《The Biblical Illustrator – Romans (Ch. 6b~8a)》

2. Every “sin” has its “wage”; and the devil is the paymaster.

II. “the gift of God is eternal life.” Here, too, is service--real, severe, lifelong. And “wages”? Yes; certain wages--wages in a most just degree. But it would not be right to call them so. “Wages” do not precede the work. But here the “wages” do precede the work. You do not work to get your “wages,” but you work because you have them. But they are infinitely disproportioned to the work; rather, all the work is so bad, that it wants to be forgiven, and a part of the wages is that God does forgive. But were it “wages,” and deserved, it would not be half so happy as now--to be an unearned thing--a gift of the love of God! What would heaven be, were it not a gift? Nevertheless, it is “wages.” God is just to give it, because deserved by “Jesus Christ our Lord.” (J. Vaughan, M. A.)

The wages of sin and the gift of God

I. The first fact. St. Paul does not say, “The punishment of sin is death,” however true that may be. He uses the word “wages.” These we earn--

1. When we dishonour our bodies.

2. When we stifle the voice of conscience within us.

3. When we reject the offers of the gospel (Proverbs 1:24, etc.). There is no sin so awful in its character and so terrible in its results as unbelief. That sin some of you are committing every day, every hour; and its wages are death--death to that peace which a man can only know when he has been cleansed by the blood of Christ; death to that hope of a happy hereafter which a firm trust in his Saviour alone can bring to him, and the death which never dies. What I have as the consequence of my sin, either here or hereafter, I have earned, and must have. I may, by God’s grace, give up my sin, but the wages of sin are shown in my shattered health, and, it may be, by the sickliness of my children. And if the death of the body sees me unsaved, how my misery will be deepened when I am constrained to say, “I have earned damnation.”

II. The second fact. Poor, lost, unworthy sinners may have eternal life in Christ, and that as a gift from God, and not as something which is to be had in another world, but something which may be had in this. See you not what a grand, brave, and noble thing it is to live in this world knowing that we belong to God, that our bodies are His, our minds His, our souls His, and that, by His grace, we are using them to His glory? Then choose ye this day whom ye will serve. (J. Burbidge.)

Wages?--or gift?

The more important any matter is, the more need there is that we view it in a right light. A human face rich with expression, or a monument of architecture rich with grandeur, or a bit of landscape rich with beauty, cannot have all that is in them set forth in one picture. Even a picture cannot set forth the Christian life: it must be experienced to be known.

I. The wages system of human existence. In all departments work is a marketable article, of which wages is the price. The one balances the other. Wages, as distinguished from other modes of income, is something that stands due though the account is seldom presented: they are paid directly to the man after a period of work is finished. St. Paul says that sin is an employer of labour. It pays wages, is bound by strong law to do so. True it does not pay in full as work is done, but will in the end clear up the debt. This is one system under which men live. Not always is this a matter of definite purpose, but it is of prevailing disposition. Their trust in this system is not always strong--are they likely after all to earn much that is desirable? But things cannot drive them hard under a God who is good. Unhappily they are not apprehending what their decision means--that it is wages and the paymaster sin. Let us remove any ambiguity about the terms of this contract: the wages of sin is death. These wages are openly paid. The installments he pays hint the kind of final recompense to be paid in the end: he now pays in disorders, loss, calamity, disease, discontent, hatred, uneasy forebodings. He cannot hide the character of these payments. God has revealed this as the recompense. This system goes on unchecked because sin is what it is; it rests upon the nature of things, God is the one source of life; if He is forsaken death must be the result. Am I working for so sad a result?

II. The free gift system of human existence. We now pass into a different climate of things. It is as if we had been walking along the northern side of a mountain in the springtime, within the chill shadow of its peaks, where the lingering wind of winter is blowing across the slushy snow, the fields bare--and now had travelled round the mountains into the southerly sunshine. We have removed from the presence of a rigorous employer to that of a most munificent friend; from hard earned wages to generous gift; life instead of death. It seems very evident that the gift system of living is brighter than the wages system of living. There must be some powerful prejudice to make men choose the latter. In other matters between God and men in the world the gift system is actually at work and men do not quarrel with it. Providence not less than grace is pervaded by this system. What do we render for the sunlight; are weal of body or mind, safety, earned? A pure wages system in the world would mean death. Sin pays like sin; God gives like God. He will give life, real, unbounded, happy. It is too great to be earned. And this is a gift from Him whom we have greatly wronged. In Christ the wages system has been broken down. Christ has earned the gift for us. (J. A. Kerr Bath, M. A.)

