Isaiah 5:18,19

Woe unto them that draw iniquity with cords of vanity.

Frivolity and profanity

Frivolity, he says, is the herald and handmaid of guilt. The cords are cords of vanity bound about us in mere thoughtlessness in the unguarded hours of recreation, in the giddy whirl of society, when talk is gay and free, and no man weighs his words; the cords of vanity bind us on subtly but surely to the calamitous burden of sin. I submit to you that the prophet in thus linking together frivolity and iniquity, commends himself to us as a close and just observer of human society. Profanity is the last term of a series; it is a stage we reach by the unmarked way of frivolous habit, and that unmarked way is the broad way of the general life. Society itself is unfavourable to thought and gravity and depth of character. It makes us of necessity superficial, light, shallow. At best it ministers to the gracious externals of a man’s conduct, and too often it does this at the cost of his character; for the philosopher said truly that custom is the principal magistrate of a man’s life; and if, by the ceaseless iteration of frivolous speech and action, we bind upon ourselves the chain of frivolous habit, be sure the mischief penetrates into the very citadel of character. (Canon H. Hensley Henson, B. D.)

God’s woes

God’s woes are better than the devil’s welcomes. When we get a woe in this book of blessings it is sent as a warning, that we may escape from woe. (C. H.Spurgeon.)

Disguises and defiances

Society, for its self-preservation and well-being, provides that virtue should be in the ascendant, should sit on the throne, should hold the empire and make the laws of the world. There have been times when vice has ostentatiously unmasked itself in high places, and with a triumphant audacity has made itself the fashion and the social law. Such was the epoch of the decadence of the old Roman civilisation. Such were the times of the restoration of the English monarchy under Charles II.
The moral collapse at the Restoration was the inevitable unbending of the bow after the rigours of the Puritan regime. England was tired of unmelodious psalm singing and endless homilies on the sin of eating Christmas pies and dancing around May poles. It welcomed with a strange alacrity and a strange forgetfulness the exiled prince, whose morals, none too good to begin with, had been debauched in foreign courts, and who brought back to the palace of his fathers nothing of royalty, except enchanting manners, graceful wit, and an insatiable thirst for pleasure. But the enthronement of vice was only for a day. Men on the morrow smote it on the face, and hurled it from the seat which gave it power and lustre. This is the history of fashionable and jewelled vice in every age. When those who inherit wealth and polite culture and the accumulated embellishments of life conspicuously trample on the laws of righteousness the insulted world calls them to account, and in self-defence consigns them to social outlawry. So plainly is Virtue the eldest born and the fairest of the daughters of God. If our Lord uttered woe on the heartless and pretentious morality of His day, the prophet uttered woe on the confessed and ostentatious immorality of his time. Isaiah’s words, as well as Christ’s, have a bearing on our modern life: “Woe unto them that draw iniquity with cords of vanity, and sin as it were with a cart rope.” Men hate hypocrisy. A profitable virtue that is not real, or a formal virtue that is not large and loving, moves us to scorn or pity. But, strange to say, the hatred of hypocrisy is not always in the interests of virtue “I will not be a hypocrite,” says one, and in his horror of hypocrisy he rushes into an open and shameless evil life. This is what the prophet means in his graphic picture, “Woe unto them that draw iniquity,” etc. He depicts a class of men who have deliberately harnessed themselves to evil, as a horse or mule is harnessed, to a loaded waggon. There are forms of iniquity which are difficult and laborious. Those who get over any ground with them must pull them with a cart rope. It is grievous business, but some men choose it, and take more trouble to be bad than actually is necessary to be good. And they prosecute ostentatiously the business that they have chosen. They take no care to conceal the evil industry of their life. It is the instinct of sin to disguise itself. It usually skulks behind an assumed goodness. It takes to itself virtuous names. It puts on masks to hide itself, not only from the eyes of men, but also from the eyes of conscience. But the man who drags sin with a cart rope boasts only one virtue, and that is a real one: he is no hypocrite. He has thrown appearances to the winds. He drags his iniquity conspicuously on the highway, in the daylight. He does not care to conceal the coat of arms on the carriage, or the livery of the driver who holds the reins and snaps over him the whip. Perhaps no one ever fully commits himself to this sort of life until he has, or thinks that he has, arrived at the conclusion that all goodness in the world is a sham; that the virtue to which men sing praises is simply a convenient fiction, which they affect to believe, and pretend to possess; that, as there is no real righteousness on the earth, so there is no sovereign righteousness in the heavens; that God is simply a dumb force, without moral quality, and indifferent to the moral quality of His creatures. Hence the prophet makes such a one say, in presumptuous taunt and irony: “Let Him make speed,” etc. Is this rude picture, culled from the page of the old Hebrew prophet, unsuited to these smooth times and this Christianised civilisation? Do none of you ever say: “I know it is wrong. It is an offence against God, against myself, against my neighbour. It is an unquestionable violation of what is pure and honest. I can See the harm that it works; but I do not disguise it. I do not pretend to be other than I am. I am at least frank. I do not affect a virtue which I do not possess”? Well, this is one alternative to hypocrisy. Did you ever think that there is another,--to recognise the evil in your nature and the sin in your life; to look at it with keen, brave eyes, illumined by the study of God’s law to guard against it day by day and moment by moment; and resolutely to fight it, in its first impulses, in its fiercest assaults, by the help of God’s grace? Is not this a possible alternative? It is not demanded of you that you be sinless; but you need not be the liveried slave of sin. It is not required of you that you be perfect; but you can enlist and do battle on the side of right. (W. W. Battershall, D. D.)

