Thus, for instance, we shall not be obliged to doubt that the Epistle to the Romans treats on the doctrine of justification by faith, as all Protestant writers would eagerly affirm. Still less shall we be disposed to deny that it treats very accurately and fully on the subject of Law and the relation of the Law to the Gospel. We shall not pass over those passages in the Epistle which assert the rights of the Gentiles, or those which speak of Israel after the flesh, or of Israel according to promise. We shall neither wish to regard the letter less as explaining the personal life and conflicts of St. Paul, than a reader of the 7th chapter would conclude that it did, nor less, as explaining the condition of the human race considered in its two heads, than would be inferred from the 5th chapter. Whatever aspect the Epistle has presented to any earnest and devout student of it, even to any, the most superficial, reader of it, ought to receive, and I believe would receive, the fullest recognition from one who understood that Christ had been revealed in the Apostle, in order that he might preach Him. But the different doctrinal and practical statements which are addressed to this Church when seen in the light of that truth, have no longer a fragmentary character; they are no longer a collection of opinions, or counsels, or arguments on different subjects, strung accidentally together; nor, again, do they constitute a mere logical formal treatise, in which expressions of sympathy and affection are inappropriate, or, at least, with which they have no natural connection. The whole will form a Letter, in which the sequence of thoughts is clear and orderly, in which no part could be omitted without injuring the sense of the other part, in which all flows forth freely from a rich, full, inspired mind, and is in the most perfect adaptation to the wants and circumstances of the particular persons to whom it is addressed.
Those who make Justification by faith the one subject of the Epistle to the Romans, can produce some evidence in favor of their hypothesis from every chapter. But the chapters, from the 3d to the end of the 9th, are the great supports of their argument. They are very much disposed to consider the first two chapters as prologue, those after the 9th, or, at all events, after the 11th, as epilogue. By this arrangement they are able, they think, to trace the argument in those which form the substance of the letter with much clearness. In the 3d it is shown how all are guilty before God; in the 4th, that Abraham and David found forgiveness of their sins, and had a righteousness imputed to them in virtue of their faith, under the old dispensation; in the 5th, how this forgiveness and imputation become available for us through the obedience of Jesus Christ; in the 6th, that the doctrine of faith without works is clear from any evil moral consequences; in the 7th, how it delivers the conscience from a terrible bondage and anguish; in the 8th, how it is connected with all anticipations and hopes of future deliverance and glory; in the 9th, how it is grounded on a divine election, not after the flesh, but the spirit.
We have here what seems a very plausible view of this part of the Epistle; but when it is examined from different points of view it gives rise to many controversies. Does St. Paul, it is asked, actually mean to say that all men whatsoever are sinners in the same sense?—that the words, “there is none righteous, no, not one: their mouth is an open sepulchre; they have the tongues of asps; there is no fear of God before their eyes;” apply to Samuel, Hezekiah, Isaiah? But, if not, where do you stop? There is no limitation of the language; there are no phrases to intimate that the description applies to the unfaithful and not to the faithful; nay, the whole argument would be destroyed by such a supposition.
What faith, it is asked again, is this which wrought such blessings for David and Abraham? What was the kind and the degree of it? Did it point to some event not yet accomplished? Was it in the future or the present? If it was in the future, how does it resemble the faith by which people are said to be justified after the coming of Christ? If it was in something actual and present, what was there which was present to them and is present to their successors?
