THE WAGES OF SIN
‘The wages of sin is death.’
The judgment of God once rested, says the Apostle, upon all the world, and that judgment was expressed in death. It is quite clear that the word has for St. Paul a peculiar significance. It was to his mind much more than the separation by one sharp wrench of the spiritual and the physical; it was much more than the entrance through a seemingly dismal portal into destinies invisible and unknown; and it was much more than the casting-off of this mortal body with all its limitations and incapacities, all its frailties and weaknesses, all its temptations and trials.
I. To St. Paul death, as he here represents it, was the culmination of a condition which man had known throughout all the years of his life—the condition of alienation from God. The ‘wages of sin’ was the breach of communion with God, and this breach of communion was a veritable death. It was death now; it implied death hereafter. Man because of his sin lived in alienation from the Divine Righteousness, and the culmination of that state of alienation was the loss of everlasting life. Death, as here conceived by the Apostle, was a process rather than a momentary experience. It was a state which enveloped man throughout his mortal career. Just as for the Christian eternal life commences here and now; so for the man estranged from God St. Paul thought of death as having already its beginning. The actual dissolution was the climax of that state—the climax in which all the consequences of estrangement found their full meaning. The idea of death could for St. Paul reach out to the experiences of this present world. It could equally cover the experiences of a life to come. Such a life, if lived apart from God, lived in the awful shadow of His wrath, lived in the darkness of completed spiritual separation, was undeserving of the name. An existence of that kind was really death—death in all the fullness of its religious significance. The man who was now without hope of eternal blessedness, though he might have all that this world could give him, though ‘he might come in no misfortune like other folk,’ though he might be exalted with the Herods or enthroned with the Cæsars, was dead. The man who lost eternal blessedness, though consciousness might continue so as to enable him to suffer and endure, though his personality might be interminable, though his existence might be prolonged for ever, was dead. Such was the death which had ‘passed unto all men, for that all sinned.’ Such was the death by which ‘by the trespass of one the many died.’ Such was the death which hitherto ‘had reigned through the One.’ Such is the death which is ‘the wages of sin.’
II. And yet God spared not His Son the spiritual agonies which were inseparable from death as ‘the wages of sin.’—Whatever may be the explanation of the atonement which approximates most nearly to the truth—whether we consider it to have consisted in a penalty paid, in a measure vicariously, by the Head of humanity in satisfaction of human indebtedness, or whether we see in it chiefly the overpowering testimony of the Son of God to the real meaning of moral evil, or whether we interpret it as the offering of that perfect penitence of which only perfect righteousness was capable, yet that Christ died as one Who was ‘made sin,’ as one Who gave Himself ‘a ransom for many,’ is a doctrine which can only be denied upon a widespread repudiation of the testimony of both Apostles and Evangelists. And it is in this aspect of His death that we find the solution of that mystery at which we just glanced—the mystery of His horror of the Cross, and of His sense of forsakenness as He hung there. It was because death as endured by Him was to stand in that terrible intimacy of relation to human transgression that He shrank from it as from a cup too bitter for Him to drink, and that as He drank it His mind went back to the despairing cry of the Psalmist. He—the Crown of the human race, in Whom all life had been summed up through the Incarnation, Who was perfectly and completely that which each one of us is only partially and fragmentarily, Who gathered our human existence into His own Divine person, Who was man ideally and representatively, Who was ‘the Son of Man,’ Who was ‘the Word made flesh’—met death as the wages of the sins of those whose nature He took upon Himself in the infinity of His love. Looked at from this point of view we can understand the deep and awful anguish which overcame Him in that garden ‘under the dark shadows of the trees, amid the interrupted moonlight.’ We can understand, too, in part that cry of exhaustion as He sank closer and closer to the end—that cry which only some caught, of which others heard only the first word and understood to be an appeal to Elijah, the expected forerunner of the Messiah. Sin implied necessary estrangement from God; and this consciousness of necessary estrangement was then upon Him Who ‘bare the sin of many’—nay, the sin of all—and Who in that death of deaths ‘made intercession for the transgressors.’
III. Calvary, as the Gospels depict it, was the outcome of sin.—To this end, awful enough in its external horrors, yet more awful in its spiritual significance the sins of the world brought Him ‘Who for us men and our salvation came down from heaven.’ And let us remember with fear and trembling—remember in those hours when sin is pleasant and welcome, when temptation bears us almost unresisting along, when we are disposed to call gross wickedness by soft names, when we are inclined to rebel against the sterner verdicts of good men or the warnings of our own consciences—that the wages of sin, sin unrepented of, sin for which we have never found or sought forgiveness, sin of which the stain and defilement still remain, is now, as in old days, death. There is such a thing as missing our salvation. There is such a thing as making the Cross of Christ of none effect. There is such a thing as being lost in an ever-deepening estrangement from God. Scripture speaks to us of the fate of the wicked only in figures; but they are figures from which we recoil in dismay. Christ can save us if we will let Him. But He cannot save us against our will. What is our view of sin? What are the eyes with which we look upon our own sins? What are the scales with which we weigh them? Have we ever said to ourselves, said with all the earnestness and solemnity of which we are capable—such earnestness and solemnity as we might employ to warn ourselves against some impending earthly disaster—‘The wages of those sins of mine is death; death now and death hereafter’? It is not easy to pass these verdicts of self-condemnation. Excuses rise so readily to the lips. But when such self-condemnation tarries—when we are inclined to pass some mitigated judgment upon the faults and vices of which we have been guilty—let us go back in thought to all of which this day is commemorative, and remember where and how we have been shown the terrible significance of sin.
IV. The wages of sin! We need never pay them.—Shrouded in perplexity as the doctrine of the reconciliation of God and man, through Him Who was both God and Man, may be, yet we know and are sure that God offers us for His sake ‘the free gift’ of ‘eternal life.’ The atonement has been made. The expiation has been offered. ‘There is now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus.’ Death may indeed be to us, apart from Christ,
The power of the night, the press of the storm,
The post of the foe.
But in Christ, with His might to help and sustain us, with His grace to aid our weakness, with the power of His victory to uphold and strengthen us, the ‘night’ will be night no longer, the ‘storm’ will have become a calm, the ‘foe’ will have lost his terrors. The time must indeed come, sooner or later, for each one of us—even for the youngest of us it cannot be so very far off—when
The journey is done, and the summit attained,
And the barriers fall.
But we will not add that ‘a battle’s to fight’ before the final recompense is enjoyed. We will rather say that far back in the centuries a battle was fought once for all—such a battle as the world never before beheld and will never see again, the battle of battles, the battle between salvation and death—and that the triumph, unspeakable and unthinkable, the triumph for ever and ever, was with Him Whose brethren we are, with Him Who was ‘tempted in all points’ as ourselves, with Him Who ‘was despised and rejected of men,’ Who ‘poured out His soul unto death and was numbered with the transgressors,’ with ‘the Son of Man.’ We may be ‘more than conquerors in Him.’ ‘Be of good cheer. I have overcome the world.’ ‘The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law; but thanks be to God Which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.’
Rev. the Hon. W. E. Bowen.
Illustrations
(1) ‘It has been said that the suffering of a few hours, however severe, would be a small price to pay for the salvation of a world. Yes; but it was not in its physical sufferings that the full bitterness of that death consisted. Those sufferings by themselves appeal to us. We are moved and subdued by some representation of the mere externals of the Passion. Many will call to mind a story told by Canon Liddon, in one of his sermons, of a German nobleman who was converted from a life of religious indifference by a picture of Christ upon the Cross with the words attached to it, “This I did for thee; what hast thou done for Me?” But it was not in those external miseries, horrible as they were, not in anything that the eye can recall or the imagination conjure up, that “the sting of death” consisted for “the Lord of Glory.” ’
(2) ‘How far death, as we know it, bears in its familiar outward circumstances traces of the results and effects of sin is a speculation with which we may occupy ourselves, but to which it is obvious that there can be no certain answer. That this life would be inadequate, even if prolonged indefinitely; that there is in it an element of incompleteness which needs fulfilment; that art and literature, painting and music, the beauties of the sunset, “the roseate hues of early dawn,” mountain peak and silver stream, sea and lake, copse and glade, forest and plain; that all these with their several interests and wonders need a life beyond, where they will be found in perfection—this is a thought which Browning has done so much to impress upon us in his Easter Day. “This mortal” must always “have put on immortality.” And yet the “one clear call” to that other world might have come amidst surroundings of which the beauty would have been realised and acknowledged by all. Death need have come not as “the Arch-Fear,” but as the friend of friends. But the advent of death is something very different. Death may be accepted with resignation; it may be received with hope and confidence; it may be anticipated with courage; it may be looked forward to with a sense of relief; it may be faced with faith. But death is a dread ordeal. It is accompanied by circumstances which cannot be avoided and the nature of which cannot be forgotten. How far are these circumstances the results, directly or indirectly, of the coming of sin? It is, as I have said, a question without an answer. We can scarcely conceive of death as stripped of certain characteristics; but we cannot, on the other hand, forget that once in the annals of the world death came to One Who was without sin, and that “God did not give His Holy One to see corruption.” ’
(SECOND OUTLINE)
THE SENSE OF SIN
Why did Jesus Christ come into the world? We are told in words of unmistakable clearness that ‘this is a true saying and worthy of all men to be received, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.’ The Bible history starts with the history of the Fall of the human race, and proceeds to work out the need for redemption, and the answer to that need in the coming of Jesus Christ.
I. The reason why men and women are losing hold of the religion of Jesus Christ is this—that they are losing their sense of sin.—They lead a life in which sin is admitted, courted, and caressed. They do not wish to part with it; they do not recognise its burden or realise its guilt. Why should they seek a Saviour from that from which they do not wish to be saved? The life which so many live now who call themselves Christians has no room, no place, for that. It is not the true life, the highest life, the best life. They must live very fast, and give themselves no time to think; they must ask others to pronounce them happy and to give them the sanction of approval which their own conscience refuses to give. It is to the interest of the average man that Christianity should not be true. Sin is an ugly word; punishment is a disagreeable thought; eternal punishment is intolerable. Christianity, it is quite true, has nothing to say to the average man, and the average man is, therefore, labouring to have nothing to say to Christianity. We need not be surprised, while men and women live as they are living now, that they turn away from Christ, and say, ‘We will not have this Man to reign over us.’ We need not be surprised that they have no difficulty in finding men who persuade them that religion is an affair of the mind and not of the heart, that Christ is a great teacher and nothing else, that His revelation is to the wise and prudent, that we walk by sight and not by faith, that the highest power is criticism, and that the ultimate standard of all truth is the self-consciousness of the individual, and that it does not matter which we believe as long as we are in earnest.
II. What the world needs is to recover the sense of sin, and in recovering the sense of sin it will recover its sense of need for a Saviour, and in finding its Saviour will learn to lay hold once more of that life of faith and that life of obligation which enables a man not merely to imitate an ideal which he imperfectly grasps, but to become himself the son of God, and to rise to the fullness of his being and the greatness of his heritage. It is impossible to study progress unless we first study the mystery of sin. Because if we believe what God has told us, sin represents a wrong attitude towards the world. Our path to perfection lies in following out the Will of God, and, as of old, the sense of that Will is subject to the eclipses which are brought on by desire, by temptation, by disobedience, by the lawlessness which is the Bible conception of sin, which abuses this world instead of using it, and turns the things which should have been to our wealth into an occasion of falling. Have you any real sense of sin? Do you really feel that you need a Saviour? Have you found such a Saviour in Jesus Christ? These are momentous questions, and it is because men turn away from them that they are taking up with a lower life which ought not to be, in which undetected sin warps their whole character and spoils it. It is because men do not feel the need that they allow the foolish cleverness of the age to take away Christ and to disparage religion.
III. Sin is unnatural, and ought not to exist within us.—And sin brings nothing with it but misery wherever it is found, and is the enemy of progress and the degradation of the human race. The Bible, of course, is persistent in this estimate of sin. It sets before us in unswerving fidelity the consequences of that fatal choice made by our first parents to follow desire instead of duty, and inclination instead of God. But we have another testimony still, and that is the testimony of human language. In human language we have crystallised for us the testimony of experience, which gathers itself up into a single word—significant, eloquent, monitory; capable of giving up its meaning to those who will interrogate it. Sin is the offence, the blow, the bar to civilisation. They were right who first called it by that name; and ‘sin’ itself, whenever we take the word on our lips, speaks to us of injury. When we speak of ‘faults’ we speak of those dread flaws and cracks which remain even in the case of forgiven sin; ‘wickedness’ tells us of its bewitching fascination; ‘evil’ carries with it a sense of injury; ‘iniquity’ of a failure in moral rectitude. You will never induce Christian men, if you can judge by the testimony of their language, ever to acquiesce in that estimate of sin which represents it as a tender and graceful defect, inevitable, irresistible, and to a great extent the result of causes which cannot be resisted.
IV. And we may say with reverence that because God knew this He sent His Son into the world to be our Saviour.—Christianity is not merely one among the religions of the world, which a progressive criticism is to reduce to the limits which our sublime understanding is willing to accept. Christianity is a necessity; Christianity is a matter which concerns our salvation. Christ is our Saviour, and if He is our Saviour it means that we need His salvation. ‘The wages of sin is death’; this is as true of the nation as of the individual. The road to progress is the road of Christianity. The road to ruin is the road of human wilfulness. To each and to all of us Christ makes His great appeal—‘Wilt thou be made whole? For the gift of God is eternal life, through Jesus Christ.’
—Rev. Canon Newbolt.
Illustration
‘Nature in a lower animal and nature in a man are to this extent different things. An animal in following nature follows its impulses and desires, guided by instinct, which controls and regulates him at every turn. And this will be seen more clearly in the case of animals in their natural state before they are brought under the cultivation and training of man. But for a human being to follow nature is to bring all his desires, impulses, and passions under the guidance of reason, and to submit, in its turn, reason to the illumination of the Spirit, which is his point of contact with God. If a man forgets this, and mistakes animalism for nature, see what follows. He loses at once, or very speedily, his position as a man. The passions rebel against the will, and reason feebly protests, and the spirit has been silenced. The will totters on its throne, and you see that most piteous of all sights—a human being degraded beyond the degradation of any other living thing, an ungoverned and ungovernable derelict on the rough tide of the world, a degraded being bitterly conscious of its own degradation, a being endowed with free will enslaved to passion and fettered in its freedom, and powerless to exert the commanding force of the will. If the plea of nature degrades our humanity, so the plea which says, “I cannot help it” enslaves it under an intolerable bondage. I am free, and I know that I am free, and no one yet, who has not bowed his neck beneath the bonds of deadly habit, has been able to say, when he sinned, that he could not help it, or has felt that it was impossible for him to have acted otherwise than as a puppet in the hands of an invisible player, hid behind the veil of his origin.’
(THIRD OUTLINE)
WHAT IS SIN?
The most critical part of the whole subject is this: What is ‘sin’? Every one’s conscience can answer it, for we all know when we sin; indeed, it would not be sin if we did not, for sin is what is against conscience, only we must take care to remember we are responsible for our conscience—for an enlightened conscience.
I. ‘Sin’ is any violation of God’s will, or word, which a man does with his eyes open.—We can make no scale of sin. All scales of sin are arbitrary and false. The only measure of the sin is the light which it darkens and the grace which it resists. An allowed bad temper at home, pride and unkindness, want of truth, self-indulgence and sloth, lust and uncleanness, meanness, ‘covetousness, which is idolatry,’ a cherished scepticism, and all the negatives—no prayer, no love to God, no usefulness, all, and many else, are equally ‘sin.’
II. Every ‘sin’ has its ‘wage’; and the devil is the paymaster.—He promises, indeed, very different ‘wages’ from what he gives. He promises the gay, and the affectionate, and the satisfying. But God has drawn up the compact, and He has shown it to you, and if you enlist in the service of sin, you never can say you have not read it; you have known it from your infancy—‘The wages of sin is death.’
III. Concerning these wages, it will strike you, at once, that the expression implies that there is a deliberate engagement—a title, and a true and horrid title it is! You have a right to your ‘wages.’ A servant can claim his ‘wages,’ and the master must give them; for whosoever ‘sins’ is an employed one, though he does not see it; he is doing his employer’s work. Let me tell you what it is.
(a) First, to destroy your own soul;
(b) Then to spread a contagion, and hurt others’ souls, so to increase your master’s kingdom, and give him another and another victim!
(c) Is that all? No, it is not half. To insult God—to grieve the Holy Ghost—to rob Christ of a jewel. That is the work which every one who ‘sins’ is doing for his employer.
IV. What are the wages?—Separation. Even in this life, little by little, the separation from the good and the pure will yet widen. A very small time you will spend upon your knees. Good thoughts will be almost strangers. The Bible will be a thing put farther and farther aside. Gulfs will come in between you and God. They will become deeper. It will be very difficult to keep them back again. And out at that distance, the soul will have got very cold; heavenly things will wither! But it is not over. There is a great deal unpaid yet. Perhaps there will come a separation unmitigated by any real hope of a reunion—a separation from the holy, and the loving, and the loved: to go out—where? To the unknown! to the drear! to a land of darkness! No voice in the valley! no arm in the crossing! And, then, separation for ever—irretrievable! Separation from that father of yours, that mother, that husband, that wife, that child, that saint, that church, that happy fellowship, that God! Separation! Eternal punishment? Yes. This is the eternal punishment—separation! I want no more. ‘For the wages of sin is death.’
—Rev. James Vaughan.
Illustration
‘We are judged now, and we shall be judged hereafter, according to the honest resistance we have made, and not because we are more or less ‘corrupt’ from the beginning. I may be fenced about with wickedness from my earliest years; oaths perhaps my first utterances; indecency before my eyes in foul and degrading habitations; my earliest habits immoral; until the mercy of God finds me out and shows me all this is bad and contrary to His will and commandment. I may then, with strong resolution, begin an entirely new course, embracing virtue with my whole heart, and renouncing utterly what I before did ignorantly, and none of those things shall be remembered any more. But if I begin the old practice over again, and deliberately swear, and become intemperate, or filthy, that relapse will be a thousand times farther removed from pardon than the shameful record of former years.’