My transgression is sealed up in a bag, and you sew up my iniquity.
All Commentaries on Job 14:17 Go To Job 14
Gregory The Dialogist
AD 604
21. Our ‘transgressions are sealed up as it were in a bag,’ in that that thing which we ourselves do in outward act, except we wash away by penance in the mean while, is kept in the secresy of God’s judgments under a kind of hiding, that one day it may also come forth out of the bag of secresy into the publicity of the Judgment. Hence it is said by Moses too; Is not this laid up in store with Me, and sealed up among My treasures? In the day of vengeance I will repay them. [Deut. 32, 34] But when for the evil things that we have done, we are bruised with the stroke of discipline, and lament the same by penance, He ‘sealeth up,’ and ‘healeth’ our iniquity, in that He neither leaves things unpunished here, nor reserves them to be punished in the Judgment. Thus He ‘seals transgressions,’ in that He marks them with exactness here, to chastise them with the rod, but He ‘heals’ them, in that He wholly remits them in the stroke. Hence the iniquity of that persecutor of Him, whom He laid prostrate on the ground, He did also by sealing heal, seeing that He said concerning him to Ananias; He is a chosen vessel unto Me to bear My Name before the Gentiles, and kings, and the children of Israel. For I will shew him how great things he must suffer for My Name’s sake. [Acts 9, 15] For to that man, whom on account of past transgressions He still threatens with future sufferings, what he had done wrong, surely He kept sealed in the heart; but as surely in so sealing He had healed his transgressions, in that He called him ‘a chosen vessel.’ Or, surely, ‘our transgressions are sealed in a bag,’ when the evil things we have been guilty of, we reflect on continually with a heedful heart. For what is the heart of man, but God’s ‘bag?’ wherein whilst we earnestly look to see how much we transgress, we carry our sins as it were ‘sealed up in God’s bag.’ Did not David keep his sin ‘sealed up in a bag,’ when he said, For I acknowledge my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me. [Ps. 51, 3] And because the faults, which we are made acquainted with in reviewing and repeating, the pitiful Creator remits to us, after the ‘transgressions being sealed in a bag,’ it is rightly subjoined, But Thou hast healed mine iniquity: as if he said in plain speech, ‘What things Thou dost now seal, so that I in repenting should see, doubtless Thou doest it, that in the retribution they should never be seen.’
