There is nothing which teaches either “what sin is,” or “what is sin,” like the cross of the Son of God.
If you have discovered a sin-where can you learn its true character? how ascertain its full enormity, save by the cross of the Son of God? The cross is God’s estimate of sin and of sins, and it is the only full measure of any sin.
If you have discovered a sin—say only a sin of omission, —a sin of which no one could take notice, save God and yourself: as, for instance, the having had a wrong motive for doing a right action), where can you measure its length, and breadth, and depth? Will you ponder over it, till the Lord comes, setting it in the light of contrast with all his mercies? What a poor measure of the baseness and abominableness of it will you be enabled to form of it thus. For, even if you could place it in the bright light of all God’s blessings and love to you, still the measure is formed by yourself and your own conscience.
Will you look into hell (as it shall be when the lake of fire and brimstone shall be; where their worm dieth not, and where their fire is not quenched), to see the dangerous character and tendency of it? Be it so; but remember sin is there judged by God on man. And you will see there only the moral results and penal judgment of sin upon creatures.
Look to the Son of God upon the cross, if you would see what sin really is. That Son of the Father, the second blessed person of the Trinity, appeared once in the presence of God his Father, bearing sin. Sin or sins of his own he had none, but was “holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners;” but he was taken as a lamb, garlanded and wreathed with our sins as laid by imputation upon him. He, the power of God, and he, the wisdom of God, appeared once before God upon this subject of sin, but he knew not how to stand there. God could hold no intercourse with his Son then; and he could not bear up under the burden, but cried out, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Observe, too, I pray you, how every circumstance, then around Jesus, made an appeal to God for sympathy. He was his beloved Son, in whom he was well pleased; his obedient servant; a perfect, righteous man, and being rejected and despised by everyone. And yet there was no sympathy shown to him when he bore the sin. This was God’s measure of sin, and it is infinite. The bitter fruits and eternal judgment of sin in hell, upon myriads of finite enemies of God, would not tell out God’s mind about sin, or its real character, as the effect of his holiness and justice against his infinite Son, when that Son stood in the sinner’s place. That veiling of the face of God from Christ Jesus; that agony of the Son then, is alone the perfect, the divine measure of what sin is. And this measure is infinite. It tells of the infinite hatred and intolerance of God against sin.
And with what humble composedness of soul may the poor sinner here study what sin is! For this, the divine measure of it, is also the very thing in which the power of it is forever put away from him that knows this measure. For the Son became the measure in bearing the judgment of our sins upon the tree. In whatever other connection you study sin, you find that which terrifies and inclines you to hide the sin you may have committed; but here you may study it without any desire to throw a veil over any action you have committed, for all the judgment has been borne, and borne away forever.
It gives, too, present access to God; for it proves the only obstacle, sin, to have been put out of the way. How foolish are the thoughts of those who, instead of drawing nigh upon this ground (the work of Jesus finished 1800 years ago on Calvary), are waiting for something to be wrought in themselves by the Spirit. Do they hope, then, that the regeneration of the Spirit, which is alone wrought in man by the knowledge of the cross (John 3: l4, 15), can be wrought in any other way than by faith in the blood of the Lamb? And if it could, will it ever make man more able to stand in the presence of God, to converse about the sin they deplore, than Jesus was? Surely, if God could not converse with even his eternal Son, when sin was only imputed to him, but hid his face from him, he will never be able to converse with any regenerate man about it unatoned for. And let regeneration be accomplished, and each one through faith, stand before God with Jesus’ name upon the forehead (Revelation 22: 3, 4), what satisfaction for sin would that furnish? No; there is but one satisfaction for sin, one work, which either God in heaven, or man, led by the Spirit of God, can ever recognize as satisfaction for sin; and that is God’s judgment upon his Son for sin.
And this judgment was both for our sins and for the root of them in us, sin-the principle whence they come. Let us look at this: —there is nothing which teaches us “like the cross of Jesus.” When you come to see the perfection which was in Jesus when nailed there, and how he still, even in the divine glory to which he is gone, bears the form of the Lamb that was slain, —do you not see the full expression of entire subjection of heart, and mind, and body, to God? Well, here, then, you see, both what is not sin, and, by contrast, what is sin. The black idol, self, in any form of it, is sin; for it was not found in Jesus, and is not found in Jesus. And it is not only for our sins of commission and omission that Jesus died, but also for the root of all these in us—the principle of sin.