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Life Through the Living One

By James H. Brookes

Chapter 2

Death Inherited.

“Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”¹ When the Lord God addressed this warning to Adam, He was not trilling with him. It was not like the menace of a fickle and foolish father, seeking to frighten his child, but failing to inflict the threatened punishment. He meant what He said, and the penalty that had been distinctly announced was strictly and literally executed. Adam did not live, as many suppose, hundreds of years after his disobedience; he died then and there. The moment sin entered his soul he was “alienated from the life of God;” and the death of his body centuries later was but the comparatively trifling accident or accompaniment of the spiritual death that came upon him the very day he ate the forbidden fruit.

The appalling results of that spiritual death were seen in the curse that blighted the fair face of creation, in the expulsion of the sinner from Eden, in the shocking murder by his first-born son of a younger brother, in the banishment of Cain from the presence of the Lord, in the thorough worldliness of his posterity, in the speedy and utter corruption of the righteous seed, until “God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually;”² and then the whole defiled and defiling scene was swept with the waters of the deluge. There is a statement, often overlooked, that explains the rapid progress of the race in iniquity. It is contained in the record that “Adam lived an hundred and thirty years, and begat a son in his own likeness, after his image.”³ Very different is the record when Adam was created, for “God said, Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness.”⁴

The likeness to God did not consist in any physical resemblance, but it was wholly spiritual; and the spiritual resemblance having been lost, Adam begat a son in his own likeness. That is to say, he transmitted his sinful nature to his posterity, according to a law illustrated in all departments of vegetable and animal life, and recognised even by infidel science, that " like produces like.” The nature thus transmitted from fallen sire to fallen son is often in the Sacred Scriptures significantly called “the flesh,” after the time when “God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth.”⁵ Of this nature it is explicitly affirmed in the inspired word, “To be carnally minded [literally, the mind of the flesh] is death," and the reason it is described as death is given in the following verse, “Because the mind of the flesh is enmity against God: for it doth not submit itself to the law of God, neither indeed can it.”⁶

Such then is the testimony of the Holy Ghost concerning the nature inherited from the first man. It is death, it is enmity against God; and as John Newton has well said, “An enemy may be reconciled, but enmity is enmity still. “It doth not submit itself to the law of God, neither indeed can it. Whatever, therefore, may be done with it, however cultivated, refined, or religious it may become, it still remains in unchangeable, irreconcilable hostility to God; and indeed never is its hostility more bitter and determined than when it is highly cultivated and religious, as seen in the history of Saul of Tarsus and many others. Before Saul's conversion he had much whereof he might trust in the flesh, and among other things he could say, touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless;”⁷ but after he saw his nature in the light of the love that saved him, he spoke of himself as the chief of sinners,⁸ “less than the least of all saints,”⁹ and exclaimed in no morbid mood, and in no exaggerated terms of self depreciation, “I know that in me (that is in my flesh ), dwelleth no good thing.”¹⁰ He does not say that there was some little good about him, a divine spark, a germ of holiness, but he declares that in the nature received from fallen Adam there dwelleth no good thing.

The conclusion he reaches from these passages is inevitable: “So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God.”¹¹ They may run the round of the sciences,
they may explore the depths of philosophy, they may be come familiar with the fine arts, they maybe baptized in any or all of the modes ever practised, and by any or all of the ecclesiastical dignitaries on the face of the earth, but if they are in the fesh, if they have only the nature inherited from man, if they are not born again, if they are not made spiritually alive, they cannot please God, for “without faith it is impossible to please Him.”¹² This is true, not merely of some, but of all the race, without distinction of rank or progress. It is a race not lying loosely side by side, like gravel on the beach, but wherever found it possesses sameness of nature, and is linked to a common origin of sin and death.

