Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2551
“O God, You know my foolishness; and my sins are not hid from You ” Psalm 69:5.
IT seems, then, that the best of men have a measure of foolishness in them and that, sometimes, that foolishness shows itself. How gentle and tender ought we to be with others who are foolish when we remember how foolish we are, ourselves! How sincerely ought we to rejoice in Christ, as made of God unto us wisdom, when we see the folly that is bound up in our hearts and which too often shows itself in our talk and in our acts! Yet while the best of men have folly in them, it is one of the marks of a good man that he knows it to be folly and that he is willing to confess his sin before God. “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” If we stand as the Pharisee stood in the Temple and cry, “God, I thank You that I am not as other men are,” we shall go home, as the Pharisee did, without the justification which comes from God. It is the truly good man who stands afar off with the publican and cries, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner,” and he, also, shall go to his house “justified rather than the other.”
There is one solemn thought which deeply impresses the man who is right at heart, but who sees his own foolishness and sin and mourns it—and that thought is that God sees it—and sees it more perfectly than he sees it, himself. His own sight of it makes him repent and humble himself. And his knowledge of God’s sight of it helps him to that repentance and humiliation. God sees everything concerning every man, but the most of men care not about God seeing them. They do not give it so much as a passing thought. It is the gracious man, the child of God who, from a broken heart, cries out, “O God, You know my foolishness; and my sins are not hid from You.” And this it is that makes a Christian man so greatly value the precious blood of Christ and the perfect righteousness which Jesus Christ has worked out, albeit that Omniscience still perceives sin, yet Justice does not perceive it.
God knows we are sinners, but He imputes to all Believers the righteousness of Christ and looks upon them as they are in Him. He cleanses us in the precious blood of Jesus so that we are clean in His sight and, “accepted in the Beloved.” What a wonderful Atonement is that which hides from God that which cannot be hidden, so that God does not see what, in another sense, He must always see—and forgets what it is impossible for Him, in another sense, ever to forget! In a just and judicial way, God casts our sin behind His back and ceases to see iniquity in His people because they are clean, every whit, through washing in the—
“Fountain filled with blood, Drawn from Immanuel’s veins.”
Now, looking at our text, I am going to call attention to the great Truth of the Omniscience of God, desiring that each one of us may say from our heart, “O God, You know my foolishness; and my sins are not hid from You.”
I. First, concerning God’s knowledge of man’s sin, I remark that IT MUST BE SO. I am not going to argue, but just to talk a little to set this Truth of God before you with greater assurance of certainty.
God must know our foolishness, for, first, He is infinite in knowledge. We cannot conceive of a God whose knowledge is limited. That condition belongs to the finite, the creature, but not to the Infinite, the Creator, the great First Cause of everything! God knows all the past, all the present and all the future. He knows all the things that might have been and are not. He knows what might have come out of certain germs and what yet may come, which at the present seems to be far remote. All knowable things must be known to the Most High—the very Nature of God implies it and, therefore, He must know my foolishness, for I know something of it myself—He must know much more than I know and my sins are not hid from him, for they are not altogether hidden from myself. God must know perfectly what I only perceive in part, though that partial perception is terrible to my own heart. Yes, the infinite knowledge of God is an absolute certainty and, consequently, His knowledge of the folly and sin of every heart is beyond all question.
Moreover, God is everywhere present At all times, He is in every place and, therefore, our foolishness and sin must be known to Him. It is not merely that you committed a folly or a sin and that it was reportedto God. No, but He was there during the doing of it. What? Though the blinds were drawn and the doors were fast closed? Yet HE was there and all through the sin He stood by you and observed your every thought and every movement! There is no darkness that hides from Him, nor any other form of screen that can be used to shut out the glances of the eyes of the Eternal. He does not see from a distance, but He is on the spot. You cannot conceive of a place where God is not, for He fills all space! There could no more be a boundary to His existence than to His knowledge and, therefore, we are sure that our text is true, “O God, You know my foolishness; and my sins are not hid from You.”