July 26, 1857
“For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”—Romans vi. 23.
The passage: Sin pays wages, and its wage is death; but what God gives is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
To sharpen the contrast, St. Paul left out the verb in each clause. You might think our translators could as well have used the future tense as the present—“the wages of sin will be death,” “the gift of God will be life.” I think they were right not to. That change would have destroyed the force of the words, their connection with what precedes, and their connection with our own daily experience.
I. St. Paul is not speaking of some future day when God will call us to account and inflict death as punishment. He views the matter differently. Every man has two possible masters, though he must serve one of them. Serve Sin, and you take its wages: slavery and death. Serve Righteousness, and you have all the freedom, energy, and life you are capable of. This statement cannot be identified with the other view. You cannot make the righteous God the author of death unless you also make Him the author of sin, since one is said to be the fruit of the other. He must instead be the Deliverer from death, the Giver of eternal life.
If you ask whether we must confess God’s real dominion over everyone and everything, or instead suppose two rival powers with different aims, I answer: assert God’s real dominion, and you will understand what the Apostle—and you yourself—mean by Sin. Sin is the denial of that dominion over things, over others, over yourself: the desire to break loose from a righteous Ruler, cherished and fed until the sense of His government is lost or inverted. Every man, deep down, tries to live independently of Him. His efforts toward that independence are acts of homage to an unrighteous power, and that power pays wages for them—death. There is no rival creator with rights over some things or persons; everything and everyone belongs to God alone. Every flower, insect, and man owes Him obedience according to its nature; whatever creature has the capacity to break that obedience, and uses it, falls under death. To say a creature “sins” is to say it has this capacity and has used it—choosing to be outside God’s order rather than under His righteousness.
- The Apostle says the wages of sin is death. Don’t you say the same thing constantly? “That man is paid for his idleness—his estate wasted, his house in confusion, ending a beggar. That man is paid for his self-conceit—thinking he knew better than anyone, now the victim of every cheat. That man is paid for his gluttony—look at his premature decay, unable now to enjoy any appetite. See how the envy he tormented others with now torments himself.” This is a habitual form of speech among us: men are paid in kind for what they do, think, or feel amiss. We secretly admit that this could not happen if Right did not govern the world as everywhere else—but also that Right is not the cause of the punishment; wrong is. Sin pays the wages. And notice: the effect we always dwell on is some disability—some power crippled, some spring of life dried up. St. Paul’s words prove an accurate summary of all our scattered experience. Death, in one form or another—the death of some energy, ultimately of the person who held it—is the wages.
So far we can see this. Looking further ahead, the prospect grows darker. Can you say what will stop this death from progressing and worsening? Can anything in your fellow-creatures or in yourself predict that the growing evil habit will suddenly be abandoned or weaken? Who told you the man in steady decay will recover? Who assured you that death, once it seizes all that is worth anything in him, will simply stop? Neither experience nor conscience told you this. Why then do you feel that inevitable decline so outrageous, so contrary to your thoughts, affections, reason—and to something in you that you can hardly name, but might almost call faith? St. Paul answers: he is no more satisfied with this fatal, endless gravitation than you are. He boldly affirms another law exists besides it: “the gift of God is eternal life in Jesus Christ our Lord.”
