Pastor's Ponderings: Old Testament bible study of Psalm 32 (September 27, 2025)

September 27, 2025:  Thursday (on Saturday) Bible Study on Old Testament of Psalm 32

Blessings and peace be with you this Saturday morning. It has been one of those kinds of weeks, so here I am doing the Psalm study on a morning on the weekend.

Thursday just got away from me completely. I finally got my certificate of completion for doing the synod required boundary training that all clergy and licensed employees must take once every three years. I finally had to contact our Lutheran Seminary in St Paul Minnesota to get the verification of my completion of the work, and to get a certificate downloaded so that it could be sent to the synod offices in Phoenix. Please offer a prayer of thanksgiving for Larry getting home after a rough time getting better enough to go home. Pray too for Teri Hardy, who will have a new kind of hip replacement surgery on October 1st.  Her recovery will be long. Keep Lisa Kartchner in your prayers too. She is having testing done to tell if she too has cancer, and she is her wife's primary care giver as she battles her own cancer and treatments. So, my intent was to get this Bible Study done on Friday. I spent all morning in the car, had lunch with the Foodies of Faith, and when I got home, Melody told me that the low tire light had come on in her car. We just had one tire repaired about three weeks ago from a puncture, so I took it to Discount Tire and found it was not repairable. Four new tires later (it’s an AWD car, so tires must all be replaced if you lose only one), so I spent nearly three hours getting that done at the garage. It is the second time over the years that I have had to replace all the tires, which seemed OK right before taking a trip in the car we planned to travel in. So, here I am coming to you on Saturday morning.

Today we are in the 32 Psalm. In general this Psalm speaks to David's (and our) relationship with God, and how our covering of our sin, or someone else's sin, really creates a circumstance where God's attempts to bring healing in that situation become skewered because a person hiding sin, either theirs, or as a victim to another's sin, means that people involved in the situation will not cooperate with God's willingness, and desire for taking care of His children.  This is the entire issue of this Psalm. In this passage we have the word for carrying sin, and that can be our own or someone else's sin. Doing so places either, or both people involved in a journey with God that means that it will be much harder to receive the Grace and Love of God's own covering for that sin. Here we really need to understand that it is not just the God of the New Testament who comes into the lives of His children through His Son, and our LORD and Savior, Jesus Christ. This is the very same way that the God of the Old Testament and the Psalms desired to be with His children too, covering their sin with His forgiveness. I know that we always think that somehow God was different about these things on the Old Testament, but He wasn't! The natural consequences for not cooperating with God, which really means, confessing, repenting, and having a contrite heart, will be our separating ourselves from God's desire for setting us free from the burden of our sin and the sin of others. The power of our failure to confess will isolate us from one another, and even more importantly, from God! Another part of this Psalm would have you and me acknowledge that without cooperating with God's grace and forgiveness, especially when we already know that if we are holding back in our cooperation with God, that the burden of the consequences of our sin will get to being overwhelming.  The other part of this is how God acts through all of this. When God forgives sin, it is forgotten, never to be brought up again in the faithful one's life, or in their death. When we confess with a contrite heart on Sunday mornings at church, this is what happens, although very often we don't fully let go of our sin, so that we continue to carry it. All of this is what David is talking about in this Psalm. I hope that this Psalm is an encouragement for our relationship with our God who loves us beyond measure, and who is always devoted to His relationship with us. With Christ's Love, Pastor Kim