Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 1868
“For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Romans 6:23.
IN the fifth chapter of this Epistle, Paul had shown, at considerable length, our justification from sin through the righteousness of Jesus Christ our Savior. Our Apostle goes on to speak of our sanctification in Christ, that as by the righteousness of Christ we have been delivered from the guilt and penalty of sin, so by the power and life of Christ in us we are delivered from the dominion of sin, so as not to live any longer therein. His objective is to show that true servants of God cannot live in sin—that by reason of our newness of life in Christ, it is not possible that we should continue to yield our members, instruments unto iniquity. We have passed out of the realm of death. We have come into the domain of life and, therefore, we must act according to that life and that life—being in its essence, pure, holy and heavenly—we must proceed from righteousness unto holiness.
While he is driving at this argument, our Apostle incidentally lets fall the text which may be regarded as a Christian proverb, a golden sentence, a Divine statement of Truth worthy to be written across the sky! As Jesus said of the woman who anointed Him to His burial, “Wherever this Gospel shall be preached, in the whole world, there shall also, this, what this woman has done, be told for a memorial of her.” And so I may say, “Wherever the Gospel is preached, there shall this golden sentence which the Apostle has let fall, be repeated as a proof of his clearness in the faith.” Here you have both the essence of the Gospel and a statement of that misery from which the Gospel delivers all who believe! “The wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
First, it will be my painful duty to dwell, for a while, upon death as the wages of sin. And then, more joyfully, we shall close our morning’s meditation by considering eternal life as the gift of God.
I. First, DEATH IS THE WAGES OF SIN. The Apostle has, in his mind’s eye, the figure of a soldier receiving his pay. Sin, the captain, pays his hired soldiers a dreadful wage. The original word signifies, “rations,” or some translate it “stipend.” It means the payment which soldiers receive, put in the plural as wages, because pay can be given in different forms—soldiers might be paid in meat, or in meal, or in money, or in part by their clothing, or by lands promised when the time of service came to an end. Now that which sin, the grim captain, pays to those who are under him, is comprehended in this terrible term, “death.” It is a word as full as it is short. A legion of terrors are found around this “king of terrors.” Death is the rations which sin pays to those who enlist beneath its banner!
Now “sin is any want of conformity to, or transgression of the Law of God.” Sin is that evil power which is in the world in rebellion against the good and gracious power of righteousness which sits upon the Throne of God. This evil power of unholiness, untruth, sin, contrariety to the mind of God, holds the great mass of our fellow men beneath its sway at this hour. The rations with which it rewards the most desperate valor of its champions is death.
To set forth this terrible fact, I shall make a few observations. First, death is the natural result of all sin. When man acts according to God’s order, he lives, but when he breaks his Maker’s laws, he wrecks himself and does that which causes death. The Lord warned Adam thus—“In the day that you eat thereof you shall surely die.” Dying does not mean ceasing to exist, for Adam did not cease to exist, nor do those who die. The term, “death,” conveys to me no such idea as that of ceasing to exist, or how could I understand that word in 1 John 3:14—“He that loves not his brother abides in death”? How could a man abide in annihilation? A grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, but it does not cease to be! No, rather, it brings forth much fruit. That Adam did die in the day when he ate of that fruit is certain, or else the Lord spoke not the truth. His nature was wrecked and ruined by separation from God and by a fall from that condition
which constitutes the true life of man. When any man commits sin, he dies to holiness and purity. No transgression is venial, but every sin is mortal and genders death.
The further a man goes in lust and iniquity, the more dead he becomes to purity and holiness—he loses the power to appreciate the beauties of virtue, or to be disgusted with the abominations of vice. Our nature, at the very outset, has lost that delicacy of perception which comes of healthy life and, as men proceed in unchastity, or injustice, or unbelief, or sin of any kind, they enter deeper and deeper into that awful moral death which is the sure wage of sin. You can sin yourself into an utter deadness of conscience and that is the first wage of your service of sin.