Ken Fish: Mechanics of the Spirit World – Sin, Transgression & Iniquity (Psalm 32:1-2)

00:06 - And he had another problem, called her husband, Uriah, the Hittite.

00:11 - And David committed adultery, and he ends up killing Uriah with the sword of the Ammonites by putting him into the frontline and he gets cut down in battle.

00:21 - And we all know Psalm 51, we’ll look at it in a minute, but David had written a Psalm about all of this.

00:29 - A couple of summers ago, I was doing my Bible study, my devotions and I was following one of those outlines that, you know, today you read these scriptures and tomorrow you read these scriptures and you kind of go along, and anyone who’s ever followed one of those, it’s a blessing and a curse.

00:45 - It’s a blessing ‘cause it keeps you going and you have a systematic way of reading the Bible.

00:50 - And I’ve read through the Bible, all of it, about 52 times, and I’ve read parts of it 400 or 500 times, depends on which parts we’re talking about.

00:59 - So, I mean, I know the Bible fairly well, but I’m following this plan, so each year I use a different one, and I’m following this plan and I get to Psalm 32 and the Lord says to me, “Stop right there, I want to show you something. ” So I read through Psalm 32 and I’m paying attention and I take some notes. The next day comes and I’m ready to go to Psalm 33 for that part of my devotional plan, and the Lord says, “Go back to Psalm 32.

” And I say, “Well, Lord, you don’t understand, I need to keep up with the Bible plan. ” And He says, “I want you to show you something, slow down. ” All right, so we go back to Psalm 32 and I learned some more.

01:39 - And the next day I’m thinking, “OK, I’ve got to read Psalm 33 and now I’ve got to read 34 ‘cause I got to catch up. ” So I’m ready to do that, and the Lord says, “Go back to Psalm 32. ” And I’m like, “Hey, wait a minute, I’m falling behind here. ” And so He and I have this thing going for about four days, five days, and presently the Lord says, “Do you want to learn what I have to show you, or do you want to follow your stupid plan?” (congregation laughing) So I put the plan aside, and for six weeks God took me through Psalm 32.

02:11 - So I read the Jewish commentaries, I read it in Hebrew, I read it in the Greek translation, I read it in several English translations, I read a bunch of commentaries by Christian authors as part of all that.

02:24 - But mostly what I did was I went through the entire Bible, chasing down all the threads that are tied to Psalm 32 and the deep revelation that’s in it, and I want to share with you a few nuggets out of that time of exploration.

02:37 - So Psalm 32 says, “Blessed is the one who’s,” watch this, “transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.

02:43 - Blessed is the man against whom the Lord counts no iniquity. “ Hmm, three words that we saw in Exodus, right? Okay, we’re going to come back and unpack them.

02:53 - “Blessed is that one who transgression, sin, and iniquity, respectively have been dealt with,” we’ll just say that, “and in whose spirit there is no deceit. ” Ah, so it’s more than just those three things.

03:09 - “For when I was silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long, for day and night your hand was heavy upon me and my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.

03:18 - Selah. “ What does that mean? Stop and consider, meditate on it.

03:23 - Chew on it a bit. So I actually had two whole days where I just meditated on verses three and four.

03:30 - “When I kept silent, my bones wasted away. ” Huh.

03:37 - Osteoarthritis, anybody? Bone disease of other kinds? Oh.

03:45 - And it seems to be tied to this. It will get better, don’t worry.

03:48 - I’m just teasing you a bit. “And day and night, the hand of God was heavy upon me. ” Now there is a phrasing in the Old Testament of the hand of the Lord came on the prophet, and when that happens it’s for prophecy, but this one isn’t for prophecy.

04:03 - This one is for chastisement. “Day and night your hand was heavy upon me and my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. ” Somebody say chronic fatigue syndrome.

04:16 - - [Congregation] Chronic fatigue syndrome. - Oh, really? Yeah.

04:21 - Selah. Let it sink in. Chew on this like a cow with its cud.

04:26 - Let’s keep going. “I acknowledged my sin to you and I did not cover my inequity.

04:31 - I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,’ and you forgave the iniquity of my sins.

04:37 - Selah. “ He’s giving the answer to the problem.

04:42 - But when we read it, it sounds all tangled up, and most of us just kind of blow through this, like skimming the tops of the waves.

04:49 - And this is more like, XO, take her down, set your depth to 100 fathoms, right? We need to go deep on this.

04:55 - We’ll come back to it. “Therefore let everyone who is godly offer prayer to you at a time when you may be found.

05:01 - Surely in the rush of great waters they shall not reach him.

05:04 - You are a hiding place for me, you preserve me from trouble, you surround me with shouts deliverance.

05:12 - Selah. “ A third point to stop and ponder.

05:16 - Now David switches. “I will teach you, I will instruct you what you should do in the way you should go.

05:23 - I will counsel you with my eye upon you. First and foremost, do not be like a horse or a mule who have no understanding, which must be curbed with bit and bridle or it will not stay near you. “ Now, if you’ve ever worked with mules and horses, they can be kind of ornery.

05:40 - And the only way to make them heed is you put that bit in their mouth, and then when you pull on it and it hurts, so they’ll begrudgingly go with it.

05:47 - David says, “Don’t fight this one. Yield to it, lean into it, embrace what I am telling you, because I am telling you truth.

05:58 - “Many are the sorrows of the wicked, but steadfast love surrounds the one who trusts in the Lord.

06:04 - Be glad in the Lord, and rejoice, O righteous, shout for joy, all you upright in heart. “ That’s the end of the psalm.

06:13 - So in Hebrew, this is really fun. In verse one, it’s talking about transgression, “Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven. ” The word in Hebrew is pasha, and it says, “whose transgression is forgiven,” the Hebrew word is nasah.

06:30 - It rhymes in Hebrew. It doesn’t work in English, but pasha, nasah, you hear it? Pasha, nasah.

06:37 - It’s designed to be something you can kind of feel the linkage and it’s like when you’re skiing and you’re slaloming down the hill.

06:45 - Transgression and forgiven. Now this word pasha, which is translated transgression, means revolt or rebellion.

06:54 - You might remember I was highlighting that when we were back in the Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah time.

07:01 - Revolt, rebellion, offense, falling away, breaking away, apostasy.

07:07 - But the key point here is, transgression is the willful offense against the ways of God, knowing you’re doing wrong or choosing not to do the right you should do, and you know darn well what you’re doing.

07:22 - This is what David did when he slept with Bathsheba and then killed Uriah.

07:26 - That is pasha, it’s transgression. It’s revolt and rebellion.

07:32 - And it goes on in Christian circles too. Well, you know, I knew I shouldn’t have done that.

07:39 - Stole from my employer, slept with my girlfriend, you name it, whatever it is, but it’s wrong and you know it’s wrong.

07:47 - Or you know there’s something you should be doing, God’s spoken to you about it, and you said, well, it’s not that big of a deal.

07:53 - In God’s eyes it is. Are we all together? I know this is a little bit of a longer message, but I just don’t know how to say all this without making this thorough.

08:03 - We okay? - Amen. - Okay. - Amen. (congregation clapping) - What’s the answer to it? Nasah, to lift up and carry away and to support forgiveness.

08:18 - That’s what the word nasah means. You know where it says, “surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows” in Isaiah 53? He nasahed, same word.

08:29 - So there’s something that when transgression is present, it needs to be lifted up and carried away and set aside, if you want to say it that way.

08:38 - Then the next thing he says, “whose sin is covered. ” Again, we have a little bit of poetry here.

08:44 - The word is chata, and it means the statutes of God.

08:49 - And the way you deal with it is you cover it, or chakah.

08:51 - So chata, chakah. If you don’t speak Hebrew, it doesn’t mean much.

08:56 - And no, this isn’t caca like your kids like to talk about.

08:59 - (congregation laughing) So in this one, this word sin, it’s not the same as transgression.

09:07 - Transgression is the knowing violation of what God commands or the knowing omission of what God has told you to do.

09:16 - This one, this sin, this is a violation of divine law and it’s offense and culpability, but it has to do with things that you didn’t actually know that they were wrong at the time you did them.

09:30 - But they’re still wrong. Many years ago, when I was in John Wimber’s church, my wife and I had a home group, and one night we got a phone call, no one had cell phones in these days, or we would have had a text.

