By Adam C. Parker
1/29/05
The Secret (I don’t however, mean THE secret, more like “really great secret”) to putting sin to death is not in a negative act of hatred of sin, but instead in something entirely different and lovely. This I realized, tonight, as I was reading John Owen’s book The Glory of Christ: His Office and Grace. This 350 year old book held what I think may be the key to the defeat of sin, which until this time I had been so close to, yet a seeming distance from. In the preface to his book, Owen recalls the wicked, twisted dimension of human sinfulness which perverts the very essence of the fallen man. He writes:
Our nature, in the original constitution of it, in the persons of our first parents, was crowned with honour and dignity. The image of God, in which it was made, and the dominion over the lower world with which it was intrusted, made it the seat of excellence, of beauty, and of glory. But of them all it was at once divested and made naked by sin, and laid groveling in the dust from whence it was taken. ‘Dust you are, and to dust you shall return’, was its righteous doom. And all its internal faculties were invaded by deformed lusts, everything that might render the whole unlike to God, whose image it had lost. Hence it became the contempt of angels, the dominion of Satan…Nothing was now more vile and base; its glory was utterly departed. It had both lost its peculiar nearness to god, which was its honour, and was fallen into the greatest distance from him of all creatures, the devils only excepted; which was its ignominy and shame. And in this state, as to anything in itself, it was left to perish eternally.[1]
Earlier, Owen actually says that this subject “deserves the severest of our thoughts.”[2] If one reads this passage slowly, meditates on it, obsesses over it, and becomes passionate about realizing the absolute, life-shatteringly filthy condition in which fallen man finds himself, he will at this point in Owen’s writing sense a taste of the desperation that we all are in apart from God’s grace. It is almost as if, when I read this passage for the first time, I was begging Owen to bring the good news, any good news! Oh to sense and taste our desperate condition is the most bitter of all pills. The importance of the Gospel is that justice would permit that Owen’s treatise actually stop at this point, our souls desperate, thirsty, suicidal. It is at this lowest of low points that Owen tells us that there is something more, something sweet, something salvational, something to rescue mankind, though that rescue is entirely unwarranted.
At this point, the experienced Christian reader will say, “Yes, yes, I know. This is the gospel that I hear preached in my church every Sunday.” If such a reader has been pierced through his soul by the spear of his own sin to such a degree as I am speaking, perhaps he will find nothing new or beneficial in these words, but if the reader is, like me, looking for and long for the secret of the mortification of sin, then he may yet discover another sliver of the truth which Owen taught me today. If such a reader is passionate and obsessive in hatred of his own wickedness, then he is already one step closer to this secret.
Owen says that it is in this condition that “the Lord Christ, the Son of god, found our nature.” Like the Samaritan walking along the road, so is Christ, as he comes upon our poor, broken, mangled, naked, debased, and ugly person.
And upon this, in infinite condescension and compassion, sanctifying a portion of it to himself, he took it to be his own, in a holy, ineffable subsistence, in his own person. And in this again the same nature, so depressed into the utmost misery, is exalted above the whole creation of God. For in that very nature, God has ‘set him at his own right hand in the heavenly places, far above all principality, and power, and might, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come’ (Eph. 1:20-21). This is that which is so celebrated by the psalmist, with the highest admiration (Ps. 8:3-8). This is the greatest privilege we have among our fellow-creatures, this we may glory in, and value ourselves upon.[3]
“This is the greatest privilege we have among our fellow-creatures.” Before I read any farther, this statement intrigued me in such a way that I had to reread whatever this “greatest privilege” is. This greatest privilege is the coming of Christ and the resultant life which we have, because of His rescue. The greatest privilege: to be rescued from the nakedness of sin and the groveling in the dust from whence we were taken.
