Sin Strikes at all God’s Attributes

Thomas Boston
Taken, with editing, from Boston’s Works, vol 1.

1. Sin is contrary to God’s unspotted holiness, which is His special glory. Of all the glorious constellations of the divine attributes which shine in the law of God, His holiness has the brightest lustre. God is righteous in all His ways and holy in all His works, but the most precious monument of His holiness is the law. It is a true representation of His image and a clear copy of His nature and will. It is the perspicuous rule of our duty, without any blemish or imperfection. See what high praise the Apostle gives it: “The commandment [is] holy, and just, and good” (Rom 7:12). It enjoins nothing but what is absolutely good, without the least mixture of evil. It is a full and complete rule, defective in nothing and superfluous in nothing, but takes in the whole duty of man.

The sum of the law is set down by the Apostle. We are to live soberly (Tts 2:12), that is, we are to abstain from everything that may stain the excellency of our rational nature. We are to live righteously; this takes to do with the situation where God has placed us in the world to advance His glory. It includes all the duties we owe those to whom we are united by the bonds of nature, of civil society, or of spiritual communion. And we are to live godly, which takes in all the internal and external duties which we owe to God, who is the Sovereign of our spirits, whose will must be the rule, and His glory the aim, of all our actions. In short, the law is so framed that its holiness and goodness lay on us an eternal obligation to obey its commands, even apart from the authority of the Lawgiver. Now sin is directly contrary to the infinite sanctity and purity of God; it consists in not doing what the law commands, or in doing what it expressly forbids, and God cannot look on it without infinite detestation (Hab 1:13). He cannot but hate what is opposite to the glory of His nature and to the lustre of all His perfections.

1. Sin vilifies the wisdom of God, which prescribed the law to men as the rule of their duty. The divine wisdom shines brightly in His laws. They are all designed to be exactly congruous to God’s nature, to His relation to us, and to man’s faculties before he was corrupted. Thus the divine law is a bright transcript both of God’s will and His wisdom; it binds the understanding and will – which are the leading faculties in man – to esteem and approve, to consent to and choose, all His precepts as best.

Now sin vilifies the infinite wisdom of God both as to the precepts of the law, the rule of our duty; and the sanction annexed to it to confirm its obligation. It charges the precepts with being an unequal yoke, as too severe and rigid in restricting our wills and actions. Thus the ungodly rebels complained of old: “The way of the Lord is not equal”; they restrain our liberties and infringe them; they are not worthy of our study and obedience. The rewards and punishments which God has annexed to the law to secure our obedience to its precepts, sin reckons them weak and ineffectual motives to serve that purpose. Thus it considers the wisdom of the Lawgiver to be defective, in not binding His subjects more firmly to their duty.

1. Sin is a high contempt and horrid abuse of the divine goodness, which should have a powerful influence in binding man to his duty. God’s goodness in creation is hereby despised, which raised us out of the dust of the earth to an excellent and glorious existence. Our parents were indeed instrumental in producing our bodies; but the variety, beauty and usefulness of the various parts, and their union together, were the high design of His wisdom and the excellent work of His hands. Man’s body is composed of as many miracles as there are members; it is full of wonders. The living idea and perfect exemplar of it was modelled in the divine mind. This affected David with holy admiration (Ps 139:14-16). The soul, the principal part, has a heavenly original, designed by the Father of lights. The faculties of understanding and choice show indelibly that we have an honour and dignity above the brutes; they make us capable of pleasing our Maker and enjoying Him.

Now, God’s purpose in giving us our being was to communicate from His own fulness to intelligent creatures, and to be actively glorified by them (Rev 4:11). No one is so lacking in rational thoughts as not to own that it is our indispensable duty and reasonable service to offer up ourselves as an entire living sacrifice to the glory of God. What is more natural, according to the laws of uncorrupted reason, than that love should correspond to love? As the one comes down with benefits, the other should ascend in praise and thankfulness. Now sin breaks all these sacred bonds of grace and gratitude, which engage us to love and obey our Maker. He is the just Lord of all our faculties of mind and feeling, and the sinner uses them all as weapons of unrighteousness to fight against God.

Again, it is He that upholds and preserves us by the powerful influence of His providence, daily surrounding us with many mercies. All the goodness which God thus bestows on men, the sinner abuses against Him. This is the most unworthy, shameful and monstrous ingratitude imaginable. This makes forgetful and unthankful men more brutish than the ox or ass, who serve and obey those that feed and keep them. Yes, it sinks them below the non-living part of creation, which invariably observes the law and order prescribed by the Creator. This is astonishing degeneracy. It was the complaint of God Himself: “Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth . . . I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against Me” (Is 1:2).

1. The sinner disparages God’s justice, in promising himself peace and safety, notwithstanding the wrath and vengeance that the Lord denounces against him. The sinner labours to dissolve the inseparable connection that God has placed between sin and punishment, which is not an arbitrary arrangement but founded on what sin deserves and on the infinite rectitude of God’s nature, which unchangeably hates it. The sinner sets God’s attributes contending, as it were, with one another, presuming that mercy will disarm justice and suspend its power by restraining it from taking vengeance upon impenitent sinners.

Thus sinners become bold and resolute in their impious courses, like the one who said, “I shall have peace though I walk in the imagination of my heart, to add drunkenness to thirst” (Dt 29:19). This casts such an aspersion on the justice of God that He solemnly threatens the severest vengeance for it, as you may see in verse 20: “The Lord will not spare him, but then the anger of the Lord and His jealousy shall smoke against that man, and all the curses that are written in this book shall lie upon him, and the Lord shall blot out His name from under heaven”.

1. Sin strikes against the omniscience of God, at least denying it implicitly. There is such depravity adhering to sin that it cannot endure the light of the sun, nor the light of conscience, but seeks to hide under a mask of virtue or a veil of darkness. What is said of the adulterer and the thief is true, in proportion, of every sinner: “If one know them, they are in the terrors of the shadow of death”. Hence many, who would blush and tremble if they were surprised in their sinful actings by a child or a stranger, are not at all afraid of the eye of God, though He exactly notices all their sins in order to judge them, and will judge them in order to punish them.

2. Sin bids defiance to God’s power. This is an attribute of God that makes Him so terrible to devils and wicked men. He has both a right to punish and power enough to revenge every transgression of His law that sinners are guilty of. Now His judicial power is supreme and His power to execute His justice is irresistible. He can with one stroke dispatch the body to the grave and the soul to the pit of hell and make men as miserable as they are sinful.

Yet sinners provoke Him as boldly as if there was no danger. We read of how the infatuated Syrians foolishly thought that God, the protector of Israel, had power only on the hills but not in the valleys. Therefore they renewed the war to their own destruction. Thus proud sinners contend with God and range an army of lusts against the armies of heaven. Being blindly bold, they run on headlong to their own ruin. They neither believe God’s all-seeing eye nor fear His almighty hand.