Chapter 9
Cain was of the wicked one and slew his brother (Genesis 4). The way of Cain (Jude 11) is not hard to describe. Cain is too proud to offer atonement for his sin; he prefers his own way of sacrifice. He presents a bloodless offering. He hates the obedience of faith. He murders the faithful Abel.
Observe the way of Cain, and beware, you proud, self-righteous ones, so that you do not follow the same way, for the steps are few from self-righteous pride to hatred of true believers, and murder is not far beyond that. The seed of every wicked act can be found in the proud spirit of self-justification, and it is a great mercy that it does not show itself in all its terrific ripeness more often. You who boast of your own merits, see the mangled body of the first martyr, for that is the full-blown development of your rebellious self-conceit. Lord, deliver us from all pride and boasting, all self-righteousness, and all hatred of the cross of Christ. There are many people whose brother’s blood cries to God from the ground (see Genesis 4:10).
There is the seducer. He spoke with flattering words and talked of love, but the poison of asps was under his tongue, for lust was in his heart. He came to a beautiful temple as a worshipper, but he committed infamous sacrilege, and left that to be the haunt of demons which once was the palace of purity.
Such men are received into society and are looked upon as gentlemen, while the fallen woman, the harlot, can only hide herself beneath the shadow of night. No one will make excuse for her sin, but the man, the criminal, is called a respectable and reputable man. He can fill places of trust and positions of honor, and there are none who point the finger of scorn at him. Sir, the voice of that poor fallen sister’s blood cries to heaven against you, and in the day of judgment her damnation shall be on you. All the shame into which you have plunged her will lie at your door. Among the dreadful sights of hell, two eyes will glare at you through the murky darkness like the eyes of serpents, burning their way into your inmost soul. “You deceived me and lured me to the pit,” she says. “Your arms dragged me down to hell, and here I lie to curse you forever and ever as the author of my eternal ruin.”
There is one sinner who can look upon this in a serious light. Who is it who has gone down to the pit? You over there, who is it who died just a few days ago? The woman who loved you as she loved her own soul, who idolized you and thought you were an angel. Shall I say it before God and to your face? You ruined her! And what next, sir? You cast her off as though she were only dirt, and you threw her into the gutter with a broken heart. Once she was there, she fell into despair, because her god cast her off, for you were her god. Her despair led to dreadful consequences and to deeper ruin still.
She has gone, and you are glad about it, because you think you will hear no more of her. Sir, you will hear of it! As long as you live, her spirit will haunt you. It will follow you to the filthy joy which you have planned for your future. On your deathbed she will be there to twist her fingers in your hair, to tear your soul out of your body and drag it down to the hell appointed for such evil people as you. You spilled her blood, the blood of her who trusted you – a fair, frail thing, worthy to be an angel’s sister – and you pulled her down and made her a devil’s tool! God save you! If He does not, your damnation will be sevenfold. Oh, you son of the devil, what will your doom be when God deals with you as you deserve? Are these scorching words? Not half as scorching as I would like to make them. I would send them hissing into your soul if I were able, not so much to condemn you, but with the hope that though you cannot make good the trouble you have done, you can still turn from the error of your ways to seek the Savior’s blood and find pardon for this great iniquity.
Then there are those who educate youth in sin. These are Satan’s captains and marshals. They are strong men with corrupt hearts, who are never more pleased than when they see the buds of evil swelling and ripening into crime. We have known some such men who possess an evil eye, who not only loved sin themselves, but delighted in it in others. They patted the boy on his back when he uttered his first profanity, and rewarded him when he committed his first theft.
Satan has his Sunday-school teachers. Hell has its missionaries who travel sea and land to make one convert and make him ten times more a child of hell than they are themselves. Most of our villages are cursed with one such wretch, and is there even a single street in any big city on which one or more such fiends do not live? Wretch, have you sought to entangle them in your net? Have you, like the spider, thrown first one strand of web around them and then another, until you have them safely in your coils to drag them down to the den of Beelzebub? If so, then the voice of your brother’s blood cries from the ground. At the judgment, this will be a witness that you will not be able to disprove – the witness of the blood of souls ruined by your sinful and evil training. Beware, you who hunt for the precious life!
Then there are some corrupt people who, if they see young converts, take pride in putting stumbling blocks in their way. As soon as they discover that there is a little working of conscience in someone, they laugh, sneer, and point their finger. How often I have seen this in a husband who tries to prevent his wife’s attendance at a prayer meeting, or in the young man who ridicules his friend because he felt the power of God’s Holy Spirit and begins to read the Scriptures, pray, and think about changing his ways! This happens too frequently in our great establishments in London, where one young man kneels to pray, and many laugh at him and insult him. They are not content to perish themselves. Like dogs pursuing a deer, so the wicked will hunt the godly.
