164. Gospel Alkali

Gospel Alkali

Job_9:30-31 : ’93If I wash myself with snowwater, and should I cleanse my hands in alkali, yet shalt thou plunge me in the ditch, and mine own clothes shall abhor me.’94

Albert Barnes’97honored be his name on earth and in heaven’97went straight back to the original writing of my text, and translated it as I have now quoted it, giving substantial reasons for so doing. Although we know better, the ancients had an idea that in snowwater there was a special power to cleanse, and that a garment washed and rinsed in it would be as clean as clean could be; but if the plain snowwater failed to do its work, then they would take lye or alkali and mix it with oil, and under that preparation they felt that the last impurity would certainly be gone. Job, in my text, in most forceful figure sets forth the idea that all his attempts to make himself pure before God were a dead failure; and that, unless we are abluted by something better than earthly liquids and chemical preparations, we are loathsome and in the ditch. ’93If I wash myself with snowwater, and should I cleanse my hands in alkali, yet shalt thou plunge me in the ditch, and mine own clothes shall abhor me.’94

You are now sitting for your picture. I turn the camera obscura of God’92s Word full upon you, and I pray that the sunshine falling through the skylight may enable me to take you just as you are. Shall it be a flattering picture, or shall it be a true one? You say: ’93Let it be a true one.’94 The first profile that was ever taken was that of Antigonus, taken three hundred and thirty years before Christ. He had a blind eye, and he compelled the artist to take his profile so as to hide the defect in his vision. But since that invention, three hundred and thirty years before Christ, there have been a great many profiles. Shall I to-night give you a one-sided view of yourselves, a profile? or shall it be a full-length portrait, showing you how you stand before heaven and earth and hell? If God will help me by his almighty grace, I shall give you that last kind of a picture.

When I first entered the ministry, I used to write my sermons all out and read them, and run my hand along the line lest I should lose my place. I have hundreds of those manuscripts. Shall I ever preach them? Never; for in those days I was somehow overmastered with the idea I heard talked all around about of the dignity of human nature, and I adopted the idea and I evolved it and I illustrated it and I argued it; but coming on in life and having seen more of the world and studied better my Bible, I find that that early teaching was faulty, and that there is no dignity in human nature, until it is reconstructed by the grace of God. Talk about vessels going to pieces on the Skerries, off Ireland! There never was such a shipwreck as in the Gihon and the Hiddekel, rivers of Eden, where our first parents foundered. Talk of a steamer going down with five hundred passengers on board! What is that to the shipwreck of twelve hundred million souls? We are by nature a mass of uncleanness and putrefaction, from which it takes all the omnipotence and infinitude of God’92s grace to extricate us. ’93If I wash myself with snowwater, and should I cleanse my hands in alkali, yet shalt thou plunge me in the ditch, and mine own clothes shall abhor me.’94

I remark, in the first place, that some people try to cleanse their soul of sin in the snowwater of fine apologies. Here is one man who says: ’93I am a sinner; I confess that: but I inherited this. My father was a sinner, my grandfather, my great-great-grandfather, and all the way back to Adam, and I couldn’92t help myself.’94 My brother, have you not, every day in your life, added something to the original estate of sin that was bequeathed to you? Are you not brave enough to confess that you have sometimes surrendered to sin, which you ought to have conquered? I ask you whether it is fair play to put upon our ancestry things for which we ourselves are personally responsible? If your nature was askew when you got it, have you not sometimes given it an additional twist? Will all the tombstones of those who have preceded us make a barricade high enough for eternal defenses? I know a devout man who had blasphemous parentage. I know an honest man whose father was a thief. I know a pure man whose mother was a waif of the street. The hereditary tide may be very strong, but there is such a thing as stemming it. The fact that I have a corrupt nature is no reason why I should yield to it. The deep stains of our soul can never be washed out by the snowwater of such insufficient apology.

Still further, says some one, ’93If I have gone into sin, it has been through my companions, my comrades, and associates; they ruined me. They taught me to drink. They took me to the gambling-hell. They plunged me into the house of sin. They ruined my soul.’94 I do not believe it. God gave to no one the power to destroy you or me. If a man is destroyed, he is self-destroyed, and that is always so. Why did you not break away from them? If they had tried to steal your purse, you would have knocked them down; if they had tried to purloin your gold watch, you would have riddled them with shot; but when they tried to steal your immortal soul, you placidly submitted to it. Those bad fellows have a cup of fire to drink; do not pour your cup into it. In this matter of the soul, every man for himself. That those persons are not fully responsible for your sin, I prove by the fact that you still consort with them. Your affinities are with them; you stay with them, and there is some prospect that you will stay with them forever. Perhaps you may have adjoining dungeons. Perhaps you may be fastened to opposite ends of the same chain. Perhaps you may carry different parts of the same groan. You cannot get off by blaming them. Though you gather up all these apologies; though there were a great flood of them; though they should come down with the force of the melting snows from Lebanon and the Himalayas, they could not wash out one stain of your immortal soul.

Still further, some persons apologize for their sins by saying: ’93We are a great deal better than some people. You see people all around about us that are a great deal worse than we.’94 You stand up columnar in your integrity, and look down upon those who are prostrate in their habits and crimes. What of that, my brother? If I failed through recklessness and wicked imprudence for ten thousand dollars, is the matter alleviated at all by the fact that somebody else has failed for one hundred thousand dollars, and somebody else for two hundred thousand, dollars? Oh, no. If I have the neuralgia, shall I refuse medical attendance because my neighbor has virulent typhoid fever. The fact that his disease is worse than mine’97does that cure mine? If I, through my foolhardiness, leap off into eternal woe, does it break the fall to know that others leap off a higher cliff into deeper darkness? When the Hudson River rail-train went through the bridge at Spuyten Duyvel did it alleviate the matter at all that instead of two or three people being hurt there were seventy-five mangled and crushed? Because others are depraved, is that any excuse for my depravity? Am I better than they? Perhaps they had worse temptations than I have had. Perhaps their surroundings in life were more overpowering. Perhaps, O man, if you had been under the same stress of temptation, instead of sitting here to-night, you would have been looking through the bars of a penitentiary. Perhaps, O woman, if you had been under the same power of temptation, instead of sitting here to-night, you would be tramping the street, the laughing-stock of men and the grief of the angels of God; dungeoned, body, mind, and soul, in the blackness of despair. Ah, do not let us solace ourselves with the thought that other people are worse than we. Perhaps in the future, when our fortunes may change, unless God prevents it, we may be worse than they are. Many a man after thirty years, after forty years, after fifty years, after sixty years, has gone to pieces on the sand-bars. Oh! instead of wasting our time in hyper-criticism about others, let us ask ourselves the questions, Where do we stand? what are our sins? what are our deficits? what are our perils? what our hopes? Let each one say to himself: ’93Where will I be? Shall I range in summery fields, or grind in the mills of a great night? Shall it be anthem or shriek? Shall it be with God or fiends? Where? Where?’94

Some winter morning you go out and see a snowbank in graceful drifts, as though by some heavenly compass it had been curved; and as the sun glints it the luster is almost insufferable, and it seems as if God had wrapped the earth in a shroud with white plaits woven in looms celestial. And you say: ’93Was there ever anything so pure as the snow, so beautiful as the snow?’94 But you brought a pail of that snow, and put it upon the stove and melted it; and you found that there was a sediment at the bottom, and every drop of that snowwater was riled; and you found that the snowbank had gathered up the impurity of the field, and that, after all, it was not fit to wash in. And so I say it will be if you try to gather up these contrasts and comparisons with others, and with these apologies attempt to wash out the sins of your heart and life. It will be an unsuccessful ablution. Such snow water will never wash away a single stain of an immortal soul.

But I hear some one say: ’93I will try something better than that. I will try the force of a good resolution. That will be more pungent, more caustic, more extirpating, more cleansing. The snowwater has failed, and now I will try the alkali of a good, strong resolution.’94 My dear brother, have you any idea that a resolution about the future will liquidate the past? Suppose I owed you five thousand dollars, and I should come to you to-morrow, and say: ’93Sir, I will never run in debt to you again; if I should live thirty years, I will never run in debt to you again;’94 will you turn to me and say: ’93If you will not run in debt in the future, I will forgive you the five thousand dollars.’94 Will you do that? No! Nor will God. We have been running up a long score of indebtedness with God. If for the future we should abstain from sin, that would be no defrayment of past indebtedness. Though you should live from this time forth pure as an archangel before the throne, that would not redeem the past. God, in the Bible, distinctly declares that he ’93will require that which is past’94’97past opportunities, past neglects, past wicked words, past impure imaginations, past everything. The past is a great cemetery, and every day is buried in it. And here is a long row of three hundred and sixty-five graves. They are the dead days of 1873. Here is a long row of three hundred and sixty-five more graves, and they are the dead days of 1872. And here is a long row of three hundred and sixty-five more graves, and they are the dead days of 1871. It is a vast cemetery of the past. But God will rouse them all up with resurrectionary blast, and as the prisoner stands face to face with juror and judge, so you and I will have to come up and look upon those departed days face to face, exulting in their smile or cowering in their frown.

’93Murder will out’94 is a proverb that stops too short. Every sin, however small as well as great, will out. In hard times in England, years ago, it is authentically stated that a manufacturer was on the way, with a bag of money, to pay off his hands. A man infuriated with hunger met him on the road, and took a rail with a nail in it from a paling fence, and struck him down, and the nail entering the skull instantly slew him. Thirty years after that the murderer went back to that place. He passed into the graveyard, where the sexton was digging a grave, and while he stood there the spade of the sexton turned up a skull, and, lo! the murderer saw a nail protruding from the back of the skull; and as the sexton turned the skull, it seemed with hollow eyes to glare on the murderer; and he, first petrified with horror, stood in silence, but soon cried out, ’93Guilty! guilty! O God!’94 The mystery of the crime was over. The man was tried and executed. My friends, all the unpardoned sins of our lives, though we may think they are buried out of sight and gone into a mere skeleton of memory, will turn up in the cemetery of the past, and glower upon us with their misdoings. I say all our unpardoned sins. Oh, have you done the preposterous thing of supposing that good resolutions for the future will wipe out the past? Good resolutions, though they may be pungent and caustic as alkali, have no power to neutralize a sin, have no power to wash away a transgression. It wants something more than earthly chemistry to do this. Yea, yea, though ’93I wash myself with snowwater, and should I cleanse my hands in alkali, yet shalt thou plunge me in the ditch, and mine own clothes shall abhor me.’94

You see from the last part of this text that Job’92s idea of sin was very different from that of Lord Byron’92s or Eugene Sue’92s or George Sand’92s or M. J. Michelet’92s or any of the hundreds of writers who have done up iniquity in mezzotint, and garlanded the wine-cup with eglantine and rosemary, and made the path of the libertine end in bowers of ease instead of on the hot flagging of infernal torture. You see that Job thinks that sin is not a flowery parterre; that it is not a table-land of fine prospects; that it is not music, dulcimer, violincello, castanet, and Pandean pipes, all making music together. No. He says it is a ditch, long, deep, loathsome, stenchful; and we are all plunged into it, and there we wallow and sink and struggle, not able to get out. Our robes of propriety and robes of worldly profession are saturated in the slime and abomination, and our soul, covered over with transgression, hates its covering, and the covering hates the soul, until we are plunged into the ditch, and our own clothes abhor us.

