Psalm 36 – Comfortably Numb

At 6 and 10 years old, my boys are in a stage where they are dirty. Seriously. They are never clean. Within 5 minutes of putting on any clean shirt, it will have a mixture of dirt, sharpie, and ketchup from the wrist to the elbows. At any point in the day, the same combination of foreign substance can be found on each of their faces. And they are completely clueless. I don’t know how they miss it, but cleanliness is completely off their radar. Even after I point it out to them, I typically get a shrug of the shoulders and an “oh well” expression. It doesn’t bother them to be dirty. They are too busy playing and going on with their lives.

We can be the same way.

“For in his own eyes he flatters himself too much to detect or hate his sin.” – Palm 36:2

This verse really captured me today. I was thinking about sin as dirt. Sometimes we can have dirt on our sleeves and not even realize it. Someone might point it out to us, and if you’re anything like me, you hate that someone saw it. You’d rather go buy a new shirt than wear it the rest of the day. This has become my natural response to obvious sin. What we'll find, however, is that if we don’t do anything about it, we get used to it. The longer we do that, the more we become accustomed to it, and it’s only a matter of time before we just end up looking at it and shrugging like our kids. As Pink Floyd put it, we can become "Comfortably Numb".

But there’s an other kind of sin mentioned in scripture.

There’s the kind that is like dirt on our faces. We don’t even know it’s there. We walk around like we just got out of the shower, we think we’re clean, yet we’re not. Maybe this could be called our hidden sin. But I think it’s bigger than stuff “others” don’t’ know about, I think it’s the stuff that “we” don’t even know about.

So how do you deal with sin that you don’t know is there? I think first, we assume that it is there and go looking for it. Second, I think we should proactively put the things in our lives that scriptures say can help us avoid it. Some of the obvious are staying connected in biblical community, spending time in God’s Word, prayer, etc…

Both our kids and Verse 2 give us some interesting insight. When we’re so busy with “our” lives, when we’re so concerned with who “we” are, when we come to the point when we think to highly of “ourselves” than we ought to, it’s a danger zone. We should be careful not to “flatter” ourselves too much. If we do, we may slip into a place where we not only lose the ability to detect sin in our own lives, but also the desire to fight it.