09:41 - But we got this phone call from this couple that was in our home group.

09:44 - And we knew they were getting friendly and it looked like a romance was budding, and they wanted to come over and talk to us.

09:50 - And we figured they were going to come and tell us they wanted to get married and, you know, all that.

09:55 - So they show up and they’re looking really down and kind of sheepish and bummed out, so we said, “What’s wrong?” And they said, “Well, you know, we’re in love, and we think we want to get married. ” “Yeah?” “Well, so, you know, we started making out,” and I thought, I know where this is going.

10:13 - And they said, “But you know, we stopped. ” And I thought, oh good.

10:17 - And they said, “And we decided to look up in the Bible to see if it was okay to have sex.

10:21 - And we couldn’t find anywhere that said you couldn’t do it, so we went ahead and did it.

10:25 - But as soon as we did it, we felt really grieved in our hearts. “ I said, “Didn’t you read the verses about fornication and adultery?” “Oh, is that what those words mean?” Ah-ha, you didn’t know.

10:38 - But you see, your heart bore witness within you anyway.

10:42 - And so on this one, many times people do things they do not know are wrong.

10:48 - Remember my story last night of the woman eating the meat in Taiwan? She didn’t know it was wrong.

10:53 - After all, the church said it was okay. Still didn’t make it okay.

10:57 - Are you following me? - [Congregation] Yes.

11:01 - - So now we’re in a different category. One is knowing, one is unknowing.

11:07 - Let’s keep going. He says, “Blessed is the man,” or woman, “against whom the Lord counts no iniquity. ” Now here, it doesn’t rhyme, the word is avon.

11:18 - And he says the Lord doesn’t count it against him, or doesn’t impute it against him.

11:23 - The word in Hebrew is chashab. It doesn’t sound like avon, so the poetry is breaking down on this one.

11:29 - But inequity here means perversity or depravity.

11:32 - It means bentness or twistedness or bowedness or pervertedness.

11:38 - But it’s the idea of an arrow’s shaft. And if an arrow, nowadays we make arrows out of aluminum, but if you had an arrow shaft in the old days, you made them out of trees, and you looked long and hard to find good tree wood that would be straight.

11:54 - This is one of the reasons, by the way, in the Middle Ages, the English could not be conquered because yew trees grew wild in the English countryside, and yew makes the best bows, and it comes out straight when you make arrow shafts.

12:07 - So they became the most feared archers in Europe because their arrows would fly farther and hit harder because of the yew.

12:14 - But if you have a crooked arrow and you put it in the bow and you fire it, shew, it goes this way.

12:21 - And the problem with inequity is when it’s in your bloodline, it will cause you to be corrupted and bent.

12:27 - And the good that you want to do you cannot do because it pulls you off of center and you find yourself fighting this thing, and you go, why am I not able to get free of this thing? Yeah.

12:41 - And so David says, “Blessed is the man or woman against whom the Lord does not count their iniquity, and in whose spirit is no deceit. ” So we have three problems as human beings, and all of these pertain to deliverance, because demons like to attach to sin or transgression or iniquity.

13:04 - And sometimes when we’re trying to drive them out of people, they don’t seem to come out.

13:08 - We’ve kind of covered the waterfront of every single thing we can think about, and lo and behold, there’s inequity going on that hasn’t been dealt with and the demons will happily attach to iniquity as well as to the sin and transgression that you yourself may be guilty of.

13:24 - How do you get inequity? Your father’s and mother’s sins become your iniquity.

13:29 - They pass in the bloodline. This is exactly what happens with the sin of Adam and Eve who ate the fruit of the tree and it passed into all of the generations of Adam is what it says in Romans.

13:41 - And we have a similar problem. Your mother and father, or grandmother and grandfather, may well have been involved in something, whether or not they knew it was wrong, and now it’s been passed into the blood, and without ever knowing it, you inherited it, and now it’s become a bondage in you.

13:57 - See how that works? So David is talking about this threefold cord that is not quickly broken, to quote another scripture.

14:08 - But he gives the remedy. The good news is this doesn’t have to be all bad.

14:11 - We’ve just got to diagnose clearly before we solve the problem.

