What Is Sin?
“0 wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me out of the body of this death? I thank Grod through Jesus Christ our Lord!” — Rom. vii. 24, 25.
A by no means incompetent judge has declared his conviction that this seventh chapter of Komans is “most certainly the most terrible tragedy in all literature, ancient or modern, sacred or profane.” “Set beside the seventh of the Romans,” he says, “all your so-called great tragedies — your Macbeths, your Hamlets, your Lears, your Othellos, are all but so many stage-plays; so much sound and fury, signifying next to nothing when set alongside this awful tragedy of sin.... The seventh of the Romans should always be printed in letters of blood. Here are passions. Here are terror and pity. Here heaven and hell meet, as nowhere else in heaven or hell; and that, too, for their last grapple together for the everlasting possession of that immortal soul, till you have a tragedy indeed; beside which there is no other tragedy.”
Yes, that is just what this chapter is and does. It describes the supreme tragedy of the soul. It describes the daily array of contending combatants even upon the plane of the sanctified life. To these hostilities there is no truce; the apparent departure of the foe is only a feint for a subtler approach. The enemy is on the field when night lulls the senses to rest, he is on the field at the new awaking. ‘’ To me, who would do good, evil is present,” a forceful, bewitching mesmerism, an almost stupefying fascination! What I hate, I doT’ The good which I would I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do.” ‘’ O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me out of the body of this death,” out of the death-dealing grip of this tremendous and ubiquitous foe? Such is the tragedy, and we have all experienced its horrors, for the battle and the battle-fields are only limited by the race. But not yet have we finished the verse. Up to this point the narrative of the chapter has raced along in heated, gasping, bewildered leaps, but the very next sentence comes like a sweet, restful morning after the convulsions of an awful night. “O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me out of the body of this death? “... ‘’ I thank God, through our Lord Jesus Christ.” So He gives His beloved rest and peace.
And now let us come to the immediate matter of our meditation by asking this question, What is this sin which so inflames this narrative, and so tyrannises the life? What is sin? I am not seeking for a mere theological definition, but for some clear, truthful, adequate, experimental conception of it. What is sin? The place to ask the question, and to seek an answer to it, is not in the restrictive and perverting publicity of a debating society, but in the deep solitudes of one’s own soul. The evidence which is requisite for a judgment will never be tabled in the open court of publicity, it must be sought amid all the reserves of the secret place. It cannot be discussed as a theological generality, an impersonal abstraction, removed from the colour and life and movement of the individual soul. There are many mathematical problems which can be discussed in abstraction, far away from the hard realities of common experience. iSTay, it has frequently been by the mystical highway of mathematical abstractions that we have marched to the discovery of material facts. The mathematician has discovered the existence of the comet long before it appeared to the astronomers. From the generality we got a particularity; by an abstraction we were led to a fact. But I do not think that is the order when we are investigating the nature of sin. In this realm I rather think the course is not from an idea to an experience, but from an experience to an idea. Before half a dozen men can fruitfully discuss the theory of sin, it is essential that each man shall have investigated the facts of his own soul and examined the secret judgments of his own experience. The appeal is to Caesar, and in this relationship Caesar is the individual soul.
What, then, has our hidden consciousness to say about it? Matthew Arnold declared that sin was “not a monster but an infirmity,” I will not discuss that in vacuo. I merely ask, what has my soul to say about it? Does my soul accept the ameliorative term, and feel itself secretly justified? If sin be only infirmity, there would be no sense of guilt and no harrowing consciousness of blame. A man who is born with imperfect physical sight is not responsible for his infirmity, nor is he conscious of any burdensome blame. But when I sin I am conscious of more than weakness; it is a happening that might have happened otherwise, and I know myself responsible for the choice. And so when I go into my soul where the sin has been wrought, and seek to label the sin by the plausible name of” infirmity,’’ my soul rejects the plea in the consuming sense of its own shame.
