Still Groaning?

Joshua Hordern

‘When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long . . . Then I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover up my iniquity.’ (Psalm 32:3,5)

When God calls, men and women groan. In Jesus Christ and by the Spirit, God calls on us to repent and trust Him. Yet we resist God’s call with every fibre of our selfish being, turned in on ourselves and away from God and others. And so we groan, burdened by sinful, silent stupidity.

Since the Academy, I’ve gone regularly with other Christians to visit juvenile detention centres. On one occasion we read Psalm 32 together. As the lads listened to the Psalm and talked about it they identified with this man who had not confessed either his guilt or his slavery to sin; they lamented their failures but felt understood by God’s voice calling to them in the darkness: the entrance of God’s word brought light and safety.

All of us stand before the Holy God along with those lads. We seek to hide from God and cover up our sins. Maybe we hide behind a sophisticated veneer of self-righteous law-keeping, denying our utter need for Christ and cutting ourselves off from life-giving confession. And so we groan, carrying the horrible burden of unconfessed sin, wasting our bones, infecting our lips and sapping our strength.

Yet God’s call remains: repent and trust the good news! It is a personal calling for each one of us in our particularity. But it is also a calling which addresses all human life in God’s world. In our day, the ‘naked public square’ ideology represents the grotesque attempt of humanity to deny this calling, hide from God and cover up iniquity, an attempt as absurd as Adam and Eve’s self-concealment behind loincloths of fig leaves and Eden’s trees.

God calls us today to confess, with lamentation and repentance, both our own sin and the sin we participate in socially, including the injustice which forces many teenagers into crime. God calls us today to trust Him for a public future for all characterised by a detailed confession of both our sin and His providential mercy. In this future, our lives as social beings and our participation in government will work towards the uncovering of iniquity and finally to public instruction in God’s way.

It was Christ, naked in public, who revealed the gospel. The cross demonstrated both our desperate need for justification and God’s loving supply of Christ’s righteousness imputed to us and received by God-given faith. Moreover, the anatomy of sin, articulated in Christ’s body on the tree, is not the last word. The resurrection shows the ultimate horizon, informing and foretelling our total existence as we await His return.

When God calls us to repent, do we groan in selfish stupidity? Or do we confess our sin, humbly trusting God’s gracious justification of sinners and joyfully setting about the good works God has prepared for us? No doubt there is a righteous groaning which feels beyond this moment to the revelation of the children of God. But there is an ungodly, prayerless groaning too. How are you groaning? How long shall we groan?

Josh Hordern, TFA Class of 2004, is currently pursuing a PhD in Christian Political Ethics at the University of Edinburgh.

2 Responses • Alumni, Wed 11 Oct 2006