The history of the Bible is the history of original sin; the doctrine of the Bible is the doctrine of God's putting it away forever. Does not the history of our races (I do not say our creation) begin with the declaration that Adam, fallen and driven out from God, begat a son in his image, after his likeness, the fruit being shown in sin against his brother, as Adam's sin had been against God, and so death actually in the world—the death of the pious marking the predominance of evil. That is the early history of sin attached to our origin, and so in our nature. Further, when the flood had swept away the insupportable violence and corruption of the world, (and of the world begun again in Noah, in whom rest was given concerning the work of man's hands, and the curse taken so far off the ground,) did he not turn the blessing into drunkenness, he to whom government had been entrusted? and did not shame and a son's wickedness inaugurate the new career of man? Did not man then sink into idolatry, of which there is no appearance before, having built a tower to establish his own will? The form of the world, in nations and peoples, is founded on it; God then called out Abraham from the midst of this idolatry, and, after a lapse of some 400 years, so that a people should be formed, brings them out of Egypt with a high hand, leads them to Sinai to give them His law—the rule of life for a child of Adam. But they made the golden calf before they had time to get it graven on stone, though they had heard the voice of God out of the midst of the fire.
Such, then, is man according to the history of the Bible: and so you will find it throughout. Before the consecration of Aaron and his sons was over, Nadab and Abdul had offered strange fire and were slain; and Israel, responsible under the priesthood, closed its history by the Ark's being taken, and judgment coming on the priesthood itself in Eli: so that the whole system was closed, for without the Ark there was no regular association with God at all. God interfered by a prophet, but that was sovereign grace. When the royalty was established Solomon fell into idolatry; and at last Lo-ammi (not my people) was written on the chosen people of God, where He had set His name that it might be owned in the midst of the universal corruption and idolatry of the world, and where grace and warning had dealt “till there was no remedy.” When God set up a head of Gentile power in Nebuchadnezzar, he sets up an idol and persecutes the saints, and the whole series of these monarchies takes the character of unintelligent ravenous beasts. But chief and last of all, (save special mercy on His intercession,) when God declared, “I have yet one Son: it may be they will reverence my Son when they see him;” they said, when they saw Him, “This is the heir; come, let us kill him, and the inheritance shall be ours.” They had then no cloak for their sin. They had seen and hated both Him and His Father. There was a reprieve through His intercession on the cross, and the Holy Ghost announced a glorified Christ, and the open door of repentance; but they would not go in. They closed the history of man with this word of judgment: “Ye do always resist the Holy Ghost; as your fathers did, so do ye.” A judged world, a broken law, persecuted prophets, the slain just One, the resisted Spirit, sum up the history of man, the history of original sin. Man must be born again.
It is a sad and solemn picture, and ought to be brought home to one's own heart, in which it is all morally true. But it brings this comfort with it, that it shows the new blessing brought in by the Last Adam to be itself entirely apart from the corrupt first Adam, though moral intelligence be brought out by their conflict and the need of God's grace be surely found in it. But Christianity has its basis in resurrection, after the work of redemption; that is, a passage into a wholly new state after God's perfect goodness, and His righteousness, too, had been proved as to the old.
Paul sums up the great truth in saying, “we were by nature the children of wrath, even as others;” and then, “but God who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us, even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, and hath raised us up together.... created in Christ Jesus.” And this makes death and resurrection the great topic of the epistles. “Reckon yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, and alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” So Peter, though less fully and elaborately: “we are begotten again to a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead;” and, “as Christ hath suffered for us in the flesh, arm yourselves likewise with the same mind.” Am I not right in saying, that the history of the Bible is the history of original sin—of, one who had to confess, if he knew himself, “Behold, I was shapen in wickedness, and in sin did my mother conceive me?” It was accompanied by marvelous longsuffering and gracious dealings, which only brought out this sin, till, the tree having been digged about and dunged, it was proved no care could make a bad tree bring forth good fruit; and the Lord says, “Now is the judgment of this world.” “The world seeth me no more.” But this was only to bring in redemption and set man on a wholly new footing, beyond evil and in the glory of God; so that it should be said, “when we were in the flesh;” “but ye are not in the flesh.” And this true and divine dealing with our nature, according to the revelation of God, is what is fully brought out in Romans; and hence, deserved condemnation, atonement, death, and resurrection. Indeed, in doctrine the epistle goes no farther—not on to ascension; because it is laying the great moral ground of sin, and putting it away, in guilt and power alike; and man's acceptance with God on a new footing: it only once just states the result of ascension as a final fact in the chain. But the same truth is insisted once and again, as in the passages already quoted. So, in experience, “I know that in me, that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing.” The flesh “is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be.” It “lusts against the Spirit.” “They that are in the flesh cannot please God.” “I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live, yet not I but Christ liveth in me.”
