Not Reckoned

The Psalm

A Psalm of David, Maschil.

1. Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.
2. Blessed is the man unto whom the LORD imputeth not iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no guile.
3. When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long.
4. For day and night thy hand was heavy upon me: my moisture is turned into the drought of summer. Selah.
5. I acknowledged my sin unto thee, and mine iniquity have I not hid. I said, I will confess my transgressions unto the LORD; and thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin. Selah.
6. For this shall every one that is godly pray unto thee in a time when thou mayest be found: surely in the floods of great waters they shall not come nigh unto him.
7. Thou art my hiding place; thou shalt preserve me from trouble; thou shalt compass me about with songs of deliverance. Selah.
8. I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go: I will guide thee with mine eye.
9. Be ye not as the horse, or as the mule, which have no understanding: whose mouth must be held in with bit and bridle, lest they come near unto thee.
10. Many sorrows shall be to the wicked: but he that trusteth in the LORD, mercy shall compass him about.
11. Be glad in the LORD, and rejoice, ye righteous: and shout for joy, all ye that are upright in heart.

Setting and occasion

The heading gives two things, and the second one is a word the psalm will pick up again when the room has forgotten it. A Psalm of David, Maschil — and מַשְׂכִּיל is from שׂכל, to have insight, to act with skill, and in its causative sense to give insight, to instruct. Thirteen psalms carry the word in their headings, on the usual count, and this is the first of them. Translators split over what it claims: a skilful psalm, a contemplative psalm, or a teaching psalm. Keep the third reading in your pocket. At verse 8 somebody says אַשְׂכִּילְךָ — I will instruct thee — and it is the same root. The psalm headed an instruction turns out to contain the instructing.

About the occasion the psalm says nothing at all, and the silence is worth respecting for a moment before it is filled. Everybody’s instinct — and it is an ancient instinct — is to read verses 3 and 4 as the months between Bathsheba and Nathan, and to hear verse 5 as “I have sinned against the LORD” (2 Sam. 12:13). It fits, and Psalm 51 sits close enough to make the pairing natural. But notice which of the two psalms carries the evidence. Psalm 51’s heading names Nathan and the occasion; Psalm 32’s names nobody. There is no woman in it, no soldier, no prophet, no king, no crime specified — only a sin heavy enough to be worth hiding, a concealment long enough to do physical damage, and a man who afterwards has something to teach. The lesson can say the tradition is reasonable. It should not say the psalm says so.

Where the psalm sits is better documented and matters more. It is the second of the seven penitential psalms and one of the four Luther called the Pauline psalms; the Psalm 130 lesson taught both groupings and named this psalm while doing it, so this one borrows rather than repeats. One thing is worth adding that the earlier lesson could not. Of the seven penitential psalms, six begin in the trouble — O LORD, rebuke me not, have mercy upon me, out of the depths. Psalm 32 begins with the verdict. It is the only one of the seven that opens on the other side of its own crisis, which is why it is the only one of the seven that can end by giving advice.

One last feature to name before the exposition, because it decides how the psalm is read aloud. There is more than one voice in it. Verses 1 and 2 are a verdict pronounced to anyone listening; verses 3 to 7 are a man speaking to God about himself; verses 8 and 9 are someone saying I will instruct thee, which is either God answering or the psalmist turning to the reader, and the question is taken up at that strophe; and verse 11 is an imperative addressed to a congregation. A psalm of eleven verses changes its audience four times. Whoever reads it in public should know where the turns are.

The shape of the psalm

Psalm 32 marks its own divisions, which is a kindness the last three psalms in this October set did not extend. Selah stands at the end of verse 4, again at the end of verse 5, and again at the end of verse 7. Look at the first two of those. They are one verse apart, and between them stands verse 5 — alone, fenced on both sides by the psalm’s own rests. Whatever Selah is, and nobody is certain, the psalm has put a silence before verse 5 and another after it and left nothing else in the enclosure. The lesson’s hinge was chosen on the grammar; the psalm’s own punctuation had already chosen it.

Inside that frame the psalm runs on an arithmetic of threes. Verses 1 and 2 name three kinds of sin and three things God does with them, one each, in order. It is the most compressed statement of forgiveness in the Psalter, and none of it survives into English as a pattern.

