In Peter Allison's sermon, 'The Balm for Sin Sick Souls,' the paradox of sin is explored: the sins we try to cover, God uncovers, but those we confess, God covers with mercy. The central theme is that pride drives us to conceal our sins, which is ultimately futile. Various societal examples are given, including how sins are renamed or minimized to justify actions. Confession, however, is portrayed as a public acknowledgment of sin that glorifies God. The sermon also delves into the Hebrew grammar of 'confession,' highlighting its dual meaning of responding with praise and acknowledgement. It emphasizes that repentance is not a prerequisite for salvation but is a grace that follows faith in Christ. The sermon critiques the justice system for covering sins and calls for open acknowledgment. Ultimately, it underscores that true transformation and forgiveness come only through God's grace and the righteousness of Christ.

Proverbs 28. I'd like to read beginning at verse 13 as we move on from our look at the first 12 verses. The first 12 verses begin in verse 13. He who covers his sins will not prosper, But whoever confesses and forsakes them will have mercy. Happy is the man who is always reverent, but he who hardens his heart will fall into calamity.

Like a roaring lion and a charging bear is a wicked ruler over poor people. A ruler who lacks understanding is a great oppressor, but he who hates covetousness will prolong his days. A man burdened with bloodshed will flee into a pit, let no one help him. Whoever walks blamelessly will be saved, but he who is perverse in his ways will suddenly fall." The word of the Lord is forever settled in the heavens. Let's pray.

Almighty Heavenly Father, thank you that your word is sure. Thank you that you have preserved it these thousands of years to us. Every word, every jot, every tittle, Lord you have preserved and you have said that it will not pass away until it is all fulfilled. We ask, Lord, for your blessing upon our study of Your Word this morning, upon our hearing of it. I ask that You would sanctify my sinful lips and set them apart this morning to proclaim Your holiness and Your grace in Christ.

Amen. Christ. Amen. Well it is one of the great truths or paradoxes of the Christian faith that the sins that we try to cover, God uncovers, and the sins that we confess and uncover, God covers. That's the message this morning.

That's the message. That the sins that we uncover in confession, God covers. God gives us mercy. He who covers his sins will not But whoever confesses and forsakes them will have mercy. Why would anyone cover their sin if by uncovering it, God would cover it.

What God does, stands forever. Why What God says indoors forever. Why would anyone cover their sin? For God to uncover it. When they could uncover it, and God would cover it in mercy.

Well the answer is pride. Pride. Pride is why we cover our sin. We want to be thought better than we actually are. Pride was the sin that caused Satan to stumble.

He wanted to exalt himself and be as God, to be God. And we do the same. We want to be the standard of what's right and wrong. We want to be the standard of truth. And we think we can do that by concealing our sin, even when we academically know that it won't succeed.

Pride It's blinding that way. It's blinding. And there are all sorts of excuses that we can use to justify what we want to do. How do we cover our sin? Well, one way we can cover it is to give it another name.

Call it something else. When two people hated each other, wanted to kill each other, they could challenge them to a duel. They could justify their murder by calling it duel, a duel. They could shoot each other. That's covering sin by just giving it another name.

Let's not call it murder Let's all agree that it's called a duel if we all agree that it's called a duel then and we don't have to treat it like murder Yes, that was there was a time in this country where that was the prevailing thinking. Not by everybody, but many. Today We have that same kind of thing with the murder of the unborn. We don't call it murder of the unborn or just murder. We call it abortion or some other word.

We give it another name. It becomes a right to our own body. Or fornication becomes love. We don't fornicate. Somebody will say, I love her.

Some man will say, I love her. No, it's fornicating. It's not love. They're very different. Very different.

So we can give our sins another name. We can even maybe give them a good name. We can justify our sins by telling ourselves it's something else than what it is. We can forget about our sins or we can try to forget about our sins. We can just put them out of our minds.

People say, well, guilt, that's just all a construct of your mind. You just need to get rid of that. Just forget about it. And then you can get rid of your guilt. That doesn't work either.

We can't banish our thoughts about it. The people that do have a hardened conscience, seared conscience, They have for so long told themselves that their sin is not a sin. They have so long put it out of their mind that they may have ceased to think much about it. But it doesn't change the fact that it's a sin. We might persuade ourselves that we're happy instead.

Do you ever pretend to be happy? Maybe just to spite somebody? Pretend that it's not a problem. So we try to persuade ourselves that we're really doing just fine, it's not a problem. Or Maybe we blame it on somebody else.

