Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 1685
Delivered on Lord’s-Day Morning, October 22, 1882
“I, even I, am He that blots outyour transgressions for My own sake, and will not remember your sins.” Isaiah 43:25.
“For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”
Jeremiah 31:31.
“For I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more.” Hebrews 8:12.
“And their sins and iniquities will I remember no more.” Hebrews 10:17.
You see these texts are all alike in their declaration that the Lord will not remember His people’s sins. I have taken four of them to make the basis of my sermon firm as adamant. It is written, “In the mouth of two or three witnesses every word shall be established.” Here then, you have Isaiah and Jeremiah, two Old Testament saints, affirming the same thing—is this not enough? Added to these, you have the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, who, in all probability, was Paul, and these three agree in one. Their united testimony is that Jehovah, the Lord God, will forgive the sins of His people, and do it in so complete a way that He will remember their iniquities no more. Now, if I did not preach at all, but merely gave you these four texts to consider, I think the service ought to be full of comfort to all who know their guiltiness and are anxious to obtain mercy.
That article in the creed is too little thought of—“I believe in the forgiveness of sin.” Men flippantly declare that they believe it when they are not conscious of any great sin of their own. But when his transgression is made apparent to a man, and his iniquity comes home to him, it is quite another matter. Does any unregenerate person believe in the forgiveness of sin? I think not. No man, in sincerity, believes it until God, the Holy Spirit, has taught him its truth, and has written it upon his heart. No revealed Truth of God is more generally doubted and disbelieved than this, the plainest of all revelations, that the Lord is gracious and full of compassion and ready to pass by the iniquities of His people! Men disbelieve for themselves and doubt it as to others when the matter is fairly tested.
When a man’s sins are set before him in the light of God’s Countenance, his first instinct is to fear that they are altogether unpardonable. If he does not state his unbelief in so many words, yet, in the secret of his soul, that dreadful conviction takes hold upon him and darkens every window of hope. He looks to the Law of God and while he looks in that direction, he will certainly conclude that there is no pardon, for the Law knows nothing of forgiveness. It is, “Do this and you shall live. Disobey and you shall die.” To convict and to condemn is all the Law was sent for. By the Law is the knowledge of sin and by its power sinners are shut up in the prison house of despair, from which only the Lord Jesus can deliver us.
What the Law asserts, the understanding, also, supports, for within the awakened man there is the memory of his past offenses—and on account of these his conscience passes judgment upon his soul—and condemns it even as the Law does. “God must punish wickedness,” is the utterance of conscience. “He were not the judge of all the earth if He did not do right and if He does right, He must visit my transgressions with the threatened penalty.” Thus, the thunder of Sinai is echoed by conscience. Meanwhile, many natural impressions and instincts assist and increase the clamors of conscience, for the man knows within himself, as the result of observation and experience, that sin must bring its own punishment.
He perceives that is a knife which cuts the hand of him that handles it; a sword that kills the man who fights with it. He feels that he cannot, himself, readily pass by offenses committed by his fellow men and so he concludes that the Lord cannot willingly forgive. That part of the hardness of his heart goes to deepen the conviction that God will not pass by his transgression and he is, therefore, terribly dismayed and hopeless of mercy. Meanwhile the devil comes in with all the horrors of the infernal Pit and threaten speedy destruction!
That same evil spirit who once pictured sin in glowing colors and set before the sinner the pleasureableness of unrighteousness, now comes in and turns accuser, forestalls the final sentence and hardens the man’s heart by the assurance that there is no hope! Bunyan very aptly pictures Diabolus, when he was attacking the town of Mansoul, as making Captain Past-Hope unfurl the red colors which were carried by Mr. Despair. And he also speaks of the roaring of the tyrant’s train, which sounded forth terribly, especially by night, so that the men of Mansoul had always in their ears the sound of Hell-fire! Hell-fire! And all this to keep them from submitting to their gracious Prince.