Behold sin, then, in this pure mirror. How is its deformity exposed, and its malignity enhanced by the purity of that law of which it is the transgression! Every sin, in a greater or less degree, aims at destroying the very existence of the divine law; and at subverting the dominion which Jehovah claims as his own indisputable prerogative amongst his own creatures. Sin implies an effort to set up another in direct opposition to the supremacy of Heaven. It is a direct and gross insult upon the Majesty of God. It pours contempt on his legislative authority to make laws, and virtually impeaches his wisdom and justice in requiring obedience to them. Sin is rebellion against the Most High; and its dreadful concomitants are anarchy and confusion. In its hideous deformity, it bears the impress of hell; and, like that malign spirit that attempted to usurp the sovereignty of the skies, it carries the features of that black apostacy, that would have pushed from his throne the Holy One of Israel.
Such is the nature of sin. But trace it, in its origin, its consequences, and its effects, and you will perceive its aggravations swell in every view. See its fatal effects even in heaven itself. What disorder did it occasion among the armies of the skies! When, after having lifted up an innumerable company of angels with proud rebellion against the throne of God, it plunged them, with Lucifer at their head, from the summit of bliss and honor, down to the inextinguishable flames and bottomless abyss of tophet. Or, go to Eden, and mark there the sad catastrophe of our fall. See our first parents arrested by the hand of justice, and, like a pair of criminals, compeers in guilt and partners in woe, turned out of that delectable spot, where all the rich spontaneous gifts of nature concurred with the light of God’s countenance, to make it a representation, in miniature, of the celestial paradise. See the angry cherub brandishing his flaming sword, placed as a vengeful guardian of the tree of life. Behold shame, sorrow, disease, and death, the melancholy attendants on the unhappy culprits! the earth under their feet, cursed with briers and thorns! and elements around them, armed with the thunder of their Creator’s frown! Ask, what is the cause of this sad reverse of their former state of rest, peace, and fertility? The answer is, this hath sin done.
Consult the history of mankind since the fall, especially those faithful records given us in the inspired writings, and you will see one continued chain of successive dispensations, loudly declarative of the evil of sin. Why were the windows of heaven opened, and the fountains of the great deep broken up, to form that immense inundation of waters, that covered every part of the globe, and topped its highest hills; and, the little family in the ark only excepted, swept away all the inhabitants of the earth at a stroke? It was because “God saw, that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” Gen. vi. 5. Why was Sodom consumed by fire from heaven, and that sink of sin converted into a lake of the most putrid and pestilential quality? Why did the earth open, and swallow up Korah and his company? or a succession of plagues depopulate and deluge with blood the Land of Egypt? How came Israel to fall by thousands in the wilderness? and in great numbers to be carried away into an enemy’s country, and to wear the galling yoke of long, grievous, and reiterated captivities? What was the cause of their final dispersion? It was SIN that lay at the root of all these visitations. And the same evil that laid Babylon or Jerusalem in ashes, and annihilated the proudest empires of Greece and Rome, is to this day proclaiming its existence in the judgments that are abroad in the earth. If the pestilence walketh in darkness, or sickness destroyeth at noon-day; if war rages, or famine stalks through the land; if earthquakes make whole continents tremble, and spread devastation and death; it is SIN, that hath awakened these awful visitants of incensed justice, which will, all at once, be let loose upon a guilty world, in the great and terrible day of the Lord, to complete its ruin, and give one final demonstration of the malignity of sin, by the conflagration of heaven and earth.
We have visited the Garden of Eden, to view there the melancholy origin and fatal effects of sin. Let us now go to another garden, where we shall see this great evil still more conspicuously displayed. I mean the garden of Gethsemane. Behold! who lies there prostrate on the ground! drowned in tears! and bathed in blood! What means that agony, which tortures his immaculate soul, and makes him “sorrowful even unto death?” What was the heavy load under which an angel is despatched from heaven to support him? Hark! how he entreats his Father, that, if possible, “the bitter cup might pass from him.” Follow him to Calvary. See him fainting under the load of his cross, as he ascends the hill. Now begins the tragical scene. Behold him extended on the accursed tree! Why, thou blessed Jesus, wert thou brought so low, and covered with such foul ignominy? Why didst thou suffer thy sacred head to be crowned, and lacerated with thorns? and thy hand to be disgraced with a symbol of mock royalty, when it might have been extended to the destruction of thine enemies? Was thy death, with all the circumstances of horror and shame that attended it, the just wages of any personal iniquity? No. Thy nature was immaculate, and thy life unblemished. But it was sin imputed, that constituted the bitter ingredient in thy cup of sorrow; and our guilt transferred, that brought thee down to the chamber of death. They were our transgressions that pointed the thorns, and sharpened the nails that pierced thy bleeding head, and hands, and feet, and opened the current that flowed from thy heart. Thou wast “wounded for our transgressions, and bruised for our iniquities.” Isa. liii. 5. O teach us to see the bitterness of sin in the depth of thy sufferings, and to stand amazed at the unexampled love that shines through them all! This will embitter sin to our hearts, and endear to us that blessed cross from whence the remedy for it flows, with the current of thy blood.
