Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 618
Delivered on Sunday Morning, March 5, 1865, by C. H. Spurgeon, at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington
“They that are whole need not a physician, but they that are sick.” Matthew 9:12.
THIS was Christ’s apology for mingling with publicans and sinners when the Pharisees murmured against Him. He triumphantly cleared Himself by showing that according to the fitness of things He was perfectly in order. He was acting according to His official Character. A physician should be found where there is work for him to do and that it is where healing is required. There was evidently none among the Pharisees—if their own opinion of themselves were to hold good—for they were perfectly whole. There was much to do, according to their own admission, among the publicans and sinners, for they were sorely sick. Therefore our Lord was in His place and fittingly executing His office when He sought out those who needed Him.
I. We shall have no time for a preface this morning and therefore let us enter at once into the text by observing that MERCY GRACIOUSLY REGARDS SIN AS A DISEASE. Sin is more than a disease. If it were only a sickness, men were to be pitied for suffering it. But the element of the perverse will, of voluntary rebellion and designed offense enters into sin, otherwise it were far less truly sin. And this makes it more than a sickness and worse than a malady. Let us not think that the picture of disease really does set forth all the heinous nature of sin—it is only a generous way in which Mercy chooses to look at it and to deal with it.
As Justice views it, all the plagues, venom, virus and disease in the world would be sweet and harmless compared with one single evil thought or imagination! But Mercy leniently and graciously chooses, in order that it may have a sort of apology for its operations under the great plan of salvation, to view sin as a disease. It is justified in such a view, for almost everything that may be said of deadly maladies may be said of sin. Let us come to particulars. Sin is an hereditary disease—we are born with a tendency towards it—no, we are born in it. The taint is in our blood—the very center of our being feels the infection.
Born in sin and shaped in iniquity, in sin did our mothers conceive us and our offspring, in like measure, received from us that original sin which is part of our fallen nature. Every man born into the world bears within him, in the bias and current of his mind, the seeds of sin. Nor is this to be wondered at, for, “Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? Not one.” “How can he be clean that is born of a woman?” Sin, like sickness, is very disabling. A sick man cannot carry burdens, climb mountains, run in service, walk with perseverance or leap for joy. The occupations and the pleasures of other men are things from which he is shut out. Even so does sin prevent our serving God.
We cannot pray to Him—we cannot praise Him aright. In every duty we are weak and for every good we are feeble. There is not a single moral power of manhood which sin has not stripped of its strength and glory. If we wished to run in the ways of God’s commands, then sin has crippled us. If we would grasp God’s promises, evil has paralyzed us. If we desired to see into the mysteries of Divine Grace, guilt has blinded us. If we would hear the voice of God, transgression has struck us with deafness. And if our voices would swell the song of cherubim and seraphim, alas, the plague of our heart within has made us dumb!
Of all of us in our measure it may be said we are, through sin, “unstable as water and shall not excel.” Sin weakens man’s nature for all good. Sin also, like certain diseases, is a very loathsome thing. Some diseases are so extremely disgusting that scarcely can their names be mentioned. But, oh, they are sweetness itself when compared with sin! The most putrid poisonous air that ever blew from a fever hospital never had such foulness in it as dwells in sin. Pest-houses and lazar-houses are clean and safe compared with the haunts of vice. In God’s esteem and in the esteem of all holy minds the most detestable, obnoxious, dreadful thing in the whole world is moral evil.
If that could be gotten rid of, all other evil would cease to be. This is the mother and nurse of all evil, the egg of all mischief, the fountain of bitterness, the root of misery. Here you have the distilled essence of Hell. The “quintessence,” as the old Divines would say, of everything that is unlovely, disreputable, dishonest, impure, abominable—in a word— damnable! Like some diseases, sin is fearfully polluting. As the leper cannot be tolerated abroad, as the plague-stricken are separated from their fellows—even so, sin separates us from communion with God and holy beings. It is not their unwillingness to associate with us, as much as our horrible unfitness to have fellowship with them. It is dreadful to bear about with us a cancer which has reached the stage of sickening rottenness. And yet this is not half so terribly disgusting as sin is to the heart of God.