Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth (v. 17).
Thus far we have seen that the specific plan and purpose of everything that God has been graciously pleased to do in and through his only begotten Son, is to bring us to a knowledge of himself. Our Lord has stated that very plainly in this great chapter that we are considering together: ‘This is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.’ And whatever we may have experienced, whatever may have happened to us, if we have not this knowledge of God, then it is doubtful whether we are in a position of salvation at all; and there is certainly no value to any moral or ethical qualities that may belong to us unless they derive centrally from this knowledge. So we have seen that we must start with the doctrine of God.
And now we come to the second great section of the truth, which is, of course, the one that follows by a kind of inevitability and logical necessity from the doctrine of God, namely, the doctrine of sin. We must now consider what the word has to tell us about sin and about ourselves in a state and a condition of sin. If, as I say, salvation ultimately means to know God, then the great problem for us is to know what it is that separates us from God. The biblical answer to that is not that it is a lack of natural capacity, nor is it a philosophical inability. No, the one thing that comes between any one of us and God is sin, and that is the great doctrine which you find running right through the Bible.
Here again is an aspect of the truth which for some reason we tend to neglect. I feel that we can say about this doctrine of sin what I once heard a man say about the observance of the Lord’s Day. He said he had come to the conclusion that the Lord’s Day, like the Lord himself, was in danger of dying between two thieves, the two thieves being Saturday night and Monday morning! He said that increasingly Saturday night was extended and extended, and blended into Sunday, and then people started their Monday morning quite early on Sunday evening. Sunday becomes just a few hours during the morning, and then we think, ‘Well, that is enough now, we have been to church once.’ Thus our Lord’s Day has been lost between two thieves.
I feel that it is equally true to say something like that about this biblical doctrine of sin, and it seems to me to be happening in this way. When we are dealing with the unconverted, we tend to say: ‘Ah, you need not worry about sin now, that will come later. All you need to do is to come to Christ, to give yourself to Christ. Do not worry your head about sin – of course you cannot understand that now. Do not worry either whether or not you have got a sense of sin or deep conviction, or whether you know these things. All you need to do is to come to Christ, to give yourself to Christ, and then you will be happy.’
Then when we are dealing with those who have so come, our tendency, again, is to say to them, ‘Of course, you must not look at yourself, you must look to Christ. You must not be for ever analysing yourself. That is wrong, that is what you did before you were converted. You were thinking in terms of yourself and of what you had got to do. The only thing you must do is to keep looking to Christ and away from yourself.’ We imagine, therefore, that all that is needed by Christians is a certain amount of comfort and encouragement, of preaching about the love of God and about his general providence and perhaps a certain amount of moral and ethical exhortation. And so, you see, the doctrine of sin is, as it were, crowded out. We fail to emphasise it both before and after conversion, and the result is that we hear very little about it.
Now whether you agree with my explanation or not, I think we must all agree with the fact that the doctrine of sin has been sadly neglected. We know that instinctively. We none of us like it, and thus it comes to pass that this doctrine is so little emphasised. And yet when you come to the Bible you find it everywhere, and for this reason, it should of necessity be central. Why should anybody come to Christ? What do people do when they come to him? What do they mean when they say they believe on him? How can that possibly happen apart from some understanding of sin? You cannot give yourself, or your heart to Christ, you cannot surrender, you cannot use the term, ‘Take him as your Saviour’, unless you know what he is to save you from.
So it is surely utterly unscriptural to indulge in any sort of evangelism which neglects the doctrine of sin. There is no real meaning or content to the term ‘Saviour’ or ‘salvation’ apart from the doctrine of sin, which has this tremendous emphasis throughout the Bible. Our fathers – perhaps I should say our grandfathers, and those who preceded them, they of the older evangelicalism – always laid great emphasis on what they called our ‘law work’. They emphasised the importance of a thorough-going preliminary law work before you came to the gospel and its redemption, and they were distrustful of those who claimed salvation except in those terms. And as you read their lives you will find they have a great deal to say about ‘the plague of their own hearts’. If you read of saintly men like Robert Murray McCheyne, and men of that generation, and those who preceded them, the men of the eighteenth century, you will find that that was their terminology. But it is a language which has somehow or other dropped out, and I think it has done so in the way I have indicated.
