Leviticus 6:1-12

Practical Religion

Lev 6:1-7

A curious combination of words is this in the second verse "... a trespass against the Lord, and lie unto his neighbour." What have the terms "Lord" and "neighbour" to do with one another? Have we not partitioned off society into special and unrelated departments? Who shall venture to throw down the lines which we have set up and to make one common society of earth and heaven? Already here is a forth-shadowing of the two commandments on which hang all the law and the prophets namely: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God... and thy neighbour as thyself." There has always been some vital connection between "Lord" and "neighbour"; how is this? Do we not pass too roughly over such conjunctions, taking them as mere matters of course a jingling of words, hiding no music, modifying no eternity of power and right? We are bungling readers at the best; we do not extract from the word its root, and life, and soul. May not that man sin against his neighbour, and yet say his prayers as if nothing had been done to violate the sanctity of upper and spiritual relations? May not a man kneel upon his overthrown neighbour, and in that attitude of oppression and triumph plead with the complacent heavens? Verily, the Bible is a book which takes part with the "neighbour"; it is a chivalrous revelation. To have come from heaven it comes with wondrous earthly sympathy and sense of right and rule of judgment. From this point of view the book may be inspired! When we sin against our neighbour, we sin against God; when we remove the ancient landmark, we violate the altar; when we tell lies to society, we smite heaven with blasphemy. This is the spirit of the book. Such spirit makes us strong, leads out our love in adoration towards the book as towards a living protector, and friend, and guide. Were it full of ghosts a great theatre of possible spiritual presences, having no relation to our life except to alarm it, we might flee away in terror and leave it to men who have skill in communing with ghostly presences; but it takes care of the flock in the field, it will not allow an ancient hedge to be taken down without a just equivalent being rendered, it will not have a bird's little nest torn to pieces without protest and judgment; it is a domestic book: it looks after the house-fire and the house-table and all things belonging to our little daily life; it has an infinite sky, but, blessed be God, it is also a world about the size of a house a house watched with the eyes of love. A book that cares so much for "neighbours" is a book which by so much arrests the moral attention and may reward the moral confidence of mankind. Violence, deceit, false-swearing, why these are the sins of to-day. There is nothing original in sinning. The old vulgarity, and the old refinement upon it, we find from the beginning. Consider the words, for there is a philosophy in their very order: "violence," "deceit," "perjury." You cannot invert that order without violating the philosophy of true development and evolution. There is an inspiration of order as well as of substance, and that inspiration is written here and proved by the fullest and happiest verification. We all begin with "violence." The first man begins branch-breaking and fruit-stealing. He tells no lie, he has no deep plot against the Eternal: he puts out his hand and wrenches the branch, and the crash of that wood, hitherto untouched, sends pain through all the garden. The next man kills his enemy. The world's sin began with violence; by-and-by violent men see that there is another way of accomplishing the purpose of the evil heart, so, without smiting and fire-kindling and rudeness, they begin to conspire and plot, and attach new meanings to words, and infuse unsuspected colours into the speech of commerce as between man and man: so language becomes manifold instead of simple: to the speaker it means one thing, to the hearer it means another thing, though the terms are the common property of the nation. After "deceit" comes the profanation of holy terms the sin against what may be termed the Holy Ghost of speech. We are, therefore, no further than this Old Testament text to-day; some are committing violence, some are plotting deceitful schemes and conspiracies, and others are standing up and insulting the spirit of truth lying not unto men, but unto God. There you have the range of