Exegetical and Hermeneutical Commentary of Psalms 19:12
Who can understand [his] errors? cleanse thou me from secret [faults].
12. More exactly:
Errors who can discern?
From hidden (faults) clear thou me.
Who can be aware of the manifold lapses of ignorance or inadvertence? Acquit me, do not hold me guilty in respect of them.
Fuente: The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges
12 14. The contemplation of this holy law leads the Psalmist to express his personal need of preservation and guidance.
Fuente: The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges
Who can understand his errors? – The word rendered errors is derived from a verb which means to wander, to go astray; then, to do wrong, to transgress. It refers here to wanderings, or departures from the law of God, and the question seems to have been asked in view of the purity, the strictness, and the extent of the law of God. In view of a law so pure, so holy, so strict in its demands, and so extended in its requirements – asserting jurisdiction over the thoughts, the words, and the whole life – who can recall the number of times that he has departed from such a law? A sentiment somewhat similar is found in Psa 119:96, I have seen an end of all perfection; thy commandment is exceeding broad. The language is such as every man who has any just sense of the nature and the requirements of the law, and a just view of his own life, must use in reference to himself. The reason why any man is elated with a conviction of his own goodness is that he has no just sense of the requirements of the law of God; and the more anyone studies that law, the more will he be convinced of the extent of his own depravity.
Hence, the importance of preaching the law, that sinners may be brought to conviction of sin; hence the importance of presenting it constantly before the mind of even the believer, that he may be kept from pride, and may walk humbly before God. And who is there that can understand his own errors? Who can number up the sins of a life? Who can make an estimate of the number of impure and unholy thoughts which, in the course of many years, have flitted through, or found a lodgment in the mind? Who can number up the words which have been spoken and should not have been spoken? Who can recall the forgotten sins and follies of a life – the sins of childhood, of youth, of riper years? There is but one Being in the universe that can do this. To Him all this is known. Nothing has escaped His observation; nothing has faded from His memory. Nothing can prevent His making a full disclosure of this if He shall choose to do so. It is in His power at any moment to overwhelm the soul with the recollection of all this guilt; it is in His power to cover us with confusion and shame at the revelation of the judgment-day. Our only hope – our only security – that He will not do this, is in His mercy; and that He may not do it, we should without delay seek His mercy, and pray that our sins may be so blotted out that they shall not be disclosed to us and to assembled worlds when we appear before Him.
Cleanse thou me from secret faults – The word here rendered secret means that which is hidden, covered, concealed. The reference is to those errors and faults which had been hidden from the eye of him who had committed them, as well as from the eye of the world. The sense is, that the law of God is so spiritual, and so pure, and so extended in its claims, that the author of the psalm felt that it must embrace many things which had been hidden even from his own view – errors and faults lying deep in the soul, and which had never been developed or expressed. From these, as well as from those sins which had been manifest to himself and to the world, he prayed that he might be cleansed. These are the things that pollute the soul; from these the soul must be cleansed, or it can never find permanent peace. A man who does not desire to be cleansed from all these secret faults cannot be a child of God; he who is a child of God will pray without ceasing that from these pollutions of the soul he may be made pure.
Fuente: Albert Barnes’ Notes on the Bible
Psa 19:12
Who can understand his errors?
Cleanse Thou me from secret faults.
The tenacity and sophistry of sin
The vulgar vices reappear subtly disguised in cultured circles. The grossness of the vices has been purged, but the viciousness is not extinct. Is there not something like this in the saintly life as compared with the old life? All the vices to which the soul is heir strive to reassert themselves in the Christian believer, and too often succeed in disturbing his peace and injuring his character. They are not now gross, offensive, violent; they are smooth and subtle, filmy and tenuous; they may even fail to provoke the notice and criticism of those who know us best. Yet we recognise in them, through their profoundest disguises, the deadly vices which, seen in their nakedness, all men loathe. All the bad passions insinuate themselves into our life unless we steadily detect and reject them. Anger, covetousness, indulgence, pride, self-will, vanity, all these motions and outgoings of unrighteousness are ever striving to assert themselves in the Christian soul and life. The tenacity of sin is marvellous, so is its sophistry. These evil thoughts and imaginations of the saintly heart may appear faint and inoffensive sins when compared with the crimson transgressions of the actual world; but the true disciple will not think so, nor will he treat them tenderly. The desires, weaknesses, and sins of the natural life are greatly diminished in the spiritual life; they have altogether lost their alarming aspect; their capacious jaws seem no longer fringed with teeth; but they are none the less of the breed of monsters, and we must show them no mercy. (W. L. Watkinson.)
Self-ignorance
There is no kind of knowledge which it is so important for a man to possess as knowledge of himself. No man can be blind to himself without sooner or later having to pay serious penalty for such blindness. The best of the ancients regarded self-knowledge as the very beginning of wisdom, just as they regarded self-mastery as the very beginning of practical virtue. It is said that Socrates, on one occasion, excused himself from giving attention to some important questions, on the ground that he could not possibly come to know such things, as he had not yet been able to know himself. There, the grand old heathen felt, was the true starting place of all true knowledge. Wisdom, like charity, began at home. There are few things, judging at first sight, of which a man might be supposed to have fuller and more accurate knowledge, than he has of his own mind and character. The subject of study is always within his reach. To avoid self-thought is impossible. To the great majority of men the subject is one of perennial and engrossing interest. Nature has so ordained it that, in many important respects, the object of greatest concern to every one of us is himself. History may be a blank to a man, science a name, literature and art dark and mysterious as the grave; but himself!–here surely the man is at home, or he is at home nowhere. The Psalmist, however, is of a widely different opinion. Of course, a certain amount of self-knowledge is thrust upon us all. Much ignorance of self, too, is corrected by our contact with men and things. Many a false and foolish notion is thus ruthlessly swept away as the years pass on. Life and God are great teachers; and, unless a man be a hopeless fool, they compel him to learn something of himself. Still, the exclamation of the Psalmist hits off an universal fact. Who can understand his errors? There is a touch of pensive surprise in the words, as if he had just had an unwonted revelation of himself, as if he had just made discovery of faults and sins hitherto hidden from him. He had no idea that there was so much lingering mischief within. He is not quite sure that he has seen the worst yet. By secret faults the Psalmist does not mean guilty things, that is, things of actual wickedness done in secret. Open transgression is the path of death. Secret transgression is more deadly still. By secret faults he means faults hidden away, not from others, but from ourselves. And it is more than probable that such faults exist in all of us. It is no uncommon thing to see a man blind as a bat to some infirmity of temper, some coarseness of manner, some infatuation or rooted prejudice, conspicuous as the sun at noonday to his friends, and not quite so pleasant! Another evidence of this lack of self-knowledge is to be found in the grave discoveries we sometimes make of our actual character and condition. The matter is sometimes brought home to us by the faithfulness of a friend. It may come through the home thrust of an enemy. Our hope is in God. The head need not have turned grey before we discover that, in a world like this, it is not in man to order his steps aright. Happy he who once and forever abandons the fruitless task, finds his way to a Saviours side, shelters beneath the Rock that is higher than he. (J. Thew.)
The difficulty of understanding our errors
At this point the Psalmist pauses. He has been looking at his life in the light of the holy law, and, realising how full of imperfection it was, he resumes again in a penitential strain, Who can understand his errors? There is not only the acknowledgment that life is full of error; there is corruption at the very spring of life. He also acknowledges the difficulty of understanding our errors. Sin destroys the power by which we detect it. It creates a false standard, by which we judge ourselves. There is a personal touch in this acknowledgment. Who can understand his own errors? The sinner is sometimes sharp in discerning the errors of other people, although blind to his own. Thus it was with David himself. We are all too ready to acknowledge sin in a general way, without trying to note the particular sins we are most guilty of. There follows the prayer, Cleanse Thou me from secret faults. These include–
1. Faults unknown to ourselves. If we are trying to follow Christ, and live a straight and honest and pure life, we find difficulties at every turn. Temptations are strewn thickly around on every path. Unknown sins are the most dangerous to the soul. Sins noted and marked upon our memories are less likely to be ruinous to the soul than those secret sins which elude the observation.
2. Faults known to ourselves, but known only to ourselves. Each lives three lives: the life by which we are known to the world, the life by which we are known to our household, and the life known only to ourselves. All sins are, to a certain extent, presumptuous. Sins of presumption, properly speaking, are sins of will, knowingly and wilfully committed. It is a sin of presumption to act as if we needed no mercy. (T. Somerville, M. A.)
The deceitfulness of sin
The sense of sin, the joy of pardon, and the yearning for goodness are essential features in the religion of Christ. If the sense of sin gives the deepest pain, the joy of pardon is the sweetest joy. The thought of the Psalmist in this passage is the difficulty for each man of understanding his sins. Error means straying, wandering from the path. There are sins of ignorance and of infirmity, unconsciously, unintentionally done through lack of self-knowledge, or of zealous vigilance against the deceits of the world and the snares of Satan. There are also sins of presumption, done with deliberateness and hardened pride and a sort of insolence against God. There are also sins which do not usually come earliest in the moral history, but which are the inevitable result and penalty of sins of carelessness and infirmity; and which imply, nay, sooner or later create, that awful insensibility which is the sure symptom of spiritual death, and for which no forgiveness, because no repentance, is possible. The sinfulness of sin consists in its being done against the majesty and holiness, and authority and love, of God. The more we know of God the more shall we feel the depravity, the wickedness of sin. The incessancy of it is a very painful and humbling, but incontestable truth. Our sins of omission, which perhaps come most home to us in the riper years of the Christian life; the sins of commission, in which we actually violate the law of God–were they to be brought up against us at the end of a single day, might turn our hair white with shame and sorrow. Its deceitfulness is one of its most malignant and dangerous features. To call good evil is not to make it evil, and to call evil good is not to make it good. Yet we love to have it so, and God answers us according to the multitude of our idols. Nevertheless, when the moral sense is darkened it is on the way to be extinguished. How then shall we keep alive in our hearts the instinct of righteousness, and the sorrowful consciousness of having come short of it? This Psalm shows us that the key of the secret, and the instrument for each of us to use, is the Word of God.
1. Would we feel about sin as God would have us feel, let us pray earnestly and constantly for the Holy Spirit.
2. Let us be on our guard against an artificial, hysterical, self-inspecting, pusillanimous remorse. Let penitence come rather through the habitual contemplation of God in Christ, than by swelling the swamps of our own corrupt nature.
3. The sense of sin, if we would avoid unreality and a sort of complacency in our humbleness, should ever be accompanied with a continuous and strenuous effort to overcome it.
4. St. Paul never forgot his past. We need not forget that we have sinned, if only we have cause to believe that we are forgiven. We may be perfectly clean, though imperfectly holy. (Bishop Thorold.)
A mans errors
1. Mans ignorance of himself is the result of mans ignorance of God; and the knowledge of God comprehends the knowledge of man. If a man would understand his errors, he must first know Him who can forgive, correct, and prevent them. A capacity of spiritual discernment is essential to man knowledge of himself.
2. Mans knowledge of his ignorance is the first stage in his educational progress towards the possession of wisdom, and the first expression of that knowledge is prayer.
3. A tendency to err in thought, in word, and in action, combined with the inherent deceitfulness of sin, is the secret of the unfathomable mystery of human error,–unfathomable, that is, by any sounding line of mere human intellect or human conscience. A tendency to err produces error. A biassed ball cannot run straight. The deceitfulness of sin, however, rather than this tendency, is the preponderating element in the unknowableness of ones own errors. Sin usually wears a disguise, and often a man does not know his own sin. The sinful heart is a cunning logician.
4. To understand ones errors, one must know the fact of the universal defilement of sin consequent upon the fall.
5. The errors of a man include secret faults and presumptuous sins. To sin knowingly is to sin presumptuously. A secret fault is one unknown to others or ourselves–to either or to both. It is a mockery for a man who has not searched himself to ask God to search him.
6. All true wisdom, possessed or attainable by any one of the human race on earth, involves constant self-scrutiny and constant prayer. Men must be advised to look both within and without. It is because we look within that we also look without.
7. All true wisdom is increasing wisdom, for it involves increasing sanctification, and included in sanctification ,is the joy of a heavenly fellowship. (T. Easton.)
The searching power of Gods law
Notice Davids holy perplexity.
1. The occasion of it. David was now looking into the law of God, and a beam of that light had darted into his conscience. The Word of God has a secret, unavoidable power upon the soul to convince it of sin. In the Scripture is presented a transcendent rule of holiness, the infinite purity and sanctity which is in God Himself. The soul, seeing this, is at once convinced of infinite impurity. In Scripture there is an exact rule of holiness prescribed. The law forbids all sin, and enjoins all holiness. It is a spiritual rule, not resting only in an outward conformity. It keeps secret thoughts under awe. The law of God is operative, not as a dead letter: it has an active power to work upon the heart. The Spirit of God goes along with it, and makes it quick, and powerful, and sharp, and mighty in operation. As to the–
2. Nature and purpose of Davids perplexity; it may be resolved into these three expressions.
(1) It is the speech of a man who confesses his ignorance; he knows not his errors.
(2) It is the speech of him who sees many errors in himself, and suspects more, and is astonished at the consideration of them.
(3) He utters his thoughts with a sighing accent, and groans within himself at the sense of them. As to the matter of this question, take it thus–Who understands the nature of all his actions, whether they be erroneous or not? Or thus–Who ever yet kept such a careful account in his conscience as to register the just number of his sins? Or thus–Who understands the many aggravations that may make a seemingly small sin out of measure sinful? What is the ground whence arises this difficulty of discerning errors? Chiefly from these three. The Divine excellency of the law of God. The marvellous subtlety and closeness of mans spirit. The falsehood of Satan, his depths of deceitfulness. Use the subject for conviction, and for consolation. (Bishop Browning.)
Knowledge of ones sins
I. To acquire a knowledge of our sinfulness is exceedingly difficult. This may be inferred from the fact that very few acquire this knowledge, and that none acquire it perfectly. We learn, both from observation and from the Scriptures, that of those sins of the heart, in which mens errors or sinfulness principally consist in the sight of God, they are all by nature entirely ignorant. Men will not come to the Saviour because they do not feel their need of Him. It is difficult to get a knowledge of our sin, for the influences of the Divine Spirit are represented as necessary to communicate this knowledge. But it would be needless to convince men of sin if they were not ignorant of their sins. Mankind are so blind to their own sinfulness, so ignorant of their true characters, that the Spirit of God alone can remove this blindness.
II. Show why it is so.
1. Because men are ignorant of the Divine law. By the law is the knowledge of sin. St. John says, sin is a deviation from the law. But mankind are naturally ignorant of the Divine law. They are alive without the law. He who would understand his errors must understand the Divine law.
2. Another cause is the nature of the human mind. It is like the eye which, while it perceives other objects, cannot see itself (save in a mirror). Men find it difficult to examine themselves.
3. Another cause is the prevalence of self-love. Every man is extremely partial ill judging himself, and exceedingly unwilling to discover his own faults.
4. The deceitfulness of sin is another cause.
5. Another is the effects which sin produces upon mens understandings and consciences. These faculties are the eyes of the soul, without which he can discern nothing. Just so far as sin prevails in the heart and life, so far it puts out or darkens these eyes of the mind with respect to all spiritual objects; so that the more sinful a man really is, so much the less sinful does he appear to himself to be. (E. Payson, D. D.)
Self-ignorance
It is no supposition, but an unquestionable fact, that to not a few of us, from the first moment of existence, there has been present, not beneath the roof but within the breast, a mysterious resident, an inseparable companion, nearer to us than friend or brother, yet of whom, after all, we know little or nothing. Many are the reasons why we should be acquainted with our moral nature. Other portions of self-knowledge we may with comparative harmlessness neglect, but to neglect this is full of peril. And we can never depute the work to another. Unnoticed error in the heart, unlike intellectual deficiencies, not merely affects our temporal condition or our social reputation, but may issue in our eternal ruin. Yet a mans moral defects are most likely to elude his own scrutiny. There is a peculiar secrecy, an inherent inscrutability, about our sins. It is the peculiar characteristic of moral disease, that it does its deadly work in secret. Sin is a malady which affects the very organ by which itself is detected. One reason why the sinful man does not understand his errors is–
I. That sin can be truly measured only when it is resisted. So long as evil reigns unopposed within it will reign m a great degree unobserved. Resistance m the best measure of force. Sins power is revealed only in the act of resistance. When the softening principle of Divine love and grace begins to thaw the icy coldness of a godless heart, then it is that the soul becomes aware of the deadly strength of sin. Then comes the feeling of an hitherto unrealised burden.
II. Sin often makes a man afraid to know himself. A man often has a latent misgiving that all is not right with his soul, yet, fearing to know the whole truth, he will inquire no further. Most men prefer the delicious tranquillity of ignorance to the wholesome pains of a self-revelation. Easily alarmed in other cases, men become strangely incurious here. With many, life is but a continuous endeavour to forget and keep out of sight their true selves.
III. The slow and gradual way in which, in most cases, sinful habits and dispositions are acquired. There is something in the mere fact of the gradual and insidious way in which changes of character generally take place, that tends to blind men to their own defects. Everyone knows how unconscious we often are of changes that occur by minute and slow degrees, as in the case of the seasons. How imperceptibly lifes advancing stages steal up on us! Analogous changes equally unnoted, because equally slow and gradual, may be occurring in our moral nature, in the state of our souls before God. Character is a thine of slow formation. Each day helps to mould it. In a thousand insignificant sacrifices of principle to passion, of duty to inclination, a mans moral being has been fashioned into the shape it wears.
IV. As character gradually deteriorates, there is a parallel deterioration of the standard by which we judge it. As sin grows, conscience declines in vigour, and partakes of the general injury which sin inflicts on the soul. Sin, in many of its forms, has an ugly look at first, but its repulsiveness rapidly wears off by familiarity. The danger of self-ignorance is not less than its guilt. Of all evils a secret evil is most to be deprecated,–of all enemies a concealed enemy is the worst. However alarming, however distressing self-knowledge may be, better that than the tremendous evils of self-ignorance. (Principal Caird, D. D.)
Sin unmeasurable
What we know is as nothing compared with what we do not know. This is true of our errors.
I. Explain the question. We all own that we have errors, but who of us can understand them? They mingle with our good, and we cannot detect them so as to separate them. And this not only in our feelings, but in our actions. And their number, guilt, aggravation–who can understand this? Let each one think of his own errors and their peculiar wickedness.
II. Impress it on the heart. In order to a mans understanding his errors he must understand the mystery of–
1. The fall. Here is a piece of iron laid upon the anvil. The hammers are plied upon it lustily. A thousand sparks are scattered on every side. Suppose it possible to count each spark as it falls from the anvil; yet who could guess the number of the unborn sparks that still lie latent and hidden in the mass of iron? Now your sinful nature may be compared to that heated bar of iron. Temptations are the hammers; your sins the sparks. If you could count them (which you cannot do), yet who could tell the multitude of unborn iniquities–eggs of sin that lie slumbering in your souls. And so we are not to think merely of the sins that grow on the surface, but if we could turn our heart up to its core and centre we should find it as fully permeated with sin as every piece of putridity is with worms and rottenness. The fact is, that man is a reeking mass of corruption. His whole soul is by nature so debased and so depraved that no description which can be given of him even by inspired tongues can fully tell how base and vile a thing he is.
