SIN and the blessed God cannot dwell together: sin and the happy believer cannot dwell together either.
God desired man’s company as well as his blessing. But His holiness was such that He could not have him in His presence in his sins: His righteousness was such that there must be, atonement for his sins. Every transgression and disobedience must have its just recompense of reward. Hence the precious statement (1 Peter 3:18): “Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the Just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God.” Why bring us to God? Because God wanted us. God’s desire is toward sinful men. Blessed assurance for every beating heart in the whole human family. He delights not in man’s banishment. He celebrates with overflowing joy the turning of a prodigal to Him. When He puts the sinner’s sins away, He uses a figure that no other can possibly reach up to. What human mind could suggest a stronger, or one more sublimely simple, than this? “As far as the east is from the west, so far hath He removed our transgressions from us” (Ps. 103:12). And does not He Himself suggest in the previous verse of the Psalm that His thoughts of grace and goodness tower over every thought of the creature? “As the heaven is high above the earth, so great is His mercy toward them that fear Him.” It was by Jesus the sin was put away; and the gift of such a sacrifice was the measure of His mercy toward us.
But there is another way of looking at it. He works by the death of Jesus to put my sins away from me; but He works in me also and turns me away from my sins. “God, having raised up His Son Jesus, sent Him to bless you, in turning away every one of you from his iniquities” (Acts 3:26). We are exposed in the presence of the perfect grace of God’s Holy One, and our iniquities become hateful to us. We turn from our sins and ourselves with loathing, and find our satisfaction in the blessed Sent One Himself. God delights to have it so.
Thus in a double way we become separated from our sins which once separated us from God. “But your iniquities,” said the prophet Isaiah, “have separated between you and your God” (Isa. 59:2).
Has the reader experienced anything of this blessing of turning away from his iniquities?
If not von are still bound un with your iniquities, and your iniquities are still bound up with you.
It is said that a man awaiting execution for the crime of murder had, one night, a dreadful dream. He dreamed that the victim whom he had murdered was clinging to him most tenaciously. Do what he would, he could not shake himself free. From the cell to the scaffold, from the scaffold into the dreaded “beyond,” he was still fastened in the grip of his victim!
We can well understand what such a thought would be to a poor condemned culprit. We can also understand something of the horror of the sentence pronounced on Gehazi: “The leprosy of Naaman shall cleave unto thee... forever” (2 Kings 5:27). But what must it be for a man to die in his sins, and to be separated by his sins from God and all that is happy forever! “Ye shall seek Me, and shall die in your sins. Whither I go, ye cannot come,” said Jesus to some. No sentence can be more terrible. May the unsaved reader be awakened to something of its awful character, and escape to the welcoming Saviour at once. It gave Him no pleasure to say, “Ye will not come to Me that ye might have life,” yet when here below He actually had to say it: and it will give Him no satisfaction to say to you beyond the grave, “Once ye would not come now ye cannot come.”
But what does give Him pleasure is to hear one of His own say, living or dying―
“The opened heavens upon me shine
With beams of sacred bliss;
Jesus proclaims that He is mine,
And whispers I am His.”
GEO. C.