Death and Life — The Wage and the Gift

Next Part Death and Life — The Wage and the Gift 2

"For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord." Romans 6:23

In the fifth chapter of this Epistle, Paul had shown at considerable length our justification from sin through the righteousness of Jesus Christ our Savior. Our apostle goes on to speak of our sanctification in Christ; that as by the righteousness of Christ we have been delivered from the guilt and penalty of sin, so by the power and life of Christ in us we are delivered from the dominion of sin, so as not to live any longer therein. His object is to show that true servants of God cannot live in sin; that by reason of our newness of life in Christ, it is not possible that we should continue to yield our members instruments unto iniquity. We have passed out of the realm of death, we have come into the domain of life; and, therefore, we must act according to that life; and that life being in its essence pure, holy and heavenly, we must proceed from righteousness unto holiness.

While he is driving at this argument, our apostle incidentally lets fall the text which may be regarded as a Christian proverb, a golden sentence, a divine statement of truth worthy to be written across the sky. As Jesus said of the woman who anointed him to his burial, "Wherever this gospel shall be preached, in the whole world, there shall also this, that this woman has done, be told for a memorial of her"; so I may say, "Wherever the gospel is preached, there shall this golden sentence, which the apostle has let fall, be repeated as a proof of his clearness in the faith." Here you have both the essence of the gospel, and a statement of that misery from which the gospel delivers all who believe. "The wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord." First, it will be my painful duty to dwell for a while upon death as the wages of sin; and then, more joyfully, we shall close our morning's meditation by considering eternal life as the gift of God.

I. First, DEATH IS THE WAGES OF SIN. The apostle has in his mind's eye the figure of a soldier receiving his pay. Sin, the captain, pays his hired soldiers a dreadful wage. The original word signifies "rations," or some translate it "stipend." It means the payment which soldiers receive, put in the plural as wages, because pay can be given in different forms: soldiers might be paid in meat, or in meal, or in money, or in part by their clothing, or by lands promised when the time of service came to an end. Now that which sin, the grim captain, pays to those who are under him, is comprehended in this terrible term "death." It is a word as full as it is short. A legion of terrors are found around this "king of terrors." Death is the rations which sin pays to those who enlist beneath its banner. Now "sin is any lack of conformity to, or transgression of the law of God."

Sin is that evil power which is in the world in rebellion against the good and gracious power of righteousness which sits upon the throne of God. This evil power of unholiness, untruth, sin, contrariety to the mind of God, holds the great mass of our fellow-men beneath its sway at this hour. The rations with which it rewards the most desperate valor of its champions is death. To set forth this terrible fact, I shall make a few observations. First, death is the natural result of all sin. When man acts according to God's order he lives; but when he breaks his Maker's laws he wrecks himself, and does that which causes death. The Lord warned Adam thus: "In the day that you eat thereof you shall surely die." Dying does not mean ceasing to exist, for Adam did not cease to exist, nor do those who die. The term "death" conveys to me no such idea as that of ceasing to exist, or how could I understand that word in 1 John 3:14: "He that loves not his brother abides in death"? How could a man abide in annihilation? A grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies; but it does not cease to be; no, rather, it brings forth much fruit. That Adam did die in the day when he ate of that fruit is certain, or else the Lord spoke not the truth. His nature was wrecked and ruined by separation from God, and by a fall from that condition which constitutes the true life of man. When any man commits sin, he dies to holiness and purity.

No transgression is venial, but every sin is mortal, and genders death. The further a man goes in lust and iniquity, the more dead he becomes to purity and holiness: he loses the power to appreciate the beauties of virtue, or to be disgusted with the abominations of his vice. Our nature at the very outset has lost that delicacy of perception which comes of healthy life; and as men proceed in unchastity, or injustice, or unbelief, or sin of any kind, they enter deeper and deeper into that awful moral death which is the sure wage of sin. You can sin yourself into an utter deadness of conscience, and that is the first wage of your service of sin. All desire after God, and all delight in him, die out where sin reigns. Alas, this death has passed upon all men. Can two walk together except they be agreed? Man may continue to believe in the existence of God, but for all practical purposes God to him is really non-existent. The fool has said in his heart, "No God" - he does not desire God; indeed, he wishes there were no God. As for seeking after God, and delighting himself in the Almighty, the sinner knows nothing thereof; his sin has killed him towards all desire for God, or love to him, or delight in him. He is to God dead while he lives. "To be carnally minded is death."

