MR. SPURGEON ON THE LAW OF GOD.
By C. H. Spurgeon
[A sermon by Rev. C. H. Spurgeon; comments in brackets by Eld. J. N. Andrews.] [How the law arouses the conscience. The ten commandments all obligatory, and our ignorance of them no excuse for our sins. What about the fourth commandment?] II. By the teaching of the text, the conscience is aroused. I feel when I read these words as if a great gulf opens at my feet: “If a soul sin, and commit any of these things which are forbidden to be done by the commandments of the Lord; though he wist it not, yet is he guilty, and shall bear his iniquity.” You know, dear friend, that you are a willful sinner, and have broken God’s law consciously; but if you may be a sinner, though you wist it not, how the solid earth rolls away from under you as in a dreadful earthquake, and almost like Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, you stand in dread as the devouring fire pours forth from the mysterious abyss. Nothing which is human can be thought certain after this. Think of the sins you may have committed; sins of thoughts which have too rapidly flitted through your mind for you to recollect them,—thoughts which pass over your mind as mere imaginations, like clouds floating aloft in the sky, which cast a flying shadow over the landscape and are gone. Think of your evil thoughts, your pleasure in hearing of uncleanness, your desires, wishes, and excuses of evil,—these are all iniquities. Then, too, our words, our hurried words of anger, of falsehood, of petulance, and pride,—our idle words, our murmuring words, our unbelieving words, our irreverent words,—words scarcely meant, which fell from us without thought: what a multitude of these may be laid to our door, and all these are full of sin! And actions in which we have excused ourselves very thoroughly, because we have never looked at them in God’s light, but have been content to regard them in the dim ray of custom,—are there not many of these which contain sin? When I think of all the forms of evil, I am compelled to fear that much of our life may have been a continuous sin, and yet we may have never condemned ourselves, or even thought about it! Remember that great command: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength.” How far short of that you and I have come! Mentally we have not served God to perfection, neither have the affections loved him with all possible intensity, nor has the soul with its desires gone after him so eagerly as it should. Verily, we are guilty, guilty much more than we have ever imagined. And as to that second command, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” who among us has done so? Have we loved our fellow-man with a love that even approximated to our love to ourselves? O God, amid the varied lights of thy ten commands, all comprehended in the white light of that one word “love,” we stand convicted, and we perceive that our ignorance affords no covering for us! We hear thy voice and tremble before it whilst thou sayest, “Though he wist it not, yet is he guilty, and shall bear his iniquity.” Our ignorance, dear friends, is evidently very great. I do not suppose that the best instructed Christian here will claim to possess much wisdom. The usual rule is that the more we really know, the more conscious we are of the littleness of our knowledge. Our ignorance, therefore, I may take it for granted all round, has been very great. What scope, then, has there been beneath the mantle of that mist of ignorance for sin to hide and multiply. As the conies swarm in the holes of the rock, the bats in the sunless caves of the earth, and the fish in the deep abysses of the sea, so do our sins swarm in the hidden parts of our nature. “Who can understand his errors? Cleanse thou me from secret faults!” The ignorance of very many persons is to a large degree willful. Many do not read the Bible at all, or very seldom, and then without desiring to know its meaning. Even some professing Christians take their religion from the monthly magazine, or from some standard book written by a human author and adopted by their sect: but few go to the word of God itself; they are content to drink of the muddied streams of human teaching instead of filling their cups at the crystal fountain of revelation. Now, brethren, if ye be ignorant of anything concerning God’s mind and will, it is not, in the case of any of you, for want of the Book, nor for want of a willing guide to instruct you in it; for, behold, the Holy Spirit waiteth to be gracious to you in this respect. “If any man lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth liberally, and upbraideth not.” If we do not know, we may know. Our ignorance has been willful if in this privileged country we remain ignorant of the gospel. Where there is confessedly such a mass of willful ignorance, who among us can imagine what myriads of evil shapes of sin swarm in the grim darkness? The prince of darkness holds his court in the blackness of that ignorance which we ourselves have willfully created by refusing to come to the light. The enemy sows the seed of evil by night, and amid Egyptian darkness the accursed grain grows to an awful ripeness and brings forth a hundred-fold. Break in, O light eternal! Break in upon the dimness of our ignorance, lest it thicken into the eternal midnight of hell. [God is just in punishing the sin of ignorance.] Now, it will be vain for any man to say in his mind, as I fear some will do, “God is hard in thus dealing with us.” If thou sayest thus, O man, I ask thee to remember God’s answer. Christ puts your rebellious speech into the mouth of the unfaithful one who hid his talent. He said, “I knew that thou wast an austere man; gathering where thou hadst not strewed.” What did his Master say? Instead of excusing himself, which it is far beneath the dignity of the great God to do, he took the man at his own confession, and he said, “Thou knewest that I was an austere man, taking up that I laid not down, and reaping that I did not sow: wherefore then gavest thou not my money into the bank, that at my coming I might have required mine own with usury?” If you know God to be hard, or say you think so, then recollect how earnest you ought to be to come up to his standard; for, call that standard what you like, it is the standard: count it to be severe if you will, it is binding upon you for all that, and by it you will have to be tried at the last, so that there is no escape for any one of us by impeaching our Maker. Wiser far is it to submit and crave for mercy. Let us recollect, in order that our doctrine may appear less strange, that it is according to the analogy of nature that when God’s laws are broken, ignorance of those laws should not prevent the penalty falling upon the offenders. The natural law is an instructive type of the moral and spiritual law, and from it we may gather much teaching. Here is the law of gravitation, by which objects are attracted to each other. It is inevitable that heavy matters will fall to the earth. A man thinks that he can fly; he puts on his wings and ascends a tower; he is fully persuaded that he is about to mount like a bird. Spectators are invited to behold the wonder, and expectations are excited. The law of gravitation is against the inventor, but he does not think so. Poor man, he firmly believes in his own flight, but the moment he leaps from the tower he falls to the earth and is gathered up a mangled corpse. Why did not God suspend his law because the man did not intentionally violate it? No; the law is stern, and changes not, and he who offends in ignorance pays the penalty. I have read that the Chinese at Pekin often endure severe winters; they have coal just under them, but they refuse to dig the coal for fear they should disturb the equilibrium of the earth, and cause the celestial empire, which is now at the top of the universe, to turn over to the bottom. The Celestials are thoroughly conscientious in this belief, but does the weather alter to suit their philosophy? Does God make them warm in winter without coal? By no manner of means. If they refuse the means of warmth they must be cold: their ignorance does not raise the temperature so much as half a degree. A physician, with the best possible motive, endeavors to find out a new drug, that he may alleviate pain. In making his experiments he inhales a deadly gas which he did not know to be fatal. He dies as surely as if he had willfully taken poison. The law is not suspended to reward his benevolence and avert the fatal result of his mistake. Whatever his motives may have been, he has broken a natural law, and the appointed penalty is exacted of him. Verily, as it is in the natural, so will you find it to be in the spiritual world. But let us go into the question a little, by way of argument. It is of necessity that it should be according to this declaration. It is not possible that ignorance should be a justification of sin; for, first, if it were so, it would follow that the more ignorant a man was the more innocent he would be. It would then assuredly be true that ignorance is bliss, for perfect ignorance would be under no responsibilities and free from all sin. All that you and I would have to do, in order to be perfectly clear from all charge, would be to know nothing. To burn the Bible, refuse to hear the gospel, and rush away from civilization would be the nearest way to freedom from all guilt. Do you not see that if things were so, knowledge might be regarded as a curse, and that the light which Christ comes to bring into the world would be a man’s most solemn affliction if it shone upon him? I protest that, in my unregenerate state, if I had been sure that ignorance would have rid me of responsibility, I would have closed every avenue of knowledge, and would have labored to abide in darkness. But such a supposition is not to be borne; it is inconsistent with the first principles of common sense. If, again, the guilt of an action depended entirely upon a man’s knowledge, we should have no fixed standard at all by which to judge right and wrong; it would be variable according to the enlightenment of each man, and there would be no ultimate and infallible court of appeal. Suppose the statute book of our own country should be constructed on the principle that in proportion only to a man’s knowledge of the law should be his guilt in breaking it, we should have numbers of persons truthfully pleading ignorance, and a great many more endeavoring to do so, and such a simple and easy method of obtaining acquittal would become popular at once. The art of forgetting would be diligently studied, and ignorance would become an enviable inheritance. We should have gentlemen brought up for being drunk and disorderly who had paid forty shillings and costs a score of times, who would still say that they did not know that they could be punished again, since they had paid the fine so often. Ignorance would be so continually pleaded, that there would be practically an end of all law, and the very foundations of the State would be undermined. The thing cannot be endured; it is absurd upon