Nor do I fare any better when I am presented with the excuse of inherited temperament. I am told that I am the creature of heredity, and that I have inherited an unfavourable and overwhelming bias. I take that softening plea into my soul, where the wreckage occasioned by a violent passion is strewn all about, but my soul will have none of it, and spurns the explanation as futile and irrelevant. The extraordinary thing is that I can excuse another man because of his legacy of bad blood and jarring nerves, but I cannot excuse myself. Nor can the other man whom I extenuate find any self-extenuation in the same plea. If heredity were invincible we should know no guilt and experience no blame.
But after every outburst of passion my soul knows it could have been otherwise, my judgment is against myself, I do not distribute the blame over my ancestry, I make the indictment personal and immediate; “my sin is ever before me.”
Tor do I fare any better with another suggestion, namely this, that sin is adequately explained by the invincibility of external circumstances, by the brutally terrific power of my environment. I confess I am very eager to throw this shield over many a brother, but it offers no defence to my own soul. I note the adversaries which surround my brother, like wolves bearing down on a fold, I mark the fierceness and suddenness of the attack, and I feel compelled to say, How could he have done anything else? But again, the extraordinary thing is this, that my brother, in his own secret consciousness, cannot accept the plea, and secretly rejects the excuse. He knows that the surrender was not inevitable, and that, to the very last moment, it was a possibility to have mastered the circumstances which led to his degradation. No man is compelled to lie; and every man knows it. He can breast the blows of circumstance, and honour and keep the truth. I am not now concerned with what we say to one another, but with what we say in our secret selves, and I testify that in my own self-consciousness my sin never finds its explanation in any supposed inevitability in my surroundings.
But let us go a step higher. It has been said that the essence of all sin is the making self the centre to which we subordinate all other beings and interests. I think there is much truth in the statement and yet I think it is a very inadequate explanation. When I take the statement and examine it among the experiences of my own secret consciousness it does not give me satisfaction. There is more in sin than the statement includes, more than the exaltation of one’s self and the subordination of one’s brother. These may be and are the consequences of sin, but I do not think they constitute its essence. When I sin I am conscious of more than self and brother; in the wide, silent solitudes of my soul I am dimly conscious of a vaster Presence still. I may not be able to define it, but its existence is surely recognised. When I retire into this secret consciousness I feel I cannot express sin in terms of self and brother, but only in terms of self and brother and God. There are more circles and centres than two; there is a third circle, and the centre of this circle I cannot forget or ignore. When Judas betrayed the IN’azarene, could the sin be all expressed in terms of Judas and ISTazarene; or was there a third Factor present, and was it the mysterious Third which haunted him with awful dread, and which drove him headlong to “the field of blood “? In the great drama of “The Tempest,” Alonzo foully rids himself of Prospero, and usurps his place and power; could the sin be adequately expressed in terms of self and brother, or is a third included, and is it to the third we owe the wail of after days?
“0, it is monstrous! monstrous! Methought the billows spoke, and told me of it; The winds did sing it to me: and the thunder, That deep and dreadful organ-pipe, pronounced The name of Prosper!”
‘^^ Th voice of the great Eternal spake in that mighty tone.” When I closely interrogate my own secret consciousness, I find this threefold circle in every sin.
And further, therefore, I cannot altogether agree with the statement that “sin is the deprivation of God.” “Deprivation” is, perhaps, a word unfortunately chosen. The Scriptures use another and a better word. “Tour sins have separated between you and your God.” Yes, but the separation is not the sin, it is the consequence of the sin. When I sin God is not away, I am too powerfully conscious that He is there. I hear His voice, I deliberately go against it. I have gone against it when it rang out like a loud alarm-bell in the dead of night! What, then, is sin?