2. Gods law especially in its spiritual application. It is exceeding broad.
3. The perfection of God.
4. Hell.
5. The Cross. George Herbert saith very sweetly–He that would know sin, let him repair to Olivet, and he shall see a Man so wrung with pain that all His head, His hair, His garments bloody be. Sin was that press and vice which forced pain to hunt its cruel food through every vein. You must see Christ sweating, as it were, great drops of blood. You must drink of the cup to its last dregs, and like Jesus cry–It is finished, or else we cannot know the guilt of our sin.
III. The practical application.
1. The folly of hoping for salvation by our own righteousness.
2. Or by our feelings.
3. What grace is this which pardons sin! Blessed be God, the spotless flood of Jesus merit is deeper than the height of mine iniquities. (C. H. Spurgeon.)
The souls error
Error, what a word, what a thing! It is the foundation stone of Satans kingdom in the world; ay, and by it be builds up and sustains his empire in the world. Two things are suggested here concerning the souls errors–
I. They are mysterious. Who Call understand his errors?
1. They are mysterious in their origin. Wire can explain the genesis of error?
2. They are mysterious in their number. Who can count them? They baffle all human arithmetic.
3. They are mysterious in their working. How Wondrously they work!
4. They are mysterious in their influence. Who shall tell the influence of one error, on one individual, on society, on the universe?
II. They are polluting. Cleanse Thou me. Errors stain the conscience and the heart, they are moral filth.
1. The cleansing of the soul from error is a work of supreme urgency. Cleanse Thou me. Without this cleansing there can be no true liberty, dignity, or happiness, no fellowship with God, no heaven.
2. The cleansing of the soul from error is the work of God. Cleanse Thou me. We cannot cleanse ourselves, though our agency in the matter is indispensable. Create ill me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. (Homilist.)
The difficulty of attaining to a knowledge of our sin
We have here a question put and a prayer offered. But the implied answer to the question must be taken with some limitations; for–
I. Some knowledge of ones errors is essential to salvation. Such as–
1. Will awaken the soul of man.
2. Drive him out of all the refuges of lies to which he will betake himself for salvation.
3. Convince him that he is utterly helpless and deserves to perish.
4. Make him come to Christ and accept the Gospel. But when men are brought to all this, then they ask–
II. Who can understand his errors? For–
1. He cannot understand the errors that he knows–their nature, their variety, their number, their aggravation, their demerit.
2. Of many of his errors he has no knowledge at all. See how long men remain in sin and are not disturbed by it. Conclusion: How humbled should we be. How forbearing is God. How precious Christs redemption. How mighty the work of the Holy Spirit. How thorough in its working true faith is. But how little of it there is. (J. R. Anderson.)
Self-knowledge
The foundation of all spiritual wisdom must be ]aid in self-knowledge. Yet men neither desire nor seek such knowledge. There is nothing that they desire less. Yet without there can be no true religion. The form may be maintained but the power will be unknown. But the good man will seek this knowledge, though he will not fully attain it.
I. The humiliating confession implied in the Psalmists question. It is implied that no man can understand his errors. And reasons for this are–
1. The infinite purity of Gods law, surpassing our comprehension.
2. Self-love, which makes him tender and partial in estimating his own faults.
3. The impossibility of recollecting every instance, even of undoubted transgression. They are so many, so varied, so secret.
II. The humble petition which follows this confession. David knew that none of his sins were hidden from God, though they might be from himself. And he knew that they defiled and polluted his soul. Hence his prayer. It is the blood of Jesus Christ which alone can cleanse us. Turn, therefore, in confession and penitence to Him. (J. Jowett, M. A.)
Difficulty of knowing our faults
A small portion of light, it is said, only serves to render darkness more visible; so, when the light of truth begins to penetrate the mind, it shows that there is within us a dark abyss; and every additional ray discovers more of the intricate windings of the human heart. For there is not only dense darkness, but many false and deceitful appearances which turn out upon investigation very different from what they seemed to be. David felt this, and hence our text.
I. Inquire why it is so difficult to know our own faults. We may know an act to be a sin, and yet not know all the moral evil that is in it. But–
1. One reason why we know so little of ourselves is, that so few reflect.
2. Another is, our thoughts are so fugitive.
3. Our feelings are so mixed as to their character.
4. Pride and self-love.
5. Our dislike of that which excites, as our sins do–painful feelings. Remorse is an intolerable pain. And so is the looking for of judgment.
6. We judge ourselves by the flatteries of others;
7. And by the ordinary conduct of men.
8. Failure to apply to ourselves the true standard of rectitude. I was alive without the law once. How, then, ought we to watch our hearts and continually seek the grace of God.
II. The import of this prayer. It is for deliverance not only from known, but from hidden sins also. And there is a two-fold cleansing–
1. That of expiation.
2. That of sanctification. Not only do we need pardon, but the continual purification of our souls.
Conclusion–
1. The best evidence of the existence of a holy nature is the sincere and prevailing desire of perfect holiness. A gracious state is not proved by the persuasion that we have attained it, but by the ardent, habitual desire after it.
3. When on account of sin the conscience is again burdened, we must turn again to the blood of Christ.
4. Remember many of our sins are hidden, but they lead on to presumptuous sins. (A. Alexander, D. D.)
Thy hearts ignorance of itself
I. The question. Who can understand his errors? Error is one of the mildest words we use to describe wrong-doing. Sin, guilt, wickedness, iniquity, seem to be terms that carry heavy blame along with them; but when we say of a man merely that he is in error, we consider we are speaking leniently. And yet error really conveys, perhaps, a clearer idea of what sin in its essence is than any of the other words. For what is error but the straying out of a path, the wandering from a way? There is no better definition of sin. The soul has a way, a path, designed for it, just as a planet has an orbit. The difference between the star and the soul is, that the one keeps to its appointed course while the other wanders; but when we ask why this is so, when we try to find out the cause of such unlikeness of behaviour, we touch one of the deepest senses in which it is possible to ask the question, Who can understand his errors?
1. Who can understand error as such? Why should that be true of the human soul which is true of nothing else that is or lives, so far as we know, namely, that it is able to break the law?
2. Who can understand his errors, in the sense of understanding the way in which the principle of sin works in the heart, and manifests itself in the life?
(1) How often men, in the bitterness of their souls, cry, What can have possessed me that I should have said or done thus or so? They cannot imagine their true selves having said or done the thing, and so they fall back upon the fancy that some other being came in and took unrightful possession of the conscience, usurped it, thus making possible that which would have been impossible had the lawful sovereign continued on the throne. But this only shows how little we know ourselves, how hard it is for us to understand our errors.
(2) When we take into account hereditary tendencies and dispositions, when we consider how much easier it is for one person to resist the temptation to intemperance, or violence of speech, than for another, the problem becomes still more complicated.
(3) Letting go the past altogether, when we try to distinguish between the various sources from which, and channels through which, our temptations approach us, how embarrassed we find ourselves. We are conscious that some of our temptations come directly through the channels of sense; we see that others, such as the allurements of ambition and the attractions of praise, touch us from the side of the world, so-called, or society; while of still others we can only say that they either originate in our own spirits or else are communicated by contact with other spirits, of whose nearness at this time or that we are ignorant. Yet when we have conceded the justice of this analysis, it remains exceedingly difficult to decide, in any given instance, from Which one of the three possible sources the temptation which happens for the moment to be pressing us with its vehement appeals has come. It is a point in favour of a beleaguered army if the general in command only knows on which side to anticipate the next attack, but where there is uncertainty about this, or what is worse, where there is the fear that the assault may come from all quarters at once, there must be corresponding loss of heart.
II. The prayer. Cleanse Thou me, etc. Here is the help, just here. Invite the Saviour of the soul to enter in through the gateway of the soul, and to take up His dwelling there. There is no one who comprehends a piece of mechanism so well as the inventor and the maker of it. You may call this a rough figure of speech, and yet, up to a certain point, it is a just one. The soul is, indeed, something much better than a watch; but still the watch and the soul have this much at least in common: each has had a maker, and it is only reasonable to say that no one can possibly understand the thing made so thoroughly as the one who made it. But note carefully the precise point where the soul has the advantage of the watch. It is here; the watchmaker touches the wheels and springs from without. He handles them with most marvellous dexterity, to be sure, but still, after all, it is only handling. The Maker of the soul can do more than handle His workmanship. He has the added power of entering in and dwelling within it, yes, actually within it, as intimately as the life power dwells within the very juices of the plant, making it lily or carnation, anemone or violet, each after its kind. Those cures are the most effectual that heal the man from within. Surface remedies are proverbially disappointing. Defects of constitution, deeply concealed flaws of nature, yield only to healing forces that, like an atmosphere breathed in, penetrate to the very inmost sources of life. It is so with the secret faults, the hidden flecks, the unnoticed weaknesses which mar the wholeness and sap the strength of the spiritual man. We need to breathe in more of God if we would breathe out more of goodness. We need to have within our veins and bounding in our pulses more of the blood of Christ if we would have the blood of Christ save us indeed, for it is not by an outward washing that God is making ready a people for Himself, but by that inward cleansing which begins at the heart. (W. R. Huntington, D. D.)
Errors
By errors he means his unwitting and inconsiderate mistakes. There are sins, some which are committed when the sun shines, i.e. with light and knowledge, and then, as it is with colours when the sun shines, you may see them, so these a man can see and know, and confess them particularly to be transgressions; there are other sins, which are committed either in the times of ignorance or else (if there be knowledge) yet with inobservance: either of these may be so heaped up in the particular number of them that, as a man did (when he did commit them), take no notice of them, so now after the commission, if he should take the brightest candle to search all the records of his soul, yet many of them would escape his notice. And, indeed, this is a great part of our misery, that we cannot understand all our debts: we can easily see too many, yet many more, he as it were dead, and out of sight; to sin is one great misery, and then to forget our sills is a misery too: if in repentance we could set the battle in array, point to every individual sin, in the true and particular times of acting and re-acting, oh how would our hearts be more broken with shame and sorrow, and how would we adore the richness of the treasure of mercy which must have a multitude in it, to pardon the multitude of our infinite errors and sins. (O. Sedgwick, B. D.)
Errors discovered to the heart
Nevertheless, though David saith, Who can understand his errors? as the prophet Jeremiah spake also, The heart of man is desperately wicked, who can know it? yet must we bestir ourselves at heaven to get more and more heavenly light to find out more and more of our sinnings: so the Lord can search the heart; and though we shall never be able to find out all our sins which we have committed, yet it is possible, and beneficial, for us to find out yet more sins than yet we do know: and you shall find these in your own experience, that as soon as ever grace entered your hearts you saw sin in another way than ever you saw it before, yea, and the more grace hath traversed and increased in the soul, the more full discoveries hath it made of sins: it hath shown new sins as it were, new sins, not for their being, not as if they were not in the heart and life before, but for their evidence, and our apprehension and feeling: we do now see such ways and such inclinations to be sinful which we did not think to be so before: as physic brings those burnouts, which had their residence before, now more to the sense of the patient: or as the sun makes open the motes of dust which were in the room before, so doth the light of the Word discover more corruption. (O. Sedgwick, B. D.)
Cleanse Thou me from secret faults.—
Secret faults
Temptation comes to all men everywhere, and St. Bernard roundly says, All life is a temptation, which means that it is a history of attacks and resistances, victories and defeats, in spiritual things. How could we ever expect to hear the praise, Well done, good and faithful servant, if we had gained no victories over self? And how shall we gain them without effort? Temptation has various sources–our own weakness, Satans plots, and Gods purposes. Examination shows that temptation is allowed for in Gods plan. Still, we are not to think God is Himself the author of temptation. The fact is, temptation has different meanings and objects, according to the different sources from which it comes. It was from mere malignity Satan tempted Job. It was from party spirit and self-sufficiency the lawyers questioned Christ, tempting Him. It is from coveting that those who would be rich fall into temptations; but when God allows us to be tempted, His trials are for our good, to disclose our weakness, to increase our strength, to rebuke our waywardness, or bring back our wandering steps. Even in their fails Gods love pursues and overtakes His children. The first thing for us to do is to discover what is our temptation and our tempter. There are inveterate habits of thought, speech, and conduct which are chronic temptations one has hardly a knowledge of, and no will to resist. And here, in these, are the great battlefields for us; and the discovery of these to us is a special occasion of Gods grace to us. When you have found out your special sin, the next thing is to enter the lists against it in a solemn way, a solemn and prepared way. We want the Holy Spirits help to know what cannot otherwise be known, the sin which doth most easily beset us. This is to be prayed for, and waited for, and worked for, and part of the prayer must be the attitude of the praying life, a watching soul, a secretly self-questioning soul, a retirement into a sort of inner oratory in ones own self, there expecting and asking that God may show us ourselves, and enable us to discover, judge, and disapprove ourselves. (T. F. Crosse, D. C. L.)
Secret sins
In the Lateran council of the Church of Rome a decree was passed that every true believer must confess his sins, all of them, once a year to the priest, and they affixed to it this declaration, that there is no hope, else, of pardon being obtained. How absurd. Can a man tell his sins as easily as he can count his fingers? If we had eyes like those of God we should think very differently of ourselves. The sins that we see and confess are but like the farmers small samples which he brings to market when he has left his granary full at home. Let all know that sin is sin, whether we see it or not: though secret to us, it is as truly sin as if we had known it to be so, though not so great as a presumptuous sin. But we want to speak to those whose sins are not unknown to themselves, but still are secret from their fellow men. Every now and then we turn up a fair stone which lies upon the green mound of the professing Church, surrounded with the verdure of apparent goodness, and we are astonished to find beneath it all kinds of filthy insects and loathsome reptiles. But that would not be just. Let me speak to you who break Gods covenant in the dark and wear a mask of goodness in the light, who shut the doors and sin in secret.
I. What folly you are guilty of. It is not secret, it is known. God knows it. This world is like the glass hives wherein bees sometimes work: we look down upon them, and we see all the operations of the little creatures. So God looketh down and seeth all.
II. The misery of secret sins. They who commit them are in constant fear of discovery. If I must be a wicked man, give me the life of a roystering sinner, who sins before the face of day: let me not act as a hypocrite and a coward. A mere profession is but painted pageantry, to go to hell in, the funeral array of dead souls; guilt is a grim chamberlain, even when his fingers are not bloody red. Secret sins bring fevered eyes and sleepless nights. Hypocrisy is a hard game to play at.
III. Its solemn guilt. You do not think there is any evil in a thing unless somebody sees it, do you? If somebody did see, then there would be evil. But to play a trick and never be discovered, as we do in trade, that is all fair. I do not believe that. A railway servant puts up a wrong signal, there is an accident, the man is tried and punished. He did the same thing the day before, but there was no accident, and so no one accused him. But it was just the same; the accident did not make the guilt, but the deed. It was his business to have taken care. Secret sin is the worst of sin, because in his heart the man is an atheist.
IV. The danger of secret sin. It will grow into a public one. You cannot preserve moderation in sin. The melting of the lower glacier in the Alps is always followed by that of the higher. When you begin to sin you go on. Christians, you dare not spare these secret sins; you must destroy them.
V. I beseech you give them up. You who are almost persuaded to be a Christian. Will you have your sin and go to hell, or leave your sin and go to heaven? Some say, You are too precise. Will you say that to God at the last? Secret sinner, in the great day of judgment what will become of thee? (C. H. Spurgeon.)
The cry from the chasm
The Tay Bridge fell because of secret faults,–a few little blisters on a girder or two. David fell through secret faults. Three lives we live, concentric circles they are, within one another, connected yet separate.
1. The outside life, in society, among our fellow men. This outside life, comparing with the other inner lives, is lived with a dangerous facility. Society life is lived very easily. And yet it may be one seething mass of rottenness and hypocrisy. Yes, this outside life is easily lived, profession easily made, and easily and spotlessly acted up to, and because of that we find this prayer of the Psalmist does not refer in particular to this outmost circle, although, of course, to this outmost circle all the eddying movements for fouler or cleaner must in time extend.
2. An inner life we live when the door flings to its hinges on the world, the life in our home group, in our family circle. Here we manage to raise a little the society mask; we can almost lift it up and lay it down, and let our eyes look on our real selves. Our surroundings at home are more favourable to the revealing of our true character. The inspection of our home privacy is prejudiced in our favour. But here again there is a Pinchbeck imitation. A saint abroad, they say, may be a devil at home; true, but a devil abroad may be a saint at home. And a saint abroad and a saint at home too may be a devil at heart. The whole role of the saint we can easily act to minutest detail as a member or office bearer of the Church, and the pious fraud can be carried through without a hitch in our home circle. The imitation may defy detection from the search of the strongest household microscopes.
3. The inmost life, the region of Davids prayer for cleansing, is heart life. Into this privacy not another being is admitted. Here is solitude unbroken. If unbosom we would, we could not. God has walled round the spirit world with the walls unclimbable and unwingable. Nobody knows but Jesus–the battles of the soul, the halting, the stumbling, the fainting, the falling, the fleeing, the thoughts hard, the thoughts bad, the thoughts harsh and hateful, the temptings, the struggles, the sins, the uncleanness–the black poisoned streams pouring from the old death jets of the fountain day by day. Why does David pray for cleansing? What is prayer? It is the appeal to power from powerlessness, the strong cry from helplessness to help. Here in this inmost life faults are truly secret–secret from the man himself. That is the bidden plague-spot, and well may we wince when we touch the place. We cannot play the hypocrite here. As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he. No mask here. Entirely helpless; if we seek cleansing, we must get it outside ourselves. For it we must pray to God. Why, O burdened psalmist heart, needest thou pray for cleansing of secret faults? In most folks vocabulary secret is comfortable, quieting, secure, and safe. Well dost thou know that faults secret to others, and secret to thee, are not secret to God. The prayer is from Davids helplessness before the secret faults of his own soul; but the agonising timbre of the petition is from the overpowering sense of this inward depravity and corruption, secret and unknown to him, yet spread out in a terrible roll before Him who cannot look upon the shadow of sin. This staggering thought is one reason for the earnestness of this prayer. (J. Robertson.)
Secret faults
The Psalmist is thinking of the errors that we dont understand, and of which we are not conscious.
1. There are faults which are secret, because they are bound up with our dispositions and characters. We see every day how blind men become to their own habitual faults.
2. There are secret faults which are due to the influence of our surroundings. There is a law known to naturalists as the law of protective colouring, according to which animals grow into the likeness of their environment. There is such a law in society. Human beings tend to assimilate themselves to the customs and opinions of the world around them. In the business world men do, without hesitation, what they could not do if they applied the law of Christ to the regulation of their daily calling. The society in which we live affects us. It tends to bring us down to its level, and imbues us with its opinions.
3. There are secret faults which consist of undeveloped germs and possibilities of evil that lie lurking in our hearts.
How are we to be delivered from these secret faults?
1. Set about the work of self-examination. Careful and judicious self-examination lies at the bottom of all progressive Christianity. It may be done in a morbid, introspective way, but it need not be.
2. We must apply ourselves to the study of the Word of God.
3. We should bring ourselves into the holy presence of Jesus Christ.
4. We must learn to pray the Psalmists prayer. We cannot cleanse ourselves, we need to be cleansed. Christ must live in us by His Holy Spirit if we are to be cleansed from our secret faults, and to become pure even as He is pure. (J. C. Lambert.)
Secret faults
Unless we have some just idea of our hearts and of sin we can have no right idea of a Moral Governor, a Saviour, or a Sanctifier. Self-knowledge is at the root of all real religious knowledge. Self-knowledge admits of degrees. No one, perhaps, is entirely ignorant of himself Most men are contented with a slight acquaintance with their hearts, and therefore a superficial faith. Men are satisfied to have numberless secret faults. They do not think about them either as sins or as obstacles to strength of faith, and live on as if they had nothing to learn.
