Thus Reuben reminded his brethren of his admonition concerning Joseph--thus would I address you with regard to your own children.
Note the words of the text: “Spake I not unto you saying, Do not sin against the child?” The essence of sin lies in its being committed against God. The sword of sin cuts both ways, it not only contends against God but against His creatures too. It is a double evil. Like a bursting shell, it scatters evil on every side. Every relationship which we sustain involves duty, and consequently, may be perverted into an occasion for sin. The text calls us to consider one particular form of sin, namely, sinning against a child, and it is of that I intend to speak this morning, looking up to the Father of spirits that He would teach me to speak aright.
I. WHAT IS THIS WHICH HAS BEEN SAID TO US? “Do not sin against the child.” This warning may be suitable for every one of us without exception, for those who are not parents, and who are not teachers of the young are nevertheless bound to remember that they are in a commonwealth of which young people make up a very considerable part. Little eyes are so quick to observe the actions of those who are grown up, that adults should be careful what they do. I would say to every man who is giving full swing to his passions, if nothing else will check you, at any rate pause awhile when yonder fair-haired girls and lisping children are gazing upon you. If you care not for angels, stop for the sake of yon blue-eyed boy. Let not the leprosy of your sin pollute your offspring more than must be. To the parent the text speaks with a still small voice, to which I trust none of us will be deaf. “Do not sin against the child”--against your own dear child! Yet how many parents do so! If, as I now speak, unconverted parents will be compelled to acknowledge the truthfulness of the accusations I shall lay against them, I hope they will be led to deep and true repentance. There are many parents who neglect altogether the religious education of their children. I remember a woman who was converted at an advanced age, who had been left years before a widow with many children; she was a most exemplary, moral, and industrious woman, and earning her living by most laborious work, she yet managed to bring up all her family, and settle them in a suitable manner; but after her conversion I think I never saw more bitter tears than those which she shed when she said, “I took care to feed them and clothe their bodies, but I never thought of their souls. Alas! for me, I knew no better; but alas! for them, I left the chief thing undone. The other day I spoke to my eldest son about the things of God, and he told me religion was all a farce, he did not regard a word I said; and well,” said she, “might he be an infidel when his mother never said a word by which he could have been led to be a believer.” Words were spoken by way of comfort to her, but like Rachel she refused to be comforted, because she said, and said truly, her great opportunity had been thrown away. The best time of effort for a mother had been allowed to pass away unused. Her harvest was passed, and her summer was ended, and her children were not saved. Parents who teach their children to sing the silly, frivolous, and perhaps licentious songs, are sacrificing them to Moloch. Shame is it when from a father’s lips the boy hears the first oath, and learns the alphabet of blasphemy. There are crowds of parents upon whose head the blood of their children will certainly descend, because they have launched them on the sea of life with the rudder set towards the rocks, with a false chart, a deceitful compass, and every other appliance for securing eternal shipwreck. The text further bears with equal severity upon the preacher. I feel it chides and chastens me. Preaching is full often too obscure for children; the words are too long, the sentences too involved, the matter too mysterious. Sacred simplicity should be so cultivated by the ambassador of Christ, that lads and lasses should hear intelligently under a good shepherd, and the least lamb should be able to find food. But we must push on. I want the Church of God, and especially this church, to attend carefully to the next few remarks. When teachers and others are earnest about the conversion of children, and some of them are converted, they then come into relationship with the Church, and too often the Lord’s people need the advice, “Do not sin against the child.” How can a Church so offend? It can do so by not believing in the conversion of children at all.
II. WHO SAYS THIS TO US?
1. Nature says it first. The instincts of humanity cry, “Do not sin against the child. It is but a child; it is little; sin not against it.”
2. Experience adds its voice to nature, “Do not sin against the child.” Hundreds of parents have been brought with sorrow to the grave through the natural result of their own failures and trespasses in reference to their children. They taught the lesson of sin, and the children, having learned it, practised it upon their parents. If you would not stuff your pillow with thorns, do not sin against the child.