14:15 - So here is his answer. Part one is found in…

14:19 - Wait, hold on. So, “when I kept silent, my bones wasted away,” and we talked about that, “through my groaning all day long, for day and night your hand was heavy upon me.

14:29 - My strength was dried up as the heat of summer. “ So what happens? When sin or transgression or inequity haven’t been dealt with, then you may actually have these things that are upon you, and they begin to suck you dry, to use a very colloquial term from modern English.

14:47 - So here’s the solution that David gives. Number one, “I acknowledged my sin to you. ” Now, this word acknowledge means to know it or perceive it or come to an understanding, to admit it and confess it.

15:01 - The Hebrew word is yeda. And this, again, is related to things that were not necessarily known.

15:10 - So as you become aware of things that were not okay, now you want to take that on board and deal with it.

15:20 - Part two, he says, “I did not cover my inequity. ” Well, the word, “not to cover,” is related to the word kefar, which means to wipe away, and it means not to conceal it or hide it.

15:37 - Now, this is a really important one, because a lot of times, and some of you will know exactly what I’m talking about, families have secrets and they don’t want to talk about that one.

15:49 - I remember when I was a kid, my grandmother used to tell me about Uncle Merlin, which right there, you should have known something’s wrong.

15:56 - (congregation laughing) But she would tell me, “Don’t go near Uncle Merlin.

16:01 - Just stay away from him. “ She never told me why.

16:05 - You could guess maybe he was a pedophile, maybe he was an ax murderer, I don’t know, but don’t go near Merlin.

16:11 - I remember my mother telling me about Uncle Merlin and she would tell me the story of one day she and her identical twin sister were walking down the road, they lived in rural Michigan, to the one-room schoolhouse.

16:24 - Those things did exist once upon a time in America.

16:27 - And as they were going down the road, Merlin came up behind them in a vehicle and was following them closely, and they became frightened, and they ran into the cornfield and he chased them into the cornfield, but they escaped from Uncle Merlin.

16:40 - Well, that reinforces the concept that he might’ve been a pedophile.

16:44 - Although I don’t actually know that he was, in fairness to him.

16:47 - But what I did know was my grandma had said, “Merlin is a no-fly zone, beware of him. ” So Merlin was one of those family secrets, and I never did fully find out what the secret was.

16:57 - But most families have those secrets. You know, your grandfather did time in the state penitentiary.

17:02 - Your mother had a couple of lovers that she brought into the home, and you know, all this went on, or, you know, there was this…

17:09 - I remember praying for one guy who had an incurable thing in his life, no one could figure it out.

17:14 - And he told me, “You know, my grandfather ran a still during prohibition and he killed an internal revenue agent. ” And I said, “There’s blood guilt on your house, and we have to clear the blood guilt. ” And as soon as we did, bang, he got healed of this thing that he’d had for years.

17:28 - Because it was iniquity in his blood that had been, in that case, the transgression of his grandfather.

17:34 - See how that works when you get the language clear? Are we all together? Some of you look shocked, some of you look angry, some of you are just confused.

17:45 - Are we all good? Okay, let’s keep going.

17:48 - We’ve got to end this sometime. And then David says, “I’m not going to cover my inequity. ” So when it comes to that, one of the things you have to do is pull the skeletons out of the closet.

18:03 - And in families, one of the most common, but not the only one, is incest.

18:10 - And to be clear, I cover this in the “Grace, Law, and Freedom” material, not this inequity stuff, but this business of incest.

18:18 - What is incest? Many people think incest, and I’m only mentioning it because it’s so commonplace and everybody will get what I’m talking about.

18:27 - I could use other examples, but with incest, many people think incest is, you know, the act of penetration.

18:36 - Can I say that? That’s not too lurid. So they leave it there, but that’s actually not right.

18:42 - In Hebrew, the concept of sex is to uncover the nakedness of another.

18:47 - Now, if you have children and you had to diaper them and bathe them, you’re not “incesting” them.

18:52 - It’s with the idea that any form of arousal is going on.

18:56 - And it doesn’t have to be full arousal, it could just be, you know, the stirring, they say, in your loins.

19:01 - You know what that is. Men and women both know it.

