SIN ONLY LEARNT IN GOD'S PRESENCE

SIN ONLY LEARNT IN GOD’S PRESENCE

The difference between learning sin in God’s presence and by falling into it is very great. One may feel sin very deeply, because one has committed it, but this never gives one God’s sense of what sin is. The cross of Christ is the measure of sin in the sight of God. Be it great or small sin, as man would speak, that is the distance in which all sin is from Him; and in that ^[p. 11] distance it is removed and atoned for, and only there. I personally measure sin as it pains my conscience and deforms me in the sight of God and man. And hence, one sin is greater to me than another; and the sin I commit is therefore necessarily the one I feel about, and my sense of it is according to the state of my conscience. My conscience is active according to my apprehension of God’s claims and appointments for me; and departure from His will and insubjection to His word are known to be sin. Sin is lawlessness; but besides this, one’s own sensibility is shocked at the moral deformities one falls into.

But all this is only viewing sin as it affects ourselves. And this is not the true measure of it. I must see how it is viewed by God. The terrible distance from God in which sin places one is only learned in the cross. I can never see what sin is but there; and if I see it there, though I may never have committed any of it, to the knowledge of my conscience, yet I see that the working of the law in my members is of that sin, which is judged in the cross, and there only is its measure meted out according to God. Then I get a sense of sin which no amount of personal failure could ever give me. There is no excusing it; no toleration of it. The cross is God’s measure of every bit of it, the least as well as the greatest; and as I see this, I can allow no less a measure of it than His, and I shrink in holiness of nature from the least, as much as I should from the greatest, though the latter would make my conscience more sensible of my personal criminality and of consequent judgment on it here. As a rule, you will find that those who have committed most sins, have not the deepest sense of sin. They generally have a deep sense of being forgiven, and they occupy themselves with it. Those who have been preserved, though greatly tempted, while fearful of danger, have not only a deeper sense of the grace of God, but also a greater horror of that from which they have escaped; and the ^[p. 12] reason of this is, that they have learned how great their weakness is, without divine succour; the very weakness is disclosed by the hand that rescues, and they shrink from the side where the weakness that would have led them down the precipice is, to the grace which rescued them, while allowing them to see their danger. True sense of sin is less concerned with the extent to which it can go, than with its purpose at the start. The latter I can only know in the presence of God, and hence the word, “Who shall deliver me out of this body of death?” (Romans 7: 24). If I only condemn myself for what I have committed, I exonerate myself from everything else. The least particle of my will introduces a distance between me and God. The cross is the measure of that distance, and in the cross only that distance has been removed and the sin atoned for. And hence, I have God’s sense about sin if I am near Him, and a deeper abhorrence, and a more rigid separation from it, than if I had experienced my frailty by committing it. In the latter case I discover the extent which sin could go in me, and I am self-condemned; but I do not see sin as terrible as God sees it, though I see how hideous it has made me. It is not only that I have to see sin atoned for in the cross, but in order to have a true sense of it, I must be on God’s side, and see it at the root in its native wilfulness, and not merely in its fruit, which is the extent to which it can go. In the one case it is God who is before me, and I see my sin, in its true distance from God - the unutterable agony of the cross. In the other, my own hideousness is before me, and I dwell on the mercy that has met me and saved me. This indeed must come first, but when I am occupied with the holy side, my sense of holiness is divine, while I know only the more deeply the grace which can forgive, and the deliverance vouchsafed to me.