Numbers 32:23 But if you will not do so, behold, you have sinned against the LORD: and be sure your sin will find you out. What the text teaches is not merely that harm done to others will recoil on the head of the wrong-doer, but that help withheld will do the same. It assumes that our brethren have a right to positive assistance at our hands. And it solemnly warns us that if we deny them that assistance, our sin will find us out. I. TAKE THE CASE OF A PARENT WHO NEGLECTS THE CHRISTIAN NURTURE OF HIS CHILDREN. He allows them, suppose, to grow up uneducated, sending them to work when they should be at school, and preferring the petty earnings they bring him to their mental and moral well-being. Or he allows them to take up with dangerous companions, without making any effort to restrain them. Or, though not unheedful of their physical comfort and intellectual culture, he neglects to bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. What is the almost certain issue? Does this negligent parent receive from his children honour, love, obedience, cheerful help? Or if he does obtain some measure of deference while they are of tender years, and dwell under his roof, what happens when they become grown men and women, and he an old man in need of sympathy and aid? Alas! the cold indifference with which they then regard him, the grudging parsimony with which, if he is poor, they contribute to his scanty maintenance, the shame and sorrow which they bring on his grey hairs by their ingratitude and wickedness — these things but too surely prove that his sin has entailed an answerable punishment. II. TAKE THE CASE OF THOSE RICH MEMBERS OF A COMMUNITY WHO NEGLECT TO PROVIDE INSTRUCTION FOR THE UNTAUGHT CHILDREN OF THE POOR. In the cost of the crimes which those unheeded ones begin in youth, and perpetrate with aggravations in riper years, their sin is finding them out. In the cost of police and prisons and heavy poor-rates, it is finding them out. In the organised and protracted strikes, which reveal the crass ignorance and pitiable credulity of their dupes, and threaten to palsy the industrial enterprise of the country, it is finding them out. And should a season of wild political excitement or of widespread commercial stagnation arrive, with its provocations to turbulence and lawlessness, it may find them out in a way yet more terribly retributive. III. TAKE THE CASE OF A CORPORATION OR A COMMUNITY WHICH DECLINES OR DELAYS TO ADOPT MEASURES CF SANITARY IMPROVEMENT. It is sad to think that the majority of men are without a conscience as regards the violation of physical laws, though that is as truly a sin against God as their violation of moral laws. But whether men arc alive to their guilt in this respect or not, certain it is that their sin is in hot pursuit of them, and will ere long seize and rend them with its deadly fangs. The prosperous inhabitants of a town cannot suffer their poorer neighbours to dwell in overcrowded and unwholesome tenements, without having themselves to smart for such selfish neglect. If the poor are tempted, amid their physical discomforts, to resort to the deceitful solace of intemperance, it must fall to the rest of the community to pay for the pauperism and crime which intemperance begets. If the poor are ruined in health and made reckless in habits by the scenes of filth and vice which environ them, it must fall to those in better circumstances to sustain the burdens and hazards which an idle and turbulent populace never fail to create. And when fever or pestilence breaks out in the squalid hovel, who shall guarantee the health of the sumptuous mansion? IV. TAKE THE CASE OF A CHRISTIAN CHURCH WHICH NEGLECTS TO ADOPT AGGRESSIVE MEASURES FOR THE RECLAMATION OF THE IRRELIGIOUS MULTITUDES AROUND IT. Every successive year adds to the numbers who never enter a house of prayer. And now, instead of the grand moral spectacle which our working-men once presented — men humble in station, but high in moral excellence; scant of secular lore, but mighty in the Scriptures — we behold throngs of workmen who are not only indifferent about religion, but positively profane and sceptical. Bespeaks not this a lack of aggressive effort on the part of our churches and congregations? Could there be now such a vast outlying mass of irreligion, had each of our churches, in place of abiding within its own pasturage, gone over the river to help those neglected ones in their combat with evil? And shall not this sin find the churches out? It is finding them out. Already are there thousands upon thousands in our land who hate every Christian Church with a perfect hatred, and who would shout with diabolic triumph over their destruction. (J. M. McCulloch, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: But if ye will not do so, behold, ye have sinned against the LORD: and be sure your sin will find you out. |
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