HOW often does Satan bolster up his victims for years with prospective imaginary happiness, only to cast them aside like a sucked-out orange in the end! Even the flimsy promise of happiness is rudely torn from their grasp at last, and they are left a prey to remorse—“without God and without hope.” Can we wonder that the great deceiver should succeed in driving a despairing one to suicide?
My attention was arrested by the account of an inquiry into the death of a retired publican—aged sixty—who had shot himself. In his pocket was found a letter, which read as follows:—
“The money found on me will do to bury me where I fall. Good enough for a dog like me. Going mad with remorse for my guilty soul! I am mad! mad! mad!”
What agony of soul must have been his! No wonder at the verdict “of unsound mind.” Without God and without hope in this world, he was driven to seek “peace in oblivion.” Cruel delusion.
Remorse for “his guilty soul” had driven this poor man mad. His last testimony shows that after a long life, from which God had been excluded, he had at last been awakened to the fact that he was “guilty before God.” What a fearful awakening Reader, take warning. Unsaved, world-loving, Christ-rejecting, remember that you are yourself equally “GUILTY BEFORE GOD,” equally under the power of Satan, and that, sooner or later you will awake to all that those words really mean. If this does not take place in “time,” it will in “eternity,” all too late for your soul’s blessing.
The “Judge of all the earth” will banish the wicked and unbelieving into outer darkness.
Awake now! View yourself in the searchlight of God’s Word. Read Romans 3. Be honest with yourself. Look into your own heart, and you must surely confess that you are indeed “guilty before God.” Do not wait until you come face to face with death. Do not tarry until remorse has got you in its fearful grip and you find yourself hopelessly too late. NOW, while your mind is sound; NOW, while you are in health, confess your state before the God of all grace. What glorious news there is for you! God is now proclaiming forgiveness. He is not even asking you to plead for it. He is sending to you a proclamation of forgiveness: “Be it known unto you ... that through this Man (the glorified Jesus) is preached unto you the forgiveness of sins” (Acts 13:3838Be it known unto you therefore, men and brethren, that through this man is preached unto you the forgiveness of sins: (Acts 13:38)).
It means this, repentant, believing reader. Your indebtedness to God has been met. The punishment merited by your sins fell on Jesus when He was “made sin.” During those awful three hours of darkness at Calvary, when God hid His face from that Blessed One, the whole question was settled. Jesus suffered for you—the “just for the unjust.” The Sinless One died for the sinful. He bowed His head beneath the judgment of a sin-hating God that you and I might be saved from it. Wondrous, blessed Deliverer! The writer can say from his heart, “My Lord and my Saviour.” What about you, my reader?
God raised Jesus from the dead, and now through Him, in His name, God proclaims forgiveness to all. Will you not receive Him today? Will you not acknowledge your guilt to Him? He will not reproach you! No! Impossible; for He says, “Him that cometh to Me I will in no wise cast out.” Pour out your guilty soul before Him, and He will give you the conscious joy of God’s forgiveness.
Delay is often fatal. Awakenings sometimes come too late. On that great Day of Judgment men will realize what it means to be overcome “with remorse for their guilty souls.” May it not be so with you.
Jesus died that you might be spared that terror. He drained at Calvary the cup of judgment, that you and I might have a running-over cup of blessing. Turn to Him now. Trust Him now. He will fill your life with gladness, and you will go through the world with this song in your heart:—
“Conscience now no more condemns me,
For His own most precious blood
Once for all has washed and cleansed me,
Cleansed me in the eyes of God.”
C. J. B.
The Love of God seen in the Judgment of Sin. — “Nothing gives such a sense of the horribleness of sin; nothing is such a testimony to the judgment of God against sin as seeing Christ under it; and yet nothing is such a testimony of the love of God to the poor sinner.”
J. N. D.