my words do stagger: there are no utterances that are great enough to convey the mighty meaning of this wondrous text. If I had the eloquence of all men united in one, if I could speak as never man spoke, (with the exception of that one God-like man of Nazareth) I could not encompass so vast a subject as this. I will not therefore pretend to do so, but offer you such thoughts as my mind is capable of producing.
3. Tonight we shall speak of three things: first, the sting of death; secondly, the strength of sin; and thirdly, the victory of faith.
4. I. First, THE STING OF DEATH. The apostle pictures death as a terrible dragon or monster, which, coming upon all men, must be fought with by each one for himself. He gives us no hopes whatever that any of us can avoid it. He tells us of no bridge across the river Death; he does not give us the faintest hope that it is possible to emerge from this state of existence into another without dying: he describes the monster as being exactly in our path, and with it we must fight, each man personally, individually, and alone; each man must die; we all must cross the black stream; each one of us must go through the iron gate. There is no passage from this world into another without death. Having told us, then, that there is no hope of our escape, he braces up our nerves for the combat; but he gives us no hope that we shall be able to slay the monster; he does not tell us that we can strike our sword into his heart, and so overturn and overwhelm death; but pointing to the dragon, he seemed to say, “You cannot slay it, man; there is no hope that you should ever put your foot upon its neck and crush its head; but one thing can be done — it has a sting which you may extract; you cannot crush death under foot, but you may pull out the sting which is deadly; and then you do not need fear the monster, for monster it shall be no longer, but rather it shall be a swift winged angel to waft you aloft to heaven.” Where, then, is the sting of this dragon? Where must I strike? What is the sting? The apostle tells us that “The sting of death is sin.” Once let me cut off that, and then, though death may be dreary and solemn, I shall not dread it; but holding up the monster’s sting, I shall exclaim, “Oh death, where is your sting? Oh grave, where is your victory?” Let us now dwell upon the fact, that “the sting of death is sin.”
5. 1. First, sin puts a sting into death from the fact that sin brought death into the world. Men could be more content to die if they did not know it was a punishment. I suppose if we had never sinned there would have been some means for us to go from this world to another. It cannot be supposed that so large a population would have existed, that all the myriads who have lived from Adam down until now could ever have inhabited so small a globe as this; there would not have been space enough for them. But there might have been provided some means for taking us off when the proper time should come, and bearing us safely to heaven. God might have furnished horses and chariots of fire for each of his Elijahs; or as it was said of Enoch, so it might have been declared of each of us, “He is not, for God has taken him.” Thus to die, if we may call it death, to depart from this body and to be with God, would have been no disgrace; in fact, it would have been the highest honour: fitting the loftiest aspiration of the soul, to live quickly its little time in this world, then to mount and be with its God; and in the prayers of the most pious and devout man, one of his sublimest petitions would be, “Oh God, hasten the time of my departure, when I shall be with you.” When such sinless beings thought of their departure they would not tremble, for the gate would be of ivory and pearl — not as now, of iron — the stream would be as nectar, far different from the present “bitterness of death.” But alas! how different! Death is now the punishment of sin. “In the day you eat of it you shall surely die.” “In Adam all die.” By his sin every one of us becomes subject to the penalty of death, and thus, being a punishment, death has its sting. To the best man, the holiest Christian, the most sanctified intellect, the soul that has the nearest and dearest intercourse with God, death must appear to have a sting, because sin was its mother. Oh fatal offspring of sin, I only dread you because of your parentage! If you did come to me as an honour, I could wade through Jordan even now, and when its chilling billows were around me I would smile amidst its surges; and in the swellings of Jordan my song should swell too, and the liquid music of my voice should join with the liquid swellings of the floods, “Hallelujah! It is blessed to cross to the land of the glorified.” This is one reason why the sting of death is sin.
6. 2. But I must take it in another sense. “The sting of death is sin”: — that is to say, that which shall make death most terrible to man will be sin, if it is not forgiven. If that is not the exact meaning of the apostle, still it is a great truth, and I may find it here. If sin lay heavy on me and were not forgiven — if my transgressions were not pardoned — if such were the fact (though I rejoice to know it is not so) it would be the very sting of death to me. Let us consider a man dying, and looking back on his past life: he will find in death a sting, and that sting will be his past sin. Imagine a conqueror’s deathbed. He has been a man of blood from his youth up. Bred in the camp, his lips were early set to the bugle, and his hand, even in infancy, struck the drum. He had a martial spirit; he delighted in the fame and applause of men; he loved the dust of battle and the garment rolled in blood. He has lived a life of what men call glory. He has stormed cities, conquered countries, ravaged continents, overrun the world. See his banners hanging in the hall, and the marks of glory on his escutcheon. {a} He is one of earth’s proudest warriors. But now he comes to die; and when he lies down to expire what shall invest his death with horror? It shall be his sin. I think I see the monarch dying; he lies in state; around him are his nobles and his counsellors; but there is someone else there. Close by his side there stands a spirit from the pit; it is the soul of a departed woman. She looks on him and says, “Monster! my husband was slain in battle through your ambition: I was made a widow, and my helpless orphan and myself were starved.” And she passes by. Her husband comes, and opening wide his bloody wounds, he cries, “Once I called you monarch; but by your vile covetousness, you provoked an unjust war. See here these wounds — I gained them in the siege. For your sake I mounted first the scaling ladder; this foot stood upon the top of the wall, and I waved my sword in triumph, but in hell I lifted up my eyes in torment. Base wretch, your ambition hurried me there!” Turning his horrid eyes upon him, he passes by. Then up comes another, and another, and another yet: waking from their tombs, they stalk around his bed and haunt him; the dreary procession still marches on, looking at the dying tyrant. He shuts his eyes, but he feels the cold and bony hand upon his forehead; he quivers for the sting of death is in his heart. “Oh Death!” he says, “to leave this large estate, this mighty realm, this pomp and power — this would be something, but to meet those men, those women, and those orphan children, face to face, to hear them saying, ‘Are you become like one of us?’ while kings whom I have dethroned, and monarchs whom I have cast down shall rattle their chains in my ears, and say, ‘You were our destroyer, but how are you fallen from heaven, oh Lucifer, son of the morning! how are you brought down as in a moment from your glory and your pride!’ ” There you see the sting of death would be the man’s sin. It would not sting him that he had to die, but that he had sinned, that he had been a bloody man, that his hands were red with wholesale murder — this would plague him indeed, for “the sting of death is sin.”
7. Or suppose another character — a minister. He has stood before the world, proclaiming something which he called the gospel. He has been a noted preacher: the multitude have been hanging on his lips; they have listened to his words; before his eloquence a nation stood amazed, and thousands trembled at his voice. But his preaching is over; the time when he can mount the pulpit is gone; another standing place awaits him, another congregation, and he must hear another and a better preacher than himself. There he lies. He has been unfaithful to his charge. He preached philosophy to charm his people, instead of preaching truth and aiming at their hearts. And as he pants upon his bed, that worst and most accursed of men — for sure none can be worse than he — there comes up one, a soul from the pit, and looking him in the face, says, “I came to you once trembling on account of sin, I asked you the road to heaven, and you did say, ‘Do such-and-such good works,’ and I did them, and am damned. You told me a lie; you did not declare plainly the word of God.” He vanishes only to be followed by another, he has been an irreligious character, and as he sees the minister upon his deathbed,
