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Pardon of sin is the general wish of gospel hearers; and it is also the general hope of all, live as they may. But bare wishes and hopes effect nothing; they do not prevail over sinners in general to seek for pardon in God's appointed way; and yet they are generally blessed who are pardoned.

I. THE MAN WHO IS PARDONED IS BLESSED —

1. With respect to God in the person of the Father, as the moral Governor, and as the God of salvation. God has forgiven all his sins — past, present, and to come.

2. He is blessed by God, in the person of the Son, with perfect Christian liberty and freedom from all the demands of law and justice.

3. He is blessed by God the Holy Ghost, who effects that work in him by which he receives Christ, and the pardon of sin with Him; and the Spirit makes his body a temple to dwell in.

4. He is blessed with perfect deliverance from all danger by Satan, that cruel and bitter enemy who has destroyed so many.

5. He is blessed with perfect deliverance from the danger of sin, which has been the ruin of all who have perished, and will be the ruin of all who shall perish.

6. He is blessed with deliverance from the second death.

7. He is graciously blessed with grace in the heart. This is the leaven which will not cease. Every grace now takes root in the soul; and the believer learns to exercise each in its proper place.

8. Now he can lay hold of the promises in Christ as his own; and, while he can act every spiritual grace in measure and degree, he lives by faith in the Lord Jesus, and has an interest in "the great and precious promises, by which he is made partaker of the Divine nature," and is blessed with the enjoyment of all the promises, which "all in Christ are yea, and in Him amen, unto the glory of God by us."

9. He is blessed with the law of God "written in his heart," and has a right to enjoy all the blessings of the covenant which is "ordered in all things and sure." He is daily conforming more and more to the Divine image, and is daily more and more "made meet to be partaker of the inheritance of the saints in light."

II. THE MEANS BY WHICH THIS BLESSEDNESS IS OBTAINED ON OUR PART IS FAITH.

1. To ascertain this principle we must consider the doctrine of regeneration, by which we understand a saving change effected in the believer by the gracious influences and operations of the Holy Spirit, for Christ's sake.

2. When this saving change is effected, the believer is considered in Scripture as "a new creature" — a "new man" — "created in Christ Jesus unto good works"; and the confidence and reliance of this new man upon the Lord Jesus Christ is called faith.

(James Kidd, D. D.)

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KJV: Even as David also describeth the blessedness of the man, unto whom God imputeth righteousness without works,

WEB: Even as David also pronounces blessing on the man to whom God counts righteousness apart from works,