It is further asked whether the idea of imputation of righteousness does not interfere with the express and solemn assertion of the Apostle, that the judgments of God are according to truth, and with his denunciation of the Jews for thinking that righteousness can be a mere formal thing? Another question takes this form: Would it not seem from the 5th chapter, that the justification by Christ was correspondent to the fall in Adam, nay, that it was in some respects more complete than that? And how can this be, if the justification is only for those who believe in it, and they are so few? Then arises a moral difficulty. “No doubt St. Paul says that we are not to continue in sin that grace may abound; but supposing that a man is not tempted to sin by the possession of grace, is he not forced to sin by the absence of it, and is not one consequence as terrible as the other?” Again; “If the faith of a man does not attract the grace, which would be a Romish doctrine, in what sense can faith be said to be really the justifying power or principle?” Once more; “To whom (I need scarcely say how often this question is repeated) does the description in the 7th chapter apply? To St. Paul unconverted or converted? To a man conscious of an evil nature, without being conscious of a deliverer, or to a man conscious of both and believing the latter to be the stronger? To whom do all the assurances of the 8th chapter apply? Is it not to those, whom according to the doctrine of the 9th, God is willing to save? Are there not others, vessels of wrath, whom, according to the same chapter, He is willing to destroy?”
It seems to me that all these difficulties may be traced to one source. It is assumed that St. Paul’s theology starts from the idea of human depravity, that he looks upon Christ and all the acts of Christ (I am afraid of using profane language, but I know not how to avoid it), as mere provisions against sin. It cannot be doubted that this notion proceeds in a great measure from an impression that St. Paul’s conversion is the key to his life and his doctrine. It will not be supposed that I can have any quarrel with that opinion; I earnestly maintain the soundness of it. But I must interpret his conversion as he interprets it; then I shall have no motive to disturb the natural order of his Epistle, or to represent the opening of it, wherein he seems to announce the innermost purpose of the whole as a mere porch or vestibule.
Chapter I
St. Paul begins his letter with saying that he is entrusted with a gospel of God concerning His Son Jesus Christ, who was made of the seed of David according to the flesh, and declared to be the Son of God with power, by the resurrection of His dead limbs or members. He says that he is not ashamed of this Gospel of God; because it is the power of God to salvation to every one that believeth. If he is asked how or why it is the power of God unto salvation, he makes answer, because in it the Righteousness of God is revealed unto faith, according as it is written in Habakkuk, the righteous man shall live by faith. As this Gospel is the revelation of the righteousness of God to every one that believeth, so also he says, it is the revelation of the wrath of God to those who hold down the truth in injustice or wrong. He explains what he means by this singular phrase. God, he says, has manifested Himself to men, not to one man here or there, but to all. His power and Godhead are seen through His works. That which is capable of being known of God He has declared to them.
St. Paul leaves us in no doubt what kind of manifestation this is. It is a manifestation of righteousness—of God as a righteous Being. He goes on to trace up the unrighteousness of men in all its different forms to their not liking or thinking it good, to retain God in their knowledge. In a number of ways they confess His righteousness; they confess that He is passing judgment upon evil. And yet they do homage to the creature more than to the Creator; they make Him in the likeness of birds and beasts and creeping things. And this idolatry, this revolt from the invisible God, brings after it a continually increasing train of moral corruptions and evils.
Chapter II
So far his countrymen might be ready to agree with him. They could condemn the idolatrous world, and boast of their own privileges. But how dare they do this? Had they the least right to say that the mere possession of a law and a covenant had exempted the members of their nation from the sins of other nations? Had not Jews been guilty of every crime which could be imputed to heathens? Had it not been even said that the Name of God was blasphemed through them among the heathen? How stood the case then? God had revealed Himself to the Gentile, God had revealed Himself in a more perfect manner to the Jew. And Jews or Gentiles, who, by patient continuance in well-doing, sought for glory and honor and eternal life—that is to say, as all the previous passage shows—Jews or Gentiles who really availed themselves of God’s revelation of Himself, and chose to retain Him in their knowledge, would obtain that which they sought; while Jews and Gentiles who were contentious, and obeyed not the truth, but obeyed unrighteousness, would find tribulation and wrath. How could such an evil come upon a member of the favored chosen nation? Because the whole covenant is with the Jew inwardly; because circumcision is not that which is outward in the flesh, but means the separation of the inner man to God, the cutting him off from that which is fleshly and outward.
