Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 812
Delivered on Sunday Morning, May 17, 1868, by C. H. SPURGEON, at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington..
“The sin of Judah is written with a pen of iron, and with the point of a diamond: it is engraved upon the tablet of their heart, and upon the horns of your altars.” Jeremiah 17:1.
IN traveling in the East, inscriptions upon the rocks are often met with, which have remained almost as sharp and clear as when they were first cut by the engraver’s tool. Some of these owe their indelible character to the hardness of the rocks upon which they have been engraved. They must have been written, to use the expressive language before us, “with a pen of iron,” and engraved as “with the point of a diamond.” When such writing had been once achieved, those who had achieved their purpose might have said with Pilate, “What I have written I have written,” for there it stood, and there it stands.
The Prophet declares that the sin of Judah was as indelibly cut into their nature as the rock writings in the stone. Their hearts were as hard as rock and sin was inscribed thereon deeply and plainly—as though written with some iron instrument. Their spirits were just as senseless and hardened as stone itself, and their iniquity appeared as if engraved with the point of a diamond. What was said of Judah, may, with equal truthfulness be said of the whole human race. Circumstances here do not alter cases. Put men where you will, whether they belong to Judah or to the uncircumcised nations, as face in water answers to face, so the heart of man to man—each man is like his fellow—the hardness of Judah’s heart is repeated in the stubbornness of barbarian and Roman, Greek and Scythian. It is seen, indeed, in us—to deal with ourselves is our main business this morning.
I. We shall commence by answering the question, WHAT IS SIN? We are always hearing about it. It is constantly dunned into our ears by the preacher. We cannot turn over a page of Holy Writ without meeting with it. What is sin? How few people have obtained a right idea of sin! How much smaller is the number who express the idea clearly! If you ask the Pharisee of old what sin was—“Well,” he would say, “it is eating without washing your hands. It is drinking wine without having first of all strained out the gnats, for those insects are unclean, and if you should swallow any of them they will render you defiled.”
His repentance dealt with his having touched a Gentile, or having come on the wind side of a Publican. Many in these days have the same notion, but with a variation. We have read of a Spanish bandit, who, when he confessed before his father-confessor, complained that one sin hung with peculiar weight upon his soul that was of peculiar atrocity. He had stabbed a man on a Friday, and a few drops of the blood of the wound had fallen on his lips, by which he had broken the precepts of “Holy Church,” in having tasted animal food on a fast day. The murder did not seem to arouse in his conscience any feeling of remorse at all—not one atom—he would have done the same tomorrow. But an accidental violation of the canons of “Mother Church” excited all his fears!
I read only last night in the newspaper an account of a visit paid by a strict high churchman to a little meeting of Plymouth Brethren and I was amused with the guilt that evidently rested on the writer’s conscience in having been found in such an assembly. He tells us, in the first place, that he was not quite well enough to sit out the usual long service in the Church. And in the second place that he had been to a celebration of the “Eucharist” in the morning, and, therefore, he thought that for once he might be pardoned for indulging his curiosity. His mind was, however, evidently burdened with the weight of his heinous sin.
There are men in England to whom it would be one of the highest crimes and misdemeanors to worship God with the most holy of His servants so long as they did not meet within walls which had been superstitiously consecrated. Singular, indeed, are the ideas which many men have of transgression! But such is not God’s view of sin. Half of those things which mere ecclesiastics condemn are not sins at all. To break the commandments of men may be virtuous! To kick against the conventionalities of a man-made Church may be an evidence of enlightenment! To refuse homage to a proud hierarchy may be a bounden duty!
The chains of custom, the fetters of fashion, the manacles of priest craft are to be scorned by all who claim the right of manhood. To break them in sunder is no sin. Sin is a want of conformity to the will of God! Sin is disobedience to God’s command! Sin is a forgetfulness of the obligations of the relation which exist between the creature and the Creator. This is the very essence of sin. Injustice to my fellow creature is truly sin, but its essence lies in the fact that it is sin against God who constituted the relation which I have violated. It is surprising, when we talk with persons who profess that they have forsaken their sins, how very seldom they will give you a distinctly spiritual definition of sin. I believe they understand it in their hearts, but their understandings come short of the desired point.