“Hide your face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.” -Psalm 51:9-10
While I was reading through Psalm 51 the other day, David’s Psalm of repentance for his sins regarding Bathsheba, this verse really struck me as speaking to exactly what I feel when my own sins are in front of me. Whenever I lose my temper with my wife, whenever I lie to cover something up, whenever I say or think things that are angry or lustful, and afterwards I reflect on what I’ve done, my first desire is that whoever knows what I did would strike it from their mind and never recall it happening again.
And this is even higher when dealing with God, who sees everything that I do, and so knows all the myriad of ways I fail him in one day alone. I think of all the things he has blessed me with, all the wonderful things that he is doing in my life and the amazing ways in which he has been revealing himself to me, and then I think about the way in which I have totally denied everything that he has shown me by behaving in the way I did, and I just want him to forget about it all. I want him to turn his eyes away from the way in which I have dishonored him, to not dwell on the fact that I have just spit in his face when I knew all along what I was commanded to do. And I fear that knowing my sin he will remove himself from me and his glorious presence from my heart (knowing that I can’t lose my salvation, but that I could lose the active voice of his Spirit in my life), so I long that he will cast away my sin while still keeping me close.
Yet I am comforted by his Word that he will. I am comforted that through the sacrifice of Jesus, God has “cancel[ed] the record of debt” against me by “nailing it to the cross” with Christ (Colossians 2:14), that not being in part but in the whole of all sins I will ever commit. It is such a fearful thing to stand knowing that I have willingly disobeyed the God who went to such great lengths to redeem my soul, and so I am thankful that his Word reveals that, by turning in repentance, that he will hide his face from my sins, that through the power of Christ’s blood which flowed from the Cross I can be renewed and restored, like Peter (John 18:17, 21:19) and like David (2 Samuel 12:13), and that by the cleansing of this defilement (2 Corinthians 7:1) I may be grown and strengthened by his grace (2 Timothy 2:1).
