Your hand was heavy upon me
Your hand was heavy upon me
Psalm 32:3-4 - Now is the perfect time to confess and repent of any sin that might be weighing on your soul!
“When I kept silent about my sin, my body wasted away Through my groaning all day long. For day and night Your hand was heavy upon me; My vitality was drained away as with the fever heat of summer. Selah.”
Psalms 32:3-4 NASB1995
Another Psalm on this summer Sunday, this one attributed to David. Psalm 32 is titled “A Psalm of David. A contemplation”, and the Hebrew word for contemplation — מַשְׂכִּיל (maśkîl) — can also be translated as “an instructive poem”. With this psalm, David provides instruction on the blessedness of confession and repentance.
David wrote this after he made the decision to confess his sin publicly and to God. Prior to his confession and repentance, he was hiding his sin and was silent about it. You know how you can feel stressed-out when you’re hiding something from someone else? That’s what David was going through, and he felt as if his body was wasting away like that of the scrawny kitten in the picture above. Charles Spurgeon cited another Bible commentator about David’s silence:
“I kept silence, not merely I was silent, I kept silence, resolutely, perseveringly; I kept it notwithstanding all the remembrance of my past mercies, notwithstanding my reproaches of conscience, and my anguish of heart.”1
David felt as if God’s hand was pressing down on him. He knew that his miserable state was due to his refusal to confess, his rebellion against God. Spurgeon said these words about God’s hand:
“God’s hand is very helpful when it uplifts, but it is awful when it presses down: better a world on the shoulder, like Atlas, than God’s hand on the heart, like David.”
The sin itself probably wasn’t bothering David all that much; instead, it was the oppression of guilt and his realization that he had lost fellowship with God. In a perfect world, we would all be grieved by our sins, but that rarely happens. Confessing, repenting, and showing humility to others we’ve offended and to God can lighten one’s heart tremendously.
The fact that David was feeling miserable about his sin made him lifeless, like a plant dying in the heat of summer. But this was actually a positive thing — he realized that he was a son of the covenant God and that God wouldn’t let him remain in a state of continuing or uncontested sin. It’s more concerning when one doesn’t feel that misery or guilt about sin!
The psalm ends with the word Selah (סֶלֶה). Alexander Maclaren said of this Hebrew word:
“The Selah indicates a swell or prolongation of the accompaniment, to emphasise this terrible picture of a soul gnawing itself.” 2
David added this at the end of these two verses to give the listener or reader time to think about their particular mindset with regard to unresolved sin. Now is the perfect time to confess and repent of any sin that might be weighing on your soul!
Heaven On Wheels Daily Prayer:
Lord, when I feel the weight of Your hand upon me, give me the wisdom to know that there is sin which I need to confess and repent of. In Jesus’ name I pray, AMEN.
Scripture quotations taken from the (NASB®) New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995, 2020 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All rights reserved. lockman.org.
Spurgeon, Charles Haddon "The Treasury of David: Volume 1" (Psalms 1-57) (Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson, 1988)
Maclaren, Alexander "The Psalms" Volume 1 (Psalms 1-38) (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1892)