(with Psa_19:12):--Many think that Jesus came into the world to forgive our sins; which is true, but it is only a part of the truth; for the New Testament reveals that He came to save us from our sins. Forgiveness is a great thing; but cleansing from sin is greater. Any kindly hearted man can forgive an injury; but only an omnipotent God can wash the love of sin from our nature. The Bible reveals that God has both the will and the power to give a clean heart.
I. It is a needful prayer. “Cleanse Thou me from secret faults.”
1. Do not our secret thoughts need cleansing?
2. Our secret imaginations need to be cleansed. Children build fairy castles in the air, and tenant them with the pure, the brave, and the true; but as we grow older, our airy castles begin to be peopled with those whose actions are tainted with sin; and when we arrive at manhood, the unconverted soul builds castles in its imagination in which iniquity abounds without any obstacle to hinder it.
3. Our secret desires need cleansing. If there were no desire for sin, there would be no transgression; and we, therefore, need to pray continually, “Lord, cleanse my sinful desires! Let my longings be washed from their bias to transgression!”
4. Our secret habits need cleansing. When a man yields to a sinful habit it is difficult to break it off. You need superhuman power; and that power shall be granted to all who sincerely ask of God. The sculptor who forms a figure in marble does it gradually by thousands of chisel strokes; and in the same way, when you are forming your soul either for goodness or badness, it is a gradual work. As no man is made an angel in a moment, so no man is made a devil in a moment. It is a work of time. It is first a thought, then a picture in the mind, then a desire, then a hesitating step, and afterwards the boldness of habit. It is hard work battling against a world inclined to sin; it is more difficult to resist a loved one who tempts us; but the hardest battle ever man can fight in this world is when he struggles against his soul’s inclination to think or do evil. And I feel persuaded that no man can cleanse his secret faults without the help of God. But however bad your secret sins may be, you can be purified. Is there anything too hard for the Lord? Christ has unfurled the flag of liberty, and His Spirit now calls on every man who is bound by sin to cry to Him for life!
II. Unbelief hinders us from being cleansed. Some men say, “Nobody can be saved from all their secret faults!” But if the Lord say He will cleanse us from all our iniquity, is it not a wicked thing to doubt it? Perhaps, somebody remarks, “Well, I used to think I might be cleansed from sin, and I tried, but failed every time.” Now let me ask you a question. Were you not a great deal happier when you were seeking to ,conquer your secret faults than you are now? You reply, “Yes, I was happier; but why did I not succeed?” A man who is trying to crush down the sin of his heart is happier than he who is content with the slavery of sin. If he do not succeed, the reason is that he is trying to do for himself what cannot be done without God. Ask the Lord to cleanse. It is your work to bring your soul in faith and prayer to Him, and it is His work to cleanse it.
III. How does the Lord cleanse us? The Jews in times of old were cleansed by being sprinkled with the blood of a beast. But this is not the way in which we are cleansed from secret faults. The Spirit of Christ can enter our souls and can cleanse us from sin. (W. Birch.)
A threefold disease and a twofold cure
Jeremiah was a prisoner in the palace of the last King of Judah. The long, national tragedy had reached almost the last scene and the last act. The besiegers were drawing their net closer round the doomed city. The prophet never faltered in predicting its fall, but he as uniformly pointed to a period behind the impending ruin, when all should be peace and joy. His song was modulated from a saddened minor to triumphant jubilation. The exiles shall return, the city shall be rebuilt, its desolate streets shall ring with hymns of praise, and the voices of the bridegroom and the bride. The land shall be peopled with peaceful husbandmen, and white with flocks. There shall be again a King upon the throne; sacrifices shall again be offered. That fair vision of the future begins with the offer of healing and cure, and with the exuberant promise of my text. The first thing to be dealt with was Judah’s sin; and that being taken away, all good and blessing would start into being, as flowerets will spring when the baleful shadow of some poisonous tree is removed.