It's another favorite. We can cover our sin by blaming it on somebody else. Maybe we blame a physical weakness that we have, an illness. Maybe we blame our ancestors. How many people have heard that one or maybe used it.

Well, I'm angry and I'm easily provoked because I'm Italian or whatever it might be. Blame it on something else. Blame it on our background. Well, that's the way my mother was. That's the way my father was.

That's why I'm this way. Or another one is the devil. The devil made me do it. Satan, He's the one. He's the one that made me do it.

He moved me to do this. Well, maybe he did. That doesn't mitigate our responsibility one iota. One iota at all. We were the ones who were moved by Satan.

We were the ones who allowed ourselves to be persuaded. It was our own, James says, it was our own desires within us, our own lusting. Lusting is just a coveting, wanting of something. It was our own desires. The King James has a big word for that called concupiscence.

We don't hear that so much, but if you read in the King James, that's what it calls it, concupiscence. It's a sin, The desire for something. There's a lot of confusion on that today. A lot of confusion. People cover the sin of homosexuality by saying, oh, well, yes, I have those desires, but I don't act on them.

I'm celibate. Well, that's good that you're celibate in a physical sense, but the desire for sin is itself a sin. That's what the 10th commandment is all about. Coveting. Coveting is desire.

You shall not desire your neighbor's wife. You shall not desire your neighbor's house. You shall not desire your neighbor's manservant or His maidservant or His ox nor His ass nor anything that is your neighbors shall not desire them." And so for somebody to say, well I desire relationships with a sexual relationship with somebody who I'm not married to or somebody who is of the same gender is to sin. Brothers and sisters, we need to be clear about that. Very clear.

The desire to sin is itself a sin. That's the tenth commandment. We don't have to extrapolate or interpolate or take God's word and reason from it, which sometimes we do need to do and it's a good thing. In this case it's one of the 10 commandments. We shall not desire to sin.

That's a sin. But that's one way that we can seek to cover our sin. It's what Adam and Eve tried to do, blame somebody else. Remember, God confronted them and Adam blamed Eve and Eve blamed the serpent. God blamed them all and God brought his judgment upon them all, the man, the woman, and the serpent.

Sometimes we might try to cover our sin by minimizing it. Minimizing it. It's not as bad as it could be. Maybe we say, well it's just the first time. I've never done this before.

This is the very first time I've looked at pornography. This is the very first time I did this. Or maybe we say that we rarely do it, we rarely do it, only once in a while. Or maybe we say we didn't mean to do it, try and take away the heinousness of it, just of it, it's to minimize it. We might also even lie to cover our sin, say something that isn't true, and then commit further sins.

Well, all of these ideas, all of these ways of covering our sin are as good or as useless as the fig leaves that Adam and Eve tried to cover themselves with. They don't work. They don't work. He who covers his sins will not prosper. Nobody that is under the wrath of God, and the condemnation of God, justly so for their sin can in any sense prosper.

Even if they come into great wealth through, in this life, it will only be a judgment against them. It will be a wealth that they didn't use. It will be tools that they didn't use for the kingdom of God. It will be a means of drawing them into greater and greater sin. Those people who have great wealth so that they don't need to work are without Christ, they're tempted into all manner of sin.

That people who have to work, they're not any worse, but the diligence of having to work and having to meet a schedule in order to be able to eat, in order to be able to eat in order to be able to provide for people that are depending on you that By itself can restrain a lot of sin people who have no need to work They don't have to schedule the meat they can get up whenever they want do whatever they want and still have plenty to eat often are tempted to grosser and greater vile sins. But those who cover their sin, Solomon says, will not prosper. It's exactly backwards. It's exactly backwards from what we in our sinful self want to convince ourselves. We want to say, well, if we cover it, then people will think we're good and then we'll be alright.

And if we uncover it, then people will think we're bad and that won't be good for us. It's exactly the opposite. Those who confess their sins find mercy and God covers them. Those who try to cover their own sin fruitlessly, uselessly, don't prosper. The heart of our criminal justice system today is all about covering sin.

And it's a sad reality. The duty of a defense lawyer in our criminal justice system is to cover the sin of his client by any way possible. Well, maybe they'll say any legal way possible, but they'll stretch that quite far, to cover the sin of their client, to get their client off the hook, to keep him from being, or her from being convicted. In fact, it's an ethical failure, according to the American Bar Association, the Texas Bar Association. It's an ethical failure for a defense attorney not to do everything that he could possibly do to cover the sin of his defendant.

