^{Ps 16 2} I said to the LORD , "You are my Lord;
apart from you I have no good thing."
³ As for the saints who are in the land,
they are the glorious ones in whom is all my delight."."

The Psalmist teaches that God is our refuge. Our refuge is established by a Creator who sustains and upholds all things in His creation. We must understand that this Creator spoke all things into existence according to His laws, decrees, statutes, curses,covenants and promises. When we are saved or delivered this Creator prevents us from the curse of the law by taking the curse upon Himself.  For his elect then , everything is recreated for the purpose of redemption. This means that God speaks a final blessing upon His elect. This is what the Psalmist does here. He says ³ As for the saints who are in the land, they are the glorious ones in whom is all my delight."

Now here is the problem. All people who are saved have a past. In the human society they are marked with their past sins. They are described by the wrongs that they did and the things that they talked about. But in the christian context that past is completely erased when they are saved. You see when we are saved we are implanted with the word of God and we are definitively sanctified. We are made completely whole and righteous. Our sins are no longer remembered by God.

Why is it then that our old sins are brought up in the christian culture? I think its because we only view salvation as a change in behavior that is caused by our sins being forgiven. We do not teach that our sins before we were saved were marked by God as the reason that we were cursed. We do not think about the entire teaching of sin and how it effects our legal relationship with God. The Psalmist teaches that to "mark a sin" is to "curse" the person. The "curse" is the voice of the violation of the law that is pronounced upon us. We must understand that God did not take away all of our sin in salvation and then reapplied it to our account in sanctification. The bible does not teach this kind of two line theology.  In the pagan world change only comes after a person has redeemed himself by acknowledging and repaying the wrong done. But in the christian world the person who is saved is already perfected but not yet obtaining that perfection. The christian view is the opposition of the worlds view of redemption. The christian gets better by "counting" our selves dead in Christ.

Now a lot of theologians teach that in sanctification we are required to confess our sins to one another. They say that we will not experience forgiveness in the sanctification paradigm. But this is not what the bible teaches. Our forgiveness is based upon counting what has already been accomplished in Christ. This reason that this distinction is very important is we first must argue for our innocence on the basis of our legal justification that was accomplished by Christ. Justification is going from a state of blame to a state of blessing. This pronouncement by the Psalmist is the line that we cannot cross. We cannot revisit those sins in the old life.   ³ As for the saints who are in the land,
they are the glorious ones in whom is all my delight." I teach that in our old life the law stands as our accuser. This is what we call standing in a relationship with God under the curse. But when we are saved we take our position on the other side of the law. Now the law becomes our defense.

So we are still sinners but our sins are not marked. This is why a simple counting our selves dead in Christ makes us better. We cannot go back to trying to atone for ourselves. There is nothing that we can do to gain forgiveness with God. This is why Calvin says that we confess sin but our sins have already been taken care of in Gods sovereign work on the Cross. The reason that sin becomes an issue is that we are trying to please other men. Because God gave us a gift that we now are aware that we are sinners. Its impossible for us to go back to being blind about our sin. When we mark our sins we are trying to be something that we are not. The only people who need their sins marked are the ones who are blind to being sinners. They are genuinely in need of marking.