19:03 - They experience it differently, but when arousal is happening because of nakedness.

19:08 - And in the book of Leviticus, it specifically says, among other things, you may not look on the nakedness of your sister or your brother.

19:17 - Grandfathers may not sleep with their grandchildren.

19:20 - You can’t sleep with a woman and her daughter.

19:22 - There’s all these different things that go on, but all of them are rooted around this idea of uncovering nakedness.

19:27 - So, if you, somewhere in your past, saw or were seen, hello, this is going both directions.

19:35 - Watch this or you’ll miss it. If you saw or were seen the nakedness of a body, and there was some degree of arousal around it, you were incested.

19:50 - And when that happened, it became an open gateway.

19:53 - Spirits will attach to that. So when people need to get free of certain things, we have to deal with the spirit of incest that is attached to, whether it’s sin or transgression or maybe iniquity, ‘cause it can happen up river and it comes down in the generations.

20:10 - Does that make sense to everybody? - [Congregation] Yes.

20:14 - - Now, I do not want a show of hands. Repeat, do not want a show of hands.

20:20 - But I do want you to stop for a moment and think about, maybe in your childhood, that uncle, that cousin, your brother or your sister, playing house, lying on top of each other, maybe taking a look.

20:34 - I prayed for many people where, one woman I prayed for, her father had taken a drill and drilled a hole in the wall of the shower, and when she would shower, he would look through the hole at her.

20:45 - Yeah, it’s pervy, I know it’s pervy. She was being incested, even though he didn’t touch her.

20:51 - Now, of course, it can get worse. Touching can occur, and even more than that can occur.

20:57 - We don’t need to belabor it and I don’t want to start teaching on that.

21:00 - But I do want you to grab this idea of what it looks like.

21:05 - And a lot of times that is not uncovered, and so it remains iniquity that is not cleaned out or wiped out, and as a result, people remain in bondage to things that they don’t even know ‘cause they say, well, nothing happened.

21:19 - It felt a little weird, but, eh. But that weird thing that you feel, what that is is the spiritual contamination of the incest.

21:29 - By the way, it doesn’t have to be incest. It could have been that boy or girl that you had a relationship with when you were way back in high school.

21:36 - And we all know what goes on, so we don’t need to elaborate on it.

21:40 - You say, yeah, but we didn’t go all the way.

21:42 - Doesn’t matter, you uncovered the nakedness, because that person touched you in an area that was reserved for your spouse.

21:49 - And now you’ve got this thing going on inside of you, and you know it, because every now and then it comes to the surface.

21:54 - Maybe when you’re making love with your spouse, or it bothers you in the night, or worse, maybe spirits visit you in the night, but you’ve never wanted to talk about it because you don’t even have language for it and you’re concerned everybody will think you’re crazy.

22:07 - Does that make sense? Some of you are nodding, so I know I’m hitting the mark with this.

22:13 - So we can’t let inequity remain covered. It’s got to be uncovered in order that the blood of Jesus that Moses saw in his time on the mountain can be brought to this thing in order to wipe it out.

22:26 - And with that, the demonic bondage that’s tied to it can get blown out the door.

22:31 - Third part of this is also in verse five, David says, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord. ” So I acknowledge my sin, I do not cover my inequity, and I make open confession of my transgressions.

22:46 - Why do I confess my transgressions? Because I knew darn well what I was doing when I did it, or I failed to do what God told me to do, and I actually need to make some adjustment with my lips.

23:01 - These three words are the very words we saw in Daniel, Ezra, and Nehemiah.

23:05 - And David says at the end of it, Selah, and here’s what happened when I did that.

23:10 - You forgave the iniquity of my sin because my inequity powers my sin.

23:16 - It drives me into behaviors and attitudes that I should not have, and it gives it force and strength.

23:24 - And that gets cut off when it gets put under the blood, but it’s got to be done in an explicit way.

23:29 - This is not one and done, I confessed my sins when I came to Jesus and it was all taken care of.

23:35 - ‘Cause this is actually meant to be a deliverance-focused message, but I’m teaching you something of the mechanics of the spirit world of sin, transgression, iniquity, and of deliverance.

23:45 - Does that make sense?.