its very face. Moreover, ignorance of the law of God is itself a breach of law, since we are bidden to know and remember it. Thus spake the Lord by his servant Moses: “Ye shall lay up these my words in your heart and in your soul, and bind them for a sign upon your hand, that they may be as frontlets between your eyes. And ye shall teach them your children, speaking of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And thou shalt write them upon the door-posts of thine house, and upon thy gates.” Knowledge of the law was a duty and ignorance a crime. Can it be possible, then, that one sin is to be an excuse for another? It is a sin on a man’s part to refuse to search into the word of God; can it be that because he commits this sin he is to be excused for the faults into which his willful ignorance leads him? It is out of the question. If sins of ignorance are not sins, then Christ’s intercession was altogether a superfluity. You remember that our text last Sabbath morning was, “He made intercession for the transgressors,” and we illustrated it by the text, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” But if there is no sin when a man does not know what he does, why did our Lord pray for pardon for ignorant transgressors? Why ask forgiveness if there be no wrong? The correct way of putting it would have been, “Father, I do not ask thee to forgive, for there is no offense, seeing that they know not what they do;” but by the fact of his having pleaded for forgiveness, it is clearly proved that there is guilt in the sin of ignorance. The work of the Holy Spirit, too, would be an evil instead of a good work in the hearts of men, if ignorance were an excuse for sin, for he has come to convince the world of sin; but if unconvinced of sin they are innocent of it, why convince them of it? Of what use is it to quicken a conscience and to enlighten it and make it bleed over a transgression, if it would be no transgression provided that conscience had never been made cognizant of it? Who is he that shall so blaspheme the Holy Ghost as to say that his work is needless and even idle? Sins of ignorance, therefore, must be sinful.130 Look at one other consequence which would follow from the contrary doctrine. The more wicked a man is, the more hardened he becomes, and the more ignorant he grows as to the beauty of holiness. Everybody knows that. A sin which troubles a child when at home with his godly father will not trouble him at all when he gets to be fifty years of age, provided he has indulged in a course of vice. From one sin to another the man descends, and, as he descends, his mental and moral eyes grow dim, and he perceives less and less the sinfulness of sin. If a man who has arrived at the utmost pitch of infamy can commit any atrocity without the smallest idea of its being wrong, if he can cheat, and lie, and swear, and I know not what, and yet call it all nothing, and wipe his mouth,—if that man is guilty of less sin because of the growing deadness of his conscience, and the limited degree of his spiritual knowledge, then verily things are turned upside down. But it is not so. The test of the guilt of an action is not a man’s conscience, nor his perception of evil, nor his knowledge, but the law itself, for sin is a transgression of the law, be that law known or unknown. The statute stands immovable and immutable, and the sinner, blind though he may be, if he fall upon it shall be broken. Once again, I am sure that many of us now present must have felt the truth of this in our own hearts. You who love the Lord and hate unrighteousness, must, in your lives, have come to a point of greater illumination, where you have said, “I see a certain action to be wrong; I have been doing it for years, but God knows I would not have done it if I had thought it wrong. Even now I see that other people are doing it, and thinking it right; but I cannot do so any more; my conscience has at last received new light, and I must make a change at once.” In such circumstances did it ever come to your mind to say, “What I have done was not wrong, because I did not know it to be wrong”? Far from it. You have justly said to yourself, “My sin in this matter is not so great as if I had transgressed willfully, with my eyes open, knowing it to be sin;” but yet you have accused yourself of the fault, and mourned over it. At least I know I have. A man like John Newton, who in his early years had been connected with the slave trade, and thought it right, as most Christian men did in those times, did not excuse himself in his after years, when his conscience was aroused to the iniquity of slavery. Do you think that the good man would say, “I was quite right in doing as I did, because everybody else did it, and I knew no better”? Ah, no. It was right or wrong whether he knew it or not, and his conscience, when it became enlightened, told him so. My conscience, and your conscience, may need to be enlightened about several matters which now we are doing complacently enough, without any notion that we are sinning; but the action bears its own character of right or wrong, whatever our judgment may be. [The reasoning in all that precedes is admirable. The thoughts are like apples of gold in pictures of silver. We should expect, after such a vindication of the holiness of the law of God, that obedience through grace would be urged upon all that are redeemed by the blood of Christ. But instead of this we are told that the law is so holy and man so weak and sinful that it is of no use to make an effort to obey! The law