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Of all the fatal effects of sin none is so dreadful as that every sin disposes for another and a worse. By gradations sin arrives at maturity; it is the only perpetual motion, and needs nothing but a beginning to keep it going.

I. HOW THE MIND OF MAN CAN BELIEVE A LIE. There is such a suitableness between truth and the understanding that the latter of itself can no more believe a lie than a correct taste can pronounce bitter to sweet. If a lie is believed it can be only as it carries the appearance of truth. Before there can be an appearance there must be an object and a faculty, and from one of these must spring all falsehood. But the object cannot cause a false appearance of itself, and therefore the difference must rest in the perception. Objects are merely passive. Truth shows itself to be truth, and falsehood falsehood, whether men apprehend them so or no. What, then, are the causes on the believers part which make any object to appear what it is not.

1. An undue distance between the faculty and its object. Approximation is necessary to perception. Distance in space hinders corporeal perception; moral distance hinders spiritual perception of God and His worship.

2. The indisposition of the intellectual faculty which follows from sin. Where the soul has deviated from the eternal rules of right, reason, and morality, it is in darkness, and while in darkness it must necessarily pass false judgments upon most things that come before it. The understanding, like some bodily eyes, is disabled from exact discernment, both by natural weakness and supervening soreness.

II. WHAT IS IT TO RECEIVE THE LOVE OF THE TRUTH.

1. To esteem and value it. Truth must first be enthroned in the judgment before it can reign in the desires.

2. To choose it as a thing transcendently good. To esteem is an act of the understanding; to choose of the will. This is the proper and finishing act of love. The great effect of love is to unite us to the thing we love, and the will is the uniting faculty, and choice the uniting act. Till we have made religion our fixed choice it only floats in the imagination; but it is the heart which must appropriate the great truths of Christianity. Then what was before only an opinion passes into reality and experience.

3. This will help us to understand what is rejecting the truth. Not because men think it false, but because it crosses their inclination. The thief hates the day; not but that he loves the light as well as other men, but he dreads that which he knows is the likeliest means of his discovery. The great condemnation that rests upon the world is that men see the light but love darkness, because their deeds are evil.

III. HOW THE NOT RECEIVING THE TRUTH INTO THE WILL AND AFFECTIONS DISPOSES THE UNDERSTANDING TO DELUSION.

1. By drawing off the understanding from fixing its contemplation upon an offensive truth. For though it is not in the power of the will when the understanding apprehends a truth to countermand its assent, yet it is able to hinder it from taking that truth into full consideration. If a man has affections averse to the purity of the truth they will not suffer his thoughts to dwell upon it, but will divert them to some object that he is more enamoured with; and so the mind lies open to the treacherous inroads of imposture.

2. By prejudicing the understanding against the truth — the understanding in that case being like the eye which views a white thing through a red glass. This was how the Jews rejected the Saviour. They saw His miracles and heard His words through the medium of, "Is not this the carpenter?" "Can any good come out of Nazareth?"

3. By darkening the mind, which is the peculiar malignity of every vice. When wise men become vicious their wisdom leaves them. The ferment of a vicious inclination lodged in the affections is like an intoxicating liquor received into the stomach, from whence it will be continually sending thick clouds and noisome steams up to the brain.

IV. HOW GOD CAN BE PROPERLY SAID TO SEND MEN DELUSIONS. "God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all"; and what is not in Him cannot proceed from Him. But God may be said to send delusions.

1. By withdrawing His enlightening influence from the understanding. The soul is not otherwise able to exert its intellectual acts than by a light flowing in upon it from the fountain of light. How reasonable, then, that God, provoked by gross sins, should deliver the soul to infatuation by a suspension of this light.

2. By commissioning the spirit of falsehood to seduce the sinner (1 Kings 22:22; 2 Corinthians 4:4). How dreadfully did God consign over the heathen world to a perpetual slavery to His deceits! And the truth is where men under the gospel will grow heathens in practice, it is but just with God to suffer them to grow heathens in their delusions.

3. By a providential disposing of men into such circumstances as have an efficacy to delude. He may place them under an heterodox ministry or in atheistical company, throw pestilent books in their way, all which, falling in with an ill-inclined judgment, and worse ordered morals, will recommend the worst of errors. And, therefore, as we find it expressed of him who kills a man unwittingly, that God delivers that man into his hands (Exodus 21:13), so when a man, by such ways as these, is drawn into false belief, it may be affirmed that God sends that man a delusion (2 Samuel 17:11, 12, 14; Ezekiel 14:9).

4. By His permission of lying wonders. Thus when Pharoah hardened his heart against the will of God, God permitted him to be confirmed in his delusion by the enchantments of the magicians. And so with the lying wonders of the Church of Rome, which confirm the legends imposed for truth upon her deluded members.

V. WHEREIN THE GREATNESS OF THIS JUDGMENT CONSISTS.

1. In itself.

(1) That it is spiritual, and so directly affects the soul. The judgments affecting the body are insignificant in comparison.

(2) It blasts the peculiar perfection of man's nature, his understanding; for ignorance and delusion are the disease of the mind, and the utmost dishonour of reason; there being no sort of reproach which a man resents with so just an indignation as the charge of folly. If slavery be that which all noble spirits abhor, and to lose the choicest of nature's freeholds, the reason, be the worst of slaveries, surely the most inglorious condition that can befall a rational creature is to be governed by a delusion (John 8:82). And, besides this, it has a peculiar malignity to bind the shackles faster on it by a strange unaccountable love, for no man entertains an error but he is enamoured of it.

2. In its effects.

(1) It renders the conscience useless. A blind watchman is a nuisance and an impertinence, and a deluded conscience is a counsellor who cannot advise, and a guide who cannot direct (Matthew 6:23).

(2) It ends in total destruction. Every error is in its tendency destructive. Hell is a deep place, and there are many steps of descent to it; but as surely as the first gloom of evening tends to and ends in the thickest darkness, so every delusion persisted in will lodge the sinner in the blackest regions of damnation.

VI. WHAT DEDUCTIONS MAY BE MADE FROM THE WHOLE.

1. That since the belief of a lie is a sin it is not inconsistent with Divine holiness to punish one sin with another (Romans 1:24, 26), and no punishment is comparable to this.

2. That the best way to confirm our faith in the truths of religion is to love and acknowledge them.

3. That hereby we may be able to find out the true cause of —

(1)  Atheism.

(2)  Fanaticism.

(R. South, D. D.)

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KJV: And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie:

WEB: Because of this, God sends them a working of error, that they should believe a lie;