(Of David. Instruction.) Blessed is he [whose] transgression is forgiven, [whose] sin is covered!
Psalm 32 is David's own song after sin, and it opens not with a rule to keep but with a blessing pronounced over a guilty man. The verse raises three questions. What does "blessed" mean? What does it mean for sin to be "covered"? And how can a guilty man be called happy?
One writer traces the opening word back to its root idea and applies it to eternity as well as to now.
What do we understand by being "blessed"? The main idea of the word is "prosperous." A prosperous man before God knows his sins, and finds the answer to them in God. Happiness marks such a man. Look at man for eternity, and not only for this life: no man is so prosperous as the one who says, "I have nothing but sin in myself, but all my rest is in God." That man has something to sing about. Whichever way he turns, he finds some fresh note of gladness and joy in it.
One writer points out that David wrote about this blessing as a man who had tasted it himself:
David, the guilty sinner once, is now the object of mercy. He knows he is forgiven, and can write of "the blessedness of the man to whom God imputes righteousness without works" (Rom. 4:6). He tasted this blessedness. It was his own real experience.
Read carefully, the verse says nothing about a clean record. It describes a man whose record was bad and has been dealt with.
In the psalm before us (Ps. 32), we get the blessedness of, and God's dealings with, the sinner whose transgressions are removed. "Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered [not the one who has not transgressed, who has not sinned]. Blessed is the man against whom the LORD counts no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit" (that is, the restored soul).
The verse uses two different words, and they are not repetition. One describes what a person did; the other describes what a person is.
"Transgression forgiven" — "sin covered." Transgression is quite different from sin. Transgression is when a person has wandered from a marked path; sin is the principle of self-willed independence in the heart of man. David found both of these things in himself, and they did not suit the heart of a creature in the presence of God. As soon as he had them forgiven and covered, he could see what prosperity it was: he could sing of all his wanderings as tied to the God who had forgiven them.
The word "covered" carries a fixed Old Testament meaning, and its picture goes back to the first pages of the Bible.
Here we have the great Old Testament thought about God's dealing with sin in forgiving mercy. It first appears in Genesis 3:21. Adam and Eve tried to cover their sinful nakedness from God's presence with fig-leaf aprons of their own making, but it did not work. So God Himself covered them with coats of skins — and such coats meant the death of a victim… So the meaning of the word "atonement" is clear: the covering of sin by sacrifice.
When God covers sin, He settles it for good:
"Covered" points back to the covering on the mercy seat. God puts sins away and remembers them no more.
The blessing does not depend on a man's record. One writer presses this home with David himself:
No man in the Old Testament records fell lower than David in his sins against God and man. Yet we learn that his sins did not exclude him from the blessing… It is a blessing into which the works of the best man cannot bring him, and from which the sins of the worst man need not exclude him. It is all of God and from God. It binds the heart of the sinner who receives it in everlasting gratitude to the gracious Giver.
Paul also says more than David could say:
David stood in the dim light of pictures and prophecies. He could only take comfort from the negative side: the Lord will NOT impute sin to the believer. Paul stands in the full light of the redemptive work of Christ, and gives us the comfort of the positive side: "God imputes RIGHTEOUSNESS without works."
Forgiveness like this changes how a person comes to God:
Full absolute forgiveness, the not imputing sin at all, is what takes guile from the heart. Otherwise we run from God. We make excuses and play our sin down, even when we dare not call it right. Where full pardon is before us, we have courage to be true in heart. Who will not list all his debts when the only question is that someone else will pay them? Who will not tell his illness when the cure is certain?
- Blessed — the word means prosperous. The richest person alive is the one who has nothing but sin in himself, and all his rest in God.
- Forgiven — the blessing rests on a man who did transgress and did sin, not on one who never did.
- Covered — the word behind it is atonement: sin covered by sacrifice, put away and remembered no more.
- Not imputed — David could say that God does not charge sin to him. Paul adds the positive side: God credits righteousness without works.