the devil's power: he oscillates from violence to perjury, touching the intermediate point of deceit. There is no genius in such an enemy; he is not fertile in invention; subjected to honest analysis he is to be laid out plainly on the world's table in three parts, violence, deceit, perjury; and all the sin that can be committed can be brought under these three categories or one of them. And all this may be done away by offering to the priest "a ram without blemish out of the flock"! Bring the "ram" and all will be well! Steal the forbidden fruit, kill the hated Abel, swear with larger boldness than the audacity of Ananias and Sapphira, and when you are done, see to it that you pick out the right "ram," offer it to the pontiff, let him slay it, and all will be well! That is an easy way out of difficulty! It is; but it is not the way of the Bible. Many persons who think they have escaped the Jewish ritual suppose they have only to see the priest, whisper the tale into his ear, furnish their "ram," and go home released and sanctified. If they imagine a delusion so deep and aggravated in its infatuation, then they have indeed escaped Leviticus and the whole Pentateuch, and every line of the Gospels and the Epistles the whole canon of revelation. Mistakes are made about this matter which are of vital consequence. We have given the enemy occasion to mock us a good deal in some of these applications; we have so acted as to leave upon the enemy the impression that we can obliterate a whole week's work of violence, deceit and perjury by going to church on Sunday especially if we are so learned in ancient law as to be quite sure that we have escaped the ancient ritual and now stand in the liberty of wantonness and in the blasphemy of licentiousness. There is to be no Sunday catharism washing by the priest or washing by the sinner's own hand until some thing else has been done. What was the ancient law? The offender was to restore that which was taken away by violence, or that about which deceit was practised, or that wherein perjury was committed. That is the first step in the process. The whole thing in controversy must be replaced. Now may the man pray? No. There is no quid pro quo in morals. You cannot balance a crime by an apology; and you cannot drive iron into wood and extract it without leaving a wound behind. Extraction is not enough, restoration is not sufficient; after the full quantity has been restored, the man is to add twenty per cent to it. If he has robbed his employer of one hundred pounds, he must replace the hundred pounds, and he must add twenty pounds to it, then he may go to church! What a blessed thing it would be for some men if they could have escaped Leviticus! for those men who sneer at the Old Testament as at an obsolete document, made yellow by time, good enough in its day but outworn by the magazines of the hour. You cannot outlive morality, moral judgment, righteousness. There is no back door through what is called natural law by which we can escape the eternal demand and claim of truth. After restoration and the addition of the fifth part thereto, the man was to go and see the pontiff of Israel and arrange about the offering of the ram. The process was not complete until the ram had been offered. We do not sin downward only, we sin upward as well. Every social offence has a religious bearing; every wrong done in the marketplace reports itself in heaven. Thus life is solemn: actions have rebounds, and throbs, and issues, often incalculable, often infinite. The criminal has a hard life of it in the Bible. Some men have escaped the Bible; that is the reason they treat one another so violently, or with so fine a deceit, or with so flat a perjury. The moral tone of the Bible begets confidence. The book wants things to be foursquare, real, solid. A book with such a claim cannot be displaced by the most elaborate argument that founds itself upon smoke and rises into the dignity of evaporation. The Bible will have what is right: therefore, the Bible may be inspired! No such morality have I met in any other book accessible to me. Bible morality is critical, minute, detailed, most critical and exacting. There is no rough and ready method of bringing things to temporary equipoise. Nothing is settled until the root is made right, the fountain is purified, restoration is completed, compensation is effected, and prayer is said over the blood that atones.

