"_When ye pray, say.... Forgive us our sins._"--LUKE xi. 2, 4.
A recent writer has pointed out that sin, like death, is not seriously
realized except as a personal fact. We really know it only when we know
it about ourselves. The word "sin" has no serious meaning to a man,
except when it means that he himself is a sinful man. And hence it comes
to pass that we can still turn to the penitential Psalms, to the seventh
chapter of Romans, to the _Confessions_ of St. Augustine, or to the
_Grace Abounding_ of John Bunyan, and make their words the language of
our own broken and contrite hearts. For when Bunyan and Augustine and
Paul and the psalmists spoke of sin, they spoke not the thoughts of
others, but their knowledge of themselves; they looked into their own
hearts and wrote. That is why their words "find" us to-day.
Nevertheless, paradox though it may seem, our greatest Teacher
concerning sin, Himself "knew no sin." Born without sin, living and
dying without sin, Christ yet "knew what was in man," knew the sin that
was in man, and from His own sinless height once for all revealed and
judged and condemned it. Let us seek, then, to learn the mind of Christ
on this great matter.
And once more, as I have had occasion to point out in a previous
chapter, we must not look for anything formal, defined, systematic in
Christ's teaching. We cannot open the Gospels, as we might some modern
theological treatise, and read out from them a scientific exposition of
sin--its origin, its nature, its treatment. The New Testament is not
like a museum, where the flowers are dried and pressed, and the fossils
lie carefully arranged within glass cases, and everything is duly
classified and labelled. Rather it is like nature itself, where the
flowers grow wild at our feet, and the rocks lie as the Creator's hand
left them, and where each man must do the classifying and labelling for
himself. Museums have their uses, and there will always be those who
prefer them--they save so much trouble. But since Christ's aim was not
to save us trouble, but to teach us to see things with our own eyes, to
see them as He saw them, and to think of them as He thinks, it is no
wonder that He has chosen rather to put us down in the midst of a world
of living truths than in a museum of assorted and dead facts.
I
What, then, is the teaching of Jesus concerning sin? His tone is at once
severe and hopeful. Sometimes His words are words that shake our hearts
with fear; sometimes they surprise us with their overflowing tenderness
and pity. But however He may deal with the sinner, we are always made to
feel that to Jesus sin is a serious thing, a problem not to be slurred
over and made light of, but to be faced, and met, and grappled with.
Christ's sense of the gravity of sin comes out in many ways.
(1) It is involved in His doctrine of man. He who made so much of man
could not make light of man's sin. It is because man is so great that
his sin is so grave. No one can understand the New Testament doctrine of
sin who does not read it in the light of the New Testament doctrine of
man. When we think of man as Christ thought of him, when we see in him
the possibilities which Christ saw, the Scripture language concerning
sin becomes intelligible enough; until then it may easily seem
exaggerated and unreal. It is the height for which man was made and
meant which measures the fall which is involved in his sin.
(2) Call to mind the language in which Christ set forth the effects of
sin. He spoke of men as blind, as sick, as dead; He said they were as
sheep gone astray, as sons that are lost, as men in debt which they can
never pay, in bondage from which they can never free themselves. The
very accumulation of metaphors bears witness to Christ's sense of the
havoc wrought by sin. Nor are they metaphors merely; they are His
reading of the facts of life as it lay before Him. Let me refer briefly
to two of them, (_a_) Christ spoke of men as in bondage through their
sin. "If," He said once, "ye abide in My word ... ye shall know the
truth, and the truth shall make you free." And straightway jealous
Jewish ears caught at that word "free." "Free?" they cried, "Free? we be
Abraham's seed, and have never yet been in bondage to any man: how
sayest Thou, Ye shall be made free?" Yet even as they lift their hands
in protest Christ hears the clink of their fetters: "Verily, verily, I
say unto you, every one that committeth sin is the bond-servant--the
slave--of sin." "To whom ye present yourselves as servants unto
obedience, his servants--his slaves--ye are whom ye obey; whether of sin
unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness." Apostle and Lord mean
the same thing, true of us as it was true of the Jews: "Every one that
committeth sin is the slave of sin." (_b_) Further, Christ says, men are
in debt through their sin. In one parable He tells us of a certain
lender who had two debtors; the one owed five hundred pence, and the
other fifty; but neither had wherewith to pay. In another parable we
hear of a servant who owed his lord ten thousand talents--a gigantic
sum, vague in its vastness, "millions" as we might say--and he likewise
had not wherewith to pay. Further, in the application of each parable,
it is God to whom this unpayable debt is due. Now, it is just at this
point that our sense of sin to-day is weakest. The scientist, the
dramatist, the novelist are all proclaiming our responsibility toward
them that come after us; with pitiless insistence they are telling us
that the evil that men do lives after them, that it is not done with
when it is done. Yet, with all this, there may be no thought of God. It
is the consciousness not merely of responsibility, but of responsibility
God-ward, which needs to be strengthened. When we sin we may wrong
others much, we may wrong ourselves more, but we wrong God most of all;
and we shall never recover Christ's thought of sin until, like the
psalmist and the prodigal, we have learned to cry to Him, "Against Thee
have I sinned, and done that which is evil in Thy sight."
(3) But sin, in Christ's view of it, is not merely something a man does,
it is what he is. Go through Paul's long and dismal catalogue of "the
works of the flesh": "Fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness,
idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousies, wraths, factions,
divisions, heresies, envyings, drunkenness, revellings, and such like."
Yet even this is not the whole of the matter. Sin is more than the
sum-total of man's sins. The fruits are corrupt because the tree which
yields them is corrupt; the stream is tainted because the fountain
whence it flows is impure; man commits sin because he is sinful. It was
just here that Christ broke, and broke decisively, with the traditional
religion of His time. To the average Jew of that day righteousness and
sin meant nothing more than the observance or the non-observance of
certain religious traditions. "For the Pharisees, and all the Jews,
except they wash their hands diligently, eat not, holding the tradition
of the elders: and when they come from the market-place, except they
wash themselves, they eat not; and many other things there be which they
have received to hold, washings of cups, and pots, and brazen vessels."
"Nay," said Jesus, "you are beginning at the wrong end, you are
concerned about the wrong things, for from within, out of the heart of
men, evil thoughts proceed, fornications, thefts, murders, adulteries,
covetings, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, railing,
pride, foolishness: all these evil things proceed from within." Deep in
the heart of man evil has its seat, and until that is touched nothing is
done.
(4) And, lastly, Christ says all men are sinful. Of course, He did not
say, nor did He imply that all are equally sinful. On the contrary, He
said plainly that whereas the debt of some is as fifty pence, the debt
of others is as five hundred pence. Neither did Christ teach that man is
wholly sinful, in the sense that there is in man nothing that is good,
or that every man is by nature as bad as he can be. Nor, let it be said
in passing, is this what theology means when it speaks, as it still
sometimes does, about the "total depravity" of human nature. What is
meant is, as Dr. Denney says, that the depravity which sin has produced
in human nature extends to the whole of it.[35] If I poison my finger,
it is not only the finger that is poisoned; the poison is in the blood,
and, unless it be got rid of, not my finger merely, but my life is in
peril. And in like manner the sin which taints my nature taints my whole
nature, perverting the conscience, enfeebling the will, and darkening
the understanding. But with whatever qualifications Christ's indictment
is against the whole human race. He never discusses the origin of sin,
but He always assumes its presence. No matter how His hearers might
vary, this factor remained constant. "If ye, being evil" that mournful
presupposition could be made everywhere. He spoke of men as "lost," and
said that He had come to seek and save them. He summoned men, without
distinction, to repentance. He spoke of His blood as "shed for many unto
remission of sins." The gospel which, in His name, was to be preached
unto all the nations was concerning "repentance and remission of sins."
Even His own disciples He taught, as they prayed, to say, "Forgive us
our sins." And though it is true He said once that He had not come to
call the righteous but sinners to repentance, He did not thereby mean to
suggest that there really are some righteous persons who have no need of
repentance; rather was He seeking by the keenness of His Divine irony to
pierce the hard self-satisfaction of men whose need was greater just
because it was unfelt.
"All have sinned;" but once more let us remind ourselves, sin is not
seriously realized except as a personal fact. The truth must come home
as a truth about ourselves. The accusing finger singles men out and
fastens the charge on each several conscience: "Thou art the man!" And
as the accusation is individual, so, likewise, must the acknowledgement
be. It is not enough that in church we cry in company, "Lord have mercy
upon us, miserable offenders"; each must learn to pray for himself, "God
be merciful to me a sinner." Then comes the word of pardon, personal and
individual as the condemnation, "The Lord also hath put away thy sin."