Several years ago, Brad Gaines challenged me to read a little book entitled The Smell of Sin and the Fresh Air of Grace by Don Everts. The opening page of that book contained this little poetic vignette entitle “Darkening Sock”:
It was a Sunday Morning.
I loved Sunday Mornings:
my familiar pew,
my favorite hymn,
pastor’s mildly entertaining 3rd point,
and the unmistakable, unique sound of …
sawing?
Quite clear (from the pew behind, it seemed)
the tight rasp and rough grind of a saw.
There in church. On a Sunday Morning.
I turned to look, and my eyes grew.
A middle-aged man with a receding hairline
bending far over, reaching toward the floor in front of him.
I looked closer, and my eyes grew.
He was working awkwardly
at his right ankle
with a red-handled, silver-toothed hacksaw.
The cotton of his right tan dress sock
began to shred
and mingled with the flesh of his right ankle.
Dark blood pulsed out
slowly darkening his sock and
spilling,
thickly,
onto the gray all-purpose sanctuary carpet.
“Are you all right?” he asked
(quite sincere)
looking up at me and my gagging face.
This is sobering imagery. After all, none of us expect anyone to take the words of this passage literally. If so, we would be a hobbling bunch of blind amputees. And in fact, it is very likely that in this passage Jesus is using hyperbole as a teaching device. Hyperbole refers to the use of deliberate exaggeration for effect. For instance, Jim Keathley or Earl Mills might say to you that at Thursday’s Keenagers luncheon, they saw me "eat my weight in banana pudding." Of course, they wouldn’t expect you to believe that I ate .....….. pounds of banana pudding, but they do want to convey to you that I ate a lot of it! That’s hyperbole. But, if Jesus is using hyperbole here, we may understand that He does not expect us to take this literally, but He does expect us to take it seriously! The sobering vocabulary of hacking off limbs, plucking out eyeballs, and being drowned with a two-ton millstone around our necks awakens us from the lazy slumber of flippancy with which we are prone to treat SIN. We are in need of awakening to realize that sin is a matter we must take seriously in our own lives and in the lives of others, for sin is a matter of severity. After all, sin is the reason that Christ underwent the unspeakable torture of
In this passage we find our Lord speaking of sin in two realms. He speaks of the severity of causing others to sin, and He speaks of the severity with which we must deal with sin in our own lives. And the severity with which He speaks of sin should awaken us to deal with it severely.
I. We Must Beware of Causing Others to Sin (v42)
Verse 42 warns us of the severity of leading others into sin. The Greek word that Jesus uses here for “stumble” is a word that was originally used to refer to the piece of wood that kept a trap open until an unsuspecting victim tripped the snare and found themselves bound in the trap. It came to be used to refer to the bait which lured the victim into the trap, or an obstacle in someone’s path which would cause them to trip or stumble. The term is applied metaphorically here to refer to “luring” one into sin or “tripping” them by placing an obstacle in the path of their spiritual walk. Now, there are any number of ways that this can be done, and it isn’t hard for us to imagine some cases where we have been led by others to do something we wouldn’t normally do. We talk about “peer pressure” when we speak to young people, but we could all testify to the fact that it continues even into adulthood. And if we were honest, perhaps each of us could recall times when we have led others to do something which violated their own conscience as we beckoned them to follow along with us. Oh, we must beware, for our Lord says this is a severe matter.
A. Leading Others To Sin is Severe, for God’s People are Precious To Him
You will notice that Jesus speaks here of “these little ones who believe.” More often than not, I would suppose that interpreters have assumed that He was referring to children, pointing back to the child He took into His arms in verses 36-37. We will see in Chapter 10 that indeed children are precious to our Lord, but I do not think that He was speaking of children only here. The immediately preceding set of verses have to do with a man who was a stranger to the disciples, but whose love for Christ was evidenced in His service to the Lord. Yet, the disciples sought to hinder this man, and were rebuked by Christ for so doing. If we would understand this as the informing context of what we read in verse 42, then we would recognize that Jesus views all those who “believe” in Him as His precious little ones, no matter their age or size. You might be 90 years old, stand 7 feet tall, or weigh 600 pounds, but to the God who made you and loves you, you are a precious little child, and He desires to tenderly guard your life as you walk in faith with Him.