1. A ready method of convincing ourselves of the existence in us of faults unknown to ourselves is to consider how plainly we see the secret faults of others.
2. Now reflect on the actual disclosures of our hidden weakness, which accidents occasion. Integrity on one side of our character is no voucher for integrity on another. We cannot tell how we should act if brought under temptations different from those which we have hitherto experienced.
3. This much we cannot but allow; that we do not know ourselves in those respects in which we have not been tried. But further than this: What if we do not know ourselves even where we have been tried, and found faithful? The recorded errors of Scripture saints occulted in those parts of their duty in which they showed obedience most perfect.
4. Think of this too: No one begins to examine himself, and to pray to know himself, but he finds within him an abundance of faults which before were either entirely, or almost entirely, unknown to him. That this is so we learn from the written lives of good men, and our own experience of others. And hence it is that our best men are ever the most humble.
5. But let a man persevere in prayer and watchfulness to the day of his death, yet he will never get to the bottom of his heart. Though he know more and more of himself as he becomes more conscientious and earnest, still the full manifestation of the secrets there lodged is reserved for another world.
Call to mind the impediments that are in the way of your knowing yourselves or feeling your ignorance.
1. Self-knowledge does not come as a matter of course; it implies an effort and a work. The very effort of steadily reflecting is painful to some men, not to speak of the difficulty of reflecting correctly.
2. Then comes in our self-love. We hope the best; this saves us the trouble of examining. Self-love answers for our safety.
3. This favourable judgment of ourselves will especially prevail if we have the misfortune to have uninterrupted health and high sprats and domestic comfort.
4. Next consider the force of habit. Conscience at first warns us against sin; but if we disregard it, it soon ceases to upbraid us; and thus sins, once known, in time become secret sins.
5. To the force of habit must be added that of custom. Every age has its own wrong ways.
6. What is our chief guide amid the evil and seducing customs of the world? Obviously the Bible. These remarks may serve to impress upon us the difficulty of knowing ourselves aright, and the consequent danger to which we are exposed of speaking peace to our souls when there is no peace. Without self-knowledge you have no root in yourselves personally; you may endure for a time, but under affliction or persecution your faith will not last. (J. H. Newman, B. D.)
Concealing faults
Various causes contribute to conceal from a man his faults.
I. A defect of knowledge. Many sin against God without being conscious of it. Where ignorance is unavoidable there sin may be excusable; but a man who would avail himself of this plea must make it appear that his ignorance was not owing to any want of care on his part to find out the law. One principal cause that our sins are so much concealed from our view is, that we form our standard of what is right, not from the pure and holy law of God, but from the general opinion of our fellow sinners. The custom of the world is our guide.
II. The want of a right disposition of mind. While we were flattering our pride with the hope of having done everything right, we may have deceived ourselves in the very idea of right. The want of right dispositions is a subject little considered. We are often under the influence of desires and tempers positively evil, without knowing it, through the deceitfulness of sin and of our own hearts. Consider this subject as the means of rendering us humble. And let it make us watchful. (Christian Observer.)
Secret faults
Look at this two-fold deliverance asked for–grace to cleanse from secret or presumptuous faults. All sins come under the category of secret sins, or those of presumption. The conscience of David was becoming more sensitive; secret sins could be secret no longer. We may perhaps compare that development of moral sensitiveness which the law is always promoting within every right-minded man with those advances of physical science by which unknown worlds above and beneath us have been brought into view, and disease detected in stages in which its presence was unsuspected by our forefathers. A century ago mans observations had not got very far beyond the range of his unassisted senses. Our astronomers have scarcely completed the sum of the stars brought into view by the newest telescopes. The biologist has discovered just as many new worlds as the student of the heavens. He finds sphere of marvellous life within sphere, and yet other spheres more deeply bidden within these, like ball within ivory ball in Oriental carving. An Italian doctor brings his microscope to bear, and, floating within a foot of the soil of the Campagna, finds the malignant bacillus which is at the root of the malarial fever of Rome. Our forefathers knew only the superficial facts of disease, corruption, decay. The biologist brings his concentrated lenses and his polarised light to bear, and he watches every movement of the tiny armies of iconoclasts as they undermine and break up the structure of the body at points where the ordinary observer did not suspect their presence. He projects an electric beam through tubes filled with stifled air, and the air is found to teem with spores that are undeveloped epidemics, with potentialities of worldwide disaster in them. Within recent times we have heard of the elaboration of instruments that may reveal new worlds of sound to us, as marvellous as the worlds of form revealed by the microscope. It is said that no man ever knows what his own voice is like till he hears it in Mr. Edisons phonograph. We are told of another instrument by which the breathings of insects are made audible. The medical expert may yet be able to detect the faintest murmur of abnormal sound in the system that indicates the approach of disease. And in the same way there must be the growth within us of a fine moral science, that will bring home to our apprehension the most obscure of our secret faults. But of all the sciences it is the most primitive and the most neglected. All that we should know is known to the Searcher of our heart long before we become conscious of it. He not only detects the flagrant faults, but the hidden blight that poisons the vitality of religion. But how can there be responsibility for sins of which we are ignorant? And how can there be guilt without responsibility? If ignorance is fated and inevitable, there can be no responsibility. But ignorance is often self-caused. Many of our sins are secret because we insist upon judging ourselves by human rather than Divine standards of life and righteousness. Our sins assume popular forms and ramifications. No more striking illustration of what the naturalists call the law of protective colouring can be found than that which presents itself in the realm of ethics. You know what that law is. The arctic fox, it is said, assumes a white fur in the winter months, so that it may pass undetected over the snows. When the spring comes and the brown earth reappears, it sheds those white hairs and assumes a fur the colour of the earth over which it moves. Many fishes have markings that resemble the sand or gravel above which they make their haunts. You may watch for hours, and till they move you are unable to recognise their presence. The bird that broods on an exposed nest is never gaily coloured. However bright the plumage of its mate, it is always attired in feathers that match its surroundings, if it has to fulfil these dangerous domestic duties. Large numbers of insects are so tinted as to be scarcely distinguishable from the leaves and flowers amidst which they live. One insect has the power of assuming the appearance of a dried twig. And is there not something very much like this in the sphere of human conduct? Our sins blend with the idiosyncrasies of the age and disguise themselves. Of course, we do not sin in loud, flashing colours, if we make any pretension to piety at least. Our sins always perfectly compose with the background of our surroundings. As a rule, they are sins into which we fall in common with men we esteem, men who have established a hold upon our affections, men whose sagacity we trust, and who by their excellence in some things lead us to think very lightly of the moral errors they illustrate in other things. Oh, the blinding tendency of this judgment by popular standards to which we are so prone! All this was sure to be illustrated in the history of the Psalmist. In the rough and tumble of his wandering life and coarse associations he would be prone to forget the inner and more delicate meanings and obligations of the law. The moral atmosphere pervading the Cave of Adullam was not more wholesome than that pervading our unreformed bankruptcy courts. The cave was not the best possible place in which to school a man in the finer shades of right and wrong. Most of Davids sins in after life seem to have been lurid reflections of the brutality, the unthinking ruthlessness, the impetuous animalisms of his former companions in arms. He evidently felt the danger he was in of falling to the level of his surroundings and of forgetting by how much he had fallen. Let us beware of gliding into an unconfessed habit of testing ourselves by human standards, when God has given to us higher and holier standards by which to measure ourselves. It is said that all organic germs cease a few miles out at sea. Air taken from the streets or the warehouses of the city yields large numbers of these germs. The air circulating through the ship in dock is charged with them. After the shore has been left behind the air taken from the deck is pure, but they are still found in air taken from the hold. After a few days at sea the air on deck and in the hold alike yields no traces of these microscopic spores that are closely connected with disease. Let us be ever breathing the spirit of Gods love. Let us get away from the din and dust and turmoil of life, out upon that infinite sea of love that is without length or breadth or depth, and our secret faults will vanish away and we shall by and by stand without offence in the presence of Gods glory. Passion, prejudice, ambition often blind men to their faults. When great passionate forces hurry us on we are not more apt to see the shortcomings and specks of corruption in the motives and actions of the passing moment, than the traveller by a racing express to see the little ring of decay in the lily of the wayside garden past which he is flying. During the Franco-Prussian War a regiment of Prussian soldiers was deploying from the shelter of a wood, in full face of French fire. The appearance of the regiment as seen from a distance, said one of the war correspondents, was like that of some dark serpent creeping out from beneath the wood. The far-stretching figure seemed to leave a dark trail in its path. The correspondent looked carefully through his glass, and this trail resolved itself under close inspection into patches of soldiers who had fallen under French fire. Some of them were seen to get on to their feet, stagger on a few paces, and fall again. The passion of battle was upon them, and they were scarcely conscious of their wounds. And is it not thus with us? We are intoxicated by the passion of lifes battle, the battle for bread and place and power and conquest of every kind; and we stagger on, unconscious of the fact that we are pierced with many a hidden wound. The excitements that are in the air whirl us along, and we are all but insensible to the moral disaster He sees who watches the battle from afar. Our slowness to recognise the hurt that has overtaken us may be the sign that the pulse of vitality is fluttering itself out. Keep back Thy servant also from presumptuous sins. It is restraint, not purification, from presumptuous sin that the Psalmist asks in the second portion of his prayer. Presumptuous sin has no place in a true child of God. He that is born of God doth not commit sin. Cleansed by the forgiving grace of God, we ought to need only deliverance from errors of inadvertence and infirmity. He that is bathed needeth not save to wash his feet. No hallowing process, however complete, can remove susceptibility to the temptation even to presumptuous sins. The work of cleansing from secret fault sometimes creates a new peril. We need to be kept back from it, as the restive horse needs the curb. David felt this, and therefore prayed this prayer. (Thomas G. Selby.)
On the duty of examining into our secret faults
The faculties of the human mind are never acknowledged to be more imperfect, or at least more inadequate, to the object proposed, perhaps, than when applied to estimate the real merit, or demerit, of mens actions; for, in order to form an opinion on this subject that might have the sanction of strict justice, we must know the motives and intentions of the heart. The generality of men divide their service between two masters, and hence are neither wholly good nor wholly bad. And as we cannot fully understand or appreciate the real character of others, so neither can we our own. Hence the petition before us. Yet we can do something towards the understanding many of our errors and secret faults; and this is our duty. Therefore I would–
I. Recommend the important duty of examining into our latent imperfections. And this because the growth of character is so gradual. Not all at once do we become vicious, and certainly not all at once do we attain the summits of virtue. We are in a great measure the children of discipline, and therefore the sooner this begins the better. Our great perils are not from the temptations of the open day, but those which are from within. These are the parents, of almost every evil deed. How important, then, to attend to these secret faults.
II. Specify some of those secret faults to which we are apt to be inattentive. They assume all manner of disguises, and the mind will throw false glosses over its own deformity. The mean rapacious wretch will call his conduct prudence, temperance, and provident wisdom. The gloomy bigot will despise the warm, steady devotion of the rational Christian. Pride will call itself independence of spirit; and meekness and gentleness will be branded as meanness and pusillanimity. But above all things, we should attend to the nature and the grounds of our satisfactions and pleasures, our griefs and vexations, in the intercourse we carry on with the world.
III. Point out secret faults which, though conscious of them ourselves, we industriously keep from the eyes of the world. There is hypocrisy in these, and hence they are worse than others. As, for instance, courtesy in order to deceive, a wicked affectation of Christian gentleness. These are wolves in sheeps clothing. Such are religious from mere worldly motives. They are hypocrites. Yet those who take no care to cleanse themselves from errors of this sort must live and act under a state of the most wretched bondage to the world. All is sacrificed to appearance. The passions, indeed, may be often mortified and suppressed, though not from a sense of religious duty (for then it would be virtue), but from respect of persons, or the fear of losing some advantage. Men who are thus wedded, as it were, to sin are often as cruel and oppressive as they are selfish and hypocritical. Though they cringe to power, and flatter to deceive; yet they will frequently retire from the insults and vexations of the world within the circle of their respective authority, and there vent their angry and malignant passions with redoubled vehemence and malice.
IV. The correction of these evils. Live as in the sight of God, before whom the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed. We may deceive men, but we cannot deceive Him. A time will shortly come when we shall be convinced that there is but one thing needful, which is the mercy and protection of God, through the merits and atonement of Christ our Lord. The fashion and the appearance of this world will then be so strangely reversed that, among many good and faithful servants who are worthy to enter into the joy of their Lord, we shall see some whose merits we thought highly of shrink from the awful trial of the last day, and vanish like smoke before the wind; while the meek and humble virtues of those whom we might have overlooked and neglected, or perhaps despised, shall shine forth like the sun in His kingdom. (J. Hewlett, B. D.)
Secret faults
I. What are they?–They stand opposed to open and presumptuous sins. They relate particularly–
1. To the secret bias of the heart to evil. There is what may be called latent guilt; a propensity of the soul never yet developed, but which new circumstances may call forth.
2. To unholy thoughts which we intend no other person shall know.
3. To those sinful emotions and affections which rise up in the best hearts almost involuntarily, and against which the pure mind struggles. Old habits of evil will torture for a long while the renewed soul.
4. To these plans of evil which are not prosecuted to their completion. Providence hinders them, or else they would be carried out.
5. Those crimes which are perpetrated in darkness or under disguise.
II. Some of the ways in which sin is concealed.
1. Men design to conceal them. And we have the power to conceal our purposes. Society could not exist if we had not such power. The body becomes the shield of the soul, to guard our plans from the observation of all other minds but that of God. But this power of concealment may be abused for purposes of evil, and often is so. But such concealment of guilt is difficult. God has placed in the human frame by nature certain indications of secret guilt; and He meant that where that guilt existed it should betray itself for the well-being of society. He designed not only that the conscience should check the offender, but He implanted in the frame itself certain indications of guilt which He intended also to be a safeguard of virtue. Now, one great art in this world is to obliterate the natural marks of guilt from the human frame, and to counterfeit the indications of innocence. The object is so to train the eye that it will not reveal the secret conviction of crime; so to discipline the cheek that it will not betray the guilty by a sudden rush of blood there; so to fortify the hand and the frame that they will not by trembling disclose the purposes of the soul. But he drills and disciplines himself, and his eye is calm, and his countenance is taught to be composed, and he speaks and acts as if he were an innocent man, and buries the consciousness of the crime deep in the recesses of the soul. Soon the brow is like brass, and the frame is schooled not to betray, and the living indexes of guilt which God had affixed to the body are obliterated, and the conscience is seared, and the whole man has departed from the beautiful form which God made, and has become an artificial and a guilty thing. Again. The arts of polished and refined life, to a melancholy extent, have the same object. They are so arranged as to conceal rancour, and envy, and hatred, and the desire of revenge. They aim not to eradicate them, but to conceal them.
2. Many secret sins are concealed because there is no opportunity of carrying the purpose into execution.
3. Others, because the man has never yet been placed in circumstances which would develop his character. Were they so placed it would be seen at once what they were.
III. Some reasons why we should adopt this prayer.
1. Because we specially need the grace of God to overcome them. If only by the grace of God we can be kept in the paths of external morality, what protection is there in the human heart against secret sins?
2. Such secret faults are peculiarly offensive to God, and we should therefore pray to be cleansed from them. The guilt of the wicked plan is not annihilated or diminished in the view of the Searcher of hearts, because He chooses to arrest it by His own Providence or because He never allows the sinner the opportunity of accomplishing it.
3. And I add, finally, that we should pray for this, because if secret faults are indulged they will sooner or later break out like smothered fires, and the true character of the heart will be developed. Fires uncap a mountain, because they have been long accumulating, and can be confined no longer. A judge on the bench, like Bacon, shocks the world by the undisputed fact that he has been bribed. The community is horror-stricken, and we feel for the moment like distrusting every man, and doubting all virtue and all piety, and we are almost led to conclude that all our estimates of human character on which we have heretofore acted are false, and we begin to distrust everybody. But such painful disclosures are not departures from the great principles of human nature. There is a maxim that no one suddenly became eminently vile. These lapses into sin are but the exponents of the real character of the man, the regular results of a long course of guilt. And so our cherished faults will one day manifest themselves, unless they are checked and removed by the grace of God and the blood of atonement.
IV. In conclusion.
1. Distrust yourself, for Who can understand his errors?
2. Be humble. Others have fallen, so may you.
3. We have much to dread at the revelations of the day of judgment. With no consciousness of sinfulness but such as I believe common to man, with the recollection of the general aim of my life to do right, with great occasion for thanksgiving that I have been preserved from the open vices that have ruined so many who began the career of life with me, yet I confess to you that if there is anything that I should more than all other things dread, it would be that the record of all my thoughts and feelings should be exhibited to the assembled universe in the last day. That the universe would acquiesce in my condemnation on such a revelation I have no manner of doubt, And if there is any one thing for which I desire to give unfeigned thanks more than others, it is that through the blood of Christ those sins may be blotted out; and that through the infinite mercy of God the secret sins of which I am conscious may never–no never–be disclosed to assembled worlds. (A. Barnes, D. D.)
Secret faults
Jesus Christ when on earth was sneered at by persons who considered themselves highly respectable, and on the whole very good sort of people. It is so now. As long as we are careless and well pleased with ourselves, so long must His message of loving forgiveness appear foolishness unto us. We cannot greatly desire to have the burden of sin taken from us if we never have felt it at all. The first thing to be done in order to appreciate the message of forgiveness of sin is to try and understand our errors. And do not be content with mere general confessions. It is easy to say vaguely, I am a miserable sinner; it is not quite so easy to say, Last Monday I told that lie, on Tuesday I was guilty of that mean action, and neglected my duty on this or that occasion, and so on. Those who feel most free from secret faults are just those who have most of them. The best men are the most humble. It is no easy matter to understand our errors, and to know ourselves even as other men know us, much less as God does. How clearly we can see failings in others which they do not see. Be sure that others see faults in us which we do not see. Ah, if some power would give us the gift of seeing ourselves as others see us. Help herein is to be found by keeping a steady eye on the suspicious part of our character. Ask yourself, What in me would my enemy first fix on if he wished to abuse me, and what fault would my neighbours be most ready to believe that I had? One cannot but be touched by that story which some wise sanitary observer made known to the public. He noticed how a young woman who had come up to London from the country, and was living in some miserable court or alley, made for a time great efforts to keep that court or alley clean. But gradually, day by day, the efforts of the poor woman were less and less vigorous, until in a few weeks she became accustomed to, and contented with, the state of filth which surrounded her, and made no further efforts to remove it. The atmosphere she lived in was too strong for her. The same difficulty is felt in resisting our errors and secret faults; but not to resist is fatal. A man is tempted to lie, to steal, to wrong his neighbour, to indulge some bad passion, and resolves to do it only once, and thinks that just once cannot matter. Oh, pause! That one sin is the trickling rill which becomes the bounding torrent, the broad river, the waste, troubled, discoloured sea. Frequently during Lent we should ask ourselves what are the bad habits that are beginning to be formed in us? We should take the different spheres of life, and examine our conduct as regards each of them. Let us judge ourselves, that we be not judged of the Lord in reference to our business, our home, our pleasures. Our duty to God and our neighbour is so and so, how have we done it? Above all, do we think of Christ as our King and personal Saviour, or is all we really know of Him the sound of His name and the words about Him in the Creeds? But some will ask, Why should I be troubled about my errors, why should I seek to be cleansed from my secret faults? Such thoughts do come to men. Help against them will be found in these facts–First, you have not to fight the battle alone. Christ is your very present help. Then next, struggle after self-improvement, because Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. Our future destiny, our eternal life, depends on what we do now. (E. J. Hardy, M. A.)
