Εικόνες σελίδας
PDF
Ηλεκτρ. έκδοση

gle sin brought down the threatenings of God against a whole nation. In short, look through the Bible, and you will see one threatening full of temporal, and another full of eternal plagues; one full of external, and another of internal and spiritual woes; and all directed against sin.

Fourth. View sin in the judgments of God. In one nation, thousands are falling before the avenging enemy; the sword is glutted with blood. In another, as many are swept off by pestilence; and all are wearing out by time. Go to the churchyards, and see the rubbish of many generations. Find you nothing of sin in all this? As Jehu exclaimed, when he saw the dead sons of Ahab, “Who slew all these?" Who brought down these sons of pride, that had just been exulting in warlike glory? Who filled your churchyards with fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, high and low, rich and poor? Surely sin has done it; for "as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned."

Fifth. Listen to one under conviction of sin; read the eighty-eighth Psalm; and there witness the trouble of a soul filled with the terrors of the wrath of God. Now, when you see one thus

crying out in anguish of spirit, and tossed by the billows of divine wrath, were you to ask the occasion of all his distress, he would tell you, sin has caused it all.

Sixth. View sin in the hateful and enormous crimes that are committed. They bring infamy and disgrace even in the eyes of men. Human

nature, corrupt as it is, shrinks at their enormity. There are sins which "are not so much as named among the Gentiles." Now, if a man be guilty of these, he becomes odious, even in the eyes of the world. But why? what is there so odious in these crimes, that men flee from the persons guilty of them? There is sin in them; and hence they are so hateful; and the only thing that distinguishes these from others, is their circumstantial aggravations; for in their nature all sins agree. The least of them, as well as the greatest, is a violation of the holy law of God, and a contempt of the great Lawgiver. And if sin appears so odious in these crying enormities, in reality it is as much so when less perceptible in sins more familiar to our corrupt natures.

Seventh. View sin in the case of the finally lost. O could you look into the pit of wo, and see the damned in chains of darkness, you might then have some sense of the evil of sin. It is sin

which has kindled the flames of everlasting fire. It is sin which thrusts the damned down to hell; 1; it is sin which holds them there, and will hold them there forever. Could you have a just impression of these things, how hateful would sin appear!

Eighth. View sin in the sufferings of Christ. Here, O sinner, as in a glass, behold your own heart. You think it a little matter that you have sinned; you "roll sin as a sweet morsel under your tongue." But come, now, and see it holding the sword; or rather thrusting it into the Saviour's side! Here is a sight which made the earth tremble, and the sun hide his face. Here you see how God looks upon sin. All the affection he bore to the Son of his eternal love, could not stay the hand of justice from inflicting death upon him, for the sin of the world. Here you may see more of the evil of sin than anywhere else. Deep indeed must the pollution be, if nothing but the blood of the Son of God could wash it away. Never did we have more dreadful evidence of the power of sin than when it blinded the eyes of men, so that they could not discern "the glory of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth;" though his Divine nature daily beamed through his human, in words which none but God could

speak, and works which none but God could do. Yet such was the power of sin, that it hurried men to the awful crime of imbruing their hands in the blood of the Son of God.

But perhaps some may ask, what have we to do with this? We have never put to death the Son of God, and hence we cannot here see any crime of our own. But suppose we grant what you say as to your innocence in this matter, yet here we see much of the nature of sin; since all sin partakes of the same common nature, and is every way equal to, if not the very same, against which God in so awful a manner manifested his displeasure, when he "spared not his own Son," but "laid on him the iniquity of us all." But does not that very sin lie at your door? Dare you raise your eyes to Heaven, and say, that you received Christ the first time an offer of him was made to you? If not, then you do as much as to say that putting him to death was no crime. By your conduct you justify the Jews, and thus in their crimes you may see your own. There can be no neutral ground here. All to whom the Gospel comes, must be either for or against the Jews in their rejecting and crucifying Christ; and in no other way can we give testimony against them, than by believing the Gospel report, that he was the Son of God, the Saviour of

the world. So far as we lack this belief, we are guilty of the death of Christ; for unbelief subscribes to the charge of the Jews against him, and declares him an impostor. You are either a believer or an unbeliever. If a believer, then it was for your very sins that Christ was crucified. For "he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities, the chastisement of our peace was upon him, and with his stripes we are healed. All we, like sheep, have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all." If you are an unbeliever, then you reject the witness Christ gave of himself; and therefore you practically declare him an impostor, and worthy of death; and you virtually give your consent to the cruelty of the Jews in the sentence of his condemnation.

II. Notice also some of the great evils implied in sin.

First. The least sin has atheism in it. An Atheist, or one who denies the existence of a God, is a creature so degenerate, that some have doubted whether there ever was a human being who disbelieved the existence of God. But there are many practical Atheists, who "profess that they know God, but in works they deny him, being abominable, and disobedient, and unto

« ΠροηγούμενηΣυνέχεια »