Bible Commentary - Psalms 32

Psalm 32 is a psalm of thanksgiving for God’s forgiveness.  We see this clearly defined in the first verse, when David says “How blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven”.  This makes a couple things clear.  First, it is not a prayer, it is a declaration of praise or thanksgiving.  David is not asking for forgiveness, he is declaring the “blessing” of forgiveness.  Second, he sets the topic very clearly to be forgiveness in particular.  David is not talking about the blessings of God in general or anything like that.  In this way the psalm is very specific.  In other ways, this psalm shares the generalities that we find in nearly every psalm.  For instance, David does not describe forgiveness for any particular thing, it is only “my sin” or “my transgressions” (v. 5).  In this way, Psalm 32 is specific in some ways and generic in others.

Structurally, I would divide this psalm into three sections.  The first section is verses 1-2, which constitutes the introduction.  This introduces the general themes and summarizes the message of the psalm as a whole.

The second section is verses 3-5.  Some commentators extend the second section from v. 3-7, based on the three “selahs” in verses 4, 5 and 7.  Certainly I think these three selahs suggest some kind of thematic grouping of these verses between 3-7.

In my opinion, verses 3-5 are more narrowly focused on David’s own story.  In these verses he is describing his own moment of crisis, when his unresolved personal sin resulted in physical distress.  “When I kept silent, my body waste away” (v. 3), but when David confessed his sin, “you forgave the guilt of my sin” (v. 5) and the pressure and physical suffering was resolved.  This is David’s own story of sin and forgiveness, highlighting the wonders of God’s forgiveness.

The third section is verses 6-11.  This is the section where David takes his own personal story and encourages other people to follow his example and seek God’s forgiveness.  The language is not entirely clear and some sections are actually pretty confusing, but we see David’s conclusion in verse 6: “Therefore let everyone who is godly pray to you”.  The conclusion is that we should all pray and seek forgiveness in the same way that David sought forgiveness.  In verses 8-9 David says “I will instruct you and teach you”, and that is speaking of the message we have already received.  The instruction of David is from his story in verses 3-5, that we suffer from our sin until we pray to God and seek forgiveness.  Verses 10-11 are a fairly standard conclusion, with David offering a final moment of praise and joy on behalf of the righteous and an admonition to fear the LORD and avoid wickedness.

Even though this is a psalm about forgiveness, I noticed that the word “forgive” in any form only appears twice in the psalm: first in verse 1, and second in verse 5.  The sparsity of the word “forgive” in a psalm that is clearly about forgiveness is interesting.  The overall effect is to place the focus squarely on verse 5, “and you forgave the guilt of my sin”.  This is what the psalm is all about; when David petitioned God for forgiveness, it was granted to him.  This is what we are supposed to learn from, this is what we are supposed to emulate in our own life.  This is the blessing that was described in verse 1: when we make mistakes and sin against the LORD, we can turn to him and he will forgive us.

I would also like to direct my readers to view the three sentences that immediately precede the “selahs”.  These three sentences form the central story and message of the psalm as a whole.  Read them in order: “my vitality was drained away”, “you forgave the guilt of my sin”, “you surround me with songs of deliverance”.

The first one is the “problem statement”.  It’s not a problem statement in the same way as what we see in prayer psalms, where the psalmist is specifically praying for the relief of some particular crisis, but it is a problem statement in the sense of David describing some of the trouble in his life at the time.  Throughout verses 3-4, David is emphasizing the connection between his unforgiven sin and physical problems of an undefined nature.

Forgiveness is once again at the center, and its position in the middle makes it the most “active” part of the psalm.  If we divide the psalm into three parts (which we can easily do), then effectively it breaks down into background, middle and conclusion.  The background is basically the “problem statement”, it is the motivation behind the psalm, what justifies the “action”.  The conclusion is praise and thanksgiving, which is the result of the “action”.  What goes in the middle is the active part of the psalm, which transforms us from the background into the conclusion.  The action is what turns the problems into praise.  In the case of prayer psalms, the action is the act of prayer or petition.  It is the moment of crying out for help, and it turns our problems into praise through God’s intervention.  In the case of this psalm, prayer is not at the center.  Instead, the center of this psalm is acknowledging our guilt and receiving forgiveness from God.  Forgiveness is the activity at the “center” and like the prayer or petition, forgiveness i what transforms David’s “wasting away” into “songs of deliverance”.

As I just mentioned, the third section is the conclusion, which is “songs of deliverance”.  This is the moment of David’s praise that God has forgiven him, God has healed him and restored him.

After David’s story concludes, he urges us to follow him and follow his example.  It is a strangely didactic moment that we don’t normally see in many of the other psalms.  For example, the prayer psalms rarely have these moments of “you should pray too and God will help you also”.  The notion that we should learn from the psalms and follow their example is typically implicit and the narrative is given to us without additional commentary.  In this case, the “narrative” refers to the three-part structure of problem statement, action, and praise for deliverance.

Not only does this psalm have a didactic conclusion, the action is mostly past-tense; at the time the psalm was written, David had already asked for forgiveness; he had already been healed and restored.  This loss of immediacy heightens the didactic nature of the psalm.  If David’s plea for forgiveness was present tense, then that becomes the focus or purpose of the psalm.  In other words, if David still needed forgiveness then that is what he would care about the most, and that’s what he would be thinking about.  Since he’s already been forgiven, the focus shifts to outside of the immediacy of his problems and towards the rest of us, the ones reading or listening to this psalm.  It becomes less about David and more about us.

Every psalm does this to some degree.  Since the psalms were written down and transmitted for other people and for later generations, every psalm is at least a little bit for others.  However, every psalm also has an author and a motivation and for psalms written in the moment of crisis, the motivation shifts more heavily towards that immediate situation and the author himself.  For psalms written after the fact, the focus shifts towards the audience for whom it was written.  This psalm is past tense, which shifts the focus towards the audience, and this tendency is reinforced by the didactic conclusion in verses 8-11.

In conclusion, it should be evident by now to my readers that this psalm utilizes much of the structure and organization of the prayer psalms even though the motivation is different.  I have made similar comments before, such as e.g. Psalm 11 and especially Psalm 20.  In both of those cases, I described in my commentary how the psalms utilized elements of the standard prayer psalm formula, but reorganized and adapted for the specific purpose at hand.  I would say that Psalm 32 is very much the same kind of thing, where the basic formula of the prayer psalm has been adapted to the purpose of highlighting God’s forgiveness.  What this shows is a common literary tradition, if not a shared authorship, between these psalms and the prayer psalms.  It shows a conventional pattern that was deeply understood by the psalmist(s), who could use the same general pattern to express different kinds of thought beyond the original design.  Of this tradition, Psalm 32 shows us another example of a unique evolution, still showing the hallmarks of the pattern behind it even as it is repurposed to bring us new ideas.