No Sin Without Law by James Ernest Clapham

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 14, 1902

No Sin Without Law

By James Ernest Clapham

“Without the law sin was dead.” It was not seen to be sin. It was as it were hidden in the grave. “For I was alive without the law once: but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died.” The law gave me knowledge of sin,—sin committed against a holy God,—and I found myself to be liable to death—I died. Not that the man who lived or lives without the knowledge of law is absolutely guiltless; for conscience, though slow to act and curtailed in power, never dies. But “sin is the transgression of the law;” where there is no law, there is no sin; just so far as law is clear, so is sin sinful. Therefore the state of man without the law was a state of life, compared with the darkness and death in which he found himself under the law.

“The commandment came”—the new revelation of law given ages ago in thunder and clouds on Sinai, given to-day in the Word of God through the Holy Ghost—rousing man from the spiritual slumber into which he had fallen. “The commandment came,” awakening the conscience, lighting up with new clearness the dim and faded characters of the law written upon the heart, revealing again the will of God, revealing sin as rebellion against that will, and as being both death and the way to death. The commandment, holy, and just, and good, came face to face with human guilt.

This revelation of law to the soul Paul describes as having a twofold effect, (1) upon that self which loves to be independent of God, with its passions and its evil will, and (2) upon conscience.

As to the first effect: “I had not known sin,” says the writer, “but by the law: for I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet,”—had not known it; not, had not felt it, but had not known it as lust. “But sin, taking occasion by the commandment, wrought in me all manner of concupiscence.”

The law was ordained to life; one of its ends was that by observing it man might obtain a right to life eternal. Obedience to it was and is still a title deed to heaven; but the obedience must be perfect, or there is a flaw in the deed, a flaw which is irreparable; for the law of God can stoop to no compromise with human disobedience. But man is carnal, sold under sin, as a slave to a master, from which there is no escape. There is a warp in his nature which ever turns him aside from the path of right, and the commandment which was ordained to life he finds to be unto death.

But there is something more than this. “Sin, taking occasion,” having found an occasion of attack on me, through the commandment, “wrought in me all manner of concupiscence.” The revelation of law stirs up man to rebellion. The characteristic of the carnal mind is the spirit of opposition to all that is good. “The carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be.” Man with his weakness, with his petty passions, with his low, earthward nature defiantly independent, takes his daily stand in opposition to the Almighty, but for whose hand sustaining him every moment he would cease to be. Puffed up with pride, impatient of control, resenting any curb upon the lawlessness of passion, he rebels against the law, even because it is the will of God.

Let no one think that this is mere theory. “Stolen waters are sweet” is a maxim of the world. In the perversity of sinful nature, the forbidden thing is invested with peculiar charms. Set bounds to the schoolboy, and they will be passed. Condemn a book, and men will read it. Brand a deed as bad, and it will find doers. “Sin, taking occasion by the commandment, wrought in me all manner of concupiscence.”

The revelation of law has a second effect. It rouses the conscience. The conscience and the reason at once declare for God, but their voice is drowned amid the clamor of the passions. The more man knows of the law, the stronger is his conviction of its beauty and its truth; but, alas, the stronger too is his conviction of his own inability to keep it. He listens to the command, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart,” and the more clearly he comprehends it, the deeper grows his despair. “That which I do,” he says, “I allow not: for what I would that I do not; but what I hate, that do I.”

This is not the state, this is not the language, of a soul solitary and apart, uttering his lonely complaint, groaning over an inward misery with which others can never sympathize. This is the state, the language, of fallen human nature, struggling with chains it cannot break, sighing for a deliverer whom it cannot see. Listen to the weary confession of men of all ages and nations, and the burden of their cry is, “The good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.” Listen to the voices of the ancients. More than two thousand years ago a heathen wrote these words: “I know the right, and yet I am on the point of doing the wrong; desire is stronger than will.” Another, three hundred years later, bemoans himself, “If I could, I would be wiser, but some unknown force drags me against my will. Desire draws me one way, conviction another. I see the better and approve, I follow the worse.”

And is the case otherwise to-day? Who of us has not often shuddered at this slavery of soul, this worse than Egyptian bondage? Who of us has not resolved against the sin that doth so easily beset, with such intensity of purpose that we have vainly thought the struggle was already over, and the victory won? But a few days, or even hours, sufficed to change the temper of the mind, and though the reasons for resolving seemed as cogent as ever, inclination or passion, with the rush of a torrent, swept them aside, and we were borne headlong into sin. Thank God for those to whom these things are but a memory, for with them “old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.”—Rev. James Ernest Clapham.