I. A threefold view of the sad condition of humanity. Observe the recurrence of the same idea in ourtext in different words. “Their iniquity whereby they have sinned against Me.”. . . “Their iniquity whereby they have sinned, and whereby they have transgressed against Me.” You see there are three expressions which roughly may be taken as referring to the same ugly fact, but yet not meaning quite the same--“iniquity, or iniquities, sin, transgression.” Suppose three men are set to describe a snake. One of them fixes his attention on its slimy coils, and describes its sinuous gliding movements. Another of them is fascinated by its wicked beauty, and talks about its livid markings, and its glittering eye. The third thinks only of the swift-darting fangs, and of the poison-glands. They all three describe the snake, but they describe it from different points of view. And so it is here. “Iniquity,” “sin,” “transgression” are synonyms to some extent, but they do not cover the same ground. They look at the serpent from different points of view. First, a sinful life is a twisted or warped life. The word rendered’ “iniquity,” in the Old Testament, in all probability, literally means something that is not straight; that is bent, or, as I said, twisted or warped. That is a metaphor that runs through a great many languages. I suppose “right” means the very same thing--that which is straight and direct; and I suppose that “wrong” has something to do with “wrung”--that which has been forcibly diverted from a right line. We all know the conventional colloquialism about a man being “straight,” and such-and-such a thing being “on the straight.” All sin is a twisting of the man from his proper course. Now there underlies that metaphor the notion that there is a certain line to which we are to conform. The schoolmaster draws a firm, straight line in the child’s copybook; and then the little unaccustomed hand takes upon the second line its attempt, and makes tremulous, wavering pot-hooks and hangers. There is a copyhead for us, and our writing is, alas! all uneven and irregular, as well as blurred and blotted. There is a law, and you know it; and you carry in yourself--I was going to say, the standard measure, and you know whether, when you put your life by the side of that, the two coincide. This veryprophet has a wonderful illustration, in which he compares the lives of men whohave departed from God to the racing about in the wilderness of a wild dromedary “entangling her ways,” as he says, crossing and recrossing, and getting into a maze of perplexity. Ah! is that not something like your life? All sin is deflection from the straight road, and we all are guilty of that. Let me ask you to consult thestandard that you carry within yourselves. It is easy to imagine that a line is straight. But did you ever see the point of a needle under a microscope? However finely it is polished, and apparently regularly tapering, the scrutinising investigation of the microscope shows that it is all rough and irregular. The smallest departure from the line of right will end, unless it is checked, away out in the regions of darkness beyond. The second of them, rendered in our version “sin,” if I may recur to my former illustration, looks at the snake from a different point of view, and itdeclares that all sin misses the aim. The meaning of the word in the original is simply “that which misses its mark.” Now, there are two ways in which thatthought may be looked at. Every wrong thing that we do misses the aim, if youconsider what a man’s aim ought to be. “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him for ever.” That is the only aim which corresponds to our constitution, to our circumstances. And so, whatever you win, unless you win God, you havemissed the aim. Anything short of knowing Him and loving Him, serving Him, being filled and inspired by Him, is contrary to the destiny stamped upon us all. Then there is another side to this. The solemn teaching of this word is notconfined to that thought, but also opens out into this other, that all godlessness, all the low, sinful lives that so many of us live, miss the shabby aim which they set before themselves. I do not believe that any man or woman ever got as much good, even of the lowest kind, out of a wrong thing as they expected to get when they ventured on it. If they did they got something else along with it that took all the gilt off the gingerbread. The drunkard gets his pleasurable oblivion, his pleasurable excitement. What about the corrugated liver, the palsied hand, the watery eye, the wrecked life, the broken hearts at home, and all the other accompaniments? There is an old story that speaks of a knight and his company who were travelling through a desert, and suddenly beheld a castle into which they were invited, and hospitably welcomed. A feast was spread before them, and they each ate and drank his fill. But as soon as they left the enchanted halls they were as hungry as before they sat at the magic table. That is the kind of food that all our wrong-doing provides for us. “He feedeth on ashes,” and hungers after he has fed. And now, further, there is yet another word here, carrying with it important lessons.Theexpression which is translated in our text “transgressed,” literally means“rebelled.” And the lesson of it is, that all sin is, however little we think it, a rebellion against God. That introduces a yet graver thought than either of the former has brought us face to face with. Behind the law is the Lawgiver. When we do wrong, we not only blunder, we not only go aside from the right line, we lift up ourselves against our Sovereign King. Sins are against God; and, dear friends, though you do not realise it, this is plain truth, that the essence, the common characteristic, of all the acts which, as we have seen, are twisted and foolish, is that in them we are setting up another than the Lord our God to be our ruler. We are enthroning ourselves in His place. Does not that thought make all these apparently trivial and insignificant things terribly important? Treason is treason, no matter what the act by which it is expressed. It may be a little thing to haul down a union-jack from a flagstaff, or to tear off a barn-door a proclamation with the royal arms at the top of it, but it may be rebellion. And if it is, it is as bad as to turn out a hundred thousand men in the field, with arms in their hands.
