
serve God. In Exodus chapter 28 it says,
Aaron may bear the iniquity of the holy things. which the children
of Israel shall hallow in all their holy gifts, and it shall
be always upon his forehead that they may be accepted before the
Lord." So when we go about to serve the Lord, there's sin in
that. There's sin in our worst thoughts. There's sin in our
best thoughts. All that is, if you want to describe
us, you would have to come up with that description of us that
the Lord has given. Only evil continually in our
natural selves, in what we are by nature. I heard Todd Nybert
say that Charles Spurgeon gave this statement, and Todd considered
it one of the best things Charles Spurgeon ever said. He says,
when I look at my sins, and I don't know if I'm quoting it just right,
I'm taking it from the way Todd said it. Charles Spurgeon said,
when I look at my sins, my good works and my bad works, I can't
tell the difference between the two. And the only safe thing
for me to do, therefore, is to come into heaven on the plank
of pure grace." Now, I love that because you can see, and Charles
Spurgeon understood the gospel, didn't he? People who understand
the gospel, they speak the truth about themselves, and they speak
the truth about what God has said concerning our salvation,
that it is in Christ alone. And that's what this verse of
scripture is saying to us. Yes, we are sinners, but how
blessed it is that God does not impute our sin to us. Like Shimei,
David, don't impute my perverseness to me. Don't impute sin to me.
He was the King, the Lord Jesus Christ is the King, and He's
the Judge. So, our sin is not imputed because
it was imputed to Christ. His righteousness was established
in His obedience to God, and that righteousness is imputed
to us. God doesn't compromise. Sin was dealt with in Him. And
God doesn't fall short of fulfilling righteousness because he imputes
the obedience of the Lord Jesus Christ to us as our own righteousness. We didn't obey. We got to get
that straight. We did not obey. Christ did. In fact, he's the only one who
did. There is none righteous. No, not one. And yet the Lord
Jesus Christ is the only one good. He's the only man. of whom
it could be said, in Adam all die, but in Christ all shall
be made alive. All right. So now, it was the
obedience of the Lord Jesus Christ that was obedience to God in
taking away our sins. And I want you to see this in
Hebrews chapter 10. This is the obedience that we
couldn't render. We couldn't give this obedience.
But this is the obedience that was required in order to take
away our sins and to establish God's righteousness that he would
impute to us because this was God's work in Christ. He says
in Hebrews chapter 10 in verse five, When he came into the world,
Jesus, the Son of God, as the Son of Man, when he came into
the world, he said, notice what he's talking about, sacrifice
and offering, thou wouldest not, but a body thou hast prepared
me. In burnt offerings and sacrifices
for sin thou hast had no pleasure, then said I, Lo, I come, in the
volume of the book it is written of me, to do thy will, O God."
Thank God that someone was appointed and able to do the will of God,
which we did not do. He says above when he said sacrifice
and offering and burnt offerings and offering for sin, thou wouldest
not neither hence pleasure therein which are offered by the law.
Then he said, Lo, I come to do thy will, O God. He taketh away
the first, the first covenant that he may establish the second,
which was the covenant in Christ's precious blood, the everlasting
covenant which was made in his precious blood. And by the witch
will, by God's will, now this is of God's doing. God designed
this. He took the initiative and he
said it and he required it and he set it out for Christ to do.
By that will, we are sanctified through the offering of the body
of Jesus Christ once for all. What amazing grace that is. Isn't
that our hope? Isn't that our hope? It was obedience
by which Christ bore our sins in obedience to the will of God.
And he came to do the will and delighted in it, the will of
God he delighted in. He humbled himself, it says in
Philippians 2, verse 6 through 8, and he became obedient unto
death, even the death of the cross. And that obedience is
the righteousness imputed to us. Excuse me. So that is the obedience. Not only does it say that there,
but in Romans chapter 5 and verse 9, it says we're justified. That
means God has justified his people. by Christ's blood, okay? So it's the blood that justifies,
doesn't it? It is the blood that takes away
our sin. It's Christ's obedience and shedding
his life on the cross that is our righteousness, and that is
imputed to us. That's what takes away our sin.
