When King David attempted to cover up Truth for Life weekend, we'll learn why a wounded conscience can actually be a wonderful thing.
Alistair Begg is teaching from Psalm 32 verses 5 through 7. The burden of sin. One is a tender conscience—a tender conscience. But if, as time goes by, that tender conscience continues to act in the wrong way and to resist the implications of wrongdoing, then it loses its power to convict. Today, when you hear God's voice in your conscience, don't harden your hearts.
That's why it says that. The other conscience that will bear and respond to the burden of sin is a wounded conscience. If you have a fracture somewhere in your body—let's say, in your knee—then the weight of things and the weight of yourself or added weight to your body will become apparent because you're wounded in your knee. The very weakness there will bear testimony to the weight that has been placed upon you. And in the same way, it is a wonderful thing—albeit a hard and difficult thing—when God comes as he comes to his servant David, and he brings his willful disobedience before him, and he confronts him with his systematic attempts at cover-up, and he points out to him that his very conscience is in danger of being seared. And he lays his hand of heaviness upon him, a hand that becomes absolutely unbearable.
Psalm 38 and verse 4, another psalm of David in this series, he says, my guilt has overwhelmed me like a burden too heavy to bear. My guilt is overwhelming like a burden too heavy to bear. Is this a dreadful thing? Is this a terrible thing?
Well, it is in one sense dreadful, but it is at the same time wonderful. You see, when you or I have a guilty conscience, because we know we're in the wrong, having offended against God and offended against one another, all of the external influences upon us will tend to say, Cover it up. Smooth it over. Just don't address it. Because it is too ugly to face.
It is too difficult to pursue. It is too demanding to climb down from where we are. And yet, what the Bible says is that the benefits far outweigh the cost. That's why David, upon reflection, is able to say, You know, when I was overwhelmed by these things, when your hand was heavy upon me, then in actual fact it tended to my good. You see, the Bible constantly asks questions which we just don't ask. It asks, for example, in 1 Samuel 6, a correlative question, and it is this, Who can stand in the presence of the Lord this holy God? Who can stand in the presence of the Lord this holy God?
And state their case. This question actually comes in 1 Samuel 6, after seventy individuals had poked their nose into something that had nothing to do with them at all, and they all died. And the people observing it looked at it and said, If God is that kind of God, who then can stand before this holy God?
Which of us is able just to go in and stand before God? You think about Moses. He takes his shoes off his feet in the presence of the burning bush, a symbol of the eternal God. Because he realizes that the ground on which he stands is holy ground. Clearly, this is not a reference to some cosmic principle or to some personal creation, where by God, G-O-D, spells whatever we want it to spell, where G-O-D, whatever that means, exists in order to bolster up our self-esteem or to assure us that everything is not out of control or to placate us in our disobedience.
This is something very different. I wonder—you may never even have asked yourself the question—I wonder, Who can stand before this holy God? Psalm 7 is not the most politically correct psalm in the Bible.
We even joked about it earlier on. The psalmist says, My shield is God Most High, who saves the upright in heart. That's fine, isn't it? You could put that on a t-shirt or take that on a little card, put it in your top pocket and bring it out to people tomorrow morning, and it is a worthy statement of the truth of God. And what about verse 11? God is a righteous judge, a God who expresses his righteous indignation or his wrath every day. How about that for a t-shirt?
How about that for a little card to slip to your waitress at the end of the meal with a decent tip? God is a righteous judge, a God who expresses his wrath every day. He is? Yes. Do you know how the King James Version translates it?
And perhaps even more accurately than the dynamic equivalence of the NIV? God is angry with the wicked every day. If you are wicked, God is angry with you every day.
Every day. You say, Well, I never heard that before. Well, it's in the Bible.
You just need to read it. You see, the God to whom we're introduced in the Bible is not a figment of our imaginations. He's not a creation of our own design and desire, a kind of, you know, tailor-made God to fit the twenty-first century, to fit the pluralistic perceptions of our culture, to allow us to absorb and placate every notion that presents itself. No, God stands above and outside of all of that, calling men and women to account. And he is the God who in his mercy and in his goodness lays his heavy hand upon the neck of David. And wonderfully so, because David was in a mess. David was an adulterer. David was a sinner. David was a liar. David was a denier.
David was at least nine months into his deceit, and when he looked at himself in a mirror, he said, I am finished. I am wasting. My bones cling to me. My skin clings to my bones. I'm like an owl in the ruins. I'm like a desert owl. My friends disabuse me. I am fevered in the day. I'm an insomniac in the night.
Why? Because God's hand of heaviness rested on him. You see, what we seek to disavow in seeking somehow or another to make more palatable to our friends this amazing story of forgiveness is actually what robs our sensible friends from being able to put together the story we're trying to tell them. Unless we have a dilemma, then the story of what Jesus has done makes no sense.
