G 01 General Testimony Scripture concerning

1. Description of Sin in1 John 3:4.

Now to this question the Apostle John gives us a very brief but most explicit answer: JZa? 6 TTOLWV rrjv a/j.apTiav, KOI T7)v avofiiav TTOLEL /cal rj dfiapria ecrrlv r) avofJLia (1 John 3:4). Here we have both the subjective and the objective presupposition of the possibility of sin. The subjective pre supposition is that man can do that which is a^aprla, sin; that is, that man has a capacity of distinguishing right from wrong, and that he can choose to do wrong and will to do it in other words, that he is a moral agent endowed with conscience and will, and so responsible for his conduct. The objective presupposition is that there is a law under which man is placed, which he is under obligation to obey, and which exists independently of his will and choice. Of this law sin is pronounced to be the transgression, or rather sin is.avo/jiia, lawlessness; a term which embraces not only positive violations of the law, but also failures and omissions in respect of any of its precepts, in short, all departures from it, whether by going athwart it or by falling short of it. The law, then, conditions the possibility of sin. Were there no law there would be no sin properly so called. As St. Paul says, " W r here no law is, there is no transgression; " and again, " Sin is not imputed where there is no law " (Romans 4:15, Romans 5:13). A free agent utterly without law might do what was morally wrong, i.e. what is contrary to the divine nature, but for him it would not be sin. Nor, on the other hand, even where there is a law does the transgression of it become sin save on the supposition that the transgressor is a free moral agent, knowing the law and willing to transgress it. With this definition in view we have only, in the first place, correctly to understand all that it implies, and, in the second place, to perceive its accordance with the general testimony of Scripture and the facts of our own consciousness to realize to ourselves a just and full and satisfactory answer to the question, What is sin?

(i.) In proceeding to expound this definition, the first thing to which I ask your attention is the recognition it makes of a distinction between the concept of lawlessness and the concept of sin. The proposition " sin is lawlessness " is not a mere identical or explicative proposition; it is ampliative and definitive of the just idea of sin: in other words, it implies that sin may be conceived of otherwise than as law lessness. Now, this is true. Sin may be viewed merely as evil, as a thing which we cannot approve of, as an unlovely thing, or as a thing which is attended with unpleasant conse quences. But under none of these aspects does sin necessarily involve the idea of lawlessness, from which it follows that when it is positively said to be lawlessness something more is told than already lay in the idea of sin. We must understand St. John, then, as meaning to tell us that sin is something more than merely evil or unlovely, that its essence lies in its want of accordance with a law, that it always has reference to a law as that by which its character is determined, and that though apart from a law there may be evil, apart from a law there can be no sin.

(ii.) It enters into the idea of law that it should be some thing enacted and rendered imperative on those who are under it. Law is something more than order: it is authorita tive order. It not only enunciates something good; it also commands and enjoins that good. It properly assumes the form of an imperative direction, with a threatened penalty in case of transgression. It is only in a secondary and derivative sense that this term is used to denote some general fact or principle, as when we speak of the laws of nature, by which we mean the great general principles according to which Nature carries on her operations; though even here the idea of imperativeness is not altogether excluded, because in con struing these general principles we tacitly assume that the power of the Creator has been exercised in impressing upon matter that constant conformity to these general principles which we speak of as obedience to the laws of Nature. " By creating His materials endued with certain fixed qualities and forms, the Divine Author of the universe has impressed them in their origin with the spirit, not the letter, of His law, and made all their subsequent combinations and relations inevitable consequences of this first impression." * Even in the case of a law of nature, then, the idea of authority and imperativeness is preserved; and this, which is a fundamental idea of law, comes forward into primary importance in all laws which are designed to regulate the conduct of intelligent and moral agents. A law for them is an enactment which they are bound to obey. It is a positive injunction which they are authoritatively called to follow. We cannot conceive of a law for such which does not essentially involve and primarily set forth this idea. Abstract the notion of imperativeness from the law, and of corresponding obligation on the part of the agent, and the idea of law disappears altogether. The party may still act in the way the law prescribes, but he does so not in virtue of the law, or from regard to it, but for some other reason with which the law as law has nothing to do.

