The Sin Toward Death

But at this point our opponent breaks in. “These passages will bear on forbidding every kind of immodesty and enforcing every kind of modesty — but without prejudice to the room left for pardon. Pardon is not flatly denied the moment sins are condemned, since the time for pardon runs alongside the very condemnation that pardon shuts out.” [a]

That was a shrewd move on the Soulish side, and it was bound to come next. So I have kept back for this point the precautions that were taken openly, even in the days of old, with a view to refusing church fellowship in cases of this kind.

For even in Proverbs — the book we call Paroemiae — Solomon deals with the adulterer in particular, as a man nowhere admitted to expiation. “But the adulterer,” he says, “through want of sense gains destruction for his own soul; he bears pains and disgrace. And his shame will not be wiped away for all time. For indignation, full of jealousy, will not spare the man on the day of judgment.” If you think that is said about a pagan, then about believers at any rate you have already heard it through Isaiah: “Come out from among them and be separate, and do not touch what is unclean.” At the very opening of the Psalms you have: “Blessed is the man who has not gone astray in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stood in the way of sinners, nor sat in the chair of pestilence.” And further on we hear that same man’s own voice: “I have not sat with the council of vanity, and with those who act unjustly I will not go in” — this has to do with the “church” of people who do wrong — “and with the ungodly I will not sit.” And: “I will wash my hands among the innocent, and I will go around your altar, Lord” — a whole company by himself. For indeed, “With a holy man you will be holy, and with an innocent man innocent, and with a chosen man chosen, and with a perverse man perverse.” And elsewhere: “But to the sinner the Lord says: Why do you expound my righteous decrees and take up my covenant on your lips? If you saw a thief, you ran along with him, and with adulterers you threw in your lot.”

So the apostle too, taking his instruction from here, says: “I wrote to you in my letter not to mix with people who are sexually immoral — not, of course, with the sexually immoral of this world,” and so on, “or you would have had to leave the world. But as it is, I am writing to you that if anyone among you is called a brother and is sexually immoral, or an idolater” — for what two things are more intimately joined? — “or a swindler” — for what two are more nearly related? — and so on, “with such a man do not so much as eat”: let alone share the thanksgiving. Because, as he adds, “a little yeast spoils the flavor of the whole lump.” Again, to Timothy: “Lay hands on no one hastily, and do not share in other people’s sins.” Again, to the Ephesians: “Do not, then, be partners with them, for at one time you were darkness.” And more forcefully still: “Do not share in the unfruitful works of darkness; rather, show them up for what they are. For the things done by them in secret are disgraceful even to speak of.” And what is more disgraceful than acts of immodesty? And if he warns the Thessalonians to withdraw even from a brother who “walks idly,” how much more from a man guilty of sexual immorality!

For these are the settled judgments of Christ, who “loved the church” and “handed himself over for her, so that he might make her holy — cleansing her thoroughly by the washing of water — in the word, so that he might present the church to himself in glory, having no stain or wrinkle” — after the washing, of course — “but that she may be holy and beyond reproach.” From then on, that is: “without wrinkle,” like a virgin; “without stain” of sexual immorality, like a bride; without the disgrace of anything vile, as one thoroughly cleansed.

And what if, even at this point, you take it into your head to reply that fellowship is indeed refused to sinners — above all to those who have been “stained by the flesh” — but only for the present, and that they are to be restored once they have pleaded their repentance, in keeping with that mercy of God which prefers a sinner’s repentance to his death? This is the foundation your whole opinion rests on, and it has to be attacked all along the line.

So we say this. If it had been open to the divine mercy to guarantee a display of itself even to those who fall after baptism, the apostle would have put it like this: “Do not share in the works of darkness — unless they have repented”; and “With such a man do not so much as eat — unless he has first wiped the brothers’ shoes clean by rolling at their feet”; and “Whoever ruins the temple of God, God will ruin — unless he has shaken out over his head, in church, the ashes of every hearth.” For in the case of the things he condemned, it was his business to lay down just as clearly how far he was condemning them, and on what condition — whether the severity he meant was temporary and conditional rather than permanent.

