hiding God from ourselves

St Augustine talks to us today about confessing our sins in A Year with the Church Fathers. And what he says is profound.

He says that when we confess our sins, which God already knows, we are not telling Him anything new. We are opening our own minds back up to reality, because sin hides the truth from us. Unconfessed sin, in fact, hides more and more truth from us until we hide Truth Himself from us, and we wonder where God is.

This is not to say that atheists are such miserable sinners that they don't see that God is there. We are all such miserable sinners. But atheists (most of them) honestly don't see that God is there. Sin, even original sin, which we all suffer from, blinds us to the reality of His existence. The more we remove sin from our eyes, like cataracts, the more clearly we can see what is truly there, and we see Him once again.

We see a hint of this in the garden of Eden, when Adam and Eve sinned and hid themselves from God. When God asks "Where are you?", it's not like He didn't know where they were. He was asking them to search for themselves, and to realize that they had hidden God from their own sight.

God, thanks for teaching us to remove the sins from our eyes, like the scales from Paul's eyes, so that we can see You more clearly.