Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 3563
“Blessed is he who transgression is forgiven; whose sin is covered.” Psalm 32:1.
MEN have, all of them, their own ideals of blessedness. Those ideals are often altogether contrary to the sayings which our Savior uttered in His Sermon on the Mount. They count those to be blessed who are strong in health, who are abundant in riches, who are honored with fame, who are entrusted with command, who exercise power—those, in fact, who are distinguished in the eyes of their fellow creatures! Yet I find not such persons called, “blessed,” in God’s Word, but oftentimes humble souls who might excite pity rather than envy, are congratulated upon the blessings which they are heirs to and which they shall soon enjoy. To the penitent there is no voice so pleasant as that of pardon! God, who cannot lie—who cannot err—tells us what it is to be blessed. Here He declares that, “blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven; whose sin is covered.” This is an oracle not to be disputed. Forgiven sin is better than accumulated wealth The remission of sin is infinitely to be preferred before all the glitter and the glare of this world’s prosperity. The gratification of creature passions and earthly desires is illusive—a shadow and a fiction—but the blessedness of the justified, the blessedness of the man to whom God imputes righteousness is substantial and true! How apt we are to say in our hearts, “Would God Adam had never fallen, for blessed must be the man who never sinned!” Could any man have attained to a perfect life which deserved commendation at God’s hands, blessedness would surely glow around him like a halo! At his feet the earth would blossom! In his nostrils the air would breathe sweet odors and his ears would be regaled with the sweet singing of birds—“content, indeed, to sojourn while he must, below the skies, but having there his home.” Such a man would feel and find the beams of brightness playing over the entire expanse of life and the thrill of gladness filling his heart with unbroken peace! The mountains and hills would break forth into singing and all the trees of the field would clap their hands, to multiply his inlets to happiness. But it is not of such imaginary bliss that our sacred Psalmist loves to sing, because, however true, it would be a mere mockery to tell us, who are so deeply fallen, of sweet delights that those, alone, could know who never fell! Our time of probation is over. We of mortal race were proved, tried and condemned long ago. It is not possible, now, for us to have the blessedness of uncorrupted innocence. And yet, thank God, blessedness is still possible to us, sinners though we are! We may hear the voice of the Ever Blessed of God pronouncing us to be blessed! His mercy can secure to us what our merit could never have earned, for so it is written, “Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven; whose sin is covered.” May everyone of us partake of this blessedness and know and rejoice in the full assurance of it!
Now the observations I address to you shall be very simple. But if they come home to us as true, and we can grasp them with a lively faith, they will be none the less gratifying to us because they seem common.
I. Evidently There Is Forgiveness with God—transgression May Be Forgiven
It is spoken of here, not as a flight of fancy, or a poetic dream. It is not an imaginary or a possible circumstance, but it is described as a fact that does occur, and has been the happy lot of some who knew its sweet relief and felt its strange felicity—“Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven.” Do take the words with all their weight of meaning, for though taught in our catechisms, embodied in our creeds, and admitted in our ordinary conversation on religious subjects, the belief in the forgiveness of sins is not always sincere and hearty. When the guilt of sin is felt and the burden of sin grows heavy—and when the wound stinks and is corrupt, as the Psalmist says—we are very apt to doubt the possibility of pardon, or, at least, of our own pardon. Under deep conviction of sin and a sense of the peculiar heinousness of our own guilt, there is a haze and more than a haze—a thick fog which hides the light of this Doctrine from our view! We think all men pardonable except ourselves. We can believe in the Doctrine of Forgiveness of Sin for blasphemers, for thieves, for drunkards, even for murderers—but there is some particular aggravation in the sins which we have committed thatappear to us to admit of no place of repentance, to find no promise of absolution. So, writing bitter things against ourselves, we become our own accusers and our own judges—and seem as if we would even become our own executioners! In our distraction we are thus prone to doubt that our transgression can be forgiven.
