ON a certain Monday morning, not so long ago, the four morning
newspapers of New York City devoted an aggregate of 16,000 words to
present summaries of forty-one sermons that had been preached on the
preceding day from the pulpits of that metropolis. A close examination
of these sermon summaries reveals the astounding fact that with but one
exception the word sin was used neither directly nor indirectly. A
visitor from Mars, reading these newspaper items, listening to the many
“inspirational” sermons of our day, or taking the current issue of a
well-known magazine and finding in the index an article on “The
Vanishing Sinner” would doubtless come to the conclusion that here on
this North American continent and in our large metropolitan areas the
Utopia of the golden age had been found in which sin was outlawed and
crime tabu.
Indeed, sin is the
most unpopular of all subjects for discussion today, when people love
to dwell lingeringly on the inherent goodness of man or try to disguise
the hideousness of sin, sugar-coat its bitterness, and explain away its
vicious nature under the masquerade of dishonest phraseology. Thus
today psychological theories are often substituted for the Ten
Commandments. In our current vocabulary a man who uses profanity and
abuses the high and holy name of God is said to show “bad taste.” A
“racketeer” whose ruthless machine gun sweeps down an innocent
pedestrian suffers under a series of “complexes.” A child that refuses
to obey its parents is coddled as a “self-expressionist.” Young people
who disregard the requirement of premarital chastity claim to enjoy the
“new freedom of our new age,” while those who do observe this chastity
are said to suffer from “inhibitions.” It’s Not Our Fault, a recent
book, is one of the latest literary attacks on the stark reality of
personal sin. “Priests Discover Sin, and Theologians Give It Names” is
the title of one of the chapters; and the burden of this “handbook for
the militantly intelligent” is that there is no absolute basis on which
any specific act can be labeled “sin.” It is, the reader is assured,
the animal inheritance of animal origin. And behind all of these new
and sometimes formidable theories and expressions by which sin often
appears “as an angel of light,” to use the words of St. Paul, lies the
unwillingness to accept the plain, unswerving statements of the Bible.
Our text tonight
speaks out in sharp protest against this palpable perversion and tells
us in the inspired wisdom of Proverbs, “Fools make a mock at sin.” And
truly, the denial or the ridicule of sin is one of the supreme follies
of that farcical philosophy of unbelief that disfigures our modern
existence. For the Scriptures, the highest of all high authorities,
indeed the only authority in matters of doctrine and morals, employ the
most clear and definite tones in rejecting this damnable delusion that
there is no sin, or that, if there is, it is not of very great
consequence.
THE
STARK REALITY OF DAMNING SIN.
Looking to the
Bible, we find that in the pages of the Old Testament alone there are
more than a dozen different terms that describe sin and wrong, that
these words altogether occur more than 2,000 times in the Hebrew sacred
writings, and that in the New Testament there is a long array of words
in frequent occurrence which similarly express sin. Now, if we remind
ourselves that the Bible in thousands of passages thus definitely
refers to sin in its various forms as to a hideous reality, who is
there that can rise up to shake his puny little fist against this
mountain of truth and insist that there is no sin? Who is there that
can raise his quavering voice against the reverberating thunder of
these words of Scripture to prove that man is naturally good and noble
and pure? Our text answers, Only a fool can thus “make a mock at sin”;
only one who stubbornly contradicts the truth and to whom, because of
this willful contradiction, the denunciation of St. John applies, “If
we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not
in us.”
How thoroughly do
our everyday experiences illustrate this Biblical truth, that men are
“the servants of sin” The strange irony in this denial and belittling
of sin is seen in the glaring contradiction that just at the time when
men have ruled sin out of existence, we find such flooding crime waves,
such widespread lawlessness, such increasing disregard of authority,
that for the first time in our national history a President of the
United States has officially called into being a national crime
commission. More divorces, more robberies, more murders, more deeds of
impurity, more small and large thievery — more sin than ever before in
the glittering, golden age in which we live! Again, only a fool can
mock at the rushing, sweeping force of such compelling evidence.
But many people
readily admit the existence of sin and yet mock at it by following the
Pharisee into the temple of their own self-sufficiency and arrogantly
thanking God that they are not “as other men are, extortioners, unjust,
adulterers”; by engaging in that widespread pastime of patting
themselves on their shoulders, asking themselves, “What is the matter
with me?” and answering with cool complacency and smug
selfsatisfaction, “I am all right.”
But, again, what
does the Bible say? Listen to this: “All have sinned and come short of
the glory of God”; “They have all gone aside, they have all together
become filthy; there is none that doeth good, no, not one.” There you
have the Biblical statements, penned in the strongest and most direct
language in which human thought may be clothed, statements that leave
no room for exemption or exception, but which include every man, woman,
and child that ever lived or that ever will live upon the face of this
wide earth. Indeed, the Scriptures tell each one of us directly and
unhesitatingly that we are burdened by a two-fold kind of sin: first,
the original and hereditary sin, of which our Lord speaks when He
declares, “That which is born of the flesh is flesh,” — that is, the
consequence of the sin committed by our first parents, who
disobediently rose up against God; and then, the sins that men commit
of themselves, which the great apostle enumerates in his long catalog
under the heading, “The Works of the Flesh” and which he describes as
“adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry,
witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions,
heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revelings, and such like:”
To emphasize the
truth of the Scriptures when they call you and me and all our fellowmen
sinners, there is that unmistakable voice of conscience that heaps up
before our mind’s eye all the sins of omission and commission which
abound in every human existence. One day they brought to our Lord a
woman taken in the act of adultery. But when Jesus challenged her
self-righteous accusers, “He that is without sin among you, let him
first cast a stone at her,” we read that the hard-hearted, stiff-necked
Pharisees were “convicted by their own conscience” and left without
hurling their stones. And to day the conscience, that restless,
assertive monitor, is both direct and personal testimony to the folly
of mocking at sin.
But very often there
is only a vague and hazy idea as to what sin is. People will readily
grant that deeds of violence, highway robbery, murder, and sexual
perversions are sinful; but they often overlook the finer and less
violent forms of wrong-doing, particularly the thoughts and words that
spring from impure and sinful motives. This is one of the most popular
of all modern mockeries, which leads men to parade themselves as
paragons of virtue, because, not being severely tempted to despicable
acts of sin, they have refrained from indulging in overt and scandalous
fractures of the moral code. But once again the Bible leaves no doubt
as to the fact that even desires and impulses may be, and often are,
sinful and wrong. The definition of sin in the Catechism, “Sin is every
transgression of the divine Law in desires, thoughts, words, and
deeds,” is entirely Scriptural; for Jesus uses a large part of the
Sermon on the Mount to tell those who regard only the consummate act of
murder and adultery as sin that even the thought of hate or impurity,
even a glance of anger or lust, is a direct and complete fracture of
the Law, so that anything that directly or indirectly militates against
the holiness of God, anything that is destructive of our neighbor’s or
of our own welfare, either in the expression of word or in the impulse
of thought, — all this is sin, disgraceful, degenerating, damning sin.
I consciously say
damning sin; for if men have been guilty of the folly of endeavoring to
rule sin out of existence, they naturally have not shrunk back from the
parallel mockery of attempting to eradicate the punishment of sin. “Be
not deceived, God is not mocked,” is a text that fits very
appropriately into the modern tendency to laugh away the specter of the
punishment of sin. But there is not a more demonstrable fact than the
stern reality of the terrifying devastation of sin. I could stand
before this microphone for hours and cite to you cold and impartial
figures which would show the terrific ravages of sin; I could quote the
professional verdicts of physicians in regard to the fearful
consequences of the sins of impurity; I could show you that sin robs a
man of his self-respect, that it has shortened the life and blasted
away the happiness of millions, that it has destroyed kingdoms and
nations. The most blatant mockery cannot laugh away such evidence.