You who are the enlisting sergeants for the evil Prince of Darkness, you who seem never as happy as when you set traps for souls to entice them to destruction, I solemnly warn you. Heed the warning, to prevent God’s avenging angel overtaking you without warning with the sword that will strike your neck and cause you to feel how terrible a thing it is to have tried to ruin the servants of the living God.
Then there is the infidel. He is the person who is not content to keep his sin to himself, but feels the need to publish his wickedness. He climbs to the top of the platform and blasphemes the Almighty to his face, defies the Eternal, takes Scripture to make it the subject of unholy jokes, and makes Christianity a theme for comedy. If this is you, be careful, for there will be a tragedy in the future in which you will be the chief sufferer!
What should I say of those men who are far more diligent than half of God’s ministers, whose names we see engraved on plaques on every wall? They will go from town to town, and never seem content unless they are preaching against something that is pure, and lovely, and of good report, or proclaiming things that would make your cheeks drain of their color if you heard them. They are dreadful things against the Most High, such as David heard when he said, Horror has taken hold upon me because of the wicked that forsake thy law (Psalm 119:53).
I address such people, because the voice of your brother’s blood cries out to God. The young men you have deluded, the working men you have led astray, the sinners whose lullaby you have sung, the souls you have poisoned with your foul drinks, the multitudes you have deceived – all these will stand up in the end, a huge army, and pointing their fingers at you, they will demand your swift destruction, because you lured them to their doom.
And what shall I say of the unfaithful preacher? He is the slumbering watchman of souls, the man who gave testimony at God’s altar that he was called by the Holy Spirit to preach the Word of God. He is the man upon whose lips people’s ears waited with attention while he stood like a priest at God’s altar to teach Israel God’s laws. He is the man who performed his duties half-asleep, in a dull and careless manner, until others also slept and thought Christianity was not to be taken very seriously.
What shall I say of the pastor with an unholy life, whose corrupt practice outside of the pulpit has made the most meaningful things from the pulpit to be powerless. He has blunted the edge of the sword of the Spirit and turned the back of God’s army in the day of battle.
What should I say about the preacher who has amused his audience with fine-sounding words and humorous stories when he ought to have stirred their consciences. He has been more concerned about fancy sermon outlines than of proclaiming the judgment of God. He has preached a dead morality when he ought to have lifted Christ on high as Moses lifted the serpent in the wilderness.
What should I say about those who have dwindled away their congregations, who have sown strife and division in churches of Christ that were once happy, peaceful, and prosperous? What should I say about the men who have joked from the pulpit about the most serious things, whose lives have been so devoid of holy passion and devout enthusiasm that people have thought truth to be a lie, Christianity a performance, prayer powerless, the Spirit of God a delusion, and eternity a joke? Among all who will need eternal compassion, surely the unfaithful, unholy, passionless minister of Christ will be the most to be pitied! What did I say? No, rather he is the most contemptible, the most despicable, and the most accursed! Surely, every thunderbolt will make his brow its target, and every arrow of God will seek his conscience as its mark.
If I must perish, let me suffer any way but as a minister who has desecrated the pulpit by a slumbering style of ministry, by a lack of passion for souls. How will such men answer for it at the throne of God – the smooth things, the polite and agreeable words, the whitewashing of men with the watered-down paint of peace, when they should have dealt with them honestly as in God’s name? Sirs, if we never play the part of the Sons of Thunder, we will hear God’s thunders in our ears forever and ever, and we will be cursed of men and cursed of the Most High without end. In hell we will have this lament peculiar to ourselves: “We preached what we did not feel. We testified of what we did not know. People did not receive our witness, for we were hypocrites and deceivers, and now we go down, richly deserving it, to the very lowest depths of eternal punishment.”
But the voice of your brother’s blood cries to God from the ground, even though you are not an infidel lecturer, even though you have not been degenerate, even though you never taught heresy, and even though you have spread no schism. If your life is unholy, your brother’s blood is on your own head.
“Oh,” says one, “If I sin, I sin to myself.”
Impossible!
The deadly contagious illness might say, “I am deadly to myself alone.” Cholera might say, “My deadly breath is for myself only.” Your example spreads. You, like the leper, leave uncleanliness on everything you touch. The very atmosphere which surrounds you breeds disease. What others see you do, they learn to do. Some may even rival you and exceed you, but if you taught them their lessons and they learn to read in hell’s book better than you, all that they learn afterwards will come to your door, because they learned the elements of sin from your practice.
