THE EXPOSITOR'S BIBLE
EDITED BY THE REV.
W. ROBERTSON NICOLL, M.A., LL.D.
Editor of "The Expositor", etc
THE EPISTLE OF ST PAUL
TO THE ROMANS
BY
HANDLEY C. G. MOULE, M.A.,
PRINCIPAL OF RIDLEY HALL, CAMBRIDGE
London
HODDER AND STOUGHTON
27, PATERNOSTER ROW
MDCCCXCIV
Printed by Hazell, Watson & Vincy, Ld., London and Aylesbury.
To
The Rev. ROBERT SINKER, D.D.,
LIBRARIAN OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE,
MY FRIEND OF THIRTY-TWO YEARS,
TO WHOSE KINDNESS AND KNOWLEDGE
I AM DEEPLY AND INCREASINGLY INDEBTED,
THIS BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY
INSCRIBED.
H. C. G. M.
Hearing read, as I do continually, the
Epistles of the blessed Paul ... I delight in the enjoyment of his
spiritual trumpet, and my heart leaps up, and my longings set me
glowing, as I recognize the voice so dear to me, and seem to image the
speaker all but present to me, and to see him in discourse. But I
mourn and am distressed, because all do not know this man as they
should know him.... It is from hence our myriad evils spring—from our
ignorance of the Scriptures. Hence grows this epidemic of our
heresies; hence our neglected lives, hence our unfruitful toil.
St Chrysostom,
Preamble to Homilies on the Epistle to the Romans.
PREFACE
He who attempts to expound the Epistle to the
Romans, when his sacred task is over, is
little disposed to speak about his Commentary; he is
occupied rather with an ever deeper reverence and
wonder over the Text which he has been permitted
to handle, a Text so full of a marvellous man, above
all so full of God.
But it seems needful to say a few words about
the style of the running Translation of the Epistle
which will be found interwoven with this Exposition.
The writer is aware that the translation is often
rough and formless. His apology is that it has
been done with a view not to a connected reading
but to the explanation of details. A rough piece
of rendering, which would be a misrepresentation in
a continuous version, because it would be out of
scale with the general style, seems to be another
matter when it only calls the reader's attention to a
particular point presented for study at the moment.
Again, he is aware that his rendering of the
Greek article in many passages (for example, where
he has ventured to explain it by "our," "true," etc.)
is open to criticism. But he intends no more in
such places than a suggestion; and he is conscious,
as he has said sometimes at the place, that it is
almost impossible to render the article as he has
done in these cases without a certain exaggeration,
which must be discounted by the reader.
The use of the article in Greek is one of the
simplest and most assured things in grammar, as
to its main principles. But as regards some details
of the application of principle, there is nothing in
grammar which seems so easily to elude the line
of law.
It is scarcely necessary to say that on questions of
literary criticism which in no respect, or at most
remotely, concern exposition, this Commentary says
little or nothing. It is well known to literary students
of the Epistle that some phenomena in the text, from
the close of ch. xiv. onwards, have raised important
and complex questions. It has been asked whether
the great Doxology (xvi. 25-27) always stood where
it now stands; whether it should stand at the close
of our ch. xiv.; whether its style and wording allow
us to regard it as contemporary with the Epistle as
a whole, or whether they indicate that it was written
later in St Paul's course; whether our fifteenth and
sixteenth chapters, while Pauline, are not out of
place in an Epistle to Rome; in particular, whether
the list of names in ch. xvi. is compatible with a
Roman destination.
These questions, with one exception, that which
affects the list of names, are not even touched upon in
the present Exposition. The expositor, personally convinced
that the pages we know as the Epistle to the
Romans are not only all genuine but all intimately
coherent, has not felt himself called to discuss, in a
devotional writing, subjects more proper to the lecture-room
and the study; and which certainly would be out
of place in the ministry of the pulpit.
Meantime, those who care to read a masterly debate
on the literary problems in question may consult the
recently published volume (1893), Biblical Studies, by
the late Bishop Lightfoot, of Durham. That volume
contains (pp. 287-374) three critical Essays (1869, 1871),
two by Bishop Lightfoot, one by the late Dr Hort,
on The Structure and Destination of the Epistle to the
Romans. The two illustrious friends,—Hort criticizing
Lightfoot, Lightfoot replying to Hort,—examine
the phenomena of Rom. xv.-xvi. Lightfoot advocates
the theory that St Paul, some time after writing the
Epistle, issued an abridged edition for wider circulation,
omitting the direction to Rome, closing the document
with our ch. xiv., and then (not before) writing, as a
finale, the great Doxology. Hort holds to the practical
entirety of the Epistle as we have it, and reasons at
length for the contemporaneousness of xvi. 25-27 with
the rest.
See also Westcott and Hort's N. T. in the Original Greek, vol. 2,
Appendix, pp. 110-114 (ed. 1).
We may note here that both Hort and Lightfoot
contend for the conciliatory aim of the Roman Epistle.
They regard the great passage about Israel (ix.-xi.) as
in some sense the heart of the Epistle, and the doctrinal
passages preceding this as all more or less meant to
bear on the relations not only of the Law and the
Gospel, but of the Jew and the Gentile as members
of the one Christian Church. There is great value in
this suggestion, explained and illustrated as it is in the
Essays in question. But the thought may easily be
worked to excess. It seems plain to the present
writer that when the Epistle is studied from within
its deepest spiritual element, it shews us the Apostle
fully mindful of the largest aspects of the life and
work of the Church, but also, and yet more, occupied
with the problem of the relation of the believing sinner
to God. The question of personal salvation was never,
by St Paul, forgotten in that of Christian policy.
To return for a moment to this Exposition, or rather
to its setting; it may be doubted whether, in imagining
the dictation of the Epistle to be begun and completed
by St Paul within one day we have not imagined "a
hard thing." But at worst it is not an impossible
thing, if the Apostle's utterance was as sustained as
his thought.
It remains only to express the hope that these pages
may serve in some degree to convey to their readers
a new Tolle, Lege for the divine Text itself; if only
by suggesting to them sometimes the words of St
Augustine, "To Paul I appeal from all interpreters of
his writings."
Ridley Hall, Cambridge,
All Saints' Day, 1893.
ERRATA.
Page 113, line 8, for "circumcision" read "uncircumcision."
Page 263, line 15, for
"אָמֵו"
read
"אָמֵן".
Forasmuch as this Epistle is ... a light and way unto the whole Scripture,
I think it meet that every Christian man not only know it, by rote and without
the book, but also exercise himself therein evermore continually, as with the
daily bread of the soul. No man verily can read it too oft, or study it too well;
for the more it is studied, the easier it is; the more it is chewed, the pleasanter
it is; and the more groundly it is searched, the preciouser things are found in
it, so great treasure of spiritual things lieth hid therein.
W. Tyndale, after Luther.
Towards the close of one of my nights of suffering, at half-past four, I asked
my kind watcher ... to read me a chapter of the Word of God. He proposed
the eighth of the Epistle to the Romans. I assented, but with the request that,
to secure the connexion of ideas, he would go back to the sixth, and even to the
fifth. We read in succession the four chapters, v., vi., vii., viii., and I thought
no more of sleep.... Then we read the ninth, and the remaining passages, to
the end, with an interest always equal and sustained; and then the first four,
that nothing might be lost. About two hours had passed.... I cannot tell
you how I was struck, in thus reading the Epistle as a whole, with the seal
of divinity, of truth, of holiness, of love, and of power, which is impressed
on every page, on every word. We felt, my young friend and I, ... that
we were listening to a voice from heaven.
A. Monod, Adieux, § V.,
Quelques Mots sur la Lecture de la Bible.
CHAPTER I
TIME, PLACE, AND OCCASION
It is the month of February, in the year of Christ
58.
See Lewin, Fasti Sacri, § 1854, etc.
In a room in the house of Gaius, a wealthy
Corinthian Christian, Paul the Apostle, having at his
side his amanuensis Tertius, addresses himself to write
to the converts of the mission at Rome.
The great world meanwhile is rolling on its way. It
is the fourth year of Nero; he is Consul the third time,
with Valerius Messala for his colleague; Poppæa has
lately caught the unworthy Prince in the net of her
bad influence. Domitius Corbulo has just resumed the
war with Parthia, and prepares to penetrate the highlands
of Armenia. Within a few weeks, in the full
spring, an Egyptian impostor is about to inflame Jerusalem
with his Messianic claim, to lead four thousand
fanatics into the desert, and to return to the city with a
host of thirty thousand men, only to be totally routed
by the legionaries of Felix. For himself, the Apostle is
about to close his three months' stay at Corinth; he has
heard of plots against his life, and will in prudence
decline the more direct route from Cenchrea by sea,
striking northward for Philippi, and thence over the
Ægæan to Troas. Jerusalem he must visit, if possible
before May is over, for he has by him the Greek
collections to deliver to the poor converts of Jerusalem.
Then, in the vista of his further movements, he sees
Rome, and thinks with a certain apprehension yet with
longing hope about life and witness there.
A Greek Christian woman is about to visit the City,
Phœbe, a ministrant of the mission at Cenchrea. He
must commend her to the Roman brethren; and a deliberate
Letter to them is suggested by this personal need.
His thoughts have long gravitated to the City of the
World. Not many months before, at Ephesus, when
he had "purposed in the Spirit" to visit Jerusalem, he
had said, with an emphasis which his biographer remembered,
"I must also see Rome" (Acts xix. 21); "I
must," in the sense of a divine decree, which had written
this journey down in the plan of his life. He was
assured too, by circumstantial and perhaps by supernatural
signs, that he had "now no more place in these
parts" (Rom. xv. 23)—that is, in the Eastern Roman
world where hitherto all his labour had been spent.
The Lord who in former days had shut Paul up to
a track which led him through Asia Minor to the
Ægæan, and across the Ægæan to Europe (Acts xvi.),
now prepared to guide him, though by paths which
His servant knew not, from Eastern Europe to
Western, and before all things to the City. Amongst
these providential preparations was a growing occupation
of the Apostle's thought with persons and interests
in the Christian circle there. Here, as we have seen,
was Phœbe, about to take ship for Italy. Yonder, in
the great Capital, were now resident again the beloved
and faithful Aquila and Prisca, no longer excluded by
the Claudian edict, and proving already, we may fairly
conclude, the central influence in the mission, whose
first days perhaps dated from the Pentecost itself, when
Roman "strangers" (Acts ii. 10) saw and heard the
wonders and the message of that hour. At Rome also
lived other believers personally known to Paul, drawn
by unrecorded circumstances to the Centre of the world.
"His well-beloved" Epænetus was there; Mary, who
had sometimes tried hard to help him; Andronicus,
and Junias, and Herodion, his relatives; Amplias
and Stachys, men very dear to him; Urbanus, who
had worked for Christ at his side; Rufus, no common
Christian in his esteem, and Rufus' mother, who had
once watched over Paul with a mother's love. All
these rise before him as he thinks of Phœbe, and
her arrival, and the faces and the hands which at his
appeal would welcome her in the Lord, under the holy
freemasonry of primeval Christian fellowship.
Besides, he has been hearing about the actual state of
that all-important mission. As "all roads led to Rome,"
so all roads led from Rome, and there were Christian
travellers everywhere (i. 8) who could tell him how the
Gospel fared among the metropolitan brethren. As he
heard of them, so he prayed for them, "without ceasing"
(i. 9), and made request too for himself, now definitely
and urgently, that his way might be opened to visit
them at last.
To pray for others, if the prayer is prayer indeed,
and based to some extent on knowledge, is a sure way
to deepen our interest in them, and our sympathetic
insight into their hearts and conditions. From the
human side, nothing more than these tidings and these
prayers was needed to draw from St Paul a written
message to be placed in Phœbe's care. From this same
human side again, when he once addressed himself to
write, there were circumstances of thought and action
which would naturally give direction to his message.
He stood amidst circumstances most significant and
suggestive in matters of Christian truth. Quite recently
his Judaist rivals had invaded the congregations of
Galatia, and had led the impulsive converts there to
quit what seemed their firm grasp on the truth of
Justification by Faith only. To St Paul this was no
mere battle of abstract definitions, nor again was it
a matter of merely local importance. The success of
the alien teachers in Galatia shewed him that the
same specious mischiefs might win their way, more or
less quickly, anywhere. And what would such success
mean? It would mean the loss of the joy of the Lord,
and the strength of that joy, in the misguided Churches.
Justification by Faith meant nothing less than Christ all
in all, literally all in all, for sinful man's pardon and
acceptance. It meant a profound simplicity of personal
reliance altogether upon Him before the fiery holiness
of eternal Law. It meant a look out and up, at once
intense and unanxious, from alike the virtues and the
guilt of man, to the mighty merits of the Saviour. It
was precisely the foundation-fact of salvation, which
secured that the process should be, from its beginning,
not humanitarian but divine. To discredit that was
not merely to disturb the order of a missionary community;
it was to hurt the vitals of the Christian soul,
tinging with impure elements the mountain springs of
the peace of God. Fresh as he was now from combating
this evil in Galatia, St Paul would be sure to
have it in his thoughts when he turned to Rome; for
there it was only too certain that his active adversaries
would do their worst; probably they were at work
already.
Then, he had been just engaged also with the
problems of Christian life, in the mission at Corinth.
There the main trouble was less of creed than of
conduct. In the Corinthian Epistles we find no great
traces of an energetic heretical propaganda, but rather
a bias in the converts towards a strange licence of
temper and life. Perhaps this was even accentuated
by a popular logical assent to the truth of Justification
taken alone, isolated from other concurrent truths,
tempting the Corinthian to dream that he might "continue
in sin that grace might abound." If such were
his state of spiritual thought, he would encounter (by
his own fault) a positive moral danger in the supernatural
"Gifts" which at Corinth about that time seem
to have appeared with quite abnormal power. An
antinomian theory, in the presence of such exaltations,
would lead the man easily to the conception that he
was too free and too rich in the supernatural order to
be the servant of common duties, and even of common
morals. Thus the Apostle's soul would be full of the
need of expounding to its depths the vital harmony of
the Lord's work for the believer and the Lord's work
in him; the co-ordination of a free acceptance with
both the precept and the possibility of holiness. He
must shew once for all how the justified are bound to
be pure and humble, and how they can so be, and what
forms of practical dutifulness their life must take. He
must make it clear for ever that the Ransom which
releases also purchases; that the Lord's freeman is
the Lord's property; that the Death of the Cross,
reckoned as the death of the justified sinner, leads
direct to his living union with the Risen One, including
a union of will with will; and that thus the Christian
life, if true to itself, must be a life of loyalty to every
obligation, every relation, constituted in God's providence
among men. The Christian who is not attentive
to others, even where their mere prejudices and mistakes
are in question, is a Christian out of character.
So is the Christian who is not a scrupulously loyal
citizen, recognizing civil order as the will of God. So
is the Christian who in any respect claims to live
as he pleases, instead of as the bondservant of his
Redeemer should live.
Another question had been pressing the Apostle's
mind, and that for years, but recently with a special
weight. It was the mystery of Jewish unbelief. Who
can estimate the pain and greatness of that mystery
in the mind of St Paul? His own conversion, while it
taught him patience with his old associates, must have
filled him also with some eager hopes for them. Every
deep and self-evidencing manifestation of God in a
man's soul suggests to him naturally the thought of
the glorious things possible in the souls of others.
Why should not the leading Pharisee, now converted,
be the signal, and the means, of the conversion of the
Sanhedrin, and of the people? But the hard mystery
of sin crossed such paths of expectation, and more and
more so as the years went on. Judaism outside the
Church was stubborn, and energetically hostile. And
within the Church, sad and ominous fact, it crept in
underground, and sprung up in an embittered opposition
to the central truths. What did all this mean?
Where would it end? Had Israel sinned, collectively,
beyond pardon and repentance? Had God cast off His
people? These troublers of Galatia, these fiery rioters
before the tribunal of Gallio at Corinth, did their conduct
mean that all was over for the race of Abraham? The
question was agony to Paul; and he sought his Lord's
answer to it as a thing without which he could not live.
That answer was full in his soul when he meditated his
Letter to Rome, and thought of the Judaists there, and
also of the loving Jewish friends of his heart there who
would read his message when it came.
Thus we venture to describe the possible outward
and inward conditions under which the Epistle to the
Romans was conceived and written. Well do we
recollect that our account is conjectural. But the
Epistle in its wonderful fulness, both of outline and of
detail, gives to such conjectures more than a shadow
for basis. We do not forget again that the Epistle,
whatever the Writer saw around him or felt within him,
was, when produced, infinitely more than the resultant
of Paul's mind and life; it was, and is, an oracle of God,
a Scripture, a revelation of eternal facts and principles
by which to live and die. As such we approach it in
this book; not to analyse only or explain, but to
submit and to believe; taking it as not only Pauline
but Divine. But then, it is not the less therefore
Pauline. And this means that both the thought and
the circumstances of St Paul are to be traced and felt
in it as truly, and as naturally, as if we had before us
the letter of an Augustine, or a Luther, or a Pascal.
He who chose the writers of the Holy Scriptures, many
men scattered over many ages, used them each in his surroundings
and in his character, yet so as to harmonize
them all in the Book which, while many, is one. He
used them with the sovereign skill of Deity. And that
skilful use meant that He used their whole being,
which He had made, and their whole circumstances,
which He had ordered. They were indeed His amanuenses;
nay, I fear not to say they were His pens. But
He is such that He can manipulate as His facile implement
no mere piece of mechanism, which, however
subtle and powerful, is mechanism still, and can never
truly cause anything; He can take a human personality,
made in His own image, pregnant, formative, causative,
in all its living thought, sensibility, and will, and can
throw it freely upon its task of thinking and expression—and
behold, the product will be His; His
matter, His thought, His exposition, His Word, "living
and abiding for ever."
Thus we enter in spirit the Corinthian citizen's house,
in the sunshine of the early Greek spring, and find our
way invisible and unheard to where Tertius sits with
his reed-pen and strips of papyrus, and where Paul is
prepared to give him, word by word, sentence by
sentence, this immortal message. Perhaps the corner
of the room is heaped with hair-cloth from Cilicia, and
the implements of the tent-maker. But the Apostle is
now the guest of Gaius, a man whose means enable
him to be "the host of the whole Church"; so we may
rather think that for the time this manual toil is intermitted.
Do we seem to see the form and face of him
who is about to dictate? The mist of time is in our
eyes; but we may credibly report that we find a small
and much emaciated frame, and a face remarkable for
its arched brows and wide forehead, and for the expressive
mobility of the lips.
See Lewin, Life and Epistles of St Paul, ii. 411, for an engraving
of a fine medallion, shewing the heads of St Paul and St Peter.
"The medal is referred to the close of the first century or the
beginning of the second."
We trace in looks, in
manner and tone of utterance, and even in unconscious
attitude and action, tokens of a mind rich in every faculty,
a nature equally strong in energy and in sympathy,
made both to govern and to win, to will and to love.
The man is great and wonderful, a master soul, subtle,
wise, and strong. Yet he draws us with pathetic force
to his heart, as one who asks and will repay affection.
As we look on his face we think, with awe and
gladness, that with those same thought-tired eyes (and
are they not also troubled with disease?) he has literally
seen, only twenty years ago, so he will quietly assure us,
the risen and glorified Jesus. His work during those
twenty years, his innumerable sufferings, above all,
his spirit of perfect mental and moral sanity, yet of
supernatural peace and love,—all make his assurance
absolutely trustworthy. He is a transfigured man
since that sight of Jesus Christ, who now "dwells in his
heart by faith," and uses him as the vehicle of His will
and work. And now listen. The Lord is speaking
through His servant. The scribe is busy with his pen,
as the message of Christ is uttered through the soul
and from the lips of Paul.
CHAPTER II
THE WRITER AND HIS READERS
Romans i. 1-7
Paul, a bondservant of Jesus Christ. So the
man opens his Lord's message with his own
name. We may, if we please, leave it and pass on, for
to the letter-writer of that day it was as much a matter
of course to prefix the personal name to the letter as
it is to us to append it. But then, as now, the name
was not a mere word of routine; certainly not in the
communications of a religious leader. It avowed responsibility;
it put in evidence a person. In a letter
of public destination it set the man in the light and
glare of publicity, as truly as when he spoke in the
Christian assembly, or on the Areopagus, or from
the steps of the castle at Jerusalem. It tells us here,
on the threshold, that the messages we are about to
read are given to us as "truth through personality";
they come through the mental and spiritual being of
this wonderful and most real man. If we read his
character aright in his letters, we see in him a fineness
and dignity of thought which would not make the
publication of himself a light and easy thing. But his
sensibilities, with all else he has, have been given to
Christ (who never either slights or spoils such gifts,
while He accepts them); and if it will the better
win attention to the Lord that the servant should
stand out conspicuously, to point to Him, it shall be
done.
For he is indeed "Jesus Christ's bondservant"; not
His ally merely, or His subject, or His friend. Recently,
writing to the Galatian converts, he has been vindicating
the glorious liberty of the Christian, set free
at once from "the curse of the law" and from the
mastery of self. But there too, at the close (vi. 17),
he has dwelt on his own sacred bondage; "the brand of
his Master, Jesus." The liberty of the Gospel is the
silver side of the same shield whose side of gold is an
unconditional vassalage to the liberating Lord. Our
freedom is "in the Lord" alone; and to be "in the
Lord" is to belong to Him, as wholly as a healthy hand
belongs, in its freedom, to the physical centre of life and
will. To be a bondservant is terrible in the abstract.
To be "Jesus Christ's bondservant" is Paradise, in the
concrete. Self-surrender, taken alone, is a plunge into
a cold void. When it is surrender to "the Son of
God, who loved me and gave Himself for me" (Gal. ii. 20),
it is the bright home-coming of the soul to the seat
and sphere of life and power.
This bondservant of His now before us, dictating, is
called to be an Apostle. Such is his particular department
of servitude in the "great house." It is a rare
commission—to be a chosen witness of the Resurrection,
a divinely authorized "bearer" of the holy Name, a
first founder and guide of the universal Church, a
legatus a latere of the Lord Himself. Yet the apostleship,
to St Paul, is but a species of the one genus,
bondservice. "To every man is his work," given by the
one sovereign will. In a Roman household one slave
would water the garden, another keep accounts, another
in the library would do skilled literary work; yet all
equally would be "not their own, but bought with a
price." So in the Gospel, then, and now. All functions
of Christians are alike expressions of the one will of
Him who has purchased, and who "calls."
Meanwhile, this bondservant-apostle, because "under
authority," carries authority. His Master has spoken
to him, that he may speak. He writes to the Romans
as man, as friend, but also as the "vessel of choice, to
bear the Name" (Acts ix. 15) of Jesus Christ.
Such is the sole essential work and purpose of his
life. He is separated to the Gospel of God; isolated
from all other ruling aims to this. In some respects
he is the least isolated of men; he is in contact all
round with human life. Yet he is "separated." In
Christ, and for Christ, he lives apart from even the
worthiest personal ambitions. Richer than ever, since
he "was in Christ" (xvi. 7), in all that makes man's
nature wealthy, in power to know, to will, to love, he
uses all his riches always for "this one thing," to make
men understand "the Gospel of God." Such isolation,
behind a thousand contacts, is the Lord's call for His
true followers still.
"The Gospel": word almost too familiar now, till
the thing is too little understood. What is it? In its
native meaning, its eternally proper meaning, it is the
divine "Good Tidings." It is the announcement of
Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour of men, in whom
God and man meet with joy. That announcement
stands in living relation to a bright chain of precepts,
and also to the sacred darkness of convictions and
warnings; we shall see this amply illustrated in this
Epistle. But neither precepts nor threatenings are
properly the Gospel. The Gospel saves from sin, and
enables for holy conduct. But in itself it is the pure,
mere message of redeeming Love.
It is "the Gospel of God"; that is, as the neighbouring
sentences shew it, the Gospel of the blessed Father.
Its origin is in the Father's love, the eternal hill whence
runs the eternal stream of the work of the Son and the
power of the Spirit. "God loved the world"; "The
Father sent the Son." The stream leads us up to
the mount. "Hereby perceive we the love of God."
In the Gospel, and in it alone, we have that certainty,
"God is Love."
Now he dilates a little in passing on this dear theme,
the Gospel of God. He whom it reveals as eternal
Love was true to Himself in the preparation as in the
event; He promised His Gospel beforehand
through His prophets in (the) holy Scriptures.
The sunrise of Christ was no abrupt, insulated phenomenon,
unintelligible because out of relation. "Since
the world began" (Luke i. 70), from the dawn of human
history, predictive word and manifold preparing work had
gone before. To think now only of the prediction, more
or less articulate, and not of the preparation through
general divine dealings with man—such had the prophecy
been that, as the pagan histories tell us,
Percrebuerat Oriente toto vetus et constans opinio, esse in fatis
ut eo tempore (cir. A.D. 70) profecti Judæa rerum potirentur.—Suetonius,
Vesp., c. 4. Tacitus (Hist., v. 13) says the same, and that the
hope was based on the antiqui sacerdotum libri.
"the whole East" heaved with expectations of a Judæan
world-rule about the time when, as a fact, Jesus came.
He came, alike to disappoint every merely popular hope
and to satisfy at once the concrete details and the
spiritual significance of the long forecast. And He sent
His messengers out to the world carrying as their text
and their voucher that old and multifold literature which
is yet one Book; those "holy writings," (our own Old
Testament, from end to end,) which were to them
nothing less than the voice of the Holy Spirit. They
always put the Lord, in their preaching, in contact with
that prediction.
In this, as in other things, His glorious Figure is
unique. There is no other personage in human history,
himself a moral miracle, heralded by a verifiable foreshadowing
in a complex literature of previous centuries.
"The hope of Israel" was, and is, a thing sui
generis. Other preparations for the Coming were, as it
were, sidelong and altogether by means of nature. In
the Holy Scriptures the supernatural led directly and in
its own way to the supreme supernatural Event; the
Sacred Way to the Sanctuary.
What was the burthen of the vast prophecy, with its
converging elements? It was concerning His
Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. Whatever the
prophets themselves knew, or did not know, of the
inmost import of their records and utterances, the
import was this. The Lord and the Apostles do not
commit us to believe that the old seers ever had a full
conscious foresight, or even that in all they "wrote of
Him" they knew that it was of Him they wrote;
though they had insights above nature, and knew
it, as when David "in the Spirit called Him Lord,"
and Abraham "saw His day." But they do amply
commit us to believe, if we are indeed their disciples,
that the whole revelation through Israel did, in a way
quite of its own kind, "concern the Son of God."
See this in such leading places as Luke xxiv. 25-27;
John v. 39, 46; Acts iii. 21-25, x. 43, xxviii. 23.
A Mahometan in Southern India, not long ago, was
first drawn to faith in Jesus Christ by reading the
genealogy with which St Matthew begins his narrative.
Such a procession, he thought, must lead up a mighty
name; and he approached with reverence the story of
the Nativity. That genealogy is, in a certain sense, the
prophecies in compendium. Its avenue is the miniature
of theirs. Let us sometimes go back, as it were, and
approach the Lord again through the ranks of His holy
foretellers, to get a new impression of His majesty.
"Concerning His Son." Around that radiant word,
full of light and heat, the cold mists of many speculations
have rolled themselves, as man has tried to analyse a
divine and boundless fact. For St Paul, and for us, the
fact is everything, for peace and life. This Jesus Christ
is true Man; that is certain. He is also, if we trust
His life and word, true Son of God. He is on the one
hand personally distinct from Him whom He calls
Father, and whom He loves, and who loves Him with
infinite love. On the other hand He is so related to
Him that He fully possesses His Nature, while He has
that Nature wholly from Him. This is the teaching of
Gospels and Epistles; this is the Catholic Faith. Jesus
Christ is God, is Divine, truly and fully. He is implicitly
called by the incommunicable Name (compare John
xii. 41 with Isa. vi. 7). He is openly called God in
His own presence on earth (John xx. 28). But what is,
if possible, even mere significant, because deeper below
the surface—He is regarded as the eternally satisfying
Object of man's trust and love (e.g. Phil. iii. 21,
Eph. iii. 19). Yet Jesus Christ is always preached as
related Son-wise to Another, so truly that the mutual
love of the Two is freely adduced as type and motive
for our love.
We can hardly make too much, in thought and
teaching, of this Divine Sonship, this Filial Godhead.
It is the very "Secret of God" (Col. ii. 2), both as a
light to guide our reason to the foot of the Throne,
and as a power upon the heart. "He that hath the
Son hath the Father"; "He that hath seen Me hath
seen the Father"; "He hath translated us into the
kingdom of the Son of His Love."
Who was born of the seed of David, according to the
flesh. So the New Testament begins (Matt. i. 1); so
it almost closes (Rev. xxii. 6). St Paul, in later years,
recalls the Lord's human pedigree again (2 Tim. ii. 8):
"Remember that Jesus Christ, of the seed of David,
is risen from the dead." The old Apostle in that last
passage, has entered the shadow of death; he feels with
one hand for the rock of history, with the other for
the pulse of eternal love. Here was the rock; the
Lord of life was the Child of history, Son and Heir
of a historical king, and then, as such, the Child of
prophecy too. And this, against all surface appearances
beforehand. The Davidic "ground" (Isa. liii. 2) had
seemed to be dry as dust for generations, when the
Root of endless life sprang up in it.
"He was born" of David's seed. Literally, the
Greek may be rendered, "He became, He came to
be." Under either rendering we have the wonderful
fact that He who in His higher Nature eternally is,
above time and including it, did in His other Nature,
by the door of becoming, enter time, and thus indeed
"fill all things." This He did, and thus He is,
"according to the flesh." "Flesh" is, indeed, but a
part of Manhood. But a part can represent the whole;
and "flesh" is the part most antithetical to the Divine
Nature, with which here Manhood is collocated and
in a sense contrasted. So it is again below, ix. 5.
And now, of this blessed Son of David, we hear
further:—who was designated to be Son of God;
literally, "defined as Son of God" betokened
to be such by "infallible proof." Never for an hour
had he ceased to be, in fact, Son of God. To the man
healed of birth-blindness He had said (John ix. 35),
"Dost thou believe on the Son of God?" But there
was an hour when He became openly and so to speak
officially what He always is naturally; somewhat as a
born king is "made" king by coronation. Historical act
then affirmed independent fact, and as it were gathered
it into a point for use. This affirmation took place
in power, according to the Spirit of Holiness, as a result
of resurrection from the dead. "Sown in weakness,"
Jesus was indeed "raised in" majestic, tranquil "power."
Without an effort He stepped from out of the depth of
death, from under the load of sin. It was no flickering
life, crucified but not quite killed, creeping back in a
convalescence mis-called resurrection; it was the rising
of the sun. That it was indeed day-light, and not day-dream,
was shown not only in His mastery of matter,
but in the transfiguration of His followers. No moral
change was ever at once more complete and more
perfectly healthful than what His return wrought in
that large and various group, when they learnt to say,
"We have seen the Lord." The man who wrote this
Epistle had "seen Him last of all" (1 Cor. xv. 8).
That was indeed a sight "in power," and working a
transfiguration.
So was the Son of the Father affirmed to be what He
is; so was He "made" to be, for us His Church, the
Son, in whom we are sons. And all this was, "according
to the Spirit of holiness"; answerably to the foreshadowing
and foretelling of that Holy Spirit who, in the
prophets, "testified of the sufferings destined for the
Christ, and of the glories that should follow" (1 Pet. i. 11).
Now lastly, in the Greek of the sentence, as if
pausing for a solemn entrance, comes in the whole
blessed Name; even Jesus Christ our Lord. Word by
word the Apostle dictates, and the scribe obeys. Jesus,
the human Name; Christ, the mystic Title; our Lord,
the term of royalty and loyalty which binds us to Him,
and Him to us. Let those four words be ours for ever.
If everything else falls in ruins from the memory, let
this remain, "the strength of our heart, and our
portion for ever."
Through whom, the Apostle's voice goes on,
we received grace and apostleship. The Son was
the Channel "through" which the Father's choice and
call took effect. He "grasped" Paul (Phil. iii. 12), and,
joined him to Himself, and in Himself to the Father;
and now through that Union the motions of the Eternal
will move Paul. They move him, to give him "grace
and apostleship"; that is, in effect, grace for apostleship,
and apostleship as grace; the boon of the Lord's
presence in him for the work, and the Lord's work as a
spiritual boon. He often thus links the word "grace"
with his great mission; for example, in Gal. ii. 9, Eph.
iii. 2, 8, and perhaps Phil. i. 7. Alike the enabling
peace and power for service, and then the service
itself, are to the Christian a free, loving, beatifying gift.
Unto obedience of faith among all the Nations. This
"obedience of faith" is in fact faith in its aspect as submission.
What is faith? It is personal trust, personal
self-entrustment to a person. It "gives up the case"
to the Lord, as the one only possible Giver of pardon
and of purity. It is "submission to the righteousness
of God" (ch. x. 3). Blessed the man who so
obeys, stretching out arms empty and submissive to
receive, in the void between them, Jesus Christ.
"Among all the Nations," "all the Gentiles." The
words read easy to us, and pass perhaps half unnoticed,
as a phrase of routine. Not so to the ex-Pharisee who
dictated them here. A few years before he would have
held it highly "unlawful to keep company with, or
come unto, one of another nation" (Acts x. 28). Now,
in Christ, it is as if he had almost forgotten that it had
been so. His whole heart, in Christ, is blent in personal
love with hearts belonging to many nations; in spiritual
affection he is ready for contact with all hearts. And
now he, of all the Apostles, is the teacher who by life
and word is to bring this glorious catholicity home
for ever to all believing souls, our own included. It
is St Paul pre-eminently who has taught man, as
man, in Christ, to love man; who has made Hebrew,
European, Hindoo, Chinese, Caffre, Esquimaux, actually
one in the conscious brotherhood of eternal life.
For His Name's sake; for the sake of the Lord Jesus
Christ revealed. The Name is the self-unfolded Person,
known and understood. Paul had indeed come to know
that Name, and to pass it on was now his very life.
He existed only to win for it more insight, more adoration,
more love. "The Name" deserved that great
soul's entire devotion. Does it not deserve our equally
entire devotion now? Our lives shall be transfigured, in
their measure, by taking for their motto also, "For His
Name's sake."
Now he speaks direct of his Roman friends. Among
whom, among these multifarious "Nations," you too are
Jesus Christ's called ones; men who belong to
Him, because "called" by Him. And what is
"called"? Compare the places where the word is used—or
where its kindred words are used—in the Epistles,
and you will find a certain holy speciality of meaning.
"Invited" is no adequate paraphrase. The "called"
man is the man who has been invited and has come;
who has obeyed the eternal welcome; to whom the
voice of the Lord has been effectual. See the word in
the opening paragraphs of 1 Corinthians. There the
Gospel is heard, externally, by a host of indifferent or
hostile hearts, who think it "folly," or "a stumbling
block." But among them are those who hear, and understand,
and believe indeed. To them "Christ is God's
power, and God's wisdom." And they are "the called."
In the Gospels, the words "chosen" and "called"
are in antithesis; the called are many, the chosen few;
the external hearers are many, the hearers inwardly are
few. In the Epistles a developed use shews the change
indicated here, and it is consistently maintained.
To all who in Rome are God's beloved ones.
Wonderful collocation, wonderful possibility!
"Beloved ones of God," as close to the eternal heart
as it is possible to be, because "in the Beloved"; that
is one side. "In Rome," in the capital of universal
paganism, material power, iron empire, immeasurable
worldliness, flagrant and indescribable sin; that is the
other side. "I know where thou dwellest," said the
glorified Saviour to much tried disciples at a later day;
"even where Satan has his throne" (Rev. ii. 13).
That throne was conspicuously present in the Rome
of Nero. Yet faith, hope, and love could breathe there,
when the Lord "called." They could much more than
breathe. This whole Epistle shows that a deep and
developed faith, a glorious hope, and the mighty love
of a holy life were matters of fact in men and women
who every day of the year saw the world as it went
by in forum and basilica, in Suburra and Velabrum, in
slave-chambers and in the halls of pleasure where they
had to serve or to meet company. The atmosphere of
heaven was carried down into that dark pool by the
believing souls who were bidden to live there. They
lived the heavenly life in Rome; as the creature of the
air in our stagnant waters weaves and fills its silver
diving-bell, and works and thrives in peace far down.
Read some vivid picture of Roman life, and think of
this. See it as it is shown by Tacitus, Suetonius,
Juvenal, Martial; or as modern hands, Becker's or
Farrar's, have restored it from their materials. What a
deadly air for the regenerate soul—deadly not only in
its vice, but in its magnificence, and in its thought!
But nothing is deadly to the Lord Jesus Christ. The
soul's regeneration means not only new ideas and
likings, but an eternal Presence, the indwelling of the
Life itself. That Life could live at Rome; and therefore
"God's beloved ones in Rome" could live there
also, while it was His will they should be there. The
argument comes a fortiori to ourselves.
(His) called holy ones; they were "called," in the sense
we have seen, and now, by that effectual Voice, drawing
them into Christ, they were constituted "holy ones,"
"saints." What does that word mean? Whatever its
etymology may be,
The linguistic root seems to point directly not to separation (as
often said) but to worship, reverence.
its usage gives us the thought of
dedication to God, connexion with Him, separation to
His service, His will. The saints are those who belong
to Him, His personal property, for His ends. Thus it
is used habitually in the Scriptures for all Christians,
supposed to be true to their name. Not an inner circle,
but all, bear the title. It is not only a glorified aristocracy,
but the believing commonalty; not the stars
of the eternal sky but the flowers sown by the Lord
in the common field; even in such a tract of that field
as "Cæsar's household" was (Phil. iv. 22).
Habitually therefore the Apostle gives the term
"saints" to whole communities; as if baptism always
gave, or sealed, saintship. In a sense it did, and does.
But then, this was, and is, on the assumption of the
concurrence of possession with title. The title left the
individual still bound to "examine himself, whether he
was in the faith" (2 Cor. xiii. 5).
These happy residents at Rome are now greeted and
blessed in their Father's and Saviour's Name; Grace to
you and peace, from God our Father and the Lord Jesus
Christ. "Grace"; what is it? Two ideas lie there
together; favour and gratuity. The grace of God is His
favouring will and work for us, and in us; gratuitous,
utterly and to the end unearned. Put otherwise, (and
with the remembrance that His great gifts are but
modes of Himself, are in fact Himself in will and
action,) grace is God for us, grace is God in us,
sovereign, willing, kind. "Peace"; what is it? The
holy repose within, and so around, which comes of the
man's acceptance with God and abode in God; an "all
is well" in the heart, and in the believer's contact with
circumstances, as he rests in his Father and his Redeemer.
"Peace, perfect peace"; under the sense of demerit,
and amidst the crush of duties, and on the crossing
currents of human joy and sorrow, and in the mystery
of death; because of the God of Peace, who has made
peace for us through the Cross of His Son, and is peace
in us, "by the Spirit which He hath given us."
CHAPTER III
GOOD REPORT OF THE ROMAN CHURCH: PAUL NOT
ASHAMED OF THE GOSPEL
Romans i. 8-17
HE has blessed the Roman Christians in the name
of the Lord. Now he hastens to tell them
how he blesses God for them, and how full his heart
is of them. The Gospel is warm all through with life
and love; this great message of doctrine and precept
is poured from a fountain full of personal affection.
Now first I thank my God, through Jesus
Christ, about you all. It is his delight to give
thanks for all the good he knows of in his brethren.
Seven of his Epistles open with such thanksgivings,
which at once convey the commendations which love
rejoices to give, wherever possible, and trace all
spiritual virtue straight to its Source, the Lord. Nor
only here to "the Lord," but to "my God"; a phrase
used, in the New Testament, only by St Paul, except
that one utterance of Eli, Eli, by his dying Saviour. It
is the expression of an indescribable appropriation and
reverent intimacy. The believer grudges his God to
none; he rejoices with great joy over every soul that
finds its wealth in Him. But at the centre of all joy
and love is this—"my God"; "Christ Jesus my
Lord"; "who loved me and gave Himself for me."
Is it selfish? Nay, it is the language of a personality
where Christ has dethroned self in His own favour,
but in which therefore reigns now the highest happiness,
the happiness which animates and maintains a self-forgetful
love of all. And this holy intimacy, with its
action in thanks and petition, is all the while "through
Jesus Christ" the Mediator and Brother. The man
knows God as "my God," and deals with Him as such,
never out of that Beloved Son who is equally One with
the believer and with the Father, no alien medium, but
the living point of unity.
What moves his thanksgivings? Because your faith
is spoken of, more literally, is carried as tidings, over the
whole world. Go where he will, in Asia, in Macedonia,
in Achaia, in Illyricum, he meets believing "strangers
from Rome," with spiritual news from the Capital,
announcing, with a glad solemnity, that at the great
Centre of this world the things eternal are proving their
power, and that the Roman mission is remarkable for
its strength and simplicity of "faith," its humble reliance
on the Lord Jesus Christ, and loving allegiance
to Him. Such news, wafted from point to point of that
early Christendom, was frequent then; we see another
beautiful example of it where he tells the Thessalonians
(1 Thess. i. 8-10) how everywhere in his Greek tour
he found the news of their conversion running in
advance of him, to greet him at each arrival. What
special importance would such intelligence bear when
it was good news from Rome!
Still in our day over the world of Missions similar
tidings travel. Only a few years ago "the saints" of
Indian Tinnevelly heard of the distress of their brethren
of African Uganda, and sent with loving eagerness "to
their necessity." Only last year (1892) an English
visitor to the Missions of Labrador found the disciples
of the Moravian Brethren there full of the wonders of
grace manifested in those same African believers.
This constant good tidings from the City makes him
the more glad because of its correspondence with his
incessant thought, prayer, and yearning over them.
For God is my record, my witness,
The word "record" in this sense came into English from Old
French. (Skeat: Etymological Dictionary.)
of this;
the God whom I serve, at once, so the Greek
(λατρεύω) implies, with adoration and obedience, in my
spirit, in the Gospel of His Son. The "for" gives the
connexion we have just indicated; he rejoices to hear of
their faith, for the Lord knows how much they are in his
prayers. The divine Witness is the more instinctively
appealed to, because these thoughts and prayers are for a
mission-Church, and the relations between St Paul and
his God are above all missionary relations. He "serves
Him in the Gospel of His Son" the Gospel of the God
who is known and believed in His Christ. He "serves
Him in the Gospel"; that is, in the propagation of it. So
he often means, where he speaks of "the Gospel"; take
for example ver. 1 above; xv. 16, 19 below; Phil. i. 5, 12;
ii. 22. "He serves Him," in that great branch of ministry,
"in his spirit" with his whole love, will, and mind,
working in communion with his Lord. And now to this
eternal Friend and Witness he appeals to seal his assurance
of incessant intercessions for them; how without
ceasing, as a habit constantly in action, I make mention
of you, calling them up by name, specifying before the
Father Rome, and Aquila, and Andronicus, and Junias,
and Persis, and Mary, and the whole circle, personally
known or not, in my prayers; literally, on occasion of
my prayers; whenever he found himself at prayer,
statedly or as it were casually remembering and beseeching.
The prayers of St Paul are a study by themselves.
See his own accounts of them, to the Corinthians, the
Ephesians, the Philippians, the Colossians, the Thessalonians,
and Philemon. Observe their topic; it is almost
always the growth of grace in the saints, to their
Master's glory. Observe now still more their manner;
the frequency, the diligence, the resolution which
grapples, wrestles, with the difficulties of prayer, so
that in Col. ii. 1 he calls his prayer simply "a great
wrestling." Learn here how to deal with God for those
for whom you work, shepherd of souls, messenger of
the Word, Christian man or woman who in any way
are called to help other hearts in Christ.
In this case his prayers have a very definite direction;
he is requesting, if somehow, now at length, my way
shall be opened, in the will of God, to come to you.
It is a quite simple, quite natural petition. His inward
harmony with the Lord's will never excludes the formation
and expression of such requests, with the reverent
"if" of submissive reserve. The "indifference" of
mystic pietism, which at least discourages articulate
contingent petitions, is unknown to the Apostles; "in
everything, with thanksgiving, they make their requests
known unto God." And they find such expression
harmonized, in a holy experience, with a profound rest
"within this will," this "sweet beloved will of God."
Little did he here foresee how his way would be opened;
that it would lie through the tumult in the Temple, the
prisons of Jerusalem and Cæsarea, and the cyclone of
the Adrian sea. He had in view a missionary journey
to Spain, in which Rome was to be taken by the way.
"So God grants prayer, but in His love
Makes ways and times His own."
His heart yearns for this Roman visit. We may
almost render the Greek of the next clause, For I
am homesick for a sight of you; he uses the
word by which elsewhere he describes
Philippian Epaphroditus' longing to be back at
Philippi (Phil. ii. 26), and again his own longing
to see the son of his heart, Timotheus (2 Tim. i. 4).
Such is the Gospel, that its family affection throws
the light of home on even unknown regions where
dwell "the brethren." In this case the longing
love however has a purpose most practical; that
I may impart to you some spiritual gift of grace, with
a view to your establishment. The word rendered
"gift of grace" (χάρισμα) is used in some places (see
especially 1 Cor. xii. 4, 9, 28, 30, 31) with a certain
special reference to the mysterious "Tongues," "Interpretations,"
and "Prophecies," given in the primeval
Churches. And we gather from the Acts and the
Epistles that these grants were not ordinarily made
where an Apostle was not there to lay on his hands.
But it is not likely that this is the import of this
present passage. Elsewhere in the Epistle
See verses 15, 16, 23, xi. 29. xii. 6 is the only passage which at
all looks the other way, and that passage implies that the Romans
already possessed the wonder-working gifts.
the word charisma is used with its largest and deepest
reference; God's gift of blessing in Christ. Here
then, so we take it, he means that he pines to
convey to them, as his Lord's messenger, some new
development of spiritual light and joy; to expound
"the Way" to them more perfectly; to open up
to them such fuller and deeper insights into the riches
of Christ that they, better using their possession of
the Lord, might as it were gain new possessions in
Him, and might stand more boldly on the glorious
certainties they held. And this was to be done
ministerially, not magisterially. For he goes on to
say that the longed-for visit would be his gain as
well as theirs;
that is, with a view to my concurrent
encouragement among you, by our mutual
faith, yours and mine together. Shall we call
this a sentence of fine tact; beautifully conciliatory
and endearing? Yes, but it is also perfectly sincere.
True tact is only the skill of sympathetic love, not
the less genuine in its thought because that thought
seeks to please and win. He is glad to shew
himself as his disciples' brotherly friend; but then
he first is such, and enjoys the character, and has
continually found and felt his own soul made glad
and strong by the witness to the Lord which far
less gifted believers bore, as he and they talked
together. Does not every true teacher know this
in his own experience? If we are not merely
lecturers on Christianity but witnesses for Christ,
we know what it is to hail with deep thanksgivings
the "encouragement" we have had from the lips
of those who perhaps believed long after we did,
and have been far less advantaged outwardly than
we have been. We have known and blessed the
"encouragement" carried to us by little believing
children, and young men in their first faith, and
poor old people on their comfortless beds, ignorant
in this world, illuminated in the Lord. "Mutual
faith," the pregnant phrase of the Apostle, faith
residing in each of both parties, and owned by
each to the other, is a mighty power for Christian
"encouragement" still.The word "comfort" in the English Version here, as commonly
elsewhere, represents παρακαλεῖν, παράκλησις, which commonly denote not so much the consolation of grief as the encouragement
which banishes depression.
But I would not have you ignorant, brethren.
This is a characteristic term of expression with
him.xi. 25; 1 Cor. x. 1, xii. 1; 2 Cor. i. 8; 1 Thess. iv. 13.
He delights in confidence and information, and not
least about his own plans bearing on his friends. That
often I purposed (or better, in our English idiom, have
purposed) to come to you, (but I have been hindered up
till now,) that I might have some fruit among you too,
as actually among the other Nations. He cannot help
giving more and yet more intimation of his loving gravitation
towards them; nor yet of his gracious avarice for
"fruit," result, harvest and vintage for Christ, in the
way of helping on Romans, as well as Asiatics, and
Macedonians, and Achaians, to live a fuller life in Him.
This, we may infer from the whole Epistle, would be
the chief kind of "fruit" in his view at Rome; but
not this only. For we shall see him at once go on to
anticipate an evangelistic work at Rome, a speaking
of the Gospel message where there would be a temptation
to be "ashamed" of it. Edification of believers
may be his main aim. But conversion of pagan souls
to God cannot possibly be dissociated from it.
In passing we see, with instruction, that St Paul
made many plans which came to nothing; he tells us
this here without apology or misgiving. He claims
accordingly no such practical omniscience, actual or
possible, as would make his resolutions and forecasts
infallible. Tacitly, at least, he wrote "If the Lord
will," across them all, unless indeed there came a case
where, as when he was guided out of Asia to Macedonia
(Acts xvi. 6-10), direct intimation was given him,
abnormal, supernatural, quite ab extra, that such and
not such was to be his path.
But now, he is not only "homesick" for Rome, with
a yearning love; he feels his obligation to Rome, with
a wakeful conscience. Alike to Greeks and to
Barbarians, to wise men and to unthinking, I
am in debt. Mankind is on his heart, in the sorts and
differences of its culture. On the one hand were "the
Greeks"; that is to say, in the then popular meaning of
the word, the peoples possessed of what we now call
"classical" civilization, Greek and Roman; an inner circle
of these were "the wise," the literati, the readers, writers,
thinkers, in the curriculum of those literatures and
philosophies. On the other hand were "the Barbarians,"
the tongues and tribes outside the Hellenic
pale, Pisidian, Pamphylian, Galatian, Illyrian, and we
know not who besides; and then, among them, or
anywhere, "the unthinking," the numberless masses
whom the educated would despise or forget as utterly
untrained in the schools, unversed in the great topics
of man and the world; the people of the field, the
market, and the kitchen. To the Apostle, because
to his Lord, all these were now impartially his
claimants, his creditors; he "owed them" the Gospel
which had been trusted to him for them. Naturally,
his will might be repelled alike by the frown or smile
of the Greek, and by the coarse earthliness of the
Barbarian. But supernaturally, in Christ, he loved
both, and scrupulously remembered his duty to both.
Such is the true missionary spirit still, in whatever
region, under whatever conditions. The Christian
man, and the Christian Church, delivered from the
world, is yet its debtor. "Woe is to him, to it, if"
that debt is not paid, if that Gospel is "hidden in a
napkin."
Thus he is ready, and more than ready, to pay his
debt to Rome. So (to render literally) what relates to
me is eager, to you too, to the men in Rome, to
preach the Gospel. "What relates to me";
there is an emphasis on "me," as if to say that the
hindrance, whatever it is, is not in him, but around him.
The doors have been shut, but the man stands behind
them, in act to pass in when he may.
His eagerness is no light-heartedness, no carelessness
of when or where. This wonderful missionary is
too sensitive to facts and ideas, too rich in imagination,
not to feel the peculiar, nay the awful greatness, of
a summons to Rome. He understands culture too well
not to feel its possible obstacles. He has seen too
much of both the real grandeur and the harsh force of
the imperial power in its extension not to feel a genuine
awe as he thinks of meeting that power at its gigantic
Centre. There is that in him which fears Rome. But
he is therefore the very man to go there, for he understands
the magnitude of the occasion, and he will the
more deeply retire upon his Lord for peace and power.
Thus with a pointed fitness he tells himself and his
friends, just here, that he is "not ashamed of the Gospel."
For I am not ashamed; I am ready even for
Rome, for this terrible Rome. I have a message
which, though Rome looks as if she must despise it, I
know is not to be despised. For I am not ashamed
of the Gospel;
The words "of Christ" must be omitted from the text here.
for it is God's power to salvation, for
every one who believes, alike for Jew, (first,) and for
Greek. For God's righteousness is in it unveiled,
from faith on to faith; as it stands written, But
the just man on faith shall live.
These words give out the great theme of the Epistle.
The Epistle, therefore, is infinitely the best commentary
on them, as we follow out its argument and hear
its message. Here it shall suffice us to note only a
point or two, and so pass on.
First, we recollect that this Gospel, this Glad Tidings,
is, in its essence, Jesus Christ. It is, supremely, "He,
not it"; Person, not theory. Or rather, it is authentic
and eternal theory in vital and eternal connexion
everywhere with a Person. As such it is truly "power,"
in a sense as profoundly natural as it is divine. It is
power, not only in the cogency of perfect principle, but
in the energy of an eternal Life, an almighty Will, an
infinite Love.
Then, we observe that this message of power, which
is, in its burthen, the Christ of God, unfolds first, at
its foundation, in its front, "the Righteousness of God";
not first His Love, but "His Righteousness." Seven
times elsewhere in the Epistle comes this phrase;
iii. 5, 21, 22, 23, 26; x. 3 twice.
rich materials for ascertaining its meaning in the spiritual
dialect of St Paul. Out of these passages, iii. 26 gives us
the key. There "the righteousness of God," seen as it
were in action, ascertained by its effects, is that which
secures "that He shall be just, and the Justifier of the man
who belongs to faith in Jesus." It is that which makes
wonderfully possible the mighty paradox that the Holy
One, eternally truthful, eternally rightful, infinitely
"law-abiding" in His jealousy for that Law which is
in fact His Nature expressing itself in precept, nevertheless
can and does say to man, in his guilt and forfeit,
"I, thy Judge, lawfully acquit thee, lawfully accept thee,
lawfully embrace thee." In such a context we need
not fear to explain this great phrase, in this its first
occurrence, to mean the Acceptance accorded by the
Holy Judge to sinful man. Thus it stands practically
equivalent to—God's way of justifying the ungodly,
His method for liberating His love while He magnifies
His law. In effect, not as a translation but as an
explanation, God's Righteousness is God's Justification.
Then again, we note the emphasis and the repetition
here of the thought of faith. "To every one that believeth";
"From faith on to faith"; "The just man
on faith shall live." Here, if anywhere, we shall find
ample commentary in the Epistle. Only let us remember
from the first that in the Roman Epistle, as
everywhere in the New Testament, we shall see
"faith" used in its natural and human sense; we shall
find that it means personal reliance. Fides est fiducia,
"Faith is trust," say the masters of Reformation
theology. Refellitur inanis hæreticorum fiducia, "We
refute the heretics' empty 'trust,'" says the Council of
Trent
Session VI., ch. ix.
against them; but in vain. Faith is trust.
It is in this sense that our Lord Jesus Christ, in
the Gospels, invariably uses the word. For this is
its human sense, its sense in the street and market;
and the Lord, the Man of men, uses the dialect of
His race. Faith, infinitely wonderful and mysterious
from some points of view, is the simplest thing in
the world from others. That sinners, conscious of
their guilt, should be brought so to see their Judge's
heart as to take His word of peace to mean what it
says, is miracle. But that they should trust His word,
having seen His heart, is nature, illuminated and led
by grace, but nature still. The "faith" of Jesus Christ
and the Apostles is trust. It is not a faculty for
mystical intuitions. It is our taking the Trustworthy
at His word. It is the opening of a mendicant hand
to receive the gold of Heaven; the opening of dying
lips to receive the water of life. It is that which makes
a void place for Jesus Christ to fill, that He may be
man's Merit, man's Peace, and man's Power.
Hence the overwhelming prominence of faith in the
Gospel. It is the correlative of the overwhelming, the
absolute, prominence of Jesus Christ. Christ is all.
Faith is man's acceptance of Him as such. "Justification
by Faith" is not acceptance because faith is a
valuable thing, a merit, a recommendation, a virtue.
See this admirably explained by Hooker, Discourse of Justification,
§ 31.
It is acceptance because of Jesus Christ, whom man,
dropping all other hopes, receives. It is, let us repeat
it, the sinner's empty hand and parted lips. It has
absolutely nothing to do with earning the gift of God,
the water and the bread of God; it has all to do with
taking it. This we shall see open out before us as
we proceed.
So the Gospel "unveils God's righteousness"; it
draws the curtains from His glorious secret. And as
each fold is lifted, the glad beholder looks on "from
faith to faith." He finds that this reliance is to be
his part; first, last, midst, and without end. He takes
Jesus Christ by faith; he holds Him by faith; he uses
Him by faith; he lives, he dies, in Him by faith; that
is to say, always by Him, by Him received, held,
used.
Then lastly, we mark the quotation from the Prophet,
who, for the Apostle, is the organ of the Holy Ghost.
What Habakkuk wrote is, for Paul, what God says,
God's Word. The Prophet, as we refer to his brief pages,
manifestly finds his occasion and his first significance
in the then state of his country and his people. If we
please, we may explain the words as a patriot's contribution
to the politics of Jerusalem, and pass on. But
if so, we pass on upon a road unknown to our Lord
and His Apostles. To Him, to them, the prophecies
had more in them than the Prophets knew; and
Habakkuk's appeal to Judah to retain the Lord Jehovah
among them in all His peace and power, by trusting
Him, is known by St Paul to be for all time an oracle
about the work of faith. So he sees it in a message
straight to the soul which asks how, if Christ is God's
Righteousness, shall I, a sinner, win Christ for me.
"Wouldst thou indeed be just with God, right with
Him as Judge, accepted by the Holy One? Take His
Son in the empty arms of mere trust, and He is thine
for this need, and for all."
"I am not ashamed of the Gospel." So the Apostle
affirms, as he looks toward Rome. What is it about
this Gospel of God, and of His Son, which gives
occasion for such a word? Why do we find, not here
only, but elsewhere in the New Testament, this contemplated
possibility that the Christian may be ashamed
of his creed, and of his Lord? "Whosoever shall be
ashamed of Me, and of My words, of him shall the Son
of Man be ashamed" (Luke ix. 26); "Be not thou
ashamed of the testimony of our Lord"; "Nevertheless,
I am not ashamed" (2 Tim. i. 8, 12). This
is paradoxical, as we come to think upon it. There
is much about the purity of the Gospel which might
occasion, and does too often occasion, an awe and
dread of it, seemingly reasonable. There is much
about its attendant mysteries which might seem to
excuse an attitude, however mistaken, of reverent
suspense. But what is there about this revelation of
the heart of Eternal Love, this record of a Life equally
divine and human, of a Death as majestic as it is
infinitely pathetic, and then of a Resurrection out of
death, to occasion shame? Why, in view of this,
should man be shy to avow his faith, and to let it be
known that this is all in all to him, his life, his peace,
his strength, his surpassing interest and occupation?
More than one analysis of the phenomenon, which
we all know to be fact, may be suggested. But for our
part we believe that the true solution lies near the words
sin, pardon, self-surrender. The Gospel reveals the
eternal Love, but under conditions which remind man
that he has done his worst to forfeit it. It tells him
of a peace and strength sublime and heavenly; but it
asks him, in order to receive them, to kneel down in the
dust and take them, unmerited, for nothing. And it
reminds them that he, thus delivered and endowed, is
by the same act the property of his Deliverer; that not
only the highest benefit of his nature is secured by his
giving himself over to God, but the most inexorable
obligation lies on him to do so. He is not his own, but
bought with a price.
Such views of the actual relation between man and
God, even when attended, as they are in the Gospel,
with such indications of man's true greatness as are
found nowhere else, are deeply repellent to the soul
that has not yet seen itself and God in the light of
truth. And the human being who has got that sight, and
has submitted himself indeed, yet, the moment he looks
outside the blessed shrine of his own union with his
Lord, is tempted to be reticent about a creed which he
knows once repelled and angered him. Well did Paul
remember his old hatred and contempt; and he felt the
temptations of that memory, when he presented Christ
either to the Pharisee or to the Stoic, and now particularly
when he thought of "bearing witness of Him
at Rome" (Acts xxiii. 11), imperial, overwhelming
Rome. But then he looked again from them to Jesus
Christ, and the temptation was beneath his feet, and
the Gospel, everywhere, was upon his lips.
CHAPTER IV
NEED FOR THE GOSPEL: GOD'S ANGER AND MAN'S
SIN
Romans i. 18-23
WE have as it were touched the heart of the
Apostle as he weighs the prospect of his
Roman visit, and feels, almost in one sensation, the
tender and powerful attraction, the solemn duty, and
the strange solicitation to shrink from the deliverance
of his message. Now his lifted forehead, just lighted
up by the radiant truth of Righteousness by Faith, is
shadowed suddenly. He is not ashamed of the Gospel;
he will speak it out, if need be, in the Cæsar's own
presence, and in that of his brilliant and cynical court.
For there is a pressing, an awful need that he should
thus "despise the shame." The very conditions in
human life which occasion an instinctive tendency to
be reticent of the Gospel, are facts of dreadful urgency
and peril. Man does not like to be exposed to himself,
and to be summoned to the faith and surrender
claimed by Christ. But man, whatever he likes or
dislikes, is a sinner, exposed to the eyes of the All-Pure,
and lying helpless, amidst all his dreams of pride,
beneath the wrath of God. Such is the logic of this
stern sequel to the affirmation, "I am not ashamed."
For God's wrath is revealed, from heaven, upon
all godlessness and unrighteousness of men who
in unrighteousness hold down the truth. "God's wrath
is revealed"; Revealed in "the holy Scriptures," in
every history, by every Prophet, by every Psalmist;
this perhaps is the main bearing of his thought. But
revealed also antecedently and concurrently in that
mysterious, inalienable conscience, which is more truly
part of man than his five senses. Conscience sees that
there is an eternal difference between right and wrong,
and feels, in the dark, the relation of that difference
to a law, a Lawgiver, and a doom. Conscience is
aware of a fiery light beyond the veil. Revelation
meets its wistful gaze, lifts the veil, and affirms the
fact of the wrath of God, and of His judgment coming.
Let us not shun that "revelation." It is not the
Gospel. The Gospel, as we have seen, is in itself one
pure warm light of life and love. But then it can never
be fully understood until, sooner or later, we have seen
something, and believed something, of the truth of the
anger of the Holy One. From our idea of that anger
let us utterly banish every thought of impatience, of
haste, of what is arbitrary, of what is in the faintest
degree unjust, inequitable. It is the anger of Him
who never for a moment can be untrue to Himself;
and He is Love, and is Light. But He is also, so also
says His Word, consuming Fire (Heb. x. 31, xii. 29);
and it is "a fearful thing to fall into His hands."
Nowhere and never is God not Love, as the Maker
and Preserver of His creatures. But nowhere also
and never is He not Fire, as the judicial Adversary of
evil, the Antagonist of the will that chooses sin. Is
there "nothing in God to fear"? "Yea," says His
Son (Luke xii. 5), "I say unto you, fear Him."
At the present time there is a deep and almost
ubiquitous tendency to ignore the revelation of the
wrath of God. No doubt there have been times, and
quarters, in the story of Christianity, when that revelation
was thrown into disproportionate prominence, and
men shrank from Christ (so Luther tells us he did in
his youth) as from One who was nothing if not the
inexorable Judge. They saw Him habitually as He is
seen in the vast Fresco of the Sistine Chapel, a sort
of Jupiter Tonans, casting His foes for ever from His
presence; a Being from whom, not to whom, the guilty
soul must fly. But the reaction from such thoughts, at
present upon us, has swung to an extreme indeed, until
the tendency of the pulpit, and of the exposition, is to
say practically that there is nothing in God to be afraid
of; that the words hope and love are enough to
neutralize the most awful murmurs of conscience, and
to cancel the plainest warnings of the loving Lord
Himself. Yet that Lord, as we ponder His words in
all the four Gospels, so far from speaking such "peace"
as this, seems to reserve it to Himself, rather than to
His messengers, to utter the most formidable warnings.
And the earliest literature which follows the New
Testament shows that few of His sayings had sunk
deeper into His disciples' souls than those which told
them of the two Ways and of the two Ends.
Let us go to Him, the all-benignant Friend and
Teacher, to learn the true attitude of thought towards
Him as "the Judge, strong and patient," "but who will
in no wise clear the guilty" by unsaying His precepts
and putting by His threats. He assuredly will teach
us, in this matter, no lessons of hard and narrow
denunciation, nor encourage us to sit in judgment on
the souls and minds of our brethren. But He will
teach us to take deep and awful views for ourselves of
both the pollution and also the guilt of sin. He will
constrain us to carry those views all through our personal
theology, and our personal anthropology too. He will
make it both a duty and a possibility for us, in right
measure, in right manner, tenderly, humbly, governed
by His Word, to let others know what our convictions
are about the Ways and the Ends. And thus, as well
as otherwise, He will make His Gospel to be to us no
mere luxury or ornament of thought and life, as it were
a decorous gilding upon essential worldliness and the
ways of self. He will unfold it as the soul's refuge and
its home. From Himself as Judge He will draw us
in blessed flight to Himself as Propitiation and Peace.
"From Thy wrath, and from everlasting condemnation,
Good Lord—Thyself—deliver us."
This wrath, holy, passionless, yet awfully personal,
"is revealed, from heaven." That is to say it is
revealed as coming from heaven, when the righteous
Judge "shall be revealed from heaven, taking vengeance"
(2 Thess. i. 7, 8). In that pure upper world He sits
whose wrath it is. From that stainless sky of His
presence its white lightnings will fall, "upon all godlessness
and unrighteousness of men," upon every kind
of violation of conscience, whether done against God or
man; upon "godlessness," which blasphemes, denies,
or ignores the Creator; upon "unrighteousness," which
wrests the claims whether of Creator or of creature.
Awful opposites to the "two great Commandments of
the Law"! The Law must be utterly vindicated upon
them at last. Conscience must be eternally verified at
last, against all the wretched suppressions of it that
man has ever tried.
For the men in question "hold down the truth in
unrighteousness." The rendering "hold down" is
certified by both etymology and context; the only
possible other rendering, "hold fast," is negatived by
the connexion. The thought given us is that man,
fallen from the harmony with God in which Manhood
was made, but still keeping manhood, and therefore
conscience, is never naturally ignorant of the difference
between right and wrong, never naturally, innocently,
unaware that he is accountable. On the other hand
he is never fully willing, of himself, to do all he knows
of right, all he knows he ought, all the demand of the
righteous law above him. "In unrighteousness," in a
life which at best is not wholly and cordially with the
will of God, "he holds down the truth," silences the haunting
fact that there is a claim he will not meet, a will he
ought to love, but to which he prefers his own. The
majesty of eternal right, always intimating the majesty
of an eternal Righteous One, he thrusts below his
consciousness, or into a corner of it, and keeps it there,
that he may follow his own way. More or less, it
wrestles with him for its proper place. And its even
half-understood efforts may, and often do, exercise a
deterrent force upon the energies of his self-will. But
they do not dislodge it; he would rather have his
way. With a force sometimes deliberate, sometimes
impulsive, sometimes habitual, "he holds down" the
unwelcome monitor.
Deep is the moral responsibility incurred by such repression.
For man has always, by the very state of the
case, within him and around him, evidence for a personal
righteous Power "with Whom he has to do." Because
that which is known of God is manifest in them;
for God manifested (or rather, perhaps, in our
idiom, has manifested) it to them. "That which is
known"; that is, practically, "that which is knowable,
that which may be known." There is that about the
Eternal which indeed neither is nor can be known,
with the knowledge of mental comprehension. "Who
can find out the Almighty unto perfection?" All
thoughtful Christians are in this respect agnostics that
they gaze on the bright Ocean of Deity, and know that
they do not know it in its fathomless but radiant
depths, nor can explore its expanse which has no
shore. They rest before absolute mystery with a
repose as simple (if possible more simple) as that with
which they contemplate the most familiar and intelligible
event. But this is not not to know Him. It
leaves man quite as free to be sure that He is, to be as
certain that He is Personal, and is Holy, as man is
certain of his own consciousness, and conscience.
That there is Personality behind phenomena, and
that this great Personality is righteous, St Paul here
affirms to be "manifest," disclosed, visible, "in men."
It is a fact present, however partially apprehended, in
human consciousness. And more, this consciousness
is itself part of the fact; indeed it is that part without
which all others would be as nothing. To man without
conscience—really, naturally, innocently without conscience—and
without ideas of causation, the whole
majesty of the Universe might be unfolded with a
fulness beyond all our present experience; but it
would say absolutely nothing of either Personality
or Judgment. It is by the world within that we are
able in the least degree to apprehend the world without.
But having, naturally and inalienably, the world of
personality and of conscience within us, we are beings
to whom God can manifest, and has manifested, the
knowable about Himself, in His universe.
For His things unseen, ever since the creation
of the universe, are full in (man's) view, presented
to (man's) mind by His things made—His everlasting
power and Godlikeness together—so as to leave
them inexcusable. Since the ordered world was, and
since man was, as its observer and also as its integral
part, there has been present to man's spirit—supposed
true to its own creation—adequate testimony around him,
taken along with that within him, to evince the reality
of a supreme and persistent Will, intending order, and
thus intimating Its own correspondence to conscience,
and expressing Itself in "things made" of such manifold
glory and wonder as to intimate the Maker's majesty
as well as righteousness. What is That, what is He,
to whom the splendours of the day and the night, the
wonders of the forest and the sea, bear witness? He
is not only righteous Judge but King eternal. He is
not only charged with my guidance; He has rights
illimitable over me. I am wrong altogether if I am
not in submissive harmony with Him; if I do not
surrender, and adore.
Thus it has been, according to St Paul, "ever since
the creation of the universe" (and of man in it). And
such everywhere is the Theism of Scripture. It
maintains, or rather it states as certainty, that man's
knowledge of God began with his being as man. To
see the Maker in His works is not, according to the
Holy Scriptures, only the slow and difficult issue of a
long evolution which led through far lower forms of
thought, the fetish, the nature-power, the tribal god,
the national god, to the idea of a Supreme. Scripture
presents man as made in the image of the Supreme,
and capable from the first of a true however faint
apprehension of Him. It assures us that man's lower
and distorted views of nature and of personal power
behind it are degenerations, perversions, issues of
a mysterious primeval dislocation of man from his
harmony with God. The believer in the holy
Scriptures, in the sense in which our Lord and the
Apostles believed in them, will receive this view of
the primeval history of Theism as a true report of
God's account of it. Remembering that it concerns
an otherwise unknown moment of human spiritual
history, he will not be disturbed by alleged evidence
against it from lower down the stream. Meanwhile
he will note the fact that among the foremost students
of Nature in our time there are those who affirm
the rightness of such an attitude. It is not lightly
that the Duke of Argyll writes words like these:—
"I doubt (to say the truth, I disbelieve) that we
shall ever come to know by science anything more
than we now know about the origin of man. I
believe we shall always have to rest on that magnificent
and sublime outline which has been given us
by the great Prophet of the Jews."
Geology and the Deluge, p. 46 (Glasgow, 1885).
So man, being what he is and seeing what he sees, is
"without excuse": Because, knowing God, they did not
glorify Him as God, nor thank Him, but proved
futile in their ways of thinking, and their
unintelligent heart was darkened. Asserting themselves
for wise they turned fools, and transmuted
the glory of the immortal God in a semblance
of the likeness of mortal man, and of things winged,
quadruped, and reptile. Man, placed by God in His
universe, and himself made in God's image, naturally
and inevitably "knew God." Not necessarily in
that inner sense of spiritual harmony and union
which is (John xvii. 3) the life eternal; but in the
sense of a perception of His being and His character
adequate, at its faintest, to make a moral claim.
But somehow—a somehow which has to do with a
revolt of man's will from God to self—that claim was,
and is, disliked. Out of that dislike has sprung, in
man's spiritual history, a reserve towards God, a
tendency to question His purpose, His character,
His existence; or otherwise, to degrade the conception
of Personality behind phenomena into forms
from which the multifold monster of idolatry has
sprung, as if phenomena were due to personalities no
better and no greater than could be imaged by man
or by beast, things of limit and of passion; at their
greatest terrible, but not holy; not ultimate; not One.
Man has spent on these unworthy "ways of thinking"
a great deal of weak and dull reasoning and imbecile
imagination, but also some of the rarest and most
splendid of the riches of his mind, made in the image
of God. But all this thinking, because conditioned by
a wrong attitude of his being as a whole, has had
"futile" issues, and has been in the truest sense
"unintelligent," failing to see inferences aright and as
a whole. It has been a struggle "in the dark"; yea, a
descent from the light into moral and mental "folly."
Was it not so, is not so still? If man is indeed
made in the image of the living Creator, a moral
personality, and placed in the midst of "the myriad
world, His shadow," then whatever process of thought
leads man away from Him has somewhere in it a fallacy
unspeakable, and inexcusable. It must mean that
something in him which should be awake is dormant;
or, yet worse, that something in him which should be
in faultless tune, as the Creator tempered it, is all
unstrung; something that should be nobly free to love
and to adore is being repressed, "held down." Then
only does man fully think aright when he is aright.
Then only is he aright when he, made by and for the
Eternal Holy One, rests willingly in Him, and lives for
Him. "The fear of the Lord is," in the strictest fact,
"the beginning of wisdom"; for it is that attitude of
man without which the creature cannot "answer the
idea" of the Creator, and therefore cannot truly follow
out the law of its own being.
"Let him that glorieth, glory in this, that he understandeth
and knoweth Him" (Jer. ix. 24) who necessarily
and eternally transcends our cognition and comprehension,
yet can be known, can be touched, clasped,
adored, as personal, eternal, almighty, holy Love.
CHAPTER V
MAN GIVEN UP TO HIS OWN WAY: THE HEATHEN
Romans i. 24-32
Wherefore God gave them up, in the desires of
their hearts, to uncleanness, so as to dishonour
their bodies among themselves.
There is a dark sequence, in the logic of facts, between
unworthy thoughts of God and the development of the
basest forms of human wrong. "The fool hath said in
his heart, There is no God:—they are corrupt, and have
done abominable works" (Psal. xiv. 1). And the folly
which does not indeed deny God but degrades His Idea,
always gives its sure contribution to such corruption.
It is so in the nature of the case. The individual
atheist, or polytheist, may conceivably be a virtuous
person, on the human standard; but if he is so it is
not because of his creed. Let his creed become a real
formative power in human society, and it will tend
inevitably to moral disease and death. Is man indeed
a moral personality, made in the image of a holy and
almighty Maker? Then the vital air of his moral life
must be fidelity, correspondence, to his God. Let man
think of Him as less than All, and he will think of
himself less worthily; not less proudly perhaps, but less
worthily, because not in his true and wonderful relation
to the Eternal Good. Wrong in himself will tend surely
to seem less awful, and right less necessary and great.
And nothing, literally nothing, from any region higher
than himself—himself already lowered in his own
thought from his true idea—can ever come in to supply
the blank where God should be, but is not. Man may
worship himself, or may despise himself, when he has
ceased to "glorify God and thank Him"; but he
cannot for one hour be what he was made to be, the
son of God in the universe of God. To know God
indeed is to be secured from self-worship, and to be
taught self-reverence; and it is the only way to those
two secrets in their pure fulness.
"God gave them up." So the Scripture says elsewhere.
"So I gave them up unto their own hearts'
lusts" (Psal. lxxxi. 12); "God turned, and gave them
up to worship the host of heaven" (Acts vii. 42);
"God gave them up to passions of degradation"; "God
gave them over to an abandoned mind"; (below,
verses 26, 28). It is a dire thought; but the inmost
conscience, once awake, affirms the righteousness of
the thing. From one point of view it is just the
working out of a natural process, in which sin is at once
exposed and punished by its proper results, without
the slightest injection, so to speak, of any force beyond
its own terrible gravitation towards the sinner's misery.
But from another point it is the personally allotted,
and personally inflicted, retribution of Him who hates
iniquity with the antagonism of infinite Personality.
He has so constituted natural process that wrong gravitates
to wretchedness; and He is in that process, and
above it, always and for ever.
So He "gave them up, in their desires of their hearts";
He left them there where they had placed themselves,
"in" the fatal region of self-will, self-indulgence; "unto
uncleanness" described now with terrible explicitness
in its full outcome, "to dishonour their bodies" the intended
temples of the Creator's presence, "among themselves,"
or "in themselves"; for the possible dishonour
might be done either in a foul solitude, or in a fouler
society and mutuality:
Seeing that they perverted the
truth of God, the eternal fact of His glory and
claim, in their (τῷ) lie, so that it was travestied,
misrepresented, lost, "in" the falsehood of polytheism
and idols; and worshipped and served the creature rather
than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen. He casts
this strong Doxology into the thick air of false worship
and foul life, as if to clear it with its holy reverberation.
For he is writing no mere discussion, no lecture on the
genesis and evolution of paganism. It is the story of a
vast rebellion, told by one who, once himself a rebel, is
now altogether and for ever the absolute vassal of the
King whom he has "seen in His beauty," and whom it
is his joy to bless, and to claim blessing for Him from
His whole world for ever.
As if animated by the word of benediction, he
returns to denounce "the abominable thing which God
hateth" with still more terrible explicitness.
For this reason, because of their preference of
the worse to the infinite Good, God gave them up to
passions of degradation; He handed them over, self-bound,
to the helpless slavery of lust; to "passions,"
eloquent word, which indicates how the man who will
have his own way is all the while a "sufferer," though
by his own fault; the victim of a mastery which he
has conjured from the deep of sin.
Shall we shun to read, to render, the words which
follow? We will not comment and expound. May
the presence of God in our hearts, hearts otherwise as
vulnerable as those of the old pagan sinners, sweep from
the springs of thought and will all horrible curiosity. But
if it does so it will leave us the more able, in humility,
in tears, in fear, to hear the facts of this stern indictment.
It will bid us listen as those who are not sitting
in judgment on paganism, but standing beside the
accused and sentenced, to confess that we too share
the fall, and stand, if we stand, by grace alone. Aye,
and we shall remember that if an Apostle thus tore
the rags from the spots of the Black Death of ancient
morals, he would have been even less merciful, if
possible, over the like symptoms lurking still in modern
Christendom, and found sometimes upon its surface.
