NOT many years ago a certain scientist in Massachusetts imported some caterpillars of a kind that interested him. He kept them in a bottle. One day the bottle tipped over, and some of the caterpillars escaped. Unnoticed, they made their way into the garden, and in due time stocked it with gipsy, moths. These moths became quite a plague, and to deal with them, and the swarms produced by them, the Bay State, as Massachusetts is called, has had to spend over a million dollars of public money!
How far-reaching are the results of some acts, insignificant in themselves! The tipping over of the bottle was a trivial incident, but thence resulted all the damage subsequently done by the insect pests.
People sometimes speak as if the original sin of Eve in the Garden were a trifling matter.
“Merely the eating of an apple," they call it.
But from that act all the trouble in the world has resulted. Think of the devastating wars, the hideous crimes, the horrible cruelties, the dire diseases, the loathsome vices that have filled and polluted the world. All the consequence of that sin!
I am sometimes asked: Why does not God intervene to put an end to all the suffering and misery in the world? Why does He not stop wars? Why does He not put down all the cruelties and acts of violence that we hear of?
The reason is this: When God intervenes in power (as He will do), it will be, first of all, to deal with sin, the root of all the mischief.
Let me ask you: Are you, after all, keenly anxious that God should intervene to put down all sin? What would such intervention mean for you? When the time comes for the Lamb of God, the Lord Jesus Christ, to take away the world's sin, according to John 1:2929The next day John seeth Jesus coming unto him, and saith, Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world. (John 1:29), how will you fare?
Unless your sin has already been taken away, blotted from God's book of remembrance, you will have to be taken away, in unsparing judgment! For God to intervene in righteous power will mean the unloosing of His holy anger against all manner of sin, and against all ungodly sinners. (See Jude 1515To execute judgment upon all, and to convince all that are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds which they have ungodly committed, and of all their hard speeches which ungodly sinners have spoken against him. (Jude 15).) It is His mercy and long-suffering which leads Him to delay.
I do not mean that you or anyone else is going to be punished for the sin committed in Eden. We have all suffered from the terrible consequences of that sin. One consequence is that "death has passed upon all men," and generation after generation of our race has gone down to the grave, like corn mown down by the sickle.
But after death comes the judgment; and this, not because of what Adam or Eve did, but because of what men themselves have done. Men will be judged, not because Adam was a sinner, but because they are sinners; not because their first parents fell into disobedience, but because they have followed in their steps, and have loved sin and practiced it.
Thank God, though there is no remedy for all the calamity that sin has brought upon the world save His own intervention in power (which He will bring to pass when Christ comes to take the kingdoms of earth and to reign in righteousness), there is a remedy, a grand and complete remedy, for the individual sinner. He may get rid of the burden of his guilt through Christ's precious blood. He may be clothed with a robe of righteousness of God's own providing.
Is this a small matter in your eyes, reader?
Should it not rather be the first of all objects with you, that you should get your guilt canceled, your sins cleansed away, and your soul made fit for heaven? H. P. B.