Seventh Sunday after Trinity

“For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”—Romans vi. 23.

To make the antithesis in this verse more striking and evident, St. Paul has left out the verb in each clause of it. Perhaps you may think that if our translators supplied a verb, they might as well have put it in the future tense as in the present. They might have said, “The wages of Sin will be Death,” not “is Death.” “The gift of God will be Life,” not “is Life.” I suspect they were quite right. They would have destroyed the force of the words, and their connection with those which precede them, if they had given this form to their version. And what is more, they would have destroyed the connection between the Apostle’s language and our own daily experience.

I. St. Paul is not telling us of some time when the Righteous God will call us to account for sins which we have committed, and will inflict death as the punishment of them. He is contemplating the subject from a point of view altogether different. He says that every man has two masters, either of whom he may serve, but one of whom he must serve. He may be the servant of Sin; then he must take its wages. They are slavery and death. He may be the servant of Righteousness; then he will have all the freedom, energy, life, he is capable of. This is his statement, which, whatever elucidation it may require, cannot, you see, be identified with that of which I have just spoken. You cannot look upon the Righteous God as the author of Death, unless you look upon Him also as the author of Sin; for one is said to be the fruit of the other. You must look upon Him as the Deliverer from death; the Giver of eternal life.

If you ask me whether you are not to confess a real dominion of God over all things and all persons in this Universe, or whether you are to suppose two rival beings, with different objects and powers for effecting them, I answer, “Assert the real dominion of God over all persons and things, and then you will know what the Apostle means by Sin; yes, and what you mean by it.” The denial of that dominion over things, over other persons, over yourself, is Sin. The desire not to be under a Righteous Ruler, to break loose from Him, to be outside of Him—this desire cherished, gratified, fed upon, till the sense of government is gone, or till the government is supposed to be just the reverse of what it is, expresses the nature of Sin. Each man, in the depth of his own nature, is trying to be by himself, to live independently. The efforts which he makes to achieve this independence are his different acts of homage and fealty to an unrighteous power; each of these efforts, the Apostle says, is rewarded by that power; wages are paid for it; the wages is Death. There is no assertion of a rival creator, from whom certain things and certain persons have derived their being, or who has some right over them. By the assumption, everything that lives, every person that lives, is God’s. No one else has or can have a right in any flower, or insect, or man. Every flower, insect, and man, according to its own qualities and capacities, owes Him obedience; if any creature has the capacity of putting itself out of its obedience, and uses that capacity, it falls under death. By saying that a creature sins, we say that it has this capacity, and has used it. It chooses not to be under Righteousness; it prefers to be out of God’s Order.

I. The Apostle says, “The wages of Sin is Death.” Do not you say the same continually? “That man,” you say, “is paid for his idleness. His estate is gone to waste. His house is in confusion. He began in comfort; he has ended with being a beggar. That man is paid for his self-conceit. He valued no one’s opinion but his own. He thought he knew the world better than any one. He has become the victim of a thousand cheats and sharpers. That man is paid for his gluttony and sottishness: look at his premature feebleness of body and soul; he cannot gratify one of the appetites which he exists to gratify. How the passion of envy with which that poor wretch tormented every one else is turned inwards, and is tormenting himself!” These are a few instances of a form of speech which is habitual with us. It signifies that men are paid in kind for that which they do, or think, or feel amiss. We secretly confess that it would not be so, if Right did not govern on this earth as well as everywhere else; but we confess also that Right is not the cause of the punishment, but that wrong is. Sin pays the wages. And the effect, you perceive, which we dwell upon, is always some disability to do the thing the wrong-doer wants to do or ought to do. Some power which he has is crippled. Some spring of life is dried up. St. Paul’s words, then, are found to be a safe and accurate generalization of all our partial experiences. Death, in one form or other, the death of some energy which the man wields, the death ultimately of him who has the energies,—is the wages.

