“Likewise, David also speaks of the blessing of the person to whom God credits righteousness apart from works: Blessed are those whose lawless acts are forgiven and whose sins are covered. Blessed is the person the Lord will never charge with sin.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

History builds on itself. You can’t make proper sense out of the present without understanding the past. History is linear like that. It is always going somewhere. Sometimes it winds this way and that and even doubles back a bit, but forward is always, ultimately where it is going. This is because it is being guided along by a God who has a plan. It is a plan He has been slowly revealing for a very long time. And He also leaves clues ahead of time for those with eyes to see. A bit of an excursus today as we pause to ponder an accessory point in Paul’s argument. Let’s talk about God’s plans and how we know them.

The New Testament is deeply rooted in the worldview of the Old. You really can’t understand the former without the latter. The New Testament authors were constantly quoting from the Old Testament in their writings. I have a commentary in my office whose sole focus is on helping readers understand how the New Testament authors made use of the Old in the various instances they quoted it. This is all because the new covenant is a fulfillment and replacement of the old. If you don’t understand the thing fulfilled, you’ll never really understand the thing that is replacing it.

Now, this doesn’t mean that we are beholden to the old covenant and its laws and expectations. Again, it was fulfilled and replaced by the new covenant. The old covenant laws are not normative for us any longer. The Ten Commandments themselves don’t have power over us and how we live our lives. that’s not the worth of the Old Testament for us. It’s worth is in the inspiration it offers, the context it gives, and the information it provides to inform our grasp of the new covenant.

One of the more important roles the Old Testament serves in this regard is to help us see how God has been planning for our salvation in Christ for a very long time.

Yesterday, we saw how God had set in place the parameters for salvation when He declared Abraham to be righteous in response to his faith and not because of anything in particular he had done. Salvation, which might be better phrased “an imputed right standing before God,” was and has always been something that was the result of our willingness to trust in God and to demonstrate that trust by obeying His commands. That is, salvation comes by faith, and not by works. It is not the result of genetic heritage either.

Having revealed this by His declaration of Abraham’s imputed (that is, a gift given as the extension of a quality possessed by someone else) righteousness, God didn’t simply leave the point alone until it was time for Jesus to arrive on the scene to do the actual giving. Much to the contrary, God kept dropping clues that this was how salvation was intended to work through the rest of the Old Testament narrative. There are so much such clues that the argument by the New Testament authors that the new covenant is the fulfillment of the old and consistent with the direction God was clearly always going is entirely justified.

Paul points to another such clue from the prophet and king, David. This comes out of Psalm 32. “Blessed are those whose lawless acts are forgiven and whose sins are covered. Blessed is the person the Lord will never charge with sin.” Now, if you go and look that up in your own Bible, the wording is going to be a bit different. This is because Paul is quoting the line from the Greek version of the Old Testament known as the Septuagint, whereas you are reading from a translation of the Hebrew version. Either way, his point is that the blessing and joyfulness of a faith-based righteousness is something God’s people have been talking about for a very long time. You can go all the way back to David, someone who was thoroughly committed to the goodness and rightness of the old covenant, and see him touting the goodness and rightness of salvation apart from any kind of works.

The whole of Psalm 32 is a joyful meditation on the forgiveness of God. David speaks of the agony of concealed sin and the quiet conviction of the Holy Spirit. He echoes the relief of confession and the freedom that comes with forgiveness. He calls others to join him in seeking the Lord from out of their sin in order to receive the forgiveness and protection He offers. The psalm concludes with a word from the Lord, calling those who are stubborn in their sin to “not be like a horse or a mule, without understanding, that must be controlled with bit and bridle or else it [God’s salvation] will not come near you,” before offering one last call to trust in the Lord and receive His faithful love.

Paul highlights David’s words here, I think, because of that first line. “Blessed are those whose lawless acts are forgiven.” The emphasis he brings is on the idea that this is forgiveness being extended to those who are acting outside the law. And nowhere in the psalm is the law mentioned. No amount of effort or works are cited as the reason for God’s forgiveness. Instead, this incredible gift is entirely the result of the trust the penitent person is willing to extend to the Lord.

The line calling hearers to not be like a horse or mule is a reference to the needlessly restrictive nature of the law; needless in the sense of its being a concession to our hardheartedness and not that it was unnecessary for God to put in place until the time for Christ had arrived. David, and now Paul, are instructing us to not be like the person who needs the law to keep them in line. There is no salvation to be found there. That was the referent of “it” at the end of that line: “or else it will not come near you.” Don’t be like that. Don’t stubbornly insist on the pathway of law (being “controlled by bit and bridle”) when the pathway of grace by faith is open to you.

That’s all what Paul means by this quote. And he’s using it to set up his next point which we’ll get to tomorrow. For now, I just don’t want you to miss the fact that what Paul was quoting here was written around a thousand years before Christ came. This is in addition to what God revealed through Abraham which came almost another thousand years before that. And here we are, reading and studying what Paul wrote two thousand years later. That’s four thousand years of consistency from God. Four thousand years during which time salvation, a right standing before God, has always been a gift from Him in response to our faith. Jesus made receiving this gift far, far easier than it had been before He arrived to do His ministry, but He didn’t do anything to fundamentally change the way the righteousness of God worked and was granted to us.

This consistency over millennia is why we can safely trust in God’s plans and receive them with confidence. You can receive them with confidence. You can place your trust in Jesus no matter who you are or where you are from or what lies in your background, and know beyond a shadow of doubt that when you do, the righteousness of God will be yours in Him. His promise to forgive your lawless acts and cover your sins and never charge you with them again will be immediately extended to you in Christ. And when it is, the life that is truly life will be yours. This is indeed good news.