The Strength of Sin - Glenn Conjurske
The Strength of Sin
by Glenn Conjurske
“The strength of sin is the law.” So says Paul in I Cor. 15:56, but he gives us no indication as to how the law is the strength of sin. He drops the remark incidentally, in a discussion of the resurrection, and never pauses to drop a hint as to wherein the law is the strength of sin. We are left to wrestle with that ourselves, by means of meditation, observation, and experience. No doubt we may all have the illumination of the Holy Spirit, but that is given us upon conditions, and not apart from our own study, experience, and meditation. Very probably there are other statements, elsewhere in the Scriptures, which will aid in the elucidation of this one, but we are given no hint as to what or where those statements are. All of this is typical of the nature of Scripture. There are a myriad of such statements in the Bible, and we are left to wrestle with all of them, by means of prayer, meditation, and spiritual experience.
Hence it is that good men often differ very widely in the explanation of the statements of Scripture. If the Bible were everywhere clear, explicit, and easy of apprehension, the case might be far otherwise, but God for his own wise reasons has given us a book which is not everywhere clear and explicit—-a book which absolutely requires deep meditation and deep spiritual experience in order to understand some of its simplest statements. We surely believe that it is possible to understand the Scriptures, and to understand them without erring too, but we absolutely repudiate the notion that they are easy to understand.
“The strength of sin is the law” is at first sight a very simple statement. There is not the slightest difficulty in apprehending what it says, but wherein the strength of the law may lie is another question. I fear that many false explanations of the matter have been taught in the church. I enter upon the subject with diffidence, conscious enough of my own insufficiency to give an adequate explanation of it. Yet at least one facet of the theme seems clear enough to me, and of that I will venture to speak.
The law sets us to labor for that which is unattainable. Its necessary result is therefore to discourage us, and in the end to drive us to despair. Paul says—-and says it strictly concerning eternal life, as the preceding verse establishes beyond cavil—-“And let us not be weary in well doing, for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.” (Gal. 6:9). To faint is to give up. It is to quit. And this is precisely what the law, if taken seriously, will bring us to. It will discourage us to despair, and cause us to give up.
Allow me to illustrate this. It is the natural endeavor of every wife to please her husband. She is driven to this by her nature. Her desire is toward him, and it is one of the deepest needs of her nature to be approved and appreciated in his eyes. So she labors to please him. But if she labors at it with her whole heart, day after day, and yet finds that she can never please him—-finds that her performances are never good enough—-finds that she is never approved, no matter how earnestly and diligently she labors for it—-there can be but one result. She will very soon be very discouraged—-very soon lose heart and spirit—-very soon despair of pleasing him, and so cease to try.
Now all of this exactly illustrates the relationship of the awakened sinner to God. He is determined to please God, to be acceptable to him. But the more he labors at it, the more he perceives that such acceptance is unattainable. He cannot please God. What is left him but to faint—-to give up, and cease trying. It is thus that the law is the strength of sin.
But the law does not stop here. By driving men to despair, it actually excites the opposition of their hearts to God. Let me illustrate again. A child labors to please its father—-labors heartily and with a good will—-and yet its father is never pleased. The father only finds fault—-puts his finger immediately upon every deficiency. The child will not only give up, but soon entertain hard and bitter thoughts of its father—-regard him not as a loving father, but as an exacting tyrant.
Now this is exactly the province of the law. It is holy, just, and good, and it requires us to be so also. It sets us upon an impossible task, and calls attention to our every failure. This drives us naturally to despair. It drives us to hard thoughts of the God who requires impossibilities of us, and in the end takes away any will which we may have had to please him. Thus the law is the strength of sin. It strengthens sin’s hold upon us, rather than delivering us from it.
On the other side, “Sin shall not have dominion over you, for ye are not under law, but under grace.” (Rom. 6:14—-so the Greek). This is commonly explained to refer to the fact that the law cannot give us the enablement which grace gives, and that is no doubt a part of it, but not all. The first thing we need in order to gain the victory over sin is acceptance with God, and not merely the fact of acceptance, but the knowledge of it. But that acceptance is the one thing of which the law everywhere deprives us. It sets us to labor to gain acceptance, but work as we will, the acceptance remains forever beyond our reach. This leads us naturally to lose spirit and faint, as explained above, and thus the dominion of sin is strengthened.
Under grace, on the other hand, we begin with acceptance with God. We walk our whole pilgrimage “accepted in the Beloved.” We walk under the eye of a loving father, not a demanding tyrant. Though fully conscious of our failures, we know that if our heart is right with God, those failures do not affect our acceptance with him. We labor indeed to be acceptable to God, but we labor as the beloved child or the darling wife, basking all the while in the love of our Lord. That the law can never give us.
Here it is that I believe lies the greatest practical difference between law and grace. It is not the province of grace to release us from the obligation of “holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord.” Those who do not follow after holiness shall never see the Lord, whether they belong to conscience, law, grace, or kingdom. Those who employ grace to release us from the obligation of holiness turn the grace of God into lasciviousness, and pervert the gospel of Christ. But it is just as possible to pervert the gospel of Christ on the other side, by turning it into another law. This is done whenever the claims of Christ and the requirements of the gospel are placed upon the principle of law. When the sincere repentance and holiness which the gospel certainly requires of us are enforced with the rigor of Mount Sinai, depriving us of our acceptance with God for every failure, then we have turned the gospel into another law, and so made the gospel the strength of sin. This is a serious error, and may serve to damn souls as effectually as turning the grace of God into lasciviousness.
