Cutting Off Your Limbs
Jul 8th, 2006 by admin
According to John Owen, there are these terrible effects of sin (John Owen, The Mortification of Sin, 72-75):
1. Sin leads to eternal destruction.
2. Sin grieves the Holy and blessed Spirit.
3. Sin causes Jesus to be wounded afresh by it.
4. Sin takes away a man’s usefulness in his generation.
There is nothing, nothing at all worse in this world than sin and its power. This is why in Matthew 17:7-9, Jesus makes this poignant statement:
Woe to the world because of the things that cause people to sin! Such things must come, but woe to the man through whom they come! 8If your hand or your foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life maimed or crippled than to have two hands or two feet and be thrown into eternal fire. 9And if your eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into the fire of hell.
While we read this as a hyperbole, sometimes I wonder if we might not read this not as a hyperbole. This is not to say that people should be out there cutting off their limbs. But, sin is so serious that if it has those consequences that John Owen mentioned, than it really is better to have your limbs cut off than end up in hell. People do not take sin seriously enough and so therefore we can never appreciate grace enough. And without grace, we are still dead in our sins. Now that is a scary thought.
- John Piper’s “How to Kill Sin”
- Death, Paradise, and the Horrors of Hell
- What Good Is It?
- Pastor, Evangelist, or Product Front Man?
- Sovereign Grace Leadership Conference
Sam, do you agree with Owen on the four points you list? I can see #1 and #2 but what about #3? Also, #4: “takes away” as opposed to “reduces”? What are your thoughts. You are further on in Owen that I am so please pontificate.
“His works, his endeavors, his labors, will seldom receive blessing from God. He labours as though in the fire, without any success in his work! The world is full of poor professors without reality. How few are there that walk in beauty and glory! How barren, and how useless are they for the most part!…Sin lies as a worm at the root of obedience and corrodes and waekns it day by day. Al grace, ways and means whereby one might be improved are hindered by sin. God blasts such men’s efforts.” (p. 75)
Interesting. Your #3 strikes me as odd for some reason. I tried to track it down to Rushing’s rendition of Mortification, page 74, which seemed sparse. So I decided to see if an unabridged version was online; it is at http://www.ccel.org/o/owen/mort.xml. Here is Owen as he would read in the “authoritative” BT imprint -
“The Lord Jesus Christ is wounded afresh by it; his new creature in the heart is wounded; his love is foiled; his adversary gratified. As a total relinquishment of him, by the deceitfulness of sin, is the ‘crucifying him afresh, and the putting of him to open shame;’ so every harbouring of sin that he came to destroy wounds and grieves him.”
Compare “As a total relinquishment of him” to Rushing “If deceitful sin engulfs the will”.
Both sound odd for me. At times Owen wrote against what he called “Papists”. A belief that he probably would not hold to was the re-crucifixion of Christ at celebration of the Eucharist. Yet in saying that sin wounds Christ afresh, it sounds similar. Just some thinking I need to sort out.
It is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, 5who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age, 6if they fall away, to be brought back to repentance, because to their loss they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace.
I guess if you can parallel the falling away, the loss, and their rejection of repentance, which I think you can certainly make a case that all unrepented sin exactly is, then I believe Owen can actually make that claim. Christ is being subjected to public disgrace and a re-crucifying when sin is wantonly flaunted and unrepented.
Gotcha. Thanks for that explanation. That makes sense.