IDENTIFIED WITH SIN

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jul 30, 1902

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 28, No. 31.

IDENTIFIED WITH SIN.

“Who is on the Lord's side?” was not a question of a special time; it is ages old and ever present. It comes to the people of to-day as truly as it came to the Hebrew host at Horeb's base fifteen centuries before Christ. It was then spoken by Moses the man of God. Then the sons of Levi responded to the call.

Six centuries later, on Carmel's height, overlooking the Great Sea on the west and Israel's sun-parched, famine-stricken lands on the east, Elijah, the prime minister of God in the earth, asked the same question of Israel's Baal-blinded hosts: “If Jehovah be God, follow Him; but if Baal, then follow him.” And the record is that “the people answered him not a word,” and so put themselves on the side of Baal.

Nine centuries after that, the Anointed of God put the same thought in this form: “He that is not with Me is against Me; and he that gathereth not with Me scattereth.”

In the great moral world there is no neutral ground. Whenever duty is presented the same eternal question rings out insistent for answer. We make positive reply when we do the duty; we negative the question when we decline. We do not need to throw ourselves against God's requirement. We need not publish our opposition. In our better judgment we may admire the glory of the duty, the beauty of its doing; but to yield to it involves a cross; it will make us unpopular; it means the sacrifice of ease or cherished pleasure. Therefore we do nothing; we endeavor to remain neutral. But we have not so remained; we can not. To attempt it is to take sides against God, to choose Baal instead of Jehovah, to be against Christ instead of for Him.

The great danger to be feared is not that God will some time arraign us before His awful court, from the decisions of which there is no appeal. He will do this; and it will indeed be an awful place for the hardened sinner. But the great danger, the awful thing, which the great God would have us dread, now, right now, is sin. It is no arbitrary decree of God which condemns the sinner at the bar in the last great assize; it is the sin which condemns. Neither will it be the sin written in the books of heaven which will condemn. They are but the record of what the condemned man has written in his own being, in body and soul and spirit, in mind and moral and muscle, he has by his negative decision of the awfully tremendous question above, sealed his own doom.

There are two great principles in the universe—evil and good, or sin and righteousness. The former is doomed in its very nature; it is doomed because it is endeavoring to counterwork the will of Omnipotent, Omniscient Righteousness. Now it is permitted for a time as an object lesson for all eternity. Soon it will be forever banished from God's dominion with all the evils it has brought. The latter—righteousness—is in its very nature eternal. It is of God, and is co-existent with Him. He who identifies himself with sin perishes with the sin. He who identifies himself with righteousness identifies himself with God, eternal life, and immortality. “Sin, when it is full grown, bringeth forth death.” “The wages of sin is death.” “In the way of righteousness is life, and in the pathway thereof there is no death.” “The Spirit is life because of righteousness.” These are fundamental, eternal truths.

We are all by nature sinners—identified with sin and death. But to him who wills to turn from the sin and yield himself to God, God in Christ Jesus destroys the sin and saves the man. But he who prefers the sin to duty enjoined of God will perish with the sin. When Israel put away their sin, and brought their offerings before God which represented their sin, their separation from sin, and their identification with, their dedication to, Him, the sin was taken away, and the people saved. “And there came forth fire from before the Lord, and consumed upon the altar the burnt-offering and the fat; and when all the people saw it, they shouted and fell on their faces.” Lev. 9:24.

In juxtaposition to this record, God has caused to be set the account of an opposite example. Nadab and Abihu, the sons of the high priest offer incense before the Lord with strange fire, not commanded of God. Drunken, minds confused, sensibilities stupified, moral vision dimmed, they could not see the holiness of God's order and the exceeding sinfulness of sin. It is the very nature of God's presence to consume sin; and when they went into His presence identified with the sin, “there came forth fire from before the Lord, and devoured them, and they died before the Lord. Lev. 10:2. The awful, sorrowful thing was not the destruction; it was the choosing of sin, identification with its eternally destructive, desolating power.

God taught the same lesson when Uzzah was slain for touching the ark, contrary to God's command. He taught the same lesson when Uzziah the King went forth from the holy temple a leper. He taught the same great truth when Ananias and Sapphira died in the presence of God identified with sin. He has given us all these examples that we in this careless age may learn that we can not sin with impunity.

Yet, notwithstanding all God's warnings in word and awful example, men—professed teachers of God, professed priests of God, are doing as God through the prophet declared they would do. Read what He says:—

“Her priests have done violence to My law, and have profaned My holy things; they have made no distinction between the holy and the common, neither have they caused men to discern between the unclean and the clean, and have hid their eyes from My Sabbaths, and I am profaned among them. . . . And I sought for a man among them, that should build up the wall, and stand in the gap before Me for the land, that I should not destroy it; but I found none.” Eze. 22:25–31.

Reader, in this day of peril, what are you doing? Where do you stand? Are you against God, identified with sin? Or are you with Him restoring the breach in God's law, identified with Him altogether in all things?