Chapter III
Accordingly he goes on in the 3d chapter to ask what gain has the Jew, or what profit is there in circumcision? And he answers, “Much every way. Chiefly because to them were committed the oracles of God.” God had revealed to them His own righteousness and His own relation to them. And what though some did not believe, should their unbelief make the faith of God of none effect? No, let Him be true, though every man was a liar. But this did not prove that the Jew, as Jew, was better than the Gentile as Gentile. Simply in themselves, apart from God, it showed them to be all alike under sin.
Now I submit, that if we follow the Apostle in these statements, the character of the rest of the Epistle will be determined by them.
The passage in the 3d chapter, which is quoted from the Psalm, need not be strained from the signification which it evidently had in the mind of the original writer as the condemnation of a particularly godless age. Taken in that sense, it will quite accomplish the purpose for which the Apostle introduces it. Those things which the Law saith it saith to them who are under the Law. How could such an indictment as this be preferred against men who had the privilege of being Jews, if that which was peculiar to them as Jews, itself constituted them righteous? That, he goes on to show, can never be the effect of Law. By Law comes the knowledge of sin. It makes a man aware of that in him which is at war with a standard wherewith he confesses that he ought to be in conformity. Such a statement of the effect and object of Law evidently presumes something antecedent to it. The Law does not discover evil in a man, except as it discovers God to him, and God as related to himself. It proclaims to him the dreadful fact of an inclination to be separated from One intimately and closely connected with him, from One whom he cannot cast off. And St. Paul insists, with the strictest consistency, that He of whom the Law thus testifies, is a righteous Being, that the sense of sin would mean nothing if He were not. The notion that the Law reveals to a man a Being of infinite power who has made a decree against him for which he will exact the utmost penalty, does not enter into St. Paul’s mind, is not hinted at in a single sentence. What he says is, that a Being who is all right and true, makes the man know that there is that in him which is adverse to Right and Truth,—awakens in him the sense, not of punishment, but of sin. Hence the conclusion is evident: whether this sense has been awakened by positive law or by any other method, the result is the same. Jew and Gentile stand alike guilty before God; the condemnation belongs, not to the circumstances in which they differ, but to that in which they are alike. The world is guilty before God.
And now comes in the Justification. The sin has consisted in the man not liking to retain the invisible and righteous God in his knowledge; God has made him conscious of that sin; the deliverance from it, the restoration of man to a right state, must be the justification. How is it effected? St. Paul declares that God has manifested the Righteousness of which the law testified, but which the law could not produce, in the Person of Jesus Christ. He says that His Righteousness is manifested in the forgiveness of sins. He says that this revelation is made to Faith. It is not the eye which recognizes the righteousness of God in Christ. It is not the outward man which asks to be forgiven. It is that within which is conscious of estrangement, which longs for reconciliation. To that God addresses himself, to that He reveals the reconciliation and His righteousness in the reconciliation. The man believes, becomes reconciled, becomes righteous. But he has no plea for boasting, he has not made himself righteous, he has not obtained any righteousness of his own. He has believed in God’s righteousness, he has believed in that righteousness, as seeking to make him righteous. God is just and the justifier. All the man’s justice, all his justification arises from his acknowledgment of God. But if there is not a different God for Jews and Gentiles, the Gentile has as much right to believe in Him, is as much bound to believe in Him, as the Jew. The revelation in Christ must be the justification of both or of neither.
Chapter IV
But the thought naturally occurs, did Abraham’s Circumcision do him no good? or was not Abraham in himself different from another man? Hear the Scripture. God reveals Himself to the uncircumcised Abraham; he believes; his faith is counted to him for righteousness. He becomes an actual inheritor and enjoyer of that which is not his own, of that which is in another. His circumcision is a seal of this righteousness which he had being yet uncircumcised. His descendants had as much right to believe in the righteous God as he had. Here was a perpetual sign and witness of their right. But the nature of the sign showed that it was a right to believe, a spiritual privilege which the descendant of Abraham possessed, not a right to think that he had something of his own which he took by descent, a fleshly privilege.
