Now the Apostle says two things--and we may put away the figure and look
at the facts that underlie it. The one is that all sin is imprisonment,
the other is that all men are in that dungeon, unless they have come out
of it through faith in Jesus Christ.
All sin is imprisonment. That is the direct contrary of the notion that
many people have. They say to themselves, 'Why should I be fettered and
confined by these antiquated restrictions of a conventional morality?
Why should I not break the bonds, and do as I like?' And they laugh at
Christian people who recognise the limitations under which God's law has
put them; and tell us that we are 'cold-blooded folks who live by rule,'
and contrast their own broad 'emancipation from narrow prejudice.' But
the reality is the other way. The man who does wrong is a slave in the
measure in which he does it. If you want to find out--and mark this, you
young people, who may be deceived by the false contrasts between the
restraints of duty and the freedom of living a dissolute life--if you
want to find out how utterly 'he that committeth sin is the slave of
sin,' try to break it off, and you will find it out fast enough. We all
know, alas! the impotence of the will when it comes to hand grips with
some evil to which we have become habituated; and how we determine and
determine, and try, and fail, and determine again, with no better
result. We are the slaves of our own passions; and no man is free who is
hindered by his lower self from doing that which his better self tells
him he ought to do. The tempter comes to you, and says, 'Come and do
this thing, just for once. You can leave off when you like, you know.
There is no need to do it a second time.' And when you have done it, he
changes his note, and says, 'Ah! you are in, and you cannot get out. You
have done it once; and in my vocabulary once means twice, and once and
twice mean _always_.'
Insane people are sometimes tempted into a house of detention by being
made to believe that it is a grand mansion, where they are just going to
pay a flying visit, and can come away when they like. But once inside
the walls, they never get past the lodge gates any more. The foolish
birds do not know that there is lime on the twigs, and their little feet
get fastened to the branch, and their wings flutter in vain. 'He that
committeth sin is the slave of sin--shut up,' dungeoned, 'under sin.'
But do not forget, either, the other metaphor in our text, in which the
Apostle, with characteristic rapidity, and to the horror of rhetorical
propriety, passes at once from the thought of a dungeon to the thought
of an impending weight, and says, 'Shut up _under_ sin.'
What does that mean? It means that we are guilty when we have done
wrong; and it means that we are under penalties which are sure to
follow. No deed that we do, howsoever it may fade from the tablets of
our memory, but writes in visible characters, in proportion to its
magnitude, upon our characters and lives. All human acts have perpetual
consequences. The kick of the rifle against the shoulder of the man that
fires it is as certain as the flight of the bullet from its muzzle. The
chalk cliffs that rise above the Channel entomb and perpetuate the
relics of myriads of evanescent lives; and our fleeting deeds are
similarly preserved in our present selves. Everything that a man wills,
whether it passes into external act or not, leaves, in its measure,
ineffaceable impressions on himself. And so we are not only dungeoned
in, but weighed upon by, and lie under, the evil that we do.
Nor, dear friends, dare I pass in silence what is too often passed in
silence in the modern pulpit, the plain fact that there is a future
waiting for each of us beyond the grave, of which the most certain
characteristic, certified by our own forebodings, required by the
reasonableness of creation, and made plain by the revelation of
Scripture, is that it is a future of retribution, where we shall have to
carry our works; and as we have brewed so shall we drink; and the beds
that we have made we shall have to lie upon. 'God shut up all under
sin.'
Note, again, the universality of the imprisonment.
Now I am not going to exaggerate, I hope. I want to keep well within the
limits of fact, and to say nothing that is not endorsed by your own
consciences, if you will be honest with yourselves. And I say that the
Bible does not charge men universally with gross transgressions. It does
not talk about the virtues that grow in the open as if they were
splendid vices; but it does say, and I ask you if our own hearts do not
tell us that it says truly, that no man is, or has been, does, or has
done, that which his own conscience tells him he should have been and
done. We are all ready to admit faults, in a general way, and to confess
that we have come short of what our own consciousness tells us we ought
to be. But I want you to take the other step, and to remember that since
we each stand in a personal relation to God, therefore all
imperfections, faults, negligences, shortcomings, and, still more,
transgressions of morality, or of the higher aspirations of our lives,
are sins. Because sin--to use fine words--is the correlative of God. Or,
to put it into plainer language, the deeds which in regard to law may be
crimes, or those which in regard to morality may be vices, or in regard
to our own convictions of duty may be shortcomings, seeing they all have
some reference to Him, assume a very much graver character, and they are
all sins.