When, therefore, sin is spoken of as a transgression of the law, or as lawlessness, it means not only that sin is an un lovely thing, but that it is also of the nature of rebellion to a lawful authority that it is not only an act of disorder, but also an act of disobedience.

(iii.) A law implies a lawgiver a superior authority from which the enactment emanates, and by which it is upheld.

Now, in the case of Man and the law under which he has been placed, this authority is God. Man’s condition as a creature implies that he is under law to God. Just as he must use the material universe as he finds it subject to a fixed ordinance imposed upon it by the fiat of the Creator, so must he himself, as a part of God’s creation, regulate his 1 Herschell, Discourse on Nat. Phil., p. 37. conduct according to those laws under which the will of God has placed him. It is true it is not the mere will of God the merum arbitrium Dei of the schoolmen which constitutes the distinction between what is right and wrong in a moral point of view: that distinction finds its ground in the Eternal Mind itself in the unchangeable nature of Jehovah. But though the will of God is not the basis of rectitude and good ness, it is that by which rectitude and goodness are made known to us and made incumbent upon us. Man can never be, strictly speaking, a law to himself. The law that binds him must be something out of himself something above himself. Through whatever medium he may acquire a know ledge of that law, whether from the constitution of his own moral nature, or from perceiving the relations of things, or by direct revelation from God, the law itself can be resolved only into the will of Him by whom the moral nature of man has been made such as it is, by whom the relations of things have been ordained, and from whom all revelations of moral and religious truth come. When sin, then, is said to be a transgression of the law or a dereliction from it, we must regard it as an act of disobedience against God, whose will the law enunciates. Sin, therefore, is not merely evil, it is not merely disorder, it is disobedience against God an act of virtual rebellion against Him as the great Moral Governor of the universe.

(iv.) Sin as lawlessness includes not only positive violations of the law, but all that comes short of con formity to it. In the definition of sin given in the Shorter Catechism, it is described as " any want of conformity to or transgression of the law of God; " and this twofold aspect of it is held by almost all who have written on the subject. 1 For such an opinion there appears the best grounds. If God impose upon His intelligent creature a law or a rule of action, it seems to be equally a departure from that law whether the creature does what the law forbids or omits to do what the law enjoins; and if the former is to be treated as an act of dis

1 Gerhard: " Peccatum sen ava^/a est aberratio a lege, sive non congruentia cum lege sive ea in ipsa natura hserat, sive in dictis, factis, ac concupiscentise inotibus inveniatur." Calov.: " Illegalitas seu difformitas a lege." Reinhard:

