I Confess My Iniquity

There is no decorative language in this Psalm. It is the prayer of a man with sin on his back and pain in his bones, and he is not pretending otherwise. "My iniquities have gone over my head; like a heavy burden, they are too heavy for me." The Psalter does not require us to be coherent in our worst hour; it gives us a Psalm for the hours when we are not. And in the middle of his groaning the man does the one thing the rest of us most often delay: "I confess my iniquity; I am sorry for my sin." He does not say the trouble is unfair. He does not blame the neighbors. He names what he did. The Psalter has set this confession in writing in the prayerbook of the people of God, that we may have a clean script to read on the days when our own words have failed.

And here the church reads a second face into this Psalm — the face of her Lord, who bore the iniquities of His people on Himself. He never sinned, but He carried the weight of our sin until the Father said it was enough. The burden of Psalm 38, too heavy for any of us to lift, was lifted by Him. The bones that had no soundness because of His people's sin were the bones laid in a Jerusalem tomb. And He rose with the weight gone. So when we confess our iniquity now, we confess it to a Father who has already received the price of it in His Son. The Psalm ends with the prayer we still pray: "Do not forsake me, O LORD! O my God, be not far from me! Make haste to help me, O Lord, my salvation!" He has not forsaken His own. He has come near. He is our salvation, and He is the Lord.