GOD is good, and does good. Sin is not of God. Creation was of God, and man was set upon earth, endowed with authority over the works of His hands. He was encircled by every token of God’s goodness to His creatures, he had nothing to wish for to complete his happiness. To wish for further good was impossible; nothing was lacking, not a good thing could have been suggested to him that he did not possess. He was a perfect creature―without a will―no need for a will―where everything was perfectly good. For him God’s will was supreme and sufficient.
Into this happy scene, sin was introduced by God’s inveterate foe—Satan. Under the guise of a serpent wily and subtle, he gained the ear of God’s creature, suggesting a course of disobedience to which Adam and his wife responded by the exercise of will on the side of evil. Not needing a will on the side of God, the only will man could entertain was on the side of sin―and he did it!! Thereby sin came in, for the exercise of freewill in man is sin!
Satan introduced it to spoil God’s creation. It brings in its train death and judgment. It is a gigantic evil, which rears its hydra-head in opposition to God Himself, and would fain dethrone Him from His supremacy in the universe. Imagine the result if this could be the case. With all the restraint that is brought to bear on the activities of sin, what do the gaol’s, and poorhouses, the cemeteries and graveyards, the reformatories and the police-courts bear witness of? Let sin gain the unbridled mastery, and hell would be―upon earth a― convincing exhibition of its effects. Selfishness and greed, pride and hypocrisy, lust and folly, infidelity and untruth are some of the fruits of this heavy limbed tree.
The consideration of its results in time or eternity, makes it plain that when God proposes to deliver a man from sin, and its power and effects, He works for his very highest good; and thus it is not the deprival of something that is merely harmful, but withdrawing and delivering from that which must prove fatal to him.
A sin, therefore, cannot be estimated by our thoughts of it (for every mental and moral faculty has likewise been impaired in man thereby), but is divinely estimated according to God’s thought of the principle which it represents. Little sins and great sins appear as alike in this respect in the sight of God. Just as a single drop of the liquid from a bottle of poison contains all the elements found in the larger quantity, so does a single sin contain those elements of self-will and self-pleasing that are component parts in every sin.
The root principle from which these fruits spring of opposition to and hatred of God, is ingrained in every child of Adam. It is the poison that was introduced into the blood at the Fall, and is communicated by birth to each and all. Sin is hereditary, and until the history of Adam’s race is closed, it will remain in man what it ever was, the active principle of antagonism to God. David says, “Behold, I was shapen in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me” (Ps. 51). It may be curbed by the outward restraints of refinement, education, and a religious profession; or it may be uncurbed as with the drunkard, the swearer, or the libertine. But, curbed or uncurbed, there it is, ―the judgment of God is ever against it, ― and here comes in the need for our deliverance both from its judgment and its power.
Can God Pass Over Sin?
Can He tolerate that which asserts itself as a sort of second God in the universe? Never. Every soul that is connected in God’s account with sin must be also connected with its judgment, ―infinite and awful. This was prefigured in all the sacrifices under the Jewish economy. It was also told out in the blood of the pascal lamb on the night of Egypt’s woe. It was foreshadowed in Abel’s blood-stained offering. It was indicated, moreover, in a more public way when the earth groaned and rocked beneath the swelling waters of the flood, and when the polluted and polluting cities of the plain were blasted with their baptism of fire. And, once more, it was told out in thrilling, telling, and terrible reality when Christ as the believer’s proxy, stood charged with the believer’s sin, and sustained the relentless wrath and the hot judgment of the Holy God against it. “Thou art holy,” said He, as the biting penalties of sin flew upon His soul, and thus He justified His God in the very moment that He was forsaken of Him (Psa. 22:1-3). Reader, God cannot pass over sin. If He spared not His own Son, when made sin for us, think you that you will be spared if you continue in sin? As God is God, and as God is true, “except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.”
Can I Change My Condition Before God?
What saith the Scripture? The Spirit of God, using Jeremiah as His mouthpiece, says, “Though thou wash thee with nitre, and take thee much cope, yet thine iniquity is marked before me, saith the Lord God” (ch. 2:22). Describing Job’s condition, we read, “If I wash myself with snow water, and make my hands never so clean; yet shalt thou plunge me in the ditch, and mine own clothes shall abhor me” (Job 9:30,31). Isaiah cries out that there is no soundness in our state under God’s eye―all is sinful corruption―abominable in the sight of God. The prophet Jeremiah thus sums it up, “Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? Then” (and oh! how hopeless the word is―THEN) “may ye also do good, that are accustomed to do evil” (Jer. 13:23). “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked” (ch. 17:9). In the New Testament Paul confirms this. “There is none righteous... none that doeth good, no, not one,” he echoes from the 14th and 53rd Psalms; and then clenches the fact from his own experience when he says, “I know that in me, that is, in my flesh, there dwelleth no good thing” (Rom. 3:10, 7:18). It is no use deceiving ourselves by talking about developing the good that is in man, for there is none to develop: it is idle to speak of fanning the inward spark into a flame, ― “there is NO light in him,” says Jesus, God’s Son (John 12:10). Sinful flesh cannot be improved or mended, that which is born of the flesh is flesh. You may turn it, and twist it, you may impose penance on it, and punish it as you will, but it is flesh still, and “they that are in the flesh cannot please God.” God has given it up as an incurable thing; it is not under probation, but under judgment, and “he that believeth not is condemned already.” No reformation will do, no resolutions can touch it, as in the sight of God.” Ye must be born again.” He Himself expects nothing from it, He has condemned it.
