How Sin Brings a Person Low
"And were brought low for their iniquity." (Ps 106:43)
If Scripture is a spiritual garden, as Chrysostom says, then the book of Psalms is a special bed within that garden, planted with fragrant flowers. Luther called the Psalms a little Bible. The Psalms make sweeter music than David's harp ever did. They are suited to every condition a Christian may face, and serve for both illumination and consolation.
In this Psalm, David sets down the sins of the people of Israel.
First, in general: "We have sinned with our fathers" (verse 6). The examples of fathers are not always to be urged. Shall we be wiser than our fathers? Fathers can err. A son sometimes does better to take his land from his father than his religion (2 Chr 29:6).
Second, David makes a particular enumeration of their sins.
1. Their forgetfulness of God: "They soon forgot his works" (verse 13), or as the original has it, "they made haste to forget his works." The Lord worked a famous miracle for them (verse 11): he drowned Israel's enemies, and Israel drowned his mercies. Our sins and God's kindnesses are both apt to slip quickly from memory. We deal with God's mercies as we deal with flowers: while they are fresh we smell them and tuck them close, but before long we throw them away and think no more of them. As Theodoret says, forgetfulness of grace and ingratitude for benefits received are truly detestable. "They made haste to forget his works."
2. Their inordinate lusting (verse 14): "They lusted exceedingly in the wilderness." They grew weary of the provision God sent them miraculously from heaven. They turned dainty; they wept for quails. It was not enough that God should supply their needs, they wanted him to satisfy their lusts as well. God gave them their request, but in anger. As Augustine observes, God often gives in wrath what he withholds in mercy. "He sent leanness into their souls," that is, he sent a plague by which they pined and consumed away.
3. Their idolatry (verse 19): "They made a calf in Horeb." They fashioned a god of gold and worshipped it. Scripture calls idols Bosheth, a shame (Hos 9:10). For this, God disclaimed them as his people: "Thy people have corrupted themselves" (Exod 32:7). Formerly God had called them his people, but now he did not say to Moses my people, he said thy people.
4. Their unbelief (verse 24): "They believed not his word, but murmured." They did not trust that God would subdue their enemies and bring them into that pleasant land flowing with milk and honey. This unbelief broke out into murmuring. Mornay asks how it comes about that, since God is goodness itself and riches itself, no one is able to lean upon him enough. They wished they had made their graves in Egypt (Exod 16:3); as Seneca says, everything weak is by nature querulous. When men begin to distrust the promise, they quarrel with providence. When faith grows low, passions grow high. For these things God stretched out his hand against them, as the text says: "And they were brought low for their iniquity."
The words divide into two parts.
1. Israel's misery: "They were brought low." Some expositors translate it "they waxed lean." The Hebrew and Septuagint render it "they were humbled."
2. The cause that brought it about: "for their iniquity."
Doctrine. The proposition arising from the text is this: sin brings a person low. "The wicked he casts down to the ground" (Ps 147:6). Sin is a planet of malign influence. As Jephthah said to his daughter when she came out to meet him with timbrel and dances, "Alas, my daughter, thou hast brought me very low" (Judg 11:35), so a man may say to his sin: Alas, my sin, you have brought me very low.
Sin is the great leveler. It brings a family low, cutting off its strength and dissolving its pillars (1 Sam 2:29). "Wherefore kick ye at my sacrifice?" (verse 29). "Behold, the days come, that I will cut off thine arm, and the arm of thy father's house, that there shall not be an old man in thine house" (verse 31). God made good that threat when he cut off Eli's two sons and removed the family's other sons from the priesthood.
Sin brings a kingdom low (1 Sam 15:19): "Wherefore didst thou not obey the voice of the Lord, but didst evil in his sight?" And then (verse 28): "The Lord hath rent the kingdom of Israel from thee this day." Sin breaks the axle of church and state. "When Ephraim spake trembling, he exalted himself; but when he offended in Baal, he died" (Hos 13:1). The tribe of Ephraim had carried a majesty that made it superior among the ten tribes; when Ephraim spoke, it struck awe and terror into others. But when it fell from God into idolatry, it degraded itself from its own honor and its strength and glory came to nothing. After that, every petty adversary would jeer at it, as the hare will tread upon a dead lion.
