R.C. Sproul

And then the other part of the gospel is the reverse transfer where God then imputes His righteousness, His merit to our account.

Now, the way David is speaking of it here is negatively.

He doesn't say, blessed is the man who receives the imputation of the righteousness of Christ.

Of course, he would believe that, and we understand that that's true, but he states it in the opposite way by saying, blessed is the man to whom the Lord does not impute an equity, because that's our standing before God.

is that rather than imputing to us the real guilt that we bear and therefore receive the punishment that we deserve, instead the Lord does not count our sins against us.

And not only does He not count our sins against us, but He counts Christ's righteousness for us.

It just doesn't get any better than that.

And these are the consequences of true repentance.

Then in verse 3 he said, "...when I kept silent, my bones grew old through my groaning all the day long.

For day and night your hand was heavy upon me, and my vitality was turned into the drought of summer.

I acknowledge my sin to you, and my iniquity I have not hidden."

And I said, I will confess my transgressions to the Lord, and you forgave the iniquity of my sin.

Throughout church history, we have seen the great saints of the ages reflect and muse upon the experience that they describe as the dark night of the soul.

when the soul senses the withdrawal of God, the withdrawal of His blessing from our lives, where He seems to have abandoned us, that He seems to have fled from our presence.

And another thing that we notice in reading the lives of the great saints is that the older they get,

the more acutely conscious they became of their own unworthiness before God.

I mean, the more we progress in sanctification, the more aware we become of how much more there is left to be done before we have been completely free of sin.

And so, what we have here is David's description of what he had gone through

in his dark night of the soul, which he uses the expression here, not of the darkness of the evening, but of the dryness of the summer in the midst of drought.

Now remember, this is a man speaking from a semi-arid environment, from a desert region of the Mideast.