67. Every One a Murderer by Nature

Every One a Murderer by Nature

We are still standing before that cross. What do you see? Murder! Murder under a hypocritical religious pretext, which makes it all the worse. Murder filling the heart of man and reaching its utmost uncovering, as the climax of outrageous intolerance hurls man’s verdict at his Creator and Lover: “Away with Him! Crucify Him!”

Whence such unspeakable treatment of the sinless One? The answer is at hand. “When desire hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin; and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death” (James 1:15, literal translation).

Murder! Murder incipient in the heart of every human being! Murder for the One who crosses desires with us in the control of His own property. For every one of us has stood with the rabble and cried: “Crucify Him!” And then to think that any one could have the insolent effrontery to stand before that scene and dare to speak of man’s native nobility and of a spark of the divine nature in every one by birth!

There certainly can be no question about man’s greatness when he can be such a great sinner that he requires such a great Saviour to bring him such a great salvation! But the true standard by which to measure it lies in the greatness of his ruin and of God’s redemption, not in anything within the breast of man that lies untouched by sin. Though the ruins of the temple may be beautiful, it is a ruin still.

There are always those who shrink from the doctrine of the cross on the plea that it is hideous and revolting. They say they have no use for any doctrine of the shambles and the slaughter house; a gospel of gore is too shocking to the sensibilities of refined people!!

Shocking? Hideous? Revolting? Those words are far too mild. Nothing can ever be so nauseating as the cross, for no such reeking filth as sin is shown by that cross to be, has ever polluted the moral atmosphere or offended the spiritual vision throughout the universe.

Those who have been granted as much of a vision of sin as they could stand, have seen that those sickening streams that flowed from the bleeding wounds of the Son of God were after all a vision of aesthetic beauty, when seen by the side of the foul and rotten heart of man which caused them to flow. When our eyes are opened to see these things as they are, the cross does indeed become hideous, shocking, brutal, not because of the vision of the blood-stained Victim hanging there, but because of the loathsome sight of the sin-stained and murderous heart of man which is uncovered there. There never again can be a sight so hideous, because it is the sin of man that makes it so. Only those can revolt at the death scenes of the Son of God who have not revolted at the sin stains of the sons of men.

What shall we say, then, that God must do with a thing like that? Can He palliate it? Can He play with it or pass it over lightly? Can He let it continue to pollute the moral atmosphere of His universe? Can He let it plunder Him of those on whom He has set His love?

None but those so blinded by the pride which shuts the eyes to the crime of the cross, can fail to see why God cannot tolerate sin! And none but those whose eyes are shut to the vision of sin when seen in the light of that cross, can possibly imagine that an impenitent sinner can ever enter heaven!