Observe the recurrence of the same idea in our text in different words:
'Their iniquity whereby they have sinned against Me.' ... 'Their
iniquity whereby they have sinned, and whereby they have transgressed
against Me.' You see there are three expressions which roughly may be
taken as referring to the same ugly fact, but yet not meaning quite the
same--'iniquity, or iniquities, sin, transgression.' These three all
speak of the same sad element in your experience and mine, but they
speak it from somewhat different points of view, and I wish to try to
bring out that difference for you.
Suppose that three men were to describe a snake. One of them fixes his
attention on its slimy coils, and describes its sinuous gliding
movements. Another of them is fascinated by its wicked beauty, and
talks about its livid markings and its glittering eye. The third thinks
only of the swift-darting fangs, and of the poison-glands. They all
three describe the snake, but they describe it from different points of
view; and so it is here. 'Iniquity,' 'sin,' 'transgression' are
synonyms to some extent, but they do not cover the same ground. They
look at the serpent from different points of view.
First, a sinful life is a twisted or warped life. The word rendered
'iniquity,' in the Old Testament, in all probability literally means
something that is not straight, but is bent, or, as I said, twisted or
warped. That is a metaphor that runs through a great many languages. I
suppose 'right' expresses a corresponding image, and means that which
is straight and direct; and I suppose that 'wrong' has something to do
with 'wrung'--that which has been forcibly diverted from a right line.
We all know the conventional colloquialism about a man being
'straight,' and such-and-such a thing being 'on the straight.' All sin
is a twisting of the man from his proper course. Now there underlies
that metaphor the notion that there is a certain line to which we are
to conform. The schoolmaster draws a firm, straight line in the child's
copybook; and then the little unaccustomed hand takes up on the second
line its attempt, and makes tremulous, wavering pot-hooks and hangers.
There is a copyhead for us, and our writing is, alas! all uneven and
irregular, as well as blurred and blotted. There is a law, and you know
it. You carry in yourself--I was going to say, the standard measure,
and you can see whether when you put your life by the side of that, the
two coincide. It is not for me to say; I know about my own, and you may
know about yours, if you will be honest. The warped life belongs to us
all.
The metaphor may suggest another illustration. A Czar of Russia was
once asked what should be the course of the railway from St. Petersburg
to Moscow, and he took up a ruler and drew a straight line upon the
chart, and said, 'There; that is the course.' There is a straight road
marked out for us all, going, like the old Roman roads, irrespective of
physical difficulties in the contour of the country, climbing right
over Alps if necessary, and plunging down into the deepest valleys,
never deflecting one hairsbreadth, but going straight to its aim. And
we--what are we? what are 'our crooked, wandering ways in which we
live,' by the side of that straight path? This very prophet has a
wonderful illustration, in which he compares the lives of men who have
departed from God to the racing about in the wilderness of a wild
dromedary, 'entangling her ways,' as he says, crossing and recrossing,
and getting into a maze of perplexity. Ah, my friend, is that not
something like your life? Here is a straight road, and there are the
devious footpaths that we have made, with many a detour, many a bend,
many a coming back instead of going forward. 'The labour of the foolish
wearieth every one of them, because he knoweth not how to go to the
city.' All sin is deflection from the straight road, and we are all
guilty of that.
Let me urge you to consult the standard that you carry within
yourselves. If you never have done it before, do it now; or, better,
when you are alone by yourselves. It is easy to imagine that a line is
straight. But did you ever see the point of a needle under a
microscope? However finely it is polished, and apparently tapering
regularly, the scrutinising investigation of the microscope shows that
it is all rough and irregular. What would a builder do if he had not a
T-square and a level? His wall would be ever so far out, whilst he
thought it perfectly perpendicular. And remember that a line at a very
acute angle of deflection only needs to be carried out far enough to
diverge so widely from the other line that you could put the whole
solar system in between the two. The smallest departure from the line
of right will end, unless it is checked, away out in the regions of
darkness beyond. That is the lesson of the first of the words here.
The second of them, rendered in our version 'sin,' if I may recur to my
former illustration, looks at the snake from a different point of view,
and it declares that all sin misses the aim. The meaning of the word in
the original is simply 'that which misses its mark.' And the meaning of
the prevalent word in the New Testament for 'sin' means, in accordance
with the ethical wisdom of the Greek, the same thing. Now, there are
two ways in which that thought may be looked at. Every wrong thing that
we do misses the aim, if you consider what a man's aim ought to be. We
have grown a great deal wiser than the Puritans nowadays, and people
make cheap reputations for advanced thought by depreciating their
theology. We have not got beyond the first answer of the Shorter
Catechism, 'Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him for
ever.' That is the only aim which corresponds to our constitution, to
our circumstances. A palaeontologist will pick up part of a skeleton
embedded in the rocks, and from the study of a bone or two will tell
you whether that creature was meant to swim, or to fly, or to walk;
whether its element was sea, or sky, or land. Our destination for God
is as plainly stamped on heart, mind, will, practical powers, as is the
destination of such a creature deducible from its skeleton. 'Whose
image and superscription hath it?' God's, stamped deep upon us all. And
so, brother, whatever you win, unless you win God, you have missed the
aim. Anything short of knowing Him and loving Him, serving Him, being
filled and inspired by Him, is contrary to the destiny stamped upon us
all. And if you have won God, then, whatever other human prizes you may
have missed, you have made the best of life. Unless He is yours, and
you are His, you have made a miss, and if I might venture to add, a
mess, of yourself and of your life.