That's what makes us holy before God. By that one sacrifice, we're
sanctified. We're perfected. by the offering
of the body of Jesus Christ. All these things are designed
by God to show us what we are, to persuade us with an unshakable
persuasion that all of our hope is in the Lord Jesus Christ. Now we receive that justification
from God that Christ accomplished in shedding his blood when we
believe. It isn't that God moves the abacus
things up and down like an accountant when we believe. because they
were already moved by the Lord Jesus Christ in God's accounting
when He shed His precious blood. It was the offering of Christ
that perfected forever them that are sanctified. It's the offering
of Christ, the sacrifice of Christ that made us holy and it's His
obedience that is our righteousness. But when we believe When we believe,
that's God's gift to us to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, then
we experience, we come into the awareness of this and we receive
what's true. We see what God has seen. And that's what we want to look
at some more here in the following verses. All right. Let me go on to verse 3 of Psalm
32, so we get through this tonight. It says, in Psalm 32, verse 3,
David says, oh, I haven't finished up the last part of verse 2.
Notice the last part of verse 2. It says, blessed is the man
to whom the Lord imputeth not iniquity, and in whose spirit
there is no guile. Now, in our spirit, there is
no guile. That's what Jesus said about
Nathanael. Remember in John chapter one,
he said, an Israelite indeed in whom is no guile. There's
no deceit here in this man. That's a phenomenal thing to
say. How could it be that we would have no guile in our spirit? Well, first of all, understand
that when the Lord saves us, when he causes us to see the
things that are being spoken of here in Psalm 32, it's out
of the context in David's experience of a great conviction of sin,
the guilt of his wrong pressed down upon him heavily. And what
did he do as a result of that? He confessed his sin to God. He agreed with God about himself
that he was a transgressor, a sinner, and an iniquitous person. And
that he agreed that only in the Lord Jesus Christ could God take
away and lift up and remove his sin and impute Christ's righteousness
to him. He agreed about these things.
And in that sense, he was in agreement with God. And you could
say, insofar as he was able to do that, there was no guile in
him. But within us, in our own experiences
and our thoughts and our motives and our understanding, in our
desires, all these things have a mixture of sin in them. So we can't separate in our own
selves, oh, that was done perfectly, and that other thing, that was
full of sin. No, it's all infected by sin. But God does say, and
this is the truth of the way things are, that even though
we were born in sin and received from our father Adam a nature
that is only sinful, yet when we're born of God, then we receive
a nature that is only holy. Because the Spirit of God cannot
give birth to what is unclean. He only births what is holy. And so when it says here that
in whose spirit is no guile, he's talking about that. He's
talking about the fact that we are given a new man, a new nature,
and in Scripture it's called many things. It's called the
new birth. In John chapter 3, it's called a resurrection. In Ephesians chapter 2, it's
called a new creation. Also in Ephesians 2 verse 10,
where his workmanship created in Christ Jesus unto good works.
And so you see in these things, their new birth, their regeneration,
our being created in Christ, our being raised from death to
life in our spirit, all are talking about the same thing. It's the
operation of the Spirit of God in us. which creates in us a
new spirit, a new nature. As God said in the new covenant,
I will put my spirit within them. He said, I will give them a new
heart. I will put the fear of the Lord
in them. All these things speak about
God's operation by his spirit to create Christ in us. In Galatians 2.20, the Apostle
Paul says, I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live,
yet not I, but Christ liveth in me. So he's talking about
the spiritual man. And this is the new man here
spoken of, the spirit, the man in whose spirit there is no guile.
And why is this given to us? Well, again, The new spirit given
to us is because of not only God's will and covenant and promises,
but also for Christ's righteousness sake. In Romans 8, verse 10,
he says, the body is dead because of sin, but the spirit is life
because of righteousness. And this is the truth that's
spoken of throughout the book of Romans, that sin once reigned
over us to death, but now grace reigns through righteousness
unto eternal life. And we know that that new spirit
within us is created. It is not going to die. It has been raised and it shall
go, as the Lord has said, directly into glory on our own death. to be absent from the body is
to be present with the Lord. And that doesn't require any
change in us because God's spirit, Christ himself, dwells in us
by his spirit and he has created us in Christ. So that's what
that's speaking about here. But let's go on in verse three
when he says, when I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my
roaring all the day long. I think it's interesting here
that he was silent and yet at the same time he was roaring.