- “Another law!” someone objects. “No—the Apostle speaks of a ‘gift,’ conferred by God’s good pleasure; introducing ‘law’ subverts the doctrine.” True, if we substitute “wages” for “gift” we destroy St. Paul’s contrast and bring life under the conditions of death. But we saw that when men earn sin’s wages, they are not obeying the law they were created for but breaking it—earning slavery and death by choice. What is that law? Simple dependence on One who does not pay but gives—from whom we receive not a bargained price for work done, but the power and privilege of working; not remission of punishment for petitions offered, but the ability to pray; not praise returned for praise rendered, but the gift and energy to praise, the freedom of gratitude, even thanks for what He is, not only for what He does. The Apostle gathers up our own experience, then preaches a Gospel that surpasses it yet confirms and elevates it. Before, man seemed bound to a stern Necessity—he sowed the wind and must reap the whirlwind, destroying himself; nature ratifies the sentence, conscience approves it as issuing from the highest judgment throne. But the One on that throne is not satisfied merely to see His creatures suffer for lacking righteousness—He can only be content when He has made them righteous. He made man in His own image; if separation from Him is death, union with Him must be eternal life. And that union is not something strange and exceptional, with death the rule and life the exception. No: death has always been the breach of God’s order, life its fulfillment. Man has never actually torn himself from God, though he has struggled desperately to do so. In countless ways he has received gifts from God alongside the wages he has earned—every sunrise, his daily food, every kind word, every friendly touch, has been a divine gift, no part of his wages. He is surrounded by gifts pressing on him continually, which ought to awaken every pulse in him to life—yet they do not, because he has the cold heart of a hireling, wanting only to establish his own claim to what is given, to shut others out. Hence the ever-growing burden of death on his spirit. Unless that burden can be removed, the cheerful world only adds to his torment; he would rather it did not smile on him, wooing a joy and sympathy he cannot return. Unless there is some gift greater than all these—the gift of life itself, not merely a call to it; a gift always renewable, as near to him as death itself, and mightier than death, delivering him from it—he must go on receiving sin’s wages, though carrying the marks of a king’s child, meant to be his Father’s steward.
But the gift of God is eternal life in Jesus Christ our Lord. This is the greater gift, containing what all others lack: a well of water springing up within the man, not lying outside him to be visited occasionally; the gift not merely of an influence but of a Person from whom the influence flows, present perpetually rather than occasionally; One who delivers the spirit from its own burden, who bids the heavy-laden rest in Him, who does not demand joy and love but kindles and gives them. This is the eternal life St. Paul knows—not some future felicity earned by service here, which could give no rest to a man toiling and suffering now. He needed One to whom he could cast every sorrow, fear, and sin hourly, from whom he could draw strength against the constant sentence of death. If such a One was with him, He would be with him always—neither height nor depth, life nor death, present nor future would separate him from His love. This life must be eternal, not something fleeting; a gift renewed daily, not a possession claimed once for all, enjoyed only while trusted in God and lost the moment it was thought earned. It must be a gift for everyone, one he could preach to all, saying: as surely as sin dwells in you, so surely does its Enemy dwell in you; as surely as you carry death, so surely you may carry life; as surely as you can take the one as your wages, so surely you may accept the other as God’s gift.
I am persuaded this is the Gospel St. Paul proclaimed everywhere—to Jews, Gentiles, Romans, Barbarians. Had it been anything less—a distant Christ, a partial deliverer, one who had not fully accomplished salvation or removed sin by His own sacrifice; a plan of salvation rather than a personal Saviour, an actual root of eternal life—he would have endured no persecution, founded no Churches, left nothing for later ages. May that same word go forth again, with the same power! May we again hear that the Kingdom of Heaven does not come with observation someday, but is already among us and in us, to be submitted to and lived in, so that it may subdue all kingdoms! May that good news reach every corner of this land, every class, with power to make them citizens and freemen and workmen of God, not Mammon’s pensioners and tools! For, brethren, this should be Gospel—good news—preached from these pulpits, not debate and argument. You complain sometimes that here, unlike the law-courts, one person speaks freely without fear of refutation. That complaint is fair—if we are merely proving points and overthrowing opponents, our errors should be exposed and our opponents given a hearing; as ministers of truth we should want our falsehoods caught, and as ministers of mercy we should want men able to clear themselves of our charges. But we mistake our calling if we think it is to establish propositions or silence disputants. Our work is a mockery unless we are ambassadors of God, authorized to declare His will and what He has done and is doing to make that will effective for all. Do you think that if we did this honestly and boldly, we would be stifling objections by mere authority? No—we would be raising the ablest, subtlest objections in the heart of every hearer. Instead of sleepy acquiescence, the human spirit would be stirred to its depths to test whether we spoke lies or truth. However we claim authority, once such a word is spoken there must follow inward controversies no one can silence, inward convulsions only another voice than ours can calm. The matter passes out of our hands and must be settled elsewhere. What seemed mere names in a book become fearful realities, mighty powers, struggling within the man himself. He must decide: will he be Sin’s hireling, taking death as his due wage, or God’s freeman, receiving eternal life as the gift that belongs to him as God’s child, called to inherit His own nature and glory?