Isaiah 5:20

Isaiah 5:20

I. The sin against which I would warn you is the sin of disregarding, and even of in the least degree underrating, the eternal distinctions of right and wrong; it is, in one word, the sin of viewing things in their wrong aspects, or of calling things by their wrong names. To talk otherwise than sadly and seriously of sin is sin.

II. The cause of the sin is a faint appreciation of moral evil; a tampering with it, a destruction of that healthy instinct which revolts at it. It is the very nature of sin, that the more we know of it the less we know it; the more we are familiar with it the less do we understand its vileness.

III. The punishment of this sin is nothing less than the failure of all life the waste, the loss, the shipwreck of the human soul the sapping of every moral force and every vital instinct. And this is death. This is the worst woe that can befall finally those who have learnt to call things by their wrong names to call evil good, and good evil.

F. W. Farrar, In the Days of thy Youth,p. 129.

References: Isaiah 5:20. Clergyman's Magazine,vol. ii., p. 36; F. W. Farrar, Preacher's Monthly,vol. x., p. 178.