Then there is another side to this. The solemn teaching of this word is
not confined to that thought, but also opens out into this other, that
all godlessness, all the low, sinful lives that so many of us live,
miss the shabby aim which they set before themselves. I do not believe
that any men or women ever got as much good, even of the lowest kind,
out of a wrong thing as they expected to get when they ventured on it.
If they did, they got something else along with it that took all the
gilt off the gingerbread. Take the lowest kind of gross evil--sins of
lust or of drunkenness. Well, no doubt the physical satisfaction
desired is secured. Yes; and what about what comes after, in addition,
that was not aimed at? The drunkard gets his pleasurable oblivion, his
desired excitement. What about the corrugated liver, the palsied hand,
the watery eye, the wrecked life, the broken hearts at home, and all
the other accompaniments? There is an old Greek legend about a certain
messenger that came to earth with a box, in which were all manner of
pleasant gifts, and down at the bottom was a speckled pest that, when
the box was emptied, crawled out into the sunshine and infected the
land. That Pandora's box is like 'the good things' that sin brings to
men. You gain, perhaps, your advantage, and you get something that
spoils it all. Is not that your experience? I do not deny that you may
satisfy your lower desires by a godless life. I know only too well how
hard it is to get people to have higher tastes, and how all we
ministers of religion are spending our efforts in order to win people
to love something better than the world can give them. I also know
that, if I could get to the very deepest recess of your hearts, you
would admit that pleasures or advantages that are complete, that is to
say, that satisfy you all round, and that are lasting, and that can
front conscience and God who is at the back of conscience, are not to
be won on the paths of sin and godlessness.
There is an old story that speaks of a knight and his company who were
travelling through a desert, and suddenly beheld a castle into which
they were invited and hospitably welcomed. A feast was spread before
them, and each man ate and drank his fill. But as soon as they left the
enchanted halls, they were as hungry as before they sat at the magic
table. That is the kind of food that all our wrongdoing provides for
us. 'He feedeth on ashes,' and hungers after he has fed. So, dear
friends, learn this ancient wisdom, which is as true today as it ever
was; and be sure, of this, that there is only one course in this world
which will give a man true, lasting satisfaction; that there is only
one life, the life of obedience to and love of God, about which, at the
end, there will not need to be said, 'This their way is their folly.'
And now, further, there is yet another word here, carrying with it
important lessons. The expression which is translated in our text
'transgressed,' literally means 'rebelled.' And the lesson of it is,
that all sin is, however little we think it, a rebellion against God.
That introduces a yet graver thought than either of the former have
brought us face to face with. Behind the law is the Lawgiver. When we
do wrong, we not only blunder, we not only go aside from the right
line, but also we lift up ourselves against our Sovereign King, and we
say, 'Who is the Lord that we should serve Him? Our tongues are our
own. Who is Lord over us? Let us break His bands asunder, and cast away
His cords from us.' There are crimes against law; there are faults
against one another. Sins are against God; and, dear friends, though
you do not realise it, this is plain truth, that the essence, the
common characteristic, of all the acts which, as we have seen, are
twisted and foolish, is that in them we are setting up another than the
Lord our God to be our ruler. We are enthroning ourselves in His place.
Do you not feel that that is true, and that in some small thing in
which you go wrong, the essence of it is that you are seeking to please
yourself, no matter what duty--which is only a heathen name for
God--says to you?
Does not that thought make all these apparently trivial and
insignificant deeds terribly important? Treason is treason, no matter
what the act by which it is expressed. It may be a little thing to haul
down a union-jack from a flagstaff, or to tear off a barn-door a
proclamation with the royal arms at the top of it, but it may be
rebellion. And if it is, it is as bad as to turn out a hundred thousand
men in the field, with arms in their hands. There are small faults,
there are trivial crimes; there are no small sins. An ounce of arsenic
is arsenic, just as much as a ton; and it is a poison just as surely.
Now I have enlarged perhaps unduly on this earlier part of my subject,
and can but briefly turn to the second division which I suggested,
viz.:--