Now count the words in verse 5, because this is the psalm’s whole argument in one line. חַטָּאתִי, my sin; וַעֲוֹנִי, my iniquity; פְשָׁעַי, my transgressions — all three of the nouns from verses 1 and 2, back in a single verse, and this time with possessive endings on them. The verdict of verse 1 was pronounced over a man in the third person. Verse 5 is the man saying the same three words about himself. And the two verbs turn round with them: he stops covering, and God lifts.

That leaves the fourth clause of verse 2, which is the one most often treated as an awkward condition tacked on to a free gift: and in whose spirit there is no guile. רְמִיָּה is deceit, slackness, treachery — and the psalm is about to show you exactly what it means by it. The guile is not some further sin the blessed man happens not to have. The guile is the covering up in verses 3 and 4. Read the clause forward into the psalm and it stops being a condition and becomes a description.

Two notes on that third column. The first is that the psalm’s centre of gravity is not where its emotion is. Verses 3 and 4 are the memorable ones — the bones, the drought, the hand — and they are told in the past tense by a man they can no longer hurt. The second is verse 8. Somebody starts speaking who has not spoken before, and English gives no help: I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go. The strophe on that verse takes the question up. What can be said here is that the psalm ends by doing what its heading promised, and that a man who has been forgiven turns out to be in a position to teach — which is not a change of subject but the point.

Romans 4, and the word Psalm 130 lacked

A fortnight ago this series made a promise and then declined to keep it. The Psalm 130 lesson set out carefully what that psalm teaches — that forgiveness is with God, that it is unearned, that it rests on his word, that it produces fear, that it is a purchase and not a waiver — and then said just as carefully what it does not do: it never says that the righteousness of another is reckoned to the sinner. When Paul wants that, he does not quote Psalm 130; he quotes Psalm 32. This is that psalm. The word the earlier lesson said was missing is standing in verse 2.

Here is Paul using it.

Two small things before the argument, because both are visible in the English and both are worth thirty seconds in a room. Paul is quoting the Greek Old Testament, which reads plurals where the Hebrew has singulars: iniquities and sins for the psalm’s transgression and sin. And Romans 4:8 says the Lord in ordinary case where the psalm says LORD in small capitals, because the covenant name does not survive into Greek. The New Testament reads the Old in translation, like everybody else.

The step Paul takes

Now notice what the quotation does and does not contain. Paul introduces it as David describing “the blessedness of the man, unto whom God imputeth righteousness without works” — and then quotes two verses in which the word righteousness does not appear at all. They say three negative things: iniquities forgiven, sins covered, sin not imputed. Paul announces a positive and produces three negatives as his evidence.

That is a step, and a lesson that slides over it is not teaching the passage. It is also a step Paul has already laid the ground for, and the ground is the verb. Three verses earlier he quoted Genesis: “Abraham believed God, and it was counted unto him for righteousness” (Rom. 4:3, quoting Gen. 15:6). The Hebrew there is וַיַּחְשְׁבֶהָ לּוֹ — the verb חשׁב with לוֹ, he reckoned it to him. And the Hebrew here is לֹא יַחְשֹׁב יְהוָה לוֹ עָוֹן — the same verb, the same to him, with a negative in front of it. In the Greek both are λογίζομαι, and Paul repeats that one word through eleven verses of a twenty-five-verse chapter (4:3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 22, 23, 24). It is bookkeeping language: what goes in the column, and against whose name.

So Paul is not deducing a righteousness out of a forgiveness. He is saying that Genesis and Psalm 32 describe one transaction from its two sides. Something is entered to Abraham’s account that he did not earn; something is not entered to this man’s account that he did. One ledger, one clerk, two entries, and neither of them is the work of the man whose name is at the top.

And there is a reason the psalm can bear that weight, which is the word it opens with. אַשְׁרֵי does not mean let off. A man with his debts cancelled is not thereby rich, and if the psalm had said forgiven and stopped, Paul’s sentence about imputed righteousness would be doing more than the text allows. But the psalm does not say the man is now level. It calls him blessed, and puts him in the same grammatical position as the righteous man of Psalm 1:1. Paul reads the blessing as the tell. A standing has been given, not merely a charge dropped.

What the confessions do with it

The Reformed confessions keep exactly this distinction, and in one case they keep it in one sentence. The Westminster Confession says that God justifies “not by infusing righteousness into them, but by pardoning their sins, and by accounting and accepting their persons as righteous” (WCF 11.1) — two verbs, joined by an and, which is precisely Paul’s two sides. The Belgic Confession goes to this psalm by name: our righteousness before God stands in the remission of sins, “as David and Paul teach us, declaring this to be the happiness of man, that God imputes righteousness to him without works” (Belgic 23).

