We cannot bring a legitimate
charge against the law as though it is too harsh, too demanding. There is only one thing the law
can say to us, cursed. For it is written, cursed
is everyone who does not continue in all things written in the
book of the law to do them. It doesn't say cursed are those
who do not agree with the law, or excuse me, who agree with
the law but aren't able to keep it all the time. The law demands
not only that you agree with it, that you see that it is just,
holy, righteous, and good, it demands that you actually perform
it. And if you don't perform it, you're under the curse. And
this performance of the law is not just your best effort, nor
even the best that any human being has ever done. It says,
cursed is everyone who does not continue in all points of the
book of the law to do it. Every point all the time. A single failure in keeping the law brings the
full weight of the divine curse. That puts us in a pretty bad
position, doesn't it? And yet, in the very face of
this lawful word written in all capitals, bold and underlined,
cursed, we read blessed, blessed. Everybody wants to be blessed.
And I don't blame them. They say, preacher, pray for
me that God will bless me. Okay. I can understand that prayer. I pray for God to bless me. But what do you count to be blessing? What is it that if you had it,
you would count yourself to be blessed, adequately blessed,
abundantly blessed, even if you had nothing else that you wanted.
Is there anything like that to you? Is there any kind of blessing,
which if you had it, it wouldn't matter what the condition of
your life, your health, your finances, Your emotion, anything
like that, none of that would matter. You could still say,
I am blessed. David knew of a thing like that. He said, blessed is he whose
transgressions are forgiven. He's got more to say about it,
but let's stop right there for a minute. He didn't say that those whose
transgressions are forgiven can expect blessing. He says they
are blessed. He didn't say those whose transgressions
are forgiven can fully expect that when they pray to God, they're
going to get the things they ask for. the blessings they seek. No, he just simply said, whoever's
transgressions are forgiven, that person is blessed, no matter
what else may be true about that person. And they are blessed And though
it doesn't state this directly, we certainly understand this
from other scriptures. They are blessed with the greatest
blessing that could ever be given to an individual by God. People talk about the deeper
life. I realize that's an old phrase.
Maybe you haven't heard it, but they come up with new phrases
all the time to describe the same kind of things. They act
as though they're levels of being Christian, you know, and they'll
say, I want the deeper life because I want God's best blessings. Really now, is there a blessing
that you can imagine any greater than having your transgressions
forgiven by the very one who has all power and authority to
send your soul to everlasting torment. I mean, how many transgressions
do you think you got? Think you can count them? Do you think that it would be
possible for you to number up your sins that you've committed
today? We do the best we can to understand
these spiritual things. And we say, well, I understand
my sin. And the fact is we don't. We
understand that we are sinners and we can recite the words,
you know, we can say we're totally depraved and we can even say
everything I do is wicked and sinful. We can say all these
things, but let us be honest. We don't feel that, because we
have days when we think we do pretty good, and we have days
when we think we do pretty bad. That's the way the flesh looks
at things. Brother Todd Nybert told me one
time, and he'd read this in one of the old writers, that this
is how you ought to pray. He says, one day I prayed, Lord,
show me myself. And he said, for a week, I was
in the deepest pit that I can imagine. And then he prayed, show me thyself. And he saw God in his grace and
mercy, and that brought him out of the pit. But he told me, he
said, I am never going to pray that prayer again. God does not reveal to us all
our sin. He does not let us see it in
all of its horrid ugliness. Whatever Brother Todd Nybert
may have experienced, that was still God just showing him more
of his sin than he'd seen before. Do you realize there's only one
being who can bear the sight of your
sin, and that's God. It is so wretchedly awful. You could combine all the words
of all the languages of man that that describe despicable, disgusting,
filthy things, combine them all together and multiply them by
the largest number you can think of, you still would not know
and understand what your sin looks like to God. I think if we knew what we were,
it'd drive us insane. It would certainly drive us to
despair. And yet we have written here
that there are people whose transgressions, and actually
in the Hebrew language that this was written in, that's in the
singular, whose transgression. And in that way, the psalmist
is lumping together all of his existence under one big category,
transgression. Sin from beginning to end. Sin
from the inside out and the outside in. It's all transgression. He's not viewing his life as
a series of transgressions. He's saying his life is a transgression. and yet it's forgiven. Forgiven
by the very one who knows the fullness of it, who knows every
detail of it, who knows all the filth and the wickedness and
the disgustingness and ugliness of it, who feels the offense
of it. That one forgives. That one wipes the slate clean, and takes the chalk out of our
hands so we can't put any more up there. You know, some people, their
idea of God's forgiveness is, well, when you, and they use
whatever phrase they described about supposedly getting saved,
when you ask Jesus into your heart, or you ask God to save
you, something like that, he erases all your past sins. But
you're going to have to deal with the ones that you commit
as a Christian. Well, then what's the use? Really? If I got an answer for anything,
I'm done. Everything we write is sin. And
so Christ by his blood has erased the record of our sins. And he
said, he looks at us and he grabbed that chalk and said, here, let
me have that. You don't have access to this chalkboard anymore.
