Comparative guilt.
The main truth of the text, that the weight of our guilt depends on the measure of our privilege, rests on the solid foundation of—
I. MAN'S MORAL FREEDOM. However much character may be affected by circumstance, it remains true that man is a free agent. When we condemn ourselves or others, as we continually do; when we distinguish between misfortune and sin, between calamity and crime; whenever we apply the word "ought" to our own or to another's behavior;—we practically assent to the doctrine that man is spiritually free; otherwise such action on our part is unjust or illogical, such language improper. But, in truth, a sense of our moral freedom is inwrought in our deepest convictions; we cannot extricate it from our nature, however much we try.
II. OUR ACCOUNTABLENESS TO GOD FOR OUR CHARACTER AND LIFE.
1. God is requiring great things of us—thought, reverence, affection, submission, obedience.
2. He is marking at every moment the life we are living, the character we are forming; he is looking upon us and into us.
3. He is recording all our actions, including among these the thoughts of our mind, the feelings of our heart, the purposes of our will.
4. He will one day call us to give an account of "all the things done in the flesh."
III. A REVEALED PRINCIPLE OF DIVINE JUDGMENT. The men of Nineveh, the great Teacher tells us, will be a source of condemnation to those of Judaea, for with slighter privilege they repented, while the contemporaries of our Lord remained impenitent at the preaching of Christ himself.
1. There is to be punishment in the future.
2. This will be comparative—some guilty servants will be "beaten with few stripes," others with" many."
3. This, again, will depend on the degree of condemnation, whether it will be less or more severe.
4. And on what, then, will God's condemnation hang? Surely on two things.
(a) We have the light that shines not only from the whole of his completed life, but also from his death and resurrection.
(b) We have Christ's own commentary, through the writings of his inspired apostles, upon his life and death.
(c) We have freedom from the national prepossessions which misguided those, his hearers.
(d) We have the accumulated experience of the Christian Church through eighteen centuries. If we heed not his Word, and range not ourselves on his side, if, "gathering not" with him the sheaves of righteousness, we scatter abroad the seeds of sin and death, who will there not be "to rise up in the judgment" and condemn us!—C.