others much, we may wrong ourselves more, but we wrong God most of all;
and we shall never recover Christ's thought of sin until, like the
psalmist and the prodigal, we have learned to cry to Him, "Against Thee
have I sinned, and done that which is evil in Thy sight."
(3) But sin, in Christ's view of it, is not merely something a man does,
it is what he is. Go through Paul's long and dismal catalogue of "the
works of the flesh": "Fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness,
idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousies, wraths, factions,
divisions, heresies, envyings, drunkenness, revellings, and such like."
Yet even this is not the whole of the matter. Sin is more than the
sum-total of man's sins. The fruits are corrupt because the tree which
yields them is corrupt; the stream is tainted because the fountain
whence it flows is impure; man commits sin because he is sinful. It was
just here that Christ broke, and broke decisively, with the traditional
religion of His time. To the average Jew of that day righteousness and
sin meant nothing more than the observance or the non-observance of
certain religious traditions. "For the Pharisees, and all the Jews,
except they wash their hands diligently, eat not, holding the tradition
of the elders: and when they come from the market-place, except they
wash themselves, they eat not; and many other things there be which they
have received to hold, washings of cups, and pots, and brazen vessels."
"Nay," said Jesus, "you are beginning at the wrong end, you are
concerned about the wrong things, for from within, out of the heart of
men, evil thoughts proceed, fornications, thefts, murders, adulteries,
covetings, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, railing,
pride, foolishness: all these evil things proceed from within." Deep in
the heart of man evil has its seat, and until that is touched nothing is
done.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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