'As sin hath reigned unto death, even so might grace
reign through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus
Christ our Lord.'--ROMANS v. 21.
I am afraid this text will sound to some of you rather unpromising.
It is full of well-worn terms, 'sin,' 'death,' 'grace,'
'righteousness,' 'eternal life,' which suggest dry theology, if they
suggest anything. When they welled up from the Apostle's glowing
heart they were like a fiery lava-stream. But the stream has cooled,
and, to a good many of us, they seem as barren and sterile as the
long ago cast out coils of lava on the sides of a quiescent volcano.
They are so well-worn and familiar to our ears that they create but
vague conceptions in our minds, and they seem to many of us to be far
away from a bearing upon our daily lives. But you much mistake Paul
if you take him to be a mere theological writer. He is an earnest
evangelist, trying to draw men to love and trust in Jesus Christ. And
his writings, however old-fashioned and doctrinally hard they may
seem to you, are all throbbing with life--instinct with truths that
belong to all ages and places, and which fit close to every one of
us.
I do not know if I can give any kind of freshness to these words, but
I wish to try. To begin with, I notice the highly-imaginative and
picturesque form into which the Apostle casts his thoughts here. He,
as it were, draws back a curtain, and lets us see two royal figures,
which are eternally opposed and dividing the dominion between them.
Then he shows us the issues to which these two rulers respectively
conduct their subjects; and the question that is trembling on his
lips is 'Under which of them do you stand?' Surely that is not fossil
theology, but truths that are of the highest importance, and ought to
be of the deepest interest, to every one of us. They are to you the
former, whether they are the latter or not.