THE THREE FACTS OF SIN
"Who forgiveth all thine iniquities;
Who healeth all thy diseases;
Who redeemeth thy life from destruction."--Ps.
ciii. 3, 4.
THERE is one theological word which has found its
way lately into nearly all the newer and finer literature of our country. It is
not only one of the words of the literary world at present, it is perhaps
the word. Its reality, its certain influence, its universality, have at
last been recognised, and in spite of its theological name have forced it into
a place which nothing but its felt relation to the wider theology of human life
could ever have earned for a religious word. That word, it need scarcely be
said, is Sin.
Even in the lighter literature of our country,
and this is altogether remarkable, the ruling word just now is Sin.
Years ago it was the gay term Chivalry which held the foreground in poem
and ballad and song. Later still, the word which held court, in novel and
romance, was Love. But now a deeper word heads the chapters and begins
the cantos. A more exciting thing than chivalry is descried in the arena, and
love itself fades in interest before this small word, which has wandered out of
theology, and changed the face of literature, and made many a new book
preach.
It is not for religion to complain that her
vocabulary is being borrowed by the world. There may be pulpits where there are
not churches; and it is a valuable discovery for religion that the world has
not only a mind to be amused but a conscience to be satisfied. But religion has
one duty in the matter--when her words are borrowed, to see that they are
borrowed whole. Truth which is to pass into such common circulation must not be
mutilated truth; it must be strong, ringing, decided, whole; it must be
standard truth; in a word. it must be Bible truth.
Now the Bible truth about this word is in itself
interesting and very striking. In David especially, where the delineations are
most perfect and masterly, the reiteration and classification of the great
facts and varieties of sin form one of the most instructive and impressive
features of the sacred writings. The Psalms will ever be the standard work on
Sin--the most ample analysis of its nature, its effects, its shades of
difference, and its cure.
And yet, though it is such a common thing, I
daresay many of us, perhaps, do not know anything about it. Somehow, it is just
the common things we are apt not to think about. Take the commonest of all
things--air. What do we know about it? What do we know about water?--that great
mysterious sea, on which some of you spend your lives, which moans all the long
winter at your very doors. Sin is a commoner thing than them all; deeper than
the sea, more subtle than the air; mysterious indeed, moaning in all our lives,
through all the winter and summer of our past--that shall last, in the undying
soul of man, when there shall be no more sea. To say the least of it, it is
unreasonable that a man should live in sin all his life without knowing in some
measure what he is about.
And as regards the higher bearings of the case,
it is clear that without the fullest information about sin no man can ever have
the fullest information about himself, which he ought to have; and what is of
more importance, without understanding sin no man can ever understand God. Even
the Christian who has only the ordinary notions of sin in the general, can
neither be making very much of himself nor of his theology; for as a rule, a
man's experience of religion and of grace is in pretty exact proportion to his
experience of sin.
No doubt, the intimate knowledge of themselves
which the Old Testament writers possessed, had everything to do with their
intimate knowledge of God. David, for instance, who had the deepest knowledge
of God, had also the deepest knowledge of his own heart; and if there is one
thing more conspicuous than another in the writings he has left us, it is the
ceaseless reiteration of the outstanding facts of Sin--the cause, the effects,
the shades of difference, and the cure of Sin.
In the clause which forms our text to-day, David
has given us in a nutshell the whole of the main facts of Sin. And for any one
who wishes to become acquainted with the great pivots on which human life
turns, and on which his own life turns; for any one who wishes to understand
the working of God's grace; for any one who wishes to examine himself on the
great facts of human Sin; there is no more admirable summary than these
words:
"Who forgiveth all thine iniquities; Who healeth
all thy diseases; Who redeemeth thy life from destruction."
These facts of Sin, when we pass it through the
prism of the text, may be said to be three in number: the Guilt of Sin,
the Stain of Sin, the Power of Sin.
And these three correspond roughly with the
natural divisions of the text:
Who forgiveth all thine iniquities = the Guilt of
Sin.
Who healeth all thy diseases = the Stain of
Sin.
Who redeemeth thy life from destruction = the
Power of Sin .
The best fact to start with will perhaps be the
last of these; and for this reason the word Life is in it. "Who
redeemeth thy Life from destruction." We have all a personal interest in
anything that concerns life. We can understand things--even things in
theology--if they will only bear upon our life. And to anything which in any
way comes home to life, in influencing it, or bettering it, or telling upon it
in any way whatever, we are always ready, for our life's sake, to give a
patient hearing. We feel prepared to take kindly to almost any doctrine if it
will only bear upon our life. And surely in the whole range of truth none has
more points of contact with the heart of man than the doctrine of the Power of
Sin.
(1) In the first place, then, let us notice that
Sin is a Power, and a power which concerns Life.
There is an old poem which bears the curious
title of "Strife in Heaven," the idea of which is something like this. The poet
supposes himself to be walking in the streets of the New Jerusalem, when he
comes to a crowd of saints engaged in a very earnest discussion. He draws near,
and listens. The question they are discussing is, Which of them is the greatest
monument of God's saving grace. After a long debate, in which each states his
case separately, and each claims to have been by far the most wonderful trophy
of God's love in all the multitude of the redeemed, it is finally agreed to
settle the matter by a vote. Vote after vote is taken, and the list of
competition is gradually reduced until only two remain. These are allowed to
state their case again, and the company stand ready to join in the final vote.
The first to speak is a very old man. He begins by saying that it is a mere
waste of time to go any further; it is absolutely impossible that God's grace
could have done more for any man in heaven than for him. He tells again how he
had led a most wicked and vicious life--a life filled up with every conceivable
indulgence, and marred with every crime. He has been a thief, a liar, a
blasphemer, a drunkard, and a murderer. On his deathbed, at the eleventh hour,
Christ came to him and he was forgiven. The other is also an old man who says,
in a few words, that he was brought to Christ when he was a boy. He had led a
quiet and uneventful life, and had looked forward to heaven as long as he could
remember.
The vote is taken; and, of course, you would say
it results in favour of the first. But no, the votes are all given to the
last. We might have thought, perhaps, that the one who led the reckless,
godless life--he who had lied, thieved, blasphemed, murdered; he who was saved
by the skin of his teeth, just a moment before it might have been too late--had
the most to thank God for. But the old poet knew the deeper truth. It required
great grace verily to pluck that withered brand from the burning. It required
depths, absolutely fathomless depths, of mercy to forgive that veteran in sin
at the close of all those guilty years. But it required more grace to keep that
other life from guilt through all those tempted years. It required more grace
to save him from the sins of his youth, and keep his Christian boyhood pure, to
steer him scathless through the tempted years of riper manhood, to crown his
days with usefulness and his old age with patience and hope. Both started in
life together; to one grace came at the end, to the other at the beginning. The
first was saved from the guilt of sin, the second from the power of sin as
well. The first was saved from dying in sin. But he who became a Christian in
his boyhood was saved from living in sin. The one required just one great act
of love at the close of life; the other had a life full of love,--it was a
greater salvation by far. His soul was forgiven like the other, but his life
was redeemed from destruction.
The lesson to be gathered from the old poet's
parable is that sin is a question of power as much as a question of guilt,--
that salvation is a question of Life perhaps far more than a question of Death.
There is something in every man's life which he needs saving from, something
which would spoil his life and run off with it into destruction if let alone.
This principle of destruction is the first great fact of Sin--its
power.
Now any man who watches his life from day to day,
and especially if he is trying to steer it towards a certain moral mark which
he has made in his mind, has abundant and humiliating evidence that this Power
is busily working in his life. He finds that this Power is working against him
in his life, defeating him at every turn, and persistently opposing all the
good he tries to do. He finds that his natural bias is to break away from God
and good. Then he is clearly conscious that there is an acting ingredient in
his soul which not only neutralizes the inclination to follow the path which he
knows to be straightest and best, but works continually and consistently
against his better self, and urges his life onwards towards a broader path
which leads to destruction.
