outlines and suggestive comments.
There are various ways of endeavouring to cover sins. By denying them. A lie is a cover which men put over their sins to conceal them from others. They sin and deny the fact, they wrap up their crimes in falsehood. Thus Cain, Rachel, Joseph’s brethren, Peter, Ananias and Sapphira, endeavoured to hide their sins. By extenuating them. Men plead excuses. The influence of others, the power of circumstances, the moral weakness of the constitution. Extenuation is a common cover. By forgetting them. They endeavour to sweep them from the memory by revelry and mirth, by sensuality, worldliness, and intemperance.—Dr. David Thomas.
A child of God will confess sin in particular; an unsound Christian will confess sin by wholesale; he will acknowledge he is a sinner in general, whereas David doth, as it were, point with his finger to the sore: “I have done this evil” (Psa. li. 4); he doth not say I have done evil, but this evil. He points at his blood-guiltiness.—Watson.
Confession of sin will work a holy contrition and a godly sorrow in the heart (Psalm xxxviii. 18). Declaration doth breed compunction. Confession of sin is but the causing of sin to recoil on the conscience, which causeth blushing, and shame of face, and grief of heart. . . . Secret confession gives a great deal of glory to God. It gives glory to God’s justice. I do confess sin, and do confess God in justice may damn me for my sin. It gives glory to God’s mercy. I confess sin, yet mercy may save me. It gives glory to God’s omnisciency. In confessing sin I do confess that God knoweth my sin.—Christopher Love.
It is fearful for a man to bind two sins together when he is not able to bear the load of one. To act wickedness and then to cloak it, is for a man to wound himself and then go to the devil for a plaster. What man doth conceal God will not cancel. Iniquities strangled in silence will strangle the soul in heaviness. There are three degrees of felicity:—the first is, not to sin; the second, to know; the third, to acknowledge our offences. Let us, then, honour Him by confession whom we have dishonoured by presumption. . . . Sinfulness is a sleep, confession a sign that we are waked. Men dream in their sleeps, but tell their dreams waking. In our sleep of security we lead a dreaming life, full of vile imaginations; but if we confess and speak our sins to God’s glory, and our own shame, it is a token that God’s Spirit hath wakened us. . . . This is true, though to some a paradox; the way to cover our sins is to uncover them.—T. Adams.
Sin is in a man at once the most familiar inmate and the greatest stranger. . . . Although he lives in it, because he lives in it, he is ignorant of it. Nothing is more widely diffused or more constantly near us than atmospheric air; yet few ever notice its existence and fewer consider its nature. Dust, and chaff, and feather, that sometimes float up and down in it, attract our regard more than the air in which they float; yet these are trifles that scarcely concern us, and in this we live, and move, and have our being. . . . Such, in this respect, is sin. It pervades humanity, but, in proportion to its profusion, men are blind to its presence. Because it is everywhere, we do not notice it anywhere. . . . But the chief effort of the alienated must ever be to cover his sins from the eye of God. . . . All the wiles of the tempter, and all the faculties of his slave, are devoted to the work of weaving a curtain thick enough to cover an unclean conscience from the eye of God. Anything and everything may go as a thread to the web; houses and lands, business and pleasure, family and friends, virtues and vices, blessings and cursings—a hideous miscellany of good and evil—constitute the material of the curtain; and the woven web is walked over and over again with love and hatred, joys and sorrows, hopes and fears, to thicken the wall without, and to deepen the darkness within, that the fool may be able, with some measure of comfort, to say “in his heart, No God.”—Arnot.
Sin and shifting came into this world together. Sin and Satan are alike in this, they cannot abide to appear in their own colour. . . . We must see our sin to confession, or we shall see it to our confusion. . . . No man was ever kept out of heaven for his confessed badness; many are for their supposed goodness.—Trapp.
St. Gregory speaketh, “He that covereth his sin, doth not hide himself from the Lord, but hideth the Lord from himself, and that which he doth, is that himself may not see God, who seeth all things, not that he be not seen.”—Jermin.
For Homiletics on verse 14 see on chaps. [xii. 15], and on [xiv. 16], pages 271 and 365.
main homiletics of the paragraph.—Verses 15–17.