Among the many warnings against sin, this was one: "Thou shalt come down very low" (Deut 28:43). And in the text that threat is fulfilled: "They were brought low for their iniquity." To amplify and illustrate this proposition, I will show two things: first, how many ways sin brings a man low; and second, why sin must bring a man low.
1. How many ways sin brings a man low.
1.) Sin brings a man low in God's esteem. The sinner sets a high price on himself (Prov 26:16), but God has low thoughts of him and looks on him with contempt. "And in his estate shall stand up a vile person" (Dan 11:21). This was spoken of Antiochus Epiphanes. He was a king; his very name means Illustrious, and some worshipped him, yet in God's account he was a vile person. The Psalmist, speaking of the wicked, says they have become filthy; in the Hebrew the word means stinking.
To see how low a sinner has fallen in God's account, consider the comparisons the Lord uses: dross (Ps 119:119), chaff (Ps 1:4), a pot boiling with scum (Ezek 24:6), a dog (2 Pet 2:22), which under the law was unclean, and a serpent (Matt 23:33), which is a cursed creature (Gen 3:14). Indeed, a wicked man is worse than a serpent, for the poison in a serpent is what God put there, but the wickedness in a sinful man is what the Devil has put there: "Why hath Satan filled thine heart?" (Acts 5:3).
Caelius Rhodiginus reports of an ancient woman who had always used flattering mirrors. By chance she caught sight of her face in a true mirror and went mad. So it is with the sinner: he thinks well of himself while he dresses by the flattering mirror of presumption, but if he truly knew how loathsome and disfigured he is in God's eyes, he would abhor himself in the dust (Zech 11:8).
2.) Sin brings a man low in his intellect. It has eclipsed the rational part of the soul; darkness lies upon the face of this deep. Since the Fall, the lamp of reason burns dim. "We know but in part" (1 Cor 13:9). There are many knots in nature that are not easy to untie. Why does the Nile overflow in summer, when by the course of nature waters are lowest? Why does the magnet attract iron rather than gold, a far nobler metal? "What way is the light parted?" (Job 38:24). "How do the bones grow in the womb?" (Eccl 11:5). Many of these things are riddles we cannot solve. The key of knowledge is lost in the tree of knowledge (Luke 11:52).
In sacred matters especially we are wrapped in ignorance. "The sword is upon our right eye" (Zech 11:17). What little of the sea will a nutshell hold? How little of God will our intellect contain? "Canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection?" (Job 11:7). Who can fully unriddle the Trinity, or fathom the mystery of the hypostatic union? And alas, as for saving, heart-transforming knowledge, how much we are still to seek until God's Spirit lights our lamp (1 Cor 2:14).
3.) Sin brings a man low in affliction, and that is the meaning of the text: "They were brought low for their iniquity"; so also in Psalm 107:39. Adam's sin brought him low; it banished him from paradise. "In those days, God cut Israel short" (2 Kgs 10:32). Sin makes God cut a people short in both their spiritual and civil liberties. Sin is the womb of sorrow and the grave of comfort. It turns the body into a hospital, causing fevers, ulcers, and catarrhs. As Horace has it, wasting sickness and a new cohort of fevers have settled upon the earth.
Sin buries a man's name, melts his fortune, and pulls his near relations away like limbs from his body. Sin is the Trojan horse out of which a whole troop of afflictions comes. Sin drowned the old world, burned Sodom, and made Zion sit in Babylon. "Jerusalem hath grievously sinned, therefore she is removed" (Lam 1:8). Sin shut up God's compassions: "Thou hast killed, and not pitied" (Lam 2:21). Israel sinned and did not repent, and God killed and did not pity.