But after all, whatever they may have said and thought, the fact which confronts us is that this is something which is found in the Bible everywhere, in the Old Testament and the New, one cannot ignore it, and it is for that reason that we must consider it. I suggest that it is absolutely vital to a true understanding of sanctification that we should know something about the biblical doctrine of sin. It is only as we realise the truth about ourselves and our condition, it is only as we come to realise our ultimate need, that we apply to Christ, who alone can supply it. In other words, there is nothing in our experience that so drives us to Christ as the realisation of our need and our helplessness.
Foul, I to the fountain fly;
Wash me, Saviour, or I die.
It is because I am foul that I fly to the fountain, and if I do not realise my need of being washed I will not go there.
Naked, come to Thee for dress;
Helpless, look to Thee for grace.
Augustus Toplady
These things of necessity go together. ‘They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick’ (Mt 9:12). You do not go to your doctor if you feel perfectly well. You never make an application for any kind of healing or redemption or salvation unless you are conscious of your need. And that, of course, is the whole trouble with the world today – it does not realise this need; that is why it does not believe in the Lord Jesus Christ.
But the same thing is true in principle of the Christian. It is those who realise their condition and their need most deeply who are the ones who apply most constantly to the Lord himself. This is the universal testimony of the saints. It does not matter where they lived, or to what century they belonged. You read the life of any saint of God, anyone who so stood out in saintliness that somebody felt it right and good and fitting that a biography should be written of him or her, and you will find that invariably this has been a characteristic of such a person. If you read their lives and their diaries, you will find that they bemoaned the fact that they were aware of indwelling sin, this ‘plague of their own heart’ as they called it, this thing in them that so often vitiated their testimony and hampered what they really desired to do and to be for the Lord. It is invariably those who have testified to the most high and glorious experiences, who at the same time testify to this other thing. Indeed the life of the Christian seems to be some sort of an ellipse which runs between these two focal points. At one and the same time you always find in the saint a hearty detestation of, and misery about, self, and yet a rejoicing and a joy in the Lord; and the one of necessity determines the other.
But let us be a little more particular. This is the truth which the word of God teaches us. It teaches us about God, then about sin, and that is the way in which it sanctifies us. There are several ways in which the word of God presents this particular aspect of the truth. I am not going to deal with it exhaustively, but let me give you some of the more obvious and general divisions.
The first way in which the Scriptures do this is, of course, through the teaching of the law – the law of God. There is much about the law of God in the Bible. It was originally given to man in the Garden of Eden, and the Scriptures tell us that there is a law written in the heart of every person born into this world. In Romans 2 Paul teaches that even the heathen, who have never heard the Scripture about the law of God, have it written in their hearts. It is also in the Bible, in a very special way, in terms of the Law which was given through Moses to the Children of Israel. You find the account given in the book of Exodus, there are constant references to it in the Psalms, and the subject also runs right through the Proverbs. These passages are in a sense doing nothing but applying this Law that was given, reminding the nation of it. It is everywhere in the Old Testament, and, indeed, it is true to say that we just cannot understand the Old Testament and its religion unless we are clear about the place and the function of the law of God in it.
Then you come to the New Testament and there again you will find constant arguments concerning the law. But what is their purpose, if we do not really understand what the law is? Now the law is given primarily in order to bring out these two points: the holiness of God and the sinfulness of man in the light of that holiness. It is interesting to observe in this connection the way in which the Jews completely misunderstood that. Their real trouble, as Paul is never tired of arguing, was that they had entirely misinterpreted the meaning of the law. They thought its purpose was to save them; that God had given them the law and said to them in effect, ‘Now you keep that, and you will be saved. You save yourselves by keeping the law.’ They had conveniently misinterpreted it; then they carried out that misinterpretation and said that they had kept the law and were righteous before God. That was the very essence of their error.
The purpose and the function of the law was really, as Paul argues in Romans 7, to show the exceeding sinfulness of sin, ‘Was then that which is good made death unto me? God forbid. But sin, that it might appear sin, working death in me by that which is good; that sin by the commandment might become exceeding sinful’ (v. 13). The law was not given in order to save man or that man might save himself by it. It was given for one purpose only, namely, that sin might be defined, that it might, as it were, have attention focused upon it. Mankind did not realise its sinfulness, so God gave the law, not that they might save themselves by keeping it, but that their very sinfulness could be brought out. The law is ‘our school-master to bring us unto Christ’ (Gal 3:24), that is its only function, to show us our helplessness, and our need of grace and of a free salvation. Therefore by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight: for by the law is the knowledge of sin’ (Rom 3:20).
