Happiness

Welcome to Truth for Life Weekend. We're beginning a series called The Missing Peace. That's P-E-A-C-E. We'll be following King David's search for reconciliation with God after his sin with Bathsheba. Alistair Begg introduces the series today by exploring the surprising keys to the true and lasting happiness that David discovered. If you have your Bible, open it with us to the first verse of Psalm 32.

Happy is the man whose iniquity the LORD does not count against him, and in whose spirit is no deceit. 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. Then I acknowledged my sin to you, and did not cover up my iniquity. I said, I will confess my transgressions to the LORD, and you forgave the guilt of my sin. Therefore let everyone who is godly pray to you, while you may be found.

Surely when the mighty waters rise, they will not reach him. You are my hiding place. You will protect me from trouble and surround me with songs of deliverance. And then God speaks to the psalmist, I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go. I will counsel you and watch over you.

Do not be like the horse or the mule, which have no understanding, but must be controlled by bit and bridle, or they will not come to you. Many are the woes of the wicked, but the LORD's unfailing love surrounds the man who trusts him. Rejoice in the LORD and be glad, you righteous, seeing all you who are upright in heart." This psalm begins, as do a number of psalms, with a word which comes twenty-six times in the Psalter—the same word with which the whole book of psalms opens up—namely, the word blessed or happy. It's a very contemporary notion, happiness. In fact, it is a timeless notion.

And it is true no matter where we go in the world, no matter what language we may attempt to speak, we will discover people who, if surveyed, will quickly respond that one of their great designs and desires in life is simply that they might be happy. Augustine spent the first part of his life in an untrammeled commitment to indulgence, drove his mother completely nuts, Monica his mom. She went to priest after priest, asking the priest to fix her son. And priest after priest said, Monica, I can't fix him. You can't fix him. All you can do is pray that God will fix him, that he will read the Bible and meet God. And what happened to Augustine?

Exactly that. And he emerges from his haze, and he says, O God, our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you. Now, here's my question. Do you think Augustine was right? Do you believe that Augustine was right? Do you believe what Augustine believes? Because I want to tell you that the basis for Augustine's statement is to be found in this book and indeed, essentially, in the opening two verses of this psalm. You will notice, too, that honesty is a vital dimension of this discovery.

You need just to see that at the end of verse 2. Happy is the man whose sin the Lord does not count against him, and in whose spirit is no deceit. The persons not lying to himself are lying to anybody else.

You cannot deceive yourself and enjoy genuine happiness, because deceit and happiness don't sleep in the same bed. But, he says, when I kept silent, my bones wasted away. When I deceived myself, when I concealed things, when I refused to come out into the open and acknowledge what really was true, my life was a complete disaster. He says in Psalm 103, one of the other Psalms, he says, you know, I was like a sparrow lonely up on the rooftop of a building. He was like a scarecrow in a melon patch.

He was a disgraceful, disastrous, deceitful mess. But he's the one who's talking about happiness in the first two verses. Well, you see, the Bible calls us to be as honest about ourselves as the Bible is honest about ourselves. And the problem for many of us is that we're dishonest about ourselves, and therefore we don't like the honesty of the Bible.

In fact, the honesty of the Bible is a very uncomfortable experience. And you may not necessarily find that these two verses at first strike you as anywhere related to happiness at all. Indeed, you may look at this and say, this is a phenomenal oxymoron, to be using the word happiness in the context of transgression and sin and inequity.

Surely, it is no help to me on the road to happiness to be reminded of what I'm really like. Well, I think this out with me, because that's exactly what the verses do, and therefore that's what we have to discover. Three words are used here. I want to point them out to you, because they all have different aspects of the human predicament. The first word is transgression. Transgression.

What is the problem that we face? Well, we're transgressors, or we trespass. We go where we shouldn't go. The word speaks of a positive offense.

There are double yellow lines that say you must not park here at any point during day or night, and you pull in, you park your car there. You're a trespasser. You're a transgressor. And what the Bible says is that in relationship to the law of God, his double yellow lines, as it relates to loving him and having no idolatry in our hearts and no covetousness and no theft and no malice and no adultery and so on, we have by our individual decisions parked on God's yellow lines.

And we are, therefore, transgressors. The second word is sin. We're familiar with this little three-letter word. Most of us try to avoid it. We don't like the sound of it, and we think that it's actually just a Christian neurosis. It's a thing that Christians use to try and explain things away.

Well, that's an interesting idea. It demands thoughtfulness. But sin is a negative. If transgression is a positive, sin is missing the mark. Failure to attain to an objective or an ideal. Most of us, if we're honest, have ideals and objectives for ourselves, standards for ourselves. And again, if we're honest, we would have to admit that we can't even live up to our own standards, let alone live up to the standard that God has set. We miss the mark.

