Like him, he would have scorned to ask our Lord’s judgment upon any matters of religion.  Like the Pharisees, he would have said, “We see,"[1] and the state of his heart and his future prospects would have given him no anxiety.  But he was not a conceited and presumptuous Pharisee.  He was a serious and thoughtful person, though not a pious and holy one.  For, he did not love God more than he loved his worldly possessions.  He had not obeyed that first and great command, upon which hang all the law and the prophets, conformity to which, alone, constitutes righteousness:  “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and all thy soul, and all thy mind, and all thy strength.”  He was not right at heart, and was therefore unprepared for death and judgment.  This he seems to have had some dim apprehension of.  For why, if he had felt that his external morality was a solid rock for his feet to stand upon, why should he have betaken himself to Jesus of Nazareth, to ask:  “What lack I yet?”

It was not what he had done, but what he had left undone, that wakened fears and forebodings in this young ruler’s mind.  The outward observance of the ten commandments was right and well in its own way and place; but the failure to obey, from the heart, the first and great command was the condemnation that rested upon him.  He probably knew this, in some measure.  He was not confidently certain of eternal life; and therefore he came to the Great Teacher, hoping to elicit from Him an answer that would quiet his conscience, and allow him to repose upon his morality while he continued to love this world supremely.  The Great Teacher pierced him with an arrow.  He said to him, “If them wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven:  and come and follow me.”  This direction showed him what he lacked.

This incident leads us to consider the condemnation that rests upon every man, for his failure in duty; the guilt that cleaves to him, on account of what he has not done.  The Westminster Catechism defines sin to be “any want of conformity unto, or any transgression of, the law of God.”  Not to be conformed, in the heart, to the law and will of God, is as truly sin, as positively to steal, or positively to commit murder.  Failure to come up to the line of rectitude is as punishable, as to step over that line.  God requires of His creature that he stand squarely upon the line of righteousness; if therefore he is off that line, because he has not come up to it, he is as guilty as when he transgresses, or passes across it, upon the other side.  This is the reason that the sin of omission is as punishable as the sin of commission.  In either case alike, the man is off the line of rectitude.  Hence, in the final day, man will be condemned for what he lacks, for what he comes short of, in moral character.  Want of conformity to the Divine law as really conflicts with the Divine law, as an overt