There is but one leading point of view more, in which the evil of sin is discoverable by the melancholy effects which it produceth; and that is, by the consideration immediately suggested in the text; which is,
That death is the wages of sin. This is a truth so obvious, that it hardly requires any argument, either to illustrate, or confirm it. The fact is, at least, incontrovertible. The notoriety of it hath been established by an intermitted series of mortality, through all the successive generations of men, from the beginning of the world to the present day. “The fathers, where are they? the prophets, do they live for ever?”
But, though the event itself is indisputable, the cause of it, as well as the nature of that cause, are subjects of sharp controversy, with those, who, when unable to stand against the evidence of facts, transfer their contentious disposition to the revelation of God; and so wrest the scriptures to their destruction. All admit, that death is the inevitable lot of human nature, because the truth addresses our very senses. But some, with strange inconsistency, insinuate, and not only insinuate, but even attempt to give it the form of an argument, that, though all must submit to death, yet the event is not to be considered as the effect of the first transgression; or, at least, that death is no penal evil, or the consequence of any entail of original guilt: since, as they argue, it would be inconsistent with the divine justice to punish a whole race for the sin of an individual; and that, since so many good men die, death ought rather to be accounted a blessing, than a penalty. All this is reason as full of fallacy, as it is of danger, and is overturned to the very foundation, by the express authority of the word of God. St. Paul asserts, that “by one man, sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death hath passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.” Rom. v. 12. Death was announced as the threatened penalty to Adam before his transgression, and it was inflicted after it, agreeably to the decree of God. Why should it be penal to him and not to his descendants? The text says, that death is the wages of sin. The cause is evil, and so must the effect produced by it. This is penal because that is criminal; unless it can be proved that there is no moral evil in the violation of the divine law, and no natural evil in an event, that tears in sunder, and reduces to dust and ashes, that frame which bears the impress of divine workmanship, and was originally the seat of health, honor, and immortality. If ever death turns out a blessing, it is over-ruled to that end by the grace and providence of God. The cause and nature of it are not, however, altered. And in every instance, it is the wages of sin, and the desert of sinners unexceptionably and universally; even of those “who did not sin after the similitude of Adam’s transgression;” that is, by actual sin. For though all infants are undoubtedly saved, who die in infancy, yet their death evinces previous transgression, though not actually, yet originally and inherently. It is a scripture maxim, that “the body is dead because of sin.” The inherency and imputation of that great moral evil makes the body obnoxious to death. And the seeds of both have an existence together in the nature of every son of Adam; which, in due time, spring up in that vicious soil, and bring forth actual transgression, and actual death.
If this doctrine, equally corroborated by scripture and facts, be not admitted, the divine justice would stand impeachable for taking off infants, whose death is often the instant successor of their birth, and is accompanied with a train of diseases, and agonizing pains. And, though in the case of them, as of adult believers, death proves a blessing, through the redemption that is by Christ Jesus; yet to those who continue in the practice of sin, and die under the guilt of it, their dissolution is the commencement of eternal woe. For, the wages of sin is death, eternal as well as temporal. The eternal duration of the penalty is, in that respect, proportioned to the infinite demerit of the offence, as being committed against the sacred law of an infinite God, and rising in aggravation according to the dignity and majesty of the Being offended. The perverse reasoning of men of corrupt minds may controvert this awful truth, too, as unjust. But their quarrel is with scripture. For that declares, that the wicked shall “go into everlasting punishment,” Mat., xxv. 46, and shall “suffer the vengeance of eternal fire,” never to be extinguished through ages more numerous than the drops of the ocean, or the countless sands upon the sea-shore.
Here imagination might paint a scene sufficient to harrow up the soul, and make the blood of every mortal run cold; were we to dwell upon the sufferings of those who are lost for ever; and to consummate and perpetuate which, the wrath of God unites with the worm that never dies, and the fire that is never quenched. I might lead you, in order to behold an exemplification of the truth in our text, not only to beds of sickness, where the pallid countenance, the cold sweat, and throbbing breast, indicate death’s near approach—to the haunts of the debauched, or the chambers of the luxurious, where sin reigns, and death triumphs with a long train of diseases both of body and mind, the sad recompense of a life spent in sin and vanity—to the dungeon’s doleful cells, where criminals drag the galling chain, and expect, with horror and remorse, the hour that is to fix them to the gibbet, and make an ignominious death the wages of their iniquity—to the church-yard, that repository of the promiscuous dead, where the crumbled bodies of the rich and great are not distinguishable from the dust of the earth; or to the charnel-house, crowded with the dry and ghastly relics of thousands, who were once flushed with health, and bloomed with beauty, like their present gay survivors, who hardly ever spend a serious thought on death, and live as if they had made a covenant with the grave—to the historic pages of the annalist and the poet, recounting the horrors of the tented field, and telling over the tens of thousands that have been cut off in the midst of their sanguinary and ambitious schemes—I say, I might not only lead you to these several scenes, as declarative of the truth before us; but I might urge, as its most tremendous completion, the state of those, who are now receiving the final wages of sin in that lake, which burns, and shall to all eternity burn, with inextinguishable flames. But I would rather wave the description, or rather an attempt to describe, what it hath not entered into the heart of man to conceive. Let us throw a veil upon this awful scene, and pass to the consideration of one that is as bright and glorious, as the other is gloomy and terrible; which is, that
“The gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”