Actually three times he makes a way for the woman and the child to escape the wrath and the destruction. Satan wants to perpetrate against that child. And in the end, he becomes so frustrated that it says, In verse 17, Satan goes off to make war on the rest of the woman’s offspring. Now, the book of Revelation is not always easy to understand, but we can understand in this particular passage that the child is Jesus and that Satan is, uh, is, is represented by this dragon.
And whoever the woman is, whether she be the church, whether she be, uh, Israel, however you interpret that, we are the rest of her. offspring, spiritually. We who are Christians, who are also co heirs in the kingdom with Jesus, are the ones that Satan is going off to destroy. And how is he most effective at destroying the people of God?
Little by little, it’s by keeping their guilty conscience alive. So stained with the reminders of their sin and their inadequacy before God that they feel that they cannot stand before God. What is it that keeps Christians weak in their faith? The answer is it is unconfessed sin that which stands between us and God and we know about it.
God knows about it, but we’re trying to pretend as if it’s not there happens all the time. I do it all the time. I sin. I’m embarrassed by what I’ve done. I know I have done something wrong instead of coming out with it. I just hide. I just hide. It is the thing. It’s the natural tendency for all humans just to kind of try to hide it away and make sure or pretend like it didn’t happen.
This is exactly what is going on in Psalm 32. This is a Psalm of David and David is one of these guys who knows his sin. Eventually, he’s going to come around and confess it and, and, and he’s going to experience forgiveness for it. But just like you and me, King David of the Old Testament was a hider, a sin denier, hoping that God wouldn’t notice, hoping that it wouldn’t affect his relationship.
with the Lord at all. And it left him weak in his relationship with God. It left him weak in his prayer life. It left him weak in his experience of faith. And what I really want you to do as we look here at Psalm 32 together is, is remember that there are two ways that we can come out of faith. One is to think about it and know it and intellectualize it.
And there’s a lot that we can learn from that. But number two, sometimes we just have to acknowledge how humans experience faith, forgiveness, and the gospel. Psalm 32 is an experiential description of how forgiveness comes to the human heart. So 2, David says this. Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.
Blessed is the man against whom the Lord counts no iniquity, and whose spirit there is no deceit. Two things I’ll point out. Number one, In this moment, he has experienced forgiveness and he feels blessed. Number two, I’ll point out at the end of this passage, verse two, he’s saying in whose spirit there is no deceit.
He knows this because David himself was a deceiver. And now in verses three and four, we’re going to go back in time in David’s memory to what it was like when he had sinned, and he knew it, and he was deceiving himself, trying to deceive God, deceiving others, And hiding his sin. This is how he describes that feeling.
He says, for when I kept silent for when I hid, when I deceived myself and God and others, when I kept silent, my bones wasted away, knew what that feels like through all my groaning all day long for day and night. Your hand was heavy upon me. You know what it’s like to have the heaviness of guilt on your shoulders?
Cause I sure do. My strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. You know what it’s like to have all the blood rest to your face for the embarrassment of what you’ve done and, and feel that heat rise up? I do. Uh, I hid and my bones wasted away. I tried to hide it. I tried to juggle it. I lied to this person about what I did wrong.
I lied to that person about what I did wrong. Then I forget which person I told which lie to, and it’s exhausting. And then in verse five, David says, even though I had hidden and concealed my sin, deceived myself, deceived others. Verse five, he says, I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover my iniquity.
I uncovered my iniquity. I said, I will confess my transgressions to the Lord. And you forgave the iniquity of my sin. It’s a very important point here. David covered his sin. It exhausted him. He uncovered his sin and confessed it to God. God took away the guilt of his iniquity. And David experiences now in verses one and two, blessedness.
He knows what it’s like to feel blessed. One last thing that I’ll point out that’s so interesting is if you go back to verse one, it says, blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Okay, one last time. David sins, he’s embarrassed, he hides his sin, he covers it up. He’s exhausted.
His bones waste away, guilt is heavy on his shoulders, so he uncovers it and confesses it to God and confesses it to others. And what does God do? He covers it back up with the blood of Jesus. He hides it forever. He takes it away as far as the East is from the West. And so David says, I I feel blessed. I have experienced what it means to be forgiveness and it is a blessed, wonderful feeling.
What is it that Satan tries to do to keep the human condition that the sin of the Christian, uh, in, you know, just make it boil and fester and keep it where it’s between us and God and it’s not confessed. He, he convinces us that we need to lie about it. He convinces us that we need to. He’s the one that’s going to help us to get out of it, hide from it.
He convinces us that we don’t need to confess that sin to God. And the human experience of that is our bones waste away. Our strength dries up as the heat of summer day, the summer day, but we will no longer be weak and ineffective in our faith. If we will keep short accounts with God, confess our sin, come to him, experience his forgiveness and know what it feels like to be blessed.