Alexander MacLaren :: The Lies of the Temptress (Hebrews 3:13)

The Lies of the Temptress

The deceitfulness of sin. — Hebrews 3:13.

There is a possible reference here, in this personification of sin, as leading men away by lies, to the story of the First Temptation. There, the weapons of the Tempter were falsehoods.

The writer of this letter does not leave us in much doubt as to what he meansby sin, for he includes in it not only gross outward acts, but goes a great deal deeper, and in the verse before my text, all but defines it as being an evil heart of unbelief, in departing from the living God.' Whether it come in the form of gross breaches of the common laws of morality, or whether it come in more refined but not less danger ous forms, everything by which my heart goes away from God is sin; and every such thing gains its power over me by dangling before my credulous eyes a series of falsehoods.

So then my purpose is just to try to unrip some of these lies, and see what is inside of them. The deceit fulness of sin 'tells lies about the bait; — lies about the hook that it hides; lies about the criminality of the act to which she would draw us; and, lastly, lies about the possibilities of deliverance. Let me touch on each of these in order.

1. First, then, my text suggests to me sin's lies about the bait.

   The old story is typical, and may stand as a welldeveloped specimen of the whole set of evil deeds. Either for the sake of winning a desirable object, or for the sake of avoiding some undesirable issue; we never do the wrong thing, and go away from God, except under a delusion that we shall be better and happier when we have got the desired thing than we should be without it.

   Now I do not mean to say that there is not a very solid reality in the pleasurable results of a great many wrong things. If a man chooses to sin to gratify sense, he does get the sensuous enjoyment out of it. But there is another question to be asked. You have got the thing you wanted; have you, — what then? Are you much the better for it? Are you satisfied with it? Was it as good as it looked when it was not yours? Is not the giant painted on the canvas outside the caravan a great deal bigger than the reality inside, when you go in to look at him? Is there anything that we have got by doing wrong for it, howsoever it may have satisfied the immediate impulse in obedience to whose tyrannous requirements we were stirred up to grasp it, which is worth, in solid enjoyment, what we gave for it? Having attained the desire, do we not find that it satisfies not us, but only some small part of us? If I might so say, we are like those men that old stories used to tell about that had swallowed some loathly worm. We feed the foul creeping thing within us, but ourselves continue hungry. Besides, sin's pleasures are false, because along with them all comes an after tang that takes the sweetness out of them. Like the prophet's book, they may be honey on the lip, but bitter as gall when swallowed. Some foul-tasting preparation of naphtha is put into spirits of wine to keep people from drinking it. The cup that sin brings to you, though it may be fiery and intoxicating, has got the nasty naphtha in it too. And you taste both the one and the other.

   There is only one thing that promises less than it performs, and which can satisfy a man's soul; and that is cleaving to God. Go to Him, let nothing draw you away from Him. Let us hold by Him in love, thought, obedience; and the lies that tempt us to our destrue tion will have no power over us; and we shall possess joys that neither pall nor end, nor leave behind them a bitterness upon the lips. ' Even in laughter the heart is sorrowful, and the end of that mirth is heaviness.'Better what Christ offers in the cup which He drank off, whereof, though the taste may be bitter at first, what remains is His own joy, perpetualand full.

2. Again, note the lies about the hook.

   The old story lends itself to us as a kind of general expression to which all the falsehoods of sin may be reduced. 'Ye shall not surely die.' I suppose that if any man had clear before him at the moment of any temptation, howsoever fiery and strong, the whole sweep of the consequences that are certainly involved in his yielding to it, he would pause on the edge, and durst not do it. But sin suppresses facts; and here are a few of the barbed points that she hides. She does not tell you anything about outward consequences. I have been speaking about gross forms of sin. I wish I could believe that there is no man among my hearers to whom dehortations from them are appro priate, but I fear that in a great city like this there are never gathered as manymen and women together as are here, without there being some whose sin lies in the direction of sensuous passion and animal indulgence. And I beseech such to remember the hook as well as the bait, and to think of the outward conse quences in broken constitutions, poisoned blood, en feebled frames, damaged reputations, loss of faculty, position, prospects, and a thousand other things, which hang round about the path of the profligate Every year there come into Manchester young men who fancy they can play the gameand not pay the stakes. Every month, I was going to say, there drop out of this great city, bankrupt in reputation, ruined in health, driven from positions of hopes and profit, the heart-break of their families, and a curse to them selves, young fellows that listened to such words as I am speaking to them now, and went away and said: We will chance it! It is exaggerated.' Yes, it would be, if I said that this was true about the whole circle of evil-doers, but it is not exaggerated, if you remem ber that a definite percentage of all the young profli gates ofManchester,year by year, go away to die, with their "bones full of the iniquity of their youth.' Did Pleasure show you that hook when she dangled her bait before your eyes?