Wages versus gift

I. Sin and its wages.

1. Sin a service.

2. These wages are “death,” and are invariably paid.

II. God and his gift. A gift--

2. That gift is eternal.

(a) From Christ, depending solely on His substitution.

(b) In Christ, ours only by appropriation.

(c) A part of Christ, continued to us only by indwelling.

(a) Begun when Christ began.

(b) Begun to us when we grasped it.

(c) Continuing till--eternity. (J. H. Rogers, M. A.)

Death and life: the wage and the gift

I. Death is the wages of sin.

1. Death is the natural result of all sin. When man acts according to God’s order he lives; but when he breaks his Maker’s laws he does that which causes death.

2. The killing power of some sins is manifest to all observers.

3. This tendency is in every case the same. Even the Christian cannot fall into sin without its being poison to him. If you sin it destroys your joy, your power in prayer, your confidence towards God. If you have spent evenings in frivolity with worldlings, you have felt the deadening influence of their society.

4. Death is sin’s due reward, and it must be paid. A master employs a man, and it is due to that man that he should receive his wages. Now, if sin did not entail death and misery, it would be an injustice. It is necessary for the very standing of the universe that sin should be punished. They that sow must reap. The sin which hires you must pay you.

5. This wage of sin is in part received by men now as soldiers receive their rations, day by day. “If ye live after the flesh, ye shall die”--such a life is a continued dying. “She that liveth in pleasure is dead while she liveth.” The wrath of God abideth on him that believeth not on the Son of God; it is there already.

6. But then a Roman soldier did not enlist merely for his rations; his chief pay often lay in the share of the booty which he received at the end of the war. Death is the ultimate wage of sin. Sin will perpetuate itself, and so forever kill the soul to God, and goodness, and joy and hope. Being under the ever-growing power of sin, it will become more and more a hopeless thing that you should escape from death which thus settles down upon you.

7. The misery of the misery of sin is that it is earned. If men in the world to come could say, “This misery has come upon us arbitrarily, quite apart from its just results,” then they would derive some comfort. But when they will be obliged to own that it was their own choice in choosing sin, this will scourge them indeed. Their sin is their bell.

8. It will be the folly of follies to go on working for such a wage. Hitherto they that have worked for sin have found no profit in it (Romans 6:21). Why, then, will you go further in sin?

9. It ought to be the grief of griefs to each of us that we have sinned. Oh, misery, to have wrought so long in a service which brings such terrible wages!

10. It must certainly be a miracle of miracles if any sinner here does not remain forever beneath the power of sin. Sin has this mischief about it, that it strikes a man with spiritual paralysis, and how can such a palsied one ward off a further blow? It makes the man dead; and to what purpose do we appeal to him that is dead? What a miracle, then, when the Divine life comes streaming down into the dead heart I What a blessedness when God interposes and finds a way by which the wage most justly due shall not be paid!

II. Eternal life is the gift of God.

1. Eternal life is imparted by grace through faith.

2. Observe what a wonderful gift this is, “the gift of God.”

3. It is life in Jesus. We are in everlasting union with the blessed person of the Son of God, and therefore we live.

Conclusion:

1. Let us come and receive this Divine life as a gift in Christ Jesus. If any of you have been working for it, end the foolish labour. Believe and live. Receive it as freely as your lungs take in the air you breathe.

2. If we have accepted it let us abide in it. Let us never be tempted to try the law of merit.

3. If we are now abiding in it, then let us live to its glory. Let us show by our gratitude how greatly we prize this gift. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Death and life

The Word of God abounds with striking contrasts, which picture the opposite character and portion of the two great classes into which all mankind are divided before God. Poverty and riches, slavery and freedom, darkness and light; but no contrast is so forcible as that between death and life.

I. Death.

1. Its origin. It is the wages of sin. The apostle sets before us what fallen man loves, what he dreads, and the union between the two. Fallen man loves sin and dreads death. Yet the death he dreads is the inevitable consequence of the sin he loves. Sin is discovered under two distinct aspects. It is--

2. Its nature. Death is separation. We call it dissolution.

II. Life.

1. How is it procured?

2. In what does it consist? It is in all respects the opposite to the death. It is the antidote to spiritual death, for it brings us into union with God. It is the destruction of bodily death; for it secures to the glorified body and soul an everlasting home in God’s presence, where is fulness of joy and pleasure for evermore. ” (W. Conway, M. A.)

