Jeremiah 3:5

Thou hast spoken and done evil things as thou couldest.

The limitation of evil

I. Some of the restraining influences of life. “As thou couldest.” By many considerations we are restrained from fulfilling the evil impulses and designs of which we are conscious; our potential wickedness is not allowed to become actual.

1. There is the restraint imposed by revelation. The possession of God’s Word was a grand discipline to the people of Israel. To know the moral perfections of God, to discern the moral significance of human life, to possess the moral law expressed with such clearness, fulness, and force, was a rare privilege. This kept Israel back from the things of lust and cruelty and shame which defiled and destroyed their heathen neighbours. Are we not today restrained by the same gracious influence? Our poet speaks of “the silver streak” that comes between us and the Continent, delivering our nation from fears, wars, and contagions. Is not that revelation which is in our hands a silver streak coming between us and contemporaneous paganism?

2. There is the restraint imposed by grace. The direct Divine action on our mind, will, conscience, feeling. This was the master-restraint of the antediluvian world. As a horse is held in by bit and bridle, as a ship on some rocky coast is held by her anchor, so have we all in dangerous clays been restrained by the Spirit of grace. Let men quench that Spirit, and the disastrous consequence is soon revealed.

3. There is the restraint imposed by society. Our civilisation, which is the grace of God organised, is full of restraining influences to which we owe far more than we sometimes think. The civil law. Public opinion. Social etiquette. Business. Domesticity. If it should be suggested that the laws, institutions, and properties of society which forbid excess are themselves expressions of the moral sense, it will at once be palpable to most that these circumscriptions are dictated by fear, policy, and selfishness rather than by any love of righteousness for its own sake. That one wolf holds another wolf in check must not be construed to mean that we are a flock of lambs.

II. Notwithstanding the restraints of life, we discover the wickedness of our nature by going as far as possible in the direction of transgression. Israel hitherto had abstained from the extreme acts of transgression which would have involved immediate retribution, but they showed their disposition by playing with the fire, by trifling on the edge of the abyss. So in these days we show what we really are by going as far as we dare or can in actual disobedience. We go as far as our material will permit. “As thou couldest.” As thou couldest with impunity. We are intemperate, with a due regard to our health; freer indulgence would destroy us, and that is not what we mean. We are uncharitable, with a due regard to our reputation; we must not infringe the law of libel. We are ambitious and vain; but our ostentation must be limited by considerations of pride and covetousness. As thou couldest with decency. We must not qualify our reputation; we must not be guilty of bad manners, bad form, bad taste. As thou couldest with advantage. Carrying out unrighteousness right up to the point where it ceases to be lucrative, and breaking it off just there. And let none conclude that sins toned down by such considerations are of less malignant quality, or less offensive before God, than are sins of a more violent or exaggerated order.

III. Many would at once proceed to greater lengths of wickedness if the restrictive influences of life were withdrawn.

1. Note the extent to which men resist these saving influences. As some engineers are wishful to drive a tunnel under the Channel and establish immediate relations with the Continent, so men are busy in all directions ingeniously attempting to evade the silver streaks which heaven has mercifully placed between them and the excesses of passion and appetite. The criticism of the Bible in the literary world, the impatience felt with it in the individual life, are frequently nothing more than a revolt against its noble righteousness. We fret at the narrowness of the way which leadeth unto life. In the name of free thought, of a free press, of free restitutions, the nude m art must be encouraged, outspoken writings protected, sexual life must be unfettered. With what strange infatuation do we rebel against and seek to escape the crystal deep which God has established between us and ruin!

2. The second sign of the irregularity and inordinativeness of our desire is found in the popularity of certain imaginative literature Modern society has put distinct and authoritative limits to many forms of indulgence; but human nature shows its old quality unchanged, for when it can no longer gratify itself in the actual world it betakes itself to the ideal world.

Conclusion--

1. Let us recognise the glory of God’s preventing grace. The Dutch call the chain of dykes which protects their fields and their firesides from the wild sea, “the golden border.” God’s grace directly affecting our heart, or expressed in the constitution of society and the circumstances of life, is a golden border shutting out a raging threatening sea of evil.

(2) Let us confess the folly of our self-righteousness. The consciousness of a self-righteousness often stands in the way of men attaining the righteousness which is of God, but the foregoing reflections show how little our self-righteousness is worth. Looking into our heart, we know ourselves to be worse than the world takes us to be. As Victor Hugo expresses it, “Our dark side is unfathomable. .. One of the hardest labours of the just man is to expunge from his soul a malevolence which it is difficult to efface. Almost all our desires, when examined, contain what we dare not avow.”

(3) We see the necessity and urgency of the grace which converts and perfects. It is by no means wholly satisfactory that we are kept by restraining grace; the grace which converts us into a new self is what we must most earnestly covet and pursue. Christianity brings us a motive of unparalleled grandeur; it fills the soul with the highest visions, convictions, loves, ambitions. And there is a sublime concurrence of forces in its motive. (W. L. Watkinson.)

The sinner’s desperate depravity

I. God in His providence has surrounded the sinner with many circumstances operating powerfully to modify human character.