Isn't that doesn't that seem like a paradox? How could he
be roaring if he was silent? Well, because he says, when I
kept silence, when I hid in my conscience from God, as Adam
did, when I hid myself from my own sin and pretended to be doing
right the view of others, except some who were insiders, they
knew about it, like Joab or Bathsheba, they knew about it, and probably
some of David's close people in his palace, but most of people
didn't see it until Nathan the prophet was sent by God to David
to confront him and say, what did you do? And he gave him that
comparison between a rich man who had many sheep and the poor
man who had but one. And the rich man took the poor
man's only sheep, which was as dear to him as a daughter, and
he killed it when his friend came for dinner. So this enraged
David so much that he said, that man will surely die. And Nathan
the prophet pointed at David. Can you imagine the prophet pointing
at the king? That's what we need today, some men who are bold
enough to tell the people in authority, thus saith the Lord,
right? Thus saith the Lord doesn't bow
to any man. So that's what Nathan did. He
looked at David and he says, you're the man. And then David,
you know, it says in 2 Samuel chapter 12, then he confessed
his sin. And that's when his silence was
broken. What he's saying here is all
that time when he was silent about his wrong, his murdering
of Uriah, his adultery with Uriah's wife, that's why he murdered
him, and his cover-up of all that, his lying hypocrisy, This
was so contrary to what you read about David in other ways, where
he seemed to have the heart even of God himself, and yet in this
case, his sin was so flagrant, it says in 2 Samuel chapter 12,
the thing that David did displeased the Lord. And this is what it
says in scripture just before God pronounces judgment on his
enemies. It displeased the Lord, and so
God took action. So it says, David said to Nathan,
I have sinned against the Lord. And Nathan said to David, notice
these words. They're so gracious. The Lord
also has put away your sin. Thou shalt not die. Amazing,
isn't that? Isn't that what Psalm 32 is saying
here? Blessed is the man to whom the
Lord will not impute sin. I'm guilty. My very nature, he
says in Psalm 51, I was shapen in iniquity and sinned and my
mother conceived me. And all that I do is full of
sin, therefore called iniquity. Our best, our righteousnesses
are as filthy rags, and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us
away. So the iniquity is what we do in our attempts to serve
God, but it's full of sin. And so David understands that
he's in agreement with God now and he poured out his heart in
agreement with God. And he confesses that all the
time I kept silence inside, I was roaring. He was roaring. And then he goes on to the next
verse. He said, for day and night, thy hand was heavy upon me. My moisture is turned into the
drought of summer. into the drought of summer. What's
that? Well, that's the desert. He was a man who had no moisture. And that brings to our mind that
he was not, during this time when he had sinned and was covering
it up, he wasn't partaking of Christ. He wasn't eating and
drinking of his blood and righteousness. He was like an unbeliever. He
had left off coming to the throne of grace. And so it wasn't like
Jesus says in John 7, he says, if any man thirst, let him come
unto me and drink. He wasn't coming and drinking
of Christ because his sin had silenced him. His conscience
wouldn't allow him to come to God. And only by God's grace
did God confront and expose and bring him to see that all of
his hope was in Christ. And that's what God does for
us. Isn't that what he has done for us? When we were under the
burden of our sin, then we understood that God has lifted the burden
from us and placed it on Christ. Then we knew, then we knew that
is what God has done in Christ, not what I do in myself that
saves me. That's my only hope, isn't it?
We came to the same view that God says is the truth of the
way things are, that there's none righteous. Christ is the
one good. He's the one who has done the
will of God. All of our righteousness is in him. And we see him as
the savior of sinners. We see him as the judge, as the
Lord and as the savior. We're convinced that our only
hope is in him. And we pour forth our heart.
Yes, I've sinned, but God is gracious in the Lord Jesus Christ. And so God's hand was heavy on
David's conscience. And that burden turned all of
the moisture that was in his soul into a desert place. So
this is the chastening hand of God, isn't it? It's the way that
God afflicts believers in their conscience. David's moisture
was dried up. He felt his sin. He sensed the
separation between himself and God. And he hid himself from
his own sin and his own self, as Adam did, thinking by ignoring
his sin to himself, it would give him some peace with God.