Abraham acquired a righteousness which was not in himself, by believing in a Righteous God. He acquired a power which was not in himself by believing in God’s power and God’s promise. And so he became the father of many nations; the father of the Faithful, circumcised or uncircumcised, all having a right to believe in One who has revealed Himself as their Justifier. But how has God revealed Himself as the Justifier of Gentiles and Jews? By raising Jesus Christ from the dead. By delivering One out of that which was the universal witness and curse of the universal sin. By announcing Himself as the deliverer of man from death and sin.
Chapter V
Do you ask how the deliverance of Jesus Christ from death was the deliverance of Man from death and the assurance that sin was vanquished for him? I could only answer by saying, “Christ was revealed in St. Paul that he might preach Him among the Gentiles.” St. Paul found that Christ was the righteous ground of his own being, that he might proclaim Him as the righteous ground of Humanity. But if you wish for a further answer to the question, St. Paul himself will give it.
The memorable 5th chapter of the Epistle begins first with declaring that having been justified, not by any thing that we have done, not by any thing in ourselves, not by any thing that separates us from our brethren, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, that we have access to a grace in which we can stand, that we can rejoice in the hope of the glory of God, that we can welcome tribulations as means of cultivating patience, experience, hope; that the supporter of hope, that which makes it not ashamed, is the love of God shed abroad in the heart. For that love of God has been manifested in Christ dying not for the good or the just, but for the ungodly. Its strength in the past affords the most certain pledge of its strength for the future. If we have been justified by His death, we shall be saved by His life. Such statements might be used,—they have often been used,—as a plea for the believer, or the man who thinks he is a believer, to exalt himself above other men, to say, “I have this peace, this hope, this experience, this love, to which you are a stranger.” St. Paul goes on to cut away the ground of this boasting, and at the same time to show what a ground there is of confidence and hope for those who will believe in God and not in their own belief. “As by the offence of one, he says, judgment came upon all men to condemnation, even so by the righteousness of one, the free gift came upon all men unto justification.” The translation is careless; there are unnecessary and inconvenient interpolations in it; but it preserves the assertion of the great fact, that the justification is coextensive with the condemnation; that if all shared in one, all share in the other. The translators trembled at their own admission. In the next sentence they evaded it by a sad tampering with the sense of the original; a tampering of which Luther also cannot be acquitted. “For as by one man’s disobedience the many were constituted sinners, so, by the obedience of one, the many shall be constituted righteous.” If only a certain portion of the human race had partaken of the sin of Adam, only a certain portion had partaken of the justification of Christ. But St. Paul affirms all to have been involved in one, all to be included in the other. All the members of the race of which Adam was the head were proved by Adam’s sin to have an inclination to separate themselves from God, and to have in themselves no righteousness at all; all the members of the race of which Christ is the head, are proved and declared to have a righteousness in Him, a righteousness which is not their own, a righteousness which they possess only by faith. If we adhere to the letter of the Epistle there is no going back from this statement; we may explain it away as we like; but there it is, set forth in plain unenigmatical words. I should feel as much difficulty as any one has felt in believing these words—I should see the absolute necessity of explaining them away by fair means or foul,—if I looked upon Christ’s death and resurrection as merely events taking place at a certain late period in the world’s history, designed to remedy certain evils which had occurred in an earlier period of it. But since I look upon them as revelations of the Son of God in whom all things had stood from the first, in whom God had looked upon His creature Man from the first, I do not want to get rid of them, I give thanks for them as the most wonderful and blessed exposition of God’s order in the universe, of man’s disorder and transgression, of the method by which one has been used for the removal and cure of the other.
Chapter VI
Part of St. Paul’s statement might seem to imply that the grace of Christ was only co-extensive with the fall in Adam. He is careful to guard against this inference. “Not as the offence,” he says, “so is also the free gift.” It was not one act of obedience matched against one act of disobedience; but against all the accumulated disobediences of human creatures from the creation day. Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound. Such a view of forgiveness, profound, expanding, infinite, surmounting all offences, going beneath all, of course seems at first a warrant for presumptuous sin. And surely if justification meant the removal of punishment—the deliverance of a man from the fear of the consequences of his transgression,—this is a very plausible, perhaps a very reasonable conclusion. The Apostle’s answer to it introduces us to that which is at once the most practical and the most deeply metaphysical part of his letter. “What! live in sin,” he says, “because we are delivered from sin? Live in that to which it is our one great privilege to be dead? For do you not know that as many of us as have been baptized into Jesus Christ, have been baptized into His death? So then we have been buried with him through baptism unto death, that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we also should walk in newness of life.” What can be so practical, so entirely accordant with the experience of every human being in every latitude, in every religion, as that there are two powers struggling for him, one dragging him down into himself and below himself, one raising him out of himself and above himself? This conviction is the key to all Mythologies, to all Philosophies, that which binds them to the conscience of the individual man, that which makes them in some imperfect degree commentaries on the world’s history. Wherein lay the difference between St. Paul’s language to his converts at Rome, and that which Pythagoras or Socrates would have addressed to any earnest disciple? It lay in this. “We know,” he says, “that the good power who is raising us up, has claimed us as his own. Our baptism is a witness, not that we have chosen the good and eschewed the evil, not that we are following truth and flying from falsehood, but that He who is good and true has chosen us, that he has taken us into his service.” This is the main idea of the chapter, that those who were servants of sin were taken to be servants of God, that their right to this name had been asserted and established, that their highest blessing and privilege was to yield up their members as instruments of righteousness. But the contrast of death and life which the Apostle introduces, gives a new expansion to this idea. “Ye are dead,” he says, “to sin: count yourselves dead. Ye are alive to God; count yourselves alive.” Here are both the facts of humanity which he has been expounding in connection with the history of the race in the last chapter, brought in to expound the history of the individual. It is not only that there is an Adam head of the race, and a Christ head; there is a Christ head, and an Adam head of thee. But the Christ has triumphed over the Adam, the Son of God in your nature has been victorious over your nature; it has been slain in Him, it has been raised to a new life in Him. And now God claims each one of you as His. Each one of you is claimed as a sharer of the death of Christ, as a sharer of His life. Act as if you were a child of Adam, as if the Adam in you was your master,—then you are a sinner, and you have the wages of sin which is death. Act as if the Adam was dead, and you were a new man married to Jesus Christ,—then you acquire His righteousness, you have your fruit unto holiness, and the end that eternal life which consists in the knowledge of God and of Jesus Christ.
Chapter VII
Christ and sin have been spoken of as two powers to either of which a man may yield obedience. Claiming Christ, being married to Him, the man dies to sin, and dying to sin, he dies to the law which condemns sin; it no longer condemns him, it condemns a state which he disclaims. He is married to another, to Him that is risen from the dead, that He may bring forth fruits to God.
Then comes that wonderful history, about which commentators have fought so much; in which suffering people find an explanation of themselves, which they feel must be in some sense the history of a past experience—one out of which the Apostle emerged when the full light broke upon his soul—in another sense the discovery of that which was true of him at all times as it is true of all men in all times. The key to the whole passage is, I believe, in these words: “I was alive without the Law once; but the commandment having come, sin came into life, and I died.” This then is the death which sin causes, the instant death: “I died; I was shut up in self. I could not get beyond myself; therefore as a spirit I was dead. I strove to escape out of this prison. I yearned after a higher state. I felt that I belonged to it; I delighted in the law of God: I could not obey it. Oh, wretched man! How can I be delivered from this death? If I am still the same, what new circumstances can make any difference to me? If I am evil, what forgiveness can make any difference to me? But thou art not evil; thou art righteous; Christ is in thee; thou art one with Him. I thank my God through Jesus Christ my Lord.” This is surely the history of a discovery made to the Apostle at a certain time. A truth was revealed to him which was good for all his after years. He had no need to repeat the same terrible process again; God claimed him as a new creature in Christ. He was so then; He would be so always. But that revelation brought with it another. “With my flesh I serve the law of sin.” That is not altered by my conversion or my baptism; my conversion and baptism both declare it. In you, your flesh, your separate self, they both alike say, there dwelleth no good thing. Only while you assert the privilege of a spiritual creature, the privilege of not being shut up in self, of being married to a living Lord, only then art thou righteous, only then art thou alive.