Oh, brethren, if we realise how intimately and inseparably we are knit
to God, and how everything that we do, and do not do, but should have
done, has an aspect in reference to Him, I think we should be less
unwilling to admit, and less tinged with levity and carelessness in
admitting, that all our faults are transgressions of His law, and we
should find ourselves more frequently on our knees before Him, with the
penitent words on our lips and in our hearts, 'Against Thee, Thee only
have I sinned, and done this evil in Thy sight.'
That was the prayer of a man who had done a foul evil in other people's
sight; who had managed to accumulate about as many offences to as many
people in one deed as was possible. For, as a king he had sinned against
his nation, as a friend he had sinned against his companion, as a
captain he had sinned against his brave subordinate, as a husband he had
sinned against his wife, and he had sinned against Bathsheba. And yet,
with all that tangle of offences against all these people, he says,
'Against Thee, Thee only.' Yes! Because, accurately speaking, the _sin_
had reference to God, and to God alone. And I wish for myself and for
you to cultivate the habit of connecting, thus, all our actions, and
especially our imperfections and our faults, with the thought of God,
that we may learn how universal is the enclosure of man in this dreadful
prison-house.
II. And so, I come, in the second place, to look at the guardian of the
prison.
That is a strange phrase of my text attributing the shutting of men up
in this prison-house to the merciful revelation of God in the Scripture.
And it is made still more striking and strange by another edition of
the same expression in the Epistle to the Romans, where Paul directly
traces the 'concluding all in disobedience' to God Himself.
There may be other subtle thoughts connected with that expression which
I do not need to enter upon now. But one that I would dwell upon, for a
moment, is this, that one great purpose of Scripture is to convince us
that we are sinful in God's sight. I do not need to remind you, I
suppose, how that was, one might almost say, the dominant intention of
the whole of the ceremonial and moral law of Israel, and explains its
many else inexplicable and apparently petty commandments and
prohibitions. They were all meant to emphasise the difference between
right and wrong, obedience and disobedience, and so to drive home to
men's hearts the consciousness that they had broken the commandments of
the living God. And although the Gospel comes with a very different
guise from that ancient order, and is primarily gift and not law, a
Gospel of forgiveness, and not the promulgation of duty or the
threatening of condemnation, yet it, too, has for one of its main
purposes, which must be accomplished in us before it can reach its
highest aim in us, the kindling in men's hearts of the same
consciousness that they are sinful men in God's sight.
Ah, brethren, we all need it. There is nothing that we need more than to
have driven deep into us the penetrating point of that conviction. There
must be some external standard by which men may be convinced of their
sinfulness, for they carry no such standard within them. Your conscience
is only _you_ judging on moral questions, and, of course, as you change,
it will change too. A man's whole state determines the voice with which
conscience shall speak to him, and so the worse he is, and the more he
needs it, the less he has it. The rebels cut the telegraph wires. The
waves break the bell that hangs on the reef, and so the black rocks get
many a wreck to gnaw with their sharp teeth. A man makes his conscience
dumb by the very sins that require a conscience trumpet-tongued to
reprehend them. And therefore it needs that God should speak from
Heaven, and say to us, '_Thou_ art the man,' or else we pass by all
these grave things that I am trying to urge upon you now, and fall back
upon our complacency and our levity and our unwillingness to take stock
of ourselves, and front the facts of our condition. And so we build up a
barrier between ourselves and God, and God's grace, which nothing short
of that grace and an omnipotent love and an all-powerful Redeemer can
ever pull down.
I wish to urge in a few words, yet with much earnestness, this thought,
that until we have laid to heart God's message about our own personal
sinfulness we have not got to the place where we can in the least
understand the true meaning of His Gospel, or the true work of His Son.
May I say that I, for one, am old-fashioned enough to look with great
apprehension on certain tendencies of present-day presentations of
Christianity which, whilst they dwell much upon the social blessings
which it brings, do seem to me to be in great peril of obscuring the
central characteristic of the Gospel, that it is addressed to sinful
men, and that the only way by which individuals can come to the
possession of any of its blessings is by coming as penitent sinners, and
casting themselves on the mercy of God in Jesus Christ? The beginning of
all lies here, where Paul puts it, 'the Scripture hath herded all men,'
in droves, into the prison, that it might have mercy upon all.
Dear friend, as the old proverb has it, deceit lurks in generalities. I
have no doubt you are perfectly willing to admit that all are sinful.
Come a little closer to the truth, I beseech you, and say each is
sinful, and I am one of the captives.