So, when you or I do or say something to one of these “little ones who believe” that would cause them to sin, or weaken their faith, or draw them away from their walk with the Lord, we are treading on dangerous ground. It may be something that is of small concern to you, and you have never considered it to be sin. But that other person may be convinced in their heart that it is wrong, and when they see that you condone it or engage in it, it will lead them to question your commitment to the Lord, or worse, will lead them away from the faith because they are acting against their own the convictions of their own conscience and understanding of God’s Word.
The Apostle Paul addressed this matter in Romans 14 and in 1 Corinthians 8 with the issue of eating meat sacrificed to idols. To some, this was of no concern, for meat is just meat, and it doesn’t get cooties on it because it has been offered to an idol, for idols are powerless. But to others, eating this meat was an endorsement of idolatry. So some, by faith, would eat; and others, by faith, would not. But Paul admonished the church in Romans 14:13, “Let us not judge one another, but rather determine this—not to put an obstacle or stumbling block (the same word used in Mark 9:42) in a brother’s way.” He goes on to say in verse 15, “For if because of food your brother is hurt, you are no longer walking according to love. Do not destroy with your food him for whom Christ died.” Now, we do not regularly have to deal with meat sacrificed to idols, but there are any number of issues we could insert in those admonitions. The point being, when you cause someone to act against their conscience or their convictions from God’s Word, you are selfishly destroying the faith of one for whom Christ died – one of His precious little ones who believe. So severe is this issue that Jesus goes on to say …
B. Leading Others To Sin Has Severe Consequences
So severe are the consequences of leading a brother or sister in Christ to sin that Jesus does not even say what they are. He only says that it would be better for that person to have a heavy millstone hung around his neck and be cast into the sea. He is referring here to the heavy stones used in the mill to grind grain. These were large, round stones that were so heavy, they had to be turned by a team of donkeys. There were two of these stones in the mill, one on top of the other, and the top stone had a hole in the middle of it where grain was poured down to be crushed between the stones. The imagery here is of taking that stone, and putting your head through the hole in it, and wearing it like a necklace when you go for a swim in the sea. One would surely drown in that situation. There is nothing good about that scenario whatsoever. But the consequences of leading a brother or sister in the faith to sin are so severe, that given the option of facing those consequences or being drowned in the sea, one would take the drowning any time.
There is dual application here for us to consider. First, each of you who believe in Jesus are so precious to Him that He will deal harshly and severely with any who seek to lead you astray. You stay close to Him and follow Him as His word and His Spirit directs you, and you can trust Him to deal with those who wish to do otherwise and who would beckon you to join them in their folly. But secondly, we must beware of the traps we set for others, sometimes with innocent motives undoubtedly. If we cause one of God’s precious children to stumble, we will be dealt with harshly, and we will wish we had been drowned before we had the opportunity to lead that one astray. So severe is this matter of introducing sin into the lives of others.
But then Jesus moves on to address the sin in each of our own lives.
II. We Must Be Severe With the Causes of Sin In Our Own Lives (vv43-48)
In the Spring of 2003, 27 year old Aron Ralston was hiking alone in Canyonlands National Park south of Moab, Utah, when he became trapped in a three-foot-wide slot with his arm helplessly pinned beneath a half-ton rock that fell upon him. He was trapped there for five days. Rescuers had almost given up the search for him, and he had run out of water on Tuesday, and now it was Thursday. With few hopes of survival left, Aron Ralston began to manipulate his arm so that it broke the radius and ulna bones. Then, taking his multipurpose pocketknife, he used the dull blade to cut the soft tissue and the pliers to tear at the tougher tendons until he had amputated it completely. Leaving the remainder of his arm beneath that rock, Ralston applied a tourniquet and administered first aid to himself, and then rappelled down the heights and walked alive out of his predicament. He said to rescuers on the scene that he realized he would not survive unless he took drastic action. In a speech some years later, Ralston claimed that he did not lose his hand, but gained his life back.[1]
Here in these verses the Lord Jesus tells us that our spiritual survival demands that we be willing to take such drastic actions in our own lives as well. Here again, we emphasize that our Lord’s words are hyperbole, they are intentional exaggerations employed for effect. The Law of Israel forbade bodily mutilation for God’s people, so we know that Jesus is not expecting us to amputate limbs. But as I said earlier, just because He doesn’t intend us to take these words literally doesn’t mean that He doesn’t expect us to take them seriously. In fact, the seriousness and severity of the situation is the reason Jesus uses such radical hyperbolic imagery. We must learn to deal with sin severely, for as the Puritan pastor John Owen once said, “Be killing sin or it will be killing you.”
