IV. The wickedness of men consists not merely in their evil works, but in the corrupt dispositions which prompt them to those works.—“The lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind” (ver. 3). The lusts of the flesh are the vices of sensuality, as intemperance, uncleanness, debauchery, and excess of riot. The desires of the fleshly mind are the lusts which arise from the corruption of the mind in its connection with flesh, as pride, malice, envy, wrath, hatred, ambition, and covetousness. Though no man indulges every vice, yet every unregenerate man obeys the carnal mind.
V. The indulgence of carnal lusts and passions brings on men the wrath of God.—“The children of wrath” (ver. 3). A mind sunk in carnality is incapable of rational felicity; it is miserable in itself and from its own corruption and perverseness. If man subjects his nature to the lusts and passions, the order of nature is inverted, the law of creation violated, and the Creator dishonoured and offended.
Lessons.—1. If you have not abandoned yourselves to the grossest forms of vice, it is because you have been placed under superior light and enjoyed a happier education than the heathen. 2. Though you may not have indulged all the lusts and vices which others have done, yet if you are children of disobedience you can no more be saved without renovation of heart and repentance of sin than they can.—Lathrop.
Ver. 3. The State of Nature.
I. If by human nature you mean nature as seen in this man or that, then unquestionably nature is evil—individual nature, personal nature, is contrary to God’s will. But if by human nature you mean nature as God made it, as it has been once in one man of our species and only one, and as by God’s grace it shall be again; if you mean nature as it is according to the idea of the Creator as shown in Jesus Christ, as it is in the eyes of God imputed not as it is but as it shall be,—then that nature is a noble thing, a thing Divine; for the life of the Redeemer Himself, what was it but the one true exhibition of our human nature?
II. Paul says that by nature we fulfil the desires of the flesh and of the mind.—I pray you to observe that it is the second and not in the first sense that he here speaks of nature. The desires of the flesh mean the appetites; those of the mind mean the passions: to fulfil the desires of the flesh is to live the life of the swine; to fulfil those of the mind is to live the life of the devil. But this is the partiality, not the entireness, of human nature. Where is the conscience, where the Spirit with which we have communion with God? To live to the flesh and to the mind is not to live to the nature that God gave us. We can no more call that living to our nature than we can say that a watch going by the mere force of the main-spring without a regulator is fulfilling the nature of a watch. To fulfil the desires of the flesh and of the mind is no more to fulfil the nature which God has given us than the soil fulfils its nature when it brings forth thorns and briars. St. Paul, in the epistle to the Romans, draws a distinction between himself and his false nature: “It is not I, but sin that dwelleth in me.” Sin is the dominion of a false nature; it is a usurped dominion.
III. The next thing that Paul tells us is that by nature we are children of wrath.—In the state of nature we are in the way to bear the wrath of God. Yet God is not wrath; He is infinite love. The eternal severity of His nature does not feel our passions, He remains for ever calm; yet such is our nature that we must think of Him as wrath as well as love: to us love itself becomes wrath when we are in a state of sin. God must hate sin and be forever sin’s enemy. If we sin He must be against us: in sinning we identify ourselves with evil, therefore we must endure the consuming fire. So long as there is evil, so long will there be penalty. Sin, live according to the lusts of the flesh, and you will become the children of God’s wrath; live after the Spirit, the higher nature that is in you, and then the law hath hold on you no longer.—F. W. Robertson.
The Worst of Evils.
I. By nature all are the children of wrath.—1. Because we want that original righteousness in which we were created, and which is required to the purity and perfection of our nature. 2. Because all the parts and powers of our soul and body are depraved with original corruption. Our understandings are so bad that they understand not their own badness, our wills which are the queens of our souls become the vassals of sin, our memories like jet good only to draw straws and treasure up trifles of no moment, our consciences through errors in our understandings sometimes accusing us when we are innocent, sometimes acquitting us when we are guilty, our affections all disaffected and out of order. 3. Some may expect that as the master of the feast said to him that wanted the wedding garment, “Friend, how camest thou in hither?” so I should demand of original sin, “Foe, and worst of foes, how camest thou in hither, and by what invisible leaks didst thou soak into our souls?” But I desire, if it be possible, to present you this day a rose without prickles, to declare plain and positive doctrine without thorny disputes or curious speculations, lest, as Abraham’s ram was caught in the thicket, so I embroil you and myself in difficult controversies. Let us not busy our brains so much to know how original sin came into us, as labour in our heart to know how it should be got out of us. But the worst is, most men are sick of the rickets in the soul, their heads swell to a vast proportion, puffed up with the emptiness of airy speculations, whilst their legs and lower parts do waste and consume, their practical parts decay, none more lazy to serve God in their lives and conversations.
Transcriber’s Note: Baptism is not a sacrament that confers salvation. It is an ordinance that serves as a public statement that salvation has already taken place. Parents are to raise their children in the “nurture and admonition of the Lord” (Eph. vi. 4).