is so pure, that unless man can be saved transgressing it, he cannot be saved at all! O lame and impotent conclusion! If the law be thus holy, grace must make the man in character like the law, and cannot save him with a character which the law condemns.] Does not this show us the utter impossibility of salvation by works? If you expect to be saved by keeping the law, you must be a bolder man than I dare to be. I know that I cannot keep the law of God, and the doctrine of my text makes it impossible beyond all other impossibility, because the law accuses me of doing wrong even when I do not intend it, and am not conscious of it. O you who hope to be saved by works, how can you ever enjoy a moment’s peace? If you think your righteousness will save you if it is perfect, how can you ever be sure that it is perfect? You may have sinned ignorantly, and that will spoil it all. Think of this and be dismayed. I do beseech you, believe our testimony when we assure you that the road to Heaven by your own righteousness is blocked up. Ten great Krupp guns which fling, each one of them, a bolt huge enough to dash your soul to hell, stand pointed against you if you attempt to make your way to Heaven by that steep ascent. There is another path: you are directed to it, for it is the sign-post of the King’s highway. That royal road to Heaven is paved with grace: God forgives the guilty freely because they trust in Christ. That path is so safe that no lion shall be there, neither shall any ravenous beast go up thereon; but as for the road of legal righteousness, attempt it not, but hearken to what we have further to say unto you. [The words of the preceding paragraph are not what should follow the solemn truths contained in the former part of this discourse. Instead of exhorting men to obedience, the whole force of the sermon is brought to bear upon those who trust in good works, and not one word of warning is addressed to those who live in immorality while professing faith in Christ. What is worse, the conclusion of the sermon is directly calculated to give comfort to those that have named the name of Christ and have not departed from iniquity.] Without doubt, there were some persons in that great congregation who needed to be told that their own righteousness will not shield them in the day of Judgment. But there was a much greater number present who profess faith in Christ and yet practice iniquity. What had the preacher to say to professed Christians that are dishonest, untruthful, and unchaste? Did he bring the authority of the law of God to bear upon the consciences of these sinners in Zion? By no means. His words were adapted to comfort them with the thought that they were accepted in the Beloved, though they were not honest, nor virtuous, nor even truthful. The preacher may say truly that he could not deal with all classes of sinners in one sermon, and that on that occasion he dealt with the self-righteous. But, O man of God, there is death in this discourse! You bear testimony against self-righteousness in such a manner as to shield those who believe without obeying. You hit those who are like the Pharisee that prayed in the temple, but you comfort those like the incestuous Corinthian who professed faith in Christ while living in transgression of the law of God. We have many Christians in these days who live in the known violation of the commandments of God. When these persons read the conclusion of your sermon, they will comfort their hearts in their iniquity, and say: “Commandment-keeping is a deadly thing; commandment-breaking is the wholesome practice of believers in Christ.” But look again at those ten Krupp guns. You say that they are ready to shoot down the man who seeks to gain Heaven by the law. But is this the only class of persons who stand within the range of these guns? Why not say also: These guns will shoot down every man who rings the changes upon faith but dodges obedience, and who travels toward hell in the path of transgression? But we need not mistake in this matter. When these ten guns were cast, an inscription was placed upon each by the Founder, designating the class of sinners that each was made to kill. And these guns are so aimed that each class of sinners is in point-blank range of the gun made to destroy that class. Thus on No. 1 is this inscription: “This gun will kill the worshipers of false gods.” On No. 3: “This gun will kill blasphemers.” On No. 6: “This gun will kill murderers.” On No. 9: “This gun will kill liars.” But you go on to teach that these guns will kill no man who believes in Christ. Alas, honored sir! have you told all the truth? Why did you not add: But there can be no true faith in Christ without repentance, and repentance causes men to turn from sin to obedience. When the day of Judgment comes, these guns will shoot down all the men that shall then be found in sin. The Pharisee that was too proud to repent, and the Christian that had so much faith that he dared to live in transgression, will both fall before these guns, and so also will all sinners, for none of them can then escape. But look at gun No. 4. On this gun is this inscription: “This gun was made to destroy those who profane the rest-day of the Creator.” Are you certain, honored sir, that you yourself are quite out of the range of this gun? Will you say: “It is true this gun seems to point in my direction, yet I stand where other good men have stood, and where most good men now stand”? Read again what you have said in this sermon on custom and opinion. I do not sit in judgment on the good men who have stood where you stand, but I must have the faithfulness to say to you, “Here is one of God’s ten commandments which yourself and your congregation violate as one man. You do it, as I doubt not, ‘inadvertently,’ but ‘it is nevertheless a sin.’ I beg you to move out of range of gun No. 4.” Do you say, “I believe in Christ and therefore cannot be condemned for breaking the fourth commandment?” So may others in your congregation say with respect to other of the commandments. But Christ and Paul and James and John spoke otherwise concerning the commandments of God. Matt. 5:19; Rom. 3:31; James 2:8–12; 1 John 5:3. We must have pardon through the blood of Christ, because we have broken the law of God, but that pardon places us under the most solemn obligation through grace henceforth to obey. III. By the grand and awful truth of the text the sacrifice is endeared. Just according to our sense of sin must be our value of the sacrifice. God’s way of delivering those who sinned ignorantly was not by denying their sin and passing it over, but by accepting an atonement for it. “The priest shall make an atonement concerning his sin wherein he hath erred, and wist it not, and it shall be forgiven him.” The forgiveness was to come through atonement. How greatly you and I need an atonement for our sins of ignorance, seeing our ignorance is great! O blood of Christ, how much we need thee! O divine Substitute, how greatly do we require thy cleansing blood! How gracious it is on God’s part to be willing to accept an atonement; for if his law had said there shall be no atonement possible, it would have been just; but infinite grace devised the plan by which, through the sacrifice of another, pardon is possible for the ignorant sinner. Behold how generous God is, for he has himself provided this sacrifice. The man who had erred under the law had to bring an offering himself, but ours is brought for us. Jesus the Son of God was not spared by the great Father, but he gave him out of his bosom that he might bleed and die. The incarnate God is the great bearer of the sin of ignorance; and to-day he can have compassion on the ignorant, and on them that are out of the way, for he has made an atonement for them. Under the law this atonement was to be a ram without blemish. Our Lord had no sin, nor shade of sin. He is the spotless victim which the law requires. All that justice, in its most severe mood, could require from man by way of penalty, our Lord Jesus Christ has rendered; for in addition to his sacrifice for the sin, he has presented a recompense for the damage, as the person who sinned ignorantly was bound to do. He has recompensed the honor of God, and he has recompensed every man whom we have injured. My brother, has another injured you? Well, since Christ has given himself to you, there is a full recompense made to you, even as there has been made to God. Blessed be his name, we may rest in this sacrifice. How supremely efficacious it is. It takes away iniquity, transgression, and sin. My dear hearers, you are bound to confess your sins to God; but if pardon were offered you upon the condition that you should mention every sin you have committed, not one of you would ever be saved. We do not know, and if we ever did know, we cannot remember all our shortcomings and all our transgressions: but the mercy is; though we do not know them, he does, and he can blot them out. Though we cannot weep over them with a distinct knowledge of them, because they are not known to us, yet Jesus bled for them with a distinct knowledge of them all, and they are all put away by his unknown sufferings,—all cast into the deeps where an angel’s eye can never trace them. By his agonies, immense, unsearchable, endured for us, and by his merits, infinite as his divine nature, our Redeemer has taken away that thick darkness of iniquity which we were not capable of comprehending. O believing sinner, the debt thou knowest not, thy glorious Surety has nevertheless borne and discharged for thee. Blessings on his name. Rest in him, and then go thy way and rejoice. Amen. [We cannot wholly approve what is said concerning the atonement. The speaker seems to teach that the atonement pardons all past offenses and releases us from all future obligation to the law of God. But the text at the head of this discourse teaches us that the sinner who brought an offering to God for his sins obtained forgiveness but not permission to sin. He returned from the altar of God, not a licensed transgressor, but a pardoned sinner, who was thenceforward to refrain from sin. This part of the lesson the speaker fails to appreciate and so does not inculcate obedience as a necessary consequence resulting from pardon. In fact, he seems to quite overlook the priesthood of Christ. Our Lord’s death upon the cross is the great sacrifice for sin. But that sacrifice cannot be accepted in behalf of the individual sinner till that sinner comes to God through the High Priest and asks that the sacrifice may be accepted in his behalf. Heb. 7:25. This forgiveness is never granted till true repentance is wrought in the sinner by the Holy Spirit. No one can repent of sins and still persist in them. Repentance which does not produce obedience is no repentance at all. The speaker calls his hearers “believing sinners;” how much better if he could in truth have called them “obedient believers.” But the sermon represents obedience as impossible and bids the believer, “Go thy way and rejoice.” Would that it had said to him in the words of Christ: “Go thy way and sin no more.”]