“Blessed
is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man against whom the LORD
counts no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit. For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away
through my groaning all day long. For
day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the
heat of summer. I acknowledged my sin to
you, and I did not cover my iniquity; I said, ‘I will confess my transgression
to the LORD,’ and you forgave the iniquity of my sin.”
(Psalm
32:1-5 ESV)
It’s no wonder that there is little
peace in the world we live in today with the way that sin is treated in our
culture—that it’s no big deal. There
seems to be little groaning over sin, even in my own life, to my shame. Despite the lack of shame over sin, God still
does not let us have the peace He intends for us when we fail to recognize and
repent of our sin. Our bones may not “waste
away through my groaning all day long”, but there is a restless unsettledness
that eats away at us, and it comes out in the way we process life and events
around us.
Last week, at the Pastor’s
Conference at Moody, I heard a speaker say something like, “until sin is
bitter, grace will not be sweet”.
Wow. That one stuck in my head
and rolled around a lot. I see how often
I take grace for granted, and I suspect that I’m not alone in that. But we take the grace of God for granted
because sin doesn’t seem as bitter to us as it is to God. We appease our conscious with the thought
that we’re really not all that bad; not as bad as someone else I know, or as
bad as some criminal. But the reality is
that all sin has a consequence, and the consequence is separation from God.
While as believers, we know that our
sins are forgiven, but when we let unrepentant sin continue and treat it as if
it were nothing serious, we make God out to be a liar because He takes sin very
seriously. It was so serious that in order
for sin to be atoned for, or to be taken away, blood had to be shed—something had
to die. Moses was given very specific
instructions for the children of Israel in regard to how they were to offer
sacrifices for sin. In every case, an
animal, and not just any animal, but one that was without blemish or defect,
had to die—had to shed its blood in order for sin to be forgiven.
Then God sent the perfect sacrifice
to the earth. “But when Christ had
offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins [His own blood], he sat down
at the right hand of God, for by a single offering he has perfected for all
time those who are being sanctified.” (Heb. 10:12,14)
God makes a promise to us through
the apostle John in 1 John 1:9: “If we
confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse
us from all unrighteousness.” God will
always honor a repentant heart. The second
term He used to characterize Himself to Moses in Ex. 34:6 is gracious. Grace is unmerited favor. In other words, there is nothing, literally
nothing we can do to deserve it. But the
only way that it is offered to us is when we agree with God about our sin,
(that’s confession), and repent of it, (that means to turn away from it).
The psalmist nails it here in Psalm
32. If we want to know what true peace
with God is like, we need to think of sin as God thinks of it, that it is
wholly offensive, destructive, and leads to unwanted consequences up to and
including death. When we begin to see
sin as a bitter thing, we will come to know the sweetness that is found in
having our account with Him cleared through the righteousness that is found in
Christ Jesus, His Son.
“Blessed is the one whose
transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.”
By
His Grace Alone,
Pastor
Bruce Jacobsen
