Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 699
Delivered on Sunday Morning, July 8, 1866, by C. H. Spurgeon, at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington
Romans 8:3.
ONE of the sweetest and most attractive titles of our Lord Jesus Christ, is, “the Friend of sinners.” He was in His manners so gentle towards offenders, so graciously did He seek out the lost, and so tenderly did He invite the erring to pardon and reconciliation that it was slanderously said of Him that He was the Friend of sin as well as of sinners. This was the old heathen slander of the days of Celsus. Philosophy and Phariseeism sneeringly asserted that Jesus treated iniquity so lightly, and made it so easy a matter to escape from its consequences that He was rather the helper and abettor of sin than its destroyer. And they blasphemously declared that His Apostles had preached the doctrine of “let us do evil that good may come.”
My Brothers and Sisters, you know that this charge was utterly and entirely false and those who uttered the libel knew it to be so, too, if they were at all conversant with our Lord’s history. In His example evil meets with no encouragement, and in His teaching it finds no excuse. If they possessed the slightest acquaintance with the objects of His life, they must have known that though the Friend of sinners, He was emphatically beyond all other public teachers the Enemy of sin. His hatred towards sin was not a mere passion—it was a principle. It did not flash forth now and then—it was a constant flame. He hated sin, if I may say so, implacably—never making a moment’s truce with it. He pursued it by day in His ministry and by night in His prayers. He lived to smite it and he died to destroy it!
And now in His risen Glory it is upon sin as well as upon Satan that He sets His heel. He was manifested that He might destroy the works of the devil and He has erected a battering engine which will not leave of Satan’s strongholds so much as one stone upon another. In the life of our Lord His tenderness for sinners was but the natural form in which His hatred for sin displayed itselfjust as a physician, from the very fact that he is the antagonist of disease, displays a deep interest in those afflicted by it.
Our Lord’s keeping company with sinners by no means proved that He was the friend of sin any more than the physician’s attendance at the hospital would at all lead to the suspicion that he was the friend of disease. The skillful physician is the friend of the diseased, but to the disease itself what enemy shall be found more determined and inveterate? Because the whole have no need of a physician, Jesus seeks them not. But since the sick need Him, He seeks them—not out of love to their sin, but out of love to them—that they may be delivered from the cruel bondage under which their sin has held them.
You will have noticed, too that even when the Savior is most tender towards a certain class of sinners, it is that He may display His wrath against sin itself—He will not execrate one sin and exonerate another—but all sin shall see in Him its deadly foe. It is true He said to the woman taken in adultery, “Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more.” By this He, by no means, excused her adultery—but He declined to assume the functions of an earthly judge—and more especially He refused to pronounce sentence upon one case alone when so many were before Him who were not accused but were known to Him to be equally guilty.
His leniency to one could do no mischief when His justice to all was so conspicuous. Those who brought the woman desired Him simply to show His hatred of her, and to manifest abhorrence of that one offense which had happened to be found out. But that flash of His eyes when He said, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her,” was a far more terrible deliverance against sin than if He had said, “Yes, take her away and bind her hand and foot, and let her die. But as for you, you hypocrites, you who are practicing, perhaps, the same sin in private, inasmuch as you have not been discovered by your fellow men, I suffer you to escape with impunity.”
If He judged one He must judge all, and therefore He dismissed them all to the appointed time for judgment, manifesting, it seems to me, quite as much His hatred of sin as His tenderness towards the sinner. So everywhere connected with the gentleness of the Savior, in which He does not “break the bruised reed nor quench the smoking flax,” there is a most determinate wrath—a lion-like fierceness against sin, especially in its hypocritical forms—for He who bids the open and acknowledged sinner come to Him cries in the same breath, “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites,” and calls them whitewashed sepulchers filled with dead men’s bones.
There is not, then, the slightest foundation for the accusation that Jesus is in the least degree the Friend of sin, though He is the Friend of sinners. On the contrary, we can easily prove the assertion which is made in the text that Jesus Christ came into the world to condemn sin, and has condemned it and that sin never was condemned before as it was in the sacrifice of His Person, and that the Law of Moses itself could not, through the weakness of the flesh, condemn sin as Jesus Christ has done. For He has not only passed sentence upon it but has executed it, carrying the sentence into effect.