You can't write anything there. You'll continue doing these things,
but they're not going to be recorded. Now all of us have forgiven some
offenses that people have done against us. It's kind of funny the things
that really get us upset, isn't it? You know, we can put up sometimes
with what we might consider pretty serious offenses, but let somebody
cut us off in traffic, you know? And we think that's the worst
thing anybody did today, you know? But we forgive offenses. But the offenses that are committed
against us are nothing compared to the offenses we've committed
against God. And the forgiveness that we grant
to others is nothing like the forgiveness that he grants to
us. It is a very rare thing when
we are able to forgive someone to such a degree that it's as
though the offense never happened. If they've broken a trust, we
may forgive them. And we may try to reestablish
a relationship with them. But there's always going to be
that little thing in the back. I don't quite trust them like
I used to. But God forgives. Forgive is actually a word from
economics. You forgive debts. And God goes to the record of
our sin, and there's that huge debt that we owe him, and he
just clears it off the books. He forgives it. He forgives it by writing paid
in full. Now, you know, if, imagine this, you know, according
to the way humans do things. Imagine you owe somebody something.
And it's, you know, the loan was made, and it's all written
down, your signature's on there, the amount, the interest rate,
and all that. And you get in a position that you can't pay
it. And so you go and say, so and
so, I know I made that loan. And when I did, I fully intended
to pay it. I tell you, I got nothing. And
I don't have any prospect that I can see of ever having any
money to pay you back. Now, your friend may say, don't
worry about it. I forgive the debt. But nobody
writes anything down on that piece of paper. And in time to
come, you upset your friend again. You do something that really
makes him mad. And he says, all right, I'm gonna show him. And
he goes over to the file drawer, he pulls out that piece of paper,
and he says, pay up. But you see, when the Lord forgives, he writes paid in full. And even if the record of the
loan is still there, Yet never will justice be allowed to bring
it out because it says right there, paid in full. And once
it's been paid in full and signed by the creditor, that means the
debt is gone. And so far as your relationship
with the creditor is concerned, nothing can ever be done about
that debt again. It's gone. Now, when the creditor, if he
just simply writes on there, paid in full, without you giving
him any money, what he's writing is true. The debt was paid, just
not by you. It's being paid by the creditor.
He's absorbing the loss, which is the same thing as paying the
debt. but having written paid in full and put his name to it,
that debt is forgiven, it's canceled, it can never be enforced again. Blessed is he whose transgression,
the entirety of his sinful, wicked existence has been cleared from
the books. By the blood of Christ, it has
been written, paid in full. And there is not a hand in heaven,
earth, or hell that can erase that declaration. Paid. I've made a few loans over the
years with the bank. When you get it paid off, they
send you a piece of paper paid in full. And I think most of
the time, I've filed that away somewhere. I want to be able
to prove they said it's paid. Oh, you and I have, as it were,
that piece of paper, the gospel of Christ, written in the blood
of Christ. that bundles the entirety of
our sinful existence into one big transgression and says, paid
in full. Now, I'm not insensitive to the
troubles that people experience. I'm not insensitive to the fact
that we all want to enjoy the natural blessings of life. But is it not true, if your sins
are forgiven, you have a blessing greater than if you owned the
entire world? I guess that Jeff Bezos that
owns Amazon, or a good portion of Amazon, is the richest man
in the world now. I read he has 180 billion some,
that's his wealth. It's mostly in Amazon stock. Now, I can't say for sure, but
I never hear him talk about Christ or anything, so I think it would
be safe to say I am more blessed than him. When I was in Indian Africa,
I saw people live in squalor, some of them. It was kind of interesting. They
themselves would be cleaned up and well-groomed, but the places
they lived in and the meager amounts that they had. You and I would think that we
had been stricken by God or something if we had to live that way, and
yet they, among them who are believers, they are more blessed
than the richest man in the world. When our sister Sharon lay on
her couch just hours away from departing this world. Her heart
barely held together. She was more blessed than the
healthiest person alive. Her transgression was forgiven. But I like this, that the Spirit
of God who inspired David to write this, He didn't write it
just one way. He wanted to make sure we understood
the fullness of what was being told to us here. He says, blessed
is he whose transgressions are forgiven. Okay, well, he described
it another way, whose sin is covered. We try to cover our sin, don't
we? And the Bible says, he that covers his sin will not prosper.
And that's true. If we try to cover it, it's not
gonna work. When Adam and Eve sinned in the
Garden of Eden, it says they became, or they knew that they
were naked. Now that doesn't mean that they
suddenly realized they didn't have any clothes on. Well, they
knew that. What it means is they came to
see it as a shameful thing and a thing which needed to be hidden. They were no longer the glorious
creatures they were before sin. And now they were embarrassed
of what they looked like. So it says that they made some
clothing out of leaves. I'm sure when they put it together,
it looked pretty good. Nice green leaves, got their bodies all
covered up. But you know what happens when
you take leaves from a vine or a tree or whatever, it doesn't
take long, they wither up to nothing and fall off. And you
know, our quote, fig leaf righteousness that we use to cover our sins,
we put it on and no more, we turn around all at once, it's
like some old dry autumn leaf and crumbles up. And once again,
we're revealed to be sinful. We can't cover our sins. We try
to cover them up in church ceremonies. We try to wash them off by church
ceremonies. Can't be done. But it does not
say, blessed is he who has covered his sins. It says, blessed is
he whose sin is covered. I once read a fellow, trying
to make an argument that in Old Testament days, sins were only
covered up until the time of Christ when they were put away.
And he said, and you know, anything that's covered up can be uncovered. And my first thought was, here's
somebody just trying to act like he knows more than he really
does. And my next thought, though, was whether or not a thing can ever
be uncovered. depends on what it is that covered
it. Now, if you cover your sins with religious deeds, they will
be uncovered. If you cover your sins by refusing, excuse me, if you
cover your sins by refusing to confess them, they still will
be uncovered. It says that, speaks of God as
the one before whom all of us are laid bare. He knows us, He sees us. He knows what you know. He knows all that
you hide. He knows about all those things
that you might be a little bit afraid, maybe even terrified
that someday it'll come out. And folks will see you for what
you are. He knows all that and a whole lot more that you don't
even know about. He knows them. But He has covered them. He has covered them in the blood
of His Son. We looked at the word atonement
in our Bible class. The work of the Lord Jesus Christ
is a work of atonement. And the word normally translated
atone in the Old Testament essentially means to cover. Now, this is
not that word, but it carries the same sense. The sacrifice
of our Lord is a cover for our sins. In another place, the Lord says,
I have blotted out your transgressions. That means there was writing
and he covered it up. So you can't see it. Just like
when, you know, in those classified documents, they've got things
that are redacted, you know, and if you look at one of those,
you know, you see some words and all at once it's a big black
They've covered those words so you can't find out what's in
there. And boy, the lengths people will go to trying to find out
what's under there. God has covered our sins in the
blood of Christ. And there's no way you can hold
it up to the light and try to see the letters that are behind
it. You can't see through the blood. There's no way you can
reverse engineer the process as has happened sometimes when
they've used computers to redact it. Someone said, well, they
may have covered it up here. I'm gonna click this, now it's
uncovered. Can't do that with the blood of Christ. He atoned for our sins. He covered our sin with his blood,
such that God, the judge of all the earth, does not see them.
He's not offended by them. We are not separated from him
because of our sins. Instead, we are reconciled to
him and enjoy a peaceable and loving relationship as father
to child. as brother to brother, as husband
to wife. They're forgiven. They're covered. Blessed is the man whose sin
the Lord does not count against him. Now, this word here, we often
It carries the old idea, the theological term, impute. And
once again, it is a word that actually belongs in the world
of accounting. In the New Testament, of course,
it's a Greek word rather than a Hebrew word, but here's an
example of it. It says, our Lord was numbered,
counted among the transgressors. And that's the word that is often
translated as impute or reckoned. But the idea here is saying that
even though we have sin, God does not produce an indictment
of sin against us. He doesn't charge us with it.