"Absentia convenientise cum lege." Dog., p. 267. obedience and rebellion, the latter surely should be treated as such likewise. To affirm otherwise would seem to lead to the monstrous conclusion that if God enjoins anything as good, we can sin only by doing something the opposite of that; there is no sin in wilfully falling short of it: so that, e.g., if He command a creature to love Him with his whole heart, that creature would sin only if he hated God, not if he failed to love Him, or came short of loving Him supremely. A doctrine like this is not only dangerous, but apparently utterly unreasonable. It has therefore been all but univer sally repudiated by all theologians; nor would it be necessary to dwell upon the subject were it not that a very serious use is sometimes made of the doctrine, viz. that though a creature cannot reach such perfection as the law embodies, he may yet live without sin if he only does not transgress the law, and if he do his honest endeavour to come up to the law, a doctrine on which the Papal scheme of works of merit and supererogation rests. In support of this doctrine an ingenious objection to the view above contended for has sometimes been propounded. It is this: If, it is said, this principle holds good of man, it must hold good in reference to all God s intelligent and moral creatures; it must hold good, therefore, of those who are sinless. Now, those sinless creatures, being creatures, are not infinitely perfect, that belongs only to God; they are therefore creatures who fall short of what is absolutely good and holy. But if a shortcoming from what is good be sinful, it follows that these are not sinless beings, and that there never can be sinless creatures, and that all advances in goodness and holiness being in reality short of perfect goodness and holiness, are nothing else than acts of sin. This reasoning has an air of plausibility, but that it is fallacious every one must feel; and it is not difficult to point out where the fallacy lies. The author of the objection has tacitly assumed that God can never impose upon any of His creatures a law which requires less than absolute perfection; for if it be posited that God may impose a law which demands only relative perfection, i.e. perfection relative to the conditions and capacities of the being on whom it is imposed, his objec tion loses all force, seeing in this case there may be a full coming up to the standard of the law and yet a coming short of absolute perfection. Now that this is actually the case, and that what the objection has assumed is false, all reason and experience conspire to show. Of all the laws which God has imposed upon His intelligent creatures of which we have any knowledge, there is not one which exacts anything more than a relative perfection. Take, e.g., the first great law of love to God. In this man is not required to love God as He in the infinitude of His being and perfections deserves to be loved, but only as far as man’s capacity extends; he is to love God with all his heart, and strength, and mind; and he who does this is sinless so far as this precept extends. If man had a higher capacity, more of mind and more of might, then the degree in which it is now his duty to love God would be too low for what would then be required of him; but still it would only be relatively to his capacities that the law would be binding on him. It is the same with all God’s laws: they are adapted to the nature and the capacity of His creatures on whom they are imposed; and it is reason able it should be so: for how can we conceive of God imposing upon man a law which he never could fully obey, which came not nigh to him, within the range of his ordinary capacities, but stood afar, at an infinite reach above him?

It is possible, then, for a creature to be sinless and yet come short of absolute perfection, even though the principle be held that a want of conformity to the law is sin; inasmuch as sinlessness consists not in conformity to the highest possible good, but in conformity to that degree of good which is in culcated by the law under which he has been placed, and is within the range of his capacities.

(v.) The law of God extends to the inner motive whence actions spring, as well as to the actions themselves. It is,indeed, in a moral point of view impossible to separate these two. The motive and the act constitute one moral whole; and though man can only judge this motive from the act, God who sees the inner soul of man, and searches his heart, judges the motive along with the act. Nay, even when the mental feeling does not give birth to a positive act, it has a substan tive existence in His sight, and is weighed in the balances of His unerring judgment. It is impossible, therefore, for us to obey the law of God unless we obey it from the heart. An act cannot be good whilst the motive from which it springs is had. The commandment of God " is exceeding broad: " it reaches from the circumference to the centre of our active being; it aims at the regulation of all our thoughts and feelings as well as all our actions; and it may be transgressed as well by a wrong state of mind as by wrong words or wrongdeeds.

2. The General Testimony of Scripture concerning Sin.

Having thus expounded the statement of the Apostle John, I now proceed to show that the doctrine thus laid down is in full accordance with the general testimony of Scripture. Here I notice,

(i.) The terms employed in Scripture to designate sin. Of these terms a few, such as Trowrjpov, KCLKOV, ala^pov, and the Hebrew py, convey immediately the idea of the moral turpi tude, the unloveliness and baseness of sin; but by far the greater part, and those most frequently used, are such as convey the idea that sin is the not doing on the part of man of something which by law and prescription he is bound to do. Sometimes it is presented as the missing of a mark which man ought to reach, or of the path he ought to keep, as in aftaprla and ^9^> anc ^ their cognates; sometimes as a deflection from God’s way, or recoil from God, as ""no, from TID, "to resile or draw back ;"?jy, from^JJ, "he turned aside;" and sometimes as lawlessness or guiltiness, i,e. liability to a legal penalty, as avo^ia and Trapafiaaw, with the Hebrew ytn, from 3JBH, which in the Hiphil signifies " to declare guilty of a breach of law," " to condemn," as, e.g., Deuteronomy 25:1: " If there be a controversy between men, and they come with judgment that they may judge them, then they shall justify the righteous and condemn (WE*"|nV) the wicked." In all these terms we find the two fundamental ideas of, first, some thing man ought to do or to be; and, secondly, a failing on the part of man to perform that requirement. The idea of sin consequently shadowed forth by these designations is essentially that of the want of conformity to or transgression of a law. And the same is conveyed by those passages of Scripture which represent sin as something done against God; for as God is the author of the law under which man is placed, as well as its administrator, every breach of the law must be an offence against Him, an act of godlessness and impiety as well as of disobedience. Hence such expressions as a<je/3eta, TrapaTrrco/jia, and W&, " rebellion " or " revolt," etc.