II. The twofold bright hope which comes through this darkness. “I will cleanse . . . I will pardon.” If sin combines in itself all these characteristics that I have touched upon, then clearly there is guilt, and clearly there are stains; and the gracious promise of this text deals with both the one and the other. “I will pardon.” What is pardon? Do not limit it to the analogy of a criminal court. When the law of the land pardons, or rather when the administrator of the law pardons, that simply means that the penalty is suspended. But is that forgiveness? Certainly it is only a part of it, even if it is a part. What do you fathers and mothers do when you forgive your child? You may use the rod or you may not; that is a question of what is best for the child. Forgiveness does not lie in letting him off the punishment; but forgiveness lies in the flowing to the child, uninterrupted, of the love of the parent’s heart. And that is God’s forgiveness. Do you need pardon? Do you not? What does conscience say? What does the sense of remorse that sometimes blesses you, though it tortures, say? I know not any gospel that goes deep enough to touch the real sore place in human nature, except the Gospel that says to you and me and all of us, “Behold the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world!” But forgiveness is not enough, for the worst results of past sin are the habits of sin which it leaves within us; so that we all need cleansing. Can we cleanse ourselves? Let experience answer. Did you ever try to cure yourself of some little trick of gesture, or manner, or speech? And did you not find out then how strong the trivial habit was? You never know the force of a current till you try to row against it. You may have the stained robe washed and made lustrous white in the blood of the Lamb. Pardon and cleansing are our two deepest needs. (A. Maclaren, D. D.)
Our sins swallowed up
You see the Thames as it goes sluggishly down through the arches, carrying with it endless impurity and corruption You watch the inky stream as it pours along day and night, and you think it will pollute the world. But you have just been down to the seashore, and you have looked on the great deep, and it has not left a stain on the Atlantic. No, it has been running down a good many years and carried a world of impurity with it, but when you go to the Atlantic there is not a speck on it. As to the ocean, it knows nothing about it. It is full of majestic music. So the smoke of London goes up, and has been going up for a thousand years. One would have thought that it would have spoiled the scenery by now; butyou get a look at it sometimes. There is the great blue sky which has swallowed up the smoke and gloom of a thousand years, and its azure splendour is unspoiled. It is wonderful how the ocean has kept its purity, and how the sky has taken the breath of the millions and the smoke of the furnaces, and yet it is as pure as the day God made it. It is beautiful to think that these are only images of God’s great pity for the race. Our sins, they are like the Thames, but, mind you, they shall be swallowed up--lost in the depths of the sea, to be remembered against us no more. Though our sins have been going up to heaven through the generations, yet, though thy sins are as crimson, they shall be as wool, as white as snow. (W. L. Watkinson.)
I will pardon all their iniquities.
The pardon of sin
I. The pardon of sin which Almighty God, in infinite mercy and grace, is now offering to sinners in the Gospel, is a full pardon--that is, it comprehends andextends to every sin, however sinful, and includes all sins, however numerous. It was foretold in ancient prophecy that when the Messiah should come “to make His soul an offering for sin,” He should, by His atoning death, “finish transgressions, make an end of sins, make reconciliation for iniquity, and bring in everlasting righteousness.” Our blessed Saviour having come, as it wee thus written of Him, and having suffered the “just for us the unjust,” the Gospel testimony of His vicarious sufferings declares that His expiatory death has made a full and perfect atonement for all the sins of His people--that He has thereby fully reconciled them to God--that “His blood cleanseth them from all sin”--that “He is able to save to the uttermost all who come unto God through Him.”
II. The pardon proclaimed in the Gospel is free--it is vouchsafed by an infinitely gracious God, suspended on no condition whatever to be performed by the sinner as the meritorious ground of its bestowal. It is this absolute freeness of the forgiveness of sin proclaimed in the Gospel that makes it worthy of an infinitely gracious God’s bestowal, and good news to poor, miserable, and wretched sinners. Were it otherwise, it could be no rest to an awakened and alarmed conscience--to a weary and heavy sin-laden soul.
III. The pardon proclaimed to sinners in the Gospel is Everlasting. This makes it a complete pardon. (A. M‘Watt.)
