For Such A Time As This 3
For Such A Time As This
Psalm 38
March 22, 2000
What is our attitude toward God when we sin? Does He excuse you, or accuse you? The goal of our meditation this evening is to gain a more clear and Spirit guided understanding of sin and grace.
Psalm 38 is the third penitential poem of King David. He is suffering severely from something that is very painful for him. Not only is David sick, with bodily affliction, but he also is being tread upon by his enemies. This Psalm is a woeful cry to God for relief.
I have said before that I like the Psalms because wherever I am there the psalmist has been before me. It brings me comfort and assurance to know that my struggles in life are not in vain. Instead, they are the classroom of the Holy Spirit. In this classroom, the Spirit reveals one man’s penitential heart.
Luther calls the arrows David speaks of “The words with which God rebukes and threatens in Scripture.” When these arrows of God’s law pierce the human heart and terrify the conscience, they are being received in good soil. So, Like Luther, I also believe the following to be absolutely true: “From the smug, who have become hardened, the arrows glance off as from a hard stone. And this continues as long as the words are spoken by the preaching of man without the co-operation and the inner penetration of God.” The apostle Paul says it this way: “The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned.” It is the penetration of God’s law that makes man sick, in body and spirit. It always accuses and never excuses any wrongdoing. It always demands perfection with respect to God’s will, and punishes any lack of it. So, if God were to hold his anger against us, and treat us accordingly, we would not see one moment of relief. That is the damning effect of sin in our lives.
The sinful human nature tries all kinds of ways to deal with sin’s putrid perturbations. Psychology, psychiatry, sociology, and what today we might call spiritology, are all ways in which sin in sinful man seeks to justify and rid itself of God’s truth. Now, I’m not saying that these scientific disciplines are wrong. They can be useful in helping us see the inclinations of our natural humanity, apart from God’s direction. But they cannot dismiss sin or deal with a hardened heart. Only God’s Word can do that. And that, not by law.
Consider these words of St. Paul: “Are you so foolish? After beginning with the Spirit, are you now trying to attain your goal by human effort? Have you suffered so much for nothing—if it really was for nothing? Does God give you his Spirit and work miracles among you because you observe the law, or because you believe what you heard?” My dear fellow redeemed, sealed by God’s Spirit unto eternal life through faith in what we have heard: it is not in us to live right in God’s sight. Even to think we can is sin. No, we are like David, deaf and dumb with respect to God. That is our condition except for one thing and one thing only; God’s Spirit that lives in us by grace through faith.
That Spirit calls out Abba, Father, to our God with groaning we can’t fathom, or begin to utter. That Spirit causes us to accept God’s pronouncement of guilt. That Spirit turns our hearts in faith toward him who saves. That Spirit causes us to confess with David: “I have become like a man who does not hear, whose mouth can offer no reply. I wait for you, O Lord; you will answer, O Lord my God, … I confess my iniquity; I am troubled by my sin. … Come quickly to help me, O Lord my Savior.”
God has indeed come to our rescue! The Christ of God came to us in human flesh, not in compulsion of law, but in the compelling love of God to deal with sin once and for all, for all! Through his own death and resurrection He did what no one else could do. He put himself in the way of sin, suffered its consequences, and put his own righteousness on us by God’s own decree: “I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.” It only remains for us then to accept this word of God as truth.
The only hindrance to having all that God has decreed is unbelief. Not believing the Spirit’s accusations damn and deliver one to the depths of hell, while the penitent heart truly can say out of sorrow and remorse, “I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me. Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are judged right when you speak and justified when you judge.”
My dear friends in the Spirit of Christ, everyone who stands before the just and holy God in this truth, also can be assured of another truth which says: “But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.”
When we are discouraged by illness and the threat of demise by our enemies, we also can remember the Psalms written for such a time as this. We can remember that this is but the classroom of the Spirit of our God and he will not forsake or be far from us. Amen.