Yet all this, even
in its most intense and horrifying form, shrinks into the infinitesimal
when compared with the final disaster that always follows in the wake
of unforgiven sin, and that is death, — not merely the inevitable end
of life that awaits every one of us, but particularly the state of
spiritual death in the hell that modern enlightenment frantically tries
to destroy. What, then, is the result of sin? The Bible warns us, “The
soul that sinneth, it shall die:” And again, “The wages of sin is
death.” There, in plain and unmistakable terms, you have a direct
expression of the appalling extreme to which sin, as a violation of the
will and Law of a just and holy God, can lead — first of all, to a
separation from God, then to punishment in the form of affliction and
death, and finally to the despair of an endless, hopeless eternity of
darkness. Who is there that can make a mock at such terrifying
realities? Our text echoes, “Only a fool.”
THE
FATHOMLESS FAVOR OF GOD.
We can understand,
then, that men have sought both for the forgiveness of sins and for the
power to counteract sin. And it is a wonderful and comforting message
that we read in the second statement of our text, “Among the righteous
there is favor.” Yes, as we know, not from man’s reason, but from the
revelation of a gracious God in His Word, there is divine favor, there
is forgiveness of our sins, there is the immeasurable love of God, that
prompted Him to send the “One Mediator between God and man, the Man
Christ Jesus,” who “gave Himself as a ransom for all.” There, in that
wondrous Gospel message, that “He became sin for us who knew no sin
that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him,” in the record
of that world-moving transaction, “He hath purchased us with His own
blood,” in that promise of purification, that this blood, “the blood of
Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanseth us from all sin,” is the invitation
that goes out tonight, addressed to all who may hear these words, to
turn away from sin and to come to Christ, not in reliance upon your own
accomplishments (for after all, how few and small and unworthy they
are!), but trusting solely in the merit of Jesus’ blood and
righteousness, in the fathomless favor of God.
It is in His Word
that we find further favor—the power to check and restrain sin, that
power for which anxious men have sought so long and so vainly. They
look about them in this world of vice and crime; they read of the
appalling increase in the penal population of our country and of the
disastrous losses that follow in the wake of sin; and they ask, “How
can we check sin? How can we limit and restrict its frequent and
destructive occurrence?” One expert tells us that we need more laws;
but the experience of the past years has shown that the more laws there
are, the more there are broken. Another expert says we need more
education; but experience again tells us that a college degree is no
diploma for morality. An uneducated thief will go down to the
freightyard and steal a ride, but an educated thief will steal the
whole railway system. Another tells us that we need gland operations
and similar services of surgeons; but everybody knows that some of the
most brutal criminals have been of almost perfect physique.
No, something else
is necessary if there is to be a really effective restraint of sin. The
Bible tells us what that something else is: the favor of God, which
offers the regenerating, reconstructing power of the Gospel of Jesus
Christ. It is this dynamic, indescribable, miraculous power of which
the great apostle speaks when he assures us, “If any man be in Christ,
he is a new creature. Old things are passed away; behold, all things
are become new.
Thus, while sin has
led us to behold the ugliest thing on earth, that which has engulfed
human existence in immeasurable woes and made men suffer horror,
misery, and anguish beyond computation, we have also been privileged to
hold out to the world tonight the favor of God, the most sublime
message that human ears can ever hear, the promise that “God so loved
the world that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth
in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life,” the message of
that all-embracing, never-failing, everlasting, and universal love of
God in Jesus Christ. This is God’s gift, as our text puts it, to the
“righteous,” to those who, coming to Jesus just as they are, find in
His blood and righteousness their beauty and their glorious dress and
thus are adjudged righteous by God. They are those who, spurning every
claim to their own righteousness or to the righteousness of others, but
believing, trusting, in Him whose promises never fail, pray with
patient confidence: —
Rock of
Ages, cleft for me,
Let me bide myself in Thee!
Let the water and the blood
From Thy riven side which flowed
Be of sin the double cure,
Cleanse me from its guilt and power.
Can you pray that
prayer? Are you hidden in the cleft Rock of Ages? Are you cleansed from
the guilt and power of sin? God grant it for Jesus’ sake! Amen.