That's a travesty of justice by the very system that God ordained to bring justice. The purpose of a defense attorney ought to be to ensure that everybody, that his client, receives a fair trial. That means that the witnesses, that means that every fact is established by a plurality of witnesses, especially if it's a death penalty case. That means that that witnesses are cross-examined. That means that the evidence is allowed to be presented and all of these things are actually absent.

In most, many trials, evidence is blocked from being presented. Witnesses are not allowed to be called. I know one case right here just down the road. The secretary, a lawyer in the secretary of state's office was being called as a witness. And that was nixed by his boss, the Secretary of State.

He wasn't going to have him witnessing and testifying to anything. That's covering, seeking to cover sin. The criminal justice system that we have, our courts, ought to be about uncovering sin. They ought to be about bringing the witnesses forward who will testify about what was done and about ensuring that there's cross-examination of those witnesses, about ensuring that there's fairness in the proceedings, that the proceedings are done lawfully. That's what it should be about, and that's what a lawyer should be for.

He should be the protection to ensure that other people are not oppressing the client. Even if they're guilty, they deserve to have the evidence heard. The people deserve that the evidence be heard. And that the case be ruled openly. No secret convictions.

No star chambers. That's covering sin. It's either covering the sin of the defendant or it's covering the sin of the prosecutors. Criminal justice system ought to be open. There ought to be never be any secret trials, hidden trials.

Today the American Department of justice will try to bring trials against people without ever having to present any evidence. They do it by saying, well, it's a national security matter. We cannot give you the evidence. You just have to believe us that we have the evidence that this person is guilty. And they expect the court to say, okay, we accept your evidence that they are guilty even though we can't see it.

You can read about that. You can read about those trials. There are books out there that describe them. That's covering sin. If a defendant is guilty, that ought to be publicly known.

There ought to be a public trial where the evidence is brought forward. And if they are worthy of death, a plurality of witnesses, a public trial and a sentencing, and a public execution is helpful. Nothing is hidden. No sins of prosecutors are hidden. We have an epidemic in our country of prosecutors hiding sin, their own.

And just recently, there are people that are working on that. It's very difficult. They have, prosecutors have a very privileged position. But they are very effective at covering sin. And there was one just recently, prosecutor, that rightly went to jail for covering sin and not allowing evidence to be presented that would have exonerated the defendant.

Whoever covers his sin will not prosper. But whoever confesses and forsakes it will have mercy." And I bring all these civil applications into it. I just comment because this whole chapter, as we've seen, is about the civil magistrate. We saw that in the first 12 verses and you'll see it in these next verses and I didn't give you the structure here but the verses 13 to 18 there's six couplets really, six, I'm sorry, six verses but three couplets. Verse 13 and verse 17 go together.

He who covers his sins won't prosper, but whoever confesses him for sakes and will have mercy, a man burdened with bloodshed will flee into a pit, let no one help them. Those two are related, both people covering sin. Verse 14 and 18 are related. Happy is the man who is always reverent, but he who hardens his heart will fall into calamity. In verse 18, whoever walks blamelessly will be saved, but he who is perverse in his ways will suddenly fall.

Those two verses are related. And then 15 and 16 are also related. Like a roaring lion and a charging bearer is a wicked ruler over poor people. A ruler who lacks understanding is a great oppressor, but he who hates covetousness will prolong his days." So this whole chapter is dealing with the civil magistrate, and so I'm making these applications into the civil magistrate. Okay, back to whoever confesses and forsakes them will have mercy.

I need to give you a little Hebrew grammar here because it has a theological significance. And so here's the little note. Some Hebrew verbs can have a different meaning depending on the stem of the verb. For example, you could take the Hebrew verb to remember. This is a car, to remember.

In the root stem it means remember. But in a different stem, it means to cause to remember. There's actually a verb stem in Hebrew that caused somebody to do something. So in that verb stem, to cause someone to remember would be to what? If you cause somebody to remember something, you remind them.

When we think of those as different words, to remember or to remind someone. But in Hebrew, it's the same word, different stem. Or you could take the word to hear, shema. You maybe recognize that word because of Deuteronomy 6, that Shema Yisrael. In the root stem it means to hear.

But in a different stem, in the stem to cause somebody to hear, it means to proclaim or even to preach and we think of those as very different words hearing and proclaiming or preaching. It's the same word in Hebrew to hear or to cause someone to hear which we idiomatically translate and rightly translate to proclaim or to preach. Well the verb here for to confess whoever confesses, the root stem of that verb means to respond to another's action with public praise. Now you're probably thinking, how can those be the same? To respond to another's action with public praise.

