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If we sin it is our fault, our own fault, our own most grievous fault. There can be no hiding. It is all there in the first few chapters of Genesis. The serpent deceives Eve, and Eve tempts Adam and the guilty creatures hide from God. But they cannot hide—“Adam where art thou?” And they cannot make excuses—Adam blames Eve, and Eve blames the serpent, when in fact they know, and God knows, they are all guilty together.
The Christian cannot say God doesn’t care. “God will forgive me, that’s his job,” says the skeptic. But you can’t say that. That is another thing the Bible will not allow you to say for behind the other two points lies most essential of all the fact that sin is a personal offense against God, and that its awful consequence is that it separates people from God. That is written with dreadful clarity in the first story of the Bible, to which I have already alluded. After their sin, Adam and Eve are driven out of the garden of God, and the whirling sword them away; they are outside. Nothing but righteousness will do with God. There is no way to get around his requirements. Not even the most magnificent show of religion will do. Shall I offer hundreds of animal sacrifices when only one is required? Shall I offer a vat of oil, when a pint will do? Shall I make the most costly sacrifice of all, my first born child? “No, he has shown you of human being what is good. . .”
The negative advantage of having the Bible, of belonging to the people of God is that it puts us in the one place where we can hear and understand the Gospel. It shows us up as sinners, persons without excuse, at whom the wrath of God is directed, who can say only, “God be merciful to me, a sinner.” And this leads us to the positive advantage of the Bible.
THE POSITIVE ADVANTAGE OF THE BIBLE
This is that the Bible having shut us up away from every hopeless way of escape, reduced us to despair, offers to us the one way of hope. It points us to Christ. There is not time to go into all that that implies. I shall quickly mention three hard facts before coming to the application.
1. God means that the gulf created between himself and humankind by sin should be bridged. That is one meaning of the sacrificial system of the Old Testament. It is true that the sacrifices couldn’t take away sin, but as Hebrews says they kept the sense of sin alive and more—they kept alive the hope that something more effective could be done. Why should God mock us with a slaughtered lamb if there is not a Lamb of God to bear away the sins of the world? The Bible never minimizes the gravity of sin, but it never suggests it is too big for God to handle.
2. Not only so, God himself takes the initiative in dealing with the problem. The Bible itself is not flotsam and jetsam thrust up from the surge of busy human life. It does not come up from beneath, it comes down from above. Even the punishment of the first sinners is matched with the promise of grace. Again and again God intervenes in mercy.
3. And this points forward to the assurance that in the end God will bridge the gulf. And this is where the New Testament begins and this is what the New Testament means. So that the advantage of being a Church member, of belonging to the people of God, is not that we are exempt the pains and sorrows, the temptations and sins of other people, but that we are in the place where God acts, we are able to hear when God speaks. We are under no illusions about ourselves, and therefore we can learn the truth about God. But beware: the advantage consists in nothing else. Not in our influence or tradition, not in our experience or virtues, but only in this that we are humbled before God, humbled and humiliated as no other people can be, and there and then we can hear the astounding word of his liberating grace.
•
“JUSTIFICATION”—Romans 3.24
[Preached twenty-seven times from 2/9/55 at Hatfield College to 11/5/00 at Cassop]
I am going to preach about justification. And I will say at once, that I know that of all the obscure technicalities of theological jargon, the word “justification” is the worst. “Surely,” you may say, “it was in process of being expelled from the language of sermons in 1904, not to speak of 1954. It is at least three syllables too long, and Latin words ending in –atio have nothing to do with the simplicity of Christ.” Well, I will not contend for the word. If you can find another that better expresses the same thing, I will gratefully use it. But for the thing itself I will contend.
Luther, and the other reformers, spoke of justification by faith as the article of faith by which the Church stands or falls; and in saying so, they were true expositors of the Bible, and good theologians. You cannot have Christianity without justification. And I will add, whether or not this is relevant to a sermon, you must decide, that to me justification has made more real difference than any other thing I have ever discovered, in theology or anything else. There is only one place to begin. We must talk about judgment.
JUDGMENT
Perhaps this is to go from bad to worse, but not if you will give the matter five minutes thought. Judgment may not be a popular theme, but it is not for that reason a false or an unprofitable one. There are several ways in which you can look at the matter. Take it first simply on the level of common sense. What does a manufacturer do with the goods he produces? At this point I sat back to think of a suitable illustration, and kindly enough, a train began to steam out of Durham station. That is sufficient. Take a railway engine. Before it is allowed on the line, the boiler is tested for steam pressure, the brakes are tested, the strength of the steel in the wheels and the body work is tested. If you make anything, you test it before you put it into use, and you keep on testing to see if its fit to do its job safely and efficiently.
Or, to take a different illustration, I spend most of my time teaching. Now a university doesn’t exist for the sake of examinations, but examinations it must have. You can lecture and discuss for a time, but in the end you have to say—“What have these young men and women made of it all? What have they taken in?” Now if God is the Creator, and he is also the Educator of humankind, it is not unreasonable that at some time or other, he should, as it were, stops the processes of creation and education and say—“How are the creatures getting on? Are they doing what I made them for? Are they learning what I am teaching?” That is judgment.
Look at it another way. In the earliest days of the Old Testament, Abraham puts the question—“Shall not the judge of all the earth do right?” That is, if there is a city with a mix-up of good and bad people in it, will God treat them all alike? Will he blast them all with the indiscriminating destructiveness of an atomic bomb? No, say the Old Testament. God is the judge of the whole earth, and because he is, he can be relied on to behave with justice. There may be much beyond the righteous dealing of God, but the Old Testament is quite sure that you can build on that as a foundation.
But it is not the Old Testament only, the New Testament also, Jesus himself, teaches the judgment of God. The famous picture of the sheep and the goats is a New Testament picture. It is of course true that there will (according to the New Testament) be a good many surprises in the judgment, some will be astonished to find themselves in white wooly coats, and others astounded at the horns they sprout. The Queen of the South, who had wit and humility enough to listen to Solomon will come off better than the preachers and professors of theology who were too wise and self-satisfied to listen to Jesus. But—the judgment is there. Jesus does not soften the judgment, he makes it more stringent. You know the old saying, he says, “thou shalt not murder, and whoever shall commit murder shall be liable to the judgment, but I tell you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be liable to the judgment.”
The upshot of all this is clear. Between us and God there stands—a judgment, and there is no evading it. Human behavior is to be taken seriously. Voltaire’s saying, “Le bon Dieu, me pardonnera, c’est san métier,” is as fatuous a piece of rationalism as you can find. We are rebellious creatures of an Almighty God. We are sinful and we are guilty. We are not fit to be called his sons and daughters; we are not fit even to be called