But if you or I think that it is safe to trifle with God’s laws, we are terribly mistaken.  The Lord proclaimed himself to Moses as “The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.”  But someone will say, This is terrible.  It is terrible; but the question is, Does the Bible speak the truth about nature?  Is nature a “fairy godmother,” or does she bring men up with sternness and inflict suffering upon the innocent children, if necessary, lest they copy after their sinful parents?  Do the children of the defaulter and drunkard and debauchee suffer because of the sins of their father, or do they not?  If the blessings won by parental virtue go down to the thousandth generation, must not the evil consequences of sin go down to the third or fourth?

That we are not under the law, but under grace, does not mean, as some seem to think, that it is safe to sin.  Otherwise the forgiveness of God becomes the lowest form of indulgence slanderously attributed to the Church of Rome.  We gain freedom from law as well as penalty only by obedience.  The artist can safely forget the laws and rules of his art only when by long obedience and practice he obeys them unconsciously.  We seem to be threatened with a belief that God will never punish sin in one who has professed Christianity.  This view cheapens sin and makes pardon worthless, it takes the iron out of the blood, and the backbone out of all our religion and ethics.  It ruins Christians and disgraces Christianity.  We sometimes seem to think that our nation or church or denomination is so important to the carrying on of God’s work that he cannot afford to let any evil befall us, whatever we may do or be.

“Hear this, I pray you, ye heads of the house of Jacob, and princes of the house of Israel, that abhor judgment and pervert all equity.  They build up Zion with blood, and Jerusalem with iniquity.  The heads thereof judge for reward, and the priests thereof teach for hire, and the prophets thereof divine for money:  yet will they lean upon the Lord and say, Is not the Lord among us? none evil can come upon us.  Therefore shall Zion for your sake be ploughed as a field, and Jerusalem shall become heaps, and the mountain of the house as the high places of the forest.”  That was plain preaching, and the people did not like it.  They would not like it any better to-day; it would come too near the truth.