So far we can see; the prospect, as we look further into the future, becomes darker still. Can you tell in the least what is to stop the progress of this death? the continual aggravation of it? Can you predict, by anything you see in your fellow-creatures or feel in yourselves, that then—just at such a moment the evil habit which has been growing stronger and stronger will be abandoned, or will be less destructive? Where did you discover that law? Who told you that the man, being in a regular process of decay, would suddenly or gradually recover? Or who gave you the least hint that death, when it had laid hold of all that was worth anything in him, would terminate him? Experience did not; your conscience did not. And why is it then that you feel that inevitable descent so outrageous, so contradictory to all your thoughts and intuitions, to your affections and to your reason, and to something in you which you do not know how to name, but which, now and then, you would almost call faith? Who will tell you? St. Paul takes upon himself to tell you. He is not satisfied with this fatal rule, this endless gravitation, any more than you are. He boldly affirms that there is another law besides this. “The gift of God is Eternal Life in Jesus Christ our Lord.”

II. “Another Law!” some one will exclaim. “No such thing; the Apostle speaks of a ‘Gift.’ It is conferred by the good pleasure of an Omnipotent Being; to introduce any notion different from this, is to subvert the doctrine of the Epistle.” Most assuredly, if we put “wages” for “gift,” we shall destroy the contrast which St. Paul presents to us altogether; we shall bring Life under the conditions of Death. But we found that when men began to receive their sin-wages, they were not submitting to the law which they were created to obey, but breaking it; they earned the reward of slavery and death, because they chose to break it. What then was the Law? A law of simple dependence on One Who does not pay, but Who gives; from Whom we take, not as bargainers so much price for so much work done, but the power of working, the privilege of working; Who does not remit so much punishment in consideration of so many petitions offered, but Who gives the privilege and ability to pray; Who does not return so much praise to us for so much praise rendered to Him, but confers the wonderful gift and energy to praise, the joy and freedom of being grateful, the still higher power of giving Him thanks, not only for what He does, but for what He is, for His own great glory. The Apostle has gathered up the fragments of our own experience; now he preaches a Gospel which surmounts all our experience, and yet which confirms it all, and translates it to a higher ground. Before, the man seemed bound to the car of a stern, hopeless Necessity. He has sown the wind, he must reap the whirlwind; he has destroyed himself. All nature seems to ratify the sentence; at least she cannot reverse it. His own conscience approves it. That conscience owns that the message, “The wages of Sin is Death,” has issued from the highest judgment throne of the Universe. But He Who sits on that judgment throne proclaims that His desires are not satisfied when His creatures suffer from the want of Righteousness. He can only be content when He has made them righteous. He formed men after His own image, in His own likeness. If to be separate from Him is eternal death, to be ever with Him must be Eternal Life. And that union with the Creator is not something strange and impossible for the creature, so that Death is the rule, Life the exception. No! Death always has been, always must be, the breach in God’s order,—Life always has been, must be, the fulfilment of it. The man never has been able to tear himself from God, though he has laboured mightily, desperately, to do so. In a thousand ways he has felt that he was receiving gifts from God, as well as wages of his own deserts. Every sunrise and sunset, his daily food, every kind word, every friendly pressure of the hand, has been a gift, a divine gift, no part of his wages. He is compassed round with gifts; they are pressing upon him continually. He feels that he is amidst gifts which he ought to be receiving through every pore of sense and soul; which ought to be awaking every pulse in him to Life; which ought to be sending a stream of calm, healthy, joyous life through him at every moment. They do not; he has the cold heart of the hireling; he wants to make out his title to what is bestowed upon him; he wants to appropriate it, to shut out others from it. And therefore there is this terrible load upon his spirit, this ever-augmenting load of Death. Unless that can be taken away, the cheerful world is only another part of his torment and curse. He would rather it did not smile upon him, woo him to a joy and sympathy which he cannot render. Unless then there is some other gift better than all these; unless it is the gift of Life itself, of the power of living, not merely a call to Life; unless there is some source from which this gift may always be renewed; unless it is a gift which is nearer to the man Himself than all those things which he has looked upon, and in which he has been unable to delight; unless it is as near to him as the Death which seems so very near; unless it is mightier than that, and is a deliverance from it, the man must still go on receiving his wages; though he may have the tokens that he is the child of a King, and the witness in him that he was meant to be his Father’s steward and almoner.