Now it was this road which David had in his mind
when he thanked God that his life had been redeemed, or kept back from
destruction. It was a beaten track we may be sure in those times, as it is
to-day, and David knew perfectly well when he penned these words that God's
hand had veritably saved him from ending his life along that road. It was not
enough in summing up his life in his old age, and calling upon his soul to
bless the Lord for all His benefits, to thank Him simply for the forgiveness of
his sins. God has done far more for him than forgive him his sins. He has
redeemed his life from destruction. He has saved him from the all but
omnipotent power of Sin. What that power was, what that power might have
become, how it might have broken loose and wrecked his life a thousand times,
let those who remember the times when it did break loose in David's life,
recall. How little might we have guessed that there was anything in the
psalmist's life to make him thank God at its close for keeping it back from
destruction. Brought up in the secluded plains of Bethlehem, and reared in the
pure atmosphere of country innocence, where could the shepherd lad get any
taint of sin which could develop in after years to a great destroying power?
And yet he got it-- somehow, he got it. And even in his innocent boyhood, the
fatal power lurked there, able enough, willing enough, vicious enough, to burst
through the boundaries of his life and wreck it ere it reached its prime. All
the time he was walking with God; all the time he was planning God's temple;
all the time he was writing his holy Psalms--which make all men wonder at the
psalmist's grace; while he was playing their grave sweet melody upon his harp
in the ear of God, the power of sin was seething and raging in his breast,
ready to quench the very inspiration God was giving him, and ruin his religion
and his soul for evermore. God kept His hand, we may be sure, through David's
life, on the springs of David's sin; and there was nothing so much to thank God
for, in taking the retrospect of his eventful course, than that his life had
been redeemed from this first great fact of Sin.
David's salvation, to round off the point with an
analogy from the old poet, was a much more wonderful thing than, say, the dying
thief's salvation. David cost grace far more than the dying thief. The dying
thief only needed dying grace. David needed living grace. The thief only needed
forgiving grace; David needed forgiving grace and restraining grace. He needed
grace to keep in his life, to keep it from running away. But the thief needed
no restraining grace. The time for that was past. His life had run away. His
wild oats were sown, and the harvest was heavy and bitter. Destruction had come
upon him already in a hundred forms. He had had no antidote to the power of
sin, which runs so fiercely in every vein of every man, and he had destroyed
himself. His character was ruined, his soul was honey-combed through and
through with sin. He could not have joined in David's psalm that his life was
saved from destruction. His death was, and the wreck of his soul was, but his
life was lost to God, to the world, and to himself. His life had never been
redeemed as David's was; so David was the greater debtor to God's grace, and
few men have had greater reason than he to praise God in old age for redeeming
their life from destruction.
Yes, there is more in salvation than forgiveness.
And why? Because there is more in sin than guilt. "If I were to be forgiven
to-day," men who do not know this say, "I should be as bad as ever to-morrow."
No, that is based on the fallacy, it is based on the heresy, that there is no
more for a man in religion than forgiveness of sins. If there were not, I say
it with all solemnity, it would be very little use to me. It would have been
little use to a man like David . And David's life would have been incomplete,
and David's psalm would have been impossible, had he not been able to add to
the record of God's pardon the record of God's power in redeeming his life from
destruction. We have all thanked God for the dying thief-- have we ever thanked
God for redeeming our life from destruction? Destruction is the natural
destination of every human soul. It is as natural for our soul to go downward
as for a stone to fall to the ground. Do we ever thank God for redeeming our
soul from that? And when we thank God we are saved, do we mean we are saved
from hell, or do we think sometimes how He has rescued our life from the
destroying power of sin?
(2) The Stain of Sin.