That's what it's saying. We did it. We know we're guilty. But God, who is the judge of
all, neither makes an indictment nor accepts an indictment against
us. If the accuser of the brethren
comes in with an indictment against us, and we look at that bill
of indictment, and we see the charges laid against us, and
we're going, oh yeah, boy, that's right. And I could tell some
more that he missed. The accuser of the brethren,
the devil, he comes in and he's got this indictment and he's
ready to hand it to God. And God casts him out of heaven. Says, you have no right to be
here. You have no right to bring a charge against this one. There's only one who has a right
to bring charges against us. And he doesn't. Doesn't mean he's not aware that
we did it. but he's not going to take it to court. He's not
going to find us guilty. He's not going to punish us. It says over here, 2 Corinthians 5, Paul refers to this scripture. And verse 19, and I tell you, if you struggle with
a sense of guilt before God, and we all do from time to time,
some of us more than others, but if your sin weighs heavy
on you and brings you under a sense of condemnation, you commit this
scripture to memory. If you're a believer, you commit
this scripture to memory and it'll comfort your heart. God was reconciling the world
to himself in Christ, not counting men's sins against them. Now, this does not apply to every
individual in the world. It is with regard to his people,
and no one can lay claim to this truth as being applied to them,
unless they are a believer, then they know it is true. But here's
the thing, God in Christ Jesus was reconciling His people to
Himself. He was healing the breach made
by our sin. And how did He do it? He didn't
charge them with their sin. He forgave it. He covered it,
and He never charges us with it. Do you really believe that? Do you really believe that right
now, you, a sinner, that so far as God is concerned,
you aren't a sinner? So far as God is concerned, you've
never done anything wrong. So far as God is concerned, there
is on the record of your life a covering of red. He doesn't
see through it. Do you honestly believe that
God, who knows full well all that you have ever done, has never arrested you for it,
has never gone into his court and written, this man, this woman
is charged with this. Jacob, the name God used when
he wanted to describe the person Jacob or any of his descendants,
described them according to their sinfulness. And he said, I see no sin in
Jacob. Man, I can see sin in Jacob.
God doesn't. You mean that scoundrel? That
cheat? That deceiver? That guy who,
don't do a business deal with him. You'll always come out on
the wrong end with that. That fellow, God sees no sin in him or his
descendants. And we who believe Christ are
of that seed. He sees no sin in his people. And then he says, Blessed is
he whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered. Blessed
is the man whose sin the Lord does not count against him, in
whose spirit is no deceit. So well now, I'm out on that
one. Well, he's not talking about
the fact that all of us are by nature liars. He's talking about
those who have been spiritually reborn and are honest with God
about what they are. Let's go on. We'll see that.
Verse three, when I kept silent, my bones wasted away. Wasted
away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your
hand was heavy on me. My strength was sapped as in
the heat of summer." Now here is a believer, here's a man who
is blessed with the forgiveness of his transgression, whose sin
is covered, and whose sin the Lord is not counting against
him. But he's not being honest with God. Now, God never punishes
His people, but He does discipline them. He does chasten them. You
see, punishment, as the word suggests, it's connected to the
word punitive. It means making somebody pay
back, make somebody pay for what they've done. God's people never
pay a dime or a penny or whatever little amount of money you want.
They never pay anything for their sin. But they may feel the heavy hand
of their heavenly father as he works in them to create
honesty in their hearts. You see, this man's sins were
already covered, but he's trying to cover them again by not admitting
to them. And the Lord will not allow us
any covering for our sin, but the covering of Christ and his
blood. And what he will do to us, if
we try to cover our sin, he will enhance the guilt of it. If we try to hide our sin from
God and pretend that we're, you know, obeying him and being good
boys and girls, he's not gonna let us stay that way. Because
if we stay in that condition, we will drift off into self-righteousness. I don't know what particular
sin David was speaking about, but I do know when he committed
that sin with David, excuse me, with Bathsheba, he didn't tell
anybody about it. He didn't even go to God about
it. He covered it up. He tried to cover it up by having
Uriah come home and spend the night with his wife. Well, Uriah
wouldn't do that, because Bathsheba was pregnant. There had to be
some kind of explanation for that, you know. Well, then he
gave orders that when Uriah went back to the front, As a soldier,
he told the general, he said, in the heat of the battle, just
everybody back up and leave Uriah out there by himself. And he
had Uriah killed, and that way he thought, the truth of my sin
will die with him. It didn't, did it? The blood
of Uriah could not cover his sin. And we don't know how long
it was, but David went around with that sin, closed up in his
heart, thinking it would never be revealed. And he would say
his prayers, but he wasn't really praying. He would go through
the motions of his religion, but he wasn't worshiping. And
as this went on, you see, David is a man after God's own heart.