III. But the gift of God is Eternal Life in Jesus Christ our Lord. This is the better gift which contains that wherein all others are defective; the gift of a well of water, not lying outside of the man, at which he may slake his thirst now and then, but springing up in him; the gift, not of a refreshing influence, but of a Person from Whom the influence comes, and in Whom he may find that perpetually which only visits him occasionally; the gift of One Who delivers the spirit from its own proper burden; Who speaks to those that are heavy-laden with their own selfishness, and bids them rest in Him the meek and lowly; the gift of One Who does not exact joy and sympathy and love, but kindles them and bestows them. Here is the Eternal Life, the only Eternal Life of which St. Paul knows anything. The phantasm of some felicity which a man is to inherit hereafter, as the reward of his services here, could give no rest or comfort to a man toiling and suffering as he was. He wanted One upon Whom he could cast his sorrows, fears, sins, every hour; One from Whom he could always draw a strength and nourishment to sustain him against the continual sentence and pressure of Death. If there was such a One with him then, he could believe that He would be with him always; that neither height nor depth, life nor death, nor things present nor things to come, would separate him from His love. His life must be Eternal Life; it could not be a changeable, inconstant treasure, here to-day and gone to-morrow. But it must be a gift fresh every day; not a property which he could claim as if it had been made over once for all to him. It must be a gift of God, which he would enjoy while he trusted in God, which he lost whenever he fancied that he had earned it. It must be a gift therefore for all as well as himself, one of which he could preach to all, one of which he could say to them, “You have it, however little you may know that you have it. As surely as you carry Sin within you, so surely is He within you Who is the enemy of Sin; as surely as you have Death with you, so surely have you Life with you; as surely as you may possess the one for your wages, so surely may you accept the other for the gift of God.”

I am persuaded, brethren, that this is the Gospel which St. Paul proclaimed whithersoever he went, among Jews, Gentiles, Romans, Barbarians. If it had been any other—if he had spoken of a distant Christ, of a partial Deliverer, of a Christ Who had not effected the salvation of mankind, of a Christ Who had not entirely taken away sin by sacrifice of Himself; of a plan of salvation, not of a personal Saviour, an actual root of Eternal Life to God’s creatures—he would have endured no persecution, established no Churches, left no treasures for the ages to come. Oh! once again may the same word go forth, may it come with the demonstration of the same Spirit! Once again may we be told that the Kingdom of Heaven is not to appear some day with observation, but is among us and in us, that we may submit to it and live in it; that it may subdue all kingdoms to itself! Once again may that good news be heard, in every corner of this land, by all classes of this land, which has power to make them citizens and freemen and workmen of God, not the poor pensioners and tools of Mammon! For, brethren, it is a Gospel, it is good news, which should be heard from these pulpits, not debates and arguments. You sometimes complain that in your law-courts each side is heard fairly, but here one person says what he likes without the danger of refutation. The complaint is reasonable. If we are occupied in proving points, in overthrowing adversaries, our false reasoning ought to be exposed; the adversaries should have the opportunity of defending themselves. And if we are the ministers of the God of Truth, we must wish anything untrue we have said to be detected; if we are ministers of mercy to men, we must wish that they should be able to clear themselves of any charges we bring against them. But we have mistaken our work, if we have supposed it is to establish certain propositions or to put down those who dispute them. Our occupation is a mockery if we are not ambassadors from God, if we are not authorized to proclaim what His Will is, to one man and to all men; what He has done, and is doing, to make that will effectual for one man and for all men. Do you think, if we fulfilled that function honestly, if we spoke out that message boldly, we should, on the strength of some authority of ours, be stifling objections? I tell you we should be raising a host of the ablest, subtlest objections in the heart of every man who listened to us. I tell you that instead of quiet, sleepy acquiescence, the human spirit would be stirred in its very depths to ascertain whether we were uttering lies, or speaking the thing as it is. Whatever we may boast of our authority and commission, however we may try to stop doubts and questionings, when such a word has gone forth there must be internal controversies which no man can silence, internal convulsions to which another voice than ours must speak peace. For the cause is then found to be taken out of our hands; it must be decided elsewhere. What are supposed to be names in a book start into awful realities, mighty powers. The man knows that they are struggling for him. He has to say whether he will be Sin’s hireling or God’s freeman; whether he will have Death as his proper necessary wages, or receive Eternal Life as a gift which belongs to him because he is the child of God and has been called to inherit His own nature and glory.