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TOPIC: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks on Personal Problems (Other Topics in this Collection)
SUBJECT: 04. Seven Facts about Sin.
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Seven Facts about Sin.
Now this old sentence ties the word wages up tight to this word sin. There is a certain logical result of sin. It is put here in the simple commercial language of a man getting the proper return for his day's work. Regarding sin's wages there are seven simple facts to be noted; simple indeed but terrific in what they involve.
The first is this, that sin earns wages. Where there is sin there is a return coming back into the life where the sin is. There is a law of compensation in sin; something is due and owing to the man who has sinned. The second fact is that sin pays wages. There is no defalcation here. Sin is never is bankrupt. It pays. It has a full purse, a heavy bank account, and pays what is due.
Sin insists on paying wages. A man may decline to receive. You may be quite willing to forgive the account, and call it square without any further exchanges. But there is always the other side to be reckoned with here, sin's side. It insists on squaring every account. Its books are kept with painstaking accuracy.
I recall a man in an eastern city whom I knew well. He stood high in financial circles, in church and social circles for years. But all the years, as it afterwards proved, he had been untrue to his trust both in financial and in family relations. He staved off payment for long, and when the crisis came stood it off a bit longer with legal processes, but though there was delay the payment was made finally. He had to receive what was due according to the law of men. Yet be it marked very keenly that the law of man's making which compelled him to receive what was due had and has very marked limitations. Man's law deals only with discovered sin, and then only when it can be technically proven. And such law can compel a man to receive only a certain portion of the due of wrong, according as men have prescribed. But sin itself is not so restricted. It deals with the actual thing known by the man who does it, and known only by him..
Sin's payment works out insistently, pervasively, irresistibly, even as a fire unquenched reaches every bit of space within the sphere of its activity. Sin insists on paying wages. This man's home was utterly broken up, his life companion suffered until her mental balance slipped, his standing among his fellows was wholly gone, his name was disgraced. When the gates of his prison-house were opened again for his bodily liberty, the stoutest of his chains refused to unloose and still held him in their cold, heavy grip. And yet when this much is said, it leaves the greater part unsaid.
The fourth fact to mark is a tremendous fact, intense, dramatic, graphic, even poetic, if such a word can be used of that which is most grimly prosaic. Yet it must be used, for there is a peculiar swing and rhythm to sin's working here. It is this—§in. pays its wages_«« kind. I mean that the pay is the same sort of stuff as the sin. That which returns into a man's life is of a piece with the sin that started the return movement. You remember that the old Hebrew, Jacob, was a herdsman, in earlier life working under contract with his uncle. When the settlement period came Jacob was not paid in gold or silver or notes. He received in pay the sort of stuff he was handling all the time, sheep and goats and oxen. He was paid in kind. That is the meaning here.
Sin in the realm of the body brings a result in .the body. The body is the open record of a man's life, to him who can read it. There the skilled physician or the skilled surgeon reads plainly the habits of the life. Sin against the law of mental life brings its sure return in that which effects the mental powers. Sin in contact with others brings a chain of results affecting those others, and in turn those whom they affect. And this is intensified in proportion to a man's relation to the community or state or nation. It is terribly true that no man sinneth unto himself. Sin is the most selfish of acts. It beslimes to some extent everyone we touch, whether we be conscious or unconscious of that touch.
This man Jacob knew bitterly the working of this old law of sin. He deceived his old father; he was deceived by his uncle Laban in the matter of his wife, and ten times over in the matter of his wages as herdsman. He wronged his brother; and his favorite son was wronged by his brothers, and that hurt the old man far more than though the wrong had been done to himself. He lied to his father; and was lied to by his sons. As a young man he used a kid in the heartless scheme to deceive his blind, aged father; and years after his sons used a kid to give good color to their attempt to deceive their father. The old man, broken in both body and spirit, knew with a bitter intimacy those last years that sin pays wages in kind. The sin breathes out its own spirit into the whole circle of one's life, and ever returns grown stronger to bother the man who first set it free and sent it out.