For this shall every one that is godly pray unto thee at a time when thou mayest be found surely in the floods of great waters they will not reach him.
David has just told how he stopped hiding his sin, confessed it, and found forgiveness. Verse 6 turns that private story outward: God forgives, so every godly person has a reason to pray, a time to pray, and a shelter when the floods come.
The verse opens by pointing back. What David has learned about God is what draws others to Him. God showing Himself this way makes the moment a time of finding.
This revelation of God stirs the thought and feeling of all who are upright and gracious-minded. It makes them look to God at the time when He reveals Himself as the forgiving God, when He can be found... Suppose they have no sense of sin at that moment. They know they are sinners, and God reveals Himself like this: His character is their delight, and their soul links itself with Him. They seek Him, not simply for forgiveness... and note, God acting like this, revealed like this, makes the time the finding time.
The word could sound like a class of superior people. In the psalm it does the opposite: it takes in everyone.
This is not all. We soon find that this mercy was no special case for David. And no one can do without such a confession, and such mercy as this psalm shows. No — "therefore let everyone who is godly offer prayer to you at a time when you may be found." So the person who has never known this way of drawing near to God is not godly but ungodly! Such is the need of grace on the part of all.
Notice how this prayer starts. It is not a cry flung into the dark. It is asking from a settled footing.
The godly man is the sinner who knows God in grace. He finds Him in the acceptable day of salvation. So he prays with calm assurance that God hears him, not vaguely. He prays to One who has already prompted that prayer by revealing Himself as the Saviour who justifies the ungodly in his worst hour of need (Rom. 4:5). Mercy received is the proper groundwork of true Christian prayer... Do not confuse the cry of distress from a heart that does not yet know peace with true prayer. God answers such a cry readily and graciously, with His full testimony of peace and forgiveness in the gospel of His Son.
The phrase carries a warning inside a promise. If there is a time when God may be found, there is also a time when He may not.
The results of knowing God as a forgiving God follow. Because God is a forgiving God, the godly can always turn to Him in confidence, at a time when He can be found. There is a time coming when men will seek God but He will not be found. Today is the acceptable time when, on the ground of Christ's work, He may be found. But grace rejected will lead to judgment, when God will no longer be found by men, but men will be found out by God.
The second half of the verse recalls Noah's ark. Water covered everything, but it could not get in where God had shut people in.
The "rush of great waters" that we are now warned about reminds us of the ark, and of the only people the Lord saved when He shut them in. No flood could reach them, while no others could escape it. Jehovah had acted for them, so all the power of His arm and all the glory of His Name stood between those inside and the flood, pledged for their security. So He was truly their hiding place. Could any flood break through such a barrier? Now we know Christ as the fulfilment of this ark. The storms beat on Him and the floods raged, but this glorious Refuge has carried His full cargo of blessing safely to shore. So the soul in Christ can say this in triumph.
The promise is not that trouble stays away. It is being kept safe while the flood breaks in. Darby reads the psalm this way for the godly few in Israel.
Israel, the Jews, have been deeply guilty in every way. God holds out forgiveness, as in this psalm and everywhere in Moses and the prophets. They feel it; God reveals Himself like this; the godly remnant are touched by it. Sins, no doubt, are confessed, but the heart of the godly turns to God. When the flood of judgments breaks in, God preserves them. In every case, the soul that knows this goodness can count on God. God Himself, known like this, is its hiding place. In the end, songs of deliverance will be its portion.
- Cause. "Therefore" ties the verse to verse 5. God shown as forgiving draws the heart, and that is what makes the moment a time of finding.
- Found. The window is open today. Refuse the grace offered, and God will find those men out instead.
- Every. Forgiveness was no special favour to David. Anyone who has never come this way is not among the godly, and everyone needs the same grace.
- Ground. This prayer rests on mercy already received. The godly ask with calm assurance, not with a vague hope.