Hard work and bad pay; no work and rich reward

I. Hard work and bad pay.

1. Who are the servants who receive the pay?

2. The work they have to perform. To be Satan’s servant is no sinecure.

3. The wages paid them.

II. No work and rich reward.

1. The pivot word is “gift.” God absolutely refuses to sell salvation. He will give to any, but barter with none.

2. The blessing specified. “Eternal life”; and this the Lord permits His children to enjoy on earth; for as part of the wages of sin is paid on account in this life, so even in this life foretastes of the gift of God are enjoyed by the saints. Peace with God, quiet trustfulness as to the future, beside a thousand other joys, are some of the clusters of the grapes of Eschol, that refresh the wearied one on his journey to the land where the vine grows. And how about the end, when the gift is received in full?

3. Forget not the channel through whom it flows; it is a gift to thee, because thy Lord paid all. (A. G. Brown.)

The wages question

Men are born to serve. The majority are materially. All are morally. Only a choice of service open to us--the service of sin, or of righteousness. We are keen on “the wages question” in matters material; much more ought we to be in matters moral. Of these two services mark--

I. The contrast in their beginnings.

1. The service of sin is at first promising.

2. The service of righteousness is at first unpromising.

II. The contrast in their issues.

1. The service of sin ends badly.

2. The service of righteousness ends blessedly.

The wages of sin inevitable

Escape is contrary to the laws of God and of God’s universe. It is as impossible as that fire should not burn, or water run up hill. Your sins are killing you by inches; all day long they are sowing in you the seeds of disease and death. There are three parts of you--body, mind, and spirit; and every sin you commit helps to kill one of these three, and in many cases to kill all three together. The bad habits, bad passions, bad methods of thought, in which they have indulged in youth, remain more or less, and make them worse men, sillier men, less useful men, less happy men, sometimes to their lives’ end; and they, if they be true Christians, know it, and repent of their early sins, and not once for all only, but all their lives long, because they feel that they have weakened and worsened themselves thereby. It stands to reason that it should be so. If a man loses his way and finds it again, he is so much the less forward on his way, surely, by all the time he has spent in getting back into the road. If a child has a violent illness it stops growing, because the life and nourishment which ought to have gone towards its growth are spent in curing the disease. And so, if a man has indulged in bad habits in his youth, he is but too likely (let him do what he will) to be a less good man for it to his life’s end, because the Spirit of God, which ought to have been making him grow in grace, freely and healthily to the stature of a perfect man, to the fulness of the measure of Christ, is striving to conquer old habits and cure old diseases of character, and the man, even though he does enter into life, enters into life halt and maimed. (Canon Kingsley.)

Sin and its wages

We have to notice three words.

I. Sin. “Sin is the transgression of the law.” Its fundamental idea is deviation from the law, as a standard of excellence or as a rule of conduct. Now, the law supposes a lawgiver, and the possibility of God’s law being disobeyed, i.e., that it has to do with moral agents. Well, then, we have to think of them as failing from some cause or other to do God’s will, which is sin. Sin is set forth under three aspects.

1. As a principle or law (Romans 8:2).

(a) The basest ingratitude, for who can deny that we owe all our powers and happiness and our very being to God?

(b) An imputation upon God’s character, viz., that He is unworthy to govern us, that His will is unjust, His law unkind.

(c) Rebellion against Him.

(d) Usurpation of His place; and hence idolatry and self-deification.

2. As an act or acts. The law, though in principle always one, has nevertheless many particular precepts, and is outraged by the violation of any of those precepts. There are sins of deed, of speech, of deportment, of looks, of motive, desire, imagination, thought, of negation, and omission. All these are the outgrowth of that self-will and selfishness in which sin essentially consists.

3. As state. Hence, we read of men being “born in sin,” and remaining “dead in trespasses and sins.” Before we commit any acts of sin, and as the source of all we do commit, we have a sinful nature--a bias to go and to do wrong. The thoroughly sinful soul may be said to live in sin always. Sin is its element and vital air. It lives without God.

II. Death.

1. Spiritual death. The soul is dead when destitute of holiness and happiness; of the disposition to do well, and of the power to enjoy God. It admits of degrees; the more it prevails, the more it grows, and the commission of sin inevitably paves the way for the perpetration of many more; and the final stage is reached when the conscience is seared as with a hot iron, proof against every appeal, and resolutely bent on his own eternal destruction.

2. Eternal death. Let us suppose a man, whose soul is dead through sin, removed out of this world into the next, and what shall we behold concerning him? His case is a million-fold more terrible than before. For--

III. Wages. This word denotes a relation of equity between sin and death. The sinner earns death as his rightful recompense. This connection is--

1. Natural. You have only to study the human mind, its laws of association and of working, to be convinced that sin, when it is finished, must bring forth death.

