The Sin of Unbelief¹2. More Reasons Why It Is so Serious

W S Plumer

1. He who by unbelief rejects the Word of God, and His well-beloved Son, rejects divine wisdom. If we say that we do not need the salvation made known in the gospel, we charge God with making a needless sacrifice and a needless provision for our souls. When one says he is well, he declares that he needs no remedy. When one says he is good enough, and justifies himself, he cannot but look upon redemption by atoning blood as either a fable or a folly – a vast expenditure to no wise purpose.

God in His wisdom determined that Christ’s work and death were necessary for our salvation. Unbelief says, We can do without a Saviour. Or if the sense of guilt is strong, then our unbelief, tending to despair, impeaches God’s wisdom by saying that the death of Christ is not sufficient, and His

¹Taken, with editing, from The Rock of Our Salvation. The first section, last month, emphasised the fact that “Unbelief Denies God’s Truthfulness”.

blood is not effective, to wash away our sins. We say the remedy is not adequate. We say that sin stains too deeply and guilt presses too heavily for us to hope in the atonement of God’s dear Son. In this view the scheme of redemption is a failure. It lacks virtue. It does not meet human needs. Could a more heinous impeachment of God’s wisdom be made? Shall man be wiser than God, who charges His angels with folly? Is it surprising that the Judge of all the earth should be offended – indeed, incensed – when men reject His Son and His gospel, which is both the wisdom of God and the power of God unto man’s salvation?

1. Unbelief is a rejection of kindness, a slighting of unspeakable mercy offered to us by the Lord. The refusal of Jesus Christ has no parallel for ingratitude, stubbornness and daring impiety. Sovereign love holds to our lips the cup of salvation. Unbelief puts it away and says, Let Thy gifts be to Thyself, and Thy rewards to another; I do not need them; I do not trust them; I do not accept them. In unbelief, the debtor in prison refuses to let Jesus be his Surety. By unbelief, the poor naked soul refuses the spotless righteousness of Christ and cleaves to the filthy rags of its own righteousness. Unbelief refuses to permit the great Deliverer to come in and knock off the chains of fiery condemnation. It spurns the balm of Gilead, although the soul is all diseased.

God expostulates with the wicked; He says, “How shall I give thee up? As I live, I have no pleasure in the death of the sinner. My repentings are kindled together.” The Father of mercy calls sinners. The Son of His love cries, “Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden”. The Holy Spirit woos. The Church of God says, “Come”. Surely it cannot be safe – it must be perilous – to esteem lightly such love and pity. It must be perilous to esteem lightly mercy bought with blood, the blood of propitiation – mercy offered to us by the Lord Himself, mercy so much needed by us all, mercy rejected by none but the perverse. God’s love to sinners is amazing; Christ’s love to them far exceeds any love the best man on earth bears to Him; the love of the Holy Spirit is unsurpassed. How, O how, can we slight such kindness?

1. Unbelief is a denial and refusal of the grace of God in the gospel of His Son. And we need all the grace offered to us. We are sinful, guilty, justly condemned, blind, ignorant, wretched, impotent. We are without strength, without holiness, without righteousness, without saving knowledge, without healing medicines, without hope, without God in the world. This is, and must continue to be, our state till we are made partakers of that grace which is rich, free, unmerited, abundant, treasured up in Christ and proclaimed in the glorious gospel. But unbelief says, Christ has died in vain; His intercession is worthless; His gospel is a fable. In robbing our souls of this mercy, we rob God of the glory of His grace. “In a word,” says John Owen, “if a

man should choose to set himself in a universal opposition unto God, he can think of no more compendious way than this” of unbelief.

1. Unbelief is a slighting of God’s power both to save and to destroy, and of His authority as a Lawgiver and Governor. He has brought all His sovereignty to bear on the duty of faith in Christ: “This is His commandment, That we should believe on the name of His Son”. To disregard this command is to contemn all His power over us, for He requires faith in His Son under the sanction of the most awful threatenings, many of which have been already quoted.

2. The sin of unbelief is in most cases terribly aggravated. It is commonly a sin that has been long persisted in. If men are now unbelievers, they have been committing that sin all their days. Their lives have been lives of unbelief. For one act of unbelief, Moses was denied admission into Canaan. For one act of unbelief, Zacharias was struck dumb. But our acts of unbelief have been as numerous as the calls of mercy which we have resisted. And our unbelief has been indulged against much instruction and knowledge. Often has the light shone as clear as day. Often have we heard appeals as solemn as death and as tender as the compassions of a dying Saviour. If we are now in unbelief, we know – we have long known – it is a sin. For unbelief indulged under a much darker dispensation, the carcasses of 600 000 men fell in the wilderness.

Again, we have seen great sinners turn from sin to the Saviour and find mercy. In their renovated lives we had the proof of the power of Christ to save. We must be guilty for disregarding the lessons of such examples. Hear the Son of God Himself on this matter: “The publicans and the harlots believed [John]; and ye, when ye had seen it, repented not afterwards that ye might believe” (Mt 21:32). Further, the salvation of the gospel is God’s last offer to man. When Christ’s atonement is rejected by unbelief, there remains no more sacrifice for sins. God will never send another Saviour into the world. Christ Himself said, “If ye believe not that I am He, ye shall die in your sins”. Indeed unbelief is by pre-eminence the damning sin of all who hear the gospel and perish. It is of the nature of all sin to work death, but unbelief is the only sin which we in a gospel land commit that renders damnation inevitable. It is the act of a poor condemned criminal on his way to execution refusing a pardon. It is the act of Esau taking the pottage, eating it and giving up the birthright for ever.

And unbelief is a sin always willfully committed. So Christ Himself charges: “Ye will not come to Me, that ye might have life”. So the apostles charged their hearers: Ye “judge yourselves unworthy of everlasting life”. Unbelief persisted in seals our perdition. It closes every door of hope and

leaves us enshrouded in the darkness of despair for ever and ever. It does all this by grieving the Holy Ghost, by vexing Him to depart from us.

1. Indeed, how can unbelief be other than an enormous sin, when it has its seat in pride, self-will, self-righteousness, love of riches, love of human honours and hardness of heart? “The wicked, through the pride of his countenance, will not seek after God.” “How can ye believe, which receive honour one of another, and seek not the honour that cometh from God only?” “Ye cannot serve God and mammon.” “If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.” “Ye do always resist the Holy Ghost.” These are but samples of the manner in which God speaks of the causes of unbelief. All unbelief has its seat in dreadful depravity.

2. We may judge of the heinousness of the sin of unbelief from the dreadful sentence resting on all in whom it reigns. The Bible says they are “condemned already”. They are condemned by the first covenant, which says, “Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things which are written in the book of the law to do them”; “The soul that sinneth, it shall die” – it shall die; it shall die; it shall die. And what a death!

But to this condemnation is added that of the gospel: “He that believeth not is condemned already”; “This is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light”. This double condemnation, how terrible! It is a condemnation from God, the Lawgiver, the Judge of all. His sentence is irreversible. And it “already” rests on unbelievers. The day of judgement will declare it and enforce it, but it will not alter it. He who lives and dies condemned will awake to shame and everlasting contempt on the morning of the last day, and will stand self-condemned as well as God-condemned at the tribunal of Christ. Beware, unbeliever, beware. Forsaking truth and embracing error, angels shrunk into devils. Forsaking error and grasping truth, sinners rise to the dignity of saints and to the companionship of angels.