Psalm 32 Continued…
Verses 3 and 4 are the opposite of 1 and 2, because they speak of the misery of unconfessed sin.
Psalm 32:3-4 When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer.
Notice the shift to a personal pronoun. Verses 1 and 2 use the terms “he” and “the man”, but here David uses the personal pronouns “I” and “me”.
David is giving us a personal illustration about the power of unconfessed sin. “When I kept silent”, he said, unwilling to confess my sin, my body wasted away and God dealt with me so severely that my vitality was drained like a man suffering in the summer heat. Do you recall a time when the summer’s heat was so oppressive you found it difficult to even breathe? For me personally, growing up in Florida; I have many a summer like that. But the worst thing about the heat is that it can keep you awake at night. Unconfessed sin hunts us down, oppresses us, and just like the heat, it keeps us awake at night.
If you’re a child of God, you can sin, but you cannot get by with it. That’s the difference between the saved and unsaved man. If you’re a man of the world, you can get by with your sin temporarily, but a child of God cannot. The hand of God was heavy upon David day and night.
Paul says, “But if we judged ourselves, we would not come under judgment. 32 When we are judged by the Lord, we are being disciplined so that we will not be condemned with the world.” (1 Corinthians 11:31-32) If we don’t judge ourselves, then God is going to judge us. God takes His own child to the woodshed for punishment.
Sometime after David’s sin, the prophet Nathan came to David to accuse him, and he said, “David, I have a little story to tell you.” This is the story: “…The Lord sent Nathan to David. When he came to him, he said, “There were two men in a certain town, one rich and the other poor. The rich man had a very large number of sheep and cattle, but the poor man had nothing except one little ewe lamb he had bought. He raised it, and it grew up with him and his children. It shared his food, drank from his cup and even slept in his arms. It was like a daughter to him. Now a traveler came to the rich man, but the rich man refrained from taking one of his own sheep or cattle to prepare a meal for the traveler who had come to him. Instead, he took the ewe lamb that belonged to the poor man and prepared it for the one who had come to him. David burned with anger against the man and said to Nathan, “As surely as the Lord lives, the man who did this deserves to die! He must pay for that lamb four times over, because he did such a thing and had no pity. Then Nathan said to David, “You are the man! This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: ‘I anointed you king over Israel, and I delivered you from the hand of Saul.’”(2 Samuel 12:1-7)
Pray
Father, please grant me the wisdom to have people like Nathan the prophet in my life and the ears to hear their words when I need to be told of my own sin.