Mark the process of repentance as well as the process of sin. There is a philosophy in the one as certainly as there is in the other. How was the offender to begin? He was to begin at the moral point. Preachers may be too much afraid of preaching in this tone, because they are afraid of being stigmatised by epithets that have nothing in them but the spite of their own utterers and mean inventors. We must not be afraid of preaching works and laws and rights. We do not honour the Book by such fear; we misinterpret its spirit and misapply its claim. Begin with the moral and work towards the spiritual restore, compensate, pray. No doubt it would suit some conditions of human nature to begin at the other end, because something might occur in the reverse process to prevent the completion of the whole. Hear not those priests though their name be Aaron who tell you to begin in metaphysical regions and work your way downwards, little by little, until you begin to bring back the property you stole. Restore the property before you see the high-priest, and give a fifth part of that which is taken back to the owner of that which was lost. Having done what is possible to humanity, begin the upper movement, and close the process with a look towards God. Let us have no whining, no canting, no sentimentality; let us rebuke the enemy wherein he thinks we are fanatics and can pray ourselves out of duties, bank ruptcies, and moral obligations. Is this preaching morality? I shall be thankful if that impression be made, for it is the one impression I wish to stamp upon the judgment and conscience of all men. This offers opportunities to every one immediately. It is not to be left to the offender first to obtain exactly clear views of the constitution of the Godhead before he begins to repay the man he has robbed. Believe me, we are not thus circumstanced that we have to fix upon a definite theory of the atonement for even the atonement has been debased into a theory until we begin to undo that which we have done amiss. We can restore stolen property: we can add to it a fifth part thereof or more, we may double it; and having done so, we must then ask pardon. Any Iscariot can throw back the thirty pieces of silver; but the only end of such villainy is to be hanged, and to die an unpitied death. We are not at liberty, as Christians, to put down upon a man's threshold the money we stole, or the property we abstracted, and to run away drying our lips and lifting up our eyes to heaven and saying "All is now well!" We have not lied unto man only, we have lied unto God; we have wounded the Spirit of truth; we have outraged the harmony of heaven. We have a great religious task now to achieve and accomplish. A book insisting upon such regulations will hold its own when all the insects that have gathered upon it to eat it up have fallen away into forgetfulness. All wronged men should revere the Bible; it takes up their case; it insists upon justice being done to them, and upon justice blossoming into restoration, and restoration being crowned with prayer, atonement, and reconciliation. Bad men should dread the Bible; they have not a friend in any one of its pages; not one of its complete proverbs can they quote in vindication of evil spirit or of evil action. Men anxious about social regeneration and harmony should go to the Bible for law, precept and guidance. What is this but Christianity anticipated? Moses and the Lamb are at one here as otherwhere and everywhere. Said Christ "Think not I am come to destroy.... I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil." Did Christ say anything about evil and the method of treating that evil before religious postures were assumed or oblations were attempted? He did. What did he say? He said, in spirit, exactly what Moses said. He saw men coming to the altar about to offer their gifts and to say their prayers, and he stopped them on the road and said to them "How stands it with you and your neighbour?" "My neighbour?" "Yes. Has thy brother aught against thee? Is there a feeling of hostility in thy heart against thy brother thy brother-man? If there is, do not go to the altar; you can do nothing there, except dishonour the very stones of which it is built. First go and be reconciled to thy brother make human and social relations right, begin at the visible point, make an impression upon the parties immediately concerned and through them upon observers, then go and offer thy gift." Can we part with a book of which this is the moral tone! Here is a lesson for inquirers into the inspiration and authority of Holy Scripture. We cannot all begin at the uppermost points; many of us cannot seize recondite matters and adjust and determine them by adequate scholarship and information; but we can all begin our inquiry by asking, What is the moral tone of the book? What does it want to be at in its actual issue? It wants to reconcile man with man, to have restoration made where injury has been done; it would bring every man on his knees to the offended person saying "I have brought back that which I took away; I restore fourfold; pity me, forgive me, stoop over me and lift me up from this proper humiliation." Does the book breathe a spirit of that kind? If so, no devil wrote it; no bad man ever inspired it; no clique of wrongdoers ever got up so complete a conspiracy. It would have father and mother honoured it would have the old folks at home made young again every day by the action of filial obedience, filial sympathy and filial help; it would set aside one day for rest every week sweet holy day: as far as possible, everything should stand still and rest awhile, taking its breath again, and looking the great look that takes in horizons and skies, constellations and thrones and powers; it would have honesty the law of life; it would have every loaf of pure flour without any leaven of untruthfulness, sharp practice, or evil skill in outwitting men. Is that the moral tone of the book? If so, I will not now trouble myself (the young inquirer may say) by questions I cannot now handle and perhaps may never be able to handle, but seeing that the book comes with such assertions of right and such claims, and insists upon them, and will in no sense be eluded, I will begin at that point, who knows but I may, step by step, go into the interior of the holy temple and see the inner lights and touch the inner mysteries? That is the right resolve; the issue of it will be that you will discover that the Sacred Book is one one as the many-coloured and resplendent sky.