This word is used extensively throughout the Bible, over a hundred times. A lot of them in the Psalms, to speak of praising God. How do we get confess out of that? If I cause myself to respond in praise to God, to cause myself to respond in praise to God is the word for confess. Now we might think that's a little odd, but it actually makes a very significant theological point and that was my reason for going into that grammar.

Because to confess is to give God glory. To confess is to give God the glory. Do you remember what Joshua said to Achan when his family was selected by Lot as the family that had caused Israel to be defeated at Ai? Joshua said to Achan, my son, I beg you give glory to the Lord, God of Israel, and make confession to him. Joshua put those two together.

Give glory to the Lord of Israel, Brother Achan, and make confession to him, and tell me now what you have done. Do not hide it from me." There we also have the contrast between confess and hide. To confess and to give glory to God is the opposite of hiding our sin and attempting to Glorify ourself remember. Why do we hide our sin out of our pride to glorify ourselves? So these two things and our exact opposites To confess is to uncover our sin and give glory to God.

To hide it is to cover it and seek to try and glorify ourself. Now the noun there in that passage in in Joshua to make confession, it's the noun form, but it is the same word. It connects very closely. It's the noun form of that verb. Joshua was calling Achan to glorify God by making confession.

And when we confess our sin, we abase ourselves and we exalt and glorify God. Specifically, to give God glory and public praise by acknowledging our sin and our need of forgiveness and our need of deliverance from sin. And so in confession we praise God's greatness in that nothing, including our sin, can be hidden from Him. His eyes see everything. He knows all things.

And so in confession we are praising God's omnipotence, or His knowing all things, His omniscience. We're praising His seeing everything and being everywhere. That nothing can be hid from Him. In confession, we praise His justice, in that He has a right to punish transgressions. And we praise His grace in forgiveness and in deliverance.

And So to confess then, to confess our sin, is to glorify and praise God by acknowledging that He sees everything, nothing can be hid from Him, that He has a right to punish our sins, but that in His justice we praise His mercy that He forgives and delivers. Now this verse brings out as well the two actions that are involved in confession. Acknowledging and forsaking. To confess is to acknowledge our sin and to forsake it. To acknowledge our sin is to simply come into agreement with what God says about our actions.

And that's where we get our word confession. It's a Latin, con, and fest. It's with, to speak with. We come into agreement about what God says about our actions, that what we have done is contrary to Him, that what we have done or said is contrary to His Word and what He desires us to do. And we're in fact saying, Lord, Your word is true when it describes me and what I have done, and my words have been false." Now forsaking sin is the other thing here.

Whoever confesses and forsakes. Forsaking sin involves replacing it with biblical action, what is pleasing to God. It's impossible to forsake sin without replacing it with the biblical action. It's impossible to do that. You cannot simply put off a sin unless you put on the new man.

You cannot put off the old man unless you put on the new man. It's impossible. Because it's impossible to do nothing. I used to ask my children, what are you doing? And sometimes they would say nothing.

And I would say something like, that's impossible. You can't do nothing. You might be doing nothing useful, nothing productive, or nothing edifying, but you're never doing nothing. You might be meditating. You might be thinking about a solution to some problem.

You might be meditating on God's word and what it means. And so you might not look like you are doing anything, but you are doing something in your mind, your thinking. And so we can never do nothing. If we are going to forsake sin and put off that old man and that old nature and its loss and the works of the flesh, we have to put on the new nature. We have to be renewed in our thinking and in what we're doing.

Those two are very important. If you work at just trying to put something off, but you never put on the new, you will always fail. Putting off of sin and forsaking it has to always involve putting on what is right. And so you need to think about what that is. What is the right thing to be doing in place of the wrong thing that you were doing.

I know of one, in one case, somebody who was, who had a problem with taking things, a problem with theft. And it was an endemic problem in this gentleman's life. And the solution came, thankfully he had a good biblical counselor. And the solution was that whenever you are tempted to take anything that is not yours, you need to go find ten people and ask them if you can mow their lawn for free. While you think about and meditate on what God would have you to do.

You see, he was trying to take what wasn't his. The answer is to give to others what you don't have to. That's what the Bible says, him who steals, let him steal no more, but rather labor with his hands that he may be able to supply a need to others. See, that was a good example. There's a very wise counselor that came up with that, of how to put off the sin of theft and put on the new man.