Here is a man laboring under the yoke of the law, discouraged to the point of despair, and about to faint—-or perhaps he fainted already ten years ago, and lives now with a defiled conscience, with hard thoughts of God, and with no heart to make another attempt to serve him. What does he need? Ah! the grand catholicon, the sovereign remedy for such a state is HOPE! Convince such a man there is hope for him, not in his own performances, but in the grace of God and the blood of Christ, and how eagerly does he embrace that hope. This is the genius of the gospel, to give hope. The law can never give it. The more we have to do with law, the more thoroughly does it deprive us of hope. Thus the principle of law remains “the strength of sin.”
Now there is great danger among those who repudiate the unholy gospel of the modern church, and preach the claims of Christ and the mandates of holiness, of turning the gospel of grace into another law. I am often accused of this, but I believe it is by those who understand neither law nor gospel. I am well aware of the deficiencies of my own understanding. I do not know how to answer all of the questions concerning the relationship of law and grace. Yet I do not believe I turn the gospel into a law. Nay, I have always opposed this tendency wherever I have seen it. Nearly twenty years ago I went to a meeting which was advertised as a “gospel meeting.” I had no opportunity to preach at that time, though I longed to do so, and before I went I prayed that God would give me an opportunity to preach. I had fond visions of a meeting in which the preacher would fail to appear, and I would stand up to address the people. My fond dream was not fulfilled, for the preacher arrived in good order—-a female preacher, but not a preacher of the gospel. As we left the building, she stood at the door to greet the people, and said to me, “We are glad you came, and hope you’ll be back.” I replied bluntly enough, “I won’t be back.” “Oh?” she said, “you disagree with us?” Said I, “You advertised this as a gospel meeting, but there is no gospel here.”
I said no more, but left the building—-followed, however, by a small crowd who had listened to my remarks to the preacher. They gathered around me, and for half an hour I refreshed my own soul, if not theirs, by preaching the gospel of acceptance with God, acceptance by grace, acceptance now, and not when I have earned it by the works of the law. I took the occasion to rather roundly impugn the gospel which they knew, saying, “You work, and work, and work, and work, and never know if you are saved. You never attain to acceptance with God. This is no gospel.”
To be sure I preach, as Paul did throughout his ministry, “that they should repent, and turn to God, and do works meet for repentance.” (Acts 26:20). I preach with Paul “that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God.” (I Cor. 6:9). I preach “holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord.” (Heb. 12:14). But all of this belongs to Paul’s gospel. The gospel gives hope and life to the weak, but it is no shelter for the filthy, the profane, and the rebellious. It gives salvation to Jacobs, weak and failing as they are, but no hope to Esaus.
It remains a fact, however, that it is possible to make another law of the gospel. Some who preach perfection have practically done so. Wesley was certainly not guilty of this, but the low Arminianism to which some of the more recent Wesleyans have descended does just that. I have known some who think they lose their acceptance with God, and are lost, every time they fail—-some who must “get saved every day.” Others preach “holiness or hell,” meaning of course, “perfection or hell.” Now perfection is precisely the requirement of the law. It is perfectly legitimate to preach “holiness or hell,” if we mean the right thing by “holiness,” for it is the Bible which says no man shall see the Lord without it. But if we mean perfect holiness, we have turned the gospel exactly into the law. Nor is the matter altered if we preach perfection by faith. If we preach anything unattainable as the condition of our acceptance with God, our gospel is nothing different from the law.
Charles G. Finney, who also preached perfection, had tendencies in the same direction. The law was impotent through the weakness of the flesh, but Finney’s theology could make no allowance for the weakness of the flesh, for in fact it made no allowance for the existence of the flesh. All sin, he held, was voluntary. Now a theology which makes “sin that dwells in me” to be voluntary, in fact makes that which I cannot help to be my fault—-and if my acceptance with God is made to hang upon this, I am under the law indeed.
The gospel has terms as well as the law, and they are not easy terms, but they are attainable. Those who preach easy salvation pervert the gospel. It is under the gospel that “the righteous” shall “scarcely be saved.” (I Pet. 4:18). Modern Evangelicals, determined to empty this text of its sense if they can, would alter “scarcely” to “with difficulty,” but they gain little by the change. If the righteous are saved “with difficulty,” then the terms of the gospel are not easy. It is not easy to “repent and believe the gospel.” It is not easy to cut off the right hand and pluck out the right eye, but it is possible. Acceptance with God is attainable under the gospel, where it was not under the law.
Yet again, there have been many who have so defined the terms of the gospel as to make another law of them. Repentance has been defined by many as to hate sin. Yet every sinner who is honest with his own heart knows very well that he cannot hate sin. He can forsake it, but he cannot hate it. Any sinner, therefore, who believes he must hate his sin in order to gain acceptance with God is under the law. He is laboring to make bricks not only without straw, but without clay, and the longer he labors to hate his sin, the more thorough will be his despair, and the more likely will he be to hate God instead of sin. Thus the gospel which is preached to him becomes the strength of sin.
And any law, gospel, or theology which bases our acceptance with God upon anything which is unattainable, or virtually unattainable, must prove to be “the strength of sin.” Every such doctrine puts us precisely in the place of the servant who labors to please a master whom he cannot please. Such a servant will soon cease to try, and resent his master also. It matters little whether the fault lies in the master or the servant. Whether the servant cannot please, or the master will not be pleased, the result is all the same. The servant will fault the master as much as the master faults the servant. This is the plight in which the law places us, and though the fault is entirely our own, the result is that the law is made “the strength of sin.”
Glenn Conjurske