So he had no comfort because he wasn't forthcoming. He wasn't
doing, as it says in verse two, the man in whose spirit is no
guile. Oh, he was a believer. He was a saved man. But what
happened here? His sin got the better of him. And in Psalm 65, verse three,
it says, Iniquities prevail against me. So he cries out to the Lord,
My iniquities, like my enemies, prevail against me. Saul was
his enemy, but he was no comparison to his own sin, was it? And so
he's he's pouring these things out and he longs for that drink
of the well from the well of God's salvation in Christ. So
he's so thirsty for that and he pours out his heart. Give
me again. Tell me, turn, cause your face
to shine and turn us again, as it says in Psalm 80. And so it
was God's hand that brought him out of the roaring in his silence,
out of the desert of his failure to come to Christ and to live
upon him. And that's what sin does. An unconfessed sin. Not facing what we are and coming
to God as sinners. This is a grace from God. But
when we are not doing that, When God withholds that from us, what
happens? It leaves us sunken. We're desperate
in our souls and God has to rescue us. And then in verse five, he
says this, he says, I acknowledged my sin to thee, and my iniquity
have I not hid. I said, I will confess my transgressions
unto the Lord, and thou forgave us the iniquity of my sin. Notice,
he confessed it to the Lord. Sure, he told Nathan, yeah, I
have sinned. But his confession was given
to God in prayer. In Psalm 51, you can read about
it. In fact, Psalm 32 is that confession too. David and all
of us must take our case to Christ. And don't don't fall into that
trap of thinking, well, I told so and so about it. They're a
good friend. And I opened up and spilled my, you know, my
my situation out to them. What a scumbag I was. And so
that we find some relief. Don't let that be the end of
it. In fact, don't let that be the first thing. In fact, don't
even do that because what you do then is you burden others
with your sin. That's not for them to carry.
People know you're a sinner. They know I'm a sinner. You don't
have to tell them. They can observe it pretty plain.
The things we think are so well hidden are pretty evident. It's
on our face. It's in the way we talk and act
and everything. Things we do, things we don't
do. It becomes pretty plain what we are to others. We don't have
to go on and on about it. What we need is grace. And the
only place to find that is at the throne of grace in the Lord
Jesus Christ. And so he says, I acknowledge
my sin to thee and my iniquity have I not hid. I said, I will
confess my transgressions to the Lord and thou forgavest my
sin. So when by God's grace we, like
David, confess our sins to the Lord, then we see and then we
find and know our cleansing and obedience is where? In Christ
alone. It has to be. We have no hope
unless it is. Isn't that the case? What if
our salvation depended upon our confessing our sins? We would
never confess them all. We don't know them all. We forget
them. We're so insensitive to what
sin is that we, as it says, drink iniquity like water. And so God
has to, he has to point, put his finger on the place. But even that is only a limited
expression of what's really the problem. So it's not our confession
that causes, brings God's salvation. It just brings that realization
to us that there's no salvation in me, there's no hope in me.
It has to be found outside of me. So confessing means we agree
with God about ourselves, and then we tell the Lord what we
did, what we are, and agree that there's nothing in us that God
should look upon. Like Mephibosheth said in 2 Samuel
9, verse 8, he said to David that he was a dead dog. Why are
you looking at me in mercy? I'm a dead dog to you. And remember,
David looked upon Mephibosheth in mercy for Jonathan's sake,
because of his oath to Jonathan. And that's another story in itself. But the fact is, is that's what
we as sinners are like, lame on both our feet, nothing attractive
about us in the sight of the king, and yet he has mercy on
it. We don't tell the Lord about
all of our sins because we're not able to, because we're such
sinners. We can't even do that right.
We can't do it because we don't know them all. We can't do it
because we forget them and we don't know them and the extent
that they are against God. But confession is agreeing with
God. And so we find by the hand of
God's mercy and his chastening that sin in us is all that we
are, all that we do, and that our only acceptance with God
must be found in Christ. Okay, that's what sin is supposed
to do in the heart of the believer, is to drive us to the Lord Jesus
Christ. It is this persuasion, and that
doesn't come from ourselves, but is God-given, it's this persuasion
that we are left only with Christ to trust, that we are left only
with Christ to hope in that is the result of God's operation
in our hearts out of our sin. And that is mercy, isn't it?
And this is what brings about the fruit of the Spirit in us. We confess our sins. He says
in verse six, for this shall everyone that is godly pray unto
thee in a time when thou mayest be found. Surely in the floods
of great waters they shall not come nigh to him. The time when
God shall be found is a time when we are sinners. OK, we need
to come to the throne of grace at all times. But there's never
a time when we're more in need of coming to the throne of grace
than when sin presses upon us. And it's that coldness of heart.