- Flood. Like those shut inside the ark, the sheltered stay beyond the water's reach. God Himself is their hiding place, and songs of deliverance are their portion.
Thou art a hiding-place for me; thou preservest me from trouble; thou dost encompass me with songs of deliverance. Selah.
Psalm 32 opens with the joy of a man whose sin is covered and never counted against him. By verse 7 he has found more than pardon: God Himself has become his hiding place, and fear has turned into refuge.
The instinct of a guilty conscience is to get away from God. David does the opposite. He runs into the presence he once dreaded. One writer contrasts him with everyone who tries to hide sin from God:
How awful the contrast with Israel's own sweet singer, who, despite his sins, could say by grace, "You are a hiding place for me!" — hiding in God, not from Him. He had before him One who could and would cover all his sins and count nothing against him. Our effort to cover our sins, or to escape from His presence, is useless indeed.
The same searching light that a guilty person dreads becomes the safest place there is once sin has been confessed. As another writer puts it, when a person is genuinely open before God, the light that will terrify the unrepentant "is already the hiding-place and fortress of the saint."
Verse 7 comes at the end of a fight. The man held out for a long time, found no rest, and only then owned his sin:
For a long time he had fought against this, but the Lord gave him no rest. Then he confesses his sin, and deceit is gone from his heart — impossible until then. We hide sin in the heart. Forgiveness in grace draws the godly man to God. When the great waters flood, they do not reach him. The Lord is the hiding place of the soul — He preserves, blesses, guides.
Full and absolute forgiveness — God not counting sin against us at all — is what takes the deceit out of the heart. Otherwise we run from God: we make excuses and play down our sin, even when we dare not call it right.
Pardon is not the end of it. God also shelters the person He forgives — even from himself:
God does not just forgive a sinner and leave him to himself. Instead, God becomes a sanctuary where a person can find refuge from himself and his sinful tendencies. He also finds God's presence a wonderful protection from the flood of great waters — the judgment that man's sin naturally brings on him.
Notice what the verse does not promise: an easy life. The storms did not stop. What changed was the man's relationship to God in the middle of them.
As soon as he was right with God the whole picture changed. Instead of being the object of his fear, God became the object of his confidence. He knew how to find God, and how to pray to Him. He discovered that God was his hiding place. There he would find refuge and protection when the storms and floods and troubles of this life threatened him. His sin had been dealt with, but the troubles remained.
The promise holds even when nothing outward changes:
Our circumstances may not change. Our sorrows may not be taken away. But if we bring Christ into our grief, we will be able to say with the psalmist: "you preserve me from trouble; you surround me with shouts of deliverance" (Ps. 32:7).
The last phrase sounds as if the rescued man does all the singing. One writer points out what marks this deliverance out from everything the psalm has said so far:
Something appears here with deliverance that makes it quite exceptional. Up to that point the psalm says not a word about God's feelings. The soul itself is happy, of course, once the burden of guilt is gone. But here we read of His happiness: "You surround me with songs of deliverance." God's joy gives its character to the blessings granted in deliverance. The soul rejoices in this too.
This writer is using an older translation. Where he reads "songs of deliverance," the ESV reads "shouts of deliverance."
The verse ends with a word left untranslated. It is a direction to the reader, not part of the sentence.
The word Selah occurs 71 times in the Psalms. It means "to pause," with a secondary meaning of "lift up." We can take it as a sign. As we read, we should pause, think, and then lift up our hearts in praise and prayer.
- Confess — Fighting God brought no rest. Honest confession cleared the deceit out of the heart and opened the way in.
- Hide — Flight reverses direction: not away from God, but into Him — "hiding in God, not from Him."
- Rest — God becomes a sanctuary, not just a pardon; He does not forgive and then leave a person to himself.
- Endure — The sin was dealt with, but the troubles remained. What changed is that God became the object of confidence instead of fear.
- Sing — The surrounding song is God's own joy over the delivered, and "Selah" asks us to stop and take that in.