Fifth Sunday after Easter
May 29, 1859
“But the righteousness which is of faith speaketh on this wise, Say not in thine heart, Who shall ascend into heaven? (that is, to bring Christ down from above): or, Who shall descend into the deep? (that is, to bring up Christ again from the dead). But what saith it? The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth, and in thy heart: that is, the word of faith, which we preach; that if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised Him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.”—Romans x. 6-9.
The passage: The righteousness that comes from faith says: do not say in your heart, “Who will go up to heaven?” (to bring Christ down), or “Who will go down into the deep?” (to bring Christ back from the dead). It says instead that the word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart. This is the word of faith that we preach: if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.
St. Paul is contrasting, as he does throughout this Epistle, the righteousness of the law, which consists in mere acts, with the righteousness of faith, which concerns a man’s being and comes from trusting a righteous God. Some of his readers, Jews and Gentiles alike, would suppose he was setting aside Moses, or treating him as belonging to an earlier time and made obsolete by the Gospel. Nothing in the letter warrants that. Everywhere Paul has appealed to the Old Testament and its heroes as examples of a righteousness that was personal, not legal. If David and the Psalmists did not contradict the old Lawgiver, neither does Paul. Here he cites the Lawgiver himself. First he quotes Leviticus, which plainly describes legal righteousness: “the man which doeth these things shall live by them.” Then he quotes Deuteronomy, which he says describes just as plainly the righteousness of faith. So he is not setting one period’s wisdom against another’s. He is asserting principles that never change and belong to the constitution of man. A law of letters, graven in stone, could never at any time be the ground of a human being’s righteousness, though at all times it could be valuable in defining what must not be done. Trust in a living person could never be swallowed up in obedience to formal rules; trust must always be the root of obedience. Moses proclaimed this in his day as Paul would in his. If it is true, all the intervening history of the world should have shed light on it. And if Paul’s Gospel is no delusion, it will not set aside the lessons of the old world but unfold them.
I. The words in Deuteronomy are these: “For this commandment which I command thee this day, it is not hidden from thee, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven, that thou shouldest say, Who shall go up for us to heaven and bring it unto us, that we may hear it and do it? Neither is it beyond the sea, that thou shouldest say, Who shall go over the sea for us and bring it unto us, that we may hear it and do it? But the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it.”
Paul does not quote these words exactly; he gives what he believes to be their inner sense. Moses, here as throughout the book, was setting the word proclaimed to Israel by an unseen God against the worship of visible things to which men are naturally prone. That impulse is a craving to find out what is in the heaven above or in the depth beneath. Men look up at the sun, moon, and stars, which seem to rule over us. What kind of rule is it? The sun looks down on the earth and sees what is done there. Is he a judge, taking account of those deeds? Blessings come from his light, but he also scorches and consumes. Are these signs of his good or ill will? The night too must have a sovereignty, one that seemed calmer and steadier than the day’s changeable government. Fearful crimes must be laid bare to eyes that look out of those clear stars. The sage might dismiss such imaginings, but not the belief that powers in the heavens affect the earth in marvellous ways. Beneath the forms that come out by day or night he perceived a Light earlier than they. And if there is a Light, is there not also a Darkness? Have they struggled for ever? Which was first, and which will outlast the other? Who will ascend into heaven to find the answer?
But again: the sun coming out like a bridegroom from his chamber, the moon walking in her brightness, speak no more to human hearts than the unfathomable deep does. Think how the first sight of the sea impresses us, and what impression it has left on the mind of the world. Before man has learned to cross it in ships, the sense of illimitable depth overpowers him even more than the sense of vastness. Is it the grave into which all things must finally descend? Has it something to do with the grave that each of us must enter? Is death the end of the universe as well as of us? Who will go down into the deep and tell us?
Moses knew that this craving for tidings from above and beneath would be in all hearts, and that no disappointment would check it. God Himself had set these heavens over their heads and surrounded them with these waters, so the message they brought was His. How then could the eagerness to question the heaven above and the deep below be stayed? “Lo! the word is nigh thee, in thy heart and in thy mouth, that thou mayest do it.”
The Ruler you are seeking in the skies is close to you. You thought He was looking down on you out of the sun because His light was entering your heart and showing you its secrets. He commands the sun, but first He commands you. His word fixed the bounds of the deep, but first it fixed what you should be and do. He is the Creator of these things, and your Lord, your Deliverer, your Friend. Trust Him, and the heavens will look bright and clear, and the deep will not be terrible. You may walk joyfully in the light of day, because it witnesses to the One who orders your steps. You may cross the deep fearlessly, because He will be with you.
This was the only way the old Lawgiver could check his people’s restless search for news from the world above and the world beneath, and so check the idolatry of upper and nether gods that was the result of that restlessness in every other country. As far as they heeded his exhortation, they could walk calmly and cheerfully along life’s common road. They could think about their steps and not be distracted by vague threats or promises. They could do what was given them to do, resist the temptations to distrust that beset them every moment, and rejoice in every glimpse of light while longing for more. These were the brave, true fighters we find in the Psalms, holding fast their faith, confessing their sins, uttering their complaints and hopes. These are the prophets, to whom God’s word came, and who testified of it to kings, priests, prophets, and people. They told them how they were forgetting the Lord, following their own delusions, fearing where no fear was, and deceiving themselves with dreams that could have no issue. For kings, priests, prophets, and people, not believing that a word was near them, even in their hearts, and not trembling before it as God’s, turned to all vain things that could not profit, to the delusions and abominations of the surrounding nations. At one time they would be taken up with gold and silver, chariots and horses, and affirm that nothing else was real. Then in hours of anguish their hearts would shake like trees in the wind. They would be afraid to ask God for signs that His promises would be fulfilled, and would consult wizards who peep and mutter. They would ask in wild dismay, “Who will go for us into the heights; who will go down for us into the deep?” The anxieties they had tried in vain to repress by a sensual life and a religion of distrust and fear would burst out in full violence, and there would be no answer. The firmament would seem to be brass, which none could break through, though all might be victims of its caprices. The ground below would utter low murmurings that none could interpret, yet it might open in a moment and swallow all the pomp and glory of the earth.
II. Fourteen hundred years had passed since Moses spoke that sentence. Paul was writing, in a character unknown to his fathers, to the people of a city on a different continent, a city that did not exist until centuries after the Lawgiver died. It seemed to have crushed all the hopes of freedom and dominion Moses had taught his countrymen to cherish, and it regarded Palestine as one of the least trophies proving it to be the predestined Queen of the Nations. Who can reckon the changes of those years, the empires that rose and fell, the dreams cherished and scattered? Yet what had not changed? The sun, moon, and stars still looked down on men and still suggested a fixed rule and order. The same questions about the nature of that rule had been stirring, and more actively than before. Astrologers had tried to discover it, and mythologies had been built to explain it. Philosophers had refuted those mythologies. Men had met enough disappointments to despair of any solution, and yet they could not despair. In all the weariness and unbelief of Paul’s time, when so many were repeating Pilate’s question “What is truth?” with more than his listlessness and scorn, the cry could be heard on every side: “Who will go for us into heaven? Who will tell us about these dynasts who exercise some strange control over our destinies?”
The sea had been the scene of many a battle and had become the servant of man’s wants and pleasures, but it had not lost its terrors. It still hinted at an abyss in which all things might sink and be lost, and still recalled the grave into which every ruler of the earth must pass. Only now, as Paul indicates by the changes he makes to Moses’ language, it was Death himself, in his grim, naked form, that presented himself to each man, rather than general symbols of him. Who is he? Is he the great King of all kings? Why do we fight him to the last, and not quietly yield to a supremacy established by centuries of evidence? Why this clinging to life, this dream of immortality, this horror of death? Who will go down into the deep and bring us back some tidings?
The countrymen of Moses were no less tormented by these questions than the heathen. They spoke learned words about a heaven above the visible heaven, about a second and third heaven, and they had much lore about the grave and a resurrection after it. But in practice they thought of God as a distant Being seated somewhere in or above the sky, just as the worshippers of Olympian Jove did. In practice their speculations about the nether world were no less confused, and in many respects darker, than those of nations that assigned it to Pluto. Why? Because they had forgotten the lesson of Moses. They knew they ought to keep the law, but did not ask how they might gain the righteous mind that would enable them to keep it. They did not believe a word was near them, speaking in their hearts, or that it came from the mouth of God. If they had, they would have asked Him to teach them about the heaven above and the deep beneath. They would have been sure He knew the secrets of both, and would not have doubted that the questions awakened in His creatures were to have a solution, more complete than they could dream of.
This is the meaning of the explanations Paul inserts into the passage he borrows from Moses: “Who shall ascend into heaven? (that is, to bring Christ down from above): Who shall descend into the deep? (that is, to bring Christ again from the dead).” He intimates that the craving to go up into heaven and down into the deep could not be quelled in the nations, and must go on producing fresh restlessness and superstition, unless it could be declared that One had sounded the deep, had entered death, the grave, and hell, and had ascended into heaven. He intimates that those who had learned Moses’ lesson, heeding the word that spoke in their hearts and trying to obey it, would welcome the news that the problem haunting all human beings was solved for all of them. The mysteries of the nether world had been penetrated, and He who descended into the lower parts of the earth had ascended far above all heavens, that He might fill all things. Above all, he says to the Roman Christians, who had received these tidings and confessed the crucified Lord as Head of all Principalities and Powers and of every name that is named: “Let there be no fever and restlessness in you. Do not ask anyone to ascend into heaven or descend into the deep. That is to disbelieve that Christ has actually conquered death and hell, actually united our nature to God’s, and actually glorified our nature at God’s right hand. Your business is to trust the risen Lord with your secret hearts, to believe in His perfect righteousness, and by faith to clothe yourselves with His nature. Your business is to fight, as your forefathers fought, against the temptations to distrust, cowardice, and baseness that beset you on every side. Your business is to desire that all be known that can be known about the heaven above or the deep beneath, because nothing can be known that will not be a greater revelation of the goodness and truth of your Father in heaven, and of the glory to which He has called us by His Son. By the simplest acts of daily obedience, and by continual efforts to be true, to speak truth, and to follow truth, you are to prove that Christ’s word is speaking to you and in you, and show forth His risen life. But you are to confess the Lord Jesus with your mouth as well as believe in Him with your heart. For He has not died and ascended for you only, but for mankind. He has not led your captivity captive, but the captivity of your race. He reigns not over you, nor even over your nation or your Church, but over all Powers in heaven and earth. So you are to proclaim to the inhabitants of the earth, not your religion, but Him who died and revived and went to His Father that He might draw all to Himself. You are to think that every man who, in whatever confusion, is striving to be faithful and righteous is obeying a word speaking in his heart, and because that word is God’s and not man’s, will be led by Him into all truth. You are not to doubt that through all cloudy and dark ways, by wars and revolutions, by judgments on kingdoms and churches, God is leading to His great victory and will accomplish it. He will throw down all our images and notions about things in the heaven above or the deep, which have hidden His righteousness from men, and will manifest Him who died and rose and ascended as the one perfect image of that righteousness to His Universe.”