Terrible, indeed, is the prosaic coolness with which
vices now called unnameable are named and narrated in
classical literature; and we ask in vain for one of even
the noblest of the pagan moralists who has spoken of
such sins with anything like adequate horror. Such
speech, and such silence, has been almost impossible
since the Gospel was felt in civilization. "Paganism,"
says Dr F. W. Farrar, in a powerful passage,
Darkness and Dawn, p. 112.
with this paragraph of Romans in his view, "is protected from
complete exposure by the enormity of its own vices.
To shew the divine reformation wrought by Christianity
it must suffice that once for all the Apostle of the
Gentiles seized heathenism by the hair, and branded
indelibly on her forehead the stigma of her shame." Yet
the vices of the old time are not altogether an antiquarian's
wonder. Now as truly as then man is awfully
accessible to the worst solicitations the moment he trusts
himself away from God. And this needs indeed to be
remembered in a stage of thought and of society whose
cynicism, and whose materialism, show gloomy signs of
likeness to those last days of the old degenerate world
in which St Paul looked round him, and spoke out the
things he saw.
For their females perverted the natural use to the
unnatural. So too the males, leaving the natural use
of the female, burst out aflame in their craving
towards one another, males in males working out
their unseemliness—and duly getting (ἀπολαμβάνοντες)
in themselves that recompense of their error which was
owed them.
And as they did not approve of keeping God in their moral knowledge,
So we venture here to render ἐπίγνωσις,
a knowledge deeper than that of merely logical conclusion.
God gave them up to an abandoned mind, "a reprobate, God-rejected,
mind"; meeting their disapprobation with His just and
fatal reprobation (δοκιμάζειν, ἀδόκιμος). That mind,
taking the false premisses of the Tempter, and reasoning
from them to establish the autocracy of self, led with terrible
certainty and success through evil thinking to evil
doing; to do the deeds which are not becoming, to expose
the being made for God, in a naked and foul unseemliness,
to its friends and its foes;
filled full of all unrighteousness,
wickedness, viciousness, greed;
brimming with envy, murder, guile, ill-nature;
whisperers, defamers, repulsive to God, outragers,
prideful, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient
to parents,senseless, faithless, loveless, truceless, pitiless;
people who (οἵτινες) morally aware of
(ἐπυγνόντες) God's ordinance, that they who
practise such things are worthy of death, not only do them,
but assent and consent with those who practise them.
Here is a terrible accusation of human life, and of the
human heart; the more terrible because it is plainly
meant to be, in a certain sense, inclusive, universal.
We are not indeed compelled to think that the Apostle
charges every human being with sins against nature,
as if the whole earth were actually one vast City of the
Plain. We need not take him to mean that every
descendant of Adam is actually an undutiful child, or
actually untrustworthy in a compact, or even actually
a boaster, an ἀλαζὼν, a pretentious claimant of praise
or credit which he knows he does not deserve. We
may be sure that on the whole, in this lurid passage,
charged less with condemnation than with "lamentation,
and mourning, and woe," he is thinking mainly of the
then state of heathen society in its worst developments.
Yet we shall see, as the Epistle goes on, that all the
while he is thinking not only of the sins of some men,
but of the sin of man. He describes with this tremendous
particularity the variegated symptoms of one
disease—the corruption of man's heart; a disease
everywhere present, everywhere deadly; limited in its
manifestations by many circumstances and conditions,
outward or within the man, but in itself quite unlimited
in its dreadful possibilities. What man is, as fallen,
corrupted, gone from God, is shewn, in the teaching
of St Paul, by what bad men are.
Do we rebel against the inference? Quite possibly
we do. Almost for certain, at one time or another, we
have done so. We look round us on one estimable
life and another, which we cannot reasonably think of
as regenerate, if we take the strict Scriptural tests of
regeneration into account, yet which asks and wins our
respect, our confidence, it may be even our admiration;
and we say, openly or tacitly, consciously or unconsciously,
that that life stands clear outside this first
chapter of Romans. Well, be it so in our thoughts;
and let nothing, no nothing, make us otherwise than
ready to recognize and honour right doing wherever we
see it, alike in the saints of God and in those who deny
His very Being. But just now let us withdraw from
all such looks outward, and calmly and in a silent hour
look in. Do we, do you, do I, stand outside this
chapter? Are we definitely prepared to say that the
heart which we carry in our breast, whatever our
friend's heart may be, is such that under no change
of circumstances could it, being what it is, conceivably
develop the forms of evil branded in this passage?
Ah, who, that knows himself, does not know that there
lies in him indefinitely more than he can know of
possible evil? "Who can understand his errors?"
Who has so encountered temptation in all its typical
forms that he can say, with even approximate truth,
that he knows his own strength, and his own weakness,
exactly as they are?
It was not for nothing that the question was discussed
of old, whether there was any man who would
always be virtuous if he were given the ring of Gyges,
and the power to be invisible to all eyes. Nor was
it lightly, or as a piece of pious rhetoric, that the
saintliest of the chiefs of our Reformation, seeing a
murderer carried off to die, exclaimed that there went
John Bradford but for the grace of God. It is just
when a man is nearest God for himself that he sees
what, but for God, he would be; what, taken apart
from God, he is, potentially if not in act. And it is in
just such a mood that, reading this paragraph of the
great Epistle, he will smite upon his breast, and say,
"God, be merciful to me the sinner" (Luke xviii. 13).
So doing he will be meeting the very purpose of the
Writer of this passage. St Paul is full of the message of
peace, holiness, and the Spirit. He is intent and eager to
bring his reader into sight and possession of the fulness
of the eternal mercy, revealed and secured in the Lord
Jesus Christ, our Sacrifice and Life. But for this very
purpose he labours first to expose man to himself; to
awaken him to the fact that he is before everything
else a sinner; to reverse the Tempter's spell, and to
let him see the fact of his guilt with open eyes.
"The Gospel," some one has said, "can never be
proved except to a bad conscience." If "bad" means
"awakened," the saying is profoundly true. With a
conscience sound asleep we may discuss Christianity,
whether to condemn it, or to applaud. We may see in
it an elevating programme for the race. We may affirm,
a thousand times, that from the creed that God became
flesh there result boundless possibilities for Humanity.
But the Gospel, "the power of God unto salvation,"
will hardly be seen in its own prevailing self-evidence,
as it is presented in this wonderful Epistle, till the
student is first and with all else a penitent. The man
must know for himself something of sin as condemnable
guilt, and something of self as a thing in helpless yet
responsible bondage, before he can so see Christ given
for us, and risen for us, and seated at the right hand of
God for us, as to say, "There is now no condemnation;
Who shall separate us from the love of God? I know
whom I have believed."
To the full sight of Christ there needs a true sight of
self, that is to say, of sin.
CHAPTER VI
HUMAN GUILT UNIVERSAL: HE APPROACHES THE
CONSCIENCE OF THE JEW
Romans ii. 1-16
WE have appealed, for affirmation of St Paul's
tremendous exposure of human sin, to a
solemn and deliberate self-scrutiny, asking the man
who doubts the justice of the picture to give up for
the present any instinctive wish to vindicate other
men, while he thinks a little while solely of himself.
But another and opposite class of mistake has to be
reckoned with, and precluded; the tendency of man
to a facile condemnation of others, in favour of himself;
"God, I thank Thee that I am not as other men are"
(Luke xviii. 11). It is now, as it was of old, only too
possible to read, or to hear, the most searching and also
the most sweeping condemnation of human sin, and to
feel a sort of fallacious moral sympathy with the sentence,
a phantom as it were of righteous indignation
against the wrong and the doers of it, and yet wholly to
mistake the matter by thinking that the hearer is righteous
though the world is wicked. The man listens as if he
were allowed a seat beside the Judge's chair, as if he
were an esteemed assessor of the Court, and could listen
with a grave yet untroubled approbation to the discourse
preliminary to the sentence. Ah, he is an
assessor of the accused; he is an accomplice of his
fallen fellows; he is a poor guilty man himself. Let
him awake to himself, and to his sin, in time.
With such a reader or hearer in view St Paul
proceeds. We need not suppose that he writes as if
such states of mind were to be expected in the Roman
mission; though it was quite possible that this might
be the attitude of some who bore the Christian name
at Rome. More probably he speaks as it were in the
presence of the Christians to persons whom at any
moment any of them might meet, and particularly to
that large element in religious life at Rome, the unconverted
Jews. True, they would not read the
Epistle; but he could arm those who would read it
against their cavils and refusals, and show them how
to reach the conscience even of the Pharisee of the
Dispersion. He could show them how to seek his
soul, by shaking him from his dream of sympathy
with the Judge who all the while was about to
sentence him.
It is plain that throughout the passage now before us
the Apostle has the Jew in view. He does not name
him for a long while. He says many things which are
as much for the Gentile sinner as for him. He dwells
upon the universality of guilt as indicated by the universality
of conscience; a passage of awful import for
every human soul, quite apart from its place in the
argument here. But all the while he keeps in view the
case of the self-constituted judge of other men, the man
who affects to be essentially better than they, to be, at
least by comparison with them, good friends with the
law of God. And the undertone of the whole passage
is a warning to this man that his brighter light will
prove his greater ruin if he does not use it; nay, that
he has not used it, and that so it is his ruin already,
the ruin of his claim to judge, to stand exempt, to have
nothing to do with the criminal crowd at the bar.
All this points straight at the Jewish conscience,
though the arrow is levelled from a covert. If that
conscience might but be reached! He longs to reach
it, first for the unbeliever's own sake, that he might be
led through the narrow pass of self-condemnation into
the glorious freedom of faith and love. But also it was
of first importance that the spiritual pride of the Jews
should be conquered, or at least exposed, for the
sake of the mission-converts already won. The first
Christians, newly brought from paganism, must have
regarded Jewish opinion with great attention and
deference. Not only were their apostolic teachers
Jews, and the Scriptures of the Prophets, to which
those teachers always pointed, Jewish; but the weary
Roman world of late years had been disposed to own
with more and more distinctness that if there were such
a thing as a true voice from heaven to man it was to
be heard among that unattractive yet impressive race
which was seen everywhere, and yet refused to be
"reckoned among the nations." The Gospels and the
Acts show us instances enough of educated Romans
drawn towards Israel and the covenant; and abundant
parallels are given us by the secular historians and
satirists. The Jews, in the words of Professor
Gwatkin, were "the recognized non-conformists" of the
Roman world. At this very time the Emperor was
the enamoured slave of a brilliant woman who was
known to be proselyted to the Jewish creed. It was
no slight trial to converts in their spiritual infancy to
meet everywhere the question why the sages of Jerusalem
had slain this Jewish Prophet, Jesus, and why
everywhere the synagogues denounced His name and
His disciples. The true answer would be better understood
if the bigot himself could be brought to say,
"God, be merciful to me the sinner."
Wherefore you are without excuse, O man,
every man who judges; when you judge the
other party you pass judgment on yourself; for you
practise the same things, you who judge. For
Reading γὰρ.
we know—this is a granted point between us—that
God's judgment is truth-wise, is a reality,
in awful earnest, upon those who practise such things.
Now is this your calculation, O man, you who
judge those who practise such things, and do
them yourself, that you will escape God's judgment?
Do you surmise that some by-way of privilege and
indulgence will be kept open for you? Or do you
despise the wealth of His kindness, and of His
forbearance and longsuffering—despise it, by
mistaking it for mere indulgence, or indifference—knowing
not that God's kind ways (τὸ χρηστὸν τοῦ Θεοῦ) lead
you to repentance? No, true to (κατὰ) your
own hardness, your own unrepentant heart, you
are hoarding for yourself a wrath which will be felt in
the day of wrath, the day of disclosure of the righteous
judgment of God, who will requite each individual
according to his works. What will be that
requital, and its law? To those who, on the line of
(κατὰ) perseverance in good work, seek, as their
point of gravitation, glory, and honour, and
immortality, He will requite life eternal. But
for those who side with (τοῖς ἐκ)
strife, who take
part with man, with self, with sin, against the claims
and grace of God, and, while they disobey the truth
of conscience, obey unrighteousness, yielding the will to
wrong, there shall be wrath and fierce anger, trouble
and bewilderment, inflicted on every soul of man,
man working out what is evil, alike Jew—Jew
first—and Greek. But glory, and honour, and
peace shall be for every one who works what is
good, alike for Jew—Jew first—and Greek.
For there is no favouritism in God's court.
Here he actually touches the Jew. He has named
him twice, and in both places recognizes that primacy
which in the history of Redemption is really his. It is
the primacy of the race chosen to be the organ of
revelation and the birth-place of Incarnate God. It
was given sovereignty, "not according to the works,"
or to the numbers, of the nation, but according to
unknown conditions in the mind of God. It carried
with it genuine and splendid advantages. It even
gave the individual righteous Jew (so surely the
language of ver. 10 implies) a certain special welcome
to his Master's "Well done, good and faithful"; not to
the disadvantage, in the least degree, of the individual
righteous "Greek," but just such as may be illustrated
in a circle of ardent and impartial friendship, where, in
one instance or another, kinship added to friendship
makes attachment not more intimate but more interesting.
Yes, the Jew has indeed his priority, his
primacy, limited and qualified in many directions, but
real and permanent in its place; this Epistle (see
ch. xi.) is the great Charter of it in the Christian
Scriptures. But whatever the place of it is, it has no
place whatever in the question of the sinfulness of sin,
unless indeed to make guilt deeper where light has
been greater. The Jew has a great historical position
in the plan of God. He has been accorded as it were
an official nearness to God in the working out of the
world's redemption. But he is not one whit the less for
this a poor sinner, fallen and guilty. He is not one
moment for this to excuse, but all the more to condemn,
himself. He is the last person in the world to judge
others. Wherever God has placed him in history, he
is to place himself, in repentance and faith, least and
lowest at the foot of Messiah's Cross.
What was and is true of the chosen Nation is now
and for ever true, by a deep moral parity, of all
communities and of all persons who are in any sense
privileged, advantaged by circumstance. It is true,
solemnly and formidably true, of the Christian Church,
and of the Christian family, and of the Christian man.
Later in this second chapter we shall be led to some reflections
on Church privilege. Let us reflect here, if but
in passing, on the fact that privilege of other kinds must
stand utterly aside when it is a question of man's sin.
Have we no temptation to forget this? Probably we are
not of the mind of the Frenchman of the old régime who
thought that "the Almighty would hesitate before He
condemned for ever a man of a marquis' condition."
But are we quite clear on the point that the Eternal
Judge will admit no influences from other sides? The
member of so excellent, so useful, a family, with many
traces of the family character about him! The relative
of saints, the companion of the good! A mind so
full of practical energy, of literary grace and skill; so
capable of deep and subtle thought, of generous words,
and even deeds; so charming, so entertaining, so
informing; the man of culture, the man of genius;—shall
none of these things weigh in the balance, and
mingle some benignant favouritism with the question,
Has he done the will of God? Nay, "there is no
favouritism in Gods court!" No one is acquitted there
for his reputable connexions, or for his possession of
personal "talents" (awful word in the light of its first
use!), given him only that he might the better "occupy"
for his Lord. These things have nothing to do with
that dread thing, the Law, which has everything to do
with the accusation and the award.
Before we pass to another section of the passage, let
us not forget the grave fact that here, in these opening
pages of this great Treatise on gratuitous Salvation, this
Epistle which is about to unfold to us the divine paradox of
the Justification of the Ungodly, we find this overwhelming
emphasis laid upon "perseverance in good work."
True, we are not to allow even it to confuse the grand
simplicity of the Gospel, which is to be soon explained.
We are not to let ourselves think, for example, that
ver. 7 depicts a man deliberately aiming through a
life of merit at a quid pro quo at length in heaven; so
much glory, honour, and immortality for so living as it
would be sin not to live. St Paul does not write to
contradict the Parable of the Unprofitable Servant (Luke
xvii.), any more than to negative beforehand his own
reasoning in the fourth chapter below. The case he contemplates
is one only to be realized where man has cast
himself, without one plea of merit, at the feet of mercy,
and then rises up to a walk and work of willing loyalty,
covetous of the "Well done, good and faithful," at its
close, not because he is ambitious for himself, but
because he is devoted to his God, and to His will.
And St Paul knows, and in due time will tell us, that
for the loyalty that serves, as well as for the repentance
that first submits, the man has to thank mercy, and
mercy only, first, midst, and last: "It is not of him
that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that
pitieth" (ix. 16). But then, none the less, he does lay
this emphasis, this indescribable stress, upon the "perseverance
in good work," as the actual march of the
pilgrim who travels heavenward. True to the genius of
Scripture, that is to the mind of its Inspirer in His
utterances to man, he isolates a main truth for the time,
and leaves us alone with it. Justification will come in
order. But, that it may do precisely this, that it may
come in order and not out of it, he bids us first consider
right, wrong, judgment, and retribution, as if there
were nothing else in the moral universe. He leads us
to the fact of the permanence of the results of the soul's
actions. He warns us that God is eternally in earnest
when He promises and when He threatens; that He
will see to it that time leaves its retributive impress for
ever on eternity.
The whole passage, read by a soul awake to itself,
and to the holiness of the Judge of men, will contribute
from its every sentence something to our conviction,
our repentance, our dread of self, our persuasion that
somehow from the judgment we must fly to the Judge.
But this is not to be unfolded yet.
It was, I believe, a precept of John Wesley's to his
evangelists, in unfolding their message, to speak first
in general of the love of God to man; then, with all
possible energy, and so as to search conscience to its
depths, to preach the law of holiness; and then, and
not till then, to uplift the glories of the Gospel of
pardon, and of life. Intentionally or not, his directions
follow the lines of the Epistle to the Romans.
But the Apostle has by no means done with the Jew,
and his hopes of heaven by pedigree and by creed.
He recurs to the impartiality of "that day," the coming
final crisis of human history, ever present to his soul.
He dwells now almost wholly on the impartiality of its
severity, still bearing on the Pharisee's dream that
somehow the Law will be his friend, for Abraham's and
Moses' sake.
For all who sinned (or, in English idiom, all
who have sinned, all who shall have sinned)
not law-wise, even so, not law-wise, shall perish, shall
lose the soul; and all who in (or let us paraphrase,
under) law have sinned, by law shall be judged, that is
to say, practically, condemned, found guilty. For not
law's hearers are just in God's court; nay, law's
doers shall be justified; for "law" is never for a
moment satisfied with applause, with approbation; it
demands always and inexorably obedience. For whenever
(the) Nations, Nations not having law, by
nature—as distinct from express precept—do the
things of the Law, when they act on the principles of it,
observing in any measure the eternal difference of right
and wrong, these men, though not having law, are to
themselves law; shewing as they do
(οἵτινες)—to
one another, in moral intercourse—the work of
the Law, that which is, as a fact, its result where it is
heard, a sense of the dread claims of right, written in
their hearts, present to the intuitions of their nature;
while their conscience, their sense of violated right,
bears concurrent witness, each conscience "concurring"
with all; and while, between each other, in the interchanges
of thought and discourse, their reasonings
accuse, or it may be defend, their actions; now in
conversation, now in treatise or philosophic dialogue.
And all this makes one vast phenomenon, pregnant
with lessons of accountability, and ominous of a
judgment coming; in the day when God shall judge
the secret things of men, even the secrets hid beneath
the solemn robe of the formalist, according to
my Gospel,
Here, perhaps, for once, the word εὐαγγέλιον
is used in an extended and "improper" sense, to denote the whole message connected
with the Glad Tidings, and so now the warning of judgment to come,
which gives to the Glad Tidings its sacred urgency.
by means of Jesus Christ, to whom
the Father "hath committed all judgment, as He is the
Son of Man" (John v. 27). So he closes another
solemn cadence with the blessed Name. It has its
special weight and fitness here; it was the name
trampled by the Pharisee, yet the name of Him who
was to judge him in the great day.
The main import of the paragraph is plain. It is, to
enforce the fact of the accountability of the Jew and the
Greek alike, from the point of view of Law. The Jew,
who is primarily in the Apostle's thought, is reminded
that his possession of the Law, that is to say of the
one specially revealed code not only of ritual but far
more of morals
Manifestly "the Law" in this passage means not the ceremonial
law of Israel, but the revealed moral law given to Israel, above all in
the Decalogue. This appears from the language of ver. 15, which
would be meaningless if the reference were to special ordinances of
worship. The Gentiles could not "shew the work of" that kind of
"law written in their hearts"; what they shewed was, as we have
explained, a "work" related to the revealed claims of God and man
on the will and life.
is no recommendatory privilege, but a
sacred responsibility. The Gentile meanwhile is shewn,
in passing but with gravest purpose, to be by no means
exempted from accountability simply for his lack of a
revealed preceptive code. He possesses, as man, that
moral consciousness without which the revealed code
itself would be futile, for it would correspond to nothing.
Made in the image of God, he has the mysterious sense
which sees, feels, handles moral obligation. He is
aware of the fact of duty. Not living up to what he
is thus aware of, he is guilty.
Implicitly, all through the passage, human failure is
taught side by side with human responsibility. Such a
clause as that of ver. 14, "when they do by nature the
things of the law," is certainly not to be pressed, in such
a context as this, to be an assertion that pagan morality
ever actually satisfies the holy tests of the eternal
Judge. Read in the whole connexion, it only asserts
that the pagan acts as a moral being; that he knows
what it is to obey, and to resist, the sense of duty.
This is not to say, what we shall soon hear St Paul so
solemnly deny, that there exists anywhere a man whose
correspondence of life to moral law is such that his
"mouth" needs not to "be stopped," and that he is
not to take his place as one of a "world guilty before
God."
Stern, solemn, merciful argument! Now from this
side, now from that, it approaches the conscience of
man, made for God and fallen from God. It strips the
veil from his gross iniquities; it lets in the sun of
holiness upon his iniquities of the more religious type;
it speaks in his dull ears the words judgment, day,
tribulation, wrath, bewilderment, perishing. But it
does all this that man, convicted, may ask in earnest
what he shall do with conscience and his Judge, and
may discover with joy that his Judge Himself has "found
a ransom," and stands Himself in act to set him free.
CHAPTER VII
JEWISH RESPONSIBILITY AND GUILT
Romans ii. 17-29
The Jew, first, and also the Greek; this has been
the burthen of the Apostle's thought thus far
upon the whole. He has had the Jew for some while
in his chief thought, but he has recurred again and again
in passing to the Gentile. Now he faces the Pharisee
explicitly and on open ground, before he passes from
this long exposure of human sin to the revelation of
the glorious Remedy.
But if
There is no practical doubt that εἰ δὲ not
ἴde ("Behold") is the
right reading here.
you, you emphatically, the reader
or hearer now in view, you who perhaps have
excused yourself from considering your own case by
this last mention of the responsibility of the non-Jewish
world; if you bear the name of Jew, whether or no you
possess the corresponding spiritual reality; and repose
yourself upon the Law, as if the possession of that
awful revelation of duty was your protection, not your
sentence; and glory in God, as if He were your private
property, the decoration of your national position,
whereas the knowledge of Him is given you
in trust for the world; and know the Will, His
Will, the Will supreme; and put the touchstone to things
which differ, like a casuist skilled in moral problems;
schooled out of the Law, under continuous training
(so the Greek present participle bids us explain) by
principles and precepts which the Law supplies;—(if)
you are sure that you, yourself, whoever else, are
a leader of blind men, a light of those who are
in the dark, an educator of the thoughtless, a
teacher of beginners, possessing, in the Law,
the outline,
Μόρφωσις: we need not understand by
this word a reference to mere formalism. Μορφή on the contrary regularly means shape
expressive of underlying substance. And μόρφωσις means not shape but shaping.
He means that the Pharisee really has, in the Law, God's formed
and formative model of knowledge and reality. Still, 2 Tim.
iii. 5 justifies our also seeing here a side suggestion of the
possibility of dissociating even the divine model from the
corresponding "power."
the system, of real knowledge and truth,
Τῦς γνώσεως, τῦς
ἀληθείας:—the adjective "real" in our rendering
represents the Greek definite article, though with a slight
exaggeration.
(the outline indeed, but not the power and life related
to it):—if this is your estimate of your position and
capacities, I turn it upon yourself. Think, and answer—You
therefore, your neighbour's teacher, do you
not teach yourself? You, who proclaim, Thou
shalt not steal, do you steal? You, who say,
Thou shalt not commit adultery, do you commit
it? You, who abominate the idols, affecting to loathe
their very neighbourhood, do you plunder temples,
entering the polluted precincts readily enough for
purposes at least equally polluting? You who
glory in the Law, as the palladium of your
race, do you, by your violation of the Law, disgrace
yourΤὸν Θεόν. We represent the definite
article here by "your," and just below by "our"; not
without hesitation, as it somewhat exaggerates the definition.
God? "For the name of our God
is, because of you, railed at among the heathen," as it
stands written, in Ezekiel's message (xxxvi. 20) to the
ungodly Israel of the ancient Dispersion—a message
true of the Dispersion of the later day.
We need not overstrain the emphasis of the Apostle's
stern invective. Not every non-Christian Jew of the
first century, certainly, was an adulterer, a thief, a
plunderer. When a few years later (Acts xxviii. 17)
St Paul gathered round him the Jews of Rome, and
spent a long day in discussing the prophecies with
them, he appealed to them with a noble frankness
which in some sense evidently expected a response in
kind. But it is certain that the Jews of the Roman
Dispersion bore a poor general character for truth and
honour. And anywise St Paul knew well that there
is a deeply natural connexion between unhallowed religious
bigotry and that innermost failure of self-control
which leaves man only too open to the worst temptations.
Whatever feeds gross personal pride promotes a swift
and deadly decay of moral fibre. Did this man pride
himself on Abraham's blood, and his own Rabbinic lore
and skill, and scorn both the Gentile "sinner" and the
'am-hââretz, "the people of the land," the rank and file
of his own race? Then he was the very man to be led
helpless by the Tempter. As a fact, there are maxims
of the later Rabbinism, which represent beyond reasonable
doubt the spirit if not the letter of the worst
watchwords of "the circumcision" of St Paul's time:
"Circumcision is equivalent to all the commandments
of the Law"; "To live in Palestine is equal to the
Commandments"; "He that hath his abode in Palestine
is sure of life eternal."See A. M'Caul's Old Paths (נתיבות עולם), p. 230, etc.
The man who could even for
an hour entertain such a creed was ready (however
deep below his consciousness the readiness lay) for
anything—under fitting circumstances of temptation.
So it is now, very far beyond the limits of the
Jewish Dispersion of our time. Now as then, and
for the Christian "outwardly" as for the Jew
"outwardly," there is no surer path to spiritual
degeneracy than spiritual pride. What are the watchwords
which have succeeded to those of the Rabbinists
who encountered St Paul? Are they words, or
thoughts, of self-applause because of the historic orthodoxy
of your creed? Because of the Scriptural
purity of your theory of salvation? Because of the
illustrious annals of your national Church, older than
the nation which it has so largely welded and
developed? Because of the patient courage, under
contempt and exclusion, of the community which some
call your denomination, your sect, but which is to you
indeed your Church? Because of your loyalty to order?
Because of your loyalty to liberty? Take heed. The
best, corrupted, becomes inevitably the worst. In
religion, there is only one altogether safe "glorying."
It is when the man can say from the soul, with
open eyes, and therefore with a deeply humbled heart,
"God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of
our Lord Jesus Christ, whereby the world is crucified
unto me, and I unto the world" (Gal. vi. 14). All
other "glorying is not good." Be thankful for every
genuine privilege. But for Christ's sake, and for your
own soul's sake, do not, even in the inmost secret of
your soul, "value yourself" upon them. It is disease,
it is disaster, to do so.
And shall not we of the Christian Dispersion take
home also what Ezekiel and St Paul say about the
blasphemies, the miserable railings at our God, caused
by the sins of those who bear His Name? Who does
not know that, in every region of heathendom, the
missionary's plea for Christ is always best listened to
where the pagan, or the Mussulman, has not before his
eyes the Christianity of "treaty-ports," and other places
where European life is to be seen lived without restraint?
The stumbling-block may be the drunken sailor, or the
unchaste merchant, or civilian, or soldier, or traveller.
Or it may be just the man who, belonging to a race
reputed Christian, merely ignores the Christian's holy
Book, and Day, and House, and avoids all semblance
of fellowship with his countrymen who have come to
live beside him that they may preach Christ where He
is not known. Or it may be the government, reputed
Christian, which, amidst all its noble benefits to the
vast races it holds in sway, allows them to know, to
think, at least to suspect, that there are cases where it
cares more for revenue than for righteousness. In all
these cases the Christian Dispersion gives occasion for
railing at the Christian's God: and the reckoning will
be a grave matter "in that Day."
But shall the Christians of the Christendom at home
stand exempt from the charge? Ah let us who name the
blessed Name with even the least emphasis of faith and
loyalty, dwelling amongst the masses who only passively,
so to speak, are Christian, who "profess nothing," though
they are, or are supposed to be, baptized—let us, amidst
"the world" which understands not a little of what we
ought to be, and watches us so keenly, and so legitimately—let
us take home this message, sent first to the old inconsistent
Israel. Do we, professing godliness, shew the
mind of Christ in our secular intercourse? Do we, on
the whole, give the average "world" cause to expect that
"a Christian," as such, is a man to trust in business,
in friendship? Is the conviction quietly forced upon
them that a Christian's temper, and tongue, are not as
other men's? That the Christian minister habitually
lives high above self-seeking? That the Christian
tradesman faithfully remembers his customers' just
interests, and is true in all his dealings? That the
Christian servant, and the Christian master, are alike
exceptionally mindful of each other's rights, and facile
about their own? That the Christian's time, and his
money, are to a remarkable degree applied to the good
of others, for Christ's sake? This is what the members
of the Christian Society, in the inner sense of the word
Christian, are expected to be in what we all understand
by "the world." If they are so, God be thanked. If
they are not so—who shall weigh the guilt? Who
shall adequately estimate the dishonour so done to the
blessed Name? And "the Day" is coming.
But he has more to say about the position of the
Jew. He would not even seem to forget the greatness
of the God-given privilege of Israel; and he will use
that privilege once more as a cry to conscience.
For circumcision indeed profits you, if you carry
law into practice; in that case circumcision is for
you God's seal upon God's own promises to the true sons
of Abraham's blood and faith. Are you indeed a practiser
of the holy Code whose summary and essence is love to
God and love to man? Can you look your Lord in the
face and say—not, "I have satisfied all Thy demands;
pay me that Thou owest," but, "Thou knowest that I
love Thee, and therefore oh how I love Thy law"? Then
you are indeed a child of the covenant, through His
grace; and the seal of the covenant speaks to you the
certainties of its blessing. But if you are a transgressor
of law, your circumcision is turned uncircumcision; the
divine seal is to you nothing, for you are not the rightful
holder of the deed of covenant which it seals. If
therefore the uncircumcision, the Gentile world,
in some individual instance, carefully keeps the
ordinances of the Law, reverently remembers the love
owed to God and to man, shall not his uncircumcision,
the uncircumcision of the man supposed, be counted as
if circumcision? Shall he not be treated as a lawful
recipient of covenant blessings even though the seal
upon the document of promise is, not at all by his fault,
missing? And thus shall not this hereditary
(ἐκ φύσεως) uncircumcision, this Gentile born and
bred, fulfilling the law of love and duty, judge you, who
by means of letter and circumcision are—law's transgressor,
using as you practically do use the terms, the letter, of
the covenant, and the rite which is its seal, as means to
violate its inmost import, and claiming, in the pride of
privilege, blessings promised only to self-forgetting love?
For not the (Jew) in the visible sphere is a Jew;
nor is circumcision in the visible sphere, in the
flesh, circumcision. No, but the Jew in the hidden sphere;
and circumcision of heart, in Spirit, not letter;
circumcision in the sense of a work on the soul,
wrought by God's Spirit, not in that of a legal claim
supposed to rest upon a routine of prescribed observances.
His praise, the praise of such a Jew, the Jew
in this hidden sense, thus circumcised in heart, does not
come from men, but does come from God. Men may,
and very likely will, give him anything but praise;
they will not like him the better for his deep divergence
from their standard, and from their spirit. But the
Lord knows him, and loves him, and prepares for him
His own welcome; "Well done, good and faithful."
Here is a passage far-reaching, like the paragraphs
which have gone before it. Its immediate bearing needs
only brief comment, certainly brief explanation. We
need do little more than wonder at the moral miracle of
words like these written by one who, a few years before,
was spending the whole energy of his mighty will upon
the defence of ultra-Judaism. The miracle resides not
only in the vastness of the man's change of view, but in
the manner of it. It is not only that he denounces
Pharisaism, but he denounces it in a tone entirely free
from its spirit, which he might easily have carried into
the opposite camp. What he meets it with is the
assertion of truths as pure and peaceable as they are
eternal; the truths of the supreme and ultimate importance
of the right attitude of man's heart towards God,
and of the inexorable connexion between such an attitude
and a life of unselfish love towards man. Here is one
great instance of that large spiritual phenomenon, the
transfiguration of the first followers of the Lord Jesus
from what they had been to what under His risen
power they became. We see in them men whose convictions
and hopes have undergone an incalculable revolution;
yet it is a revolution which disorders nothing.
Rather, it has taken fanaticism for ever out of their
thoughts and purposes. It has softened their whole
souls towards man, as well as drawn them into an
unimagined intimacy with God. It has taught them to
live above the world; yet it has brought them into the
most practical and affectionate relations with every
claim upon them in the world around them. "Your
life is hid with Christ in God"; "Honour all men";
"He that loveth not, knoweth not God."
But the significance of this particular passage is
indeed far-reaching, permanent, universal. As before,
so here, the Apostle warns us (not only the Jew of
that distant day) against the fatal but easy error of
perverting privilege into pride, forgetting that every
gift of God is "a talent" with which the man is to
trade for his Lord, and for his Lord alone. But also,
more explicitly here, he warns us against that subtle
tendency of man's heart to substitute, in religion, the
outward for the inward, the mechanical for the spiritual,
the symbol for the thing. Who can read this passage
without reflections on the privileges, and on the seals
of membership, of the Christian Church? Who
may not take from it a warning not to put in the
wrong place the sacred gifts, as sacred as they can
be, because divine, of Order, and of Sacrament? Here
is a great Hebrew doctor dealing with that primary
Sacrament of the Elder Church of which such high
and urgent things are said in the Hebrew Scriptures;
a rite of which even medieval theologians have
asserted that it was the Sacrament of the same grace
as that which is the grace of Baptism now.So Bernard, Sermo in Cœnâ, c. 2.
But when he has to consider the case of one who has
received the physical ordinance apart from the right
attitude of soul, he speaks of the ordinance in terms
which a hasty reader might think slighting. He does
not slight it. He says it "profits," and he is going
soon to say more to that purpose. For him it is
nothing less than God's own Seal on God's own Word,
assuring the individual, as with a literal touch divine,
that all is true for him, as he claims grace in humble faith.
But then he contemplates the case of one who, by
no contempt but by force of circumstance, has never
received the holy seal, yet believes, and loves, and
obeys. And he lays it down that the Lord of the
Covenant will honour that man's humble claim as surely
as if he brought the covenant-document ready sealed
in his hand. Not that even for him the seal, if it may
be had, will be nothing; it will assuredly be divine
still, and will be sought as God's own gift, His seal ex
post facto. But the principle remains that the ritual
seal and the spiritual reality are separable; and that
the greater thing, the thing of absolute and ultimate
necessity between the soul and God, is the spiritual
reality; and that where that is present there God
accepts.
It was the temptation of Israel of old to put Circumcision
in the place of faith, love, and holiness, instead
of in its right place, as the divine imperial seal upon the
covenant of grace, the covenant to be claimed and used
by faith. It is the temptation of some Christians now
to put the sacred order of the Church, and particularly
its divine Sacraments, the holy Bath and the holy Meal,
in the place of spiritual regeneration, and spiritual
communion, rather than in their right place as divine
imperial seals on the covenant which guarantees both
to faith. For us, as for our elder brethren, this
paragraph of the great argument is therefore altogether
to the purpose. "Faith is greater than water," says
even Peter Lombard,See Sententiæ, iv., iv., 3-7.
the Magister of the medieval
Schools. So it is. And the thought is in perfect unison
with St Paul's principle of reasoning here. Let it be
ours to reverence, to prize, to use the ordinances of our
Master, with a devotion such as we might seem sure we
should feel if we saw Him dip His hand in the Font,
or stretch it out to break the Bread, and hallow it, and
give it, at the Table. But let us be quite certain, for
our own souls' warning, that it is true all the while—in
the sense of this passage—that "he is not a Christian
which is one outwardly, neither is that Baptism, or
Communion, which is outward; but he is a Christian
which is one inwardly, and Baptism and Communion
are those of the heart, in the Spirit, not in the letter."
Sacred indeed are the God-given externals of
Christian order and ordinance. But there are degrees
of greatness in the world of sacred things. And the
moral work of God direct upon the soul of man
is greater than His sacramental work done through
man's body.
CHAPTER VIII
JEWISH CLAIMS: NO HOPE IN HUMAN MERIT
Romans iii. 1-20
AS the Apostle dictates, there rises before his mind
a figure often seen by his eyes, the Rabbinic
disputant. Keen, subtle, unscrupulous, at once eagerly
in earnest yet ready to use any argument for victory,
how often that adversary had crossed his path, in Syria,
in Asia Minor, in Macedonia, in Achaia! He is present
now to his consciousness, within the quiet house of
Gaius; and his questions come thick and fast, following
on this urgent appeal to his, alas, almost impenetrable
conscience.
"What then is the advantage of the Jew? Or
what is the profit of circumcision?" "If some
did not believe, what of that? Will their faithlessness
cancel God's good faith?" "But if our righteousness
sets off God's righteousness, would God be unjust, bringing
His wrath to bear?"
We group the questions together thus, to make it the
clearer that we do enter here, at this opening of the
third chapter, upon a brief controversial dialogue;
perhaps the almost verbatim record of many a dialogue
actually spoken. The Jew, pressed hard with moral
proofs of his responsibility, must often have turned
thus upon his pursuer, or rather have tried thus to
escape from him in the subtleties of a false appeal to
the faithfulness of God.
And first he meets the Apostle's stern assertion that
circumcision without spiritual reality will not save. He
asks, where then is the advantage of Jewish descent?
What is the profit, the good, of circumcision? It is a
mode of reply not unknown in discussions on Christian
ordinances; "What then is the good of belonging to
a historic Church at all? What do you give the
divine Sacraments to do?" The Apostle answers his
questioner at once;
Much, in every way; first,
because they were entrusted with the Oracles of
God. "First," as if there were more to say in detail.
Something, at least, of what is here left unsaid is said
later, ix. 4, 5, where he recounts the long roll of Israel's
spiritual and historical splendours; "the adoption, and
the glory, and the covenants, and the law-giving, and
the worship, and the promises, and the Fathers, and the
Christ." Was it nothing to be bound up with things
like these, in a bond made at once of blood-relationship,
holy memories, and magnificent hopes? Was it nothing
to be exhorted to righteousness, fidelity, and love by
finding the individual life thus surrounded? But here
he places "first" of even these wonderful treasures this,
that Israel was "entrusted with the Oracles of God," the
Utterances of God, His unique Message to man "through
His prophets, in the Holy Scriptures." Yes, here was
something which gave to the Jew an "advantage"
without which the others would either have had no
existence, or no significance. He was the trustee of
Revelation. In his care was lodged the Book by which
man was to live and die; through which he was to
know immeasurably more about God and about himself
than he could learn from all other informants put
together. He, his people, his Church, were the "witness
and keeper of Holy Writ." And therefore to be born
of Israel, and ritually entered into the covenant of
Israel, was to be born into the light of revelation, and
committed to the care of the witnesses and keepers of
the light.
To insist upon this immense privilege is altogether
to St Paul's purpose here. For it is a privilege which
evidently carries an awful responsibility with it. What
would be the guilt of the soul, and of the Community,
to whom those Oracles were—not given as property,
but entrusted—and who did not do the things they
said?
Again the message passes on to the Israel of the
Christian Church. "What advantage hath the Christian?
What profit is there of Baptism?" "Much, in every
way; first, because to the Church is entrusted the
light of revelation." To be born in it, to be baptized
in it, is to be born into the sunshine of revelation, and
laid on the heart and care of the Community which
witnesses to the genuineness of its Oracles and sees
to their preservation and their spread. Great is the
talent. Great is the accountability.
But the Rabbinist goes on. For if some did
not believe, what of that? Will their faithlessness
cancel God's good faith? These Oracles of God
promise interminable glories to Israel, to Israel as a
community, a body. Shall not that promise hold good
for the whole mass, though some (bold euphemism for
the faithless multitudes!) have rejected the Promiser?
Will not the unbelieving Jew, after all, find his way
to life eternal for his company's sake, for his part
and lot in the covenant community? "Will God's
faith," His good faith, His plighted word, be reduced
to empty sounds by the bad Israelite's sin?
Away with the thought,Μὴ γένοιτο: literally, "Be it not"; "May it not be." Perhaps
nothing so well represents the energy of the Greek as the "God
forbid" of the Authorized Version.
the Apostle answers. Any thing is more possible than that God should
lie. Nay (δὲ), let God prove true, and every man prove
liar; as it stands written (Psal. li. 4), "That Thou
mightest be justified in Thy words, and mightest overcome
when Thou impleadest."Ἐν τῷ κρίνεσθαι σε: we may
render this (as in 1 Cor. vi. 1) "When Thou goest to
law." The Hebrew is, literally, "When Thou judgest"; and
the Septuagint Greek, used here by St Paul, probably represents this,
though by a slight paraphrase.
He quotes the Psalmist
in that deep utterance of self-accusation, where he takes
part against himself, and finds himself guilty "without
one plea," and, in the loyalty of the regenerate and
now awakened soul, is jealous to vindicate the justice
of his condemning God. The whole Scripture contains
no more impassioned, yet no more profound and
deliberate, utterance of the eternal truth that God is
always in the right or He would be no God at all;
that it is better, and more reasonable, to doubt anything
than to doubt His righteousness, whatever
cloud surrounds it, and whatever lightning bursts
the cloud.
But again the caviller, intent not on God's glory but
on his own position, takes up the word. But
if our unrighteousness exhibits, sets off, God's
righteousness, if our sin gives occasion to grace to
abound, if our guilt lets the generosity of God's Way
of Acceptance stand out the more wonderful by contrast—what
shall we say? Would God be unjust, bringing
His (τὴν) wrath to bear on us, when our pardon would
illustrate His free grace? Would He be unjust?
Would He not be unjust?
We struggle, in our paraphrase, to bring out the
bearing, as it seems to us, of a passage of almost equal
grammatical difficulty and argumentative subtlety.
The Apostle seems to be "in a strait" between the
wish to represent the caviller's thought, and the dread
of one really irreverent word. He throws the man's
last question into a form which, grammatically, expects
a "no" when the drift of the thought would lead us up
to a shocking "yes."Μὴ ἄδικος; where logically it would rather be
οὐκ ἄδικος.—Just
above, we explain "God's righteousness" to mean, as commonly in
the Epistle, "God's way of acceptance," His reckoning His Righteousness
to the sinner.
And then at once he passes to
his answer. I speak as man, man-wise; as if this
question of balanced rights and wrongs were one between
man and man, not between man and eternal God.
Such talk, even for argument's sake, is impossible
for the regenerate soul except under urgent protest.
Away with the thought that He would not be
righteous, in His punishment of any given sin.
Since how shall God judge the world? How, on such
conditions, shall we repose on the ultimate fact that He
is the universal Judge? If He could not, righteously,
punish a deliberate sin because pardon, under certain
conditions, illustrates His glory, then He could not
punish any sin at all. But He is the Judge; He does
bring wrath to bear!
Now he takes up the caviller on his own ground,
and goes all lengths upon it, and then flies with
abhorrence from it. For if God's truth, in
the matter of my lie, has abounded, has come more
amply out, to His glory, why am I tooΚἀγώ: he speaks as claiming, on the caviller's principles, equal
indulgence for himself.
called to judgment as a sinner? And why not say, as the
slander against us goes, and as some assert
that we do say, "Let us do the ill that the good may
come"? So they assert of us. But their doom is just,—the
doom of those who would utter such a maxim,
finding shelter for a lie under the throne of God.
No doubt he speaks from a bitter and frequent
experience when he takes this particular case, and
with a solemn irony claims exemption for himself
from the liar's sentence of death. It is plain that
the charge of untruth was, for some reason or another,
often thrown at St Paul; we see this in the marked
urgency with which, from time to time, he asserts his
truthfulness; "The things which I say, behold, before
God I lie not" (Gal. i. 20); "I speak the truth in Christ
and lie not" (below, ix. 1). Perhaps the manifold
sympathies of his heart gave innocent occasion sometimes
for the charge. The man who could be "all things
to all men" (1 Cor. ix. 22), taking with a genuine insight
their point of view, and saying things which shewed
that he took it, would be very likely to be set down by
narrower minds as untruthful. And the very boldness
of his teaching might give further occasion, equally
innocent; as he asserted at different times, with equal
emphasis, opposite sides of truth. But these somewhat
subtle excuses for false witness against this great
master of holy sincerity would not be necessary where
genuine malice was at work. No man is so truthful
that he cannot be charged with falsehood; and no
charge is so likely to injure even where it only feigns to
strike. And of course the mighty paradox of Justification
lent itself easily to the distortions, as well as to
the contradictions, of sinners. "Let us do evil that
good may come" no doubt represented the report
which prejudice and bigotry would regularly carry
away and spread after every discourse, and every
argument, about free Forgiveness. It is so still: "If
this is true, we may live as we like; if this is true,
then the worst sinner makes the best saint." Things
like this have been current sayings since Luther, since
Whitefield, and till now. Later in the Epistle we shall
see the unwilling evidence which such distortions bear
to the nature of the maligned doctrine; but here the
allusion is too passing to bring this out.
"Whose doom is just." What a witness is this to
the inalienable truthfulness of the Gospel! This brief
stern utterance absolutely repudiates all apology for
means by end; all seeking of even the good of men
by the way of saying the thing that is not. Deep and
strong, almost from the first, has been the temptation
to the Christian man to think otherwise, until we
find whole systems of casuistry developed whose aim
seems to be to go as near the edge of untruthfulness as
possible, if not beyond it, in religion. But the New
Testament sweeps the entire idea of the pious fraud
away, with this short thunder-peal, "Their doom is
just." It will hear of no holiness that leaves out truthfulness;
no word, no deed, no habit, that even with the
purest purpose belies the God of reality and veracity.
If we read aright Acts xxiv. 20, 21, with Acts xxiii. 6,
we see St Paul himself once, under urgent pressure
of circumstances, betrayed into an equivocation, and
then, publicly and soon, expressing his regret of conscience.
"I am a Pharisee, and a Pharisee's son;
about the hope and resurrection of the dead I am called
in question." True, true in fact, but not the whole
truth, not the unreserved account of his attitude towards
the Pharisee. Therefore, a week later, he confesses,
does he not? that in this one thing there was "evil in
him, while he stood before the council." Happy the
Christian, happy indeed the Christian public man,
immersed in management and discussion, whose memory
is as clear about truth-telling, and whose conscience is
as sensitive!
What then? are we superior?Προεχόμεθα: "Do we make excuse
for ourselves?" is a rendering
for which there are clearer precedents in the use of the verb. But
the context seems to us to advocate the above rendering, which is
quite possible grammatically.
Say not so at all (μηδαμῶς).
Thus now he proceeds, taking
the word finally from his supposed antagonist. Who
are the "we" and with whom are "we" compared?
The drift of the argument admits of two replies to this
question. "We" may be "we Jews"; as if Paul placed
himself in instinctive sympathy, by the side of the compatriot
whose cavils he has just combated, and gathered
up here into a final assertion all he has said before of
the (at least) equal guilt of the Jew beside the Greek.
Or "we" may be "we Christians," taken for the moment
as men apart from Christ; it may be a repudiation of
the thought that he has been speaking from a pedestal,
or from a tribunal. As if he said, "Do not think that I,
or my friends in Christ, would say to the world, Jewish
or Gentile, that we are holier than you. No; we speak
not from the bench, but from the bar. Apart from Him
who is our peace and life, we are 'in the same condemnation.'
It is exactly because we are in it that
we turn and say to you, 'Do not ye fear God?'" On
the whole, this latter reference seems the truer to the
thought and spirit of the whole context.
For we have already charged Jews and Greeks, all of
them, with being under sin; with being brought under sin,
as the Greek (ὑφ᾽ἁμαρτίαν)
bids us more exactly render,
giving us the thought that the race has fallen from a
good estate into an evil; self-involved in an awful superincumbent
ruin.
As it stands written, that there
is not even one man righteous; there is not a
man who understands, not a man who seeks his (τὸν)
God. All have left the road; they have turned worthless
together. There is not a man who does what is good,
there is not, even so many as one. A grave set open is
their throat, exhaling the stench of polluted words; with
their tongues they have deceived; asps' venom is under
their lips;ὑπὸ τὰ χείλη: again the Greek (as
in verse 9) gives the thought of motion to a position under.
The human "aspic" is depicted as bringing its venom up to its
mouth, ready there for the stroke of its fangs.
(men) whose mouth is brimming with curse
and bitterness. Swift are their feet to shed blood; ruin
and misery for their victims are in their ways; and the
way of peace they never knew. There is no such thing
as fear of God before their eyes.
Here is a tesselation of Old Testament oracles. The
fragments, hard and dark, come from divers quarries;
from the Psalms (v. 9, x. 7, xiv. 1-3, xxxvi. 1, cxl. 3),
from the Proverbs (i. 16), from Isaiah (lix. 7). All in
the first instance depict and denounce classes of sins
and sinners in Israelite society; and we may wonder
at first sight how their evidence convicts all men everywhere,
and in all time, of condemnable and fatal sin.
But we need not only, in submission, own that somehow
it must be so, for "it stands written" here; we
may see, in part, how it is so. These special charges
against certain sorts of human lives stand in the same
Book which levels the general charge against the human
heart (Jerem. xvii. 9), that it is "deceitful above all
things, hopelessly diseased," and incapable of knowing
all its own corruption. The crudest surface phenomena
of sin are thus never isolated from the dire underlying
epidemic of the race of man. The actual evil of men
shews the potential evil of man. The tiger-strokes of
open wickedness shew the tiger-nature, which is always
present, even where its possessor least suspects it.
Circumstances infinitely vary, and among them those
internal circumstances which we call special tastes and
dispositions. But everywhere amidst them all is the
human heart, made upright in its creation, self-wrecked
into moral wrongness when it turned itself from God.
That it is turned from Him, not to Him, appears when
its direction is tested by the collision between His claim
and its will. And in this aversion from the Holy One,
who claims the whole heart, there lies at least the
potency of "all unrighteousness."
Long after this, as his glorious rest drew near, St
Paul wrote again of the human heart, to "his true son"
Titus (iii. 3). He reminds him of the wonder of that
saving grace which he so fully unfolds in this Epistle;
how, "not according to our works," the "God who
loveth man" had saved Titus, and saved Paul. And
what had he saved them from? From a state in which
they were "disobedient, deceived, the slaves of divers
lusts and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful,
hating one another." What, the loyal and laborious
Titus, the chaste, the upright, the unutterably earnest
Paul? Is not the picture greatly, lamentably exaggerated,
a burst of religious rhetoric? Adolphe MonodAdieux, § 1.
tells us that he once thought it must be so; he felt
himself quite unable to submit to the awful witness.
But years moved, and he saw deeper into himself,
seeing deeper into the holiness of God; and the truthfulness
of that passage grew upon him. Not that its
difficulties all vanished, but its truthfulness shone out;
"and sure I am," he said from his death-bed, "that
when this veil of flesh shall fall I shall recognize in that
passage the truest portrait ever painted of my own
natural heart."
Robert Browning, in a poem of terrible moral interest and power,Gold Hair, a Legend of Pornic.
confesses that, amidst a thousand doubts
and difficulties, his mind was anchored to faith in
Christianity by the fact of its doctrine of Sin:
"I still, to suppose it true, for my part
See reasons and reasons; this, to begin;
'Tis the faith that launched point blank her dart
At the head of a lie; taught Original Sin,
The Corruption of Man's Heart."
Now we know that whatever things the Law
says, it speaks them to those in the Law, those
within its range, its dominion; that every mouth may
be stopped, and all the world may prove guilty with
regard to God. "The Law"; that is to say, here, the
Old Testament Revelation. This not only contains the
Mosaic and Prophetic moral code, but has it for one
grand pervading object, in all its parts, to prepare man
for Christ by exposing him to himself, in his shame
and need. It shews him in a thousand ways that "he
cannot serve the Lord" (Josh. xxiv. 19), on purpose that
in that same Lord he may take refuge from both his guilt
and his impotency. And this it does for "those in the
Law"; that is to say here, primarily, for the Race, the
Church, whom it surrounded with its light of holy fire,
and whom in this passage the Apostle has in his first
thoughts. Yet they, surely, are not alone upon his
mind. We have seen already how "the Law" is,
after all, only the more full and direct enunciation of
"law"; so that the Gentile as well as the Jew has to
do with the light, and with the responsibility, of a
knowledge of the will of God. While the chain of
stern quotations we have just handled lies heaviest on
Israel, it yet binds the world. It "shuts every mouth."
It drags MAN in guilty before God.
"That every mouth may be stopped." Oh solemn
silence, when at last it comes! The harsh or muffled
voices of self-defence, of self-assertion, are hushed at
length. The man, like one of old, when he saw his
righteous self in the light of God, "lays his hand on his
mouth" (Job xl. 4). He leaves speech to God, and
learns at last to listen. What shall he hear? An
eternal repudiation? An objurgation, and then a final
and exterminating anathema? No, something far other,
and better, and more wonderful. But there must first
be silence on man's part, if it is to be heard. "Hear—and
your souls shall live."
So the great argument pauses, gathered up into an
utterance which at once concentrates what has gone
before, and prepares us for a glorious sequel. Shut thy
mouth, O man, and listen now:
Because by means of works of law there shall be justified no
flesh in His presence; for by means of law comes—moral
knowledge (ἐπύγνωσις) of sin.
CHAPTER IX
THE ONE WAY OF DIVINE ACCEPTANCE
Romans iii. 21-31
SO then "there is silence" upon earth, that man
may hear the "still, small voice," "the sound of
stillness" (1 Kings xix. 12),1 Kings xix. 12.
from the heavens. "The
Law" has spoken, with its heart-shaking thunder. It
has driven in upon the soul of man, from many sides,
that one fact—guilt; the eternity of the claim of righteousness,
the absoluteness of the holy Will of God,
and, in contrast, the failure of man, of the race, to
meet that claim and do that will. It has told man,
in effect, that he is "depraved,"Depravatus: twisted, wrenched from the straight line.
that is to say,
morally distorted. He is "totally depraved," that is,
the distortion has affected his whole being, so that he
can supply on his own part no adequate recovering
power which shall restore him to harmony with God.
And the Law has nothing more to say to him, except
that this condition is not only deplorable, but guilty,
accountable, condemnable; and that his own conscience
is the concurrent witness that it is so. He is a sinner.
To be a sinner is before all things to be a transgressor
of law. It is other things besides. It is to be morally
diseased, and in need of surgery and medicine. It is to
be morally unhappy, and an object of compassion. But
first of all it is to be morally guilty, and in urgent need
of justification, of a reversal of sentence, of satisfactory
settlement with the offended—and eternal—Law of God.
That Law, having spoken its inexorable conditions,
and having announced the just sentence of death,
stands stern and silent beside the now silent offender.
It has no commission to relieve his fears, to allay his
grief, to pay his debts. Its awful, merciful business is
to say "Thou shalt not sin," and "The wages of sin is
death." It summons conscience to attention, and tells it in
its now hearing ear far more than it had realized before
of the horror and the doom of sin; and then it leaves conscience
to take up the message and alarm the whole
inner world with the certainty of guilt and judgment. So
the man lies speechless before the terribly reticent Law.
Is it a merely abstract picture? Or do our hearts,
the writer's and the reader's, bear any witness to its
living truthfulness? God knoweth, these things are no
curiosities of the past. We are not studying an interesting
phase of early Christian thought. We are reading
a living record of the experiences of innumerable lives
which are lived on earth this day. There is such a thing
indeed in our time, at this hour, as conviction of sin.
There is such a thing now as a human soul, struck
dumb amidst its apologies, its doubts, its denials, by the
speech and then the silence of the Law of God. There
is such a thing at this hour as a real man, strong and
sound in thought, healthy in every faculty, used to look
facts of daily life in the face, yet broken down in the indescribable
conviction that he is a poor, guilty, lost sinner,
and that his overwhelming need is—not now, not just
now—the solution of problems of being, but the assurance
that his sin is forgiven. He must be justified, or he
dies. The God of the Law must somehow say He has
no quarrel with him, or he dies a death which he sees,
as by an intuition peculiar to conviction of sin, to be in its
proper nature a death without hope, without end.
Is this "somehow" possible?
Listen, guilty and silent soul, to a sound which is
audible now. In the turmoil of either secular indifference
or blind self-justification you could not hear it; at
best you heard a meaningless murmur. But listen now;
it is articulate, and it speaks to you. The earthquake,
the wind, the fire, have passed; and you are indeed
awake. Now comes "the sound of stillness" in its turn.
But now, apart from Law, God's righteousness
stands displayed, attested by the Law and the
Prophets; but (δὲ)—though attested by them, in the
Scriptures which all along, in word and in type,
promise better things to come, and above all a Blessed
One to come—(it is) God's righteousness, through
faith in Jesus Christ, prepared for all and bestowed
upon all who believe in Him. For there
is no distinction; for all have sinned, and fall
short of the glory of God, being justifiedΔικαιούμενοι: the present participle indicates rather the permanent
principle of justification than its actual procedure, which is, in each
case, a divine sentence of acceptance, an act, an event, single and
apart. See on ch. v. 1.
gift-wise, gratuitously, by His grace, through the
redemption, the ransom-rescue, which is in Christ Jesus.
Yes, it resides always in Him, the Lord of
saving Merit, and so is to be found in Him
alone; whom God presented,Ὃν προέθετο ὁ Θεός:
it is possible to render, "Whom God designed,"
in His eternal counsel of redemption. But the context just
below emphasizes the thought of "declaration," manifestation,
explanation of the hidden Treasure. This seems to decide for the
other rendering.
put forward, as Propitiation,Ἱλαστήριον: elsewhere in Scripture Greek this word means the
Mercy Seat, the golden lid of the Ark, above which the Shechinah shone
and on which the blood of atonement was sprinkled. Here is indeed
a manifest and noble type of Christ. But on the other hand the word
ἱλαστήριον gets that meaning only indirectly. Its native meaning is
rather "a price of expiation." And a somewhat sudden insertion
here of the imagery of the Mercy Seat seems unlikely, in the absence
of all other allusion to the High Priestly function of our Lord.
through faith in His blood,We may punctuate, "through faith, in His blood"; as if to say
"He is Propitiation in (in virtue of) His blood; we get the benefit
through faith." But this rendering seems to us the less likely, as the
less simple. The construction, "faith in" πίστις ἐν τινί, is fully
verified by Mark i. 15; "believe in the Gospel."
His blood of death, of sacrifice, of the altar; so as to demonstrate, to explain,
to clear up, His righteousness, His way of acceptance
and its method. The Father "presented" the Son so
as to shew that His grace meant no real connivance,
no indulgence without a lawful reason. He "presented"
Him because of His passing-by of sins done
before; because the fact asked explanation that, while
He proclaimed His Law, and had not yet revealed His
Gospel, He did nevertheless bear with sinners, reprieving
them, condoning them, in the forbearance of God, in the
ages when He was seen to "hold back"Ἀνοχή: we think that the word here is a pregnant expression
for "the time when God forebore."
His wrath, but did not yet disclose the reason why. It was
with a view, he says again, to this demonstration
(τὴν ἔνδειξιν) of His righteousness in the present
period, the season, the καιρός, of the manifested Gospel;
that He may be, in our view, as well as in divine fact,
at once just, true to His eternal Law, and Justifier of
him who belongs to (τὸν ἐκ) faith in Jesus.
This is the voice from heaven, audible when the
sinner's mouth is shut, while his ears are opened by
the touch of God. Without that spiritual introduction
to them, very likely they will seem either a fact in the
history of religious thought, interesting in the study of
development, but no more; or a series of assertions
corresponding to unreal needs, and in themselves full
of disputable points. Read them in the hour of conviction
of sin; in other words, bring to them your whole
being, stirred from above to its moral depths, and you
will not take them either indifferently, or with opposition.
As the key meets the lock they will meet your
exceeding need. Every sentence, every link of reasoning,
every affirmation of fact, will be precious to you
beyond all words. And you will never fully understand
them except in such hours, or in the life which has such
hours amongst its indelible memories.
Listen over again, in this sacred silence, thus broken
by "the pleasant voice of the Mighty One."
"But now"; the happy "now" of present fact, of
waking certainty. It is no day-dream. Look, and
see; touch, and feel. Turn the blessed page again;
γέγραπται, "It stands written." There is indeed a
"Righteousness of God," a settled way of mercy which
is as holy as it is benignant, an acceptance as good in
eternal Law as in eternal Love. It is "attested by the
Law and the Prophets"; countless lines of prediction
and foreshadowing meet upon it, to negative for ever
the fear of illusion, of delusion. Here is no fortuitous
concourse, but the long-laid plan of God. Behold its
procuring Cause, magnificent, tender, divine, human,
spiritual, historic. It is the beloved Son of the Father;
no antagonist power from a region alien to the blessed
Law and its Giver. The Law-Giver is the Christ-Giver;
He has "set Him forth," He has provided in
Him an expiation which—does not persuade Him to
have mercy, for He is eternal Love already, but
liberates His love along the line of a wonderfully
satisfied Holiness, and explains that liberation (to the
contrite) so as supremely to win their worship and
their love to the Father and the Son. Behold the
Christ of God; behold the blood of Christ. In the
Gospel, He is everywhere, it is everywhere; but what is
your delight to find Him, and it, here upon the threshold
of your life of blessing? Looking upon the Crucified,
while you still "lay your hand upon your mouth," till
it is removed that you may bless His Name, you understand
the joy with which, age after age, men have
spoken of a Death which is their life, of a Cross which
is their crown and glory. You are in no mood, here
and now, to disparage the doctrine of the Atoning Blood;
to place it in the background of your Christianity; to
obscure the Cross behind even the roofs of Bethlehem.
You cannot now think well of any Gospel that does not
say, "First of all, Christ died for our sins, according
to the Scriptures" (1 Cor. xv. 3). You are a sinner, and
you know it; "guilty before God"; and for you as
such the Propitiation governs your whole view of man,
of God, of life, of heaven. For you, however it may be
for others, "Redemption" cannot be named, or thought
of, apart from its first precious element, "remission of
sins," justification of the guilty. It is steeped in ideas
of Propitiation; it is red and glorious with the Redeemer's
blood, without which it could not have been.
The all-blessed God, with all His attributes, His
character, is by you seen evermore as "just, yet the
Justifier of him that believeth in Jesus." He shines on
you through the Word, and in your heart's experience,
in many another astonishing aspect. But all those others
are qualified for you by this, that He is the God of a
holy Justification; that He is the God who has accepted
you, the guilty one, in Christ. All your thoughts of
Him are formed and followed out at the foot of the
Cross. Golgotha is the observatory from which you
count and watch the lights of the moving heaven of
His Being, His Truth, His Love.
How precious to you now are the words which once,
perhaps, were worse than insipid, "Faith," "Justification,"
"the Righteousness of God"! In the discovery
of your necessity, and of Christ as the all-in-all to meet
it, you see with little need of exposition the place and
power of Faith. It means, you see it now, simply your
reception of Christ. It is your contact with Him, your
embrace of Him. It is not virtue; it is absolutely
remote from merit. But it is necessary; as necessary
as the hand that takes the alms, or as the mouth that
eats the unbought meal. The meaning of Justification
is now to you no riddle of the schools. Like all the
great words of scriptural theology it carries with it in
divine things the meaning it bears in common things,
only for a new and noble application; you see this with
joy, by the insight of awakened conscience. He who
"justifies" you does exactly what the word always imports.
He does not educate you, or inspire you, up to acceptability.
He pronounces you acceptable, satisfactory, at
peace with Law. And this He does for Another's sake;
on account of the Merit of Another, who has so done
and suffered as to win an eternal welcome for Himself
and everything that is His, and therefore for all who
are found in Him, and therefore for you who have fled
into Him, believing. So you receive with joy and
wonder "the Righteousness of God," His way to bid
you, so deeply guilty in yourself, welcome without fear
to your Judge. You are "righteous," that is to say,
satisfactory to the inexorable Law. How? Because
you are transfigured into a moral perfectness such as
could constitute a claim? No, but because Jesus Christ
died, and you, receiving Him, are found in Him.
"There is no difference." Once, perhaps, you resented
that word, if you paused to note it. Now you take all its
import home. Whatever otherwise your "difference"
may be from the most disgraceful and notorious
breakers of the Law of God, you know now that there
is none in this respect—that you are as hopelessly,
whether or not as distantly, remote as they are from
"the glory of God." His moral "glory," the inexorable
perfectness of His Character, with its inherent demand
that you must perfectly correspond to Him in order
so to be at peace with Him—you are indeed "short
of" this. The harlot, the liar, the murderer, are short
of it; but so are you. Perhaps they stand at the bottom
of a mine, and you on the crest of an Alp; but you are
as little able to touch the stars as they. So you thankfully
give yourself up, side by side with them, if they
will but come too, to be carried to the height of divine
acceptance, by the gift of God, "justified gift-wise by
His grace."
Where then is our (ἡ) boasting? It is shut
out. By means of what law? Of works? No,
but by means of faith's law, the institute, the ordinance,
which lays it upon us not to deserve, but to confide.
And who can analyse or describe the joy and rest of
the soul from which at last is "shut out" the foul
inflation of a religious "boast"? We have praised
ourselves, we have valued ourselves, on one thing or
another supposed to make us worthy of the Eternal.
We may perhaps have had some specious pretexts for
doing so; or we may have "boasted" (such boastings are
not unknown) of nothing better than being a little less
ungodly, or a little more manly, than some one else.
But this is over now for ever, in principle; and we lay
its practice under our Redeemer's feet to be destroyed.
And great is the rest and gladness of sitting down at
His feet, while the door is shut and the key is turned
upon our self-applause. There is no holiness without
that "exclusion"; and there is no happiness where
holiness is not.
For we reckon,Reading γὰρ not οὖν.
we conclude, we gather up our facts and reasons thus, that man is justifiedΔικαιοῦσθαι: the present infinitive, as in ver. 25, puts before us
the permanence of the principle on which is based the definite act.
by faith, apart from, irrespective of, works of law. In
other words, the meriting cause lies wholly in Christ,
and wholly outside the man's conduct. We have seen,
implicitly, in the passage above, verses 10-18, what is
meant here by "works of Law," or by "works of the
Law." The thought is not of ritual prescription, but
of moral rule. The law-breakers of verses 10-18 are
men who commit violent deeds, and speak foul words,
and fail to do what is good. The law-keeper, by consequence,
is the man whose conduct in such respects is
right, negatively and positively. And the "works of the
law" are such deeds accordingly. So here "we conclude"
that the justification of fallen man takes place,
as to the merit which procures it, irrespective of his
well-doing. It is respective only of Christ, as to merit;
it has to do only, as to personal reception, with the
acceptance of the meriting Christ, that is to say with
faith in Him.
Then come, like a short "coda" following a full
musical cadence, two brief questions and their answers,
spoken almost as if again a Rabbinist were in discussion.
Is God the Jews' God only? Not of the Nations
too? Yes, of the Nations too; assuming (εἴπερ)
that God is one, the same Person in both cases; who
will justify Circumcision on the principle of faith, and
Uncircumcision by means of faith. He takes the fact,
now ascertained, that faith, still faith, that is to say
Christ received, is the condition to justification for all
mankind; and he reasons back to the fact (so amply
"attested by the Law and the Prophets," from Genesis
onwards) that the true God is equally the God of all.
Probably the deep inference is suggested that the fence
of privilege drawn for ages round Israel was meant
ultimately for the whole world's blessing, and not to
hold Israel in a selfish isolation.
We cancel Law, then, by this faith of ours
(διὰ τῆς πίστεως)? We open the door, then,
to moral licence? We abolish code and precept, then,
when we ask not for conduct, but for faith? Away
with the thought; nay, we establish Law; we go the
very way to give a new sacredness to its every command,
and to disclose a new power for the fulfilment
of them all. But how this is, and is to be, the later
argument is to shew.
Detached Note to Romans III.
It would be a deeply interesting work to collect and
exhibit together examples of the conveyance of great
spiritual blessing, in memorable lives, through the
perusal of the Epistle to the Romans. Augustine's
final crisis (see below, on xiii. 14) would be one such
example. As specimens of what must be a multitude
we quote two cases, in each of which one verse in this
third chapter of the Epistle proved the means of the
divine message in a life of historical interest.
Padre Paolo Sarpi (1552-1623), "Councillor and
Theologian" to the Venetian Republic, and historian of
the Council of Trent, was one of the many eminent
men of his day who never broke with the Roman
Church, yet had genuine spiritual sympathies with the
Reformation. The record of his last hours is affecting
and instructive, and shews him reposing his hope with
great simplicity on the divine message of this chapter,
though the report makes him quote it inexactly.
"Night being come, and want of spirits increasing
upon him, he caused another reading of the Passion
written by Saint John. He spake of his own misery,
and of the trust and confidence which he had in the
blood of Christ. He repeated very often those words,
Quem proposuit Deus Mediatorem per fidem in sanguine
suo, 'Whom God hath set forth to be a Mediator
through faith in His blood.' In which he seemed to
receive an extreme consolation. He repeated (though
with much faintness) divers places of Saint Paul. He
protested that of his part he had nothing to present
God with but miseries and sins, yet nevertheless he
desired to be drowned in the abyss of the divine
mercy; with so much submission on one side, and yet
so much cheerfulness on the other side, that he drew
tears from all that were present."The Life of Father Paul the Venetian, translated out of Italian:
London, 1676.
It was through the third chapter of the Romans that
heavenly light first came to the terribly troubled soul
of William Cowper, at St Albans, in 1764. Some have
said that Cowper's religion was to blame for his
melancholy. The case was far different. The first
tremendous attack occurred at a time when, by his
own clear account, he was quite without serious
religion; it had nothing whatever to do with either
Christian doctrine or Christian practice. The recovery
from it came with his first sight, in Scripture, of the
divine mercy in our Lord Jesus Christ. His own
account of this crisis is as follows:
Memoir of the Early Life of William Cowper, written by Himself.
"But the happy period which was to afford me a
clear opening of the free mercy of God in Christ Jesus,
was now arrived. I flung myself into a chair near the
window, and, seeing a Bible there, ventured once more
to apply to it for comfort and instruction. The first
verse I saw was the 25th of the 3rd of Romans;
'Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through
faith in His blood, to declare His righteousness for the
remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance
of God.'
"Immediately I received strength to believe it, and
the full beams of the Sun of Righteousness shone upon
me. I saw the sufficiency of the atonement He had
made, my pardon sealed in His blood, and all the
fulness and completeness of His justification. Unless
the Almighty arm had been under me, I think I should
have died with gratitude and joy. I could only look
up to heaven in silent fear, overwhelmed with love and
wonder. But the work of the Holy Ghost is best
described in His own words; it is 'joy unspeakable
and full of glory.'"
CHAPTER X
ABRAHAM AND DAVID
Romans iv. 1-12
THE Jewish disputant is present still to the Apostle's
thought. It could not be otherwise in this argument.
No question was more pressing on the Jewish
mind than that of Acceptance; thus far, truly, the
teaching and discipline of the Old Testament had not
been in vain. And St Paul had not only, in his
Christian Apostleship, debated that problem countless
times with Rabbinic combatants; he had been himself
a Rabbi, and knew by experience alike the misgivings
of the Rabbinist's conscience, and the subterfuges of
his reasoning.
So now there rises before him the great name of
Abraham, as a familiar watchword of the controversy
of Acceptance. He has been contending for an absolutely
inclusive verdict of "guilty" against man, against
every man. He has been shutting with all his might
the doors of thought against human "boasting," against
the least claim of man to have merited his acceptance.
Can he carry this principle into quite impartial issues?
Can he, a Jew in presence of Jews, apply it without
apology, without reserve, to "the Friend of God"
himself? What will he say to that majestic Example
of man? His name itself sounds like a claim to almost
worship. As he moves across the scene of Genesis, we—even
we Gentiles—rise up as it were in reverent
homage, honouring this figure at once so real and so
near to the ideal; marked by innumerable lines of
individuality, totally unlike the composed picture of
legend or poem, yet walking with God Himself in a
personal intercourse so habitual, so tranquil, so congenial.
Is this a name to becloud with the assertion
that here, as everywhere, acceptance was hopeless but
for the clemency of God, "gift-wise, without deeds of
law"? Was not at least Abraham accepted because
he was morally worthy of acceptance? And if Abraham,
then surely, in abstract possibility, others also.
There must be a group of men, small or large, there
is at least one man, who can "boast" of his peace
with God.
On the other hand, if with Abraham it was not thus,
then the inference is easy to all other men. Who but
he is called "the Friend" (2 Chron. xx. 7, Isai. xli. 8)?
Moses himself, the almost deified Lawgiver, is but "the
Servant," trusted, intimate, honoured in a sublime
degree by his eternal Master. But he is never called
"the Friend." That peculiar title seems to preclude
altogether the question of a legal acceptance. Who
thinks of his friend as one whose relation to him needs
to be good in law at all? The friend stands as it were
behind law, or above it, in respect of his fellow. He
holds a relation implying personal sympathies, identity
of interests, contact of thought and will, not an anxious
previous settlement of claims, and remission of liabilities.
If then the Friend of the Eternal Judge proves, nevertheless,
to have needed Justification, and to have received
it by the channel not of his personal worth but of the
grace of God, there will be little hesitation about other
men's need, and the way by which alone other men
shall find it met.
In approaching this great example, for such it will
prove to be, St Paul is about to illustrate all the main
points of his inspired argument. By the way, by implication,
he gives us the all-important fact that even an
Abraham, even "the Friend," did need justification somehow.
Such is the eternal Holy One that no man can
walk by His side and live, no, not in the path of inmost
"friendship," without an acceptance before His face as
He is Judge. Then again, such is He, that even an
Abraham found this acceptance, as a matter of fact, not
by merit but by faith; not by presenting himself, but
by renouncing himself, and taking God for all; by
pleading not, "I am worthy," but, "Thou art faithful."
It is to be shewn that Abraham's justification was such
that it gave him not the least ground for self-applause;
it was not in the least degree based on merit. It was
"of grace, not of debt." A promise of sovereign kindness,
connected with the redemption of himself, and of
the world, was made to him. He was not morally
worthy of such a promise, if only because he was
not morally perfect. And he was, humanly speaking,
physically incapable of it. But God offered Himself
freely to Abraham, in His promise; and Abraham
opened the empty arms of personal reliance to receive
the unearned gift. Had he stayed first to earn it he
would have shut it out; he would have closed his arms.
Rightly renouncing himself, because seeing and trusting
his gracious God, the sight of whose holy glory annihilates
the idea of man's claims, he opened his arms, and
the God of peace filled the void. The man received his
God's approval, because he interposed nothing of his
own to intercept it.
From one point of view, the all-important view-point
here, it mattered not what Abraham's conduct had been.
As a fact, he was already devout when the incident of
Gen. xv. occurred. But he was also actually a sinner;
that is made quite plain by Gen. xii., the very chapter
of the Call. And potentially, according to Scripture,
he was a great sinner; for he was an instance of the
human heart. But this, while it constituted Abraham's
urgent need of acceptance, was not in the least a
barrier to his acceptance, when he turned from himself,
in the great crisis of absolute faith, and accepted
God in His promise.
The principle of the acceptance of "the Friend" was
identically that which underlies the acceptance of the
most flagrant transgressor. As St Paul will soon
remind us, David in the guilt of his murderous
adultery, and Abraham in the grave walk of his
worshipping obedience, stand upon the same level
here. Actually or potentially, each is a great sinner.
Each turns from himself, unworthy, to God in His promise.
And the promise is his, not because his hand
is full of merit, but because it is empty of himself.
It is true that Abraham's justification, unlike David's,
is not explicitly connected in the narrative with a moral
crisis of his soul. He is not depicted, in Gen. xv., as
a conscious penitent, flying from justice to the Judge.
But is there not a deep suggestion that something not
unlike this did then pass over him, and through him?
That short assertion, that "he trusted the Lord, and
He counted it to him for righteousness," is an anomaly
in the story, if it has not a spiritual depth hidden in it.
Why, just then and there, should we be told this about
his acceptance with God? Is it not because the vastness
of the promise had made the man see in contrast
the absolute failure of a corresponding merit in himself?
Job (xlii. 1-6) was brought to self-despairing penitence
not by the fires of the Law but by the glories of Creation.
Was not Abraham brought to the same consciousness,
whatever form it may have taken in his character and
period, by the greater glories of the Promise? Surely
it was there and then that he learnt that secret of self-rejection
in favour of God which is the other side of all
true faith, and which came out long years afterwards,
in its mighty issues of "work," when he laid Isaac on
the altar.On St James' use of that great incident, see detached note, p. 115.
It is true, again, that Abraham's faith, his justifying
reliance, is not connected in the narrative with any
articulate expectation of an atoning Sacrifice. But
here first we dare to say, even at the risk of that
formidable charge, an antique and obsolete theory of
the Patriarchal creed, that probably Abraham knew
much more about the Coming One than a modern
critique will commonly allow. "He rejoiced to see
My day; and he saw it, and was glad" (John viii. 56).
And further, the faith which justifies, though what it
touches in fact is the blessed Propitiation, or rather
God in the Propitiation, does not always imply an
articulate knowledge of the whole "reason of the hope."
