Sin

I.

NO careful reader of the Bible can help being impressed with the world of difference between the view of sin there presented and as it is viewed in the world around him. Sin, as presented to us in the Bible, is a terrible thing—the abominable thing which God hates. Its fruits and its consequences are no less terrible. It has opened the floodgates of sorrow, shame and suffering in this world, and more dreadful still, the gates of eternal sorrow, shame and suffering in the world to come. God never looks lightly upon sin. He did not look lightly on it when laid upon His eternal and well-beloved Son. He never meant that men or angels should look lightly upon it, for upon sin there rests the curse of the Highest. As we search our own hearts and look around us in the world we feel that there must be something seriously wrong with our outlook. Sin is not to us and the overwhelming mass of our fellowmen what the Bible tells us it is. If so be that, the Holy Spirit has convinced us of sin that does not mean that we have fathomed the mystery of iniquity. When we read the solemn words: “Without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sin,” and then turn our eyes to the unspeakably solemn transactions of Calvary when the Blessed Redeemer was making an end of sin and bringing in an everlasting righteousness for a countless number who were given to Him by the Father in the counsels of eternity, how inscrutable this mystery of iniquity becomes.

Again, when it is borne in mind that neither the might of the eternal Godhead nor the unsearchable resources of divine Wisdom could find a way for its removal except by the way of the Cross, how impenetrable the mystery appears. Sin is not the trifling thing that the world regards it to be. It brought down strong angels from the blessedness of Heaven to the never-ending misery of Hell, and none of them ever had power to return. It brought down the human race likewise, and made every member of our race liable to all the miseries of this life, to death itself and the pains of hell for ever. Such a calamity is not something of merely historical interest without any special bearing on the individual. For in each of us this power reigns as a master, unless subdued by grace, dominating our understanding, will, conscience and heart. None of the human race, any more than the angels, has ever been able to break the terrible spell that sin has cast over mind, will, conscience and affections. Sin is our master and we are its willing slaves. It is only when the Great Deliverer comes to set us free that we begin to know a little of the strength of the chains by which we were bound and the deep-seated pervading nature of the corruption by which sin polluted our whole being. We are not exaggerating when we speak of sin in this way, wide though it may be from the general opinion held among men. This naturally raises the question: How is it then that there is such a wide gulf between man’s view of sin and the view that God gives of it? The answer is simple—the god of this world has drugged the minds and consciences of men that they are incapable of feeling as they really are. No anaesthetic applied by man has ever been so effective in deadening the sensibility of the body as Satan’s in stupefying and deadening the feelings in man’s soul. His sight and hearing have been so seriously affected and perverted that he imagines the perversion is the right view and that the correct view is wrong. He calls darkness light and light darkness, bitter sweet and sweet bitter, and evil good and good evil. No amount of reasoning will put man right on these matters. God has not allotted such a task even to the angels in heaven.

It is the work of the Holy Spirit to convince of sin, and this work is of a threefold nature as the word in the original indicates (1) conviction, (2) convincing, (3) reproof. The sinner is brought face to face with his sin and the work of the Holy Spirit shows him that this is his sin. It is now a personal matter—before it might, in the sinner’s estimation, be true for others, but it did not apply to him. But the situation is reversed. He is now before the Judge of the whole earth, at the bar of God, and he can make no excuse for all the sins he has committed. God has summoned him, and it behoves him to answer that summons—”Come now and let us reason together.” “He showed me a heart,” says Dr. Duncan in one of the most beautiful and arresting of his Communion Table addresses, “‘there are seven abominations in a man’s heart’—seven being the Scripture number for completeness. And my eye was fixed on that with horror. I speak not now of godly sorrow and repentance, but of horror; and with something that is surely worse, with shame. For it was not simply my eye fixed on the heart, but God showing me His own eye looking on it. ‘See thy sin under my eye; see, my eye sees that.’ God be merciful to me a sinner!”

(2) Convincing. The work of the Holy Spirit goes a step further, not only convicting, but convincing. A criminal may be convicted for breach of his country’s law, but the judge has not always power to convince him that he has done wrong. In the case of the sinner, however, he is convinced that he has sinned. And a person so convinced will not spend much time seeking excuses, but confession will come readily to him—”against thee, thee only have I sinned.”

(3) There is also reproof. The work of the Holy Spirit in the heart is of such a nature that it reproves sin, it is at ceaseless war with it as an unrighteous and unholy and an unclean thing. But if the work of the Holy Spirit ended here, how miserable would the convicted sinner’s state be. None of the saints could help him. The archangel that stands before the throne of God would be helpless. The still voice of mercy whispered that there was hope, and to quote again from Dr. Duncan: “I heard a voice, at first distant and mysterious; but it came nearer, a still, small voice publishing peace, proclaiming salvation; a voice which came from Zion; the city of our solemnities, the city of our God; a voice publishing peace, proclaiming salvation which comes from Zion; a voice proclaiming, as salvation, so also a Saviour: ‘Behold I bring you good tidings of great joy, for unto you is born in the city of David, a Saviour’: and not merely a Saviour, and a Saviour on earth—Immanuel, God with us, God among us, God for us—but a Saviour slain. Methought then I stood on Calvary and heard these words: ‘It is finished.’ God said, ‘Look into the heart of Christ and behold Him in His vicarious death. Behold Him and “know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor, that ye through His poverty might be rich.” The greatest depth of this poverty being not in His incarnation—though that was a wondrous depth—look at it in His death. Then methought God said: ‘Come by the blood of the mercy seat.’ And I heard a voice speak from the mercy seat, from between the cherubim. And what voice was that? ‘This is my beloved Son (not merely with whom, but) in whom I am well pleased, hear Him!’ said He from the mercy seat, from between the cherubim. ‘The Lord is well pleased for his righteousness sake,’ said He from the mercy seat, from between the cherubim. ‘I, even I, am He that blotteth out thy transgressions, and will not remember thy sins,’ said He from the mercy seat, from between the cherubim. ‘Return unto me, for I have redeemed thee,’ said He from the mercy seat, from between the cherubim. Sweet invitation to me, a departer, ‘Return unto me.'”

It was his deep sense of sin that made this saintly scholar value the priceless worth of Christ’s atonement. A shallow view of sin necessarily leads to a shallow view of the atoning work of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Meantime we must leave further treatment of this subject, but hope to return to it in our next issue.

(To be continued).

Notes of a Sermon.

Preached by Rev. MALCOLM GILLIES, Stornoway.

“If thou hast run with the footmen, and they have wearied thee, then how canst thou contend with horses? and if in the land of peace, wherein thou trustedst, they wearied thee, then how wilt thou do in the swellings of Jordan?” (Jer. xii., 5).

THE chapter contains the prophet’s prayer and the Lord’s double answer. Jeremiah confesses that the ways of the Lord are righteous, but yet he is at a loss, as Asaph before him, to understand the prosperity of the wicked. Dwelling in the midst of his own relations and acquaintances in Anathoth, he takes notice of how near they are to God in profession, but how far off they are in practice. Yet they prosper; they seem to have been rooted in the earth. Providence favours them, while they treat Jeremiah who serves the Lord with a pure heart, as a fool or worse, because he does not run with them to the same excess of riot. The prophet calls upon God to vindicate His glory by pouring down His judgments upon the wicked.

In God’s answer to Jeremiah, there is no effort made to explain the mysterious workings of the Divine government in God’s dealings with saint and sinner. His ways are past finding out. What we have is a re-statement of facts and a word of counsel to the prophet as his stay in troublous times. We have in the latter part of the chapter what is in many respects the most wonderful of lamentations in the whole Word of God. It resembles very much the weeping of the Son of God in our nature, as He looked upon Jerusalem ere He entered to endure His last sufferings there. It was not what was before Him that made Him weep, but that madness in sin, which caused Jerusalem, in spite of centuries of privileges, and of sufferings for the abuse of privileges, not to know, even then in her last day of opportunity, the things belonging to her peace.

In this lamentation we have such expressions as these—“I have forsaken my house; I have left my heritage; I have given the dearly beloved of my soul into the hands of her enemies.”

There is a bitter complaint about the spiritual guides of that day, which we would do well to lay to heart. Their very great number, as well as their unfaithfulness, was a curse—”Many pastors have destroyed my vineyard; they have trodden my portion under foot; they have made my pleasant portion a desolate wilderness.” God laments over the utter desolation and destruction caused by the hands of the Chaldeans, though they were the express instruments of His righteous anger. We have this set before us in II. Chron., xxxvi., 16: “But they mocked the messengers of God, and despised His words, and misused His prophets, until the wrath of God arose against His people, till there was no remedy.” But in common with all other prophecies, while sore punishments are threatened against sin, there is the promise of doing good to His chosen people in their latter end.

Jeremiah is not left without a word in season suitable to his trying condition, but the consolations of God are not like the comforts of men. It would do the prophet little good if it were man who emphasised to him the deceitfulness of the men of Anathoth and who would advise him, not to give any place to their honeyed expressions of friendship. This was real comfort, as it came from God, as was also the forewarning given him of even greater difficulties awaiting him. The people of Anathoth were mere footmen, yet the prophet found them so difficult to deal with that he had expressed his weariness in a bitter complaint. But if these are footmen, Jerusalem’s king, princes, priests and people are horsemen, in audacious rebellion against the Most High; and if wearied by footmen, Jeremiah, “How wilt thou contend with horses?” If the prophet’s own township, a mere country village, has been felt to be full of vexations and troubles, what will Jerusalem be to him? And how much harder will it be to encounter the rolling waves of the Chaldean invasion which, as the swellings of Jordan, will sweep all opposition before it. God is here preparing His servant for heavier and more grievous trials and thereby directing him to cleave closely to his duty in dependence on Divine help, and to deliver the Lord’s message faithfully in the face of enmity and mockery, and of the desolations of God’s judgments.

I must not take up the time in speaking about the literal setting of these words. God speaks here to each one of us as surely as He spoke them to Jeremiah. We should deem it a great privilege that the words addressed to him are also addressed to us, and for the same purpose—that we also should make God our strength. Let us notice from the words—

I.—Our final difficulty, “the swellings of Jordan.”

The River Jordan runs its course along the East coast of Canaan, and separates that country from the desert through which God led the children of Israel. It has been taken in all ages since then as a simile of Death, that river through which all must pass who will enter the heavenly Canaan. We all should meditate oftentimes on this solemn change; it is set before us almost every day at the expense of young and old. Very soon it will convey its solemn lesson to the living at our own expense. “It is appointed unto all men once to die and after this the judgment.” The Jordan safely crossed meant an entrance into Emmanuel’s Land, but otherwise, this river carried him that entered its flood, down to the Dead Sea where nothing lives; a sea the depths of which cannot be sounded; the grave of those cities of the Plain, “turned to ashes and condemned with an overthrow.” The Jordan is an apt illustration of Death—unavoidable to the heirs of glory, as the destined route to their inheritance, but to the Christless soul it is the Destroyer, Doom, the King of Terrors.

The Jordan always overflowed its banks during harvest time. The harvest of the souls of mankind is going on continually. The Angel with the sharp sickle has received his command: “Thrust in thy sharp sickle and gather the clusters of the vine of the earth, for her grapes are fully ripe.” Rev. xiv., 18. This overflowing rouses the young lions in the thickets about Jordan (Jer. xlix., 19), and they become terrible to the way-faring man. Sins that have long been forgotten are roused up when the sinner approaches the hour of death. Some die like lambs, as men say, but others are made, in their last moments, to possess the sins of their youth. That is what will make the passage over the Jordan of Death terrible, causing the sinner to ask like Pope Hadrian: “Soul, where art thou going?” The swellings of Jordan are caused by the conviction, “I must meet the God against whom I have sinned.” Thus God is viewed like unto a bear that has been robbed of her whelps. “I am not prepared to meet Him; I have spent my lifetime, neglecting the eternal concerns of my soul.” Most of the human race are possessed with the delusion that it will be an easy matter to find mercy on a death-bed. God’s Word is altogether contrary to that vain hope. The Scriptures give us but one, and only one instance of a sinner saved at the eleventh hour—the thief on the cross; that is given us, to magnify the glory of the Redeemer’s power to save. The whole Bible teaches the almost complete futility of death-bed repentance, and the pulpit should teach only what the Bible teaches, and the utmost care be used so that no pillow shall be put under the head of the careless sinner, encouraging him or her to entertain such a vain hope. Many conclude that if one cries for mercy on a death-bed that all is well, not discerning that the Devil cares not how much a sinner may use such words as “Christ” and “mercy” so long as Unbelief holds the citadel. No, My Friends, this persuasion has no foundation in God’s Word. If ever any of our race seemed to get real repentance on a death-bed, the foolish virgins were these persons. They saw their danger; they appealed to the Wise, just as people will ask for the prayers of the godly. “Give us of your oil,” they implored, and when directed, they used all diligence to procure the one thing they now realized they needed. In spite of all their endeavours the door of mercy was eternally shut in their faces.

Mr. Spurgeon tested 1000 cases of those who seemed to have true repentance on an expected death-bed, and who were brought back to health. Only two out the thousand proved in after life that they had repented after a godly sort. I will not deny but that there have been some who were truly turned to God in their last hours, but to me, there is nothing more sickening than the platitudes expressed often with very little foundation, in some such cases, and I cannot but view this as part of the strong delusion which has taken hold of this generation. In saying this we have no desire to wound the feelings of those who had good ground of their hopes that all was well with the dying.

Are you one of those, dear friend, who are expecting to become godly on your death-bed? (if you have such a favour which many do not get). Will not the terrors of the swellings of Jordan be terrible enough without having the concern of unforgiveness, Christlessness, and eternal ruin to contend with? Is it when a nurse is wetting your lips with a spoon that you will begin to seek the Christ you have rejected all your days? When your friend is wiping the death-sweat off your brow, think you that you can then make your peace with God, having spurned the peace that was made by the blood of the Saviour’s cross all your lifetime? Give no place to such a delusion: listen, God declares: “Because I have called, and ye refused; I have stretched out my hand, and no man regarded. But ye have set at nought all my counsel, and would none of my reproof: I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when your fear cometh” (Prov. i., 24-28). Do you know to what you are like, you who intend to repent on your death-bed? You are like a sailing vessel that would be built on the slip at Stornoway, completely fitted out, and taken over as soon as launched to the other side of the loch and anchored beside the coal hulks. There she was left at anchor, year after year, until the rats had eaten holes in all her bulkheads and partitions and till she had become water-logged and crazy. Then on the stormiest day of a stormy winter her anchor was taken up and she was headed out to the Minch, where she had never before measured her strength to wind and current. No sooner out past the lighthouse than the mighty billows engulf her and down she goes with all hands.

This will be your ruinous experience, unless you take warning in time and make sure of that salvation which is now offered to you in the gospel. As the swellings of Jordan were the final trial of Israel, so Death is the final and in many respects the greatest trial of all to us. These “went through the flood on foot: there did they rejoice in Him.” All those who have the Captain of Salvation will conquer Death itself by faith in Him.

