Lessons of wary walking and humility. We are good because we have not
been tried.
Lessons of charity and brotherly kindness. Every thief in the hulks,
every prostitute on the streets, is our brother and sister, and they
prove their fraternity by their sin. 'Whatever man has done man may
do.' '_Nihil humanum alienum a me puto_.' 'Let him that is
without sin cast the first stone.'
III. The fatal necessity by which sin repeats itself in aggravated
forms.
See how Hazael is drifted into his worst crimes. His first one leads
on by fell necessity to others. A man who has done no sin is
conceivable, but a man who has done only one is impossible. Did you
ever see a dam bursting or breaking down? Through a little crack comes
one drop: will it stop there--the gap or the trickle? No! The drop has
widened the crack, it has softened the earth around, it has cleared
away some impediments. So another and another follow ever more
rapidly, until the water pours out in a flood and the retaining
embankment is swept away.
No sin 'is dead, being alone.' The demon brings seven other devils
worse than himself. The reason for that aggravation is plain.
There is, first, habit.
There is, second, growing inclination.
There is, third, weakened restraint.
There is, fourth, a craving for excitement to still conscience.
There is, fifth, the necessity of the man's position.
There is, sixth, the strange love of consistency which tones all life
down or up to one tint, as near as may be. There comes at last
despair.
But not merely does every sin tend to repeat itself and to draw others
after it. It tends to repeat itself in aggravated forms. There is
growth, the law of increase as well as of perpetuity. The seed
produces 'some sixty and some an hundredfold.'
And so the slaughtered soldiers and desolated homesteads of Israel
were the sequel of the cloth on Ben-hadad's face. The secret of much
enormous crime is the kind of relief from conscience which is found in
committing a yet greater sin. The Furies drive with whips of
scorpions, and the poor wretch goes plunging and kicking deeper and
deeper in the mire, further and farther from the path. So you can
never say: 'I will only do this one wrong thing.'
We see here how powerless against sin are all restraints. The prophecy
did not prevent Hazael from his sins. The clear sense that they were
sins did not prevent him. The horror-struck shudder of conscience did
not prevent him. It was soon gagged.
Hear, then, the conclusion of the whole matter. Christ reveals us to
ourselves. Christ breaks the chain of sin, makes a new beginning, cuts
off the entail, reverses the irreversible, erases the indelible,
cancels the irrevocable, forgives all the faultful past, and by the
power of His love in the soul, works a mightier miracle than changing
the Ethiopian's skin; teaches them that are accustomed to evil to do
well, and though sins be as scarlet, makes them white as snow. He
gives us a cleansed past and a bright future, and out of all our sins
and wasted years makes pardoned sinners and glorified, perfected
saints.