I am afraid many people never look at their transgressions in this light. You cannot help being leaders and teachers. If in your own house you are a drunkard, your boys will be drunkards too! I have heard of a man who flogged his son for swearing, swearing at him the whole time he did it. We know instances of people who feel as if they would sooner bury their children than see them grow up like themselves, but how can it be helped?
Your practice must and will influence your children, and not only your children, but all with whom you come into contact in the world. Do not think, if you are an employer, that your employees can know how you live your life without being affected by that knowledge. There may be some among them who have an inward principle that will not yield to temptation, but I know of hardly anything more dangerous than for a number of people to constantly come into contact with one whom they look up to as a teacher who is also a teacher of the arts of sin and a leader of damnation to their souls. Be careful; if not for yourselves, then for others, or the voice of your brother’s blood will cry unto God from the ground.
What should the cry be against open sinners and unbelievers? It would be an awful thing to pray for a man’s damnation, but there are some people I know of who do so much harm while they live, that if they were dead, people would breathe more freely. I know a village where there lives a man who contaminates half the population. There is a malicious look upon his face that causes virtue to blush and a contemptuous smirk that causes courage to cower. He is a wretch, so well taught and so deeply instructed in the realm of iniquity, that wherever he goes he finds no one a match for him, either in his reasoning or in the infamous conclusions that he draws. He is a man who is a deadly upas tree, dropping black poison upon all beneath his shadow.4
4 The upas tree is a tropical Asian tree, the sap of which contains poisonous glycosides. The sap has been used for poison arrows. The tree was once thought to have given off a poisonous gas.
I once thought that I would half pray that the man would die and go to his destruction, but one must not do that. Yet, if he were gone, the saints might say, “It is well.” Just as the saints will say “Hallelujah!” over Babylon when it is destroyed and the smoke of her torment goes up forever (Revelation 19:3), I thought that same shout of “Hallelujah!” might be said when those people against whom the blood of many young people cries out to God from the ground go to their doom, for God has judged the great sinner who made the people of the earth drunk with the wine of his fornication (Revelation 18:3).
What can we do to be rid of the past? Can tears of repentance do it? No. Can promises of change make a blank page where there are so many blots and blemishes? No. Nothing we can do removes our sin. But can’t the future make up for the past? Cannot future zeal wipe out past carelessness? Cannot the endeavor of our life yet to come make amends for the idleness or vice of the life that is past? No. The blood of our brothers has been shed, and we cannot gather it up. The harm we have caused cannot be undone!
Souls that are lost through us cannot now be saved. The gates of hell are so shut that they can never be opened. There is no restitution we can make. The redemption of the soul is precious, and it ceases forever. The sin cannot be washed away by repentance or removed by reformation. What then? There would be hopeless despair for every one of us if there were not another blood – the blood of One called Jesus. It cries from the ground, too, and the voice of that blood says, Father, forgive them. Father, forgive them (Luke 23:34).
I hear a voice that says, “Vengeance, vengeance, vengeance,” like the voice of Jonah in Nineveh, enough to make everyone clothe himself in sackcloth; but a sweeter and louder cry comes up, “Mercy, mercy, mercy.” The Father bows His head and says, “Whose blood is that?” The voice replies, “It is the blood of your only begotten Son, shed on Calvary for sin.”
The Father lays His thunder aside, sheathes His sword, stretches out His hand, and cries to you sons and daughters of men, “Come unto Me, and I will have mercy upon you. Turn, turn from your ways. I will pour out My Spirit upon you and you shall live. Repent and believe the gospel.” Hate the sin that is past and trust in Jesus for the future. He is able to completely save all who come to God by Him, for the blood of Jesus Christ, God’s dear Son, cleanses us from all sin (1 John 1:7).
Flee, sinner, flee! The avenger of the blood that you have shed pursues you in haste. With feet that are winged and a heart that is thirsty for blood, he pursues you. Run, man, run! The city of refuge is before you. It is there along the narrow way of faith. Fly, fly, for unless you reach that city before he overtakes you, he will smite you, and one blow will be your everlasting ruin.
Do not linger! Do not stop and look at the field on the left, for you will stain that field with your blood if you linger there! Do not stop at that tavern on the right. Stop for none of these things! He comes! Hear his footsteps on the hard highway! He comes, he comes, he comes now! Oh, that you may pass through the entrance of the refuge city! Trust the Son of God. Your sin will be forgiven, and you will have entered into everlasting life.