I must not leave this subject without pointing out that the passage opened to Israel through the Jordan illustrates the much more glorious passage which has been opened for the people of God through Death by means of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. When Israel came to Jordan, they found it impassable till God’s power drove back the waters and opened a dry pathway from one side to the other. As soon as the feet of the priests bearing the Ark of the Covenant touched the river, it fled before them and the way was opened. That Ark was a type of God’s Eternal Son in our nature who tasted death for every man, and at the same time it was impossible that He should be holden of death. He abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel. To have an entrance at all, and some will have an abundant entrance into Heaven, Emmanuel’s Land, through this grim pathway, we must be united to Christ by faith, and as the members must be where the Head has been crowned, so where He is, there shall all His redeemed and saved ones be also.

II.—God’s reasoning respecting this final trial.

In the opening part of the chapter, Jeremiah asks permission to reason with God respecting His government. God answers Jeremiah by reasoning with him about his troubles and how unfit he was to cope with the same. This reasoning which is as much for us as it was for the prophet, calls attention to the personal experience of each individual. Life’s journey is not a procedure from great trials to lesser, though at each stage we are apt to think that matters are as difficult as they can well be. It is, speaking generally, a process from lesser trials to greater, till we come to the greatest trial of all. God in His over-ruling providence deals thus with saint and sinner. This is brought before us in the lives of Abraham, Joseph, Moses, etc., till we come to Jeremiah, who meets first with footmen, then horses, and last of all, with the swellings of Jordan.

Without enlarging on this phase of the subject which each one can fill in for himself, and which reveals the glory of Him who provides a back to carry the heavier burden, let me confine myself to that application of it which concerns us all. Let me treat the subject in connection with the experience we have in being called upon to resist sin. Mankind is confronted with the law of God from the earliest childhood. The temptation to do wrong, to lie, steal, to break the Holy Sabbath, to neglect prayer, etc., strive for mastery with each one of us as soon as we become conscious of good and evil. Which is to be the victor—the child or the sin? What is the universal experience of mankind regarding this? As you look back on your early days, must you not confess that these early temptations to sin were as footmen, running with you? More than that, they got the better of you, forestalled you. They were the victors; you were the vanquished. You ran with the footmen and they wearied you. There was more or less of a struggle, but “Old Adam” was too much for “Young Melanthon.” God would have us call to remembrance these early struggles and conflicts, so that we might consider results. Who will dare gainsay that childhood and youth are not only vanity, but are likewise periods of our life which prove our weakness and the deceitfulness of sin and Satan.

If then, we have run with the footmen and they wearied us, how can we expect to contend with horses? If the sins of youth gained the mastery, shall not sin which has gathered strength by much sinning, be the master? When one first acts wrongly, conscience is aroused and alarmed. If the sin is repeated, the conscience becomes seared, the understanding becomes blunted, and the will loses all power to resist; sin has become strong. It is no longer a running with footmen; it is a contending with horses. How utterly infatuated sinners are in boasting of their power to give up “the sin which doth so easily beset them.” Let us take the sin of unbelief, the crowning sin—our not closing in with Christ, as our personal Saviour. The Holy Spirit in His common operations strives especially with the young. When the claims of the Saviour’s love and grace are pressed home on the young heart, what an effort must be made before this rejecting of Christ gains the victory. But when this sin is committed Sabbath after Sabbath and year after year, it becomes like the leviathan, it laughs at the shaking of the spear, the sharp point of which declares that “he that believeth not the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him.” It does not give the least concern at last to the sinner to spurn the most earnest entreaties to be reconciled to God through Jesus Christ. Thus sinners come to trample under foot the Son of God and to count the blood of the Covenant, wherewith He was sanctified, an unholy thing, and to do despite unto the Spirit of grace, and after doing so, wipe their mouths like the harlot and say, “I have done no evil.” If all sin, and this sin of unbelief especially, bears this fruit, where is the reasonableness of expecting a complete change of heart in the hour of death?