God has not said in vain, “Every imagination of the thoughts of his heart is only evil continually;” and this said, too, in grace, “I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake; for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth.” It was not merely the previous wickedness of the antediluvians. They were gone. It was His motive for dealing with the race no, more in that way. So the Lord, “Out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies.” Did you ever see it stated in Scripture that good things come out of his heart naturally? God has tried it in every way. It was lawless, broke the law, killed His Son, resisted His Spirit. The dealings of God, in patient mercy, which we find in Scripture, only wrought this out, so that we might have a Scriptural delineation, a history, which proved that sin which, after all, is the history of our own hearts. For self-will, law-breaking, slighting Christ, and resisting the appeals of God's Spirit, are not confined to antediluvians or Jews. The Scripture hath concluded all under sin, that all might come on the ground of pure mercy. And you will see that, (developed only in promise in Adam's time, then by prophecy, in figures under the law, in accomplishment in Christ, in testimony to His glory by the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven,) the putting of sin away is the great doctrine of Scripture. “Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin (not the sins, as often falsely cited) of the world.” It is changing the whole principle on which the world, as such, stood. So, again, “But now once in the end of the world,” i.e., the consummation of the ages—these times of testing responsible man from Adam to Christ, “he hath appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.” That is morally founded, as to the glory of God, on the death of Christ, and man after Him is introduced by resurrection into the new condition, beyond sin, consequent on that glorifying of God. At the same time there is the bearing of sins for the redeemed; but this is not our subject now. Thus a depth is given to Christ's sacrifice which mere salvation, precious as it is, could not give, though we come into it so. “Now is the Son of man glorified, and God is glorified in him. If God be glorified in him, God shall also glorify him in himself, and shall straightway glorify him.”
Hence, while we must come in as sinners by the cross, or there is no truth in the inward parts, and sin is not judged in ourselves, without which there is no moral deliverance, and by which we morally side with God against ourselves as sinners and against sin; yet, when we have entered by this new and living way, it is not a standing without, in the hope that, by the blessed One's bearing our sins on the cross, we may be safe; but (where that has been fully realized by us as the needed and only way) we have now passed within, by the new and living way, and contemplate the cross in peace, so to speak, from the divine side, and see all the absolute beauty of it. And there is nothing like it—nothing in which God is thus morally glorified. “Therefore doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life that I might take it again.” He does not even say, “for the sheep:” it is the thing itself which is so excellent. And this makes me so often feel mere evangelical teaching so poor, even where true, as I thankfully say it is, as far as it goes. It leaves the Christian outside, hoping for and thinking only of, himself, instead of the deep conviction that there is no good thing in himself, bringing him in by an accomplished work, and then, as within, looking that he should display the character suited to it. They are right to dread Antinomianism and to distrust themselves. But I suspect that the true secret of putting Christians under the law (which Christianity does not) is, that, having nothing of the discipline of the primitive church, they are obliged to modify the gospel, and make the law a schoolmaster after Christ, to keep men in order. Then all fall naturally into it; because man has the keeping of it. If he has a tender conscience, it tortures him, as we often see; if not, he thinks of himself, takes for granted some failure is to be there, judges it perhaps pretty easily—will really sorrow over it, if the new nature be there—but, in any case, he can think of himself, and that the heart likes. A man likes thinking badly of himself, ay, and saying so, better than not thinking of himself at all, and simply displaying Christ's gracious life by thinking on Himself only. We have to judge ourselves; but our right state is thinking of the Lord alone. Is not having done with self the really difficult thing? Is it not the aim of Christianity, settling first, in a divine way, the question of sin righteously with God by atonement? And is not power there to deliver from self or flesh, and give us the victory, though we may fail? It is a humbling thought that we are such. But it is better to know ourselves; and the largest supplies of grace, and divine objects, are there to take us out of ourselves. In the Philippians we have the pattern of it in one of like passions with ourselves. There, in the picture of the Christian normal state, the flesh (save having no confidence in it) and sin are not mentioned. Yet the writer had a thorn in the flesh to keep it down. If we were perfectly humble, we should not need humbling; but we do, all of us, even Paul, as we see in this ease.
Christ, then, has been manifested to put away sin out of God's sight, out of man's heart, and out of the world: the great work which does it is accomplished; the results are not all accomplished in power. He who has not judged original sin, has not the estimate of the new nature animated by the Spirit of God, which is on God's side against sin. I judge the individual in no way: he may hate what he sees in himself of actual sin. I speak of abstract, moral truth. He who does not see the principle, and nature, and guilt of sin, as it stands in man's self-will, has not the estimate which the knowledge of a holy nature in reconciliation to God gives.