   She suppresses the action of conscience. There is nothing more awful than the occasional swiftness and completeness of the revulsion of feeling between the moment before and the moment after. While yet escape from the temptation was possible, the thing looked so fascinating, so all-desirable; and the next moment, when the thing is done, and can never be undone, and you have got round to the back of it, it looks so hideous and threatening. Conscience lulled, or at least unheard during the hubbub of the clamant voices of the passions that yelled to be fed, lifts up her solemn voice sometimes, the moment that they are silent, gnawing the poisoned portion that is thrown to them, and speaks. Did Pleasure tell you about that hook when she dangled the bait before your eyes?

   She suppresses the action of sin upon character. We do not perceive how all our deeds, even the small and apparently transitory and incidental, are really linked together in an iron network of cause and effect, so as that every one of them lives on and on, in more or less perceptible and distinct effects upon our characters. You cannot do a wrong thing, departing from the living God,' without thereby leaving an indelible mark upon your whole spiritual and moral nature. Loftier aspirations die out of you, the incapacity for better actions is confirmed, and that awful, mysterious thing that we call 'habit' comes in to ensure that once done, twice will be probable, and twice done, thrice and innumerable times more will be almost certain. There is nothing more mystical and solemn about our lives than the way in which un thought of and trifling deeds harden themselves into habits, and dominate us, whether we will or no. And so the sin which once stood in front of us with a smile and tempted us, because it was desirable, afterwards comes behind us with a frown, and is a taskmaster with a whip. Instead of being drawn from before by anticipated delight, we are driven from behind by tyrannous habit, and commit the old sin, not because we expect pleasure, but to get away from misery. The flowery fetters become iron, and the evil once done gets to be our master, and we are held and bound in the chain of our sins. And more than that, there is the necessity for perpetual increase, heavier doses, more pungent formsof evil, in order to titillate the increasing insensitiveness of the nature. You take a tiger cub into your house when it is little; it is prettily striped, graceful in its motions, playful and affection ate; and it grows up, and when it is big, it is the master of you, if it is not the murderer of you! Do not you take the little sin into your hearts. It will grow, and its claws will grow, and its ferocity will grow.

   And now all these consequences suggest the last of sin's suppressions that I would specify.

   They all make a future retribution a probable thing. And that future retribution is a plain and necessary inference from any belief at all in a God and in a future life. But the tempting sin has nothing to say about that future judgment, or if it has, has only this to say: 'Ye shall not die.' Is it not strange that it is almost impossible to getmanyof you — reasonable, far sighted, prudentmen and women as you are, in regard to ordinary things — to look that fact fairly in the face? You are like sailors who get into the spirit-room in a ship when she is driving on the rocks, and as long as you can get the momentary indulgence, never mind about what is coming.

   But you cannot jump the life to come. Let noman deceive you with vain words; because of these things the wrath of God is coming upon the children of disobedience.' And so, dear brethren, let me plead with you. Weak mywords are, I know, to break down the walls with which we surround ourselves. But oh, let me try to get within the defences, and plead with you not to let wishes, inclinations, and earthly tastes make you so short-sighted; but take into view all the consequences of your actions, and then tell me, if, regard being had to the whole duration oftheir results, anything is so wise as to love and serve and cleave to God who dwells in Christ, and in whom is our portion and our all. It is an evil thing and a bitter to depart from the living God.'

3. Then notice again, the lies as to the criminality of the deed.

   Once more the old story avails us. 'Hath God said, Ye shall not eat?' is the insinuated suggestion that creeps into most men's minds. I suppose that the number of us who, with clear eyes, knowing the thing at the moment that we do it to be wrong, do yet resolve that, wrong as it is, it shall be done, is comparatively few. I suppose that by far the majority simply ignore the question of right or wrong, when the question of pleasant and desirable comes to be canvassed. Before the committal — as I was saying a moment ago — we have an awful power of silencing our consciences. Just as housebreakers carry somedrugged meat for the house — dogs when they intend to break into some lonely farmhouse, so we are all adepts in applying gentle phrases to our own evil, while if the şame thing is done by anybody else weshall flame up in indignation, as David did when Nathan told him about the man and his one ewe lamb. Therefore it comes to this — do not you trust to instinctive utter ances of inclination calling itself conscience. Remem ber that you can bribe conscience to say anything but that it is right to do wrong. You will get it to say anything that you teach it about what is wrong and what is not. And therefore you must find a better guide than conscience. You have to enlighten it and educate it and check it, and keep it wakeful and suspicious, as the price of purity.