Kinds of sin
The terms used in the Word of God to describe the life of the Christian believer show that it is not a path of ease, nor one of self-indulgence. Gurnall says, The Christians work is too delicate and too curious to be done well between sleeping and waking, and too important to be done ill and clambered over, no matter how. He had need to be awake that walks upon the brink of a deep river, or that treads on the brow of a steep hill. The Christians path is so narrow, and the danger is so great, that it calls both for a nimble eye to discern and a steady eye to direct; but a sleepy eye can do neither.
I. Confession of sin. There are–
1. Secret faults. The heart is deceitful above all things: who can know it? Amazed at the inward corruptions you discover, again and again in wonder you well may ask, Who can understand his errors?–who can count the number of the one-fourth part of his secret faults? Some persons think there is no harm in what they in their ignorance call errors, or little sins. But little sins, suppose them to be so, are very dangerous. A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump. A little staff may kill a giant. A little leak will sink a man-of-war. A little flaw in a good cause mars it. So a little sin, if unforgiven, will bar up the doors of heaven, and set wide open the gates of hell. Though the scorpion be little, it will sting to death a lion; and so the least sin will destroy you forever, if not pardoned by the blood of Christ. Watching, therefore, your heart, you will resist every kind of sin, and bring it into subjection to the obedience of Christ. But secret faults, if indulged, will break forth ere long into open sins. These are what David here confesses as–
2. Presumptuous sins. David knew what he said when he thus spake. He knew that lust, when it is conceived, bringeth forth sin, and that sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death. David had not forgotten the deceit, the lying, the murder, the adultery, most awful sins of presumption, of which he himself had been guilty in the matter of the wife of Uriah the Hittite.
II. Supplication of pardon. He prays to be delivered–
1. From the guilt of sin.
2. The power of sin. Keep back from presumptuous sins. David knew that, were it not for the restraining grace of God, there was no sin which he might not be tempted to commit. 0h, what a scene of sin and misery this fallen world of ours would become were it not for this preventing power of God! See the ease of Abimelech in regard to Sarah. Laban in regard to Jacob. And yet more does He hold back His people; David from destroying Nabal.
III. Devotedness of life. He singles out two things.
1. Edifying discourse. Let the words of my mouth, etc.
2. Devout reflection.
3. He recognises the mainspring of all true religion. O Lord, my strength and my Redeemer. We all need a Redeemer. (C. Clayton, M. A.)
On insensibility to offences
These words express a rational and affecting prayer without entering into any interpretation of them. For who has not need to pray against his sins?
I. Secret faults, what are they? Not those which are concealed from mankind, but those which are secret from the offender himself. That these are meant is evident from the opening of the verse, Who can tell how oft he offendeth? There would be no reason in the question if the sins were only those which other people did not know of. He must mean those which he himself knew not off Looking back upon the sins of his past life, David finds himself, as many of us must do, lost and bewildered in their number and frequency. And besides these, there were many which were unnoticed, unreckoned, and unobserved. Against these he prays.
II. But can there be any such secret sins? Yes, because habit makes us so familiar with them by repetition, that we think nothing at all of them. These are not notorious crimes but ordinary sins, both of omission and of commission. We may neglect any duty till we forget that it is one. And so with sins of commission. Serious minds are shocked with observing with what complete indifference and unconcern many forbidden things are practised.
III. But are they not, therefore, sins? If there be no sense and perception of them, are they yet sins? If it be denied that they are, then it is only the timorous beginner who can be brought to account. It is not that the reasons against the sin have lessened or altered, but only that they, by frequent commission of the sin, have become insensible of it. If the sense be the measure of the guilt of sin, then the hardened sinner is well off indeed. These secret sins, then, are sins. Then–
1. Let us join in this prayer, Oh, cleanse, etc.; and
2. See the exceeding great danger of evil habits of all kinds. (Archdeacon Paley, D. D.)
Secret faults
We read in books about the West Indies of a huge bat which goes under the ugly name of the vampire bat. It has obtained this name, sucking as it does the blood of sleepers, even as the vampire is fabled to do. So far, indeed, there can be no doubt; but it is further reported, whether truly or not I will not undertake to say, to fan them with its mighty wings, that so they may not wake from their slumbers, but may be hushed into deeper sleep while it is thus draining away the blood from their veins. Sin has often presented itself to me as such a vampire bat, possessing, as it does, the same fearful power to lull its victims into an ever deeper slumber, to deceive those whom it is also destroying. It was, no doubt, out of a sense of this its deceiving power that the royal Psalmist uttered those memorable words, Who can understand his errors?
I. How is it that sin is able to exercise this cheating, deluding power upon us? Oftentimes great faults seem small faults, not sins but peccadilloes, and small faults seem no faults at all to us; or, worse than this, that men walk altogether in a vain show, totally and fatally misapprehending their whole spiritual condition, trusting in themselves that they are righteous, with a lie in their right hand, awaking only when it is too late to the discovery that they have fallen short altogether of the righteousness of God.
1. Sin derives its power altogether from ourselves. It has a friend and partisan in us all. Hence we are only too ready to spare it and to come to terms with it, and not to extirpate it root and branch as we should. Our love of ease leads to this. Obedience is often hard and painful. But compliance with sin is almost always easy. Then, again, there is our love of pleasure. The Gospel of the grace of God says, Mortify your corrupt affections; do not follow nor be led by them. They war against the soul; and you must kill them or they will kill you. Hard lesson to learn! unwelcome truth to accept! And then, there is our pride. Every natural man has a certain ideal self which he has set up, whether he knows it or not, in the profaned temple of his heart, for worship there–something which he believes himself to be, or very nearly to approach to being. And this ideal self, as I have called it, is something which he can regard with complacency, with self-satisfaction, and, on the whole, with admiration. Will a man willingly give this up, and abhor himself in dust and ashes?
II. How shall we deliver ourselves from these sorceries of sin, these delusions about ourselves?
1. And as a necessary preliminary to any such endeavour, I would say, Grasp with a full and firm faith the blessed truth of the one sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction made for your sins. You will never dare to look your own sins full in the face till you have looked up to the Cross of Calvary, and seen a Saviour crucified there for those sins of yours. Till then you will be always seeking cloaks, palliations, excuses for sin, playing false with your conscience, and putting darkness for light. You will be open to the thousand suggestions that it is not that horrible thing which indeed in Gods sight it is.
2. Then remember, that He who made the atonement for your sins, the same is also the giver of the Spirit which convinces of sin and of righteousness and of judgment. Throw open the doors and windows of the house of your soul. Let the light of God, the light of the Holy Ghost, search every nook, penetrate every recess, find its way into every chamber. Ask of God, ask earnestly and continually, for this convincing Spirit. There is nothing else which will ever show us to ourselves as we really are. Those Pharisees of old whom He who reads the secrets of all hearts denounced as whited sepulchres, do you suppose they knew themselves to be hypocrites, actors of a part, wearers of a mask, wholly different in the sight of God from that which they were in one anothers sight and in the sight of an admiring world? Ab, no! he is but a poor hypocrite who only deceives others; the true hypocrite has managed also, and first, to deceive himself. So it was, no doubt, with those whom I speak of. Probably nothing seemed more unjust to them than this charge of hypocrisy which the Lord persisted in bringing against them; so deceitful and desperately wicked are these hearts of ours. (R. Chenevix Trench, D. D.)
Secret sins
Self–examination is most necessary to the knowledge of our sins, but it of ten happens that with all our search some sins may escape our notice. As in temporal concerns, men often know that by a long course of prodigality, and many expensive vanities, they have contracted a great debt upon their estates, and have brought themselves to the very brink of poverty and distress, and yet, when they try to consider of their condition, find themselves utterly unable to state their accounts, or to set forth the particulars of the debt they labour under; but the more they endeavour to recollect, the more they are convinced that they are mere strangers at home, and ignorant of their own affairs. So in spiritual concerns likewise. Such was Davids feeling as expressed in the text. Whenever men doubt their own sincerity and due performance of religious acts it is extremely difficult to reason with their fears and scruples, and to dispossess them of the misapprehensions they have of their own state and condition. Such suggestions as bring ease and comfort to their minds come suspected, as proceeding from their own or their friends partiality; and they are afraid to hope, lest even to hope in their deplorable condition, should prove to be presumption, and assuming to themselves more than in reason or justice belongs to them. But when we can show them men of approved virtue and holiness, whose praise is in the Book of Life, who have struggled with the same fears and waded through even the worst of their apprehensions to the peaceful fruits of righteousness, it helps to quicken both their spirits and their understanding, and at once to administer knowledge and consolation. And for this reason we can never sufficiently admire the wisdom of God, in setting before us the examples of good men in their lowest and most imperfect state. Had they been shown to us only in the brightest part of their character, despair of attaining to their perfection might incline us to give over the pursuit, by throwing a damp upon our best resolutions. But when we see how God raised them up from their low estate, then heavenly joy and peace often spring from the lowest depth of sorrow and woe. Now let us observe–
I. That the security and efficacy of repentance do not depend upon a particular recollection of all our errors. What are secret sins? They are–
1. Negligences. These often surprise us in our devotions, for we find our fervour and attention gone. We are not conscious of it at the time; the fault is secret to us.
2. Ignorances also. There is no conscious intent, as in sins of presumption.
3. But our sins may partake of the malice of the will, and yet escape the notice of the understanding. For habit, custom, long usage in sin will so deaden conscience that we lose the very sense and feeling of sin.
4. Being partakers in other mens sins, which we are when by our ill example they have been led to sin. Then we share with them in the guilt of their iniquity. How far our influence spreads, to what instances and what degrees of vice, how many we seduced by our example, or hardened by our encouragement, is more than we can tell, and yet not more than we shall answer for. Those who are thus entered in our service, and sin under our conduct, are but our factors. They trade for us, as well as for themselves; and whatever their earnings are, we shall receive our due proportion out of the wages of their sin. This is a guilt which steals upon us without being perceived; it grows whilst we sleep, and is loading our account even when our bodies are in the possession of the grave. The higher our station and the greater our authority the more reason have we to fear being involved in this kind of guilt; because in proportion to our authority will the infection of our example spread; and as our power is great, our encouragement will be the more effectual. But then, on the other side, the good men have done shall live after them, and be placed to their account. It shall be part of their joy to see how others have been blessed through their means.
II. The guilt we contract by them. There is guilt, else David had not prayed, Cleanse Thou me from secret faults. They are sometimes the most heinous of all. The guilt of sin does not arise from the power of our memory, nor is it extinguished by the weakness of it. The consequence from the whole is this. That since many of our sins are secret to us, they can only be repented of in general; and since many of our secret sins are very heinous, they must seriously and solemnly be repented of. (T. Sherlock, D. D.)
Secret faults
Undiscovered sins. The Psalmist is thinking that, beyond the range of conscience and consciousness, there are evils in us all.
I. In every man are sins of which the doer is unaware. Few of us are familiar with our own appearance. Our portraits surprise us. The bulk of good men do not know themselves. Evil has the strange power of deceiving us, and hiding from us our acts real character. Conscience is loudest where it is least needed, and most silent where most required. Conscience wants educating. We bribe our consciences as well as neglect them. Down below every life there lies a great dim region of habits and impulses and fleeting emotions, into which it is the rarest thing for a man to go with a candle in his hand, to see what it is like. Ignorance diminishes criminality, but ignorance does not alter the nature of a deed.
II. The special perilousness of hidden faults. As with a blight upon a rose tree, the little green creatures lurk on the under side of the leaves, and in all the folds of the buds, and, because unseen, they increase with alarming rapidity. The very fact that we have faults in our characters, which everybody sees but ourselves, makes it certain that they will grow unchecked, and so will prove terribly perilous. Those secret faults are like a fungus that has grown in a wine cask; whose presence nobody suspected. It sucks up all the generous liquor to feed its own filthiness, and when the staves are broken there is no wine left, nothing but the foul growth. Many a Christian man and woman has the whole Christian life arrested, and all but annihilated, by the unsuspected influence of a secret sin.
III. The discipline, or practical issues, to which such considerations should lead.
1. They ought to take down our self-complacency, if we have any. It should give us a low estimate of ourselves.
2. It should lead us to practise rigid self-inspection.
3. We should diminish as much as possible the merely mechanical and instinctive part of our lives. The less we live by impulse the better. A mans best means of knowing what he is is to take stock of what he does. If yon will put your conduct through the sieve you will come to a pretty good understanding of your own character.
4. One of the surest ways of making conscience more sensitive is always to consult it, and always to obey it. If you neglect it, and let it prophesy to the wind, it will stop speaking before long.
5. Compare yourselves constantly with your model. Do as the art students do in a gallery–take your poor daub right into the presence of the masterpiece, and go over it, line by line and tint by tint. Get near Jesus Christ, that you may learn duty from Him, and you will find out many of the secret sins.
6. Ask God to cleanse us. Revised Version has, Clear Thou me from secret faults. And there is present in the word, if not exclusively, yet at least predominantly, the idea of a judicial acquittal. So we may be sure that, though our eye does not go down there into the dark depths, Gods eye goes; and that where He looks He looks to pardon, if we come to Him through Jesus Christ our Lord. (A. Maclaren, D. D.)
The anatomy of secret sins
I. In what respect are sins called secret? For the resolution of thin know that sins hath a double reference. Either to God, and so really no sin nor manner of sinning is secret. Can any hide himself in secret places, that I shall not see him? saith the Lord; do not I fill heaven and earth? saith the Lord (Jer 23:24); it is true, that wicked men with an atheistical folly imagine to hide themselves and their sinful ways from God, they seek deep to hide their counsel from the Lord, and their works are in the dark, and they say, Who seeth us? and who knoweth us? (Isa 29:15) But really it is not so, though the cloud may somewhat eclipse the light of the sun, and though the dark night may shut it forth altogether, yet there stands no cloud, nor curtain, nor moment of darkness or secrecy twixt the eyes of God and the ways of man. The ways of a man are before the eyes of the Lord, and He pondereth all his goings (Pro 5:21). Or to man, and thus indeed comes in the division of sin into–
1. Open; and
2. Secret. Now, in this reset sin may be termed secret diversely–
1. In respect of the person sinning: when his very sinning is (formally considered) hidden from himself; he doth a thing which is really sinful, but to him it is not apprehensively so. What outrages did Paul breathe out against the Church in times of his ignorance which he did not know to be acts of sin.
2. In respect of the manner of sinning, and thus sins may be termed secret.
(1) When they are coloured and disguised, though they do fly abroad, yet not under that name, but apparelled with some semblances of virtues.
(2) When they are kept off from the stage of the world they are like fire in the chimney; though you do not see it, yet it burns; just as twixt a book shut and a book opened, that which is shut hath the same lines and words, but the other being opened, every man may see and read them.
(3) When they are kept, not only from a public eye, but from any mortal eye. But what were those secret sins from which David desired to be cleansed? Nay, that is a secret; he doth not instance in anyone, because his desire is to be freed from everyone; he speaks indefinitely.
II. But what is that to be cleansed? There be two expositions of it.
1. One is that he desires to be justified, to be pardoned those sins. And indeed, the blood of Christ which justifies is a cleansing thing, it wipes off the guilt.
2. Another is that he desires more to be sanctified, and that inward actings or motions might be subdued. And observe, he doth desire to be cleansed, he doth not desire to be dipped only into the water, or sprinkled; he doth not desire only to be a little rinsed.
Where observe by the way three things.
1. First, he who hath received true grace needs more grace: our lives need to be still reformed, and our hearts still to be cleansed.
2. Again, the progress and perfection of cleansing the soul appertains to God as well as the beginning. The physician must go through with his cure, or else the patient will relapse.
3. Lastly, persons truly holy and sensible desire yet further measures of holiness.
III. But why should we desire to be cleansed from secret sins?
1. Because secret sins will become public sins if they be not cleansed. It is with the soul as it is with the body, wherein diseases are first bred and then manifested; and if you suppress them not in their root, you shall shortly see them to break out in the fruit: or as it is with fire catching the inside of the house first, and there if you do not surprise it, it will make way for itself to get to the outside. Lust, when it hath conceived, bringeth forth sin (Jam 1:15). But when they come to public and visible actings, then they are a copy, they are exemplary sins; and like the plague infecting Other persons, others are capable to imitate them, and so more souls are tainted; and God now receives a common dishonour.
2. Secret sins are apt to deceive us most, and therefore cleanse these.
(1) Because we have not that strict and spiritual judgment of the inwards of sin, as of the outwards; many times we conceive of them as no sins at all.
(2) And because most men decline sin upon outward respects, which do not reach the actings of secret sins; shame and fear, and observance are great, and the only restraints to many. They do not live in and visibly commit such sins, because they like not shame and are afraid of punishment.
(3) The strength of sin is inward, therefore labour to be cleansed from secret sins.
The strength of a sin–
1. Lies in its nearness to the fountain, from whence it can take a quick, immediate, and continual supply; and so do our secret sins, they are as near to original sin as the first droppings are to the springhead.
2. It lies in the acceptance of the affections: love and liking set sin upon its throne.
3. It lies in the confidence of commission: now a man doth take more heart and boldness to commit secret sins than open.
4. It lies in the iteration and frequency of acting, for sin often repeated and acted is like a cable double in strength by the manifold twistings.
5. The principal object of Gods eye is the inward and secret frame of the soul, therefore labour to be cleansed from secret sins (Psa 66:16). If I regard iniquity in my heart the Lord will not hear me (Psa 51:6). Behold, Thou desirest truth in the inward parts. (O. Sedgwick, B. D.)
True holiness hath a contrariety to all sin
1. That true holiness hath a repugnancy and a contrariety to all sins. It is not contrary to sin, because it is open and manifest; nor to sin, because it is private and secret, but to sin as sin, whether public or whether private, because both the one and the other is contrary to Gods will and glory, as it is with true light, though it be but a beam, yet it is universally opposite to all darkness: or as it is with heat, though there be but one degree of it, yet it is opposite to all cold; so if the holiness be true and real, it cannot comply with any known sin; you can never reconcile them in the affection; they may have an unwilling consistence in the person, but you can never make then, to agree in the affection.
2. That sanctification is not perfect in this life; he who hath most grace hath yet some sin. Grace, though it may be sound and saving, yet is it not absolute and perfect.
3. Here you may understand the grounds and reasons of the many troubles and heavy complaints of Christians. The main battle of a Christian is not in the open field; his quarrels are most within, and his enemies are in his own breast. When he hath reformed an ill life, yet it shall cost him infinitely much more to reform an ill heart; he may receive so much power from grace at the beginning as in a short time to draw off from most of the former gross acts of sinnings, but it will be a work of all his days to get a thorough conquest of secret corruptions.
4. Then all the work of a Christian is not abroad, if there be secret sins to be cleansed. There are two sorts of duties. Some are direct, which are working duties; they are the colours of grace in the countenance and view of the conversation, setting it forth with all holy evenness and fruitfulness and unblameableness. Some are reflexive, which are searching duties; they appertain to the inward rooms, to the beautifying of them, and reforming of them; for not only the life, but the heart also is the subject of our care and study. I am not only to labour that I do no evil, but also that I be not evil, not only that sin do not distain my paths, but also that it doth not defile my intentions: not only that my clothes be handsome, but also that my skin be white, my inboard parts be as acceptable to God as my outward frame is plausible with man. (O. Sedgwick, B. D.)