It's that that shame. It's the awareness of our of
our complete failure, our shameless failure in all this that holds
us back because we somehow think that if I could just clean things
up, I'd have greater boldness, a greater basis to be bold in
the presence of God, which is, again, that's iniquity, isn't
it? Any trust in ourselves is iniquity. Our sin, our righteousnesses
are as an unclean thing and our iniquities have taken us away
like the wind. But he says, everyone that is
that is godly shall pray unto thee for this. So everyone that's
called of God is the everyone that's godly here. And they all
pray as David do. David did to the Lord Jesus Christ. He prays to him. He tells him
about his sin. And so the question is this,
are we godly? Well, do we practice godliness?
Do we come to Christ or do we hide from him? and how we need
him to bring us to himself. Because as soon as I start asking
questions about this, am I godly? Do I come to Christ? Do I confess
my sins? I find I have need to confess
the sin of not confessing my sin and the sin of not trusting. And I keep going down the same
spiral. And finally, I have to pull up
and say, but it's all to be found in the Lord Jesus Christ. So
all of God's people, all of the people of the Lord Jesus are
godly, and they exercise godliness by doing what? By coming to him
in the desert of their conscience, in the pain of their roaring,
when they kept silence, to be washed by him, by his blood. We come to him for cleansing.
There's power in the blood. And we see that power through
all the scriptures that speak of it. We ask the Lord not to
impute our sins to us like Shimei, and though he knows we perversely
did whatever we did, we ask, and are whatever all that we
are, we ask him to forgive us, to cover us, and not impute it
to us. But in fact, instead of that,
to impute to us his own righteousness. And what a bold request that
is, isn't it? To come to the Lord Jesus Christ
and ask him not to impute our sins to us? That seems contrary
to truth and righteousness, doesn't it? But that's the very heart
of what he did. His name is Jesus. Why? Because he shall save his people
from their sins. For this reason, Christ Jesus
came into the world to save sinners. So if this is his reason, this
is his name, we better go to him, shouldn't we? Otherwise,
we're staying back in our pride and thinking that we'll be more
self-assured and more acceptable to God if we could somehow clean
ourselves up first. That's not the way to come to
the Lord Jesus Christ. We come to the throne of grace
because we need grace. We need mercy, that mercy which
is God not giving us what we deserve, that grace which is
God giving us what Christ deserves. That's what we need. So why not
come with our need? We don't need to. Sure, we don't
want to sin. We don't want to do it again.
We want to do what's right. But the fact is, what we need
most is to be found in Christ. Right. God has to put us in him
and view us in him. And we need to be have faith
in him. That's what that's what we need
most of all. Then in verse seven, it says,
Thou art my hiding place. Thou shalt preserve me from trouble.
Thou shalt compass me about with songs of deliverance. Thou, in
this case, of course, is the Lord Jesus Christ. He is our
hiding place. There is nowhere to hide from
God, is there? We know we must appear before him in judgment,
but Christ has satisfied God's justice. The judge has answered
his justice. says in Psalm 85, Lord, thou
has been favorable to thy land. Thou has brought back the captivity
of Jacob. Thou has forgiven the iniquity
of thy people. Thou has covered all their sin.
Thou has taken away all thy wrath. Thou has turned thyself from
the fierceness of thine anger. Do you see it? Do you see how
that this is The only hope that we have that the Lord Jesus Christ
himself, who is our hiding place, has answered God's justice. He
has taken away God's wrath. He has fulfilled his righteousness. He has established his truth.
He himself is that truth. And this is the way he has made
it known in what he did for sinners by the will of God to save them
from their sins. And so he is our hiding place. Don't we find it to be so? In
Christ, there is no sin. And so he says this, Thy people
shall be all righteous. And in Isaiah 60 and verse 21,
you shall preserve me from trouble. What is the Lord Jesus Christ
do for his people? Well, he says here, he shall
preserve them from trouble. He is their hiding place. Therefore,
it means that he is their defense to defend them against all accusers. Every accusation brought against
one of Christ's sheep is a false accusation. Why? Because God
has justified them. Christ died for them. That's
the reason he justified them. In Revelation chapter 12, let
me read this to you. In Revelation chapter 12, it
describes this false accuser who is Satan. He says this, let
me read these, starting in verse seven of Revelation 12, if I
can get there. He says, there was war in heaven. Michael and his angels fought
against the dragon. Michael and his angels would
be Christ and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon
fought against his angels. I'm sorry and the dragon fought
and his angels and then in verse 8, but they prevailed not neither
was there found was their place found any more in heaven and
the great dragon was cast out that old serpent called the devil
and Satan which delude which deceiveth the whole world He
was cast out to the earth and his angels were cast out with
him and I heard a loud voice saying in heaven Now is come
salvation and strength and the kingdom of our God, the power
of his Christ. For the accuser of our brethren
is cast down, which accused them before God day and night. And
they overcame him, those who were God's people, they overcame
him, the devil, how? By the blood of the lamb. By
the word of their testimony, the gospel. And they loved not
their lives, even unto death. because they had died in Christ.