It assuredly implies a true submission to all that the
believer knows of the revelation of that reason. But he
may (by circumstances) know very little of it, and yet
be a believer. The saint who prayed (Psal. cxliii. 2)
"Enter not into judgment with Thy servant, O Lord,
for in Thy sight shall no man living be justified," cast
himself upon a God who, being absolutely holy, yet can
somehow, just as He is, justify the sinner. Perhaps
he knew much of the reason of Atonement, as it lies
in God's mind, and as it is explained, as it is demonstrated,
in the Cross. But perhaps he did not. What
he did was to cast himself up to the full light he had,
"without one plea," upon his Judge, as a man awfully
conscious of his need, and trusting only in a sovereign
mercy, which must also be a righteous, a law-honouring
mercy, because it is the mercy of the Righteous Lord.
Let us not be mistaken, meanwhile, as if such words
meant that a definite creed of the Atoning Work is not
possible, or is not precious. This Epistle will help us
to such a creed, and so will Galatians, and Hebrews,
and Isaiah, and Leviticus, and the whole Scripture.
"Prophets and kings desired to see the things we
see, and did not see them" (Luke x. 24). But that is
no reason why we should not adore the mercy that has
unveiled to us the Cross and the blessed Lamb.
But it is time to come to the Apostle's words as
they stand.
What then shall we say that Abraham has
found—"has found," the perfect tense of abiding
and always significant fact—"has found," in his great
discovery of divine peace—our forefather, according to
the flesh? "According to the flesh"; that is to say,
(having regard to the prevailing moral use of the word
"flesh" in this Epistle,) "in respect of self," "in the
region of his own works and merits."We see much reason, however, in the explanation which connects
κατὰ σάρκα with πατέρα(or προπάτορα) ἡμῶν: "our father according
to the flesh," our natural progenitor.
For if Abraham was justified as a result of works, he
has a boast; he has a right to self-applause. Yes, such
is the principle indicated here; if man merits, man is
entitled to self-applause. May we not say, in passing,
that the common instinctive sense of the moral discord
of self-applause, above all in spiritual things, is one
among many witnesses to the truth of our justification
by faith only? But St Paul goes on; Ah, but not
towards God; not when even an Abraham looks Him in
the face, and sees himself in that Light. As if to say,
"If he earned justification, he might have boasted
rightly; but 'rightful boasting,' when man sees God,
is a thing unthinkable; therefore his justification was
given, not earned." For what says the Scripture,
the passage, the great text (Gen. xv. 6)? "Now
Abraham believedIn the Greek, ἐπίστευσε stands first in the clause, and is thus
emphatic.
God, and it was reckoned to him as
righteousness." Now to the man who works, his
(ὁ) reward, his earned requital,Not that μισθὸς always gives the thought of earning as a right.
It may mean merely "result, issue," however realized. See e.g.
2 John 8. But the context here decides the reference.
is not reckoned
grace-wise, as a gift of generosity, but debt-wise; it is
to the man who does not work, but believes, confides, in
Him who justifies the ungodly one, that "his faith is
reckoned as righteousness." "The ungodly one"; as if
to bring out by an extreme case the glory of the
wonderful paradox. "The ungodly," the ἀσεβής, is
undoubtedly a word intense and dark; it means not
the sinner only, but the open, defiant sinner. Every
human heart is capable of such sinfulness, for "the
heart is deceitful above all things." In this respect,
as we have seen, in the potential respect, even an
Abraham is a great sinner. But there are indeed
"sinners and sinners," in the experiences of life; and
St Paul is ready now with a conspicuous example of
the justification of one who was truly, at one miserable
period, by his own fault, "an ungodly one."
"Thou hast given occasion to the enemies of the Lord
to blaspheme" (2 Sam. xii. 14). He had done so indeed.
The faithful photography of the Scriptures shews us
David, the chosen, the faithful, the man of spiritual
experiences, acting out his lustful look in adultery, and
half covering his adultery with the most base of constructive
murders, and then, for long months, refusing
to repent. Yet was David justified: "I have sinned
against the Lord"; "The Lord also hath put away
thy sin." He turned from his awfully ruined self to
God, and at once he received remission. Then, and
to the last, he was chastised. But then and there he
was unreservedly justified, and with a justification
which made him sing a loud beatitude.
Just as David too speaks his felicitation
(τὸν μακαρισμὸν) of the man (and it was himself)
to whom God reckons righteousness irrespective of works,
"Happy they whose iniquities have been remitted,
and whose sins have been covered; happy the
man to whom the Lord will not reckon sin"
(Psal. xxxii. 1, 2). Wonderful words, in the
context of the experience out of which they spring! A
human soul which has greatly transgressed, and which
knows it well, and knows too that to the end it will
suffer a sore discipline because of it, for example and
humiliation, nevertheless knows its pardon, and knows
it as a happiness indescribable. The iniquity has been
"lifted"; the sin has been "covered," has been struck
out of the book of "reckoning," written by the Judge.
The penitent will never forgive himself; in this very
Psalm he tears from his sin all the covering woven by
his own heart. But his God has given him remission,
has reckoned him as one who has not sinned, so far as
access to Him and peace with Him are in question.
And so his song of shame and penitence begins with
a beatitude, and ends with a cry of joy.
We pause to note the exposition implied here of the
phrase, "to reckon righteousness." It is to treat the
man as one whose account is clear. "Happy the man
to whom the Lord will not reckon sin." In the phrase
itself, "to reckon righteousness," (as in its Latin equivalent,
"to impute righteousness,") the question, what
clears the account, is not answered. Suppose the impossible
case of a record kept absolutely clear by the
man's own sinless goodness; then the "reckoned,"
the "imputed, righteousness" would mean the Law's
contentment with him on his own merits. But the
context of human sin fixes the actual reference to an
"imputation" which means that the awfully defective
record is treated, for a divinely valid reason, as if it
were, what it is not, good. The man is at peace
with his Judge, though he has sinned, because the
Judge has joined him to Himself, and taken up his
liability, and answered for it to His own Law. The
man is dealt with as righteous, being a sinner, for his
glorious Redeemer's sake. It is pardon, but more than
pardon. It is no mere indulgent dismissal; it is
a welcome as of the worthy to the embrace of the
Holy One.
Such is the Justification of God. We shall need to
remember it through the whole course of the Epistle.
To make Justification a mere synonym for Pardon is
always inadequate. Justification is the contemplation
and treatment of the penitent sinner, found in Christ,
as righteous, as satisfactory to the Law, not merely as
one whom the Law lets go. Is this a fiction? Not at
all. It is vitally linked to two great spiritual facts. One
is, that the sinner's Friend has Himself dealt, in the
sinner's interests, with the Law, honouring its holy claim
to the uttermost under the human conditions which He
freely undertook. The other is that he has mysteriously,
but really, joined the sinner to Himself, in faith, by the
Spirit; joined him to Himself as limb, as branch, as
bride. Christ and His disciples are really One in the
order of spiritual life. And so the community between
Him and them is real, the community of their debt on
the one side, of His merit on the other.
Now again comes up the question, never far distant
in St Paul's thought, and in his life, what these
facts of Justification have to do with Gentile sinners.
Here is David blessing God for his unmerited acceptance,
an acceptance by the way wholly unconnected with
the ritual of the altar. Here above all is Abraham,
"justified in consequence of faith." But David was a
child of the covenant of circumcision. And Abraham was
the father of that covenant. Do not their justifications
speak only to those who stand, with them, inside that
charmed circle? Was not Abraham justified by faith
plus circumcision? Did not the faith act only because
he was already one of the privileged?
This felicitation
therefore, this cry of "Happy are the freely
justified," is it upon the circumcision, or upon the
uncircumcision? For we say that to Abraham, with an emphasisBy the position of the name in the Greek sentence.
on "Abraham," his faith was reckoned as
righteousness. The question, he means, is legitimate,
"for" Abraham is not at first sight a case in point for
the justification of the outside world, the non-privileged
races of man. But consider: How
then was it reckoned? To Abraham in circumcision or
in uncircumcision? Not in circumcision, but in uncircumcision;
fourteen years at least had to
pass before the covenant rite came in. And
he received the sign of circumcision, (with a stress upon
"sign," as if to say that the "thing," the reality signed,
was his already,) as a seal on the righteousness of the
faith that was in his circumcision, a seal on the acceptance
which he received, antecedent to all formal privilege,
in that bare hand of faith. And all this was so, and
was recorded so, with a purpose of far-reaching significance:
that he might be father, exemplar, representative,
of all who believe notwithstanding uncircumcision,Διὰ ἀκροβυστίας: as if passing
through its seeming obstacle.
that to them righteousness should be reckoned; and father of
circumcision, exemplar and representative within
its circle also, for those who do not merely belong
to circumcision, but for thoseSo the Greek precisely. But practically the words "for those"
may be omitted here.
who also step in the
track of the uncircumcision-faith of our father Abraham.
So privilege had nothing to do with acceptance, except
to countersign the grant of a grace absolutely free.
The Seal did nothing whatever to make the Covenant.
It only verified the fact, and guaranteed the bona fides
of the Giver. As the Christian Sacraments are, so was
the Patriarchal Sacrament; it was "a sure testimony
and effectual sign of God's grace and good will."See Article xxv.
But the grace and the good will come not through the
Sacrament as through a medium, but straight from God
to the man who took God at His word. "The means
whereby he received," the mouth with which he fed
upon the celestial food, "was faith."See Article xxviii.
The rite came
not between the man and his accepting Lord, but as
it were was present at the side to assure him with a
physical concurrent fact that all was true. "Nothing
between" was the law of the great transaction; nothing,
not even a God-given ordinance; nothing but the empty
arms receiving the Lord Himself;—and empty arms
indeed put "nothing between."
Detached Note to Chapter X
The following is extracted from the Commentary on this
Epistle in "The Cambridge Bible" (p. 261).
"[What shall we say to] the verbal discrepancy
between St Paul's explicit teaching that 'a man is
justified by faith without works,' and St James' equally
explicit teaching that 'by works a man is justified, and
not by faith only'? With only the New Testament
before us, it is hard not to assume that the one Apostle
has in view some distortion of the doctrine of the other.
But the fact (see Lightfoot's Galatians, detached note
to ch. iii.) that Abraham's faith was a staple Rabbinic
text alters the case, by making it perfectly possible
that St James (writing to members of the Jewish
Dispersion) had not Apostolic but Rabbinic teaching
in view. And the line such teaching took is indicated
by Jas. ii. 19, where an example is given of the faith
in question; and that example is concerned wholly
with the grand point of strictly Jewish orthodoxy—God
is One.... The persons addressed [were thus those
whose] idea of faith was not trustful acceptance, a belief
of the heart, but orthodox adherence, a belief of the
head. And St James [took] these persons strictly on
their own ground, and assumed, for his argument, their
own very faulty account of faith to be correct.
"He would thus be proving the point, equally dear
to St Paul, that mere theoretic orthodoxy, apart from
effects on the will, is valueless. He would not, in the
remotest degree, be disputing the Pauline doctrine that
the guilty soul is put into a position of acceptance with
the Father only by vital connexion with the Son, and
that this connexion is effectuated, absolutely and alone,
not by personal merit, but by trustful acceptance of
the Propitiation and its all-sufficient vicarious merit.
From such trustful acceptance 'works' (in the profoundest
sense) will inevitably follow; not as antecedents
but as consequents of justification. And thus
... 'it is faith alone which justifies; but the faith
which justifies can never be alone.'"
CHAPTER XI
ABRAHAM (ii)
Romans iv. 13-25
AGAIN we approach the name of Abraham, Friend
of God, Father of the Faithful. We have seen
him justified by faith, personally accepted because
turning altogether to the sovereign Promiser. We see
him now in some of the glorious issues of that acceptance;
"Heir of the world," "Father of many nations."
And here too all is of grace, all comes through faith.
Not works not merit, not ancestral and ritual privilege,
secured to Abraham the mighty Promise; it was his
because he, pleading absolutely nothing of personal
worthiness, and supported by no guarantees of ordinance
"believed God."
We see him as he steps out from his tent under that
glorious canopy, that Syrian "night of stars." We
look up with him to the mighty depths, and receive
their impression upon our eyes. Behold the innumerable
points and clouds of light! Who can count the
half-visible rays which make white the heavens, gleaming
behind, beyond, the thousands of more numerable luminaries?
The lonely old man who stands gazing there,
perhaps side by side with his divine Friend manifested
in human form, is told to try to count. And then he
hears the promise, "So shall thy seed be."
It was then and there that he received justification by
faith. It was then and there also that, by faith, as a
man uncovenanted, unworthy, but called upon to take
what God gave, he received the promise that he should
be "heir of the world."
It was an unequalled paradox—unless indeed we
place beside it the scene when, eighteen centuries later,
in the same land, a descendant of Abraham's, a Syrian
Craftsman, speaking as a religious Leader to His
followers, told them (Matt. xiii. 37, 38) that the "field
was the world," and He the Master of the field.
"Heir of the world"! Did this mean, of the universe
itself? Perhaps it did, for Christ was to be the
Claimant of the promise in due time; and under His
feet all things, literally all, are set already in right, and
shall be hereafter set in fact. But the more limited,
and probably in this place the fitter, reference is vast
enough; a reference to "the world" of earth, and of
man upon it. In his "seed," that childless senior was to
be King of Men, Monarch of the continents and oceans.
To him, in his seed, "the utmost parts of the earth"
were given "for his possession." Not his little clan
only, encamped on the dark fields around him, nor even
the direct descendants only of his body, however
numerous, but "all nations," "all kindreds of the earth,"
were "to call him blessed," and to be blessed in him, as
their patriarchal Chief, their Head in covenant with God.
"We see not yet all things" fulfilled of this astonishing
grant and guarantee. We shall not do so, till vast
promised developments of the ways of God have come to
sight. But we do see already steps taken towards that
issue, steps long, majestic, never to be retraced. We see
at this hour in literally every region of the human world
the messengers—an always more numerous army—of
the Name of "the Son of David, the Son of Abraham."
They are working everywhere; and everywhere, notwithstanding
innumerable difficulties, they are winning
the world for the great Heir of the Promise. Through
paths they know not these missionaries have gone out;
paths hewn by the historical providence of God, and by
His eternal life in the Church, and in the soul. When
"the world" has seemed shut, by war, by policy, by
habit, by geography, it has opened, that they may enter;
till we see Japan throwing back its castle-doors, and
inner Africa not only discovered but become a household
word for the sake of its missions, of its martyrdoms, of
the resolve of its native chiefs to abolish slavery even
in its domestic form.In Uganda, 1893.
No secular conscious programme has had to do with
this. Causes entirely beyond the reach of human combination
have been, as a fact, combined; the world
has been opened to the Abrahamic message just as the
Church has been inspired anew to enter in, and has
been awakened to a deeper understanding of her glorious
mission. For here too is the finger of God; not only
in the history of the world, but in the life of the Church
and of the Christian. For a long century now, in the
most living centres of Christendom, there has been
waking and rising a mighty revived consciousness of
the glory of the Gospel of the Cross, and of the Spirit;
of the grace of Christ, and also of His claim. And at
this hour, after many a gloomy forecast of unbelieving
and apprehensive thought, there are more men and
women ready to go to the ends of the earth with the
message of the Son of Abraham, than in all time before.
Contrast these issues, even these—leaving out of
sight the mighty future—with the starry night when the
wandering Friend of God was asked to believe the
incredible, and was justified by faith, and was invested
through faith with the world's crown. Is not God
indeed in the fulfilment? Was He not indeed in the
promise? We are ourselves a part of the fulfilment;
we, one of the "many Nations" of whom the great
Solitary was then made "the Father." Let us bear our
witness, and set to our seal.
In doing so, we attest and illustrate the work, the ever
blessed work, of faith. That man's reliance, at that great
midnight-hour, merited nothing, but received everything.
He took in the first place acceptance with God, and
then with it, as it were folded and embedded in it, he took
riches inexhaustible of privilege and blessing; above all,
the blessing of being made a blessing. So now, in view
of that hour of Promise, and of these ages of fulfilment,
we see our own path of peace in its divine simplicity.
We read, as if written on the heavens in stars, the
words, "Justified by Faith." And we understand already,
what the Epistle will soon amply unfold to us,
how for us, as for Abraham, blessings untold of other
orders lie treasured in the grant of our acceptance.
"Not for him only, but for us also, believing."
Let us turn again to the text.
For not through law came the promise to
Abraham, or to his seed, of his being the world's
heir, but through faith's righteousness; through the
acceptance received by uncovenanted, unprivileged
faith. For if those who belong to law inherit
Abraham's promise, faith is ipso facto void,
and the promise is ipso facto annulled.We attempt thus to represent the perfects, κεκένωται, κατήργηται.
For wrath
is what the Law works out; it is onlyRead οὗ δὲ not
οὗ γάρ.
where law is not that transgression is not either. As
much as to say, that to suspend eternal blessing,
the blessing which in its nature can deal only with
ideal conditions, upon man's obedience to law, is to bar
fatally the hope of a fulfilment. Why? Not because
the Law is not holy; not because disobedience is not
guilty; as if man were ever, for a moment, mechanically
compelled to disobey. But because as a fact man is a
fallen being, however he became so, and whatever is
his guilt as such. He is fallen, and has no true self-restoring
power. If then he is to be blessed, the work
must begin in spite of himself. It must come from
without, it must come unearned, it must be of grace, through faith.
Therefore it is on (literally, "out
of") faith, in order to be grace-wise, to make
secure the promise, to all the seed, not only to that which
belongs to the Law, but to that which belongs to the
faith of Abraham, to the "seed" whose claim is no less
and no more than Abraham's faith; who is
father of all us, as it stands written, (Gen.
xvii. 5), "Father of many NationsIt is impossible to convey in English the point of the word ἔθνη
here, with its faint reference to the Gentiles (in the sense common
in later Judaism), spiritually "naturalized" among Abraham's descendants.
have I appointed thee"—in the sight of the God whom he believed, who
vivifies the dead, and calls, addresses, deals with, things
not-being as being. "In the sight of God"; as if to say,
that it matters little what Abraham is for "us all" in the
sight of man, in the sight and estimate of the Pharisee.
The Eternal Justifier and Promiser dealt with Abraham,
and in him with the world, before the birth of that Law
which the Pharisee has perverted into his rampart of
privilege and isolation. He took care that the mighty
transaction should take place not actually only, but
significantly, in the open field and beneath the boundless
cope of stars. It was to affect not one tribe, but
all the nations. It was to secure blessings which were
not to be demanded by the privileged, but taken by the
needy. And so the great representative Believer was
called to believe before Law, before legal Sacrament, and
under every personal circumstance of humiliation and discouragement.
Who, past hope, on hope,
believed; stepping from the dead hope of
nature to the bare hope of the promise, so that he
became father of many Nations; according to what stands
spoken, "So shall thy seed be."Observe the characteristically fragmentary quotation, which
assumes the reader's knowledge of the context—the context of the
stars. Compare Heb. vi. 14, which similarly quotes Gen. xxii. 16, 17.
And, because he failed notΜὴ ἀσθενήσας:—we attempt to convey the thought, given by the
aorist, that he then and there was "not weak."
in his (τῇ) faith, he did not notice his
own body, already turned to death, near (που) a century
old as he now was, and the death-state of the womb of
Sarah. No, on the promise of God—he did not
waver by his unbelief,We render this clause as literally as possible. It is as if he
would have written "On the promise of God he relied," but changed
the expression to one more ample and more forcible. "His unbelief":
τῇ ἀπιστίᾳ. Not that Abraham had unbelief actually, but
he had it potentially; he might have disbelieved. In that sense
unbelief was "his."
but received strengthἘνεδυναμώθη: the thought is of
strength summoned at a crisis.
by his (τῇ) faith, giving glory to God, the "glory" of
dealing with Him as being what He is, Almighty
and All-true, and fully persuaded that
what He has promised He is able actually to do. Wherefore
actually (καὶ) it was reckoned to him as
righteousness. Not because such a "giving to
God the glory" which is only His eternal due was
morally meritorious, in the least degree. If it were
so, Abraham "would have whereof to glory." The
"wherefore" is concerned with the whole record, the
whole transaction. Here was a man who took the
right way to receive sovereign blessing. He interposed
nothing between the Promiser and himself. He treated
the Promiser as what He is, all-sufficient and all-faithful.
He opened his empty hand in that persuasion, and so,
because the hand was empty, the blessing was laid
upon its palm.
Now it was not written only on his account, that
it was reckoned to him, but also on account of us,
to whom it is sure (μέλλει) to be reckoned, in the
fixed intention of the divine Justifier, as each
successive applicant comes to receive; believing as we
do on the Raiser-up of Jesus our Lord from the dead; who
was delivered up on account of our transgressions,
and was raised up on account of our justification.
Here the great argument moves to a pause, to the
cadence of a glorious rest. More and more, as we have
pursued it, it has disengaged itself from the obstructions
of the opponent, and advanced with a larger motion into
a positive and rejoicing assertion of the joys and wealth
of the believing. We have left far behind the pertinacious
cavils which ask, now whether there is any hope
for man outside legalism, now whether within legalism
there can be any danger even for deliberate unholiness,
and again whether the Gospel of gratuitous acceptance
does not cancel the law of duty. We have left the
Pharisee for Abraham, and have stood beside him to
look and listen. He, in the simplicity of a soul which
has seen itself and seen the Lord, and so has not one
word, one thought, about personal privilege, claim, or
even fitness, receives a perfect acceptance in the hand
of faith, and finds that the acceptance carries with it
a promise of unimaginable power and blessing. And
now from Abraham the Apostle turns to "us," "us all,"
"us also." His thoughts are no longer upon adversaries
and objections, but on the company of the faithful, on
those who are one with Abraham, and with each other,
in their happy willingness to come, without a dream
of merit, and take from God His mighty peace in the
name of Christ. He finds himself not in synagogue
or in school, disputing, but in the believing assembly,
teaching, unfolding in peace the wealth of grace. He
speaks to congratulate, to adore.
Let us join him there in spirit, and sit down with Aquila
and Priscilla, with Nereus, and Nymphas, and Persis,
and in our turn remember that "it was written for us
also." Quite surely, and with a fulness of blessing
which we can never find out in its perfection, to us also
"faith is sure to be reckoned, μέλλει λογίζεσθαι, as
righteousness, believing as we do, τοῖς πιστεύουσιν, on the
Raiser-up of Jesus our Lord, ours also, from the dead."
To us, as to them, the Father presents Himself as the
Raiser-up of the Son. He is known by us in that act.
It gives us His own warrant for a boundless trust in
His character, His purposes, His unreserved intention
to accept the sinner who comes to His feet in the name
of His Crucified and Risen Son. He bids us—not forget
that He is the Judge, who cannot for a moment connive.
But He bids us believe, He bids us see, that He, being
the Judge, and also the Law-Giver, has dealt with His
own Law, in a way that satisfies it, that satisfies
Himself. He bids us thus understand that He now
"is sure to" justify, to accept, to find not guilty, to find
righteous, satisfactory, the sinner who believes. He
comes to us, He, this eternal Father of our Lord, to
assure us, in the Resurrection, that He has sought, and
has "found, a Ransom"; that He has not been prevailed
upon to have mercy, a mercy behind which there may
therefore lurk a gloomy reserve, but has Himself "set
forth" the beloved Propitiation, and then accepted Him
(not it, but Him) with the acceptance of not His word
only but His deed. He is the God of Peace. How do
we know it? We thought He was the God of the
tribunal, and the doom. Yes; but He has "brought the
great Shepherd from the dead, in the blood of the everlasting
Covenant" (Heb. xiii. 20). Then, O eternal
Father of our Lord, we will believe Thee; we will
believe in Thee; we will, we do, in the very letter of
the words Thou didst bid Thy messenger write down
here, "believe upon Thee," ἐπὶ τὸν Ἐγείραντα, as in a
deep repose. Truly, in this glorious respect, though
Thou art consuming Fire, "there is nothing in Thee
to dread."
"Who was delivered up because of our transgressions."
So dealt the Father with the Son, who gave Himself.
"It pleased the Lord to bruise Him"; "He spared not
His own Son." "Because of our transgressions"; to
meet the fact that we had gone astray. What, was
that fact thus to be met? Was our self-will, our pride,
our falsehood, our impurity, our indifference to God,
our resistance to God, to be thus met? Was it to be
met at all, and not rather left utterly alone to its own
horrible issues? Was it eternally necessary that, if
met, it must be met thus, by nothing less than the
delivering up of Jesus our Lord? It was even so.
Assuredly if a milder expedient would have met our
guilt, the Father would not have "delivered up" the
Son. The Cross was nothing if not an absolute sine
quâ non. There is that in sin, and in God, which
made it eternally necessary that—if man was to be
justified—the Son of God must not only live but
die, and not only die but die thus, delivered up, given
over to be done to death, as those who do great sin
are done.
Deep in the heart of the divine doctrine of Atonement
lies this element of it, the "because of our transgressions";
the exigency of Golgotha, due to our sins.
The remission, the acquittal, the acceptance, was not
a matter for the verbal fiat of divine autocracy. It was
a matter not between God and creation, which to Him
is "a little thing," but between God and His Law, that
is to say, Himself, as He is eternal Judge. And this, to
the Eternal, is not a little thing. So the solution called
for no little thing, but for the Atoning Death, for the
laying by the Father on the Son of the iniquities of us
all, that we might open our arms and receive from the
Father the merits of the Son.
"And was raised up because of our justification;"
because our acceptance had been won, by His deliverance
up. Such is the simplest explanation of the
grammar, and of the import. The Lord's Resurrection
appears as, so to speak, the mighty sequel, and also the
demonstration, warrant, proclamation, of His acceptance
as the Propitiation, and therefore of our acceptance in
Him. For indeed it was our justification, when He
paid our penalty. True, the acceptance does not
accrue to the individual till he believes, and so receives.
The gift is not put into the hand till it is open, and
empty. But the gift has been bought ready for the
recipient long before he kneels to receive it. It was
his, in provision, from the moment of the purchase;
and the glorious Purchaser came up from the depths
where He had gone down to buy, holding aloft in His
sacred hands the golden Gift, ours because His for us.
A little while before he wrote to Rome, St Paul had
written to Corinth, and the same truth was in his soul
then, though it came out only passingly, while with
infinite impressiveness. "If Christ is not risen, idle
is your faith; you are yet in your sins" (1 Cor. xv. 17).
That is to say, so the context irrefragably shews, you
are yet in the guilt of your sins; you are still unjustified.
"In your sins" cannot possibly there refer to the moral
condition of the converts; for as a matter of fact, which no
doctrine could negative, the Corinthians were "changed
men." "In your sins" refers therefore to guilt, to law,
to acceptance. And it bids them look to the Atonement
as the objective sine quâ non for that, and to the
Resurrection as the one possible, and the only necessary,
warrant to faith that the Atonement had secured its end.
"Who was delivered up; who was raised up."
When? About twenty-five years before Paul sat
dictating this sentence in the house of Gaius. There
were at that moment about three hundred known living
people, at least (1 Cor. xv. 6), who had seen the Risen
One with open eyes, and heard Him with conscious ears.
From one point of view, all was eternal, spiritual,
invisible. From another point of view our salvation
was as concrete, as historical, as much a thing of place
and date, as the battle of Actium, or the death of
Socrates. And what was done, remains done.
"Can length of years on God Himself exact,
And make that fiction which was once a fact?"
CHAPTER XII
PEACE, LOVE, AND JOY FOR THE JUSTIFIED
Romans v. 1-11
WE reached a pause in the Apostle's thought with
the close of the last paragraph. We may
reverently imagine, as in spirit we listen to his dictation,
that a pause comes also in his work; that he is
silent, and Tertius puts down the pen, and they spend
their hearts awhile on worshipping recollection and
realization. The Lord delivered up; His people
justified; the Lord risen again, alive for evermore—here
was matter for love, joy, and wonder.
But the Letter must proceed, and the argument has
its fullest and most wonderful developments yet to
come. It has now already expounded the tremendous
need of justifying mercy, for every soul of man. It has
shewn how faith, always and only, is the way to
appropriate that mercy—the way of God's will, and
manifestly also in its own nature the way of deepest
fitness. We have been allowed to see faith in illustrative
action, in Abraham, who by faith, absolutely, without
the least advantage of traditional privilege, received
justification, with the vast concurrent blessings which
it carried. Lastly we have heard St Paul dictate to
Tertius, for the Romans and for us, those summarizing
words (iv. 25) in which we now have God's own certificate
of the triumphant efficacy of that Atoning Work,
which sustains the Promise in order that the Promise
may sustain us believing.
We are now to approach the glorious theme of the
Life of the Justified. This is to be seen not only as a
state whose basis is the reconciliation of the Law, and
whose gate and walls are the covenant Promise. It is
to appear as a state warmed with eternal Love;
irradiated with the prospect of glory. In it the man,
knit up with Christ his Head, his Bridegroom, his all,
yields himself with joy to the God who has received
him. In the living power of the heavenly Spirit, who
perpetually delivers him from himself, he obeys, prays,
works, and suffers, in a liberty which is only not yet
that of heaven, and in which he is maintained to the
end by Him who has planned his full personal salvation
from eternity to eternity.
It has been the temptation of Christians sometimes
to regard the truth and exposition of Justification as if
there were a certain hardness and as it were dryness
about it; as if it were a topic rather for the schools
than for life. If excuses have ever been given for
such a view, they must come from other quarters than
the Epistle to the Romans. Christian teachers, of
many periods, may have discussed Justification as coldly
as if they were writing a law-book. Or again they may
have examined it as if it were a truth terminating in
itself, the Omega as well as the Alpha of salvation;
and then it has been misrepresented, of course. For
the Apostle certainly does not discuss it drily; he lays
deep indeed the foundations of Law and Atonement, but
he does it in the manner of a man who is not drawing
the plan of a refuge, but calling his reader from the
tempest into what is not only a refuge but a home.
And again he does not discuss it in isolation. He spends
his fullest, largest, and most loving expositions on its
intense and vital connexion with concurrent truths.
He is about now to take us, through a noble vestibule,
into the sanctuary of the life of the accepted, the life of
union, of surrender, of the Holy Ghost.
Justified therefore on terms of faith,Ἐκ πίστως: "out of faith."
The phrase has often met us in the Greek before. It calls for various
renderings in various contexts; that given above seems best to
paraphrase it here.
we have peaceSee detached note, p. 140, for an account of the various reading
here, ἔχωμεν εἰρήνην, "Let us have peace."
towards our (τὸν) God, we possess in
regard of Him the "quietness and assurance" of acceptance,
through our Lord Jesus Christ, thus delivered up,
and raised up, for us; through whom we have
actually (καὶ) foundἘσχήκαμεν: "we have had," "we have got."
our (τὴν) introduction, our
free admission, by our (τῇ) faith, into this grace, this unearned
acceptance for Another's sake, in which we stand,
instead of falling ruined, sentenced, at the tribunal.
And we exult, not with the sinful "boasting"Καυχᾶσθαι, καύχησις:
see above ii. 23, iii. 27, iv. 2.
of the legalist, but in hope (literally, "on hope,"
ἐπ' ἐλπίδι,
as reposing on the promised prospect) of the glory of our
(τοῦ) God, the light of the heavenly vision and fruition of
our Justifier, and the splendour of an eternal service of
Him in that fruition.
Nor only so, but we
exult too in our tribulations, with a better
fortitude than the Stoic's artificial serenity, knowing
that the tribulation works out, develops, patient persistency,Ὑπομονὴ is more than "patience."
By usage it implies "patience in action"; "perseverance."
as it occasions proof after proof of the power
of God in our weakness, and thus generates the habit of
reliance; and then (δὲ) the patient persistency develops
proof, brings out in experience, as a proved fact, that
through Christ we are not what we were; and then the
proof develops hope, solid and definite expectation of
continuing grace and final glory, and, in particular, of
the Lord's Return; and the hope does not shame, does
not disappoint; it is a hope sure and steadfast, for it
is the hope of those who now know that they are
objects of eternal Love; because the love of our (τοῦ)
God has been poured out in our hearts; His love to us
has been as it were diffused through our consciousness,
poured out in a glad experience as rain from the cloud,
as floods from the rising spring,It is quite possible, of course, to explain
ἡ ἀγάπη τοῦ Θεοῦ,
grammatically, to mean "our love to God." And some, more mystically,
explain it of God's faculty of love conveyed to us that we, with
it, may love Him. But the following context, especially ver. 8, is
clearly against such expositions. Verses 6-11 are in fact an explanation
of the thought of ver. 5.
through the Holy Spirit that was given to us.
Here first is mentioned explicitly, in the Apostle's
argument, (we do not reckon ch. i. 4 as in the argument,)
the blessed Spirit, the Lord the Holy Ghost.
Hitherto the occasion for the mention has hardly arisen.
The considerations have been mainly upon the personal
guilt of the sinner, and the objective fact of the Atonement,
and the exercise of faith, of trust in God, as a genuine
personal act of man. With a definite purpose, we may
reverently think, the discussion of faith has been kept
thus far clear of the thought of anything lying behind
faith, of any "grace" giving faith. For whether or no
faith is the gift of God, it is most certainly the act of
man; none should assert this more decidedly than
those who hold (as we do) that Eph. ii. 8The writer ventures to refer to his Commentary on Ephesians in
The Cambridge Bible.
does teach that where saving faith is, it is there because God has
"given" it. But how does He "give" it? Not,
surely, by implanting a new faculty, but by so opening
the soul to God in Christ that the divine magnet
effectually draws the man to a willing repose upon such
a God. But the man does this, as an act, himself. He
trusts God as genuinely, as personally, as much with
his own faculty of trust, as he trusts a man whom he
sees to be quite trustworthy and precisely fit to meet
an imperative need. Thus it is often the work of the
evangelist and the teacher to insist upon the duty
rather than the grace of faith; to bid men rather thank
God for faith when they have believed than wait for the
sense of an afflatus before believing. And is this not
what St Paul does here? At this point of his argument,
and not before, he reminds the believer that his
possession of peace, of happiness, of hope, has been
attained and realized not, ultimately, of himself but
through the working of the Eternal Spirit. The insight
into mercy, into a propitiation provided by divine love,
and so into the holy secret of the divine love itself,
has been given him by the Holy Ghost, who has taken
of the things of Christ, and shewn them to him, and
secretly handled his "heart" so that the fact of the
love of God is a part of experience at last. The
man has been told of his great need, and of the sure
and open refuge, and has stepped through its peaceful
gate in the act of trusting the message and the will of
God. Now he is asked to look round, to look back,
and bless the hand which, when he was outside in the
naked field of death, opened his eyes to see, and guided
his will to choose.
What a retrospect it is! Let us trace it from the
first words of this paragraph again. First, here is the
sure fact of our acceptance, and the reason of it, and
the method. "Therefore"; let not that word be forgotten.
Our Justification is no arbitrary matter, whose
causelessness suggests an illusion, or a precarious
peace. "Therefore"; it rests upon an antecedent, in
the logical chain of divine facts. We have read that
antecedent, ch. iv. 25; "Jesus our Lord was given
up because of our transgressions, and was raised up
because of our justification." We assented to that fact;
we have accepted Him, only and altogether, in this work
of His. Therefore we are justified,
δικαιωθέντες,Observe the aorist form of the participle.
placed by an act of divine Love, working in the line of divine
Law, among those whom the Judge accepts, that He
may embrace them as Father. Then, in this possession
of the "peace" of our acceptance, thus led in
(προσαγωγή),
through the gate of the promise, with the footstep of
faith, we find inside our Refuge far more than merely
safety. We look up from within the blessed walls,
sprinkled with atoning blood, and we see above them
the hope of glory, invisible outside. And we turn to our
present life within them (for all our life is to be lived
within that broad sanctuary now), and we find resources
provided there for a present as well as a prospective
joy. We address ourselves to the discipline of the
place; for it has its discipline; the refuge is home, but
it is also school; and we find, when we begin to try it,
that the discipline is full of joy. It brings out into a
joyful consciousness the power we now have, in Him
who has accepted us, in Him who is our Acceptance,
to suffer and to serve in love. Our life has become a
life not of peace only but of the hope which animates
peace, and makes it flow "as a river." From hour to
hour we enjoy the never-disappointing hope of "grace
for grace," new grace for the next new need; and
beyond it, and above it, the certainties of the hope of
glory. To drop our metaphor of the sanctuary for
that of the pilgrimage, we find ourselves upon a pathway,
steep and rocky, but always mounting into purer
air, and so as to shew us nobler prospects; and at the
summit—the pathway will be continued, and transfigured,
into the golden street of the City; the same
track, but within the gate of heaven.
Into all this the Holy Ghost has led us. He has
been at the heart of the whole internal process. He
made the thunder of the Law articulate to our conscience.
He gave us faith by manifesting Christ. And, in
Christ, He has "poured out in our hearts the love
of God."
For now the Apostle takes up that word, "the Love
of God," and holds it to our sight, and we see in its
pure glory no vague abstraction, but the face, and the
work, of Jesus Christ. Such is the context into which
we now advance. He is reasoning on; "For Christ,
when we still were weak." He has set justification
before us in its majestic lawfulness. But he has
now to expand its mighty love, of which the Holy
Ghost has made us conscious in our hearts. We
are to see in the Atonement not only a guarantee
that we have a valid title to a just acceptance. We
are to see in it the love of the Father and the Son,
so that not our security only but our bliss may
be full.
For Christ, we still being weak, (gentle euphemism
for our utter impotence, our guilty inability
to meet the sinless claim of the Law of God,)
in season, in the fulness of time, when the ages of
precept and of failure had done their work, and man
had learnt something to purpose of the lesson of self-despair,
for the ungodly—died. "For the ungodly,"
ὑπὲρ ἀσεβῶν,
"concerning them," "with reference to them,"
that is to say, in this context of saving mercy, "in their
interests, for their rescue,Ὑπὲρ is literally "over," and in
itself imports simply "concern with"; as when we say that a man
is busy "over" an important matter; as it were stooping over it,
attending to it. Its special references depend altogether upon context
and usage. In itself it neither teaches nor denies the doctrine
of a vicarious and substitutionary work; ἀητὶ is the preposition which guarantees as true
that great aspect of the Lord's death. But ὑπὲρ of course amply allows for such an
application of its meaning, where the context suggests the
idea.
as their propitiation."
"The ungodly," or, more literally still, without the
article, "ungodly ones"; a designation general and
inclusive for those for whom He died. Above (iv. 5)
we saw the word used with a certain limitation, as of
the worst among the sinful. But here, surely, with a
solemn paradox, it covers the whole field of the Fall.
The ungodly here are not the flagrant and disreputable
only; they are all who are not in harmony with God;
the potential as well as the actual doers of grievous sin.
For them "Christ died"; not "lived," let us remember,
but "died." It was a question not of example, nor of
suasion, nor even of utterances of divine compassion.
It was a question of law and guilt; and it was to be
met only by the death-sentence and the death-fact;
such death as He died of whom, a little while before,
this same Correspondent had written to the converts of
Galatia (iii. 13); "Christ bought us out from the curse
of the Law, when He became a curse for us." All the
untold emphasis of the sentence, and of the thought, lies
here upon those last words, upon each and all of them,
"for ungodly ones—He died,"
ὑπὲρ ἀσεβῶν—ἀπέθανε.
The sequel shews this to us; he proceeds:
For scarcely,
with difficulty, and in rare instances, for a just
man will one die; "scarcely," he will not say
"never," for for the good man, the man answering in
some measure the ideal of gracious and not only of legal goodness,We incline more than formerly, though still with some doubt,
to see a rising climax here, as indicated in the paraphrase, from
δίκαιος to
ὁ ἀγαθός.
perhaps someone actually ventures to
die. But God commends, as by a glorious contrast
(συνίστησι),
His love, "His" as above all current
human love, "His own love,"
τὴν Ἑαυτοῦ, towards us,
because while we were still sinners, and as such repulsive
to the Holy One, Christ for us did die.
We are not to read this passage as if it were a
statistical assertion as to the facts of human love and
its possible sacrifices. The moral argument will not
be affected if we are able, as we shall be, to adduce
cases where unregenerate man has given even his life
to save the life of one, or of many, to whom he is not
emotionally or naturally attracted. All that is necessary
to St Paul's tender plea for the love of God is the
certain fact that the cases of death even on behalf of
one who morally deserves a great sacrifice are relatively
very, very few. The thought of merit is the ruling
thought in the connexion. He labours to bring out the
sovereign Lovingkindness, which went even to the
length and depth of death, by reminding us that, whatever
moved it, it was not moved, even in the lowest
imaginable degree, by any merit, no, nor by any "congruity,"
in us. And yet we were sought, and saved.
He who planned the salvation, and provided it, was the
eternal Lawgiver and Judge. He who loved us is
Himself eternal Right, to whom all our wrong is unutterably
repellent. What then is He as Love, who,
being also Right, stays not till He has given His Son
to the death of the Atonement?
So we have indeed a warrant to "believe the love
of God" (1 John iv. 16). Yes, to believe it. We look
within us, and it is incredible. If we have really seen
ourselves, we have seen ground for a sorrowful conviction
that He who is eternal Right must view us
with aversion. But if we have really seen Christ, we
have seen ground for—not feeling at all, it may be, at
this moment, but—believing that God is Love, and
loves us. What is it to believe Him? It is to take
Him at His word; to act altogether not upon our
internal consciousness but upon His warrant. We
look at the Cross, or rather, we look at the crucified
Lord Jesus in His Resurrection; we read at His feet
these words of His Apostle; and we go away to take
God at His assurance that we, unlovely, are beloved.
"My child," said a dying French saint, as she gave
a last embrace to her daughter, "I have loved you
because of what you are; my heavenly Father, to
whom I go, has loved me malgré moi."
And how does the divine reasoning now advance?
"From glory to glory"; from acceptance by the Holy
One, who is Love, to present and endless
preservation in His Beloved One. Therefore
much more, justified now in His blood, as it were "in"
its laver of ablution, or again "within" its circle of
sprinkling as it marks the precincts of our inviolable
sanctuary, we shall be kept safe through Him, who now
lives to administer the blessings of His death, from the
wrath, the wrath of God, in its present imminence over
the head of the unreconciled, and in its final fall "in that
day." For if, being enemies, with no initial
love to Him who is Love, nay, when we were
hostile to His claims, and as such subject to the hostility
of His Law, we were reconciled to our (τῷ) GodOn the meaning of καταλλαγή
see detached note, p. 141.
through the death of His Son, (God coming to judicial peace with
us, and we brought to submissive peace with Him,) much
more, being reconciled, we shall be kept safe in His life,
in the life of the Risen One who now lives for us, and
in us, and we in Him. Nor only so, but we
shall be kept exulting too in our (τοῦ) God through
our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom now we have receivedἘλάβομεν: but the English perfect best represents the idea.
this (τὴν) reconciliation.
Here, by anticipation, he indicates already the mighty
issues of the act of Justification, in our life of Union
with the Lord who died for us, and lived again. In the
sixth chapter this will be more fully unfolded; but he
cannot altogether reserve it so long. As he has advanced
from the law-aspect of our acceptance to its
love-aspect, so now with this latter he gives us at
once the life-aspect, our vital incorporation with our
Redeemer, our part and lot in His resurrection-life.
Nowhere in this whole Epistle is that subject expounded
so fully as in the later Epistles, Colossians and Ephesians;
the Inspirer led His servant all over that region then, in
his Roman prison, but not now. But He had brought
him into the region from the first, and we see it here
present to his thought, though not in the foreground of
his discourse. "Kept safe in His life"; not "by" His
life, but "in" His life. We are livingly knit to Him
the Living One. From one point of view we are
accused men, at the bar, wonderfully transformed, by the
Judge's provision, into welcomed and honoured friends
of the Law and the Lawgiver. From another point of
view we are dead men, in the grave, wonderfully vivified,
and put into a spiritual connexion with the mighty life
of our Lifegiving Redeemer. The aspects are perfectly
distinct. They belong to different orders of thought.
Yet they are in the closest and most genuine relation.
The Justifying Sacrifice procures the possibility of our
regeneration into the Life of Christ. Our union by
faith with the Lord who died and lives brings us into
actual part and lot in His justifying merits. And our
part and lot in those merits, our "acceptance in the
Beloved," assures us again of the permanence of the
mighty Love which will maintain us in our part and
lot "in His life." This is the view of the matter which
is before us here.
Thus the Apostle meets our need on every side. He
shews us the holy Law satisfied for us. He shews us
the eternal Love liberated upon us. He shews us the
Lord's own Life clasped around us, imparted to us;
"our life is hid in God with Christ, who is our Life"
(Col. iii. 3, 4). Shall we not "exult in God through
Him"?
And now we are to learn something of that great
Covenant-Headship, in which we and He are one.
Detached Notes to Chapter XII
I
Εἰρήνην ἔχομεν, "We have peace":
Εἰρήνην ἔχωμεν,
"Let us have peace." Which did St Paul write? On the
whole, after long thought upon the evidence, we decide
for the former reading. The documentary witness is
strong for the latter. For those who place the great
Uncial manuscripts in the place of practical decision,
ἔχωμεν has a clear verdict in its favour. But the other
class of copies, the Cursive, later on the whole than
the Uncials, but probably often representing correction
rather than corruption, are greatly in favour of ἔχομεν.
The evidence of ancient Versions, and of quotations
by early Christian writers, inclines on the whole for
ἔχωμεν. But in the study of a reading the argument
and context of course claim attention; for most surely
the original reading, whatever it was, was pertinent.
Now here the question of pertinence seems to us to lead
to a decided verdict for ἔχομεν. The Apostle is engaged
here altogether with assertion, instruction; exhortation
is to come later. Through this whole paragraph he
does nothing but assert facts and principles. Is it to be
believed that he begins it with a disjointed exhortation?
In itself the exhortation would bear a meaning perfectly
intelligible. "Let us have peace" would mean
"Let us enjoy peace."
So ἔχωμεν χάριν, Heb. xii. 28,
means, practically, "Let us use grace." Neither exhortation
would mean that we do not yet possess, in
respect of the Lord's gift, "peace" and "grace" respectively.
But, we repeat it, the context here seems
decisive against the presence here of any exhortation.
We want, logically, assertion.
The interchange of ω and ο in manuscripts is, as a
fact, frequent.
See the case carefully considered, and decided for
ἔχομεν, in Dr Scrivener's Introduction to the Criticism of
the N. T., p. 625.
II
Καταλλάσσειν, Καταλλαγή. It is sometimes held that
these words denote "reconciliation" in the sense of
man's laying aside his distrust, reluctance, resistance
towards God, not of God's laying aside His holy
displeasure against man; and that for this latter idea,
that of persuading an offended superior to grant peace,
we should need the words διαλλάσσεσθαι (which we
have Matt. v. 24, and in the Lxx. in e.g. 1 Sam. xxix. 4,
where the English has, "Wherewith should he reconcile
himself to his master?") and διαλλαγὴ (which does not
occur in the N. T.). But καταλλαγὴ (and its verb) is
as a fact used in the Greek of the Apocrypha in
connexions where the thought is just that of the
clemency of a king, induced to pardon. See e.g.
2 Macc. v. 20, where the English Version reads, "the
great Lord being reconciled (ἐν τῇ καταλλαγῇ τοῦ μεγάλου Δεσπότου)
[the temple] was set up." So 2 Macc. i. 5,
where we have the prayer (English Version), "God be
at one with you," καταλλαγείη ὑμῖν. Thus no elaborate
distinction can safely be drawn between the two sets of
compounds. And there is no place in the N. T. where
the meaning, conciliation of an offended party, would not
well suit καταλλάσσεσθαι, etc. The present passage
(Rom. v. 10, 11) would be practically meaningless otherwise.
The whole thought is of the divine mercy, providing
a way for accepting grace. To "receive τὴν καταλλαγὴν"
is a phrase which, by its very form as well as its connexion,
points to the thought not of reluctance overcome
but mercy found.
The word "atonement" (A.V., ver. 11) needs remark.
It seems certain that its derivation is "at-one-ment"
(See Skeat, Etymol. Dict., s.v.), though an etymological
connexion with ver-söhnen, (Dutch, ver-zoenen) has been
maintained (see Hofmeyr, The Blessed Life, p. 25).
But as Trench remarks, (Synonyms of the N. T., s.v.
καταλλαγὴ,) the usage of English has now long attached
the idea of propitiation (ἱλασμὸς)
to the word "atonement"; which should therefore be avoided as a
rendering for καταλλαγή.
CHAPTER XIII
CHRIST AND ADAM
Romans v. 12-21
WE approach a paragraph of the Epistle pregnant
with mystery. It leads us back to Primal
Man, to the Adam of the first brief pages of the Scripture
record, to his encounter with the suggestion to
follow himself rather than his Maker, to his sin, and
then to the results of that sin in his race. We shall
find those results given in terms which certainly we
should not have devised a priori. We shall find the
Apostle teaching, or rather stating, for he writes as to
those who know, that mankind inherits from primal
Man, tried and fallen, not only taint but guilt, not only
moral hurt but legal fault.
This is "a thing heard in the darkness." It has
been said that Holy Scripture "is not a sun, but a
lamp." The words may be grievously misused, by
undue emphasis on the negative clause; but they
convey a sure truth, used aright. Nowhere does the
divine Book undertake to tell us all about everything
it contains. It undertakes to tell us truth, and to tell
it from God. It undertakes to give us pure light, yea,
"to bring life and immortality out into the light,"
(2 Tim. i. 10). But it reminds us that we know "in
part," and that even prophecy, even the inspired
message, is "in part" (1 Cor. xiii. 9). It illuminates
immensely much, but it leaves yet more to be seen
hereafter. It does not yet kindle the whole firmament
and the whole landscape like an oriental sun. It sheds
its glory upon our Guide, and upon our path.
A passage like this calls for such recollections. It
tells us, with the voice of the Apostle's Lord, great facts
about our own race, and its relations to its primeval
Head, such that every individual man has a profound
moral and also judicial nexus with the first Man. It
does not tell us how those inscrutable but solid facts fit
into the whole plan of God's creative wisdom and moral
government. The lamp shines there, upon the edges of
a deep ravine beside the road; it does not shine sunlike
over the whole mountain-land.
As with other mysteries which will meet us later, so
with this; we approach it as those who "know in
part," and who know that the apostolic Prophet, by no
defect of inspiration, but by the limits of the case,
"prophesies in part." Thus with awful reverence,
with godly fear, and free from the wish to explain
away, yet without anxiety lest God should be proved
unrighteous, we listen as Paul dictates, and receive
his witness about our fall and our guilt in that mysterious
"First Father."
We remember also another fact of this case. This
paragraph deals only incidentally with Adam; its main
theme is Christ. Adam is the illustration; Christ is
the subject. We are to be shewn in Adam, by contrast,
some of "the unsearchable riches of Christ." So
that our main attention is called not to the brief outline
of the mystery of the Fall, but to the assertions of the
related splendour of the Redemption.
St Paul is drawing again to a close, a cadence. He
is about to conclude his exposition of the Way of
Acceptance, and to pass to its junction with the Way
of Holiness. And he shews us here last, in the matter
of Justification, this fragment from "the bottoms of the
mountains"—the union of the justified with their redeeming
Lord as race with Head; the nexus in that
respect between them and Him which makes His
"righteous act" of such infinite value to them. In the
previous paragraph, as we have seen, he has gravitated
toward the deeper regions of the blessed subject; he
has indicated our connexion with the Lord's Life as
well as with His Merit. Now, recurring to the thought
of the Merit, he still tends to the depths of truth, and
Christ our Righteousness is lifted before our eyes from
those pure depths as not the Propitiation only, but the
Propitiation who is also our Covenant-Head, our Second
Adam, holding His mighty merits for a new race,
bound up with Himself in the bond of a real unity.
He "prophesies in part," meanwhile, even in respect
of this element of his message. As we saw just above,
the fullest explanations of our union with the Lord
Christ in His life were reserved by St Paul's Master
for other Letters than this. In the present passage we
have not, what probably we should have had if the
Epistle had been written five years later, a definite
statement of the connexion between our Union with
Christ in His covenant and our Union with Him in His
life; a connexion deep, necessary, significant. It is
not quite absent from this passage, if we read verses 17,
18, aright; but it is not prominent. The main thought
is of merit, righteousness, acceptance; of covenant, of
law. As we have said, this paragraph is the climax of
the Epistle to the Romans as to its doctrine of our
peace with God through the merits of His Son. It is
enough for the purpose of that subject that it should
indicate, and only indicate, the doctrine that His Son is
also our Life, our indwelling Cause and Spring of purity
and power.
Recollecting thus the scope and the connexion of the
passage, let us listen to its wording.
On this account, on account of the aspects of
our justification and reconciliation "through
our Lord Jesus Christ" which he has just presented, it isIt will be seen that we assume, between διὰ
τοῦτο and ὥσπερ, some such implied
thought as "the case stands." We think it may be thus
grammatically; and that even if a less simple explanation of the
construction is adopted, such an insertion gives the import of
the whole passage aright.
just as through one man sin entered into the world,
the world of man, and, through sin, death, and so
to all men death travelled, διῆλθε, penetrated, pervaded,
inasmuch as all sinned; the Race sinning in its Head,
the Nature in its representative Bearer. The facts of
human life and death shew that sin did thus pervade
the race, as to liability, and as to penalty: For
until law came sin was in the world; it was
present all along, in the ages previous to the great
Legislation. But sin is not imputed, is not put down as
debt for penalty, where law does not exist, where in no
sense is there statute to be obeyed or broken, whether
that statute takes articulate expression or not.It will be seen that the rapid steps of thought lead, in this one
verse, from one meaning of the word "law" to another. He means
that there was sin before the Code of the Decalogue, but not therefore
before God had, in some degree, expressed His royal will, and
man had broken it.
But death became king (ἐβασίλευσεν), from
Adam down to Moses, even over those who did not sin on
the model of the transgression of Adam—who is (in the
present tense of the plan of God) pattern of the Coming
One.
He argues from the fact of death, and from its
universality, which implies a universality of liability, of
guilt. According to the Scriptures, death is essentially
penal in the case of man, who was created not to die
but to live. How that purpose would have been
fulfilled if "the image of God" had not sinned against
Him, we do not know. We need not think that the
fulfilment would have violated any natural process;
higher processes might have governed the case, in
perfect harmony with the surroundings of terrestrial
life, till perhaps that life was transfigured, as by a
necessary development, into the celestial and immortal.
But however, the record does connect, for man, the fact
of death with the fact of sin, offence, transgression.
And the fact of death is universal, and so has been
from the first. And thus it includes generations most
remote from the knowledge of a revealed code. And
it includes individuals most incapable of a conscious
act of transgression such as Adam's was; it includes
the heathen, and the infant, and the imbecile. Therefore
wherever there is human nature, since Adam fell,
there is sin, in its form of guilt. And therefore, in
some sense which perhaps only the supreme Theologian
Himself fully knows, but which we can follow a little
way, all men offended in the First Man—so favourably
conditioned, so gently tested. The guilt contracted by
him is possessed also by them. And thus is he "the
pattern of the Coming One."
For now the glorious Coming One, the Seed of the
Woman, the blessed Lord of the Promise, rises on the
view, in His likeness and in His contrast. Writing to
Corinth from Macedonia, about a year before, St Paul
had called him (1 Cor. xv. 45, 47) "the Second Adam,"
"the Second Man"; and had drawn in outline the
parallel he here elaborates. "In Adam all die; even
so in Christ all shall be made alive." It was a thought
which he had learned in Judaism,See Schöttgen, Horæ Hebraicæ, on 1 Cor. xv. 45. He quotes
from the Rabbis: "As the First Adam was one, was first,
אחד, in sin,
so Messiah shall be the last, האחרן, for the utter taking away of
sins."
but which his Master had affirmed to him in Christianity; and noble
indeed and far-reaching is its use of it in this exposition
of the sinner's hope.
But not as the transgression, so the gracious
gift (χάρισμα). For if, by the transgression of
the one, the many, the many affected by it, died, much
rather did the grace of God. His benignant action, and
the gift, the grant of our acceptance, in the grace of the
one Man, Jesus Christ, ("in His grace," because involved
in His benignant action, in His redeeming work)
abound unto the many whom it, whom He, affected.
We observe here some of the phrases in detail.
"The One"; "the One Man":—"the one," in each case,
is related to "the many" involved, in bane or in blessing
respectively. "The One Man":—so the Second
Adam is designated, not the First. As to the First,
"it goes unsaid" that he is man. As to the Second,
it is infinitely wonderful, and of eternal import, that He,
as truly, as completely, is one with us, is Man of men.
"Much rather did the grace, and the gift, abound":—the
thought given here is that while the dread sequel
of the Fall was solemnly permitted, as good in law, the
sequel of the divine counter-work was gladly sped by
the Lord's willing love, and was carried to a glorious
overflow, to an altogether unmerited effect, in the
present and eternal blessing of the justified. "The
many," twice mentioned in this verse, are the whole
company which, in each case, stands related to the
respective Representative. It is the whole race in
the case of the Fall; it is the "many brethren" of
the Second Adam in the case of the Reconciliation.
The question is not of numerical comparison between
the two, but of the numerousness of each host in
relation to the oneness of its covenant Head. What
the numerousness of the "many brethren" will be we
know—and we do not know; for it will be "a great
multitude, which no one can number." But that is
not in the question here. The emphasis, the "much
rather," the "abundance," lies not on the compared
numbers, but on the amplitude of the blessing which
overflows upon "the many" from the justifying work
of the One.
He proceeds, developing the thought. From the act
of each Representative, from Adam's Fall and Christ's
Atonement, there issued results of dominion, of royalty.
But what was the contrast of the cases! In the Fall,
the sin of the One brought upon "the many" judgment,
sentence, and the reign of death over them. In
the Atonement, the righteousness of the One brought
upon "the many" an "abundance," an overflow, a
generous largeness and love of acceptance, and the
power of life eternal, and a prerogative of royal rule
over sin and death; the emancipated captives treading
upon their tyrants' necks. We follow out the Apostle's
wording:
And not as through the one who sinned, who
fell, so is the gift; our acceptance in our Second
Head does not follow the law of mere and strict retribution
which appears in our fall in our first Head.
(For, he adds in emphatic parenthesis, the judgment
did issue, from one transgression,So we interpret ἑνὸς, in the light of the
πολλὰ παραπτώματα just below.
in condemnation,
in sentence of death; but the gracious gift issued, from
many transgressions,—not indeed as if earned by them,
as if caused by them, but as occasioned by them; for this
wonderful process of mercy found in our sins, as well
as in our Fall, a reason for the Cross—in a deed
of justification.)Δικαίωμα: the form of the word indicates not a process, or a
principle, but an act. Apparently, by context, it may mean either a
moral act of righteousness (see Rev. xix. 8, and perhaps below,
ver. 18), or a legal "act and deed" of acceptance. The parallel with
κατάκριμα pleads here for the latter.
For if in one transgression,We adopt the reading ἐν ἑνί.
The other, τῷ τοῦ ἑνός, amounts to
the same import, but without the pregnant force of the word "in."
"in" it, as the effect is involved in its cause, death came
to reign (ἐβασίλευσε) through the one offender,We supply this word, and not "transgression," because of the
parallel just below, "the One, Jesus Christ."
much rather those who are receiving, in their successive cases
and generations, that (τὴν) abundance of the grace just
spoken of (ver. 15: χάρις, ἐπερίσσευσε), and of the
free gift of righteousness, of acceptance, shall, in life,
life eternal, begun now, to end never, reign over their
former tyrants through the One, their glorious One,
Jesus Christ.
And now he sums up the whole in one comprehensive
inference and affirmation. "The One," "the
many"; "the One," "the all"; the whole mercy for
the all due to the one work of the One;—such is the
ground-thought all along. It is illustrated by "the one"
and "the many" of the Fall, but still so as to throw the
real weight of every word not upon the Fall but upon
the Acceptance. Here, as throughout this paragraph,
we should greatly mistake if we thought that the
illustration and the object illustrated were to be pressed,
detail by detail, into one mould. To cite an instance
to the contrary, we are certainly not to take him to
mean that because Adam's "many" are not only fallen
in him, but actually guilty, therefore Christ's "many"
are not only accepted in Him, but actually and
personally meritorious of acceptance. The whole
Epistle negatives that thought. Nor again are we to
think, as we ponder ver. 18, that because "the condemnation"
was "to all men" in the sense of their
being not only condemnable but actually condemned,
therefore "the justification of life" was "to all men"
in the sense that all mankind are actually justified.
Here again the whole Epistle, and the whole message
of St Paul about our acceptance, are on the other
side. The provision is for the genus, for man; but
the possession is for men—who believe.As to the universality of the offer, it is interesting and important
to find Calvin thus writing, on ver. 18:—Communem omnium gratiam
fecit, quia omnibus exposita est, non quod ad omnes extendatur re
ipsa. Nam etsi passus est Christus pro peccatis totius mundi, atque
omnibus indifferenter Dei benignitate offertur, non tamen omnes
apprehendunt. "The Lord," thus says the great French expositor,
"suffered for the sins of the whole world," and "is offered impartially
to all in the kindness of God."
No; these great details in the parallel need our reverent caution,
lest we think peace where there is, and can be, none.
The force of the parallel lies in the broader and deeper
factors of the two matters. It lies in the mysterious
phenomenon of covenant headship, as affecting both
our Fall and our Acceptance; in the power upon the
many, in each case, of the deed of the One; and then
in the magnificent fulness and positiveness of result
in the case of our salvation. In our Fall, sin merely
worked itself out into doom and death. In our Acceptance,
the Judge's award is positively crowned and as
it were loaded with gifts and treasures. It brings
with it, in ways not described here, but amply shewn
in other Scriptures, a living union with a Head who
is our life, and in whom we possess already the
powers of heavenly being in their essence. It brings
with it not only the approval of the Law, but accession
to a throne. The justified sinner is a king already,
in his Head, over the power of sin, over the fear of
death. And he is on his way to a royalty in the
eternal future which shall make him great indeed,
great in his Lord.
The absolute dependence of our justification upon
the Atoning Act of our Head, and the relation of our
Head to us accordingly as our Centre and our Root of
blessing, this is the main message of the passage we
are tracing. The mystery of our congenital guilt is
there, though it is only incidentally there. And after all
what is that mystery? It is assuredly a fact. The
statement of this paragraph, that the many were "constituted
sinners by the disobedience of the one," what
is it? It is the Scripture expression, and in some
guarded sense the Scripture explanation, of a consciousness
deep as the awakened soul of man; that I, a
member of this homogeneous race, made in God's
image, not only have sinned, but have been a sinful
being from my first personal beginning; and that I
ought not to be so, and ought never to have been so.
It is my calamity, but it is also my accusation. This
I cannot explain; but this I know. And to know this,
with a knowledge that is not merely speculative but
moral, is to be "shut up unto Christ," in a self-despair
which can go nowhere else than to Him for acceptance,
for peace, for holiness, for power.
Let us translate, as they stand, the closing sentences
before us:
Accordingly therefore, as through one transgression
there came a result to all men, to
condemnation, to sentence of death,so through one deed
of righteousnessΔικαίωμα: see note above, p. 150. It
seems to us almost equally possible to explain this word here (as in
our translation) of the Lord's Atoning Act, satisfying the Law for us,
and of the Accepting "Act and Deed" of the Father, declaring Him
accepted, and us in Him.
there came a result to all men, (to
"all" in the sense we have indicated, so that whoever
of mankind receives the acceptance owes it always and
wholly to the Act of Christ,) to justification of life, to an
acceptance which not only bids the guilty "not die,"
but opens to the accepted the secret, in Him who is
their Sacrifice, of powers which live in Him for them as
He is their Life. For as, by the disobedience of
the one man, the many, the many of that case,
were constituted sinners, constituted guilty of the fall of
their nature from God, so that their being sinful is not
only their calamity but their sin, so too by the obedience
of the One, "not according to their works," that is, to their
conduct, past, present, or to come, but "by the obedience
of the One," the many, His "many brethren," His Father's
children through faith in Him, shall be, as each comes
to Him in all time, and then by the final open proclamation
of eternity, constituted righteous, qualified for the
acceptance of the holy Judge.
Before he closes this page of his message, and turns
the next, he has as it were a parenthetic word to say,
indicating a theme to be discussed more largely later.
It is the function of the Law, the moral place of the
preceptive Fiat, in view of this wonderful Acceptance
of the guilty. He has suggested the question already,
iii. 31; he will treat some aspects of it more fully later.
But it is urgent here to enquire at least this, Was Law
a mere anomaly, impossible to put into relation with
justifying grace? Might it have been as well out of
the way, never heard of in the human world? No,
God forbid. One deep purpose of acceptance was to
glorify the Law, making the preceptive Will of God as
dear to the justified as it is terrible to the guilty. But
now, besides this, it has a function antecedent as well
as consequent to justification. Applied as positive
precept to the human will in the Fall, what does it do?
It does not create sinfulness; God forbid. Not God's
will but the creature's will did that. But it occasions
sin's declaration of war. It brings out the latent
rebellion of the will. It forces the disease to the
surface—merciful force, for it shews the sick man his
danger, and it gives point to his Physician's words of
warning and of hope. It reveals to the criminal his
guilt; as it is sometimes found that information of a
statutory human penalty awakens a malefactor's conscience
in the midst of a half-unconscious course of
crime. And so it brings out to the opening eyes of
the soul the wonder of the remedy in Christ. He sees
the Law; he sees himself; and now at last it becomes
a profound reality to him to see the Cross. He believes,
adores, and loves. The merit of his Lord covers his
demerit, as the waters the sea. And he passes from
the dread but salutary view of "the reign" of sin over
him, in a death he cannot fathom, to submit to "the
reign" of grace, in life, in death, for ever.
Now law came sideways in; law in its largest
sense, as it affects the fallen, but with a special
reference, doubtless, to its articulation at
Sinai. It came in "sideways," as to its relation to our
acceptance; as a thing which should indirectly promote
it, by not causing but occasioning the blessing; that
the transgression might abound, that sin, that sins, in
the most inclusive sense, might develop the latent evil,
and as it were expose it to the work of grace. But
where the sin multiplied, in the place, the region, of
fallen humanity, there did superabound the grace; with
that mighty overflow of the bright ocean of love which
we have watched already. That just as our (ἡ)
sin came to reign in our (τῷ) death, our penal
death, so too might the grace come to reign, having its
glorious way against our foes and over us, through
righteousness, through the justifying work, to life eternal,
which here we have, and which hereafter will receive
us into itself, through Jesus Christ our Lord.
"The last words of Mr Honest were, Grace reigns.
So he left the world." Let us walk with the same
watchword through the world, till we too, crossing that
Jordan, lean with a final simplicity of faith upon "the
obedience of the One."
CHAPTER XIV
JUSTIFICATION AND HOLINESS
Romans vi. 1-13
IN a certain sense, St Paul has done now with the
exposition of Justification. He has brought us
on, from his denunciation of human sin, and his detection
of the futility of mere privilege, to propitiation,
to faith, to acceptance, to love, joy, and hope, and
finally to our mysterious but real connexion in all this
blessing with Him who won our peace. From this
point onwards we shall find many mentions of our
acceptance, and of its Cause; we shall come to some
memorable mentions very soon. But we shall not
hear the holy subject itself any more treated and
expounded. It will underlie the following discussions
everywhere; it will as it were surround them, as with
a sanctuary wall. But we shall now think less directly
of the foundations than of the superstructure, for which
the foundation was laid. We shall be less occupied
with the fortifications of our holy city than with the
resources they contain, and with the life which is to
be lived, on those resources, within the walls.
Everything will cohere. But the transition will be
marked, and will call for our deepest, and let us add,
our most reverent and supplicating thought.
"We need not, then, be holy, if such is your programme
of acceptance." Such was the objection,
bewildered or deliberate, which St Paul heard in his
soul at this pause in his dictation; he had doubtless
often heard it with his ears. Here was a wonderful
provision for the free and full acceptance of "the
ungodly" by the eternal Judge. It was explained and
stated so as to leave no room for human virtue as a
commendatory merit. Faith itself was no commendatory
virtue. It was not "a work," but the antithesis
to "works." Its power was not in itself but in its
Object. It was itself only the void which received "the
obedience of the One" as the sole meriting cause of
peace with God. Then—may we not live on in sin,
and yet be in His favour now, and in His heaven
hereafter?
Let us recollect, as we pass on, one important lesson
of these recorded objections to the great first message of
St Paul. They tell us, incidentally, how explicit and
unreserved his delivery of the message had been, and
how Justification by Faith, by faith only, meant what
was said, when it was said by him. Christian thinkers,
of more schools than one, and at many periods, have
hesitated not a little over that point. The medieval
theologian mingled his thoughts of Justification with
those of Regeneration, and taught our acceptance
accordingly on lines impossible to lay true along those
of St Paul. In later days, the meaning of faith has
been sometimes beclouded, till it has seemed, through
the haze, to be only an indistinct summary-word for
Christian consistency, for exemplary conduct, for good
works. Now supposing either of these lines of
teaching, or anything like them, to be the message
of St Paul, "his Gospel," as he preached it; one
result may be reasonably inferred—that we should
not have had Rom. vi. 1 worded as it is. Whatever
objections were encountered by a Gospel of acceptance
expounded on such lines, (and no doubt it would have
encountered many, if it called sinful men to holiness,) it
would not have encountered this objection, that it seemed
to allow men to be unholy. What such a Gospel would
seem to do would be to accentuate in all its parts the
urgency of obedience in order to acceptance; the vital
importance on the one hand of an internal change in
our nature (through sacramental operation, according
to many); and then on the other hand the practice of
Christian virtues, with the hope, in consequence, of
acceptance, more or less complete, in heaven. Whether
the objector, the enquirer, was dull, or whether he
was subtle, it could not have occurred to him to say,
"You are preaching a Gospel of licence; I may, if you
are right, live as I please, only drawing a little deeper
on the fund of gratuitous acceptance as I go on." But
just this was the animus, and such were very nearly
the words, of those who either hated St Paul's
message as unorthodox, or wanted an excuse for the
sin they loved, and found it in quotations from St
Paul. Then St Paul must have meant by faith what
faith ought to mean, simple trust. And he must have
meant by justification without works, what those words
ought to mean, acceptance irrespective of our recommendatory
conduct. Such a Gospel was no doubt
liable to be mistaken and misrepresented, and in just
the way we are now observing. But it was also, and it
is so still, the only Gospel which is the power of God
unto salvation—to the fully awakened conscience, to the
soul that sees itself, and asks for God indeed.
This undesigned witness to the meaning of the
Pauline doctrine of Justification by Faith only will appear
still more strongly when we come to the Apostle's
answer to his questioners. He meets them not at
all by modifications of his assertions. He has not a
word to say about additional and corrective conditions
precedent to our peace with God. He makes no
impossible hint that Justification means the making of
us good, or that Faith is a "short title" for Christian
practice. No; there is no reason for such assertions
either in the nature of words, or in the whole cast of
the argument through which he has led us. What does
he do? He takes this great truth of our acceptance in
Christ our Merit, and puts it unreserved, unrelieved, unspoiled,
in contact with other truth, of coordinate, nay, of
superior greatness, for it is the truth to which Justification
leads us, as way to end. He places our acceptance
through Christ Atoning in organic connexion with our
life in Christ Risen. He indicates, as a truth evident
to the conscience, that as the thought of our share in
the Lord's Merit is inseparable from union with the
meriting Person, so the thought of this union is inseparable
from that of a spiritual harmony, a common
life, in which the accepted sinner finds both a direction
and a power in his Head. Justification has indeed
set him free from the condemning claim of sin, from
guilt. He is as if he had died the Death of sacrifice,
oblation, and satisfaction; as if he had passed through
the Lama Sabachthani, and had "poured out his soul"
for sin. So he is "dead to sin," in the sense in which
his Lord and Representative "died to" it; the atoning
death has killed sin's claim on him for judgment. As
having so died, in Christ, he is "justified from sin." But
then, because he thus died "in Christ," he is "in Christ"
still, in respect also of resurrection. He is justified, not
that he may go away, but that in His Justifier he may
live, with the powers of that holy and eternal life with
which the Justifier rose again.
The two truths are concentrated as it were into one,
by their equal relation to the same Person, the Lord.
The previous argument has made us intensely conscious
that Justification, while a definite transaction in law, is
not a mere transaction; it lives and glows with the
truth of connexion with a Person. That Person is the
Bearer for us of all Merit. But He is also, and equally,
the Bearer for us of new Life; in which the sharers of
His Merit share, for they are in Him. So that, while
the Way of Justification can be isolated for study, as
it has been in this Epistle, the justified man cannot be
isolated from Christ, who is his life. And thus he can
never ultimately be considered apart from his possession,
in Christ, of a new possibility, a new power, a new
and glorious call to living holiness.
In the simplest and most practical terms the Apostle
sets it before us that our justification is not an end in
itself, but a means to an end. We are accepted that
we may be possessed, and possessed after the manner
not of a mechanical "article," but of an organic limb.Not that the imagery of the limb appears here, explicitly.
But it does appear below, xii. 5, and in the contemporary passage
1 Cor. vi. 15; and more fully in the Epistles of the First Captivity.
We have "received the reconciliation" that we may
now walk, not away from God, as if released from a
prison, but with God, as His children in His Son.
Because we are justified, we are to be holy, separated
from sin, separated to God; not as a mere indication that
our faith is real, and that therefore we are legally safe,
but because we were justified for this very purpose,
that we might be holy. To return to a simile we have
employed already, the grapes upon a vine are not
merely a living token that the tree is a vine, and is
alive; they are the product for which the vine exists.
It is a thing not to be thought of that the sinner should
accept justification—and live to himself. It is a moral
contradiction of the very deepest kind, and cannot be
entertained without betraying an initial error in the
man's whole spiritual creed.
And further, there is not only this profound connexion
of purpose between acceptance and holiness. There is
a connexion of endowment and capacity. Justification
has done for the justified a twofold work, both limbs of
which are all important for the man who asks, How can
I walk and please God? First, it has decisively broken
the claim of sin upon him as guilt. He stands clear
of that exhausting and enfeebling load. The pilgrim's
burthen has fallen from his back, at the foot of the
Lord's Cross, into the Lord's Grave. He has peace
with God, not in emotion, but in covenant, through our
Lord Jesus Christ. He has an unreserved "introduction"
into a Father's loving and welcoming presence,
every day and hour, in the Merit of his Head. But then
also Justification has been to him as it were the signal
of his union with Christ in new life; this we have
noted already. Not only therefore does it give him, as
indeed it does, an eternal occasion for a gratitude
which, as he feels it, "makes duty joy, and labour
rest." It gives him a new power with which to live
the grateful life; a power residing not in Justification
itself, but in what it opens up. It is the gate through
which he passes to the fountain; it is the wall which
ramparts the fountain, the roof which shields him as he
drinks. The fountain is his justifying Lord's exalted
Life, His risen Life, poured into the man's being by
the Spirit who makes Head and member one. And
it is as justified that he has access to the fountain, and
drinks as deep as he will of its life, its power, its purity.
In the contemporary passage, 1 Cor. vi. 17, St Paul
had already written (in a connexion unspeakably
practical), "He that is joined unto the Lord is one
spirit." It is a sentence which might stand as a
heading to the passage we now come to render.
What shall we say then? Shall we cling to
(ἐπιμενοῦμεν, ἐπιμένωμεν)
the sin that the
grace may multiply, the grace of the acceptance of the
guilty? Away with the thought! We, the very men whoΟἵτινες: the paraphrase is perhaps a slight exaggeration of the
force of the pronoun.
died to that (τῇ) sin,—when our
Representative, in whom we have believed, died for us
to it, died to meet and break its claim—how shall we
any longer live, have congenial being and action, in it,
as in an air we like to breathe? It is a moral impossibility
that the man so freed from this thing's
tyrannic claim to slay him should wish for anything
else than severance from it in all respects. Or
do you not know that we all, when baptizedὍσοι ἐβαπτίσθημεν:
we give a paraphrase, not a translation, to shew the meaning practically.
into Jesus Christ, when the sacred water sealed to us
our faith-received contact with Him and interest in
Him, were baptized into His Death, baptized as coming
into union with Him as, above all, the Crucified, the
Atoning? Do you forget that your covenant-Head, of
whose covenant of peace your baptism was the divine
physical token, is nothing to you if not your Saviour
who died, and who died because of this very sin with
which your thought now parleys; died because only so
could He break its legal bond upon you, in order to
break its moral bond? We were entombed
therefore with Him by means of our (τοῦ) baptism,
as it symbolized and sealed the work of faith, into His
(τὸν) Death; it certified our interest in that vicarious
death, even to its climax in the grave which, as it were,
swallowed up the Victim; that just as Christ rose from
the dead by means of the glory of the Father, as that
death issued for Him in a new and endless life, not
by accident, but because the Character of God, the
splendour (δόξα) of His love, truth, and power, secured
the issue, so we too should begin to walk
(πετιπατήσωμεν)
in newness of life, should step forth in a power altogether
new, in our union still with Him. All possible emphasis
lies upon those words, "newness of life." They bring
out what has been indicated already (v. 17, 18), the
truth that the Lord has won us not only remission of
a death-penalty, not only even an extension of existence
under happier circumstances, and in a more grateful
and hopeful spirit—but a new and wonderful life-power.
The sinner has fled to the Crucified, that he may not
die. He is now not only amnestied but accepted. He
is not only accepted but incorporated into his Lord, as
one with Him in interest. He is not only incorporated
as to interest, but, because His Lord, being Crucified,
is also Risen, he is incorporated into Him as Life.
The Last Adam, like the First, transmits not only legal
but vital effects to His member. In Christ the man
has, in a sense as perfectly practical as it is inscrutable,
new life, new power, as the Holy Ghost applies to his
inmost being the presence and virtues of his Head.
