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Very little consideration may show us the importance of seeing wherein consists the real nature of sin. The empiric who sets himself, in dealing with any disease of the body, merely to counteract its external symptoms, often aggravates the malady with which he ignorantly meddles; and he assuredly runs a far greater risk of working a far wider ruin who attempts in such presumptuous ignorance to deal with the disorders of the soul. Weigh the effects of sin, and you must appreciate something of its deadly character; look what it has wrought in the heavenly world; remember that those natures, framed according to the wise design of the All-Wise and the All-Mighty with the largest capacities for blessedness with which created beings could be gifted, have all those vast capacities filled with anguish, unconceivable, unalleviated, and then see what sin has wrought, and measure as you can in that awful shattering of God's great work of love what sin is. Or turn to this world, and compare what it was when, as "very good," God's blessing rested upon its rejoicing dawn; and then gather into one heap the sadnesses of this present earth — its darkened imaginations, its toiling, wearied, suffering multitudes — and remember that all these are the work of sin, and see what a poison must be in it. Or look to Calvary, and know that this too is sin's work. For, secondly, all this belongs not to some distant world, not to beings of another kind from us, not to devils in hell; but it belongs to us, it touches us, nay, it is in us, in every one of us, ruling in some, struggling in ethers, present in all. What, then, is its nature? "Sin is the transgression of the law." But, then, what is "the law"? It is the manifestation to reasonable creatures by the unapproachable and incomprehensible Lord of so much of the perfection of His own necessary character as can be comprehended by the creature to whom it is revealed, in order that the character of the supreme Lord may be formed and maintained, according to his limited capacity, in the creature also. This connection of the reasonable creature's happiness with the existence of a true harmony between his own spiritual being and the character of God, is a necessary consequence of the inalienable relation between the perfect Creator, from whom we have our being and in whom we subsist, and the reasonable creatures of His hand. First, because only by this harmony of his own will with the will of his Creator can the perfection of the creature's own nature be reached or maintained. And next, because only in the Creator can the creature, created with capacities for knowing, loving, serving, resting on his Creator, ever find complete happiness. By whatever means, then, the supreme Lord reveals Himself to His reasonable creatures, that revelation is to them "the law." And as in keeping this law there is for the creature all blessedness, so in the transgression of it there is certain and inevitable misery. For, first, every variation from it is a disturbance, it may be a fatal disturbance, of the intricate and marvellous machinery of his own being, all of which was planned and executed with Divine wisdom for a purpose to which he in his waywardness is running counter. Here, doubtless, we may find the cause and the history of the fall of the apostate angels. Under some temptation of self-will they quitted that order in which God's loving wisdom had placed them; and violating that, the indwelling grace of God, whereby alone the creature can ever stand upright, was first resisted and then quenched in them, and their nature became incapable of the bliss for which they had been created. And as it was with them, so it must be with every other creature; in choosing that which is at variance with the will of Him who created them, they reject all possible perfectness in their own nature. Again, they lose that which alone can fill with perfect and enduring happiness the reasonable soul created capable of knowing it, the loving revelation to itself of the Lord of all as its abiding portion. For the creature whose will, affections, and spiritual nature are diverse from those of the Almighty, cannot rejoice in Him; the contradiction between them makes it impossible; all the boundless reach of the Creator's perfections becomes to such a fallen one the occasion of a more energetic repulsion of his own nature from that, the only true centre and rest of his being. All this leads to some most practical conclusions.

1. First, we have here some light thrown on the awful mystery of eternal death, and of the steps down which the creatures of the God of love are dragged into it. Malignity, hatred, despair, the last and blackest sins into which the smaller pleasurable sins have run, are often, even in this life, a visible anguish to their victim; and the reason of all this, and its end, is taught us as we gaze into the nature of sin. For sin is not a thing, but a certain mode of action by a reasonable creature, and that action affects his own inward constitution; and the misery of eternity is not the mere retribution appointed for something which happened in this life, but is a continuous and most intense course of action into which action here has by necessary steps run on.

2. Secondly, see here the true evil of the least allowed sin. For this, which is the consequence of the deadly nature of sin, must be in every sin; and when we give way to the least sin, we yield ourselves to it, and we cannot know how far it may prevail over us. The mere allowing our earthly hearts to fix with too much delight upon lawful things short of their true Lord — this of itself may destroy us, by being the first step which leads us away from Him as the centre of our being. Still more, one habit of sin, one allowed evil temper, one permitted lust, may be the acting of our soul against God which insures for us the eternal rebellion of a lost spirit in the blackness of despair. Doubtless, as some poisons destroy the life of the body more suddenly than others, so some sins lay waste the soul with a more awful rapidity than others, because they concentrate into themselves a more energetic contradiction of the holiness of the blessed God: but all have the evil nature in them; and one therefore which possesses the soul may, and if it remains, must, shut it out from heaven and blessedness, not because God is a severe exactor of a threatened penalty, but because sin must part the soul which it possesses from Him, who, by the necessity of His own blessed nature, cannot bear iniquity.

3. And again, see here the need we have of crying constantly to God for larger and yet larger gifts of His converting grace.

4. And, lastly, let us learn hence that lesson without which prayer for the gifts of God's grace is nothing but delusion — the lesson of striving in act against sin.

(Bp. S. Wilberforce.)

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KJV: Whosoever committeth sin transgresseth also the law: for sin is the transgression of the law.

WEB: Everyone who sins also commits lawlessness. Sin is lawlessness.