Those, then, are some of the scriptural statements, and all this great teaching about the law is simply to bring out in us a sense of sin. Therefore it follows of necessity that if we have never really studied this biblical doctrine, if we have never applied it to ourselves, if we are not doing so constantly, then we are not as aware of our own sinfulness as we should be. That is what the Fathers meant by a ‘thorough-going law work’. It is only as I truly face the law of God that I begin to see what I am.
We see this, too, in the Sermon on the Mount. In its essence this Sermon is an explanation and an exposition of God’s law. It is our Lord showing us the real spiritual content of the law, demonstrating the law’s spiritual nature, denouncing the false interpretation of the Pharisees, and really bringing us to see what it is telling us. And he does so, surely, with the object of bringing us to realise our sinfulness. The aim of the Sermon on the Mount is to disabuse us of all ideas about human self-righteousness. It is an exposure of the Pharisees and Scribes and of all who tended to follow them. In a sense, its whole purpose is to bring us into a condition in which we shall be ‘poor in spirit’, in which we shall ‘mourn’, in which we shall ‘hunger and thirst after righteousness’. That is its obvious appeal. It is to bring us into the position and the state of those who are described by the Beatitudes.
Again, we find the same teaching in the epistles. That is the meaning of these discussions and arguments about the law, and of terms such as the ‘old man’, and the ‘new man’, and ‘flesh’ and the ‘law of sin and death’ and so on. You find this constantly in the epistles, particularly, perhaps, you find it in their exhortations. These are made in order that the people should examine themselves and ‘prove’ themselves, to make certain that they are in the faith; to ‘test the spirits’; to avoid the false and to hold fast to that which is true. All that is part of the teaching concerning sin.
That, therefore, in general, is the way in which you find this doctrine about sin presented in the Scriptures. And that leads me to ask my second question. What in particular is the teaching about sin? Now obviously I am dealing with it here solely from the standpoint of the Christian. I should be emphasising certain other things if I were presenting it to the unbeliever, but I am particularly concerned now about the biblical teaching concerning sin with regard to God’s people. And here there are certain principles which stand out very clearly.
The first is the vital and essential difference between sin and sins. The main trouble with a false doctrine of sin is that it tends to make us think of sin only in terms of actions. There have been many schools of false teaching about holiness, which have been wrong entirely because they have defined sin in that way, and, therefore, have taught that as long as we are not guilty of voluntary, wilful sin, we are perfect, we are entire and fully sanctified.
But the Bible draws a very sharp distinction between particular actions and a sinful state and condition, and its emphasis is not so much upon what we do, as upon what we are, upon the condition we are in, which leads us to do these things. That is a broad principle which it lays down everywhere.
So, to put it the other way round, the biblical emphasis is on being rather than doing. It is a positive state. True Christians are not so much people who do certain things, as people who are something, and because of what they are, then they do those things. Another way the Bible puts this important principle is in its teachings that sin, primarily, is a wrong attitude towards God, and a wrong relationship with him. Again you see that it defines sin not merely in terms of the moral, ethical character of the action. On the contrary, it goes further back and shows that in its essence sin is a wrong relationship with God and a wrong attitude towards him. Therefore sin, defined comprehensively, is anything or everything that prevents our living only to God, for him, and for his glory.
Those who say that sin ultimately means self are, of course, perfectly right. They are right as far as they go, but they do not go far enough. Sin is self, self-centredness and selfishness. But the real trouble about selfishness is not so much that I am self-centred, as that I am not God-centred. You see, you can have philosophical, and moral and ethical teachings which will denounce selfishness. All the idealistic systems, all the programmes for Utopia, are always very careful to denounce self-centredness. Obviously you cannot have a well-ordered society if everybody is out for himself or herself. There must be give and take. You agree that you must consider the other person, and that you must put in certain limits on your freedom in order that the other person may enjoy freedom. So you can denounce self as such, and still be far removed from the biblical doctrine of sin. Self in all its forms is sinful, says the Bible, because it puts self where God ought to be.
