When I Stopped Hiding My Wrong

King David had done something wrong,
and he told no one.
Not his friends. Not his servants.
Not God.

He went to his meetings.
He ate his dinners.
He sat on his throne and smiled.
(Kings get a lot of practice at looking fine.)

His song doesn't say what the wrong was.
It says what hiding it did to him.

"When I kept it to myself," David sang,
"my bones wore out.
I groaned all day long.
Day and night, LORD,
your hand pressed down on me,
heavy, heavy,
and my strength dried up
like a puddle in August."

Then one day David stopped covering it up.
"I will tell the LORD," he said,
and he told him.
The wrong, and the hiding of the wrong.
All of it.

"And you forgave me," David sang.
"You took my guilt away."
The hand came off his back,
and David could breathe again.

So he put the gladdest word he knew
at the very top of his song:

"Blessed is the one whose wrongs are forgiven,
whose sins are covered!
Blessed is the one
the LORD holds nothing against,
who has nothing left to hide!"

David had tried to cover his own sin,
and it nearly crushed him.
When God covered it, it was gone.

"You are my hiding place," he sang.
"You keep me safe from trouble.
You put songs of rescue all around me."
(David had tried hiding from God.
It works about as well as a toddler hiding behind a curtain
with both feet sticking out.)

Then God answers, right inside the song:
"I will teach you the way to go.
I will guide you,
and my eye will be on you."

And God adds a warning:
"Don't be like a horse or a mule
that has to be pulled along by straps and a bit in its mouth,
or it won't come near you."
(A mule will plant all four feet and refuse to budge
for reasons nobody has ever worked out.
God would rather his people simply came.)

David finished with a shout to everyone listening:
"The LORD's love wraps around the one who trusts him!
Be glad! Sing, all of you! Sing!"

But covering a wrong always cost something.
At God's house, year after year,
animals died for the people's sins,
and the sins were covered for one more year,
and the next year it all had to be done again.
David's sons sat on his throne, one after another,
and every one of them had wrongs of his own to hide.

At last another son of David came
who never once had a thing to cover.
On a hill outside Jerusalem,
the weight that had crushed David
was laid on him instead,
every hidden wrong from every hiding heart.
He carried it all the way to the cross,
and he died,
and on the third day he walked out of his grave alive.

Jesus is the hiding place David sang about,
and there is room in him
for everyone who stops hiding and comes.