Psalm 32

Psalms 32:1-2

The Hebrew title, which this page's text does not show, reads A Psalm of David, Maschil, a word the tradition renders instruction or contemplation and that this psalm itself plays on at verse 8, I will instruct thee. The Psalter's first word, blessed, returns here doubled, blessed the one forgiven and blessed the one in whom the Lord finds no guile, echoing the two ways set out at 1:1 and 2:12. Paul quotes these opening verses at Rom 4:6-8 as David describing the blessedness of the man to whom God imputeth righteousness without works, the Old Testament's own account of justification by faith.

Psalms 32:3-4

Silence here is not peace but suppression: when I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long, the body breaking down under a guilt the mouth will not confess. Day and night thy hand was heavy upon me reads the discipline as God's own pressure rather than mere consequence, and my moisture is turned into the drought of summer pictures the body's own strength dried out from within. The commentators read these two verses as the anatomy of unconfessed sin, the very condition David turns from in the verse that follows.

Psalms 32:5

I acknowledged my sin: I acknowledged my sin unto thee, and mine iniquity have I not hid answers verses 3 and 4 directly: where silence brought decay, speech brings relief, and thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin arrives in the same verse as the confession, without delay. Selah closes the verse, one of three markers in this psalm, and the honest reading, offered without certainty, is a musical pause inviting the singer to weigh what has just been said. Henry marks the pace of the verse as its own argument, forgiveness given the moment the resolve to confess is spoken.

Psalms 32:6-7

David's own experience becomes instruction for every godly one, pray in a time when thou mayest be found, before the door of confession closes. The floods of great waters that cannot reach the forgiven man answer the drought of verse 4, the wasting of unconfessed guilt exchanged for a flood that cannot touch him. Thou art my hiding place turns the psalm from confession to refuge, and Spurgeon reads compass me about with songs of deliverance as a man surrounded not by enemies but by singers.

Psalms 32:8-9

I will instruct thee answers the psalm's own title, Maschil, and the commentators divide over the speaker, some hearing the Lord answering David's prayer of verse 7, others hearing David turning to teach the godly he named in verse 6. Guide thee with mine eye pictures a rider so attentive to the horseman that a glance suffices, set directly against the horse or mule of verse 9, an animal that must be forced by bit and bridle because it will not read a look. Gill takes the contrast as the whole point of confession, the forgiven man meant to become teachable rather than merely relieved.

Psalms 32:10-11

The psalm closes on the two ways of Psalm 1, sorrows for the wicked and mercy compassing the one who trusts, the same verb, compass, that framed the hiding place of verse 7 now framing mercy itself. Be glad, rejoice, shout for joy pile three commands of praise into one verse, the confessed man's silence of verse 3 answered at last by noise he is glad to make. Wesley reads the whole psalm as proof that repentance ends in joy rather than in gloom, the pattern later penitential psalms will follow.