Reading Ryle's Holiness last night gave me much to ponder as I look at myself and the church. Here are a few extracts from the opening chapter, simply entitled "Sin":
No proof of the fullness of sin, after all, is so overwhelming and unanswerable as the cross and passion of our Lord Jesus Christ and the whole doctrine of His substitution and atonement. Terribly black must that guilt be for which nothing but the blood of the Son of God could make satisfaction. Heavy must that weight of human sin be which made Jesus groan and sweat drops of blood in agony at Gethsemane and cry at Golgotha, "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" (Matt. 27:46). Nothing, I am convinced, will astonish us so much, when we awake in the resurrection day, as the view we will have of sin and the retrospect we will take of our own countless shortcomings and defects. Never until the hour when Christ comes the second time will we fully realize the "sinfulness of sin." Well might George Whitefield say, "The anthem in heaven will be: What has God wrought!"
Ryle above correctly points out one thing that is lacking today, and one thing needful... an appreciation of the VILENESS of sin. It's so often swiftly brushed aside, and I am guilty as well of going along with that tide and disregarding the true blackness of sin. How blind I am, and how sad I am to recognize how easily I want to lay aside the truth. In Heaven, our eyes will be opened, however, to the grandeur of what God TRULY has done in our salvation.
I fear we do not sufficiently realize the extreme subtlety of our soul’s disease. We are too apt to forget that temptation to sin will rarely present itself to us in its true colors, saying, "I am your deadly enemy and I want to ruin you forever in hell." Oh, no! Sin comes to us, like Judas, with a kiss, and like Joab, with an outstretched hand and flattering words. The forbidden fruit seemed good and desirable to Eve, yet it cast her out of Eden. The walking idly on his palace roof seemed harmless enough to David, yet it ended in adultery and murder. Sin rarely seems sin at its first beginnings. Let us then watch and pray, lest we fall into temptation. We may give wickedness smooth names, but we cannot alter its nature and character in the sight of God. Let us remember St. Paul’s words: "Exhort one another daily . . . lest any be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin" (Heb. 3:13). It is a wise prayer in our Litany: "From the deceits of the world, the flesh and the devil, good Lord, deliver us."
I have commented on this before, and Ryle brings me again to these thoughts - we fool ourselves into thinking that we can 'deal with sin'. How arrogant it is for us to presume that we are capable and watchful enough to avoid the snares of the enemy. Satan, as is sin, his weapon, is subtle. Rarely do we see, as Ryle points out, so clearly that a temptation is there awaiting us... it's not so clear as that, most of the time... thus we must pray for watchfulness and discernment. Do we do this?
I say, then, in the first place, that a scriptural view of sin is one of the best antidotes to that vague, dim, misty, hazy kind of theology which is so painfully current in the present age. It is vain to shut our eyes to the fact that there is a vast quantity of so–called Christianity nowadays which you cannot declare positively unsound, but which, nevertheless, is not full measure, good weight and sixteen ounces to the pound. It is a Christianity in which there is undeniably "something about Christ and something about grace and something about faith and something about repentance and something about holiness," but it is not the real "thing as it is" in the Bible. Things are out of place and out of proportion. As old Latimer would have said, it is a kind of "mingle–mangle," and does no good. It neither exercises influence on daily conduct, nor comforts in life, nor gives peace in death; and those who hold it often awake too late to find that they have got nothing solid under their feet. Now I believe the likeliest way to cure and mend this defective kind of religion is to bring forward more prominently the old scriptural truth about the sinfulness of sin. People will never set their faces decidedly towards heaven and live like pilgrims until they really feel that they are in danger of hell. Let us all try to revive the old teaching about sin in nurseries, in schools, in training colleges, in universities. Let us not forget that "the law is good if we use it lawfully" and that "by the law is the knowledge of sin" (1 Tim. 1:8; Rom. 3:20; 7:7). Let us bring the law to the front and press it on men’s attention. Let us expound and beat out the Ten Commandments and show the length and breadth and depth and height of their requirements. This is the way of our Lord in the sermon on the mount. We cannot do better than follow His plan. We may depend upon it, men will never come to Jesus and stay with Jesus and live for Jesus unless they really know why they are to come and what is their need. Those whom the Spirit draws to Jesus are those whom the Spirit has convinced of sin. Without thorough conviction of sin, men may seem to come to Jesus and follow Him for a season; but they will soon fall away and return to the world.
His first line is shocking, but I always like to point it out. There is nothing new under the sun. He said that "a scriptural view of sin is one of the best antidotes to that vague, dim, misty, hazy kind of theology which is so painfully current in the present age." Now Ryle is not nearly so old as some that I like to trot out in comparing their age to today's (he wrote this in 1879) but nevertheless it is easily applied to our circumstances. The "vague, dim, misty, hazy" kind of theology which prevails indeed would do with a good dose of the Biblical understanding of sin. Yet we are afraid to apply it. Why? I think the reason can be boiled down to this - we fear man rather than God, and are afraid that if we dare mention sin, we'll turn people away. My question to those who argue that mentioning sin should be avoided: "If people are turned away, because we lay an appropriate level of importance on a sound doctrine of sin, do we have any response but lamentation? Is it right for US to decide who will embrace Biblical truth, and who will not???" No, I answer. God saves, God chooses. Just as Ezekiel was bound to deliver the word of truth to his countrymen, knowing (as God had told him) that none would listen, so too it is our duty to faithfully report the truth about sin and about ourselves to family and neighbor. That report can be and indeed must be a compassionate one... but the results of that truth-bearing MUST be left to God, and not taken upon ourselves. As we can see by the man-centered "gospel" presentation that prevails today, the results are predictable when we in a subtle expression of self-worship take God's responsibilities and prerogatives into our own hands.
Posted by toddpedlar at June 30, 2004 07:11 AM | TrackBack