   The same set of lies about the criminality of our actions operates with still greater effect after the commission. I was speaking a moment or two ago about the sudden waking of conscience when the deed is done. But there is a worse thing than that, and that is when conscience does not wake.That is the condition, I have no doubt, of many people listening to me now. She wiped her mouth and said I have done no harm.' You can muffle the bell so that there will come no sound. You can sear your hand, if you once press a hot iron upon it; and you can make the cuticle of your conscience, if I may so say, just as insensitive by the same process. So then, my friend, do you take care that you do not thus darken the light that is in you, till it becomes darkness. And remember also that your knowing nothing against yourself does not prove you to be blameless. There is nothing harder than to drive home the consciousness of sinfulness. I can fancy what is passing in some, as they listen to me now. Someof you refer all that I am saying to that other man in the corner there, whom it will fit so well. Some of you are saying to yourselves,' Oh yes, I admit it all in a general way'; but not summoning up in your mind any of the evils which cling and cleave to you individually. And some of you are trying to break the force of what I am saying by theories about responsibility, and how a man is the creature of circum stances and the like; or by pleading in arrest of judgment your better side:' I am a respectable man. Nobody can find any fault with me. I am a good father, a good husband, an honest tradesman, a man of myword, a cultured gentleman perhaps, a student, a man abhorring gross sin, and so forth; and your words have nothing at all to do with me.' Ah! have they not?' Departing from the living God'; that is the sin that I am talking about, brother — not going and getting drunk, stealing, wallowing in the sty of sensualism; not the mere external acts. The kernel of all sin is living to ourselves. That is what I want to lay upon all your consciences. And that is the hardest of all results for even the most earnest and pleading words to effect, in the minds of the respectable, self complacent, gospel-hardened people that come and fill these pews.

4. The last word that! wish to say is in reference to the falsehoods of sin in regard to the deliverance therefrom.

   These other lies, like bubbles, sometimes burst. The first of them, about the pleasures, generally bursts as soon as the thing is done. The others about the pains and the criminality often disappear, when pricked by some thought of God and contact with Him. But the repertory of the deceiver is not empty yet. And she can turn her haled and bring out another set of lies, in order to retain her dominion. For the sin that said to you before you did it: 'There is no harm in it; you do not need to do it again; it is only just once and it will be done with,' says to you, after you have done it, when you begin to feel that it was wrong, and try to shake off its guilt and power: 'You have done it howl. You never can get away any more. The thing is past, and neither in regard of its consequences nor in regard of its power will you ever escape from it. What you have written you have written. You are mine!' And so she lays her iron claw upon the man and holds him.

   Some of us put that into a philosophical principle, and say that in this great system of rigid interlocking of cause and effect, the idea of forgiveness and of a new beginning of life is impossible and absurd. Someofus that cannot talk in that strain, yet know what it is to have to say:' There is no hope! I have loved evil, and after it I must yet go.

   So sin lies to us just as she lied before. And I have to crone with the message that, of all her falsehoods none is more false and fatal than the falsehood that a sinful man cannot turn from his evil; conquer all his transgression; begin a new happy, clean life; and be sure of forgiveness from his Father in heaven. 'Jesus Christ, the faithful and true witness,' has died that it may be possible to bring to us pure and true promises of lasting and satisfying blessedness, and to avert from each of us, if we will trust in the power of His blood, the worst and penal consequences of our transgression, and, if we will trust in the power of His imparted Spirit, to make our future altogether unlike our past, and deliver us from the habit and entail of our sins. So, dear friend, these two stand before you. On one side the Sorceress with a smile on her lips, a lie on her tongue, and a knife in her sleeve. Do not go into her house. The dead are there; and her guests are in the depths of Hell. On the other side stands Jesus Christ who has died to redeem our souls from her deceit and violence'; and trusting in whom we may all say: 'My soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers. The snare is broken and I am escaped.'