Twenty-second Sunday after Trinity
October 31, 1858
“By mercy and truth iniquity is purged: and by the fear of the Lord men depart from evil.”—Proverbs xvi. 6.
The passage: By mercy and truth wrongdoing is purged away, and by the fear of the Lord people turn from evil.
These few words suggest many opposing theories in law, education, and theology. One doctrine we all know well today: if you want to reform criminals, use mercy, since every other method has been tried and failed. Those who think this an all-sufficient rule for convicted wrongdoers usually extend it to disciplining children, believing that severity aggravates the evil it tries to cure. The same habit of mind arrives, without any effort of logic, at a third conclusion: that God’s character should be presented to men as pure, unmixed mercy. Only so, they say, can a sinner’s hard heart be melted and his iniquity purged.
The opposite temper is almost as common, either as a reaction against this or as the thing that provoked it. “Make criminals and children feel that there is a stern law that executes itself and does not lose its power because they choose to trifle with it. That may bring the actual offender to reason, and it is the only method likely to deter others. It teaches the young to see transgression as something that brings detection and shame. It forms strong men, not soft and puny ones, as the other system does.” Those who give these qualities the highest throne on earth can see in the Majesty of Heaven only fixed, eternal Justice and Right. The sense of these, they think, purges iniquity if anything can.
As we think of the first clause of the text, so we will think of the second. One class says: “The Old Dispensation taught the fear of the Lord; the principle of the New is love of Him. Men may depart from evil out of fear, but they soon return to it. Let them delight in Him who forbids evil, and they will renounce it forever.” The opposite school answers: “Vain expectation, contradicted by all experience! What becomes of mere feeling, affection, gratitude, and sympathy when a strong motive meets the heart, backed by subtle arguments for the understanding? What you trusted gives way, and often joins the attacker. The hope of forgiveness you have taken such care to encourage is a standing temptation to take the risk. The tender, sensitive spirit your gentle treatment has created is the most prone to dangerous attractions. Fortify it with fear and let it tremble to do wrong, or you will not keep it from falling. Awaken its fears when it has fallen, or it will never depart from evil.”
These arguments are very perplexing in practice. The most practical people find, in themselves or in their experience, that neither school can be followed without reservation. But their attempts to follow both, or to find a compromise, are seldom successful. A criminal law that is partly severe and partly lenient loses both the security of rules and the grace of gentleness. The harm done by an education that is rigid today and relaxed tomorrow is proverbial. All wise people say that unvarying cruelty, or the most resolute indulgence, is less destructive of body and soul. And I dare not hide my conviction, brethren, that the theology behind these experiments, which secretly or openly justifies them, is even more terrible in principle and effect. Popular and scholastic writing often puts forward a conflict in the Divine Mind between Justice and Mercy, and a scheme by which they are reconciled. I am sure good and wise men would have found this too revolting for their consciences if they had remembered Whom they were daring to speak of. In prayer or thanksgiving they could not have borne such a conception of the Being whose name is holy and whose nature is one. But rhetoric and technical phrases can put a thick veil between the heart and its object. While we are busy with them we may have no sense of standing in a Divine presence, and may say of Him who inhabits eternity things we would resent as mean if said of a fellow-creature we cared for. By a Mercy and Truth torn apart and set against each other, iniquity is not purged, and the fear that such a picture of God produces will not make men depart from evil.
Solomon spoke in the spirit of the Old Testament, yet his words show no sense of contradiction between these two qualities and no attempt to adjust them to each other. He assumes they work together and that neither can exist without the other. He does not say that Truth must be tempered with Mercy, or that Mercy must not go too far lest it interfere with Truth. He does not say that Mercy pleads for the guilty man Truth condemns, or that Truth demands compensation for its concessions to Mercy. He says simply, “By Mercy and Truth iniquity is purged.” Both are equally enemies of iniquity, equally interested in destroying it, and equally interested in delivering the creature it torments.