The power of sin could never run through a man's
life without leaving its mark behind. Nothing in the world ever works without
friction. A mountain torrent digs a glen in the mountain side; the sea cuts a
beach along the shore; the hurricane leaves a thousand fallen witnesses behind
to mark its track. And the great river of sin, as it rolls through a human
life, leaves a pile of ruins here and there as melancholy monuments to show
where it has been. Nature, with all its strength, is a wonderfully delicate
machine, and everything has its reaction somewhere and some time. Nothing is
allowed to pass, and nothing has so appalling a reaction upon every one and
everything as sin.
History is an undying monument of human sin. The
most prominent thing on its pages are the stains--the stains of sin which time
has not rubbed out. The history of the world, for the most part, has been
written in the world's blood; and all the reigns of all its emperors and kings
will one day be lost in one absorbing record of one great reign--the one long
reign of sin. As it has been with history so it is in the world to-day. The
surface of society is white with leprosy. Take away the power of sin to-morrow,
the stain of sin remains. Whatever the world may suffer from want of conviction
of the guilt of sin, it will never be without conviction of its stain. We see
it in one another's lives. We see it in one another's faces. It is the stain of
the world's sin that troubles the world's conscience. It is the stain of the
world's sin that troubles philanthropy; that troubles the Parliament of the
country; that troubles the Press of the country. It is the stain of the world's
sin especially that is making a place in literature for this word sin. It is
this side of sin that is absorbing the finest writing of the day; that is
filling our modern poetry; that is making a thousand modern books preach the
doctrine of Retribution, which simply means the doctrine of the stain of sin.
Society is not wise enough to see the power of sin, or religious enough to see
the guilt of sin; but it cannot fail to see the stain of sin. It does not care
for the power or the guilt of sin; it cares for the stain of sin, because it
must. That troubles society. That lies down at its doors, and is an eyesore to
it. It is a loathsome thing to be lying there, and society must do something.
So this is what it does with it: on one corner it builds a prison--this will
rid the world of its annoyance. In another corner it plants a madhouse--the
sore may fester there unseen. In another it raises an hospital; in a fourth it
lays out a grave-yard. Prisons, mad-houses, hospitals --these are just so much
roofing which society has put on to hide the stain of sin. It is a good thing
in some ways that sin has always its stain. Just as pain is a good thing to
tell that something is wrong, so the stain of sin may be a good thing to tell
that the power has broken loose. Society might never trouble itself if it were
not for the stain. And in dealing with the stain of sin it sometimes may do a
very little to maim its power. But it is a poor, poor remedy. If it could only
see the power and try to deal with that--try to get God's grace to act on that,
the world might be redeemed from destruction after all. But it only sees the
stain when it is too late--the stain which has dropped from the wound after the
throat of virtue has been cut. Surely, when the deed is done, it is the least
it can do to remove the traces of the crime.
But one need not go to society or history to see
the stains of sin. We see it in one another's lives and in our own lives. Our
conscience, for instance, is not so quick as it might have been-- the stains of
sin are there, between us and the light. We have ignored conscience many a time
when it spoke, and its voice has grown husky and indistinct. Our intellectual
life is not so true as it might have been--our intellectual sins have stained
it and spoilt our memory, and taken the edge off our sympathy, and filled us
with suspicion and one-sided truths, and destroyed the delicate power of
faith.
There are few more touching sights than to see a
man in mature life trying to recover himself from the stains of a neglected
past. The past itself is gone; but it remains in dark accumulated stains upon
his life, and he tries to take them off in vain. There was a time once, when
his robe was white and clean. "Keep your garment unspotted from the world,"
they said to him, the kind home-voices, as he went out into life. He remembers
well the first spot on that robe. Even the laden years that lie between have no
day so dark--no spot now lies so lurid red upon his soul as that first sin.
