44. How Leniency Invites Sin

How Leniency Invites Sin

There is an illustration of these self-evident truths in a story told of Prince Eugene. During the wars conducted by him and the Duke of Marlborough, they had a discussion one day as to the punishment of men guilty of outrages in the way of marauding.

Prince Eugene said: “I always hang every such offender.” A soldier had been brought in who was guilty of marauding, and the Duke said: “If you hang men for such offences, you will hang half the army.” The Prince said: “Now, Duke, safety requires such lawlessness to be punished. You have not been accustomed to execute these men, and I have been. Now search the records, and if it is not found that you have executed far more men than I have, I will let this man go free.” The records were searched, and it was found that at least five times more men had been executed by the more lenient general than by the more severe one. In other words, exactly in proportion as the Duke of Marlborough had swung away from condemnation toward forgiveness, in just that proportion had he swung toward consent to crime, and the inevitable result followed in the multiplying of offenders. But there is another side to this problem. If God condemns sin on the basis of love to the sinless, how can the sinful ever be brought within the reach of His love? If God cannot escape condemning sin, and if sinners are condemned by the execution of the penalty, they are thus put beyond the reach of His love. How, then, can salvation from that penalty ever become possible? We must pursue our thinking further before we can come upon the clue.

We think next of the penalty by which justice must be enforced.

Sin’s penalty must of course include its own inescapable effects on the sinner.

Independence of God, producing complete separation from Him in thought, purposes, interests—in everything, indeed, and putting Him completely out of the heart, is the separation of the whole being from life, for life is possible only in total moral union with and dependence upon Him. It is therefore the condition of spiritual death, and this is the realm where the will of self is supreme.

Death is therefore not separation from existence, but separation from life. An amputated arm dies because it is separated from the source of physical life, not blotted out of existence. It is in a condition of corruption and physical disintegration, but the substance composing the arm persists, and will continue to do so. And so with the soul separated from God. Such a condition is the complete absence of the life-in-God which might have been, and the death-in-self of a soul perverted from what it was intended by God to be. And this is precisely the meaning in Scripture of “destroy” as applied to those who die in sin. It never means annihilation; it always means perversion from God’s original intention.

If one goes out into eternity in his sins, he goes into the “second death,” which is the inevitable effect, and now the eternal doom, upon those separated from life-in-God. “The soul that sinneth, it shall die”(Ezekiel 18:4). And death requires a cemetery. Consignment to the cemetery, therefore, must also be included in the effects of sin that inhere in the penalty. And the cemetery is hell, which is the inescapable lot of those who pass out of this life in a state of spiritual death. But this is not all. The penalty on sin must also include a just recompense for its ill-deserts.

Recall that since sin is the reaction of hatred toward the will of God over the life, the sinner who passes from this earth in his sins will inevitably remain fixed in a state of anarchy forever. And this is the spirit which would destroy, if it were possible, the government of God and all it stands for.