Man in his depravity turns all the goodness of God into poison for himself; he turns the grace of God into lasciviousness. God has given to each one of us for the present, a land of peace. The land of the Bible, of the Sabbath, of secret, of family, of public means of grace is verily a land of peace, in spite of all the iniquity that abounds in it. All that is from God in this land is on the side of the sinner that he might forsake his sin: “The goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance.” Man makes it a land of false peace. The very long suffering and kindness of God are turned into the gall and wormwood of a defiant continuance in unconcern and sin. If this is man’s condition (and I appeal to your conscience to give a right judgment) each day leaving him less able to combat evil, each day finding him less willing to seek God, how then can we hope for victory, when all physical, mental and social props are gone? What wilt thou do in the swellings of Jordan when you have been the loser and the Devil and Sin, the victors, from your earliest days till now. Man’s life, apart from a saving interest in the divine Saviour, is failure, failure, failure, and every hour, every incident of his life from the cradle to his dying days witnesses that in his combat with the swellings of the Jordan of Death, his lot will be an everlasting failure.

III.—God’s purpose in thus reasoning with us.

Such reasoning as we have in this passage is God’s common method in Scripture in dealing with man’s callous irrationality in the matter of his eternal interests. In one place the sinner is very unfavourably compared with the brutes that perish. “The ox knoweth his owner and the ass his master’s crib; my people know me not; Israel doth not consider” (Isa. i., 3). God meets this want of consideration with a “Come now and let us reason together, saith the Lord, and though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.” There is no hope for the sinner apart from laying to heart his solemn position before God. If he is to know his own miserable state as a sinner, unable to be a saviour to himself, he must begin to weigh eternal values, as they are weighed in the balances of the sanctuary. God reasons with man so that man may stand aghast at his own unreasonableness and folly in having neglected so long the eternal verities of God and his soul. God would have us face and find the answer to the question: What shall it profit a man though he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?

The Lord did not thus reason with Jeremiah merely to show him his utter insufficiency to overcome the difficulties awaiting him. Such a disclosure in itself would only unfit him for duty, and make him despair of success. He required to be brought to face all these issues only in the name and in the strength of the Almighty whose servant he was and whose will he had to obey. It was necessary for Jeremiah as sure as it was for Paul to have that truth confirmed to him: “My grace is sufficient for thee, and my strength is made perfect in weakness. Luther had to learn the same lesson. He spent the night before his second appearance in the presence of the Emperor at the Diet of Worms, pleading that he would not be permitted to lean in the least degree upon self, but altogether upon the Almighty Arm of the God whose truth he was called upon to confess. Jeremiah, Paul, Luther, and all the other true witnesses were more than conquerors through grace that brought them off the sinking sand of vain confidence, and placed them upon the stable rock of the all-sufficiency of Jehovah.

Salvation comes to the sinner in the day he is taken out of self into Christ. It is indispensable for you to know yourself lost and undone, to have the sentence of death in yourself, in order that you may look alone to the Saviour who saves by blood and power. Your case is hopeless apart from Christ and a saving interest in Him. There is no reason for hopelessness, but rather for strong confidence, if you become one with Christ by faith. United to Him in His All-fulness and ability to save to the uttermost, you will pass out of spiritual death into life. You will begin your course in that way the walls of which are salvation and which leads to fulness of joy and pleasures for evermore. By the grace that is in Christ Jesus you will contend with footmen, horses, and though they will weary you, they will not overcome you. When you come to the swellings of Jordan, the River will be deep or shallow or dry to you according to your trust in the King that reigns over the Fair Country. Because He overcame, the River of Death will not seal your doom, but will form the avenue by which you will enter to your everlasting inheritance in Emmanuel’s Land. May the Lord add His blessing to our meditation on His word.

Esau cried, not for his sin in selling the birth-right; but for his loss in missing the blessing.—John Trapp.

Gold may be gold, and bear the King’s stamp upon it, when it is trampled upon by men.—Samuel Rutherford.