I. God’s merciful threatenings.

The fact of sin affects God’s relation to and dealings with the sinner.  It does not prevent the flowing forth of His love, which is not drawn out by anything in us, but wells up from the depths of His being, like the Jordan from its source at Dan, a broad stream gushing forth from the rock.  But that love which is the outgoing of perfect moral purity must necessarily become perfect opposition to its own opposite in the sinfulness of man.  The divine character is many-sided, and whilst ’to the pure’ it ‘shows itself pure,’ it cannot but be that ‘to the froward’ it ‘will show itself froward.’  Man’s sin has for its most certain and dreadful consequence that, if we may so say, it forces God to present the stern side of His nature which hates evil.  But not merely does sin thus modify the fact of the divine relation to men, but it throws men into opposition in which they can see only the darkness which dwells in the light of God.  To the eye looking through a red tinted medium all things are red, and even the crystal sea before the throne is ’a sea of glass mingled with fire.’

No sin can stay our reception of a multitude of good gifts appealing to our hearts and revealing the patient love of our Father in heaven, but every sin draws after it as certainly as the shadow follows the substance, evil consequences which work themselves out on the large scale in nations and communities, and in the smaller spheres of individual life.  And surely it is the voice of love and not of anger that comes to warn us of the death which is the wages of sin.  It is not God who has ordained that ‘the soul that sinneth it shall die,’ but it is God who tells us so.  The train is rushing full steam ahead to the broken bridge, and will crash down the gulph and be huddled, a hideous ruin, on the rocks; surely it is care for life that holds out the red flag of danger, and surely God is not to be blamed if in spite of the flag full speed is kept up and the crash comes.

The miseries and sufferings which follow our sins are self-inflicted, and for the most part automatic.  ’Whatsoever a man soweth, that’—­and not some other crop—­’will he also reap.’  The wages of sin are paid in ready money; and it is as just to lay them at God’s door as it would be to charge Him with inflicting the disease which the dissolute man brings upon himself.  It is no arbitrary appointment of God’s that ’he that soweth to the flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption’; nor is it His will acting as that of a jealous despot which makes it inevitably true that here and hereafter, ’Every transgression and disobedience shall receive its just recompense of reward,’ and that to be parted from Him is death.

If then we rightly understand the connection between sin and suffering, and the fact that the sorrows which are but the echoes of preceding sins have all a distinctly moral and restorative purpose, we are prepared rightly to estimate how tenderly the God who warns us against our sins by what men call threatenings loves us while He speaks.