Sin destroyed in the cause
Now, as a man may deal with a tree, so he may deal with his sins; the axe may be employed only to lop off the branches, which yet all live in the root, and he may apply his axe to the very root, to the cutting of it up, and so he brings an universal death to the tree: so it is possible for a man to bestow all his pains to lop off sin only in the visible branches in the outward limbs of it, and it is also possible for a man to be crucifying the secret lust, the very corrupt nature and root of sinfulness. Now, this! say, he who bestows his study, his prayers, his tears, his cares, his watchings, his strength to mortify corruption in the root, in the nature, in the cause, how unquestionable is it that he doth desire to be cleansed from secret sins. (O. Sedgwick, B. D.)
Beware of secret sins
I. Motives to enforce our care. There be many arguments which may justly stir us up to take heed of and to cleanse from secret sins.
1. The Lord knoweth our secret sinnings as exactly as our visible sinnings (Psa 44:21).
2. The Lord will make manifest every secret thing (Mar 4:22). There is a two-fold breaking out of a secret sin or manifestation of it. One is natural: the soul cannot long be in secret actings, but some one part of the body or other will be a messenger thereof. Another is judicial; as when the judge arraigns, and tries, and screws out the close murder, and the dark thefts: so God will bring to light the most hidden works of darkness.
3. Thy secrets shall not only be manifested, but shall also be judged by God (Rom 2:16).
4. Secret sins are more dangerous to the person in some respects than open sins.
For–
1. A man doth by his art of sinning deprive himself of the help of his sinfulness: like him who will carry his wound covered, or who bleeds inwardly; help comes not in because the danger is not descried nor known.
2. If a mans sin breaks out, there is a minister at hand, a friend near, and others to reprove, to warn, to direct.
II. The aggravations of secret sins.
1. The more foul the sin naturally is, the worse is the secret acting of it.
2. The more relations are broken by secret sinning, the worse they are, and more to be wared.
3. The more profession a man makes, the worse are his secret sinnings; forasmuch as he carrieth not only a badge, but also a judge on his shoulders.
4. The more light a man hath meeting him in the dark, and secret actings of sin, the more abominable is the sin.
5. The more frequent a man is in secret sinnings, the deeper is his guilt; when he can drive a trade of sin within doors: when it is not a slip, but a course.
III. The means which help against secret sins.
1. If thou hast been guilty of secret sins, be humbled and repent.
2. Take heed of secret occasions and provocations.
3. Crush the temptations which come from the roots.
4. Get an hatred of sin, which will oppose sin in all kinds, and all times, and in all places.
5. Get the fear of God planted in thy heart. There are three sorts of sins which this fear will preserve a man against. First, pleasant sins, which take the sense with delight. Secondly, profitable sins, which take the heart with gain, but what shall it profit me to win the whole world and to lose my soul. Thirdly, secret sins of either sort.
6. Believe Gods omniscience and omnipresence.
7. Get thy heart to be upright. (O. Sedgwick, B. D.)
The peril of secret sins
In some waters a man may drive strong piles, and build his warehouses upon them, sure that the waters are not powerful enough to undermine his foundations; but there is an innumerable army of minute creatures at work beneath the water, feeding themselves upon those strong piles. They gnaw, they bore, they cut, they dig into the poled wood, and at last a child might overthrow those foundations, for they are cut through and eaten to a honeycomb. Thus by avarice, jealousy, and selfishness mens dispositions are often cut through, and they dont know it. (H. W. Beecher.)
Fuente: Biblical Illustrator Edited by Joseph S. Exell
Verse 12. Who can understand his errors?] It is not possible, without much of the Divine light, to understand all our deviations from, not only the letter, but the spirituality, of the Divine law. Frequent self-examination, and walking in the light, are essentially necessary to the requisite degree of spiritual perfection.
Cleanse thou me from secret faults.] From those which I have committed, and have forgotten; from those for which I have not repented; from those which have been committed in my heart, but have not been brought to act in my life; from those which I have committed without knowing that they were sins, sins of ignorance; and from those which I have committed in private, for which I should blush and be confounded were they to be made public.
Fuente: Adam Clarke’s Commentary and Critical Notes on the Bible
Who can understand? this may be here added, either,
1. As a further proof of the excellency and necessity of Gods law, because mens errors are so many and hard to be discovered and prevented, that they indispensably need such a friend and counsellot as the law is, to give them the true knowledge of themselves and of their sins. Or,
2. As a just and sorrowful censure of himself, upon the consideration of the exact purity of Gods law, and the comparing of his life with it. Thy law, O Lord, is holy, and just, and good. But I am a poor sinful wretch, falling infinitely short of it, and condemned by it. Or,
3. As a signification of the insufficiency of Gods law, strictly so called, for the healing and saving of mens souls, and of the necessity of further supplies of the gospel and grace of God; whereby the eyes of their minds may be enlightened to see that light which shines in Gods law, and their hearts may be renewed to yield universal obedience to it, for which therefore he prays in the following words. And withal, he implies that he did not expect that reward which he last mentioned as a just recompence to his obedience, which he confesseth to need a pardon more than to deserve a reward, but only as an effect of Gods grace and goodness.
His errors; either,
1. His sins of ignorance, of which this word is used, Lev 4:2,22,27; Ec 5:6. Or rather,
2. His sins in general, (which afterwards he divides into secret and presumptuous sins,) or all deviations from Gods law, which are thus called, 1Sa 26:21; Psa 119:67,118; Heb 9:7; Jam 5:20. The sense is, I cannot comprehend the numbers, or the several kinds, or all the heinous aggravations of my sins.
Cleanse thou me; both by justification, or the pardon of my sins, through the blood of thy Son, which is to be shed for me; and by sanctification through thy Holy Spirit, co-working in and with thy word, to the further renovation of my heart and life for these are the two ways of cleansing sinners most frequently mentioned both in the Old and New Testament: though the first may seem to be principally, if not only, intended, because he speaks of his past sins, which could be cleansed no other way but by remission.
From secret faults, i.e. from the guilt of such sins as were secret, either,
1. From others; such as none knows but God and my own conscience: or,
2. From myself; such as I never observed, or did not discern the evil of. Pardon my unknown sins, of which I never repented particularly, as I should have done.
Fuente: English Annotations on the Holy Bible by Matthew Poole
12-14. The clearer our view ofthe law, the more manifest are our sins. Still for its full effect weneed divine grace to show us our faults, acquit us, restrain us fromthe practice, and free us from the power, of sin. Thus only can ourconduct be blameless, and our words and thoughts acceptable to God.
Fuente: Jamieson, Fausset and Brown’s Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible
Who can understand [his] errors?…. Sin is an error, a wandering out of the way of God, swerving from the rule of his word; and many mistakes are made by the people of God themselves; even so many that they cannot number them; they are more than the hairs of their head; they cannot understand, find out and express, neither their number, nor their evil nature, nor the many aggravating circumstances which attend them: this the psalmist said, upon a view of the large extent, glory, and excellency of the word of God; and upon comparing himself with it, in which, as in a glass, he saw how far short he came of it, and what a disagreement and want of conformity there was in him unto it; see Ps 119:97; and he suggests, that though the word he had been describing was perfect, pure, and clean, he was not; nor could he expect any reward of debt, but merely of grace, for his observance of it; and that it was best, under a sense of sin, to have recourse, not to works of righteousness done by men; but to the grace and mercy of God in Christ, as follows:
cleanse thou me from secret [faults]; by which are meant not such sins as are done in secret, and are unknown to men; such as David’s sin with Bathsheba, 2Sa 12:12; nor the inward motions of sin in the heart, to which none are privy but God, and a man’s own soul; not but that each of these may be properly enough included in such a petition; but sins, which are unknown to a man himself are meant: there are some actions, which, though known when committed, are not known to be sinful ones; and there are some sins which are committed unadvisedly, and through carelessness, and pass unobserved; not only many vain and sinful thoughts pass to and fro uncontrolled, without being taken notice of; but many foolish and idle words are spoken, and many evil actions, through infirmity and inadvertency, are done, which, when a good man, at the close of a day, comes to reflect upon the things that have passed in it, are quite hidden from him, are unknown to him, being unobserved by him; wherefore such a petition is highly proper to be inserted in his address at the throne of grace: and which also supposes the person sensible of the defiling nature of sin, and of his own impotency to cleanse himself from it; and that God only can do it, who does it by the application of the blood of his Son, which cleanses from all sin; for this respects not regenerating and sanctifying grace, but pardoning grace; a manifestation of it, a view of acquittance from sin by Christ, and of freedom from obligation to punishment for it.
Fuente: John Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible
12. Who can understand his errors? This exclamation shows us what use we should make of the promises of the law, which have a condition annexed to them. It is this: As soon as they come forth, every man should examine his own life, and compare not only his actions, but also his thoughts, with that perfect rule of righteousness which is laid down in the law. Thus it will come to pass, that all, from the least to the greatest, seeing themselves cut off from all hope of reward from the law, will be constrained to flee for refuge to the mercy of God. It is not enough to consider what the doctrine of the law contains; we must also look into ourselves, that we may see how far short we have come in our obedience to the law. Whenever the Papists hear this promise,
“
He who doeth these things shall live in them,” (Lev 18:5,)
they do not hesitate at once to connect eternal life with the merit of their works, as if it were in their own power to fulfill the law, of which we are all transgressors, not only in one point, but in all its parts. David, therefore, being involved as it were in a labyrinth on all sides, acknowledges with astonishment that he is overwhelmed under a sense of the multitude of his sins. We ought then to remember, in the first place, that as we are personally destitute of the righteousness which the law requires, we are on that account excluded from the hope of the reward which the law has promised; and, in the next place, that we are guilty before God, not of one fault or of two, but of sins innumerable, so that we ought, with the bitterest sorrow, to bewail our depravity, which not only deprives us of the blessing of God, but also turns to us life into death. This David did. There is no doubt that when, after having said that God liberally offers a reward to all who observe his law, he cried out, Who can understand his errors? it was from the terror with which he was stricken in thinking upon his sins. By the Hebrew word שגיאות, shegioth, which we have translated errors, some think David intends lesser faults; but in my judgment he meant simply to say, that Satan has so many devices by which he deludes and blinds our minds, that there is not a man who knows the hundredth part of his own sins. The saints, it is true, often offend in lesser matters, through ignorance and inadvertence; but it happens also that, being entangled in the snares of Satan, they do not perceive even the grosser faults which they have committed. Accordingly, all the sins to the commission of which men give themselves loose reins, not being duly sensible of the evil which is in them, and being deceived by the allurements of the flesh, are justly included under the Hebrew word here used by David, which signifies faults or ignorances. (466) In summoning himself and others before the judgment-seat of God, he warns himself and them, that although their consciences do not condemn them, they are not on that account absolved; for God sees far more clearly than men’s consciences, since even those who look most attentively into themselves, do not perceive a great part of the sins with which they are chargeable.
After making this confession, David adds a prayer for pardon, Cleanse thou me from my secret sins. The word cleanse is to be referred not to the blessing of regeneration, but to free forgiveness; for the Hebrew verb נקה, nakah, here used, comes from a word which signifies to be innocent. The Psalmist explains more clearly what he intended by the word errors, in now calling them secret sins; that is to say, those with respect to which men deceive themselves, by thinking that they are no sins, and who thus deceive themselves not only purposely and by expressly aiming at doing so, but because they do not enter into the due consideration of the majesty of the judgment of God. It is in vain to attempt to justify ourselves under the pretext and excuse of ignorance. Nor does it avail any thing to be blind as to our faults, since no man is a competent judge in his own cause. We must, therefore, never account ourselves to be pure and innocent until we are pronounced such by God’s sentence of absolution or acquittal. The faults which we do not perceive must necessarily come under the review of God’s judgment, and entail upon us condemnation, unless he blot them out and pardon them; and if so, how shall he escape and remain unpunished who, besides these, is chargeable with sins of which he knows himself to be guilty, and on account of which his own conscience compels him to judge and condemn himself? Farther, we should remember that we are not guilty of one offense only, but are overwhelmed with an immense mass of impurities. The more diligently any one examines himself, the more readily will he acknowledge with David, that if God should discover our secret faults, there would be found in us an abyss of sins so great as to have neither bottom nor shore, as we say; (467) for no man can comprehend in how many ways he is guilty before God. From this also it appears, that the Papists are bewitched, and chargeable with the grossest hypocrisy, when they pretend that they can easily and speedily gather all their sins once a year into a bundle. The decree of the Lateran Council commands every one to confess all his sins once every year, and at the same time declares that there is no hope of pardon but in complying with that decree. Accordingly, the blinded Papist, by going to the confessional, to mutter his sins into the ear of the priest, thinks he has done all that is required, as if he could count upon his fingers all the sins which he has committed during the course of the whole year; whereas, even the saints, by strictly examining themselves, can scarcely come to the knowledge of the hundredth part of their sins, and, therefore, with one voice unite with David in saying, Who can understand his errors? Nor will it do to allege that it is enough if each performs the duty of reckoning up his sins to the utmost of his ability. This does not diminish, in any degree, the absurdity of this famous decree. (468) As it is impossible for us to do what the law requires, all whose hearts are really and deeply imbued with the principle of the fear of God must necessarily be overwhelmed with despair, so long as they think themselves bound to enumerate all their sins, in order to their being pardoned; and those who imagine they can disburden themselves of their sins in this way must be persons altogether stupid. I know that some explain these words in a different sense, viewing them as a prayer, in which David beseeches God, by the guidance of his Holy Spirit, to recover him from all his errors. But, in my opinion, they are to be viewed rather as a prayer for forgiveness, and what follows in the next verse is a prayer for the aid of the Holy Spirit, and for success to overcome temptations.
(466) “ Dont a bon droict toutes pechez ausquels les hommes se laschent la bride, pource qu’ils ne sentent pas abon escient le real qui y est, et sont deceus par les allechemens de la chair, sont nommez du mot Hebrie a duquel David use yci qui signifie Fautes ou Ignorances .” — Fr.
(467) “ Il se trouvera en nous un tel abysme de pechez, qu’il n’y aura no fond ne rive, comme on dit.” — Fr.
(468) “ Cela ne diminue en rien l’absurdite de ce beau decret.” — Fr.
Fuente: Calvin’s Complete Commentary
(12) His eulogium on the Law was not Pharisaic or formal, for the poet instantly gives expression to his sense of his own inability to keep it. If before we were reminded of St. Pauls, The law is holy, and the commandment holy, and just, and good, (Rom. 7:12), his own spiritual experience, contained in the same chapter, is here recalled: For the good that I would I do not: but the evil that I would not, that I do.
Who can understand.In the original the abruptness of the question is very marked and significant. Errors who marks? From unconscious ones clear me, i.e., pronounce me innocent, not cleanse, as in Authorised Version.
Fuente: Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers (Old and New Testaments)
12. Errors The radical idea of the word is, to wander, go astray, rove; used often of unconscious sins, (sins of ignorance,) as Lev 4:2. These are difficult to detect. The Hebrew is very emphatic: As to his wanderings, who can know them?
Secret faults Sins of ignorance. The law of Moses prescribed atonement for such, after they should come to the knowledge of the person. Leviticus 4; Lev 5:15-19; Num 15:25. They belonged to the lowest class of offences; yet, if persisted in after knowledge, they became wilful transgressions.
Fuente: Whedon’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments
‘Who can discern his errors?
Clear me from hidden faults.’
But the Psalmist admits that although he delights in Yahweh’s Instruction there are still errors and sins in his life that he is not easily aware of. For he is so sinful that even God’s Instruction cannot cover all his sins. So he prays that he may be cleansed from what is hidden, his faults of which he is not aware. He wants God to put him in the right before Him because he himself, as far as he is able, looks to Him and lives according to His word.
Fuente: Commentary Series on the Bible by Peter Pett
The Resulting Prayer For Deliverance From Sin And Declaration Of God’s Total Reliability ( Psa 19:12-14 ).
Psa 19:12. Who can understand his errors? While we praise and adore God for his mercies, it seems impossible to forget one great circumstance which affects both them and ourselves; I mean, how undeserved they are: It is a reflection which, like the pillar of the cloud that waited on the Israelites, casts light and beauty upon the mercies of God, and darkness and confusion of face upon ourselves. Can we help thinking, that, notwithstanding God has thus secured and hedged us about with a law which is perfect, with commandments that are pure, yet still our own weakness is perpetually betraying us into error; our folly or our wickedness driving us into sins more in number than either we can or, too often, care to remember? The royal Psalmist saw the justness of this reflection; and, while his heart glowed with the sense of God’s unbounded mercies, he turned short upon himself with this complaint, Who can understand his errors? This complaint is followed by a fervent prayer to God for pardon and protection: From the prospect of the power and goodness of God, and our own weakness and misery, the soul
[through divine grace] easily melts into sorrow and devotion; lamenting what it feels, and deploring what it wants, from the hand which only is able to save and to redeem. Cleanse thou me from secret faults. He calls his faults secret, not with design to extenuate his crimes, or as if he thought the actions he had now in view of so doubtful a nature, that it was not easily to be judged whether they should be placed among the sinful or the indifferent circumstances of his life; and therefore, if they were faults, they were secret ones, such as stole from him without the consent and approbation of his mind; but secret he calls them, with respect to their number. So often had he offended, that his memory was too frail to keep an exact register of all his errors. But though they were secret to him, yet well he knew that God had placed them in the light of his countenance; and therefore, though he could neither number nor confess them, he begs that they might not be imputed to, or rise up in judgment against his soul. This sense is well expressed in our old translation: Who can tell how oft he offendeth? Oh cleanse thou me from my secret faults! Bishop Sherlock.
DISCOURSE: 522 Psa 19:12-13. Who can understand his errors? Cleanse thou me from secret faults. Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins; let them not have dominion over me: then shall I be upright, and I shall be innocent from the great transgression.
THE moral law, as revealed in the Scriptures, is a perfect transcript of the mind and will of God; and is therefore a mirror in which we may see how deformed we are through the introduction and dominance of sin. It was from a contemplation of its transcendent excellence that the Psalmist was led to bewail his want of conformity to it, and to implore mercy at the hands of God for his innumerable violations of it, and grace, to preserve him from any wilful opposition to it in future. And the more we study it, the more shall we be disposed to adopt the petitions in our text, Cleanse me from the guilt I have already contracted: Keep me from falling a sacrifice to my sinful propensities. I.
Sins of infirmity
These are innumerable But besides the guilt we have contracted through defect, consider that which has arisen from deviations from the precise line of duty which we should have followed. We may conceive of an arrow shot in the right line towards an object, though it fall short of the object itself: and so we may conceive of our attempts to serve God, as perfect in point of aim, though defective in force and energy. But there is a bias in our fallen nature which causes innumerable aberrations from the perfect line of duty. In duty, of whatever kind it be, the principle ought to be as pure as the light itself: but in us it never is so: somewhat of a corrupt mixture will be found in every thing we do. There is so much blindness in our understanding, so much perverseness in our will, and so much sensuality in our affections, that we are imperceptibly drawn aside; our very judgment is deceived; yea, our mind and conscience are defiled; so that, when we would do good, evil is present with us; and, when we do, as we think, act entirely as unto the Lord, the heart-searching God beholds a mixture of self in our best motives, that serves yet further to vitiate and debase our best actions.
To all this add our actual transgressions, by thought, word, and deed, against the holy commands of God. It is still of secret sins only that I am speaking, and of such as may justly be called sins of infirmity. But how vast the aggregate of evil which has arisen in our hearts from the secret workings of pride, or worldliness, or impurity, or unbelief, or some other corrupt feeling of our fallen nature! Yet not one of these has been unobserved by God, nor will one be kept out of sight in the final judgment.
Well then may we, even in this superficial view of our past errors and deviations, say, Who can understand them?] Yet, after all, our guilt from these is light in comparison of that which ariseth from our,
II.
Sins of presumption
These differ widely from the former; being committed, not from mere inadvertence or infirmity, but with the concurrence of the will in opposition to the dictates of an enlightened conscience. Yet in speaking of these we shall not confine ourselves to those grosser sins, from which more moral and decent persons are exempt; but shall turn your attention rather to that state and habit of life which conscience must condemn, as well as the more flagrant transgressions. If not delivered from them in time, we shall suffer the punishment of them to all eternity Let me then entreat you to adopt the prayer in our text: beg of God that he would enable you to understand your errors; (for who, without divine instruction, can understand them?) and that he would cleanse you from them; and that he would keep you back from every presumptuous sin: for though, every presumptuous sin is not the unpardonable transgression, yet, I must say, that presumptuous sin, continued in after warnings and exhortations to depart from it, hardens the heart, and sears the conscience, and endangers the being given up by God to final impenitence.]
Application
Be prevailed upon, Brethren,
1.
To regard sin as the greatest of all evils
[Such indeed it is, whether ye will believe it or not. You may be ready to think that suffering is the greatest: but suffering may tend to good: it may, like the furnace, purify us from our dross, and prepare us, under Gods gracious care, as vessels of honour for our Masters use. But sin defiles, debases, and destroys the soul. Fools may make a mock at it; but at last it will sting like a serpent, and bite like an adder: it may be sweet in the mouth, but it will be gall in the stomach. See, Brethren, from what a mass of guilt and corruption you need to be delivered! See also what judgments are hanging over your devoted heads! O that I could see you in earnest in fleeing from the wrath to come, and in laying hold on eternal life! Be ye not like that perverse and daring people, who, when remonstrated with by the prophet, replied, As for the word that thou hast spoken unto us in the name of the Lord, we will not hearken unto thee: but we will certainly do whatsoever thing goeth forth out of our own mouth [Note: Jer 44:16-17.]. Neither deceive yourselves by endeavouring to vindicate yourselves before God: for, whatever you may say to extenuate your guilt, your sins even of infirmity need forgiveness; and your sins of presumption, if not repented of and forgiven, will plunge you into remediless and endless ruin.]
2.
To improve the present moment in order to obtain deliverance from it
[Now you can offer the prayer of David: but how long that privilege will be continued to you, you know not. This however you know, that your views of sin will soon be changed, either in this world or in the world to come. Conceive of a presumptuous sinner, dying in his iniquity, and first having his eyes opened in the eternal world. What does he then think of all his past excuses, on which he once placed such confident reliance? What, if he were permitted to address you from his abode of misery, would be the scope of his admonitions? Can you doubt? And, if not, will you still go on in those ways, which your own consciences condemn? But, as the Rich Man was not suffered to return from hell to warn his surviving brethren, who were walking in his steps, so neither will any be sent from the dead, to instruct you. You have Moses and the prophets; and those you must both hear and obey: and, if you will not believe them, nothing awaits you but to eat the fruit of your own doings, and to be filled immediately with your own devices. Now, however, you are warned: now, I trust, your consciences attest the truth and importance of all that ye have heard: and now I conclude with that solemn admonition of St. James, To him that knoweth to do good and doeth it not, to him it is sin [Note: Jam 4:17.].]
This forms a most beautiful break and interruption to the Psalmist’s devout contemplation. It comes in with a striking demand upon the heart, as if under a consciousness that having such discoveries made of Jesus and his preciousness, how inexcusable it must be in any soul to overlook and forget him. And hence he cries out, Who can tell, in the multiplied instances of his own transgressions, these particulars? Reader! recollect, how secret soever or unknown in numberless occasions to ourselves, yet our sins are all open and naked to the eyes of him with whom we have to do. Oh! what a relief to the soul is that scripture, the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth from all sin. 1Jn 1:7 .
Psa 19:12 Who can understand [his] errors? cleanse thou me from secret [faults].
Ver. 12. Who can understand his errors? ] This David speaketh doubtless out of a deep sense of his own imperfections and defects in what the law (so much by him commended) requireth; and to prevent mistakes, lest any man, hearing him speak of great reward, should think that heaven may be merited and salvation attained by a man’s own righteousness. No such matter, believe it, saith holy David, I have neither done the law nor deserved the reward, but do fly to God by prayer; and three things I have to beg of him: First, That he would graciously pardon my secret sins and errors, unknown to myself, or at least to others. Secondly, That he would keep me from proud and presumptuous sins, Psa 19:13 . Thirdly, That he would bridle my tongue and mind from speaking, or but thinking, aught that may be offensive to his majesty, Psa 19:14 . For the first of these, Humanum est, errare et ignorare suum, It is incident to every man to err, and then to be ignorant of his errors (Jun.). Certain it is, that our lives are fuller of sins than the firmament is of stars, or the furnace of sparks. And if the best man’s faults were written in his forehead, it would make him pull his hat over his eyes, as the proverb hath it. David here seeth such volumes of corruptions in his heart, and so many foul erratas in his life, that he cannot but cry out, Who can understand, &c., O cleanse, &c. The most perfect saints are the most sensible of their imperfections; as the more delicate the senses are the more sharply are they affected with what offends them, Rom 7:14 1Co 15:9-10 . Alas for us (saith one good man)! Ipsae lachrymae sunt lachrymabiles; we had need to weep over our tears, sigh over our sobs, mourn over our griefs, &c. Look how when we have swept a room never so clean (saith Spinaeus, De Instit. Christian.), if the sun do but come into it at the windows, we soon espy abundance of filthy motes, mingled with the beams thereof; so is it with our hearts, when once enlightened. What a blind buzzard then was he that said, Non habeo, Domine, quod mihi ignoscas, Lord, I have nothing for thee to pardon! And no wiser was Bellarmine, that great scholar, but ill read in his own heart, if that be true that is reported of him, viz. that when the priest came to absolve him, he could not remember any particular sin to confess till he went back in his thoughts as far as his youth. Of Philip III, king of Spain, it is said, that he lived so strictly that he never committed any gross crime or wilful wickedness; yet coming to die, he cried out, Oh that I had never reigned! Oh that I had lived a private life in the wilderness, that I might not have now to answer for not doing the good or hindering the evil that I might have done in my government! (Val. Max. Christ. 263).
Cleanse thou me from secret faults Psalms
SECRET FAULTS
Psa 19:12 The contemplation of the ‘perfect law, enlightening the eyes,’ sends the Psalmist to his knees. He is appalled by his own shortcomings, and feels that, beside all those of which he is aware, there is a region, as yet unilluminated by that law, where evil things nestle and breed.
The Jewish ritual drew a broad distinction between inadvertent-whether involuntary or ignorant-and deliberate sins; providing atonement for the former, not for the latter. The word in my text rendered ‘errors’ is closely connected with that which in the Levitical system designates the former class of transgressions; and the connection between the two clauses of the text, as well as that with the subsequent verse, distinctly shows that the ‘secret faults’ of the one clause are substantially synonymous with the ‘errors’ of the other.
They are, then, not sins hidden from men, whether because they have been done quietly in a corner, and remain undetected, or because they have only been in thought, never passing into act. Both of these pages are dark in every man’s memory. Who is there that could reveal himself to men? who is there that could bear the sight of a naked soul? But the Psalmist is thinking of a still more solemn fact, that, beyond the range of conscience and consciousness, there are evils in us all. It may do us good to ponder his discovery that he had undiscovered sins, and to take for ours his prayer, ‘Cleanse Thou me from secret faults.’
I. So I ask you to look with me, briefly, first, at the solemn fact here, that there are in every man sins of which the doer is unaware.
Then, besides that, there is a great part of every one’s life which is mechanical, instinctive, and all but involuntary. Habits and emotions and passing impulses very seldom come into men’s consciousness, and an enormously large proportion of everybody’s life is done with the minimum of attention, and is as little remembered as it is observed.
Then, besides that, conscience wants educating. You see that on a large scale, for instance, in the history of the slow progress which Christian principle has made in leavening the world’s thinkings. It took eighteen centuries to teach the Church that slavery was unchristian. The Church has not yet learned that war is unchristian, and it is only beginning to surmise that possibly Christian principle may have something to say in social questions, and in the determination, for example, of the relations of capital and labour, and of wealth and poverty. The very same slowness of apprehension and gradual growth in the education of conscience, and in the perception of the application of Christian principles to duty, applies to the individual as to the Church.
Then, besides that, we are all biassed in our own favour, and what, when another man says it, is ‘flat blasphemy,’ we think, when we say it, is only ‘a choleric word.’ We have fine names for our own vices, and ugly ones for the very same vices in other people. David will flare up into generous and sincere indignation about the man that stole the poor man’s ewe lamb, but he has not the ghost of a notion that he has been doing the very same thing himself. And so we bribe our consciences as well as neglect them, and they need to be educated.
Thus, down below every life there lies a great dim region of habits and impulses and fleeting emotions, into which it is the rarest thing for a man to go with a candle in his hand to see what it is like.
But I can imagine a man saying, ‘Well, if I do not know that I am doing wrong, how can it be a sin?’ In answer to that, I would say that, thank God! ignorance diminishes criminality, but ignorance does not alter the nature of the deed. Take a simple illustration. Here is a man who, all unconsciously to himself, is allowing worldly prosperity to sap his Christian character. He does not know that the great current of his life has been turned aside, as it were, by that sluice, and is taken to drive the wheels of his mill, and that there is only a miserable little trickle coming down the river bed. Is he any less guilty because he does not know? Is he not the more so, because he might and would have known if he had thought and felt right? Or, here is another man who has the habit of letting his temper get the better of him. He calls it ‘stern adherence to principle,’ or ‘righteous indignation’; and he thinks himself very badly used when other people ‘drive him’ so often into a temper. Other people know, and he might know, if he would be honest with himself, that, for all his fine names, it is nothing else than passion. Is he any the less guilty because of his ignorance? It is plain enough that, whilst ignorance, if it is absolute and inevitable, does diminish criminality to the vanishing point, the ignorance of our own faults which most of us display is neither absolute nor inevitable; and therefore, though it may, thank God! diminish, it does not destroy our guilt. ‘She wipeth her mouth and saith, I have done no harm’: was she, therefore, chaste and pure? In all our hearts there are many vermin lurking beneath the stones, and they are none the less poisonous because they live and multiply in the dark. ‘I know nothing against myself, yet am I not hereby justified. But he that judgeth me is the Lord.’
II. Now, secondly, let me ask you to look at the special perilousness of these hidden faults.
These secret faults are like a fungus that has grown in a wine-cask, whose presence nobody suspected. It sucks up all the generous liquor to feed its own filthiness, and when the staves are broken, there is no wine left, nothing but the foul growth. Many a Christian man and woman has the whole Christian life arrested, and all but annihilated, by the unsuspected influence of a secret sin. I do not believe it would be exaggeration to say that, for one man who has made shipwreck of his faith and lost his peace by reason of some gross transgression, there are twenty who have fallen into the same condition by reason of the multitude of small ones. ‘He that despiseth little things shall fall by little and little’; and whilst the deeds which the Ten Commandments rebuke are damning to a Christian character, still more perilous, because unseen, and permitted to grow without check or restraint, are these unconscious sins. ‘Happy is he that condemneth not himself in that thing which he alloweth.’
III. Notice the discipline, or practical issues, to which such considerations should lead.
Further, let me press upon you two practical points. This whole set of contemplations should make us practise a very rigid and close self-inspection. There will always be much that will escape our observation-we shall gradually grow to know more and more of it-but there can be no excuse for that which I fear is a terribly common characteristic of the professing Christianity of this day-the all but entire absence of close inspection of one’s own character and conduct. I know very well that it is not a wholesome thing for a man to be always poking in his own feelings and emotions. I know also that, in a former generation, there was far too much introspection, instead of looking to Jesus Christ and forgetting self. I do not believe that self-examination, directed to the discovery of reasons for trusting the sincerity of my own faith, is a good thing. But I do believe that, without the practice of careful weighing of ourselves, there will be very little growth in anything that is noble and good.
The old Greeks used to preach, ‘Know thyself.’ It was a high behest, and very often a very vain-glorious one. A man’s best means of knowing what he is, is to take stock of what he does. If you will put your conduct through the sieve, you will come to a pretty good understanding of your character. ‘He that hath no rule over his own spirit is like a city broken down, without walls,’ into which all enemies can leap unhindered, and out from which all things that will may pass. Do you set guards at the gates and watch yourselves with all carefulness.
Then, again, I would say we must try to diminish as much as possible the mere instinctive and habitual and mechanical part of our lives, and to bring, as far as we can, every action under the conscious dominion of principle. The less we live by impulse, and the more we live by intelligent reflection, the better it will be for us. The more we can get habit on the side of goodness, the better; but the more we break up our habits, and make each individual action the result of a special volition of the spirit guided by reason and conscience, the better for us all.
Then, again, I would say, set yourselves to educate your consciences. They need that. One of the surest ways of making conscience more sensitive is always to consult it and always to obey it. If you neglect it, and let it prophesy to the wind, it will stop speaking before long. Herod could not get a word out of Christ when he ‘asked Him many questions’ because for years he had not cared to hear His voice. And conscience, like the Lord of conscience, will hold its peace after men have neglected its speech. You can pull the clapper out of the bell upon the rock, and then, though the waves may dash, there will not be a sound, and the vessel will drive straight on to the black teeth that are waiting for it. Educate your conscience by obeying it, and by getting into the habit of bringing everything to its bar.
And, still further, compare yourselves constantly with your model. Do as the art students do in a gallery, take your poor daub right into the presence of the masterpiece, and go over it line by line and tint by tint. Get near Jesus Christ that you may learn your duty from Him, and you will find out many of the secret sins.
And, lastly, let us ask God to cleanse us.
My text, as translated in the Revised Version, says, ‘ Clear Thou me from secret faults.’ And there is present in that word, if not exclusively, at least predominantly, the idea of a judicial acquittal, so that the thought of the first clause of this verse seems rather to be that of pronouncing guiltless, or forgiving, than that of delivering from the power of. But both, no doubt, are included in the idea, as both, in fact, come from the same source and in response to the same cry.
And so we may be sure that, though our eye does not go down into the dark depths, God’s eye goes, and that where He looks He looks to pardon, if we come to Him through Jesus Christ our Lord.
He will deliver us from the power of these secret faults, giving to us that divine Spirit which is ‘the candle of the Lord,’ to search us, and to convince of our sins, and to drag our evil into the light; and giving us the help without which we can never overcome. The only way for us to be delivered from the dominion of our unconscious faults is to increase the depth and closeness and constancy of our communion with Jesus Christ; and then they will drop away from us. Mosquitoes and malaria, the one unseen in their minuteness, and the other, ‘the pestilence that walketh in darkness,’ haunt the swamps. Go up on the hilltop, and neither of them are found. So if we live more and more on the high levels, in communion with our Master, there will be fewer and fewer of these unconscious sins buzzing and stinging and poisoning our lives, and more and more will His grace conquer and cleanse.
They will all be manifested some day. The time comes when He shall bring to light the hidden things and darkness and the counsels of men’s hearts. There will be surprises on both hands of the Judge. Some on the right, astonished, will say, ‘Lord, when saw we Thee?’ and some on the left, smitten to confusion and surprise, will say, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Thy name?’ Let us go to Him with the prayer, ‘Search me, O God! and try me; and see if there be any wicked way in me; and lead me in the way everlasting.’
understand = discern.
his. Not in Hebrew text.
errors = wanderings. Like those of the “planets” (= wanderers).
Cleanse = clear, or acquit. Hebrew. nakah.
secret = hidden things; things that are not discerned.
Psa 19:12
Psa 19:12
THE PSALMIST’S PRAYER
“Who can discern his errors?
Clear thou me from hidden faults.”
We should have expected such a prayer here. The contemplation of God’s commandments always results in one’s being conscious of the need of prayer.
“Clear thou me from hidden faults.” This is not a reference to the faults, or sins, that are hidden from others, but from ourselves, as indicated by the first line. As an apostle stated it, “I know nothing against myself; but that does not prove that I am justified.”
E.M. Zerr:
Psa 19:12. This verse has reference to the life of a human being passed in a world where innumerable temptations abound. No man fully realizes the multitude of weaknesses that exist in his flesh; no one but the Lord knows. Such is the meaning of the question, who can understand his errors? Recognizing this fact, David asked the Lord to cleanse him from the errors that he could not see but which can be seen by the Lord. Of course it must be understood that such a favor from God will not be extended to a man unless his life otherwise is in keeping with the law. The same teaching regarding the continuous favor of the cleansing for a righteous person is given in 1Jn 1:7.
Hidden Faults
Who can discern his errors?
Clear thou me from hidden faults.
Psa 19:12.
1. The Nineteenth Psalm is one of those which are called Psalms of Nature. The thoughts, at any rate in part, belong apparently to the early shepherd life of him who was promoted by God from the sheep-folds to feed Jacob His people and Israel His inheritance. In his wanderings on the hills and in the valleys around Bethlehem the bold, romantic, thoughtful youth had ample leisure to meditate upon the wonders of the natural world, and in this contemplation his mind rises from the everlasting order to the God who is there revealed; and is inspired with a sense of that unseen Presence which guides and directs the whole. As he sees the sun break forth in the morning from his couch of cloud, as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, until his radiance spreads over the whole clear sky, and there is nothing hid from the heat thereof, he beholds in this a figure of the pure, and enlightening, and cheering law of Jehovah; and the desire comes for that sinlessness which can bear the full light of this Sun of Righteousness, and the words well up from his heart, Who can discern his errors? Clear thou me from hidden faults. Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins; let them not have dominion over me: then shall I be perfect, and I shall be clear from great transgression. Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my rock, and my redeemer.
2. The Psalmist stands perplexed before the mystery of his own being; he is at once ignorant of himself and yet mistrustful of himself; he does not know himself, yet knows himself sufficiently well to suspect himself; therefore he appeals to the Spirit who searcheth all things. How true it is that we are mainly unknown to ourselves; that within us are unexplored regions; that our heart is substantially undiscovered! Schopenhauer one day strayed into the Royal Gardens of Berlin; and when an officer inquired of him, Who are you, sir? the philosopher responded, I dont know; I shall be glad if you can tell me. The officer reported him for a lunatic; but he was far from thathe was one who had deeply pondered the mystery of personality, and was accordingly puzzled by it.
The exclamation of the Psalmist hits off a universal fact. Who can discern his errors? It is the cry of a man who almost despairs of ever coming to know and understand his actual inner condition, of ever coming to see himself as God sees him. There is a touch of pensive surprise in the words, as if he had just had an unwonted revelation of himself, as if he had just made discovery of faults and sins hitherto hidden from him. The sight fills him with astonishment and alarm. He had no idea there was so much lingering mischief within. He is not quite sure that he has seen the worst yet. If there be this, there may be more. Who can discern his errors?1 [Note: J. Thew, Broken Ideals, 110.]
