New Park Street Pulpit · Sermon No. 330
Delivered on Sabbath Morning, August 26, 1860, by the Rev. C. H. Spurgeon, at Exeter Hall, Strand
“So that as sin has reigned in death, even so might Grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord.” Romans 5:21.
I shall not pretend to enter into the fullness of this text, but merely select that topic, “Grace reigns through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord.”
Our Apostle represents man as being subject to two great kings. Sin is the grim tyrant, to whom, in the first place, man has bowed his willing neck. The reign of sin is a reign of terror and delusion; it promises pleasure, but being full of all manner of deceivableness, of unrighteousness, it gives pain even in this world—and in the world to come—eternal death! An awful contemplation is that of the reign of sin. Permitted to come into this world as an usurper—having mounted its throne upon the heart of man by flattering blandishments, and crafty pleasantries, it was not long before it fully developed itself. Its first act was to smite Eden with blast and mildew by its breath; its next act was to slay the second child of man, and that by the hand of the eldest-born. Since then, its reign has been scarlet with blood, black with iniquity, and fraught with everything that can make the heart of man sad and wretched! Oh Sin, you tyrant monster, all the demons that ever sat upon the throne of Rome were never such as you are! And all the men, who, from the wild north, have come forth as the scourges of man, the destroying angels of our race, though they have waded up to their knees in the blood of mortals, have never been so terrible as you are! You have reigned in death and that an eternal death—a death from which there shall be no resurrection—a death which casts souls into an eternal grave—a grave of fire!
Our Apostle now changes the subject, and represents man under the gracious state, as rejoicing in another government, ruled by another king. Just as sin has reigned, and with despotic and irresistible power has ground his subjects in the very dust, and then cast them into the flames, so does Divine Grace with irresistible goodness, compel the chosen multitude to yield obedience, and thus prepares them for eternal bliss. Look, it lifts up the beggar from the dunghill, and makes him to sit among princes! Mark its shining course, and behold it blessing the sons of man wherever it stretches out its silver scepter, chasing away the misery of night, and giving the gladsomeness of Gospel day; sending back the fiends of discord and of cruelty, to the dens from which they once escaped. See its bidding the angels of mercy keep perpetual watch and ward over the sons of Adam who have given themselves up to its sway of the Kingdom of Grace!
My business this morning is not with sin, but with Grace—a pleasing and a glowing theme. May God fill souls, and touch our tongue, that we may speak of those things which we have made touching the King, and may God greatly bless what shall be said to each of our hearts!
I shall invite you, first of all, to see Grace in its reigning acts, and then I shall bid you come with joy and wonder, and behold Grace as it sits upon its throne.
I. First, then, I shall need your attention to a series of pictures, in which you shall see Grace manifesting its REIGNING POWER and reigning, too, in places the most unlikely ever to have yielded to its power. Come with me then, Brothers and Sisters, and I will take you in spirit to the Valley of Vision. See, strewn there among the rugged rocks, the bleached and dried bones of the house of Israel—a skull there, and the arm which once was allied to it, scattered so far apart that human wisdom could not bring them bone to bone, much less could human strength clothe the bones with flesh. Death reigns there—that irresistible all-subduing power, before whom monarchs and all their armies, though they be numberless as the host of Xerxes, must bow themselves. O, Death, we come this day to see you defeated, to see you cast from your throne! But who shall do it? Come forth, you ministers of Christ, and see what you can do. Here are souls spiritually dead—no, dry—as far away from hope as the bones of the morgue are from life! Come, you ministers, attune your eloquence and see what you can do! Behold, Chrysostom speaks, the golden-mouthed John showers forth his marvelous sentences, but the bones stir not. And now Whitefield speaks with seraph voice as though he would move Heaven and earth, but there is not a motion among those crisp particles that once might have lived, but which live no more. Come, Isaiah, and let us hear your thundering appeals, or you, Jeremy, cannot your tears bedew these bones with the circulating drops of life? Come, Ezekiel, with your eagle eyes, and with your soaring wing, or you, Daniel, with your fiery words piercing through the thick clouds of the future and exposing, as with lightning fire, the glory that is to come! I hear them speak, and Seer follows Seer in noble emulation of earnest utterance, but the dry bones move not! They are locked in the fell embrace of death, and life comes not to them even by these living words. Alas, eloquence, and human might and wisdom, and rhetoric and logic—yes, and zeal and earnestness, and God-given passion—cannot wake the soul of the spiritually dead! Though all the men whom God has chosen to be His representatives from the beginning of the reign of Grace even to the end thereof—though all should strive and persuade, and plead with eloquence that might move a rock, yet souls dead in trespasses and sin could not and would not live by power so weak as this!