It is strange that men should need to be told, and that with all emphasis, the evil case in which they are; and stranger still that they should resent the discovery and reject it.  This pathetic pleading is the voice of a divine Father trying to convince His son of misery and danger; and the obscurity of the text is as if that voice was choked with sobs, and could only speak in broken syllables the tragical word in which all the evil of Israel’s sin is gathered up—­’his destruction,’ or ‘corruption.’  It gathers up in one terrible picture the essential nature of sin and the death of the soul, which is its wages—­inward misery and unrest, outward sorrows, the decay of mental and moral powers, the spreading taint which eats its way through the whole personality of a man who has sinned, and pauses not till it has reduced his corpse to putrefaction.  All these, and a hundred more effects of sin, are crowded together in that one word ‘thy destruction.’

It is strange that it needs God’s voice, and that in its most piercing tones, to convince men of ruin brought by sin.  A mortifying limb is painless.  There is no consciousness in the drugged sleep which becomes heavier and heavier till it ends in death.  There is no surer sign of the reality and extent of the corruption brought about by sin, than man’s ignorance of it.  There is no more tragical proof that a man is ‘wretched, and miserable, and blind, and naked’ than his vehement affirmation, ’I am rich, and have gotten riches, and have need of nothing,’ and his self-complacent rejection of the counsel to ’buy refined gold, and white garments, and eye-salve to anoint his eyes.’  So obstinately unconscious are we of our ruin that even God’s voice, whether uttered in definite words, or speaking in sharp sorrows and punitive acts, but too often fails to pierce the thick layer of self complacency in which we wrap ourselves, and to pierce the heart with the arrow of conviction.  Indeed we may say that the whole process of divine education of a soul, conducted through many channels of providences, has for its end mainly this—­to convince His wandering children that to be against Him, against their Help, is their destruction.

But, perhaps, the strangest of all is the attitude which we often take up of resenting the love that would reveal our ruin.  It is stupid of the ox to kick against its driver’s goad; but that is wise in comparison with the action of the man who is angry with God because He warns that departure from Him is ruin.  Many of us treat Christianity as if it had made the mischief which it reveals, and would fain mend; and we all need to be reminded that it is cruel kindness to conceal unpleasant truths, and that the Gospel is no more to be blamed for the destruction which it declares than is the signalman with his red flag responsible for the broken-down viaduct to which the train is rushing that he tries to save.

II.  The loving appeal to conscience as to the cause.