092. THE SINNER CANNOT ESCAPE FROM HIMSELF

THE SINNER CANNOT ESCAPE FROM HIMSELF

No; annihilation is not misery, and the misery which the Scriptures describe as the portion of the wicked is not annihilation. It is the pain of a soul which was made for God, made a vessel to be filled from the infinite fountain of truth and beauty and goodness, but which has emptied itself of its divine contents, and which has only sorrow and desolation in place of God’s fullness and joy. But the misery of eternal sin is more than this, it is the gnawing of a conscience that is compelled to recognize its sin as a self-chosen degradation, and its suffering as the wages which itself has earned. The greatest names in literature have occupied themselves in depicting the terrors and torments of conscience. Nero shrieking as he flies at midnight from the phantoms that pursue him through the halls of his golden house; Macbeth losing all strength at sight of Banquo’s ghost and finding a bloodspot on his hand so red that it might "the multitudinous seas incarnadine," are the real and the ideal portraits of that Conscience that "makes cowards of us all." It is not the courtroom and the judge and the sheriff that make the convict’s cheek turn pale; it is the law and the judge and the executioner within his own bosom. In a remorseful conscience human nature turns upon itself, and be comes its own detecter, and judge, and tormentor. From all outward punishment let a man escape,—he cannot escape from misery, if he be a sinner, for he cannot escape from himself. Has the reader never committed a sin under circumstances of great aggravation, a sin that afterward came up before him with a power to crush and torture him that seemed to drink up his very life? How far that anguish that he suffered surpassed the exquisiteness of any physical pain! What fearfulness and dread took hold upon him! David in the thirty-second Psalm describes it: "When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long. For day and night thy hand was heavy upon me; my moisture is turned into the drought of summer." If the reader has ever had such an experience, he knows that it does not take darkness and a prison-house and instruments of bodily torture to make a hell. As the poet has said: The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven. When Uzziah, audaciously usurping the priest’s office and attempting to enter the holy place of the temple, was smitten with the leprosy, he did not need to be thrust out of the sanctuary; we are told that "he himself hasted to go out." Judas in his suicide went "to his own place," just as truly as Peter, when released from prison, went to his own company. The decisive and controlling element in the future state of the wicked, as of the righteous, is not the outward but the inward. If hell is a place, it is only that the outward may correspond to the inward. If there are outward torments, it is only because these will be fit, though subordinate, accompaniments of the inward state of the soul. Surely there need be no positive inflictions of God’s hand, so long as the soul’s misery consists in the loss of all good, whether physical or spiritual, and in the torments of an evil conscience, self-banished from the presence of God and from the society of the holy. And conscience gives us a pledge of the eternity of this suffering. Remorse has no tendency to exhaust itself. Each new remembrance of past sin only puts it in some new light of aggravation and enormity. There are offenses, committed years ago, which we thought little of at the time, but which have caused us growing pain ever since. That harsh word spoken long ago to the child now dead and gone from earthly sight forever, —that neglect of the mother whose love was stronger than that of any earthly friend, but who is now where she cannot be reached by our confessions,—is there any tendency in these memories to grow less keen, any tendency in our self-reproach to grow less bitter? So it shall be in the world to come with every remembered sin against the mercy and love of God. Memory and conscience have power to make one sin a source of endless misery. When we add to this the probability that in that future world all that diverts the mind from the contemplation of its guilt will be removed, all the objects that here absorb its attention and desires will have passed away, and the soul will be thrown inward upon itself and its own broodings over the past, we see preparations for future suffering in the very constitution of our being. But even if memory could forget the past, there would be a present of sin ever before it. An ever-renewed affirmation of its evil decision presents forever new occasion for conviction and remorse. "This is the misery of evil deed, that of new evil it becomes the seed." Dislike for God reproduces itself in evergrowing hatred, and each new thought of selfishness and rebellion adds new fuel to the tormenting fires of conscience. So our very nature corroborates the declarations of Scripture with regard to the eternal suffering of the impenitent. The very laws of our being make provision for it. Eternal misery is the natural and inevitable accompaniment of eternal sin. And so through these two points, first, that there are some who will forever sin, and secondly, that eternal sinning involves eternal misery, we reach the third and last element of the Scripture doctrine, namely, that this misery is the appointed vindication of God’s law, and so constitutes an eternal punishment. For punishment is any pain or loss directly or indirectly inflicted by the Lawgiver in vindication of his justice outraged by the violation of law. However indirect the method in which the suffering is visited, the sinner will be compelled to recognize in it the hand of God. For God made his nature. God sustains it from hour to hour. The sinner has sundered the spiritual bond that united him to his Creator. He cannot sunder the natural bond. He cannot cease to live and move and have his being in God. Here we can banish the thought of God; we can confine our attention to second causes; we can personify law. But there, these things which now hide God from us will become transparent, and God will be seen, the All in all. Then, though he move not a finger, all pain will be seen to be his ordinance, the manifestation of his will, the vindication of his holiness, the evidence of his hatred of sin. Then, it will be seen that these pains of conscience are no arbitrary inflictions, that no fiat of the divine will could do away with them, because they are the necessary reaction of God’s pure nature against the sin that is its antagonist and wouldbe destroyer. Then, it shall be seen that God’s nature just as much binds him to punish sin as the sinner’s sin binds him to endure the punishment. And therefore it shall be seen that there is no discharge or cessation of misery possible. So long as God is God, he must punish sin. If he did not visit an eternal sin with eternal misery, he would cease to be holy,—that is, he would cease to be God.