Ps. 32.6 (confession and the arc)

“Therefore / let every godly one / pray to you / at a time of stress, - at the flood / of mighty waters / they shall not / reach him.” Based on his experience of a long drawn-out time of groaning, as compared with the swiftness of Yhwh’s forgiveness, the psalmist now speaks in more proverbial terms. He draws upon imagery and language we have seen before but now puts it to use in terms of one whose ‘weight of iniquity’ has been lifted. “A time of stress” has often referred to a person who is in danger from enemies and in need of redemption. Here, in context, it refers to a person who is suffering from withheld confession, who, like the psalmist, is experiencing the oppression and silence of sin. The traditional imagery is again employed in the “flood of mighty waters”. We saw in psalm 29 these ‘mighty waters’ and reflected at length about their ominous nature; here, that sense is confirmed. How are we to read this? Is he saying that those who confess will avoid danger, or is he saying that those who confess will be relieved of the internal ‘groaning’ and sickness that fell upon him in his silence? The “flood of mighty waters” does seem to recall the primal flood with Noah. There, the flood inundated the world due to its swarming sinfulness; Noah, by contrast, as a “godly man” was “not reached”. Is confession then something that operates like an arc? Something in which the person can dwell, safe above the flood that is sent to destroy those who fail to confess? Or, are we to hear this ‘flood of mighty waters’ as Yhwh ‘flooding of the individual’, his ‘pressing hand’ that is designed, through applied pressure, to force the sinner to confess (force him into the arc)? The sense here, as well, is that the individual by being ‘above the waters’ stands with Yhwh (who is always portrayed as either enthroned above the mighty waters or as ‘upon’ the mighty waters); with Yhwh he stands secure above the churning waters of chaos.