Sin Covered

There is a word in the first verse of this Psalm that the apostle Paul will later seize and build a doctrine on. "Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered." Covered. Not erased by our willpower. Not paid down by our resolutions. Covered — as a body is covered by a cloak in the cold, as a debt is covered when another hand sets the money on the counter. The Psalter has been quietly teaching the church the doctrine of justification by faith all along; here in Psalm 32 it puts the lesson on the front page. The blessed man is not the one whose sins are small. He is the one whose sins, however large, have been covered. And the covering is not his own.

David tries first the other way. Silence. Hiding. "When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long." Some of us know exactly what room of the soul he is describing — the locked closet where we keep the sin we will not name to anyone, least of all to God. The bones rot in that room. The summer feels like a long drought. And then comes verse five: "I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover my iniquity... and you forgave the iniquity of my sin." We did not cover it; He covered it. The blood of Christ has spread itself over what we finally brought into the light, and the silence of the locked closet has been broken by the welcome of a Father. Blessed is the one whose sin is covered — by the only covering that ever held.