But in fact, in every letter, he both bars a man of that character, sinning after he has come to believe, from being admitted among believers, and, if he has been admitted, shoves him out of fellowship, with no hope hanging on any condition or any length of time. So he stands rather on our side. He shows that the repentance the Lord prefers is the repentance that comes before believing, before baptism — that is the repentance reckoned better than the sinner’s death; the sinner being a man to be washed once for all through the grace of Christ, who once for all suffered death for our sins. The apostle laid this rule down in his own case as well. When he states that Christ came for this purpose, to save sinners, of whom he himself had been “the first,” what does he add? “And I was shown mercy, because I acted in ignorance, in unbelief.” So that mercy of God which prefers a sinner’s repentance to his death has in view people who are still ignorant and still unbelieving, for whose release Christ came — not people who already know God and have been taught the sacred pledge of the faith. But if God’s mercy applies to those who are still ignorant and unbelieving, then of course it follows that repentance is what invites that mercy to itself. And that leaves untouched the other kind of repentance, the kind that comes after believing, which for lighter sins will be able to obtain pardon from the overseer, and for graver and unforgivable ones from God alone.

But how long are we to go on with Paul, when even John seems to give the other side some quiet support? For in the Revelation he appears to have plainly granted sexual immorality the help of repentance. To the angel of the church at Thyatira the Spirit sends word that he has this against him, that he kept the woman Jezebel in fellowship — “who calls herself a prophet, and teaches and seduces my servants into sexual immorality and into eating what has been sacrificed to idols. And I gave her a generous stretch of time to enter into repentance, and she is not willing to enter into it on the count of her sexual immorality. Look, I will throw her onto a bed, and her adulterers along with her into the greatest distress, unless they repent of her works.” I am satisfied with this much: that among the apostles there is a common agreement in the rules of faith and of discipline. “Whether it is I,” says Paul, “or they, this is what we preach.” So it matters to the whole sacred pledge we hold that we should believe nothing was conceded by John which Paul flatly refused. Whoever keeps his eye on this harmony of the Holy Spirit will be led by him into his meanings. [q]

For the woman the angel was quietly bringing into the church, and rightly urging toward repentance, was a heretic, who had taken it on herself to teach what she had learned from the Nicolaitans. And who doubts that a heretic, taken in by a counterfeit rite, on discovering his mishap and making up for it by repentance, both wins pardon and is restored to the church’s arms? That is why among us too a heretic — who counts as no better than a pagan, in fact as worse than a pagan — is cleansed of both characters by the baptism of truth, and admitted.

Or else, if you are certain that this woman had once had a living faith and afterwards died to it and turned heretic, so that you can claim pardon by repentance for her not as a heretic but as a believer who sinned — then let her repent, I grant you; but with a view to stopping her adultery, not with a view to being restored to the church as well. For that will be a repentance which we ourselves acknowledge to be owed, and far more than you do; but its pardon we leave to God.

In fact this same Revelation, further on, assigns “the detestable and the sexually immoral,” along with “the cowardly and unbelieving and murderers and sorcerers and idolaters” — anyone guilty of such a crime while professing the faith — to “the lake of fire,” with no condition attached to the sentence. And it cannot be made to look as though it had pagans in view, since it has just given its verdict about believers: “Those who have conquered will have this inheritance, and I will be God to them and they will be sons to me.” Then it adds: “But to the cowardly and unbelieving and detestable and sexually immoral and murderers and sorcerers and idolaters — a share in the lake of fire and sulfur, which is the second death.” And again like this: “Blessed are those who act according to the commands, so that they may have the right to the tree of life and to the gates, to go into the holy city. Dogs, sorcerers, the sexually immoral, murderers — outside!” Meaning, of course, those who do not act according to the commands; and being sent outside is what happens to people who have been inside. Besides, “What business is it of mine to judge those outside?” had already come earlier.

From John’s letter, too, they pluck a proof straight away. It says: “The blood of his Son cleanses us thoroughly from every sin.” Then we shall sin always, and in every way, if he always cleanses us thoroughly from every sin — or else, if not always, then not again after we have come to believe; and if not from sin, then not again from sexual immorality. But where did John start from? He had laid it down that God is light, and that darkness is not in him, and that we are lying if we say we have fellowship with him and walk in darkness. “But if,” he says, “we walk in the light, we shall have fellowship with him, and the blood of Jesus Christ our Lord cleanses us thoroughly from every sin.” So then: do we sin while walking in the light? And sinning in the light, shall we be thoroughly cleansed? Not at all. For the man who sins is not in the light but in the dark. That is how he shows us the way in which we are to be thoroughly cleansed from sin: by walking in the light, where sin cannot be committed. So the sense in which he says we “are thoroughly cleansed” is not insofar as we sin, but insofar as we do not sin. For walking in the light and having no fellowship with darkness, we shall behave as men who have been thoroughly cleansed — sin not being altogether laid aside, but not being knowingly committed. This is the power of the Lord’s blood: those it has already cleansed from sin, and set from then on “in the light,” it keeps pure from then on, if they will go on persevering in walking in the light.

“But he goes on,” you say: “If we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, to forgive us those sins and to cleanse us thoroughly from every unrighteousness.”

Does he say “from impurity”? He does not — or else, if he does, then he cleanses us from idolatry as well. But there is a difference in the sense. For look yet again: “If we say,” he says, “that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.” And more fully still: “Little children, I have written these things to you so that you may not sin; and if you have sinned, we have an Advocate with God the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; and he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins.”

“Going by those words, it will be granted both that we do sin and that we have pardon.” Then what becomes of your case, when I read on and find something else?

For he states that we do not sin at all, and he argues the point at length precisely so as to make no such concession — laying it down that sins have been wiped out once for all by Christ, not that pardon is to be had afterwards. And the sense requires us to take that statement as a call to chastity. “Everyone,” he says, “who has this hope makes himself chaste, because he too is chaste. Everyone who commits sin commits lawlessness as well; and sin is lawlessness. And you know that he was made manifest to take sins away” — sins, of course, that are from then on not to be incurred again, if it is true, as it is, that he goes on: “Everyone who remains in him does not sin; everyone who sins has neither seen him nor knows him. Little children, let no one deceive you. Everyone who does what is right is righteous, as he too is righteous. The one who commits sin is of the devil, since the devil sins from the beginning. For this is why the Son of God was made manifest: to undo the works of the devil.” And undo them he did, by setting a man free through baptism, since the handwritten bond that meant death had been handed over to him as an outright gift. And so: “The one who is being born of God does not sin, because God’s seed remains in him; and he cannot sin, because he has been born of God. By this the sons of God and the sons of the devil are made plain.” By what? Only in this way: the first by not sinning, from the time they were born from God; the second by sinning, because they are from the devil, exactly as though they had never been born from God at all. And if he says, “The man who is not righteous is not of God,” then how will the man who is not modest become a son of God all over again, when he has already stopped being one?

“Then this comes close to saying that John has forgotten himself. In the earlier part of his letter he asserts that we are not without sin, and now he lays it down that we are not to sin at all — in the one place flattering us a little with the hope of pardon, and in the other insisting with all possible strictness that whoever has sinned is no son of God.”

Far from it. For not even we ourselves forget the distinction between sins, which is where this digression started; and John has confirmed that distinction here. There are some sins committed daily, which every one of us is liable to. Who will get through without ever being angry unfairly and keeping his anger past sundown? Or without using his hands on someone; or carelessly speaking evil; or swearing rashly; or breaking his word; or lying out of embarrassment or “necessity”? In business, in public office, in trade, in what we eat, in what we see, in what we hear — how great are the temptations that work on us! So that if there were no pardon for sins of this kind, salvation would be out of anyone’s reach. For these, then, there will be pardon, through Christ, who pleads with the Father and is heard.

But there are also their opposites: the graver, ruinous sins, the ones incapable of pardon — murder, idolatry, fraud, denying the faith, blasphemy; and of course adultery and sexual immorality as well; and any other “violation of the temple of God.” For these Christ will plead no more. These will not be incurred at all by a man born of God — and if he does incur them, he will stop being a son of God.

So John’s rule of difference stands. He arranges a distinction between sins, and that is why he now admits and now denies that the sons of God sin. For he had his eye on the closing passage of his letter, and was laying the groundwork for it, meaning to say at the end, more plainly: “If anyone knows his brother to be sinning a sin that is not toward death, he is to ask, and the Lord will give life to the man whose sin is not toward death. For there is a sin toward death; I do not say that anyone should ask about that one.” He too remembered, as I have, that Jeremiah was forbidden by God to plead with him on behalf of a people that was committing deadly sins. “Every unrighteousness is sin, and there is a sin toward death. But we know that everyone who has been born of God does not sin” — meaning the sin that is toward death. So there is nothing left for you but either to deny that adultery and sexual immorality are deadly sins, or else to admit that they are unforgivable — sins for which it is not even permitted to make intercession that would be heard.