That fifth row is the one to linger on, because it is where this psalm is usually mishandled in both directions. Verse 5 is not a transaction in which confession buys pardon; the psalm has already pronounced the blessing in verse 1 before any confessing is mentioned, and Paul’s whole point is without works. But verse 5 is also not optional, and four verses of wasted bones are the psalm’s argument that it is not. The Confession says both halves in one sentence and neither half without the other.

How the psalm has been used

Long before it was a Reformation proof text this psalm was a deathbed one. Possidius, who knew Augustine and wrote his life, says that in his last illness Augustine had the penitential psalms copied out and hung on the wall where he could see them from his bed, and that he read them and wept. The sources support that about the seven as a group rather than this psalm in particular, and it is worth passing on in that form. Psalm 32 is the second of those seven, and the only one of them that opens on the far side of its own crisis.

Luther’s use is the one the October set has already met. Asked which psalms were his favourites he named the Pauline psalms — 32, 51, 130 and 143 — because they teach that forgiveness is granted without the law and without works; the Psalm 130 lesson has that story and its caveats. What can be added here is only that of the four, this is the one he could have quoted fastest, and the one Paul had already quoted for him.

Singing Psalm 32

Eleven verses that begin with a verdict, spend four on a man drying out, turn on one line, and end in three imperatives to shout. Almost nothing else in the Psalter covers that distance in eleven verses, and it is the whole problem of leading it: one tune has to carry both verse 4 and verse 11 without making a liar of either.

Metre and settings

Check metre and stanza breaks against the edition in your hands. For this psalm check one thing more: whether the setting keeps the accounting word in verse 2. Imputeth not is the clause Paul quotes, and a paraphrase that softens it to forgives has quietly removed the reason this psalm is on an October list.

Suggested CM tunes

• ST. ANNE — solid and public; suits a psalm whose first word is a verdict pronounced out loud.
• WINCHESTER OLD — plain and old, and it will not oversell verses 3 and 4.
• BELMONT — gentler, and the natural choice if the room is meeting this psalm for the first time.
• DUNDEE (French) — steady, quickly learned, and it holds its shape across eleven verses.
• ST. MAGNUS — brighter and firmer, for a congregation that is going to sing through to verse 11 in one go.

Confirm the metre against your own book before printing; tune names travel between metres more often than anyone expects.

Leading suggestion

The psalm’s own order is the thing worth protecting, and it is easy to lose. It gives the verdict first and the evidence afterwards, which is the reverse of how a room expects a penitential psalm to work. So let the verdict arrive before any singing does: read verses 1 and 2 aloud, one voice, and only then begin. A congregation that has heard blessed, forgiven, covered, not imputed before it sings a note about wasted bones is hearing the psalm the way the psalm is built.

After that, follow the Selahs, because the psalm has already marked its own stops. Sing verses 3 and 4 and stop at the first one. Sing verse 5 alone — whatever the setting makes of it, keep it by itself — and stop at the second. Verses 6 and 7 to the third. Then take verses 8 to 11 without a break; from I will instruct thee to shout for joy is one movement and should sound like one.

Two things not to do. Do not hurry verses 3 and 4 to get to the good part: they are the psalm’s evidence that the good part cost something. And do not soften verse 9. The horse and the mule are in the psalm because being managed is the alternative to being taught, and a congregation that laughs at the animals and moves on has missed the offer.

This is the last of the six psalms gathered for October, and the set is worth naming whole at the end of it. Psalm 46 is sung from inside a city that cannot be moved; Psalm 62 by a man being quietly pushed, who finds that only one thing bears weight; Psalm 130 from under the water, by a man whose trouble is himself; Psalm 124 by a people counting what did not happen to them; Psalm 119 by a man whose every answer comes from something he was told; and Psalm 32 by a man who stopped hiding and found he had been blessed before he opened his mouth. A fortress, a rock, a debt, an escape, a lamp and a verdict — the whole set now has lessons. Psalm 130 is the one to read beside this lesson, because the question it deliberately left open is the one this psalm answers.

The psalm’s own settings, recordings and music sheets are collected on its psalter page, with recordings here, as they are added.