“We are lived by forces we pretend to understand,” says W.H. Auden. Auden was a poet of the last century whose most important poems were in a work entitled, “The Age of Anxiety.” He understood that we act, feel and make decisions by forces we don’t often understand but think we can fix through intelligence or will. We think we can fix our grief by just keeping busy without going through the pain. We think we can fix our depression by just listening to “positive thinking” tapes and upbeat music. We think we can fix our spiritual deadness by reading scripture all day but without going through the pain and suffering of the humiliation of confession. To move past these emotional walls to fix our life is the gift of faith given to us by our relationship with God. Through faith the forces of anxiety and fear can be diminished to engage a more honest approach about our life, and not only more honest but more courageous. This is what is necessary to negotiate these forces we don’t always understand.
David was a person who found help in exposing his sins to God and then to his nation. It was through this process he found a way out of the trap of trying to fix everything. He was a political leader that was trained to fix what was wrong on the surface by discounting it with political rhetoric. He could make his bad press go away. But he could never do that with God. Therefore he gave his heart to God and then divulged to Israel his lessons in humility. He did not try and engage the forces he didn’t understand, instead he gave to God the simple truth of his sin; a force which he not only didn’t understand but knew how it destroyed his life. In order to destroy sin from his life he needed to give it God. He said in his song to the temple musicians, “Count yourself lucky, how happy you must be---you get a fresh start. . . Count yourself lucky---God holds nothing against you.” This understanding does not arrive by contemplating God’s nature, it comes from his deep remorse and love for God that drove him to humiliate himself to God and nation. From there he gets a fresh start. It only comes to a person when the cycle is broken.
Sin is a power that is not completely understood except when it leads our life to unimaginable grief. But only then do we understand its consequence on how it convinces us to change our behavior according to its designs. We understand our devastation through sin but don’t necessarily know what sin actually is.
The only quest that we have when sin comes into our life is to break through its falsehoods with honesty. To be honest helps break the cycle of lies by transparency. An honest heart breaks the cycle of deception, manipulation and the unending task of rationalization. David says, “When I kept it all inside my bones turned to powder . . . the pressure never let up.” His point is that when I tried to hide my sin, when I tried to fix it by myself I entered an eternal circle of pain. “But when I let it go, it gave me the power to address God and make a clean breast of things.” I was free to live for God, not bound up with lies which only made me think of trying to get out of things. It only brought misery that could not be fixed.
David’s poem of confession and heart break is a courageous act of coming clean. But it is also a poem for the nation that might provide them a second chance at making an “honest heart” in all of them. What David did in this Psalm is to help them not be afraid at opening their lives before God. They needn’t worry about retribution by coming clean with God and each other. They can look forward to a life of freedom. By his courageous act of confession he tried to help his people throw off their painful bondage of guilt and find a life of salvation and grace with God.
Eventually, David moves past his days of hiding his sin to actually deciding to let his life become an open book to God, to the public and even himself. He had to admit his pain and sin so he could move past his continual pain of guilt that he couldn’t fix. His last phrase is an address to the nation just for this purpose. He says, “Celebrate God. Sing together----every one! All you honest-hearts, raise the roof!” He wants to raise the roof in celebration because there is nothing like the freedom of being known by God and being forgiven. Once we celebrate we will not be bound to “live by forces we pretend to understand”, we can live without fear.
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