(ii.) The support this receives from other express state ments of the word of God. Take, e.g., the declarations of St. Paul in his Epistle to the Romans (iii. 20): "By the law is the knowledge of sin," i.e. it is by the enactment of the law that what is sin is determined, and by its sentence that the transgressor knows he has sinned. Still more explicitly does Paul in the same Epistle reiterate the statement of St. John when he says (v. 13), " Sin is not imputed where there is no law," a statement which plainly intimates that sin takes its birth and being from the law of which it is a transgression, and that apart from the law there would be no sin. To the same effect are such statements as these, "Where there is no law there is no transgression." " Without the law sin was dead." " The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is the law" (Romans 4:15; Romans 7:8; 1 Corinthians 15:1-58.

56). In all these passages the same great truth is set forth.

Man is not only a being susceptible of moral impressions and capable of moral distinctions; he is directly and authorita tively under law to God, bound to obey His will, and subject to obligation to do that which is right and to abstain from that which is wrong. As God’s creature he is the subject of a kingdom which has laws for the regulation of its affairs and penalties to be inflicted on those who are rebellious. Now, these laws man does not keep as he ought. Some things which God has commanded him to do he refuses or neglects to do, and some things which God has forbidden he persists in doing. There is thus a want of conformity on his part to God’s law, transgression and lawlessness; and this the Bible stigmatizes as sin.

(iii.) The account which the Bible gives of the first great sin which man ever committed places this truth in a clear light. That sin consisted, so far as the act was concerned, in the eating of a particular fruit which our first parents had been forbidden to eat. Now, wherein lay the sin here? Not in the mere act surely: there was nothing immoral in that; the eating of one fruit was per se as innocent as the eating of another. The sin lay in this act being contrary to God’s ex press command; in its being, therefore, an act of disobedience against God, and virtual rebellion against Him. Here then lay the essence of the first sin, it was an act of lawless ness; and it stands out with this single character of evil belonging to it at the head of all the long train of woes and evils which it brought into the world, an awful and memorable comment on the declaration that sin is the trans gression of law.

(iv.) It is on this ground that sin may be righteously punished. That God should inflict suffering of any kind upon His intelligent creatures is a fact not to be contemplated without anxious and solemn feeling. Every thoughtful man will feel that there is a difficulty in the fact which there is a pressing urgency to have removed. Is it righteous in God to make suffering consequent on any wrong act? Is it consis tent with His goodness and beneficence to make physical calamity consequent upon moral evil? These are difficult questions, and I apprehend we can steer our way to a solution of them only by keeping fast hold of the principle that it is not simply as moral evil that sin is punished, but because being morally evil it is the transgression of the divine law.

It is of the essence of a law that it be enforced by penal sanctions; and it is indispensable to the stability of a law that when the sanctioning penalty has been incurred it shall be inflicted. The punishment of the sinner, therefore, flows out of his position as under a law of which his sin is a trans gression; it comes to pass by the necessity of the case; it could not be otherwise. Man as a creature is conditioned by law; man as a moral creature is conditioned by moral law; law to be law must be sanctioned by a threatened penalty to be inflicted on the transgressor, and when the penalty is incurred it must be inflicted, else the law will become of none effect. When man thus sins and is punished for it, this is no arbitrary act of the divine administration; it is a necessary and unavoidable consequence of his sin being a transgression of the divine law. On this ground, there fore, may the punishment of sin by God be vindicated, on this, but not on any other; and hence there comes back from that suffering which is the penalty of sin a clear testimony of the truth that sin is the transgression of the law.

