Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2950
“Now we know that God hears not sinners.” John 9:31.
I HAVE taken my text out of its context for a certain purpose. Part of the purpose will be answered immediately if I say how wrong it is to take any passage of Scripture away from that which comes before it, and that which follows after it—for you may, if you are so inclined, prove anything you like from the Bible if you wrench a line from its context and hold it up by itself. You can, indeed, act in the same way with any other book. You may take an expression from any human being’s writings, as some people do from these Divine writings, and make the author say what he never meant. That is how many treat the Word of God. For instance, a man may say that he can prove from Scripture that God has forsaken and forgotten His people. By turning to Isaiah 49:14, we find that Zion, in an unbelieving fainting fit said, “The Lord has forsaken me, and my Lord has forgotten me.” It was not true, but was one of the lies of unbelief. If you take from their context the words in Psalm 14:1, “There is no God,” you will have the opposite of what David wrote, “The fool has said in his heart, There is no God.” If you pick out a sentence from the New Testament, without the context, you may say that Scripture declares that our Lord Jesus Christ was a gluttonous man and a wine-bibber because His enemies falsely said so. And you may declare that it is your duty to worship the devil, because Matthew records that he said to Christ, “Fall down and worship me.” You see at once the absurdity and wickedness of wresting the Scriptures in that fashion.
Now take the words that I have chosen for my text, “We know that God hears not sinners.” Who said that? A man who was born blind, to whom Christ had given sight! And who believed it? A set of still blinder Pharisees! He was arguing with them and he wished to convince them, so he used an argument which was especially suitable to them. It was their Pharisaic belief that God would not hear sinners. “Very well,” he said, “but God has heard Christ and, therefore, according to your own belief, Jesus Christ, who has opened my eyes, cannot be a sinner.” It was a capital argumentum ad hominen, as we say—an argument to the men themselves. But we are not going to accept everything that this man said. We are not bound to do so, for he did not speak under any sort of Inspiration. The Evangelist was Inspired to record what the man said, but we would be very foolish if we believed all that he said, shrewd as he proved himself to be.
Is it true that “God hears not sinners”? It is true and it is not true. It is true, most true as this man meant it, but it is utterly false in the sense in which some persons have understood it. So I am going to speak, first, upon how it is true that God hears not sinners. And, secondly, upon how it is not true.
I. First, then, IT IS TRUE THAT GOD HEARS NOT SINNERS IN THE SENSE IN WHICH THIS MAN USED
THE EXPRESSION, namely, that if Christ had been an impostor, it is not possible to conceive that God would have listened to His prayer and given Him the power to open the blind man’s eyes—for that would have been, for God, the Just and the True—to set His seal to a lie, and that cannot be. The man was quite accurate in arguing, “If this Jesus of Nazareth is a deceiver, how is it that” (as the man supposed) “He has asked God to open the eyes of one born blind, and God has done it, thereby as good as saying that this Deceiver was true?” It is not supposable that the Most High could have done anything of the kind! It can never be believed that God will listen to the prayers of men who ask Him to support their lies and assist them in the propagation of that which is contrary to His own Kingdom. That was the primary sense in which, I have no doubt, the man meant his statement—and in that sense it is true. God will back up the
right and the true, and stand by the Christ whom He, Himself, has sent—but He will not support imposture and falsehood!
In another sense it is true that “God hears not sinners,” that is to say, He will hear none of us—no sinner among us, (and who among us is not a sinner?) in and of ourselves. If heard, it must be through the interposition of the Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus, for up to the immediate Presence of the thrice-holy God the guilty sinner cannot come by himself. The fire of the Divine Holiness would burst forth and utterly destroy the presumptuous rebel who might attempt such an intrusion! But Jesus meets us just where we are—we give our prayers into His hands and He perfumes them and cleanses us with His own most precious blood—and then He presents both ourselves and our prayers before His Father’s face. God could not hear those prayers of ours, neither could He have respect unto us or to our offering, apart from the mediation of Christ! He must—to use the language of one of our hymn-writers—“look through Jesus’ wounds” on us and then, but not till then—can He regard us favorably. As a matter of absolute justice, irrespective of the Mediator, God could not and would not hear any prayer from any sinful being in the universe!