Chapter VIII
The 8th chapter most consistently carries out this idea. “There is therefore no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath freed me from the law of sin and death.” These words, and all the magnificent passage that follows them, develope more fully the truth which has been gradually working itself out through all the previous part of the epistle, that man in the flesh, in himself, is condemned, hopelessly condemned, that his state is a state of alienation from God, a death which must go on by an unchangeable eternal law; that man in the spirit, in Christ Jesus, is justified, redeemed, renewed, under a law of resurrection, with all possibilities of expanding vision and ever-increasing glory. What is added to that great revelation in this chapter is, that the spirit united to Christ raises up the body to be its minister, to partake its risen freedom, even as the body has drawn down the spirit to partake of its subjection to all visible things. Nor does the regenerating law and principle stop here. The Apostle sees the whole involuntary creation subjected to man’s bondage; therefore, assured of a share in his emancipation. So little does he tolerate the notion that the fallen condition of any creature can ever, by any possibility, become its true condition, so deeply does the thought penetrate his mind and his theology, that humanity can only be contemplated in Christ, that the law of the spirit of life in Him is the law of the universe. All the passages at the conclusion of the chapter respecting those whom God foreknew, predestinated, justified, called, glorified; passages, which, so far from wishing to pass over or evade, I would most earnestly press upon the attention of every reader, and entreat him to seek more and more earnestly for the fullest signification of them; all these must be interpreted by the Apostle’s previous language. If we forget what he has said about the spirit and the flesh, if we fail to see that there is a flesh and a spirit in every man, if we do not confess that the spiritual man is the man, the one who is walking according to God’s will and the constitution which He has established for human beings, all those words lose their force; we may seem to take them literally; we shall find by degrees that we are obliged to twist the letter as much as we pervert the spirit of the texts in which they occur. When, therefore, the Apostle concludes with that song of rapture: “Who shall lay any thing to the charge of God’s elect?” I apprehend those will hear it most faintly, and will join least in it, who are trying to make out for themselves the right to be God’s elect to the exclusion of others; and that those hearts will echo most clearly with it, which thank God that He has been pleased of His mere mercy and love to call them out of the pride and exclusiveness that are natural to them, to enter into those common blessings and privileges which he has bestowed upon their kind in Him who died and rose again for it, and to have a glimpse of that infinite love which is above all, and over all, and through all, and beneath all.
Chapter IX
The 9th chapter opens with an expression of the infinite sorrow which St. Paul had felt when he thought of his nation as cast away by God. He felt the anguish of an Israelite, but he felt more than that. The permanence of this nation is bound up with this belief in the promises of God. If it ceases then the Word of God hath failed; He who is, and was, and is to come, has changed His mind and purpose. But this, says St. Paul, is impossible; Israel cannot cease. And is it a new thing to distinguish Israelites from Israel? Is not the whole history full of cases of men who seemed to be the natural heirs of the promises being rejected, while yet the promise and the race continue? What is the meaning of such cases? They are explained by that great law which has been developed already—the law of the spirit and the flesh. Israelites fancy that they are such in virtue of their descent from Abraham or Isaac. What! were not Ishmael and Esau firstborn of Abraham and Isaac? What did their rejection indicate? Not any special wrong-doing on their part. Their exclusion was decided before they had done good or bad. Why? To signify that the race stood on a higher ground than that of fleshly relationship, that it was the witness of a spiritual relationship;—of God’s calling, not of man’s generation,—of sonship to Him, not of sonship to Abraham.