We fall short. The third word is the word iniquity. I translated it in iniquity in my reading, because in verse 2 it is the word iniquity.

The NIV has it in verse 5, but it's also there in the Hebrew in verse 2. If you've seen Crown Bowls—not ten-pin bowling, but the bowling that is done by very respectable-looking English people on essentially a croquet lawn—they have that little white ball that they're trying to roll the balls to, and no matter how hard they try to bowl them straight, they know that it is absolutely impossible. And that is because there is an inherent bias in the bowl. Therefore, you have to bowl it outward to bring it in, or you've got to bring it this way or this way, but you can bring it this way. And that's exactly the word for iniquity.

In-equity. A moral perversity, an internal bias, the corruption of our natures. Well, I say again to you, it's quite surprising, isn't it, that he starts off happy, happy, and then immediately introduces these three aspects. But the reason he is able to address them is because the predicament is more than matched by the cure. The diagnosis is absolutely matched by the cure that is offered. You see, you would not want your doctor to lie to you, would you? All that a lying physician will do is provide us a momentary feeling of elation.

We go, we're assessed, he tells us we're fine, we walk out with a spring in our step and put the keys in our ignition and drive away. But if the person is a liar, they have done us a great disservice. Far better it would have been, although more painful, for them to have been honest about the diagnosis, allowing us then to say, Well, at least I know what my predicament is. And perhaps now we can turn our energies towards a cure and a solution. The great physician never tells lies. And actually, the great physician never has to say what some physicians will inevitably say, I'm sorry, there is nothing more that can be done. If you've been trying to deal with the fact of your trespasses and your unfilled baskets and your internal bias, and you've been going places where eventually you know there is no answer there, why wouldn't you consider what's said here?

I think you would. So follow, as the threefold predicament is addressed by a threefold cure. Happy is he whose transgressions are forgiven. The word for forgiven means lifted or removed. Happy is the individual whose transgressions are lifted. Or the word means a stain that is removed.

A stain that is removed. You go to the dry cleaner with trousers that you were wearing playing golf, and they have mud all up the insides, because you're such a hacker, and you say to the man, If you could please get rid of the stains on the inside of these trousers, it would be a tremendous encouragement to me. And the fellow says, just making sure that he doesn't disappoint you in the end, he says, Well, I'm not sure I can guarantee it, but I'll see what I can do.

And so that's our best hope. If that's the way you're trying to deal with the stain of the transgressions in your life, going to places and going to people who tell you, There's no way I can guarantee it, but I'll see what I can do. Let me suggest you come here. I don't mean Parkside.

I mean here. Because there is a phenomenal happiness in those whose burdens are lifted and whose stains are removed. The second word he uses is covered. Blessed and happy is the one whose sins are covered.

Covered. The idea is not covering or hiding something that is still present and unresolved the way you may hide something in your garage. That's not the word that is used here. It's not that God covers it over, hangs a sheet over it, and just makes it sound as if it's all gone. No, the word that is used here is the reverse of the staining word. He removes the stain, and he blots out the transgression. He blots out the transgression so that it is absolutely impossible to see the handwriting.

Because the blot is so significant and so deep, you could not see any of the writing. All the things that were against me, all the things that I did wrong, all of my sin and all of my ugliness, all of that stuff, he blots out. He blots it out. That's the basis of happiness.

I'm not making that up. It says it in Isaiah 43.25. I am he who blots out your transgressions. And thirdly, happy is the man whose sin the Lord does not count against him.

In other words, not only does he cleanse us and cover us, but he cancels the debt against us. What we have here is actually the doctrine of justification by faith. Whose sin the Lord does not credit to him. Genesis 15, in verse 6, we get the first instance of this in relationship to Abraham.

Genesis 15, 6, Abraham believed the Lord, and the Lord credited it to him as righteousness. Happy is the man whose sin the Lord does not count against him. It doesn't say, Happy is the individual whose sin the Lord does not count. It says, whose sin the Lord does not count against him.

Why? Because he counts it against his Son. That's the significance of Jesus dying in the place of sinners. Because God is holy, he must count sin.

Because he is just, he must punish sin. Well, I am a transgressor. I am sinful. I am iniquitous.

What possible hope do I have? Only in this, that he does not count our sins against us, because he counts our sins against him. Now, if you're still awake, you may find yourself saying, how does this work for David in the Old Testament? Because after all, David's a long way away from Jesus dying on the cross. And if you read your Bible at all, you say to yourself, I don't know how it worked in the Old Testament.

I don't know what was going on there. And since I know some of you are probably asking that question, I want to give you the answer to it, and to do so by reading to you from one of my favorite Old Testament scholars and a friend and a mentor, Alec Mattia. And in his book, Look to the Rock, he points something out—and I want you to listen carefully to this, and once I finish this, you can put up your tray tables and get ready and remove all headsets, because we're gonna land the plane.

