“If the Son, therefore, shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed” (John viii. 36).
(Continued from page 264.)
2nd.—The polluting power of Sin.
No one is entirely ignorant of the injurious influence of the appetites and passions—”of the lusts that war against the soul,” of “the law of the members warring against the law of the mind.” Many, however, are regardless of the working in the hidden man of the heart of those spiritual passions, “the lusts of the mind,” which are equally known to God, and marked by Him as those which express themselves in overt acts, and which, as attaching to the spirit, or higher and more enduring part of man, are more evil and odious to God. Still more are unable to discover any thing like unity of character, and concurrence of operation, in these ever changing passions, for morally polluting human nature and opposing God; they appear like accidental and contradictory movements without any fixed direction; nay, it may seem that the check which one of these forces opposes to another is salutary; and we may well allow that much of what passes for morals in the world, is nothing more than the restraining of one evil passion by the counter operation of another equally offensive in the sight of God. How common is it to have sordid love of gain as alone the cause of temperance; vanity the only source of religious and moral acting; and pride producing self-denial in one quarter, that it may have larger scope in another; and men, supposing that by playing them off thus one against the other, and by opposing them all by considerations of reason and self-interest, they may be made harmless, and will be finally subdued.
But to understand this matter aright, we must go deeper into human nature, and inquire what that great principle in the mind is, from which these movements spring, and to which they minister. It is the love of gratifying self. This is the great master-passion, the great leading disposition of fallen man. The passions or propensities may be various in their kind, in their movements, and in the measure of their exercise; but they have this in common, that they all, and in all their movements, are employed to gratify self; and this taste or love for self-gratifying becomes, by a law of our nature, stronger by every indulgence. Now, if it shall be found, that this leading disposition of human nature is itself the very essence of sin, it must be allowed that what ministers to it and increases it, pollutes human nature.
In advancing such a position as that the disposition of gratifying self, as found in fallen human nature, is the very essence of sin, we may expect to have it questioned in some such manner as this:—What! is it possible that any living being should not have the desire of gratifying himself, or, what is tantamount, should not have the desire of happiness, or, if such a thing were possible, would existence be desirable on those terms? The objection is plausible, and we admit readily, that the desire of happiness is an essential attribute of rational existence. But we do not admit that it ought to have the primary place; that high place belongs to another disposition, and the desire of happiness has, or ought to have, a place secondary and subservient to that disposition.
In the original creation of man, God formed him to be in relation with Himself, and accommodated him in his soul to that universal law which was the bond of this connection between Himself and His creatures. The great enactment of that law was, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart.” This fundamental clause in the divine law enjoined, as the leading disposition in the creature, supreme love to God. God wrote this disposition on the human heart; it was the primary one, the ground of all moral movement, and in acting from this great motive, God provided that there should be a gratification of incalculable amount and duration to the creature. He thus put creature gratification in the second place; but by this He did not lower it in character, or lessen it in degree. On the contrary, by putting the love of God first, He opened up, in the divine nature, to which this disposition attracted man, an infinite field of excellence for observation and enlargement of feeling, which should never cease to produce the purest and most intense happiness.
Man, in the fall, by violating the law of God, broke his relation with God; lost the primary disposition of loving God imprinted at his first creation; ceased to retain the knowledge of God: and then his secondary property, the desire of happiness, sought created objects with which he was surrounded, with them to gratify himself. He took the world instead of God as his object, and sent out all his propensities to draw gratification from this new object; need we say, how mean in the comparison!
The sin, then, in his present state of heart, is not that he desires to be happy viewed in the abstract, but that he seeks for his own gratification the primary place, or that self-love occupies the place of the love of God, and that he has chosen the world as his delight rather than God. “Be astonished, O ye heavens, at this, and be horribly afraid, be ye very desolate, saith the Lord; for my people have committed two evils, they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water. This state of the heart is essentially polluted and wicked. The exercise of the passions ministering to it, and giving it indulgence, strengthens it, and thereby increases the pollution of our natures. And, if we consider moral purity to consist in conformity to the divine law, which is the true standard of purity, then we must see that the selfish or carnal mind which is enmity to God, is not subject to it, neither indeed can be. Thus, that law has as its first and great enactment “Love the Lord thy God,” which is essentially opposed to the selfish principle. The one cannot be ascendant without the dethronement of the other; it is the contrariety in their very essence, of these two antagonist principles, that causes enmity to arise in the selfish or carnal mind whenever the demand of the law for the ascendency of its great principle stands fully out. The carnal man would willingly do many things of what the law requires, but to put God before himself is too much.
3rd.—Satanic temptation.
The legal captivity to Satan by the curse of the law has already been adverted to. He assaulted our first parents with temptation when in innocence, but it seems to have been from without, by verbal persuasion, and by exhibition to the senses, addressed to desires and principles, and tastes that were natural and legitimate. The sanctuary of the mind does not appear to have been permitted to be invaded. Christ being sinless could say, “The prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in me.” But soon as they became accursed or subjects of penalty, became of the same class, and occupied one common ground with Satan as fallen and apostate, there seemed to be a nearer fellowship established, a fuller access to the mind given, as well as sympathies formed which facilitated the temptation to sin which he employed against them, and which, as a powerful and designing spirit, he was able to manage successfully and covertly. Of Judas it is said that “Satan entered into him.” The permission seems to have been given him in his character of avenger, thus to operate against the children of disobedience, still under limitation, saving certain points necessary to their moral freedom and natural existence, and to the accomplishment of certain designs of heaven. This restriction is intimated in the narrative of the Book of Job regarding Satan. See chap. i. ver. 7-12; and chap. ii. ver. 1-7. The Scripture is clear as to the existence, power, extensiveness, and polluting efficacy of this agency. “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world” (Eph. vi. 12). Satan is called “the spirit that worketh in the children of disobedience.” “Ye,” saith Christ, “are of your father the Devil, and the lusts of your father ye do.”
