It has ruined him, body & soul
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"In whom we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of His grace." Ephesians 1:7
As no heart can sufficiently conceive, so no tongue can adequately express, the state of wretchedness and ruin into which sin has cast guilty, miserable man. In separating him from God, it has severed him from the only Source and fountain of all happiness and all holiness. It has ruined him, body and soul. The body it has filled with sickness and disease.
Thesoul it has defaced, and destroyed the image of God in which it was created. It has shattered all his mental faculties—broken his judgment—polluted his imagination—alienated his affections.
It has made him love sin—and hate God. It has filled him from top to toe with pride, lust, and cruelty, and has been the prolific parent of all those crimes and abominations under which earth groans, the bare recital of some of which has filled so many hearts with disgust and horror. These are the more visible fruits of the fall.
But nearer home, in our own hearts, in what we are or have been, we find and feel what wreck and ruin sin has made! There can be no greater mark of alienation from God than wilfully and deliberately to seek pleasure and delight in things which His holiness abhors. But who of the family of God has not been guilty here? Every movement and inclination of our natural mind, every desire and lust of our carnal heart, was, in times past, to find pleasure and gratification in something abhorrent to the will and word of the living Jehovah.
There are few of us who, in the days of our flesh, have not sought pleasure in some of its varied but deceptive forms. The theatre, the race-course, the dance, the sports, the card-table, the midnight revel, "the pleasures of sin" were resorted to by some of us. Our mad, feverish, thirst after excitement—the continued cry of our wicked flesh, "
Give, give!"—our miserable recklessness or headlong, daring determination to 'enjoy ourselves,' as we called it, cost what it would, plunged us again and again into the sea of sin, where, but for sovereign grace, we would have sunk to rise no more!
Or, if the 'restraints of morality' put their check upon gross and sinful pleasures, there still was a seeking after such "allowable amusements" (as we deemed them), as change of scene and place, foreign travel, the reading of novels and works of fiction, fine dress, visiting, building up airy castles of love and romance, studying how to obtain human applause, devising plans of self-advancement and self-gratification, occupying the mind with cherished studies, and delighting ourselves in those pursuits for which we had a natural taste, as music, drawing, poetry, or, it might be, severer studies and scientific researches.
We have named these middle-class pursuits as less obvious sins, than such gross crimes as drunkenness and vile debauchery in the lower walks of life. But, viewed with a spiritual eye, all are equally stamped with the same fatal brand of death in sin. The moral and the immoral, the refined and the unrefined, the polished few or the crude many, are alike "without God and without hope in the world."
We are often met with this question—"What harm is there in this pursuit, or in that amusement?" The harm is, that the amusement is delighted in for its own sake—that it occupies the mind, and fills the thoughts, shutting God out—that it renders spiritual things distasteful—that it sets up an idol in the heart, and is made a substitute for God. Now this we never really know nor feel, until divine light illuminates the mind, and divine life quickens the soul.
We then begin to see and feel into what a miserable state sin has cast us—how all our life long we have done nothing but what God abhors—that every imagination of the thoughts of our hearts has been evil, and only evil continually—that we have brought ourselves under the stroke of God's justice, under the curse of His righteous law, and now there appears nothing but death and destruction before our eyes, and unless we poor slaves of sin, Satan, and death were redeemed, we could not be reconciled to God. "
In whom we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of His grace."
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