Now if you start with that definition of sin you see how comprehensive it becomes! Take that Pharisee, for instance, who thanked God that he was not like other people. Up to a point he was quite honest and truthful in what he said. He was not guilty of certain things, and he did other things. Yes. But he stopped at that. If he had realised that the essence of sin is to fail to be in the right relationship to God, or to have the right attitude towards God, he would have realised his sinfulness. There are many Christian people who are very careful not to commit certain external sins, but they are not quite so careful about pride and self-satisfaction, and about smugness and glibness; they are not so careful about rivalry and jealousy in their own Christian organisations. No, they have forgotten all that. Self is in the ascendant, at times even in their work, instead of God. But because they think of sin only in terms of actions, and have forgotten that it is primarily relationship to God, they are not aware of their sinfulness. However, that is the very essence of sin – failing to live entirely and wholly to God’s glory. And it matters not how good we may be, nor how much better we may be than other people. If we are not loving the Lord our God with all our heart, and all our soul, and all our mind, and all our strength, then we are sinners. ‘All have sinned, and come short of the glory of God’ (Rom 3:23). That is the biblical teaching.
Then the other great principle is that sin is something which is deep down in our natures; it is not something on the surface. It is not a lack of culture, or of knowledge, or of instruction. Nor is it like a little speck on the surface of an otherwise perfect apple. No, it is at the centre, at the very core. It is not merely something in the stream, but at the fountain out of which the stream comes. It is something which is central to a man’s being.
This, again, is emphasised everywhere in the Scripture. Paul refers to it as a principle. It is the whole meaning of the term ‘the flesh’, which does not mean the physical body, but that principle in a man’s life that tends to control him. Indeed the Bible says that sin is so deep in man that nothing can possibly rid him of it, or deliver him from it, except a rebirth. Teaching is not enough, neither are exhortation, nor example. Even the example of Christ is not enough; in a sense it damns more than anything else. There is only one hope, says the Scripture: you must be ‘born again’. You must be made and created anew. Sin is so deep down in man himself that he needs a new nature. Sin indeed is as deep a problem as this – that nothing but the Incarnation and all that our Lord did, can possibly deal with it. And so we must realise that though we are Christians and have received a new nature, the problem is still there because of the remnants of old nature. We have not finished with it.
There, I suggest, are the three main controlling principles. But we must still divide that up just a little further. If that is the truth about sin, we must ask the question, How, then, does it show itself? So we turn to the teaching of the Bible. First and foremost, sin is what is always described as ‘missing the mark’, not being at the place where you ought to be. You are shooting and you just miss the mark; or you are travelling and you do not arrive at the exact destination. That is the very essence of the biblical understanding of sin. It is an absence of righteousness and of holiness. Every sinner is not what he ought to be, and not what he was when he came out of the hands of God. We are not reflecting the glory of God as we were meant to do. We are not as we were when man was made in God’s image. The image has been marred. Something has gone.
You see the importance of regarding sin in that way. The man who realises that that is a primary part of the definition of sin, is a man who realises that he is still a sinner. But if you are simply looking at drunkards and prostitutes, or at particular actions, of course you think that you are all right. You are not conscious of sin, so you are not humble and you do not ‘mourn’. You are self-satisfied and contented; you are looking down at other people. But once you realise that we are meant to be holy and righteous, and that we are not that, then you realise at once that you are a sinner.
But sin is not only this negative condition of not being righteous and holy, it is also a positive transgression of the law. Consider John’s argument about that in 1 John 3, ‘... for sin is the transgression of the law’ (v. 4). Sin is disobedience to God’s commandments, and the Bible emphasises this quite as much as the negative. Our trouble is not only that we are not what we ought to be, but that we deliberately do things that we should not do. It is a breaking of the law, a transgression, a cutting across what God has indicated as being his holy will.
Yes, but it is something even worse than that. It is what is described as ‘concupiscence’. We find this word in Romans 7 and it is something that we must always preach. ‘But sin, taking occasion by the commandment, wrought in me all manner of concupiscence. For without the law sin was dead’ (v. 8). This is the biblical way of describing desire – evil desire. The trouble is not simply that we break the law and do things that are wrong, the trouble is also that we ever want to do so; that it ever gives us pleasure to do these things; that there ever is an inclination in us to do them; that there is something in us which makes such disobedience appeal to us – that is an element in concupiscence.
