WE ARE CONSIDERING the fact that all branches apart from Jesus wither and are gathered and burned. We once thought God threw people into the fires of hell. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” was the title of a famous sermon of past generations. But something in the spirit of Jesus made us question this. The God revealed in Him was different. Does that mean that hell has been abolished? By no means. It means that we are putting the responsibility for hell where it belongs—on us. We said yesterday that we light our own funeral pyre. The punishment is inherent. Sin by its very nature is disintegrating. Sin and its punishment are one and the same thing. Does God punish sin? He doesn’t have to, for He has made sin and its punishment one and the same thing. You don’t have to punish the eye for having sand in it, the body for having a cancer, the soul for having evil in it. The word “evil” is the word “live” spelled backward. It is an attempt to live life against itself, and it can’t be done. Thomas Carlyle says: “Sin is, has been, and ever shall be the parent of misery.” He could have added, “the parent of decay,” for sin is disintegration.
“Where the carcass is, there the eagles are gathered together.” Where there is the carcass of evil, there the eagles, the forces that clean up the evil from the universe, are gathered together. Sin is self-consuming. It burns itself up. That is not something imposed on life by an angry God, that is something that is inherent in a moral universe. Sin is self-defeating and self-destroying. “He who spits against the wind spits in his own face.” He who revolts against God revolts against himself, destroys himself, burns himself up in the fires of his own self-conflicts.
O God, Thy laws are our protection—our protection against self-destruction. They are the hedges set up so we will not fall to our doom. They are preventive grace. But we brush past Thy grace to our own destruction. Forgive us. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: Iniquity is literally “missing the mark,” so I miss the mark of life when I practice iniquity, hence I perish.
