The importance of adequate impressions of sin.
We seldom hear sin spoken about now as the old prophets spoke about it. We do not think about sin as the defiance of God, the attempted overthrow of his authority, the expression of the soul's hatred of God, and therefore calling for terrible vindications of the Divine power and claims. In reading biographies of very holy and devoted Christians, we have observed that they had deep and overwhelming impressions of the evil of sin—impressions quite beyond the reach of our sympathy. Perhaps we have inclined to call them morbid, and to think such views were the result of diseased imaginations. The truth, however, is that these holy men and women had visions of the infinite holiness of God. They saw the "sapphire throne," and they trembled and veiled their faces before the exceeding majesty of the Divine purity. They saw themselves and sin truly and worthily, because they saw these things in the full clear light of God. We do not so see them, because we do not live near enough to God. Take as a specimen the following sentences of John Bunyan—surely as honest and sincere a man before God and his fellows as ever lived: "My original and inward pollution—that was my plague and affliction. That I saw at a dreadful rate, always putting forth itself within me. That I had the guilt of to amazement. By reason of that I was loathsome in my own eyes, and I thought I was in God's eyes too. Sin and corruption, I said, would as naturally bubble out of my heart as water out of a fountain. I thought that every one had a better heart than I had; I could have changed hearts with anybody. I thought none but the devil himself could equalize me for inward wickedness and pollution of mind. I fell, therefore, at the sight of my own vileness, deeply into despair." Making all allowance for the quaintness of this language, and for the spirit of the age in which Bunyan lived, do we not feel that his Christian life became so noble because his foundations had been laid so low? And we need more worthy apprehensions of the essential hatefulness and evil of sin to lie as the foundation-stones on which we may rear our godly life.
1. All the great truths and doctrines of Divine revelation rest upon the fact of human sin. Repentance, justification, atonement, redemption, sanctification, all assume the fact of our sin. It is too much the habit to discuss these doctrines as if they were merely questions of science, having a general intellectual interest; but with the smitings of guilt on our hearts, and the avenger of blood at our heels, they become intensely real; they are no less than the conditions of the soul's safety in the city of refuge. We should understand them so much better if we had more soul-moving impressions of the evil and the guilt of our state before God.
2. All the Christian graces depend on deep views of sin. That possesses our souls with pity and charity and long-suffering towards others. That makes and keeps us bumble. The believing man is he who, in his self-helplessness, has learned to lean wholly. The hopeful man is he who has cried "out of the depths unto the Lord. The man who feels for others is he who "knows the plague of his own heart."
3. All the earnestness and zeal of Christian work depend on worthy views of sin. Are men perishing in sin? then we must rescue and save them. John Howe says, "Shall-our Redeemer be left to weep alone over perishing souls? Have we no tears to spend upon this doleful subject? Oh that our heads were waters, and our eyes fountains! Is it nothing to us that multitudes are sinking, going down to perdition, under the name of Christian, from under the means of life and salvation—perishing—and we can do nothing to prevent it? We know they must perish that do not repent and turn to God, and love him above all; that do not believe in his Son, and pay him homage as their rightful Lord." We are guilty before God in neglecting to keep vivid in our hearts humbling convictions of sin; and we may trace to this neglect our imperfect impressions of the holiness of God, of the majesty of his Law, and of the necessity for atonement by blood-shedding. We may also trace to this neglect our easy subjection to the pleasures and vanities of the world; our indifference in the pursuit of Christian virtues, and our coldness and deadness to the claims of Christian work. To see sin rightly we must see it—
I. IN THE CONSEQUENCES TO WHICH IT LEADS. We wonder why these stern writings of the old prophets are preserved, and make up so large a portion of God's Word. They are needed to keep before us the connection between sin and suffering, to show the wickedness of sin by the bitterness of its consequences. We do not need either old prophets or new ones to convince us of the fact of sin. Conscience and observation suffice for that. Nor do we need old prophets or new ones to convince us of the fact of suffering. But we do need them to convince us of the connection between the two. And that was just the mission of the old prophets. In vigorous language they describe dreadful famines, devouring pestilences, the march of myriad locusts, frightful scenes of battle-fields and siege, the desolation of fair countries, the exile and captivity of nations. But they never leave us to imagine for a moment that such things are mere calamities. They are consequences of sin; the whirlwind which those reap who sow the wind. They try to make us see behind the apparent order of cause and effect, and they say, "Ye have provoked the Lord your God to anger, therefore hath all this evil come upon you." Sin is invisible. Sin is pleasing to our corrupt nature, and we will not see its true character. So God writes it up before our eyes in bodily, social, national, hereditary woes. Illustrate from the end of the avaricious man, the drunkard, the presumptuous, etc; as given in this chapter.