3. Conscience repeats the same advice; that inward monitor ceases not to remind us of what is due to God and to His peculiar charge, the weak and feeble. Conscience tells us plainly that we must not sport with responsibilities so vast.
4. The Church adds her voice to that of conscience. “Do not sin against the child,” for the children are the Church’s hope. Bring them to Christ, that He may put His hands upon them and bless them, that they may become the future teachers and preachers, the pillars and defence of Christ’s Church below.
5. God Himself, speaking from the excellent glory, this morning, saith to each one of His servants here, “Do not sin against the child,” and I ask that if no other voice be heard, we may all bow before His glorious Majesty, and ask for grace to be willing and obedient.
III. Thirdly, having heard the message, WHAT THEN? Only two things.
1. Does not that exhortation startle some of the unconverted and unawakened here? I think if I were as you are, sir, if I had lived to be sixty years of age, and my son had died through drunkenness, or my daughter were at this time living a godless life, and I were unconverted, it would shoot a pang through my heart to think that I should have brought such misery upon them through my neglect of Divine things.
2. Does not this command of this morning press upon every Christian here, not alone upbraiding us, but as arousing our laggard energies, exciting us to something more of diligence and effort? Will you not roll away that reproach which I mentioned just now, which rests upon some of you, because there are schools without teachers? Parents, will you not pray for your children, and even to-day seek to hold up Jesus before them? Will we not all, God helping us, say within ourselves, that we will not longer sin against the child, but in Jesus’ name seek to gather His lambs and feed them for Him? (C. H. Spurgeon.)
Do not hurt the child
I. How MAY WE SIN AGAINST A CHILD?
1. We may sin against a child first of all by spoiling him. If the peach trees and plum trees that are nailed to the garden walls by a hundred little pieces of cloth could but think and speak, they might very likely say to the gardener so busily at work with the hammer--“Why fasten us up like this, and forbid our beautiful branches from running on the ground or playing in the breeze. How unkind it is to put so many restraints upon us and leave us so little liberty; let us just for this season run over the wall, along by the wall, or away from the wall, or any way we please.” But the gardener, with a smile, would reply, “It is out of kindness I do it, not from mere caprice. Wait until the spring has glided into summer, and all thy branches are decked with snowy bloom. Wait until the summer has mellowed into autumn, and then when thy boughs are laden with fruit, which they never could have borne but for these restrictions, then you will see that all has been done for thy good and to make thy fruit the richer.” So, parents, out of very kindness to the child you must sometimes say, “No,” and place restrictions on him.
2. There is a second way in which you may sin against a child, the very reverse of that just mentioned, and it is by harshness.
3. A third way of sinning against a child is by bad example. It is Gilfillan who remarks that “any fault in a parent, any inconsistency, any disproportion between profession and practice, or precept and practice, falls upon the child’s eye with the force and precision of sunbeams on a daguerreotype plate.” On what other ground can you account for the awful proficiency in sin which you find in many a little one?
4. There is a fourth way of sinning against a child which I do not for a moment suppose is followed by any present. It is by selling a child for gain. Would that my Master might enable me to express in language strong enough the indignant thoughts that burn within my breast concerning this miserable traffic in children’s souls. Joseph is not the only child that has been sold for a few pieces of silver. Do you ask me what I mean and to what I refer? I answer to the thoughtless wicked practice of setting the child to any kind of work, and placing him amidst any kind of companionship so as to have the benefit of the few pence he may earn. Better starve without it than live by it, for it is nothing less than blood money.
5. Our next point is one that will, I doubt not, include many present. You may sin against the child by neglecting the means for its salvation.
II. THERE ARE MANY REASONS WHY WE SHOULD NOT SIN AGAINST THE CHILD.
1. Sin not against him, because he is a child. If you must sin against some one, sin against one of your own size and strength, but it is a dastardly thing and Cowardly to sin against a child. The little thing’s innocence ought to be its safeguard, and its very weakness should prove its protection.
2. Sin not against the child, because by so doing you may blast his whole life. You may with your foot so alter the course of that tiny little mountain rivulet that, instead of flowing gently down and widening as it goes until it glides through the smiling valley, refreshing thirsty man and beast, it leaps from rock to rock, from crag to crag, falling at last with hideous roar clown some black precipice. Oh, the fatal result of turning its course so near the spring.