(v.) The doctrine of redemption by atonement rests for its vindication on this view of sin. For suppose man’s sin to be merely an offence of a personal kind against God, the doing of something repugnant to His wishes, or merely a departure from moral order, it will not be easy to see what inseparable barrier lay in the way of his offences being for given without an atonement on his repenting and entering on a better course. A mere personal offence might have been forgiven on the representation of the offender; and as to sin being a breach of moral order, it is difficult to see why atone ment should be made for that, or, indeed, what sense we are to attach to the expression " atonement to the moral order of the universe; " one might as well speak of making atonement to the physical order of the universe. It is only when we distinctly realize and represent to our minds the idea of government by law, and of sin as a violation of that law, and an act of rebellion against that government, that the necessity of an atonement for the pardon of sin becomes manifest. In that case it is at once seen that where sin has been committed and the penalty consequently of the law incurred, one of two things must happen if the law is to be sustained: either the sinner must endure the penalty he has incurred, or an atonement must be made for his sin which shall have the effect of making his forgiveness and release compatible with the claims and honour of the law. It appears, then, that unless we keep steadily before us the view of sin as a trans gression of the law of God, we shall be unable to see clearly whence arose the necessity of an atonement for sin ere it could be forgiven. And here I may observe how, in point of fact, the theological systems of men are necessarily moulded according as they take or refuse this view of sin. If men think of sin simply as an infirmity or an error, deserving censure, it may be, but still more calling for pity and compassion; or if they view it merely in the light of an immorality, a departure from ethical propriety or the moral order of the world, a thing requiring to be put right, but not entailing any punishment on the party who has gone astray, it is easy to see that their views of redemption and of the relation of Christ to the sinner will be exceedingly different from those of the man who views sin as an act of transgression, a breach of the law which God, as the great Euler, has given man to obey, an act of rebellion against God, entailing upon the party commit ting it the charge of guilt in the sight of God, and exposing him to the penalty attached to the breach of that law, as legally his due. To the former, salvation means nothing more than rescue from evil; to the latter, it means also and primarily deliverance from guilt. The one thinks merely of escape from the discomforts and disadvantages of a weak moral nature; the other thinks primarily of pardon for damnatory offences as introductory to reconciliation with God and restoration to moral power and goodness. Into the mind of the one there enters simply the idea of moral tightness as constituting salvation; in the mind of the other there is pro minent, as antecedent to that, the idea of legal righteousness or justification at the bar of God. Clearly, therefore, because these two persons set out from different views of sin, they have arrived at different views of salvation, different notions of what men are to seek in Christ; and the logical result of this will be an entirely different scheme of theology for the one than for the other, so different that if the latter be right, the system of the former must not only be defective, but positively and perilously wrong. A conviction of this was doubtless in the mind of the apostle when he was writing his Epistle to the Eomans; and hence he labours so earnestly to lay the basis of his whole system in a demonstration of sin, so as to shut men up to a conviction of it, of its guilt, illegality, and penal effect especially. He felt he could proceed on sure ground in showing the nature and excellency of the gospel only as he could convince men of sin, so that every mouth might be stopped, and all flesh become guilty (L>TTOCH/CO? = reus, pcenis ubnoxius) before God. That accomplished, the way was clear for his setting forth God’s way of justifying sinners and so saving them. It was only as he could make it manifest that all had sinned and come short of the glory of God, that he felt there was any use in telling men how they might be justified freely by God’s grace, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. From all this we may see the importance, both in our theology and in our preaching, of right views of sin as a transgression of the divine law, entailing guilt, condemnation, and punishment.