II. IS THE CONTRAST OF GOD'S MERCIFUL DEALINGS WITH US. It is mostly in this way that God is accustomed to present sin to us. See the opening parable of this chapter. Sins and vices look hateful indeed, as staining and debasing poor Africans. Drunkenness is hideous, corrupting the poor islanders of the Southern Seas. But what do such things look like, putting to utter shame the enlightened islanders of Christian Britain? Are not lust, and passion, and greed, and drunkenness, and down-treading the poor, and neglecting the offered salvation, aggravated immensely by God's abounding mercy to us? God pleads his mercy (see John 11:3, John 11:4). We plead thus: Do you think, if you had lived in Christ's days, you could have gone on sinning on the very knoll of Calvary, under the very shadow of the cross on which your Savior died? Could you have cast lots for his raiment with those rough gamesters, danced a merry round about his cross, and done the deeds beneath his very agony which now stain your life? It may be that very thing which you are, in spirit, doing now. The shadow of the cross has never passed away; it lies right across Christian England today. We live through our daily lives beneath it. It is not really a dark shadow; it is transformed; it is the Lord's rainbow of love shining through tears. It arches our whole sky. Its presence glorifies all goodness; but its presence also aggravates all sin, all self-indulgence, all neglect of God. The issue, the final issue, for all who sin under the very shadow of the cross—that no human lips can describe, as no human imagination can conceive. That must be the woe unspeakable, the dreadful day of God.—R.T.
God's judgments through natural agencies.
The Prophet Isaiah lived in anxious times. He was keenly observant of the social and moral features of his age—a discerner of the "signs of the times." He was sent by God to show the people how national wrong-doing bore its sure fruitage in bad harvests and in national calamities, and to help them to see in such fruitage the operation of Divine judgments. In the text the prophet clearly sees trouble coming on apace, and taking form as scant and withered harvests, either through unkindly seasons or the visitation of locusts. "Their root shall be as rottenness, and their blossom shall go up as dust." Ewald well describes the social conditions which Isaiah observed in their more serious aspects in relation to the Divine will and Law. "The constant increase of the power and security of the realm, and the profusion of an age rendered prosperous by the development of arts and distant commerce, were accompanied by an equally vigorous growth of other things; the craving for enjoyment and luxury among the people, and especially among the women of the capital; the foolish predilection for foreign manners and foreign superstitions of every kind, and a wantonness of life, from which many, even of the judges, were not altogether free, and under which the defenseless inhabitants had to suffer with increasing severity; all of which Isaiah, the great prophet of his age, who lived in Jerusalem, recognized and depicted in the sharpest outlines." Dean Stanley gives a yet more striking picture of that luxurious age. "The luxury and insolence of the nobles was in a high degree oppressive and scandalous. Bribery was practiced in the seats of judgment, and enormous landed property was accumulated against the whole spirit of the Israelite commonwealth. With the determination and, we may add, the avarice of their race, they laid their deep schemes at night, and carried them out with their first waking. They "did evil with both hands;" they skinned the poor to the very quick; they picked their bones and ground them to powder. The great ladies of Zion were haughty, and paced along the streets tossing their necks, and leering with their eyes, walking and mincing as they went, covered with tinkling ornaments, chains, bracelets, mantles, veils, of all fashions and sizes." Isaiah declares that Jehovah observed all these moral and social evils, and that he used the agencies of nature to execute his judgments on such sinners. They would find, when the harvest came round, that "ten acres of land would only yield one bath, and the seed of a homer would only yield an ephah." God would smite them through the fields. Is Isaiah's teaching obsolete? Does God speak to the men of this age by the voice of nature? Having found out that the world is ruled by law, have we gained the right to banish the Lawgiver? Whether men call us superstitious or not, we unhesitatingly say that God is in the harvest still, and its limitation is the voice of God calling on us to humble ourselves concerning our social and national iniquities. That this is a right and reasonable view to take will appear if we consider—