Sin is the great humbler. Did not David's sin bring him low? "There is no rest in my bones because of my sin" (Ps 38:3). Did not Manasseh's sin bring him low? It changed his royal crown into fetters (2 Chr 33:11). For sin God turned King Nebuchadnezzar out to grass (Dan 4:33). Sin is like the Egyptian reed, too feeble to support us but sharp enough to wound us: "The children of Noph and Tahapanes have broken the crown of thy head" (Jer 2:16). The Egyptians, as Herodotus reports, were not a warlike but a womanish people, feeble and weak, yet even these proved too strong for Israel and made a spoil of her. "Hast thou not procured this unto thyself?" (Jer 2:17). Is it not your own sin that has brought you low?
And sin does not only bring us low in affliction, it embitters affliction; sin puts teeth into the cross. Guilt makes affliction heavy. A little water is heavy in a leaden vessel, and a little affliction is heavy in a guilty conscience.
4.) Sin brings one low in melancholy. Melancholy is a dark humor seated chiefly in the brain. Some in its grip have strange and dismal conceits, imagining their bodies to be made of glass and that any touch will shatter them. As Balduin writes in his treatise on cases of conscience, some corrupted by this melancholic humor believe themselves to be brute animals and imitate their sounds; some fancy themselves to be clay vessels and give way to everyone they meet, lest they be broken by contact. They make their lives bitter and hasten their own end.
Melancholy clothes the mind in black. It puts a Christian out of tune so that he is fit neither for prayer nor praise. Just as lute-strings when wet will not sound, neither can one under the power of melancholy "make melody in his heart to the Lord" (Eph 5:19). When the mind is troubled it is unfit for its work. Melancholy disturbs reason and weakens faith. Satan works greatly on this temperament; it is the devil's bath, and he bathes in it with delight.
Through the dark spectacles of melancholy everything appears black. When such a Christian looks at sin, he says, "This Leviathan will devour me." When he looks at the means of grace, he fears they will only increase his guilt. When he looks at affliction, he dreads it will swallow him up entirely. Melancholy breeds fears, stirs up jealousies and false suspicions. I may allude here to the words of the psalm: "There were they in great fear, where no fear was" (Ps 53:5). Balduin adds that those who labor under this disease are greatly afraid that the houses they live in, or even the sky above them, will fall upon them.
5.) Sin brings a man low in spiritual plagues. It brings many to a seared conscience and final hardening: "The Lord hath poured out upon you the spirit of a deep sleep, and hath closed your eyes" (Isa 29:10). Men are brought low indeed when no sermon will stir them, and even the ringing of Aaron's bell cannot wake them. They are like the blacksmith's dog that lies sleeping beside the anvil while sparks fly all around. Conscience is in a lethargy. As Bernard puts it, a wound that has become insensible is beyond healing. When a man's speech is gone and his feeling lost, he is drawing quickly toward death. So when the checks of conscience cease, and a man feels neither his sin nor God's wrath, you may ring the death-bell: he is past hope of recovery. Some are thus brought low to a reprobate mind. This is the threshold of hell.
6.) Sin brings a man low in temptation. Paul began to grow proud, and God sent him "a messenger of Satan to buffet him" (2 Cor 12:7). Some, Chrysostom among them, think this was a visible apparition of Satan tempting him to sin; others hold that the Devil was assaulting Paul's faith, making him believe he was a hypocrite. Satan laid a train of temptation to blow up the fort of his grace. This temptation was so severe that Paul called it "a thorn in the flesh," and it put him to great anguish. Such temptations the godly often fall into. They are tempted to question the truth of God's promises, or the truth of their own graces. Sometimes they are tempted to blasphemy, sometimes to self-murder. Thus they are brought low, almost gone, and ready to give consent. The Devil nibbles at their heel, but God wards off the blow from their head.
7.) Sin brings one low in desertion. This is an abyss indeed: "Thou hast laid me in the lowest pit" (Ps 88:6). Desertion is a short hell. "My beloved hath withdrawn himself, and was gone" (Song 5:6). Christ knocked, but the spouse was loath to rise from her bed of sloth and open to him promptly, and so Christ was gone. When the Devil finds a person sleeping, he enters; but when Christ finds him sleeping, he departs. And when this Sun of Righteousness withdraws his golden beams from the soul, darkness follows.
As the commentator Musculus observes, the deserted soul may be compared to a captive cast into a foul and deep pit, lying there in utter misery with no remaining hope for his life. Desertion is the arrow of God shot into the soul: "The arrows of the Almighty are within me, the poison whereof drinketh up my spirit" (Job 6:4). The deadly shaft is lodged deep in the side. The Scythians in their wars used to dip their arrows in the blood and gall of asps, so that the venom would more keenly torture the enemy. In the same way the Lord shot his poisoned arrow of desertion at Job, and under those wounds Job's spirit lay bleeding.
Scripture calls God a light and a fire. The deserted soul feels the fire but does not see the light. So dreadful is this condition that the most tormenting bodily pains, kidney stones, colic, and strangury, are but a pleasure compared with it. No worldly delights can bring any comfort in this state; worldly things can no more relieve a troubled mind than a silk stocking can ease a broken leg. "While I suffer thy terrors, I am distracted" (Ps 88:15). Luther in desertion was like one giving up the ghost: according to a letter written to Melanchthon, no blood was seen in his face, and he was heard to speak no word, and his body seemed dead.
8.) Sin brings many low in despair. This is a gulf that none but the reprobate fall into. "Thou saidst, there is no hope" (Jer 2:25). As Isidore put it, to despair is to descend into hell. Despair, as Tertullian calls it, is a devourer of salvation, a millstone tied about the soul that sinks it in perdition. Despair looks on God not as a Father but as a Judge. It refuses the remedy. Other sins need Christ; despair rejects him. It closes up the openings of Christ's wounds, so that no blood will flow out to heal. This is the voice of despair: "My sin is greater than the mercy of God can pardon." It makes the wound broader than the plaster.
Despair is a God-affronting sin; it is sacrilege, robbing God of his crown-jewels, his power, goodness, and truth. How Satan triumphs to see the honor of God's attributes laid in the dust by despair! Despair casts away the anchor of hope, and then the soul must sink. What will a ship do in a storm without an anchor? Despair locks men up in impenitence. I have read of one Hubertus who died despairing; he made his will after this manner: "I yield my goods to the King, my body to the grave, my soul to the Devil." As Scripture says, "They that go down into the pit cannot hope for thy truth" (Isa 38:18). Those who go down into this pit of despair cannot hope for the truth of God's promise. And this despair grows at last into horror and raving, as the cry in Seneca's tragedy has it: "Alas, what scorpion stings within?"
9.) Sin without repentance brings a man into the bottomless pit, and then he is brought low indeed. Sin drags hell in its wake: "The wicked shall be turned into hell" (Ps 9:17). Not to speak of the punishment of loss, which theologians consider the worst part of hell, that is, being separated from the beatific sight of God, "in whose presence is fulness of joy" (Ps 16:11), the punishment of sense is bad enough on its own. Then wrath will come upon sinners "to the uttermost" (1 Thess 2:16).
When God's anger is kindled only a little, and a spark of it falls into a man's conscience in this life, it is already terrible. What will it be when he stirs up all his wrath (Ps 78:38)? How dreadful it was with Spira when he had only sipped the cup of wrath: he became a mere skeleton, his flesh wasted away, and he was a terror to himself. What is it, then, to lie steeping in hell?
Some may ask where hell is located. As Chrysostom said, let us not be curious about where it is, but rather take care to escape it. To satisfy curiosity: hell is some infernal place, and it lies low, "Hell beneath" (Prov 15:24). Hesiod said hell is as far beneath the earth as heaven is above it. Beza writes that we believe the underworld to be a certain and definite place, not without reason called an abyss by Scripture, a place appointed for the dreadful and eternal punishment of Satan and the ungodly. Tertullian likewise describes it as a place beneath the earth. If sin brings a man to hell, it truly brings him low.