But it is even worse than that. Concupiscence is as terrible and as foul a thing as this, that even the law of God inflames us. Look at Paul’s argument in Romans 7. He says,
For when we were in the flesh, the motions of sins, which were by the law, did work in our members to bring forth fruit unto death. But now we are delivered from the law, that being dead wherein we were held; that we should serve in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter. What shall we say then? Is the law sin? God forbid. Nay, I had not known sin, but by the law: for I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet. But sin, taking occasion by the commandment, wrought in me all manner of concupiscence. For without the law sin was dead. For I was alive without the law once: but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died. And the commandment, which was ordained to life, I found to be unto death. For sin, taking occasion by the commandment, deceived me, and by it slew me. Wherefore the law is holy, and the commandment holy, and just, and good. Was then that which is good made death unto me? God forbid. But sin, that it might appear sin, working death in me by that which is good; that sin by the commandment might become exceeding sinful’ (vv. 5–13).
Paul’s argument is as follows. There is this terrible thing called concupiscence in man, and it works in this way. You tell a man, a child, indeed anybody, not to do a thing. Now, it is a good thing to tell people not to do what is wrong, and to do what is good. Yes, says Paul, but this is what I have found, and we have all found the same thing, that the very commandment which tells me not to do that evil thing, by drawing my attention to it, inflames my desire to do it. So that the very law leads me to sin. It is not because the law is not right and good and just and holy. God forbid, he says, that anybody should say that. The problem is this evil thing in me called concupiscence, which will even turn good into evil. To the pure all things are pure. To those who are not pure there is nothing good.
That is why as a Christian I have never believed in morality teaching. Nor have I ever agreed with those who argue, ‘Tell people of the evil effects of that sin, and it will keep them from it,’ because it will not. It will inflame their desire for that very thing that you are telling them not to do. And that is why people quite often delude and defile themselves by reading books about such things. They say that what they want to do is to see the evil of the thing. What is actually happening is that they are enjoying it. They are sinning in their minds and in their imaginations. That is what is meant by concupiscence; this passion, this flame, this fire, that can even misuse the law of God, and turn it into a kind of bellows that makes the flame worse. Tell a man not to and it may drive him to do it – indeed, you are introducing him to it. So it is a dangerous thing for fallen man to think like that and to imagine that moral instruction about sex and such things is going to control the moral problem. It is having exactly the opposite effect; and to believe in that kind of teaching is to misunderstand the essential biblical teaching about sin. No, our fathers were right. They did not tell their children about sex and morality, and there was less immorality than there is now. It is a dangerous thing to talk about these things; it is like pouring petrol on the fire. Concupiscence – that is the great argument of the seventh chapter of the epistle to the Romans.
Finally, I must put it in these words. Sin shows itself, says Paul, as a kind of law in my life and in my members. You will notice he talks about the law in his members’ – ‘For I delight in the law of God after the inward man: but I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members’ (Rom 7:22–23). That is sin, with its terrible power. It is a great principle. It is a law, says Paul, and it works in this way: even though we may know that the law of God is right and good and just and holy, and though we believe in it and even want to keep it, we find that we are doing something else. Why? Because there is another law in our members, this thing called the flesh.
Paul therefore comes to the conclusion that ‘...in me (that is, in my flesh) dwelleth no good thing’ (Rom 7:18). As I have said, Paul does not mean the physical body, but this principle of sin, this law of sin, this law in the members. They are all synonymous terms. It is this thing that governs man, so that though I want to do the right thing, and subscribe to it and love it, I nevertheless find myself doing the other thing. That, as I see it, is the biblical teaching in its essence with regard to sin – and we know it is true.
But how often do we think about this? How often do we meditate upon it? How often do we search ourselves and examine ourselves to see how guilty we are? Are we dismissing these things lightly, pushing them away, not really facing them? The Scripture exhorts us to face them: that is why it puts the law before us everywhere. We need to be kept down. We need to be humbled. We need to be convicted of sin.
And it is only as we are, that we shall realise the need of sanctification. It is only as we are, that we shall apply to Christ and seek his face and seek God. It is only as we are, that we shall thank God that the whole of salvation, from beginning to end, is God’s work and not ours. It will deliver us out of this superficial dealing with the problem in terms of actions. It will enable us to see our true condition as sold under sin, and covered by the law of sin and death. Then we will know that we are doomed and condemned and hopeless, and needing that mighty operation of the Spirit of God which, blessed be his name, gives us new life and new birth, and then proceeds by the application of this blessed word in us and upon us, to perfect us until eventually, because it is his work and his power, we shall stand before him faultless and blameless, and with exceeding joy.
God grant that we may understand the biblical teaching – the word of God’s teaching about sin – that it may drive us to Christ.