Joshua 7:15

"Handfuls of Purpose"

For All Gleaners

"He hath wrought folly in Israel." Jos 7:15

The charge seems to be a two-fold one. The first is that "He hath transgressed the covenant of the Lord;" and the second is that "He hath wrought folly." Look upon sin as being not only criminal but foolish. The sinner is not only a criminal, but a fool. He plays with fire, and burns himself. He trifles with edged instruments, and maims himself. He tampers with eternal forces, and thus in every way disables and impoverishes himself. It is pitiful to think that at the end the sinner will stand forth as a fool, and not as a hero. He mistakes the relations of things; the values of things; the consequences of actions. A great French statesman was blamed because he pronounced a certain policy not only as a crime, but worse than a crime a blunder. Crime does not touch one side of the character alone, for then under some conditions it might claim somewhat of heroic importance, and be invested with a kind of transient grandeur. According to the Christian conception the universe is a great moral constitution; not an infinite vastness of matter, but a symbol and expression of something within tenderly sensitive and ineffably pure: he, therefore, who operates in a manner contrary to its law and purpose undertakes to supersede Omniscience, and to re-create creation: at the end he stands forth in pitiable weakness: a man who is not only regarded as foolish, but who is constrained to call himself a fool. Some men are more touched by the contempt which follows upon folly, than by the censure which follows upon crime; their pride is affected, their sense of dignity is lowered. God thus attacks the sinner at every point; he shows that in the very act of playing the great man the sinner becomes a foolish man, and is obliged at last to confess that his conception of life has been a profound and pitiable mistake. Folly has but a short day. The time of its revelation is always at hand. No sinner has ever proved himself to have been both a genius and a criminal in the moral sense: genius there may have been in the conception of the crime as a merely mechanical or social act, but the folly of it has been demonstrated by its consequences. It may be for this reason that God pities the sinner: he sees what a fool the sinner is; he sees to what fate of contempt and shame the sinner is hastening; he knows it is hard for the sinner to kick against the pricks. On every ground God hates the sin and pities the sinner.