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The fact of retribution is necessarily a very serious one to all who are not "past feeling." We find the law of retribution working here in our life. It cannot be denied. The natural inference is that a law here indicates a similar law beyond the period and condition we call temporal. It is wiser and better always to face facts, never to ignore them, never to close our eyes to them. Interrogate them. Let us have the courage resolutely to stand by the laws and facts which are revealed. We recognize in ourselves, and so in other men, a sense of a righteousness which ought to be obeyed and maintained; and we recognize also a condition of feeling, mind, will, life, that is not according to righteousness. All our efforts to make righteousness and unrighteousness the same, or the one a modification of the other, are failures. We recognize also that unrighteousness brings penalty. Righteousness and unrighteousness, happiness and misery, are not expressible in terms of material gifts. The kingdom of God is within you, saith the Lord; so is the kingdom of the devil. Thus, it is evident that in considering this theme of retribution, we have to look below the surface. We have to school ourselves into the recognition that a man is rich or poor really not according to what he has but according to what he is. Let us never lose sight of this fact that union with God in Christ is heaven, for the soul of man was made for that; separation from God in Christ is hell, the soul of man was never made for that. Whatever brings us nearer to God brings us into the sphere of ineffable reward, such as eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath entered into the heart of man to conceive; whatever separates us from Him brings us into that sphere of retribution into which we cannot look far, where the selfish and the loveless find those of their own order and hind.

1. That the Eternal One can make no compromise with sin. "If God were not sure to punish the evil, and to make it bear, so far as it remains evil, the weight of his condemnation, the good would lose for us its reality."

2. As to duration, that as long as the sin lasts, so long will its appropriate punishment last.

3. That no punishment will be inflicted which will throw the Divine Character as revealed in Christ into discord with itself.

4. That, as there is no malice in the Divine nature and no cruelty, all punishment will have as its purpose an end worthy of the Divine nature.

5. That future punishment will be to present sin as consequence to cause.

6. That it will be inevitable and not arbitrary.

7. That it will be of such a nature, that no enlightened mind in the universe of God can offer any objection to it that shall not be unreasonable.

(Reuben Thomas.)

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KJV: Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.

WEB: Don't be deceived. God is not mocked, for whatever a man sows, that he will also reap.