Dealing with the Sin of Ignorance
(Overcomer Wu)
"Who can understand his errors? Cleanse Thou me from secret faults” Psalm 19:12
The Bible speaks of a particular kind of sins that we are incline to ignore yet need to be dealt with, namely, the sins of ignorance. So there are sins which we commit of which we are not conscious. In the Psalms quoted above, there is a prayer to be cleansed of secret or hidden sins: "Who can understand his errors? Cleanse Thou me from secret faults" (Psa 19:12). There are faults, offenses, and sins in our hearts of which even we ourselves are unaware. The apostle Paul also says, “I know nothing against myself; yet am I not hereby justified: but He that judgeth me is the Lord” (1Cor. 4:4). It is not enough to be cleansed of conscious transgression; there are sins of ignorance. Only God sees us through and through. There are things that we do which seems perfectly legal and right; however, it may not be so in the eyes of God.
We all have blind spots where we simply cannot see with our physical eyes. Similarly, we cannot see our faults even as our neighbor sees them. The Pharisee in his prayer, which really was not a prayer at all, spoke much of other people's sins, but saw none in himself. We are all much like him. We are prejudiced in our own favor. We are all so forgiving toward our own shortcomings. We make all manner of allowance for our own faults, and are spritefully patient with our own infirmities. We see our good things magnified, and our blemishes through tainted glasses that makes them seem almost virtues.
This is so true that if we met ourselves someday on the street, the self God sees, we probably would not recognize it as really ourselves. Our own judgment of our life is neither reliable nor conclusive. There is a self we do not see and perhaps cannot see until we are under the intense shining of the Lord. Then we cannot see into the future to know where the subtle tendencies of our life are leading us. We do many things which to our own eyes appear innocent and harmless, but which have in them a hidden motive or hidden evil we cannot see. We indulge ourselves in many things which to us do not appear sinful, but which leave on our soul a touch of blight, a soiling of purity of which stains our heart so that we no longer see God as we ought (Matt 5:8). We permit ourselves many little habits in which we see no danger, but which are silently twining their invisible threads into a cable which someday shall bind us and render us spiritually powerless.
There is another category of hidden faults: the deceitfulness of sin. No doubt there are many things in most of us – ways of living, traits of character, qualities of disposition – which we consider, perhaps, among our strong points, or at least fair and commendable things in us, which in God's eye are not only flaws and blemishes, but sins in the sense that they causes us to be self-reliant rather than God-reliant. Sometimes good and evil in certain qualities do not lie very far apart. It is quite easy for devotion to principle to shade off into obstinacy. It is quite easy for self-respect and consciousness of ability to develop into towers of self-conceit. It is easy for a man to make himself believe that he is cherishing righteous indignation, when in truth he is only giving way to very bad temper. It is easy to let gentleness become weakness, and tolerance toward sinners grow into tolerance toward sin.
It is easy for us to become very careful in many phases of our conduct, while in general we are really quite careless. For example, a man may be very accommodating and hospitable to other saints, while in his own home he has utter disregard for the comfort and convenience of those nearest to him.
Who of us does not have little or greater secret blemishes lying alongside his most sterling virtues? The enemy often capitalizes on our own strengths to turn against us, because it is in the areas of our strengths that we feel we needed the least help in; thus, we pay the least attention to those areas of our lives or character and spiritually it makes us the most vulnerable in those areas. Moses' strength was his zeal to deliver God's people from the slavery and oppression of Egypt. This was undeniably a great zeal. However, it was that same zeal which caused him to resort to his own methodology of delivering the children of Israel... he ended up committing murder and was forced into exile. Elijah's strength was courage in facing the enemies. After confronting 400+ prophets of Balaam and defeated them single-handedly with God on his side, Elijah shortly became so depressed at the news of a woman, Jezebel, seeking to kill him. Peter's strength was his boldness to launch out for the Lord Jesus at His bidding. Yet it was also this very strength that gave ground to Satan to speak to pity the Lord Jesus in Matthew 16. We know of course that that remark of Peter elicited the most excoriating rebuke from the Lord in the entire Bible! Therefore, we need to beware that some of the “secret faults” may lie hidden underneath the veneer of our strengths.
God knows all our faults and our weaknesses through and through. The substance of it all is that besides the faults our neighbors see in us, besides those our closest friends see, besides those of which we ourselves are aware, all of us have undiscovered sins in our life, hidden faults of which only God knows and perhaps those that are offensive towards Him. Nonetheless, they are still sins in the Lord's eyes that needs to be dealt with. We need to learn to confess and deal with these as well asking for the cleansing of the Lord's precious Blood.
If we are living a God-pleasing life, we want to find every flaw or blemish of whatever kind there is in us. Someone says: “Count yourself richer that day you discover a new fault in yourself--not richer because it is there, but richer because it is no longer a hidden fault.” A great help to keep us from sinning against the Lord, either consciously or inadvertently, is to keep the Lord's Word in our hearts: “Your Word have I hid in my heart that I might not sin against You” (Psa 119:11). Verse 29 of the same chapter of Psalms 119 tells us that the Lord's giving us of His gracious law(another synonym of the Word of God in Psalms 119) will remove from us the ways of lying. Also, in the immediate context of the title verse quoted above in Psalms 19... just prior to verse 12 where David pleaded with the Lord to cleanse him from his secret faults; verse 7-11 gives us the antidote or the solution to avoid this condition, namely, the Word(law) of the Lord! Verse 8 says, “... the commandment(another synonym of God's Word) of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes.” Oh, how we need more of the Lord's Word to enlighten our eyes to see ourselves as the Lord sees us that we may not be harboring secret faults, or the sin of ignorance.