What say the Scriptures? Jesus had comparatively little to say about sin as sin. Enough had been said, and enough was known. He came to remove it, not to describe it. But this much is taught, these two things at any rate, and I think they are both confirmed in the secret consciousness of the individual life; firstly, sin is a voluntary breaking away from the Divine will, a conscious and deliberate violation of the Divine order; and, secondly, sin results in a certain distortion of the life, a certain twist in our relationship to the Highest, which evidences itself in the disturbing and maiming sense of guilt. A violation and a distortion! Such is the teaching of the Scriptures, and such are the findings of my own experience. I am prepared, therefore, to accept these words of a great experimental thinker, that sin is “the God-resisting disposition, in virtue of which man, in self-sufficiency and pride, opposes himself to God, and withdraws himself from the spirit of Divine life and love.” That satisfies my consciousness, as indeed it explains my experience. Well, now, how shall we deal with it? ‘^ Who shall deliver us out of this body of death? “Matthew Arnold tells us that it is “an infirmity to be got rid of,” but he omits to tell us how. He certainly says that “thinking about sin beyond what is indispensable for the firm effort to get rid of it is a waste of energy and a waste of time.” I truly believe in the sanity of the warning conveyed in this counsel; but, ah, me! that bit about “the firm effort to get rid of it “appears to mock at my desire. It seems like telling one of our electric cars, whose trolley-pole is all awry, to make” firm effort “to get along! Just what Matthew Arnold counsels me to do I am unable to do. What is this” firm effort “by which I am to get rid of sin, and its attending distortion of guilt? Another counsellor comes to my side with the answer, get rid of it “by healthy developments in favourable conditions.’’ Yes, but again, what are the ‘’ favourable conditions” in which the “healthy development” will be inevitable? Mark you, it cannot be done by education. Paul was an educated man, and of a very fine order, but he needed something far beyond what could be provided by the schools. Let us make no mistake about it, we are not going to purge our land of sin by a more efficient system of education. Why, our public schools are possible cesspools. There is not a schoolmaster or schoolmistress anywhere who does not painfully realise how comparatively impotent is a school system to keep life pure and sweet. The discipline of a school can compel an external order; it cannot control the riot that may be raging within. Nor is the curriculum fitted to accomplish much more than the discipline; at any rate, let us not unduly build upon the influence of our schools in purifying and directing the energies of our youth, and in establishing them in a sweet and wholesome life. Nor are we going to do it by the creation of garden cities and the transfiguration of men’s material surroundings. Let me not be misunderstood; not for one moment would I wish it to be inferred that I disparage these helpful ministries to the creation of a larger and healthier life. It is the knowledge of their worth which has driven me to seek to bring into one of the dingiest centres of a great city something of the light and colour and warmth of finer fellowships. But I want to labour under no misapprehension. We may, by a more favourable environment, diminish crime and at the same time only change the accent of sin. When a man ceases to be a drunkard he does not necessarily become a saint. Police statistics may be reliable guides as to the crime of a city, but they are no criterion of its moral and spiritual health.
We may diminish the city’s crime, and at the same time utterly fail to diminish the city’s sin. Crime is just the public obtrusiveness of sin; we may stop the obtrusion, and the crime has gone, but the sin itself may hide beneath the skin. We may remove the eruption, and leave the blood defiled. There may be no drunkard in a city, but sin may abound. No, the merely fine environment will leave the essential virus untouched, and will not deliver us from the bondage and wretchedness of indwelling sin.
Nor do I think that altruistic service will give us the desired emancipation. I have known men and women who have gone out to serve their fellows, and in the service their hearts have been dark and cold as a tomb, haunted by ghostly and disturbing presences. Men go on to public bodies, and surrender their strength to the common weal, but this in itself does not bring the freedom they seek. All these are comparatively favourable conditions, but taken altogether, and alone, they will not deliver the life from the virus of sin. Then,” O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me out of this body of death?
I thank God, through Jesus Christ our Lord.” I bring you to that — the reality of sin, and the reality of a personal Saviour. ‘’ Through Jesus Christ.” The deliverance can be effected by a personal covenant, by the union of two lives, by the mutual surrender of your life and of the life of the Prince of Glory, the now exalted Christ of God. Jesus Christ, who liberated the palsied, who freed the Magdalene, is alive, exercising universal sway, and can come into vital, revitalising, emancipating relationship with every child of the race. On His side the surrender is made; ^’ for their sakes I sanctify Myself,” and when on our side the surrender is made, and the spiritual union is consummated, this is the joyful experience in the sweet consciousness of a redeemed life:
“He breaks the power of cancelled sin.
He sets the prisoner free.”