Moralia in Job 559

Verse 17. — You have sealed up my offenses as if in a bag, but you have cured my iniquity. 21. Sins, unless washed away by penitence, will go forth from the bag of secrecy to the public of judgment. — Our offenses are sealed up as if in a bag, because what we do outwardly, unless we wash it away by intervening penitence, is kept under a certain concealment in the secrecy of God's judgments, so that at some time it may even go forth from the bag of secrecy to the public of judgment. Hence too it is said through Moses: Are not these things stored up with me, and sealed in my treasuries? In the day of vengeance I will repay them (Deuteronomy xxxii, 34, 35). But when for the evils we have done we are worn down by the scourge of discipline, and bewail them through penitence,

he seals our iniquity and cures it, because he neither leaves it here unavenged, nor reserves it to be punished in judgment. He seals our offenses, therefore, because he subtly attends to them here in order to strike; but he cures them, because he utterly remits them by the scourge. Hence he cured by sealing even the iniquity of that persecutor of his whom he had cast down to the ground, when he said of him to Ananias: This man is a vessel of election to me, to bear my name before the Gentiles, and kings, and the children of Israel. For I will show him how great things he must suffer for my name (Acts ix, 15). For to him to whom he threatens sufferings yet to come for past excesses, he assuredly held sealed in his heart that which he had done amiss.

But without doubt he had cured his offenses by sealing them, whom he called a vessel of election. Or certainly our sins are sealed in a bag when we ever weigh with a solicitous heart the evils we have done. For what is the heart of man but the bag of God? Where, while we diligently observe through how many things we transgress, we carry our sins as if sealed in the bag of God. Or did not David hold his sin sealed in the bag, who said: For I acknowledge my iniquity, and my offense is ever before me (Psalm l, 5)? And because our merciful Creator remits to us the faults which we come to know by regarding and repenting of them, rightly after 'offenses sealed in a bag' it is added: But you have cured my iniquity. As if he openly said:

The very things which you now seal that I may see them by repenting, you do without doubt so that they may not appear at the recompense. There follows: