Acts 1:15-26 - Homiletics

The rewards of iniquity.

The physical laws by which the material world is governed are not more fixed and certain than the moral laws which secure to iniquity its just reward. Nor has the patient and honest inquirer more difficulty in ascertaining those laws than the physicist has in ascertaining the laws of nature by observation and experiment. Neither is it peculiar to Holy Scripture to set forth the sequences of cause and effect which occur under those moral laws; the history of the world and our own daily experience do so likewise. Holy Scripture does but record and exhibit typical and striking instances by which our own observation and experience are confirmed. Now, there is one feature common to a great many, perhaps more or less to all, acts of iniquity, viz. that they have, so to speak, a double reward. There is the reward which the worker contemplated as the fruit of his misdoing; and there is the reward which he lost eight of, but which followed by an inevitable necessity of the moral Law of God. Both are clearly exhibited in the awful case of Judas. The reward which he looked for, and for the sake of which he betrayed the innocent blood, was the possession of thirty pieces of silver. We know the poverty of the Son of man, and that he had no silver or gold, no houses or lands, with which to reward his followers. We know how days of toil succeeded one the other during which the gains were indeed immense-souls nourished, enlightened, instructed in the Word of God, prepared for the kingdom of heaven, weaned from sin, won to righteousness—but not such gains as would please the worldly mind. And we know the mind of Judas, that it was very covetous and greedy of lucre. We know with what eyes he looked upon Mary's costly offering of love, and how he was wont to rob the bag which contained the alms for the poor. We can well believe, therefore, that to a mind so constituted and so depraved the possession of thirty pieces of silver appeared no mean reward. It would be some consolation for the loss of the portion of the three hundred pence which he might have abstracted from the bag had the ointment been sold and the price given to the poor. Perhaps he had set his heart upon that very field which was bought with the price of blood, and which was to become the strangers' burial-ground. Anyhow, he got his reward. He did the deed and he got the money, "the reward of iniquity"—the reward which he looked for as the fruit of his sin. And sinners very often do get their expected reward. Adam and Eve became "as gods, knowing good and evil;" Gehazi obtained his two talents of silver and his two changes of garments; Ahab got possession of the coveted vineyard; Zimri gained a throne by the slaughter of the house of Bassha; the men of Gibeah slaked their lust on the Levite's concubine; hatred, revenge, ambition, continually by iniquity obtain their reward, and the pages of Scripture and of profane history, as well as our own experience, teem with examples of the reward of successful wickedness. But now let us look at the other reward of iniquity; that which comes in due season as the inevitable fruit of the just judgment of God; that of which Horace, heathen as he was, spoke, when he hid—

" Raro antecedentem scelestum

Deseruit pede poena claudo ."

Judas has got his money. Perhaps he has concluded his bargain for the field. He is no longer a poor man like his Master. The former gains of robbery have been swelled by the price of treachery. But he had forgotten his manhood. He had forgotten that man has a conscience, and that a guilty conscience is like the raging sea, which cannot be stilled. He had shut his eyes to everything but the reward he coveted. But now the storm is rising. Remorse begins her terrible work. Vain regret, agonizing fear, terrible serf-reproach, unbearable shame,—all rush upon his soul, and distract and tear it. The remembrance, perhaps, of the Lord's goodness; some distinct impressions of his wonderful love; the recollections, maybe, of some true happiness in his service before the curse of covetousness lit upon him; flashes of the hope once entertained of the kingdom of heaven, but now turned into despair;—these move his heart only to make it capable of feeling more bitterly what he now was, and what he must be for ever. His whole existence a curse by his own exceeding wickedness! "Good were it for me if I had not been born! I have no place to hide in from the terrors of God—the terrors of God's goodness! I am, and must be forever. And God is, and must be forever! But I cannot abide God's presence! I cannot abide my own consciousness!" Such were the maddening thoughts of the son of perdition-of him whose iniquity had gained its reward. He tries to rush from consciousness, to escape from himself and from God. He flings from him the accursed silver; but he cannot fling away the guilt of blood. And so he takes a halter and hangs himself, and goes to his own place. But let us reckon up his gains and losses. He had gained thirty pieces of silver—the reward of his iniquity. But he had lost his apostleship, the highest office on earth; his throne, the highest place of man in heaven, under Jesus Christ; his peace of mind, his serf-respect, his power of enjoying life, the esteem of all good men; any place among men save that of shame, and ignominy, and disgrace, and abhorrence, lie had lost his own soul—his life; all the pleasures of time, all the jeers of eternity. This was "the reward of iniquity," which came upon him by the inevitable justice of God. And this is written for our learning, that we may ponder it and be wise. And we are led to the same conclusion by following up in any other case, and comparing, the twofold rewards of iniquity. The conclusion to which we are inevitably led is—

I. That the three things which are necessary to a man's happiness are:

1. The approval of his own conscience.

2. The sense of being approved by God.

3. The esteem of his fellow men, and of all God's rational creatures.

II. That by iniquity all these three are forfeited, and that the gains or reward of iniquity are as inadequate a compensation for such loss as Esau's mess of pottage was for the loss of his birthright. The gains, the pleasures, the temporal rewards of iniquity, come and go like a dream, like a tale, like a flash of lightning. The eternal reward of iniquity abides; terrible in its undiscovered vastness, awful in its unknown horrors, and in its fixity of tenure; fixity written in the phrase which tells us of Judas that he went "to his own place."

III. We learn that every man has the place in eternity which he made his own in time. A man's own place in the eternal world is that which falls to him by the unchanging laws of God, according to his choice of good or evil in this world. The atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ has, indeed, opened a way of righteousness to those who had seemed to have lost it for ever; but to those who obstinately love darkness rather than light, and cling to iniquity in the very face of mercy, there remains in the nature of things no other end than that, like Judas, they go each one "to his own place."