2. Judicial. The wicked are turned into hell by a just and holy God; and the same reasons which send them there must avail to keep them there. They have no power to make themselves good, and being immortally evil they must be immortally shut out from heaven. Certainly God will not lay upon the wicked more of these terrible “wages” than they individually deserve. But who shall determine the full and adequate deserts of sin? Conclusion:

1. Christians should not live in sin, but utterly hate and discard it, and earnestly strive to perfect holiness in the fear of the Lord. They have done with it as a state; let them have done with it as a law, and in its individual acts.

2. Here is a message of warning to the ungodly. See for what wages you are working; part are being paid now, but immense arrears are being treasured up in the future. You think you are working for pleasure, for gold, for honour, but lo! it is for death. (T. G. Horton.)

Death the wages of sin

I. What sin is.

1. Original sin. Sin bears date with our very being, and indeed we were sinners before we were born (Ephesians 2:3). There are some who deny this to be properly sin at all, because nothing can be truly sin which is not voluntary. But original corruption in every infant is voluntary, not indeed in his own person, but in Adam his representative. Pelagians, indeed, tell us that the sons of Adam came to be sinners only by imitation. But, then, what are those first inclinations which dispose us to such bad imitations?

2. Actual sin may be considered--

(a) The sin of our words (Matthew 12:37).

(b) The sin of our external actions, theft, murder, uncleanness; and to prove which to be sins, no more is required but only to read over the law of God, and where the written letter of the law comes not, men are “a law to themselves.”

(c) The sin of our desires. Desires are sin, as it were, in its first formation. For as soon as the heart has once conceived this fatal seed, it first quickens and begins to stir in desire; so that the ground and the principal prohibition of the law is, “Thou shalt not covet.” Indeed, action is only a consummation of desire; and could we imagine an outward action performable without it, it would be rather the shell and outside of a sin than properly a Sin itself.

(a) As when a man is engaged in a sinful course by surprise and infirmity.

(b) When a man pursues a course of sin against the reluctancies of an awakened conscience; when salvation waits and knocks at the door of his heart, and he both bolts it out and drives it away; when he fights with the word, and struggles with the Spirit; and, as it were, resolves to perish in spite of mercy itself, and of the means of grace (Isaiah 1:5; John 9:41).

(c) When a man sins in defiance of conscience; so breaking all bonds, so trampling upon all convictions, that he becomes not only untractable, but finally incorrigible. And this is the ne plus ultra of impiety, which shuts the door of mercy and seals the decree of damnation, Now this differs from original sin thus, that that is properly the seed, this the harvest; that merits, this actually procures death. For although as soon as ever the seed be cast in there is a design to reap; yet, for the most part, God does not actually put in the sickle till continuance in sin has made the sinner ripe for destruction.

II. What is included in death which is here allotted for the sinner’s wages?

1. Death temporal. We must not take it as the separation of the soul from the body, for that is rather the consummation of death, the last blow given to the falling tree.

2. Death eternal, in comparison of which the other can scarce be called death, but only a transient change; easily borne, or at least quickly past.

III. In what respect death is properly called “the wages of sin.”

1. Because wages presuppose service. And undoubtedly the service of sin is of all others the most laborious. It will engross all a man’s industry, drink up all his time; it is a drudgery without intermission, a business without vacation. Such as are the commands of sin, such must be also the service. But the commands of sin are for their number continual, for their vehemence importunate, and for their burden tyrannical.

2. Because wages do always imply a merit in the work requiring such a compensation. It is but equitable that he who sows should also reap (Galatians 6:8).

(a) Sin is a direct stroke at God’s sovereignty. We read of the kingdom of Satan in contradistinction to the kingdom of God, into which sin translates God’s subjects. No wonder if God punishes sin, which is treason against the King of kings, with death; for it pots the question “Who shall reign?”

(b) Sin strikes at God’s very being (Psalms 14:1). Sin would step not only into God’s throne, but also into His room. Conclusion: Sin plays the bait of a little, contemptible, silly pleasure or profit; but it hides that fatal hook by which that great catcher of souls shall drag them down to his eternal execution. “Fools make a mock at sin.” Fools they are indeed for doing so. But is it possible for anything that wears the name of reason, to be so much a fool as to mock at death too? In every sin which a man deliberately commits, he takes down a draught of deadly poison. In every lust which he cherishes, he embraces a dagger and opens his bosom to destruction, he who likes the wages, let him go about the work. (R. South, D. D.)

Eternal life

I. Its nature. A life of--

1. Perfect immunity from all the sufferings and dangers to which we are here exposed.

2. Preeminent intellectual enjoyment--“Here we know in part,” etc.