Then the companion stain came, for sins are mostly twins. Then another, and
another, and many more, till count was lost, and the whole robe was patterned
over with sin-stains. The power of God has come to make a new man of him, but
the stains are sunk so deeply in his soul that they are living parts of him
still. It is hard for him to give up the world. It is hard for him to be pure.
It is hard for him to forget the pictures which have been hanging in the
galleries of his imagination all his life--to forget them when he comes to
think of God; to forget them when he kneels down to pray; to forget them even
when he comes to sit in church. The past of his life has been all against him;
and even if his future is religious, it can never be altogether unaffected by
the stain of what has been. It is the stain of sin which makes repentance so
hard in adult life, which yields the most impressive argument to the young to
remember their Creator in their youth. For even "the angels," says Ruskin, "who
rejoice over repentance, cannot but feel an uncomprehended pain as they try and
try again in vain whether they may not warm hard hearts with the brooding of
their kind wings."
But if the stain of sin is invisible in moral and
intellectual life, no one can possibly be blind to it in bodily life. We see it
in one another's lives, but more than that, we see it in one another's faces.
Vice writes in plain characters, and all the world is its copybook. We can read
it everywhere and on everything around, from pole to pole. The drunkard, to
take the conspicuous example, so stains his bodily life with his sin that the
seeds of disease are sown which, long after he has reformed, will germinate in
his death. If all the drunkards in the world were to be changed to-morrow, the
stains of sin in their bodies even would doubtless bring a large majority--in a
few years, less or more--to what was after all really a drunkard's grave.
There is a physical demonstration of sin as well
as a religious; and no sin can come in among the delicate faculties of the
mind, or among the coarser fibres of the body, without leaving a stain, either
as a positive injury to the life, or, what is equally fatal, as a
predisposition to commit the same sin again. This predisposition is always one
of the most real and appalling accompaniments of the stain of sin. There is
scarcely such a thing as an isolated sin in a man's life. Most sins can be
accounted for by what has gone before. Every sin, so to speak, has its own
pedigree, and is the result of the accumulated force, which means the
accumulated stain of many a preparatory sin.
Thus when Peter began to swear in the High
Priest's palace it was probably not the first time Peter swore. A man does not
suddenly acquire the habit of uttering oaths; and when it is said of Peter,
"Then began he to curse and to swear, it does not at all mean by "then" and
"began" that he had not begun it long ago. The legitimate inference is, that in
the rough days of his fisherman's life, when the nets got entangled perhaps, or
the right wind would not blow, Peter had come out many a time with an oath to
keep his passion cool. And now, after years of devoted fellowship with Christ,
the stain is still so black upon his soul that he curses in the very presence
of his Lord. An outbreak which meets the public eye is generally the climax of
a series of sins, which discretion has been able, till then, to keep out of
sight. The doctrine of the stain of sin, has no exceptions; and few men, we may
be sure, can do a suddenly notorious wrong without knowing something in private
of the series to which it belongs.
But the most solemn fact about this stain of sin
is that so little can be done for it. It is almost indelible. There is a very
solemn fact about this stain of sin--it can never be altogether blotted out.
The guilt of sin may be forgiven, the power of sin may be broken, but the
stains of sin abide. When it is said, "He healeth our diseases," it means
indeed that we may be healed; but the ravages which sin has left must still
remain. Small-pox may be healed, but it leaves its mark behind. A cut limb may
be cured, but the scar remains for ever. An earthquake is over in three
minutes, but centuries after the ground is still rent into gulfs and chasms
which ages will never close. So the scars of sin on body and mind and soul live
with us in silent retribution upon our past, and go with us to our graves.
And the stain does not stop with our
lives. Every action of every man has an ancestry and a posterity in other
lives. The stains of life have power to spread. The stains of other lives have
crossed over into our lives, stains from our lives into theirs. "I am a part,"
says Tennyson, "of all that I have met." A hundred years hence we all must live
again--in thoughts, in tendencies, in influences, perhaps in sins and stains in
other lives. The sins of the father shall be visited on the children. The
blight on the vicious parent shall be visited on the insane offspring. The
stain on the intemperate mother shall reappear in the blasted lives of her
drunken family. Finer forms of sin reappear in the same way--of companion on
companion, of brother on sister, of teacher on pupil. For God Himself has made
the law, that the curse must follow the breach; and even He who healeth our
diseases may never interfere with the necessary stain of a sinful life.