The great object of satanic malignity is to retain the creature in sin, and, when under a remedial system, to prevent the soul’s coming under the operation of this system so as to be recovered to God. Satan at present requires no direct recognition of himself; he allows the self we have spoken of to rule and be obeyed, because that is enough to secure the reign of sin. He will allow men to do many good things, if so be that they exalt themselves on that ground. He will become the patron of religious systems, if so be that in spirit and bearing they are adverse to God’s way of salvation. He acts by system not to prompt to all sins, and at all times in utter recklessness. The grand point with him is to prevent man’s becoming acquainted with the gospel way of escape. He aims to effect this object; 1st, by endeavouring to conceal from men their real condition and danger, and persuading them that they are sufficiently good and safe as they are; and, O! how many myriads of blinded self-complacent creatures does he retain captives by this delusion; men who say, “Peace, peace, when there is no peace,” and who go down to death with the “lie” which he palmed upon them, “in their right hands.” 2nd, he attempts directly to obscure the gospel. “If our gospel be hid, it is to them that are lost; in whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them that believe not” (2 Cor. iv. 4). He persuades them that the gospel is mysterious, and to their poor benighted and deceived minds it must appear strange; and he would have them believe that all that is essential in religion must be plain to every one, cruelly concealing from them that what makes it mysterious, is their ignorance of the first principles of divine government and human responsibility, and the complication of evil, and the terribleness of the condemnation under which they lie. It is a remedy commensurate to an evil which they have never felt or imagined; and so it is inconceivable. This moral binding of the mind by deceptions, those chains of darkness, constitute the strength of Satan’s enslaving power over the children of disobedience.
II. Proof corroborative of the Scripture representation of this bondage, may be drawn.
1st.—From Death and its appearances.
The terror which death impresses gives it all the character of a penal infliction; it seems not an ordinary process of nature, such as certain animals undergo in passing from one stage of existence to another, the chrysalis state, for instance; but a violence done to nature, a forcible disruption of its frame, against which nature struggles. A similar inference may be drawn from its universality. “It is appointed unto all men once to die.” However various in qualities and in course of life, all come to this common fate at last. There is a general proscription which this destroyer enforces against every living being of the fallen family of Adam, as well as against all the living creatures which connect with man on earth. “The earth is accursed for thy sake,” saith God to Adam. Does not this furnish daily and hourly evidence of the resting of the condemnatory sentence of the law on human nature? The exception in favour of those who are delivered from condemnation, does not hold to the extent of an exemption from natural death in the present world, any more than their deliverance from the ascendency of sin, carries their entire exemption from its existence in them. While here, sin has a place in them; and so death, its inseparable attendant, rests upon them; but, as we shall afterwards see, its sting is taken away.
2nd. Ample proof may be derived from the history of man in every past age, and the general aspect of the world in the present.
This opens up before us on the great scale, one vast manifestation of the mingled workings of selfish, flagitious, and ungodly principles. We behold a “world lying in wickedness,” and pervaded with misery. Are men then free? or are they in bondage to what so manifestly subjugates the race in every age, and in every place? The experience of the saints without one single exception, wherever it has been expressed or recorded, as it has been in many thousand instances, carries an uniform and decided testimony to the existence of just such a bondage as we have described. “O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” is the language of Paul; also, “I am carnal, sold under sin.” “Iniquities prevail against me,” is the declaration of David. The want of consciousness of such bondage in others, in no degree invalidates the proof. Extreme cases of bodily disease, by affecting the mind, destroy the consciousness of disease. Equally does the spiritual blindness which characterises fallen man, and the morbid state of his moral feelings and principles, disqualify his mind from perceiving and being conscious of his state. “While they promise them liberty, they themselves are the servants of corruption.” It may be laid down as an indubitable truth, that where there is no consciousness of bondage, there the enthralment of the soul is as yet unbroken and entire.
III. Let the evil of this state of bondage be steadily viewed and considered.
You must have observed, that it is an inward spiritual bondage affecting the moral powers and liberties of the soul, and assigning the soul over to a prison-house and a cruel avenger’s power for ever more. The calamity does not obtrude itself upon the world, like the spectacle of a fettered body enslaved to a cruel tyrant, so as to rouse the indignation, and call forth the efforts, of the generous in the cause of enslaved and insulted human nature, to bid it to be free; no, before the world are seen certain badges of religious freedom—certain outward Christian decorations belonging to the freemen of Christ—his baptism—his profession of faith—his Church’s outward privileges; but O! how little is it perceived, that too often all these badges are worn by the most abject slaves of sin and Satan, and may descend with them to hell!
Is it no evil that the soul of man, formed in the image of God and capable of enjoying him, should, by the very eternity of its existence, be the most wretched and pitiable thing in its bondage of all that occupies earth? Arrested in its progress to the exalted heights it might have assumed in perfection and happiness; having no price to offer for its ransom; no power, so enamoured is it with its chains, ever truly to desire to be free? Is it no evil that God should have lost His place in the human heart, that the field of His excellencies should be unexplored, His authority not recognised, His generous love not responded to, by the spiritual powers of His own offspring created for such purposes; but that these high powers should be in servile subjection to a malignant and ungenerous enemy? Is it a light thing that the rights of God should be thus alienated, and His honour tarnished?—Would that men would consider the awful calamity which rests on the unseen but most important part of human nature. Would that men would pity that soul which is destined to live for ever, though it be in bondage!—would that men would think of that blessed God who is offended and dishonoured by their bondage!