It is because God's hand rests in heaviness on the psalmist that he needs to acknowledge his sin. Until it did, what was he doing? Lying about it. Covering it up.
Justifying it. Saying, He's dead now. He'll never be back.
That guy, I don't need to worry about him anymore. It's just Bathsheba and me and the baby. No.
Absolutely not. Now, can I step out of this psalm for just a moment? Will you think with me and see whether there's logic in what I'm saying? Is this statement here, for example, in Psalm 7, about the righteous indignation of God, is it possible for us to say, Oh, well, you know, that's the Old Testament stuff? We understand that, but that's how God was in the Old Testament. When we get out of that malachite business and get into the New Testament, then, of course, we get free from all of that. We have to examine our Bibles. We did this last week, didn't we, when we talked about cumulative truth? We said, How is it that David could acknowledge such forgiveness and so on? After all, Jesus had never come. We talked about the nature of cumulative truth and the whole idea of forgiveness and the scapegoat and so on, finding its fulfillment in Jesus, but nevertheless, as an historic act, being significant in its time. Well, in the same way, if we push forward, what do we find? Do we find the apostles stepping out onto the streets of Jerusalem and Athens and so on and proclaiming a completely different message? For example, saying, I know some of you may have read the Old Testament, but of course, that was the Old Testament.
Let me tell you what the story is in the New. If we listen to some people, that's exactly what they suggest to us. It's because they don't know the Bible. Let's just take Paul. We'll just use Paul. I'll give you an illustration from Paul and then close with Luther. Paul goes to the intelligentsia in Athens, right? And he's very gracious and wise in his introduction.
I can see you're a very religious group of people. I looked around your place. I've been listening to some of your poets, and there's a direct correlation between a lot of their searching and a lot of what I have to tell you. I'm surprised you have a shrine here or a statue here to the unknown God.
I guess you're just covering your bases in case you've missed someone. And he says, I'd like to start just from there and tell you that this God that you don't know, I know. And he's the Creator of the ends of the earth, he's sovereign over geography and history, and he established all the nations of man.
He put them where he wanted them. He's the Lord of language and so on. And then what does he do? He gets to the point where he says, And he has set a day. He has set a day.
Oh, the people said, set a day for what? He said, He has set a day for judgment. Since he is the Creator, and since we are his creation, and since he has told us how he wants his creation to be, and since we are not as he asked us to be, we're all moving towards our final examination. He's given out the papers, everyone will complete the test, and everyone will go under the scrutiny of his gaze. He has set a day when he will judge the world by the man he has appointed, namely Jesus. Acts chapter 10, you get reference to that. And he is given proof of this by the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Response? Some people said, We're out of here.
Another group said, Quite good, maybe we can listen again. And a small group believed and became followers of Jesus and actually followers of Paul. What was he doing? He's essentially doing what is in concurrence with Psalm 32.
Happiness is our great quest, happiness is to know God, our great dilemma is sin, and God has established a mechanism for dealing with this. You say, Well, that was in a big crowd. I'm sure he wasn't like that when he was one-on-one with people. Really?
Don't set yourselves up now. Acts chapter 24, he's in custody with Felix and Drusilla, Felix and Drusilla having a night off from Monopoly or Scrabble or whatever it is that they're usually doing, and they say to one another, What do you want to do? And Drusilla said, Why don't we get Saul up here and have him do a talk for us? And so they bring him in and remember what his talk was. He said, I have three points I wanted to talk to you about tonight.
Thanks for inviting me up. I wanted to talk to you about righteousness and self-control and the judgment to come. What? They were sitting in an adulterous relationship.
Felix, by the mechanisms of a Cypriot magician, had stolen away his brother's wife and was now sleeping with her. What are you doing, Paul? You sure this is the sermon you want to preach right now?
Why would you preach this sermon? Righteousness, self-control. They're unrighteous. They're out of control. Yeah. And there's a coming judgment.
Why are you doing that? So that if there is any tenderness left in their conscience, they may cry out to God for forgiveness. So that perhaps by the words that I speak, their conscience may be wounded. And as a result, brought to wholeness. You see, it was in the area of conscience that Luther was tyrannized, wasn't he? If you know anything of history, you know how zealous Luther was, how good a fellow he was, how committed he was to the very notions of doing the right thing before God, and how paralyzed he was by his inability to do so. And when he finally puts it all together, he realizes, number one, the law that I'm trying to keep cannot put me in a right standing before God.
By doing this stuff, I can't make myself acceptable to God. He discovered that not just in the thin air. He actually discovered that by reading his Bible.
He'd never really seen it when he read it. No one will be declared righteous in God's sight by observing the law. Rather, through the law, we become conscious of sin.
And yet many who come routinely to Parkside are still operating on the basis of the law. God's law or your own law. And you are still trying to patch up your resume. You're still convinced that although the Bible says what it says, and although you've heard this a hundred times, you still are going to manage this one.
