The Best Hiding Place

“You are a hiding place for me…”

Psalm 32:7a

Have you ever played hide and seek with little kids?  It’s a blast.  They tend to hide out in the open.  Each time they hide they go back to the same “hiding” place.  When they are looking for you, you need not to make it too difficult for them to find you.  That’s what’s going on with the picture I am matching with this blog.  That picture of me with a box of rags dumped over my head, is from me playing hide and seek with my grandson Kellan. You can see he found me.  Even Molly found me. 

Hide and seek with little ones is fun and funny.  What’s not so funny, indeed is much more serious, is how we “play hide and seek” with God.  Our very first parents Adam and Eve started this game.  After their first sin, they tried to hide their nakedness under fig leaves.  Then when “they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.”   Even King David, a man after God’s heart, played this deadly game.  After he committed adultery with Bathsheba and she became pregnant, David tried repeatedly to hide his sin.  He first tried to make it look like her husband was the father.  When that didn’t work, David arranged to have Uriah killed in battle.  That way he could take Bathsheba as his wife, people would either think the child was his, or they would assume it was Uriah’s (because Uriah would no longer be around to deny it.)  We play the game to.  You know how.  We hide our sins by denying them, by lying about them, by blaming others, by making excuses… simply by doing whatever we can to hide them. Why do we hide them?  We are ashamed.  We are afraid of the consequences, of what other people will do or say, of what people will think of us if they find out.

The problem is that our attempts to hide our sin – even if successful – don’t help.  The shame we hide simply grows and takes root in our hearts.  It eats away at us like cancer.   David describes this in Psalm 32 – “For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.”  After all, even though we may be able to hide them from each other, we can’t hide our sin from ourselves.  We know what we have done or been doing.  More importantly, we can’t hide our sin from God.  He knows. He knew what Adam and Eve had done and where they were hiding.  He called them out.  He knew what David had done, and so sent the prophet Nathan to confront David.  He knows all your secret sins and mine.  You and I can never win a game of hide and seek with God.

Much better is to come out of hiding and tell Him.  Confess our sins.  Admit the truth to yourself and God.  After all, “if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just and will forgive our sins…”  That’s what David discovered.  “I said, I will confess my sins and You forgave the iniquity of my sin.” 

How can God simply forgive the terrible things we have done? Quite simply He has provided a better hiding place in Jesus.  Jesus took your sins, carried them to the cross and died for you in your place. He shed His blood on the cross to cover your sins.  His blood “cleanses us” of all our sin.  Think about what happened to you in baptism.  “You were buried with Christ by baptism into death in order that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.”  At baptism, your sins were buried with Christ in His tomb, never to be dug up again!  In Christ Jesus… in His death on the cross… in His empty tomb God has provided for you and me, what we can never provide for ourselves.  He has given us the one, the only sure, the best hiding place for our sin – Jesus.

God would invite you to confess your sins.  If you are having a real struggle, He would invite you to also confess them to another person you can trust – someone like a Pastor who will never tell anyone.  Why?  Because He wants you to learn what David learned.  When David finally confessed his sin, God took them.  He hid them.  That’s what David said here, “You are a hiding place for me…”  That’s what Jesus is for you too – the best hiding place ever.