Proverbs 20:9

A Gospel Question

Pro 20:9

This is a gospel question before the time of the gospel. Every indication of great human pain and unrest, fierce trouble and tumult that will not be calm, is of the greatest consequence as enabling us to form some opinion of the mysteriousness of human nature and the purpose of God in its constitution. It would be a false supposition that all this moral pain, fear, shame, distress, and sense of moral impotence came upon men in consequence of the birth of Christ into the world, who came with a new revelation of human nature, and consequently to suppose that if Christ had not come into the world no such self-humiliation and self-despair would have been experienced. All the great conditions of the human mind we find as distinctly in the Old Testament as in the New: all the questions that sharpen themselves into fierce agonies are in the nature of man and part of the mystery of his constitution. They are not learned from books or derived from external teaching; they rise up in the heart of man to assert a mysterious purpose and an incalculable and solemn destiny. It would be impossible for any man seated at the Lord's table, or seated at the Cross itself, to put a more intensely evangelical question than is put in the text, which occurs actually in the Proverbs "Who can say, I have made my heart clean, I am pure from my sin?"

When the lawyer stood up and tempted Christ, saying: "Master, which is the great commandment in the law? What shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?" Jesus Christ did not make a new answer for the occasion: he threw the mocking inquirer back upon the first ages upon the law, his favourite study, thus showing that all the great questions of the human heart were anticipated in the Old Testament, and that, properly read, the Old Testament is in its own degree as evangelical a book as is the New Covenant written with the precious blood of Christ. Does any man suppose that if we did not come to church we should not be troubled by great and solemn inquiries? Let us first of all do away with that mischievous sophism in our moral thinking. A man has only to look into his own heart, as the enlightened and foremost pagans did, to find in that heart questions that demand a revelation, agonies that can find no healing balm away from God. The inquiry of the text is a purely personal one; it comes to each of us: if any man can answer the question in the affirmative let him do so. We do not find anything in the inquiry that forecloses any novel and peculiar experience on our part, so that if there be a man who can say, "Yes," to the inquiry of the text, he will entitle us to put to him some very searching cross-examination.

Let us examine the ground that is laid down in the text. The solemn, personal, direct, urgent inquiry is this Who can say, I have made my heart clean, I am pure from my sin? Can you? Then why those occasional doubts, and fears, and gloomy forecasts which trouble your conscience? The pure man ought to be lifted above fear, the clean soul ought to have a peculiar, a shadowless joy. Have you that gladness? Then why those nightmares of the soul, why those sudden fears, why those peculiar distresses, why those doubts and scepticisms and questionings why so many indications of unrest and tumult? This ought to suggest that you have not completed the task which you supposed yourself to have accomplished in the heart Can you say yes to the inquiry? Then why those blemishes on your character which are so obvious to every observer? how comes it that you do not impress other people with having done this work, the purification and cleansing in your nature and conscience, and will and purpose how account for this marvellous misconception of your character that prevails on every hand so conceited, so peevish, so fretful, so truthless, so unreliable, so inconstant, so difficult of management, pleasant when you have your own way, disagreeable when you have to take some other course? Why so where is the purity, where is the cleansing, where is the proof? Questions of this kind, in return for calm assertion of purity and cleansing, must considerably impair the integrity and wholeness of the claim. A man cannot have made his heart pure and clean without somebody knowing it. Where is the witness? Would your wife sign an affidavit to testify to your purity and cleansing your husband any two of your sons, any two persons who have known you for the last ten years only would they sign that this man A.B. has cleansed his heart and made his soul pure, so that there is now no flaw in all the integrity of his manhood: he is holy, complete, clean, and ineffably and superlatively true and right? The challenge is laid down, I await until it be taken up. But I cannot wait so long, for life is short I must make more limited stipulations with you. And why with you? Because with myself. How do I know you so well? Because I know myself in and out How did you acquire all this knowledge of human nature? By studying my individuality and nothing else. He who knows himself knows everybody: humanity is one.

Have you made your heart clean and purified yourself from sin? How did you do it? You cannot hesitate to reveal the process if you have accomplished the result. We shall question the reality of the result if you hesitate one moment about revealing the process. Have we not seen little children, who have been set to do a puzzle, suddenly in the midst of the fierce buzz of conversation say, "There it is"? How did you do it? "I will not tell how I did it." But did you do it fairly and honestly? Just in proportion as you decline to say how it was done, we must think that it was done wrongfully, clandestinely, that some liberty was taken with the law of the case, and that there is a blemish in the process. How did you make your heart pure and clean from sin? how did you come to be able to do something which no other man in Biblical history has ever confessed that he did in any sense that God himself would accept and endorse? Where the nitre, the soap? Where the strange chemistry? Abana and Pharpar, and broad rivers and deep, in the east and in the west, have been useless for the removing of this deep ingrained stain of the devil, how did you remove it? In the fifty-first Psalm, David, in the supreme agony of his self-abhorrence and contrition, desires God to be merciful to him, and to cleanse him, and to create in him a clean heart, and to renew within him a right spirit. Here we have David and David's sin renouncing themselves, giving up the problem of self-purification and cleansing, how then do you account for having done something which has been the supreme and impossible miracle of all antecedent human consciousness? We encounter an affirmative declaration with very stubborn doubt.