Cords and cart-ropes

I. Explain the singular description. Here are persons harnessed to the waggon of sin--harnessed to it by many cords, all light as vanity and yet strong as cart ropes.

1. Let me give you a picture. Here is a man who, as a young man, heard the Gospel and grew up under the influence of it. He is an intelligent man, a Bible reader, and somewhat of a theologian. He attended a Bible class, was an apt pupil, and could explain much of Scripture, but he took to lightness and frothiness. He made an amusement of religion and a sport of serious things. He came under the bond of this religious trifling, but it was a cord of vanity small as a packthread. Years ago he began to be bound to his sin by this kind of trifling, and at the present moment I am not sure that he ever cares to go and hear the Gospel or to read the Word of God, for he has grown to despise that which he sported with. The wanton witling has degenerated into a malicious scoffer: his cord has become a cart rope. His life is all trifling now.

2. I have seen the same thing take another shape, and then it appeared as captious questioning. How can he believe in Christ when he requires Him, first of all, to be put through a catechism and to be made to answer cavils? Oh, take heed of tying up your soul with cart ropes of scepticism.

3. Some have a natural dislike to religious things and cannot be brought to attend to them. Let me qualify the statement. They are quite prepared to attend a place of worship and to hear sermons, and occasionally to read the Scriptures, and to give their money to help on some benevolent cause; but this is the point at which they draw the line--they do not want to think, to pray, to repent, to believe, or to make heart work of the matter. If you indulge in demurs and delays and prejudices in the first days of your conviction, the time may come when those little packthreads will be so intertwisted with each other that they will make a great cart rope, and you will become an opposer of everything that is good, determined to abide forever harnessed to the great Juggernaut car of your iniquities, and so to perish.

4. I have known some men get harnessed to that ear in another way, and that is by deference to companions. There is no doubt that many people go to hell for the love of being respectable. It is not to be doubted that multitudes pawn their souls, and lose their God and heaven, merely for the sake of standing well in the estimation of a profligate. He that would be free forever must break the cords ere yet they harden into chains.

5. Some men are getting into bondage in another way; they are forming gradual habits of evil.

6. I fear that not a few are under the delusive notion that they are safe as they are. Carnal security is made up of cords of vanity.

II. THERE IS A WOE ABOUT REMAINING HARNESSED TO THE CART OF SIN, and that woe is expressed in our text.

1. It has been hard work already to tug at sin’s load.

2. But, if you remain harnessed to this car of sin, the weight increases. You are like a horse that has to go a journey, and pick up parcels at every quarter of a mile: you are increasing the heavy luggage and baggage that you have to drag behind you.

3. Further, I want you to notice that as the load grows heavier, so the road becomes worse, the ruts are deeper, the hills are steeper, and the sloughs are more full of mire. An old man with his bones filled with the sin of his youth is a dreadful sight to look upon; he is a curse to others, and a burden to himself.

4. The day will come when the load will crush the horse.

5. I am sure that there is nobody here who desires to be eternally a sinner: let him then beware, for each hour of sin brings its hardness and its difficulty of change. When the moral brakes are taken off, and the engine is on the downgrade, and must run on at a perpetually quickening rate forever, then is the soul lost indeed.

III. Now I want to offer some ENCOURAGEMENT FOR BREAKING LOOSE.

1. There is hope for every harnessed slave of Satan. Jesus Christ has come into the world to rescue those who are bound with chains.

2. You are bound with the cords of sin, and in order that all this sin of yours might effectually be put away, the Lord Jesus, the Son of the Highest, was Himself bound.

3. There is in this world a mysterious Being whom thou knowest not, but whom some of us know, who is able to work thy liberty. Wherever there is a soul that would be free from sin this free Spirit waits to help him.

4. Our experience should be a great encouragement to you. (C. H.Spurgeon.)

Spiritual cart ropes

Cart ropes are composed of several small cords firmly twisted together, which serve to connect the beasts of burden with the draught they pull after them. These represent a complication of means closely united, whereby a people here described continue to join them selves to the most wearisome of all burdens. They consist of false reasonings, foolish pretexts, and corrupt maxims, by which obstinate transgressors become firmly united to their sins, and persist in dragging after them their iniquities. Of this sort the following are a few specimens: God is merciful, and His goodness will not suffer any of His creatures to be completely and everlastingly miserable. Others, as well as they, are transgressors. Repentance will be time enough upon a death bed or in old age. The greatest of sinners often pass unpunished. A future state of retribution is uncertain. Unite these, and such like cords, and, I suppose, you have the cart ropes whereby the persons mentioned draw after them much sin and iniquity. All these pretexts, however, are light as vanity. (R. Macculloch.)

