Hide Your Face From My Sin

Psalm 51:9 3/14/18 (Create in Me a Clean Heart #9) HIDE YOUR FACE FROM MY SINS

You ever find yourself stuck on YouTube watching cat videos or dog videos? How about the Guilty Dog videos? Typically their owners come home and find that their dog has gotten into the garbage, so they turn on their phone and start asking the dog about it. It looks something like this:

Slide: Guilty Dog video

Now most scientists say that dogs don’t actually feel the emotion of guilt when they act that way and they “look guilty”. They are just responding to your dominance and disapproval with a submissive behavior. “I don’t know what you’re saying, but you’re mad about something, so I’m just going to look meek and let you know that you’re in charge.” But it is interesting, isn’t it, that in those circumstances your dog simply doesn’t want to make eye contact with you. They’d rather hide. It’s interesting because that is exactly the behavior that humans demonstrate as well, isn’t it? Do you remember Adam and Eve? When God called out to them after the garbage they got into, what did they do? The Bible says:

Slide: “Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden.” (Genesis 3:8 NIV)

Well, they tried to hide. You can’t of course, hide from God. And you can’t hide from the consequences of your sin. They couldn’t, and we can’t. As we go deeper now into King David’s Psalm of repentance, we see that he understood that. So instead of trying to cover up his sin or to hide from God himself, he asks God to do it.

Slide: “Hide your face from my sins and blot out all my iniquity.” (Psalms 51:9 NIV)

I pray O Lord that – somehow – there might be a way where my garbage isn’t constantly staring You in the face. And he’s repeating a little bit here from the start of this great prayer:

Slide: “…according to your great compassion blot out my transgressions. Wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin.” (Psalms 51:1–2 NIV)

And I pointed out then that David uses multiple words for his wrong-doing. He starts with “Transgressions”: that’s similar to the word we use in the Lord’s Prayer: “Trespass”. It means there was a clear line that you knew you shouldn’t cross, but you did it anyway. It wasn’t an accident, it wasn’t a mistake, it was a deliberate rebellion against God’s law and an attempt to write your own laws for your behavior. Doesn’t that sound familiar today? And here he repeats the word: “Iniquity.” That means doing what is not just, not right.

And doesn’t that fit when you think of what David did to Uriah, and Bathsheba, and to his country and to God?

And finally, he also used the more generic word: “Sin”, which brings us back to “guilt” and basically covers all wrongdoing. In other words, David was covering all the bases and making sure that everybody knew that he knew he was without excuse, his garbage was on display for everybody to see, and he was falling completely on the mercy of Almighty God… which is exactly where all of us need to be.

So we get all that and have been praying these things right along with David, but in verse 9 he brings something new into the picture: The face of God. When Moses led the people of Israel out of Egypt and met with God on top of Mt. Sinai, he asked for the presence of God and he was bold to ask to see God himself, face to face. And God answered him: “…you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.” (Exodus 33:20 NIV) That’s the face of God that David was afraid to see, the face of judgment and wrath against sin, the face of holiness that cannot look at sin without seeing justice done against it. See, God does not look at sin like the people who make the guilty dog videos and post them on YouTube. God doesn’t think it’s funny when He sees that we’ve gotten into the garbage of life again.

One of the most powerful scenes in the Passion of Christ for us is when Jesus is being questioned in the courtyard of the high priest, and Peter had snuck into the courtyard and was watching, but he was being questioned himself by some of the servant girls who accused him of being one of the disciples with Jesus. And he was denying it. And finally after he was questioned a third time, the Bible says: