The Sin of Cover-up

And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account.
~Hebrews 4:13

Recently, on 60 Second Scripture, I read from 2 Corinthians 5:10, "we must all appear before the Judgment seat of Christ so that everyone may receive what is due him for the things done in the body, whether good or evil."

This got me to thinking about our current passage in Hebrews. Everything we say, everything we do, everything in our hearts, every thought in our heads, is known to God; there is nothing that He does not see no matter how well we think we hide it.

Our nature is to hide from the truth. From the time we are small children if we are asked what we have done wrong, we will say 'nothing' and look guilty while trying to look at the ground or anywhere but up at our parents. We are the same way with God. We try to pretend that everything is alright in our life, but we cannot look at God and say we have done nothing wrong. We continue to try to hide things from childhood on through adulthood, either because we know what we have done is wrong, or because we are ashamed of what we have done, and because we really don't want others to see us for who we really are.

But God knows who we really are, after all, He created us. He knew us before we were formed in our mother's womb, He knows the beginning from the end, and whatever we are going to do in life, He has already seen.

Even in our Christian walk there are things that we like to hide from others, and from God. We don't want people to know how we act at home with our spouses, that we get angry and yell at them sometimes, or say things we shouldn't, or say hurtful things to our children. We don't want anyone to know those dirty parts of our lives that we try to pretend don't really exist. The problem with hiding those things is that eventually, they come to light for everyone to see. But mostly, God sees them as they occur, and in fact, God knows they're going to happen before we even open our mouths.

We see many accounts of this in the Bible from Jonah and the incident with the whale to King David when he had Bathsheba's husband sent into battle to die so he could cover up the affair he had with her.

We are a deceitful people. We want to run from God, we want to hide the truth, we like doing things in the dark so that no one knows or sees what we are doing; we like to whisper so no one can hear us; we like to say things behind people's backs; there truly is nothing good within us. At least not on our own.

If we go down a few verses in Hebrews, 5:16 says, "Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in the time of need."

There's a lot of sin in this world & we see it all around us. Every day on the news we see sin abounding, but I don't think there's a greater sin than the sin of cover up. We're trying to hide something that can't be hidden, at least not from God, and not even from others because eventually, our sin finds us out. So I ask you today to examine your heart to see if there's anything that you're trying to hide from God, and from others. If there is, confess your sin to God, confess the cover-up, ask Him to forgive you because He is gracious and full of mercy, and He will answer that prayer. He will forgive us anything. No matter how dark the deed may seem to us, it's already been seen by God and there's no reason not to ask Him to forgive us.

Don't let sin, or the sin of cover-up, rob you of your salvation because that's what it can do. Sin is like a sore, it festers up. It's like that flesh-eating disease, once it starts, it just multiplies and drags us farther from God.

God loves you so much. It's one of those kind of loves that here on Earth we think we can imagine it by thinking of how much we love our own children, but our love for our children doesn't even come close to the love that God has for us. So don't let yourself be separated from the love of God because you're caught up in the sin of cover-up. I pray in Jesus'' name that each and every one of us will bring all of our deeds to light, ask God to forgive us, and to continue forward, walking in the light and the love Jesus Christ, Amen.