There is no stop in apostasy. Let men once apostatise from God, there is no stop then; they cannot tell whither they may go, when once they begin to roll down. Steps in an apostate’s departure from God are--
1. Some slight sin against knowledge, though never so little, for sin of mere infirmity I cannot call apostasy; but if it be ever so little a sin against knowledge, it breaks the bond of obedience. When you will venture to do that which you know is against God, this bond of obedience being broken, no marvel though you fall, and “sin more and more.”
2. Every act of sin tends to increase the habit. Corruption grows by acting; as with grace, every act of grace extends grace in the heart of a man; and the way to grow in grace is to act grace much; so that when you are acting your grace, you do not only that which is your duty, but you are growing in grace: so when you are acting of corruption, you are, not only doing that which is evil, but you are increasing the tendency to it; and therefore every sin that causes us to decline from God, makes us to go more and more from God.
3. Every sin against conscience weakens the work of conscience. The authority of conscience will quickly be weakened when it is once broken; break but off the yoke of conscience, and conscience will be weaker than it was before. The first time a man sins against conscience, his conscience, having a great deal of strength in it, mightily troubles him; but having had a flaw, as it were, it grows weaker. Every sin does somewhat weaken conscience, and therefore one that falls off from God will “sin more and more.”
4. A man loses his comfort in God according to the degree of his departure from Him.
5. When one has sinned against God, holy duties become very unsuitable to his soul. It is a more difficult thing to engage his heart in them than before, and so he comes to neglect duties, and by neglecting them his corruption grows.
6. The presence of God is terrible to an apostate. He cannot think of God without some terror; before he would often think and speak of God, but now he puts off the thoughts of God. It must needs be that he must wander up and down even more and more, be as a Cain wandering away from the presence of God.
7. The thoughts of whatsoever might turn an apostate’s heart to God aregrievous to him.
8. One sin cannot be maintained without another. As now, you find when one man has done wrong to another, he knows not how to carry it out but by doing him more wrong, to crush him if he can. And so there are many sins that have other sins depending upon them. If a man be engaged in a business that is sinful, in order that he may carry it on successfully, he must commit a great many other sins, and so fall off more and more.
9. The pride of men’s hearts is such that they will attempt to justify transgression. Men love to justify what they have done; when they have sinned, they will grow more resolute and violent, that all people might think that their hearts recoil not in the least.
10. When men have gone far in sin, they grow desperate. They little hope ever to recover themselves, and therefore “sin more and more.”
11. God in His just judgment withdraws Himself from apostates.
12. God gives up apostates to their corruptions, and to the power of the devil. Oh, stand with all your might against the beginning of sin; tremble, and stop on the threshold! (Jeremiah Burroughs.)
Sinning more and more
1. The start in life is fair and promising.
2. There is a wish to be a man before the age of manhood has been reached.
3. There is an aversion to religion, and an appetite for what is evil.
4. There is indulgence in vicious habits.
5. There is the silencing of all the remonstrances of conscience.
6. There is the defiance of irreligion and immorality. (G. Brooks.)
And have made them molten images of their silver, and idols according to their own understanding, all of it the work of the craftsman.
Idols wholly human productions
The emphasis is where you would not expect it to be; it is upon the words “all of it.” There is not one sacred spot in any idol; there is not one faint signature of the living God upon anything that man has made with his own hands to worship; it is as if eyes of fire had searched the idols through and through, and as if the hands of critics had written their record, and reported in these words: The idol is all base, all dross, all material; all of it is the work of the hands of craftsmen. Men cannot step from the finite to the infinite. A finite creature cannot make an infinite idol. Whatever is made is less than the maker. If a man has made a god, he is greater than the god he has made. To have genius and power to make it is to have another genius and power equal to condemn it. Men get tired of what they halve made. Ambition may arise and say, Make a better; then comes the displacement of the former god, amid every sign and token of contempt. These words should be cried out poignantly, bitterly, sarcastically. A man is standing before the idol, and he has gone through it atom by atom, so to speak, lineament by lineament, and he says at the end--“all of it” there is not one speck of heavenly gold in all this handful of earthly rubbish. “They say of them, Let the men that sacrifice kiss the calves.” It was said in Israel concerning the calves, “These be thy gods, O Israel.” To kiss was in the ancient times a sign of homage, either human or Divine. Men kissed their gods. When they could not kiss their gods, as, for example, in the instance of the heavenly bodies, they kissed their fingers, and waved their kissed hands to the objects of worship. The Divine Being does not hesitate to accept this action, and give it its highest meaning, hence in the Second Psalm there is one who says, “Kiss the Son, lest He be angry, and ye perish from the way.” That man should have descended to kiss a god of his own making is the consummation of weakness, and the very climax of ignorance and blasphemy. All this happened in ancient times. That is true, but all this happens letter for letter to-day. Man cannot get beyond the tether of his race. It is man that is tethered; not a man, some man, a particular and dying man, but humanity. We are all in one condemnation; the act of homage has not ceased, the object of desire may have changed. Men live in circumstances, and are lost in details, and therefore it is probable that they may imagine if they have substituted some other object for the calves of Israel, therefore they have left the old idolatry. That is not so. If a man be trusting to his own right arm, he is as great an idolater as any that ever lived in Israel. Whoso says he has money enough to keep out the difficulties of time, the slaves of want, and therefore he need not concern himself with providence in any spiritual or metaphysical sense, is as much an idolater as he who in uncivilised lands bows down to stock or stone, or lifts eyes of wondering ignorance tothe blue heavens that he may fix them upon something of which he will make the image of a god. Yet all these heathen practices admit of the highest applications. Let no man reject nature, it is God’s handiwork; no craftsman made the sun; no hireling servant set the stars in their places. If any poor heart, iii at ease, should pick out some fair-faced star and say, Be thou god to me, it might be the beginning of a higher religion, the truer and nobler faith. These are mysteries, and are not to be spoken about scornfully. He does not know the human heart who says to men who know no better, that idolatry is a sin. It was a sin in Israel, because it involved backsliding from the true God; but find a man in a savage land who has never heard of God or Christ, and to whom the words, father, mother, brother, sister, carry no dew of blessing, no colour of poetry, no suggestion of wider and eternal fellowships--find a man there clinging to but a handful of mud in the expectation that there is something in it that can help him, and it is no sin: it should be the business of those who know better to, teach him better: let what he has seized be the alphabet out of which to make words, and music, and wisdom. (Joseph Parker, D. D.)
The gold god
Iwas travelling recently with an old Jewish merchant, who had commenced his career in a Western city fifty years ago, and who has been accumulating money all these years until he is now a millionaire, though as hot in the chase for the dollars as in his younger years. His whole thought and being seemed absorbed in the matter of getting money. He told me his wife was very different from himself; she was fond of music and books and art. “She came to me the other day,” said he, “with a book on astronomy in her hands, and said: ‘Jacob, there is going to be a new star; let me read to you about, it’” “But,” said the old man, “I answered her by lifting both hands and exclaiming: ‘Don’t bother me, Rebecca! I care more about the price of overalls than about all the stars in the sky.’” It seemed to me a striking illustration of the power of the moneygetting instinct when given full sway in a man’s life to drown out all desire for higher things. (A. Banks, D. D.)