The cord of sin

These words are at all times, and among every people, of especial interest, were it only on two accounts--

(1) The easy thoughtlessness with which men begin their acquaintance with sin, and

(2) The hardness of heart in which they are confirmed by its habits. These are represented under a very lively figure in the former of these two verses; and the desperate rebelliousness of spirit to which they are brought, so as to utter defiance against the judgment of the Almighty, is expressed to the life in the latter.

I. THE FIGURE under which the sinner is represented in the former of these verses is that of a rope-maker. He begins with a slight slender thread of flax or hemp, which he can break almost with as much ease as a spider’s web; but the end of his work is a cart rope, thick and strong enough to bind the strongest man or beast upon earth. So a man begins and ends with sin. He begins with drawing iniquity with cords of vanity. The iniquity upon which he is tempted to enter seems to him a mere trifle at first, to which, if not good, he thinks that he gives a hard name to call it downright had; and if it even do smite his conscience with some evil signs of its real nature, which he can hardly mistake, he is vain enough, in the notion of his own strength, to think, that when he has gone into it he can as easily come out of it again. It is but as flax or tow (he says); it is but a cord of vanity and not of substance. He needs not to go on spinning and drawing it out (he thinks); but he will stop short as soon as he has gone as far as he wants, and that is not far. Alas! how many can fix the beginning of their ruin in this world, and imminent peril of the judgment of the next, on the day when they said in foolish security, and in face of a warning conscience, “It is but for this once!” Alas! they never said so again. It proved to them to be “now and forever.”

II. The text informs us in the next verse that these men, who, beginning with drawing iniquity with cords of vanity, had ended with drawing sin, as it were, with a cart rope, WENT ON TO MOCK AT JUDGMENT TO COME. The thoughts of judgment to come re, of course, very unpleasant to him who knows that he shall have to suffer from it when it does come. His sin, therefore, hardens him into a disbelief of it. (R. W. Evans, B.D.)

The growth of sin

Sin grows as naturally and as fast as the fire, which lays a city in ruins, comes out of a single spark in some solitary obscure corner; as surely as the rains, which bury a whole country in a flood, begin with a few sprinkled drops, which were not worth talking about; as surely as the river, which must be crossed with ships, begins with a well which you might empty almost with the scoop of your hand; as certainly as the strong thick cart rope begins with a few weak flaxen or hempen threads. (R. W.Evans, B. D.)

Strength of habit

The surgeon of a regiment in India relates the following incident: “A soldier rushed into the tent, to inform me that one of his comrades was drowning in a pond close by, and nobody could attempt to save him in consequence of the dense weeds which covered the surface. On repairing to the spot, we found the poor fellow in his last struggle, manfully attempting to extricate himself from the meshes of rope-like grass that encircled his body; but, to all appearance, the more he laboured to escape, the more firmly they became coiled round his limbs. At last he sank, and the floating plants closed in, and left not a trace of the disaster. After some delay, a raft was made, and we put off to the spot, and sinking a pole some twelve feet, a native dived, holding on by the stake, and brought the body to the surface. I shall never forget the expression of the dead man’s face--the clenched teeth, and fearful distortion of the countenance, while coils of long trailing weeds clung round his body and limbs, the muscles of which stood out stiff and rigid, whilst his hands grasped thick masses, showing how bravely he had struggled for life.” This heart-rending picture is a terribly accurate representation era man with a conscience alarmed by remorse, struggling with his sinful habits, but finding them too strong for him. Divine grace can save the wretch from his unhappy condition, but if he be destitute of that, his remorseful agonies will but make him more hopelessly the slave of his passions. Laocoon, in vain endeavouring to tear off the serpents’ coils from himself and children, aptly portrays the long-enslaved sinner contending with sin in his own strength. (C. H.Spurgeon.)

Insidious nature of sin

In the gardens of Hampton Court you will see many trees entirely vanquished and well-nigh strangled by huge coils of ivy, which are wound about them like the snakes around the unhappy Laocoon: there is no untwisting the folds, they are too giant-like, and fast fixed, and every hour the rootlets of the climber are sucking the life out of the unhappy tree. Yet there was a day when the ivy was a tiny aspirant, only asking a little aid in climbing; had it been denied then, the tree had never become its victim, but by degrees the humble weakling grew in strength and arrogance, and at last it assumed the mastery, and the tall tree became the prey of the creeping, insinuating destroyer. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Moral slavery

James II on his death bed thus addressed his son, “There is no slavery like sin and no liberty like God’s service.” (H. Melvill, B. D.)