Hebrews 9:22 And almost all things are by the law purged with blood; and without shedding of blood is no remission. How is it possible for any ordinary man to grasp this whole question of sin — what it is in its essence as well as in its consequence -and to show how the death of Christ puts away sin? I cannot tell you everything contained in the word "sin"; but I can tell you enough to make it criminal for you to be a persistently wilful sinner. I cannot explore the deepest depths of redemption, but I can make it appear that redemption is an act in accord with our highest intuitions of what the Divine character should be; that assuming the Bible revelation that "God is love," redemption will be to that fact as consequence to cause. Now, it has been said, and with very good reason, that our views in regard to the fact of sin will affect everything else in our theology. In men generally we find two opposite conditions of feeling on this matter of sin. With one class the world is so full of sin that they can see nothing else greater than it. It fills their whole sphere of vision. Man is a sinner — more a sinner than a man. The world is black with sin, and this is the one overwhelming impression which the world makes upon them. At the opposite extreme we find a large class of men who make next to nothing of sin. The article of their creed most frequently proclaimed is, that there is a soul of goodness in all things evil. They try philosophically to evaporate the fact of sin in some such way as this. The body, being body, cannot sin, and the spirit, being an incorruptible essence, cannot sin, and, therefore, we have made a grand mistake. We are already in a sinless world. One cannot well believe that this kind of theological jugglery is very satisfactory even to those who practise it. Now they who see nothing greater than sin in the world must live lives of perpetual gloom bordering on despair. And they who make sin to be to the race as measles to the child can have no very adequate view of anything to which the word redemption can be properly applied. Sin is not by any means the greatest fact in this world's history, but it is a fact momentous and terrible, whether we regard it in relation to the individual, or to the race. If it were what the first class of whom I have spoken make it, would it not be a sufficient reason for arresting the further propagation and development of this race of man? But what I believe the providence of God teaches us, and what Scripture suggests, is this — that in every one born into this world there is more of man than of sin. No man is all sinner. It is not a convertible term, and, therefore, it seems to my own mind that the gloomiest views of man in his relation to sin are just as unrighteous, just as far astray from the truth, as those lax and shallow views which make sin to be as involuntary in its character as is physical disease. The men whose individuality God's Spirit specially prepared, that through it the voice of God might be heard in human tones, often speak of " sin" and "the sinner" — but how? Even in this wise — "All have sinned, and come short of the glory of God"; "If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us"; "The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men"; "I find a law in my members warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into subjection to the law of sin which is in my members." These, and many other passages that we might quote, all tend to show this — that sin is as much a spiritual fact as disease is a physical fact — a fact dark and dismal — not to be set aside as of little account, not to be explained away as though it were a mere figure of speech; but in Scripture there are other facts put alongside of sin, facts greater than sin, facts of man's relation to God, and God's relation to man, which make it impossible for the careful Bible student to despond, much less despair. Man is never identified with his sin as though it were a part of his very life. Man is a composite being, and sin is referred to as being an element that has entered into his nature altogether foreign to it — with which man's nature is, in some form or other, always at war — a poisonous element which his nature seeks to cast out, which it cannot assimilate. St. Paul was the spokesman for them all when he cried out, "Oh, wretched man that I am; who shall deliver me?" To him sin was a state of captivity from which man could not deliver himself. Therefore the cry for a deliverer. Therefore the assurance in his own soul that Jesus Christ was such a deliverer as he and all men needed. Theologians have been accustomed to speak of sin under two divisions, ,' original" and "actual." I will not trouble you with any such exposition of those terms as might be agreeable to speculators. I don't know that we can improve upon them. By "original sin" we mean that which belongs to us as being joined to a past sinful parentage — for who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean thing? Actual sin is that which belongs to us personally — which is our own. The tendency to sin was born in us; there can be no denial of that fact. That we have indulged the tendency is undeniable, too. Whence did we get this propulsion? From past generations. Some ancestor stood behind us with his vices, and pushed us forward. It seems unfair that we should be linked to the vices of the past, and we complain of it — perhaps try to shift our responsibility on to the fathers who are dead, perhaps excuse ourselves to ourselves by the consideration that the evil we recognise is not of our own origination. Let us remember that the channel down which the vice which plagues us has come was originally constructed for the transmission of virtue. The pipes laid from a great reservoir to a large city for the purposes of health may, by neglect, become the channel of disease; but who shall say that the original conduits were not constructed on principles of beneficence, and for purposes which justified themselves? No faculty of man was so made that it could sin and not suffer. The suffering that sooner or later follows sin, that suffering proclaims that some law of God has been broken. The more earnestly we penetrate into them, the more thoroughly are we convinced that God's ways justify themselves. The Creator has made this race of ours so much a unit, that if one member suffer all the members suffer with it, and if one member rejoice all the members rejoice with it. That separateness of man from man, that absolute individualism which is at the base of much practical religious error, is more an imagination than a fact. As one has well put the matter, "No creature is, so to speak, merely itself in the world. It is where it is, or what it is, as the result of an indefinite advance and appropriation of preceding forms of existence." We cannot throw the blame of our actual transgressions on any ancestor. It is our own. We feel it to be our own. This linking of man with man, of father with child, of one generation with another, is God's grand provision and protest against that selfish individualism which is ever trying to assert and justify itself at the expense of all our social affections. The philanthropies of society are set going by the presence of pain and woe. And thus a new and higher life is manifested as operative in society — a spirit not legal, not of the nature of naked justice, not an exacting, but a self-sacrificing, spirit. And mark, this philanthropic spirit is evoked outside, as well as inside, the areas of religious profession. Let us be thankful that in this, as in other ways, pain is a sort of unlicensed evangelist in the world inducing men to act Christianly who are averse to thinking Christianly. I always cherish the most sanguine hopes in respect to philanthropic men. Those who go with us a mile have always a slumbering disposition to go with us twain. Such persons cannot do the good they do without getting good. Neither can they go into the battle with pain and suffering without having the inquiry started in their own minds as to what all this suffering means. And surely at times the truth about its origin must flash across their spirits." A man or woman who goes about doing good must, all the time, be approaching nearer and nearer to those central truths which lie at the heart of things. We are thrown back upon the fact of sin in us, of a disorder not curable by the patient, not curable by any man or any body of men — curable, if at all, only by God. When it is put away as sin, it still remains in its consequences as disease. God has forgiven it as sin, for "Jesus hath put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself." Accepting Christ Jesus as our Lord and Redeemer, we begin to realise that sin, as sin, is forgiven. But we still feel its power; it is a disorder within. But a disorder in the Great Physician's hands, who has forgiven it, will deliver us from it. So that the very hopelessness of our case is the source of our confidence. We cannot forgive our own sin; therefore God our Father, out of His own nature, for His own sake, is sure to forgive when we apply for forgiveness. We cannot cure sin, and, therefore, He who always delights to help the helpless is sure to take the cure into His own hands. (Reuen Thomas.) Parallel Verses KJV: And almost all things are by the law purged with blood; and without shedding of blood is no remission. |
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