He loves God, he wants fellowship with God, but he's refusing that
fellowship by covering up his sin himself. And it goes on and
on, and God just puts his hand on him and keeps pushing him
down, keeps making him aware of his guilt, Makes him suffer. Why? Because God's mad? No, God's not mad. Because God's
trying to get even with him? No, God's not trying to get even
with him. God's breaking him. God's restoring him. And there
can be no restoration until the guilt is acknowledged. And what
does he say? Then verse five, then I acknowledge
my sin to you. I said, all right, God, you're
right. I did that. It was wrong. I sinned against
you. I acknowledge my sin to you and
I'm going to quit covering it up. I said, I will confess my transgressions
to the Lord and you forgave the guilt of my sin. David didn't say, I confessed
and told him, I'm never gonna do that again. He said, I just
told him, yes, I sinned. Nathan came, Nathan the prophet
came to David and uncovered his sin. And when he did, David said,
I have sinned against the Lord. And Nathan said, and the Lord
has forgiven your sin. Yeah? Now, is this true of you? Has your sin been forgiven through
Christ? Has your sin been covered by
the blood of Christ? Has God, the judge of all, refused
to charge you with your sins, then you are blessed. But if, with all that blessing, you let
a rebellious streak rise up in you in which you try to establish
your own righteousness by hiding your sin from God, God is going to say, do you really
think you can get away with that? Do you really think I'm going
to let you put up a wall between you and
me and you pretend that we're on
good terms right now? No. You'll be blessed, but you won't
feel blessed because your father will put his heavy hand on you,
and I don't know what it'll be like. You know, they used to
try to terrify me in church. You know, Al, he might kill you.
You know, well, that means he'd take you to heaven, you know?
Is that a real bad thing? I don't know what method is.
I know this. He doesn't have to make you sick. God has access
to your heart, and he can touch it. And he can make you grieve. He can make you feel the guilt
of your sin. He can make you keenly aware
of the fact that by your own rebellion, you have put up a
wall between you and God and you cannot enjoy sweet fellowship
with him. And you know what? Even at that
time, you are the most blessed person in the world because your
sin is forgiven. It is covered, and God's not
charging you with it, and He's not gonna let you get away with
trying to hide it from Him. He's going to expose it, And
then he's gonna say, I forgive it, I cover it, I never wrote
it down. And then you will not only be
blessed, you will feel blessed. And the more that we can enter
into that truth, the less we'll feel unblessed by anything that
goes on in this world. The man, the woman who can fully
lay hold of what that means can go to the doctor and get a terminal
diagnosis and say, I'm the most blessed man in the world. the one who can lay hold of that
blessed truth. Blessed is the man whose transgression
is forgiven. They can lay hold of that. They
can open their checkbook and see negative numbers and say,
I am still the most blessed person who ever lived. They can stare into the grave
of a loved one and say, I am blessed above measure. They can endure the conflicts
and troubles of this life. They can feel their body breaking
down as the years pass by. They can be brokenhearted by
wayward children. They can suffer all the things
that the world suffers and yet say, I am blessed. Praise the Lord, O my soul. and
all that is within me, praise his holy name. Praise the Lord,
O my soul, and forget not all his benefits, who forgives all
your sin. Anybody have anything to complain
about now? Oh, we'll think of something
before long, but right now, Have you got anything you can
complain about? Have you got anything to be worried about? Oh God grant that this truth would burn in us brightly all
the time. What peace comes from the knowledge
of this blessedness? Brothers and sisters, let us
never try to hide our sins from God. It's fine to hide them from
one another. You don't need to go telling everybody everything
you've done. But don't go to prayer and say,
oh mighty God, glorious art thou, and all that kind of stuff and
all the time. You've got this sin hidden away
in your heart. God's seen through all that religious
language you're blowing at him. And he's gonna deal with that.
And when he does, you'll break. You'll say, oh God, I've sinned.
And he'll say, I find no record of it. Everything's all right. All right. Lord be thanked for his grace,
right?