1. Education. This makes Christendom differ from the dark places of the earth, which are full of the habitations of cruelty.

2. Human law. Look at some country in a state of anarchy. Look at some city or village where law is suspended. Look at France, while under the reign of terror, when law was abrogated, and see one company after another pass under the guillotine; and the executioners of today the victims of tomorrow; and, tell us, is not character greatly modified by municipal law?

3. The law of God. If men have no other belief in it, but that which may be denominated the faith of history, it still greatly modifies human character.

4. The troublesome supervision of conscience. This everlasting censorship, while it has held men back from sin, has been hated, warred against, scowled upon, by the whole human family.

5. The whole Gospel has modified human character beyond all calculation. It so commends itself to their reason, and applies such power to their consciences, that it becomes exceedingly difficult to understand it. It is so tender, majestic, commanding, and reasonable, that it for a time melts and overawes many who ultimately reject its provisions.

6. All the Gospel institutions--every thing associated with Christian worship operates in modifying human character, and rendering it in appearance better than it is.

7. The desire of heaven has the same effect. None, perhaps, are so abandoned as not to hope that they may, after all, live and be happy after death.

8. The fear of hell

9. The expectation of judgment.

10. Public sentiment.

11. Domestic affection. The silken cords which entwine round the family circle prevent the commission of many a crime.

II. By these circumstances every sinner is actually restrained in his wickedness and held down in his downward career.

1. Men are uneasy under these circumstances, which shows them to be restraints. Let men be unrestrained, and they will be easy. It is only pain of some kind that renders them uneasy, and willing to change their position. Hence they will not come to the light, lest their deeds should be reproved.

2. Men are constantly trying to alter their circumstances. But they are too indolent by nature to try to alter their circumstances, unless they are circumstances of restraint.

3. When men at length alter their circumstances in any of these respects, they often show out a worse character; manifesting what they would have been before, if they might, if these restraints had been sundered and they let loose upon the world.

4. When these restraints are all removed, men are uniformly far more wicked than if they had not been imposed.

III. Every sinner does make the attempt and succeeds as far as God will let him to sunder these ligatures that would hold him fast to reason, hope, and heaven.

1. See how he breaks over and breaks through the restraints of education. He Cries to throw off what he knew of God, and all he had learned of the Saviour, and of the operations of the Holy Spirit; all he had learned of the operations of the Godhead, in the history of the Church. And when he cannot forget, he raves at his own recollections.

2. When he has tried for a time, but has tried in vain, to retrace the process of education, he finds himself reined in by human laws. If he cannot forget God, perhaps he can snap asunder the power of human control. He can evade all human ties. He can rise above the law, and tread it down like the mire of the street. Or he can violate its precepts and despise its regulations, and hold on and hold out in despite of all its sanctions, presuming in his heart that God will not know, neither will the Almighty consider it. Thus he blesses himself in his own delusion, and trusts for safety in his own righteousness. But he meets with more disturbance yet.

3. From the law of God. Impenitent and unbelieving, he has read in that law what, if he cannot put down, he is a ruined man: “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.” Thus is dashed, at the first stroke, the whole fabric of a dark and fatal idolatry. If man worships his money, or his merchandise, or his farm, or his friend, or anything but God, or gives anything else his supreme affection, even if he does not professedly worship it, he is condemned of God. And He adds, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.” But how unfashionable it would be to care about this commandment, and let the apprehension that God “will not hold him guiltless that taketh His name in vain,” produce a serious moment, or a pang of distress!

4. Not quite so easily does he dispose of the troublesome supervision of conscience. This vicegerent of Heaven stays often many a month after open war is declared. It sometimes will hold close conference with the heart, although the heart may wish to be alone. It will not go to sleep in the grave: it will watch, even while the wretch is dying, to secure the honour of God, and gather courage for a fresh attack just by the dying pillow And the agony of its first onset in the unseen world, hard by the place of dying, devils cannot know. For they have never spurned a dying Saviour, and they have never died. But all the embrasures that can be opened upon the soul by this moral avenger must be closed, or its eternal thunders will be heard and felt.

5. But still he has a slight conflict with the institutions of the Gospel. Every church-going bell fills his conscience with guilt, and each return of the day of rest reminds him of a mother’s prayers. He must pervert its holy design, or writhe under the lashes of a guilty conscience.

6. The hardened sinner would dislodge himself from all thought of heaven or fear of hell. And yet these are very powerful ligatures, and often the last to be sundered. When men think of relinquishing heaven, they sometimes forget, that awakening previous question, “If I abandon the thought of heaven, where shall I then be? What means that worm which never dies? What mean those chains of darkness--and that gnashing of teeth--and that quenchless fire?”

7. The sinner must have broken through all the restraints of public sentiment, before we can know how bad he would be; and this ligature he tries to snap asunder. But he will find that public very populous, before he gets through. After he has gone his round with mortals, and has learned not to care what men think of his conduct, he must cease, too, to care what is thought of his deeds in heaven.

8. There yet remains to be noticed one of the most powerful motives of restraint, the domestic affections. It is impossible to guess what men would be, till they throw off the hold, for instance, that a mother has upon a profligate son. (D. A. Clark.)