"In Him he lives, by Him he moves."
To men innumerable the discovery of this ancient
truth, or the fuller apprehension of it, has been indeed
like a beginning of new life. They have been long
and painfully aware, perhaps, that their strife with
evil was a serious failure on the whole, and their
deliverance from its power lamentably partial. And
they could not always command as they would the
emotional energies of gratitude, the warm consciousness
of affection. Then it was seen, or seen more fully,
that the Scriptures set forth this great mystery, this
powerful fact; our union with our Head, by the Spirit,
for life, for victory and deliverance, for dominion over
sin, for willing service. And the hands are lifted up,
and the knees confirmed, as the man uses the now
open secret—Christ in him, and he in Christ—for the
real walk of life. But let us listen to St Paul again.
For if we became vitally connected (σύμφυτοι),
He with us and we with Him, by the likeness
of His Death, by the baptismal plunge, symbol and seal
of our faith-union with the Buried Sacrifice, why (ἀλλὰ),
we shall be vitally connected with Him by the likeness also
of His Resurrection, by the baptismal emergence, symbol
and seal of our faith-union with the Risen Lord, and
so with His risen power.We thus paraphrase a difficult sentence. It seems to us that the
ὁμοίωμα τοῦ θανάτου Αὐτοῦ
must refer to the baptismal rite. If so, our
paraphrase as a whole will be justified.—As to the "plunge" and
"emergence," we would only say, without entering further on an
agitated question, that it seems to us clear that baptism was at first,
theoretically, an entire immersion, but that, also primevally, the theory
was allowed to be modified in practice; the pouring of water in such
cases representing the ideal immersion. As early as "the Teaching of
the Twelve Apostles," cent. i. (ch. vii.), there are signs of this.
This knowing, that our old man, our old state, as out of Christ and
under Adam's headship, under guilt and in
moral bondage, was crucified with Christ, was as it
were nailed to His atoning Cross, where He represented
us. In other words, He on the Cross, our Head
and Sacrifice, so dealt with our fallen state for us,
that the body of sin, this our body viewed as sin's stronghold,
medium, vehicle, might be cancelled, might be in
abeyance, put down, deposed, so as to be no more the
fatal door to admit temptation to a powerless soul within.
"Cancelled" is a strong word. Let us lay hold upon
its strength, and remember that it gives us not a dream,
but a fact, to be found true in Christ. Let us not
turn its fact into fallacy, by forgetting that, whatever
"cancel" means, it does not mean that grace lifts us
out of the body; that we are no longer to "keep under
the body, and bring it into subjection," in the name of
Jesus. Alas for us, if any promise, any truth, is
allowed to "cancel" the call to watch and pray, and
to think that in no sense is there still a foe within.
But all the rather let us grasp, and use, the glorious
positive in its place and time, which is everywhere and
every day. Let us recollect, let us confess our faith,
that thus it is with us, through Him who loved us.
He died for us for this very end, that our "body of sin"
might be wonderfully "in abeyance," as to the power
of temptation upon the soul. Yes, as St Paul proceeds,
that henceforth we should not do bondservice to sin; that
from now onwards, from our acceptance in Him, from
our realization of our union with Him, we should say to
temptation a "no" that carries with it the power of the
inward presence of the Risen Lord. Yes, for He has
won that power for us in our Justification through His
Death. He died for us, and we in Him, as to sin's
claim, as to our guilt; and He thus died, as we have
seen, on purpose that we might be not only legally
accepted, but vitally united to Him. Such is the connexion
of the following clause, strangely rendered in
the English Version, and often therefore misapplied,
but whose literal wording is,
For he who died,
he who has died, has been justified from his
(τῆς) sin;
stands justified from it, stands free from its
guilt. The thought is of the atoning Death, in which
the believer is interested as if it were his own. And
the implied thought is that, as that death is "fact
accomplished," as "our old man" was so effectually
"crucified with Christ," therefore we may, we must,
claim the spiritual freedom and power in the Risen
One which the Slain One secured for us when He bore
our guilt.
This possession is also a glorious prospect, for it is
permanent with the eternity of His Life. It not only
is, but shall be. Now if we died with Christ,
we believe, we rest upon His word and work for
it, that we shall also live with Him,
More literally, perhaps, "shall also come to life with Him." If
we read this aright, it points to the prospect future at the moment of
the atoning Death, when, ideally, we died. It does not therefore
mean, practically, that we do not live with Him now, as we certainly
do (see just below, ver. 11). But it is as if to say, "we believe that
our share in His risen Life surely follows, now and always, our share
in His atoning Death."
that we shall share not only now but for all the future the powers of His
risen life. For He lives for ever—and we are in Him!
Knowing that Christ, risen from the dead, no
longer dies, no death is in His future now;
death over Him has no more dominion, its claim on Him
is for ever gone. For as to His dying (ὃ ἀπέθανε),
it was as to our (τῇ) sin He died;
it was to deal with our sin's claim; and He has dealt
with it indeed, so that His death is "once," ἐφάπαξ,
once for ever; but as to His living (ὃ ζῇ), it is as to God
He lives; it is in relation to His Father's acceptance, it
is as welcomed to His Father's throne for us, as the
Slain One Risen. Even so must you too reckon
yourselves, with the sure "calculation" that His
work for you, His life for you, is infinitely valid, to be
dead indeed to your (τῇ) sin, dead in His atoning death,
dead to the guilt exhausted by that death, but living to
your (τῷ) God, in Christ Jesus;The words τῷ Κυρίῳ ἡμῶν
are to be omitted from the text.
welcomed by your eternal Father, in your union with His Son, and in
that union filled with a new and blessed life from your
Head, to be spent in the Father's smile, on the Father's
service.
Let us too, like the Apostle and the Roman
Christians, "reckon" this wonderful reckoning; counting
upon these bright mysteries as upon imperishable facts.
All is bound up not with the tides or waves of our
emotions, but with the living rock of our union with
our Lord. "In Christ Jesus":—that great phrase,
here first explicitly used in the connexion, includes all
else in its embrace. Union with the slain and risen
Christ, in faith, by the Spirit—here is our inexhaustible
secret, for peace with God, for life to God, now and in
the eternal day.
Therefore do not let sin reignΜὲ βασιλευέτω: possibly the present
imperative may imply, "do not go on letting it reign."
in your mortal body, mortal, because not yet fully emancipated,
though your Lord has "cancelled" for you its character
as "the body of sin," the seat and vehicle of conquering
temptation. Do not let sin reign there, so that you
should obey the lusts of it,Omit αὐτῃ ἐν from the text.
of the body. Observe the
implied instruction. The body, "cancelled" as "the
body of sin," still has its "lusts," its desires; or rather
desires are still occasioned by it to the man, desires which
potentially, if not actually, are desires away from God.
And the man, justified through the Lord's death and
united to the Lord's life, is not therefore to mistake
a laissez-faire for faith. He is to use his divine
possessions, with a real energy of will. It is for him,
in a sense most practical, to see that his wealth is
put to use, that his wonderful freedom is realized in
act and habit. "Cancelled" does not mean annihilated.
The body exists, and sin exists, and "desires" exist.
It is for you, O man in Christ, to say to the enemy,
defeated yet present, "Thou shalt not reign; I veto
thee in the name of my King."
And do not presentΠαριστάνετε: we may perhaps explain this present imperative
also to mean "do not go on so doing."
your limbs, your bodies in the detail of their faculties, as implements
(ὅπλα) of unrighteousness, to sin, to sin regarded as the
holder and employer of the implements. But presentΠαραστήσατε: the aorist certainly implies a critical resolve, a
decision of surrender.
yourselves, your whole being, centre and circle, to God,
as men living after death, in His Son's risen life, and
your limbs, hand, foot, and head, with all their faculties,
as implements of righteousness for God.
"O blissful self-surrender!" The idea of it, sometimes
cloudy, sometimes radiant, has floated before
the human soul in every age of history. The spiritual
fact that the creature, as such, can never find its true
centre in itself, but only in the Creator, has expressed
itself in many various forms of aspiration and endeavour,
now nearly touching the glorious truth of the matter,
now wandering into cravings after a blank loss of
personality, or however an eternal coma of absorption
into an Infinite practically impersonal; or again,
affecting a submission which terminates in itself, an
islam, a self-surrender into whose void no blessing
falls from the God who receives it. Far different is
the "self-presentation" of the Gospel. It is done in
the fulness of personal consciousness and choice. It
is done with revealed reasons of infinite truth and
beauty to warrant its rightness. And it is a placing
of the surrendered self into Hands which will both
foster its true development as only its Maker can, as
He fills it with His presence, and will use it, in the
bliss of an eternal serviceableness, for His beloved
will.
CHAPTER XV
JUSTIFICATION AND HOLINESS: ILLUSTRATIONS FROM HUMAN LIFE
Romans vi. 14—vii. 6
AT the point we have now reached, the Apostle's
thought pauses for a moment, to resume.It will be observed that we place the paragraph after ver. 13, not,
as many editions of the Epistle do, after ver. 14. It seems to us clear
that ver. 14 has a closer connexion with the following than with the
previous context. It looks back, not precisely to ver. 13, but to the
general recent argument, that it may then look definitely forward, over
new ground.
He has brought us to self-surrender. We have seen the
sacred obligations of our divine and wonderful liberty.
We have had the miserable question, "Shall we cling
to sin?" answered by an explanation of the rightness
and the bliss of giving over our accepted persons, in
the fullest liberty of will, to God, in Christ. Now
he pauses, to illustrate and enforce. And two human
relations present themselves for the purpose; the one
to shew the absoluteness of the surrender, the other
its living results. The first is Slavery, the second is
Wedlock.
For sin shall not have dominion over you; sin
shall not put in its claim upon you, the claim
which the Lord has met in your Justification; for you are
not broughtὙπὸ νόμον, ὑπὸ χάριν:
the accusative case gives the preposition properly the meaning of
motion underwards. But this must not be pressed too far.
under law, but under grace. The whole
previous argument explains this sentence. He refers to
our acceptance. He goes back to the justification of
the guilty, "without the deeds of law," by the act of
free grace; and briefly restates it thus, that he may take
up afresh the position that this glorious liberation means
not licence but divine order. Sin shall be no more your
tyrant-creditor, holding up the broken law in evidence
that it has right to lead you off to a pestilential prison,
and to death. Your dying Saviour has met your creditor
in full for you, and in Him you have entire discharge in
that eternal court where the terrible plea once stood
against you. Your dealings as debtors are now not with
the enemy who cried for your death, but with the Friend
who has bought you out of his power.
What then? are we to sin, because we are not
brought under law, but under grace? Shall our life
be a life of licence, because we are thus wonderfully free?
The question assuredly is one which, like that of ver. 1,
and like those suggested in iii. 8, 31, had often been
asked of St Paul, by the bitter opponent, or by the false
follower. And again it illustrates and defines, by the
direction of its error, the line of truth from which it flew
off. It helps to do what we remarked above,p. 157.
to assure us that when St Paul taught "Justification by faith,
without deeds of law," he meant what he said, without
reserve; he taught that great side of truth wholly, and
without a compromise. He called the sinner, "just as he
was, and waiting not to rid his soul of one dark blot," to
receive at once, and without fee, the acceptance of God
for Another's blessed sake. Bitter must have been the
moral pain of seeing, from the first, this holy freedom
distorted into an unhallowed leave to sin.Luther's Esto peccator, et pecca fortiter, has been often quoted as if
that great saint meant to argue licence from Justification by faith. "God
forbid." The words occur in a counsel to Melanchthon, whose anxious
conscience doubted whether it were not a sin to communicate in one
Kind, even where the true Rite in both Kinds could not be had. It
was Luther's glowing paradox, to drive a manifestly morbid and
weakening scrupulousness from his friend's mind. See Julius Hare's
Vindication of Luther, pp. 178, etc.
But he will not meet it by an impatient compromise, or untimely confusion.
It shall be answered by a fresh collocation; the
liberty shall be seen in its relation to the Liberator; and
behold, the perfect freedom is a perfect service, willing
but absolute, a slavery joyfully accepted, with open eyes
and open heart, and then lived out as the most real of
obligations by a being who has entirely seen that he is
not his own.
Away with the thought. Do you not know that
the party to whom you present, surrender, yourselves
bondservants, slaves, so as to obey him,—bondservants
you are, not the less for the freewill of the
surrender, of the party whom you obey; no longer
merely contractors with him, who may bargain, or retire,
but his bondservants out and out; whether of sin, to
death, or of obedience, to righteousness? (As if their
assent (ὑπακοὴ) to Christ, their Amen to His terms of
peace, acceptance, righteousness, were personified; they
were now the bondsmen of this their own act and deed,
which had put them, as it were, into Christ's hands for
all things.) Now (δὲ) thanks be to
our (τῷ) God,
that you were bondmen of sin, in legal claim, and
under moral sway; yes, every one of you was this, whatever
forms the bondage took upon its surface; but you
obeyed from the heart the mould of teaching to which
you were handed over.So undoubtedly the Greek must be rendered.
They had been sin's slaves.
Verbally, not really, he "thanks God" for that fact of
the past. Really, not verbally, he "thanks God" for the
pastness of the fact, and for the bright contrast to it in
the regenerated present. They had now been "handed
over," by their Lord's transaction about them, to another
ownership, and they had accepted the transfer, "from the
heart." It was done by Another for them, but they had
said their humble, thankful fiat as He did it. And
what was the new ownership thus accepted? We
shall find soon (ver. 22), as we might expect, that it
is the mastery of God. But the bold, vivid introductory
imagery has already called it (ver. 16) the
slavery of "Obedience." Just below (vers. 19, 20)
it is the slavery of "Righteousness," that is, if we
read the word aright in its whole context, of "the
Righteousness of God," His acceptance of the sinner
as His own in Christ. And here, in a phrase most
unlikely of all, whose personification strikes life
into the most abstract aspects of the message of the
grace of God, the believer is one who has been transferred
to the possession of "a mould of Teaching."
The apostolic Doctrine, the mighty Message, the living
Creed of life, the Teaching of the acceptance of the
guilty for the sake of Him who was their Sacrifice, and
is now their Peace and Life—this truth has, as it were,
grasped them as its vassals, to form them, to mould
them, for its issues. It is indeed their "tenet." It holds
them; a thought far different from what is too often
meant when we say of a doctrine that "we hold it."
Justification by their Lord's merit, union with their
Lord's life; this was a doctrine, reasoned, ordered,
verified. But it was a doctrine warm and tenacious
with the love of the Father and of the Son. And it
had laid hold of them with a mastery which swayed
thought, affection, and will; ruling their whole view of
self and of God.
Now (δὲ),
liberated from your (τῆς)
sin, you were enslaved to the Righteousness of God.See above, p. 173.
Here is the point of the argument. It is
a point of steel, for all is fact; but the steel is steeped
in love, and carries life and joy into the heart it penetrates.
They are not for one moment their own. Their
acceptance has magnificently emancipated them from
their tyrant-enemy. But it has absolutely bound them
to their Friend and King. Their glad consent to be
accepted has carried with it a consent to belong. And
if that consent was at the moment rather implied than
explicit, virtual rather than articulately conscious, they
have now only to understand their blessed slavery better
to give the more joyful thanksgivings to Him who has
thus claimed them altogether as His own.
The Apostle's aim in this whole passage is to awaken
them, with the strong, tender touch of his holy reasoning,
to articulate their position to themselves. They have
trusted Christ, and are in Him. Then, they have
entrusted themselves altogether to Him. Then, they
have, in effect, surrendered. They have consented to
be His property. They are the bondservants, they are the slaves,We do not forget that many Christians feel a strong repugnance
to the use of this word, steeped as it is in associations of degradation
and wrong. For ourselves, we would yield to this feeling so far as
habitually to prefer the word of milder sound, "bondservant." But
surely in this passage the Apostle on purpose so accentuates the
thought of our bondservice that its fullest and sternest designation is
in place. And, if in any degree we gather the thought of other hearts
from our own, there are times and connexions in which the fulness of
the joy of service demands that designation in order to its adequate
realization.
of His Truth, that is, of Him robed and
revealed in His Truth, and shining through it on them
in the glory at once of His grace and of His claim.
Nothing less than such an obligation is the fact for
them. Let them feel, let them weigh, and then let
them embrace, the chain which after all will only prove
their pledge of rest and freedom.
What St Paul thus did for our elder brethren at Rome,
let him do for us of this later time. For us, who read
this page, all the facts are true in Christ to-day. To-day
let us define and affirm their issues to ourselves, and
recollect our holy bondage, and realize it, and live it
out with joy.
Now he follows up the thought. Conscious of the
superficial repulsiveness of the metaphor—quite as
repulsive in itself to the Pharisee as to the Englishman—he
as it were apologizes for it; not the less carefully,
in his noble considerateness, because so many of his
first readers were actually slaves. He does not lightly
go for his picture of our Master's hold of us to the
market of Corinth, or of Rome, where men and women
were sold and bought to belong as absolutely to their
buyers as cattle, or as furniture. Yet he does go there,
to shake slow perceptions into consciousness, and bring
the will face to face with the claim of God. So he
proceeds:
I speak humanly, I use the terms of
this utterly not-divine bond of man to man, to
illustrate man's glorious bond to God, because of the
weakness of your flesh, because your yet imperfect state
enfeebles your spiritual perception, and demands a
harsh paradox to direct and fix it. For—here is what
he means by "humanly"—just as you surrendered your limbs,Μέλη: what "the body" is in such passages as xii. 1 that "the
limbs" are in detail.
your functions and faculties in human life, slaves
to your (τῇ) impurity and to your
(τῇ) lawlessness, unto that
(τὴν)
lawlessness, so that the bad principle did indeed
come out in bad practice, so now, with as little reserve
of liberty, surrender your limbs slaves to righteousness,
to God's Righteousness, to your justifying God, unto
sanctification—so that the surrender shall come out
in your Master's sovereign separation of His purchased
property from sin.
He has appealed to the moral reason of the regenerate
soul. Now he speaks straight to the will. You are,
with infinite rightfulness, the bondmen of your God.
You see your deed of purchase; it is the other side of
your warrant of emancipation. Take it, and write your
own unworthy names with joy upon it, consenting and
assenting to your Owner's perfect rights. And then
live out your life, keeping the autograph of your own
surrender before your eyes. Live, suffer, conquer,
labour, serve, as men who have themselves walked to
their Master's door, and presented the ear to the awl
which pins it to the doorway, each in his turn saying,
"I will not go out free."Exod. xxi. 5, 6; Deut. xv. 16, 17.
To such an act of the soul the Apostle calls these
saints, whether they had done the like before or no.
They were to sum up the perpetual fact, then and there,
into a definite and critical act
(παραστήσατε, aorist) of
thankful will. And he calls us to do the same to-day.
By the grace of God, it shall be done. With eyes open,
and fixed upon the face of the Master who claims us,
and with hands placed helpless and willing within His
hands, we will, we do, present ourselves bondservants
to Him; for discipline, for servitude, for all His will.
For when you were slaves of your (τῆς) sin,
you were freemen as to righteousness, God's Righteousness
(τῇ δικαιοσύνῃ). It had nothing to do
with you, whether to give you peace or to receive your
tribute of love and loyalty in reply. Practically, Christ
was not your Atonement, and so not your Master; you
stood, in a dismal independence, outside His claims. To
you, your lips were your own; your time was your own;
your will was your own. You belonged to self; that is
to say, you were the slaves of your sin. Will you go
back? Will the word "freedom" (he plays with it, as
it were, to prove them) make you wish yourselves back
where you were before you had endorsed by faith your
purchase by the blood of Christ? Nay, for what was
that "freedom," seen in its results, its results upon
yourselves? What fruit, therefore, (the "therefore"
of the logic of facts,) used you to have
then, in those old days, from things over which you are
ashamed now? Ashamed indeed; for the end, the issue,
as the fruit is the tree's "end," the end of those things
is—death; perdition of all true life, here and hereafter
too. But now, in the blessed actual state of
your case, as by faith you have entered into
Christ, into His work and into His life, now liberated
from sin and enslaved to God, you have your fruit, you
possess indeed, at last, the true issues of being for
which you were made, all contributing to sanctification,
to that separation to God's will in practice which is the
development of your separation to that will in critical
fact, when you met your Redeemer in self-renouncing
faith. Yes, this fruit you have indeed; and as its end,
as that for which it is produced, to which it always and
for ever tends, you have life eternal. For the
pay of sin, sin's military stipend (ὀψώνια),
punctually given to the being which has joined its war
against the will of God, is death; but the free gift of
God is life eternal, in Jesus Christ our Lord.
"Is life worth living?" Yes, infinitely well worth,
for the living man who has surrendered to "the Lord
that bought him." Outside that ennobling captivity,
that invigorating while most genuine bondservice, the
life of man is at best complicated and tired with a
bewildered quest, and gives results at best abortive,
matched with the ideal purposes of such a being. We
"present ourselves to God," for His ends, as implements,
vassals, willing bondmen; and lo, our own end
is attained. Our life has settled, after its long friction,
into gear. Our root, after hopeless explorations in the
dust, has struck at last the stratum where the immortal
water makes all things live, and grow, and put forth fruit
for heaven. The heart, once dissipated between itself
and the world, is now "united" to the will, to the love,
of God; and understands itself, and the world, as never
before; and is able to deny self and to serve others
in a new and surprising freedom. The man, made
willing to be nothing but the tool and bondman of God,
"has his fruit" at last; bears the true product of his
now re-created being, pleasant to the Master's eye, and
fostered by His air and sun. And this "fruit" issues,
as acts issue in habit, in the glad experience of a life
really sanctified, really separated in ever deeper inward
reality, to a holy will. And the "end" of the whole
glad possession, is "life eternal."
Those great words here signify, surely, the coming
bliss of the sons of the resurrection, when at last
in their whole perfected being they will "live" all
through, with a joy and energy as inexhaustible as its
Fountain, and unencumbered at last and for ever by
the conditions of our mortality. To that vast future,
vast in its scope yet all concentrated round the fact
that "we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as
He is," the Apostle here looks onward. He will say
more of it, and more largely, later, in the eighth chapter.
But as with other themes so with this he preludes with
a few glorious chords the great strain soon to come.
He takes the Lord's slave by the hand, amidst his
present tasks and burthens, (dear tasks and burthens,
because the Master's, but still full of the conditions of
earth,) and he points upward—not to a coming manumission
in glory; the man would be dismayed to foresee
that; he wants to "serve for ever";—but to a scene
of service in which the last remainders of hindrance to
its action will be gone, and a perfected being will for
ever, perfectly, be not its own, and so will perfectly
live in God. And this, so he says to his fellow-servant,
to you and to me, is "the gift of God"; a grant as free,
as generous, as ever King gave vassal here below.
And it is to be enjoyed as such, by a being which,
living wholly for Him, will freely and purely exult to
live wholly on Him, in the heavenly places.
Yet surely the bearing of the sentences is not wholly
upon heaven. Life eternal, so to be developed hereafter
that Scripture speaks of it often as if it began hereafter,
really begins here, and develops here, and is already
"more abundant" (John x. 10) here. It is, as to its
secret and also its experience, to know and to enjoy God,
to be possessed by Him, and used for all His will. In
this respect it is "the end," the issue and the goal, now and
perpetually, of the surrender of the soul. The Master
meets that attitude with more and yet more of Himself,
known, enjoyed, possessed, possessing. And so He gives,
evermore gives, out of His sovereign bounty, life eternal
to the bondservant who has embraced the fact that he
is nothing, and has nothing, outside his Master. Not
at the outset of the regenerate life only, and not only
when it issues into the heavenly ocean, but all along
the course, the life eternal is still "the free gift of God."
Let us now, to-day, to-morrow, and always, open the
lips of surrendering and obedient faith, and drink it in,
abundantly, and yet more abundantly. And let us use
it for the Giver.
We are already, here on earth, at its very springs; so
the Apostle reminds us. For it is "in Jesus Christ our
Lord"; and we, believing, are in Him, "saved in His
life." It is in Him; nay, it is He. "I am the Life"; "He
that hath the Son, hath the life." Abiding in Christ, we
live "because He liveth." It is not to be "attained";
it is given, it is our own. In Christ, it is given, in
its divine fulness, as to covenant provision, here, now,
from the first, to every Christian. In Christ, it is
supplied, as to its fulness and fitness for each arising
need, as the Christian asks, receives, and uses for his
Lord.
So from, or rather in, our holy bondservice the
Apostle has brought us to our inexhaustible life, and
its resources for willing holiness. But he has more to
say in explaining the beloved theme. He turns from
slave to wife, from surrender to bridal, from the
purchase to the vow, from the results of a holy
bondage to the offspring of a heavenly union. Hear
him as he proceeds:
Or do you not know, brethren, (for I am talking
(λαλῶ) to those acquainted with law, whether
Mosaic or Gentile,) that the law has claim on
the man, the party (ἄνθρωπος) in any given
case, for his whole lifetime? For the woman
with a husband (ἀνὴρ) is to her living husband
bound by law, stands all along bound (δέδεται) to
him. His life, under normal conditions, is his adequate
claim. Prove him living, and you prove her his. But
if the husband should have died, she stands ipso facto cancelledWe render the bold phrase literally.
(κατήργηται) from the husband's law, the
marriage law as he could bring it to bear against her.
So, therefore, while the husband lives, she will
earn adulteress for her name, if she weds another
(ἑτέρῳ, "a second") husband. But if the husband should
have died, she is free from the law in question, so as to
be no adulteress, if wedded to another, a second, husband.
Accordingly, my brethren, you too, as a mystic
bride, collectively and individually,See 1 Cor. vi. 17.
were done to death as to the Law, so slain that its capital claim
upon you is met and done, by means of the Body of the
Christ (τοῦ Χριστοῦ), by "the doing to death" of His
sacred Body for you, on His atoning Cross, to satisfy
for you the aggrieved Law; in order to your wedding
Another, a second Party (ἑτέρῳ), Him who rose from the
dead; that we might bear fruit for God; "we," Paul
and his converts, in one happy fellowship, which he
delights thus to remember and indicate by the way.
The parable is stated and explained with a clearness
which leaves us at first the more surprised that in the
application the illustration should be reversed. In
the illustration, the husband dies, the woman lives,
and weds again. In the application, the Law does
not die, but we, its unfaithful bride, are "done to death
to it," and then, strange sequel, are wedded to the
Risen Christ. We are taken by Him to be "one
spirit" with Him (1 Cor. vi. 17). We are made one in
all His interests and wealth, and fruitful of a progeny
of holy deeds in this vital union. Shall we call all this
a simile confused? Not if we recognize the deliberate
and explicit carefulness of the whole passage. St Paul,
we may be sure, was quite as quick as we are to see
the inverted imagery. But he is dealing with a
subject which would be distorted by a mechanical
correspondence in the treatment. The Law cannot
die, for it is the preceptive will of God. Its claim is,
in its own awful forum domesticum, like the injured
Roman husband, to sentence its own unfaithful wife
to death. And so it does; so it has done. But
behold, its Maker and Master steps upon the scene.
He surrounds the guilty one with Himself, takes her
whole burthen on Himself, and meets and exhausts her
doom. He dies. He lives again, after death, because
of death; and the Law acclaims His resurrection as
infinitely just. He rises, clasping in His arms her
for whom He died, and who thus died in Him, and
now rises in Him. Out of His sovereign love, while
the Law attests the sure contract, and rejoices as "the
Bridegroom's Friend," He claims her—herself, yet in
Him another—for His blessed Bride.
All is love, as if we walked through the lily-gardens
of the holy Song, and heard the call of the turtle in
the vernal woods, and saw the King and His Beloved
rest and rejoice in one another. All is law, as if
we were admitted to watch some process of Roman
matrimonial contract, stern and grave, in which every
right is scrupulously considered, and every claim
elaborately secured, without a smile, without an
embrace, before the magisterial chair. The Church,
the soul, is married to her Lord, who has died for
her, and in whom now she lives. The transaction is
infinitely happy. And it is absolutely right. All the
old terrifying claims are amply and for ever met. And
now the mighty, tender claims which take their place
instantly and of course begin to bind the Bride. The
Law has "given her away"—not to herself, but to the
Risen Lord.
For this, let us remember, is the point and bearing
of the passage. It puts before us, with its imagery at
once so grave and so benignant, not only the mystic
Bridal, but the Bridal as it is concerned with holiness.
The Apostle's object is altogether this. From one
side and from another he reminds us that we belong.
He has shewn us our redeemed selves in their blessed
bondservice; "free from sin, enslaved to God." He
now shews us to ourselves in our divine wedlock;
"married to Another," "bound to the law of" the
heavenly Husband; clasped to His heart, but also to
His rights, without which the very joy of marriage
would be only sin. From either parable the inference
is direct, powerful, and, when we have once seen the
face of the Master and of the Husband, unutterably
magnetic on the will. You are set free, into a liberty
as supreme and as happy as possible. You are appropriated,
into a possession, and into a union, more close
and absolute than language can set forth. You are
wedded to One who "has and holds from this time
forward." And the sacred bond is to be prolific of
results. A life of willing and loving obedience, in the
power of the risen Bridegroom's life, is to have as it
were for its progeny the fair circle of active graces,
"love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness,
fidelity, meekness, self-control."
Alas, in the time of the old abolished wedlock there
was result, there was progeny. But that was the fruit
not of the union but of its violation. For when
we were in the flesh, in our unregenerate days,
when our rebel self,No word, for practical purposes, answers better than "self"
(as popularly used in Christian parlance) to the idea represented by
St Paul's use of the word σὰρξ in moral connexions.
the antithesis of "the Spirit," ruled
and denoted us, (a state, he implies, in which we all
were once, whatever our outward differences were,) the
passions, the strong but reasonless impulses, of our sins,
which passions were by means of the Law, occasioned
by the fact of its just but unloved claim, fretting the
self-life into action, worked actively in our limbs, in our
bodily life in its varied faculties and senses, so as to
bear fruit for death. We wandered, restive, from our
bridegroom, the Law, to Sin, our paramour. And
behold, a manifold result of evil deeds and habits, born
as it were into bondage in the house of Death. But
now, now as the wonderful case stands in the
grace of God, we are (it is the aorist, but our
English fairly represents it) abrogated from the Law,
divorced from our first injured Partner, nay, slain (in our
crucified Head) in satisfaction of its righteous claim, as
having died (ἀποθανόντεςSo read, not ἀποθανόντος. The textual evidence supports
ἀποθανόντες, and the evidence of the context is all for it. He has
elaborately avoided, in applying his illustration, the thought that
the Law can die. We die, in Christ, in judicial satisfaction of its most
righteous claim. It lives with us, it guides us, with the authority of
God. But it is now our monitor, not our avenger of blood.)
with regard to that in which
we were held captive, even the Law and its violated
bond, so that we do bondservice in the Spirit's newness,
and not in the Letter's oldness.
Thus he comes back, through the imagery of wedlock,
to that other parable of slavery which has become so
precious to his heart. "So that we do bondservice,"
"so that we live a slave-life";
ὤστε δουλεύειν ἡμᾶς.
It is as if he must break in on the heavenly Marriage
itself with that brand and bond, not to disturb the joy
of the Bridegroom and the Bride, but to clasp to the
Bride's heart the vital fact that she is not her own;
that fact so blissful, but so powerful also and so practical
that it is worth anything to bring it home.
It is to be no dragging and dishonouring bondage,
in which the poor toiler looks wistfully out for the
sinking sun and the extended shadows. It is to be
"not in the Letter's oldness"; no longer on the old
principle of the dread and unrelieved "Thou shalt,"
cut with a pen of legal iron upon the stones of
Sinai; bearing no provision of enabling power, but all
possible provision of doom for the disloyal. It is to be
"in the Spirit's newness"; on the new, wonderful
principle, new in its full manifestation and application
in Christ, of the Holy Ghost's empowering presence.Such passages as this and its companion, 2 Cor. iii. 4-8, have
no reference, however remote, to the "letter and spirit" of Holy
Scripture. They contrast Sinai and Pentecost.
In that light and strength the new relations are discovered,
accepted, and fulfilled. Joined by the Spirit
to the Lord Christ, so as to have full benefit of His
justifying merit; filled by the Spirit with the Lord
Christ, so as to derive freely and always the blessed
virtues of His life; the willing bondservant finds in his
absolute obligations an inward liberty ever "new,"
fresh as the dawn, pregnant as the spring. And
the worshipping Bride finds in the holy call to "keep
her only unto Him" who has died for her life,
nothing but a perpetual surprise of love and gladness,
"new every morning," as the Spirit shews her the
heart and the riches of her Lord.
Thus closes, in effect, the Apostle's reasoned exposition
of the self-surrender of the justified. Happy
the man who can respond to it all with the Amen of
a life which, reposing on the Righteousness of God,
answers ever to His Will with the loyal gladness
found in "the newness of the Spirit." It is "perfect
freedom" to understand, in experience, the bondage
and the bridal of the saints.
CHAPTER XVI
THE FUNCTION OF THE LAW IN THE SPIRITUAL LIFE
Romans vii. 7-25
THE Apostle has led us a long way in his great
argument; through sin, propitiation, faith, union,
surrender, to that wonderful and "excellent mystery,"
the bridal oneness of Christ and the Church, of Christ
and the believer. He has yet to unfold the secrets
and glories of the experience of a life lived in the
power of that Spirit of whose "newness" he has
just spoken. But his last parable has brought him
straight to a question which has repeatedly been
indicated and deferred. He has told us that the
Law of God was at first, ideally, our mystic husband,
and that we were unfaithful in our wedded life, and
that the injured lord sentenced to death his guilty
spouse, and that the sentence was carried out—but
carried out in Christ. Thus a death-divorce took
place between us, the justified, and the Law, regarded
as the violated party in the covenant—"Do this and
live."
Is this ancient husband then a party whom we are
now to suspect, and to defy? Our wedlock with him
brought us little joy. Alas, its main experience was
that we sinned. At best, if we did right, (in any deep
sense of right,) we did it against the grain; while
we did wrong, (in the deep sense of wrong, difference
from the will of God,) with a feeling of nature and
gravitation. Was not our old lord to blame? Was
there not something wrong about the Law? Did not
the Law misrepresent God's will? Was it not, after
all, Sin itself in disguise, though it charged us with the
horrible guilt of a course of adultery with Sin?
We cannot doubt that the statement and the treatment
of this question here are in effect a record of personal
experience. The paragraph which it originates, this long
last passage of i., bears every trace of such experience.
Hitherto, in the main, he has dealt with "you"
and "us"; now he speaks only as "I," only of "me,"
and of "mine." And the whole dialect of the passage,
so to say, falls in with this use of pronouns. We
overhear the colloquies, the altercations, of will with
conscience, of will with will, almost of self with self,
carried on in a region which only self-consciousness can
penetrate, and which only the subject of it all can thus
describe. Yes, the person Paul is here, analysing and
reporting upon himself; drawing the veil from his
own inmost life, with a hand firm because surrendered
to the will of God, who bids him, for the Church's sake,
expose himself to view. Nothing in literature, no
Confessions of an Augustine, no Grace Abounding of a
Bunyan, is more intensely individual. Yet on the
other hand nothing is more universal in its searching
application. For the man who thus writes is "the
chosen vessel" of the Lord who has perfectly adjusted
not his words only but his being, his experience, his
conflicts and deliverances, to be manifestations of
universal spiritual facts.
We need hardly say that this profound paragraph
has been discussed and interpreted most variously.
It has been held by some to be only St Paul's intense
way of presenting that great phenomenon, wide as
fallen humanity—human will colliding with human
conscience, so that "no man does all he knows."
Passages from every quarter of literature, of all ages,
of all races, have been heaped around it, to prove, (what
is indeed so profoundly significant a fact, largely confirmatory
of the Christian doctrine of Original Sin,See J. B. Mozley's Lectures, etc., ix, x.)
that universal man is haunted by undone duties; and
this passage is placed as it were in the midst, as the
fullest possible confession of that fact, in the name of
humanity, by an ideal individual. But surely it needs
only an attentive reading of the passage, as a part of
the Epistle to the Romans, as a part of the teaching
of St Paul, to feel the extreme inadequacy of such an
account. On the one hand the long groaning confession
is no artificial embodiment of a universal fact;
it is the cry of a human soul, if ever there was a
personal cry. On the other hand the passage betrays
a kind of conflict far deeper and more mysterious than
merely that of "I ought" with "I will not." It is a
conflict of "I will" with "I will not"; of "I hate" with
"I do." And in the later stages of the confession we
find the subject of the conflict avowing a wonderful
sympathy with the Law of God; recording not merely an
avowal that right is right, but a consciousness that God's
precept is delectable. All this leads us to a spiritual
region unknown to Euripides, and Horace, and even
Epictetus.
Again it has been held that the passage records the
experiences of a half-regenerate soul; struggling on
its way from darkness to light, stumbling across a
border-zone between the power of Satan and the
kingdom of God; deeply convinced of sin, but battling
with it in the old impossible way after all, meeting self
with self, or, otherwise, the devil with the man. But
here again the passage seems to refuse the exposition,
as we read all its elements. It is no experience of a
half-renewed life to "take delight with the law of God
after the inner man." It is utterly unlawful for a half-regenerate
soul to describe itself as so beset by sin
that "it is not I, but sin that dwelleth in me." No
more dangerous form of thought about itself could be
adopted by a soul not fully acquainted with God.
Again, and quite on the other hand, it has been
held that our passage lays it down that a stern but
on the whole disappointing conflict with internal evil is
the lot of the true Christian, in his fullest life, now,
always, and to the end; that the regenerate and believing
man is, if indeed awake to spiritual realities, to feel at
every step, "O wretched man that I am"; "What I
hate, that I do"; and to expect deliverance from such a
consciousness only when he attains his final heavenly
rest with Christ. Here again extreme difficulties attend
the exposition; not from within the passage, but from
around it. It is literally encircled with truths of liberty,
in a servitude which is perfect freedom; with truths of
power and joy, in a life which is by the Holy Ghost.
It is quite incongruous with such surroundings that it
should be thought to describe a spiritual experience
dominant and characteristic in the Christian life.
"What shall we say then?" Is there yet another
line of exegesis which will better satisfy the facts of
both the passage and its context? We think there is
one, which at once is distinctive in itself, and combines
elements of truth indicated by the others which we have
outlined. For those others have each an element of truth,
if we read aright. The passage has a reference to the
universal conflict of conscience and will. It does say
some things quite appropriate to the man who is awake
to his bondage but has not yet found his Redeemer.
And there is, we dare to say, a sense in which it may
be held that the picture is true for the whole course of
Christian life here on earth; for there is never an hour of
that life when the man who "says he has no sin" does
not "deceive himself" (1 Joh. i. 8). And if that sin be
but simple defect, a falling "short of the glory of God";
nay, if it be only that mysterious tendency which, felt or
not, hourly needs a divine counteraction; still, the man
"has sin," and must long for a final emancipation, with
a longing which carries in it at least a latent "groan."
So we begin by recognizing that Paul, the personal
Paul, speaking here to all of us, as in some solemn
"testimony" hour, takes us first to his earliest deep
convictions of right and wrong, when, apparently after
a previous complacency with himself, he woke to see—but
not to welcome—the absoluteness of God's will.
He glided along a smooth stream of moral and mental
culture and reputation till he struck the rock of "Thou
shalt not covet," "Thou shalt not desire," "Thou must
not have self-will." Then, as from a grave, which was
however only an ambush, "sin" sprang up; a conscious
force of opposition to the claim of God's will as against
the will of Paul; and his dream of religious satisfaction
died. Till we close ver. 11, certainly, we are in the
midst of the unregenerate state. The tenses are past;
the narrative is explicit. He made a discovery of law
which was as death after life to his then religious
experience. He has nothing to say of counter-facts
in his soul. It was conviction, with only rebellion as its
issue.
Then we find ourselves, we hardly know how, in a
range of confessions of a different order. There is a
continuity. The Law is there, and sin is there, and a
profound moral conflict. But there are now counter-facts.
The man, the Ego, now "wills not," nay,
"hates," what he practises. He wills what God prescribes,
though he does it not. His sinful deeds are,
in a certain sense, in this respect, not his own. He
actually "delights, rejoices, with the Law of God." Yet
there is a sense in which he is "sold," "enslaved,"
"captured," in the wrong direction.
Here, as we have admitted, there is much which is
appropriate to the not yet regenerate state, where
however the man is awakening morally, to good purpose,
under the hand of God. But the passage as
a whole refuses to be satisfied thus, as we have seen.
He who can truly speak thus of an inmost sympathy,
a sympathy of delight, with the most holy Law of God,
is no half-Christian; certainly not in St Paul's view
of things.
But now observe one great negative phenomenon of
the passage. We read words about this regenerate
sinner's moral being and faculties; about his "inner
man," his "mind," "the law of his mind"; about
"himself," as distinguished from the "sin" which
haunts him. But we read not one clear word about that
eternal Spirit, whose glorious presence we have seen
(vii. 6), characterizing the Gospel, and of whom we are
soon to hear in such magnificent amplitude. Once only
is He even distantly indicated; "the Law is spiritual"
(ver. 14). But that is no comfort, no deliverance.
The Spirit is indeed in the Law; but He must be also
in the man, if there is to be effectual response, and
harmony, and joy. No, we look in vain through the
passage for one hint that the man, that Paul, is contemplated
in it as filled by faith with the Holy Ghost
for his war with indwelling sin working through his
embodied conditions.
But he was regenerate, you say. And if so, he was
an instance of the Spirit's work, a receiver of the
Spirit's presence. It is so; not without the Spirit,
working in him, could he "delight in the law of God,"
and "with his true self serve the law of God." But
does this necessarily mean that he, as a conscious
agent, was fully using his eternal Guest as his power
and victory?
We are not merely discussing a literary passage.
We are pondering an oracle of God about man. So
we turn full upon the reader—and upon ourselves—and
ask the question, whether the heart cannot help to
expound this hard paragraph. Christian man, by grace,—that
is to say, by the Holy Spirit of God,—you have
believed, and live. You are a limb of Christ, who is
your life. But you are a sinner still; always, actually,
in defect, and in tendency; always, potentially, in ways
terribly positive. For whatever the presence of the
Spirit in you has done, it has not so altered you that,
if He should go, you would not instantly "revert to
the type" of unholiness. Now, how do you meet
temptation from without? How do you deal with the
dread fact of guilty imbecility within? Do you, if I
may put it so, use regenerate faculty in unregenerate
fashion, meeting the enemy practically alone, with only
high resolves, and moral scorn of wrong, and assiduous
processes of discipline on body or mind? God forbid we
should call these things evil. They are good. But they
are the accidents, not the essence, of the secret; the
wall, not the well, of power and triumph. It is the
Lord Himself dwelling in you who is your victory; and
that victory is to be realized by a conscious and decisive
appeal to Him. "Through Him you shall do valiantly;
for He it is that shall tread down your enemies"
(Psal. lx. 12). And is not this verified in your experience?
When, in your regenerate state, you use the true
regenerate way, is there not a better record to be given?
When, realizing that the true principle is indeed a
Person, you less resolve, less struggle, and more
appeal and confide—is not sin's "reign" broken, and
is not your foot, even yours, because you are in conscious
union with the Conqueror, placed effectually on
"all the power of the enemy"?
We are aware of the objection ready to be made,
and by devout and reverent men. It will be said that
the Indwelling Spirit works always through the being
in whom He dwells; and that so we are not to think
of Him as a separable Ally, but just to act ourselves,
leaving it to Him to act through us. Well, we are
willing to state the matter almost exactly in those last
words, as theory. But the subject is too deep—and
too practical—for neat logical consistency. He does
indeed work in us, and through us. But then—it is
He. And to the hard pressed soul there is an unspeakable
reality and power in thinking of Him as a
separable, let us say simply a personal, Ally, who is
also Commander, Lord, Life-Giver; and in calling Him
definitely in.
So we read this passage again, and note this absolute
and eloquent silence in it about the Holy Ghost. And
we dare, in that view, to interpret it as St Paul's
confession, not of a long past experience, not of an
imagined experience, but of his own normal experience
always—when he acts out of character as a regenerate
man. He fails, he "reverts," when, being a sinner by
nature still, and in the body still, he meets the Law,
and meets temptation, in any strength short of
the definitely sought power of the Holy Ghost,
making Christ all to him for peace and victory. And
he implies, surely, that this failure is not a bare
hypothesis, but that he knows what it is. It is not that
God is not sufficient. He is so, always, now, for ever.
But the man does not always adequately use God;
as he ought to do, as he might do, as he will ever rise
up afresh to do. And when he does not, the resultant
failure—though it be but a thought of vanity, a flush of
unexpressed anger, a microscopic flaw in the practice
of truthfulness, an unhallowed imagination darting in
a moment through the soul—is to him sorrow, burthen,
shame. It tells him that "the flesh" is present still,
present at least in its elements, though God can keep
them out of combination. It tells him that, though
immensely blest, and knowing now exactly where to
seek, and to find, a constant practical deliverance (oh
joy unspeakable!), he is still "in the body," and that
its conditions are still of "death." And so he looks
with great desire for its redemption. The present of
grace is good, beyond all his hopes of old. But the
future of glory is "far better."
Thus the man at once "serves the Law of God," as
its willing bondman (δουλεύω, ver. 25), in the life of
grace, and submits himself, with reverence and shame,
to its convictions, when, if but for an hour, or a moment,
he "reverts" to the life of the flesh.
Let us take the passage up now for a nearly continuous
translation.
What shall we say then, in face of the thought of our
death-divorce, in Christ, from the Law's condemning
power. Is the Law sin? Are they
only two phases of one evil? Away with the thought!
But—here is the connexion of the two—I should not
have known, recognized, understood, sin but by means
of law. For coveting, for example, I should not have
known, should not have recognized as sin, if the Law
had not been saying, "Thou shalt not covet."Exod. xx. 17.—Observe here that great fact of Christian doctrine;
that desire, bias, gravitation away from God's will, is sin, whether
carried into act or not. Is not St Paul here recalling some quite
special spiritual incident?
But sin, making a fulcrum of the commandment,Ἀφορμὴν λαβοῦσα διὰ τῆς ἐντολῆς.
produced, effected, in me all coveting, every various
application of the principle. For, law apart,
sin is dead—in the sense of lack of conscious
action. It needs a holy Will, more or less revealed, to
occasion its collision. Given no holy will, known or
surmised, and it is "dead" as rebellion, though not as
pollution. But I, the person in whom it lay buried, was
all alive (ἔζων), conscious and content, law apart, once
on a time (strange ancient memory in that biography!).
But when the commandment came to my conscience and
my will, sin rose to life again, ("again"; so it was no new
creation after all) and I—died; I found myself legally
doomed to death, morally without life-power, and bereft
of the self-satisfaction that seemed my vital breath.
And the commandment that was life-wards, prescribing
nothing but perfect right, the straight
line to life eternal, proved (εὑρέθη) for me deathwards.
For sin, making a fulcrum of the commandment,
deceived me, into thinking fatally wrong of God
and of myself, and through it killed me, discovered me
to myself as legally and morally a dead man. So that
the Law, indeed (μὲν), is holy, and the commandment,
the special precept which was my actual
death-blow, holy, and just, and good. (He says, "the
Law, indeed" (μὲν), with the implied antithesis that
"sin, on the other hand," is the opposite; the whole
fault of his misery beneath the Law lies with sin.)
The good thing then, this good Law, has it to meἘμοὶ is slightly emphatic; as if to say, "at least in my case."
become death? Away with the thought!
Nay, but sin did so become that it might come out as sin,
working out death for me by means of the good Law —that
sin might prove overwhelmingly sinful, through the
commandment, which at once called it up, and, by awful
contrast, exposed its nature. Observe, he does not
say merely that sin thus "appeared" unutterably evil.
More boldly, in this sentence of mighty paradoxes, he
says that it "became" such. As it were, it developed
its character into its fullest action, when it thus used
the eternal Will to set creature against Creator.
Yet even this was overruled; all happened thus "in
order," so that the very virulence of the plague might
effectually demand the glorious Remedy.
For we know, we men with our conscience,
we Christians with our Lord's light, that the
Law, this Law which sin so foully abused, is spiritual,
the expression of the eternal Holiness, framed by the
sure guidance of the Holy Spirit; but then I, I Paul,
taken as a sinner, viewed apart from Christ, am fleshly,
a child of self, sold to be under sin; yes, not only when,
in Adam, my nature sold itself at first, but still and
always, just so far as I am considered apart from Christ,
and just so far as, in practice, I live apart from Christ,
"reverting," if but for a minute, to my self-life. For
the work I work out, I do not know, I do not
recognize; I am lost amidst its distorted conditions;
for it is not what I will that I practise (πράσσω), but it is what I hate that I
do (ποιῶ). But if what I do is what I
do not will, I assent to the Law that it, the Law, is good;
I shew my moral sympathy with the precept by the endorsement given it
by my will, in the sense of my earnest moral preference.For this meaning of θέλειν see the closely parallel passage, the
almost sketch or embryo of this paragraph, Gal. v. 17.
But now, in this state of facts, it is no longer I who work
out the work, but the indweller in me—Sin.
He implies by "no longer" that once it was otherwise;
once the central choice was for self, now, in the regenerate
life, even in its conflicts, yea, even in its
failures, it is for God. A mysterious "other self" is
latent still, and asserts itself in awful reality when the
true man, the man as regenerate, ceases to watch and
to pray. And in this sense he dares to say "it is no
more I." It is a sense the very opposite to the dream
of self-excuse; for though the Ego as regenerate does
not do the deed, it has, by its sleep, or by its
confidence, betrayed the soul to the true doer. And
thus he passes naturally into the following confessions,
in which we read at once the consciousness of a state
which ought not to be, though it is, and also the
conviction that it is a state out of character with himself,
with his personality as redeemed and new-created. Into
such a confession there creeps no lying thought that he
"is delivered to do these abominations" (Jer. vii. 10);
that it is fate; that he cannot help it. Nor is the
miserable dream present here that evil is but a phase
of good, and that these conflicts are only discordant
melodies struggling to a cadence where they will
accord. It is a groan of shame and pain, from a man
who could not be thus tortured if he were not born
again. Yet it is also an avowal,—as if to assure
himself that deliverance is intended, and is at hand,—that
the treacherous tyrant he has let into the place
of power is an alien to him as he is a man regenerate.
Not for excuse, but to clear his thought, and direct his
hope, he says this to himself, and to us, in his dark
hour.
For I know that there dwells not in me, that
is, in my flesh, good; in my personal life, so
long, and so far, as it "reverts" to self as its working
centre, all is evil, for nothing is as God would have it
be. And that "flesh," that self-life, is ever there,
latent if not patent; present in such a sense that it is
ready for instant reappearance, from within, if any
moral power less than that of the Lord Himself is in
command. For the willing lies at my hand; but the
working out what is right, does not.Read not οὐχ εὑρίσκω, but simply οὔ.
"The willing"
(τὸ θέλειν), as throughout this passage, means not the
ultimate fiat of the man's soul, deciding his action, but
his earnest moral approbation, moral sympathy, the convictions
of the enlightened being. For not
what I will, even good, do I; but what I do not
will, even evil, that I practise.Again ποιῶ and πράσσω, as in ver. 16.
Now if what I do is
what I do not will, no longer, as once, do I
work it out, but the indweller in me, Sin.
Again his purpose is not excuse, but deliverance.
No deadly antinomianism is here, such as has withered
innumerable lives, where the thought has been admitted
that sin may be in the man, and yet the man may not
sin. His thought is, as all along, that it is his own
shame that thus it is; yet that the evil is, ultimately, a
thing alien to his true character, and that therefore he
is right to call the lawful King and Victor in upon it.
And now comes up again the solemn problem of the
Law. That stern, sacred, monitor is looking on all the
while, and saying all the while the things which first
woke sin from its living grave in the old complacent
experience, and then, in the regenerate state, provoked
sin to its utmost treachery, and most fierce invasions.
And the man hears the voice, and in his new-created
character he loves it. But he has "reverted," ever so
little, to his old attitude, to the self-life, and so there is
also rebellion in him when that voice says "Thou shalt."
So I find the Law—he would have said, "I
find it my monitor, honoured, aye and loved,
but not my helper"; but he breaks the sentence up in
the stress of this intense confession; so I find the Law—for
me, me with a will to do the right,—that for me
the evil lies at hand. For I have glad sympathy
with (συνήδομαι) the Law of God; what He
prescribes I endorse with delight as good, as regards
the inner man, that is, my world of conscious insight and affectionIn itself, the phrase ὁ ἔσω ἄνθρωπος
is neutral. By usage it attaches itself to ideas of
regeneration. See 2 Cor. iv. 16, Eph. iii. 16.
in the new life; but I see (as if I
were a watcher from without) a rival (ἕτερον)
law, another and contradictory precept, "serve thyself,"
in my limbs, in my world of sense and active faculty,
at war with the law of my mind, the Law of God, adopted
by my now enlightened thinking-power as its sacred
code, and seeking to make me captive in that warΑἰχμαλωτίζοντα: "Making me prisoner
of war." Observe the present tense, which indicates not
necessarily the full success of the strategy, but its aim.
to the law of sin, the law which is in my limbs.
Unhappy man am I. Who will rescue me out of the body of this death,The Greek equally allows the rendering "out of this body of
death."
out of a life conditioned by this mortal body, which in the Fall became
sin's especial vehicle, directly or indirectly, and which
is not yet (vii. 23) actually "redeemed"? Thanks be to God,Read χάρις τῷ Θεῶ.
who giveth that deliverance, in covenant and in measure now, fully and in
eternal actuality hereafter, through Jesus Christ our Lord.
So then, to sum the whole phenomenon of the conflict
up, leaving aside for the moment this glorious hope of
the issue, I, myself, with the mind indeed do bondservice
to the law of God, but with the flesh, with the life of
self, wherever and whenever I "revert" that way, I do
bondservice to the law of sin.
Do we close the passage with a sigh, and almost
with a groan? Do we sigh over the intricacy of the
thought, the depth and subtlety of the reasoning, the
almost fatigue of fixing and of grasping the facts below
the terms "will," and "mind," and "inner man," and
"flesh," and "I"? Do we groan over the consciousness
that no analysis of our spiritual failures can console
us for the fact of them, and that the Apostle seems
in his last sentences to relegate our consolations to the
future, while it is in the present that we fail, and in
the present that we long with all our souls to do, as
well as to approve, the will of God?
Let us be patient, and also let us think again. Let
us find a solemn and sanctifying peace in the patience
which meekly accepts the mystery that we must needs
"wait yet for the redemption of our body"; that the
conditions of "this corruptible" must yet for a season
give ambushes and vantages to temptation, which will
be all annihilated hereafter. But let us also think
again. If we went at all aright in our remarks previous
to this passage, there are glorious possibilities for the
present hour "readable between the lines" of St Paul's
unutterably deep confession. We have seen in conflict
the Christian man, regenerate, yet taken, in a practical
sense, apart from his Regenerator. We have seen him
really fight, though he really fails. We have seen
him unwittingly, but guiltily, betray his position to the
foe, by occupying it as it were alone. We have seen
also, nevertheless, that he is not his foe's ally but his
antagonist. Listen; he is calling for his King.
That cry will not be in vain. The King will take a
double line of action in response. While his soldier-bondservant
is yet in the body, "the body of this death,"
He will throw Himself into the narrow hold, and
wonderfully turn the tide within it, and around it. And
hereafter, He will demolish it. Rather, He will transfigure
it, into the counterpart—even as it were into the
part—of His own Body of glory; and the man shall rest,
and serve, and reign for ever, with a being homogeneous
all through in its likeness to the Lord.
CHAPTER XVII
THE JUSTIFIED: THEIR LIFE BY THE HOLY SPIRIT
Romans viii. 1-11
The sequence of the eighth chapter of the Epistle
on the seventh is a study always interesting and
fruitful. No one can read the two chapters over without
feeling the strong connexion between them, a connexion
at once of contrast and of complement. Great indeed
is the contrast between the paragraphs vii. 7-25 and the
eighth chapter. The stern analysis of the one, unrelieved
save by the fragment of thanksgiving at its close, (and
even this is followed at once by a re-statement of the
mysterious dualism,) is to the revelations and triumphs
of the other as an almost starless night, stifling and
electric, to the splendour of a midsummer morning
with a yet more glorious morrow for its future. And
there is complement as well as contrast. The day is
related to the night, which has prepared us for it, as
hunger prepares for food. Precisely what was absent
from the former passage is supplied richly in the latter.
There the Name of the Holy Spirit, "the Lord, the Life-Giver,"
was unheard. Here the fact and power of the
Holy Spirit are present everywhere, so present that
there is no other portion of the whole Scripture, unless
we except the Redeemer's own Paschal Discourse, which
presents us with so great a wealth of revelation on this
all-precious theme. And here we find the secret that
is to "stint the strife" which we have just witnessed,
and which in our own souls we know so well. Here is
the way "how to walk and to please God" (1 Thess.
iv. 1), in our justified life. Here is the way how, not
to be as it were the victims of "the body," and the
slaves of "the flesh," but to "do to death the body's
practices" in a continuous exercise of inward power, and
to "walk after the Spirit." Here is the resource on
which we may be for ever joyfully paying "the debt" of
such a walk; giving our redeeming Lord His due, the
value of His purchase, even our willing, loving surrender,
in the all-sufficient strength of "the Holy Ghost given
unto us."
Noteworthy indeed is the manner of the introduction of
this glorious truth. It appears not without preparation
and intimation; we have heard already of the Holy Ghost
in the Christian's life, v. 5, vii. 6. The heavenly water
has been seen and heard in its flow; as in a limestone
country the traveller may see and hear, through fissures
in the fields, the buried but living floods. But here
the truth of the Spirit, like those floods, finding at last
their exit at some rough cliff's base, pours itself into the
light, and animates all the scene. In such an order
and manner of treatment there is a spiritual and also
a practical lesson. We are surely reminded, as to the
experiences of the Christian life, that in a certain sense
we possess the Holy Ghost, yea, in His fulness, from
the first hour of our possession of Christ. We are
reminded also that it is at least possible on the other
hand that we may need so to realize and to use our
covenant possession, after sad experiments in other
directions, that life shall be thenceforth a new experience
of liberty and holy joy. We are reminded meanwhile
that such a "new departure," when it occurs, is new
rather from our side than from the Lord's. The water
was running all the while below the rocks. Insight and
faith, given by His grace, have not called it from above,
but as it were from within, liberating what was there.
The practical lesson of this is important for the Christian
teacher and pastor. On the one hand, let him
make very much in his instructions, public and private,
of the revelation of the Spirit. Let him leave no
room, so far as he can do it, for doubt or oblivion in
his friends' minds about the absolute necessity of the
fulness of the presence and power of the Holy One, if
life is to be indeed Christian. Let him describe as
boldly and fully as the Word describes it what life
may be, must be, where that sacred fulness dwells; how
assured, how happy within, how serviceable around,
how pure, free, and strong, how heavenly, how practical,
how humble. Let him urge any who have yet to learn
it to learn all this in their own experience, claiming on
their knees the mighty gift of God. On the other hand,
let him be careful not to overdraw his theory, and to
prescribe too rigidly the methods of experience. Not all
believers fail in the first hours of their faith to realize,
and to use, the fulness of what the Covenant gives
them. And where that realization comes later than
our first sight of Christ, as with so many of us it does
come, not always is the experience and action the same.
To one it is a crisis of memorable consciousness, a
private Pentecost. Another wakes up as from sleep to
find the unsuspected treasure at his hand—hid from him
till then by nothing thicker than shadows. And another
is aware that somehow, he knows not how, he has come
to use the Presence and Power as a while ago he did
not; he has passed a frontier—but he knows not when.
In all these cases, meanwhile, the man had, in one
great respect, possessed the great gift all along. In
covenant, in Christ, it was his. As he stepped by
penitent faith into the Lord, he trod on ground which,
wonderful to say, was all his own. And beneath it
ran, that moment, the River of the water of life. Only,
he had to discover, to draw, and to apply.
Again, the relation we have just indicated between
our possession of Christ and our possession of the Holy
Ghost is a matter of the utmost moment, spiritual and
practical, presented prominently in this passage. All
along, as we read the passage, we find linked inextricably
together the truths of the Spirit and of the Son. "The
law of the Spirit of life" is bound up with "Christ Jesus."
The Son of God was sent, to take our flesh, to die as
our Sin-Offering, that we might "walk according to the
Spirit." "The Spirit of God" is "the Spirit of Christ."
The presence of the Spirit of Christ is such that, where
He dwells, "Christ is in you." Here we read at once
a caution, and a truth of the richest positive blessing.
We are warned to remember that there is no separable
"Gospel of the Spirit." Not for a moment are we to
advance, as it were, from the Lord Jesus Christ to a
higher or deeper region, ruled by the Holy Ghost. All
the reasons, methods, and issues of the work of the
Holy Ghost are eternally and organically connected
with the Son of God. We have Him at all because
Christ died. We have life because He has joined us
to Christ living. Our experimental proof of His fulness
is that Christ to us is all. And we are to be on the
guard against any exposition of His work and glory
which shall for one moment leave out those facts. But
not only are we to be on our guard; we are to rejoice
in the thought that the mighty, the endless, work of the
Spirit is all done always upon that sacred Field, Christ
Jesus. And every day we are to draw upon the indwelling
Giver of Life to do for us His own, His characteristic,
work; to shew us "our King in His beauty," and to
"fill our springs of thought and will with Him."
To return to the connexion of the two great chapters.
We have seen how close and pregnant it is; the contrast
and the complement. But it is also true, surely, that the
eighth chapter is not merely and only the counterpart
to the seventh. Rather the eighth, though the seventh
applies to it a special motive, is also a review of the
whole previous argument of the Epistle, or rather the
crown on the whole previous structure. It begins with a
deep re-assertion of our Justification; a point unnoticed
in vii. 7-25. It does this using an inferential particle,
"therefore," ἄρα—to which, surely, nothing in the just
preceding verses is related. And then it unfolds not only
the present acceptance and present liberty of the saints,
but also their amazing future of glory, already indicated,
especially in ch. v. 2. And its closing strains are full
of the great first wonder, our Acceptance. "Them He
justified"; "It is God that justifieth." So we forbear to
take ch. viii. as simply the successor and counterpart
of ch. vii. It is this, in some great respects. But it is
more; it is the meeting point of all the great truths of
grace which we have studied, their meeting point in the
sea of holiness and glory."In this surpassing chapter the several streams of the preceding
arguments meet and flow in one 'river of the water of life, clear as
crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb,' until it
seems to lose itself in the ocean of a blissful eternity."—David Brown,
D.D., "The Epistle to the Romans," in "Handbooks for Bible Classes."
As we approach the first paragraph of the chapter,
we ask ourselves what is its message on the whole, its
true envoi. It is, our possession of the Holy Spirit of
God, for purposes of holy loyalty and holy liberty.
The foundation of that fact is once more indicated, in
the brief assertion of our full Justification in Christ, and
of His propitiatory Sacrifice (ver. 3). Then from those
words, "in Christ," he opens this ample revelation of our
possession, in our union with Christ, of the Spirit who,
having joined us to Him, now liberates us in Him, not
from condemnation only but from sin's dominion. If
we are indeed in Christ, the Spirit is in us, dwelling in
us, and we are in the Spirit. And so, possessed and
filled by the blessed Power, we indeed have power to
walk and to obey. Nothing is mechanical, automatic;
we are fully persons still; He who annexes and
possesses our personality does not for a moment violate
it. But then, He does possess it; and the Christian, so
possessing and so possessed, is not only bound but
enabled, in humble but practical reality, in a liberty
otherwise unknown, to "fulfil the just demand of the
Law," "to please God," in a life lived not to self but
to Him.
Thus, as we shall see in detail as we proceed, the
Apostle, while he still firmly keeps his hand, so to speak,
on Justification, is occupied fully now with its issue,
Holiness. And this issue he explains as not merely a
matter of grateful feeling, the outcome of the loyalty
supposed to be natural to the pardoned. He gives it
as a matter of divine power, secured to them under
the Covenant of their acceptance.
Shall we not enter on our expository study full of
holy expectation, and with unspeakable desires awake,
to receive all things which in that Covenant are ours?
Shall we not remember, over every sentence, that in it
Christ speaks by Paul, and speaks to us? For us
also, as for our spiritual ancestors, all this is true. It
shall be true in us also, as it was in them.
We shall be humbled as well as gladdened; and
thus our gladness will be sounder. We shall find that
whatever be our "walk according to the Spirit," and
our veritable dominion over sin, we shall still have
"the practices of the body" with which to deal—of the
body which still is "dead because of sin," "mortal," not
yet "redeemed." We shall be practically reminded, even
by the most joyous exhortations, that possession and personal
condition are one thing in covenant, and another
in realization; that we must watch, pray, examine self,
and deny it, if we would "be" what we "are." Yet
all this is but the salutary accessory to the blessed
main burthen of every line. We are accepted in the
Lord. In the Lord we have the Eternal Spirit for our
inward Possessor. Let us arise, and "walk humbly,"
but also in gladness, "with our God."
St Paul speaks again, perhaps after a silence,
and Tertius writes down for the first time the now
immortal and beloved words. So no adverse
sentence is there now, in view of this great
fact of our redemption, for those in Christ Jesus.There can be no reasonable doubt that the words "who walk not
after the flesh, but after the Spirit," should be omitted. They are
probably a gloss from ver. 4; inserted (perhaps first as a side-note)
by scribes who failed to appreciate the profound simplicity of the
Apostle's dictum.
"In Christ Jesus"—mysterious union, blessed fact,
wrought by the Spirit who linked us sinners to the Lord.We thus indicate the thought given by the otherwise difficult
"For" of ver. 2. That "for" cannot mean to imply that there is no
condemnation because the Spirit has enabled us to be holy; this would
stultify the whole argument of chapters iii.-v. What, in that context,
it must imply is the complex fact (1) that we are in Christ—where
there is no condemnation, and (2) that we are there by the Holy
Spirit, who brought us to saving faith. Now we are to learn (3) what
that Spirit has done also for us in giving us union with Christ.
For the law of the Spirit of the
life which is in Christ JesusΤοῦ πνεύματος τῆς
ζωῆς ἐν Χπριστῷ Ἰησοῦ. In the Greek of the
N. T. it is possible so to interpret. Classical Greek would require
τῆς ζωῆς τῆς ἐν Χ. Ἰ.
The rendering, however, "the law of the Spirit of
life, in Christ Jesus," (making the last three words govern the whole
previous thought,) is amply admissible.
freed me, the man of the conflict just described, from the law of sin and of
death. The "law," the preceptive will, which legislates
the covenant of blessing for all who are in Christ, has
set him free. By a strange, pregnant paradox, so we take
it, the Gospel—the message which carries with it acceptance,
and also holiness, by faith—is here called a "law."
For while it is free grace to us it is also immovable
ordinance with God. The amnesty is His edict. It is
by heavenly statute that sinners, believing, possess the
Holy Spirit in possessing Christ. And here, with a
sublime abruptness and directness, that great gift of
the Covenant, the Spirit, for which the Covenant
gift of Justification was given, is put forward as the
Covenant's characteristic and crown. It is for the
moment as if this were all—that "in Christ Jesus" we,
I, are under the fiat which assures to us the fulness
of the Spirit. And this "law," unlike the stern "letter"
of Sinai, has actually "freed me." It has endowed
me not only with place but with power, in which to
live emancipated from a rival law, the law of sin and
of death. And what is that rival "law"? We dare
to say, it is the preceptive will of Sinai; "Do this, and
thou shalt live." This is a hard saying; for in itself
that very Law has been recently vindicated as holy, and
just, and good, and spiritual. And only a few lines
above in the Epistle we have heard of a "law of
sin" which is "served by the flesh." And we should
unhesitatingly explain this "law" to be identical with
that but for the next verse here, a still nearer context,
in which "the law" is unmistakably the divine moral
Code, considered however as impotent. Must not this
and that be the same? And to call that sacred Code
"the Law of sin and of death" is not to say that it is sinful
and deathful. It need only mean, and we think it does
mean, that it is sin's occasion, and death's warrant, by
the unrelieved collision of its holiness with fallen man's
will. It must command; he, being what he is, must rebel.
He rebels; it must condemn. Then comes his Lord to
die for him, and to rise again; and the Spirit comes, to
unite him to his Lord. And now, from the Law as provoking
the helpless, guilty will, and as claiming the sinner's
penal death—behold the man is "freed."
For—(the
process is now explained at large) the impossible
of the Law—what it could not do, for this was
not its function, even to enable us sinners to keep its
precept from the soul—God, when He sent His own Son
in likeness of flesh of sin, Incarnate, in our identical
nature, under all those conditions of earthly life which
for us are sin's vehicles and occasions, and as Sin-Offering,Περὶ ἁμαρτίας: the phrase is stamped
with a sacrificial speciality by the Greek of the O. T. See
e.g. Levit. xvi. 3, 5, 6, 9, 11, 15, 16, 25, 27. And cp.
Heb. x. 8.
expiatory and reconciling, sentenced sin in the
flesh; not pardoned it, observe, but sentenced it. He
ordered it to execution; He killed its claim and its power
for all who are in Christ. And this, "in the flesh," making
man's earthly conditions the scene of sin's defeat,
for our everlasting encouragement in our "life in the
flesh." And what was the aim and issue? That the
righteous demand (δικαίωμα) of the Law might
be fulfilled in us, us who walk not flesh-wise,
but Spirit-wise; that we, accepted in Christ, and using
the Spirit's power in the daily "walk" of circumstance
and experience, might be liberated from the life of self-will,
and meet the will of God with simplicity and joy.
Such, and nothing less or else, was the Law's
"righteous demand"; an obedience not only universal
but also cordial. For its first requirement, "Thou shalt
have no other God," meant, in the spiritual heart of it,
the dethronement of self from its central place, and the
session there of the Lord. But this could never be
while there was a reckoning still unsettled between the
man and God. Friction there must be while God's
Law remained not only violated but unsatisfied, unatoned."The way of him that is laden with guilt is exceeding crooked."
Prov. xxi. 8 R.V.
And so it necessarily remained, till the
sole adequate Person, one with God, one with man,
stepped into the gap; our Peace, our Righteousness,
and also by the Holy Ghost our Life. At rest because
of His sacrifice, at work by the power of His Spirit, we
are now free to love, and divinely enabled to walk in
love. Meanwhile the dream of an unsinning perfectness,
such as could make a meritorious claim, is not so much
negatived as precluded, put far out of the question. For
the central truth of the new position is that the Lord has
fully dealt, for us, with the Law's claim that man shall
deserve acceptance. "Boasting" is inexorably "excluded,"
to the last, from this new kind of law-fulfilling
life. For the "fulfilment" which means legal satisfaction
is for ever taken out of our hands by Christ,
and only that humble "fulfilment" is ours which
means a restful, unanxious, reverent, unreserved
loyalty in practice. To this now our "mind," our cast
and gravitation of soul, is brought, in the life of acceptance,
and in the power of the Spirit.
For they
who are flesh-wise, the unchanged children of
the self-life, think, "mind," have moral affinity and
converse with, the things of the flesh; but they who are
Spirit-wise, think the things of the Spirit, His love, joy,
peace, and all that holy "fruit." Their liberated and
Spirit-bearing life now goes that way, in its true bias.
For the mind, the moral affinity, of the flesh, of
the self-life, is death; it involves the ruin of
the soul, in condemnation, and in separation from God;
but the mind of the Spirit, the affinity given to the
believer by the indwelling Holy One, is life and peace;
it implies union with Christ, our life and our acceptance;
it is the state of soul in which He is realized. Because—this
absolute antagonism of the two "minds"
is such because—the "mind" of the flesh is
personal hostility (ἔχθρα) towards God; for to God's Law
it is not subject. For indeed it cannot be subject to it; thoseWe do not translate the δὲ. It seems to be best represented in
English by connecting the clause only by position with what goes
before.
who are in flesh, surrendered to the
life of self as their law, cannot please God,The Greek lays a solemn emphasis by position on Θεῷ.
"cannot meet the wish" (ἀρέσαι) of Him whose loving
but absolute claim is to be Lord of the whole man.
"They cannot": it is a moral impossibility. "The
Law of God" is, "Thou shalt love Me with all thy
heart, and thy neighbour as thyself"; the mind of the
flesh is, "I will love my self and its will first and
most." Let this be disguised as it may, even from the
man himself; it is always the same thing in its essence.
It may mean a defiant choice of open evil. It may mean
a subtle and almost evanescent preference of literature,
or art, or work, or home, to God's will as such. It is
in either case "the mind of the flesh," a thing which
cannot be refined and educated into holiness, but must
be surrendered at discretion, as its eternal enemy.
But you (there is a glad emphasis on
"you") are not in flesh, but in Spirit, surrendered
to the indwelling Presence as your law and secret,
on the assumption that (εἴπερ: he suggests not weary
misgivings but a true examination) God's Spirit dwells
in you; has His home in your hearts, humbly welcomed
into a continuous residence. But if any one has not
Christ's Spirit, (who is the Spirit as of the Father so of
the Son, sent by the Son, to reveal and to impart Him,)
that man is not His. He may bear his Lord's name,
he may be externally a Christian, he may enjoy the
divine Sacraments of union; but he has not "the
Thing." The Spirit, evidenced by His holy fruit, is
no Indweller there; and the Spirit is our vital Bond
with Christ. But if Christ is, thus by the
Spirit, in you, dwelling by faith in the hearts
which the Spirit has "strengthened" to receive Christ
(Eph. iii. 16, 17)—true (μὲν),
the body is dead, because of sin,
the primeval sentence still holds its way there; the
body is deathful still, it is the body of the Fall; but the SpiritWe refer the word πνεῦμα here, as throughout the passage, to
the Holy Ghost. No other interpretation seems either consistent
with the whole context, or adequate to its grandeur.
is life, He is in that body, your secret of power
and peace eternal, because of righteousness, because of
the merit of your Lord, in which you are accepted, and
which has won for you this wonderful Spirit-life.
Then even for the body there is assured a glorious
future, organically one with this living present. Let
us listen as he goes on: But if the Spirit of
Him who raised Jesus, the slain Man, from the
dead, dwells in you, He who raised from the dead Christ
Jesus, the Man so revealed and glorified as the Anointed
Saviour, shall also bring to life your mortal bodies,
because of (διὰ τὸ κτλWe read thus, not διὰ τοῦ κτλ
("by means of, by the agency of, His Spirit").
The two readings have each strong support, but we think the balance of
evidence is for the accusative not the genitive. Happily the
exegetical difference is not serious. The accusative gives indeed a
meaning which may well include that given by the genitive, while it
includes other ideas also.)
His Spirit, dwelling in you.
That "frail temple," once so much defiled, and so
defiling, is now precious to the Father because it is the
habitation of the Spirit of His Son. Nor only so;
that same Spirit, who, by uniting us to Christ, made
actual our redemption, shall surely, in ways to us unknown,
carry the process to its glorious crown, and
be somehow the Efficient Cause of "the redemption of
our body."
Wonderful is this deep characteristic of the Scripture;
its Gospel for the body. In Christ, the body is seen to
be something far different from the mere clog, or prison,
or chrysalis, of the soul. It is its destined implement,
may we not say its mighty wings in prospect, for the
life of glory. As invaded by sin, it must needs pass
through either death or, at the Lord's Return, an
equivalent transfiguration. But as created in God's
plan of Human Nature it is for ever congenial to the
soul, nay, it is necessary to the soul's full action. And
whatever be the mysterious mode (it is absolutely
hidden from us as yet) of the event of Resurrection, this
we know, if only from this Oracle, that the glory of the
immortal body will have profound relations with the
work of God in the sanctified soul. No mere material
sequences will bring it about. It will be "because of
the Spirit"; and "because of the Spirit dwelling in
you," as your power for holiness in Christ.We are aware that ver. 11 has been sometimes interpreted of
present blessings for the body; as if the fulness of the Holy Ghost
was to effect a quasi-glorification of the body's condition now;
exempting it from illness, and at least retarding its decay. But this
seems untenable. If the words point this way at all, ought they not
to mean a literal exemption from death altogether? But this manifestly
was not in the Apostle's mind, if we take his writings as a
whole. That spiritual blessings may, and often do, act wonderfully
in the life of the body, is most true. But that is not the truth of this
verse.
So the Christian reads the account of his present
spiritual wealth, and of his coming completed life, "his
perfect consummation and bliss in the eternal glory."
Let him take it home, with most humble but quite
decisive assurance, as he looks again, and believes
again, on his redeeming Lord. For him, in his inexpressible
need, God has gone about to provide "so
great salvation." He has accepted his person in His
Son who died for him. He has not only forgiven him
through that great Sacrifice, but in it He has "condemned,"
sentenced to chains and death, his sin, which
is now a doomed thing, beneath his feet, in Christ.
And He has given to him, as personal and perpetual
Indweller, to be claimed, hailed, and used by humble
faith, His own Eternal Spirit, the Spirit of His Son,
the Blessed One who, dwelling infinitely in the Head,
comes to dwell fully in the members, and make Head
and members wonderfully one. Now then let him
give himself up with joy, thanksgiving, and expectation,
to the "fulfilling of the righteous demand of God's
Law," "walking Spirit-wise," with steps moving ever
away from self and towards the will of God. Let him
meet the world, the devil, and that mysterious "flesh,"
(all ever in potential presence,) with no less a Name than
that of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
Let him stand up not as a defeated and disappointed
combatant, maimed, half-blinded, half-persuaded to succumb,
but as one who treads upon "all the power of the
enemy," in Christ, by the indwelling Spirit. And let
him reverence his mortal body, even while he "keeps
it in subjection," and while he willingly tires it, or gives
it to suffer, for his Lord. For it is the temple of the
Spirit. It is the casket of the hope of glory.
