The Wages of Sin is Death
Romans 6:23.
Introduction: This
text points out a three-fold contrast:
1.
Sin is contrasted
with God;
2.
wages is contrasted
with gift;
3.
and death is
contrasted with eternal life.
Sin is a paymaster;
God is a giver.
Sin pays wages;
Sin’s wages is death: God gives gifts; God’s gift is eternal life.
What and who is a
taskmaster? A taskmaster is one who
assigns work to another and sees that the work is done. The Egyptians set cruel
taskmasters over the Israelites who assigned heavy and unreasonable tasks and
then whipped them if they did not do them. The Bible represents the sinner as
the servant of sin. In John 8:33-34, the Jews said to Christ, “We be
Abraham’s seed, and were never in bondage to any man...” Jesus answered
them, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whosoever committeth sin is the
servant of sin.” The worse slavery is
slavery to sin.
Sin is a
cruel taskmaster. He gets his servant to
work early in life. In the government of sin there is no child-labor law. Why do
little boys smoke and curse? Because they are servants of sin. Why do girls
smoke and drink and disobey parents? Because they are slaves of sin. They do not
belong to themselves. They are in bondage to sin.
Sin works in men and
women of all ages. Why does the gambler buy lottery tickets with the money that
ought to be spent for food for his wife and children? He is sin’s slave. He does
sin’s bidding.
What is the
explanation of the drunkard’s life? Why will a man take money needed for
groceries and spend it for booze? It is because he is the servant of sin. Why
are the amusement places of this world filled while the churches suffer
from small crowds? It is because most of the people are lost and in the
employment of sin. Why can hellholes get the people’s money while the cause of
Christ counts its pennies and nickels? It is because this world lieth in the lap
of the wicked one. Men do not belong to themselves. They are tied hand and foot
by the cords of sin. A slave does not have freedom. He carries out the orders of
another; he must do what his owner says. John 8:34 declares,
“Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin.”
Listen to Proverbs
5:21, 22 “For the ways of man are before the eyes of the LORD, and he
pondereth all his goings. His own iniquities shall take the wicked himself, and
he shall be holden with the cords of his sins.”
What a picture! Man is here seen bound
by his own iniquities. Sin ties a man up.
In Gulliver’s
Travels we are told the story of a man who journeys to a land where the
people were no larger than his little finger. Being tired after his long
journey, and seeing no one near, he lay down upon the grass and went to sleep.
When he awoke he found he was tied down, hand and foot. The little people into
whose land he had come, fearing he might harm them, had driven small pegs in the
ground and roped him down. The ropes were hardly stronger than threads, but they
had tied so many of them about him that he was utterly helpless.
You see it is easy to break one strand of thread. Wind one strand around my wrists and I jerk; and it is broken. Wind it five times about my wrists, a little harder jerk and it still breaks. But now wind it around my wrists 30 or 40 times, and then I jerk but it does not break.
It is so with our
sins. Some boy or girl tells a lie. It doesn’t seem so bad, we just call it a
“fib.” But he tells another, and another, and on and on until he is a bold faced
liar. A man takes a drink, and another, and another until he is its slave. This
is how a person gets hooked on drugs, or on pornography, or any other sin.
It comes on a little at a time, until it completely envelopes and fills
our hearts, minds, and bodies.
Sin is a hard taskmaster. He has no retirement plan for old sinners. He works them after they get old and bent. He drives them on and on in his nefarious business even as they totter toward the grave. Sin has no respect for gray hairs. Sin has no pity for the weak. Sin has no remorse of conscience. Sin has no sympathy for the miserable.
Look at that old man
yonder. He is godless and indifferent to the things of God and eternity. He
rarely ever goes to church. Christ is nothing to him.
