h. SINS CRYING TO HEAVEN (PECCATA CLAMANTIA)

Certain sins cry out to God for public vengeance. As such, Scripture lists murder (Gen. 4:10: “The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto Me from the ground”); the slaying of Christians (Rev. 6:10: “They cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost Thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?”); withholding from hired laborers their wages (James 5:4); the oppression, in general, of the helpless, strangers, widows, orphans, the poor, the enslaved, etc., who cannot help themselves and therefore cry to God that He would intervene. (Ex.22:21-24; Is.3: 14-15; Ex. 3:7-9; etc.) Chemnitz (Loci, I, p. 258): “In the schools they call them peccata clamantia because Scripture says that these sins, even though men remain silent, cry to God and call for His vengeance.” Referring to Gen. 4:10; 18:20; Ex. 3:7; 22:23; James 5:4, he quotes the old memory verse:

Clamitat ad coelem vox sanguinis et Sodomorum,Vox oppressorum mercesque retenta laborum

(To heaven cries the voice of the blood and of the Sodomites, The voice of the oppressed and the withheld wage of the laborers.) — At the same time we bear in mind that unbelief, the refusal to accept Jesus as the Savior of the world, is the greatest and most grievous sin. John 16:9: “Of sin, because they believed not on Me” (John 15:22). It may be called peccatum clamantissimum. Christ reproved the unbelief of the Pharisees, who objected to the “Hosannah” at His entrance into Jerusalem, with the words: “I tell you that if these should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out” (Luke 19:40; cp. Heb. 12:22-25).

When some dogmaticians speak of peccata non clamantia, they do not mean to say (as some neologists do) that there is a class of “guiltless sins,” but they are pointing out that God in His patience and long-suffering is withholding His judgment of sin, giving room for repentance, or that according to His reckoning the measure of their sin is not yet full (Gen. 15:16: “The iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full”). As for us Christians, we thank God that He also recognizes peccata non clamantia. For while we know and experience, on the one hand, that we harbor a multitude of sins, which certainly merit God’s wrath and eternal damnation, we know, on the other hand, that these sins no longer cry to God for vengeance; God daily and richly forgives them because we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the Righteous, who has made full propitiation for our sins, and we can pray with the full assurance of being heard: “Hide Thy face from my sins, and blot out all mine iniquities” (Ps. 51:9).