Who Shall Deliver Me?
cries the burdened soul. “I am all wrong. I am a traitor to my God. I have loved what He hates, and hated what He loves. I have lived in self-will and independence of God. Ah! woe is me, I am undone. Would to God, I had never been born, rather than have come into this fearful state. Where must I turn for refuge? Escape I must, for the fires of hell are burning in my soul already; the miseries of an undone eternity are kindled now, — oh, where shall I hide, what must I do to be saved? Go on in sin I cannot, I dare not; hell is too awful already. If I amend my ways, my God is still my Judge, and He has already declared that all my righteousnesses are as filthy rags, and I am as an unclean thing under them (Isa. 64:6). What must I do?”
Softly and sweetly the answer is heard from the Gospel of God, “He hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” (2 Cor. 5:21). “God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh” (Rom. 8:3). Sin appeared in its worst form when it nailed the Incarnate Son of God to the wooden cross. But it was then that Jesus was dealt with before God as though He, the sinless One, had been Sin incarnate instead of the Incarnate Son, and the whole of God’s judgments against sin passed mercilessly over His soul. Every form of sin in the world; every hideous shape that it could take in man was (through His matchless grace) there taken up in His own Person, and the condemnations thereof overtook Him; every kind of crime that sinners could ever be forgiven was confessed by Him as though He had done then all, and the terrible threats of Justice were awfully verified and substantiated in the wrath that caused Him to cry, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” “Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world.” “Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, to bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit.”
Yes, thank God, while we were yet sinners Christ died for us. He has in grace taken part in life of flesh and blood in order that He might bear the condemnation that rested upon us in our life of flesh and blood. And His death for our sin has forever ended the believer’s history before God as a sinner. In God’s account the death of Jesus is the judgment on Adam’s fallen race: fully borne and utterly exhausted for all who trust in Him. “It is finished.”
Now, since God in righteousness has dealt with sin at the cross, and has been fully satisfied, yea infinitely glorified in Jesus’ cross, and death, and blood-shedding, it has cleared the way for Him to act according to His own purpose and grace. He has raised that Man from the dead, who put sin away by His death; He has set Him in glory to express His supreme satisfaction in His atoning work; and has sent down the Holy Ghost to announce that it is now a righteous thing with Him to put Man in His glory (John 16:10).
Moreover, through this Man is preached unto you the forgiveness of sins, and in Him all that believe are justified from all things. The Gospel of God is His power unto salvation to everyone that believeth. Blessed is the man that believes God’s record of His Son. For he knows that his sins have been borne by Jesus, and atoned for by His blood; and though he still finds sin dwelling within him, in faith he reckons as God reckons, that it has been already judicially dealt with (Rom. 8:3). So that just as his Saviour has died to sin (never to have that question raised again), and now lives unto God, so for him the great sin-question is over, sin has lost its hold upon him, he reckons himself dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God in Jesus Christ our Lord. Life is for him now connected with Christ, not with sinful Adam; a life which is triumphant over the whole power of sin and death, and yet a life that is lived in dependence upon God; which has the Holy Ghost as its power, and which permits of fellowship with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ (1 John 1). What a complete deliverance! My judgment borne by Another; the death that was my due already passed in the death of Christ; my whole connection with sin and a sinful race dissolved before God, and true to faith now; and a connection divinely formed in my soul with the Man whom sin can never touch, who lives after the power of an endless life.
Reader, he that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life; and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him. Dost thou believe on the Son of God?
Soon, very soon God will vindicate the cause of Jesus against the world that murdered Him, and sad beyond all telling will it be if you should fall under His avenging wrath because you obey not the Gospel of God (1 Peter 4:17). Today, His blood, speaking better things than that of Abel, calls not for vengeance but for the righteous pardon of those who confide in its efficacy; tomorrow your blood may sprinkle His garments, and stain His raiment as a witness of His holy vengeance upon those who will have their fling of sin (Isa. 63:3).
Oh! let not the hour chime again before you take your place as a lost sinner, and put your confidence in Jesus’ precious blood. Sing with me,
“Precious, precious blood of Jesus,
Shed on Calvary;
Shed for rebels, shed for sinners,
Shed for me!”
Precious blood that hath redeemed us,
All the price is paid;
Perfect pardon now is offered,
Peace is made.
Though thy sins are red like crimson,
Deep in scarlet glow,
Jesus’ precious blood can make them
White as snow.
Precious blood, whose full atonement
Makes us nigh to God!
Precious blood, our song and glory
Praise and laud!”