I know that some modern religionists caricature sorrow for sin, and they make out an easier path than the Pilgrim’92s Progress that John Bunyan dreamed of. The road they travel does not start where John’92s did, at the City of Destruction, but at the gate of the university; and I am very certain that it will not come out where John’92s did, under the shining ramparts of the celestial city. No repentance, no pardon. If you do not, my brother, feel that you are down in the ditch, what do you want of Christ to lift you out? If you have no appreciation of the fact that you are astray, what do you want of him who came to seek and save that which was lost? Yonder is the Campania, the swiftest of the Cunarders, coming across the Atlantic. The wind is abaft, so that she has not only her engines at work, but all sails up. I am on board the St. Louis, of the National line. The boat davits are swung around. The boat is lowered. I get into it with a red flag, and cross over to where the Campania is coming, and I wave the flag. The captain looks off from the bridge, and says, ’93What do you want?’94 I reply, ’93I come to take some of your passengers across to the other vessel; I think they will be safer and happier there.’94 The captain would look down with indignation and say, ’93Get out of the way or I will run you down.’94 And then I would back oars, amidst the jeering of two or three hundred people looking over the taffrail. But the St. Louis and the Campania meet under different circumstances after a while. The Campania is coming out of a cyclone; the life-boats all smashed; the bulwarks gone; the wheel off; the vessel rapidly going down. The boatswain gives his last whistle of despairing command. The passengers run up and down the deck, and some pray and all make a great outcry. The captain says, ’93You have about fifteen minutes now to prepare for the next world.’94 ’93No hope!’94 sounds from stem to stern, and from the ratlines down to the cabin. I see the distress. I am let down by the side of the St. Louis. I push off as fast as I can toward the sinking Campania. Before I come up, people are leaping into the water in their anxiety to get to the boat, and when I have swung up under the side of the Campania, the frenzied passengers rush through the gangway until the officers, with ax and clubs and pistols, try to keep back the crowd, each wanting his turn to come next. There is but one lifeboat, and they all want to get into it, and the cry is, ’93Me next! me next!’94 You see the application before I make it. As long as a man going on in his sin feels that all is well, that he is coming out at a beautiful port, and has all sail set, he wants no Christ, he wants no help, he wants no rescue; but if under the flash of God’92s convicting spirit he shall see that by reason of sin he is dismasted and water-logged and going down into the trough of a sea where he cannot live, how soon he puts the sea-glass to his eye and sweeps the horizon, and at the first sign of help cries out, ’93I want to be saved. I want to be saved now. I want to be saved forever.’94 No sense of danger, no application for rescue.

Oh, that God’92s eternal spirit would flash upon us a sense of our sinfulness! The Bible tells the story in letters of fire, but we get used to it. We joke about sin. We make merry over it. What is sin? Is it a trifling thing? Sin is a vampire that is sucking out the life-blood of your immortal nature. Sin? It is a Bastile that no earthly key ever unlocked. Sin? It is expatriation from God and heaven. Sin? It is grand larceny against the Almighty, for the Bible asks the question, ’93Will a man rob God?’94 answering it in the affirmative. This Gospel is a writ of replevin to recover property unlawfully detained from God.

The bell at the gate of Greenwood tolls. The procession goes through and ropes are wrapped around the casket and the casket lowered five or six feet; but the body inside the casket is no more dead than is every man until he has been regenerated by the grace of God. It is not my say so, but the Bible, which pronounces us dead, dead in trespasses and in sins. The maniac who puts around his brow a bunch of straw and thinks it is a crown, and holds in his hand a stick and thinks it is a scepter, and gathers up some pebbles and thinks they are diamonds, is no more beside himself than is every one who has not accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as his personal Saviour; for the Bible, in the parable, intimates that every prodigal is beside himself, in phantasia, in delirium, in madness.

In the Sandwich Islands there is a man with leprosy. The hollow of the foot has swollen until it is flat on the ground. The joints begin to fall away. The ankle thickens until it looks like the foot of a wild beast. A stare unnatural comes to the eye. The nostril is constricted. The voice drops to an almost inaudible hoarseness. Tubercles blotch the whole body, and from them there comes an exudation that is unbearable to the beholder. That is leprosy, and we have all got it unless cleansed by the grace of God. See Leviticus. See Second Kings. See Mark. See Luke. See fifty Bible allusions and confirmations. If these things be so, should I not tell you?

The Bible is not complimentary in its language. It does not speak mincingly about our sins. It does not talk apologetically. There is no vermilion in its style. It does not cover up our transgressions with blooming metaphor. It does not sing about them in weak falsetto; but it thunders out, ’93The imagination of man’92s heart is evil from his youth.’94 ’93Every one has gone back. He has altogether become filthy. He is abominable and filthy, and drinketh in iniquity like water.’94 And then the Lord Jesus Christ flings down at our feet this humiliating catalogue, ’93Out of the heart of men proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornication, murders, thefts, blasphemy.’94 There is a text for your rationalist to preach from! Oh, the dignity of human nature! There is an element of your science of man that the anthropologist never has had the courage yet to touch; and the Bible, in all the ins and outs of the most forceful style, sets forth our natural pollution, and represents iniquity as a frightful thing, as an exhausting thing, as a loathsome thing. It is not a mere bemiring of the feet, it is not a mere befouling of the hands; it is going down, head and ears under, in a ditch, until our own clothes abhor us.

My brethren, shall we stay down where sin thrusts us? I shall not, if you do. We cannot afford to. I have, to-night, to tell you that there is something purer than snowwater, something more pungent than alkali, and that is the blood of Jesus Christ that cleanseth from all sin. Ay, the river of salvation, bright, crystalline, and heaven-born, rushes through this audience with billowy tide strong enough to wash your sins completely and forever away. O Jesus! let the dam that holds it back now break, and the floods of salvation roll over us.

Let the water and the blood,

From thy side a healing flood,

Be of sin the double cure,

Save from wrath and make me pure.

O sinner! get down on both knees and bathe in that flood of mercy. Ay, strike out with both hands, and try to swim to the other shore of this river of God’92s grace. To you is the word of this salvation sent. Take this largess of the Divine bounty. Though you have gone down in the deepest ditch of libidinous desire and corrupt behavior, though you have sworn all blasphemies until there is not one sinful word left for you to speak, though you have been submerged by the transgressions of a lifetime, though you are so far down in your sin that no earthly help can touch your case’97the Lord Jesus Christ bends over you today, and offers you his right hand, proposing to lift you up, first making you whiter than snow, and then raising you to glories that never die. ’93Billy,’94 said a Christian bootblack to another, ’93when we come up to heaven it won’92t make any difference that we’92ve been bootblacks here, for we shall get in, not somehow or other, but, Billy, we shall get straight through the gate.’94 Oh, if you only knew how full and free and tender is the offer of Christ, this day you would all take him without one single exception; and if all the doors of this house were locked save one, and you were compelled to make egress by only one door and I stood there and questioned you and the Gospel of Christ had made the right impression upon your heart today, you would answer me as you went out, one and all, ’93Jesus is mine, and I am his!’94 Oh, that this might be the day when you would receive him! It is not a Gospel merely for footpads and vagrants and buccaneers; it is for the highly polished and the educated and the refined as well. ’93Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.’94 Whatever may be your associations, and whatever your worldly refinements, I must tell you, as before God I expect to answer in the last day, that if you are not changed by the grace of God, you are still down in the ditch of sin, in the ditch of sorrow, in the ditch of condemnation; a ditch that empties into a deeper ditch, the ditch of the lost. But blessed be God for the lifting, cleansing, lustrating power of his Gospel.

The voice of free grace cries, Escape to the mountain;

For all that believe Christ has opened a fountain.

Hallelujah! to the Lamb who hath bought us our pardon;

We’92ll praise him again when we pass over Jordan.

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage