THE 32nd Psalm says, “Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered, blessed is the man unto whom the LORD will not impute iniquity.” The Psalmist did not believe in the modern notion that it was impossible to know whether your sins are forgiven or not until the Judgment-day. He believed in the present forgiveness of sins. If a person knows what it is to be a sinner and does not know the forgiveness of sins, that person is not happy. But God wants to make every believer happy by giving him the knowledge of present forgiveness of sins. We want the reader to notice what it was that made the Psalmist so sure and so happy about the forgiveness of sins. He does not excuse his sins, he does not tone them down, nor palliate them; he does not say he is not so bad as other people. No! he confesses his sins fully; he makes a clean breast of them to God; and as the result of confession he gets forgiveness.
But notice another thing: he does not seek to cover his sins himself. That would make him a greater sinner than ever. If he tried ever so much to cover his own sins, he could not possibly hide them from God. Adam and Eve tried to hide their nakedness from God; but God saw through their wretched flimsy covering, as He will see through ours, if we make one. No! all the patchwork covering of good resolutions, religious exercises, alms-deeds, pious frames and feelings, will never hide our sins from God. Nor can we hide them from Him by forgetting them. We may hide them from ourselves and from our fellows; but we cannot cheat God. No, dear friend, we cannot cover our sins: but God can. And how does He do it? By the BLOOD. When a sinner goes to God and confesses his sin, as the Psalmist did, as a believer in Christ, God covers his sin over by the blood of Christ; and if God covers them thus, who shall uncover them again? God Himself says “Their sins and iniquities I will remember no more.” Who shall bring them to remembrance when God says that?
The LORD will not impute iniquity to the person who trusts in Christ, because Christ has borne iniquity.
Forgiveness, sins covered, iniquity purged, eternal life, and a thousand other blessings, are all eternally secured to the believer through the blood of Christ. Reader, will you not trust it? Believe in Him.
H. C. C.