We must make a very broad distinction between crime and sin, between the overt act and the inner and spiritual motive, purpose, and inclination of the soul. Crime is the vulgarity of sin; crime is the blackguardism of evil nature. We must therefore leave that quarter altogether and go indoors, looking at the secret heart, looking into the mysterious constitution and operation of all the motive powers which impel us in our constant thinking and in our daily action. It is a question of the reins, of the heart, the desire of the soul, the motions of the will, the suggestions of the deep nature. This is not a matter of washing hands, but of washing hearts, and the rivers can supply no water that can get far enough in to touch the black blood of the rebel heart. This is the grand evangelical doctrine without which it would be impossible to understand the priesthood and the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

Suppose a man should say, "Yes, I have made my heart clean, and I am pure from sin." How would such a testimony affect the general judgment: of mankind would it instantly secure implicit and grateful credence? Think a moment. I have heard a man say, "I have made my heart clean, I am pure from my sin," or words which seem to involve the precise meaning of that declaration how did that testimony affect me? I do not want to take any pessimist view of human nature: I am so constituted that I always take the best view of every man until he has proved himself to be unworthy of confidence; I could not live under any other impulse or standard of judgment. When the declaration therefore was made, taking this optimist and brightest view of human nature, what impression did it make upon my mind? Did I at once invite the witness to my confidence, and offer him all the resources of every kind that were at my command? Instantly I encountered his testimony with incredulity, just as one would have done if he had said that by lifting up his shoulders he was preventing the planets from falling from their orbits. How is that testimony regarded in your place of business would you allow the man, upon that testimony, to become your debtor? Why then should you sentimentalise about a possibility which you would ignore in all the practical transactions of life? Why have a sentimental theory and a practical theory? Why be liberal and noble in all regions where you are not touched or implicated, and be thoroughly sceptical and stubborn in doubtfulness in all those lines where you are really summoned to a deep and solemn judgment upon appearances and realities?

Was the man then unanswered? Certainly not. Where then was the blemish? He did not know what he was talking about. He meant crime when he said sin; he meant outrage when he said wrong, evil. He thought of the magistrate, not of God; it was the constable he defied, not the Judge of the whole earth. Understand, therefore, that within a given region man may be honourable and upright and clean and pure. Relatively, socially, no one may be able to say one word against him. That proves nothing whatever as to his interior and spiritual condition before God. How can such a man be brought to a clear understanding of the realities of things? By talking? Never. By hearing profound and eloquent exposition of evangelical truth? You might as well speak to him in an unknown tongue. How will he be brought to a right standpoint? By scourging, by sorrow by bereavement, pain, loss, by earthquakes that shall make the fabric of his prosperity and his confidence tremble. Meet him coming back with slow and dragging step from his one child's grave, and then he will have ears to hear what the Spirit saith to all mankind. Meet him sitting on the ruins of his prosperity, unable with palsied hands to put one stone on the top of another, and then with paralysed lips he may try to tell what a fool he was when he thought himself good and true and clean. Not the evangelical sermon but the evangelical Providence will take hold of that man, and wring him till he cry out, "I abhor myself in dust and ashes." When such sorrow overtakes a man it is like morning falling upon a traveller: it is not darkness, it is light; it is not imprisonment, it is deliverance; it is not limitation, it is an expansion and enfranchisement in divine rulership and dominion and sacred, holy hope. So when the Providence darkens around us, it is a cloud full of bright stars and suns. Let the outer enclosure fall off, and the shining orb will beam and burn upon our eyes in ample, genial summer.

There is a tremendous responsibility in returning an affirmative answer to the inquiry of the text. The nature and extent of that responsibility throws immeasurable doubt upon an audacious and profane affirmative. If a man were to say, "Yes, I have made my heart clean, and am pure from my sin," the first thing he would do would be to contradict the whole testimony of Scripture. Nowhere in the Bible is it allowed that any man can purify his own nature. Everywhere in the Scriptures the exact contrary is explicitly and emphatically laid down. We ought not to forego the testimony of Scripture lightly upon the easy affirmation of a man who in all probability has not taken into consideration the full signification of the terms which he employs when he declares himself pure and clean.

The next thing he does is to supersede the work of Christ. The declaration of the gospel is that the blood of Christ cleanseth from all sin; without shedding of blood there is no remission. The gospel declaration is that "if we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." The evangelical statement is, "Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration and the renewing of the Holy Ghost." He therefore undertakes a very grave responsibility who testifies that without Christ he has solved the problem of purity and self-cleansing.

The next thing he does is to withdraw himself from all the cleansing, purifying agencies which constitute the redeeming ministry of the universe. He commits the sin against the Holy Ghost the unpardonable sin. Why unpardonable? Because he comes out of the region within which the Holy Ghost operates. Were it possible for an owner of many fields to withdraw one of them from the influence of the sun, and the dew, and the living air, he would commit the unpardonable sin in that department of action. That is the unpardonable sin getting away from, cutting the connection with, all spiritual agency, all redeeming power, all the mediatorial scheme of Christ, involving and including his life, his doctrine, his example, his atoning sacrificial death, his divine resurrection, his priestly intercession, and his great gift of the ever-pleading, ever-living, ever-renewing Holy Ghost.

Seeing then that so much responsibility would be incurred by returning an affirmative reply to the text, who will dare say Yes? Let God be true and every man a liar. Blessed are those who know the power and the painfulness of conviction of sin. Until we know what sin is we cannot understand the meaning of grace. Only he who has been plagued as with the torment of fire till his tongue, a blistered tongue, has been unable to ask for the one drop of water that would cool its fever and renew the sufferer's hope only those who have known the hopelessness of that agony are prepared for the Cross, the Christ, the Blood, the Gospel.

Are we trifling with little external terms and neglecting inner and spiritual realities? Are we debating etymologies when sin is drinking our blood, and leaving us withered, desiccated, at the Creator's feet? Begin to be wise by beginning to be self-renouncing. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. There is no heaven along the line of self-hope, there is no pardon in the direction of self-trust. Could we see a man with condemnation written upon his own brow with his own hand, and the same word written upon his heart, upon his will, upon his understanding, upon his imagination could we see a man who has written himself unworthy of God's light and God's love, we should see a soul in the right direction for receiving and appreciating the infinite gospel of the eternal God. May he who can give the hell of conviction bless us with the heaven of reconciliation!

Prayer

Almighty God, every tone of hope in thy blessed word we praise thee, for our hearts are much cast down, and are in great pain and fear from time to time, so that we need some word from thy holy Book to touch our life in its shame, and to bring back the hope which we have sinned away. Thy word is full of light, the entrance of thy word giveth life to the heart. We have lost our first estate, and are no longer upright before God; we have sought out many inventions, every one of which has proved a deceit and a lie, so that we, who began in our own sagacity to give ourselves life, have utterly failed to do anything but aggravate our degradation and our shame. We come to the living for life, to the sun for light, to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ for new creation, new manhood, new hope, for the purity which in itself is immortal, for the rest which is deep as the peace of God, and coming so, even along the line of thine own sweet welcome, thou wilt not say to our hearts one word to increase their discouragement or their distress. We live in thy Son, who died for us; we live by faith on the Son of God; we live, yet not we, but Christ liveth in us, and the life which we now live in the flesh is a life of faith, a mystery that is full of light a wondrous enjoyment beyond the expression of words. For every hope of immortality we bless the Lord alone. He made us, and not we ourselves, and it hath pleased him to make us in his own image and likeness. We mourn our sin, for therein have we found the truth of thy word, "In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." The wages of sin is death; the soul that sinneth it shall die; we are all dead men; before the Lord we are as if we had never been, and thou, blessed Christ, Eternal Son of the Eternal Father, art come as the Resurrection and the Life to bring life and immortality to light, so that in thee we live again, and in thee we cannot die. This day we keep holy festival; we take the Bread and the Cup, which typify the body and the blood of Jesus Christ. We need such memories; we bless thee for such tokens of recollection and such simple helps on the wilderness way. These things remind us of Christ's presence here and Christ's great ministry. We would eat and drink after examination of our souls in the sight of God not that we may find no sin there, but that we may find an earnest and simple desire that our sin may be washed away and our souls be thoroughly cleansed. We come before this table of memorial, not as perfect men, but as souls that trust in Christ, that renounce themselves and their sins, that look away from their own strength unto the omnipotence of the loving Saviour, as men who, having tried sin and found it wanting, come to Christ the living Lord, and cast themselves upon his finished work, as men who do not deserve to be pardoned, and who yet, by the grace of God, may be forgiven. Inasmuch as we come before thee in living God, may our fire be kindled from the fire of the altar. Bless us in business, where it is almost impossible to be blessed, where lies are profits, where falsehood is canonized. Deliver us from double speech, from double meaning, from all manner of duplicity; may we be sincere, transparent, knowing that it is more needful for us to be good than that we should live. The Lord be with those for whom we ought to pray in special tenderness: be with the bereaved in their loneliness oh, so cold, so cold! Be with those who are in great sorrow because of imminent calamity; thou knowest the power of the imagination, thou knowest how our enemy can operate upon our fancy and make great calamities out of small appearances; remember our frame, remember we are dust. Be with all the little children; they know not upon what scene they have come, they think of flowers and play and music and dance and revel of innocence; they know not that they are already in the enemy's land: to thy keeping we commend them; they will not be lost if thou canst save them, thou Shepherd of the universe. Come out from thy dwelling-place, O thou that inhabitest eternity, and seek us, and find us, and save us. We pray at the Cross, for there alone may men pray; we behold the dying Saviour; we pray at the open grave where the angels say concerning our loved One, He is not here, he is risen; yea, we come to his seat of intercession and there pray, knowing that he will take up our supplication into his own great pleading and make it prevalent before the throne. The Lord help us, the Lord carry our burdens himself awhile, the Lord lead us, through many a dark place, into the land of the morning. Amen.