Acknowledging and then forsaking, and that requires putting on whatever that sin is. When we want to put it off, we've got to put on the opposite. What God commands us to do. And it always involves love, right? Because love is the fulfilling of the law.

No matter what that... But it's helpful for us to make those actions concrete. Not just talk about love in some generic term. For husbands that are having problems living with their wives, being able to specifically demonstrate love to a wife. Or for a wife who has difficulty reverencing her husband, specifically do that which is reverencing and honoring to Him.

When my children were little and they disobeyed, they didn't listen to my voice and obey. Then I would help them practice putting on, not only forsaking the sin, but also putting on. So we would practice, we would train. I would say we would play a version of Simon Says. I would say sit down.

And they would say, I would train them to sit down and say yes daddy. I would say stand up And I would want them to stand up and say, yes, daddy, why? Because I'm training them to not only forsake the disobedience, but put on the obedience. If it was a problem coming, then I would put them across the room. And if they're a toddler, I'd carry them across the room.

And then I would say, come. And I would want them to come, and I would say, good. And then we would do it again, and maybe again. So that they put off not coming when they were called and put on coming when they were called. That's forsaking sin.

And parents, we can help train our children in this process of putting off sin by training them in what they ought to be doing instead. Now there's some, sometimes some common misunderstandings that repentance, this putting off of our sin, is somehow a prerequisite to our salvation. But repentance is not a prerequisite to salvation. We don't change ourselves in order to come to Christ. We don't put off our sin and put on the new man so that we can then come to Christ.

That is to totally miss the heart of the gospel. We can't do that. We can't change ourselves. We come to Christ so he can change us. Amen.

To miss this, as I said, is to really miss the Gospel itself. The good news of the Gospel is that Christ makes sick sinners well. Sick sinners well. The larger catechism says that repentance unto life is a saving grace. Rod in the heart of a sinner by the Spirit of God, whereby out of his sense and sight, not only of the danger, but also the filthiness and odiousness of his sins, and upon the apprehension of God's mercy in Christ to such as are penitent, he grieves and hates his sin and turns from them to God, purposing and endeavoring constantly to walk with him in all the ways of new obedience.

Faith and repentance are saving graces. We come in faith to Christ and He changes us. You see faith and repentance in that sense go together. As somebody described it once, they're like two spokes on a wheel. When the wheel turns, they both move at once.

One isn't preceding the other. Repentance is not a prerequisite to salvation. It is a saving grace. We come to Christ in order to be changed. And also secondly, Repentance is not the cause or the basis of our forgiveness in Christ.

God doesn't save us because we repent. We can't repent apart from His grace. We repent because He has made us alive in Christ. We repent because He has convicted us of our sin and drawn us to Himself. We turn in faith and repentance to Christ because out of His free and special love to His elect, He calls us.

By His Word and by His Spirit, He enlightens our minds to our sinfulness and our rebellion. What we were once blind to, what we once minimized, what we once tried to cover, He enlightens our minds to how wicked and sinful it is and He invites and draws us to Christ. By His almighty power and grace, He renews our will, He determines our will so that we love what we once hated and we hate what we once used to love. And by His grace and power, He enables us to answer His gracious call to accept and embrace that undeserved favor that offered to us in Christ. Now isn't that wonderful news?

Wonderful news. The basis of our pardon is not our repentance. The basis of our pardon is the righteousness of Christ imputed to our account, placed in our account with God. We are forgiven and can receive mercy when we confess our sins because God has poured out the penalty for our sin upon Jesus Christ. I'm going to go on and look at verse 17, but I think we'll stop there this morning as we prepare to come to the Lord's table.

God has forgiven us in Christ and when we, God can forgive us and give us mercy when we confess our sins because God has poured out The penalty for our sin, the wrath of God, He's poured it out on Christ. Almighty Heavenly Father, we thank you for this grace, this gospel of the grace of God in Christ. We rejoice this morning at your redemption. We rejoice and marvel at your love that you would love us despite our sin, despite the fact that we are at enmity against you, that we once hated and abhorred you, yet you, because of your love for us, you died for us. Father, how difficult it is for us to love those who hate us.

Yet this is what you have done. And in so doing, you have not only procured our redemption, but you have given us an example of what we ought to do. That even as you lay down your life for us, we also ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. Oh Lord, may you quicken us, make us alive and enable us to do this. It is impossible in natural power and in the flesh.

So Lord, we are asking for your supernatural grace and power to do what we could not do on our own. And we give to you, Lord, all of the glory and all of the praise for all that you have done in us and through us and for us in Jesus Christ. Amen.