What is man that he should be clean?
Original sin
Of all the truths acknowledged and assumed in this ancient book, we find none more clearly or readily confessed than that of man’s original sin and native corruption. “What is man that he should be clean?” When a question is asked in argument and left unanswered, it is the strongest possible form of denial. It is more than saying no man is clean or righteous. It represents such a supposition as man’s priority or holiness to be preposterous and absurd. Man, as man, and as born of woman by natural descent, is necessarily imperfect and impure. God is Himself the pure and perfect one, and nothing is pure or perfect but what is in God. All other purity and perfection is therefore comparative. Man may be pure and perfect as a man, while he is still very far from the purity and holiness of God. God has other and higher beings than man. Compare man with these. By “saints” here are meant the holy angels. God is said not to put trust in them. Their perfection is derived and comparative, not absolute. Contemplate man as he actually is; take the positive side of the charge brought against him in the text. II he is not clean, and cannot be righteous in God’s sight, then what is he? “How much more abominable and filthy is man, which drinketh iniquity like water.” It might be urged that this is the representation made of the case by an angry and unscrupulous disputant, only anxious to establish his own position. But does not Job himself allow much the same? Is he not brought to say, “Behold, I am vile.” “I abhor myself”? Such representations abound in Scripture. Away, then, with all human maxims and all worldly opinions, which only throw a false gloss over the heart, and conceal its hidden corruption without touching it. Let us always look at ourselves in the looking glass of God’s Word, and not in the deceitful mirror of our own judgment, or the flattering world’s opinion. (W. E. Light, M. A.)
Holiness imperfect in the best men
Archbishop Usher was once asked to write a treatise upon sanctification; this he promised to do, but six months rolled away and the good Archbishop had not written a sentence. He said to a friend, “I have not begun the treatise, yet I cannot confess to a breach of my promise, for to tell you the truth I have done my best to write upon the subject; but when I came to look into my own heart I saw so little of sanctification there, and found that so much which I could have written would have been merely by rote as a parrot might have talked, that I had not the face to write it.” Yet if ever there was a man renowned for holiness it was Archbishop Usher; if ever there was a saintly man who seemed to be one of the seraphic spirits permitted to stray beyond the companionship of his kind among poor earthworms here, it was Usher, yet this is the confession he makes concerning himself. Where, then, shall we hide our diminished heads? (C. H. Spurgeon.)