- Guileless — full pardon ends pretending. Nobody hides a debt when someone else has agreed to pay it.
Blessed is the man unto whom Jehovah reckoneth not iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no guile!
Psalm 32 does not describe the happiness of a man who never sinned. It describes a man whose sin God refuses to charge against him. Two things stand together in this verse: what God will not put on the account, and what is no longer in the man's spirit.
The blessing here is announced over a sinner. It describes how God deals with a man whose transgressions He has removed.
In this psalm (Ps. 32) we see the blessedness of the sinner whose transgressions are removed, and God's dealings with him — not the man who has not transgressed, who has not sinned, but the restored soul.
To impute is to charge something to a person's account. This verse settles how much God leaves off that account, and what that does to a man's heart.
The phrase is absolute and general — "to whom Jehovah imputes not iniquity." It is the whole condition of the person. It is not that his iniquity or some particular fault is forgiven, though certainly that is true as well. It is absolute non-imputation of any. The man exists before God as having no sin, according to the judgment of God. Then my heart is open and free before God. I know this, and I look up to God as owning no sin, sure that He sees none. So there is no cloud, nothing to hide.
The verse says God does not count the iniquity; it does not say where the iniquity went. Commentators point to the cross for the answer, and to what God counts instead.
There was no denying David's dreadful guilt, yet the Lord in marvellous grace did not impute iniquity to him (v. 2). The only way this could be true was by the Lord Jesus bearing that iniquity in His great sacrifice. Elsewhere we read that instead of imputing iniquity to believers, God imputes righteousness to all "who believe in Him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord" (Rom. 4:22-25).
If sin is not counted, the question naturally follows: what about the sins committed after a person is forgiven? One writer separates God's discipline from God's reckoning.
It is a wonderful thing for anyone to be able to say, "Thank God, there is one thing God will not do: He will not impute sin to me. I know I have sinned badly, even since I was converted... He may take me in hand and use the rod to correct me, but He will not impute sin to me." Our failure will never damage the relationship God has established between us and Himself, because He has established it in Christ. So until sin can be imputed to Christ, it cannot be imputed to the believer.
The second half of the verse names something else: deceit, which older translations call "guile." It is not the sin itself but the cover-up.
"In whose spirit there is no guile." (v. 2.) Guile has nothing to do with guilt. Guilt is the condition of a man who has sinned and has not found an answer to his sin. Guile is pretending. While David was trying to patch himself up, he was forgetting that his sin was out in the open before his people. Think of it: he tried to stand before God as a creature who was not ruined, when he, the man after God's own heart, had taken the place of a model sinner! It would not do. God says, "I know all the iniquity, but I do not impute it."
The two halves of the verse are linked, and the link runs in a direction most people would not expect: honesty is the fruit of grace, not its price.
Happy then, again, is the man to whom Jehovah imputes no iniquity — or "perversity," which is what the word means. This stands in direct connection with what follows: that in his spirit there is now no longer "guile," which is perversity. The second is the effect of the first. The non-imputation is the moral remedy. Grace sets the soul right. It enables the soul to judge sin honestly, and wins it to God, so parting it from that perversity.
Jesus once used almost these words of a man named Nathanael, when He saw him under a fig tree.
And Nathanael's "guilelessness" was the guilelessness of this Psalm, I believe, and not of mere natural disposition. (John 1:47) He had been under the fig tree in the spirit of this Psalm, as a convicted man pouring out his heart. That had freed his spirit from guile. Here we learn that a confessing spirit is a guileless spirit.
- Nothing denied. The blessing belongs to a sinner, not to a man with a clean record. The sin is real, and God covers it.
- Nothing charged. God does not pardon one fault at a time. He counts no iniquity at all, because Christ bore it.
- Nothing hidden. Guile is the cover-up, not the crime. Where a man owns his sin, the pretending stops.
- Nothing earned. Honesty is the effect of grace, not its price. God's refusal to count sin sets the soul right and wins it to Him.
- Nothing to fear. God may use the rod to correct His children, but He will never put sin to their account.