Sin and Forgiveness

July 18th, 2025
by Lance Waldie

Psalm 32:1-2 How blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered! 2 How blessed is the man to whom the Lord does not impute iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit!

We note here three words for sin and three words for forgiveness of those sins. First, David speaks of his “transgression” (Heb. peshah). This term means “going away; departure.” In this context it refers to a departure from God and His law. In short, transgression refers to someone knowing the truth and willfully disregarding it. Transgression is thus a sin against God, God alone (cf. Psalm 51:4). Certainly David sinned against Bathsheba and her husband whom he killed, along with the nation whom he served as king. But first and foremost he sinned against God. Alexander Maclaren wrote with reference to transgression, “You have not got to the bottom of the blackness until you see that it is a flat rebellion against God himself.”

A second term David uses for sin in Psalm 32 is “sin” (Heb. chattath) in v. 1. Akin to the Greek term for sin (hamartia), it means to “fall short” of a mark. In the ancient world the term was used in archery to describe one who misses his target, whose arrow “falls short.” Sin is therefore man’s falling short of God’s perfect standard, a failure to measure up to Him.

David uses a third term in v. 2 for sin, namely “iniquity” (Heb. hawon)—perverted; guilty. So, if we put all three terms together, we see that we as humans have transgressed; we are in rebellion against God. We have fallen short of God’s perfect standard; we are thus all sinners, for we do not keep God’s divine law. We have therefore corrupted ourselves and are guilty, bearing our own burden of guilt. In short, we are from the womb depraved and in need of a Savior (cf. Rom. 3:10-12).

Now we note three terms used by David for how God will deal with us when we confess and repent of our sins. First, note that the blessed of God are “forgiven” upon confession. The term means “lifted up.” So, transgression is like a heavy weight on our soul that is “lifted up” by God when we confess it and repent of it. When we confess our sins, God removes them “as far as the east is from the west” (Ps. 103:12). God then “remembers” our sin no more (Isa. 43:25).

A second term depicting God’s actions with our sins is “covered” (Heb. keseh). Here, one is reminded of the imagery of the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur) in Leviticus 16. On the Day of Atonement the high priest of Israel took blood from an animal he had recently sacrificed in the temple and carried it into the Holy of Holies where only he could go, and that only once per year. It was there that he sprinkled the dead animal’s blood on the mercy seat of the Ark of the Covenant—the “covering” of the ark. The blood was sprinkled on the Ark’s cover because it separated the presence of the holy God, symbolized as dwelling in the space between the wings of the cherubim above the ark, and the broken law of God that was contained in the Ark itself. It therefore covered the broken Law of God, protecting the sinner from divine judgment. Notably, in the NT, in the Greek text, the term for “mercy seat” is “propitiation.” This term means “to satisfy,” that is, the act of turning God’s wrath aside. David simply speaks of it as “covering.”

A third term used by David to signify God’s forgiveness in Psalm 32:2 is that God does not “impute” (Heb. chashab). Actually, this term depicts what God does not do; He “does not count” the sin against us. This term, used in bookkeeping, is the word Paul used in Romans 4:7-8 to explain how God writes our sin into Christ’s ledger and punishes Him for what we did! This is why Christ died on the cross, paying death—the wages of our sin (Rom. 6:23).

Food For Thought
We have all sinned, and the wages of sin is death (Rom. 3:23; 6:23). But while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us (Rom. 5:8). Receive Him and find eternal forgiveness (Rom. 10:9-10).