Consider, first, the plurality of hell's torments. In bodily sickness, seldom more than one disease troubles a patient at a time, the stone, or the gout. But in hell there is a diversity of torments.
a) There is darkness (Jude 13). Hell is a dark region. As Calvin notes on Matthew, Scripture uses darkness as a figure for dreadful and appalling horror.
b) There are bonds and chains (2 Pet 2:4). God has golden cords, which are his precepts binding men to duty, and iron chains, which are partly his decree in appointing the wicked to destruction, and partly his power in holding and chaining them under wrath. The binding of the wicked in chains signifies that the damned cannot move from place to place, which might perhaps offer some small relief, but they are tied to the stake and cannot stir. The wicked could go from one sin to another in this life, but in hell they shall not move from one place to another.
c) There is the worm that never dies (Mark 9:44). This is a self-accusing mind, so tormenting that it is as if a venom-filled worm were gnawing at a man's heart. Those who would not hear the voice of conscience shall be made to feel the worm of conscience.
Consider, second, the severity of hell's torment. It is described as a lake of fire (Rev 20:15). Fire is the most agonizing element. Nebuchadnezzar's fiery furnace was nothing but painted fire by comparison. It is called fire prepared (Matt 25:41), as if God had sat down to devise some exquisite torment. Dives cries out, "I am tormented in this flame" (Luke 16:24).
Consider, third, that the torments of hell will afflict every part of both body and soul.
a) The body shall be tormented. That body which was so tender and delicate that it could not bear heat or cold will suffer in every part. The eyes will be tormented with the sight of devils; the ears with the hideous shrieks of the damned; and the tongue that was fired with passion will now have fire enough: "Send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue" (Luke 16:24).
b) All the powers of the soul shall be tormented. The mind will apprehend divine displeasure. The memory will recall what mercies were abused, what means of grace were slighted, and what a heaven has been forfeited. The conscience will be tormented with self-accusation; the sinner will arraign himself for stifling and resisting the motions of the Holy Spirit.
Consider, fourth, that the wicked will not merely be forced to behold the devil; they will be shut up in the den with this roaring lion, and he will spit fire in their faces.
Consider, fifth, that the wicked will hear the language of hell: "Men were scorched with great heat, and blasphemed the name of God" (Rev 16:9). To hear the reprobate cursing God, and to have one's ears chained to their oaths and blasphemies, what a hell that will be.
Consider, sixth, that the torments of hell have no end. Origen imagined a fiery stream in which the souls of sinful men, and even devils, would be purged and then pass into heaven. But Scripture asserts that whoever is not purged from sin by Christ's blood (1 John 1:7) will lie under the torrid zone of God's wrath to all eternity: "The smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever" (Rev 14:11).
That word ever burns hotter than the fire. At death all our earthly sorrows die; but the torments of hell are as long-lived as eternity. "They shall seek death, and shall not find it" (Rev 9:6). Always dying, but never dead. As Bernard writes: the damned shall so die that they always live, and so live that they always die, where the tormentor is never wearied, and the tormented never perishes. Here the wicked thought a prayer long, thought a Sabbath long (Amos 8:5), but how long will it be to lie in hell forever? From that place no footprints lead back.
Consider, seventh, that the pains of hell are without intermission. When a man is in pain in this life, at least while he sleeps he does not feel it. There is no sleep in hell. What would the damned give for one hour of sleep? "They rest not day nor night" (Rev 4:8). In outward pain there is some abatement: the burning fit is sometimes off, and the sick patient is more at ease than before. But the damned soul never says, "I have more ease." Those infernal pains are always acute and sharp; there are no cooling intervals in those inflammations.
Consider, eighth, that in hell the wicked will see the godly advanced to a kingdom while they themselves are consigned to misery: "There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth, when ye shall see Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and all the prophets in the kingdom of God, and you yourselves thrust out" (Luke 13:28). When sinners see those whom they hated and scorned seated at Christ's right hand and crowned with glory, while they themselves are cast out to the devils, and when the ungodly see those whom they censured and persecuted sitting as their judges and joining with Christ in condemning them, "Know ye not that the saints shall judge the world?" (1 Cor 6:2), how will this aggravate the misery of those hellish wretches and make them gnash their teeth in envy. As Calvin observes, God has honored the saints so greatly as to appoint them judges of the whole world, that is, assessors together with Christ.
Consider, ninth, that in hell the wicked will have no one to sympathize with them. It is some comfort in suffering to have friends grieve alongside us, but the damned have no one to show them compassion.
