SIN is as oil on paper, which always spreads farther, always penetrates deeper. It is a cancer that can not rest, but must eat on. And this process of sin in and about you shall only cease when nothing more remains into which sin is able to enter.
Sin attacks not only the root of your life; it did not merely push its way through into your nature; it did not merely poison your personal existence; but from out these centers it continues its path along every direction of your existence and of your life; and there is nothing about you or in you, be it in your heart or in your head, in your feeling or your will, in your conscience or your imagination, in any talent or any gift, in any taste or sense or inclination, in pleasure or aversion, but sin stands ready to take everything in its employ, to communicate its polution to it, to corrupt it and to transpose it into an instrument of Satan.
Yea, even piety, the best, the noblest trait we still have, even our piety sin attacks to transmute it into shameful hypocrisy and to corrupt it into progressive Phariseism.
And you can think of nothing so fine in your person, in your environment, in the sphere of your life, yea, in the deepest and tenderest of your mind and heart, but sin stands ready to corrupt even that finest quality and to turn it into sin.
Once more, it can not rest, until your whole person is satiated with sin.
Only when everything in you shall have become sin, will Satan let go of you.
But that shall never be, for this is sin’s eternal business. This will be hell for the lost, that in them every resistance in behalf of good shall be overmastered and will-less and defenceless they must forever see, and forever tolerate, that sin devours their soul, eats out their heart and poisons their lifeblood.
Satan himself has altogether become sin, and the punishment of hell shall be no other, than eternally to get farther away from God and to make closer approach to the Devil.
Here on earth we are exhorted: “Seek fellowship with God!”, and he who will not do this, must once have eternal fellowship with Satan.
To live near unto God!—or once eternally unto Satan; to dwell ever nearer to the Evil one and make approach to him, there is no other choice.
DO you now understand what it means, that “Jesus is made to be sin for you”? (2 Cor. 5:21).
What you too, in case you are lost, shall eternally be engaged to become; so to be given to sin, that there is nothing of you save sin; this is what Jesus is made, He the Holy One of God.
You were lost. Lost because sin ever festered in you. And this festering would steadily progress till it reached that dreadful point, at which you yourself would be nothing but sin. No longer a sinner, but one who has become one with sin; identified with sin; lost in sin; so that your very person is gone, and nothing remains to and in you but sin.
In the manner of a plant that becomes stone.
One often sees in a quarry how a plant that is gradually overpowered by the nature of stone, gradually hardens and stiffens; how at length it begins to lose its vegetable nature and to take on the nature of stone; till at last the whole plant disappears, and no more mention is possible of organic life, and nothing remains but a mass of stone glued to the rock.
So it is with the sinner.
He was placed in the midst of sin, and now sin begins to assimilate him, to make him like unto itself and to transpose him into its own character. This goes very slowly. For as long as a man still remains himself, he struggles against it. The sinner is not yet sin, but is a man who, outwinged by sin, is drawn towards it and is gradually changed into its dreadful nature and hardened. And when at last this dreadful process were ended, man would be destroyed, and nothing of what once was a man would remain save a mass of sin.
And that is what Jesus is made for you. (2 Cor. 5:21).
“SINNER” Jesus never was. This He could not be. To be a sinner He would have had to let sin enter into the sanctuary of His personal existence, and that Jesus never did and could not do. Then He would have ceased to be God, and God, as the apostle teaches with so great emphasis, can not deny Himself.
But He Who never could be a sinner, is for the sake of sinners Himself made to be sin. With His soul He has sunk away into that uttermost and most terrible state, in which we cease to offer resistance, and allow ourselves to be devoured alive by sin, till at length nothing deeper nor more dreadful nor more gruesome was left in the hellish depth of sin. And that altogether essentially sinful character He has not thrust away from Him, but has taken it up into Himself, placed Himself under it, borne it; till at length not one sinner could be sunken away so deeply, or could have wandered off so far and be so utterly lost, but that Jesus was certain that that one’s sin also was included in the sin which for our sakes He bare.
And when He thus went down into the uttermost depth of sin, so that He in very deed arrived close by Satan and now was utterly forsaken of God, He ever yet remained the Holy One of God, in that He, from sheer obedience to the Father and from love to His elect, allowed Himself to be involved to the very uttermost in the dreadful nature of sin. Thus, far from ever having been a sinner Himself, He proved Himself to be the Holy One most in this, that He allowed Himself altogether to be made sin.
But therefore there is also no semblance, no, nothing but full uprightness in Jesus, when He is made to be sin.
He must needs go down into that depth of sin, not that He might enjoy it, but that He might destroy it; not to have part in it, but as a foreign terrible power to attack it; yea, it would have become sin in Him, if thus He had not allowed Himself wholly to be made sin.
Wholly, thus also with the assumption of the guilt that rested upon sin, for the very neutralization of that guilt and of the wrath of God resting upon that guilt, was His aim.
That guilt could not be taken away, except He first enter into the fellowship with that sin, from which that guilt was born and ever continued to be born.
The wrath of God had to be borne, not against any particular sin, but against sin itself; against the nature of sin; more still; against the unholy lack of reality, that had entered into and penetrated our human race. In the full sense of the word, the wrath of God that burned against the sin of the whole human race. For our whole race dies of one guilt; the motherguilt of the root-sin, once in Paradise committed by the Covenanthead of us all against God.
Hence it does not go by count, as though one might say: there are ten million elect, and each elect has ten million sins. Now multiply these together and you get the number of the sins which Jesus has borne on the wood.
No, spiritual things are not so external as that. They do not go by count or by number. All sins flow from one source; the guilt of all has sprung from one guilt. And now Jesus has attacked that source, that root-guilt He has taken away; thus in all reality bearing the wrath of God which was kindled against the sin of our whole human race.
Thus nothing must, nothing could remain in the nature of sin, from which Jesus withdrew Himself, else He would not have saved a single one of His elect.
For you yourself, according to your own confession, as child of the Kingdom, know far better than the impenitent, how you with your own person are rooted deeply in the essence (nature) of sin; that there is nothing in sin, of which you can say, “This was outside of me”; and that not merely for your committed sins, far less for your conscious sins, but much more for sin in the absolute sense, you stand guilty before God.
And therefore there is no comfort, there can be no peace for your soul, no acquittal, no salvation, before you hear God declare it, and with warm thankfulness for so great a compassion you accept it, that your Savior, your Surety and your Mediator has so taken upon Himself the whole sin, the nature itself of sin, that He is made to be sin for you, and that through this spiritual miracle of miracles the righteousness became yours, which was laid up for you in Jesus.
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