Ps. 32.2 (the counting of iniquity)

“Blessed / is the man / against whom / Yhwh / counts no iniquity – and in whose spirit / there is no deceit”. The image of ‘counting against’ would seem to imply some type of divine ledger, as if the ‘counting against’ were a form of Yhwh’s ‘remembering’ of the sin; this would cohere with other pleadings by psalmists that Yhwh ‘forget’ the sin. Furthermore, there are hints in Scripture that a people’s ‘ledger’ is ‘not yet full’ but, when the time comes, wrath will descend because their ‘sin is complete’. Are we to hear this echo here? That the psalmist is aware of Yhwh’s ‘remembering’ or ‘accounting’ of his sin and that the ‘blessed man’ is the one whose iniquity is not recorded? What would be the danger of its being ‘counted’ if not that it would be a ‘storing up of wrath’? In another image conveying the same idea: that Yhwh waits until the fruit of iniquity is ripe before he ‘plucks it’. The following line is rather strange in context—the previous three all involved act on Yhwh’s part as to the particular deviance (lifting, covering, not counting). Here, by contrast, the psalmist’s interior state of ‘no deceit’ is forefront with no mention of Yhwh. The content (no deceit) is not peculiar, of course, and has been alluded to in several psalms as to the ‘righteous man’. To understand this better, we will have to  examine what comes later. What we will realize is that these two opening verses are a type of introduction/summary of the entire psalm and that this portion represents the ‘guilelessness’ inherent in a person who brings himself to confession. As already indicated in our section on ‘the covering’ of sin, prior to confession the psalmist is divided: he remains silent about something that Yhwh is trying to get him to vocalize. This withdrawn rebellion separates what should be unified. This lack of unity is, as we have seen before, what constitutes “deception” in the psalms (and what the wicked are constantly accused of.