And, Beloved, I am not sure that those of us who are saved do not, sometimes, have misgivings about this grand Truth of God. Although I know that I am saved in Christ, yet at times when I look back upon my life, and especially dwell upon some dark blots which God has forgiven, but for which I can never forgive myself—the question comes across me, “Is it so? Is that really blotted out? It was so, crimson, So scarlet—can it be that the spot is entirely gone?”We know that being washed in the blood of Christ, we are whiter than snow, but it is not always that our faith can realize the forgiveness of sins while our heart and conscience are revolving the flagrancy of their guilt. It should not be so! We ought to be able to bear, at one and the same time, a vision of sin in all its horror and a full view of the Sacrifice for sin in all its holiness and acceptance to God! We ought to be able to feel that we are guilty, weak, lost and ruined, yet to believe that Christ is not only able to save to the very uttermost, but that He has saved us—we ought to be able to confess our crimes while we cast ourselves without a question into His blessed arms! I trust that we can do this, but, alas, a fly may find its way into the sweetest pot of ointment! A little folly may taint a good reputation and an unworthy doubt may tarnish the purest faith—so it may be profitable to remind even the forgiven man that forgiveness of sin is possible, that forgiveness of sin is presented in the Gospel as a Covenant Blessing, that forgiveness of sin is the possession of every Believer in Jesus, that his sin has gone entirely and irreversibly and that for him all manner of sin has been forgiven, blotted out and put away through the precious blood of Jesus, seeing that he has believed in God’s great propitiatory Sacrifice!
Perhaps there has strolled into this sanctuary tonight some professing Christian who, though a true child of God, has foully stained his profession. It may be, my dear Friend, that in your weakness, and to your shame—and to your confusion of face—you have forsaken God and have fallen into sin. You knew better, you who have instructed others, you who would have denounced such conduct with great severity in your fellow creatures, have fallen into the transgression, yourself, and now you are conscious that both the sin and its results are very bitter. You are smarting under the rod, your bones have been sorely broken and, perhaps, while I am speaking, it seems as if my words were putting them out of joint again where there had been a little healing! Beloved Brother or Sister in Christ, if your sin is a public sin, a grievous sin, a black and foul sin—if it is a sin which conscience cannot for a moment tolerate, a sin which God’s people must detest, even though it is in you who are dear to them, let me entreat you not to suffer the deceitfulness of sin to drive you to despair! In the anguish of remorse, do not shun the Mercy Seat! Doubt not that the Lord is still ready to pardon you. Let not Satan persuade you that you have sinned a sin which is unto death/No, come to the Cross of Christ! The blood of Jesus was real and it was really shed to wash away real sin, not sin in the abstract, as we talk of it here, but sin in the concrete as you have committed it—such sin as yours—no, yoursin, that special sin, that degrading sin, that sin which you are ashamed to mention! That sin which makes you now, even at the very thought of it, hang your head and blush. Know of a truth that your sin is pardonable! Do you ask me why I draw this inference from my text? I answer that it was penned by David when his crimes were complicated, his character corrupted and his case seemed beyond the possibility of a cure! “Deliver me from bloodguiltiness, O God!” Whatever your sin may have been, it can scarcely have exceeded his in atrocity! You know how he added sin to sin—you know how high he stood and how low he sunk—and you know how sweetly he could sing, “Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven; whose sin is covered.” It shines forth more clearly, now, than ever it shone before! Sin is pardonable! The Lord God is merciful and gracious! Hear the heavenly invitation, “Come, now, let us reason together; though your sins are as scarlet, they shall be white as wool; though they are red like crimson, they shall be whiter than snow.” Hear Jehovah’s voice out of Heaven, “I, even I, am He that blots out your iniquities for My name’s sake: I will not remember your sins.”
With such a peerless proclamation of perfect pardon we leave this point. We trust, however, that you will not leave it till you have proved its preciousness and its power.
Observe now that the pardon being proved, the—