Bishop Perowne renders the text, As for errorswho can perceive (them)? The word error here is analogous to the Greek word for sin, which gives the notion of missing the mark. It means straying, wandering from the path. There are sins of ignorance and of infirmity unconsciously, unintentionally done through lack of self-knowledge, or of jealous vigilance against the deceits of the world and the snares of Satan. There are also sins of presumption, done with deliberateness and hardened pride, and a sort of insolence against God. There are also sins which do not usually come earliest in the moral history, but which are the inevitable result and penalty of sins of carelessness and infirmity; and which imply, nay, sooner or later create, that awful insensibility which is the sure symptom of spiritual death, and for which no forgiveness, because no repentance, is possible.2 [Note: A. W. Thorold, Questions of Faith and Duty, 56.]
Nothing is more common than the confession, on the part of eminently holy men, that every day of their lives gives them some new understanding of the sinfulness of their own hearts; that the guilt which once seemed slight and easily covered now rises before them in such mountainous proportions that nothing but infinite power and infinite love can remove it. These confessions of sin recur continually in the hymnology of the Church and constitute no small part even of the sacred Word. Is it not one of the greatest of wonders, while the holiest men esteem themselves so great sinners, while progress in goodness is marked most clearly by an increasing knowledge and abhorrence of personal sinis it not, I say, one of the greatest of wonders that those who make no pretensions to religion, and have no aspirations after holiness, are scarcely conscious that they are sinners at all, and the greatest transgressors are least troubled by the accusations of conscience? It was the humble consciousness of his own sinfulness that gave such power to the preaching of Robert MCheyne, whom God took to Himself in the fulness of his youth and promise. With incomparable modesty he said one day: The reason, I think, why so many of the worst sinners of Dundee come to hear me is that they discover so much likeness between their hearts and mine. And this is the secret of the Psalmists power over us; this is the reason why we can hear from his lips such sad descriptions of human nature and yet, instead of cherishing an instinctive feeling of repulsion toward them, can yield our assent and make our penitent confession of their truth.1 [Note: A. H. Strong, Miscellanies, ii. 360.]
I.
Our Hidden Faults
1. What is the meaning of these words of the Poet-King, when he prays to be cleared from his hidden faults? It might seem at first to be simple and clear, to be an entreaty that he may be preserved from those sins which we commonly speak of as secret, because they are unknown to our fellow-men; as distinguished from the open and presumptuous offences which are a shameless and notorious breach of the Divine law. We are all conscious of much in that inner life, known only to ourselves and to God, that is inconsistent with our outward profession of morality and religion, in direct antagonism to His revealed will. But this very consciousness excludes all such offences from the list of those of which David is speaking. There is a further and more subtle analysis of character here implied than that which contrasts itself with an exhaustive division of sins into those which are openly exhibited, and those which are secretly indulged. There is a more awful truth to be learned here than that of an inner life of falsehood and impurity and unbelief, which we shrink from disclosing to our fellows. There are sins which are unknown to ourselves, there are evil influences in our hearts of which we are absolutely unconscious, until they have become stereotyped into habits, or suddenly startle us by breaking forth in unmistakable wickedness. There are offences which we cannot confess, or repent of, because we are ignorant of their existence; which we may vaguely include in our conception of a heart that is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, in our general petitions for a clean heart and a right spirit; but which we cannot recognize or discriminate, so as to keep a special guard against them or resolve on a detailed renunciation of them. Who, says the Psalmist, can understand, or who can mark his errors? It is a condition of our finite power of apprehension, that we cannot thoroughly comprehend even our own nature, or penetrate the mysteries of our own sinfulness. From wilful blindness or want of spiritual perception, or the superficial analysis of conduct, which declines to probe down to the intent and motive, or the casuistry which seeks to reconcile things which are irreconcilable, none can reckon how oft he offendeth.
We are all a supreme mystery to ourselves; the mystery of creation in general, profound as it is, is as nothing to the mystery of our own existence and personality. Is there anything we know less about than the entity that says I whenever we speak? The chemist can take up a piece of ore, or a glass of water, and tell you what is in it to its ultimate atoms of oxygen and hydrogen. But he cannot get behind his own consciousness. He experiences states of feeling and perceives successions of ideas, but of the percipient soul he knows nothing. A man may lose his soul; but, even though he be a philosopher, he cannot find it.1 [Note: J. Halsey, The Spirit of Truth, 278.]
It is with our characters as with our faces. Few of us are familiar with our own appearance, and most of us, if we have looked at our portraits, have felt a little shock of surprise, and been ready to say to ourselves, Well! I did not know that I looked like that! And the bulk even of good men are almost as much strangers to their inward physiognomy as to their outward. They see themselves in their looking-glasses every morning, although they go away and forget what manner of men they were. But they do not see their true selves in the same fashion in any other mirror.1 [Note: A. Maclaren, The God of the Amen, 78.]
The ancient precept, Man, know thyself! was recognized as so wise and good that it was thought to be of Divine origin. The best of the ancients regarded self-knowledge as the very beginning of wisdom, just as they regarded self-mastery as the very beginning of practical virtue. It is said that Socrates, on one occasion, excused himself from giving attention to some important questions, on the ground that he could not possibly come to know such things, as he had not yet been able to know himself. There, the grand old heathen felt, was the true starting-place of all true knowledge. Wisdom, like charity, began at home. And he could not bring himself to admire those who carried on their researches at the ends of the earth, ignorant of what was proceeding in their own domains.2 [Note: J. Thew, Broken Ideals, 107.]
2. Though we may be unconscious of it, sin is always sin. The principle of evil is the same whether it be hand-murder or heart-murder. Sin is not confined to the outward act; it lies also in the thoughts and motives behind the act. The thought of the foolish is sin. The desire to injure your neighbour is sin, though it may never result in outward action. The plan to sin is sinful whether you carry it out or not. Human judges have nothing to do with inward desires, for all these are beyond their reach; but the Divine Judge reads the reins and hearts of men. The heart makes the man, and if the heart is wrong, all is wrong.
In the Book of Leviticus different sacrifices are required for the sin of ignorance in the priest, the ruler of the people, and the private individual and proselyte. The priest stood at the head of the chosen people, and, in virtue of his exceptional position, might justly be expected to possess superior knowledge and a more than average sense of the authority and penetrating power of the Divine law. For a sin of inadvertence in the priest, the sacrifice of a bullock, the most costly offering known to the Levitical law, was required. The inadvertence was scarcely excusable in one living in the heart of the daily sanctities. The light of the holy place was about the mans footsteps, and in this case a sin of ignorance crept up almost to the margin of conscious sin. It demanded a costlier atonement than in others. Again, when the ruler of the people had committed a sin of ignorance, he was required to offer a he-goat. His position was not quite so sacred as that of the priest, nor were his religious opportunities so rich and inspiring. But still his life was devoted to high tasks of moral discrimination. He occupied a representative position, and ought to stand out from the rank and file of the congregation in quick perception and sensitive religious tone. When the private individual or proselyte had unwittingly sinned, a she-goat only, a still less costly form of sacrifice, was required. The lowliest were members of the elect congregation and worshippers of Jehovah, and could not be quite absolved from all responsibility, although the opportunities of others might be higher.1 [Note: T. G. Selby, The Imperfect Angel, 144.]
3. Hidden sin is a great peril, and if unchecked will manifest itself in overt deed. Every man has two livesthe inward and the outward. Christianity directs its chief attention to the inner man, and the inwardness of its teachings renders it unique. Of old, murder was a thing of the handan outward act; but Christ speaks of murder as a thing of the heartan inward thought or feeling. You may commit murder without shedding one drop of blood, for a man who is angry with his brother without a cause is a murderer. In the Sermon on the Mount there are two voicesthe one an ancient voice dealing with the outward, and the other a new Voice from heaven dealing with the inner empire of the spirit. Christianity is not a painted paganism, but a condition of soul. Its great question is this, How is it with thine heart? What is the state of thy spirit? What of the man within the man? The Bible is the heart-book, par excellence. The human race is suffering, not from skin-disease, but from heart-disease; and if man is to be lifted up he must be lifted up from the very root of his being. It is the glory of the Gospel that its master-purpose is to subject every thought to the obedience of Christ.
These secret faults are like a fungus that has grown in a wine-cask, whose presence nobody suspected. It sucks up all the generous liquor to feed its own filthiness, and when the staves are broken, there is no wine left, nothing but the foul growth. Many a Christian man and woman has the whole Christian life arrested, and all but annihilated, by the unsuspected influence of a secret sin. I do not believe it would be exaggeration to say that, for one man who has made shipwreck of his faith and lost his peace by reason of some gross transgression, there are twenty who have fallen into the same condition by reason of the multitude of small ones. He that despiseth little things shall fall by little and little; and whilst the deeds which the Ten Commandments rebuke are damning to a Christian character, still more perilous, because unseen, and permitted to grow without check or restraint, are these unconscious sins. Happy is he that condemneth not himself in that thing which he alloweth.1 [Note: A. Maclaren, The God of the Amen, 81.]
A large oak-tree was cut down in a grove, and near the heart of it was found a small nail surrounded by twenty-nine concentric circles of wood, the growth of as many years. And did that little nail injure the oak? Alas! it did, for the sap carried with it the oxide from the metal, until a space of three or four feet in length and four or five inches in diameter was completely blackened. The hidden nail in the heart proved injurious to the mighty oak. And the secret sin in your heart, my brother, will injure your manhood. Even when it does not develop into an act, it will blacken the noblest part of your nature. It will convert your soul into a macadamized road for the foulest of satyrs. Your moral perception will be obscured, your moral sensibility will be blunted, your moral appetite will be vitiated, your conscience will be impaired, and all the vitalities of your soul will be brought low.2 [Note: J. Ossian Davies.]
4. The influence of our hidden sins reaches out to our fellow-men. What injury unknown to ourselves we may have inflicted on others! Like the widening circles on the surface of the water when the child throws the pebble into the pool, so the sins of our childhood and of other days have spread we know not whither. It is possible (we must remember) to lead others into sins which we have never committed ourselves. Arguments for mere love of amusement or display of skill may raise doubts in the mind of another which we have never felt and cannot answer. An expenditure which to us may not be worse than waste may lead another into embarrassments which will destroy the peace of years and break the hearts of those who denied themselves to provide what should have been more than enough. Our thoughtlessness may lead another to break a heart which we have never knownbut it is through our fault that this heart is broken.
A sanitary officer noticed how a young woman who had come up to London from the country, and was living in some miserable court or alley, made for a time great efforts to keep that court or alley clean. But gradually, day by day, the efforts of that poor woman were less and less vigorous, until in a few weeks she became accustomed to, and contented with, the state of filth which surrounded her, and made no further efforts to remove it. The atmosphere she lived in was too strong for her.1 [Note: E. J. Hardy.]
A light-hearted lad passes through a wood, and thoughtlessly strikes a young oak sapling. The scar heals over, but when that tree is cut down a thousand years afterwards, that blow is written on its heart. As heedlessly he puts the first thought of impurity into the soul of another, innocent up to that moment; and, owing to that thought perhaps, that soul is lost. Ive seen pretty clearly, says Adam Bede in George Eliots story, ever since I could cast up a sum, that you can never do what is wrong without breeding sin and trouble, more than you can ever see. Its like a bit of bad workmanship; you never see the end of the mischief it will do.2 [Note: Ibid.]
II.
Their Cause
1. One hidden and mysterious source may be found in heredity. Over and above the animal nature that we all possess, and that too often possesses us, are acquired tendencies to certain forms of evil which we have inherited from our ancestors. No man knows what hereditary predispositions are flowing in his veins. Peculiar appetites and sensibilities are transmitted from generation to generation; and here is the secret explanation of many a mans lapse into evil courses. The taint is in his blood. Many a man is a very powder magazine of violent passions stored up within him from forgotten progenitors. And when he goes where sparks are flying there is a sudden and fearful explosion, and everybody wonders!
You may carry in your system the germs of certain diseases for years without suspecting the fact. The germs lie dormant until conditions favourable to their vitalization and development arise, and then comes the outbreak. So there are latent in many mens blood susceptibilities to the power of drink and lust which no one suspects, and which they themselves suspect least of any. But when they are thrown into certain society, or placed under certain conditions, the fever that was in their veins breaks out and runs its course, and the end is collapse and death. It is sad to reflect that the drunkard or the libertine may transmit to his children and his childrens children his passions, but that he cannot transmit his remorse.1 [Note: J. Halsey, The Spirit of Truth, 288.]
2. Another cause of hidden sin is a blunt conscience. Secret sins arise from inadequate religious knowledge, and neglect of religious thought and instruction not infrequently explains this defect of knowledge. Secret sins arise from the fact that passions which are antagonistic to keen intellectual and religious susceptibility are cherished, and passion is always more or less under the control of the will. Secret sins arise through association with men whose common frailties blind us to our own; and it is at our own choice that we enter into these associations, or, at least, that we suffer ourselves to be so completely absorbed by them.
The Arctic fox, it is said, assumes a white fur in the winter months, so that it may pass undetected over the snows. When the spring comes, and the brown earth reappears, it sheds these white hairs and assumes a fur the colour of the earth over which it moves. Many fishes have markings that resemble the sand or gravel above which they make their haunts. You may watch for hours, and till they move you are unable to recognize their presence. The bird that broods on an exposed nest is never gaily coloured. However bright the plumage of its mate, it is always attired in feathers that match its surroundings, if it has to fulfil these dangerous domestic duties. Large numbers of insects are so tinted as to be scarcely distinguishable from the leaves and flowers amidst which they live. One insect has the power of assuming the appearance of a dried twig. And is there not something very much like this in the sphere of human conduct? Our sins blend with the idiosyncrasies of the age and disguise themselves. Of course we do not sin in loud, flashing colours, if we make any pretension to piety at least. Our sins always perfectly compose with the background of our surroundings. As a rule, they are sins into which we fall in common with men we esteem, men who have established a hold upon our affections, men whose sagacity we trust, and who by their excellence in some things lead us to think very lightly of the moral errors they illustrate in other things.2 [Note: T. G. Selby, The Imperfect Angel, 150.]
3. Still more, self-love too often conceals from conscience the sins it ought to judge and to condemn. Conscience is a judicial and not an inquisitorial faculty, and it pronounces judgment only on what it sees and knows. If we choose deliberately to cover over or to disguise the real state of our hearts, conscience will certainly fail to judge us as we ought to be judged.
It is said that Catherine of Russia, when journeying through some of the most desolate and miserable parts of her dominion, ordered painted villages to be erected on certain points of the road in which she was travelling, so that the country might not look so cheerless and deserted. And just in like manner self-love deludes us by hiding the reality from us, so that we seem to be better than we really are. It will call sin by another name, so that it no longer seems to be sin. The saddest imperfections often masquerade in stolen garments, so as to disguise their own evil nature. Avarice, for example, ceases to be regarded as a sin when self-love declares it is thrift.1 [Note: G. S. Barrett, Musings for Quiet Hours, 25.]
4. Sin is hidden, because the restraints of society hold it in check. Anger, pride, malice, selfishness, deceit of our hearts are checked in their manifestations by the influences of society and of early habit. Therefore we do not estimate them in their true light.
The traveller in the White Mountains remarks that the valley at the foot of Mount Washington is strewn with enormous boulders of granite, which have been loosened from year to year from the great overhanging cliff, and, carrying destruction in their course, have tumbled to the very spot where they now lie. If you inquire what force has separated these immense masses from the parent rock you find that behind the green fringe of foliage which waves so luxuriantly in summer, and hidden in the crevices of the mountain, are pools of water which the winter frosts change to ice. Expanding as they freeze, these little pools of limpid water have power to tear the solid rock asunder, and hurl its gigantic fragments down the mountain-side. So there are destructive powers lurking in the soulpowers which are latent during the short summer of life, but which are competent, when all restraint upon them is removed, to make the fairest seeming nature a shattered wreck. The real destructive power of sin is in great part hidden now, but it will be felt when the sunshine of Gods grace comes to an end, and eternal winter settles down upon the soul.2 [Note: A. H. Strong, Miscellanies, ii. 366.]
III.
Their Cure
1. We must realize that God sees the things to which we are blind.All our latent defects are open to the eye of the Searcher of hearts. The awful beam from His presence strikes across our self-purified and self-sifted life, and detects thoughts and solicitations and unwholesome sympathies that are the hidden and deeply-folded cells in which sin conceives itself. Divine law is sent forth to enlighten all who are docile to its monitions, to search into the deep places of action, and to create a perfect inward as well as outward righteousness. Its going forth, like that of the sun, with which the Psalmist links it in his comparison, is from the end of the heaven, and its circuit unto the ends of it: and there is nothing hid from the heat thereof. And as this clear and ever-growing light from God is projected across our souls, we come to feel that we are full of secret corruptions,corruptions fraught with peril both to ourselves and to others; corruptions which, unless cleansed by continuous and immeasurable grace from God, must prevail at last over the things that are lovely and of good report. Under this widening horizon of penetrating light, we come to suspect that there may yet be undisclosed corruptions within us, and we are constrained to cry that the purifying power of God may go deeper than our own knowledge,deep as Gods knowledge, deep as a beam of that mysterious light which, unapproachable itself, yet approaches and enters into the soul of all things. Thou hast set our iniquities before thee, our secret sins in the light of thy countenance.
My smile is bright, my glance is free,
My voice is calm and clear;
Dear friend, I seem a type to thee
Of holy love and fear.
But I am scannd by eyes unseen,
And these no saint surround;
They mete what is by what has been,
And joy the lost is found.
Erst my good Angel shrank to see
My thoughts and ways of ill;
And now he scarce dare gaze on me,
Scar-seamd and crippled still.1 [Note: Cardinal Newman, Verses on Various Occasions, 68.]
When in 1896 the engineers were planning the foundations for the Williamsburg Bridge, New York, the deepest of their twenty-two borings was a hundred and twelve feet below high water. Steel drills had indicated bed-rock from twelve to twenty feet higher than was the actual case; the diamond drill, however, showed the supposed bed-rock to be merely a deposit of boulders. So the diamond drill of God pierces our self-delusions, detects the fallacy of our assumptions, proves what we thought sterling to be only stones of emptiness, discloses the very truth of things far down the secret places of the soul.2 [Note: W. L. Watkinson, The Fatal Barter, 103.]
So rapidly can the human body be radiographed that snapshots can be taken with the rays, and Dr. Rosenthal, of Munich, has photographed the heart of a living person in one-tenth of a second. Now, this lightning picture of a human heart fairly represents those flashes of insight we occasionally get into our essential self, of which the physical organ is a metaphor. At the back of our reasonings, feelings, and volitions is a world unknown, except as it is revealed by glimpses and expressed in guesses. But He who made us in the lowest parts of the earth comprehends us and knows us altogether. For thou, even thou only, knowest the hearts of all the children of men. As the whole physical universe is known to the Almighty Spirit, as He calls every star by name, and inhabits every province; so the rational universe is displayed to the Divine gaze, and there is no mystery of body, brain, or spirit to Him. There is no creature that is not manifest in his sight: but all things are naked and laid open before the eyes of him with whom we have to do.3 [Note: Ibid. 98.]
2. We must welcome the light of His presence.The spaces between the windows of one of the rooms of a famous palace are hung with mirrors, and by this device the walls are made just as luminous as the windows through which the sunshine streams. Every square inch of surface seems to reflect the light. Let our natures be like that, no point of darkness anywhere, the whole realm of the inward life an unchequered blaze of moral illumination.
