Repentance: The Path to Joy and Forgiveness

"SPROUL: When we began our study of repentance, I made the observation that as far as I know, the only cure for guilt is forgiveness, and the only necessity for forgiveness is repentance. And so there is this inseparable relationship among these three qualities of guilt, repentance and forgiveness. And anyone who has gone through the pain of genuine repentance, I am sure has also experienced the unspeakable joy of forgiveness, and that's why I don't want to conclude our series on repentance without looking to the end of repentance, or the goal of repentance, which is the restoration of the soul to fellowship with God and to the experience of that unspeakable joy of forgiveness." [00:00:05]

"In Psalm 32, the author of Psalm 51, David, gives us his feelings of forgiveness where he says, in verse one, 'Blessed is He whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered, and blessed is the man to whom the Lord does not impute iniquity and in whose spirit there is no deceit.' These powerful words of benediction are quoted in the New Testament as the apostle Paul, for example, sets forth the gospel in his epistle to the Romans. He appeals to these words from Psalm 32." [00:01:07]

"We remember that one of the devices that the prophets used in the Old Testament to communicate the word of God to the people was the use of the oracle, and there were two kinds of oracles. There were oracles of doom by which the prophet would be God's spokesman to announce the impending judgment that He would bring upon the nation and there was also the oracle of weal -- W-E-A-L -- the good news; and the bad news of judgment was prefaced by the term 'cursed be,' and the good news that was announced in terms of the divine benediction was prefaced by the word 'blessed.'" [00:01:58]

"That's why in the beatitudes, when Jesus speaks there, He uses this oracular form when He goes through the beatitudes: 'Blessed are those who do this and blessed are those who do that.' Well now David is pronouncing an oracle of weal that has direct implications for himself. I've often spoken about how the oracle of the curse or judgment which is pronounced with the use of the term 'woe,' is used by Isaiah in chapter six where he pronounces the curse upon himself, 'Woe is me, for I am an unclean man.' Now David is giving the contrast to the woe, which is the blessedness." [00:02:56]

"At the heart of the gospel is this concept of imputation, which means a legal transfer of accounts, a reckoning, or a transfer on the one hand in the cross. In the drama of the cross we see our sins transferred to Christ, who is our substitute. That is, our sins are imputed to Him legally, so that when God looks down from heaven at His son on the cross, He sees one who is covered with our guilt, covered with our iniquity by way of imputation." [00:05:38]

"And then the other part of the gospel is the reverse transfer where God then imputes His righteousness, His merit to our account. Now the way David is speaking of it here is negatively. He doesn't say, 'Blessed is the man who receives the imputation of the righteousness of Christ.' And of course he would believe that, and we understand that that's true, but he states it in the opposite way by saying, 'Blessed is the man to whom the Lord does not impute iniquity,' because that's our standing before God, is that rather than imputing to us the real guilt that we bear and therefore receive the punishment that we deserve, instead the Lord does not count our sins against us." [00:06:32]

"Then in verse three he said, 'When I kept silent my bones grew old, through my groaning all the day long. For day and night Your hand was heavy upon me, and my vitality was turned into the drought of summer. I acknowledged my sin to You, and my iniquity I have not hidden, and I said, 'I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,' and You forgave the iniquity of my sin.' Throughout church history we have seen the great saints of the ages reflect and muse upon the experience that they describe as 'the dark night of the soul,' when the soul senses the withdrawal of God, the withdrawal of His blessing from our lives, where He seems to have abandoned us, that He seems to have fled from our presence." [00:07:31]

"And so what we have here is David's description of what he had gone through in his 'dark night of the soul,' which he uses the expression here not of the darkness of the evening, but of the dryness of the summer in the midst of drought. Now remember, this is a man speaking from a semi-arid environment, from a dessert region of the middle east. And if you've ever been through Palestine you will see the phenomenon of what is called the 'wadi' -- W-A-D-I -- which we call in southwestern united states 'dry gulches' or 'arroyos' where you see in the midst of the dessert these pathways that are like creek beds but no water is flowing in them, but they are made when the storm does come and you have flash flooding and the run off from the mountains and so on, create these crevices in the hard surface of the dessert and they are the way in which the water is washed away." [00:09:05]

"However, during drought in the desert, the earth becomes parched and the land becomes cracked and these river beds, these 'wadis' are dry and this is what David is recalling here, 'During that time where I was experiencing guilt without relief and the hand of the Lord was heavy upon me and I felt oppressed by my burden of guilt, my soul was dry as a potsherd. I was like the drought in summer.' And that's the language he uses, which everyone in Palestine was aware of that. And he says, 'My vitality was turned into the drought of summer.' Earlier, 'When I kept silent, when I was not confessing my sin before God, my bones grew old.'" [00:10:25]

"And then he goes on to say, 'For this cause, everyone who is godly shall pray to You in a time that You may be found.' Remember the phrase, 'Seek ye the Lord while He may be found. Call ye upon Him when He is near. Let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts for He will have mercy upon him and abundantly pardon.'" [00:12:29]

"And so David is saying that after a person experiences the forgiveness of God, they have now come to a safe hiding place, a safe place where in the midst of the flood of the great waters, no harm will befall them. 'You shall preserve me from trouble, and You shall surround me,' he says, 'with songs of deliverance. I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go. I will guide you with My eye.' And now of course, he's not instructing, but God is instructing him, 'Do not be like the horse or like the mule, which have no understanding, which must be harnessed with bit and bridle else they will not come near you.'" [00:17:42]

"And then David finishes this psalm by saying, 'Many sorrows shall be to the wicked, but he who trusts in the Lord, mercy shall surround him.' Boy I love that image. It's not that we will just be touched lightly or tapped on the shoulder by mercy, but the mercy of God will surround us, be all around us. We'll be engulfed by the mercy of God. That's the Christian life. That's what is true for everyone who places their trust in the Lord." [00:19:28]