Our Lord’s words here give us pause to consider the following matters.
A. We Must Recognize and Remove The Causes of Sin in Our Lives
Jesus mentions three parts of the body which He says may be the cause of sin. He mentions the hand, the foot, and the eye. Now, if you believe that these parts of your body are the cause of sin in your life, you can do a little experiment. Let’s say that a man has a wondering eye for lustful images. Now, if that man would blindfold himself for a day, do you know what he would find? He would find that lustful images continue to flood his mind. If a person thinks that his or her hand is the cause of the sin in their lives, then let them go through a day with one arm tied behind the back. They will find that they are no more holy than with the arm unbound. At the root of our sin is desire, and desire is seated in the heart. We sin because, at least for that moment, we want what sin promises more than what God promises. And we choose what we want. But there are certain things in life that seem to trigger these desires, and these things are conveniently symbolized by the body parts Jesus speaks of here. The hands represent the things we do; the feet, the places we go, and the eyes, the things we see.
If we would examine our lives and ask ourselves, “When am I am my weakest when it comes to sin?” we may recognize that there are certain things we see, certain things we do, or certain places we go, which cause our desires to be inflamed and usurp our desire for God’s glory in our lives. Perhaps it is a relationship with someone – we find that when we are with that person we do things we know we shouldn’t. Perhaps it is movies, television programs or the internet, and when we view those things, we find desires awakened which we thought were long dead. Perhaps there are places we frequent or activities we engage in where we find our defenses weakened. Our Lord Jesus is saying to us here that none of those things, none of those relationships, none of those places, are so important to us to risk shipwrecking our faith. We must be done with them for His sake. It would be better for us to be “unplugged” from the internet than beset in the sin of pornography. It would be better for our friends to consider us square than for us to follow them into sin. It would better for us to be lonely than to keep friendships alive which continually lead us astray.
William Hendriksen puts it this way: “The lesson is this: sin, being a very destructive force, must not be pampered. It must be ‘put to death’ …. Temptation should be flung aside immediately and decisively. Dillydallying is deadly. Halfway measures work havoc. The surgery must be radical. Right at this very moment without any vacillation the obscene book should be burned, the scandalous picture destroyed, the soul-destroying film condemned, the sinister yet very intimate social tie broken, and the baneful habit discarded. In the struggle against sin the believer must fight hard. Shadow-boxing will never do.”[2]
Better to enter into the life of God’s Kingdom with eyes, hands and feet missing than to keep those things intact and find hell awaiting the end of life. And that brings us to the final matter:
B. We must realize the eternal significance of our choices
In no uncertain terms, Jesus sets forth the alternatives. A person can take sin seriously and deal with it severely and enter into life in the
Isn’t it interesting that Jesus speaks of “entering into life.” See we think this is life, what we have right now. But this is not really life; this is existence. Life is lived in the presence of God. Notice that Jesus says in verse 43, “enter life,” and in v45, “enter life,” and in v47, “enter the
That is a harder question than asking, “Do you want to go to heaven or hell?” No one wants to go to hell. Well, some say they do. Ted Turner, for instance, said in an address to the National Press Club, “Heaven is going to be perfect. And I don't really want to be there...Those of us that go to hell, … when we get there we'll have a chance to make things better because hell is supposed to be a mess. And heaven is perfect. Who wants to go to a place that's perfect? Boring, boring."[3] Ted Turner knows not what he says. If we take the words of Christ seriously, which obviously Ted Turner and many others do not, hell is not somewhere you want to be, and you won’t make it better by being there.
The word translated “hell” in this passage is the word Gehenna. Jesus used this word to describe the eternal torment of hell because it was an image with which the people of His day were familiar. Just south of
Some will undoubtedly object at this point and say, “But what about our treasured doctrine of once saved, always saved?” Certainly it is a biblical truth that the one who has been genuinely born again is eternally secure in their salvation and have no fear of hell. But it is also a truth of Scripture that one cannot be born again until they turn to Christ in faith and turn away from the life of sin in repentance. This does not mean that we will not continue to sin, but it means that the genuine Christian has set themselves against sin, and whenever it rears its ugly head, we deal with it severely, and thus demonstrate our salvation by persevering in the pursuit of holiness. Nowhere is this more plainly stated than in Romans 5:20-6:4 &. There is no genuine Christian who doesn’t continually deal severely with sin in his or her life.
The prevailing opinion of church experts today is that pastors should cease preaching on matters of sin and hell. This very weekend, the Greensboro Coliseum hosted a well-known pastor who spoke to a full arena about the niceties of life and happiness, and though I was not there, I can guarantee you that the words “sin” and “hell” were never spoken there. But we cannot ignore these matters spoken of so severely by the Lord Jesus Himself. I know that a message like this is difficult to hear. It is difficult to preach. But preach it and hear it and believe it and obey it, we must! And so we do not ask the simple question, “Do you want to go to heaven?” We ask a much harder question: “Are you fed up with the futility of live lived for the momentary pleasures of sin, and ready now to turn to a life lived in the pursuit of the glory of God?” If so, then we must look intently at sin – the sin that we lead others into, and the sin that we enter into ourselves, and we must deal with the root cause of it. Insulating ourselves from temptations will do much for us, but the real root cause of sin is the human heart. Cut off your arms, cut off your legs, gouge out your eyes, and you are none the better for it. The sinful human heart still beats within your chest. So, we must come before the Lord and say, “Oh Lord, I am powerless to overcome the reign of sin in my life. I need a new heart. I need your strength and power to have this victory.” If you have been born-again by faith in Christ, the Holy Spirit of God lives within you, and He is able to bring you this victory over sin in your life. Each one of us will continue to sin, because of our human nature. But when we do, or even when we are faced with the temptation to sin, we can rely on Him to overcome this sin in our lives as we deal severely with it. And if we are unwilling to deal with sin in this way, then we must intently question the sincerity of our commitment to Christ.
Undoubtedly there are some within our midst today who will recognize that they have never truly been saved from sin – they have never turned to Christ in faith and repentance. And if that is the case for you today, then we would urge you to do so even now. The decision is yours to make, and the consequences of that decision are eternal. Some will say that I am trying to make you doubt your salvation, and I would say that there are worse things than doubting. Namely, having a false assurance that you are right with God when in fact you are not. Doubt can be healthy if it drives you to God’s word for genuine assurance. Paul said in 2 Corinthians 13:5, “Test yourselves to see if you are in the faith; examine yourselves! Or do you not recognize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you—unless indeed you fail the test?” If you fail that test, and recognize that Christ is not in you, and you are not in the faith, then thank God for doubt, for it has driven you to the point of decision where you can be saved. If God is speaking to you about that right now, then let Him have His way with you and bring you into the life of His Kingdom.
And some Christian people will recognize from these words that their consciences have become dull to the Spirit’s convicting work, and they have become flippant and casual about the presence of sin in their lives. This word from God then would be a wake up call to understand that God hates sin, and He wants you to hate it too. Where it is present in your life, He desires to rip it out by the roots. And so as you consider the besetting sins that continue to plague your life, ask yourself what are the causes? What is it that awakens the corpse of carnal desire in your life? Is it something you see? Is it something you do, or somewhere you go? Is it a relationship with another person? Is it a habit or particular set of circumstances? Once you recognize that, you must with all zeal and sincerity make whatever sacrifice is necessary for you to overcome by the Holy Spirit’s power that temptation in your life. For it is far better to enter the life of the Kingdom of God having made those sacrifices than to persevere in resistance to the Spirit’s conviction and find in the end that you never had salvation, and in hell it will be too late to remedy that condition.
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