T| " Give me first a death in which there is no life, and then a life in which there is no death." He who uttered these words was not a Christian as we count Christian, but he understood the great law which regulates human and Christian life better than many of us Christians do. There is only one kind of perfect human life, and that is the life which is exemplified in Jesus Christ ; and to this life there is only one possible path, and that is through a genuine death. The grub cannot pass to the higher life of the dragon-fly without first sickening and becoming dead to all the life it has been familiar with in the water, and we, in order to enter the true eternal life of man, must die to what we have been most familiar with in the old life.1
I.
Dead to Sin.
1. To be dead to an object is to be as incapable of being touched, influenced, or affected by it as if we were really dead.
1 Marcus Dods.
ROMANS vi. ii 329
Thus some people are dead to the pleasures of the world — that is, earthly pleasures have no attraction for them ; or they are dead to ambition — that is, the honours and dignities of the world are to their minds nothing better than children's toys. And in this way, too, men are often dead to what is good — to truth, to justice, to honour, to duty ; they are as insensible to their claims as a dead man would be. And so it is with regard to sin. To be dead to sin is to be insensible to all its tempta- tions ; it- is to be in that state in which the motions of sin within and the allurements to sin without have no power; it is to be dead to all sinful appetites, passions, desires, thoughts ; dead to all sinful objects and aims — in a word, it is to have ceased from sin, as one who is dead has ceased from all living acts.
TJ Being dead to sin must obviously be the opposite of being dead in sin. The latter must undeniably be a state of entire sinfulness — a state in which the soul is dead to all good through the power of sin over it. But right over against this, to be dead to sin must be to be indifferent to its attractiveness — beyond the reach of its influence — as fully removed from its influences as the dead are from the objects of sense in this world. As he who is dead in the natural sense has nothing more to do with earthly things, so he who is dead to sin has nothing to do any more with sin's attractions or with sinning itself.1
2. More particularly, St. Paul's expression, "dead to sin," suggests such ideas as these —
(1) We are dead to sin in the sense of being beyond its power to inflict penalty on us. He that is dead is freed from sin in that sense. If a servant has come to a settlement with his master there remains no longer any bond between them. Now the wages of sin is death, and our wages have been paid in the death of Christ. That is, roughly, Paul's theology. The law has no claim upon a man who has suffered its extreme penalty, and this the old legal phraseology of Scotland brought out when it spoke of criminals being justified in the Grassmarket, when they were hung there. By death they cleared scores with the law. Thus we have by the death of Christ the removal of our guilt.
(2) To be dead to sin means, further, that we are irre- sponsive to the appeals of sin. How still, how unmoved, how irresponsive the dead are ! Let the master shout at his slave's
1 C. G. Finney.
330 A GOOD RECKONING
dead body; not one finger stirs to obey his orders. Let him bring his lash across the upturned face; not a muscle quivers. Was the dead man vain and fond of applause ? the acclaims of a world bring no smile of pleasure to his face now. Was he mean, greedy, grasping ? tell him of the most promising investments : he has no ear, no heart for them. Fill the dead hand with gold ; the fingers will not close upon it. Set round the dead the things that but a few hours ago made his eye glitter and his pulses quicken ; now he is beyond them all — dead to them. The soldier who a few months ago sprang forward at the sound of the bugle now lies stiff on the field, and knows no difference between the charge and the retire. The most passionate kiss that love presses on the face of the dead wins no acknowledgment, no returning embrace. As a wild Bechuana said : " Soon I shall be dead, and they will bury me in my field ; my flocks will come to pasture above me, but I shall no longer hear them, and I shall not come forth from my tomb to take them and carry them with me to my sepulchre." Such is the image of our life in the midst of the world since we believed in Christ ; such is the insensibility of the true Christian, of the man who avails himself of his position ; such is his insensibility to the temptations that charmed him in his former years, to all that constituted the very essence of his old life. The man who was led by his appetites, and could not walk the streets without sinning, sets the Cross of Christ before him, and finds he can as little sin as if he were a corpse. The man who lowered his character and lost his self-respect to make a larger profit than was legitimate, carries with him the remembrance of Christ's death, and can as little overreach or swindle as the miser who was buried a century ago. He is dead to the old life ; it is a thing of the past ; it is not in that direction he looks for happiness, nor from it that appeals have any effect.