These are carefully concealed or madly disregarded, while we are in
the stage of merely being tempted, but when we have done the evil,
they are unmasked, like a battery against a detachment that has been
trapped. The previous denial that anything will come of the sin, and
the subsequent proclamation that this ugly issue has come of it, are
both parts of sin's mockery, and one knows not which is the more
fiendish, the laugh with which she promises impunity or that with
which she tells of the certainty of retribution. We may be mocked, but
'God is not mocked. Whatever a man soweth, that'--and not some other
growth--'shall he also reap.' We dwell in an all-related order of
things, in which no act but has its appropriate consequences, and in
which it is only fools who say to themselves, 'I did not think it
would matter much.' Each act of ours is at once sowing and reaping; a
sowing, inasmuch as it sets in motion a train the issues of which may
not be realised by us till the act has long been forgotten; a reaping,
inasmuch as what we are and do to-day is the product of what we were
and did in a forgotten past. We are what we are, because we were long
ago what we were. As in these composite photographs, which are
produced by laying one individual likeness on another, our present
selves have our past selves preserved in them. We do not need to bring
in a divine Judge into human life in order to be sure that, by the
play of the natural laws of cause and effect, 'every transgression and
disobedience receives its just recompense of reward.' Given the world
as it is, and the continuous identity of a man, and you have all that
is needed for an Iliad of woes flowing from every life that makes
terms with sin. If we gather into one dismal pile the weakening of
power for good, the strengthening of impulses to evil, the inward
poverty, the unrest, the gnawings of conscience or its silence, the
slavery under evil often loathed even while it is being obeyed, the
dreary sense of inability to mend oneself, and often the wreck of
outward life which dog our sins like sleuth-hounds, surely we shall
not need to imagine a future tribunal in order to be sure that sin is
a murderess, or to hear her laugh as she mocks her helpless victims.
But as surely as there are in this present world experiences which
must be regarded as consequences of sin, so surely do they all assume
a more dreadful character and take on the office of prophets of a
future. If man lives beyond the grave, there is nothing to suggest
that he will there put off character as he puts off the bodily life.
He will be there what he has made himself here. Only he will be so
more intensely, more completely. The judgments of earth foretell and
foreshadow a judgment beyond earth.
There is but one more word that I would say, and it is this. Jesus has
come to set the captives of sin free from its mockery, its tyranny,
its worst consequences. He breaks the power of past evil to domineer
over us. He gives us a new life within, which has no heritage of evil
to pervert it, no memories of evil to discourage it, no bias towards
evil to lead it astray. As for the sins that we have done, He is ready
to forgive, to seal to us God's forgiveness, and to take from our own
self-condemnation all its bitterness and much of its hopelessness. For
the past, His blood has taken away its guilt and power. For the future
it sets us free from the mockery of our sin, and assures us of a
future which will not be weakened or pained by remembrances of a
sinful past. Sin mocks at fools, but they who have Christ for their
Redeemer, their Righteousness, and their Life can smile at her
impotent rage, and mock at her and her impotent attempts to terrify
them and assert her lost power with vain threats.