It is said that all organic germs found in the atmosphere cease a few miles out at sea. Air taken from the streets or the warehouses of the city yields large numbers of these germs. The air circulating through the ship in dock is charged with them. After the shore has been left behind, the air taken from the deck is pure, but they are still found in air taken from the hold. After a few days at sea the air on deck and in the hold alike yields no trace of these microscopic spores that are closely connected with disease. Let us be ever breathing the spirit of Gods love. Let us get away from the din and dust and turmoil of life, out upon that infinite sea of love that is without length or breadth or depth, and our secret faults will vanish away, and we shall by and by stand without offence in the presence of Gods glory.1 [Note: T. G. Selby, The Imperfect Angel, 157.]
3. We must educate the conscience.One of the surest ways of making conscience more sensitive is always to consult it and always to obey it. If you neglect it, and let it prophesy to the wind, it will stop speaking before long. Herod could not get a word out of Christ when he asked him many questions because for years he had not cared to hear His voice. And conscience, like the Lord of conscience, will hold its peace after men have neglected its speech. You can pull the clapper out of the bell upon the rock, and then, though the waves may dash, there will not be a sound, and the vessel will drive straight on to the black teeth that are waiting for it. Educate your conscience by obeying it, and by getting into the habit of bringing everything to its bar.
Within recent times we have heard of the elaboration of instruments that may reveal new worlds of sound to us, as marvellous as the worlds of form revealed by the microscope. It is said that no man ever knows what his own voice is like till he hears it in Mr. Edisons phonograph. We are told of another instrument by which the breathings of insects are made audible. The medical expert may yet be able to detect the faintest murmur of abnormal sound in the system that indicates the approach of disease. Ingenious appliances will register for us variations of temperature that are too fine for our dull senses to perceive. We have stepped from time to time into new realms of interest and knowledge and sensation, and undiscovered realms yet lie before us. To the eye and to the ear of the Maker all these worlds have been open from the beginning. They are just coming into our horizon with the development of science. And in the same way there must be the growth within us of a fine moral science, that will bring home to our apprehension the most obscure of our secret faults.1 [Note: T. G. Selby, The Imperfect Angel, 141.]
A lady missionary in Algiers heard this prayer from a little Arab girl one day, O God, take away all the ugly weeds from my heart, and plant lovely flowers there, that it may be always a garden green and beautiful for Jesus. This is just what we all wantthe weeds of evil uprooted, and the flowers of good adorning the soul.2 [Note: J. Ossian Davies.]
4. We must practise vigilance.What I say unto you, I say unto all, Watch. Let us guard well the ingoings and outgoings of life. Let us keep our hearts with all diligence, and double-sentry the door of our lips. Let us turn our fear into a prayer, and our prayer into a purpose. Search me, O God, and know my heart, try me and know my thoughts, and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. Let us indite our 19th Psalm, that we may never have to write our 51st. That we may avoid error, let us learn to discriminate error; and that we may discriminate errorfor to discern our faults is half the battle in correcting themlet us cultivate conscience and set before us the most perfect ideals; ever considering Him who, bearing our nature, yet did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth.3 [Note: J. Halsey, The Spirit of Truth, 290.]
Great were his fate who on the earth should linger,
Sleep for an age and stir himself again,
Watching thy terrible and fiery finger
Shrivel the falsehood from the souls of men.
Oh that thy steps among the stars would quicken!
Oh that thine ears would hear when we are dumb!
Many the hearts from which the hope shall sicken,
Many shall faint before thy kingdom come.
Lo for the dawn, (and wherefore wouldst thou screen it?)
Lo with what eyes, how eager and alone,
Seers for the sight have spent themselves, nor seen it,
Kings for the knowledge, and they have not known.
Times of that ignorance with eyes that slumbered
Seeing he saw not, till the days that are,
Now, many multitudes whom none had numbered,
Seek him and find him, for he is not far.1 [Note: F. W. H. Myers, Saint Paul.]
Slight Ailments is the title of a work by a distinguished physician. Its design is to describe the symptoms of incipient maladies, to show how serious ailments arise out of slight ones, and to direct the treatment that these ominous signs demand. It is unnecessary to say that this work is popular; that it has gone through many editions. If we have the slightest reason to suspect ourselves of being unsound, if we discover any tendency in our constitution toward one or another malady, we at once take the matter in hand, whatever may be the cost or inconvenience. Despise no new accident to your body, but take opinion of it, writes Lord Bacon. How readily we accept his advice! We do not delay until the disturbing symptoms give place to decided maladies like cancer or consumption. We are admonished by the novel weakness, the unusual pain, the nebulous sign, and satisfy ourselves as to what the accident signifies, and how it may best be dealt with. Did we not act thus, we should before long bitterly reflect upon ourselves. Ought we not to follow the same course touching the appearance of sinister signs in our spiritual and moral life? to note any new accident of the soul, and ask opinion of it?2 [Note: W. L. Watkinson, The Fatal Barter, 131.]
5. We must ask God to cleanse us.Clear thou me from secret faults. And there is present in that word, if not exclusively, at least predominantly, the idea of a judicial acquittal, so that the thought of the first clause of this verse seems rather to be that of pronouncing guiltless, or forgiving, than that of delivering from the power of. But both, no doubt, are included in the idea, as both, in fact, come from the same source and in response to the same cry. And so we may be sure that, though our eye does not go down into the dark depths, Gods eye goes, and that where He looks He looks to pardon, if we come to Him through Jesus Christ our Lord.
The Psalmists sense of the fact that there could be no indiscriminate salvation through Church or human organization or external and vicarious service was just as clear as that of St. Paul himself. He felt that he could not be effectually cleansed by his relation to the theocracy, or the national sacrifices, or the visible system and service of religion, in connexion with which he was perhaps already a leading figure. The ceremonial offering did not necessarily bring the purification of the spirit. He must be cleansed by a virtue coming down from God and through Gods unknown sacrifice, and not by a power going up from himself and through his own trespass-offering. The law, with its frequent and curiously graded sacrifices, had been but a remembrancer of certain selected sins, and had led him to see that all corruption, in its wider ravage and more insidious penetration, must be purged by a Divine process.
The only way for us to be delivered from the dominion of our unconscious faults is to increase the depth and closeness and constancy of our communion with Jesus Christ; and then they will drop away from us. Mosquitoes and malaria, the one unseen in their minuteness, and the other, the pestilence that walketh in darkness, haunt the swamps. Go up on the hill-top, and neither of them is found. So if we live more and more on the high levels, in communion with our Master, there will be fewer and fewer of these unconscious sins buzzing and stinging and poisoning our lives, and more and more will His grace conquer and cleanse.1 [Note: A. Maclaren, The God of the Amen, 84.]
The consummate ability of Stas, the Belgian chemist, is celebrated because he eliminated from his chemicals every trace of that pervasive element, sodium, so thoroughly that even its spectroscopic detection was impossible. But such is the efficacy of Divine grace that it can eliminate so thoroughly every trace of that pervasive and persistent element known as sin that we may be presented before the throne holy and unreprovable and without blemish. That the sincere may attain this purification, they are prepared to pass through the hot fires of bitter and manifold discipline.2 [Note: W. L. Watkinson, The Fatal Barter, 105.]
Literature
Barrett (G. S.), Musings for Quiet Hours, 23.
Binnie (W.), Sermons, 187.
Caird (J.), Aspects of Life, 33.
Halsey (J.), The Spirit of Truth, 276.
Hodge (C.), Princeton Sermons, 110.
Keble (J.), Sermons for the Christian Year: Lent to Passiontide, 95.
King (E.), The Love and Wisdom of God, 97.
Maclaren (A.), The God of the Amen, 77.
Newman (J. H.), Parochial and Plain Sermons, i. 41.
Selby (T. G.), The Imperfect Angel, 136.
Spurgeon (C. H.), New Park Street Pulpit, iii. (1857) No. 116.
Strong (A. H.), Miscellanies, ii. 359.
Thew (J.), Broken Ideals, 106.
Thorold (A. W.), Questions of Faith and Duty, 55.
Trench (R. C), Westminster and other Sermons, 249.
Voysey (C.), Sermons, xiv. No. 20; xvi. No. 39; xxvii. No. 9; xxx. No. 43.
Watkinson (W. L.), The Fatal Barter, 127.
Watkinson (W. L.), Studies in Christian Character, i. 21.
Wilson (J. M.), Sermons Preached in Clifton College Chapel, 60.
Christian World Pulpit, lxiv. 146 (Ossian Davies).
Churchmans Pulpit: The Lenten Season, v. 54 (Jackson), 181 (Stokoe).
Literary Churchman, 1885, p. 96 (Hardy).
can: Psa 40:12, Job 6:24, Isa 64:6, 1Co 4:4, Heb 9:7
cleanse: Psa 51:5-10, Psa 65:3, 1Jo 1:7
secret: Psa 90:8, Psa 139:2, Psa 139:23, Psa 139:24, Lev 4:2-35, Jer 17:9
Reciprocal: Lev 5:2 – hidden Lev 5:17 – though Lev 13:6 – wash Num 15:22 – General Deu 21:6 – wash their hands Deu 21:8 – lay not 1Ki 8:46 – there is no man Job 9:3 – he cannot Job 22:5 – thine Job 31:37 – declare Job 34:32 – which Psa 51:2 – cleanse Psa 69:5 – and my sins Eze 45:20 – every one Rom 7:15 – what Rom 7:21 – evil Gal 3:11 – that Gal 5:17 – the flesh Phi 3:9 – not Heb 10:26 – if 1Jo 1:9 – and to
SECRET FAULTS
Cleanse Thou me from secret faults.
Psa 19:12
David does not merely mean what are hidden from other people, secret from the eye of the world. He means those which he himself is ignorant of. This is the gist of the prayer. It is like the petition in our Litany when we call upon God to forgive us our sins, negligences, and ignorances. But how is it possible that when a man does wrong without knowing that it is wrong, God can be so very angry? Does not the very fact that he is ignorant take away the guilt? One often hears people speak so. Yet, surely it must be from want of thought. If we do a wrong act, the act is wrong all the same whether we know it or not. It is a different kind of sin from what it would have been if we had done it presumptuously and of full choicebut it is wrong all the same. Do not such things as these want forgiving? Is there no guilt here?
There is yet another consideration which comes in upon this subject: namely, that we might know better; the very ignorance which some people fancy excuses their doing wrong is itself a sin. Nobody need be ignorant. Many of those who profess and call themselves Christians seem to forget this. David knew it. This psalm shows that he knew it. What is Gods Word given us for but for this very purpose, that we should not be ignorant? Ignorance means neglect of Gods Holy Spirit; and neglect of the Spirit is a sin. The sins which we do without knowing them not only show what we are, they also show that we have refused Gods help to make us better. It was a sin of ignorance that crucified the Lord of Glory. That shows what sins of ignorance may come to. After that let no one say there can be no harm in what we do wrong if only we did not know it.
Are there no Christians now that need this prayer? Brethren, do not we need it? The Jews of old had their Sin-offering to bring it home to them day by day that sins of ignorance were of all others the sins which most showed how much they needed repentance and forgiveness. Christ, our Sin-offering, brought to His Cross by the most stupendous sin of ignorance the world has seen, sets before us the awful deadly nature of sins of ignorance. There upon that Cross we see the height which our sins of ignorance may reach tosecret sinssins we do not even know are sins at all. David had learned the lesson, when he prayed Cleanse Thou me from my secret faults. God grant that we may learn it, and daily say that prayer in our Litany with deeper earnestnessForgive us our ignorances.Amen.
Psa 19:12. Who can understand his errors? Upon the consideration of the perfect purity of Gods law, and the comparing of his spirit and conduct with it, he is led to make a penitent reflection upon his sins. Is the commandment thus holy, just, and good? then who can understand his errors? Lord, I am a sinful creature, and fall infinitely short of the demands of thy law, and am condemned by it. Cleanse thou me Both by justification, or the pardon of my sins, through the blood of thy Son, which is in due time to be shed for me; and by sanctification through thy Holy Spirit, working in and with thy word, to the further renovation of my heart and life. For these are the two ways of cleansing sinners most frequently spoken of, both in the Old and New Testament: though the first may seem to be principally, if not only intended, because he speaks of his past sins, from which he could be cleansed no other way but my remission. From secret faults From the guilt of such sins as were secret, either from others, such as none knows but God and my own conscience; or from myself, such as I never observed, or did not discern the evil of. Pardon my unknown sins, of which I never repented particularly, as I should have done.
19:12 Who can understand [his] {l} errors? cleanse thou me from secret [faults].
(l) Then there is no reward of duty, but of grace: for where sin is, there death is the reward.
3. Prayer for cleansing 19:12-14
David’s rhetorical question expresses the impossibility of knowing if or when we violate God’s will without the light that His Word provides. It can bring to light faults hidden otherwise and can warn us of what displeases God so we can confess and avoid these offenses. David asked God to use His Word to bring these sins to his attention so they would not dominate him. This would result in his being blameless in God’s sight and free from the huge mass of sin that would be his without the revelation of Scripture.
Fuente: Commentary Series on the Bible by Peter Pett
Fuente: Commentary on the Holy Bible by Thomas Coke
PRAYER AGAINST SINS OF INFIRMITY AND PRESUMPTION
We all need to be delivered from,
[It is not of gross outward sin that we are here to speak, but of errors and secret sins; that is, such sins as escape the notice of ourselves as well as of others.
Consider the sins arising from defect. The law requires that we love God with all our heart, and all our mind, and all our soul, and all our strength; and our neighbour, under whatever circumstances, as ourselves. Now, if we trace the whole extent of our duty to God, as our Creator; to the Lord Jesus Christ, as our Redeemer; and to the Holy Spirit, as our Sanctifier; if we further pursue into all the different relations of life our duty to our fellow-creatures, and reflect that the smallest short-coming in the performance of it is sin: and then, if we reflect how great our short-comings are, even when we exert ourselves to the uttermost to fulfil the will of God; we shall see that, under this head alone, our sins are more numerous than the sands upon the sea-shore; since, in fact, we have been doing nothing but what, in fact, was sin, from the very first moment that we came into the world.
We need therefore to cry earnestly to God to cleanse us from them
[The guilt in which they involve the soul is exceeding great: nor can it be purged away but by the atoning blood of Christ. The circumstance of their having been unobserved by us does not lessen the guilt of them, as we imagine; but only shews how blind and ignorant we are, and how vitiated and debased that soul must be which can harbour such evils unconscious of their malignity, and almost of their very existence. God himself cautions us against regarding this as an extenuation, which, if rightly viewed, is rather an aggravation of our guilt. Suffer not thy mouth to cause thy flesh to sin; neither say thou before the angel, that it was an error; wherefore should God be angry at thy voice, and destroy the work of thine hands [Note: Ecc 5:6.]? An atonement was offered by the high priests of old for the errors of the people [Note: Heb 9:7. ]: and in the atonement of Christ must we seek refuge from all which have been, however inadvertently, committed by us. This is strongly intimated by the offerings which were appointed for all without exception, when they erred; but which differed according to the degree of criminality which might justly attach to persons, by reason of their advantages for knowing better, and the injury that was likely to accrue from their example [Note: Lev 4:1-35.]. But none were excused: the very moment that their error was pointed out to them, they were to bring their offering: and through that alone could they obtain absolution from their sin [Note: Lev 5:17-19.]. We should therefore, all, without exception, pray with David, Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. Yea, we should also pray with him, Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me! For God requireth truth in our inward parts: and, if we are not thus renewed in the spirit of our minds, we cannot hope for admission into that city where no unclean thing can enter [Note: Rev 21:27.].]
Consider what presumptuous sins are
[They are any sins whatever that are committed against light and knowledge, or on a presumption that God will not punish them in the eternal world.
Now it is perfectly well known to all of us, that we ought to have the fear of God before our eyes: we ought to stand in awe of Gods judgments: we ought to search out and execute his commands. We ought not to live unto ourselves, but unto him: and to make his word the unvaried rule of our conduct. We know that we have duties also towards our adorable Redeemer: and that, as we should live altogether by faith in him, so we should live altogether to his glory. Now, if we are habitually neglecting these duties, and living to ourselves and to the world, what is our life but one continued course of presumptuous sin? I wish that the more moral, decent, and conscientious part of my audience would attend to this, that they may see how great their deficiencies are, and how awful their guilt.]
To these we are ever prone
[Every man by nature rushes into them, even as a horse into the battle: nor can any but God keep us back from them. How daring we are in the commission of them, is plain from numberless passages of Scripture, where the language of the carnal heart is depicted; Tush! God shall not see; neither will the Almighty regard it. We have a general notion about Gods mercy: and from the very hope that he will forbear to execute the award of justice, we are encouraged to proceed in our career of sin; thus turning the very grace of God into licentiousness, and continuing in sin with the hope that grace will abound. And what an ascendant these sins will gain over us may be daily seen, not only in the impieties of those who never knew any thing of God, but in the degeneracy of many, who once gave promises of better things. The gradations of such persons departure from God are strongly marked by the Psalmist: they first walk (transiently) in the counsel of the ungodly, (who, from their want of real piety, are dangerous advisers;) they then learn to stand (deliberately) in the way (and habits) of the wicked; and then come to sit (habitually and at their ease) in the seat of the scornful [Note: Psa 1:1.]. And this is no other than what every presumptuous sinner has reason to expect: for God is indignant against him, in proportion as his transgressions partake of this horrid aggravation. Of the heathen it is said, They liked not to retain God in their knowledge; therefore God gave them over to a reprobate mind [Note: Rom 1:8.]: and even of his own people Israel themselves, God says, Israel would none of me: so I gave them up [Note: Psa 81:11-12.]. What wonder, then, if he should say of us also, They are joined to idols: let them alone [Note: Hos 4:17.]? If instead of crying mightily to God to keep us back from presumptuous sins, we yield ourselves willingly to the commission of them, we can expect nothing, but that they should have the entire dominion over us, and constrain God to swear in his wrath, that we shall never enter into his rest. This, I say, we may well expect: for God has declared, that]
[How heinous they are in the sight of God may be known from hence; that, though sacrifices were appointed for sins of infirmity, none were prescribed for any presumptuous sin whatever: the offender was to be cut off without mercy from the people of the Lord [Note: Num 15:27-31.] The servant that knew not his lords will, and did things contrary to it, was yet accounted worthy of some punishment: but he who knowingly violated his lords commands, was beaten with many stripes [Note: Luk 12:47-48.]. And Capernaums doom, we are told, shall be more severe than that of Sodom and Gomorrha, because of the deeper malignity which her superior advantages infused into all her sins [Note: Mat 11:23-24.].
Fuente: Charles Simeon’s Horae Homileticae (Old and New Testaments)
Fuente: Hawker’s Poor Man’s Commentary (Old and New Testaments)
Fuente: John Trapp’s Complete Commentary (Old and New Testaments)
Fuente: Expositions Of Holy Scripture by Alexander MacLaren
Fuente: Companion Bible Notes, Appendices and Graphics
Fuente: Old and New Testaments Restoration Commentary
Fuente: The Great Texts of the Bible
Fuente: The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge
Fuente: Church Pulpit Commentary
Fuente: Joseph Bensons Commentary on the Old and New Testaments
Fuente: Geneva Bible Notes
Fuente: Expository Notes of Dr. Constable (Old and New Testaments)
Fuente: Expository Notes of Dr. Constable (Old and New Testaments)