Because you really are, unlike the people around you and the people in your office and the people everywhere else, you really are a pretty good citizen. If you lived a thousand lifetimes, you could never make yourself acceptable to God. When Luther got that, he then understood that the perfection of God demanded that his holiness deal with our disobedience—that God is offended and insulted and made angry by our human disobedience.
That's what really messed him up. Here he is, saying his prayers, doing his penance, going through the routine. Then he realizes, This doesn't work.
This won't work. Then he realizes, And this holy God before whom I cannot stand must deal with disobedience. Then he said, Unless this holy God has, on account of his own mercy and grace, made a way for people in the condition of myself to be brought into a relationship with him, then there's no hope at all. And then he went back to reading his Bible again.
And suddenly, as happens in people's lives, something that he had read a hundred times before came alive to him. But now, but now, a righteousness from God—not for God, from God, apart from law has been made known, to which the law and the prophets testify. And then he goes on and reads, and he says, This righteousness comes from God through Jesus Christ to all who believe. To all who believe. Not to all who do, but to all who believe.
He'd been doing like a crazy man. He wasn't resting in what God had provided. And later on he wrote these amazing words, and with this I close, It is the sweetest mercy of God, that it is not imaginary sinners he saves, but real sinners. He doesn't save imaginary sinners. We escape, says Luther, his condemnation, because of his mercy, not because of our righteousness. Grace is given to heal the sick, not to decorate spiritual heroes. Grace is given to heal the sick, not to decorate spiritual heroes. It is given to those who say, Your hand is heavy upon me.
I am a disaster, and I am broken, and I am wasted. Have you ever said that to God? I'm not asking now if somebody signed you up for purpose in your life, or whether you decided that a little religion would be a help to you—after all, to add it to your resume might be nice—or whether you thought it would be a nice idea, just as an insurance policy, somehow or another to include Jesus in the trunk of your existence.
None of that. I'm asking you what the Bible asks you. Have you ever lain down before God and said, God, I am a dead woman without you? I am a dead man and lost without you. Unless you come and do for me what I cannot do for myself, then I remain absolutely hopeless and absolutely helpless. I say, I'm not gonna do that. I'm not gonna do that.
I didn't work as hard as I worked and brought up my family and did what I did to go where—I don't know where you want me to do this, but I am not gonna do that. Well, please, God, he'll put his heavy hand on you one more time, and not the heaviness that snuffs you into eternity and to your final examination, for which this morning again you heard there is necessary prep, and which apparently you have determined you of all people can do without. You're listening to Truth for Life Weekend. That is Alistair Begg explaining how the heavy hand of God can be a means of mercy and grace.
Keep listening. Alistair will return to close today's program. I hope you are benefiting from this study of Psalm 32. If you missed any of the messages in this series, you can catch up online. All of Alistair's teaching can be streamed or downloaded or shared for free through the Truth for Life mobile app or on our website at truthforlife.org. Today's message is titled My Hiding Place.
It's from the series The Missing Peace. While you're on our website, be sure to check out the book we are recommending called Remade, Embracing Your Complete Identity in Christ. This is a book that will assure you that if you're a believer, God is indeed working out his plan and purpose to make you more like Jesus. This book begins with 30 short readings that explain how in Christ you have a new identity and a new calling. The next set of 30 readings address how, although you are still a sinner here on earth, you can fully rest in Jesus' provision of salvation. And the final 30 readings will help you keep your experience of suffering in the proper perspective. As you read Remade, you'll be encouraged as you begin to see yourself as God sees you as a sinner saved by grace, a sufferer upheld by Jesus, and a saint and co-heir with Christ. This is the last week and we'll be talking about the book Remade, so visit our website today for more information.
Again, that's truthforlife.org. Now, here's Alistair to close with prayer. Father, your Word wounds us. You take your bow as it were and you fire the arrows into our hearts.
We're harmed by them in order that we might be healed by the provisions of your grace. We look at old David there, sick and wounded and disappointed in a flat-out disgrace to himself and all of his friends and loved ones. When I kept silent, when I covered up, when I hid, then I was wasted. But then I acknowledged my sin.
I confessed my transgressions. And what a wonderful change in our lives is then worked. Please, Lord, bring us to the place by whatever means that we might cry out to you for your mercy and for your grace. Then we'll sing your songs in a strange land. Then we'll be surrounded by these songs of deliverance. Then we'll know that you are our hiding place.
But we'll never hide in you as long as we're trying to hide from you. Bring us out into the open, O God, we pray, and welcome us in the embrace of your Son. And may your grace and your mercy and your peace be the portion of all who believe now and forevermore. Amen. I'm Bob Lapine. We are glad you studied along with us this weekend. Next weekend we'll learn about the only place where we can truly hide our sin. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.
