Psalm 31:2
kinda sorta clean houses
Blessed is the man to whom the Lord hath not imputed sin, and in whose spirit there is no guile. (Psalm 31:2 DR)
At one time or another we have probably all tried to cover or hide something that was dirty and needed to be cleaned, and either we neglected to do so through sloth or some other reason. A guest is coming over for dinner, and you focus on cleaning the areas the guest will be, perhaps throwing some things you don’t want to properly clean or organize into a room and closing the door so it can’t be seen.
One can certainly say to some extent “I cleaned the house,” but that doesn’t mean the house is actually clean. Certain areas may be, but others simply remain hidden.
In this verse the Psalmist considers the man blessed to whom God has not imputed sin. But what is this imputation? In English this can be rendered as credit, in the sense of giving credit for something or attributing credit to something. The sense then would be that God sees that blessed man as righteous and lacking sin.
It is here that the conception of this imputation can have significant theological differences. Some theologies understand this imputation as being a legal declaration of sorts, as if God looks upon the man he chooses to impute righteousness (or conversely not impute sin) and that alone is the source of the righteousness or lack of sin. This is probably a crude analogy, but it would be like the house guest looking at the house he is visiting with the recently cleaned kitchen and living room and declaring the house clean, whereby the house is thus deemed clean and not still full of clutter and garbage. In this sense the imputation exists regardless of the actual state of that to which the attribute is being attributed.
This, of course, is a rather impoverished understanding of imputation, as the parallelism of the verse demonstrates. It goes on to apply the same blessed state to the one in whose spirit there is no guile. In parallelism the secondary clause generally builds upon and expands the previous clause; in this case the not imputed sin is conjoined with there is no guile.
It’s important to note that the Psalmist speaks of the guile not existing within the spirit of the blessed man. This is not just some declaration that this is the case; rather, the lack of imputation of sin is because that sin no longer exists within the blessed man’s spirit. The imputation (either positively or negatively) is thus predicated on the actual state of the one to whom the imputation is applied; otherwise it would be an arbitrary declaration. St. Bellarmine concludes:
Sins are said here to be “covered,” not that they exist though covered and hidden from us, but because they are entirely destroyed, and grace has taken their place, and thus they are truly covered, so that even God, from whom nothing can be hidden, cannot see them; and thus the prophet uses various metaphors, to signify the remission of sins, so that the deficiency of explanation in one, may be supplied by another. The most remarkable occurs in Psalm 50, where he says, “Thou shalt sprinkle me with hyssop, and I shall be cleansed: thou shalt wash me, and I shall be made whiter than snow.” Here the forgiveness of sins is said not merely to cover the stain and to hide it, but really to wash it, and to wash it in such a way as even to make it white even whiter than snow. What means, then, the removal of a stain, and the increasing its whiteness, but the removal of sin, and the infusion of grace? What means the substitution of light for darkness, but the removal of sin, and substitution of justice? (St. Robert Bellarmine, A Commentary on the Psalms, 31, 2.)
I utilized Trapcode Mir for this animation, which is always a great tool for nice abstract looking projects. I thought it’d make a nice background for the text, and I basically set up my mesh and animated it, setting either the X steps or Y steps (I don’t remember which off-hand) to a value greater than 1, which gives the separated stringy look. I didn’t have any deep reason behind this; sometimes it’s just about aesthetics.
Enjoy.
Blessed is the man to whom the Lord hath not imputed sin,
and in whose spirit there is no guile.
(Psalm 31:2 DR)
View a higher quality version of this gif here: