Self-Righteousness — a 2
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Self-righteous people are not much inclined to search the Scriptures, they do not read them with an understanding heart, so as to get the meaning; they rather make the Bible say their own meaning, and twist it to support their own pleasing dream. Like a battery of ordnance of the strongest kind, both law and gospel fire into the sinner’s righteousness and sink it, like a riddled hulk, into the deeps of the sea.
"But cannot a man arrive at a religion by his own unaided the thoughts?" says one. A great many have tried it, but the very idea is absurd. Facts about God and man are to be learned, and not invented. Suppose a man were to think out the science of botany, but never went to see the flowers, he would deliver strange botanical lectures, misleading and absurd, for no cogitation upon what a flower ought to be would ever enable a man to guess at what flowers really are. Suppose a man who never looked at the stars were to despise the telescope and depend on his thoughts for his astronomy, would he not make strange work of it? We have heard of the German who excogitated a camel out of his inward consciousness, and there are many people of the same order of learned ignorance and profound folly. Such do not look at what the gospel is, but they have their own notions of what it ought to be; they do not look at what revelation declares, but at what their own precious thoughts can manufacture. Half the people in the world make their own theology, and are either too idle or too proud to be guided by infallible Scripture. As many a vintner composes his own wine, so do these concoct their own doctrine, and by this means they arrive at a high opinion of their own goodness.
Like the spider, they make their web out of their own bowels: they are righteous, and by no means the sort of people which the Word of God declares them to be. He whose foundation is his own dreams is certain to be deceived. Listen, O man, and learn wisdom. God’s thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are his ways your ways, and in the day when he comes to deal with your imagined righteousness, he will make short work of it, and you will have to cry, "We all do fade as a leaf, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags, and our iniquities like the wind have carried us away." The sooner that happens the better, for if it comes not until you get into the next world, it will be dreadful then to be found naked where you never can be clothed, to have your imagined riches melt into a poverty from which you never can recover, to be made a bankrupt where you thought yourself wealthy, and in a world where you never can begin again. Woe to those who make eternal shipwreck while they dream that they are steering straight to the desired haven. God saves you from setting up to furnish yourselves with inspiration. You are not oracles, and should never dream of being so. Search the Scriptures to know the facts of your case, and then you will recoil from the very idea of the righteousness of unrenewed man. Your glory will become your shame, your spangled robes will turn to worthless rags, and you will accept with humble gratitude the righteousness, which is of God by faith.
5. This leads us on to our fifth remark, which is this: SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS HAS THIS VICE ABOUT IT, THAT IT ALWAYS LEADS TO DESPISING OTHERS. That is the pith of the text. They said, "Stand by yourself, come not near to me; for I am holier than you." The self-righteous think thus of one another: one-sinner dreads pollution from another, one rebel is alarmed lest he should be made disloyal by another. Think of a wretch condemned to die for his sin, and yet afraid that a fellow criminal might soil his innocence. To what a pitch of madness does pride lift itself! "Do not come near me; I am holy," cries the man steeped in sin. Oh, the absurdity of self-righteousness! This pride is loathsome to the last degree. This pride is seen to be still more loathsome when the proud self-deceiver bids the lowly penitent man stand off. The repenting publican has his eyes opened to his real state, and he goes up to the temple and he prays, "God be merciful to me a sinner." He does not dare to look up, he is so broken-hearted;
but yonder Pharisee is bold to thank God for his own surpassing virtues. See how he gathers up his skirts for fear the fringe of his clothing should touch the ground whereon the publican has set his polluting foot. Why, sirs, that publican was one of God’s jewels, and this abominable Pharisee was a mere dunghill, reeking with offensive self-conceit. He did not know it, but his self-righteousness made him despise the very man of whom God has said, "To this man will I look, and with him will! dwell; even to him that is poor and of a contrite spirit, and that trembles at my word."
"Oh," says one of my free-thinking but self-righteous hearers, "I hate such cant. Confessing sin is all nonsense. I cannot endure to hear such talk." We are well aware of that, good sir, but this weighs nothing with us. We know you very well, and recognize in you an old acquaintance of some nineteen hundred years standing. Proud Pharisees never can endure penitent publicans, nor their Savior either. They are always saying of the Lord’s ministers that which they once said of himself, "This man receives sinners and eats with them." They find fault with the great Advocate and his clients, with the great Physician and his patients, but the Redeemer’s kingdom waits not their patronage and fears not their opposition. If you reject the banquet of mercy, and will not come to it, there are others who shall, and your refusal shall bring on your own head the contempt you now reserve for others.
Yes, and this self-righteous spirit dares to pour its bitterness upon the most gracious men. If you want a thorough-paced persecutor find a self-righteous man. I tell you there is no venom in the heart of dissolute, debauched men against Christianity that is at all comparable to the poison of asps which lies in the heart of the self-righteous man. Who was it in Jerusalem that hunted down the saints? It was not some son of Belial who railed at them. I daresay that many a Jerusalem rioter said, "What matters it? They have their ways and I have mine; let the men alone." But there was one man in Jerusalem who above most others thought that truly he had kept all the commandments of God from his youth up, and was utterly blameless, and he hated the Christians because they preached a doctrine which struck at his self-esteem.
Therefore he despised men who were a hundred times better than himself, he dragged them into the synagogue, and scourged them, to compel them to blaspheme; and when he had done all he could in his own country to worry them, he obtained letters from the high priest that he might go to Damascus to hunt them even in strange cities. He truly thought he did God service when he breathed out threatenings and bloodshed against God’s own children. Yes, it is so, and must be so: they that are born after the flesh persecutes them that are born after the Spirit. Ishmael, the child of Hagar, the bondwoman, which comes from Sinai, in Arabia, hates the Isaac that is born of the free woman, according to promise. There is a deadly feud between these two, and this is a part of the sin of self-righteousness, that it sets itself so bitterly against Christ and his people, and is the direst opponent that the gospel has among men. We see the self-righteous spirit at times display itself in the papers when they touch on religious subjects. One of them lately condemned the hymn-" Sinner, nothing do, either great or small, Jesus did it, did it all, long, long ago."
This is shocking doctrine, so they say, for it denies salvation by good works! Of course, editors of papers are good judges, for they are so exceedingly careful of our morality, and so studious never to insert anything that could injure our purity. That precious, plainspoken bit of gospel verse is too much for our pious friend, the editor, and he is afraid that it will hurt our morals. Self-righteousness is always afraid of the gospel, lest the uncompromising truth should unmask its self-deceit. Why, sirs, the doctrine of justification by faith alone is the essence of Protestantism, and the soul of the gospel. That Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, and that salvation is not by works of righteousness which we have done, but by the sovereign grace of God who passes by transgression, iniquity, and sin, is the great truth for which reformers protested and martyrs died. Let those who gainsay it look to themselves.
6. But I must pass on to observe that SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS IS MOST ABOMINABLE IN THE SIGHT OF GOD. What does he compare it to? He says, "It is a smoke in my nose, a fire that burns all the day." At the bottom of the garden we gather together the dead leaves, and all the rubbish of the garden, and the heap is lighted, and it keeps on burning and smoldering all the day; and if you go and stand in the eye of the wind your eyes will smart, your nose will be offended, and you will feel that you cannot bear it. As you see the refuse burning, smoking, smoldering all the day it will tell you what the Lord thinks of man’s righteousness. This is his opinion of those who say, "Stand by, I am holier than you"; their boasted righteousness is a burning heap of rubbish, pouring forth a thick smoke most obnoxious to him.
We do not wonder that he thus scorns and abhors proud, self-righteousness, for God is a God of truth, and truth cannot bear a lie, and self-righteousness is a mass of lies. He who is of perfect nature cannot bear mere pretense. It is so among men in common matters. You introduce a man of real learning to a person who has purchased for himself a sham degree and who boasts that he is a classical scholar. Mark his disgust when the pretender quotes a Latin author, and in the very first sentence gives false quantities. The truly learned man says, "He is a disgrace to his title; let me get away from him; he pretends to be a doctor, and yet he makes all these blunders." He who possesses the reality is indignant with the counterfeit. Now, God is truly holy, and cannot, therefore, bear that these men should talk about a holiness which they have no claim to, and vaunt themselves, and brag within themselves of a thing that is not theirs. The true God, therefore, calls them a smoke in his nose.
Moreover, self-righteousness is such a proud thing. God is always provoked with pride. It is one of the evils, which his soul hates. He daily fits his arrow upon his string to fetch down the proud in heart. The self-righteous man is proud in himself and proud with a contemptuous sneer at others, and therefore the Lord abhors him.
Self-righteousness also denies the wisdom of God’s plan, and is utterly opposed to it. God’s present plan of working in the world goes upon the theory that we are guilty; being guilty, he provides a Savior for us, and sends us a gospel full of grace. His whole system is a gigantic blunder if we are, or can be, righteous in and of ourselves. The work of the Holy Spirit is needless if we can be of ourselves fit for Heaven. The whole character of this gracious dispensation is a mistake if man is not guilty. The man who says "I am righteous," virtually casts a slur upon a work which is meant to be the highest display of the divine love and wisdom. He is like the Greek to whom the cross of Christ was" foolishness." I venture to say that self-righteousness in effect makes Christ; himself to be a superfluity, and this, my brethren, is the unkindest cut of all. This is a stab at the heart of the great Father. Did Jesus come down from Heaven and take our nature because we were sinners, and in that nature did he give himself a sacrifice that he might put away sin, and was all this a mistake? Calvary, are you a blunder?
Bleeding Savior, were you an amiable enthusiast, putting away sin which did not exist, and filling a fountain for the removal of stains which are not to be found? Yet self-righteousness involves all this. If one sinner has a right to be self-righteous so has another; and then it comes to this, that God should deal with us all on quite another theory, and instead of his dear Son coming to the world to die for us as sinners, we might all go to Heaven without an atonement or a Savior. Do you think God can bear such a slur upon Christ, such a trampling on the precious blood of his own Son? Can even patience bear this?
I may be speaking to some who have not before considered what their self-righteousness means, but I hope they see it now. Get rid of it, my dear friends; put off your ornaments of imagined virtue, and put the dust and ashes of confession on your heads. Go home and tear your finery to pieces, and put on the robe of heavenly righteousness, otherwise you will be as long as you live nothing but that smoking heap of weeds at the bottom of the garden; and whereas you think you are a bright and shining light, God’s thoughts will be the reverse, for he will count you to be a mere smoke in his nose, a fire that smolders all the day.
7. The last point, and one of the most practical is this, that SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS MOST EFFECTUALLY BARS A MAN FROM ALL HOPE OF SALVATION. We cannot be saved unless we become truly holy, but, my brethren, no man ever becomes truly holy who is content with a false holiness. If he says, "I am holy" he never will be holy. The student who enters college as a wise man will probably remain a fool. You never can win wisdom until you confess your folly. The man who says, "I am rich," but is under a delusion which makes him call counters gold, will never be rich; it is a first necessity that he be able to estimate his true estate. So that self-righteousness shuts a man out from real righteousness most effectually.
It also prevents the heart from repentance. How can you repent if you have never sinned? How can you mourn your failure to obey while you conceive that you have kept the law? It shuts you out, too, from faith. You never will believe in Jesus Christ while you believe in yourself. "How can you believe," said Christ, "that receive honor one of another?" If you can save yourself you do not want a Savior, and consequently you will never trust in the Savior of sinners. Man, while you are righteous, Christ and your heart will never agree. He brings you water, but you are not thirsty: he brings you the bread of life, but you are not hungry: he has made for you a clothing of needlework, but you are not naked; he comes to enrich you, but you are not poor: he comes to give you pardon, but you are not guilty; he comes to give you everlasting life, but you are not dead. What is there, then, in Christ for you? Just nothing, and so you will never have Christ.
All the entreaties of God, even such as are described in this chapter, when he stretches out his hands all the day, will never make a self-righteous man come to him. The prodigal did not say, "I will arise, and go unto my father" while he could fill his belly with the husks that the swine did eat.Soul poverty and destitution bring a man to God; but God may call as long as he wills, man never will come as long as he can be independent of his heavenly Father: so that self-righteousness is the ruin of all who harbor it.
Let me warn you who have heard the gospel continually, that if you are self-righteous the privileges which you enjoy will be all neutralized and cease to be privileges; for if you do not come to Jesus when he stretches out his hands, he will call others who are not now a people, and he will be found of those that sought him not. You are first now in point of privilege, but the first shall be last; while those outside that have not heard the gospel shall hear it and be saved; and so the last shall be first. God will turn the tables upon you: the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness, where shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth, while many shall come from the east and from the west, and shall sit down in the kingdom of God. Beware, you who are self-righteous, lest, because you put yourselves to be the head, God should make you the tail, for then all your Sabbath privileges, and gospel hearings, will be like millstones about your necks, to sink you low as the lowest Hell.
What is the remedy for all this? The remedy is just this. God says, "Behold me;" that is to say, he bids you cease from doting upon your own imagined beauties and worshiping your own foolish image. Look first to the holy God and tremble. Can you, of yourself, ever be like him, pure, spotless, and glorious? Can you ever hope to deserve anything of him? Look to him and despair. Then comes the second, "Behold me." See Christ Jesus on the cross dying, the just for the unjust, to bring us to God. As you see him dying your self-righteousness will die. You will say, "He would never have suffered thus for me unless I had sin to repent of. God would never have put him to this grief for me unless I had been sadly guilty. I should never have wanted such a Savior if I had not been a great transgressor. In the heights and depths of dying love I read the heights and depths of my-accursed sin; in the infinity of the atonement I read the boundless blackness of my guilt, and lie humble before God. At the same time in that perfect righteousness divine, which has put away sin, I see the hope of a sinner, and as a sinner I look to Christ for everything." If you do this, it is well. God blesses you. May every one here be enabled to do this immediately, and unto God shall be the glory forever and ever. Amen.
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