Alan Gross
Well-Known Member
Even the fire of hell through eternity will not take away the stain of sin in the souls there.
That how dreadfully, eternally, deep our sin is, Against a Trice-Holy, Eternal God.
This pollution spreads, like leaven and leprosy. It is universal, and has defiled all the faculties of the inner man, so that there is "no soundness in it" (Isa. 1:6).
Refusal to consider fallen man’s condition helps no one.
Until we are brought to realize this truth
we shall never despair of self
and look away to Another.
Biblical Description of Sin
No representations of sin are more common in the Scriptures than those taken from its defiling effects.
Throughout it is portrayed as ugly and revolting, unclean and disgusting.
Sin is pictured by leprosy, the most loathsome disease which can attack the human frame.
It is likened to wounds, bruises and putrefying sores.
It is compared to a cage of unclean birds.
The inseparable connection of the beautiful and good and the ugly and sinful pervades the moral teaching of both Testaments. That connection is ethical and not aesthetic.
To reverse the order would be to reduce righteousness to a matter of taste, and to regulate authority according to its appeal to our sentiments.
As someone has said, the aesthetic sentiment is a reflection from the moral sphere, a transfer to our senses of those perceptions found in their purity only in the realm of the spiritual and divine.
Sin is really and originally all that is ugly; nothing else is ugly except as a result of its connection with sin.
The ugliness which it creates is its own blot. It has deranged the whole structure of the soul, and morally ulcerated man from head to foot.
"We are all as an unclean thing" (Isa. 64:6).
Thus God’s Word describes us: foul and filthy. That pollution is deep and unmistakable, likened to crimson dye (Isa. 1:18),
or to the blackness of the Ethiopian (Jer. 13:23),
which cannot be washed away by the niter of positive thinking or the soap of reformation (Jer. 2:22).
It is an indelible pollution, for it is
"written with a pen of iron, and with the point of a diamond: it is graven upon the table of ... [the] heart" (Jer. 17:1).
The great deluge did not wash it from the earth, nor did the fire that came down upon Sodom burn it out. It is ineradicable.
Even the fire of hell through eternity will not take away the stain of sin in the souls there.
This pollution spreads, like leaven and leprosy. It is universal, and has defiled all the faculties of the inner man, so that there is "no soundness in it" (Isa. 1:6).
Soul and body alike are contaminated,
for we read of the
"filthiness of the flesh and spirit" (II Cor. 7:1).
It extends to the thoughts and imaginations,
as well as to words and deeds.
It is malignant and deadly, "the poison of asps"
(Rom. 3:13).
"I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live; yea, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live" (Ezek. 16:6).
The doubling of that expression
shows the deadly nature of the pollution.
Sin is as loathsome as it is criminal; it is like a foul stench in the nostrils of the Lord.
Thus the day man corrupted himself, his Maker could no longer endure him, but drove him out of the garden (Gen. 3:24).
The Scriptures liken man to foxes for their subtlety,
to wild bulls for their intractableness,
to briers and thorns for their hurtfulness,
to pigs for their greediness and filthiness,
to bears and lions for their cruelty and bloodthirstiness, to serpents for their hatefulness.
However unpleasant and forbidding this subject,
it is an integral part of "the counsel of God"
which His ministers are not at liberty to withhold.
They are not free to pick and choose their themes, still less to tone them down. Rather each one is told by his Master, "Speak unto them all that I commanded thee: be not dismayed at their faces" (Jer. 1:17).
Asylums, prisons and cemeteries are depressing sights, yet they are painful facts of human history.
Refusal to consider fallen man’s condition helps no one.
Until we are brought to realize this truth
we shall never despair of self and look away to Another.
This solemn side of the picture is indeed dark,
yet it is the necessary background to redemption
That how dreadfully, eternally, deep our sin is, Against a Trice-Holy, Eternal God.
This pollution spreads, like leaven and leprosy. It is universal, and has defiled all the faculties of the inner man, so that there is "no soundness in it" (Isa. 1:6).
Refusal to consider fallen man’s condition helps no one.
Until we are brought to realize this truth
we shall never despair of self
and look away to Another.
Biblical Description of Sin
No representations of sin are more common in the Scriptures than those taken from its defiling effects.
Throughout it is portrayed as ugly and revolting, unclean and disgusting.
Sin is pictured by leprosy, the most loathsome disease which can attack the human frame.
It is likened to wounds, bruises and putrefying sores.
It is compared to a cage of unclean birds.
The inseparable connection of the beautiful and good and the ugly and sinful pervades the moral teaching of both Testaments. That connection is ethical and not aesthetic.
To reverse the order would be to reduce righteousness to a matter of taste, and to regulate authority according to its appeal to our sentiments.
As someone has said, the aesthetic sentiment is a reflection from the moral sphere, a transfer to our senses of those perceptions found in their purity only in the realm of the spiritual and divine.
Sin is really and originally all that is ugly; nothing else is ugly except as a result of its connection with sin.
The ugliness which it creates is its own blot. It has deranged the whole structure of the soul, and morally ulcerated man from head to foot.
"We are all as an unclean thing" (Isa. 64:6).
Thus God’s Word describes us: foul and filthy. That pollution is deep and unmistakable, likened to crimson dye (Isa. 1:18),
or to the blackness of the Ethiopian (Jer. 13:23),
which cannot be washed away by the niter of positive thinking or the soap of reformation (Jer. 2:22).
It is an indelible pollution, for it is
"written with a pen of iron, and with the point of a diamond: it is graven upon the table of ... [the] heart" (Jer. 17:1).
The great deluge did not wash it from the earth, nor did the fire that came down upon Sodom burn it out. It is ineradicable.
Even the fire of hell through eternity will not take away the stain of sin in the souls there.
This pollution spreads, like leaven and leprosy. It is universal, and has defiled all the faculties of the inner man, so that there is "no soundness in it" (Isa. 1:6).
Soul and body alike are contaminated,
for we read of the
"filthiness of the flesh and spirit" (II Cor. 7:1).
It extends to the thoughts and imaginations,
as well as to words and deeds.
It is malignant and deadly, "the poison of asps"
(Rom. 3:13).
"I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live; yea, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live" (Ezek. 16:6).
The doubling of that expression
shows the deadly nature of the pollution.
Sin is as loathsome as it is criminal; it is like a foul stench in the nostrils of the Lord.
Thus the day man corrupted himself, his Maker could no longer endure him, but drove him out of the garden (Gen. 3:24).
The Scriptures liken man to foxes for their subtlety,
to wild bulls for their intractableness,
to briers and thorns for their hurtfulness,
to pigs for their greediness and filthiness,
to bears and lions for their cruelty and bloodthirstiness, to serpents for their hatefulness.
However unpleasant and forbidding this subject,
it is an integral part of "the counsel of God"
which His ministers are not at liberty to withhold.
They are not free to pick and choose their themes, still less to tone them down. Rather each one is told by his Master, "Speak unto them all that I commanded thee: be not dismayed at their faces" (Jer. 1:17).
Asylums, prisons and cemeteries are depressing sights, yet they are painful facts of human history.
Refusal to consider fallen man’s condition helps no one.
Until we are brought to realize this truth
we shall never despair of self and look away to Another.
This solemn side of the picture is indeed dark,
yet it is the necessary background to redemption
