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(J.C. Ryle)
"As He drew near to the gate of the town, behold, a dead person was being carried out, the only son of his mother, and she was a widow." Luke 7:12
We see here, what sorrow sin has brought into the world. We are told of a funeral at Nain. All funerals are mournful things, but it is difficult to imagine a funeral more mournful than the one here described. It was the funeral of a young man, and that young man the only son of his mother, and that mother a widow. There is not an item in the whole story, which is not full of misery. And all this misery, be it remembered, was brought into the world by sin. God did not create it at the beginning, when He made all things "very good." Sin is the cause of it all! "Sin entered into the world" when Adam fell, "and death by sin." Romans 5:12
Let us never forget this solemn truth. The world around us is full of sorrow. Sickness, and pain, and infirmity, and poverty, and labor, and trouble--abound on every side. From one end of the world to the other--the history of families is full of lamentation, and weeping, and mourning, and woe.
And whence does it all come? Sin is the fountain and root to which all must be traced. There would neither have been tears, nor illness, nor deaths, nor funerals in the earth--if there had been no sin. We must bear this state of things patiently. We cannot alter it. We may thank God that there is a remedy in the Gospel, and that this present life is not all. But in the meantime, let us lay the blame at the right door. Let us lay the blame on sin.
How much we ought to hate sin! Instead of loving it, cleaving to it, dallying with it, excusing it, playing with it--we ought to hate it with a deadly hatred! Sin is the great murderer, and thief, and pestilence, and nuisance of this world. Let us make no peace with it. Let us wage a ceaseless warfare against it. It is "the abominable thing which God hates!" Happy is he who is of one mind with God, and can say, I "abhor that which is evil." Romans 12:9
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