This was surely the only view that could satisfy a Jew who believed in the God of Abraham. He had been taught from infancy that the Lord of Heaven and Earth revealed Himself to his fathers as the God of Righteousness and Truth. They were to trust in that righteousness and truth and flee to it as a refuge in every trouble. That Truth was an unfathomable depth, but it was their only security. The temptation to honour gods less righteous and less true was strong. The surrounding heathen worshipped such gods, and all the evil tendencies in the Israelites inclined them to join in. They fell into it and found themselves degraded and enslaved. What escape had they? The Being they had forgotten was what He had always been. His Mercy and Truth were fixed like the hills, or like the firmament over their heads. When they were tired of their own inventions, and every reed they leaned on had pierced their hands, the memory of Him came back. There had been a time when the thought of One so unlike themselves was terrible, and they had fled to creatures they could judge by their own standard, images of their own good and evil. In their despondency and weakness it became their only comfort that there was One unlike themselves, not changeable and capricious as they were. They cried to Him, and He heard and delivered them. He was merciful and forgave their transgressions. The grace was wonderful and wholly undeserved, and until they felt that, they did not know what it meant. It opened depths in the Divine character they had known nothing of, or only by hearsay. But was the goodness strange, or more perplexing, because it came from a perfectly Righteous Being? Surely not. They felt that only a perfectly Righteous Being could be perfectly merciful. To be unmerciful, hard-hearted, and selfish was a chief part of their own unrighteousness and falsehood. Why, but because they had departed from that blessed Image after which they were formed, in which Mercy and Truth are necessarily and eternally united?
In the Psalms we see that God’s Righteousness and Truth are the refuge holy men run to from enemies within as well as without, from the sins crushing their spirits as much as from the Philistines or Ammonites threatening their bodies. They beg for Mercy, but from One they believe is willing to give it because He is Righteous. The Mercy they beg for is deliverance from unrighteousness, from lying lips and a deceitful tongue. They dare not cherish a view of Mercy that makes it indulgence of sin, or tolerance of falsehood in themselves or others. That view was often presented to them, but to yield to it is to depart from God. It is one of the diseases and enemies they want Him to deliver them from, one of the iniquities purged by His Mercy and Truth. In the same way, they knew the notion of Truth or Justice that confounds it with power or sovereignty, supposing its aim is to exact so much vengeance for so much wrong, and that it must have an equivalent for any delay in carrying out its sentences. They knew it from the religion of the heathen, and knew it because their evil hearts sympathized with it. But when they turned to their true King, the God of Truth without iniquity, they trusted Him to abolish those dark idols of their fancy and to teach them to sanctify Him in their hearts and make Him their fear and dread.
Yes, their fear and dread. It is true, as has been said, that the Old Testament teaches that the fear of God is the beginning and end of wisdom, and that by it a man departs from evil. But holy men gave that name to the fear of God, not to that miserable substitute, the fear of punishment. It was fear of the Righteous and Merciful Lord, not of some false being, a creature of their own thoughts clothed with their own evil qualities. Such creatures they were not to fear, but to fight continually against the fear of them. The more gracious and blessed their Creator and Lord, the more they were to cultivate the fear of Him. Superstition and idolatry end in universal fear, but they begin with an effort to get rid of fear. A man does not like the feeling of an Invisible Presence near him night and day, spying out his ways and looking into his heart. He cannot bear the claim such a Being makes on his awe, and he longs to trifle. If he can have gods measurable by his conceptions and approachable by his senses, he can trifle even in worship. He knows these gods are beneath him, and he takes his revenge for the effort of honouring them by gross familiarity, sometimes by open contempt. Whatever fear he has of beings whose characters he has brought down to his own level, who are mainly his patrons and helpers, puts him under no necessity of departing from evil and has no power to withdraw him from it.
I have spoken of the Old Dispensation. Is everything changed in the New, as we are sometimes told? Jesus said, “He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father.” Did anyone see in Him the warfare of Truth with Mercy that we have so rashly dreamed of in the eternal Mind? There was a warfare throughout His life on earth, with foes seen and unseen: Scribes and Pharisees, the rulers of the darkness of this world, spiritual wickedness in high places. But it was the warfare of Truth and Mercy against untruth and hardness of heart. These were united in all who set themselves against His words and acts, and the perfect harmony of their opposites was revealed in Him. He showed that Mercy and Truth are divided only by the evil that seeks to destroy both, and that iniquity is purged by their perfect union. Before that manifestation, the battle of attributes that our weakness and sin produce in us could be transferred to God. Holy men were raised by God’s teaching out of that temptation, and the experience of division in themselves forced them to demand unity in Him. But when they saw in a human face the glory of the Only Begotten of the Father, a glory full of Grace and Truth, the mist cleared from their eyes. Once the subject nature reflected the absolute Nature, all was calm, peace, and concentrated good. And it was seen that the Son of God became the Son of Man so that men might receive the uniting Spirit of God, so that the strife of opposing feelings and tempers might be stilled in them, and so that they might show to their fellow-men, in word and act, that Mercy and Truth which together, and not apart, purge iniquity.
But are we not taught that the Sacrifice of Christ purges iniquity? Yes, brethren, but we are not taught, in the Bible at least, that it was a sacrifice to one attribute to bring it into agreement with another. We are taught that it was the sacrifice of a Son to a Father, whose Will He perfectly delighted to do. That Will, being true and merciful, was perfectly manifested in the act of self-sacrifice. It was the only act that could purge the sin of self-will, which is the sin of the world, reconcile the world to God, and bring the rebellious will back under His gracious government. The iniquity of our race and of each of its members is purged by the Mercy and Truth of the Father, seeking creatures who had become hateful and false because they had stopped trusting Him and made gods like themselves. It is purged by the Mercy and Truth of the Son, uniting Himself to those creatures in all their misery and death to raise them to share His life. And it is purged by the Mercy and Truth of the Spirit, stirring men’s wills to bear the fruit of merciful and true works and so be richly rewarded with the knowledge of Him.
And by the fear of this great and holy Name men depart from evil. It is rightly said that mere belief in One all-pitiful to infirmities and sins is not enough to keep men from evil or raise them out of it. It is also rightly said that dread of an unbending Lawgiver, pursuing evil with swift and inevitable punishment, is not enough either. The despair of the second conclusion has the same result as the ease of the first. Reckless, unclean living is as much an escape from the bondage of terror as it is encouraged by the expectation of endless indulgence. But the fear of One in whom all Mercy and Truth dwell, separation from whom is separation from Mercy and Truth, from whom comes restoration as well as life, and who seeks to deliver us from the misery in us that we may possess the treasures in Him — this fear, once it is in the heart and penetrates the whole man, will keep us from every evil way. We should never fancy that the revelation of God in the New Testament has made this fear obsolete or unsuitable to us. The Name uttered there is the Name of absolute, eternal Truth and Love, and so it should make us tremble more than any heard in the old time. An Israelite might break through the bounds of Sinai and mock its thunders with less danger to his moral being than a Christian runs by continually receiving the pledges of Christ’s Redemption and fellowship with man while cultivating in himself every temper Christ came to redeem us from, the mind most contrary to His.
Yes, brethren, this is the awfulness of our position. It is our moral being that is at stake. What threatens us is the second death of all trust, affection, and sincerity, or, in Solomon’s words, of Mercy and Truth, in ourselves and in the world. This death, to which all other punishments are nothing, may be stealing upon us amid outward respectability, under the shadow of religious ordinances, while our profession looks fairest to ourselves and to the world. Suppose any of us discovers that it is so: that the life within has been perishing, and that we have grown less merciful and less true while using seemly phrases and punctually doing what are called religious duties. If that fearful discovery comes, let us beware how we use it. First, let us not try to persuade ourselves we must be mistaken and that our consciences have been too harsh. God is greater than our hearts and knows all things, and He is telling us these secrets. Next, let us not try by any artificial method to cultivate the fear we have lacked, or to produce an affected reverence for the outward thing or shrine when reverence for the inner Presence has gone. That will make us more false, and probably more unmerciful, since we will comfort ourselves by condemning those we suppose less devout than we are. Lastly, let us not cast off God’s ordinances as if they had caused our insincerity. They have been true; we have been liars. They have been saying to us: “He who is Truth and Mercy has come near you, has pardoned you and made peace with you. He would have given you His Mercy and Truth, that you might show the image of both in your dealings with men. If in your shame and confusion you now turn to Him, owning that you have no such qualities of your own and never can have them without Him, He will show you that He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. His Mercy and Truth still have power to purge iniquity, and He can give you the Fear by which men depart from evil.”