Two Infamous Trumpets by Thomas Brooks The Privy Key of Heaven, 1665 You have set our iniquities before You, our secret sins in the light of Your presence. Can anyone hide in secret places, so that I cannot see him? Do not I fill heaven and earth? The eyes of the Lord are everywhere, keeping watch on the wicked and the good. Proverbs 15.3. As we are never out of the reach of God's hand, so we are never from under the view of God's eye. God is privy to our most secret sins. His eye is as much upon secret sins as it is upon open sins. God has an eye upon our inmost evils. He sees all that is done in the dark. There is no cloud, nor curtain, nor moment of darkness, which can stand between the eyes of God and the ways of men. For a man's ways are in full view of the Lord, and he examines all his paths. Proverbs 5.21. In this Scripture, Solomon mainly speaks of the ways of the adulterer, which usually are plotted with a most cunning secrecy. Yet God sees all those ways. Look, as no boldness can exempt the adulterer from the justice of God, so no secrecy can hide him from the eye of God. Though men labour to hide their ways from others and from themselves, yet it is but labour in vain to endeavour to hide them from God. Men who labour to hide God from themselves can never hide themselves from God. A godly man turned to infamous trumpets from their harlotry with only this argument, that God sees all things in the dark when the doors are closed, the windows shut, and the curtains drawn. Those sins which lie closest, and are most secretly lurking in the heart, are as obvious and odious to God as those who are most fairly written upon a man's forehead. God is all eye, so that He sees all, even the most secret turnings and windings of our hearts, Neither is there any creature that is not manifest in his sight, but all things are naked and opened, that is, anatomized, to the eyes of him with whom we have to do. Hebrews 4.13 What is the curtain, or the darkest night, or the double lock, or the secret chamber, to him who clearly observes all things in a perfect nakedness? God has an eye upon the most inward intentions of the heart and the most subtle motions of the soul. Certainly there is not a creature, not a thought, not a thing, but lies open to the all-seeing eye of God. The Lord knows all our secret sinnings as exactly as our visible sinnings. Ambrose said, If you cannot hide yourself from the Son, which is God's minister of light, how impossible will it be to hide yourself from Him whose eyes are ten thousand times brighter than the sun. My eyes are on all their ways. They are not hidden from me, nor is their sin concealed from my eyes." Jeremiah 16, 17. This is the killing aggravation of all sin, that it is done before the face of God, that it is committed in the royal presence of the King of kings. The very consideration of God's omnipresence should bravely arm us against sin. Shall not the strict, the pure, the jealous eye Of an all-seeing God keep you from sinning In the secret chamber, when all curtains are drawn, Doors bolted, and everyone in the house sleeping, But you and your Delilah? Oh, what dreadful atheism is bound up in that man's heart, who is more afraid of the eye of his father, his pastor, his child, than he is of the eye and presence of the Eternal God! Those who wallow in secret sins act as if there were no God to behold them, nor conscience to accuse them, nor judgment day to arraign them, nor justice to condemn them, nor hell to torment them. Though they may escape the eyes of men, yet they shall never escape the judgment of God.