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tion of which began on Adam, with the very first hour of his history as a sinner. It was then that he became dead unto God; and that his soul was driven into exile, from all the joys and communications of the divine life-just as surely as in person, he was exiled from the scenes of loveliness and delight that were in the garden of paradise. It is this character of the soul which forms its own punishment in the place of condemnation; and here in every unregenerate bosom, is the germ of that, which ministers to the second death on the other side of the grave all its agony and all its bit

terness.

It is a matter of experience, as we have already amply endeavoured to demonstrate, that this death of the soul has passed upon all men, just as surely and as universally as the dissolution of the body. There is one species of life or of vivacity, that remains to us-vivacity to the things of sense, so that they form the world in which we move, and to the objects of which alone it is that we are feelingly alive. There is another species of life or of vivacity that is extinguished-vivacity to the things of faith, so as that God and eternity and the unseen realities of another world have no more power to excite or to interest us, than if we were inanimate beings. It is the reawakening of this vivacity in the soul which is stated in the Bible, as an event equally miraculous with a resurrection from literal death. It takes effect upon us on our truly receiving Christ. He who believeth on me,

though he were dead, yet shall he live. He who believeth hath passed from death unto life a death, on the one hand, in which we may be most profoundly immersed, at the very time that we are bustling with eager and intense desire among this world's affairs; and a life, on the other hand, to which we may be raised long before our bodies have dissolved-a life which begins with conversion; which matures and makes progress along the course of our sanctification; which, so far from being arrested by the death of the body, is thereby released into a scene of enlargement, and will at length, by the reunion which takes place on the day of judgment, be brought to that state of final accommodation, in which all its powers and all its sensibilities will be for ever consecrated to the full enjoyment of God.

Think then, ye hearers, whether in this sense of the terms, you are indeed dead or alive. You may surely be sensible, if God be practically seen and recognised by you; or if, stopping short at the visions of carnality, you only move in a pictured world of atheism. Then know that Christ is knocking at the door of every sleeper's heart, for the purpose of awakening him. He employs the hope and the offer of His gospel as the instruments of reviving you; and, should you close with the proposition of being reconciled through Him unto God, He will cause the breath of another life to animate your powers-and, instead of living as you have done heretofore, without God, you will know

what it is, under the light of His countenance and the influences of His Spirit, to live with Him in the world.

This death then, both temporal and spiritual, is the judicial sentence inflicted on all who have incurred it. On whatever subject we see it taking effect, we may infer of him, that he is reckoned a sinner and dealt with accordingly. And if we see that, in point of fact, this death hath passed upon all men, it proves that in the estimation of the Judge all men have sinned.

V. 13. This sentence, it may be remarked, was in full operation anterior to the promulgation of the Mosaic law. The death of the soul in trespasses and sins, was as much the doom and the characteristic of nature in the antediluvian and patriarchal ages, as it is now; and that more visible mortality, which sweeps successive generations from the face of the world, was as relentless and universal in its ravages. The men of that period were treated as men under guilt, and all shared in the very sentence that was passed and fulfilled on our one common progenitor. Death was dealt out to them all, and just because sin was reckoned to them all. And yet sin is not imputed where there is no law. Under what law then was it, that, between the creation and the delivery of the commandments from mount Sinai, men were counted as transgressors? Not the Jewish law which then did not exist; but some prior law which extended over the whole world, and involved all the men of it in one common condemnation.

The truth is, that Paul never lost sight of the main purpose of his argument, which was to reduce Jews and Gentiles to the same footing; and bring the former to a thankful acquiescence in that same salvation, of which he welcomed the latter to an equal participation. The Jews were constantly building a superiority to themselves upon their law. They fancied that they stood out, in point of immunity and favour with God, from all the rest of the species-in virtue of the relationship they held with Abraham as their father. The apostle reasons with them on their prior relationship to Adam as their father-a relationship through which sin, and death the sentence of sin, found a like way among all the families of the earth; and from which Abraham himself, the immediate founder of their own nation was not exempted. He thus confounds the distinction, on which the children of Israel were disposed to hold out against the gospel of Jesus Christ; and, demonstrating all to be under the virulence of that disease which issued in sin and death from the common fountain-head of our species, he demonstrates all to be in need of the same remedy, and befitting patients for the same healing application.

V. 14. If death reigned from Adam to Moses, it could not be in the shape of a penalty for the violations of the Mosaic law; and yet it was in the shape of a penalty rendered to men for the violation of some law or other. What could that law be? What but either the law of the heart, or the

representative law made with Adam, by which he stood to God in the relation of federal head of all his posterity; by which, had he kept it, he would have transmitted the right which he had earned for himself as a privilege won and wrought for by him. on behalf of his descendants, but by which, as he broke it, he brought down a forfeiture on his own head, and in which, all who spring from him do share. In Adam all died, because in Adam all are held to have sinned. Such is the economy under which we sit, an economy which we shall not stop any further to explain or vindicate at present, having already endeavoured to acquit God of all alleged severity against you on the score of your guilt and helplessness by nature--and that, by directing your eye to the amplitude of the compensations which are so fully provided and so freely offered to you in the gospel.

Death reigned universally from Adam to Moses ; and the term even directs our attention to a class more unlikely than the others to be made partakers of this fatality, and therefore serving still more effectually to mark how far the effect of Adam's sin was carried among the great human family. The death of those who arrived at maturity may have been ascribed to their own wilful transgressions against the law of conscience. Each personally sinned against the light of a known duty. Each transgressed the prohibition of an inward voice, just as effectually as Adam transgressed the prohibition of that voice which was uttered from

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