I. MAN IS SENSITIVE TO NATURE, AND NATURE TO MAN. If we are still thus sensitive, God can use nature still as a medium by which to communicate his will to us. Nature has not yet become one of the dead languages; God can speak to us in it. We are affected by the nature-moods of each passing day. Crisp frost braces us to exertion; glowing sunshine and clear skies are reflected in bright and cheerful feelings; cloudy, dull days make our work drag heavily. Storm-times fill us with fear. Everybody anxiously observes the character of the seasons. The nation alternates between hope and fear as reports come of rains, or late frosts, or blight, or flood. Nature is ever bringing to us messages from God, gracious testimonies of his acceptance or of his reproof. And no voices are so loud or so clear as those of the harvest, which is God's yearly replenishing of our exhausted stores, and so the intimation of Divine regard or Divine disfavor. And nature is sensitive to man, and responsive to man's conditions and doings. Go into some parts of our land, some metal and mining districts, and notice how nature, in response to man, has changed her aspect. Her trees cannot live. Her atmosphere has become damp and chill. See her fields responding to man's draining. She now runs off her moisture in sudden and desolating floods. See the thick smoke-cloud hanging over great towns. Nature responds by breeding fatal diseases beneath it. God is ever fitting issues to actions, and in the issues revealing the character of the action. "Sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death." Visit the Holy Land, now desolate and barren, once fruitful and cultivated. It has but responded to the destruction of its timber, by the invading armies that have tramped over it again and again. The prophets seem to have, as one great part of their mission, to show that changes in seasons, loss of fruitage, bad harvests, fearful storms, locusts and caterpillars, are really the judgment-responses of nature to the doings, the wrong-doings, of men. Close up our Scriptures if it is no longer true that God speaks to men through nature; for St. Paul says, "God gave them rain from heaven, and fruitful seasons, filling their hearts with food and gladness." Surely the invisible things of God may be clearly understood by the things that are made.
II. NATURE CAN STILL BE USED AS AN AGENT OF DIVINE JUDGMENT ON MAN. If God is, then he cannot pass by sin. If God visits the sins of cities and of nations as such, then he must find some instruments of chastisement which will directly affect cities and nations. His instruments may be the destructive forces of nature—famine, pestilence, fear, and war—which directly reach corporate and national feeling. Herein is a curious thing. Men are ready enough to hear the voice of God when he sends a bountiful harvest. The whole land rings with the harvest-song, and men do not mind our saying that God sent the harvest. Bat how blind and deaf men become when harvest fails! Our blessings come from God; but how we try to make out that our disasters are only consequences of some unwisdom, or some neglect of social or agricultural laws! We need not see God's hand in them. Let us not, however, be afraid of either side of the great truth. If God would recognize our faithfulness to him, he can find rich golden corn, and sunny autumn for its ripening and its ingathering. If he needs to chastise, and awaken in us the sense of sin, then he can make withered ears stand in the fields, summer floods damage the shocks, and sunless autumn hinder the ripening. Can it ever take away from the judgment-aspect of national calamity that we are able to explain how the earth, in its movements through space, has come rote a damp region, or rote a cold region; how certain atmospheric conditions have developed the blight; and how the current of certain winds has brought the locusts; and how a disturbance of nature's limiting agencies has developed unduly the caterpillar? But if God speaks to us in judgment, let us never forget that he really speaks to us in mercy. He ever blends mercy with judgment; and the response he asks from our hearts will go into the old words: "Come, let us return unto the Lord: for he hath torn, and he will heal us; he hath smitten, and he will bind us up. After two days will he revive us: in the third day he will raise us up, and we shall live in his sight." "To the Lord our God belongeth mercies and forgivenesses, though we have rebelled against him."—R.T.
Isaiah 4
Isaiah
Isaiah 6
Isaiah 5 - isaiah-5 - worlddic.com