15 Good understanding giveth favour: but the way of transgressors is hard.
Introduction
The message today is so simple that I hope you don’t miss it. I’ll give it to you in just one sentence with six words: The way of transgressors is hard. Most people don’t believe that. In fact, they believe just the opposite. They believe that the way of the transgressor is the way of thrills and excitement and happiness. They believe that the Christian way—the way of righteousness—is a real drag. That’s why there are so many people living apart from God. But if you could bug the pastor’s study, or if you could read through the psychiatrist’s files, you would discover that the Bible is accurate when it says, “The way of transgressors is hard.”
Look at this verse of scripture for a moment. Make sure you really understand what it says. There are three key words in it. The first is the word way. It means “the road” or “the path.” It suggests the journey and not just the destination. The destination of the transgressor is hard. The Bible tells us that often enough when it says, “The wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). Jesus talked about two houses—one built upon a rock and the other upon the sand. The winds blew, the rains fell, and the floods came, and the house founded upon the rock stood. But the house founded upon the sand fell, and great was the fall of it. Jesus was warning us about the final destruction of those who do not build their lives on the word of God.
He was saying to us that the end of the transgressor is hard. Then Jesus said, “Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it” (Matthew 7:13-14). And when Jesus talked about two gates, two ways, and two final destinations, he was warning us about the end of transgressors. He was saying that the end of the transgressor is hard. But this verse of scripture is not talking about the final destination of transgressors. It is talking about the journey there. It is talking about the trip itself. It is saying to us that even the journey of sin is hard.
The second word that we need to understand is the word transgressors. It is one of three words used in the Bible to describe disobedience to God. The first and most common word that is used in the Bible is the verb sin. It means “to miss the mark.” It describes what a hunter may do when he goes out into the fields to hunt an animal. He draws back the bow and takes careful aim at his target, but something happens and that arrow goes astray, and he completely misses the target. That’s what the word sin means.
When the Bible says that we have all sinned and come short of the glory of God, it means that all of us have missed the mark in life. We are not what we ought to be. It doesn’t mean that we are as bad as we could be. We could be worse than we are. It doesn’t mean that we are necessarily as bad as somebody else. We can look around us and find somebody worse than we are. But it does mean that we are not what we ought to be. We have failed to measure up to God’s ideal. We are sinners and have missed the mark.
A second word that is used in the Bible to describe this kind of wrong living is the word iniquity. It means “to twist or to bend.” God’s way is straight and right. But we manage to twist it, and we bend it and we pervert it from what he intended. In that sense all sin is perversion and all perversion is sin.
The other word that is used to describe disobedience is the word transgression. That’s the word that is used here. It means “to break the law of God deliberately.” We best understand it when we relate it to the word trespass. All of us have had the experience of walking through a field and seeing a fence posted with a sign that said, “No trespassing.” We understood what the sign meant. It meant that beyond that fence was private property. We did not belong there. We had no right there. If we climbed over that fence we would be breaking the law and violating someone else’s property rights.
With a clear knowledge of the sign’s presence and knowing what it meant, we climbed the fence anyhow. We trespassed on someone else’s property. When the Bible uses the word transgress, that is exactly what it means. It means that we have deliberately broken the law of God. We have gone into areas where we do not belong and done things we ought not do. We have crossed the solid yellow stripe that means, “No passing.” Thus we have sinned against God. This verse is saying to us that the person who deliberately breaks the law of God is headed for a hard time.
The third word in this verse that is important for our understanding is the word hard. The way (the journey, or the path) of the transgressor—the person who deliberately breaks the law of God—is hard. The word hard means “rough and rocky.” It means that it is a difficult pathway to travel covered with hardships and heartaches. That, by the way, is why sin is forbidden and why God continues to give us warnings in his word. It is not because God decided that we needed to have rules and regulations. It is not that God is bent on making us miserable. It’s simply because he knows the best pathway. It is because God loves us and wants the best for us that he marks out a certain pathway and says, “Walk in this way and you shall find life, joy, and happiness.” It is because the way of transgressors is hard that God marks out for us the way of righteousness.
In what sense is the way of transgressors hard? In what way is this verse of scripture true in your life and in mine today?
1. The way of transgression leads to guilt. It is impossible for us to know the tremendous price in guilt and mental anguish that people pay for their sin. David spoke to us about this mental anguish, this emotional drain that accompanies sin, when he wrote: “Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man unto whom the Lord imputeth not iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no guile. When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long. For day and night thy hand was heavy upon me: my moisture is turned into the drought of summer. Selah. I acknowledge my sin unto thee, and mine iniquity have I not hid. I said, I will confess my transgressions unto the Lord; and thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin. Selah” (Psalm 32:1-5).
The word selah means “pause and think of that.” These words of confession come from the time when David committed adultery with Bathsheba. He had her husband put to death to cover up his sin, and then he lied to the whole nation. Eventually God caught up with him and brought judgment upon him. Out of this experience he writes this testimony. Twice he tells us to pause and think of what he is saying. First he tells us to pause and think of the misery that unconfessed sin brings. Then he tells us to pause and think of the happiness that comes with forgiveness. In that period of time when he kept his sin within him, he was weighted down by the burden and the guilt and the anxiety of it all and he was a sick and miserable man. Then he confessed and forsook his sin and found joy. He is saying what the scripture says here, “The way of transgressors is hard.”
Transgression almost always brings with it this kind of guilt and mental anguish. That is the testimony of Luis Salas. He was the election judge in Jim Wells County in 1948. He has now confessed that over 200 ballots were faked and stuffed into ballot box number 13 to give Lyndon Johnson a victory over Coke Stevenson. What could cause a 76-year-old man after thirty years of silence to confess like that? What would lead a man to uncover his own wrongdoing when there was no way for anyone ever to uncover it? In his own words, it was his conscience that kept bothering him and in the last years of his life he wanted some “peace of mind.”
Listen to the story of a prominent businessman. He was bar hopping and skirt chasing. His lovely and devoted wife came to ask what she should do. How should she respond to all of this? With tears in her eyes and a quiver in her voice she said, “He is so unhappy.” She was saying what the Bible is saying here. The way of the transgressor is hard.
Listen to the confession of the traveling salesman. He told me at lunch one day how he had been unfaithful to his wife and had come to hate himself because of it. He said, “When I could stand myself no longer, I went to my wife and I told her what I had done.” He too was saying that the way of the transgressor is hard.
Listen to the words of the young teenage girl as she poured out her soul to me. She was estranged from her family. She had almost ruined her life. I asked her, “If you could change one thing in your life, what would it be?” Without a moment’s hesitation she said, “I would erase the past and I would start my life all over again.” She had learned at an early age that the way of the transgressor is hard.
Listen to the lament of Richard Nixon concerning Watergate: “That the way I tried to deal with Watergate was the wrong way is a burden that I shall bear for every day of the life that is left to me.” He was experiencing the fact that the way of the transgressor is hard.
Listen to the lady who told me about a friend of hers. He had once walked with God. He had even been called to be a missionary. Then he became involved with another woman. His marriage went sour. He and his wife divorced and he forsook God. Several months passed before this lady saw the man again. When she did she said she hardly recognized him because he looked so bad. Then she said, “Preacher, he looked as though he had a terminal illness.” Then she paused and said, “I suppose that he did. I suppose he did.”
That’s what sin is. It is a terminal illness. It eventually takes its toll on us. The greatest suffering that takes place in our world today is not physical suffering. It is not disease that we fight and dread so. The greatest suffering in our world is the mental anguish that comes because of our sin and the sin of others.
[1]For every person in the hospital who is being eaten up with cancer, there are hundreds of people outside the hospital who are being eaten up with guilt and mental anguish as a result of their sin. Neither the church nor the Bible invented guilt. It is universal in human nature. You cannot successfully deal with your guilt without dealing with the religious questions that it poses.
Someone has said, “You cannot drive a nail, no matter how small, into a board, no matter how large, without weakening the timber.” And I say that you cannot harbor in your heart a transgression, no matter how small, without it in some way having an effect upon you mentally and emotionally. That’s what the Bible means when it says that the way of the transgressor is hard.
2. The way of transgression leads to despair. Not only is the way of transgressors hard because it brings mental anguish, it also brings despair and emptiness. Many people today believe that they can find thrills and happiness by walking the forbidden path, by walking in the haze of sin, or by living just beyond the city limits of morality. They think that in throwing off the restraints of God they can find the real happiness that they are looking for. But they wind up disillusioned. I’m not suggesting that there is no pleasure in sin. There is. Otherwise people would not be flocking to it. But while there is pleasure in sin, it is short-lived and costly.
The writers of Hebrews said, “By faith Moses, when he was come to years, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter; Choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God, than to enjoy the pleasure of sin for a season” (Hebrews 11:24-25). Moses looked sin squarely in the face, and there was no denying that there was pleasure in it. If he stayed in Egypt and remained the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, he would have access to all the thrills, excitement, wealth, power, and influence of Egypt. But he also saw that the pleasure of sin was short-lived. Moses saw that not only was the end of sin hard, but also the journey of sin was hard. So weighing the alternatives, he decided that the wise choice was to walk in the way of righteousness.
Sure, there is pleasure in sin. There are thrills and excitement in transgressing the law of God. Even God admits it. But eventually that kind of life will catch up with us. The Bible warns, “Be sure your sin will find you out” (Numbers 32:23). It doesn’t say, “Be sure your sins will be found out.” It says, “They will find you out.” They will catch up with you. Sin has its kicks. But it also has a kickback.
If you choose the way of the transgressor, you are choosing a rough and rocky road. God has warned you in advance. Billy Graham’s Decision magazine carried a disturbing testimony some time ago. The author was a heavy equipment operator from Ohio who was away from home a great deal. He said he walked into his motel room one evening after work, turned on the television trying to find a Western to relax by, and Billy Graham happened to be on. He said the words that Graham spoke in his sermon seemed to be striking at the very depths of his heart. Then he said, “I’m not sure why I’m writing this letter or why I even listened to the program, but at age 27 I felt as though I was at the end of my rope. My marriage to a fine woman resulted in two children and ended in divorce. Years of living in the handcuffs of the devil have paid off in temporary physical happiness and almost permanent despair.”
There are many people who, if they were honest, would say that living for years in the handcuffs of the devil has paid them off the same way: temporary happiness and permanent despair. It is because God knows the mental anguish and the permanent despair of sin that he says, “The way of the transgressor is hard.”
3. The way of transgression leads to slavery. The way of transgression is hard not only because it brings mental anguish but because it eventually brings slavery to sin. One of the tragedies of walking in the way of transgression is that you get on the other side of the fence and you step into quicksand. You become a slave to your sin until it destroys you.
Billy Sunday told the story about a man who bought a snake when it was small. He watered and fed it until it became very large. At first he could have killed it. At last it killed him. We read something like that in the newspapers quite often. A person buys a lion cub as a pet. He feeds it, nurses it, and plays with it. Then one day when it is grown, it turns on him and mauls him. It happens all of the time.
Are you nursing some habit in your life that may one day kill you? It may be small right now, but if you don’t get rid of it, it will grow until it consumes and destroys you. As 18th century publisher Samuel Johnson said, the chains of habit are usually too small to be felt until they are too large to be broken. A bear can hug you to death as well as claw you to death. Sin wraps its tentacles around a person and begins to squeeze. It doesn’t hurt at first. In fact, it’s comfortable and warm. But eventually the grip tightens until we can’t breathe and our whole spiritual life is gone. That’s what the Bible means when it says, “The way of transgression is hard.”
[2]Abraham’s nephew Lot is a case in point. As a result of a dispute between them, Abraham gave Lot his choice of all the land of Israel. He chose that portion of land near the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. The Bible has this interesting comment concerning Lot’s first decision. It says, “He pitched his tent towards Sodom” (Genesis 13:12). He didn’t move there. He just moved in that direction. It was only a matter of time until he would move in. He and his family lived in Sodom for 20 years. When the wickedness of the cities became so great that God decided to destroy them, he warned Lot to get out. Lot warned his children and his children laughed at him. He warned his sons-in-law, but they would pay no attention to him. He warned his wife, and while she left she looked back longingly and was turned into a pillar of salt.
At first Lot moved his family into Sodom. Then Sodom moved into his family. In time it destroyed them. That’s what happens with sin. It moves in, takes over, and becomes dominant. We become the slaves and it becomes the master. That’s what the Bible means when it says, “The way of the transgressor is hard.”
The only thing Satan offers you is a temporary thrill and eternal hell. That’s all! But there is another way. It is the way of life. It is the way of righteousness. And that’s why Jesus said there are two roads. That’s why he said, “Straight is the gate and narrow is the way that leads to life.” Jesus is that way. He is the life. If you are wise you will hear and heed the word of God that says the way of the transgressor is hard, and turn to Christ today.
[1]Illustration.
[2]Illustration.