The Hard Life

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · May 5, 1903

THERE is nothing arbitrary in God's judgments. The way of the transgressor is hard because it brings him into conflict with the world's true order and his own appointed way of growth. Prophet and poet agree that it is out of the sinner's own transgressions that the penalty grows.

“The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices Make whips to scourge us.”

“Thine own wickedness shall correct thee, and thy backslidings shall reprove thee: know therefore and see that it is an evil thing and bitter, that thou hast forsaken the Lord thy God, and that my fear is not in thee, saith the Lord God of hosts.”

The sinner's life is a hard life in its penalties. He who sows a sin sows a seed which will spring up and bear fruit after its kind. The sowing men call pleasure, but the harvest all agree is suffering. It is a hard life to suffer for old sins, and harder still to see others suffer. For no man can sow evil, and be sure that none of it will ripen in his neighbor's fields. To reap the evil harvest is bad enough, but to see it ripening in the lives of those we love is harder yet. Our increasing knowledge has only emphasized this certainty of penalty following transgression. The warnings of the book are continually illustrated in the experiences of the world.

The transgressor's life is hard, in its deprivations. The question is sometimes raised whether the sinner does not, after all, get more out of the world than the true disciple. He who has turned from evil to live with God never raises that question. He knows that the earth, without peace of heart, without joy in right and sympathy with good, without the happiness of God's presence and the delight of service, is a hard and narrow and unhappy place. The true and full inheritance of the earth belongs to the children of God, and to no others. To be self-deprived of the highest and the best is to be cheated of what makes our life worth living.

Far back, also, in every transgressor's consciousness lies the hard trial of self-contempt. He may not admit it to his thought. Conscience may be ill educated and under careful discipline; but in the moments when he sees clearly, the sinner is self-judged. God has let us sit upon the seat of counsel, and we see what value we have put upon our souls in bartering with evil.

“Still, as of old, Man by himself is priced; For thirty pieces Judas sold Himself, not Christ.”

It is hard to fear to meet one's own thought sitting as the judge; to dodge and shift and evade the quiet hour that brings self-condemnation. It is hard to be, amid whatever passing joys, without God and without hope in a world that is so full of hope and so bright with the presence of our Heavenly Father.— The Congregationalist.