“By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.”¹³ It is not enough to say that all men are doomed to death, but as the result of sin, and the sin of one man, death has already pass upon all men. They are not dead to their earthly interests and obligations and relations, but to God. Love to Him is not their governing principle even amid the most winning display of amiable traits of character, and virtuous actions, and heroic exploits; and they would be what they are if there were no God. The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God,”¹⁴ and that fool is as often seen among those whom the world most admires for culture and honour and success in life, as among the ignorant, the degraded, and the worthless. A man may stand high in the esteem of his fellow-men, and yet it may be true of him that “God is not in all his thoughts.”¹⁵ Hence the Holy Spirit's solemn testimony by the Apostle, “Though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity [love], it profiteth me nothing.”¹⁶

Hence too our Saviour's solemn testimony, “That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit, is spirit. Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye MUST be born again.”¹⁷ Man is born into the world with a certain nature called “the flesh.” That nature, it is declared, “is death,” “enmity against God," “not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be.” All that proceeds from that nature partakes of its characteristics, for like produces like, and the stream cannot rise higher than the source; and hence the absolute necessity of a second birth, of a new nature from above. The first nature is like the leviathan God describes to Job: “Will he make a covenant with thee? wilt thou take him for a servant for ever? wilt thou play with him as with a bird? . . . . He beholdeth all high things: he is a king over all the children of pride.”¹⁸ Truly the flesh is a dangerous and deceitful monster, neither to be trified with nor trusted.

“Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?”¹⁹ It cannot be done by any skill or culture. They may cover their plantations with thorn-trees, and employ the most famous arborists and horticulturists and landscape gardeners, and crowds from far and near may flock to look at the beautiful effects, and exclaim in admiration, “Never were such thorn - trees seen; " but, if cultivated a thousand years, they cannot be made to yield grapes. Thistles of every variety may be brought from every clime, and trained and trimmed until they excite astonishment by their size and gracefulness and richness of colouring; but no amount of care can compel them to produce figs. It is not the nature of thorn-trees to bring forth grapes, nor of thistles to bring forth figs; neither is it the nature of man to yield fruit that is acceptable to God.

From the beginning He has classified unregenerate man with unclean beasts. “Every firstling of an ass thou shalt redeem with a lamb; and if thou wilt not redeem it, then thou shalt break his neck: and all the first-born of man among thy children shalt thou redeem.”²⁰ A broken-necked ass, then, is the Bible symbol of the flesh, or of human nature, of whose dignity and grandeur we hear and read so much. “Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? not one.”²¹ How then can man be justified with God? or how can he be clean that is born of a woman?”²² “Behold, I was shapen in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.”²³ This is not the extravagant statement of a gloomy fanatic or misanthrope, but the deliberate testimony of a man who spake as he was moved by the Holy Ghost, showing that iniquity and sin are inwoven in the very warp and woof of our being. The heart ( not only a bad man's heart, but the human heart] is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?”²⁴

The Lord Jesus Christ knows it, “because He knew all men, and needed not that any should testify of man: for He knew what was in man;”²⁵ and He declares, “I am He which searcheth the reins and hearts.”²⁶ Let us then hear His testimony: From within, out of the heart of man, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lascivious ness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness: all these evil things come from within, and defile the man.”²⁷ So deep-seated and irremediable is the corruption of our nature, that even a quickened or regenerated man, looking to his own strivings for deliverance, is forced to ex claim, “The good that I would, I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do. . . . I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present with me. For I delight in the law of God after the inward man: but I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?”²⁸

It only remains to show that this corruption is universal, including all the so-called races of men, extending through all ages, and spreading over all lands. “We have before proved both Jews and Gentiles, that they are all under sin;”²⁹ and then the inspired Apostle cites as evidence the testimony of God, given a thousand years before. It is testimony both negative and positive concerning man, and it refers to his throat, tongue, lips, mouth, feet, ways, and eyes, closing with the announcement, mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God.” The history of the earliest times, and the observation of intelligent travellers among the nations and tribes of the earth existing at present, demonstrate the unity of mankind with regard to sin and death. “There is none righteous, no, not one: there is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God. They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one.”

The tiger born to-day is like the tiger that was born outside of Eden; and the man who is born to-day is like the man who was born outside of Eden, in his relations to God. If a tiger is captured and caged, it does not cease to be a tiger; and although man may be conquered and curbed bylaw and education, his nature remains the same under all circumstances and in all generations. It is said of a distinguished British statesman of the last century, that he undertook the task of subduing and training a tiger cub, which had been sent to him from India. He succeeded quite well, until the animal licked with its rough tongue the cut finger of its sleeping master, and the taste of blood instantly arousing all the inherent and unchangeable propensities of its tigerish nature, nothing

could be done with it except to put it to death. So man may do very well under restraint; but let a favourable opportunity offer to show what he really is, let a strong temptation come, and all the enmity of the flesh to God, all of its insubordination to the law of God, will most certainly be manifested. “He that trusteth in his own heart is a fool.”³⁰