What, then, is the teaching of Jesus concerning sin? His tone is at once severe and hopeful. Sometimes His words are words that shake our hearts with fear; sometimes they surprise us with their overflowing tenderness and pity. But however He may deal with the sinner, we are always made to feel that to Jesus sin is a serious thing, a problem not to be slurred over and made light of, but to be faced, and met, and grappled with. Christ's sense of the gravity of sin comes out in many ways.

(1) It is involved in His doctrine of man. He who made so much of man could not make light of man's sin. It is because man is so great that his sin is so grave. No one can understand the New Testament doctrine of sin who does not read it in the light of the New Testament doctrine of man. When we think of man as Christ thought of him, when we see in him the possibilities which Christ saw, the Scripture language concerning sin becomes intelligible enough; until then it may easily seem exaggerated and unreal. It is the height for which man was made and meant which measures the fall which is involved in his sin.

(2) Call to mind the language in which Christ set forth the effects of sin. He spoke of men as blind, as sick, as dead; He said they were as sheep gone astray, as sons that are lost, as men in debt which they can never pay, in bondage from which they can never free themselves. The very accumulation of metaphors bears witness to Christ's sense of the havoc wrought by sin. Nor are they metaphors merely; they are His reading of the facts of life as it lay before Him. Let me refer briefly to two of them, (a) Christ spoke of men as in bondage through their sin. "If," He said once, "ye abide in My word ... ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." And straightway jealous Jewish ears caught at that word "free." "Free?" they cried, "Free? we be Abraham's seed, and have never yet been in bondage to any man: how sayest Thou, Ye shall be made free?" Yet even as they lift their hands in protest Christ hears the clink of their fetters: "Verily, verily, I say unto you, every one that committeth sin is the bond-servant--the slave--of sin." "To whom ye present yourselves as servants unto obedience, his servants--his slaves--ye are whom ye obey; whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness." Apostle and Lord mean the same thing, true of us as it was true of the Jews: "Every one that committeth sin is the slave of sin." (b) Further, Christ says, men are in debt through their sin. In one parable He tells us of a certain lender who had two debtors; the one owed five hundred pence, and the other fifty; but neither had wherewith to pay. In another parable we hear of a servant who owed his lord ten thousand talents--a gigantic sum, vague in its vastness, "millions" as we might say--and he likewise had not wherewith to pay. Further, in the application of each parable, it is God to whom this unpayable debt is due. Now, it is just at this point that our sense of sin to-day is weakest. The scientist, the dramatist, the novelist are all proclaiming our responsibility toward them that come after us; with pitiless insistence they are telling us that the evil that men do lives after them, that it is not done with when it is done. Yet, with all this, there may be no thought of God. It is the consciousness not merely of responsibility, but of responsibility God-ward, which needs to be strengthened. When we sin we may wrong others much, we may wrong ourselves more, but we wrong God most of all; and we shall never recover Christ's thought of sin until, like the psalmist and the prodigal, we have learned to cry to Him, "Against Thee have I sinned, and done that which is evil in Thy sight."

(3) But sin, in Christ's view of it, is not merely something a man does, it is what he is. Go through Paul's long and dismal catalogue of "the works of the flesh": "Fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousies, wraths, factions, divisions, heresies, envyings, drunkenness, revellings, and such like." Yet even this is not the whole of the matter. Sin is more than the sum-total of man's sins. The fruits are corrupt because the tree which yields them is corrupt; the stream is tainted because the fountain whence it flows is impure; man commits sin because he is sinful. It was just here that Christ broke, and broke decisively, with the traditional religion of His time. To the average Jew of that day righteousness and sin meant nothing more than the observance or the non-observance of certain religious traditions. "For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, except they wash their hands diligently, eat not, holding the tradition of the elders: and when they come from the market-place, except they wash themselves, they eat not; and many other things there be which they have received to hold, washings of cups, and pots, and brazen vessels." "Nay," said Jesus, "you are beginning at the wrong end, you are concerned about the wrong things, for from within, out of the heart of men, evil thoughts proceed, fornications, thefts, murders, adulteries, covetings, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, railing, pride, foolishness: all these evil things proceed from within." Deep in the heart of man evil has its seat, and until that is touched nothing is done.

(4) And, lastly, Christ says all men are sinful. Of course, He did not say, nor did He imply that all are equally sinful. On the contrary, He said plainly that whereas the debt of some is as fifty pence, the debt of others is as five hundred pence. Neither did Christ teach that man is wholly sinful, in the sense that there is in man nothing that is good, or that every man is by nature as bad as he can be. Nor, let it be said in passing, is this what theology means when it speaks, as it still sometimes does, about the "total depravity" of human nature. What is meant is, as Dr. Denney says, that the depravity which sin has produced in human nature extends to the whole of it.^[35] If I poison my finger, it is not only the finger that is poisoned; the poison is in the blood, and, unless it be got rid of, not my finger merely, but my life is in peril. And in like manner the sin which taints my nature taints my whole nature, perverting the conscience, enfeebling the will, and darkening the understanding. But with whatever qualifications Christ's indictment is against the whole human race. He never discusses the origin of sin, but He always assumes its presence. No matter how His hearers might vary, this factor remained constant. "If ye, being evil" that mournful presupposition could be made everywhere. He spoke of men as "lost," and said that He had come to seek and save them. He summoned men, without distinction, to repentance. He spoke of His blood as "shed for many unto remission of sins." The gospel which, in His name, was to be preached unto all the nations was concerning "repentance and remission of sins." Even His own disciples He taught, as they prayed, to say, "Forgive us our sins." And though it is true He said once that He had not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance, He did not thereby mean to suggest that there really are some righteous persons who have no need of repentance; rather was He seeking by the keenness of His Divine irony to pierce the hard self-satisfaction of men whose need was greater just because it was unfelt.

"All have sinned;" but once more let us remind ourselves, sin is not seriously realized except as a personal fact. The truth must come home as a truth about ourselves. The accusing finger singles men out and fastens the charge on each several conscience: "Thou art the man!" And as the accusation is individual, so, likewise, must the acknowledgement be. It is not enough that in church we cry in company, "Lord have mercy upon us, miserable offenders"; each must learn to pray for himself, "God be merciful to me a sinner." Then comes the word of pardon, personal and individual as the condemnation, "The Lord also hath put away thy sin."