As there is through sin a death to God, so is there a death to all spiritual things. "The natural man receives not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned." The man does not perceive and discern spiritual things, for he is dead to them. Talk to him of the sorrows of the spiritual life, he has never felt them, and he despises them as mean cant. Speak to him of the joys of the spiritual life, and you will soon discover that you are casting your pearls before swine: he has never sought such joys, he does not believe in them, and he thinks you a fanatic for talking such nonsense. He is as dead to spiritual realities as a mole is blind to astronomy, or a stone is dead to music. To him it is as though there were neither angel, nor spirit, nor God, nor mercy-seat, nor Christ, nor holiness, nor heaven, nor hell. Giving himself up to the dominion of sin, the sinner receives more and more the result of his sin; even as the apostle says, "Sin, when it is finished, brings forth death." "He that sows to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption."

Inasmuch as in holy and spiritual things dwells the highest happiness of our manhood, this man becomes an unhappy being; at first by deprivation of the joy which spiritual life brings with it, and afterwards by suffering the inevitable misery of spiritual death. God has justly appointed that if a man will not be conformed to God he shall not taste of happiness; and if a man will follow after that which is evil, that evil shall of necessity bring with it sorrow and distress. Since sin as naturally brings spiritual death upon men as fire brings burning, death is spoken of as the wages of sin.

I would observe next, that the killing power of some sins is manifest to all observers; for it operates upon the body and the mind as well as upon the spirit. This spiritual death of which I speak may not strike some of you with fear: you may think it a small matter, though to me I do confess that hell, however painted, is never so terrible a thing as the death which fills it. Some sins are murderous to a degree which is clear to all. For instance, if a man takes to drunkenness, or if he indulges in lasciviousness, it is manifest even to the unspiritual that the wages of sin is death. See how by many diseases and deliriums the drunkard destroys himself: he has only to drink hard enough, and his grave will be dug. The horrors which attend upon-the filthy lusts of the flesh I will not dare to mention; but many a body rotting above ground shall be my silent witness. All know, or ought to know, the mischief which is occasioned to men and women by the violation of that law which commands us to be pure. I spoke the other day to an aged brother who feels the result of natural decay, but is in all other respects sound and healthy, and I congratulated him upon retaining so much vigor at such an age. "Yes," he replied, "I owe it to the grace of God that I never abused myself in my younger days, and hence I have a store of strength in my old age."

How many, on the contrary, feel the sins of their youth in their bone, and in their flesh. We have all known that sins of the flesh kill the flesh; and therefore we may infer that sins of the mind kill the mind. Death in any part of our manhood breeds death to the whole. Death drags man down from the power, beauty, and joy of life to the wretched existence, the feebleness, the abominableness of death. The man is no more a man, but the wreck of a man; and his body is not the house of his soul, but a ruin, in which his poor spirit seeks in vain for comfort. A withered heart, a blinded mind, a blasted being; such is the death which comes of sin. The wage of sin is openly death when it assumes certain forms, and it is always really so, take what form it may.

Now this tendency is in every case the same, "the wages of sin is death" everywhere to everyone. It is so not only where you can see it operating upon the body, but where you cannot see it. I may perhaps startle you when I say that the wages of sin is death even in the man who has eternal life. Sin has the same deadly character to one as to the other, only an antidote is found. You, my Christian brother, cannot fall into sin without its being poison to you, as well as to anybody else; in fact, to you it is more evidently poison than to those hardened to it. If you sin it destroys your joy, your power in prayer, your confidence towards God. If you have spent evenings in frivolity with worldlings, you have felt the deadening influence of their society. What about your prayers at night? You cannot draw near to God. The operation of sin upon your spirit is most injurious to your communion with God. You are like a man who has taken a noxious drug, whose fumes are stupefying the brain, and sending the heart into slumber. If you, being a child of God, fall into any of the sins which so easily beset you, I am sure you will never find that those sins quicken your grace or increase your faith; but on the contrary, they will work you evil, only evil, and that continually.

Sin is deadly to any man and every man, whoever he may be; and were it not for the mighty curative operation which the indwelling Spirit of God is always carrying on upon the believer's nature, not one of us would survive the deadly effects of even those sins of infirmity and ignorance into which we fall. I wonder not that Paul cried aloud, "O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" If a man takes poison, if it does not absolutely kill him, it injures him, and thus proves its killing tendency. In certain places the air is pestilential, and though a very healthy man may pass through them and seem none the worse, yet this does not disprove the general deadly tendency of the malarious district, nor does it even prove that the healthy person is not secretly but really injured by having been there. Evils caused by sin may be too deep to be at once visible, just as the most serious of diseases have their periods of incubation, during which the person affected has no idea of the ill which is hatching within him. Sin is in itself an unmitigated evil, root which bears wormwood. Sin is death. Wonder not therefore that the apostle says, "the wages of sin is death." As the sparks fly upward, and as the rain falls to the ground, so sin leads to death. As the river takes its leap in the thundering cataract, so must the stream of sin create the fall of death.

Moreover, when we read of anything being a wage, what does it mean? It means that it is a reward for labor. Death is sin's due reward, and it must be paid. A master employs a man, and it is due to that man that he should receive his wages. If his master did not pay him his wages, it would be an act of gross injustice. Now, if sin did not bring upon man death and misery, it would be an injustice. It is necessary for the very standing of the universe that sin should be punished. It must be so. They that sow must reap. The sin which hires you must pay you. Wrong cannot produce right. Iniquity, transgression and sin must, in the nature of things, become darkness, sorrow, misery, death. Every transgression and disobedience must receive its just recompense of reward. There is no use in attempting to alter it so long as God and justice reign: those who do sin's work must receive sin's wage, and "the wages of sin is death."

Now, observe, that this death, this wage of sin, is in part received by men now as soldiers receive their rations, day by day. It is a terrible thing that they do so receive it. The Scripture says, "If you live after the flesh, you shall die" - such a life is a continued dying. Again, it is written, "She that lives in pleasure is dead while she lives." The wrath of God abides on him that believes not on the Son of God; it is there already. I would that men here who are not converted would recollect where they now are - they are "dead in trespasses and sins." O men, you are not merely sick, but you are "dead in your sins"! You are already dead to the highest spiritual enjoyments, and can never know them except by passing from death unto life. You cannot rejoice in God, you cannot know spiritual truth, you cannot taste of spiritual bliss, for your sin deadens you to these things every day that you live in it. To all that which is worthy of a man, to all that which is the true life of manhood, you are dead through sin.

But then a Roman soldier did not enlist merely for his rations; his chief pay often lay in the share of the booty which he received at the end of the war. He expected to share in his captain's triumph, and to be a partaker in the spoil. Death is the ultimate wage of sin. The death which is here intended is the eternal loss and wreckage of the soul, the destruction of all about it that is worth having, the drifting of the guilty being for ever upon the full tide of those evil tendencies which caused his sin, and were further increased by sin. When all comes to all, this is where sin will drive you: it will perpetuate itself, and so for ever kill the soul to God, and goodness, and joy and hope. You will enter upon a world in which the highest enjoyments which even God himself can provide for men will be revealed, but they will be hidden from your eyes because you will be utterly incapable of knowing, appreciating, and enjoying them. Being under the ever-growing power of sin, it will become more and more a hopeless thing that you should escape from the death which thus settles down upon you.

All the agencies which could have recovered you from the clutch of death have failed to bless you in the life which has come to an end; and now in eternity neither the death of Christ, nor the Holy Spirit, nor the ministry of the word, will ever again operate upon you. Until your last moments you chose sin, and through eternity you will still choose it; for this death is the reward of your sin. Our Lord himself said, "These shall go away into everlasting punishment." Then you shall come to know to the full what that awful word "death" really means as God intends it.

Meanwhile, if you would escape this dreadful doom, read your Bible and see how the result of sin is expounded. As our Savior taught, that future death includes within itself the fire which never shall be quenched, the worm that never dies, the outer darkness, the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, and the departure into everlasting fire which begins with a curse from the lip of love. Alienation from God is death, and can never be otherwise. The Holy Spirit, speaking of the ungodly, says, "In flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ: who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of his power." This will be the ultimatum of sin. As surely as rivers run into the sea, so surely must sin run into death; there is no help for it. This hard and impenitent heart heaps up for itself wrath against the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God. Sin inevitably pays to all who are its servants the death by which bondage to its power is sealed for ever. O my God, grant us grace to see what a wretched service this is which pays such terrible rations now, and gives such a terrible dividing of the spoil in the end.

I shall not longer dwell upon it, the subject is so distressing to me; save that I must add a few solemn words. The misery of the misery of sin is that it is earned. Every pang that shall fall upon the ungodly either in this life or in the life to come will have this for its sting, - that it was duly earned. The sinner may well say, "I worked for this; I laid myself out to earn this; I now feel the misery of what I wilfully did." Death is the result of being out of gear with God. But the sinner puts himself into that condition. If men in the world to come could say, "this misery of ours has come upon us by an arbitrary arrangement on the part of God, quite apart from its just results," then they would derive from that fact some kind of comfort to their conscience, some easement of their biting remorse. But when they will be obliged to own that all their woe was their own choice in choosing sin, and is still their own choice in abiding in sin, this will scourge them indeed. Their sin is their hell. The worm which gnaws at the heart of the lost soul is its own willful hate of God, and love of evil.

O lover of sin, you are under the power of this death - this worse than death! You are dead to God, and dead to holiness, and dead to love, and dead to true happiness; and you have brought this death upon yourself, every part and particle of it. You have chosen that which has made you a wreck and a ruin, and that in the teeth of many warnings and admonitions. It must be so, that "the wages of sin is death," and the terror of that death is that it comes as a wage. Why will you die? Why will you earn death? Why will you choose your own delusions? Have you wickedly determined to prove what outer darkness means? Have you turned your back on God just to see how a man must fare who wars with his Maker? Have not enough dashed themselves to pieces on the rock of sin? Why will you do the same? If you will do so, this shall be the misery of your misery: that you brought it on yourselves, and that you rejected the one remedy provided of the Lord in the person of his Son Jesus Christ.

Note, next - and I speak with the truest compassion - that it will be the folly of follies to go on working for such wage. Until now they that have worked for sin have found no profit in it. What fruit have you had, any of you, in the things whereof you have cause to be ashamed? Has sin ever brought you any real benefit? Come, now, and let us reason together: - up until now has doing wrong ever worked for your health, or your happiness? Are you the better for hate, or greed, or lust, or drink? Has sin ever developed your inner self into anything worth calling life? You know it has not. It has rather destroyed you than improved you, and you know it. Why, then, will you go further in sin? Have you not learned enough already of the deadly nature of evil? Why will you press further into this barren region, which will become more and more a howling wilderness to you as you advance into it? Why will you go where it will be more and more difficult to return? Oh, may God's infinite mercy prevent our being such madmen as to labor in the very fire to earn nothing else but death! God forbid that we should plunge from sin to sin by an inventiveness of rebellion, only to discover more and more what it is to be dead forever to God, and heaven, and hope, and everything that is to be desired.

Let me add, it ought to be the grief of griefs to each of us that we have sinned. Oh, misery, to have wrought so long in a service which brings such terrible wages! Though I have known the Lord now these six-and-thirty years, I still regret most deeply every sin that I have ever committed against the perfect law of the Lord. I take it that repentance is not the temporary act of a certain period of time, but it is the spirit of the whole life after conversion. When we know we are forgiven, we repent all the more that ever we loved that sin which is so abominable unto God, and so evil in every way. Evil seems most evil when we have the clearest sense of divine goodness. Its constant wage is death, and only death; and our lamentation is that we harbored this assassin, yes, even became its slave. Let us humble ourselves before God, because we have played the fool exceedingly by sinning against him; we have wounded, injured, and destroyed ourselves, and all for nothing - our only wage being a still deeper destruction.

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