3. Do not sin, moreover, against the child, because children are Christ’s favourites. He ever showed a peculiar sympathy with and care over children. (A. G. Brown.)
His blood is required
The heinousness of sin
From this, as well as from many other passages of Scripture, may be learnt the unpardonable nature of sin, and that even penitence itself cannot always protect us from the evils which vice naturally brings in its train. And this we see to be continually the case in the world around us. We often perceive that the consequences of one false step, one single error, can never be altogether averted, by any repentance or amendment on the part of the sinner. Suspicion and distrust still cling to him through life, haunting him at every step, and blasting all his prospects. This is the natural course of things; and what is the natural course of things but the will of God, making use of human instruments to manifest to the world His utter abhorrence of even the very appearance of evil. Let us not, then, deceive ourselves in supposing that because God has opened to us a hope of forgiveness, through the death of His Son, sin has thereby lost any of its blackness in His sight. Still less let us imitate the conduct of those who do evil that good may come, and who profanely imagine that God can be glorified by their iniquities. It is true that “there is joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons which need no repentance”--but the joy arises from the unexpectedness and difficulty of his repentance, and not from his greater acceptableness in the sight of a holy God. Let it then be our earnest labour, from our earliest youth to our latest old age, to keep ourselves as much as possible undefiled in the way, and we shall still feel enough of our original frailty within us, to convince us that we are, after all, but unprofitable servants. Let the magnitude of the price which has been paid for our offences be a proof to us of the heinous nature of sin, and not an occasion of negligence. And let us learn, from the example before us, that guilt, though it may be retrieved, by repentance, from eternal punishment in the next world, will hardly ever escape from its evil consequences in this--that though the wound may be healed, yet the scar will still remain--and that though we may sin, like Reuben, from weakness rather than from vice, yet from us, like Reuben, will some bitter atonement for our transgression be hereafter required. (D. Charles.)
Blood-guiltiness
Although it was not certain that Joseph was dead, yet Reuben had too good reason to charge his brethren with blood-guiltiness. They were guilty of a bloody crime even in the eyes of men. No thanks were due to them for the care that Divine Providence took of him, any more than we owe thanks to the murderers of our Lord, because God brought Him again from the dead. We are accountable for those mischiefs that are the probable consequences of our wilful sins, as much as for the real consequences of them, if we had the same reason to dread them. When we repent of such sins, our grief on the whole will not be so painful as it would have been if God had not prevented the fatal effects which we had reason to dread; but the sin is the same, and the grief with which we ought to lament the sin is the same, only it is to be mingled with thankfulness and joy in that mercy which hath counteracted the natural effects of our misconduct. Two pair of combatants go forth to fight a duel. One kills his antagonist. Another fires his pistol with a view to kill his neighbour; but Divine Providence mercifully prevents the shedding of blood. He is no less a murderer in the eye of God than the other, and has the same reason to deplore his bloody purposes. But the other has an additional reason or bitter grief, because God hath suffered him to execute his bloody purpose, and to send into the other world a fellow-creature, who died in an act of wickedness like his own. You will all say, that whatever crimes are chargeable upon you, the guilt of blood is not in your skirts. Joseph’s brethren might probably have said the same thing. They do not say, We are guilty of our brother’s blood, but, We are guilty of turning a deaf ear to his mournful cries. Reuben, however, does not hesitate to charge them in direct terms with the guilt of blood; and we do not find that they had the courage to contradict him. They could not but see that their cruelty to Joseph had brought on, or might have brought on, his death. Isaiah tells the people of his own time, that their hands were full of blood (Isa_1:15). It is not to be supposed that the generality of the people were chargeable with that kind of murder which would have exposed them to an ignominous death by the laws of their country. But in the eyes of the great Judge, they were stained with blood in such a manner, that when they made many prayers with hands stretched out to His throne of mercy, He turned away His eyes from beholding them and His ears from hearing their supplication (Isa_1:15). (G. Lawson D. D.)
