'Jesus did not commit Himself unto them, because He knew all men, and needed not that any should testify of man: for He knew what was in man.'—S. John ii. 24, 25.
'Sin is lawlessness.'—1 S. John iii. 4. [R.V.]
'He knew what was in man.' The words describe our Lord in presence of a fact universally recognized—man's moral unsatisfactoriness. He looks steadily at man's first offer of service, at man's first enthusiasm, when 'many believed in His name,' and He discerns behind it a disqualifying cause; something which prevents Him from trusting man as he is, and from committing to him the great work of His kingdom. He sees sin in man and all that sin involves of moral failure, of refusal to endure, of spiritual blindness, of lawless self-assertion, of passion, of selfishness, of self-will. That there is in human nature this disqualifying taint of sin is, we may say, a fact universally recognized. It is the fact which in slow embittering experience has turned philanthropists into cynics and saddened the wisest. But to our Lord it was a fact present from the first. 'He needed not that any should testify of man.' He reckoned with sin to start with. Therefore He could not use mankind, as it offered itself, for His purposes. It needed a fresh start, a vital re-creation, to fit it for such high ends. 'Except ye be converted and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.' 'Except a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.'
Christ recognizes the fact of sin. All men more or less come to recognize it within them and without. But yet there have been very different ways of explaining it.
For upon the surface it is tempting to interpret the struggle between good and evil, as we know it so sadly well in our narrow experience, as representing a universal conflict between opposite principles. The world is a composite thing, men have supposed, the result of the antagonism of two Principles, two kingdoms, two Gods, one good and the other evil; or they have explained the world as representing the action of a good God upon an intractable material, eternal as Himself, which limits His power and restrains His hand. On either of these cognate theories[610] the soul of man is naturally represented as a creation of the good Principle or a particle of it, embedded in a vile body of material evil which clogs and hinders and impedes it, which is the seat of lusts and passions, defiling the purity of the spiritual element. The spirit is good and the body is evil. This is the theory upon which so much of Oriental asceticism has proceeded. The object of such asceticism is to liberate the pure spirit from the trammels of the corrupting and imprisoning body. That is most spiritual which is least material. Purification is abstraction from the body. The spirit is akin to God, and will one day win its way up to be re-absorbed in God. The body is material and evil, the seat of sin, and to be dealt with as such. Hence the remorseless persecution of the body which has been exhibited by the devotees of Gnosticism or Brahmanism—the denunciation of marriage, of animal flesh and wine. Hence, on the other hand, the wild rebound into licentiousness which has sometimes characterized Gnostic or Manichaean sects. For, after all, when asceticism has done its utmost we are still in the body. If connection with the body is sin, eating and drinking at all is as sinful as excess; marriage the same as licence. Outward acts become indifferent—indifferently bad. This principle explains the reaction from extreme mortification to extreme licence which characterizes Orientalism.
Once more, in modern times, from a different point of view, materialism has again interpreted sin as an essential part of nature. Ignoring the distinction of what is moral and what is physical, the materialistic Positivism, for instance, of Mr. Cotter Morison represents goodness and badness in men as the simple product of natural forces like goodness and badness in fruits of the earth, each class of good and bad men being essentially and inevitably what it shows itself to be. 'Nothing is gained,' he says, 'by disguising the fact that there is no remedy for a bad heart and no substitute for a good one[611].'
It is common to all the anti-Christian views of sin that at the last resort they make sin natural, a part of nature. It is characteristic of Christ's view of sin—of the Scriptural view of it—that it makes it unnatural. It is characteristic, again, of the non-Christian view that it makes the body, the material, the seat of sin. It is essential to the Christian view to find its seat and only source in the will[612].
Take the vilest crime, and Christianity assures you that throughout the transaction, as you may observe it, there is nothing evil in the natural material which is employed, there is only the lawless misuse of material which is in itself good. The worst passions are but the disorderly exercise of feelings and faculties in themselves good and capable of redemption. Lust is only love uncontrolled by the will, and, therefore, lawless. Take the lowest criminal, and Christianity assures you that, however habituated all his nature to run to evil, if you can once get his will—what Scripture calls his 'heart'—set right and given to God, that right direction of the will, the heart, will after long battle at last carry with it all the nature; the forces of grace are set free to act when the obstacle of the will's rebellion or apathy is removed, and (though it takes ages beyond this mortal life) at last the whole being will be purified, and what began in the surrender of the will will take effect in the illumination of the intellect and the purifying of the affections. Thus it is that Christianity can represent God as justifying the sinner in virtue of faith. Faith is the first movement of the will and heart by which the sinner, from the far-off country of his exile, seeks his true home, from the depth of his sin, claims Christ as his own. At this first movement God welcomes him. He meets him with His acceptance. He claims him as His true son, because in that first movement of the moral being God sees the pledge of all that is to come. He sees the forces let loose which will bring the final victory. He deals with the sinner by a Divine anticipation, not as he is, but as he is on the way to become[613]. 'His faith is reckoned for righteousness.'
Let us dwell on the Christian view of sin, in its essence, in its appeal, in its practical justification, in its anthropological results.
(1) In its essence. It is expressed by S. John, 'Sin is lawlessness:' ἡ ἁμαρτία ἐστὶν ἡ ἀνομία. The two terms are coincident. For God, and God only, made the world, and there is no other Creator, no other creation. He made it, and pronounced it very good in its completeness. The universe, in all its sum of forces and existences, is good, and of God. The very existence of anything is a pledge of its natural goodness. It exists only because God created it and sustains it and dwells in it. It must cease to exist, S. Augustine tells us, if it were simply evil[614]. Positive existence is always, so far, good.