4. Sorrow for Sin
4
Sorrow for Sin1
I have surely heard Ephraim bemoaning himself.
—Jeremiah 31:18
Ephraim, God’s dear child, is brought in, as commended of God, and the Lord tells over and over again about Ephraim’s prayers and sorrowing for sin: “I have surely heard Ephraim bemoaning himself” (Jer. 31:18).
1. We have a precept for it in the New Testament: “Be afflicted, and mourn, and weep: let your laughter be turned to mourning, and your joy to heaviness. Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and he shall lift you up” (James 4:9–10). Now, they had better reason to mourn for sin because they did lust, war, and were contentious than because there were afflictions on them. Nature will cause any to cry when punishment is on them; not nature but grace, not the flesh but the Spirit causes men sorrow for sin as sin: “If then their uncircumcised hearts be humbled, and they then accept of the punishment of their iniquity: then will I remember my covenant with Jacob” (Lev. 26:41–42).
2. To mourn for sin is a grace promised under the New Testament: “And I will pour upon the house of David, and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the spirit of grace and of supplications, and they shall look upon me whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for him, as one mourneth for his only son” (Zech. 12:10).
3. Those for whom the consolations of Christ are ordained are the mourners in Zion; but the consolations of Christ are not for legal mourners and such as are weary and laden for sin and yet never come to Christ or believe. There is no promise made to such mourners as Cain and Judas were. Can we say that God promises grace and mercy to any acts of the flesh or of unbelief?
4. It is a mark of a conscience in a right frame2 to be affected with a sense of the least3 sin, as David was one in whose conscience there remained the character of a stripe4 when he but cut the lap of Saul’s robe (1 Sam. 24).
5. And when wicked men sin, their conscience is past feeling (Eph. 4:19) and seared as with a hot iron (1 Tim. 4:2). It is not an argument of faith, understanding the meaning of sin pardoned, not to mourn for sin and confess it…. Justified Job says, “If I wash myself with snow water, and make my hands never so clean; yet shalt thou plunge me in the ditch, and mine own clothes shall abhor me” (Job 9:30–31). “Behold, I am vile; what shall I answer thee?” (Job 40:4). This is what Job says, after he was by God’s pen declared an upright man, of his own ways in his sufferings. And David, a justified man, says, “Enter not into judgment with thy servant: for in thy sight shall no man living be justified” (Ps. 143:2). Yet Job and David were no hypocrites.
1. Trial and Triumph, sermon 17, 190–92, 94.
2. frame: condition
3. least: smallest
4. stripe: the mark left by a lash