His god is his belly or his business or pleasure. He is still trying
to get hold of some more money to spend at sin’s joints or to buy another piece
of land with, or to fatten his bankroll. He drinks God’s water and breathes
God’s air, but he hates God’s church and despises God’s people. What is the
explanation of such a life? He is in the employment of sin. Sin is pressing the
yoke heavily on his neck, and in a little while he will be in sin’s grave,
and after a longer while he will be in the devil’s hell; unless the
grace of God teaches his heart to fear and opens his eyes to see the Lamb
of God.
Sin pays off; it
pays a man what he earns. Sin pays wages. Men are concerned about wages. They
argue over wages; strike; fight. Men want what they earn. To get what one earns
is justice. The wages of sin is death; that’s justice.
Death is not what sin
promises, but God says death is what sin pays. Sin promises pleasure and
happiness and good, but it pays off in different coin. Men sin because they
think there will be good in it. Men drink, men use tobacco, men do drugs for the
good feeling; he gambles for the money he thinks he will earn. Sin does not come
to a man and say, “If you will do this or that I will pay you off in death.” Sin
says in doing this or that you will be profited; there will be pleasure or
satisfaction or happiness.
Genesis 3:4-7 records
what Satan told the woman in the garden of Eden “the serpent said unto the
woman, Ye shall not surety die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat
thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good
and evil. And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it
was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of
the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he
did eat. And the eyes of them both were opened...”. Hebrews 11:25 emphasizes
that there is no abiding pleasure in sin by stating, “…Pleasures of sin for a
season,”.
What is death? Death
used in several different senses. It never means non-existent. Death and life
are not synonyms for existence or non-existence but for states or conditions of
existence.
There is physical
death, which means separation of the visible from the invisible part of man.
Then there is death in the moral or judicial sense, which means moral separation
from God. We speak of the sinner as being at a guilty distance from God;
Ephesians 2:1 declares, “who were dead in trespasses and sins,”.
There is only one
physical death. Hebrews 9:27 tells us, “And as it is appointed unto
men once to die, but after this the judgment.”
“Let the dead bury their dead,” Matthew 8:22.
But morally there is
a first and second death; a present and future tense of death. The sinner is now
dead, which means that he is separated from the favor and blessings of God,
under the curse of His law. The second death is the lake of fire, where the
curse of the law is executed. Come to the Day of Judgment. Come to sin’s pay
window and get sin’s pay envelope. Open it and see what is in it. Horror
of horrors! Matthew 25.41 states, “Depart from me, ye cursed, into
everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels,”
Listen to Revelation 20:13-15, “And the sea gave up the dead which
were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and
they were judged every man according to their works. And death and hell were
cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death. And whosoever was not
found written in the book of life was cast into the take of fire,”.
God gives a gift. The value of a gift does not depend upon any service rendered but upon the ability and generosity of the giver. What a great giver is God. A king once remembered one of his generals with a valuable gift. The soldier said to his king, this is too great for me to accept. The king replied, but it is not too great for a king to give. Men who go to hell get what they earned, but heaven is God’s gift to paupers.
Just as there are
two aspects of death, so are there two aspects of eternal life; a present and a
future. The believer now has eternal life, the very moment he believes. John
3:16 states, “For God so
loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in
him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
John 3:36 continues, “He that believeth on the Son
hath everlasting life”. He is not condemned; he is redeemed from the curse,
he has justification before God. He
has eternal life. But just as the living sinner does not experience death in its
fullest sense, so the living believer does not have eternal life in its fullest
sense. Eternal life will have a fuller and sweeter meaning when we awake in His
likeness; when we are conformed to the image of God’s son; when we reach our
inheritance beyond the skies.
No man can have
eternal life without taking Christ. Eternal life means right relationship to
God. I Peter 3:18 declares,
“For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that
he might bring us to God.”. The road back to God’s favor is paved with the
stones of Christ’s obedience and cemented by the blood of the Cross. John 14:6
states, “Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no
man cometh unto the Father, but by me,”.
To repeat our text,
Romans 6:23 states, “For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of
God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord,”.