The sinner ought to be struck by this, because, most of the time, even the redeemed sinner does not consider this to be his greatest privilege, and even if he acknowledges this fact, it is not a part of his soul or his heart. I was personally pierced by this, because there is a great distance in my own life between what I know of Christ and the brokenness that comes from believing what we know. Belief is a gift of God to the heart, knowledge is the gift of the senses to the mind, but only God’s Spirit can take our knowledge, carry it over, and penetrate the heart – the innermost man, and bring about a spiritual conviction in His child. Oh how rare it is to be a saint who is pierced through by his own beliefs! We tend to abstract our thoughts so much that we put up pedestals with empty statements sitting on them, for so long as our thoughts remain far from us, we will not be changed by them. An awareness of our nonchalance equivalent to the patient’s realization that the infection has been spreading because he has not been taking his penicillin. But I demure:
This is the greatest privilege we have among our fellow-creatures, this we may glory in, and value ourselves upon. Those who engage this nature in the service of sensual lusts and pleasures, who think that its felicity and utmost capacities consist in their satisfaction, with the accomplishment of other earthly, temporal desires, are satisfied with it in its state of apostasy from God…
For me, this seems to be the key to unlocking the foolhardy, suicidal nature of every sinful decision that I make. To sin is to say yes to that terrible paragraph quoted from Owen earlier. When I sin, I say that I am satisfied with being naked in sin, wallowing in the dust, vile and filthy, facing righteous doom, despicable, lost, a stranger to God, base, utterly devoid of any union with God, fallen to the greatest distance from God, living in utter ignominy and shame, and left to perish eternally. Sin is saying yes to all of these things! It is approving of my old condition and saying, “I just love to roll naked in the dust! I just love to be despicable, devoid of beauty, twisted, vile, and hideous!”
What a revelation it is for many of us to comprehend the absolute depths to which we fall when we, who have experienced the very greatest of all possible privileges, sink to the very lowest of all possible conditions by loving sin more than God.
But those who have received the light of faith and grace, so as rightly to understand the being and end of that nature of which they are partakers, cannot bur rejoice in its deliverance from the utmost debasement, into that glorious exaltation which it has received in the person of Christ. And this must needs make thoughts of him full of refreshment to their souls. Let us take care of our persons, the glory of our nature is safe in him.
Owen’s conclusion here (only the third page of his preface!) is encouragement to take refreshment of our souls in Christ, since we partake of him. The image here is almost of one who wanders through the desert starving, there is no food in the entire world, but then he finds a banquet table with food upon it. Sometimes, this wanderer finds his nourishment with the real food that the banquet provides. Ultimately, this is the only reason for his survival at all. But periodically, the man kneels in the dust, and with his spit fashions a mud-pie, as though that could even be a remotely suitable meal! We laugh at such an illustration because it seems ludicrous and foolish, but we ought to laugh at ourselves, every time we say yes to thoughts of lust or stealing or jealousy, because when we do those things, we are eating mud pies when we are sitting at a banquet table.
Will we allow ourselves to take our refreshment, nourishment, rest, and our life from Christ? Will I continue to delight myself in lust and mud-pies? Owen’s writing here makes it clear to me that sin is approving of apostasy, and we do not take that apostasy seriously enough.
I said at the beginning that the secret to defeating sin is not in a negative act of hatred of sin, but instead in something entirely different and lovely. I think we may have found this answer, buried in this one page of Owen’s writings. The secret to defeating sin is not to hate the mud pies, but to love the banquet. It is a positive fixation on the object of proper delight, not on the object of proper disgust. John Piper, in his series on the insufficiency of Hell, says that the secret to conviction of sin is not a fear of hell, but a love of holiness.
A person can only feel sorrow for his sin when he has sensed the absolute beauty of the right and good. When he does so, his own condition becomes the subject of a radical contrast between “what is” and “what ought.” When Peter witnessed Jesus’ miraculous catch of fish, he begged God to go away from him, not because he was afraid of Hell, but because he sensed his own lack. In the same way, the prophet Isaiah, when he perceived the glory of God cried out, “Woe is me, for I am undone!” This is a great secret in the Christian life, when we understand the holiness of God and the beauty of his Son. The secret to the Christian life is a love of beauty, but first a person must taste that beauty if he is ever to love it. And if he tasted and truly loved it, why would he ever choose mud-pies?