They knew that in Christ they would never die. And so they
had no life in this world to love. They loved their life in
glory with Christ. And so you see this, that Christ,
our hiding place, defends us against all accusers, like the
woman taken in adultery in John chapter 8. And as it says in
Romans 8, where we love to quote it, who shall lay anything to
the charge of God's elect? Who? Who? And all of heaven and
earth is silent because it is God that justifies. And who is
he that condemneth? It is Christ that died. Ye rather,
who is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who
also makes intercession for us. And so these are the words we
find a hiding place in, don't we? There is therefore now no
condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus. Yes, we must
all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, but we have appeared
in the Lord Jesus Christ. He has appeared there for us
and he has answered every charge. And now he says, who? Who shall
lay anything to the charge? God has justified them already
as early as they were his elect. He justified them in the Lord
Jesus Christ. Okay, so in Christ there's no
sin, there's no condemnation, and therefore there's no judgment
for God's people. He says in Psalm 143, verse two,
enter not into judgment with thy servant, for in thy sight
shall no man living be justified. Don't judge me one on one, judge
me in my mediator. And so Christ defends all who
are in him from every accusation, and that's what we love to read
about it, we love to sing about it. He says here in this verse,
thou art my hiding place, thou shalt preserve me from trouble,
thou shalt compass me about with songs of deliverance. And what
are these songs of deliverance? Well, there's songs about our
Lord Jesus Christ. Songs like, there is a fountain
filled with blood drawn from Emmanuel's veins, and sinners
plunge beneath that flood, lose all their guilty stains. Don't
you love those songs? I do. Jesus paid it all, all
to him I owe. Sin has left a crimson stain,
but he washed it white as snow. God does not impute my sin to
me, because he imputed it to Christ and gives me now his righteousness. And then in Psalm 32 and verse
eight, he says this, I will instruct thee. This is the Lord speaking
to his people. I will instruct thee and teach
thee in the way which thou shall go. I will guide thee with mine
eye. Now, when the when the Lord is
teaching us, you know what happens? We learn. You hear people say,
I remember when we were younger, what's God doing with you? What's
he teaching you? Or what's he trying to teach you? Or something
like that. It's hard for us to learn. I do admit that. But when
the Lord teaches us, we do learn. But all those things are silly
because when God teaches us, we learn the lesson. And that
is what happened when God instructs us. He's the great teacher. He's
the master. Right. And God doesn't try to
teach us, but he actually instructs us. And what does he say to us?
Blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not impute sin. Isn't
that what he says? This man in whose spirit is no
guile, confessing your sins, looking to Christ, that's what
he's taught us, isn't it? Has he taught us something else?
Sometimes you wonder, did I ever learn anything else in the Bible?
You know, what about the end of time? Or what about church
government? Or, you know, you can go down
the list. But there's one thing that God has taught all of his
people. They all know the Lord. They all do. That was the promise
in the New Covenant. And how do they know him? Their
sins and iniquities I will remember no more. And that for Christ's
sake. That's what they know. They know
that Lord, don't they? He's our Savior. And he's our
Lord, and I could go on and on about that, but let's go on to
verse 9. He says, be not as the horse or the mule which have
no understanding, whose mouth must be held in with bit and
bridle as they come near to you. Horses and mules don't understand. They don't understand their master's
mind, do they? They're just horses and mules.
And horses and mules have to be restrained by a bit or sometimes
inspired to do something with a whip because they only act
out of obedience to their master when he afflicts them, when he
restrains them. He has to hold them back and
he has to push them on ahead through these things to get them
to do what he wants. He has to steer them with that bit and
that bridle And so a horse and a mule won't see any beauty in
the Lord Jesus Christ, in his glorious person, in his will,
in his work, in his ascension, in his exaltation, in his intercession. They won't see any beauty in
his grace because horses and mules are servants. But God's
people are children and God, he uses his grace to motivate
his children. Grace comes in the middle like
the prodigal son. Grace comes to us when we have
left our father and wasted all that he gave to us. And he restores
us and he preaches Christ and him crucified to us. That's what
sons here. And that's what grace does to
us. But horses, they live on straw and oats, don't they? The wood and the hay and the
stubble. That's just the works of men's hands. But God's people,
They live upon the works of God in Christ. They live upon the
gold foundation of Christ and Him crucified. And they build
the temple in preaching the gospel of Christ. And that's the precious
stones. So this is the difference between
horses and mules and God's people. You have to hold them back lest
they come near, like God did in the Garden of Eden. He put
the flaming sword in the hand of the cherub to keep the way
to the tree of life so that men wouldn't touch it until Christ
came. And so don't be as a horse in
the mule. Job said this, In the book of Job, chapter 23, verse
16, God makes my heart soft, makes my heart soft, not my mouth. He makes my heart soft. The Almighty
troubles me. That's what he said. God does
this through many ways, especially through the ministry of his word
concerning Christ in the midst of our sin, as Psalm 32 is all
about. Now look at the last verse, or
actually the 10th verse. Many sorrows shall be to the
wicked, but he that trusteth in the Lord, mercy shall compass
him about. All people outside of Christ
are wicked in the Bible, all of them. There's none righteous,
no, not one. There's none that understand
it. There's none that seeketh after God. There's none that
doeth good. All outside of Christ are wicked. In ourselves, we're
wicked. Outside of Christ, if we stand
in judgment outside of Christ, we will be condemned as the wicked. And so that's what this is referring
to. All who consider that in themselves there are some basis
on the ground of their works that God could accept them, that's
wickedness. The wicked appear before God
in their conscience now. And they appear before God and
shall appear on the last day by considering what they are
and what they've done. They have no understanding, they
have no faith in Christ or trust in His righteousness. If they
did, then they would be clothed in His righteousness, but they
don't. Many sorrows shall be to the wicked, it says here in
verse 10. Many sorrows in this life. You hear of all kinds of sorrows
today. I heard of a terrible thing in our own town. A high
school girl took her own life at the school. Amazing. Such
sadness, such sorrows. But the sorrows in this life
will not compare to the sorrows after judgment. Will they? There's no comparison. Most of
our troubles are self-made. Most of our troubles are because
we want something we don't have. I need a better place. I need
a better situation. I need more money. I need to
get rid of this problem. All these things, most of them
are self-made. But someone who trusts in the
Lord, it says here, he says, many sorrows shall be to the
wicked, but he that trusteth in the Lord, mercy shall compass
him about. So in the Lord, it means in Christ,
doesn't it? We trust in Christ. We trust
God in the Lord Jesus Christ. We trust him to receive us for
Christ's sake, to look upon us as he looks upon his son, not
to consider our sin and not to consider our works either. Not
to use those as a barrier between us because they would prevent
us from coming to God, but we come to God and enter into his
presence by the blood of Jesus. So the righteous here, he says
here, many sorrows shall be to the wicked, but he that trusts
in the Lord, mercy shall compass him about. That's the one who
is called righteous in the next verse. Look at this. He says,
be glad in the Lord and rejoice, ye righteous. Do you see that?
Be glad in the Lord and rejoice, ye righteous." Now notice, from
the very beginning of this psalm, in Romans chapter 4, God, the
Holy Spirit, led the apostle Paul to reveal the meaning of
this psalm, that it has to do with God imputing righteousness
to sinners. He says in Romans 4 verse 5,
But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth
the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness. And he goes
on to say, Even as David describes the blessedness of the man to
whom God imputes righteousness without works. We didn't do anything
for this. It was a pure grace. Pure grace. So he says, rejoice ye righteous. We're not righteous in ourselves.
We're righteous because we're righteous by Christ's righteousness,
which is in him. And his righteousness is imputed
to us. It's not righteousness. It's
not an obedience we produced. He did it. It's outside of us.
It's an outside of me righteousness. But God has counted it ours.
So he says, Rejoice ye righteous. And this is the reason why in
Romans four that Paul says, David said how blessed it is that God
imputes righteousness to a man without works, even to sinners,
to the ungodly. All who look to God, all who
look to God by looking to Christ are righteous according to scripture,
all of them. We don't look for what we are
in ourselves, do we? We don't consider our prayers,
we don't consider our faith, we don't consider our repentance,
we don't consider our sorrows and tears, we don't consider
our reform, we don't consider our commitment, we don't consider
ourselves. Man, we have to get that through
our head about a hundred times a day, don't we? And throughout
our life. Do not look to yourself. Look
to the Lord Jesus Christ. Look away from those things.
Look to His faith. He's the one who believed God
perfectly. He's the one who was faithful.
He's the one who loved God. Look to him, admire him, and
stop thinking that you're going to find something admirable in
yourself, especially before God. But when we consider him, We
don't consider ourselves, we don't seem to be righteous if
we do consider ourselves, do we? Even as believers, when we
trust Christ, do we find that we appear righteous in our own
esteem? No, we find the opposite. It
seems like we become more sinful as we get older. As we progress,
it seems like sin is even more strong. And what are we gonna
do? We're gonna go by what we sense,
by what we feel, by what we observe about ourselves. No, this is
why God says, be glad in the Lord and rejoice ye righteous. He's talking about an imputed
righteousness, isn't it? And he says, shout for joy all
ye that are upright in heart. It's repeating. He's concluding
with the way he started. and He's admonishing us now to
be glad and rejoice. You have cause, you have ground
for joy. If God can receive you in the
presence of His holiness with exceeding joy, as Jude 24 says,
then you should rejoice now by faith. You should rejoice in
Christ. The only reason we don't rejoice now is because we're
weighed down by trouble And in our troubles, we think that somehow
God's favor with us has been lost and it needs to be restored
by something that we can do to get back to on track. But the
fact is that the way you get back on track is to abandon all
hope in yourself and trust in yourself and look only to Christ.
And when you do that, God says, rejoice ye righteous. We are
not righteous in ourselves. We are righteous in Christ. We have no righteousness of our
own. All our righteousness is His. He gives what is His to
us and He counts His own beauty as our beauty. And he says to
his church, he says, thou art all fair, my love, I see no spot
in thee. And the persuasion that God gives
us of this is called faith, and this faith is in him, in Christ,
in his righteousness, and God tells us in his word that he's
given us this faith. To all who trust Christ, He has
shown us this, that we are in Him. By the faith that He gives
us, He shows us this is the evidence by which God gives His people
to know that they're in Christ. They look to Him. We look to
Him. He will not cast us out. He says in John 6 in verse 56,
let me read this to you, this will be the last verse and we'll
close here. In John 6 in verse 56, it's a wonderful text of
scripture about our union with Christ and the result of that
union. He says in John 6, 56, he that
eateth my flesh, which is trusting Christ, in his broken body and
shed blood. He that eateth my flesh and drinketh
my blood dwells in me." He's in me. And I in Him, I dwell
in Him. Isn't that a concise statement
of our salvation? We're in Him and He is in us. And the outworking of that is
we come to Him at all times by faith. We look to Him to be all
for us, to be our righteousness, the reason God doesn't impute
our sins to us. It's all on Christ. Jesus said,
look unto me and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth, for
I am God and there is none else. And he also said this, surely
shall one say, in the Lord have I righteousness and strength,
even to him shall men come. In the Lord shall all the seed
of Israel be justified. and shall glory in the Lord."
If we could just learn those words and take them to our heart,
we could see here that Psalm 32 is telling us, you who trust
in the Lord, you who are in Christ, rejoice. Be glad. Your joy should be overflowing
and abound because everything depends on Him. Everything, it
doesn't depend on you. Not what God thinks of you and
your own self and your own works, your own understanding, your
own prayers. It's not about you, it's what God thinks about him.
And our trust in Christ causes us to come to the same persuasion.
Let's pray. Lord, we thank you for the Lord
Jesus so much that you would accept him for us and help us,
Lord, to trust him and truly be glad and rejoice in joy, with
joy unspeakable, and that these songs that we would sing would
be about him and they would come from our hearts and we would
express them. Oh, that God has not imputed our sins to us, but
has imputed to us the very righteousness of God, which is the obedience
of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. in our place as our substitute. And we come to God by Him even
now, asking you for the grace to believe Him and to walk by
this faith in Him. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.