"Take my influence," cried a sinful man, who was
dying; "take my influence, and bury it with me." He was going to be with
Christ, his influence had been against Him; he was leaving it behind. As a
conspirator called by some act of grace to his sovereign's table remembers with
unspeakable remorse the assassin whom he left in ambuscade at his king's palace
gate, so he recalls the traitorous years and the influences which will plot
against his Lord when he is in eternity. Oh, it were worth being washed from
sin, were it only to escape the possibility of a treachery like that. It were
worth living a holy and self-denying life, were it only to "join the choir
invisible of those immortal dead who live again in lives made better by their
presence."
(3) But now, lastly, we come to the third great
fact of Sin, its Guilt. And we find ourselves face to face with the
greatest question of all, "What has God to say to all this mass of Sin?"
Probably every one will acknowledge that his life
bears witness to the two first facts of Sin. Starting with this admission, a
moment's thought lands us in a greater admission. We all acknowledge sin.
Therefore we must all acknowledge ourselves to be guilty. Whether we feel it or
no, Guilt is inseparable from Sin. Physical evil may make a man sorry, but
moral evil makes him guilty. It may not make him feel guilty --we are
speaking of facts--he is guilty. So we are guilty for our past lives. We
may be sorry for the past. But it is not enough that we are sorry, we are
guilty for the past. We are more than sinners, we are criminals. This is where
the literary conception of Sin is altogether defective and must be
supplemented. It knows nothing, and can teach nothing, of the guilt of a
sinner's soul. It is when we come to God that we learn this. God is our Father,
but God is our Judge. And when we know that, our sin takes on a darker
colouring. It grows larger than our life, and suddenly seems to be infinite.
The whole world, the whole universe, is concerned in it. Sin only made us
recoil from ourselves before; now it makes God recoil from us. We are out of
harmony with God. Our iniquities have separated us from God, and in some
mysterious way we have come to be answerable to Him. We feel that the Lord has
turned and looked upon us as He looked at Peter, and we can only go out and
weep bitterly.
If these experiences are foreign to our souls, we
must feel our sense of guilt when we come to look at Christ. Christ could not
move through the world without the mere spectacle of His life stirring to their
very depths the hearts of every one whose path He crossed. And Christ cannot
move through the chambers of our thoughts without the dazzling contrast to
ourselves startling into motion the sense of burning shame and sin. But, above
all, Christ could not die upon the cross without witnessing to all eternity of
the appalling greatness of human guilt. And it is the true climax of conviction
which the prophet speaks of: "They shall look on Me whom they have pierced, and
they shall mourn."
This conviction of Sin, in this the deepest
sense, is not a thing to talk about, but to feel. And when it is felt, it
cannot be talked about. It is too deep for words. It comes as an unutterable
woe upon the life, and rests there, in dark sorrow and heaviness, till Christ
speaks Peace.
Such, in outline, are the three facts of Sin.
They are useful in two ways: they teach us ourselves, and they teach us God. It
is along these three lines that you will find salvation. Run your eye along the
first--the power of Sin--and you will understand Jesus. "Thou shalt call His
name Jesus, for He shall save His people from their sins." Look at the
second--the stain of Sin--and you will understand the righteousness of Christ.
You will see the need of the One pure life. You will be glad that there has
been One who has kept His garment unspotted from the world.
Look at the third, and you will see the Lamb of
God taking away the Sin of the world. You will understand the Atonement. You
will pray:--
Let the water and
the blood,
From Thy riven side which flowed,
Be of sin the double cure,
Cleanse me from its guilt and power.
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