But listen carefully to this. In the Bible, truth is cumulative. For while what is first revealed needs the completion, which only a further revelation will bring, yet the first revelation is indispensable as an eternal Word of God, an essential contribution to the whole fabric of revealed truth. Now, you say, I didn't get any of that at all.

That's okay, because he's about to illustrate it. There are many places, he says, where we see this cumulative principle at work in the Old Testament, and nowhere more obviously so than in the question of sacrifice. If you've read your Old Testament, you find yourself saying, What were these people doing when they were offering these sacrifices? After all, the sacrifices, we know, could never take away sin. So what was happening when they offered the sacrifice? How did they know they were forgiven? Listen. At the risk of seeming oversimple, let me present it in this way, says Mattia. A father has just returned from the temple after presenting his sin offering as prescribed in the book of Leviticus.

He comes back into the house, and the dialogue goes as follows. Why did you go to the temple today? The father says, I wanted to make a sin offering because I needed the Lord's forgiveness.

And have you been forgiven? Oh, yes. How do you know? Because I saw the goat die in my place. But how do you know it was dying in your place? Because I laid my hand on its head and appointed it to be my substitute.

Why was it your substitute? Well, this is what the Lord told us to do. He taught us that he wants us to offer a sacrifice for sin and that when we lay our hand on the animal's head, it becomes our substitute. But how do you really know that when the animal died, your sins were forgiven? Because the Lord promised.

Says Mattia, this simple piece of imagination is no more than a conversational spelling out of Leviticus 17. All true religion must come to rest on a veritable divine revelation. He told us to do it.

And all the benefits of true religion come to the worshiper on the ground of believing the promises of God. We could even dare to extend the conversation one step further and listen to what one of the sons says and what the father replies. The son then, having listened to this dialogue, says to his dad, Really, dad, what you're saying is this. You believe the promise of God. You could say that you're justified by faith.

Well, says the dad, it's not an expression I've ever used. But yes, that's the truth of the matter. Justification by faith. I must tell Paul that when I see him.

I know he intends to write something along those lines. You see, think about it. Now go back out into the community tomorrow and tell people that you were reading Psalm 32, verses 1 and 2, and it confronted you with the fact that you're a transgressor, that you missed the mark, and that you're morally perverse. But you also discovered that God has made provision for our transgression, for our sin, for our iniquity. He cleanses us, he covers us over with a robe of righteousness, and he cancels all the debt that is against us. And our friends all say to us, And how do you know that's true? And what is our only answer?

Because he said it is. It's no different seven centuries before Christ or two thousand years after Christ. Happiness is to be found in the living God. That relationship with the living God is grounded in forgiveness—a forgiveness which Paul writes about in Romans 4, because what does he do to illustrate the principle? He quotes the very verses here from Psalm 32, and he makes it clear that Abraham is a classic Old Testament illustration of this truth.

And he makes just the most wonderful and clear, even in the complexity of the details of his argument, the most wonderfully clear explication of it. In chapter 1 and in verse 18 and following, he has pointed out the human predicament that God has given men over to the consequences of their sin. That's verse 24 of Romans chapter 1. Therefore, God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity, for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie. They worsted and then served, created things, rather than the Creator, and so on. In other words, the reason for the mess is because God gave us over to the consequences of our sin, but because of the kind of God he is, he in turn gave up his Son for the consequences of our sin.

And until a man or a woman understands the first preposition—two—the second preposition means nothing. I can tell you all day and all day long that by his death upon the cross Jesus cleanses, covers, and cancels sin. But until the Holy Spirit works within your heart and mind and confronts you with the fact of your transgression, with the reality of your sin, with the nature of your internal bias, then the fact of what Jesus has done for us remains entirely irrelevant to us. Well, I think we'd better stop there.

We'll come back to this. You're listening to Truth for Life Weekend. That is Alistair Begg explaining the vital role of truth and forgiveness as we pursue lasting joy. Well, if you were encouraged by today's message and you're thinking, you know, it would be good to spend time in God's Word every day, you can enjoy a quiet Bible study with Alistair each day when you sign up for the Truth for Life daily devotional email. You can begin each morning by reading a passage of Scripture followed by a brief commentary from Alistair and then consider how to live out the instruction as you go about your day. The daily devotional email is a free subscription. You can sign up for it at truthforlife.org slash lists.

And while you're on the website, check out the book we are recommending currently. It's called The Lord of Psalm 23. This book will take you verse by verse through the deep truths found in this well known Psalm that begins with the Lord is my shepherd I shall not want. In this short set of verses, you'll find an endearing portrait of Jesus as our shepherd, our companion, and our host for all eternity. For more information about the book, visit our website today truthforlife.org. Thanks for listening this weekend. Next weekend, we'll learn why trying to hide our sin from God is a futile endeavor, even when we seem to be successfully deceiving everyone else around us. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.