CHAPTER XVIII
HOLINESS BY THE SPIRIT, AND THE GLORIES THAT SHALL FOLLOW
Romans viii. 12-25
NOW the Apostle goes on to develop these noble
premisses into conclusions. How true to
himself, and to his Inspirer, is the line he follows!
First come the most practical possible of reminders
of duty; then, and in profound connexion, the inmost
experiences of the regenerate soul in both its joy and
its sorrow, and the most radiant and far-reaching
prospects of glory to come. We listen still, always
remembering that this letter from Corinth to Rome is to
reach us too, by way of the City. He who moved His
servant to send it to Aquila and Herodion had us too in
mind, and has now carried out His purpose. It is open
in our hands for our faith, love, hope, life to-day.
St Paul begins with Holiness viewed as Duty, as
Debt. He has led us through our vast treasury of
privilege and possession. What are we to do with it?
Shall we treat it as a museum, in which we may
occasionally observe the mysteries of New Nature, and
with more or less learning discourse upon them? Shall
we treat it as the unwatchful King2 Kings xx. 12, 13.
of old treated his
splendid stores, making them his personal boast, and so
betraying them to the very power which one day was to
make them all its spoil? No, we are to live upon our
Lord's magnificent bounty—to His glory, and in His
will. We are rich; but it is for Him. We have His
talents; and those talents, in respect of His grace, as
distinct from His "gifts," are not one, nor five, nor ten,
but ten thousand—for they are Jesus Christ. But we
have them all for Him. We are free from the law of sin
and of death; but we are in perpetual and delightful
debt to Him who has freed us. And our debt is—to
walk with Him.
"So, brethren, we are debtors." Thus our new paragraph
begins. For a moment he turns to say what we
owe no debt to; even "the flesh," the self-life. But it is
plain that his main purpose is positive, not negative.
He implies in the whole rich context that we are debtors
to the Spirit, to the Lord, "to walk Spirit-wise."
What a salutary thought it is! Too often in the
Christian Church the great word Holiness has been
practically banished to a supposed almost inaccessible
background, to the steeps of a spiritual ambition, to a
region where a few might with difficulty climb in the
quest, men and women who had "leisure to be good,"
or who perhaps had exceptional instincts for piety. God
be thanked, He has at all times kept many consciences
alive to the illusion of such a notion; and in our own day,
more and more, His mercy brings it home to His children
that "this is His will, even the sanctification"—not of
some of them, but of all. Far and wide we are reviving
to see, as the fathers of our faith saw before us, that
whatever else holiness is, it is a sacred and binding
debt. It is not an ambition; it is a duty. We are
bound, every one of us who names the name of Christ,
to be holy, to be separate from evil, to walk by the
Spirit.
Alas for the misery of indebtedness, when funds fall
short! Whether the unhappy debtor examines his affairs,
or guiltily ignores their condition, he is—if his conscience
is not dead—a haunted man. But when an honourable
indebtedness concurs with ample means, then one of
the moral pleasures of life is the punctual scrutiny and
discharge. "He hath it by him"; and it is his happiness,
as it is assuredly his duty, not to "say to his
neighbour, Go and come again, and to-morrow I will
give" (Prov. iii. 28).
Christian brother, partaker of Christ, and of the
Spirit, we also owe, to Him who owns. But it is an
indebtedness of the happy type. Once we owed, and
there was worse than nothing in the purse. Now we
owe, and we have Christ in us, by the Holy Ghost,
wherewithal to pay. The eternal Neighbour comes to
us, with no frowning look, and shews us His holy
demand; to live to-day a life of truth, of purity, of
confession of His Name, of unselfish serviceableness,
of glad forgiveness, of unbroken patience, of practical
sympathy, of the love which seeks not her own. What
shall we say? That it is a beautiful ideal, which we
should like to realize, and may yet some day seriously
attempt? That it is admirable, but impossible?
Nay; "we are debtors." And He who claims has first
immeasurably given. We have His Son for our acceptance
and our life. His very Spirit is in us. Are not
these good resources for a genuine solvency? "Say
not, Go and come again; I will pay Thee—to-morrow.
Thou hast it by thee!"
Holiness is beauty. But it is first duty, practical and
present, in Jesus Christ our Lord.
So then, brethren, debtors are we—not to the flesh, with
a view to living flesh-wise; but to the Spirit—who
is now both our law and our power—with a
view to living Spirit-wise. For if you are living flesh-wise,
you are on the way (μέλλετε) to die. But if by the
Spirit you are doing to deathΘανατοῦτε: observe the present tense,
the process is a continuing one.
the practices, the stratagems,
the machinations, of the body, you will live. Ah, the body
is still there, and is still a seat and vehicle of temptation.
"It is for the Lord, and the Lord is for it" (1 Cor. vi. 13).
It is the temple of the Spirit. Our call is (1 Cor. vi. 20)
to glorify God in it. But all this, from our point of view,
passes from realization into mere theory, wofully gainsaid
by experience, when we let our acceptance in
Christ, and our possession in Him of the Almighty
Spirit, pass out of use into mere phrase. Say what
some men will, we are never for an hour here below
exempt from elements and conditions of evil residing
not merely around us but within us. There is no stage
of life when we can dispense with the power of the
Holy Ghost as our victory and deliverance from "the
machinations of the body." And the body is no separate
and as it were minor personality. If the man's body
"machinates," it is the man who is the sinner.
But then, thanks be to God, this fact is not the real
burthen of the words here. What St Paul has to say
is that the man who has the indwelling Spirit has with
him, in him, a divine and all-effectual Counter-Agent to
the subtlest of his foes. Let him do what we saw him
above (vii. 7-25) neglecting to do. Let him with
conscious purpose, and firm recollection of his wonderful
position and possession (so easily forgotten!), call up
the eternal Power which is indeed not himself, though
in himself. Let him do this with habitual recollection
and simplicity. And he shall be "more than conqueror"
where he was so miserably defeated. His path
shall be as of one who walks over foes who threatened,
but who fell, and who die at his feet. It shall be less
a struggle than a march, over a battlefield indeed, yet a
field of victory so continuous that it shall be as peace.
"If by the Spirit you are doing them to death." Mark
well the words. He says nothing here of things often
thought to be of the essence of spiritual remedies; nothing
of "will-worship, and humility, and unsparing treatment
of the body" (Col. ii. 23); nothing even of fast and
prayer. Sacred and precious is self-discipline, the watchful
care that act and habit are true to that "temperance"
which is a vital ingredient in the Spirit's "fruit" (Gal. v. 22, 23).
It is the Lord's own voice (Matt. xxvi. 41)
which bids us always "watch and pray"; "praying in
the Holy Ghost" (Jude 20). Yes, but these true exercises
of the believing soul are after all only as the covering
fence around that central secret—our use by faith of the
presence and power of "the Holy Ghost given unto
us." The Christian who neglects to watch and pray
will most surely find that he knows not how to use
this his great strength, for he will be losing realization
of his oneness with his Lord. But then the man who
actually, and in the depth of his being, is "doing to
death the practices of the body," is doing so, immediately,
not by discipline, nor by direct effort, but by the
believing use of "the Spirit." Filled with Him, he
treads upon the power of the enemy. And that fulness
is according to surrendering faith.
For as many as are led by God's Spirit, these
are God's sons; for you did not receive a spirit
of slavery, to take you back again (πάλιν)
to fear; no,
you received a Spirit of adoption to sonship, in which
Spirit, surrendered to His holy power, we cry,
with no bated, hesitating breath, "Abba, our (ὁ)
Father." His argument runs thus; "If you would live
indeed, you must do sin to death by the Spirit. And
this means, in another aspect, that you must yield yourselves
to be led along by the Spirit, with that leading
which is sure to conduct you always away from self and
into the will of God. You must welcome the Indweller
to have His holy way with your springs of thought and
will. So, and only so, will you truly answer the idea,
the description, 'sons of God'—that glorious term, never
to be satisfied by the relation of mere creaturehood, or
by that of merely exterior sanctification, mere membership
in a community of men, though it be the Visible
Church itself. But if you so meet sin by the Spirit, if
you are so led by the Spirit, you do shew yourselves
nothing less than God's own sons. He has called you
to nothing lower than sonship; to vital connexion with a
divine Father's life, and to the eternal embraces of His
love. For when He gave and you received the Spirit,
the Holy Spirit of promise, who reveals Christ and joins
you to Him, what did that Spirit do, in His heavenly
operation? Did He lead you back to the old position,
in which you shrunk from God, as from a Master who
bound you against your will? No, He shewed you that
in the Only Son you are nothing less than sons, welcomed
into the inmost home of eternal life and love.
You found yourselves indescribably near the Father's
heart, because accepted, and new-created, in His Own
Beloved. And so you learnt the happy, confident call
of the child, 'Father, O Father; Our Father, Abba.'"The Aramaic "Abba," used by our Lord in His hour of darkness,
had probably become an almost personal Name to the believers.
So it was, and so it is. The living member of
Christ is nothing less than the dear child of God. He
is other things besides; he is disciple, follower, bondservant.
He never ceases to be bondservant, though
here he is expressly told that he has received no
"spirit of slavery." So far as "slavery" means
service forced against the will, he has done with this,
in Christ. But so far as it means service rendered by
one who is his master's absolute property, he has
entered into its depths, for ever. Yet all this is
exterior as it were to that inmost fact, that he is—in a
sense ultimate, and which alone really fulfils the word—the
child, the son, of God. He is dearer than he
can know to his Father. He is more welcome than he
can ever realize to take his Father at His word, and
lean upon His heart, and tell Him all.
The Spirit itself bears witness with our spirit,
that we are God's children, born children, τεκνά.
The Holy One, on His part, makes the once cold, reluctant,
apprehensive heart "know and believe the love
of God." He "sheds abroad God's love in it." He
brings home to consciousness and insight the "sober
certainty" of the promises of the Word; that Word
through which, above all other means, He speaks. He
shews to the man "the things of Christ," the Beloved,
in whom he has the adoption and the regeneration;
making him see, as souls see, what a paternal welcome
there must be for those who are "in Him." And then,
on the other part, the believer meets Spirit with spirit.
He responds to the revealed paternal smile with not
merely a subject's loyalty but a son's deep love; deep,
reverent, tender, genuine love. "Doubtless thou art His
own child," says the Spirit. "Doubtless He is my Father,"
says our wondering, believing, seeing spirit in response.
But if children, then also heirs; God's heirs, Christ's
co-heirs, possessors in prospect of our Father's
heaven (towards which the whole argument now
gravitates), in union of interest and life with our Firstborn
Brother, in whom lies our right. From one hand
a gift, infinitely merciful and surprising, that unseen
bliss will be from another the lawful portion of the
lawful child, one with the Beloved of the Father. Such
heirs we are, if indeed we share His sufferings, those deep
but hallowed pains which will surely come to us as we
live in and for Him in a fallen world, that we may also
share His glory, for which that path of sorrow is, not
indeed the meriting, but the capacitating, preparation.
Amidst the truths of life and love, of the Son, of the
Spirit, of the Father, he thus throws in the truth of
pain. Let us not forget it. In one form or another, it
is for all "the children." Not all are martyrs, not all
are exiles or captives, not all are called as a fact to meet
open insults in a defiant world of paganism or unbelief.
Many are still so called, as many were at first, and as
many will be to the end; for "the world" is no more
now than it ever was in love with God, and with His
children as such. But even for those whose path is—not
by themselves but the Lord—most protected, there
must be "suffering," somehow, sooner, later, in this
present life, if they are really living the life of the
Spirit, the life of the child of God, "paying the debt"
of daily holiness, even in its humblest and gentlest
forms. We must observe, by the way, that it is to
such sufferings, and not to sorrows in general, that the
reference lies here. The Lord's heart is open for all
the griefs of His people, and He can use them all for
their blessing and for His ends. But the "suffering
with Him" must imply a pain due to our union. It
must be involved in our being His members, used by
the Head for His work. It must be the hurt of His
"hand" or "foot" in subserving His sovereign thought.
What will the bliss be of the corresponding sequel!
"That we may share His glory"; not merely, "be
glorified," but share His glory; a splendour of life, joy,
and power whose eternal law and soul will be, union
with Him who died for us and rose again.
Now towards that prospect St Paul's whole thought
sets, as the waters set towards the moon, and the mention
of that glory, after suffering, draws him to a sight of
the mighty "plurity" of the glory. For I
reckon, "I calculate"—word of sublimest prose,
more moving here than any poetry, because it bids us
handle the hope of glory as a fact—that not worthy of
mention are the sufferings of the present season (καιροῦ,
not χρόνου; he thinks of time not in its length but in
its limit), in view of the glory about to be unveiled upon
us (εἰς ἡμᾶς), unveiled, and then heaped upon us, in its golden fulness.With this verse on his lips, unfinished, Calvin died, 1564.
For—he is going to give us
a deep reason for his "calculation"; wonderfully
characteristic of the Gospel. It is that the final
glory of the saints will be a crisis of mysterious blessing
for the whole created Universe.We cannot think that the κτίσις of this passage refers only, as
some would have it, to humanity (as Mark xvi. 15, Col. i. 23). The
κτίσις is a something which was "subjected" involuntarily, and so,
surely, not guiltily. This could not be said of humanity.
In ways absolutely unknown, certainly as regards anything said in this
passage, but none the less divinely fit and sure, the
ultimate and eternal manifestation of Christ Mystical,
the Perfect Head with His perfected members, will be
the occasion, and in some sense too the cause, the
mediating cause, of the emancipation of "Nature," in
its heights and depths, from the cancer of decay, and
its entrance on an endless æon of indissoluble life and
splendour. Doubtless that goal shall be reached through
long processes and intense crises of strife and death.
"Nature," like the saint, may need to pass to glory
through a tomb. But the issue will indeed be glory,
when He who is the Head at once of "Nature,"See Col. i. 15, 16. The Lord's Headship of Creation, explicitly
revealed there, is seen as it were only just below the surface here.
of the heavenly nations, and of redeemed man, shall bid
the vast periods of conflict and dissolution cease, in the
hour of eternal purpose, and shall manifestly "be what
He is" to the mighty total.
With such a prospect natural philosophy has nothing
to do. Its own laws of observation and tabulation forbid
it to make a single affirmation of what the Universe shall
be, or shall not be, under new and unknown conditions.
Revelation, with no arbitrary voice, but as the authorized
while reserved messenger of the Maker, and standing
by the open Grave of the Resurrection, announces that
there are to be profoundly new conditions, and that
they bear a relation inscrutable but necessary to the
coming glorification of Christ and His Church. And
what we now see and feel as the imperfections and
shocks and seeming failures of the Universe, so we learn
from this voice, a voice so quiet yet so triumphant, are
only as it were the throes of birth, in which "Nature,"
impersonal indeed but so to speak animated by the
thinking of the intelligent orders who are a part of her
universal being, preludes her wonderful future.
For the longing outlook of the creation is
expecting—the unveiling of the sons of God.
For to vanity, to evil, to failure and decay, the creation
was subjected not willingly, but because
of Him who made it subject; its Lord and
Sustainer, who in His inscrutable but holy will
bade physical evil correspond to the moral evil of
His conscious fallen creatures, angels or men. So
that there is a deeper connexion than we can yet
analyse between sin, the primal and central evil, and
everything that is really wreck or pain. But this
"subjection," under His fiat, was in hope,
because the creation itself shall be liberated
from the slavery of corruption into the freedom of the
glory of the children of God, the freedom brought in for
it by their eternal liberation from the last relics of the
Fall.S For we know, by observation of natural
evil, in the light of the promises, that the whole
creation is uttering a common groan of burthen and
yearning, and suffering a common birth-pang, even till
now, when the Gospel has heralded the coming glory.
Nor only so, but even the actual possessors of
the firstfruits of the Spirit, possessors of that
presence of the Holy One in them now, which is the sure
pledge of His eternal fulness yet to come, even we ourselves,
richly blest as we are in our wonderful Spirit-life,
yet in ourselves are groaning, burthened still with mortal
conditions pregnant of temptation, lying not around us
only but deep within (ἐν ἑαυτοῖς),
expecting adoption,
full instatement into the fruition of the sonship which
already is ours, even the redemption of our body.
From the coming glories of the Universe he returns,
in the consciousness of an inspired but human heart, to
the present discipline and burthen of the Christian. Let
us observe the noble candour of the words; this "groan"
interposed in the midst of such a song of the Spirit and
of glory. He has no ambition to pose as the possessor
of an impossible experience. He is more than conqueror;
but he is conscious of his foes. The Holy
Ghost is in him; he does the body's practices victoriously
to death by the Holy Ghost. But the body is there,
as the seat and vehicle of manifold temptation. And
though there is a joy in victory which can sometimes
make even the presence of temptation seem "all joy"
(Jas i. 2), he knows that something "far better" is
yet to come. His longing is not merely for a personal
victory, but for an eternally unhindered service. That
will not fully be his till his whole being is actually, as
well as in covenant, redeemed. That will not be till
not the spirit only but the body is delivered from the
last dark traces of the Fall, in the resurrection hour.
For it is as to our (τῇ) hope that we were
saved. When the Lord laid hold of us we were indeed saved,See the perfect participle, σεσωσμένοι, Eph. ii. 5, 8.
but with a salvation which was
only in part actual. Its total was not to be realized
till the whole being was in actual salvation. Such
salvation (see below, xiii. 11) was coincident in prospect
with "the Hope," "that blessed Hope,"Is ἡ ἐλπὶς ever used in the N. T. in any other connexion than this?
the Lord's Return and the resurrection glory. So, to
paraphrase this clause, "It was in the sense of the
Hope that we were saved."Luther's rendering is good as a paraphrase, Wir sind wohl selig,
doch in der Hoffnung.
But a hope in sight is not a hope; for, what a man sees, why does he hope for?
Hope, in that case, has, in its nature, expired in possession.
And our full "salvation" is a hope; it is bound up
with a Promise not yet fulfilled; therefore, in its nature,
it is still unseen, still unattained. But then, it is
certain; it is infinitely valid; it is worth any waiting
for. But if, for what we do not see, we do hope,
looking on good grounds for the sunrise in the
dark east, with patience we expect it. "With patience,"
literally "through patience," δι' ὑπομονῆς. The "patience"
is as it were the means, the secret, of the waiting;
"patience," that noble word of the New Testament
vocabulary, the saint's active submission, submissive
action, beneath the will of God. It is no nerveless,
motionless prostration; it is the going on and upward,
step by step, as the man "waits upon the Lord, and
walks, and does not faint."
CHAPTER XIX
THE SPIRIT OF PRAYER IN THE SAINTS:
THEIR PRESENT AND ETERNAL WELFARE IN THE LOVE OF GOD
Romans viii. 26-39
IN the last paragraph the music of this glorious
didactic prophecy passed, in some solemn phrases,
into the minor mood. "If we share His sufferings";
"The sufferings of this present season"; "We groan
within ourselves"; "In the sense of our hope we were
saved." All is well. The deep harmony of the
Christian's full experience, if it is full downwards as well
as upwards, demands sometimes such tones; and they
are all music, for they all express a life in Christ, lived
by the power of the Holy Ghost. But now the strain
is to ascend again into its largest and most triumphant
manner. We are now to hear how our salvation, though
its ultimate issues are still things of hope, is itself a
thing of eternity—from everlasting to everlasting. We
are to be made sure that all things are working now,
in concurrent action, for the believer's good; and that
his justification is sure; and that his glory is so certain
that its future is, from his Lord's point of sight, present;
and that nothing, absolutely nothing, shall separate
him from the eternal Love.
But first comes one most deep and tender word, the
last of its kind in the long argument, about the presence
and power of the Holy Ghost. The Apostle has the
"groan" of the Christian still in his ear, in his heart;
in fact, it is his own. And he has just pointed himself
and his fellow believers to the coming glory, as to
a wonderful antidote; a prospect which is at once
great in itself and unspeakably suggestive of the greatness
given to the most suffering and tempted saint by
his union with his Lord. As if to say to the pilgrim,
in his moment of distress, "Remember, you are more
to God than you can possibly know; He has made you
such, in Christ, that universal Nature is concerned in
the prospect of your glory." But now, as if nothing
must suffice but what is directly divine, he bids him
remember also the presence in him of the Eternal
Spirit, as his mighty but tenderest indwelling Friend.
Even as "that blessed Hope," so, "likewise also," this
blessed present Person, is the weak one's power. He
takes the man in his bewilderment, when troubles from
without press him, and fears from within make him
groan, and he is in sore need, yet at a loss for the right
cry. And He moves in the tired soul, and breathes
Himself into its thought, and His mysterious "groan"
of divine yearning mingles with our groan of burthen,
and the man's longings go out above all things not
towards rest but towards God and His will. So the
Christian's innermost and ruling desire is both fixed
and animated by the blessed Indweller, and he seeks
what the Lord will love to grant, even Himself and
whatever shall please Him. The man prays aright, as
to the essence of the prayer, because (what a divine
miracle is put before us in the words!) the Holy Ghost,
immanent in him, prays through him.
Thus we venture, in advance, to explain the sentences
which now follow. It is true that St Paul does not
explicitly say that the Spirit makes intercession in us,
as well as for us. But must it not be so? For where
is He, from the point of view of Christian life, but
in us?
Then, in the same way, the Spirit also—as
well as "the hope"—helps, as with a clasping,
supporting hand (συναντιλαμβάνεται),
our weakness,Read ἀσθενείᾳ.
our shortness and bewilderment of insight, our feebleness
of faith. For what we should pray for as we ought,
we do not know; but the Spirit Itself interposes to
intercede (ὑπερεντυγχάνει) for us, with groanings unutterable;
but (whatever be the utterance or no utterance)
the Searcher of our (τὰς) hearts knows
what is the mind, the purport, of the Spirit; because God-wise,So we venture to render κατὰ Θεόν.
with divine insight and sympathy,
the Spirit with the Father, He intercedes for saints.
Did He not so intercede for Paul, and in him,
fourteen years before these words were written, when
(2 Cor. xii. 7-10) the man thrice asked that "the thorn"
might be removed, and the Master gave him a better
blessing, the victorious overshadowing power? Did
He not so intercede for Monnica, and in her, when she
sought with prayers and tears to keep her rebellious
Augustine by her, and the Lord let him fly from her
side—to Italy, to Ambrose, and so to conversion?Confessiones, v. 8.
But the strain rises now, finally and fully, into the
rest and triumph of faith. "We know not what we
should pray for as we ought"; and the blessed Spirit
meets this deep need in His own way. And this, with
all else that we have in Christ, reminds us of a somewhat
that "we know" indeed; namely, that all things, favourable
or not in themselves, concur in blessing for the saints.
And then he looks backward (or rather, upward) into
eternity, and sees the throne, and the King with His
sovereign will, and the lines of perfect and infallible plan
and provision which stretch from that Centre to infinity.
These "saints," who are they? From one view-point,
they are simply sinners who have seen themselves, and
"fled for refuge to the" one possible "hope"; a "hope
set before" every soul that cares to win it. From another
view-point, that of the eternal Mind and Order, they are
those whom, for reasons infinitely wise and just, but
wholly hidden in Himself, the Lord has chosen to be
His own for ever, so that His choice takes effect in
their conversion, their acceptance, their spiritual transformation,
and their glory.
There, as regards this great passage, the thought
rests and ceases—in the glorification of the saints.
What their Glorifier will do with them, and through
them, thus glorified, is another matter. Assuredly He
will make use of them in His eternal kingdom. The
Church, made most blessed for ever, is yet beatified,
ultimately, not for itself but for its Head, and for His
Father. It is to be, in its final perfectness, "an
habitation of God, in the Spirit" (Eph. ii. 22). Is He
not so to possess it that the Universe shall see Him in
it, in a manner and degree now unknown and unimaginable?
Is not the endless "service" of the
elect to be such that all orders of being shall through
them behold and adore the glory of the Christ of God?
For ever they will be what they here become, the
bondservants of their Redeeming Lord, His Bride, His
vehicle of power and blessing; "having of their own
nothing, in Him all, and all for Him." No self-full
exaltations await them in the place of light; or the
whole history of sin would begin over again, in a new
æon. No celestial Pharisaism will be their spirit; a
look downward upon less blessed regions of existence,
as from a sanctuary of their own. Who can tell what
ministries of boundless love will be the expression of
their life of inexpressible and inexhaustible joy? Always,
like Gabriel, "in the presence," will they not always also,
like him, "be sent" (Luke i. 19) on the messages of
their glorious Head, in whom at length, in the "divine
event," "all things shall be gathered together"?
But this is not the thought of the passage now in our
hands. Here, as we have said, the thought terminates
in the final glorification of the saints of God, as the
immediate goal of the process of their redemption.
But we know that for those who love God all
things work together for good, even for those
who, purpose-wise, are His called ones. "We know it,"
with the cognition of faith; that is to say, because He,
absolutely trustworthy, guarantees it by His character,
and by His word. Deep, nay insoluble is the mystery,
from every other point of view. The lovers of the
Lord are indeed unable to explain, to themselves or
others, how this concurrence of "all things" works out
its infallible issues in them. And the observer from outside
cannot understand their certainty that it is so. But
the fact is there, given and assured, not by speculation
upon events, but by personal knowledge of an Eternal
Person. "Love God, and thou shalt know."See a noble poem by James Montgomery, The Lot of the Righteous.
They "love God," with a love perfectly unartificial, the
genuine affection of human hearts, hearts not the less
human because divinely new-created, regenerated from
above. Their immediate consciousness is just this;
we love Him. Not, we have read the book of life;
we have had a glimpse of the eternal purpose in itself;
we have heard our names recited in a roll of the
chosen; but, we love Him. We have found in Him
the eternal Love. In Him we have peace, purity, and
that deep, final satisfaction, that view of "the King
in His beauty," which is the summum bonum of the
creature. It was our fault that we saw it no sooner,
that we loved Him no sooner. It is the duty of every
soul that He has made to reflect upon its need of Him,
and upon the fact that it owes it to Him to love Him in
His holy beauty of eternal Love. If we could not it was
because we would not. If you cannot it is because, somehow
and somewhere, you will not; will not put yourselves
without reserve in the way of the sight. "Oh taste and
see that the Lord is good"; oh love the eternal Love.
But those who thus simply and genuinely love God
are also, on the other side, "purpose-wise, His called
ones"; "called," in the sense which we have found
above (p. 19) to be consistently traceable in the
Epistles; not merely invited, but brought in; not
evangelized only, but converted. In each case of the
happy company, the man, the woman, came to Christ,
came to love God with the freest possible coming of
the will, the heart. Yet each, having come, had the
Lord to thank for the coming. The human personality
had traced its orbit of will and deed, as truly as when
it willed to sin and to rebel. But lo, in ways past our
finding out, its free track lay along a previous track of
the purpose of the Eternal; its free "I will" was the
precise and fore-ordered correspondence to His "Thou
shalt." It was the act of man; it was the grace of God.
Can we get below such a statement, or above it?
If we are right in our reading of the whole teaching of
Scripture on the sovereignty of God, our thoughts upon
it, practically, must sink down, and must rest, just
here. The doctrine of the Choice of God, in its sacred
mystery, refuses—so we humbly think—to be explained
away so as to mean in effect little but the choice of man.
But then the doctrine is "a lamp, not a sun." It is presented
to us everywhere, and not least in this Epistle,
as a truth not meant to explain everything, but to
enforce this thing—that the man who as a fact loves the
eternal Love has to thank not himself but that Love that
his eyes, guiltily shut, were effectually opened. Not
one link in the chain of actual Redemption is of our
forging—or the whole would indeed be fragile. It is
"of Him" that we, in this great matter, will as we
ought to will. I ought to have loved God always. It
is of His mere mercy that I love Him now.
With this lesson of uttermost humiliation the truth
of the heavenly Choice, and its effectual Call, brings us
also that of an encouragement altogether divine. Such
a "purpose" is no fluctuating thing, shifting with the
currents of time. Such a call to such an embrace
means a tenacity, as well as a welcome, worthy of
God. "Who shall separate us?" "Neither shall any
pluck them out of My Father's hand." And this is the
motive of the words in this wonderful context, where
everything is made to bear on the safety of the children
of God, in the midst of all imaginable dangers.
For whom He knew beforehand, with a foreknowledge
which, in this argument, can mean
nothing short of foredecisionSee e.g. xi. 2; Acts ii. 23; 1 Pet. i. 2, 20.
—no
mere foreknowledge of what they would do, but rather of what He would
do for them—those He also set apart beforehand, for
conformation, deep and genuine, a resemblance due
to kindred being,Συμμόρφους: μορφὴ
is likeness not by accident but of essence. The
Greek here is literally, "conformed ones of the image, etc."; as if
their similitude made them part of that which they resembled.
to the image, the manifested Countenance,
of His Son, that He might be Firstborn amongst
many brethren, surrounded by the circling host of
kindred faces, congenial beings, His Father's children
by their union with Himself. So, as ever in the
Scriptures, mystery bears full on character. The man
is saved that he may be holy. His "predestination"Let us banish from the idea of "predestination" all thought of a
mechanical pagan destiny, and use it of the sure purpose of the living
and loving God.
is not merely not to perish, but to be made like Christ,
in a spiritual transformation, coming out in the moral
features of the family of heaven. And all bears ultimately
on the glory of Christ. The gathered saints are
an organism, a family, before the Father; and their vital
Centre is the Beloved Son, who sees in their true sonship
the fruit of "the travail of His soul."
But those whom He thus set apart beforehand,
He also called, effectually drew so as truly and
freely to choose Christ; and those whom He thus called
to Christ, He also justified in Christ, in that great way of
propitiation and faith of which the Epistle has so largely spoken; butΔέ: the "but" of logic. He is proving the security of the prospect
of glory.
those whom He thus justified, He also
glorified. "Glorified": it is a marvellous past tense. It
reminds us that in this passage we are placed, as it were,
upon the mountain of the Throne; our finite thought is
allowed to speak for once (however little it understands
it) the language of eternity, to utter the facts as the
Eternal sees them. To Him, the pilgrim is already in
the immortal Country; the bondservant is already at
his day's end, receiving His Master's "Well done, good
and faithful." He to whom time is not as it is to us
thus sees His purposes complete, always and for ever.
We see through His sight, in hearing His word about it.
So for us, in wonderful paradox, our glorification is presented,
as truly as our call, in terms of accomplished fact.
Here, in a certain sense, the long golden chain of the
doctrine of the Epistle ends—in the hand of the King
who thus crowns the sinners whose redemption, faith,
acceptance, and holiness, He had, in the Heaven of His
own Being, fore-willed and fore-ordered, "before the
world began," above all time. What remains of the
chapter is the application of the doctrine. But what an
application! The Apostle brings his converts out into
the open field of trial, and bids them use his doctrine
there. Are they thus dear to the Father in the Son?
Is their every need thus met? Is their guilt cancelled
in Christ's mighty merit? Is their existence filled with
Christ's eternal Spirit? Is sin thus cast beneath their
feet, and is such a heaven opened above their heads?
"Then what have they to fear," before man, or before
God? What power in the universe, of whatever order
of being, can really hurt them? For what can separate
them from their portion in their glorified Lord, and
in His Father's love in Him? Again we listen, with
Tertius, as the voice goes on:
What therefore shall we say in view of these
things? If God is for us, who is against us? HeὍς γε: the particle deeply underlines the pronoun.
who did not spare His own true (ἰδίου) Son, but for us
all handed Him over to that awful expiatory,
propitiatory, darkness and death, so that He
was "pleased to bruise Him, to put Him to grief"
(Isai. liii. 10), all for His own great glory, but, no
whit the less, all for our pure blessing; how (wonderful
"how"!) shall He not also with Him, because all
is included and involved in Him who is the Father's
All, give us also freely all things (τὰ πάντα,
"the all things that are")? And do we want to be sure that
He will not, after all, find a flaw in our claim, and
cast us in His court? Who will lodge a charge against
God's chosen ones? Will God—who justifies them?Ὁ δικαιῶν: we adopt the interrogative
rendering of all the clauses here. It is equally good as grammar, and
far more congenial to the glowing context.
Who will condemn them, if the charge
is lodged? Will Christ—who died, nay rather who rose,
who is on the right hand of God, who is actually
(καὶ) interceding
for us? (Observe this one mention in the whole
Epistle of His Ascension, and His action for us above,
as He is, by the fact of His Session on the Throne, our
sure Channel of eternal blessing, unworthy that we are.)
Do we need assurance, amidst "the sufferings of this
present time," that through them always the invincible
hands of Christ clasp us, with untired love? We "look
upon the covenant" of our acceptance and life in Him
who died for us, and who lives both for and in us, and we
meet the fiercest buffet of these waves in peace.
Who
shall sunder us from the love of Christ? There
rise before him, as he asks, like so many angry personalities,Observe the τίς of the question,
not τί.
the outward woes of the pilgrimage.
Tribulation? or Perplexity? or Persecution? or Famine?
or Nakedness? or Peril? or Sword? As it stands written,
in that deep song of anguish and faith (Psal.
xliv.) in which the elder Church, one with us
in deep continuity, tells her story of affliction, "For
Thy sake we are done to death all the day long; we
have been reckoned, estimated, as sheep of slaughter."
Even so. But in these things, all of them, we
more than conquer; not only do we tread upon our
foes; we spoil them, we find them occasions of glorious gain,Cp. 1 Cor. iii. 22: "All things are yours, whether life or death."
through Him who loved us. For I am sure
that neither death, nor life, life with its natural
allurements or its bewildering toils, nor angels, nor
principalities, nor powers,Strong documentary evidence favours the transference of
"powers" to a place after "things to come." But surely rhythm,
and the affinity of words, look the other way.
whatever Orders of being unfriendly to Christ and His saints the vast Unseen
contains, nor present things, nor things to come, in all
the boundless field of circumstance and contingency,
nor height, nor depth, in the illimitable sphere of space,
nor any other creature, no thing, no being, under the
Uncreated One, shall be able to sunder us, "us" with
an emphasis upon the word and thought (ἡμας χωρίσαι),
from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord—from
the eternal embrace wherein the Father embosoms
the Son, and, in the Son, all who are one with Him.
So once more the divine music rolls itself out into the
blessed Name. We have heard the previous cadences
as they came in their order; "Jesus our Lord, who was
delivered because of our offences, and was raised again
because of our justification" (iv. 25); "That grace might
reign, through Jesus Christ our Lord" (v. 21); "The gift
of God is eternal life, in Jesus Christ our Lord" (vi. 23);
"I thank God, through Jesus Christ our Lord" (vii. 25).
Like the theme of a fugue it has sounded on, deep and
high; still, always, "our Lord Jesus Christ," who is all
things, and in all, and for all, to His happy believing
members. And now all is gathered up into this. Our
"Righteousness, and Sanctification, and Redemption"
(1 Cor. i. 33), the golden burthens of the third chapter,
and the sixth, and the eighth, are all, in their living
ultimate essence, "Jesus Christ our Lord." He makes
every truth, every doctrine of peace and holiness, every
sure premiss and indissoluble inference, to be life as
well as light. He is pardon, and sanctity, and heaven.
Here, finally, the Eternal Love is seen not as it were
diffused into infinity, but gathered up wholly and for
ever in Him. Therefore to be in Him is to be in It.
It is to be within the clasp which surrounds the Beloved
of the Father.
Some years ago we remember reading this passage,
this close of the eighth chapter, under moving circumstances.
On a cloudless January night, late arrived in
Rome, we stood in the Coliseum, a party of friends
from England. Orion, the giant with the sword, glimmered
like a spectre, the spectre of persecution, above
the huge precinct; for the full moon, high in the heavens,
overpowered the stars. By its light we read from a little
Testament these words, written so long ago to be read
in that same City; written by the man whose dust now
sleeps at Tre Fontane, where the executioner dismissed
him to be with Christ; written to men and women some
of whom at least, in all human likelihood, suffered in
that same Amphitheatre, raised only twenty-two years
after Paul wrote to the Romans, and soon made the
scene of countless martyrdoms. "Do you want a
relic?" said a Pope to some eager visitor. "Gather
dust from the Coliseum; it is all the martyrs."
We recited the words of the Epistle, and gave thanks
to Him who had there triumphed in His saints over life
and death, over beasts, and men, and demons. Then
we thought of the inmost factors in that great victory;
Truth and Life. They "knew whom they had believed"—their
Sacrifice, their Head, their King. He
whom they had believed lived in them, and they in
Him, by the Holy Ghost given to them. Then we
thought of ourselves, in our circumstances so totally
different on the surface, yet carrying the same needs in
their depths. Are we too to overcome, in "the things
present" of our modern world, and in face of "the
things to come" yet upon the earth? Are we to be
"more than conquerors," winning blessing out of all
things, and really living "in our own generation"
(Acts xiii. 36) as the bondmen of Christ and the sons of
God? Then for us also the absolute necessities are—the
same Truth, and the same Life. And they are
ours, thanks be to the Name of our salvation. Time
hath no more dominion over them, because death hath
no more dominion over Him. For us too Jesus died.
In us too, by the Holy Ghost, He lives.
CHAPTER XX
THE SORROWFUL PROBLEM:
JEWISH UNBELIEF;
DIVINE SOVEREIGNTY
Romans ix. 1-33
WE may well think that again there was silence
awhile in that Corinthian chamber, when
Tertius had duly inscribed the last words we have
studied. A "silence in heaven" follows, in the Apocalypse
(viii. 1), the vision of the white hosts of the redeemed,
gathered at last, in their eternal jubilation, before
the throne and the Lamb. A silence in the soul is the
fittest immediate sequel to such a revelation of grace
and glory as has passed before us here. And did not
the man whose work it was to utter it, and whose
personal experience was as it were the informing soul
of the whole argument of the Epistle from the first,
and not least in this last sacred pæan of faith, keep
silence when he had done, hushed and tired by this
"exceeding weight" of grace and glory?
But he has a great deal more to say to the Romans,
and in due time the pen obeys the voice again. What
will the next theme be? It will be a pathetic and
significant contrast to the last; a lament, a discussion,
an instruction, and then a prophecy, about not himself
and his happy fellow-saints, but poor self-blinded unbelieving
Israel.
The occurrence of that subject exactly here is true to
the inmost nature of the Gospel. The Apostle has just
been counting up the wealth of salvation, and claiming
it all, as present and eternal property, for himself and
his brethren in the Lord. Justifying Righteousness,
Liberty from Sin in Christ, the Indwelling Spirit,
electing Love, coming and certain Glory, all have been
recounted, and asserted, and embraced. Is it selfish,
this great joy of possession and prospect? Let those
say so who see these things only from outside. Make
proof of what they are in their interior, enter into
them, learn yourself what it is to have peace with God,
to receive the Spirit, to expect the eternal glory; and
you will find that nothing is so sure to expand the
heart towards other men as the personal reception into
it of the Truth and Life of God in Christ. It is possible
to hold a true creed—and to be spiritually hard and
selfish. But is it possible so to be when not only the
creed is held, but the Lord of it, its Heart and Life, is
received with wonder and great joy? The man whose
certainties, whose riches, whose freedom, are all consciously
in Him, cannot but love his neighbour, and
long that he too should come into "the secret of the
Lord."
So St Paul, just at this point of the Epistle, turns
with a peculiar intensity of grief and yearning towards
the Israel which he had once led, and now had left,
because they would not come with him to Christ.
His natural and his spiritual sympathies all alike go
out to this self-afflicting people, so privileged, so
divinely loved, and now so blind. Oh that he could
offer any sacrifice that would bring them reconciled,
humbled, happy, to the feet of the true Christ! Oh
that they might see the fallacy of their own way of
salvation, and submit to the way of Christ, taking His
yoke, and finding rest to their souls! Why do they
not do it? Why does not the light which convinced
him shine on them? Why should not the whole
Sanhedrin say, "Lord, what wouldst Thou have us to
do?" Why does not the fair beauty of the Son of
God make them too "count all things but loss" for
Him? Why do not the voices of the Prophets prove
to them, as they do now to Paul, absolutely convincing
of the historical as well as spiritual claims of the Man
of Calvary? Has the promise failed? Has God done
with the race to which He guaranteed such a perpetuity
of blessing? No, that cannot be. He looks
again, and he sees in the whole past a long warning
that, while an outer circle of benefits might affect the
nation, the inner circle, the light and life of God indeed,
embraced "a remnant" only; even from the day when
Isaac and not Ishmael was made heir of Abraham.
And then he ponders the impenetrable mystery of the
relation of the Infinite Will to human wills; he
remembers how, in a way whose full reasons are unknowable,
(but they are good, for they are in God,)
the Infinite Will has to do with our willing; genuine
and responsible though our willing is. And before that
opaque veil he rests. He knows that only righteousness
and love is behind it; but he knows that it is a
veil, and that in front of it man's thought must cease
and be silent. Sin is altogether man's fault. But
when man turns from sin it is all God's mercy, free,
special, distinguishing. Be silent, and trust Him, O
man whom He has made. Remember, He has made
thee. It is not only that He is greater than thou, or
stronger; but He has made thee. Be reasonably
willing to trust, out of sight, the reasons of thy Maker.
Then he turns again with new regrets and yearnings
to the thought of that wonderful Gospel which was
meant for Israel and for the world, but which Israel
rejected, and now would fain check on its way to the
world. Lastly, he recalls the future, still full of eternal
promises for the chosen race, and through them full of
blessing for the world; till he rises at length from
perplexity and anguish, and the wreck of once eager
expectations, into that great Doxology in which he
blesses the Eternal Sovereign for the very mystery of
His ways, and adores Him because He is His own
eternal End.
Truth I speak in Christ, speaking as the
member of the All-Truthful; I do not lie, my
conscience, in the Holy Ghost, informed and governed
by Him, bearing me concurrent witness—the soul within
affirming to itself the word spoken without to others—that
I have great grief, and my heart has incessant
pain, yes, the heart in which (v. 5) the
Spirit has "poured out" God's love and joy; there is
room for both experiences in its human depths.
For I was wishing, I myself, to be anathema from
Christ, to be devoted to eternal separation from Him;
awful dream of uttermost sacrifice, made impossible only
because it would mean self-robbery from the Lord who
had bought him; a spiritual suicide by sin—for
the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen flesh-wise.
For they are (οἵτινές εἰσιν)
Israelites, bearers of the
glorious theocratic name, sons of the "Prince with
God" (Gen. xxxii. 28); theirs is the adoption, the call
to be Jehovah's own filial race, "His son, His firstborn"
(Exod. iv. 22) of the peoples; and the glory, the
Shechinah of the Eternal Presence, sacramentally seen
in Tabernacle and Temple, spiritually spread over the
race; and the Covenants, with Abraham, and Isaac, and
Levi, and Moses, and Aaron, and Phinehas, and David;
and the Legislation, the holy Moral Code, and the Ritual,
with its divinely ordered symbolism, that vast Parable
of Christ, and the Promises, of "the pleasant land," and
the perpetual favour, and the coming Lord;
theirs are the Fathers, patriarchs, and priests,
and kings; and out of them, as to what is flesh-wise, is
the Christ,—He who is over all things, God, blessed to all
eternity. Amen.For this rendering, rather than the alternative, "Blessed for ever
be the God who is over all," see the reasons offered below, p. 261.
It is indeed a splendid roll of honours, recited over
this race "separate among the nations," a race which
to-day as much as ever remains the enigma of history,
to be solved only by Revelation. "The Jews, your
Majesty," was the reply of Frederick the Great's old
believing courtier, when asked with a smile for the
credentials of the Bible; the short answer silenced the
Encyclopædist King. It is indeed a riddle, made of
indissoluble facts, this people everywhere dispersed,
yet everywhere individual; scribes of a Book which has
profoundly influenced mankind, and which is recognized
by the most various races as an august and lawful
claimant to be divine, yet themselves, in so many
aspects, provincial to the heart; historians of their own
glories, but at least equally of their own unworthiness
and disgrace; transmitters of predictions which may
be slighted, but can never, as a whole, be explained
away, yet obstinate deniers of the majestic fulfilment
in the Lord of Christendom; human in every fault and
imperfection, yet so concerned in bringing to man the
message of the Divine that Jesus Himself said of them
(John iv. 22), "Salvation comes from the Jews." On
this wonderful race this its most illustrious member
(after his Lord) here fixes his eyes, full of tears. He
sees their glories pass before him—and then realizes
the spiritual squalor and misery of their rejection of
the Christ of God. He groans, and in real agony asks
how it can be. One thing only cannot be; the promises
have not failed; there has been no failure in the
Promiser. What may seem such is rather man's misreading
of the promise.
But it is not as though the word of God has
been thrown out (ἐκπέπτωκε), that "word" whose
divine honour was dearer to him than even that of his
people. For not all who come from Israel constitute
Israel; nor, because they are seed of Abraham,
are they all his children, in the sense of family
life and rights; but "In Isaac shall a seed be called
thee" (Gen. xxi. 12); Isaac, and not any son of thy
body begotten, is father of those whom thou shalt claim
as thy covenant-race. That is to say, not the
children of his (τῆς) flesh are the children of his
(τοῦ) God; no, the children of the promise, indicated and
limited by its developed terms, are reckoned as seed.
For of the promise this was the word (Gen.
xviii. 10, 14), "According to this time I will
come, and Sarah, she and not any spouse of thine; no
Hagar, no Keturah, but Sarah, shall have a son."
And the law of limitations did not stop there, but
contracted yet again the stream of even physical filiation:
Nor only so, but Rebecca too—being with child,
with twin children, of one husband—no problem
of complex parentage, as with Abraham, occurring here—even
of Isaac our father, just named as the selected
heir—(for it was while they were not yet born, while they
had not yet shewn any conduct
(πραξάντων τι) good or
bad, that the choice-wise purpose of God might
remain, sole and sovereign, not based on works,
but wholly on the Caller)—it was said to her
(Gen. xxv. 23), "The greater shall be bondman
to the less." As it stands written, in the prophet's
message a millennium later, "Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated,"Mal. i. 2, 3.—It is plain that "hatred" in such a connexion (and
cp. Matt. vi. 24, Luke xiv. 26) need mean no more than relative
repudiation. No personal animosity is in question, but a decisive
rejection of a rival claim. See Grimm's N. T. Lexicon (Thayer), s.v.
μισεῖν.
I repudiated him as heir.
So the limit has run always along with the promise.
Ishmael is Abraham's son, yet not his son. Esau is
Isaac's son, yet not his son. And though we trace in
Ishmael and in Esau, as they grow, characteristics
which may seem to explain the limitation, this will not
really do. For the chosen one in each case has his
conspicuous unfavourable characteristics too. And the
whole tone of the record (not to speak of this its
apostolic interpretation) looks towards mystery, not
explanation. Esau's "profanity" was the concurrent
occasion, not the cause, of the choice of Jacob. The
reason of the choice lay in the depths of God, that
World "dark with excess of bright." All is well there,
but not the less all is unknown.
So we are led up to the shut door of the sanctuary
of God's Choice. Touch it; it is adamantine, and it is
fast locked. No blind Destiny has turned the key, and
lost it. No inaccessible Tyrant sits within, playing to
himself both sides of a game of fate, and indifferent to
the cry of the soul. The Key-Bearer, whose Name is
engraved on the portal, is "He that liveth, and was
dead, and is alive for evermore" (Rev. i. 18). And if
you listen you will hear words within, like the soft deep
voice of many waters, yet of an eternal Heart; "I am
that I am; I will that I will; trust Me." But the door
is locked; and the Voice is mystery.
Ah, what agonies have been felt in human souls, as
men have looked at that gate, and pondered the unknown
interior! The Eternal knows, with infinite
kindness and sympathy, the pain unspeakable which
can beset the creature when it wrestles with His
Eternity, and tries to clasp it with both hands, and to
say that "that is all!" We do not find in Scripture,
surely, anything like an anathema for that awful sense
of the unknown which can gather on the soul drawn—irresistibly
as it sometimes seems to be—into the
problems of the Choice of God, and oppressed as with
"the weight of all the seas upon it," by the very
questions stated presently here by the Apostle. The
Lord knoweth, not only His will, but our heart, in
these matters. And where He entirely declines to
explain (surely because we are not yet of age to
understand Him if He did) He yet shews us Jesus,
and bids us meet the silence of the mystery with the
silence of a personal trust in the personal Character
revealed in Him.
In something of such stillness shall we approach the
paragraph now to follow? Shall we listen, not to
explain away, not even over much to explain, but to
submit, with a submission which is not a suppressed
resentment but an entire reliance? We shall find that
the whole matter, in its practical aspect, has a voice
articulate enough for the soul which sees Christ, and
believes on Him. It says to that soul, "Who maketh
thee to differ? Who hath fashioned thee to honour?
Why art thou not now, as once, guiltily rejecting
Christ, or, what is the same, postponing Him? Thank
Him who has 'compelled thee,' yet without violation of
thyself, 'to come in.' See in thy choice of Him His
mercy on thee. And now, fall at His feet, to bless
Him, to serve Him, and to trust Him. Think ill of
thyself. Think reverently of others. And remember
(the Infinite, who has chosen thee, says it), He willeth
not the death of a sinner, He loved the world, He bids
thee to tell it that He loves it, to tell it that He is Love."
Now we listen. With a look which speaks awe, but
not misgiving, disclosing past tempests of doubt, but
now a rest of faith, the Apostle dictates again:
What therefore shall we say? Is there injustice
at God's bar (παρὰ τῷ Θεῷ)? Away with
the thought. The thing is, in the deepest sense, unthinkable.
God, the God of Revelation, the God of
Christ, is a Being who, if unjust—ceases to be, "denies
Himself." But the thought that His reasons for some
given action should be, at least to us now, absolute
mystery, He being the Infinite Personality, is not unthinkable
at all. And in such a case it is not unreasonable,
but the deepest reason, to ask for no more than
His articulate guarantee, so to speak, that the mystery
is fact; that He is conscious of it, alive to it (speaking
humanly); and that He avows it as His will. For when
God, the God of Christ, bids us "take His will for it,"
it is a different thing from an attempt, however powerful,
to frighten us into silence. It is a reminder Who
He is who speaks; the Being who is kindred to us, who
is in relations with us, who loved us, but who also has
absolutely made us, and cannot (because we are sheer
products of His will) make us so much His equals as to
tell us all. So the Apostle proceeds with a "for" whose
bearing we have thus already indicated:
For to Moses
he says (Exod. xxxiv. 19), in the dark sanctuary
of Sinai, "I shall pity whomsoever I do
pity, and compassionate whomsoever I do compassionate";
My account of My saving action shall stop there. It
appears (ἄρα) therefore that it, the ultimate
account of salvation, is not of (as the effect is
"of" the first cause) the willer, nor of the runner, the
carrier of willing into work, but of the Pitier—God.
For the ScriptureObserve the vital personality of the phrase; "the Scripture
speaks." Cp. Gal. iii. 8 for perhaps the strongest example of the kind.
says (Exod. x. 16) to
Pharaoh, that large example of defiant human sin, real
and guilty, but also, concurrently, of the sovereign
Choice which sentenced him to go his own way, and
used him as a beacon at its end, "For this very
purpose I raised thee up, made thee stand, even beneath
the Plagues, that I might display in thee My power,
and that My Name, as of the just God who strikes down
the proud, might be told far and wide (διαγγελῇ)
in all the earth."
Pharaoh's was a case of concurrent phenomena. A
man was there on the one hand, willingly, deliberately,
and most guiltily, battling with right, and rightly bringing
ruin on his own head, wholly of himself. God was there
on the other hand, making that man a monument not
of grace but of judgment. And that side, that line, is
isolated here, and treated as if it were all.
It appears then that whom He pleases, He
pities, and whom He pleases, He hardens, in
that sense in which He "hardened Pharaoh's heart,"
"made it stiff" (חזק),
"made it heavy" (כבד),
"made it harsh" (קשׁה)—by
sentencing it to have its own
way. Yes,Cp. Psal. lxxxi. 12, and above, i. 24, 26.
thus "it appears." And beyond that
inference we can take no step of thought but this—that
the Subject of that mysterious "will," He who thus
"pleases," and "pities," and "hardens," is no other
than the God of Jesus Christ. He may be, not only
submitted to, but trusted, in that unknowable sovereignty
of His will. Yet listen to the question which speaks
out the problem of all hearts:
You will say to
me therefore, Why does He still, after such an
avowal of His sovereignty, softening this heart, hardening
that, why does He still find fault? Ah why? For
His act of will who has withstood? (Nay, you have
withstood His will, and so have I. Not one word of the
argument has contradicted the primary fact of our will,
nor therefore our responsibility. But this he does not
bring in here.) Nay rather, rather than take
such an attitude of narrow and helpless logic,
think deeper; Nay rather, O man, O mere human being
(ὦ ἄνθρωπε), you—who are you, who are answering back
to your (τῷ) God? Shall the thing formed say to its
Former, Why did you make me like this? Has
not the potter authority over his (τοῦ) clay, out
of the same kneaded mass to make this vessel for honour
but that for dishonour? But if God, being
pleased to demonstrate His (τὴν) wrath, and to
evidence what He can do—what will St Paul go on to
say? That the Eternal, being thus "pleased," created
responsible beings on purpose to destroy them, gave
them personality, and then compelled them to transgress?
No, he does not say so. The sternly simple illustration,
in itself one of the least relieved utterances in the whole
Scripture—that dread Potter and his kneaded Clay!—gives
way, in its application, to a statement of the work
of God on man full of significance in its variation. Here
are indeed the "vessels" still; and the vessels "for
honour" are such because of "mercy," and His own
hand has "prepared them for glory." And there are
the vessels "for dishonour," and in a sense of awful
mystery they are such because of "wrath." But the
"wrath" of the Holy One can fall only upon demerit;
so these "vessels" have merited His displeasure of
themselves. And they are "prepared for ruin"; but
where is any mention of His hand preparing them?
And meanwhile He "bears them in much longsuffering."
The mystery is there, impenetrable as ever, when we
try to pierce behind "His will." But on every side it
is limited and qualified by facts which witness to the
compassions of the Infinite Sovereign even in His
judgments, and remind us that sin is altogether "of"
the creature. So we take up the words where we
dropped them above: What if He bore, (the tense
throws us forward into eternity, to look back thence on
His ways in time,) in much longsuffering, vessels of
wrath, adjusted for ruin? And acted otherwise
with others,
that He might evidence the wealth
of His glory, the resources of His inmost Character,
poured upon vessels of pity, which He prepared in
advance for glory, by the processes of justifying and
hallowing grace—whom in fact (καὶ) He called, effectually,
in their conversion, even us, not only from the
Jews, but also from the Gentiles? For while the
lineal Israel, with its privilege and its apparent failure,
is here first in view, there lies behind it the phenomenon
of "the Israel of God," the heaven-born heirs of the
Fathers, a race not of blood but of the Spirit. The
great Promise, all the while, had set towards that Israel
as its final scope; and now he gives proof from the
Prophets that this intention was at least half revealed
all along the line of revelation.
As actually (καὶ) in our
(τῷ) Hosea (ii. 23,
Heb., 25) in the book we know as such, He
says, "I will call what was not My people, My people;
and the not-beloved one, beloved.In the Hebrew, literally, "I will pity the not-pitied one" (feminine,
of the idealized people or church; so in the Greek here,
ἠγαπημένην).
Divine "pity" is more than "akin to" divine "love."
And (another Hosean oracle,i. 10 (Hebrew, ii. 1).
in line with the first) it shall be,
in the place where it was said to them, Not My people are
ye, there they shall be called sons of the living God." In
both places the first incidence of the words is on the
restoration of the Ten Tribes to covenant blessings.
But the Apostle, in the Spirit, sees an ultimate and
satisfying reference to a vaster application of the same
principle; the bringing of the rebelling and banished
ones of all mankind into covenant and blessing.
Meanwhile the Prophets who foretell that great ingathering
indicate with equal solemnity the spiritual
failure of all but a fraction of the lineal heirs of promise.
But Isaiah cries overὙπέρ: with the thought of a lament over the ruined ones. The
preposition appears here in its original and literal meaning.
Israel, "If the number of
the sons of Israel should be as the sand of the sea,
the remnant only shall be saved; for as one who
completes and cuts short will the Lord do His
work (λόγον,
דבר) upon the earth."Isa. x. 22, 23: perhaps with an insertion of the phrase, "the
number of," from Hos. i. 10. As to wording, he quotes freely from
the Hebrew, more nearly from the Lxx. But the substance is identical
as compared with both. Following considerable documentary evidence,
we omit here the Greek words represented by "in righteousness;
because a short work."
Here again is a first and second incidence of the prophecy. In every stage
of the history of Sin and Redemption the Apostle, in
the Spirit, sees an embryo of the great Development.
So, in the wofully limited numbers of the Exiles who
returned from the old captivity he sees an embodied
prophecy of the fewness of the sons of Israel who shall
return from the exile of incredulity to their true
Messiah. And as Isaiah (i. 9) has foretold
(προείρηκεν), so it is; "Unless the Lord of Hosts
(Σαβαώθ,
צבאות) had left us a seed,The equivalent of the Lxx. for the "very small remnant"
(שׂריד) of the Hebrew.
like Sodom we had become, and to Gomorrah we had been resembled."
Such was the mystery of the facts, alike in the older
and in the later story of Israel. A remnant, still a
remnant, not the masses, entered upon an inheritance
of such ample provision, and so sincerely offered. And
behind this lay the insoluble shadow within which is
concealed the relation of the Infinite Will to the wills
of men. But also, in front of the phenomenon, concealed
by no shadow save that which is cast by human sin,
the Apostle sees and records the reasons, as they reside
in the human will, of this "salvation of a remnant." The
promises of God, all along, and supremely now in Christ,
had been conditioned (it was in the nature of spiritual
things that it should be so) by submission to His way
of fulfilment. The golden gift was there, in the most
generous of hands, stretched out to give. But it could
be put only into a recipient hand open and empty. It
could be taken only by submissive and self-forgetting
faith. And man, in his fall, had twisted his will out of
gear for such an action. Was it wonderful that, by his
own fault, he failed to receive?
What therefore shall
we say?For the seventh and last time he uses this characteristic phrase.
Why, that the Gentiles, though they
did not (τὰ μὴ) pursue righteousness, though
no Oracle had set them on the track of a true divine
acceptance and salvation, achieved righteousness, grasped
it when once revealed, butΔέ: in slightly suggested contrast to the ideal of the Jew, a
merited acceptance.
the righteousness
that results on faith; but Israel, pursuing a law
of righteousness, aiming at what is, for fallen man, the
impossible goal, a perfect meeting of the Law's one
principle of acceptance, "This do and thou shalt live," did not attain that law;Omit here the word δικαιοσύνης.
that is to say, practically,
as we now review their story of vain efforts in the
line of self, did not attain the acceptance to which
that law was to be the avenue. The Pharisee as such,
the Pharisee Saul of Tarsus for example, neither had
peace with God, nor dared to think he had, in the
depth of his soul. He knew enough of the divine
ideal to be hopelessly uneasy about his realization
of it. He could say, stiffly enough, "God, I thank
Thee" (Luke xviii. 11, 14); but he "went down to
his house" unhappy, unsatisfied, unjustified. On what
account? Because it was not of faith, but as of works;Omit τοῦ νόμου.
in the unquiet dream that man
must, and could, work up the score of merit to a valid
claim. They stumbledOmit γάρ.
on the Stone of their
(τοῦ) stumbling; as it stands written
(Isai. viii. 14, xxviii. 16), in a passage where the great perpetual
Promise is in view, and where the blind people are
seen rejecting it as their foothold in favour of policy, or
of formalism, Behold, I place in Sion, in the very centre
of light and privilege, a Stone of stumbling, and a Rock of
upsetting; and he whoOmit πᾶς.
confides in Him, (or, perhaps,
in it,) he who rests on it, on Him (ἐπ' αὐτῷ),
shall not be put to shame.
One great Rabbi at least, Rashi, of the twelfth
century, bears witness to the mind of the Jewish
Church upon the significance of that mystic Rock.
"Behold," so runs his interpretation, "I have established
a King, Messiah, who shall be in Zion a stone
of proving."
Was ever prophecy more profoundly verified in
event? Not for the lineal Israel only, but for Man,
the King Messiah is, as ever, the Stone of either
stumbling or foundation. He is, as ever, "a Sign
spoken against." He is, as ever, the Rock of Ages,
where the believing sinner hides, and rests, and builds,
"Below the storm-mark of the sky,
Above the flood-mark of the deep."
Have we known what it is to stumble over Him?
"We will not have this Man to reign over us"; "We
were never in bondage to any man; who is He that
He should set us free?" And are we now lifted by a
Hand of omnipotent kindness to a place deep in His
clefts, safe on His summit, "knowing nothing" for the
peace of conscience, the satisfaction of thought, the
liberation of the will, the abolition of death, "but Jesus
Christ, and Him crucified"? Then let us think with
always humbled sympathy of those who, for whatever
reason, still "forsake their own mercy" (Jonah ii. 8).
And let us inform them where we are, and how we
are here, and that "the ground is good." And for
ourselves, that we may do this the better, let us often
read again the simple, strong assurance which closes
this chapter of mysteries; "He who confides in Him
shall not be put to shame"; "shall not be disappointed";
"shall not" in the vivid phrase of the Hebrew itself,
"make haste." No, we shall not "make haste." From
that safe Place no hurried retreat shall ever need to
be beaten. That Fortress cannot be stormed; it cannot
be surprised; it cannot crumble. For "It is He";
the Son, the Lamb, of God; the sinner's everlasting
Righteousness, the believer's unfailing Source of peace,
of purity, and of power.
Detached Note to IX. 5.
The following is transcribed, with a few modifications,
from the writer's Commentary on the Epistle in The
Cambridge Bible:
["Who is over all, God blessed for ever.] The Greek
may, with more or less facility, be translated (1) as in
A.V.; or (2) 'who is God over all,' etc.; or (3) 'blessed
for ever be He who is God over all' (i.e., the Eternal
Father).... If we adopt (3) we take the Apostle to
be led, by the mention of the Incarnation, to utter a
sudden and solemn doxology to the God who gave that
crowning mercy. In favour of this it is urged (by some
entirely orthodox commentators, as H. A. W. Meyer)
that St Paul nowhere else styles the Lord simply
'God,' but rather 'the Son of God,' etc. By this they
do not mean to detract from the Lord's Deity; but they
maintain that St Paul always so states that Deity,
under divine guidance, as to mark the 'Subordination
of the Son'—that Subordination which is not a difference
of Nature, Power, or Eternity, but of Order; just
such as is marked by the simple but profound words
Father and Son.
"But on the other hand there is Tit. ii. 13, where
the Greek is (at least) perfectly capable of the rendering,
'our great God and Saviour, Jesus Christ.' [There is
Acts xx. 28, where the evidence is very strong for the
reading, retained by the R.V. (text), 'the Church of
God, which He purchased with His own blood.' And
if St John is to be taken to report words exactly, in his
narrative of the Resurrection, in an incident whose
point is deeply connected with verbal precision, we
have one of the first Apostles, within eight days of the
Resurrection, addressing the Risen Lord (John xx. 28)
as 'my God.' (We call attention to this as against the
contention that only the latest developments of inspiration,
represented in e.g. St John's Preamble to his
Gospel, shew us Christ called explicitly God.)]
"If ... it is divinely true that 'the Word is God,'
it is surely far from wonderful if here and there, in
peculiar connexions, [St Paul] should so speak of
Christ, even though guided to keep another phase of
the truth habitually in view.
"Now, beyond all fair question, the Greek here is
quite naturally rendered as in the A.V.; had it not
been for historical controversy, probably, no other
rendering would have been suggested. And lastly,
and what is important, the context far rather suggests
a lament (over the fall of Israel) than an ascription of
praise. And what is most significant of all, it pointedly
suggests some explicit allusion to the super-human
Nature of Christ, by the words 'according to the flesh.'
But if there is such an allusion, then it must lie in the
words, 'over all, God.'"
It may be interesting to add the following note from
Franz Delitzsch (Brief an die Römer in das Hebräische
übersetzt und aus Talmud und Midrasch erläutert,
Leipzig, 1870, p. 89):
"Christus, nach dem Fleisch, welcher ist Gott über alles,
hochgelobet in Ewigkeit. Deshalb nämlich weil er Gott
und Mensch in Einer Person ist. Er ist der andere
David (דוד אחר),
und ist Jahve unsere Gerechtigkeit
(יהוה צדקנו
Jer. xxiii. 6). Auch der Midrasch Mischle
zu Spr. xix. 21 zählt
ה׳ צדקנו
neben דוד unter den
Messiasnamen auf, und auch anderwärts bezeugen Talmud
und Midrasch, dass der Messias יהוה heisst; denn
'Gott war in Christo und versöhnte die Welt mit ihm
selber.' Paulus sagt in Grunde nichts anderes als was
Jesaia ix. 5, wo die Zunz'sche Bibelübersetzung, der
exegetischen Wahrheit die Ehre gebend, übersetzt:
'Man nennt seinen Namen: Wunder, Berather, starker
Gott, ewiger Vater, Fürst des Friedens.' Der Messias
ist und heisst אל גבור
und אבי־עד,
also obwohl nicht האלהים,
doch אלהים (אל)
לעולמים."
Delitzsch renders the close of ix. 5 thus:
וַאֲשֶׁר
מֵהֶם
יָצָא
הַמָּשִׁיחַ
לְפִי
בְשָׂרוֹ
אֲשֶׁר
הוּא
אֵל
עַל־הַכֹּל
מְבֹרָךְ
לְעוֹל
מִים
אָמֵו
CHAPTER XXI
JEWISH UNBELIEF AND GENTILE FAITH: PROPHECY
Romans x. 1-21
THE problem of Israel is still upon the Apostle's
soul. He has explored here and there the conditions
of the fact that his brethren, as a mass, have
rejected Jesus. He has delivered his heart of its loving
human groan over the fact. He has reminded himself,
and then his readers, that the fact however involves no
failure of the purpose and promise of God; for God
from the first had indicated limitations within the
apparent scope of the Abrahamic Promise. He has
looked in the face, once for all, the mystery of the
relation between God's efficient will and the will of the
creature, finding a refuge, under the moral strain of
that mystery, not away from it but as it were behind
it, in the recollection of the infinite trustworthiness, as
well as eternal rights, of man's Maker. Then he has
recurred to the underlying main theme of the whole
Epistle, the acceptance of the sinner in God's own one
way; and we have seen how, from Israel's own point
of view, Israel has stumbled and fallen just by his own
fault. Israel would not rest upon "the Stone of
stumbling"; he would collide with it. Divine sovereignty
here or there—the heart of Jewish man, in its
responsible personality, and wholly of itself, rebelled
against a man-humbling salvation. And so all its
religiousness, its earnestness, its intensity, went for
nothing in the quest for peace and purity. They
stumbled—a real striking of real wayward feet—at
the Stumbling Stone; which all the while lay ready to
be their basis and repose.
He cannot leave the subject, with its sadness, its
lessons, and its hope. He must say more of his love
and longing for Israel; and also more about this aspect
of Israel's fall—this collision of man's will with the
Lord's Way of Peace. And he will unfold the deep
witness of the prophecies to the nature of that Way,
and to the reluctance of the Jewish heart to accept it.
Moses shall come in with the Law, and Isaiah with the
Scriptures of the Prophets; and we shall see how their
Inspirer, all along from the first, indicated what should
surely happen when a salvation altogether divine should
be presented to hearts filled with themselves.
Brethren, he begins, the deliberate desire
(εὐδοκία) of my heart, whatever discouragements may oppose it,We thus attempt to convey the force of μέν.
and my petition unto God for them,So read; not "for Israel."
is salvationwards. He is inevitably moved to
this by the pathetic sight of their earnestness, misguided
indeed, guiltily misguided, utterly inadequate to constitute
for them even a phantom of merit; yet, to the
eyes that watch it, a different thing from indifference
or hypocrisy. He cannot see their real struggles, and
not long that they may reach the shore.
For I bear them witness, the witness of one
who once was the type of the class, that they
have zeal of God, an honest jealousy for His Name, His
Word, His Worship, only not in the line of spiritual
knowledge (κατ' ἐπίγνωσιν).
They have not seen all He is, all His Word means, all His worship implies.
They are sure, and rightly sure, of many things about
Him; but they have not "seen Him." And so they
have not "abhorred themselves" (Job xli. 5, 6). And
thus they are not, in their own conviction, shut up to a
salvation which must be altogether of Him; which is
no contract with Him, but eternal bounty from Him.
Solemn and heart-moving scene! There are now,
and were then, those who would have surveyed it, and
come away with the comfortable reflection that so much
earnestness would surely somehow work itself right at
last; nay, that it was already sufficiently good in itself
to secure these honest zealots a place in some comprehensive
heaven. If ever such thoughts had excuse,
surely it was here. The "zeal" was quite sincere. It
was ready to suffer, as well as to strike. The zealot
was not afraid of a world in arms. And he felt himself
on fire not for evil, but for God, for the God of Abraham,
of Moses, of the Prophets, of the Promise. Would not
this do? Would not the lamentable rejection of Jesus
which attended it be condoned as a tremendous but
mere accident, while the "zeal of God" remained as the
substance, the essence, of the spiritual state of the
zealot? Surely a very large allowance would be
made; to put it at the lowest terms.
Yet such was not the view of St Paul, himself once
the most honest and disinterested Jewish zealot in the
world. He had seen the Lord. And so he had seen
himself. The deadly mixture of motive which may
underlie what nevertheless we may have to call an
honest hatred of the Gospel had been shewn to him in
the white light of Christ. In that light he had seen—what
it alone can fully shew—the condemnableness of
all sin, and the hopelessness of self-salvation. From
himself he reasons, and rightly, to his brethren. He
knows, with a solemn sympathy, how much they are in
earnest. But his sympathy conceals no false liberalism;
it is not cheaply generous of the claims of God. He
does not think that because they are in earnest they are
saved. Their earnestness drives his heart to a deeper
prayer for their salvation.
For knowing not the righteousness of our (τοῦ)
God, His way of being just, yet the Justifier, and
seeking to set up their own righteousness, to construct for
themselves a claim which should "stand in judgment,"
they did not submit to the righteousness of our (τοῦ)
God, when it appeared before them, embodied in "the
Lord our Righteousness." They aspired to acceptance.
God bade them submit to it. In their view, it was a
matter of attainment; an ascent to a difficult height,
where the climber might exult in his success. As He
presented it, it was a matter of surrender, as when a
patient, given over, places himself helpless in a master-healer's
hands, for a recovery which is to be due to
those hands alone, and to be celebrated only to their praise.Cp. 1 Pet. i. 2;
εἰς ὑπακοὴν ... Ἰησοῦ Χριτοῦυ;
an "obedience" which means the decisive submission of
the sinner to the Saviour's method of mercy.
Alas for such "ignorance" in these earnest souls;
for such a failure in Israel to strike the true line of
"knowledge"! For it was a guilty failure. The Law
had been indicating all the while that their Dispensation
was not its own end, but one vast complex means to
shut man up to a Redeemer who was at once to satisfy
every type, and every oracle, and to supply "the impossible
of the Law" (viii. 3), by giving Himself to be
the believer's vicarious Merit.
For the Law's
end, its Goal, its Final Cause in the plan of
redemption, is—Christ, unto righteousness, to effect and
secure this wonderful acceptance, for every one who
believes. Yes, He is no arbitrary sequel to the Law;
He stands organically related to it. And to this the
Law itself is witness, both by presenting an inexorable
and condemning standard as its only possible code of
acceptance, and by mysteriously pointing the soul away
from that code, in its quest for mercy, to something
altogether different, at once accessible and divine. For
Moses writes down (γράφει) thus the righteousness
got from the Law, "The man who doesὉ ποιήσας: the aorist sums up acts
into a single idea of action.
them, shall live in it"Ἐν αὐτῇ: "in the righteousness";
such seems to be the true reading. To "live in" a righteousness
is to live as it were surrounded, guaranteed, by it.
(Levit. xviii. 5); it is a matter
of personal action and personal meriting alone. Thus
the code, feasible and beneficent indeed on the plane
of national and social life, which is its lower field of
action, is necessarily fatal to fallen man when the
question lies between his conscience and the eternal
Judge. But the righteousness got from faith,
the acceptance received by surrendering trust,
thus speaks (Deut. xxx. 12-14)—in Moses' words indeed,
(and this is one main point in the reasoning, that he is
witness,) yet as it were with a personal voice of its own,
deep and tender; "Say not in thy heart, Who shall
ascend to the heaven?" that is, to bring down Christ, by
human efforts, by a climbing merit; "or, Who
shall descend into the abyss? that is, to bring up
Christ from the dead," as if His victorious Sacrifice needed
your supplement in order to its resurrection-triumph.
But what does it say? "Near thee is the
utterance, the explicit account of the Lord's
willingness to bless the soul which casts itself on Him,Observe that the context in Deut. xxx. is full of the thought that
rebels and law-breakers shall be welcome back when they come
penitent to their God, "without one plea," but taking Him at His
word.
in thy mouth, to recite it, and in thy heart," to welcome
it. And this message is the utterance of faith, the
creed of acceptance by faith alone, which we
proclaim; that if you shall confess in your mouth
Jesus as Lord,Or, with an alternative reading, "that Jesus is Lord."
as divine King and Master, and shall
believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead,
owning in the soul the glory of the Resurrection, as
revealing and sealing the triumph of the Atonement,
you shall be saved. For with the heart faith is
exercised, unto righteousness, with acceptance
for its resultant; while (δὲ)
with the mouth confession is
made, unto salvation, with present deliverance and final
glory for its resultant, the moral sequel of a life which
owns its Lord as all in all. For the Scripture
says (Isai. xxviii. 16), "Everyone who believes
on Him shall not be ashamed,"
See above, ix. 33.
shall never be disappointed;
shall be "kept, through faith, unto the salvation
ready to be revealed in the last time" (1 Pet. i. 5).
We have traversed here a tract pregnant of questions
and mystery. We have to remember here also, as in
previous places, that the Scripture is "not a sun, but a
lamp." Much, very much, which this passage suggests
as problem finds in its words no answer. This citation
from Deuteronomy, with its vision of ascents and descents,
its thoughts of the heaven and the abyss, what
did it mean when aged Moses spoke it in the plains of
Moab? What did it mean to him? Did he see, did
he feel, Messiah in every clause? Had he conscious foreviews,
then and there, of what was to be done ages later
beyond that stern ridge of hills, westward of "the narrow
stream"? Did he knowingly "testify beforehand"
that God was to be born Man at Bethlehem, and to die
Man at Jerusalem? We do not know; we cannot
possibly know, until the eternal day finds Moses and
ourselves together in the City of God, and we better
understand the mysterious Word, at last, in that great
light. If our Master's utterances are to be taken as
final, it is quite certain that "Moses wrote of Him"
(John v. 46). But it is not certain that he always knew
he was so writing when he so wrote; nor is it certain
how far his consciousness went when it was most
awake that way. In the passage here cited by St Paul
the great Prophet may have been aware only of a
reference of his words to the seen, the temporal, the
national, to the blessings of loyalty to Israel's God-given
polity, and of a return to it after times of revolt and
decline. But then, St Paul neither affirms this nor
denies it. As if on purpose, he almost drops the
personality of Moses out of sight, and personifies Justification
as the speaker. His concern is less with the
Prophet than with his Inspirer, the ultimate Author
behind the immediate author. And his own prophet-insight
is guided to see that in the thought of that
Author, as He wielded Moses' mind and diction at
His will, Christ was the inmost purport of the words.
We may ask again what are the laws by which the
Apostle modifies here the Prophet's phrases. "Who
shall descend into the abyss?" The Hebrew reads, "Who
shall go over (or on) the sea?" The Septuagint reads,
"Who shall go to the other side of the sea?" Here too
"we know in part." Assuredly the change of terms was
neither unconsciously made, nor arbitrarily; and it was
made for readers who could challenge it, if so it seemed
to them to be done. But we should need to know the
whole relation of the One inspiring Master to the minds
of both His Prophet and His Apostle to answer the
question completely. However, we can see that
Prophet and Apostle both have in their thought here
the antithesis of depth to height; that the sea is, to Moses
here, the antithesis to the sky, not to the land; and that
St Paul intensifies the imagery in its true direction
accordingly when he writes, "into the abyss."
Again, he finds Justification by Faith in the Prophet's
oracle about the subjective "nearness" of "the utterance"
of mercy. Once more we own our ignorance of the
conscious purport of the words, as Moses' words. We
shall quite decline, if we are reverently cautious, to say
that for certain Moses was not aware of such an inmost
reference in what he said; it is very much easier to
assert than to know what the limitations of the consciousness
of the Prophets were. But here also we
rest in the fact that behind both Moses and Paul, in
their free and mighty personalities, stood their one
Lord, building His Scripture slowly into its manifold
oneness through them both. He was in the thought
and word of Moses; and meantime already to Him the
thought and word of Paul was present, and was in His
plan. And the earlier utterance had this at least to do
with the later, that it drew the mind of the pondering
and worshipping Israel to the idea of a contact with
God in His Promises which was not external and
mechanical but deep within the individual himself, and
manifested in the individual's free and living avowal
of it.
As we quit the passage, let us mark and cherish its
insistence upon "confession," "confession with the mouth
that Jesus is Lord." This specially he connects with
"salvation," with the believer's preservation to eternal
glory. "Faith" is "unto righteousness"; "confession"
is "unto salvation." Why is this? Is faith after all
not enough for our union with the Lord, and for our
safety in Him? Must we bring in something else, to
be a more or less meritorious makeweight in the scale?
