^ Letters of Thomas Erskine of Linlatlien, i. 879.
^e THE BEATITUDE OF FORGIVENESS
The great question before the mind of the Psahnist is how the burden of sin may be removed not from the Divine side, but from the human, and so he states one necessary condition to that removal — confession : " I said, I will confess my trans- gressions unto the Lord ; and thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin " (ver. 5). Sin must be confessed before it is removed. Till a man confesses his sins he hugs them to himself, and refuses to part with them. When he truly confesses them he puts them away by an act of will. Not till then are they removed. God cannot forgive the man who is impenitent, for that man will presently sin again. He cannot forgive, much as He longs so to do, because there is an obstacle in the way. Repentance removes that obstacle ; it opens the door to the exercise of God's forgiving grace. The moment we repent we are pardoned.
^ Excellent as repentance may be in itself, and quite inde- pendent of all results, yet the one ultimate test of it is amendment — amendment, and nothing else. We have done wrong and are sorry for it. What is the test of the value of our sorrow ? Our doing the same thing no more. We desire to be forgiven. We pray to God for that forgiveness. What is to us the certain seal that He has heard our prayer, and by the power of His Son's Cross has finally forgiven us? The seal is tliat we have been enabled to sin so no more. Put it how you will, you must always come back to that. I do not say that no repentance is wortli anything which is followed by further falls. God forbid. I do not say that God never forgives until He also makes the sin impossible. God forbid. But I do say that to ns — to us there is no other proof either of the genuineness of our repentance, or of the certainty of God's forgiveness.^
II.
The Blessedness of Forgiveness.
In all the benedictions of the Bible the thing brought prominently into notice is not the outward circumstances but the inner state or life of the man who is blessed. Blessedness does not depend on outward possessions, such as worldly goods, or lands, or hif^h birth, or erudite culture. Indeed, there are words of Christ which suggest that they who stand possessed of these ' Archbishop Temple.
PSALM XXXII. I, 2 ^^
things will find it harder to enter that Paradise which has not yet faded from our world, and to pass through the gates of that city which are before our eyes, if only they were opened to discern them. When He repeated the Sermon of the Mountain-Heights and of the Dawn to the multitudes that stood breathless beneath its spell, He said, " Woe unto you that are rich. Woe unto you that are full. Woe unto you, ye that laugh." He did not mean that such would be necessarily excluded, but that entrance into blessedness would be hard for them.
1. The forgiven soul enjoys the blessedness of deliverance. The very essence of the benediction is the exquisite sense of trans- gression forgiven, sin covered. This royal sinner knew the felicity in its full range. Through all those weary months of sullen silence which followed David's murder and adultery, he was a most miserable man. He knew that his Divine Judge had not pardoned him. He was conscious all the time of lying under the withering condemnation of God. He felt that his iniquity lay naked and open to the eye of Him with whom he had to do. He might to some extent conceal his fault from his fellows, but in all its hideous enormity it was exposed to the gaze of the Searcher of hearts. Could the king have any jeace or comfort under that continual sense of the silent sentence of Heaven on his conduct ? 0 what a joyful man he was when the grace of God enabled him to confess, " I have sinned," and the sweet response came, " The Lord also hath put away thy sin " ! When he contrasted the sordid wretchedness of the preceding months with his condition, now that the springs of his better nature had found vent, would he not feel that he was in the seventh heaven ? It was not enough for him to say that his transgression was forgiven : he had to supplement that with this other word, that his sin was covered, in order to utter fully his felicity. His Judge had pardoned him, how much was that ! But was it not even more that his Heavenly Father had blotted out his foul guilt, so that it should be never seen or remembered more ?
^ Whatever I have studied of the Epistles of St. Paul, and this has been for many years, and with as much yearning eager- ness and breathless awe as I have felt in nothing except the words of the Lord Jesus, has tended to the confirmation of the
7^ THE BEATITUDE OF FORGIVENESS
old evangelic interpretation of them, in which perhaps I should not have seen my way so clearly but for their accordance with my own "experience." All that unutterable sense of sin, that terrible deadly fight with evil, those strivings of the Spirit I went through, and more ; all that deliverance, that liberty of the Gospel, that being justified by faith in Christ, that peace with God, that shedding abroad by the Holy Ghost of the love of God in the heart, that coming in of the " new creation " ; all the shades and lights of experience since then. Twenty-three years of such experience, which inwardly is as great and as simple a fact as the facts of seeing and hearing, make me unable to receive, even to perceive, any other interpretation. And I have met witli such scores and hundreds who strike hands with me in life and death on these great matters that it is settled " without controversy " to me.^