Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2000
“By His stripes we are healed.” Isaiah 53:5.
It was well that the seeker was wise enough to search the sacred volume. It was better, still, that in that volume there should be such a life-giving Word and that the Holy Spirit should reveal it to the seeker’s heart. I said to myself, “That text will suit me well and, perhaps, a voice from God may speak through it, yet again, to some other awakened sinner.” May He, who by these words spoke to the chamberlain of the Ethiopian queen who, also, was impressed with them while in the act of searching the Scripture, speak, also, to many who shall hear or read this sermon! Let us pray that it may be so! God is very gracious and He will hear our prayers.
The object of my discourse is very simple. I would come to the text and I would come at you! May the Holy Spirit give me power to do both to the glory of God!
I. In endeavoring to come to the full meaning of the text, I should remark, first, that GOD, IN INFINITE MERCY, HERE TREATS SIN AS A DISEASE. “By His stripes”—that is, the stripes of the Lord Jesus—“we are healed.” Through the sufferings of our Lord, sin is pardoned and we are delivered from the power of evil—this is regarded as the healing of a deadly malady. The Lord, in this present life, treats sin as a disease. If He were to treat it once, as sin, and summon us to His bar to answer for it, we would, at once, sink beyond the reach of hope, for we could not answer His accusations, nor defend ourselves from His justice. In great mercy He looks upon us with pity and, for the time being, treats our ill manners as if they were diseases to be cured rather than rebellions to be punished. It is most gracious on His part to do so, for while sin is a disease, it is a great deal more!
If our iniquities were the result of an unavoidable sickness, we might claim pity rather than censure. But we sin willfully, we choose evil, we transgress in heart and, therefore, we bear a moral responsibility which makes sin an infinite evil. Our sin is our crime rather than our calamity! However, God looks at it in another way, for a season, so that He may be able to deal with us on hopeful grounds—He looks at the sickness of sin and not, as yet, at the wickedness of sin. Nor is this without reason, for men who indulge in gross vices are often charitably judged by their fellows to be not only wholly wicked, but partly mad. Propensities to evil are usually associated with a greater or less degree of mental disease—perhaps, also, of physical disease. At any rate, sin is a spiritual malady of the worst kind.
Sin is a disease, for it is not essential to manhood, nor an integral part of human nature as God created it. Man was never more fully and truly man than he was before he fell. And He who is especially called “the Son of Man “knew no sin,
neither was guile found in His mouth, yet He was perfectly Man. Sin is abnormal—a sort of cancerous growth which ought not to be within the soul. Sin is disturbing to manhood—sin unmans a man. Sin is sadly destructive to man. It takes the crown from his head, the light from his mind and the joy from his heart. We may name many grievous diseases which are the destroyers of our race, but the greatest of these is sin! Sin, indeed, is the fatal egg from which all other sicknesses have been hatched. It is the fountain and source of all mortal maladies.
It is a disease because it puts the whole system of the man out of order. It places the lower faculties in the higher place, for it makes the body master over the soul. The man should ride the horse, but in the sinner, the horse rides the man. The mind should keep the animal instincts and propensities in check, but in many men, the animal crushes the mental and the spiritual. For instance, how many live as if eating and drinking were the chief objects of existence? They live to eat, instead of eating to live! The faculties are thrown out of gear by sin so that they act fitfully and irregularly—you cannot depend upon any one of them keeping its place. The equilibrium of the life-forces is grievously disturbed. Even as a sickness of body is called a disorder, so is sin the disorder of the soul. Human nature is out of joint, out of health and man is no longer man—he is dead through sin even as he was warned of old, “in the day that you eat, thereof, you shall surely die.” Man is marred, bruised, sick, paralyzed, polluted and rotten with disease—just in proportion as sin has shown its true character.
Sin, like disease, operates to weaken man. The moral energy is broken down so as scarcely to exist in some men. The conscience labors under a fatal consumption and is gradually ruined by a decline. The understanding has been lamed by evil and the will is rendered feeble for good, though forcible for evil! The principle of integrity, the resolve of virtue in which a man’s true strength really lies, is sapped and undermined by wrong-doing. Sin is like a secret flow of blood which robs the vital parts of their essential nourishment. How near to death, in some men, is even the power to discern between good and evil! The Apostle tells us that when we were yet without strength, in due time, Christ died for the ungodly—and this being without strength is the direct result of the sickness of sin which has weakened our whole manhood.