If this is what he means, he is gainsaying the whole
argument of the Epistle on its main theme. No; it is
eternally true that we are justified, that we are accepted,
that we are incorporated, that we are kept, through
faith only; that is, that Christ is all for all things in
our salvation, and our part and work in the matter is
to receive and hold Him in an empty hand. But then
this empty hand, holding Him, receives life and power
from Him. The man is vivified by his Rescuer. He
is rescued that he may live, and that he may serve as
living. He cannot truly serve without loyalty to his
Lord. He cannot be truly loyal while he hides his
relation to Him. In some articulate way he must
"confess Him"; or he is not treading the path where
the Shepherd walks before the sheep.
The "confession with the mouth" here in view is,
surely, nothing less than the believer's open loyalty to
Christ. It is no mere recitation of even the sacred
catholic Creed; which may be recited as by an automaton.
It is the witness of the whole man to Christ,
as his own discovered Life and Lord. And thus it
means in effect the path of faithfulness along which the
Saviour actually leads to glory those who are justified
by faith.
That no slackened emphasis on faith is to be felt
here is clear from ver. 11. There, in the summary and
close of the passage, nothing but faith is named; "whosoever
believeth on Him." It is as if he would correct
even the slightest disquieting surmise that our repose
upon the Lord has to be secured by something other
than Himself, through some means more complex than
taking Him at His word. Here, as much as anywhere
in the Epistle, this is the message; "from faith to
faith." The "confession with the mouth" is not a different
something added to this faith; it is its issue, its
manifestation, its embodiment. "I believed; therefore
have I spoken" (Psal. cxvi. 10).
This recurrence to his great theme gives the Apostle's
thought a direction once again towards the truth of the
world-wide scope of the Gospel of Acceptance. In the
midst of this philo-judean section of the Epistle, on his way
to say glorious things about abiding mercy and coming
blessing for the Jews, he must pause again to assert the
equal welcome of "the Greeks" to the Righteousness of
God, and the foreshadow of this welcome in the Prophets.
For there is no distinction between Jew and
Greek (wonderful antithesis to the "no distinction"
of iii. 23!). For the same Lord is Lord of all,
wealthy to all who call upon Him, who invoke Him, who
appeal to Him, in the name of His own mercies in His
redeeming Son. For we have the prophecies
with us here again. Joel, in a passage (ii. 32)
full of Messiah, the passage with which the Spirit of
Pentecost filled Peter's lips, speaks thus without a
limit; "Every one, whoever shall call upon the Lord's
Name, shall be saved." As he cites the words, and the
thought rises upon him of this immense welcome to the
sinful world, he feels afresh all the need of the heathen,
and all the cruel narrowness of the Pharisaism which
would shut them out from such an amplitude of blessing.
How then canThroughout these questions we read the verbs in the conjunctive.
they call on Him on whom they neverWe thus represent, with hesitation, the aorist tense.
believed? But how can they believe on
Him whom they never heard? But how can they hear
Him apart from a proclaimer? But how can they
proclaim unless they are sent, unless the Church
which holds the sacred light sends her messengers out into
the darkness? And in this again the Prophets are with
the Christian Apostle, and against the loveless Judaist:
As it stands written (Isai. lii. 7), "How fair the feet of
the gospellers of peace, of the gospellers of good!"No doubt the immediate reference of Isai. lii. 7 is to good news
for "Zion" rather than from her to the world. But the context is
full not only of Messiah but (ver. 15) of "many nations."
Here, as an incident in this profound discussion, is
given for ever to the Church of Christ one of the most
distinct and stringent of her missionary "marching-orders."
Let us recollect this, and lay it on our own
souls, forgetting awhile, for we may, the problem of
Israel and the exclusiveness of ancient Pharisaism.
What is there here for us? What motive facts are
here, ready to energize and direct the will of the
Christian, and of the Church, in the matter of the
"gospelling" of the world?
We take note first of what is written last, the moral
beauty and glory of the enterprise. "How fair the
feet!" From the view-point of heaven there is nothing
on the earth more lovely than the bearing of the name
of Jesus Christ into the needing world, when the bearer
is one "who loves and knows." The work may have,
and probably will have, very little of the rainbow of
romance about it. It will often lead the worker into the
most uncouth and forbidding circumstances. It will
often demand of him the patient expenditure of days
and months upon humiliating and circuitous preparations;
as he learns a barbarous unwritten tongue, or a
tongue ancient and elaborate, in a stifling climate; or
finds that he must build his own hut, and dress his
own food, if he is to live at all among "the Gentiles."
It may lay on him the exquisite—and prosaic—trial of
finding the tribes around him entirely unaware of their
need of his message; unconscious of sin, of guilt, of
holiness, of God. Nay, they may not only not care for
his message; they may suspect or deride his motives,
and roundly tell him that he is a political spy, or an
adventurer come to make his private gains, or a
barbarian tired of his own Thule and irresistibly
attracted to the region of the sun. He will often be
tempted to think "the journey too great for him," and
long to let his tired and heavy feet rest for ever. But
his Lord is saying of him, all the while, "How fair the
feet!" He is doing a work whose inmost conditions
even now are full of moral glory, and whose eternal
issues, perhaps where he thinks there has been most
failure, shall be, by grace, worthy of "the King in His
beauty." It is the continuation of what the King
Himself "began to do" (Acts i. 1), when He was His
own first Missionary to a world which needed Him immeasurably,
yet did not know Him when He came.
Then, this paragraph asserts the necessity of the
missionary's work still more urgently than its beauty.
True, it suggests many questions (what great Scripture
does not do so?) which we cannot answer yet at all:—"Why
has He left the Gentiles thus? Why is so
much, for their salvation, suspended (in our view) upon
the too precarious and too lingering diligence of the
Church? What will the King say at last to those who
never could, by the Church's fault, even hear the
blessed Name, that they might believe in It, and call
upon It?" He knoweth the whole answer to such
questions; not we. Yet here meanwhile stands out this
"thing revealed" (Deut. xxix. 29). In the Lord's normal
order, which is for certain the order of eternal spiritual
right and love, however little we can see all the conditions
of the case, man is to be saved through a personal
"calling upon His Name." And for that "calling" there
is need of personal believing. And for that believing
there is need of personal hearing. And in order to that
hearing, God does not speak in articulate thunder from
the sky, nor send visible angels up and down the earth,
but bids His Church, His children, go and tell.
Nothing can be stronger and surer than the practical
logic of this passage. The need of the world, it says to
us, is not only amelioration, elevation, evolution. It is
salvation. It is pardon, acceptance, holiness, and heaven.
It is God; it is Christ. And that need is to be met not
by subtle expansions of polity and society. No "unconscious
cerebration" of the human race will regenerate
fallen man. Nor will his awful wound be healed by
any drawing on the shadowy resources of a post-mortal
hope. The work is to be done now, in the Name of
Jesus Christ, and by His Name. And His Name, in
order to be known, has to be announced and explained.
And that work is to be done by those who already
know it, or it will not be done at all. "There is
none other Name." There is no other method of
evangelization.
Why is not that Name already at least externally
known and reverenced in every place of human dwelling?
It would have been so, for a long time now, if the Church
of Christ had followed better the precept and also the
example of St Paul. Had the apostolic missions been
sustained more adequately throughout Christian history,
and had the apostolic Gospel been better maintained
in the Church in all the energy of its divine simplicity
and fulness, the globe would have been covered—not
indeed in a hurry, yet ages ago now—with the knowledge
of Jesus Christ as Fact, as Truth, as Life. We are
told even now by some of the best informed advocates
of missionary enterprise that if Protestant Christendom
(to speak of it alone) were really to respond to the
missionary call, and "send" its messengers out not by
tens but by thousands (no chimerical number), it would
be soberly possible within thirty years so to distribute
the message that no given inhabited spot should be, at
furthest, one day's walk from a centre of evangelization.
This programme is not fanaticism, surely. It is a
proposal for possible action, too long deferred, in the
line of St Paul's precept and example. It is not meant
to discredit any present form of well-considered operation.
And it does not for a moment ignore the futility
of all enterprise where the sovereign power of the
Eternal Spirit is not present. Nor does it forget the
permanent call to the Church to sustain amply the
pastoral work at home, in "the flock of God which is
among us" (1 Pet. v. 2). But it sees and emphasizes
the fact that the Lord has laid it upon His Church to be
His messenger to the whole world, and to be in holy
earnest about it, and that the work, as to its human
side, is quite feasible to a Church awake. "Stir up,
we beseech Thee, O Lord, the wills of Thy faithful
people," to both the glory and the necessity of this
labour of labours for Thee, "that they, plenteously
bringing forth the fruit of it, may of Thee be plenteously
rewarded," in Thy divine use of their obedience, for the
salvation of the world.
But the great Missionary anticipates an objection
from facts to his burning plea for the rightness of an
unrestrained evangelism. The proclamation might be
universal; but were not the results partial? "Here a
little, and there a little"; was not this the story of
missionary results even when a Paul, a Barnabas,
a Peter, was the missionary? Everywhere some
faith; but everywhere more hostility, and still more
indifference! Could this, after all, be the main track
of the divine purposes—these often ineffectual excursions
of the "fair feet" of the messengers of an eternal
peace? Ah, that objection must have offered no mere
logical difficulty to St Paul; it must have pierced his
heart. For while His Master was his first motive, his
fellow-men themselves were his second. He loved
their souls; he longed to see them blessed in Christ,
saved in Him from "the death that cannot die," filled
in Him with "life indeed" (ἡ ὄντως ζωή,
1 Tim. vi. 19). The man who shed tears over his converts as he warned
them (Acts xx. 31) had tears also, we may be sure,
for those who would not be converted; nay, we know
he had: "I tell you, even weeping
(καὶ κλαίων), that
they are the enemies of the Cross of Christ" (Phil.
iii. 18). But here too he leans back on the solemn
comfort, the answer from within a veil,—that Prophecy
had taken account of this beforehand. Moses, and
Isaiah, and David, had foretold on the one hand a
universal message of good, but on the other hand a
sorrowfully limited response from man, and notably
from Israel. So he proceeds:
But not all obeyedThe aorist gathers up the history of evangelization into a point
of thought.
the good tidings, when "the word" reached
them; for—we were prepared for such a
mystery, such a grief—for Isaiah says (liii. 1), in his
great Oracle of the Crucified, "Lord, who believed our
hearing" (ἀκοὴ), the message they heard of us, about
One "on whom were laid the iniquities of us all"?
And as he dictates that word "hearing," it emphasizes
to him the fact that not mystic intuitions born out of
the depths of man are the means of revelation, but
articulate messages given from the depths of God, and
spoken by men to men. And he throws the thought
into a brief sentence, such as would lie in a footnote in
a modern book: So we gather (ἄρα) that faith
comes from hearing; but the hearing comes through Christ'sRead Χρισυοῦ, probably.
utterance (ῥῆμα); the messenger has
it because it was first given to him by the Master
who proclaimed Himself the Way, Truth, Life, Light,
Bread, Shepherd, Ransom, Lord. All is revelation,
not reverie; utterance, not insight.
Then the swift thought turns, and returns again.
The prophecies have foretold an evangelical utterance to
the whole human world. Not only in explicit prediction
do they do so, but in the "mystic glory" of their more
remote allusions. But I say, Did they not hear?
Was this failure of belief due to a limitation of
the messenger's range in the plan of God? Nay, rather,
"Unto all the earth went out their tone, and to the ends
of man's world (ἡ οἰκουμένη)
their utterances" (Psal. xix. 4). The words are the voice of that Psalm where
the glories of the visible heavens are collocated with
the glories of the Word of God. The Apostle hears
more than Nature in the Sunrise Hymn of David; he
hears grace and the Gospel in the deep harmony which
carries the immortal melody along. The God who
meant the skies, with their "silent voices," to preach
a Creator not to one race but to all, meant also
His Word to have no narrower scope, preaching a
Redeemer. Yes, and there were articulate predictions
that it should be so, as well as starry parables; predictions
too that shewed the prospect not only of a
world evangelized, but of an Israel put to shame by the
faith of pagans.
But I say (his rapid phrase
meets with an anticipating answer the cavil yet
unspoken) did not Israel know? Had they no distinct
forewarning of what we see to-day? First comes Moses, saying,So we paraphrase πρῶτος
(not πρῶτον)
Μωϋσῆς λέγει.
in his prophetic Song, sung at the foot
of Pisgah (Deut. xxxii. 21), "I—the 'I' is emphatic;
the Person is the Lord, and the action shall be nothing
less than His—I will take a no-nation toSo we attempt to give the force of
ἐπ' οὐκ ἔθνει, ἐπὶ ἔθνει.
move your jealousy; to move your anger I will take a nation non-intelligent";
a race not only not informed by a previous
revelation, but not trained by thought upon it to an
insight into new truth. And what Moses indicates,
Isaiah, standing later in the history, indignantly explains:
But Isaiah dares anything (ἀποτολμᾷ),
and says (lxv. 1), "I was found by those who
sought not Me; manifest I became to those who consulted not Me."Ἐμὲ is emphatic in both clauses.
Ἐπερωτᾶν is used of the
consultation of an oracle. Our translation thus seems better than
the more secondary explanation, "who sought not to do My will."
But as to Israel he says,
in the words next in order in the place (lxv. 2), "All
the day long I spread my hands open, to beckon and to
embrace, towards a people disobeying and contradicting."
So the servant brings his sorrows for consolation to—may
we write the words in reverence?—the sorrows
of his Master. He mourns over an Athens, an Ephesus,
and above all over a Jerusalem, that "will not come to
the Son of God, that they might have life" (John v. 40).
And his grief is not only inevitable; it is profoundly
right, wise, holy. But he need not bear it unrelieved.
He grasps the Scripture which tells him that his Lord
has called those who would not come, and opened the
eternal arms for an embrace—to be met only with a
contradiction. He weeps, but it is as on the breast of
Jesus as He wept over the City. And in the double
certainty that the Lord has felt such grief, and that
He is the Lord, he yields, he rests, he is still. "The
King of the Ages" (1 Tim. i. 17) and "the Man of
Sorrows" are One. To know Him is to be at peace
even under the griefs of the mystery of sin.
CHAPTER XXII
ISRAEL HOWEVER NOT FORSAKEN
Romans xi. 1-10
A PEOPLE disobeying and contradicting. So the
Lord of Israel, through the prophet, had described
the nation. Let us remember as we pass on
what a large feature in the prophecies, and indeed in
the whole Old Testament, such accusations and exposures
are. From Moses to Malachi, in histories, and
songs, and instructions, we find everywhere this tone
of stern truth-telling, this unsparing detection and description
of Israelite sin. And we reflect that every
one of these utterances, humanly speaking, was the
voice of an Israelite; and that whatever reception it
met with at the moment—it was sometimes a scornful
or angry reception, oftener a reverent one—it was
ultimately treasured, venerated, almost worshipped, by
the Church of this same rebuked and humiliated Israel.
We ask ourselves what this has to say about the true
origin of these utterances, and the true nature of the
environment into which they fell. Do they not bear
witness to the supernatural in both? It was not
"human nature" which, in a race quite as prone, at
least, as any other, to assert itself, produced these
intense and persistent rebukes from within, and secured
for them a profound and lasting veneration. The
Hebrew Scriptures, in this as in other things, are
a literature which mere man, mere Israelite man,
"could not have written if he would, and would not
have written if he could."I borrow the phrase from the late Prof. H. Rogers' Supernatural
Origin of the Bible inferred from Itself, a book of masterly thinking
and reasoning.
Somehow, the Prophets not only spoke with an authority more than human,
but they were known to speak with it. There was a
national consciousness of divine privilege; and it was
inextricably bound up with a national conviction that
the Lord of the privileges had an eternal right to
reprove His privileged ones, and that He had, as a fact,
His accredited messengers of reproof, whose voice was
not theirs but His; not the mere outcry of patriotic
zealots but the Oracle of God. Yea, an awful privilege
was involved in the reception of such reproofs: "You
only have I known; therefore will I punish you" (Amos
iii. 2).
But this is a recollection by the way. St Paul, so
we saw in our last study, has quoted Isaiah's stern
message, only now to stay his troubled heart on the
fact that the unbelief of Israel in his day was, if we
may dare to put it so, no surprise to the Lord, and
therefore no shock to the servant's faith. But is he to
stop there, and sit down, and say, "This must be so"?
No; there is more to follow, in this discourse on Israel
and God. He has "good words, and comfortable words"
(Zech. i. 13), after the woes of the last two chapters, and
after those earlier passages of the Epistle where the Jew
is seen only in his hypocrisy, and rebellion, and pride.
He has to speak of a faithful Remnant, now as always
present, who make as it were the golden unbroken link
between the nation and the promises. And then he has
to lift the curtain, at least a corner of the curtain, from
the future, and to indicate how there lies waiting there
a mighty blessing for Israel, and through Israel for the
world. Even now the mysterious "People" was serving
a spiritual purpose in their very unbelief; they were
occasioning a vast transition of blessing to the Gentiles,
by their own refusal of blessing. And hereafter they
were to serve a purpose of still more illustrious mercy.
They were yet, in their multitudes, to return to their
rejected Christ. And their return was to be used as
the means of a crisis of blessing for the world.
We seem to see the look and hear the voice of the
Apostle, once the mighty Rabbi, the persecuting patriot,
as he begins now to dictate again. His eyes brighten,
and his brow clears, and a happier emphasis comes
into his utterance, as he sets himself to speak of his
people's good, and to remind his Gentile brethren how,
in God's plan of redemption, all their blessing, all they
know of salvation, all they possess of life eternal, has
come to them through Israel. Israel is the Stem,
drawing truth and life from the unfathomable soil of the
covenant of promise. They are the grafted Branches,
rich in every blessing—because they are the mystical
seed of Abraham, in Christ.
I say therefore, Did God ever thrust
away His people? Away with the thought! For I
am an Israelite, of Abraham's seed, Benjamin's tribe; full
member of the theocratic race (Ἰσραηλίτης),
and of its first royal and always loyal tribe; in my own person, therefore,
I am an instance of Israel still in covenant. God neverWe attempt to express the aorist thus, with hesitation.
thrust away His people, whom He
foreknew with the foreknowledge of eternal choice and purpose.See above, p. 237.
That foreknowledge was "not according
to their works," or according to their power; and
so it holds its sovereign way across and above their
long unworthiness. Or do you not know, in Elijah,
in his story, in the pages marked with his name, what
the Scripture says? How he intercedes before God, on
God's own behalf, against Israel, saying (1 Kings
xix. 10), "Lord, Thy prophets they killed, and
Thy altars they dug up; and I was left solitary,
and they seek my life"? But what says the
oracular answer (ὁ χρηματισμὸς)
to him? "I have left for Myself seven thousand men, men who
(οἵτινες)
bowed never knee to Baal" (1 Kings xix. 18). So
therefore at the present season also there proves
to be (γέγονεν) a remnant,
"a leaving" (λεῖμμα),
left by the Lord for Himself, on the principle of
(κατὰ)
election of grace; their persons and their number following
a choice and gift whose reasons lie in God alone. And
then follows one of those characteristic "foot-notes" of
which we saw an instance above (x. 17): But
if by grace, no longer of works; "no longer,"
in the sense of a logical succession and exclusion;
since the grace proves (γίνεται),
on the other principle, no longer grace. But if of works, it is no
longer grace; since the work is no longer work.This last sentence, "But if of works, etc.," is only doubtfully
supported by documents. But it bears, to our mind, strong internal
marks of genuineness. It is at once too difficult, and too deeply
related to the context, to look like the insertion of a scribe.
That is to say, when once the grace-principle is admitted, as it is here
assumed to be, "the work" of the man who is its
subject is "no longer work" in the sense which makes
an antithesis to grace; it is no longer so much toil done
in order to so much pay to be given. In other words,
the two supposed principles of the divine Choice are in
their nature mutually exclusive. Admit the one as
the condition of the "election," and the other ceases;
you cannot combine them into an amalgam. If the
election is of grace, no meritorious antecedent to it is
possible in the subject of it. If it is according to
meritorious antecedent, no sovereign freedom is possible
in the divine action, such freedom as to bring the
saved man, the saved remnant, to an adoring confession
of unspeakable and mysterious mercy.
This is the point, here in this passing "foot-note,"
as in the longer kindred statements above (ch. ix.), of
the emphasized allusion to "choice" and "grace." He
writes thus that he may bring the believer, Gentile
or Jew, to his knees, in humiliation, wonder, gratitude,
and trust. "Why did I, the self-ruined wanderer, the
self-hardened rebel, come to the Shepherd who sought
me, surrender my sword to the King who reclaimed
me? Did I reason myself into harmony with Him?
Did I lift myself, hopelessly maimed, into His arms?
No; it was the gift of God, first, last, and in the midst.
And if so, it was the choice of God." That point of
light is surrounded by a cloud-world of mystery, though
within those surrounding clouds there lurks, as to God,
only rightness and love. But the point of light is there,
immovable, for all the clouds; where fallen man chooses
God, it is thanks to God who has chosen fallen man.
Where a race is not "thrust away," it is because "God
foreknew." Where some thousands of members of
that race, while others fall away, are found faithful to
God, it is because He has "left them for Himself on the
principle of choice of grace." Where, amidst a widespread
rejection of God's Son Incarnate, a Saul of
Tarsus, an Aquila, a Barnabas, behold in Him their
Redeemer, their King, their Life, their All, it is on that
same principle. Let the man thus beholding and
believing give the whole thanks for his salvation in the
quarter where it is all due. Let him not confuse one
truth by another. Let not this truth disturb for a moment
his certainty of personal moral freedom, and of its
responsibility. Let it not for a moment turn him into
a fatalist. But let him abase himself, and give thanks,
and humbly trust Him who has thus laid hold of him
for blessing. As he does so, in simplicity, not speculating
but worshipping, he will need no subtle logic
to assure him that he is to pray, and to work, without
reserve, for the salvation of all men. It will be more
than enough for him that His Sovereign bids him do
it, and tells him that it is according to His heart.
To return a little on our steps, in the matter of the
Apostle's doctrine of the divine Choice: the reference
in this paragraph to the seven thousand faithful in
Elijah's day suggests a special reflection. To us, it
seems to say distinctly that the "election" intended
all along by St Paul cannot possibly be explained
adequately by making it either an election (to whatever
benefits) of mere masses of men, as for instance of a
nation, considered apart from its individuals; or an
election merely to privilege, to opportunity, which may
or may not be used by the receiver. As regards
national election, it is undoubtedly present and even
prominent in the passage, and in this whole section
of the Epistle. For ourselves, we incline to see it
quite simply in ver. 2 above; "His people, whom He
foreknew." We read there, what we find so often in
the Old Testament, a sovereign choice of a nation to
stand in special relation to God; of a nation taken, so
to speak, in the abstract, viewed not as the mere total
of so many individuals, but as a quasi-personality.
But we maintain that the idea of election takes another
line when we come to the "seven thousand." Here we
are thrown at once on the thought of individual experiences,
and the ultimate secret of them, found only
in the divine Will affecting the individual. The "seven
thousand" had no aggregate life, so to speak. They
formed, as the seven thousand, no organism or quasi-personality.
They were "left" not as a mass, but as
units; so isolated, so little grouped together, that even
Elijah did not know of their existence. They were
just so many individual men, each one of whom found
power, by faith, to stand personally firm against the
Baalism of that dark time, with the same individual
faith which in later days, against other terrors, and other
solicitations, upheld a Polycarp, an Athanasius, a Huss,
a Luther, a Tyndale, a De Seso, a St Cyran. And the
Apostle quotes them as an instance and illustration of
the Lord's way and will with the believing of all time.
In their case, then, he both passes as it were through
national election to individual election, as a permanent
spiritual mystery; and he shews that he means by this
an election not only to opportunity but to holiness.
The Lord's "leaving them for Himself" lay behind
their not bowing their knees to Baal. Each resolute
confessor was individually enabled, by a sovereign and
special grace. He was a true human personality, freely
acting, freely choosing not to yield in that terrible
storm. But behind his freedom was the higher freedom
of the Will of God, saving him from himself that he
might be free to confess and suffer. To our mind, no
part of the Epistle more clearly than this passage
affirms this individual aspect of the great mystery.
Ah, it is a mystery indeed; we have owned this at
every step. And it is never for a moment to be
treated therefore as if we knew all about it. And it
is never therefore to be used to confuse the believer's
thought about other sides of truth. But it is there,
as a truth among truths; to be received with abasement
by the creature before the Creator, and with
humble hope by the simple believer.
He goes on with his argument, taking up the thread
broken by the "foot-note" upon grace and works:
What therefore? What Israel, the nation, the
character, seeks after, righteousness in the
court of God, this it lighted not upon
(οὐκ ἐπέτυχεν),The aorists sum up the manifold history.
as one who seeks a buried treasure in the wrong field
"lights not upon" it; but the election, the chosen ones,
the "seven thousand" of the Gospel era, did light upon
it. But the rest were hardened, (not as if God
had created their hardness, or injected it; but
He gave it to be its own penalty;) as it stands written
(Isai. xxix. 10, and Deut. xxix. 4Such a combination of citations is a significant witness to the
Apostle's view of the O. T. as, from its divine side, one Book everywhere.),
"God gave them a spirit of slumber, eyes not to see, and ears not to hear,
even to this day." A persistent ("unto this day")
unbelief was the sin of Israel in the Prophets' times,
and it was the same in those of the Apostles. And the
condition was the same; God "gave" sin to be its
own way of retribution. And David says (Psal.
lxix. 22), in a Psalm full of Messiah, and of
the awful retribution justly ordained to come on His impenitent
enemies, "Let their table turn into a trap, and
into toils (θήρα), and into a stumbling-block, and
into a requital to them; darkened be their eyes,
not to see, and their back ever bow Thou together."
The words are awful, in their connexion here, and
in themselves, and as a specimen of a class. Their
purpose here is to enforce the thought that there is
such a thing as positive divine action in the self-ruin
of the impenitent; a fiat from the throne which "gives"
a coma to the soul, and beclouds its eyes, and turns its
blessings into a curse. Not one word implies the
thought that He who so acts meets a soul tending
upwards and turns it downward; that He ignores or
rejects even the faintest enquiry after Himself; that
He is Author of one particle of the sin of man. But we
do learn that the adversaries of God and Christ may be,
and, where the Eternal so sees it good, are, sentenced to
go their own way, even to its issues in destruction. The
context of every citation here, as it stands in the Old
Testament, shews abundantly that those so sentenced
are no helpless victims of an adverse fate, but sinners
of their own will, in a sense most definite and personal.
Only, a sentence of judgment is concerned also in the
case; "Fill ye up then the measure" (Matt. xxiii. 32).
But then also in themselves, and as a specimen of a
class, the words are a dark shadow in the Scripture sky.
It is only by the way that we can note this here, but it
must not be quite omitted in our study. This sixty-ninth
Psalm is a leading instance of the several Psalms
where the Prophet appears calling for the sternest
retribution on his enemies. What thoughtful heart has
not felt the painful mystery so presented? Read in
the hush of secret devotion, or sung perhaps to some
majestic chant beneath the minster-roof, they still tend
to affront the soul with the question, Can this possibly
be after the mind of Christ? And there rises before us
the form of One who is in the act of Crucifixion, and
who just then articulates the prayer, "Father, forgive
them; for they know not what they do." Can these
"imprecations" have His sanction? Can He pass
them, endorse them, as His Word?
The question is full of pressing pain. And no answer
can be given, surely, which shall relieve all that pain;
certainly nothing which shall turn the clouds of such
passages into rays of the sun. They are clouds; but
let us be sure that they belong to the cloud-land which
gathers round the Throne, and which only conceals, not
wrecks, its luminous and immovable righteousness and
love. Let us remark, for one point, that this same dark
Psalm is, by the witness of the Apostles, as taught by
their Master, a Psalm full of Messiah. It was undoubtedly
claimed as His own mystic utterance by the
Lamb of the Passion. He speaks in these dread words
who also says, in the same utterance (ver. 9), "The zeal
of Thine house hath eaten me up." So the Lord Jesus
did endorse this Psalm. He more than endorsed it;
He adopted it as His own. Let this remind us further
that the utterer of these denunciations, even the first
and non-mystical utterer,—David, let us say,—appears
in the Psalm not merely as a private person crying out
about his violated personal rights, but as an ally and
vassal of God, one whose life and cause is identified
with His. Just in proportion as this is so, the violation
of his life and peace, by enemies described as quite
consciously and deliberately malicious, is a violation
of the whole sanctuary of divine righteousness. If so,
is it incredible that even the darkest words of such a
Psalm are to be read as a true echo from the depths of
man to the Voice which announces "indignation and
wrath, tribulation and anguish, to every soul of man
that doeth evil"? Perhaps even the most watchful
assertor of the divine character of Scripture is not
bound to assert that no human frailty in the least
moved the spirit of a David when he, in the sphere of
his own personality, thought and said these things.
But we have no right to assert, as a known or necessary
thing, that it was so. And we have right to say that
in themselves these utterances are but a sternly true
response to the avenging indignation of the Holy One.
In any case, do not let us talk with a loose facility
about their incompatibility with "the spirit of the New
Testament." From one side, the New Testament is
an even sterner Book than the Old; as it must be of
course, when it brings sin and holiness "out into the
light" of the Cross of Christ. It is in the New Testament
that, "the souls" of saints at rest are heard saying
(Rev. vi. 10), "How long, O Lord, holy and true,
dost Thou not judge and avenge our blood on them
that dwell on the earth?" It is in the New Testament
that an Apostle writes (2 Thess. i. 6), "It is a righteous
thing with God to recompense tribulation to them which
trouble you." It is the Lord of the New Testament, the
Offerer of the Prayer of the Cross, who said (Matt.
xxiii. 32-35) "Fill ye up the measure of your fathers.
I send unto you prophets, and wise men, and scribes,
and some of them ye shall kill and crucify; that upon
you may come all the righteous blood shed upon the
earth."
His eyes must have rested, often and again, upon
the denunciations of the Psalms. He saw in them that
which struck no real discord, in the ultimate spiritual
depth, with His own blessed compassions. Let us not
resent what He has countersigned. It is His, not ours,
to know all the conditions of those mysterious outbursts
from the Psalmists' consciousness. It is ours to recognize
in them the intensest expression of what rebellious
evil merits, and will find, as its reward.
But we have digressed from what is the proper
matter before us. Here, in the Epistle, the sixty-ninth
Psalm is cited only to affirm with the authority of
Scripture the mystery of God's action in sentencing the
impenitent adversaries of His Christ to more blindness
and more ruin. Through this dark and narrow door
the Apostle is about to lead us now into "a large
room" of hope and blessing, and to unveil to us a
wonderful future for the now disgraced and seemingly
rejected Israel.
CHAPTER XXIII
ISRAEL'S FALL OVERRULED, FOR THE WORLD'S BLESSING,
AND FOR ISRAEL'S MERCY
Romans xi. 11-24
THE Apostle has been led a few steps backwards
in the last previous verses. His face has been
turned once more toward the dark region of the
prophetic sky, to see how the sin of Christ-rejecting
souls is met and punished by the dreadful "gift" of
slumber, and apathy, and the transmutation of blessings
to snares. But now, decisively, he looks sunward.
He points our eyes, with his own, to the morning light
of grace and promise. We are to see what Israel's fall
has had to do with the world's hope and with life in
Christ, and then what blessings await Israel himself,
and again the world through him.
I say, therefore, (the phrase resumes the
point of view to which the same words above
(ver. 1) led us,) did they stumble that they might fall?
Did their national rejection of an unwelcome because
unworldly Messiah take place, in the divine permission,
with the positive divine purpose that it should bring on
a final rejection of the nation, its banishment out of its
place in the history of redemption? Away with the
thought! But their partial fallΠαράπτωμα:
so we venture to render the word here, where its
compound form gets a special point from its neighbourhood to the
simple verb πίπτειν (πέσωσι).
is the occasion of God's
salvation (ἡ σωτηρία) for the Gentiles, with a view to
move them, the Jews, to jealousy, to awake them to a
sight of what Christ is, and of what their privilege in
Him might yet be, by the sight of His work and glory
in once pagan lives.
Observe here the divine benignity which lurks even
under the edges of the cloud of judgment. And
observe too, thus close to the passage which has put
before us the mysterious side of divine action on human
wills, the daylight simplicity of this side of that action;
the loving skill with which the world's blessing is
meant by the God of grace to act, exactly in the line
of human feeling, upon the will of Israel.
But would that "the Gentiles" had borne more in
heart that last short sentence of St Paul's, through
these long centuries since the Apostles fell asleep! It
is one of the most marked, as it is one of the saddest,
phenomena in the history of the Church that for ages,
almost from the days of St John himself, we look in
vain either for any appreciable Jewish element in
Christendom, or for any extended effort on the part of
Christendom to win Jewish hearts to Christ by a wise
and loving evangelization. With only relatively insignificant
exceptions this was the abiding state of
things till well within the eighteenth century, when the
German Pietists began to call the attention of believing
Christians to the spiritual needs and prophetic hopes of
Israel, and to remind them that the Jews were not only
a beacon of judgment, or only the most impressive and
awful illustration of the fulfilment of prophecy, but the
bearers of yet unfulfilled predictions of mercy for themselves
and for the world. Meanwhile, all through the
Middle Age, and through generations of preceding and
following time also, Christendom did little for Israel
but retaliate, reproach, and tyrannize. It was so of old
in England; witness the fires of York. It is so to this
day in Russia, and where the Judenhetze inflames innumerable
hearts in Central Europe.
No doubt there is more than one side to the persistent
phenomenon. There is a side of mystery; the permissive
sentence of the Eternal has to do with the long
affliction, however caused, of the people which once
uttered the fatal cry, "His blood be on us, and on our
children" (Matt. xxvii. 25). And the wrong-doings of
Jews, beyond a doubt, have often made a dark occasion
for a "Jew-hatred," on a larger or narrower scale. But
all this leaves unaltered, from the point of view of the
Gospel, the sin of Christendom in its tremendous failure
to seek, in love, the good of erring Israel. It leaves as
black as ever the guilt of every fierce retaliation upon
Jews by so-called Christians, of every slanderous belief
about Jewish creed or life, of every unjust anti-Jewish
law ever passed by Christian king or senate. It leaves
an undiminished responsibility upon the Church of
Christ, not only for the flagrant wrong of having too
often animated and directed the civil power in its
oppressions of Israel, and not only for having so
awfully neglected to seek the evangelization of Israel
by direct appeals for the true Messiah, and by an open
setting forth of His glory, but for the deeper and more
subtle wrong, persistently inflicted from age to age, in a
most guilty unconsciousness—the wrong of having failed
to manifest Christ to Israel through the living holiness
of Christendom. Here, surely, is the very point of the
Apostle's thought in the sentence before us: "Salvation
to the Gentiles, to move the Jews to jealousy." In his
inspired idea, Gentile Christendom, in Christ, was to be
so pure, so beneficent, so happy, finding manifestly in
its Messianic Lord such resources for both peace of conscience
and a life of noble love, love above all directed
towards opponents and traducers, that Israel, looking
on, with eyes however purblind with prejudice, should
soon see a moral glory in the Church's face impossible
to be hid, and be drawn as by a moral magnet to the
Church's hope. Is it the fault of God (may He pardon
the formal question, if it lacks reverence), or the fault of
man, man carrying the Christian name, that facts have
been so wofully otherwise in the course of history? It
is the fault, the grievous fault, of us Christians. The
narrow prejudice, the iniquitous law, the rigid application
of exaggerated ecclesiastical principle, all these things
have been man's perversion of the divine idea, to be
confessed and deplored in a deep and interminable
repentance. May the mercy of God awaken Gentile
Christendom, in a manner and degree as yet unknown,
to remember this our indefeasible debt to this people
everywhere present with us, everywhere distinct from
us;—the debt of a life, personal and ecclesiastical, so
manifestly pure and loving in our Lord the Christ as
to "move them to the jealousy" which shall claim Him
again for their own. Then we shall indeed be
hastening the day of full and final blessing, both for
themselves and for the world.
To that bright coming day the Apostle points us now,
more directly than ever: But if their partial fallΠαράπτωμα: see above p. 294.
be the world's wealth, and their lessening
(ἥττημα), their reduction, (a reduction in one aspect to
a race of scattered exiles, in another to a mere remnant
of "Israelites indeed,") be the Gentiles' wealth, the occasion
by which "the unsearchable wealth of Messiah"
(Eph. iii. 8) has been as it were forced into Gentile receptacles,
how much more their fulness, the filling of the dry
channel with its ample ideal stream, the change from
a believing remnant, fragments of a fragmentary people,
to a believing nation, reanimated and reunited? What
blessings for "the world," for "the Gentiles," may not
come through the vehicle of such an Israel? But
Read δὲ not γάρ.
It is the "but" of a slight pause and resumption.
to you I speak, the GentilesThe converts of the Roman Mission were surely Gentiles for
the most part. See further below, ver. 25.
to you, because if I reach the Jews, in the way I mean, it must
be through you. So far indeed as I, distinctively I
(ἐγώ),
am the Gentiles' Apostle, I glorify my ministry as such;
I rejoice, Pharisee that I once was, to be devoted as no
other Apostle is to a ministry for those whom I once
thought of as of outcasts in religion. But I speak as
your own Apostle, and to you, if perchance I
may move the jealousy of my flesh and blood,Τὴν σάρκα μου:
we venture to write "flesh and blood" as the
nearest equivalent in our parlance to the vigorous Greek, "my flesh."
and may save some from amongst them, by letting them as it
were overhear what are the blessings of you Gentile
Christians, and how it is the Lord's purpose to use those
blessings as a magnet to wandering Israel.It will be seen that we punctuate the Greek here as follows:
Ὑμῖν δὲ λέγω τοῖς ἔθνεσιν (ἐφ' ὅσον μὲν οὖν εἰμὶ ἐγὼ
ἐθνῶν ἀπόστολος, τὴν διακονίαν μου δοξάζω) εἴ πῶς κτλ.
The thought of his "glory" in his
"ministry" is surely parenthetical; thrown in to remind them that his
plea for Israel means no change of heart towards his Gentile converts,
or any wavering in the certainty that in Christ they are as completely
"the people of God" as Israel is. The "main line" of the sentence
runs past this parenthesis: "To you Gentiles I speak, in the hope of
moving the jealousy of the Jews."
His hope is that, through the Roman congregation, this glorious open
secret will come out, as they meet their Jewish neighbours
and talk with them. So would one here, another
there, "in the streets and lanes of the City," be drawn to
the feet of Jesus, under the constraint of that "jealousy"
which means little else than the human longing to understand
what is evidently the great joy of another's heart;
a "jealousy" on which often grace can fall, and use
it as the vehicle of divine light and life.
He says only, "some of them"; as he does in the
sister Epistle; 1 Cor. ix. 22.Cp. too 2 Cor. iii. 14-16 with this whole passage.
He recognizes it as his present task, indicated alike by circumstance and
revelation, to be not the glad ingatherer of vast
multitudes to Christ, but the patient winner of scattered
sheep. Yet let us observe that none the less he spends
his whole soul upon that winning, and takes no excuse
from a glorious future to slacken a single effort in the
difficult present.
For if the throwing away of them, their downfall
as the Church of God, was the world's
reconciliation, the instrumental or occasioning cause of
the direct proclamation to the pagan peoples of the
Atonement of the Cross, what will their reception be,
but life from the dead? That is to say, the great
event of Israel's return to God in Christ, and His
to Israel, will be the signal and the means of a vast
rise of spiritual life in the Universal Church, and of
an unexampled ingathering of regenerate souls from
the world. When Israel, as a Church, fell, the fall
worked good for the world merely by driving, as it
were, the apostolic preachers out from the Synagogue,
to which they so much longed to cling. The Jews did
anything but aid the work. Yet even so they were
made an occasion for world-wide good. When they are
"received again," as this Scripture so definitely affirms
that they shall be received, the case will be grandly
different. As before, they will be "occasions." A
national and ecclesiastical return of Israel to Christ will
of course give occasion over the whole world for a vastly
quickened attention to Christianity, and for an appeal for
the world's faith in the facts and claims of Christianity,
as bold and loud as that of Pentecost. But more than
this; Israel will now be not only occasion but agent. The
Jews, ubiquitous, cosmopolitan, yet invincibly national,
coming back in living loyalty to the Son of David, the
Son of God, will be a positive power in evangelization
such as the Church has never yet felt. Whatever the
actual facts shall prove to be in the matter of their
return to the Land of PromiseThis chapter is silent on that great matter.
(and who can watch
without deep reflection the nation-less land and the
land-less nation?) no prediction obliges us to think
that the Jews will be withdrawn from the wide world
by a national resettlement in their Land. A nation is
not a Dispersion merely because it has individual
citizens widely dispersed; if it has a true national
centre, it is a people at home, a people with a home.
Whether as a central mass in Syria, or as also a
presence everywhere in the human world, Israel will
thus be ready, once restored to God in Christ, to be a
more than natural evangelizing power.
Let this be remembered in every enterprise for the
spiritual good of the great Dispersion now. Through
such efforts God is already approaching His hour of
blessing, long expected. Let that fact animate and give a
glad patience to His workers, on whose work He surely
begins in our day to cast His smile of growing blessing.
Now the argument takes a new direction. The restoration
thus indicated, thus foretold, is not only sure
to be infinitely beneficial. It is also to be looked for
and expected as a thing lying so to speak in the line of
spiritual fitness, true to the order of God's plan. In
His will, when He went about to create and develop
His Church, Israel sprung from the dry ground as the
sacred Olive, rich with the sap of truth and grace, full
of branch and leaf. From the tents of Abraham onward,
the world's true spiritual light and life was there. There,
not elsewhere, was revelation, and God-given ordinance,
and "the covenants, and the glory." There, not elsewhere,
the Christ of God, for whom all things waited,
towards whom all the lines of man's life and history
converged, was to appear. Thus, in a certain profound
sense, all true salvation must be not only "of" Israel
(John iv. 24) but through him. Union with Christ was
union with Abraham. To become a Christian, that is to
say, one of Messiah's men, was to become, mystically, an
Israelite. From this point of view the Gentile's union with
the Saviour, though not in the least less genuine and
divine than the Jew's, was, so to speak, less normal.
And thus nothing could be more spiritually normal than
the Jew's recovery to his old relation to God, from which
he had violently dislocated himself. These thoughts
the Apostle now presses on the Romans, as a new
motive and guide to their hopes, prayers, and work.
(Do we gather from the length and fulness of the
argument that already it was difficult to bring Gentiles
to think aright of the chosen people in their fall and
rebellion?) He reminds them of the inalienable consecration
of Israel to special divine purposes. He
points them to the ancient Olive, and boldly tells them
that they are, themselves, only a graft of a wild stock,
inserted into the noble tree. Not that he thinks of
the Jew as a superior being. But the Church of
Israel was the original of the Church. So the restoration
of Israel to Christ, and to the Church, is a
recovery of normal life, not a first and abnormal grant
of life.
But if the first-fruit was holy, holy is the
kneaded lump too. Abraham was as it were
the Lord's First-fruits of mankind, in the field of His
Church. "Abraham's seed" are as it were the mass
kneaded from that first-fruits; made of it. Was the
first-fruits holy, in the sense of consecration to God's
redeeming purpose? Then that which is made of it
must somehow still be a consecrated thing, even though
put aside as if "common" for awhile. And if the root
was holy, holy are the branches too; the lineal heirs of
Abraham are still, ideally, potentially, consecrated to
Him who separated Abraham to Himself, and moved
him to his great self-separation. But if some
of the branches (how tender is the euphemism
of the "some"!) were broken off, while you, wild-olive
as you were, were grafted in among them, in their place
of life and growth, and became a sharer of the root and
of the Olive's fatness,—do not boast over the torn-off
branches. But if you do boast over them—not
you carry the root, but the root carries you.
You will say then, The branches were broken
off—that I might be grafted in. Good: true—and
untrue: because of their unbelief they were broken
off, while you because of your faith stand. They were no
better beings than you, in themselves. But neither are
you better than they, in yourself. They and you alike
are, personally, mere subjects of redeeming mercy;
owing all to Christ; possessing all only as accepting
Christ. "Where is your boasting, then?" Do not be
high-minded, but fear, fear yourself, your sin,
your enemy. For if God did not spare the
natural branches, take care lest He spare not you either.
See therefore God's goodness and sternness. On
those who fell, came His sternness
(ἀποτομία,
not ἀποτομίαν);
but on you, His goodness, if you abide
by that (τῇ) goodness, with the adherence and response
of faith; since you too will be cut out otherwise. And
they too, if they do not abide by their (τῇ)
unbelief, shall be grafted in; for God is able
to graft them in again. For if you from the
naturally wild olive were cut out, and non-naturally
(παρὰ φύσιν)
were grafted into the Garden-Olive,
how much more shall those, the branches naturally,
be grafted into their own Olive!
Here are more topics than one which call for reverent
notice and study.
1. The imagery of the Olive, with its root, stem, and
branches. The Olive, rich and useful, long-lived, and
evergreen, stands, as a "nature-parable" of spiritual
life, beside the Vine, the Palm, and the Cedar, in the
Garden of God. Sometimes it pictures the individual
saint, living and fruitful in union with his Lord (Psal.
lii. 8). Sometimes it sets before us the fertile organism of
the Church, as here, where the Olive is the great Church
Universal in its long life before and after the historical
coming of Christ; the life which in a certain sense began
with the Call of Abraham, and was only magnificently
developed by the Incarnation and Passion. Its Root,
in this respect, is the great Father of Faith. Its Stem
is the Church of the Old Testament, which coincided,
in the matter of external privilege, with the nation of
Israel, and to which at least the immense majority of
true believers in the elder time belonged. Its Branches
(by a slight and easy modification of the image) are its
individual members, whether Jewish or Gentile. The
Master of the Tree, arriving on the scene in the Gospel
age, comes as it were to prune His Olive, and to graft.
The Jewish "branch," if he is what he seems, if he
believes indeed and not only by hypothesis, abides
in the Tree. Otherwise, he is—from the divine point
of view—broken off. The Gentile, believing, is grafted
in, and becomes a true part of the living organism;
as genuinely and vitally one with Abraham in life and
blessing as his Hebrew brother. But the fact of the
Hebrew "race" in root and stem rules still so far as to
make the re-ingrafting of a Hebrew branch, repenting,
more "natural" (not more possible, or more beneficial,
but more "natural") than the first ingrafting of a
Gentile branch. The whole Tree is for ever Abrahamic,
Israelite, in stock and growth; though all mankind
has place now in its forest of branches.
2. The imagery of Grafting. Here is an instance
of partial, while truthful, use of a natural process in
Scripture parable. In our gardens and orchards it is
the wild stock which receives, in grafting, the "good"
branch; a fact which lends itself to many fertile illustrations.
Here, on the contrary, the "wild" branch is
inserted into the "good" stock. But the olive-yard
yields to the Apostle all the imagery he really needs.
He has before him, ready to hand, the Tree of the
Church; all that he wants is an illustration of communication
and union of life by artificial insertion.
And this he finds in the olive-dresser's art, which
shews him how a vegetable fragment, apart and alien,
can by human design be made to grow into the life of
the tree, as if a native of the root.
3. The teaching of the passage as to the Place of
Israel in the divine Plan of life for the world. We have
remarked on this already, but it calls for reiterated
notice and recollection. "At sundry times, and in
divers manners," and through many and divers races
and civilizations, God has dealt with man, and is
dealing with him, in the training and development of
his life and nature. But in the matter of man's
spiritual salvation, in the gift to him, in his Fall, of the
life eternal, God has dealt with man, practically, through
one race, Israel. Let it never be forgotten that the
"sundry times and divers manners" of the apostolic
Epistle (Heb. i. 1) are all referred to "the prophets";
they are the "times" and "manners" of the Old
Testament revelation. And when at length the same
Eternal Voice spoke to man "in the Son"
(ἐν Ὑιῷ),
that Son came of Israel, "took hold of Abraham's
seed" (Heb. ii. 16), and Himself bore definite witness
that "salvation is from the Jews" (John iv. 24).
Amidst the unknown manifoldness of the work of
God for man, and in man, this is single and simple—that
in one racial line only runs the stream of
authentic and supernatural revelation; in the line of
this mysteriously chosen Israel. From this point of
view, the great Husbandman has planted not a forest
but a Tree; and the innumerable trees of the forest
can get the sap of Eden only as their branches are
grafted by His hand into His one Tree, by the faith
which unites them to Him who is the Root below the
root, "the Root of David," and of Abraham.
4. The appeal to the new-grafted "branch" to
"abide by the goodness of God." We have listened,
as St Paul has dictated to his scribe, to many a deep
word about a divine and sovereign power on man;
about man's absolute debt to God for the fact that he
believes and lives. Yet here, with equal decision, we
have man thrown back on the thought of his responsibility,
of the contingency in a certain sense of his
safety on his fidelity."To our safety our sedulity is required." Hooker, Sermon on
the Perpetuity of Faith in the Elect (at the close of the sermon). See
the whole sermon, with its temperate and well-balanced assertion of
the power of grace.
"If you are true to mercy,
mercy will be true to you; otherwise you too will be
broken off." Here, as in our study of earlier passages,
let us be willing to go all along with Scripture in the
seeming inconsistency of its absolute promises and its
contingent cautions. Let us, like it, "go to both
extremes"; then we shall be as near, probably, as our
finite thought can be at present to the whole truth as
it moves, a perfect sphere, in God. Is the Christian
worn and wearied with his experience of his own
pollution, instability, and helplessness? Let him embrace,
without a misgiving, the whole of that promise,
"My sheep shall never perish." Has he drifted into
a vain confidence, not in Christ, but in privilege, in
experience, in apparent religious prosperity? Has he
caught himself in the act of saying, even in a whisper,
"God, I thank Thee that I am not as other men are"?
Then let him listen in time to the warning voice, "Be
not high-minded, but fear"; "Take heed lest He spare
not thee." And let him put no pillow of theory between
the sharpness of that warning and his soul. Penitent,
self-despairing, resting in Christ alone, let him "abide
by the goodness of God."
CHAPTER XXIV
THE RESTORATION OF ISRAEL DIRECTLY FORETOLD:
ALL IS OF AND FOR GOD
Romans xi. 25-36
THUS far St Paul has rather reasoned than predicted.
He has shewn his Gentile friends the
naturalness, so to speak, of a restoration of Israel to
Christ, and the manifest certainty that such a restoration
will bring blessing to the world. Now he advances to
the direct assertion, made with a Prophet's full authority,
that so it shall be. "How much rather shall they be
grafted into their own Olive?" The question implies
the assertion; nothing remains but to open it in full.
For I would not have you ignorant, brethren,
of this mystery, this fact in God's purposes, impossible
to be known without revelation,Such is the normal meaning of μυστήριον
in the N. T. It is a thing which in itself may or may not be what we mean by
"mysterious." But it is a thing which mere observation and
reasoning cannot à priori arrive at; God must disclose it.
but luminous when revealed; (that you may not be wise in your own
esteem, valuing yourselves on an insight which is all
the while only a partial glimpse); that failure of perception
(πώρωσος), in a measure, in the case of many,
not all, of the nation, has come upon Israel, and will
continue until the fulnessΠλήρωμα is the practical realization of an ideal.
of the Gentiles shall come
in, until Gentile conversion shall be in some sense a
flowing tide. And so all Israel, Israel as a
mass, no longer as by scattered units, shall be
saved, coming to the feet of Him in whom alone is
man's salvation from judgment and from sin; as it
stands written (Psal. xiv. 7, Isai. lix. 20, with Isai.
xxvii. 9), "There shall come from Sion the Deliverer; He
shall turn away all impiety (ἀσεβείας)
from Jacob; and such they shall find the covenant I shall have granted,
So we paraphrase
αὕτη αὐτοῖς ἡ παρ' Ἐμοῦ διαθήκη.
such shall prove to be My promise
and provision, 'ordered and sure,' when I shall take
away their sins," in the day of My pardoning and
restoring return to them.
This is a memorable passage. It is in the first place
one of the most definitely predictive of all the prophetic
utterances of the Epistles. Apart from all problems of
explanation in detail, it gives us this as its message on
the whole; that there lies hidden in the future, for the
race of Israel, a critical period of overwhelming blessing.
If anything is revealed as fixed in the eternal plan,
which, never violating the creature's will yet is not
subject to it, it is this. We have heard the Apostle
speak fully, and without compromise, of the sin of
Israel; the hardened or paralysed spiritual perception,
the refusal to submit to pure grace, the restless quest
for a valid self-righteousness, the deep exclusive
arrogance. And thus the promise of coming mercy,
such as shall surprise the world, sounds all the more
sovereign and magnificent. It shall come; so says
Christ's prophet Paul. Not because of historical antecedents,
or in the light of general principles, but because
of the revelation of the Spirit, he speaks of that
wonderful future as if it were in full view from the
present; "All Israel shall be saved."
We read "no date prefixed." As far as this chapter
is concerned, years and days are as if they were not.
On the whole, surely, a large range of process is in his
view; he cannot expect to see fulfilled within a narrow
season the accomplishment of all the preliminaries to
the great event. But he says nothing about this. All
we gather is that he sees in the future a great progress
of Gentile Christianity; a great impression to be made
by this on the mind of Israel; a vast and comparatively
sudden awakening of Israel, by the grace
of God, however brought to bear; the salvation of
Israel in Christ on a national scale; "the receiving
of them again"; and "life from the dead" as the
result—life from the dead to the world at large. However
late or soon, with whatever attendant events,
divine or human, thus it shall be. The "spiritual
failure of perception in part" shall vanish. "The
Deliverer shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob." "All
Israel shall be saved."
"Believest thou the Prophets?" The question,
asked of Agrippa by St Paul, comes to us from this prediction
of his own. "Lord, we believe." Our Master
knows that for us in our day it is not easy. The
bad air of materialism, and the profound and stolid
fatalism which it involves, is thick around us. And
one symptom of its malign influence is the growing
tendency in the Church to limit, to minimize, to explain
if possible away, from the Scriptures, the properly
and distinctively superhuman, whether of work or
word. Men bearing the Christian name, and bearing
it often with loyal and reverent intention, seem to think
far otherwise than their Lord thought about this very
element of prediction in the holy Book, and would have
us believe that it is no great thing to grasp, and to
contend for. But as for us, we desire in all things to
be of the opinion of Him who is the eternal Truth and
Light, and who took our nature, expressly, as to one
great purpose, in order to unfold to us articulately His
opinion. He lived and died in the light and power of
predictive Scripture. He predicted. He rose again
to commission His Apostles, as the Spirit should teach
them, to see "things to come" (John xvi. 13). To us,
this oracle of His "chosen Vessel" gives us articles
of faith and hope. We do not understand, but we
believe, because here it is written, that after these days
of the prevalence of unbelief, after all these questions,
loud or half articulate, angry or agonizing, "Where is
the promise?" the world shall see a spiritual miracle
on a scale unknown before. "All Israel shall be saved."
Even so, Lord Jesus Christ, the Deliverer. Fill us
with the patience of this hope, for Thy chosen race, and
for the world.
It is almost a pain to turn from this conspectus of the
passage to a discussion of some of its details. But it
is necessary; and for our purpose it need be only
brief. Whatever the result may be, it will leave
untouched the grandeur of the central promise.
1. "Until the fulness of the Gentiles come in." Does
this mean that the stream of Gentile conversions shall
have flowed and ceased, before the great blessing comes
to Israel? Certainly the Greek may carry this
meaning; perhaps, taken quite apart, it carries it
more easily than any other. But it has this difficulty,
that it would assign to the "salvation" of Israel no
influence of blessing upon the Gentile world. Now
ver. 12 has implied that "the fulness" of Israel is to be
the more-than-wealth of "the world," of "the Gentiles."
And ver. 15 has implied, if we have read it aright,
that it is to be to "the world" as "life from the dead."
This leads us to explain the phrase here to refer not to
the close of the ingathering of the Gentile children of
God, but to a time when that process shall be, so to speak, running high.The aorist εἰσέλθῃ may rather gather up
the great ingathering into one thought than mark a narrow crisis in it.
That time of great and manifest
grace shall be the occasion to Israel of the shock, as it
were, of blessing; and from Israel's blessing shall date an
unmeasured further access of divine good for the world.
As we pass, let us observe the light thrown by these
sentences on the duty of the Church in evangelizing the
Gentiles for the Jews, as well as the Jews for the Gentiles.
Both holy enterprises have a destined effect outside
themselves. The evangelist of Africa, India, China,
is working for the hour of the "salvation of all Israel."
The evangelist of the Hebrew Dispersion is preparing
Israel for that hour of final blessing when the "saved"
nation shall, in the hand of God, kindle the world with
holy life.
2. "All Israel shall be saved." It has been held by
some interpreters that this points to the Israel of God,
the spiritual sons of Abraham. If so, it would be fairly
paraphrased as a promise that when the Gentile conversions
are complete, and the "spiritual failure of perception"
gone from the Jewish heart, the family of faith
shall be complete. But surely it puts violence on
words, and on thought, to explain "Israel" in this whole
passage mystically. Interpretation becomes an arbitrary
work if we may suddenly do so here, where the antithesis
of Israel and "the Gentiles" is the very theme
of the message. No; we have here the nation, chosen
once to a mysterious speciality in the spiritual history of
man, chosen with a choice never cancelled, however
abeyant. A blessing is in view for the nation; a
blessing spiritual, divine, all of grace, quite individual
in its action on each member of the nation, but national
in the scale of its results. We are not obliged to press
the word "all" to a rigid literality. Nor are we obliged
to limit the crisis of blessing to anything like a moment
of time. But we may surely gather that the numbers
blessed will be at least the vast majority, and that the
work will not be chronic but critical. A transition,
relatively swift and wonderful, shall shew the world a
nation penitent, faithful, holy, given to God.
3. The quotations from Psalms and Prophets (verses
26, 27) offer more questions than one. They are
closely interlaced, and they are not literal quotations.
"Out of Sion" takes the place of "for Zion." "He
shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob" takes the
place of "For them that turn from transgression in
Jacob." "This is the covenant" takes the place of "This
is His blessing." And there are other minute points
of variation. Yet we reverently trace in the originals
and the citations, which all alike are the work of prophetic
organs of the Spirit, the great ruling thought,
identical in both, that "the Deliverer" belongs primarily
to "Zion," and has in store primarily a blessing for her
people.
Are we, with some devout interpreters, to explain the
words, "The Deliverer shall come out of Sion," as predicting
a personal and visible return of the Ascended Jesus
to the literal Zion, in order to the salvation of Israel, and
an outgoing of Him from thence to the Dispersion, or
the world, in millennial glory? We deliberately forbear,
in this exposition, to discuss in detail the great controversy
thus indicated. We leave here on one side
some questions, eagerly and earnestly asked. Will Israel
return to the Land as Christian or as anti-Christian?
Will the immediate power for their conversion be the
visible Return of the Lord, or will it be an effusion
of His Spirit, by which, spiritually, He shall visit and
bless? What will be the attendant works and wonders
of the time? All we do now is to express the conviction
that the prophetic quotations here cannot be
held to predict unmistakably a visible and local Return.
If we read them aright, their import is satisfied by a
paraphrase somewhat thus: "It stands predicted that to
Zion, that is, to Israel, belongs the Deliverer of man, and
that for Israel He is to do His work, whenever finally
it is done, with a speciality of grace and glory." Thus
explained, the "shall come" of ver. 26 is the abstract
future of divine purpose. In the eternal plan, the
Redeemer was, when He first came to earth, to come
to, for, and from "Zion." And His saving work was
to be on lines, and for issues, for ever characterized
by that fact.
Assuredly the Lord Jesus Christ is, personally, literally,
visibly, and to His people's eternal joy, coming
again; "this same Jesus, in like manner" (Acts i. 11).
And as the ages unfold themselves, assuredly the insight
of the believing Church into the fulness and, if we may
say so, manifoldness of that great prospect grows. But
it still seems to us that a deep and reverent caution is
called for before we attempt to treat of any detail of that
prospect, as regards time, season, mode, as if we quite
knew. Across all lines of interpretation of unfulfilled
prophecy—to name one problem only—it lies as an
unsolved riddle how all the saints of all ages are equally
bidden to watch, as those who "know not what hour
their Lord shall come."
But let us oftener and oftener, however we may differ
in detail, recite to one another the glorious essence of
our hope. "To them that look for Him will He appear
the second time, without sin, unto salvation"; "We
shall meet the Lord in the air"; "So shall we be
ever with the Lord" (Heb. ix. 28, 1 Thess. iv. 17).
We shall never quite understand the chronology and
process of unfulfilled prophecy, till then.
Now briefly and in summary the Apostle concludes
this "Epistle within the Epistle"; this oracle about
Israel. As regards the Gospel, from the point of
view of the evangelization of the world apart
from Judaism, that "gospelling" which was, as it were,
precipitated by the rebellion of Israel, they are enemies,
on account of you, permitted, for your sakes, in a certain
sense, to take a hostile attitude towards the Lord and
His Christ, and to be treated accordingly; but as
regards the election, from the point of view of the divine
choice, they are beloved, on account of the
Fathers; for irrevocableἈμεταμέλητα: literally,
"unrepented-of," and so, "admitting no repentance,"
μεταμελεία, "change of mind."
This is fairly represented by "irrevocable."
are the gifts and the call of our
(τοῦ) God. The "gifts" of unmerited choice,
of a love uncaused by the goodness of its object, but
coming from the depth of the Eternal; the "call"
which not only invites the creature, but effects the end of the invitation;See above, p. 19.
these are things which in their nature
are not variable with the variations of man and of time.
The nation so gifted and called, "not according to
its works," is for ever the unalterable object of the
eternal affection.
May we not extend the reference of a sentence so
absolute in its oracular brevity, and take it to speak the
secret of an indefectible mercy not only to nation, but
to individual? Here as elsewhere we shall need to
remember the rule which bids us, in the heights and
depths of all truth, "go to both extremes." Here as
elsewhere we must be reverently careful how we apply
the oracle, and to whom. But does not the oracle say
this, that where the eternal Love has, without merit,
in divine speciality, settled upon a person, there, not
arbitrarily but by a law, which we cannot explain but
which we can believe, it abides for ever? Still, this is a
reflection to be made only in passing here. The immediate
matter is a chosen people, not a chosen soul; and
so he proceeds:
For as once you obeyed not our
(τῷ) God, but now, in the actual state of things, in
His grace, found mercy, on occasion of their disobedience;
so they too now obeyed not, on occasion of your
mercy, in mysterious connexion with the
compassion which, in your pagan darkness, revealed salvation to you,It is possible to render here: "they did not obey your mercy"; i.e.,
they refused submission to that Gospel in which you found embodied
the mercy of God. But the balance of thoughts and sentences is in
favour of the rendering above.
that they too may find mercy. Yes,
even their "disobedience," in the mystery of grace, was
permitted in order to their ultimate blessing; it was to
be overruled to that self-discovery which lies deep in all
true repentance, and springs up towards life eternal in
the saving "confidence of self-despair." The pagan
(ch. i.) was brought to self-discovery as a rebel against
God indicated in nature; the Jew (ch. ii.) as a rebel
against God revealed in Christ. This latter, if such a
comparison is possible, was the more difficult and as it
were advanced work in the divine plan. It took place,
or rather it is taking and shall take place, later in order,
and nearer to the final and universal triumph of
redemption. For God shut them all
(τοὺς πάντας) up into disobedience, that He might
have mercy upon them all. With a fiat of judicial
permission He let the Gentile develop his resistance to
right into unnatural outrage. He let the Jew develop
his into the desperate rejection of his own glorious
Messiah. But He gave the fiat not as a God who did
not care, a mere supreme Law, a Power sitting unconcerned
above the scene of sin. He let the disease burst
into the plague-spot in order that the guilty victim might
ask at last for His remedy, and might receive it as mere
and most astonishing mercy.
Let us not misuse the passage by reading into it a vain
hope of an indiscriminate actual salvation, at the last,
of all individuals of the race; a predestinarian hope for
which Scripture not only gives no valid evidence, but
utters against it what at least sound like the most
urgent and unequivocal of its warnings. The context
here, as we saw in another connexion just now, has
to do rather with masses than with persons; with
Gentiles and Jews in their common characteristics
rather than taken as individuals. Yet let us draw from
the words, with reverent boldness, a warrant to our
faith wholly to trust the Eternal to be, even in the least
fathomable of His dealings, true to Himself, true to
eternal Love, whatever be the action He shall take.
Here the Apostle's voice, as we seem to listen to it,
pauses for a moment, as he passes into unspoken
thoughts of awe and faith. He has now given out his
prophetic burthen, telling us Gentiles how great has
been the sin of Israel, but how great also is Israel's
privilege, and how sure his coming mercy. And behind
this grand special revelation there still rise on his soul
those yet more majestic forms of truth which he has led
us to look upon before; the Righteousness of God, the
justifying grace, the believing soul's dominion over sin,
the fulness of the Spirit, the coming glory of the saints,
the emancipated Universe, the eternal Love. What remains,
after this mighty process of spiritual discoveries,
but to adore? Listen, as he speaks again, and again
the pen moves upon the paper:
Oh depth of wealth of God's wisdom and
knowledge too! How past all searching are
His judgments, and past all tracking are His
ways! "For who ever knew the Lord's mind?
Or who ever proved His counsellor?"He quotes nearly verbatim from Isai. xl. 13. Cp. Jerem.
xxiii. 18.
Or who ever first gave to Him, and requital shall be
made to the giver (αὐτῷ)? Because out of Him,
and through Him, and unto Him, are all things:Τὰ πάντα: the Greek gives us at once
the items and the sum of the "all."
to Him be the glory, unto the ages. Amen.
Even so, Amen. We also prostrate our being, with
the Apostle, with the Roman saints, with the whole
Church, with all the company of heaven, and give
ourselves to that action of pure worship in which the
creature, sinking lowest in his own eyes, yea out of his
own sight altogether, rises highest into the light of his
Maker. What a moment this is, what an occasion, for
such an approach to Him who is the infinite and personal
Fountain of being, and of redemption! We have been
led from reason to reason, from doctrine to doctrine,
from one link to another in a golden chain of redeeming
mercies. We have had the dream of human merit
expelled from the heart with arrows of light; and the
pure glory of a grace most absolute, most merciful, has
come in upon us in its place. All along we have been
reminded, as it were in fragments and radiant glimpses,
that these doctrines, these truths, are no mere principles
in the abstract, but expressions of the will and of the
love of a Person; that fact full of eternal life, but
all too easily forgotten by the human mind, when its
study of religion is carried away, if but for an hour,
from the foot of the Cross, and of the Throne. But
now all these lines converge upwards to their Origin.
By the Cross they reach the Throne. Through the
Work of the Son—One with the Father, for of the Son
too it is written (Col. i. 16) that "all things are through
Him, and unto Him"—through His Work, and in it,
we come to the Father's Wisdom and Knowledge,
which drew the plan of blessing, and as it were calculated
and furnished all its means. We touch that
point where the creature gravitates to its final rest, the
vision of the Glory of God. We repose, with a profound
and rejoicing silence, before the fact of mysteries
too bright for our vision. After all the revelations
of the Apostle we own with him in faith, with an
acquiescence deep as our being, the fact that there is
no searching, no tracking out, the final secrets of the
ways of God. It becomes to us wonderfully sufficient,
in the light of Christ, to know that "the Lord, the Lord
God, merciful and gracious," is also Sovereign, Ultimate,
His own eternal Satisfaction; that it is infinitely fit and
blessed that, as His Will is the true efficient cause of all
things, and His Presence their secret of continuance,
so He is Himself their final Cause, their End, their
Goal; they fulfil their idea, they find their bliss, in
being altogether His; "all things are unto Him."
"To whom be the glory, unto the ages. Amen."
The advancing "ages," αἰῶνες, the infinite developments
of the eternal life, what do we know about them?
Almost nothing, except the greatest fact of all; that in
them for ever the redeemed creature will glorify not
itself but the Creator; finding an endless and ever
fuller youth, an inexhaustible motive, a rest impossible
to break, a life in which indeed "they cannot die any
more," in surrendering always all its blissful wealth of
being to the will and use of the Blessed One.
In these "ages" we already are, in Christ. We shall
indeed grow for ever with their eternal growth, in Him,
to the glory of the grace of God. But let us not forget
that we are already in their course, as regards that life
of ours which is hid with Christ in God. With that recollection,
let us give ourselves often, and as by the "second
nature" of grace, to adoration. Not necessarily to frequent
long abstractions of our time from the active services
of life; we need only read on into the coming passages
of the Epistle to be reminded that we are hallowed, in
our Lord, to a life of unselfish contact with all the needs
around us. But let that life have for its interior,
for its animation, the spirit of worship. Taking by
faith our all from God, let us inwardly always give
it back to Him, as those who not only own with the
simplest gratitude that He has redeemed us from condemnation
and from sin, but who have seen with
an adoring intuition that we and our all are of the
"all things" which, being "of Him," and "by Him,"
are also wholly "unto Him," by an absolute right, by
the ultimate law of our being, as we are the creatures
of the eternal Love.
CHAPTER XXV
CHRISTIAN CONDUCT THE ISSUE OF CHRISTIAN TRUTH
Romans xii. 1-8
AGAIN we may conjecture a pause, a long pause and
deliberate, in the work of Paul and Tertius.
We have reached the end, generally speaking, of the
dogmatic and so to speak oracular contents of the
Epistle. We have listened to the great argument of
Righteousness, Sanctification, and final Redemption.
We have followed the exposition of the mysterious
unbelief and the destined restoration of the chosen
nation; a theme which we can see, as we look back on
the perspective of the whole Epistle, to have a deep and
suggestive connexion with what went before it; for
the experience of Israel, in relation to the sovereign
will and grace of God, is full of light thrown upon
the experience of the soul. Now in order comes the
bright sequel of this mighty antecedent, this complex
but harmonious mass of spiritual facts and historical
illustrations of the will and ways of the Eternal. The
voice of St Paul is heard again; and he comes full upon
the Lord's message of duty, conduct, character.
As out of some cleft in the face of the rocky hills
rolls the full pure stream born in their depths, and
runs under the sun and sky through green meadows
and beside the thirsty homes of men, so here from
the inmost mysteries of grace comes the message of
all-comprehensive holy duty. The Christian, filled with
the knowledge of an eternal love, is told how not to
dream, but to serve, with all the mercies of God
for his motive.
This is indeed in the manner of the New Testament;
this vital sequence of duty and doctrine; the divine
Truths first, and then and therefore the blessed Life.
To take only St Paul's writings, the Ephesian and
Colossian Epistles are each, practically, bisected by a
line which has eternal facts before it and present
duties, done in the light and power of them, after it.
But the whole Book of God, in its texture all over,
shews the same phenomenon. Someone has remarked
with homely force that in the Bible everywhere, if only
we dig deep enough, we find "Do right" at the bottom.
And we may add that everywhere also we have only to
dig one degree deeper to find that the precept is rooted
in eternal underlying facts of divine truth and love.
Scripture, that is to say, its Lord and Author, does
not give us the terrible gift of a precept isolated and
in a vacuum. It supports its commandments on a base
of cogent motive; and it fills the man who is to keep
them with the power of a living Presence in him;
this we have seen at large in the pages of the Epistle
already traversed. But then, on the other hand, the
Lord of Scripture does not leave the motive and the
Presence without the articulate precept. Rather,
because they are supplied and assured to the believer,
it spreads out all the more amply and minutely a
moral directory before his eyes. It tells him, as a man
who now rests on God and loves Him, and in whom
God dwells, not only in general that he is to "walk
and please God" but in particular "how" to do it
(1 Thess. iv. 1). It takes his life in detail, and applies
the will of the Lord to it. It speaks to him in explicit
terms about moral purity, in the name of the Holy One;
about patience and kindness, in the name of redeeming
Love; about family duties, in the name of the Father and
of the Son; about civic duties, in the name of the King
Eternal. And the whole outline and all the details
thus become to the believer things not only of duty
but of possibility, of hope, of the strong interest given
by the thought that thus and thus the beloved Master
would have us use His divine gift of life. Nothing is
more wonderfully free, from one point of view, than
love and spiritual power. But if the love is indeed
given by God and directed towards Him in Christ, the
man who loves cannot possibly wish to be his own law,
and to spend his soul's power upon his own ideas or
preferences. His joy and his conscious aim must be to
do, in detail, the will of the Lord who is now so dear
to him; and therefore, in detail, to know it.
Let us take deep note of this characteristic of
Scripture, its minuteness of precept, in connexion with
its revelation of spiritual blessing. If in any sense
we are called to be teachers of others, let us carry
out the example. Richard Cecil, wise and pregnant
counsellor in Christ, says that if he had to choose
between preaching precepts and preaching privileges,
he would preach privileges; because the privileges of
the true Gospel tend in their nature to suggest and
stimulate right action, while the precepts taken alone
do not reveal the wealth of divine life and power. But
Cecil, like his great contemporaries of the Evangelical
Revival, constantly and diligently preached as a fact
both privilege and precept; opening with energetic
hands the revealed fulness of Christ, and then and
therefore teaching "them which had believed through
grace" not only the idea of duty, but its details.
Thomas Scott, at Olney, devoted his week-night
"lecture" in the parish church, almost exclusively,
to instructions in daily Christian life. Assuming that
his hearers "knew Christ" in personal reality, he
told them how to be Christians in the home, in the
shop, in the farm; how to be consistent with their
regenerate life as parents, children, servants, masters,
neighbours, subjects. There have been times, perhaps,
when such didactic preaching has been too little used
in the Church. But the men who, under God, in the
last century and the early years of this century, revived
the message of Christ Crucified and Risen as all in all
for our salvation, were eminently diligent in teaching
Christian morals. At the present day, in many
quarters of our Christendom, there is a remarkable
revival of the desire to apply saving truth to common
life, and to keep the Christian always mindful that he
not only has heaven in prospect, but is to travel to it,
every step, in the path of practical and watchful holiness.
This is a sign of divine mercy in the Church. This is
profoundly Scriptural.
Meanwhile, God forbid that such "teaching how to
live" should ever be given, by parent, pastor, schoolmaster,
friend, where it does not first pass through the
teacher's own soul into his own life. Alas for us if we
shew ever so convincingly, and even ever so winningly,
the bond between salvation and holiness, and do not
"walk accurately" (Eph. v. 15) ourselves, in the details
of our walk.
As we actually approach the rules of holiness now
before us, let us once more recollect what we have
seen all along in the Epistle, that holiness is the aim
and issue of the entire Gospel. It is indeed an
"evidence of life," infinitely weighty in the enquiry
whether a man knows God indeed and is on the way to
His heaven. But it is much more; it is the expression
of life; it is the form and action in which life is
intended to come out. In our orchards (to use again
a parable we have used already) the golden apples are
evidences of the tree's species, and of its life. But a
wooden label could tell us the species, and leaves can
tell the life. The fruit is more than label or leaf; it is
the thing for which the tree is there. We who believe
are "chosen" and "ordained" to "bring forth fruit"
(John xv. 16), fruit much and lasting. The eternal
Master walks in His garden for the very purpose of
seeing if the trees bear. And the fruit He looks for is
no visionary thing; it is a life of holy serviceableness
to Him and to our fellows, in His Name.
But now we draw near again and listen:
I exhort you therefore, brethren, by means of
the compassions of God; using as my logic and
my fulcrum this "depth of riches" we have explored;
this wonderful Redemption, with its sovereignty, its
mercy, its acceptance, its holiness, its glory; this overruling
of even sin and rebellion, in Gentile and in Jew,
into occasions for salvation; these compassionate indications
in the nearer and the eternal future of golden
days yet to come;—I exhort you therefore to present, to
give over, your bodies as a sacrifice, an altar-offering,
living, holy, well-pleasing, unto God; for this
(ἥτις) is your
rational devotion (λατρεία). That is to say, it is the
"devotion," the cultus, the worship-service, which is
done by the reason, the mind, the thought and will, of
the man who has found God in Christ. The Greek
term, latreia, is tinged with associations of ritual and
temple; but it is taken here, and qualified by its
adjective, on purpose to be lifted, as in paradox, into
the region of the soul. The robes and incense of the
visible sanctuary are here out of sight; the individual
believer is at once priest, sacrifice, and altar; he immolates
himself to the Lord,—living, yet no longer to
himself.
But observe the pregnant collocation here of "the
body" with "the reason." "Give over your bodies";
not now your spirit, your intelligence, your sentiments,
your aspirations, but "your bodies," to your Lord. Is
this an anti-climax? Have we retreated from the
higher to the lower, in coming from the contemplation
of sovereign grace and the eternal glory to that of the
physical frame of man? No more than the Lord Jesus
did, when He walked down from the hill of Transfiguration
to the crowd below, and to the sins and miseries
it presented. He came from the scene of glory to
serve men in its abiding inner light. And even He, in
the days of His flesh, served men, ordinarily, only through
His sacred body; walking to them with His feet;
touching them with His hands; meeting their eyes with
His; speaking with His lips the words that were spirit
and life. As with Him so with us. It is only through
the body, practically, that we can "serve our generation
by the will of God." Not without the body but through
it the spirit must tell on the embodied spirits around
us. We look, we speak, we hear, we write, we nurse,
we travel, by means of these material servants of the
will, our living limbs. Without the body, where
should we be, as to other men? And therefore, without
the surrender of the body, where are we, as to
other men, from the point of view of the will of God?
So there is a true sense in which, while the surrender
of the will is all important and primary from one point
of view, the surrender of the body, the "giving over" of
the body, to be the implement of God's will in us, is
all-important, is crucial, from another. For many a
Christian life it is the most needful of all things to
remember this; it is the oblivion, or the mere half-recollection,
of this which keeps that life an almost
neutral thing as to witness and service for the Lord.
And do not growThe Greek imperative is present, and indicates a process.
conformed to this world, this æon
(αἰών), the course and state of things
in this scene of sin and death; do not play "the
worldling," assuming a guise (σχῆμα) which in itself is
fleeting, and which for you, members of Christ, must
also be hollow; but grow transfigured, living out a
lasting and genuine change of tone and conduct, in
which the figure (μορφὴ)
is only the congenial expression of the essenceSee Trench, N. T. Synonyms, s.v. μορφή,
for the pregnant difference of the two nouns which are the distinctive
elements here of the two verbs.—by
the renewal of your mind, by using as an implement in the holy process that
divine light which has cleared your intelligence of the
mists of self-love, and taught you to see as with new
eyes "the splendour of the will of God"; so as that
you test, discerning as by a spiritual touchstone, what
is the will of God, the good, and acceptable, and perfect
(will).
Such was to be the method, and such the issue, in
this development of the surrendered life. All is divine
in origin and secret. The eternal "compassions," and
the sovereign work of the renewing and illuminating
Spirit, are supposed before the believer can move one
step. On the other hand the believer, in the full
conscious action of his renewed "intelligence," is to
ponder the call to seek "transfiguration" in a life of
unworldly love, and to attain it in detail by using the
new insight of a regenerated heart. He is to look, with
the eyes of the soul, straight through every mist of self-will
to the now beloved Will of God, as his deliberate
choice, seen to be welcome, seen to be perfect, not because
all is understood, but because the man is joyfully surrendered
to the all-trusted Master. Thus he is to move
along the path of an ever brightening transfiguration;
at once open-eyed, and in the dark; seeing the Lord,
and so with a sure instinct gravitating to His will, yet
content to let the mists of the unknown always hang
over the next step but one.
It is a process, not a crisis; "grow transfigured."
The origin of the process, the liberation of the movement,
is, at least in idea, as critical as possible; "Give
over your bodies." That precept is conveyed, in its
Greek form (παραστῆσαι, aorist), so as to suggest precisely
the thought of a critical surrender. The Roman
Christian, and his English younger brother, are called
here, as they were above (vi. 13, 19), to a transaction
with the Lord quite definite, whether or no the like has
taken place before, or shall be done again. They are
called, as if once for all, to look their Lord in the face,
and to clasp His gifts in their hands, and then to put
themselves and His gifts altogether into His hands,
for perpetual use and service. So, from the side of his
conscious experience, the Christian is called to a
"hallowing of himself" decisive, crucial, instantaneous.
But its outcome is to be a perpetual progression,
a growth, not so much "into" grace as "in" it
(2 Pet. iii. 18), in which the surrender in purpose
becomes a long series of deepening surrenders in habit
and action, and a larger discovery of self, and of the
Lord, and of His will, takes effect in the "shining" of
the transfigured life "more and more, unto the perfect
day" (Prov. iv. 18).
Let us not distort this truth of progression, and its
correlative truth of the Christian's abiding imperfection.
Let us not profane it into an excuse for a life which
at the best is stationary, and must almost certainly be
retrograde, because not intent upon a genuine advance.
Let us not withhold "our bodies" from the sacred
surrender here enjoined upon us, and yet expect to
realize somehow, at some vague date, a "transfiguration,
by the renewal of our mind." We shall be indeed
disappointed of that hope. But let us be at once
stimulated and sobered by the spiritual facts. As we
are "yielded to the Lord," in sober reality, we are in
His mercy "liberated for growth." But the growth is
to come, among other ways, by the diligent application
of "the renewal of our mind" to the details of His
blessed Will.
And it will come, in its true development, only in the
line of holy humbleness. To exalt oneself, even in
the spiritual life, is not to grow; it is to wither. So
the Apostle goes on:
For I say, through the grace that has been
given me, "the grace" of power for apostolic
admonition, to every one who is among you, not to be
high-minded beyond what his mind should be, but to be
minded toward sober-mindedness, as to each God distributed
faith's measure. That is to say, let the individual
never, in himself, forget his brethren, and the
mutual relation of each to all in Christ. Let him
never make himself the centre, or think of his personal
salvation as if it could really be taken alone. The
Lord, the sovereign Giver of faith, the Almighty
Bringer of souls into acceptance and union with Christ
by faith, has given thy faith to thee, and thy brother's
faith to him; and why? That the individual gifts,
the bounty of the One Giver, might join the individuals
not only to the Giver but to one another, as recipients
of riches many yet one, and which are to be spent in
service one yet many. The One Lord distributes the
one faith-power into many hearts, "measuring" it out
to each, so that the many, individually believing in the
One, may not collide and contend, but lovingly cooperate
in a manifold service, the issue of their "like
precious faith" (2 Pet. i. 2) conditioned by the variety
of their lives. So comes in that pregnant parable of
the Body, found only in the writings of St Paul, and in
four only of his Epistles, but so stated there as to take
a place for ever in the foreground of Christian truth.
We have it here in the Romans, and in larger detail in
the contemporary 1 Corinthians (xii. 12-27). We have
it finally and fully in the later Epistolary Group, of the
first Roman Captivity—in Ephesians and Colossians.
There the supreme point in the whole picture, the
glorious Head, and His relation to the Limb and to the
Body, comes out in all its greatness, while in these
earlier passages it appears only incidentally.See 1 Cor. xii. 21: "Can the head say to the feet, etc.?"
But each presentation, the earlier and the later, is alike true to
its purpose. When St Paul wrote to the Asiatics, he
was in presence of errors which beclouded the living
splendour of the Head. When he wrote to the
Romans, he was concerned rather with the interdependence
of the limbs, in the practice of Christian
social life.
We have spoken of "the parable of the Body." But
is the word "parable" adequate? "What if earth be
but the shadow of heaven?" What if our physical
frame, the soul's house and vehicle, be only the
feebler counterpart of that great Organism in which
the exalted Christ unites and animates His saints?
That union is no mere aggregation, no mere alliance
of so many men under the presidency of an invisible
Leader. It is a thing of life. Each to the living
Head, and so each to all His members, we are joined
in that wonderful connexion with a tenacity, and with
a relation, genuine, strong, and close as the eternal life
can make it. The living, breathing man, multifold yet
one, is but the reflection, as it were, of "Christ
Mystical," the true Body with its heavenly Head.
For just as in one body we have many limbs,
but all the limbs have not the same function,
so we, the many, are one body in Christ, in our
personal union with Him, but in detail
(τὸ δὲ καθεῖς),
limbs of one another, coherent and related
not as neighbours merely but as complementary
parts in the whole. But having endowments
(χαρίσματα) —according to the grace that was
given to us—differing, be it prophecy, inspired utterance,
a power from above, yet mysteriously conditioned
(1 Cor. xiv. 32) by the judgment and will of the utterer,
let it follow the proportion of the man's faith, let it be
true to his entire dependence on the revealed Christ,
not left at the mercy of his mere emotions, or as it were
played upon by alien unseen powers; be it active service
(διακονία), let the man be in his
service, wholly given to it, not turning aside to covet
his brother's more mystic gift; be it the teacher, let him
likewise be in his teaching, whole-hearted in his allotted
work, free from ambitious outlooks from it; be
it the exhorter, let him be in his exhortation;
the distributer of his means, for God, with open-handedness;
the superintendent, of Church, or of home, with
earnestness; the pitier, (large and unofficial designation!)
with gladness, doubling his gifts and works of
mercy by the hallowed brightness of a heart set free
from the aims of self, and therefore wholly at the service
of the needing.
This paragraph of eight verses lies here before us,
full all along of that deep characteristic of Gospel life,
surrender for service. The call is to a profoundly
passive inward attitude, with an express view to a
richly active outward usefulness. Possessed, and
knowing it, of the compassions of God, the man is
asked to give himself over to Eternal Love for purposes
of unworldly and unambitious employment in the path
chosen for him, whatever it may be. In this respect
above all others he is to be "not conformed to this
world"—that is, he is to make not himself but his
Lord his pleasure and ambition. "By the renewal of
his mind" he is to view the Will of God from a point
inaccessible to the unregenerate, to the unjustified, to
the man not emancipated in Christ from the tyranny
of sin. He is to see in it his inexhaustible interest,
his line of quest and hope, his ultimate and satisfying
aim; because of the practical identity of the Will and
the infinitely good and blessed Bearer of it. And this
more than surrender of his faculties, this happy and
reposeful consecration of them, is to shew its reality in
one way above all others first; in a humble estimate of
self as compared with brother Christians, and a watchful
willingness to do—not another's work, but the duty
that lies next.
This relative aspect of the life of self-surrender is
the burthen of this great paragraph of duty. In the
following passage we shall find precepts more in detail;
but here we have what is to govern all along the whole
stream of the obedient life. The man rich in Christ is
reverently to remember others, and God's will in them,
and for them. He is to avoid the subtle temptation to
intrude beyond the Master's allotted work for him. He
is to be slow to think, "I am richly qualified, and could
do this thing, and that, and the other, better than the
man who does it now." His chastened spiritual instinct
will rather go to criticize himself, to watch for the
least deficiency in his own doing of the task which at
least to-day is his. He will "give himself wholly to
this," be it more or less attractive to him in itself. For
he works as one who has not to contrive a life as full
of success and influence as he can imagine, but to
accept a life assigned by the Lord who has first given
to him Himself.
The passage itself amply implies that he is to
use actively and honestly his renewed intelligence.
He is to look circumstances and conditions in the
face, remembering that in one way or another
the will of God is expressed in them. He is to
seek to understand not his duties only but his personal
equipments for them, natural as well as spiritual.
But he is to do this as one whose "mind" is "renewed"
by his living contact and union with his
redeeming King, and who has really laid his faculties
at the feet of an absolute Master, who is the Lord of
order as well as of power.
What peace, energy, and dignity comes into a life
which is consciously and deliberately thus surrendered!
The highest range of duties, as man counts highest, is
thus disburthened both of its heavy anxieties and of its
temptations to a ruinous self-importance. And the lowest
range, as man counts lowest, is filled with the quiet
greatness born of the presence and will of God. In the
memoirs of Mme de la Mothe Guyon much is said of
her faithful maid-servant, who was imprisoned along
with her (in a separate chamber) in the Bastille, and
there died, about the year 1700. This pious woman,
deeply taught in the things of the Spirit, and gifted with
an understanding far above the common, appears never
for an hour to have coveted a more ambitious department
than that which God assigned her in His obedience.
"She desired to be what God would have her be, and
to be nothing more, and nothing less. She included
time and place, as well as disposition and action.
She had not a doubt that God, who had given remarkable
powers to Mme Guyon, had called her to
the great work in which she was employed. But
knowing that her beloved mistress could not go alone,
but must constantly have some female attendant, she
had the conviction, equally distinct, that she was called
to be her maid-servant."Upham: Life, etc., of Mme de la M. Guyon, ch. I.
A great part of the surface of Christian society would
be "transfigured" if its depth was more fully penetrated
with that spirit. And it is to that spirit that the
Apostle here definitely calls us, each and every one,
not as with a "counsel of perfection" for the few, but
as the will of God for all who have found out what is
meant by His "compassions," and have caught even a
glimpse of His Will as "good, and acceptable, and
perfect."
"I would not have the restless will
That hurries to and fro,
Seeking for some great thing to do
Or secret thing to know;
I would be treated as a child,
And guided where I go."
CHAPTER XXVI
CHRISTIAN DUTY: DETAILS OF PERSONAL CONDUCT
Romans xii. 9-21
ST PAUL has set before us the life of surrender, of
the "giving-over" of faculty to God, in one great
preliminary aspect. The fair ideal (meant always for a
watchful and hopeful realization) has been held aloft.
It is a life whose motive is the Lord's "compassions";
whose law of freedom is His will; whose inmost aim is,
without envy or interference towards our fellow-servants,
to "finish the work He hath given us to do." Now into
this noble outline are to be poured the details of personal
conduct which, in any and every line and field,
are to make the characteristics of the Christian.
As we listen again, we will again remember that the
words are levelled not at a few but at all who are in
Christ. The beings indicated here are not the chosen
names of a Church Calendar, nor are they the passionless
inhabitants of a Utopia. They are all who, in
Rome of old, in England now, "have peace with God
through our Lord Jesus Christ," "have the Spirit of
God dwelling in them," and are living out this wonderful
but most practical life in the straight line of their
Father's will.
As if he could not heap the golden words too thickly
together, St Paul dictates here with even unusual
abruptness and terseness of expression. He leaves
syntax very much alone; gives us noun and adjective,
and lets them speak for themselves. We will venture
to render as nearly verbatim as possible. The English
will inevitably seem more rough and crude than the
Greek, but the impression given will be truer on the
whole to the original than a fuller rendering would be.
Your (ἡ) love, unaffected.
Abominating the ill, wedded toSee the context of 1 Cor. vi. 17 for an apology for this paraphrase
of κολλώμενοι.
the good. For your brotherly-kindness,
full of mutual home-affection (φιλόστοργοι).
For your honour, your code of precedence, deferring to one another. For your
earnestness,"In business" gives perhaps too special a direction to the thought,
as we use the word "business" now. Not that that special direction
would not have a noble truth in it, rightly understood.
not slothful. For the Spirit, as
regards your possession and use of the divine Indweller, glowing.Literally "boiling," as a caldron on the fire.
For the Lord, bond-serving.This reading, τῷ κυρίῳ,
as against τῷ καιρῷ, appears to be certainly
right.—Our rendering is bold; for undoubtedly "serving the Lord"
meets the Greek grammar more simply. But the datives are hitherto
so clearly datives of relation that we think this also must be so explained.
We can only apologize for the crude compound "bond-serving"
by the wish to represent the full force of δουλεύοντες.
For your hope, that is to say, as to the hope of the
Lord's Return, rejoicing. For your affliction, enduring.
For your prayer, persevering. For the wants of
the saints, for the poverty of fellow-Christians,
communicating; "sharing" (κοινωνοῦντες),
a yet nobler thing than the mere "giving" which may ignore the
sacred fellowship of the provider and the receiver. HospitalityΤὴν φιλοξενίαν:
we may paraphrase the article by "your hospitality,"
or even "Christian hospitality." But this would exaggerate
the impression it represented.—prosecuting
(διώκοντες) as with a studious
cultivation. Bless those who persecuteΔιώκοντας:
it seems certain that this word was suggested by the
διώκοντες just before,
widely different as the references are. But how shall English convey this echo?
you; bless, and do not curse. This was a solemnly appropriate
precept, for the community over which, eight
years later, the first great Persecution was to break
in "blood, and fire, and vapour of smoke." And no
doubt there was abundant present occasion for it, even
while the scene was comparatively tranquil. Every
modern mission-field can illustrate the possibilities of
a "persecution" which may be altogether private, or
which at most may touch only a narrow neighbourhood;
which may never reach the point of technical outrage, yet
may apply a truly "fiery trial" to the faithful convert.
Even in circles of our decorous English society is no
such thing known as the "persecution" of a life "not
conformed to this world," though the assault or torture
may take forms almost invisible and impalpable, except
to the sensibilities of the object of it? For all such
cases, as well as for the confessor on the rack, and the
martyr in the fire, this precept holds expressly; "Bless,
do not curse." In Christ find possible the impossible;
let the resentment of nature die, at His feet, in the
breath of His love.
To rejoice with the rejoicing, and to weep
with the weeping; holy duties of the surrendered
life, too easily forgotten. Alas, there is such a phenomenon,
not altogether rare, as a life whose self-surrender,
in some main aspects, cannot be doubted, but which
utterly fails in sympathy. A certain spiritual exaltation
is allowed actually to harden, or at least to seem to
harden, the consecrated heart; and the man who
perhaps witnesses for God with a prophet's ardour is yet
not one to whom the mourner would go for tears and
prayer in his bereavement, or the child for a perfectly
human smile in its play. But this is not as the Lord
would have it be. If indeed the Christian has "given
his body over," it is that his eyes, and lips, and hands,
may be ready to give loving tokens of fellowship in
sorrow, and (what is less obvious) in gladness too, to
the human hearts around him.
FeelingΦρονοῦντεσ: the word "thinking"
does not quite rightly represent the Greek.
Φρονεῖν is not "to think,"
in the sense of articulate reflection, but to have a mental and moral
disposition, of whatever kind. A popular use of the word "to
feel" fairly represents this.
the same thing towards one another;
animated by a happy identity of sympathy and
brotherhood. Not haughty in feeling,Lit., "not 'minding,' affecting, high things." We paraphrase, to
retain the word "feeling" for φρονεῖν.
but full of lowly sympathies;Lit., "being led away with the humble (things)." Some paraphrase
is necessary here.
accessible, in an unaffected fellowship, to
the poor, the social inferior, the weak and the defeated,
and again to the smallest and homeliest interests of all.
It was the Lord's example; the little child, the wistful
parent, the widow with her mites, the poor fallen
woman of the street, could "lead away" (συναπάγειν)
His blessed sympathies with a touch, while He responded
with an unbroken majesty of gracious power,
but with a kindness for which condescension seems a
word far too cold and distant.
Do not get to be wise in your own opinion; be ready
always to learn; dread the attitude of mind, too possible
even for the man of earnest spiritual purpose, which
assumes that you have nothing to learn and everything to
teach; which makes it easy to criticize and to discredit;
and which can prove an altogether repellent thing to
the observer from outside, who is trying to estimate
the Gospel by its adherent and advocate.
Requiting
no one evil for evil; safe from the spirit
of retaliation, in your surrender to Him "who when
He was reviled, reviled not again; when He suffered,
threatened not." Taking forethought for good in the
sight of all men; not letting habits, talk, expenses,
drift into inconsistency; watching with open and considerate
eyes against what others may fairly think to be
unchristian in you. Here is no counsel of cowardice, no
recommendation of slavery to a public opinion which
may be altogether wrong. It is a precept of loyal jealousy
for the heavenly Master's honour. His servant is to
be nobly indifferent to the world's thought and word
where he is sure that God and the world antagonize.
But he is to be sensitively attentive to the world's
observation where the world, more or less acquainted
with the Christian precept or principle, and more or
less conscious of its truth and right, is watching,
maliciously or it may be wistfully, to see if it governs
the Christian's practice. In view of this the man will
never be content even with the satisfaction of his own
conscience; he will set himself not only to do right,
but to be seen to do it. He will not only be true to a
monetary trust, for example; he will take care that the
proofs of his fidelity shall be open. He will not only
mean well towards others; he will take care that his
manner and bearing, his dealings and intercourse, shall
unmistakably breathe the Christian air.
If possible, as regards your side, (the "your"
is as emphatic as possible in position and
in meaning,) living at peace with all men; yes, even
in pagan and hostile Rome. A peculiarly Christian
principle speaks here. The men who had "given
over their bodies a living sacrifice" might think,
imaginably, that their duty was to court the world's
enmity, to tilt as it were against its spears, as if the
one supreme call was to collide, to fall, and to be
glorified. But this would be fanaticism; and the
Gospel is never fanatical, for it is the law of love. The
surrendered Christian is not, as such, an aspirant for
even a martyr's fame, but the servant of God and man.
If martyrdom crosses his path, it is met as duty; but
he does not court it as éclat. And what is true of
martyrdom is of course true of every lower and milder
form of the conflict of the Church, and of the Christian,
in the world.
Nothing more nobly evidences the divine origin of
the Gospel than this essential precept; "as far as it
lies with you, live peaceably with all men." Such wise
and kind forbearance and neighbourliness would never
have been bound up with the belief of supernatural
powers and hopes, if those powers and hopes had been
the mere issue of human exaltation, of natural enthusiasm.
The supernatural of the Gospel leads to
nothing but rectitude and considerateness, in short to
nothing but love, between man and man. And why?
Because it is indeed divine; it is the message and gift
of the living Son of God, in all the truth and majesty
of His rightfulness. All too early in the history of the
Church "the crown of martyrdom" became an object of
enthusiastic ambition. But that was not because of the
teaching of the Crucified, nor of His suffering Apostles.
Not avenging yourselves, beloved; no, give place
to the wrath; let the angry opponent, the dread
persecutor, have his way, so far as your resistance or
retaliation is concerned. "Beloved, let us love" (1 John
iv. 7); with that strong and conquering love which wins
by suffering. And do not fear lest eternal justice should
go by default; there is One who will take care of that
matter; you may leave it with Him. For it stands written
(Deut. xxxii. 35), "To Me belongs vengeance; I will
recompense, saith the Lord." "But if"
Read, ἀλλ' ἐὰν.
(and again he quotes the older Scriptures, finding in
the Proverbs (xxv. 21, 22) the same oracular authority
as in the Pentateuch), "but if thy enemy is hungry, give
him food; if he is thirsty, give him drink; for so doing
thou wilt heap coals of fire on his head"; taking the best
way to the only "vengeance" which a saint can wish,
namely, your "enemy's" conviction of his wrong, the
rising of a burning shame in his soul, and the melting
of his spirit in the fire of love. Be not thou
conquered by the evil, but conquer, in the good,
the evil.
"In the good"; as if surrounded by it,We are aware that not seldom in the N. T. ἐν represents the
Hebrew ב
(of בכלם)
in its familiar instrumental meaning, without
any definite trace of local imagery. But where the more literal
rendering has an obvious fitness it is best to retain it. Thus we
render ἐν here by "by" not "in."
moving invulnerable, in its magic circle, through "the contradiction
of sinners," "the provoking of all men."
The thought is just that of Psal. xxxi. 18, 19: "How
great is Thy goodness, which Thou hast laid up for them
that fear Thee, which Thou hast wrought for them that
trust in Thee before the sons of men! Thou shalt hide
them in the secret of Thy presence from the pride of
man; Thou shalt keep them secretly in a pavilion from
the strife of tongues." "The good" of this sentence
of St Paul's is no vague and abstract thing; it is "the
gift of God" (vi. 28); it is the life eternal found and
possessed in union with Christ, our Righteousness, our
Sanctification, our Redemption. Practically,Though the τῳ ἀγαθῳ of the Greek is
certainly neuter, by its balance with τὸ κακόν.
it is "not It but He." The Roman convert who should find it
more than possible to meet his enemy with love, to
do him positive good in his need, with a conquering
simplicity of intention, was to do so not so much by
an internal conflict between his "better self" and his
worse, as by the living power of Christ received in his
whole being; by "abiding in Him."
It is so now, and for ever. The open secret of divine
peace and love is what it was; as necessary, as versatile,
as victorious. And its path of victory is as straight and
as sure as of old. And the precept to tread that path,
daily and hourly, if occasion calls, is still as divinely
binding as it ever was for the Christian, if indeed he
has embraced "the mercies of God," and is looking to
his Lord to be evermore "transfigured, by the renewing
of his mind."
As we review this rich field of the flowers, and of
the gold, of holiness, this now completed paragraph
of epigrammatic precepts, some leading and pervading
principles emerge. We see first that the sanctity of the
Gospel is no hushed and cloistered "indifferentism."
It is a thing intended for the open field of human life;
to be lived out "before the sons of men." A strong
positive element is in it. The saint is to "abominate
the evil"; not only to deprecate it, and deplore. He
is to be energetically "in earnest." He is to "glow"
with the Spirit, and to "rejoice" in the hope of glory.
He is to take practical, provident pains to live not only
aright, but manifestly aright, in ways which "all men"
can recognize. Again, his life is to be essentially social.
He is contemplated as one who meets other lives at
every turn, and he is never to forget or neglect his
relation to them. Particularly in the Christian Society,
he is to cherish the "family affection" of the Gospel;
to defer to fellow Christians in a generous humility; to
share his means with the poor among them; to welcome
the strangers of them to his house. He is to think it
a sacred duty to enter into the joys and the sorrows
round him. He is to keep his sympathies open for
despised people, and for little matters. Then again, and
most prominently after all, he is to be ready to suffer,
and to meet suffering with a spirit far greater than
that of only resignation. He is to bless his persecutor;
he is to serve his enemy in ways most practical and
active; he is to conquer him for Christ, in the power of
a divine communion.
Thus, meanwhile, the life, so positive, so active in
its effects, is to be essentially all the while a passive,
bearing, enduring, life. Its strength is to spring not
from the energies of nature, which may or may not be
vigorous in the man, but from an internal surrender to
the claim and government of his Lord. He has "presented
himself to God" (vi. 13); he has "presented his
body, a living sacrifice" (xii. 1). He has recognized,
with a penitent wonder and joy, that he is but the limb
of a Body, and that his Head is the Lord. His thought
is now not for his personal rights, his individual exaltation,
but for the glory of his Head, for the fulfilment of
the thought of his Head, and for the health and wealth
of the Body, as the great vehicle in the world of the
gracious will of the Head.
It is among the chief and deepest of the characteristics
of Christian ethics, this passive root below a rich growth
and harvest of activity. All through the New Testament
we find it expressed or suggested. The first Beatitude
uttered by the Lord (Matt. v. 3) is given to "the poor,
the mendicant (πτωχοί), in spirit."
The last (John xx. 29)
is for the believer, who trusts without seeing. The
radiant portrait of holy Love (1 Cor. xiii.) produces its
effect, full of indescribable life as well as beauty, by the
combination of almost none but negative touches; the
"total abstinence" of the loving soul from impatience,
from envy, from self-display, from self-seeking, from
brooding over wrong, from even the faintest pleasure in
evil, from the tendency to think ill of others. Everywhere
the Gospel bids the Christian take sides against
himself. He is to stand ready to forego even his surest
rights, if only he is hurt by so doing; while on the
other hand he is watchful to respect even the least
obvious rights of others, yea, to consider their weaknesses,
and their prejudices, to the furthest just limit.
He is "not to resist evil"; in the sense of never fighting
for self as self. He is rather to "suffer himself to be
defrauded" (1 Cor. vi. 7) than to bring discredit on his
Lord in however due a course of law. The straits and
humiliations of his earthly lot, if such things are the will
of God for him, are not to be materials for his discontent,
or occasions for his envy, or for his secular ambition.
They are to be his opportunities for inward triumph;
the theme of a "song of the Lord," in which he is to
sing of strength perfected in weakness, of a power not
his own "overshadowing" him (2 Cor. xii. 9, 10).
Such is the passivity of the saints, deep beneath
their serviceable activity. The two are in vital connexion.
The root is not the accident but the proper
antecedent of the product. For the secret and unostentatious
surrender of the will, in its Christian sense,
is no mere evacuation, leaving the house swept but
empty; it is the reception of the Lord of life into the
open castle of the City of Mansoul. It is the placing
in His hands of all that the walls contain. And placed
in His hands, the castle, and the city, will shew at
once, and continually more and more, that not only
order but life has taken possession. The surrender of
the Moslem is, in its theory, a mere submission. The
surrender of the Gospel is a reception also; and thus its
nature is to come out in "the fruit of the Spirit."
Once more, let us not forget that the Apostle lays
his main emphasis here rather on being than on doing.
Nothing is said of great spiritual enterprises; everything
has to do with the personal conduct of the men
who, if such enterprises are done, must do them. This
too is characteristic of the New Testament. Very
rarely do the Apostles say anything about their converts'
duty, for instance, to carry the message of Christ
around them in evangelistic aggression. Such aggression
was assuredly attempted, and in numberless ways,
by the primeval Christians, from those who were
"scattered abroad" (Acts viii. 4) after the death of
Stephen onwards. The Philippians (ii. 15, 16) "shone
as lights in the world, holding out the word of life."
The Ephesians (v. 13) penetrated the surrounding darkness,
being themselves "light in the Lord." The
Thessalonians (1, i. 8) made their witness felt "in Macedonia,
and Achaia, and in every place." The Romans,
encouraged by St Paul's presence and sufferings, "were
bold to speak the word without fear" (Phil. i. 14).
St John (3 Ep. 7) alludes to missionaries who, "for the
Name's sake, went forth, taking nothing of the Gentiles."
Yet is it not plain that, when the Apostles thought
of the life and zeal of their converts, their first care, by
far, was that they should be wholly conformed to the
will of God in personal and social matters? This
was the indispensable condition to their being, as a
community, what they must be if they were to prove
true witnesses and propagandists for their Lord.
God forbid that we should draw from this phenomenon
one inference, however faint, to thwart or discredit
the missionary zeal now in our day rising like a fresh,
pure tide in the believing Church. May our Master
continually animate His servants in the Church at
home to seek the lost around them, to recall the lapsed
with the voice of truth and love. May He multiply a
hundredfold the scattered host of His "witnesses in
the uttermost parts of the earth," through the dwelling-places
of those eight hundred millions who are still
pagan, not to speak of the lesser yet vast multitudes of
misbelievers, Mahometan and Jewish. But neither in
missionary enterprise, nor in any sort of activity for
God and man, is this deep suggestion of the Epistles
to be forgotten. What the Christian does is even more
important than what he says. What he is is the all-important
antecedent to what he does. He is "nothing
yet as he ought to" be if, amidst even innumerable
efforts and aggressions, he has not "presented his body
a living sacrifice" for his Lord's purposes, not his own;
if he has not learnt, in his Lord, an unaffected love, a
holy family affection, a sympathy with griefs and joys
around him, a humble esteem of himself, and the
blessed art of giving way to wrath, and of overcoming
evil in "the good" of the presence of the Lord.
CHAPTER XXVII
CHRISTIAN DUTY; IN CIVIL LIFE AND OTHERWISE: LOVE
Romans xiii. 1-10
A NEW topic now emerges, distinct, yet in close
and natural connexion. We have been listening
to precepts for personal and social life, all rooted in
that inmost characteristic of Christian morals, self-surrender,
self-submission to God. Loyalty to others
in the Lord has been the theme. In the circles of
home, of friendship, of the Church; in the open field
of intercourse with men in general, whose personal
enmity or religious persecution was so likely to cross
the path—in all these regions the Christian was to act
on the principle of supernatural submission, as the sure
way to spiritual victory.
The same principle is now carried into his relations
with the State. As a Christian, he does not cease to be
a citizen, to be a subject. His deliverance from the
death-sentence of the Law of God only binds him, in
his Lord's name, to a loyal fidelity to human statute;
limited only by the case where such statute may really
contradict the supreme divine law. The disciple of
Christ, as such, while his whole being has received an
emancipation unknown elsewhere, is to be the faithful
subject of the Emperor, the orderly inhabitant of his
quarter in the City, the punctual taxpayer, the ready
giver of not a servile yet a genuine deference to the
representatives and ministers of human authority.
This is he to do for reasons both general and
special. In general, it is his Christian duty rather to
submit than otherwise, where conscience toward God
is not in the question. Not weakly, but meekly, he is
to yield rather than resist in all his intercourse, purely
personal, with men; and therefore with the officials
of order, as men. But in particular also, he is to
understand that civil order is not only a desirable thing,
but divine; it is the will of God for the social Race
made in His Image. In the abstract, this is absolutely
so; civil order is a God-given law, as truly as the
most explicit precepts of the Decalogue, in whose
Second Table it is so plainly implied all along. And
in the concrete, the civil order under which the
Christian finds himself to be is to be regarded as a
real instance of this great principle. It is quite sure
to be imperfect, because it is necessarily mediated
through human minds and wills. Very possibly it
may be gravely distorted, into a system seriously
oppressive of the individual life. As a fact, the supreme
magistrate for the Roman Christians in the year 58
was a dissolute young man, intoxicated by the discovery
that he might do almost entirely as he pleased with
the lives around him; by no defect however in the
idea and purpose of Roman law, but by fault of the
degenerate world of the day. Yet civil authority, even
with a Nero at its head, was still in principle a thing
divine. And the Christian's attitude to it was to be
always that of a willingness, a purpose, to obey; an
absence of the resistance whose motive lies in self-assertion.
Most assuredly his attitude was not to be
that of the revolutionist, who looks upon the State
as a sort of belligerent power, against which he, alone
or in company, openly or in the dark, is free to
carry on a campaign. Under even heavy pressure the
Christian is still to remember that civil government is,
in its principle, "of God." He is to reverence the
Institution in its idea. He is to regard its actual
officers, whatever their personal faults, as so far
dignified by the Institution that their governing work
is to be considered always first in the light of the
Institution. The most imperfect, even the most erring,
administration of civil order is still a thing to be
respected before it is criticized. In its principle, it is a
"terror not to good works, but to the evil."
It hardly needs elaborate remark to shew that such a
precept, little as it may accord with many popular political
cries of our time, means anything in the Christian but
a political servility, or an indifference on his part to
political wrong in the actual course of government.
The religion which invites every man to stand face to
face with God in Christ, to go straight to the Eternal,
knowing no intermediary but His Son, and no ultimate
authority but His Scripture, for the certainties of the soul,
for peace of conscience, for dominion over evil in himself
and in the world, and for more than deliverance from
the fear of death, is no friend to the tyrants of mankind.
We have seen how, by enthroning Christ in the heart,
it inculcates a noble inward submissiveness. But from
another point of view it equally, and mightily, develops
the noblest sort of individualism. It lifts man to a
sublime independence of his surroundings, by joining
him direct to God in Christ, by making him the Friend
of God. No wonder then that, in the course of history,
Christianity, that is to say the Christianity of the
Apostles, of the Scriptures, has been the invincible
ally of personal conscience and political liberty, the
liberty which is the opposite alike of licence and of
tyranny. It is Christianity which has taught men
calmly to die, in face of a persecuting Empire, or of
whatever other giant human force, rather than do
wrong at its bidding. It is Christianity which has
lifted innumerable souls to stand upright in solitary
protest for truth and against falsehood, when every
form of governmental authority has been against them.
It was the student of St Paul who, alone before the
great Diet, uttering no denunciation, temperate and
respectful in his whole bearing, was yet found immovable
by Pope and Emperor: "I can not otherwise;
so help me God." We may be sure that if the world
shuts the Bible it will only the sooner revert, under
whatever type of government, to essential despotism,
whether it be the despotism of the master, or that of
the man. The "individual" indeed will "wither."
The Autocrat will find no purely independent spirits
in his path. And what then shall call itself, however
loudly, "Liberty, Fraternity, Equality," will be found at
last, where the Bible is unknown, to be the remorseless
despot of the personality, and of the home.
It is Christianity which has peacefully and securely
freed the slave, and has restored woman to her true
place by the side of man. But then, Christianity has
done all this in a way of its own. It has never
flattered the oppressed, nor inflamed them. It has
told impartial truth to them, and to their oppressors.
One of the least hopeful phenomena of present political
life is the adulation (it cannot be called by another
name) too frequently offered to the working classes by
their leaders, or by those who ask their suffrages. A
flattery as gross as any ever accepted by complacent
monarchs is almost all that is now heard about themselves
by the new master-section of the State. This
is not Christianity, but its parody. The Gospel tells
uncompromising truth to the rich, but also to the poor.
Even in the presence of pagan slavery it laid the law
of duty on the slave, as well as on his master. It
bade the slave consider his obligations rather than
his rights; while it said the same, precisely, and more
at length, and more urgently, to his lord. So it at
once avoided revolution and sowed the living seed
of immense, and salutary, and ever-developing reforms.
The doctrine of spiritual equality, and spiritual connexion,
secured in Christ, came into the world as the
guarantee for the whole social and political system of
the truest ultimate political liberty. For it equally
chastened and developed the individual, in relation to
the life around him.
Serious questions for practical casuistry may be raised,
of course, from this passage. Is resistance to a cruel
despotism never permissible to the Christian? In a
time of revolution, when power wrestles with power,
which power is the Christian to regard as "ordained
of God"? It may be sufficient to reply to the
former question that, almost self-evidently, the absolute
principles of a passage like this take for granted
some balance and modification by concurrent principles.
Read without any such reserve, St Paul leaves
here no alternative, under any circumstances, to submission.
But he certainly did not mean to say that the
Christian must submit to an imperial order to sacrifice
to the Roman gods. It seems to follow that the letter
of the precept does not pronounce it inconceivable that
a Christian, under circumstances which leave his action
unselfish, truthful, the issue not of impatience but of
conviction, might be justified in positive resistance;
such resistance as was offered to oppression by the
Huguenots of the Cevennes, and by the Alpine Vaudois
before them. But history adds its witness to the
warnings of St Paul, and of his Master, that almost
inevitably it goes ill in the highest respects with
saints who "take the sword," and that the purest
victories for freedom are won by those who "endure
grief, suffering wrongfully," while they witness for right
and Christ before their oppressors. The Protestant
pastors of Southern France won a nobler victory than
any won by Jean Cavalier in the field of battle when, at
the risk of their lives, they met in the woods to draw up
a solemn document of loyalty to Louis XV.; informing
him that their injunction to their flocks always was,
and always would be, "Fear God, honour the King."
Meanwhile Godet, in some admirable notes on this
passage, remarks that it leaves the Christian not only
not bound to aid an oppressive government by active
co-operation, but amply free to witness aloud against its
wrong; and that his "submissive but firm conduct is
itself a homage to the inviolability of authority. Experience
proves that it is in this way all tyrannies have
been morally broken, and all true progress in the history
of humanity effected."
What the servant of God should do with his
allegiance at a revolutionary crisis is a grave question
for any whom it may unhappily concern. Thomas
Scott, in a useful note on our passage, remarks that
"perhaps nothing involves greater difficulties, in very
many instances, than to ascertain to whom the authority
justly belongs.... Submission in all things lawful to 'the
existing authorities' is our duty at all times and in all
cases; though in civil convulsions ... there may
frequently be a difficulty in determining which are 'the
existing authorities.'" In such cases "the Christian,"
says Godet, "will submit to the new power as soon as
the resistance of the old shall have ceased. In the
actual state of matters he will recognize the manifestation
of God's will, and will take no part in any
reactionary plot."
As regards the problem of forms or types of government,
it seems clear that the Apostle lays no bond of
conscience on the Christian. Both in the Old Testament
and in the New a just monarchy appears to be the ideal.
But our Epistle says that "there is no power but of
God." In St Paul's time the Roman Empire was in
theory, as much as ever, a republic, and in fact a personal
monarchy. In this question, as in so many others
of the outward framework of human life, the Gospel is
liberal in its applications, while it is, in the noblest
sense, conservative in principle.
We close our preparatory comments, and proceed to
the text, with the general recollection that in this brief
paragraph we see and touch as it were the corner-stone
of civil order. One side of the angle is the indefeasible
duty, for the Christian citizen, of reverence for law, of
remembrance of the religious aspect of even secular
government. The other side is the memento to the
ruler, to the authority, that God throws His shield over
the claims of the State only because authority was
instituted not for selfish but for social ends, so that it
belies itself if it is not used for the good of man.
Let every soul, every person, who has "presented
his body a living sacrifice," be submissive
to the ruling authorities; manifestly, from the context,
the authorities of the State. For there is no authority except by God;Read ὑπὸ not ἀπό.
but the existing authorities have been
appointed by God. That is, the imperium of the King
Eternal is absolutely reserved; an authority not sanctioned
by Him is nothing; man is no independent source
of power and law. But then, it has pleased God so to
order human life and history, that His will in this matter
is expressed, from time to time, in and through the actual
constitution of the state. So that the opponent
of the authority withstands the ordinance of God,
not merely that of man; but the withstanders will on
themselves bring sentence of judgment; not only the
human crime of treason, but the charge, in the court of
God, of rebellion against His will. This is founded on
the idea of law and order, which means by its nature
the restraint of public mischief and the promotion, or
at least protection, of public good. "Authority," even
under its worst distortions, still so far keeps that aim
that no human civic power, as a fact, punishes good
as good, and rewards evil as evil; and thus for the
common run of lives the worst settled authority is
infinitely better than real anarchy. For rulers,
as a class (οἱ ἄρχοντες), are not a terror to the
good deed, but to the evil; such is always the fact in
principle, and such, taking human life as a whole, is the
tendency, even at the worst, in practice, where the
authority in any degree deserves its name. Now do you
wish not to be afraid of the authority? do what is good,
and you shall have praise from it; the "praise," at least,
of being unmolested and protected. For God's
agent (διάκονος) he is to you, for what is good;
through his function God, in providence, carries out
His purposes of order. But if you are doing what is evil,
be afraid; for not for nothing (εἰκῆ), not without warrant,
nor without purpose, does he wear his (τὴν) sword,
symbol of the ultimate power of life and death; for
God's agent is he, an avenger, unto wrath, for
the practiser of the evil. Wherefore, because
God is in the matter, it is a necessity to submit, not only
because of the wrath, the ruler's wrath in the case
supposed, but because of the conscience too; because you
know, as a Christian, that God speaks through the state
and through its minister, and that anarchy is therefore
disloyalty to Him. For on this account too you
pay taxes; the same commission which gives
the state the right to restrain and punish gives it the
right to demand subsidy from its members, in order to
its operations; for God's ministers are they,
His λειτουργοί,
a word so frequently used in sacerdotal connexions that
it well may suggest them here; as if the civil ruler
were, in his province, an almost religious instrument of
divine order; God's ministers, to this very end persevering
in their task; working on in the toils of administration,
for the execution, consciously or not, of the divine plan
of social peace.
This is a noble point of view, alike for governed
and for governors, from which to consider the prosaic
problems and necessities of public finance. Thus
understood, the tax is paid not with a cold and compulsory
assent to a mechanical exaction, but as an act
in the line of the plan of God. And the tax is devised
and demanded, not merely as an expedient to adjust a
budget, but as a thing which God's law can sanction,
in the interests of God's social plan.
Discharge
therefore to all men, to all men in authority,
primarily, but not only, their dues; the tax, to whom
you owe the tax, on person and property; the toll, to
whom the toll, on merchandise; the fear, to whom the
fear, as to the ordained punisher of wrong; the honour,
to whom the honour, as to the rightful claimant in
general of loyal deference.
Such were the political principles of the new Faith, of
the mysterious Society, which was so soon to perplex
the Roman statesman, as well as to supply convenient
victims to the Roman despot. A Nero was shortly to
burn Christians in his gardens as a substitute for lamps,
on the charge that they were guilty of secret and
horrible orgies. Later, a Trajan, grave and anxious,
was to order their execution as members of a secret
community dangerous to imperial order. But here is
a private missive sent to this people by their leader,
reminding them of their principles, and prescribing
their line of action. He puts them in immediate spiritual
contact, every man and woman of them, with the Eternal
Sovereign, and so he inspires them with the strongest
possible independence, as regards "the fear of man."
He bids them know, for a certainty, that the Almighty
One regards them, each and all, as accepted in His
Beloved, and fills them with His great Presence, and
promises them a coming heaven from which no earthly
power or terror can for a moment shut them out. But
in the same message, and in the same Name, he commands
them to pay their taxes to the pagan State, and
to do so, not with the contemptuous indifference of the
fanatic, who thinks that human life in its temporal
order is God-forsaken, but in the spirit of cordial loyalty
and ungrudging deference, as to an authority representing
in its sphere none other than their Lord and
Father.
It has been suggested that the first serious antagonism
of the state towards these mysterious Christians was
occasioned by the inevitable interference of the claims
of Christ with the stern and rigid order of the Roman
Family. A power which could assert the right, the duty,
of a son to reject his father's religious worship was taken
to be a power which meant the destruction of all social
order as such; a nihilism indeed. This was a tremendous
misunderstanding to encounter. How was it
to be met? Not by tumultuary resistance, not even by
passionate protests and invectives. The answer was
to be that of love, practical and loyal, to God and man,
in life and, when occasion came, in death."To believe, to suffer, and to love, was the primitive taste"
(Milner).
Upon the line of that path lay at least the possibility of martyrdom,
with its lions and its funeral piles; but the end of
it was the peaceful vindication of the glory of God and
of the Name of Jesus, and the achievement of the best
security for the liberties of man.
Congenially then the Apostle closes these precepts of
civil order with the universal command to love. Owe
nothing to anyone; avoid absolutely the social
disloyalty of debt; pay every creditor in full,
with watchful care; except the loving one another.
Love is to be a perpetual and inexhaustible debt, not
as if repudiated or neglected, but as always due and
always paying; a debt, not as a forgotten account is
owing to the seller, but as interest on capital is continuously
owing to the lender. And this, not only because
of the fair beauty of love, but because of the legal duty
of it: For the lover of his fellow
(τὸν ἕτερον, "the other
man," be he who he may, with whom the man has to do)
has fulfilled the law, the law of the Second Table, the code
of man's duty to man, which is in question here. He
"has fulfilled" it; as having at once entered, in principle
and will, into its whole requirement; so that all he now
needs is not a better attitude but developed information.
For the, "Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou
shalt not murder, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness,This clause is perhaps to be omitted here.
Thou shalt not covet," and
whatever other commandment there is, all is summed
up in this utterance, "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as
thyself" (Lev. xix. 18). Love works the neighbour
no ill; therefore love is the Law's fulfilment.
Is it a mere negative precept then? Is the life of
love to be only an abstinence from doing harm, which
may shun thefts, but may also shun personal sacrifices?
Is it a cold and inoperative "harmlessness," which
leaves all things as they are? We see the answer
in part in those words, "as thyself." Man "loves
himself," (in the sense of nature, not of sin,) with a love
which instinctively avoids indeed what is repulsive and
noxious, but does so because it positively likes and desires
the opposite. The man who "loves his neighbour
as himself" will be as considerate of his neighbour's
feelings as of his own, in respect of abstinence from
injury and annoyance. But he will be more; he will
be actively desirous of his neighbour's good. "Working
him no evil," he will reckon it as much "evil" to be
indifferent to his positive true interests as he would
reckon it unnatural to be apathetic about his own.
"Working him no evil," as one who "loves him as
himself," he will care, and seek, to work him good.
"Love," says Leibnitz, in reference to the great
controversy on Pure Love agitated by Fénelon and
Bossuet, "is that which finds its felicity in another'sngood."See Card. Bausset, Vie de Fénelon, ii. 375. Leibnitz, in a letter
to T. Burnet, quotes the words from a work of his own; Amare est
felicitate alterius delectari.
Such an agent can never terminate its action
in a mere cautious abstinence from wrong.
The true divine commentary on this brief paragraph
is the nearly contemporary passage written by the same
author, 1 Cor. xiii. There, as we saw above, the
description of the sacred thing, love, like that of the
heavenly state in the Revelation, is given largely in
negatives. Yet who fails to feel the wonderful positive of
the effect? That is no merely negative innocence which
is greater than mysteries, and knowledge, and the use of
an angel tongue; greater than self-inflicted poverty, and
the endurance of the martyr's flame; "chief grace below,
and all in all above." Its blessed negatives are but a
form of unselfish action. It forgets itself, and remembers
others, and refrains from the least needless wounding
of them, not because it wants merely "to live and let
live," but because it loves them, finding its felicity in
their good.
It has been said that "love is holiness, spelt short."
Thoughtfully interpreted and applied, the saying is
true. The holy man in human life is the man who,
with the Scriptures open before him as his informant
and his guide, while the Lord Christ dwells in his
heart by faith as his Reason and his Power, forgets
himself in a work for others which is kept at once
gentle, wise, and persistent to the end, by the love
which, whatever else it does, knows how to sympathize
and to serve.
CHAPTER XXVIII
CHRISTIAN DUTY IN THE LIGHT OF THE LORD'S RETURN
AND IN THE POWER OF HIS PRESENCE
Romans xiii. 11-14
THE great teacher has led us long upon the path
of duty, in its patient details, all summed up in
the duty and joy of love. We have heard him explaining
to his disciples how to live as members together of
the Body of Christ, and as members also of human
society at large, and as citizens of the state. We have
been busy latterly with thoughts of taxes, and tolls,
and private debts, and the obligation of scrupulous
rightfulness in all such things. Everything has had
relation to the seen and the temporal. The teaching
has not strayed into a land of dreams, nor into a desert
and a cell; it has had at least as much to do with the
market, and the shop, and the secular official, as if the
writer had been a moralist whose horizon was altogether
of this life, and who for the future was "without hope."
Yet all the while the teacher and the taught were
penetrated and vivified by a certainty of the future
perfectly supernatural, and commanding the wonder
and glad response of their whole being. They carried
about with them the promise of their Risen Master
that He would personally return again in heavenly
glory, to their infinite joy, gathering them for ever
around Him in immortality, bringing heaven with Him,
and transfiguring them into His own celestial Image.
Across all possible complications and obstacles of the
human world around them they beheld "that blissful
hope" (Tit. ii. 13). The smoke of Rome could not
becloud it, nor her noise drown the music of its promise,
nor her splendour of possessions make its golden vista
less beautiful and less entrancing to their souls.Omitte mirari beatæ
Fumum et opes strepitumque Romæ. (Horace.)
Their Lord, once crucified, but now alive for evermore, was
greater than the world; greater in His calm triumphant
authority over man and nature, greater in the wonder
and joy of Himself, His Person and His Salvation. It
was enough that He had said He would come again,
and that it would be to their eternal happiness. He had
promised; therefore it would surely be.
How the promise would take place, and when, was
a secondary question. Some things were revealed and
certain, as to the manner; "This same Jesus, in like
manner as ye saw Him going into heaven" (Acts i. 11).
But vastly more was unrevealed and even unconjectured.
As to the time, His words had left them, as they still
leave us, suspended in a reverent sense of mystery,
between intimations which seem almost equally to
promise both speed and delay. "Watch therefore, for
ye know not when the Master of the house cometh"
(Mark xiii. 35); "After a long time the Lord of the
servants cometh, and reckoneth with them" (Matt.
xxv. 19). The Apostle himself follows his Redeemer's
example in the matter. Here and there he seems to
indicate an Advent at the doors, as when he speaks of
"us who are alive and remain" (1 Thess. iv. 15). But
again, in this very Epistle, in his discourse on the
future of Israel, he appears to contemplate great
developments of time and event yet to come; and
very definitely, for his own part, in many places, he
records his expectation of death, not of a death-less
transfiguration at the Coming. Many at least among
his converts looked with an eagerness which was
sometimes restless and unwholesome, as at Thessalonica,
for the coming King; and it may have been
thus with some of the Roman saints. But St Paul at
once warned the Thessalonians of their mistake; and
certainly this Epistle suggests no such upheaval of
expectation at Rome.
Our work in these pages is not to discuss "the times
and the seasons" which now, as much as then, lie in
the Father's "power" (Acts i. 7). It is rather to call
attention to the fact that in all ages of the Church this
mysterious but definite Promise has, with a silent
force, made itself as it were present and contemporary
to the believing and watching soul. How at last it shall
be seen that "I come quickly" and, "The day of Christ
is not at hand" (Rev. xxii. 12, 20, 2 Thess. ii. 2),
were both divinely and harmoniously truthful, it does not
yet fully appear. But it is certain that both are so; and
that in every generation of the now "long time" "the
Hope," as if it were at the doors indeed, has been calculated
for mighty effects on the Christian's will and work.
So we come to this great Advent oracle, to read it
for our own age. Now first let us remember its wonderful
illustration of that phenomenon which we have
remarked already, the concurrence in Christianity of a
faith full of eternity, with a life full of common duty.
Here is a community of men called to live under an
almost opened heaven; almost to see, as they look
around them, the descending Lord of glory coming
to bring in the eternal day, making Himself present
in this visible scene "with the voice of the archangel
and the trump of God," waking His buried saints from
the dust, calling the living and the risen to meet Him
in the air. How can they adjust such an expectation
to the demands of "the daily round"? Will they not
fly from the City to the solitude, to the hill-tops and
forests of the Apennines, to wait with awful joy the
great lightning-flash of glory? Not so. They somehow,
while "looking for the Saviour from the heavens"
(Phil. iii. 20), attend to their service and their business,
pay their debts and their taxes, offer sympathy to
their neighbours in their human sadnesses and joys,
and yield honest loyalty to the magistrate and the
Prince. They are the most stable of all elements in
the civic life of the hour, if "the powers that be"
would but understand them; while yet, all the while,
they are the only people in the City whose home, consciously,
is the eternal heavens. What can explain
the paradox? Nothing but the Fact, the Person, the
Character of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is not an
enthusiasm, however powerful, which governs them,
but a Person. And He is at once the Lord of immortality
and the Ruler of every detail of His servant's
life. He is no author of fanaticism, but the divine-human
King of truth and order. To know Him is to
find the secret alike of a life eternal and of a patient
faithfulness in the life that now is.
What was true of Him is true for evermore. His
servant now, in this restless close of the nineteenth age,
is to find in Him this wonderful double secret still.
He is to be, in Christ, by the very nature of his faith,
the most practical and the most willing of the servants
of his fellow-men, in their mortal as well as immortal
interests; while also disengaged internally from a
bondage to the seen and temporal by his mysterious
union with the Son of God, and by his firm expectation
of His Return.
And this, this law of love
and duty, let us remember, let us follow,
knowing the season, the occasion, the growing crisis
(καιρόν); that it is already the hour for our awaking out
of sleep, the sleep of moral inattention, as if the eternal
Master were not near. For nearer now is our salvation, in
that last glorious sense of the word "salvation" which
means the immortal issue of the whole saving process,
nearer now than when we believed, and so by faith entered
on our union with the Saviour. (See how he delights to
associate himself with his disciples in the blessed unity of
remembered conversion; "when we believed.")
The night, with its murky silence, its "poring
dark," the night of trial, of temptation, of the absence
of our Christ, is far spent,Προέκοψε: literally,
"made progress." The aorist may refer to the
event of the First Advent, when our eternal Sun was heralded by
Himself the Morning Star. But perhaps it is best represented by the
English perfect, as in the A.V. and above.
but the day has drawn near; it has been a long night, but that means a near
dawn; the everlasting sunrise of the longed-for Parousia,
with its glory, gladness, and unveiling. Let us put off
therefore, as if they were a foul and entangling night-robe,
the works of the darkness, the habits and acts of the moral
night, things which we can throw off in the Name of
Christ; but let us put on the weapons of the light, arming
ourselves, for defence, and for holy aggression on the
realm of evil, with faith, love, and the heavenly hope.
So to the Thessalonians five years before (1, v. 8), and
to the Ephesians four years later (vi. 11-17), he wrote of
the holy Panoply, rapidly sketching it in the one place,
giving the rich finished picture in the other; suggesting
to the saints always the thought of a warfare first and
mainly defensive, and then aggressive with the drawn
sword, and indicating as their true armour not their
reason, their emotions, or their will, taken in themselves,
but the eternal facts of their revealed salvation in Christ,
grasped and used by faith.
As by day, for it is
already dawn, in the Lord, let us walkΠεριπατήσωμεν:
perhaps the aorist suggests a new outset in the "walk."
decorously, becomingly, as we are the hallowed soldiers of our
Leader; let our life not only be right in fact; let it
shew to all men the open "decorum" of truth, purity,
peace, and love; not in revels and drunken bouts;
not in chamberings, the sins of the secret couch, and
profligacies, not—to name evils which cling often to the
otherwise reputable Christian—in strife and envy, things
which are pollutions, in the sight of the Holy One, as real
as lust itself. No; put on, clothe and arm yourselves
with, the Lord Jesus Christ, Himself the living sum and
true meaning of all that can arm the soul; and for the
flesh take no forethought lust-ward. As if, in euphemism,
he would say, "Take all possible forethought against the
life of self (σάρξ), with its lustful, self-wilful gravitation
away from God. And let that forethought be, to arm
yourselves, as if never armed before, with Christ."
How solemnly explicit he is, how plain-spoken, about
the temptations of the Roman Christian's life! The men
who were capable of the appeals and revelations of the
first eight chapters yet needed to be told not to drink to
intoxication, not to go near the house of ill-fame, not to
quarrel, not to grudge. But every modern missionary
in heathendom will tell us that the like stern plainness
is needed now among the new-converted faithful. And
is it not needed among those who have professed the
Pauline faith much longer, in the congregations of our
older Christendom?
It remains for our time, as truly as ever, a fact of
religious life—this necessity to press it home upon the
religious, as the religious, that they are called to a
practical and detailed holiness; and that they are never
to ignore the possibility of even the worst falls. So
mysteriously can the subtle "flesh," in the believing
receiver of the Gospel, becloud or distort the holy import
of the thing received. So fatally easy is it "to corrupt
the best into the worst," using the very depth and richness
of spiritual truth as if it could be a substitute for
patient practice, instead of its mighty stimulus.
But glorious is the method illustrated here for triumphant
resistance to that tendency. What is it? It is not
to retreat from spiritual principle upon a cold naturalistic
programme of activity and probity. It is to penetrate
through the spiritual principle to the Crucified and
Living Lord who is its heart and power; it is to bury self
in Him, and to arm the will with Him. It is to look for
Him as Coming, but also, and yet more urgently, to use
Him as Present. In the great Roman Epic, on the verge
of the decisive conflict, the goddess-mother laid the invulnerable
panoply at the feet of her Æneas; and the
astonished Champion straightway, first pondering every
part of the heaven-sent armament, then "put it on,"
and was prepared. As it were at our feet is laid the
Lord Jesus Christ, in all He is, in all He has done, in
His indissoluble union with us in it all, as we are one
with Him by the Holy Ghost. It is for us to see in
Him our power and victory, and to "put Him on," in a
personal act which, while all by grace, is yet in itself
our own. And how is this done? It is by the "committal
of the keeping of our souls unto Him" (1 Pet.
iv. 19), not vaguely, but definitely and with purpose, in
view of each and every temptation. It is by "living
our life in the flesh by faith in the Son of God" (Gal.
ii. 20); that is to say, in effect, by perpetually making
use of the Crucified and Living Saviour, One with us
by the Holy Spirit; by using Him as our living
Deliverer, our Peace and Power, amidst all that the
dark hosts of evil can do against us.
Oh wonderful and all-adequate secret; "Christ,
which is the Secret of God" (Col. ii. 2)! Oh divine
simplicity of its depth;
"Heaven's easy, artless, unencumber'd plan"!
Not that its "ease" means our indolence. No; if
we would indeed "arm ourselves with the Lord Jesus
Christ" we must awake and be astir to "know whom
we have trusted" (2 Tim. i. 12). We must explore
His Word about Himself. We must ponder it, above
all in the prayer which converses with Him over His
promises, till they live to us in His light. We must
watch and pray, that we may be alert to employ our
armament. The Christian who steps out into life "light-heartedly,"
thinking superficially of his weakness, and
of his foes, is only too likely also to think of his Lord
superficially, and to find of even this heavenly armour
that "he cannot go with it, for he hath not proved it"
(1 Sam. xvii. 39). But all this leaves absolutely
untouched the divine simplicity of the matter. It leaves
it wonderfully true that the decisive, the satisfying, the
thorough, moral victory and deliverance comes to the
Christian man not by trampling about with his own
resolves, but by committing himself to his Saviour and
Keeper, who has conquered him, that now He may conquer
"his strong Enemy" for him.
"Heaven's unencumbered plan" of "victory and
triumph, against the devil, the world, and the flesh," is
no day-dream of romance. It lives, it works in the
most open hour of the common world of sin and
sorrow. We have seen this "putting on of the Lord
Jesus Christ" victoriously successful where the most
fierce, or the most subtle, forms of temptation were to be
dealt with. We have seen it preserving, with beautiful
persistency, a life-long sufferer from the terrible solicitations
of pain, and of still less endurable helplessness—every
limb fixed literally immovable by paralysis on
the ill-furnished bed; we have seen the man cheerful,
restful, always ready for wise word and sympathetic
thought, and affirming that his Lord, present to his
soul, was infinitely enough to "keep him." We have
seen the overwhelmed toiler for God, while every step
through the day was clogged by "thronging duties,"
such duties as most wear and drain the spirit, yet
maintained in an equable cheerfulness and as it were
inward leisure by this same always adequate secret,
"the Lord Jesus Christ put on." We have known the
missionary who had, in sober earnest, hazarded his life
for the blessed Name, yet ready to bear quiet witness to
the repose and readiness to be found in meeting disappointment,
solitude, danger, not so much by a stern
resistance as by the use, then and there, confidingly, and
in surrender, of the Crucified and Living Lord. Shall
we dare to add, with the humiliated avowal that only a
too partial proof has been made of this glorious open
Secret, that we know by experiment that the weakest
of the servants of our King, "putting on Him,"
find victory and deliverance, where there was defeat
before?
Let us, writer and reader, address ourselves afresh
in practice to this wonderful secret. Let us, as if we
had never done it before, "put on the Lord Jesus Christ."From this point to the close of the chapter the writer has used,
with modifications, passages from a Sermon (No. iii.) in his volume
entitled Christ is All.
Vain is our interpretation of the holy
Word, which not only "abideth, but liveth for ever"
(1 Pet. i. 23), if it does not somehow come home. For
that Word was written on purpose to come home;
to touch and move the conscience and the will, in the
realities of our inmost, and also of our most outward,
life. Never for one moment do we stand as merely
interested students and spectators, outside the field of
temptation. Never for one moment therefore can we
dispense with the great Secret of victory and safety.
Full in face of the realities of sin—of Roman sin,
in Nero's days; but let us just now forget Rome and
Nero; they were only dark accidents of a darker
essence—St Paul here writes down, across them all,
these words, this spell, this Name; "Put ye on the Lord
Jesus Christ." Take first a steady look, he seems to
say, at your sore need, in the light of God; but then,
at once, look off, look here. Here is the more than
Antithesis to it all. Here is that by which you can be
"more than conqueror." Take your iniquities at the
worst; this can subdue them. Take your surroundings
at the worst; this can emancipate you from their
power. It is "the Lord Jesus Christ," and the
"putting on" of Him.
Let us remember, as if it were a new thing, that He,
the Christ of Prophets, Evangelists, and Apostles, is a
Fact. Sure as the existence now of His universal
Church, as the observance of the historic Sacrament
of His Death, as the impossibility of Galilean or
Pharisaic imagination having composed, instead of
photographed, the portrait of the Incarnate Son, the
Immaculate Lamb; sure as is the glad verification in
ten thousand blessed lives to-day of all, of all, that the
Christ of Scripture undertakes to be to the soul that
will take Him at His own terms—so sure, across all
oldest and all newest doubts, across all gnosis and all
agnosia, lies the present Fact of our Lord Jesus
Christ.
Then let us remember that it is a fact that man, in
the mercy of God, can "put Him on." He is not far
off. He presents Himself to our touch, our possession.
He says to us, "Come to Me." He unveils Himself as
literal partaker of our nature; as our Sacrifice; our
Righteousness, "through faith in His blood"; as the
Head and Life-spring, in an indescribable union, of a
deep calm tide of life spiritual and eternal, ready to
circulate through our being. He invites Himself to
"make His abode with us" (John xiv. 23); yea more,
"I will come in to him; I will dwell in his heart by
faith" (Rev. iii. 20; Eph. iii. 17). In that ungovernable
heart of ours, that interminably self-deceptive
heart (Jerem. xvii. 9), He engages to reside, to be
permanent Occupant, the Master always at home. He
is prepared thus to take, with regard to our will, a
place of power nearer than all circumstances, and deep
in the midst of all possible inward traitors; to keep
His eye on their plots, His foot, not ours, upon their
necks. Yes, He invites us thus to embrace Him into
a full contact; to "put Him on."
May we not say of Him what the great Poet says
of Duty, and glorify the verse by a yet nobler application?—
"Thou who art victory and law
When empty terrors overawe,
From vain temptations dost set free,
And calm'st the weary strife of frail humanity!"
Yes, we can "put Him on" as our "Panoply of
Light." We can put Him on as "the Lord," surrendering
ourselves to His absolute while most benignant
sovereignty and will, deep secret of repose. We can
put Him on as "Jesus," clasping the truth that He,
our Human Brother, yet Divine, "saves His people
from their sins" (Matt. i. 21). We can put Him on
as "Christ," our Head, anointed without measure by
the Eternal Spirit, and now sending of that same Spirit
into His happy members, so that we are indeed one
with Him, and receive into our whole being the
resources of His life.
Such is the armour and the arms. St Jerome,
commenting on a kindred passage (Eph. vi. 13), says
that "it most clearly results that by 'the weapons
of God' the Lord our Saviour is to be understood."
We may recollect that this text is memorable in connexion
with the Conversion of St Augustine. In his Confessions
(viii. 12) he records how, in the garden at Milan,
at a time of great moral conflict, he was strangely
attracted by a voice, perhaps the cry of children playing:
"Take and read, take and read." He fetched and
opened again a copy of the Epistles (codicem Apostoli),
which he had lately laid down. "I read in silence the
first place on which my eyes fell; 'Not in revelling and
drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in
strife and envying; but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ,
and make no provision for the flesh in its lusts.' I
neither cared, nor needed, to read further. At the close
of the sentence, as if a ray of certainty were poured
into my heart, the clouds of hesitation fled at once."
His will was in the will of God.
Alas, there falls one shadow over that fair scene. In
the belief of Augustine's time, to decide fully for
Christ meant, or very nearly meant, so to accept the
ascetic idea as to renounce the Christian home. But
the Lord read His servant's heart aright through the
error, and filled it with His peace. To us, in a
surrounding religious light far clearer, in many things,
than that which shone even upon Ambrose and
Augustine; to us who quite recognize that in the
paths of homeliest duty and commonest temptation
lies the line along which the blessed power of the
Saviour may best overshadow His disciple; the Spirit's
voice shall say of this same text, "Take and read, take
and read." We will "put on," never to put off. Then
we shall step out upon the old path in a strength new,
and to be renewed for ever, armed against evil, armed
for the will of God, with Jesus Christ our Lord.
CHAPTER XXIX
CHRISTIAN DUTY: MUTUAL TENDERNESS AND TOLERANCE:
THE SACREDNESS OF EXAMPLE
Romans xiv. 1-23
But him who is weak—we might almost
render, him who suffers from weakness
(τὸν ἀσθενοῦντα),
in his (τῇ) faith (in the sense here not of
creed, a meaning of πίστις rare in St Paul,
but of reliance on his Lord; reliance not only for justification but, in this
case, for holy liberty), welcome into fellowship—not for
criticisms of his scruples, of his
διαλογισμοί, the anxious
internal debates of conscience. One man believes,
has faith, issuing in a conviction of liberty, in
such a mode and degree as to eat all kinds of food; but
the man in weakness eats vegetables only; an extreme
case, but doubtless not uncommon, where a convert, tired
out by his own scruples between food and food, cut the
knot by rejecting flesh-meat altogether. The eater—let
him not despise the non-eater;Τὸν μὴ (not οὐκ)
ἐσθίοντα: the μὴ
gives "non-eating" as not merely a fact, but a condition, about the man.
while the non-eater—let him not judge the eater; for our
(ὁ) God welcomed him to fellowship, when he came to the
feet of His Son for acceptance. You—who are
you, thus judging Another's domestic (οἰκέτην)?
To his own Lord, his own Master, he stands, in approval,—or,
if that must be, falls, under displeasure; but he shall
be upheld in approval; for able is that (ὁ) LordRead δυνατεῖ ηὰρ ὁ Κύρος.
to set him so, to bid him "stand," under His sanctioning smile.
One man distinguishes (κρίνει) day above day;
while another distinguishes every day; a phrase
paradoxical but intelligible; it describes the thought of
the man who, less anxious than his neighbour about
stated "holy-days," still aims not to "level down" but
to "level up" his use of time; to count every day
"holy," equally dedicated to the will and work of God.
Let each be quite assured in his own mind; using the
thinking-power (νοῦς) given him by his Master, let him
reverently work the question out, and then live up to
his ascertained convictions, while (this is intimated by
the emphatic "his own mind") he respects the convictions
of his neighbour. The man who 'minds'
(ὁ φρονῶν) the day, the "holy-day" in question,
in any given instance, to the Lord he 'minds' it; [and the
man who 'minds' not the day, to the Lord he does not 'mind' it];Probably the negative limb of ver. 6. is only an explanatory gloss,
not the words of the Apostle.
both parties, as Christians, in their convictions
and their practice, stand related and responsible,
directly and primarily, to the Lord; that fact must always
govern and qualify their mutual judgments. AndRead καὶ.
the eater, the man who takes food indifferently without
scruple, to the Lord he eats, for he gives thanks at his
meal to God; and the non-eater, to the Lord he does not
eat the scrupled food, and gives thanks to God for that of
which his conscience allows him to partake.
The connexion of the paragraph just traversed with
what went before it is suggestive and instructive. There
is a close connexion between the two; it is marked
expressly by the "but" (δέ) of ver. 1, a link strangely
missed in the Authorized Version. The "but" indicates
a difference of thought, however slight, between the two
passages. And the difference, as we read it, is this.
The close of the thirteenth chapter has gone all in the
direction of Christian wakefulness, decision, and the
battle-field of conquering faith. The Roman convert,
roused by its trumpet-strain, will be eager to be up and
doing, against the enemy and for his Lord, armed from
head to foot with Christ. He will bend his whole purpose
upon a life of open and active holiness. He will
be filled with a new sense at once of the seriousness and
of the liberty of the Gospel. But then—some "weak
brother" will cross his path. It will be some recent
convert, perhaps from Judaism itself, perhaps an ex-pagan,
but influenced by the Jewish ideas so prevalent
at the time in many Roman circles. This Christian, not
untrustful, at least in theory, of the Lord alone for
pardon and acceptance, is however quite full of scruples
which, to the man fully "armed with Christ," may seem,
and do seem, lamentably morbid, really serious mistakes
and hindrances. The "weak brother" spends much
time in studying the traditional rules of fast and feast,
and the code of permitted food. He is sure that the God
who has accepted him will hide His face from him if he
lets the new moon pass like a common day; or if the
Sabbath is not kept by the rule, not of Scripture, but of
the Rabbis. Every social meal gives him painful and
frequent occasion for troubling himself, and others; he
takes refuge perhaps in an anxious vegetarianism, in
despair of otherwise keeping undefiled. And inevitably
such scruples do not terminate in themselves. They
infect the man's whole tone of thinking and action. He
questions and discusses everything, with himself, if not
with others. He is on the way to let his view of
acceptance in Christ grow fainter and more confused.
He walks, he lives; but he moves like a man chained,
and in a prison.
Such a case as this would be a sore temptation to
the "strong" Christian. He would be greatly inclined,
of himself, first to make a vigorous protest, and then, if
the difficulty proved obstinate, to think hard thoughts
of his narrow-minded friend; to doubt his right to the
Christian name at all; to reproach him, or (worst of all)
to satirize him. Meanwhile the "weak" Christian would
have his harsh thoughts too. He would not, by any
means for certain, shew as much meekness as "weakness."
He would let his neighbour see, in one way or
other, that he thought him little better than a worldling,
who made Christ an excuse for personal self-indulgence.
How does the Apostle meet the trying case, which
must have crossed his own path so often, and sometimes
in the form of a bitter opposition from those who were
"suffering from weakness in their faith"? It is quite
plain that his own convictions lay with "the strong," so
far as principle was concerned. He "knew that nothing
was unclean" (ver. 14). He knew that the Lord was
not grieved, but pleased, by the temperate and thankful
use, untroubled by morbid fears, of His natural bounties.
He knew that the Jewish festival-system had found its
goal and end in the perpetual "let us keep the feast"
(1 Cor. v. 3) of the true believer's happy and hallowed life.There seems to be a broad and intelligible difference between
the Sabbath-keeping of the Jewish law and the Sabbath-keeping of
man; the enjoyment and holy use of the primeval Rest for man and
beast. We take it that that duty and privilege is not in question
here at all. The "weak" Christian was the anxious scholar of the
Rabbis, not the man simply loyal to the Decalogue.
And accordingly he does, in passing, rebuke
"the weak" for their harsh criticisms (κρίνειν) of "the
strong." But then, he throws all the more weight, the
main weight, on his rebukes and warnings to "the
strong." Their principle might be right on this great
detail. But this left untouched the yet more stringent
overruling principle, to "walk in love"; to take part
against themselves; to live in this matter, as in everything
else, for others. They were not to be at all
ashamed of their special principles. But they were to
be deeply ashamed of one hour's unloving conduct.
They were to be quietly convinced, in respect of private
judgment. They were to be more than tolerant—they
were to be loving—in respect of common life in the Lord.
Their "strength" in Christ was never to be ungentle;
never to be "used like a giant." It was to be
shewn, first and most, by patience. It was to take
the form of the calm, strong readiness to understand
another's point of view. It was to appear as reverence
for another's conscience, even when the conscience
went astray for want of better light.
Let us take this apostolic principle out into modern
religious life. There are times when we shall be
specially bound to put it carefully in relation to other
principles, of course. When St Paul, some months
earlier, wrote to Galatia, and had to deal with an error
which darkened the whole truth of the sinner's way to
God as it lies straight through Christ, he did not say,
"Let every man be quite assured in his own mind." He
said (i. 8), "If an angel from heaven preach any other
Gospel, which is not another, let him be anathema."
The question there was, Is Christ all, or is He not?
Is faith all, or is it not, for our laying hold of Him?
Even in Galatia, he warned the converts of the miserable
and fatal mistake of "biting and devouring one another"
(v. 15). But he adjured them not to wreck their peace
with God upon a fundamental error. Here, at Rome,
the question was different; it was secondary. It concerned
certain details of Christian practice. Was an
outworn and exaggerated ceremonialism a part of the
will of God, in the justified believer's life? It was not
so, as a fact. Yet it was a matter on which the Lord,
by His Apostle, rather counselled than commanded.
It was not of the foundation. And the always overruling
law for the discussion was—the tolerance born of
love. Let us in our day remember this, whether our
inmost sympathies are with "the strong" or with "the
weak." In Jesus Christ, it is possible to realize the ideal
of this paragraph even in our divided Christendom. It
is possible to be convinced, yet sympathetic. It is possible
to see the Lord for ourselves with glorious clearness,
yet to understand the practical difficulties felt by others,
and to love, and to respect, where there are even great
divergences. No man works more for a final spiritual
consensus than he who, in Christ, so lives.
Incidentally meantime, the Apostle, in this passage
which so curbs "the strong," lets fall maxims which
for ever protect all that is good and true in that well-worn
and often misused phrase, "the right of private
judgment." No spiritual despot, no claimant to be the
autocratic director of a conscience, could have written
those words, "Let every man be quite certain in his own
mind"; "Who art thou that judgest Another's domestic?"
Such sentences assert not the right so much as the
duty, for the individual Christian, of a reverent
"thinking for himself." They maintain a true and
noble individualism. And there is a special need just
now in the Church to remember, in its place, the value
of Christian individualism. The idea of the community,
the society, is just now so vastly prevalent (doubtless
not without the providence of God) in human life, and
also in the Church, that an assertion of the individual,
which was once disproportionate, is now often necessary,
lest the social idea in its turn should be exaggerated
into a dangerous mistake. Coherence, mutuality, the
truth of the Body and the Members; all this, in its
place, is not only important but divine. The individual
must inevitably lose where individualism is his whole
idea. But it is ill for the community, above all for the
Church, where in the total the individual tends really
to be merged and lost. Alas for the Church where the
Church tries to take the individual's place in the knowledge
of God, in the love of Christ, in the power of
the Spirit. The religious Community must indeed inevitably
lose where religious communism is its whole
idea. It can be perfectly strong only where individual
consciences are tender, and enlightened; where individual
souls personally know God in Christ; where
individual wills are ready, if the Lord call, to stand
alone for known truth even against the religious
Society;—if there also the individualism is not self-will,
but Christian personal responsibility; if the man
"thinks for himself" on his knees; if he reverences the
individualism of others, and the relations of each to all.
The individualism of Rom. xiv., asserted in an argument
full of the deepest secrets of cohesion, is the holy
and healthful thing it is because it is Christian. It is
developed not by the assertion of self, but by individual
communion with Christ.
Now he goes on to further and still fuller statements
in the same direction:
For none of us to himself lives, and none
of us to himself dies. How, and wherefore?
Is it merely that "we" live lives always, necessarily,
related to one another? He has this in his heart indeed.
But he reaches it through the greater, deeper, antecedent
truth of our relation to the Lord. The Christian is
related to his brother-Christian through Christ, not to
Christ through his brother, or through the common
Organism in which the brethren are "each other's limbs."
"To the Lord," with absolute directness, with a perfect
and wonderful immediateness, each individual Christian
is first related. His life and his death are "to others,"
but through Him. The Master's claim is eternally first;
for it is based direct upon the redeeming work in
which He bought us for Himself.
For whether we live, to the Lord we live; and
whether we be dead (ἀποθνήσκωμεν), to the Lord
we are dead; in the state of the departed, as before,
"relation stands." Alike therefore whether
(ἐαν τε οὖν)
we be dead, or whether we live, the Lord's we are; His
property, bound first and in everything to His possession.
For to this end Christ both died and lived again,Read ἀπέθανε καὶ ἀνέζησε.
that He might become Lord (κυριεύσῃ, not
κυριεύῃ) of us both dead and living.
Here is the profound truth seen already in earlier
passages in the Epistle. We have had it reasoned out,
above all in the sixth chapter, in its revelation of the
way of Holiness, that our only possible right relations
with the Lord are clasped and governed by the fact that
to Him we rightly and everlastingly belong. There,
however, the thought was more of our surrender under
His rights. Here it is of the mighty antecedent fact,
under which our most absolute surrender is nothing
more than the recognition of His indefeasible claim.
What the Apostle says here, in this wonderful passage
of mingled doctrine and duty, is that, whether or no we
are owning our vassalage to Christ, we are nothing if
not de jure His vassals. He has not only rescued us,
but so rescued us as to buy us for His own. We may
be true to the fact in our internal attitude; we may be
oblivious of it; but we cannot get away from it. It
looks us every hour in the face, whether we respond or
not. It will still look us in the face through the endless
life to come.
For manifestly it is this objective aspect of our
"belonging" which is here in point. St Paul is not
reasoning with the "weak" and the "strong" from
their experience, from their conscious loyalty to the Lord.
Rather, he is calling them to a new realization of what
such loyalty should be. It is in order to this that he
reminds them of the eternal claim of the Lord, made
good in His Death and Resurrection; His claim to
be so their Master, individually and altogether, that
every thought about one other was to be governed by
that claim of His on them all. "The Lord" must
always interpose, with a right inalienable. Each
Christian is annexed, by all the laws of Heaven, to
Him. So each must—not make but realize that annexation,
in every thought about neighbour and about brother.
The passage invites us meantime to further remark,
in another direction. It is one of those utterances which,
luminous with light given by their context, shine also
with a light of their own, giving us revelations independent
of the surrounding matter. Here one such
revelation appears; it affects our knowledge of the
Intermediate State.
The Apostle,We transcribe here a few paragraphs from the closing pages of
our book Life in Christ and for Christ.
four times over in this short paragraph,
makes mention of death, and of the dead. "No one of
us dieth to himself"; "Whether we die, we die unto
the Lord"; "Whether we die, we are the Lord's";
"That He might be Lord of the dead." And this last
sentence, with its mention not of the dying but of the
dead, reminds us that the reference in them all is to the
Christian's relation to his Lord, not only in the hour of
death, but in the state after death. It is not only that
Jesus Christ, as the slain One risen, is absolute Disposer
of the time and manner of our dying. It is not only
that when our death comes we are to accept it as an
opportunity for the "glorifying of God" (John xxi. 19;
Phil. i. 20) in the sight and in the memory of those who
know of it. It is that when we have "passed through
death," and come out upon the other side,
"When we enter yonder regions,
When we touch the sacred shore,"
our relation to the slain One risen, to Him who, as such,
"hath the keys of Hades and of death" (Rev. i. 18), is
perfectly continuous and the same. He is our absolute
Master, there as well as here. And we, by consequence
and correlation, are vassals, servants, bondservants to
Him, there as well as here.
Here is a truth which, we cannot but think, richly
repays the Christian's repeated remembrance and
reflection; and that not only in the way of asserting
the eternal rights of our blessed Redeemer over us, but
in the way of shedding light, and peace, and the sense
of reality and expectation, on both the prospect of our
own passage into eternity and the thoughts we entertain
of the present life of our holy beloved ones who have
entered into it before us.
Everything is precious which really assists the soul
in such thoughts, and at the same time keeps it fully
and practically alive to the realities of faith, patience,
and obedience here below, here in the present hour.
While the indulgence of unauthorized imagination in
that direction is almost always enervating and disturbing
to the present action of Scriptural faith, the least help
to a solid realization and anticipation, supplied by the
Word that cannot lie, is in its nature both hallowing and
strengthening. Such a help we have assuredly here.
He who died and rose again is at this hour, in holy
might and right, "the Lord" of the blessed dead.
Then, the blessed dead are vassals and servants of
Him who died and rose again. And all our thought of
them, as they are now, at this hour, "in those heavenly
habitations, where the souls of them that sleep in the
Lord Jesus enjoy perpetual rest and felicity,"Visitation of the Sick (Prayer for a Sick Child).
gains indefinitely in life, in reality, in strength and glory, as we
see them, through this narrow but bright "door in heaven"
(Rev. v. 1), not resting only but serving also before
their Lord, who has bought them for His use, and who
holds them in His use quite as truly now as when we
had the joy of their presence with us, and He was seen
by us living and working in them and through them here.
True it is that the leading and essential character
of their present state is rest, as that of their resurrection
state will be action. But the two states overflow
into each other. In one glorious passage the Apostle
describes the resurrection bliss as also "rest" (2 Thess.
i. 7). And here we have it indicated that the
heavenly intermediate rest is also service. What the
precise nature of that service is we cannot tell. "Our
knowledge of that life is small." Most certainly, "in
vain our fancy strives to paint" its blessedness, both of
repose and of occupation. This is part of our normal
and God-chosen lot here, which is to "walk by faith,
not by sight" (2 Cor. v. 7), οὐ διὰ εἴδους,
"not by Object seen," not by objects seen. But blessed is the spiritual
assistance in such a walk as we recollect, step by step,
as we draw nearer to that happy assembly above, that,
whatever be the manner and exercise of their holy life,
it is life indeed; power, not weakness; service, not
inaction. He who died and revived is Lord, not of us
only, but of them.
But from this excursion into the sacred Unseen we
must return. St Paul is intent now upon the believer's
walk of loving large-heartedness in this life, not the next.
But you—why do you judge your brother?
(he takes up the verb, κρίνειν, used in his
former appeal to the "weak," ver. 3). Or you too (he
turns to the "strong"; see again ver. 3)—why do you
despise your brother? For we shall stand, all of us,
on one level, whatever were our mutual sentiments on
earth, whatever claim we made here to sit as judges on
our brethren, before the tribunal
(βῆμα) of our
(τοῦ) God.So read, not τοῦ Χριστοῦ.
It is significant meantime, as a testimony to the Apostle's view of
his Master's Nature, that in 2 Cor. v. 10, a perfectly
parallel passage, he writes, "we must all appear before the tribunal
of Christ."
For it stands written (Isai. xlv. 23), "As I live,
saith the Lord, sure it is as My eternal Being,
that to Me, not to another, shall bend every knee; and
every tongue shall confess, shall ascribe all sovereignty,
to God," not to the creature. So then each of us,
about himself, not about the faults or errors of
his brother, shall give account to God.
We have here, as in 2 Cor. v. 10, and again, under
other imagery, in 1 Cor. iii. 11-15, a glimpse of that
heart-searching prospect for the Christian, his summons
hereafter, as a Christian, to the tribunal of his Lord.
In all the three passages, and now particularly in this,
the language, though it lends itself freely to the universal
Assize, is limited by context, as to its direct purport, to
the Master's scrutiny of His own servants as such. The
question to be tried and decided (speaking after the
manner of men) at His "tribunal," in this reference,
is not that of glory or perdition; the persons of the
examined are accepted; the enquiry is in the domestic
court of the Palace, so to speak; it regards the award
of the King as to the issues and value of His accepted
servants' labour and conduct, as His representatives, in
their mortal life. "The Lord of the servants cometh, and
reckoneth with them" (Matt. xxv. 19). They have been
justified by faith. They have been united to their
glorious Head. They "shall be saved" (1 Cor. iii. 15),
whatever be the fate of their "work." But what will
their Lord say of their work? What have they done for
Him, in labour, in witness, and above all in character?
He will tell them what He thinks. He will be infinitely
kind; but He will not flatter. And somehow, surely,—"it
doth not yet appear" how, but somehow—eternity,
even the eternity of salvation, will bear the impress of
that award, the impress of the past of service, estimated
by the King. "What shall the harvest be?"
And all this shall take place (this is the special emphasis
of the prospect here) with a solemn individuality
of enquiry. "Every one of us—for himself—shall give
account." We reflected, a little above, on the true
place of"individualism" in the life of grace. We see
here that there will indeed be a place for it in the
experiences of eternity. The scrutiny of "the tribunal"
will concern not the Society, the Organism, the total,
but the member, the man. Each will stand in a solemn
solitude there, before his divine Examiner. What he
was, as the Lord's member, that will be the question.
What he shall be, as such, in the functions of the
endless state, that will be the result.
Let us not be troubled over that prospect with the
trouble of the worldling, as if we did not know Him who
will scrutinize us, and did not love Him. Around the
thought of His "tribunal," in that aspect, there are cast
no exterminating terrors. But it is a prospect fit to make
grave and full of purpose the life which yet "is hid
with Christ in God," and which is life indeed through
grace. It is a deep reminder that the beloved Saviour
is also, and in no figure of speech, but in an eternal
earnest, the Master too. We would not have Him
not to be this. He would not be all He is to us as
Saviour, were He not this also, and for ever.
St Paul hastens to further appeals, after this solemn
forecast. And now all his stress is laid on the duty
of the "strong" to use their "strength" not for self-assertion,
not for even spiritual selfishness, but all for
Christ, all for others, all in love.
No more therefore let us judge one another;
but judge, decide, this rather—not to set stumblingblock
for our (τῷ) brother, or trap. I
know—he instances his own experience and
principle—and am sure, in the Lord Jesus, as one who is
in union and communion with Him, seeing truth and
life from that view-point, that nothing, nothing of the
sort in question, no food, no time, is "unclean" of itself;
literally, "by means of itself," by any inherent mischief;
only, to the man who counts anything "unclean," to him
it is unclean. And therefore you, because you are not
his conscience, must not tamper with his conscience.
It is, in this case, mistaken; mistaken to his own loss,
and to the loss of the Church. Yes, but what it wants
is not your compulsion, but the Lord's light. If you
can do so, bring that light to bear, in a testimony made
impressive by holy love and unselfish considerateness.
But dare not, for Christ's sake, compel a conscience.
For conscience means the man's best actual sight of
the law of right and wrong. It may be a dim and
distorted sight; but it is his best at this moment. He
cannot violate it without sin, nor can you bid him do
so without yourself sinning. Conscience may not
always see aright. But to transgress conscience is
always wrong.
ForProbably read γὰρ not δὲ.
—the
word takes up the argument at
large, rather than the last detail of it—if for
food's sake your brother suffers pain, the pain of a moral
struggle between his present convictions and your
commanding example, you have given up walking
(οὐκέτι περιπατεῖς)
love-wise. Do not, with your food,
(there is a searching point in the "your," touching to
the quick the deep selfishness of the action,) work his
ruin for whom Christ died.
Such sentences are too intensely and tenderly in
earnest to be called sarcastic; otherwise, how fine and
keen an edge they carry! "For food's sake!" "With
your food!" The man is shaken out of the sleep of
what seemed an assertion of liberty, but was after all
much rather a dull indulgence of—that is, a mere
slavery to—himself. "I like this meat; I like this
drink; I don't like the worry of these scruples; they
interrupt me, they annoy me." Unhappy man! It is
better to be the slave of scruples, than of self. In
order to allow yourself another dish—you would slight
an anxious friend's conscience, and, so far as your
conduct is concerned, push him to a violation of it.
But that means, a push on the slope which leans
towards spiritual ruin. The way to perdition is paved
with violated consciences. The Lord may counteract
your action, and save your injured brother from himself—and
you. But your action is, none the less,
calculated for his perdition. And all the while this soul,
for which, in comparison with your dull and narrow
"liberty," you care so little, was so much cared for
by the Lord that He—died for it.
Oh consecrating thought, attached now, for ever, for
the Christian, to every human soul which he can
influence: "For whom Christ died!"
Do not therefore let your good, your glorious
creed of holy liberty in Christ, be railed at, as
only a thinly veiled self-indulgence after all; for the kingdom
of our (τοῦ) God is not feeding
(βρῶσις) and
drinking; He does not claim a throne in your
soul, and in your Society, merely to enlarge your bill of
fare, to make it your sacred privilege, as an end in itself, to
take what you please at table; but righteousness, surely
here, in the Roman Epistle, the "righteousness" of
our divine acceptance, and peace, the peace of perfect
relations with Him in Christ, and joy in the Holy Spirit,
the pure strong gladness of the justified, as in their
sanctuary of salvation they drink the "living water,"
and "rejoice always in the Lord." For he who in this wayRead τούτῳ not τούτοις.
Possibly the pronoun refers to "the Holy Spirit"
(Πνεῦμα) just mentioned.
lives as bondservant to Christ,
spending his spiritual talents not for himself
but for his Master, is pleasing to his
(τῷ) God, and is
genuine to his fellow-men (τοῖς ἀνθρώποις).
Yes, he stands the test (δόκιμος)
of their keen scrutiny. They
can soon detect the counterfeit under spiritual assertions
which really assert self. But their conscience affirms
the genuineness of a life of unselfish and happy holiness;
that life "reverbs no hollowness."
Accordingly therefore let us pursue the interests
of peace, and the interests of an edification
which is mutual; the "building up" (οἰκοδομὴ)
which looks beyond the man to his brother, to his
brethren, and tempers by that look even his plans for
his own spiritual life.
Again he returns to the sorrowful grotesque of preferring
personal comforts, and even the assertion of the
principle of personal liberty, to the good of others.
Do not for food's sake be undoing (κατάλυε) the
work of our God. "All things are pure"; he
doubtless quotes a watchword often heard; and it was
truth itself in the abstract, but capable of becoming a
fatal fallacy in practice; but anything is bad to the man
who is brought by a stumblingblock to eat it.Lit., "who eats by means of a stumblingblock"; the example,
with its weight of "public opinion," being the means of overriding
his conscience.
Yes, this is bad (κακόν). What is good
(καλὸν) in contrast?
Good it is not to eat flesh, and not to drink
wine (a word for our time and its conditions),
and not to do anything in which your brother is stumbled,
or entrapped, or weakened. Yes, this is Christian liberty;
a liberation from the strong and subtle law of self; a
freedom to live for others, independent of their evil, but
the servant of their souls.
You—the faith you have,Probably read πίστιν ἣν ἔχεις, κατὰ κτλ.
have it by yourself, in the presence of your God. You have believed;
you are therefore in Christ; in Christ you are
therefore free, by faith, from the preparatory restrictions
of the past. Yes; but all this is not given you for
personal display, but for divine communion. Its right
issue is in a holy intimacy with your God, as in the
confidence of your acceptance you know Him as your
Father, "nothing between." But as regards human
intercourse, you are emancipated not that you may
disturb the neighbours with shouts of freedom and acts
of licence, but that you may be at leisure to serve them
in love. Happy the man who does not judge himself,
who does not, in effect, decide against his own soul,
in that which he approves, δοκιμάζει,
pronounces satisfactory to conscience. Unhappy he who says to himself,
"This is lawful," when the verdict is all the while
purchased by self-love, or otherwise by the fear of
man, and the soul knows in its depths that the thing
is not as it should be.
And the man who is
doubtful, whose conscience is not really satisfied
between the right and wrong of the matter, if he
does eat, stands condemned, in the court of his own heart,
and of his aggrieved Lord's opinion, because it was not
the result of faith; the action had not, for its basis, the
holy conviction of the liberty of the justified. Now
anything which is not the result of faith, is sin; that is
to say, manifestly, "anything" in such a case as this;
any indulgence, any obedience to example, which the
man, in a state of inward ambiguity, decides for on a
principle other than that of his union with Christ by
faith.
Thus the Apostle of Justification, and of the Holy
Spirit, is the Apostle of Conscience too. He is as
urgent upon the awful sacredness of our sense of right
and wrong, as upon the offer and the security, in
Christ, of peace with God, and the holy Indwelling,
and the hope of glory. Let our steps reverently follow
his, as we walk with God, and with men. Let us
"rejoice in Christ Jesus," with a "joy" which is "in
the Holy Ghost." Let us reverence duty, let us
reverence conscience, in our own life, and also in the
lives around us.
CHAPTER XXX
THE SAME SUBJECT: THE LORD'S EXAMPLE: HIS RELATION TO US ALL
Romans xv. 1-13
THE large and searching treatment which the
Apostle has already given to the right use of
Christian Liberty, is yet not enough. He must pursue
the same theme further; above all, that he may put it
into more explicit contact with the Lord Himself.
We gather without doubt that the state of the Roman
Mission, as it was reported to St Paul, gave special
occasion for such fulness of discussion. It is more
than likely, as we have seen from the first, that the
bulk of the disciples were ex-pagans; probably of very
various nationalities, many of them Orientals, and as
such not more favourable to distinctive Jewish claims
and tenets. It is also likely that they found amongst
them, or beside them, many Christian Jews, or Christian
Jewish proselytes, of a type more or less pronounced
in their own direction; the school whose less worthy
members supplied the men to whom St Paul, a few
years later, writing from Rome to Philippi, refers as
"preaching Christ of envy and strife" (Phil. i. 15).
The temptation of a religious (as of a secular) majority
is always to tyrannize, more or less, in matters of
thought and practice. A dominant school, in any
age or region, too easily comes to talk and act as if all
decided expression on the other side were an instance
of "intolerance," while yet it allows itself in sufficiently
severe and censorious courses of its own. At Rome,
very probably, this mischief was in action. The
"strong," with whose principle, in its true form, St Paul
agreed, were disposed to domineer in spirit over the
"weak," because the weak were comparatively the few.
Thus they were guilty of a double fault; they were
presenting a miserable parody of holy liberty, and they
were acting off the line of that unselfish fairness which
is essential in the Gospel character. For the sake not
only of the peace of the great Mission Church, but of
the honour of the Truth, and of the Lord, the Apostle
therefore dwells on mutual duties, and returns to them
again and again after apparent conclusions of his discourse.
Let us listen as he now reverts to the subject,
to set it more fully than ever in the light of Christ.
But (it is the "but" of resumption, and of
new material) we are bound, we the able,
οἱ δυνατοὶ
(perhaps a sort of soubriquet for themselves
among the school of "liberty," "the capables")—to bear
the weaknesses of the unable, (again, possibly, a soubriquet,
and in this case an unkindly one, for a school,)
and not to please ourselves. Each one of us, let
him please not himself but his neighbour, as
regards what is good, with a view to edification.
"Please"; ἀρέσκειν,
ἀρεσκέτω. The word is one
often "soiled with ignoble use," in classical literature;
it tends to mean the "pleasing" which fawns and
flatters; the complaisance of the parasite. But it is
lifted by Christian usage to a noble level. The cowardly
and interested element drops out of it; the thought
of willingness to do anything to please remains; only
limited by the law of right, and aimed only at the other's
"good." Thus purified, it is used elsewhere of that
holy "complaisance" in which the grateful disciple
aims to "meet half way the wishes" of his Lord (see
Col. i. 10). Here, it is the unselfish and watchful aim
to meet half way, if possible, the thought and feeling
of a fellow-disciple, to conciliate by sympathetic attentions,
to be considerate in the smallest matters of opinion
and conduct; a genuine exercise of inward liberty.Observe that St Paul utterly repudiates the thought of "pleasing"
(ἀρέσκειν) where it means a
servile and really compromising deference to human opinion
(Gal. i. 10).
There is a gulph of difference between interested
timidity and disinterested considerateness. In flight
from the former, the ardent Christian sometimes breaks
the rule of the latter. St Paul is at his hand to warn
him not to forget the great law of love. And the Lord
is at his hand too, with His own supreme Example.
For even our (ὁ) Christ did not please Himself;
but, as it stands written (Psal. lxix. 9), "The
reproaches of those who reproached Thee, fell upon Me."
It is the first mention in the Epistle of the Lord's
Example. His Person we have seen, and the Atoning
Work, and the Resurrection Power, and the great
Return. The holy Example can never take the place
of any one of these facts of life eternal. But when they
are secure, then the reverent study of the Example is
not only in place; it is of urgent and immeasurable
importance.
"He did not please Himself." "Not My will, but
Thine, be done." Perhaps the thought of the Apostle
is dwelling on the very hour when those words were
spoken, from beneath the olives of the Garden, and
out of a depth of inward conflict and surrender which
"it hath not entered into the heart of man"—except
the heart of the Man of men Himself—"to conceive."
Then indeed "He did not please Himself." From pain
as pain, from grief as grief, all sentient existence
naturally, necessarily, shrinks; it "pleases itself" in
escape or in relief. The infinitely refined sentient Existence
of the Son of Man was no exception to this law of
universal nature; and now He was called to such pain,
to such grief, as never before met upon one head.
We read the record of Gethsemane, and its sacred
horror is always new; the disciple passes in thought
out of the Garden even to the cruel tribunal of the
Priest with a sense of relief; his Lord has risen from
the unfathomable to the fathomable depth of His woes—till
He goes down again, at noon next day, upon the
Cross. "He pleased not Himself." He who soon
after, on the shore of the quiet water, said to Peter, in
view of his glorious and God-glorifying end, "They
shall carry thee whither thou wouldest not"—along a
path from which all thy manhood shall shrink—He
too, as to His Human sensibility, "would not" go to
His own unknown agonies. But then, blessed be His
Name, "He would go" to them, from that other side,
the side of the infinite harmony of His purpose with the
purpose of His Father, in His immeasurable desire of
His Father's glory. So He "drank that cup," which
shall never now pass on to His people. And then He
went forth into the house of Caiaphas, to be "reproached,"
during some six or seven terrible hours, by
men who, professing zeal for God, were all the while
blaspheming Him by every act and word of malice and
untruth against His Son; and from Caiaphas He went
to Pilate, and to Herod, and to the Cross, "bearing
that reproach."
"I'm not anxious to die easy, when He died hard!"
So said, not long ago, in a London attic, lying crippled
and comfortless, a little disciple of the Man of Sorrows.
He had "seen the Lord," in a strangely unlikely
conversion, and had found a way of serving Him; it
was to drop written fragments of His Word from the
window on to the pavement below. And for this
silent mission he would have no liberty if he were
moved, in his last weeks, to a comfortable "Home."
So he would rather serve his beloved Redeemer thus,
"pleasing not himself," than be soothed in body, and
gladdened by surrounding kindness, but with less
"fellowship of His sufferings." Illustrious confessor—sure
to be remembered when "the Lord of the
servants cometh"! And with what an a fortiori does
his simple answer to a kindly visitor's offer bring home
to us (for it is for us as much as for the Romans) this
appeal of the Apostle's! We are called in these words
not necessarily to any agony of body or spirit; not
necessarily even to an act of severe moral courage;
only to patience, largeness of heart, brotherly love.
Shall we not answer Amen from the soul? Shall not
even one thought of "the fellowship of His sufferings"
annihilate in us the miserable "self-pleasing" which
shews itself in religious bitterness, in the refusal to
attend and to understand, in a censoriousness which
has nothing to do with firmness, in a personal attitude
exactly opposite to love?
He has cited Psalm lxix. as a Scripture which, with
all the solemn problems gathered round its dark
"minatory" paragraph, yet lives and moves with
Christ, the Christ of love. And now—not to confirm
his application of the Psalm, for he takes that for
granted—but to affirm the positive Christian use of the
Old Scriptures as a whole, he goes on to speak at
large of "the things fore-written." He does so with the
special thought that the Old Testament is full of truth
in point for the Roman Church just now; full of the
bright, and uniting, "hope" of glory; full of examples
as well as precepts for "patience," that is to say, holy
perseverance under trial; full finally of the Lord's
equally gracious relation to "the Nations" and to Israel.
For all the things fore-written, written in the
Scriptures of the elder time, in the age that
both preceded the Gospel and prepared for it, for our
instruction were written—with an emphasis upon "our"—that
through the patience and through the encouragement
of the Scriptures we might hold our
(τὴν) hope, the hope
"sure and steadfast" of glorification in the glory of our
conquering Lord. That is to say, the true "Author
behind the authors" of that mysterious Book watched,
guided, effected its construction, from end to end, with
the purpose full in His view of instructing for all time
the developed Church of Christ. And in particular, He
adjusted thus the Old Testament records and precepts
of "patience," the patience which "suffers and is
strong," suffers and goes forward,The noble word ὑπομονή,
as we have remarked already, is rarely if ever merely passive
in New Testament usage.
and of "encouragement,"
παράκλησις,
the word which is more than "consolation,"
while it includes it; for it means the voice
of positive and enlivening appeal. Rich indeed are
Pentateuch, and Prophets, and Hagiographa, alike in
commands to persevere and be of good courage, and
in examples of men who were made brave and patient
by the power of God in them, as they took Him at His
word. And all this, says the Apostle, was on purpose,
on God's purpose. That multifarious Book is indeed
in this sense one. Not only is it, in its Author's
intention, full of Christ; in the same intention it is full
of Him for us. Immortal indeed is its preciousness,
if this was His design. Confidently may we explore
its pages, looking in them first for Christ, then for ourselves,
in our need of peace, and strength, and hope.
Let us add one word, in view of the anxious controversy
of our day, within the Church, over the
structure and nature of those "divine Scriptures," as
the Christian Fathers love to call them. The use of
the Holy Book in the spirit of this verse, the persistent
searching of it for the preceptive mind of God in it,
with the belief that it was "written for our instruction,"
will be the surest and deepest means to give us "perseverance"
and "encouragement" about the Book itself.
The more we really know the Bible, at first hand, before
God, with the knowledge both of acquaintance and reverent
sympathy, the more shall we be able with intelligent
spiritual conviction, to "persist" and "be of good cheer"
in the conviction that it is indeed not of man, (though
through man,) but of God. The more shall we use it
as the Lord and the Apostles used it, as being not only
of God, but of God for us; His Word, and for us. The
more shall we make it our divine daily Manual for a
life of patient and cheerful sympathies, holy fidelity,
and "that blessed Hope"—which draws "nearer now
than when we believed."
But may the God of the patience and the encouragement,
He who is Author and Giver of
the graces unfolded in His Word, He without whom
even that Word is but a sound without significance in
the soul, grant you, in His own sovereign way of acting
on and in human wills and affections, to be of one
>
mind mutually (ἐν ἀλλήλοις),
according to Christ Jesus;
"Christwise," in His steps, in His temper, under His
precepts; having towards one another, not necessarily
an identity of opinion on all details, but a community
of sympathetic kindness. No comment here is better
than this same Writer's later words, from Rome
(Phil. ii. 2-5); "Be of one mind; having the same
love; nothing by strife, or vainglory; esteeming others
better than yourselves; looking on the things of others;
with the same mind which was also in Christ Jesus,"
when He humbled Himself for us. And all this, not
only for the comfort of the community, but for the
glory of God:
that unanimously, with one
mouth, you may glorify the God and Father of
our Lord Jesus Christ; turning from the sorrowful
friction worked by self-will when it intrudes into the
things of heaven, to an antidote, holy and effectual,
found in adoring Him who is equally near to all His
true people, in His Son.
Wherefore welcome one another into fellowship,
even as our (ὁ) Christ welcomed you,So read, not ἡμᾶς. The point of the mention
here of "you" is manifest.
all the individuals of your company, and all the groups of it, to
our (τοῦ) God's glory. These last words may mean
either that the Lord's welcome of "you" "glorified"
His Father's grace; or that that grace will be "glorified"
by the holy victory of love over prejudice among the
Roman saints. Perhaps this latter explanation is to be
preferred, as it echoes and enforces the last words of
the previous verse. But why should not both references
reside in the one phrase, where the actions of the Lord
and His disciples are seen in their deep harmony?
ForReading γὰρ not δέ,
and omitting Ἰησοῦν just afterwards.
I say that Christ stands constitutedΓεγενῆσθαι, the perfect.
But perhaps read γενέσθαι.
Servant (διάκονον)
of the Circumcision, Minister of divine
blessings to Israel, on behalf of God's truth, so
as to ratify in act the promises belonging to the Fathers,
so as to secure and vindicate their fulfilment, by His
coming as Son of David, Son of Abraham;
but (a "but" which, by its slight correction,
reminds the Jew that the Promise, given wholly through
him, was not given wholly for him) so that the Nations, on
mercy's behalf, should glorify God, blessing and adoring
Him on account of a salvation which, in their case, was
less of "truth" than of "mercy," because it was less
explicitly and immediately of covenant; as it stands
written (Psal. xviii. 49), "For this I will confess to
Thee, will own Thee, among the Nations, and will strike
the harp (ψαλῶ) to Thy Name"; Messiah confessing
His Eternal Father's glory in the midst of His redeemed
Gentile subjects, who sing their "lower part"
with Him. And again it, the Scripture, says,
(Deut. xxxii. 43), "Be jubilant, Nations, with His people."In the received Hebrew Text the word
את, "with," is absent,
and the rendering may be, in paraphrase, either, "Ye Nations, congratulate
His people," or "Rejoice ye Nations, who are His people."
Either the great Rabbi-Apostle read את,
or he gave the essence of the Mosaic words, not their form, (using the
Lxx. rendering as his form,) to convey the thought of the loving
sympathy, before God, of Israel and the Nations.
And again (Psal. cxvii. 1),
"Praise the Lord, all the Nations, and let all
the peoples praise Him again"
(ἐπαινεσάτωσαν). And
again Isaiah says (xi. 10), "There shall come
(literally, "shall be") the Root of Jesse, and He
who rises up—"rises," in the present tense of the
divine decree—to rule (the) Nations; on Him (the)
Nations shall hope;" with the hope which is in fact
faith, looking from the sure present to the promised
future. Now may the God of that hope,
τῆς ἐλπίδος,
"the Hope" just cited from the Prophet,
the expectation of all blessing, up to its crown and
flower in glory, on the basis of Messiah's work, fill you
with all joy and peace in your (τῷ) believing, so that
you may overflow in that (τῇ) hope, in the Holy Spirit's
power; "in His power," clasped as it were within His
divine embrace, and thus energized to look upward,
heavenward, away from embittering and dividing
temptations to the unifying as well as beatifying
prospect of your Lord's Return.
He closes here his long, wise, tender appeal and
counsel about the "unhappy divisions" of the Roman
Mission. He has led his readers as it were all round
the subject. With the utmost tact, and also candour,
he has given them his own mind, "in the Lord," on
the matter in dispute. He has pointed out to the
party of scruple and restriction the fallacy of claiming
the function of Christ, and asserting a divine rule
where He has not imposed one. He has addressed
the "strong," (with whom he agrees in a certain sense,)
at much greater length, reminding them of the moral error
of making more of any given application of their principle
than of the law of love in which the principle was
rooted. He has brought both parties to the feet of
Jesus Christ as absolute Master. He has led them to
gaze on Him as their blessed Example, in His infinite
self-oblivion for the cause of God, and of love. He
has poured out before them the prophecies, which tell
at once the Christian Judaist and the ex-pagan convert
that in the eternal purpose Christ was given equally
to both, in the line of "truth," in the line of "mercy."
Now lastly he clasps them impartially to his own heart
in this precious and pregnant benediction, beseeching
for both sides, and for all their individuals, a wonderful
fulness of those blessings in which most speedily and
most surely the spirit of their strife would expire. Let
that prayer be granted, in its pure depth and height,
and how could "the weak brother" look with quite his
old anxiety on the problems suggested by the dishes
at a meal, and by the dates of the Rabbinic Calendar?
And how could "the capable" bear any longer to lose
his joy in God by an assertion, full of self, of his own
insight and "liberty"? Profoundly happy and at rest
in their Lord, whom they embraced by faith as their
Righteousness and Life, and whom they anticipated in
hope as their coming Glory; filled through their whole
consciousness, by the indwelling Spirit, with a new insight
into Christ; they would fall into each other's
embrace, in Him. They would be much more ready,
when they met, to speak "concerning the King" than to
begin a new stage of their not very elevating discussion.
How many a Church controversy, now as then, would
die of inanition, leaving room for a living truth, if the
disputants could only gravitate, as to their always most
beloved theme, to the praises and glories of their redeeming
Lord Himself! It is at His feet, and in His
arms, that we best understand both His truth, and the
thoughts, rightful or mistaken, of our brethren.
Meanwhile, let us take this benedictory prayer, as
we may take it, from its instructive context, and carry
it out with us into all the contexts of life. What the
Apostle prayed for the Romans, in view of their controversies,
he prays for us, as for them, in view of
everything. Let us "stand back and look at the
picture." Here—conveyed in this strong petition—is
St Paul's idea of the true Christian's true life, and the
true life of the true Church. What are the elements,
and what is the result?
It is a life lived in direct contact with God. "Now
the God of hope fill you." He remits them here (as
above, ver. 5) from even himself to the Living God. In
a sense, he sends them even from "the things fore-written,"
to the Living God; not in the least to disparage
the Scriptures, but because the great function
of the divine Word, as of the divine Ordinances, is to
guide the soul into an immediate intercourse with the
Lord God in His Son, and to secure it therein. God
is to deal direct with the Romans. He is to manipulate,
He is to fill, their being.
It is a life not starved or straitened, but full. "The
God of hope fill you." The disciple, and the Church,
is not to live as if grace were like a stream "in the
year of drought," now settled into an almost stagnant
deep, then struggling with difficulty over the stones of
the shallow. The man, and the Society, are to live
and work in tranquil but moving strength, "rich" in
the fruits of their Lord's "poverty" (2 Cor. viii. 9);
filled out of His fulness; never, spiritually, at a loss for
Him; never, practically, having to do or bear except in
His large and gracious power.
It is a life bright and beautiful; "filled with all joy
and peace." It is to shew a surface fair with the reflected
sky of Christ, Christ present, Christ to come.
A sacred while open happiness and a pure internal
repose is to be there, born of "His presence, in which
is fulness of joy," and of the sure prospect of His
Return, bringing with it "pleasures for evermore."
Like that mysterious ether of which the natural philosopher
tells us, this joy, this peace, found and maintained
"in the Lord," is to pervade all the contents of the
Christian life, its moving masses of duty or trial, its
interspaces of rest or silence; not always demonstrative
but always underlying, and always a living power.
It is a life of faith; "all joy and peace in your
believing." That is to say, it is a life dependent for
its all upon a Person and His promises. Its glad
certainty of peace with God, of the possession of His
Righteousness, is by means not of sensations and
experiences, but of believing; it comes, and stays, by
taking Christ at His word. Its power over temptation,
its "victory and triumph against the devil, the world,
and the flesh," is by the same means. The man, the
Church, takes the Lord at His word;—"I am with you
always"; "Through Me thou shalt do valiantly";—and
faith, that is to say, Christ trusted in practice, is
"more than conqueror."
It is a life overflowing with the heavenly hope;
"that ye may abound in the hope." Sure of the past,
and of the present, it is—what out of Christ no life
can be—sure of the future. The golden age, for this
happy life, is in front, and is no Utopia. "Now is
our salvation nearer"; "We look for that blissful
(μακαρίαν) hope, the appearing of our great God and
Saviour"; "Them which sleep in Him God will bring
with Him"; "We shall be caught up together with
them; we shall ever be with the Lord"; "They shall
see His face; thine eyes shall set the King in His
beauty."
And all this it is as a life lived "in the power of the
Holy Ghost." Not by enthusiasm, not by any stimulus
which self applies to self; not by resources for gladness
and permanence found in independent reason or affection;
but by the almighty, all-tender power of the Comforter.
"The Lord, the Life-Giver," giving life by bringing us
to the Son of God, and uniting us to Him, is the Giver
and strong Sustainer of the faith, and so of the peace,
the joy, the hope, of this blessed life.
"Now it was not written for their sakes only, but
for us also," in our circumstances of personal and of
common experience. Large and pregnant is the application
of this one utterance to the problems perpetually
raised by the divided state of organization, and of
opinion, in modern Christendom. It gives us one
secret, above and below all others, as the sure panacea,
if it may but be allowed to work, for this multifarious
malady which all who think deplore. That secret is
"the secret of the Lord, which is with them that
fear Him" (Psal. xxv. 14). It is a fuller life in the
individual, and so in the community, of the peace and
joy of believing; a larger abundance of "that blessed
hope," given by that power for which numberless hearts
are learning to thirst with a new intensity, "the power
of the Holy Ghost."
It was in that direction above all that the Apostle
gazed as he yearned for the unity, not only spiritual
but practical, of the Roman saints. This great master
of order, this man made for government, alive with all
his large wisdom to the sacred importance, in its true
place, of the external mechanism of Christianity, yet
makes no mention of it here, nay, scarcely gives one
allusion to it in the whole Epistle. The word
"Church" is not heard till the final chapter; and then
it is used only, or almost only, of the scattered mission-stations,
or even mission-groups, in their individuality.
The ordered Ministry only twice, and in the most
passing manner, comes into the long discourse; in the
words (xii. 6-8) about prophecy, ministration, teaching,
exhortation, leadership; and in the mention (xvi. 1) of
Phœbe's relation to the Cenchrean Church. He is
addressing the saints of that great City which was
afterwards, in the tract of time, to develop into even
terrific exaggerations the idea of Church Order. But
he has practically nothing to say to them about unification
and cohesion beyond this appeal to hold fast
together by drawing nearer each and all to the Lord,
and so filling each one his soul and life with Him.
Our modern problems must be met with attention,
with firmness, with practical purpose, with due regard
to history, and with submission to revealed truth. But
if they are to be solved indeed they must be met outside
the spirit of self, and in the communion of the Christian
with Christ, by the power of the Spirit of God.
CHAPTER XXXI
ROMAN CHRISTIANITY: ST PAUL'S COMMISSION:
HIS INTENDED ITINERARY: HE ASKS FOR PRAYER
Romans xv. 14-33
THE Epistle hastens to its close. As to its instructions,
doctrinal or moral, they are now
practically written. The Way of Salvation lies extended,
in its radiant outline, before the Romans, and
ourselves. The Way of Obedience, in some of its main
tracks, has been drawn firmly on the field of life.
Little remains but the Missionary's last words about
persons and plans, and then the great task is done.
He will say a warm, gracious word about the spiritual
state of the Roman believers. He will justify, with a
noble courtesy, his own authoritative attitude as their
counsellor. He will talk a little of his hoped for and
now seemingly approaching visit, and matters in connexion
with it. He will greet the individuals whom
he knows, and commend the bearer of the Letter, and
add last messages from his friends. Then Phœbe may
receive her charge, and go on her way.
But I am sure, my brethren, quite on my own
part (καὶ αὐτὸς ἐγώ),
about you, that you are,
yourselves, irrespective of my influence, brimming with
goodness, with high Christian qualities in general, filled
with all knowledge, competent in fact (καὶ) to admonish
one another. Is this flattery, interested and insincere?
Is it weakness, easily persuaded into a false optimism?
Surely not; for the speaker here is the man who has
spoken straight to the souls of these same people about
sin, and judgment, and holiness; about the holiness of
these everyday charities which some of them (so he
has said plainly enough) had been violating. But a
truly great heart always loves to praise where it can,
and, discerningly, to think and say the best. He who
is Truth itself said of His imperfect, His disappointing
followers, as He spoke of them in their hearing to
His Father, "They have kept Thy word"; "I am
glorified in them" (John xvii. 6, 10). So here his
Servant does not indeed give the Romans a formal
certificate of perfection, but he does rejoice to know,
and to say, that their community is Christian in a high
degree, and that in a certain sense they have not
needed information about Justification by Faith, nor
about principles of love and liberty in their intercourse.
In essence, all has been in their cognizance already; an
assurance which could not have been entertained in
regard of every Mission, certainly. He has written
not as to children, giving them an alphabet, but as to
men, developing facts into science.
But with a certain boldness (τολμηρότερον)
I have writtenἜγραψα: the epistolary aorist.
to you, here and there,Ἀπὸ μέρους
"as regards part" of his instructions and cautions.
He probably refers particularly to the discussions of ch. xiv. 1—xv. 13.
just as reminding you; because of the grace, the free gift of his
commission and of the equipment for it, given
me by our (τοῦ) God, given in order to my being
Christ Jesus' minister sent to the Nations, doing priest-work
with the Gospel of God, that the oblation of the Nations,
the oblation which is in fact the Nations self-laid upon
the spiritual altar, may be acceptable, consecrated in the
Holy Spirit. It is a startling and splendid passage of
metaphor. Here once, in all the range of his writings
(unless we except the few and affecting words of Phil.
ii. 17), the Apostle presents himself to his converts as
a sacrificial ministrant, a "priest" in the sense which
usage (not etymology) has so long stamped on that
English word as its more special sense. Never do the
great Founders of the Church, and never does He who is
its Foundation, use the term ἱερεύς,
sacrificing, mediating,
priest, as a term to designate the Christian minister
in any of his orders; never, if this passage is not to
be reckoned in, with its ἱερουργεῖν,
its "priest-work,"
as we have ventured to translate the Greek. In the
distinctively sacerdotal Epistle, the Hebrews, the word
ἱερεὺς comes indeed into the foreground. But there it
is absorbed into the Lord. It is appropriated altogether
to Him in His self-sacrificial Work once done,
and in His heavenly Work now always doing, the work
of mediatorial impartation, from His throne,He is seen in the Epistle not before the throne, standing, but on
the throne, seated.
of the blessings which His great Offering won. One other
Christian application of the sacrificial title we have in
the Epistles: "Ye are a holy priesthood," "a royal
priesthood" (1 Pet. ii. 5, 9). But who are "ye"? Not
the consecrated pastorate, but the consecrated Christian
company altogether. And what are the altar-sacrifices
of that company? "Sacrifices spiritual"; "the praises
of Him who called them into His wonderful light"
(1 Pet. ii. 5, 9). In the Christian Church, the pre-Levitical
ideal of the old Israel reappears in its sacred
reality. He who offered to the Church of Moses
(Exod. xix. 6) to be one great priesthood, "a kingdom
of priests, and a holy nation," found His favoured nation
unready for the privilege, and so Levi representatively
took the place alone. But now, in His new Israel, as
all are sons in the Son, so all are priests in the Priest.
And the sacred Ministry of that Israel, the Ministry
which is His own divine institution, the gift (Eph. iv. 11)
of the ascended Lord to His Church, is never once
designated, as such, by the term which would have
marked it as the analogue to Levi, or to Aaron.
Is this passage in any degree an exception? No; for
it contains its own full inner evidence of its metaphorical
cast. The "priest-working" here has regard, we find,
not to a ritual, but to "the Gospel." "The oblation" is—the
Nations. The hallowing Element, shed as it were
upon the victims, is the Holy Ghost. Not in a material
temple, and serving at no tangible altar, the Apostle
brings his multitudinous converts as his holocaust to
the Lord. The Spirit, at his preaching and on their
believing, descends upon them; and they lay themselves
"a living sacrifice" where the fire of love shall consume
them, to His glory.
I have therefore my (read τὴν) right to exultation,
in Christ Jesus, as His member and
implement, as to what regards God; not in any respect
as regards myself, apart from Him. And then he
proceeds as if about to say, in evidence of that assertion,
that he always declines to intrude on a brother
Apostle's ground, and to claim as his own experience
what was in the least degree another's; but that indeed
through him, in sovereign grace, God has done great
things, far and wide. This he expresses thus, in
energetic compressions of diction:
For I will not dare to talk at all of things which
Christ did not work out through me, (there is an
emphasis on "me,") to effect obedience of (the)
Nations to His Gospel, by word and deed, in
power of signs and wonders, in power of God's
Spirit; a reference, strangely impressive by its very
passingness, to the exercise of miracle-working gifts by
the writer. This man, so strong in thought, so practical
in counsel, so extremely unlikely to have been
under an illusion about a large factor in his adult and
intensely conscious experience, speaks direct from himself
of his wonder-works. And the allusion, thus
dropped by the way and left behind, is itself an
evidence to the perfect mental balance of the witness;
this was no enthusiast, intoxicated with ambitious
spiritual visions, but a man put in trust with a
mysterious yet sober treasure. So that from
Jerusalem, and round about it (Acts xxvi. 20),
as far as the Illyrian region, the highland seabord which
looks across the Adriatic to the long eastern side of
Italy, I have fulfilled the Gospel of Christ, carried it
practically everywhere, satisfied the idea of so distributing
it that it shall be accessible everywhere to
the native races.
But this I have done with this ambition, to
preach the Gospel not where Christ was already
named, that I might not build on another man's foundation;
but to act on the divine word, as it
stands written (Isai. lii. 15), "They to whom
no news was carried about Him, shall see; and those
who have not heard, shall understand." Here was an
"ambition" as far-sighted as it was noble. Would that
the principle of it could have been better remembered in
the history of Christendom, and not least in our own
age; a wasteful over-lapping of effort on effort, system
on system, would not need now to be so much deplored.
Thus as a fact (καὶ) I was hindered for the
most part—hindrances were the rule, signals
of opportunity the exception—in coming to you; you,
whose City is no untrodden ground to messengers
of Christ, and therefore not the ground which
had a first claim on me. But now, as no longer
having place in these regions, eastern Roman Europe
yielding him no longer an unattempted and accessible
district to enter, and having a home-sick feeling
(ἐπιποθίαν: see above, i. 11)
for coming to you, these many years whenever I may be journeying to
Spain, [I will come to youThese words have weak documentary support. But surely the
ellipsis left by their absence is difficult to accept, even in St Paul's
free style.].
For I hope, on my
journey through, to see the sight of you (θεάσασθαι,
as if the view of so important a Church would be a spectacle
indeed), and by youOr perhaps "from you," ἀφ' ὑμῶν.
to be escorted there, if first I may
have my fill of you, however imperfectly
(ἀπὸ μέρους).
As always, in the fine courtesy of pastoral love, he
says more, and thinks more, of his own expected gain of
refreshment and encouragement from them, than even
of what he may have to impart to them. So he had
thought, and so spoken, in his opening page (i. 11, 12);
it is the same heart throughout.
How little did he realize the line and details of the
destined fulfilment of that "home-sick feeling"! He
was indeed to "see Rome," and for no passing "sight
of the scene." For two long years of sorrows and
joys, restraints and wonderful occasions, innumerable
colloquies, and the writing of great Scriptures, he was
to "dwell in his own hired lodgings" there. But he
did not see what lay between.
For St Paul ordinarily, as always for us, it was
true that "we know not what awaits us." For us, as
for him, it is better "to walk with God in the dark,
than to go alone in the light."
Did he ultimately visit Spain? We shall never know
until perhaps we are permitted to ask him hereafter. It
is not at all impossible that, released from his Roman
prison, he first went westward and then—as at some time
he certainly did—travelled to the Levant. But no tradition,
however faint, connects St Paul with the great
Peninsula which glories in her legend of St James.
Is it irrelevant to remember that in his Gospel he has
notably visited Spain in later ages? It was the Gospel
of St Paul, the simple grandeur of his exposition of
Justification by Faith, which in the sixteenth century
laid hold on multitudes of the noblest of Spanish hearts,
till it seemed as if not Germany, not England, bid
fairer to become again a land of "truth in the light."
The terrible Inquisition utterly crushed the springing
harvest, at Valladolid, at Seville, and in that ghastly
Quemadero at Madrid, which, five-and-twenty years ago,
was excavated by accident, to reveal its deep strata of
ashes, and charred bones, and all the débris of the Autos.
But now again, in the mercy of God, and in happier
hours, the New Testament is read in the towns of
Spain, and in her highland villages, and churches are
gathering around the holy light, spiritual descendants of
the true, the primeval, Church of Rome. May "the God
of hope fill them with all peace and joy in believing."
But now I am journeying to Jerusalem, the
journey whose course we know so well from
Acts xx. xxi., ministering to the saints, serving the
poor converts of the holy City as the collector and
conveyer of alms for their necessities. For
Macedonia and Achaia, the northern and
southern Provinces of Roman Greece, finely personified
in this vivid passage, thought good to make something of
a (τινὰ) communication,
a certain gift to be "shared"
among the recipients, for the poor of the saints who live
at Jerusalem; the place where poverty seemed specially,
for whatever reason, to beset the converts. "For
they thought good!" yes; but there is a
different side to the matter. Macedonia and
Achaia are generous friends, but they have an obligation
too: And debtors they are to them, to these poor
people of the old City. For if in their spiritual
things the Nations shared, they, these Nations,
are in debt, as a fact, (καί,)
in things carnal, things
belonging to our "life in the flesh," to minister to
them; λειτουργῆσαι,
to do them public and religious service.
When I have finished this then, and sealed
this fruit to them, put them into ratified ownership
of this "proceed" (καρπὸν)
of Christian love, I will
come away by your road (δι' ὑμῶν)
to Spain. (He means,
"if the Lord will"; it is instructive to note that even
St Paul does not make it a duty, with an almost
superstitious iteration, always to say so). Now
I know that, coming to you, in the fulness of Christ's benedictioOmitting the words τοῦ εὐαγγελίου τοῦ.
I shall come. He will come with
his Lord's "benediction" on him, as His messenger to the
Roman disciples; Christ will send him charged with
heavenly messages, and attended with His own prospering
presence. And this will be "in fulness"; with
a rich overflow of saving truth, and heavenly power,
and blissful fellowship.
Here he pauses, to ask them for that boon of which
he is so covetous—intercessory prayer. He has been
speaking with a kind and even sprightly pleasantry
(there is no irreverence in the recognition) of those
Personages, Macedonia and Achaia, and their gift,
which is also their debt. He has spoken also of what
we know from elsewhere (1 Cor. xvi. 1-4) to have
been his own scrupulous purpose not only to collect
the alms but to see them punctually delivered, above all
suspicion of misuse. He has talked with cheerful
confidence of "the road by Rome to Spain." But now
he realizes what the visit to Jerusalem involves for
himself. He has tasted in many places, and at many
times, the bitter hatred felt for him in unbelieving
Israel; a hatred the more bitter, probably, the more his
astonishing activity and influence were felt in region
after region. Now he is going to the central focus of the
enmity; to the City of the Sanhedrin, and of the
Zealots. And St Paul is no Stoic, indifferent to fear,
lifted in an unnatural exaltation above circumstances,
though he is ready to walk through them in the power
of Christ. His heart anticipates the experiences of
outrage and revilings, and the possible breaking up of
all his missionary plans. He thinks too of prejudice
within the Church, as well as of hatred from without;
he is not at all sure that his cherished collection will
not be coldly received, or even rejected, by the Judaists
of the mother-church; whom yet he must and will call
"saints." So he tells all to the Romans, with a generous
and winning confidence in their sympathy, and begs
their prayers, and above all sets them praying that he
may not be disappointed of his longed-for visit to them.
All was granted. He was welcomed by the Church.
He was delivered from the fanatics, by the strong arm
of the Empire. He did reach Rome, and he had holy
joy there. Only, the Lord took His own way, a way
they knew not, to answer Paul and his friends.
But I appeal to you, brethren,—the "but"
carries an implication that something lay in the
way of the happy prospect just mentioned,—by our Lord
Jesus Christ, and by the love of the Spirit, by that holy
family affection inspired by the Holy One into the
hearts which He has regenerated,So we explain, rather than take the reference to be to the Holy
Spirit's love for us. In this context, surely, this latter would be less
in point.
to wrestle along with me in your prayers on my behalf to our
(τῷ) God; that I may be rescued from those
who disobey the Gospel in Judea, and that my ministrationΔιακονία: another possible reading is
δωροφορία, "gift-bearing."
which takes me to Jerusalem
(ἡ εἰς Ἱερουσαλὴμ)
may prove acceptable to the saints, may be taken by the
Christians there without prejudice, and in love; that I
may with joy come to you, through the will of God,Perhaps read, "through the will of the Lord Jesus."
and may share refreshing rest with you,
the rest of holy fellowship where the tension of discussion
and opposition is intermitted, and the two
parties perfectly "understand one another" in their
Lord. But the God of our (τῆς) peace be with
you all. Yes, so be it, whether or no the
longed-for "joy" and "refreshing rest" is granted in
His providence to the Apostle. With his beloved
Romans, anywise, let there be "peace"; peace in their
community, and in their souls; peace with God, and
peace in Him. And so it will be, whether their human
friend is or is not permitted, to see them, if only the
Eternal Friend is there.
There is a deep and attractive tenderness, as we
have seen above, in this paragraph, where the writer's
heart tells the readers quite freely of its personal
misgivings and longings. One of the most pathetic,
sometimes one of the most beautiful, phenomena of
human life is the strong man in his weak hour, or
rather in his feeling hour, when he is glad of the
support of those who may be so much his weaker.
There is a sort of strength which prides itself upon
never shewing such symptoms; to which it is a point of
honour to act and speak always as if the man were self-contained
and self-sufficient. But this is a narrow type
of strength, not a great one. The strong man truly
great is not afraid, in season, to "let himself go"; he is
well able to recover. An underlying power leaves him
at leisure to shew upon the surface very much of what
he feels. The largeness of his insight puts him into
manifold contact with others, and keeps him open to
their sympathies, however humble and inadequate these
sympathies may be. The Lord Himself, "mighty to
save," cared more than we can fully know for human
fellow-feeling. "Will ye also go away?" "Ye are
they that have continued with Me in My temptations";
"Tarry ye here, and watch with Me"; "Lovest thou
Me?"
No false spiritual pride suggests it to St Paul to
conceal his anxieties from the Romans. It is a
temptation sometimes to those who have been called
to help and strengthen other men, to affect for themselves
a strength which perhaps they do not quite feel.
It is well meant. The man is afraid that if he owns
to a burthen he may seem to belie the Gospel of
"perfect peace"; that if he even lets it be suspected
that he is not always in the ideal Christian frame, his
warmest exhortations and testimonies may lose their
power. But at all possible hazards let him, about
such things as about all others, tell the truth. It is
a sacred duty in itself; the heavenly Gospel has no
corner in it for the manœuvres of spiritual prevarication.
And he will find assuredly that truthfulness,
transparent candour, will not really discount his witness
to the promises of his Lord. It may humiliate him,
but it will not discredit Jesus Christ. It will indicate
the imperfection of the recipient, but not any defect in
the thing received. And the fact that the witness has
been found quite candid against himself, where there is
occasion, will give a double weight to his every direct
testimony to the possibility of a life lived in the hourly
peace of God.
It is no part of our Christian duty to feel doubts and
fears! And the more we act upon our Lord's promises
as they stand, the more we shall rejoice to find that
misgivings tend to vanish where once they were always
thickening upon us. Only, it is our duty always to be
transparently honest.
However, we must not treat this theme here too
much as if St Paul had given us an unmistakable text
for it. His words now before us express no "carking
care" about his intended visit to Jerusalem. They only
indicate a deep sense of the gravity of the prospect,
and of its dangers. And we know from elsewhere (see
especially Acts xxi. 13) that that sense did sometimes
amount to an agony of feeling, in the course of the very
journey which he now contemplates. And we see him
here quite without the wish to conceal his heart in
the matter.
In closing we note, "for our learning," his example as
he is a man who craves to be prayed for. Prayer, that
great mystery, that blessed fact and power, was indeed
vital to St Paul. He is always praying himself; he
is always asking other people to pray for him. He
"has seen Jesus Christ our Lord"; he is his Lord's
inspired Minister and Delegate; he has been "caught
up into the third heaven"; he has had a thousand proofs
that "all things," infallibly, "work together for his
good." But he is left by this as certain as ever, with a
persuasion as simple as a child's, and also as deep as
his own life-worn spirit, that it is immensely well worth
his while to secure the intercessory prayers of those
who know the way to God in Christ.
CHAPTER XXXII
A COMMENDATION: GREETINGS: A WARNING:
A DOXOLOGY
Romans xvi. 1-27
ONCE more, with a reverent licence of thought,
we may imagine ourselves to be watching in
detail the scene in the house of Gaius. Hour upon
hour has passed over Paul and his scribe as the
wonderful Message has developed itself, at once and
everywhere the word of man and the Word of God.
They began at morning, and the themes of sin, and
righteousness, and glory, of the present and the future
of Israel, of the duties of the Christian life, of the
special problems of the Roman Mission, have carried
the hours along to noon, to afternoon. Now, to the
watcher from the westward lattice,
"Slow sinks, more lovely ere his race be run,
Along Morea's hills the setting sun;
Not, as in northern climes, obscurely bright,
But one unclouded blaze of living light."
The Apostle, pacing the chamber, as men are wont to
do when they use the pens of others, is aware that his
message is at an end, as to doctrine and counsel. But
before he bids his willing and wondering secretary rest
from his labours, he has to discharge his own heart of
the personal thoughts and affections which have lain
ready in it all the while, and which his last words about
his coming visit to the City have brought up in all their
life and warmth. And now Paul and Tertius are no
longer alone; other brethren have found their way to
the chamber—Timotheus, Lucius, Jason, Sosipater;
Gaius himself; Quartus; and no less a neighbour than
Erastus, Treasurer of Corinth. A page of personal
messages is yet to be dictated, from St Paul, and from
his friends.
Now first he must not forget the pious woman who is—so
we surely may assume—to take charge of this inestimable
packet, and to deliver it at Rome. We know
nothing of Phœbe but from this brief mention. We cannot
perhaps be formally certain that she is here described
as a female Church-official, a "deaconess" in a sense
of that word familiar in later developments of Church-order—a
woman set apart by the laying-on of hands,
appointed to enquire into and relieve temporal distress,
and to be the teacher of female enquirers in the mission.
But there is at least a great likelihood that something
like this was her position; for she was not merely an
active Christian, she was "a ministrant of the Church."
And she was certainly, as a person, worthy of reliance
and of loving commendatory praise, now that some cause—absolutely
unknown to us; perhaps nothing more
unusual than a change of residence, obliged by private
circumstances—took her from Achaia to Italy. She had
been a devoted and it would seem particularly a braveSee on προστάτις below.
friend of converts in trouble, and of St Paul himself.
Perhaps in the course of her visits to the desolate she had
fought difficult battles of protest, where she found harshness
and oppression. Perhaps she had pleaded the
forgotten cause of the poor, with a woman's courage,
before some neglectful richer "brother."
Then Rome itself, as he sees Phœbe reaching it,
rises—as yet only in fancy; it was still unknown to
him—upon his mind. And there, moving up and down
in that strange and almost awful world, he sees one by
one the members of a large group of his personal
Christian friends, and his beloved Aquila and Prisca
are most visible of all. These must be individually
saluted.
What the nature of these friendships was we know
in some instances, for we are told here. But why the
persons were at Rome, in the place which Paul himself
had never reached, we do not know, nor ever shall.
Many students of the Epistle, it is well known, find a
serious difficulty in this list of friends so placed—the
persons so familiar, the place so strange; and they
would have us look on this sixteenth chapter as a
fragment from some other Letter, pieced in here by
mistake; or what not. But no ancient copy of the
Epistle gives us, by its condition, any real ground for
such conjectures. And all that we have to do to realize
possibilities in the actual features of the case, is to
assume that many at least of this large Roman group,
as surely Aquila and Prisca,See 1 Cor. xvi. 19.
had recently migrated from the Levant to Rome; a migration as common and
almost as easy then as is the modern influx of foreign
denizens to London.
Bishop Lightfoot, in an Excursus in his edition of the Philippian Epistle,Pp. 171-178 (eighth edition).
has given us reason to think
that not a few of the "Romans" named here by St
Paul were members of that "Household of Cæsar" of
which in later days he speaks to the Philippians (iv. 22)
as containing its "saints," saints who send special greetings
to the Macedonian brethren. The Domus Cæsaris
included "the whole of the Imperial household, the
meanest slaves, as well as the most powerful courtiers";
"all persons in the Emperor's service, whether slaves
or freemen, in Italy and even in the provinces." The
literature of sepulchral inscriptions at Rome is peculiarly
rich in allusions to members of "the Household." And
it is from this quarter, particularly from discoveries in it
made early in the last century, that Lightfoot gets good
reasons for thinking that in Phil. iv. 22 we may, quite
possibly, be reading a greeting from Rome sent by
the very persons (speaking roundly) who are here
greeted in the Epistle to Rome. A place of burial on the
Appian Way, devoted to the ashes of Imperial freedmen
and slaves, and other similar receptacles, all to be
dated with practical certainty about the middle period
of the first century, yield the following names:
Amplias, Urbanus, Stachys, Apelles, Tryphæna, Tryphosa,
Rufus, Hermes, Hermas, Philologus, Julius, Nereis; a
name which might have denoted the sister (see ver. 15)
of a man Nereus.
Of course such facts must be used with due reserve
in inference. But they make it abundantly clear that,
in Lightfoot's words, "the names and allusions at the
close of the Roman Epistle are in keeping with the
circumstances of the metropolis in St Paul's day."
They help us to a perfectly truthlike theory. We
have only to suppose that among St Paul's converts
and friends in Asia and Eastern Europe many either
belonged already to the ubiquitous "Household,"
or entered it after conversion, as purchased slaves
or otherwise; and that some time before our Epistle
was written there was a large draft from the provincial
to the metropolitan department; and that thus,
when St Paul thought of personal Christian friends
at Rome, he would happen to think, mainly, of "saints
of Cæsar's Household." Such a theory would also,
by the way, help to explain the emphasis with which
just these "saints" sent their greeting, later, to Philippi.
Many of them might have lived in Macedonia, and
particularly in the colonia of Philippi, before the time
of their supposed transference to Rome.
We may add, from Lightfoot's discussion, a word
about "the households," or "people"—of Aristobulus
and Narcissus—mentioned in the greetings before us.
It seems at least likely that the Aristobulus of the
Epistle was a grandson of Herod the Great, and brother
of Agrippa of Judea; a prince who lived and died at
Rome. At his death it would be no improbable thing
that his "household" should pass by legacy to the
Emperor, while they would still, as a sort of clan, keep
their old master's name. Aristobulus' servants, probably
many of them Jews (Herodion, St Paul's kinsman, may
have been a retainer of this Herod), would thus now
be a part of "the Household of Cæsar," and the
Christians among them would be a group of "the
Household saints." As to the Narcissus of the Epistle,
he may well have been the all-powerful freedman of
Claudius, put to death early in Nero's time. On his
death, his great familia would become, by confiscation,
part of "the Household"; and its Christian members
would be thought of by St Paul as among "the Household
saints."
Thus it is at least possible that the holy lives which
here pass in such rapid file before us were lived not
only in Rome, but in a connexion more or less close
with the service and business of the Court of Nero. So
freely does grace make light of circumstance.
Now it is time to come from our preliminaries to
the text.
But—the word may mark the movement of
thought from his own delay in reaching them to
Phœbe's immediate coming—I commend to you Phœbe,
our sister, (this Christian woman bore, without change,
and without reproach, the name of the Moon-Goddess
of the Greeks,) being a ministrant (διάκονον) of the
Church which is in Cenchreæ, the Ægæan port
of Corinth; that you may welcome her, in the
Lord, as a fellow-member of His Body, in a way worthy
of the saints, with all the respect and the affection of
the Gospel, and that you may stand by her
(παραστῆτε αὐτῇ)
in any matter in which she may need you, stranger
as she will be at Rome. For she on her part
(αὕτη) has provedLit., "did prove": it is the epistolary aorist.
a stand-by (almost a champion, one who
stands up for others, προστάτις)
of many, aye, and of me among them.
Greet PriscaRead Πρίσκαν not
Πρίσκιλλαν.
and Aquila (Ἀκύλας), my co-workers
in Christ Jesus; the friends who
(οἵτινες) for my life's sake submitted their own
throat to the knife (it was at some stern crisis
otherwise utterly unknown to us, but well known in
heaven); to whom not only I give thanks, but also all
the Churches of the Nations; for they saved the man
whom the Lord consecrated to the service of the Gentile
world. And the Church at their house greet
with them; that is, the Christians of their
neighbourhood, who used Aquila's great room as their
house of prayer; the embryo of our parish or district
Church. This provision of a place of worship was an
old usage of this holy pair, whom St Paul's almost
reverent affection presents to us in such a living individuality.
They had gathered "a domestic Church"
at Corinth, not many months before (1 Cor. xvi. 19).
And earlier still, at Ephesus (Acts xviii. 26), they
wielded such a Christian influence that they must have
been a central point of influence and gathering there
also. In Prisca, or Priscilla, as it has been remarked,By the late Dean Howson, in Smith's Bible Dictionary.
we have "an example of what a married woman may
do, for the general service of the Church, in conjunction
with home-duties, just as Phœbe is the type of the
unmarried servant of the Church, or deaconess."
Greet Epænĕtus, my beloved, who is the firstfruits of Asia,So certainly read, not Ἀχαΐας.
that is of the Ephesian Province, unto
Christ; doubtless one who "owed his soul" to St Paul
in that three years' missionary pastorate at Ephesus,
and who was now bound to him by the indescribable
tie which makes the converter and converted one.
Greet Mary—a Jewess probably, Miriam or
Maria,—for she (ἥτις)
toiled hard for you;Reading ὑμᾶς.
when and how we cannot know.
Greet Andronicus and Junias, Junianus, my
kinsmen, and my fellow-captives in Christ's war
(συναιχμαλώτους);
a loving and mindful reference to the
human relationships which so freely, but not lightly,
he had sacrificed for Christ, and to some persecution-battle
(was it at Philippi?) when these good men had
shared his prison; men who (οἵτινες)
are distinguished
among the apostles; either as being themselves, in a
secondary sense, devoted "apostles," Christ's missionary
delegates, though not of the Apostolate proper, or as
being honoured above the common, for their toil and
their character, by the Apostolic Brotherhood; who
also before me came to be, as they are, in Christ.The perfect, γέγονασι, γέγοναν,
imports the permanence of their blessed position, up to the date.
Not improbably these two early converts helped to "goad"
(Acts xxvi. 14) the conscience of their still persecuting
Kinsman, and to prepare the way of Christ in his
heart.
Greet Amplias, Ampliatus, my beloved in
the Lord; surely a personal convert of his own.
Greet Urbanus, my co-worker in Christ, and
Stachys—another masculine name—my beloved.
Greet Apelles, that (τὸν) tested man in Christ;
the Lord knows, not we, the tests he stood.
Greet those who belong to Aristobulus' people.See above, p. 425, on this allusion, and on Herodion, and on
"Narcissus' people."
Greet Herodion, my kinsman.
Greet those who belong to Narcissus' people,
those who are in the Lord.
Greet Tryphæna and Tryphosa, (almost certainly,
by the type of their names, female
slaves,) who toil in the Lord, perhaps as "servants of
the Church," so far as earthly service would allow them.
Greet Persis, the beloved woman, (with faultless
delicacy he does not here say "my beloved," as he had
said of the Christian men mentioned just above,) for
she (ἥτις) toiled hard in the Lord;
perhaps at some time when St Paul had watched her in a former and
more Eastern home.
Greet Rufus—just possibly the Rufus of Mar. xv. 21,
brother of Alexander, and son of Cross-carrying
Simon; the family was evidently known to
St Mark, and we have good cause to think that St
Mark wrote primarily for Roman readers—Rufus, the
chosen man in the Lord, a saint of the élite; and his
mother—and mine! This nameless woman had done a
mother's part, somehow and somewhere, to the motherless
Missionary, and her lovingkindness stands recorded now
"In either Book of Life, here and above."
Greet Asyncrĭtus, Phlegon, Hermas, Patrŏbas,
Hermes, and the brethren who are with them;
dwellers perhaps in some isolated and distant quarter
of Rome, a little Church by themselves.
Greet Philologus and Julia, Nereus and his
sister, and all the saints who are with them, in
their assembly.
Greet one another with a sacred kiss; the
Oriental pledge of friendship, and of respect.
All (read πᾶσαι)
the Churches of Christ greet you; Corinth, Cenchreæ, "with all
the saints in the whole of Achaia" (2 Cor. i. 1).
The roll of names is over, with its music, that
subtle characteristic of such recitations of human
personalities, and with its moving charm for the heart
due almost equally to our glimpses of information about
one here and one there and to our total ignorance
about others; an ignorance of everything about them
but that they were at Rome, and that they were in
Christ. We seem, by an effort of imagination, to see,
as through a bright cloud, the faces of the company,
and to catch the far-off voices; but the dream "dissolves
in wrecks"; we do not know them, we do not
know their distant world. But we do know Him in
whom they were, and are; and that they have been
"with Him, which is far better," for now so long a
time of rest and glory. Some no doubt by deaths of
terror and wonder, by the fire, by the horrible wild-beasts,
"departed to be with Him"; some went, perhaps,
with a dismissal as gentle as love and stillness could
make it. But however, they were the Lord's; they
are with the Lord. And we, in Him,
"Are tending upward too,
As fast as time can move."
So we watch this unknown yet well-beloved company,
with a sense of fellowship and expectation impossible
out of Christ. This page is no mere relic of the past;
it is a list of friendships to be made hereafter, and to
be possessed for ever, in the endless life where personality
indeed shall be eternal, but where also the union
of personalities, in Christ, shall be beyond our utmost
present thought.
But the Apostle cannot close with these messages
of love. He remembers another and anxious need, a
serious spiritual peril in the Roman community. He
has not even alluded to it before, but it must be
handled, however briefly, now:
But I appeal to you, brethren, to watch the
persons who make the divisions and the stumbling-blocks
you know of, alien to the teaching which you
learnt (there is an emphasis on "you," as if to difference
the true-hearted converts from these troublers);—and
do turn away from them; go, and keep, out of their
way; wise counsel for a peaceable but effectual resistance.
For such people are not bondservants
of our Lord Jesus Christ, but they are bondservants
of their own belly. They talk much of a
mystic freedom; and free indeed they are from the
accepted dominion of the Redeemer—but all the more
they are enslaved to themselves; and by their (τῆς)
pious language and their specious pleas they quite beguile
(ἐξαπατῶσι)
the hearts of the simple, the unsuspicious.
And they may perhaps have special hopes
of beguiling you, because of your well-known readiness
to submit, with the submission of faith, to sublime
truths; a noble character, but calling inevitably for the
safeguards of intelligent caution: For your
obedience, "the obedience of faith," shewn
when the Gospel reached you, was carried by report
to all men, and so to these beguilers, who hope now
to entice your faith astray. As regards you, therefore,
looking only at your personal condition, I rejoice.
Only I wish you to be wise as to what is good, but
uncontaminated (by defiling knowledge) as to what is
evil. He would not have their holy readiness to
believe distorted into an unhallowed and falsely tolerant
curiosity. He would have their faith not only submissive
but spiritually intelligent (σαφούς); then they
would be alive to the risks of a counterfeited and
illusory "Gospel." They would feel, as with an
educated Christian instinct, where decisively to hold
back, where to refuse attention to unwholesome teaching.
But the God of our (τῆς) peace will crush
Satan down beneath your feet speedily. This
spiritual mischief, writhing itself, like the serpent of
Paradise, into your happy precincts, is nothing less than
a stratagem of the great Enemy's own; a movement
of his mysterious personal antagonism to your Lord,
and to you His people. But the Enemy's Conqueror,
working in you, will make the struggle short and
decisive. Meet the inroad in the name of Him who
has made peace for you, and works peace in you, and
it will soon be over.In our short Commentary on the Epistle in The Cambridge Bible
we advocate a rather different view of these verses in detail. But
the main reference seems to us to be what it then seemed.
The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ
be (or may we not render is?) with you.
What precisely was the mischief, who precisely were
the dangerous teachers, spoken of here so abruptly and
so urgently by St Paul? It is easier to ask the question
than to answer it. Some expositors have sought a
solution in the fourteenth and fifteenth chapters, and
have found in an extreme school of theoretical "liberty"
these men of "pious language and specious pleas."
But to us this seems impossible. Almost explicitly,
in those chapters, he identifies himself in principle with
"the capable"; certainly there is not a whisper of
horror as regards their principle, and nothing but a
friendly while unreserved reproof for the uncharity of
their practice. Here he has in his mind men whose
purposes and whose teachings are nothing but evil; who
are to be—not indeed persecuted but—avoided; not met in
conference, but solemnly refused a further hearing. In
our view, the case was one of embryo Gnosticism. The
Romans, so we take it, were troubled by teachers who
used the language of Christianity, saying much of "Redemption,"
and of "Emancipation," and something of
"Christ," and of "the Spirit"; but all the while they
meant a thing totally different from the Gospel of the
Cross. They meant by redemption and freedom, the
liberation of spirit from matter. They meant by Christ
and the Spirit, mere links in a chain of phantom beings,
supposed to span the gulf between the Absolute Unknowable
Existence and the finite World. And their
morality too often tended to the tenet that as matter
was hopelessly evil, and spirit the unfortunate prisoner
in matter, the material body had nothing to do with its
unwilling, and pure, Inhabitant: let the body go its own
evil way, and work out its base desires.
Our sketch is taken from developed Gnosticism,
such as it is known to have been a generation or two
later than St Paul. But it is more than likely that
such errors were present, in essence, all through the
Apostolic age. And it is easy to see how they
could from the first disguise themselves in the special
terminology of the Gospel of liberty and of the
Spirit.
Such things may look to us, after eighteen hundred
years, only like fossils of the old rocks. They are
indeed fossil specimens—but of existing species. The
atmosphere of the Christian world is still infected, from
time to time—perhaps more now than a few generations
ago, whatever that fact may mean—with unwholesome
subtleties, in which the purest forms of truth are
indescribably manipulated into the deadliest related
error; a mischief sure to betray itself, however, (where
the man tempted to parley with it is at once wakeful
and humble,) by some fatal flaw of pride, or of untruthfulness,
or of an uncleanness however subtle. And
for the believer so tempted, under common circumstances,
there is still, as of old, no counsel more
weighty than St Paul's counsel here. If he would
deal with such snares in the right way, he must "turn
away from them." He must turn away to the Christ
of history. He must occupy himself anew with the
primeval Gospel of pardon, holiness, and heaven.
Is the Letter to be closed here at last? Not quite
yet; not until one and then another of the gathered
circle has committed his greetings to it. And first
comes up the dear Timotheus, the man nearest of
all to the strong heart of the Apostle. We seem
to see him alive before us, so much has St Paul,
in one Epistle and another, but above all in his
dying Letter to Timotheus himself, contributed to
a portrait. He is many years younger than his
leader and Christian father. His face, full of thought,
feeling, and devotion, is rather earnest than strong.
But it has the strength of patience, and of absolute
sincerity, and of rest in Christ. Timotheus
repays the affection of Paul with unwavering fidelity.
And he will be true to the end to his Lord and
Redeemer, through whatever tears and agonies of
sensibility. Then Lucius will speak, perhaps the
Cyrenian of Antioch (Acts xiii. 1); and Jason, perhaps
the convert of Thessalonica (Acts xvii. 5);
and Sosipater, perhaps the Berean Sopater of Acts
xx. 4; three blood-relations of the Apostle, who
was not left utterly alone of human affinities, though
he had laid them all at his Master's feet. Then the
faithful Tertius claims the well-earned privilege of
writing one sentence for himself. And Gaius modestly
requests his salutation, and Erastus, the man of
civic dignity and large affairs. He has found no
discord between the tenure of a great secular office
and the life of Christ; but to-day he is just a
brother with brethren, named side by side with the
Quartus whose only title is that beautiful one, "the
brother," "our fellow in the family of God." So the
gathered friends speak each in his turn to the Christians
of the City; we listen as the names are given:
There greets you Timotheus my fellow-worker,
and Lucius, and Jason, and Sosipatrus, my
kinsmen.
There greets you I, Tertius, who wrote the
Epistle in the Lord; he had been simply
Paul's conscious pen, but also he had willingly drawn
the strokes as being one with Christ, and as working in
His cause.
There greets you Gaius, host of me and of
the whole Church; universal welcomer to his
door of all who love his beloved Lord, and now
particularly of all at Corinth who need his Lord's
Apostle.
There greets you Erastus, the Treasurer of the City,
and Quartus (Kouartos), the brother.Ver. 24 is probably to be omitted, as an insertion after date.
Here, as we seem to discern the scene, there is
indeed a pause, and what might look like an end.
Tertius lays down the pen. The circle of friends
breaks up, and Paul is left alone—alone with his unseen
Lord, and with that long, silent Letter; his own, yet
not his own. He takes it in his hands, to read, to
ponder, to believe, to call up again the Roman converts
so dear, so far away, and to commit them again for
faith, and for life, to Christ and to His Father. He
sees them beset by the encircling masses of pagan
idolatry and vice, and by the embittered Judaism which
meets them at every turn. He sees them hindered by
their own mutual prejudices and mistakes, for they are
sinners still. Lastly, he sees them approached by this
serpentine delusion of an unhallowed mysticism, which
would substitute the thought of matter for that of sin,
and reverie for faith, and an unknowable Somewhat,
inaccessible to the finite, for the God and Father of our
Lord Jesus Christ. And then he sees this astonishing
Gospel, whose glorious outline and argument he has
been caused to draw, as it was never drawn before, on
those papyrus pages; the Truth of God, not of man;
veiled so long, promised so long, known at last; the
Gospel which displays the sinner's peace, the believer's
life, the radiant boundless future of the saints, and, in
all and above all, the eternal Love of the Father and
the Son.
In this Gospel, "his Gospel," he sees manifested
afresh his God. And he adores Him afresh, and commits
to Him afresh these dear ones of the Roman
Mission.
He must give them one word more, to express his
overrunning heart. He must speak to them of Him
who is Almighty for them against the complex might of
evil. He must speak of that Gospel in whose lines the
almighty grace will run. It is the Gospel of Paul, but
also and first the "proclamation made by Jesus Christ"
of Himself as our Salvation. It is the Secret "hushed"
throughout the long æons of the past, but now spoken
out indeed; the Message which the Lord of Ages,
choosing His hour aright, now imperially commands
to be announced to the Nations, that they may submit
to it and live. It is the vast Fulfilment of those
mysterious Scriptures which are now the credentials,
and the watchword, of its preachers. It is the supreme
expression of the sole and eternal Wisdom; clear to
the intellect of the heaven-taught child; more unfathomable,
even to the heavenly watchers, than Creation itself.
To the God of this Gospel he must now entrust the
Romans, in the glowing words in which he worships
Him through the Son in whom He is seen and praised.
To this God—while the very language is broken by
its own force—he must give glory everlasting, for His
Gospel, and for Himself.
He takes the papers, and the pen. With dim eyes,
and in large, laborious letters,Gal. vi. 11: "See with what great letters I have written to you,
in autograph!" It has been remarked that this great Doxology bears
a literary likeness to other passages which he probably wrote with
his own hand.
and forgetting at the
close, in the intensity of his soul, to make perfect the
grammatical connexion, he inscribes, in the twilight,
this most wonderful of Doxologies. Let us watch him
to its close, and then in silence leave him before his
Lord, and ours:
But to Him who is able to establish you,
according to my Gospel, and the proclamation of,
made by, Jesus Christ, true to (κατὰ)
(the) unveiling of (the) Secret hushed in silence during ages of
times, but manifested now, and through (the) prophetic Scriptures,
according to the edict of the God of Ages, for faith's obedience,
published among all the Nations—to God Only Wise, through Jesus
Christ—to whom be the glory unto the ages of the ages.
Amen.
Indexes
Index of Scripture Commentary
Index of Hebrew Words and Phrases
- אָמֵו:
1
- אָמֵן:
1
- אבי־עד:
1
- אחד:
1
- אל גבור:
1
- אלהים (אל) לעולמים:
1
- את:
1
2
- ב:
1
- בכלם:
1
- דבר:
1
- דוד:
1
- דוד אחר:
1
- האחרן:
1
- האלהים:
1
- ה׳ צדקנו:
1
- וַאֲשֶׁר מֵהֶם יָצָא הַמָּשִׁיחַ לְפִי בְשָׂרוֹ אֲשֶׁר הוּא אֵל עַל־הַכֹּל מְבֹרָךְ לְעוֹל מִים אָמֵו:
1
- חזק:
1
- יהוה:
1
- יהוה צדקנו:
1
- כבד:
1
- נתיבות עולם:
1
- צבאות:
1
- קשׁה:
1
- שׂריד:
1
Index of Pages of the Print Edition