This is the idea which the reader will find going through the whole chapter. Popular writers, as well as learned commentators, have strangely inverted it. Instead of making the permanence consist in the preservation of Israel, they have construed St. Paul’s words as if he said, Israel may perish, but a few select Israelites, of whom I am one, will be saved; a kind of consolation which, instead of making his anguish of heart less, would have utterly overwhelmed him; for then the Word of God had failed, the distinct promises and assurances of the prophets had not been fulfilled. Secondly, in strict conformity with this first misinterpretation, they have supposed that the exclusion of Ishmael and of Esau when they had done neither good nor evil, is an assertion of God’s arbitrariness or self-will, or, as they phrase it, sovereignty. If it had been so, all that conceit of the Jews of their own privileges and superiority to other people with which St. Paul was fighting, would have been confirmed by the very instances he was employing as arguments against it. Whereas, if he says to the Jew, “You cannot pretend that Jacob was chosen because he was better than Esau, or Isaac, because he was better than Ishmael; but it was done to fulfil a purpose of the divine mind, and that purpose the very one which I have been setting forth in all this letter, to put contempt upon mere fleshly descent which is partial and limited, and to assert that spiritual bond which exists between God and man in Christ, the Lord of man’s spirit, the Son of God and the Son of Man;” he maintains the great object for which he lived, and deduces his right to be an apostle to the Gentiles from the history of the Jews.
Starting from these false premises, it has been natural enough that interpreters should have seen in all the rest of the chapter a mere assertion of naked sovereignty displayed in choosing one set of men and rejecting another. And no doubt, if this particular passage has no connection with all the rest of the letter in which it occurs; if it has not been the business of that letter to set forth God emphatically as the righteous Being who is making men righteous; if there has been nothing said before about the justification of all by the obedience of One, as all had been condemned by the disobedience of one; if there has been no attempt to reconcile these different assertions by the experience of the Apostle that there was in himself, because he was a man, though he was also a circumcised and elect Jew, a flesh in which there was no good thing, and a spirit which hungered after righteousness; if there has been no testimony that God in Christ receives and adopts this spirit, and baptizes, quickens, raises it by His own Spirit, and promises to raise the body too in due time out of its thraldom to that flesh which He has condemned; if we are to start with the words, “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy,” without the least knowledge what manner of being speaks the words, and respecting what manner of being they are spoken; if we are at liberty to deduce our knowledge of these points from some heathen conception of an Ammon or a Jove; most assuredly these words must convey that impression to the minds of readers which has been received from them. But if the fundamental idea of God be that of the righteous Being, then to believe that it is not by willing and running that we obtain what we seek, but, by God’s mercy, is a repetition of all that has been said already, a witness that man is merely a receiver of that good which proceeds from the Source of good. It tells us that we do not work our way to heaven, but that heaven comes down to us to receive us and adopt us into itself. And the answer of St. Paul to the natural and continually-recurring objection, “Who hath resisted His will? Why doth He yet find fault?” is not an answer which resolves every thing into God’s sovereignty, so setting aside all the previous doctrine of the epistle; but is an assertion of the great and consolatory truth, that a man submitting himself to the will of the Ruler of the universe, submits to a perfectly gracious and loving and merciful will, which is seeking to make him gracious, and merciful, and loving; and that a man resisting and disputing this will, striving against it, contending with his Maker, hardens himself, shuts himself up in self-will, becomes proud, ungracious, unloving. And this especially, when, like those with whom St. Paul is arguing, he sets up his religious privileges, his divine election, as a ground and plea for self-exaltation, as a reason for preferring himself to his brethren. Thence comes that special hardness of heart which the Jews at this time were displaying, which made them, as he says elsewhere, “enemies to God, and contrary to all men.” The very pride of Pharaoh was coming out in the descendants of the men who had been delivered from the yoke of Pharaoh. In that case God’s will had been manifested and accomplished through Pharaoh’s hardening of the heart against His will, God’s power and grace had been shown through his disobedience. It would be the same again. God’s will would be shown forth through the hardening of the heart of these Israelites.
This is no doubt going down very deep. There is a will, a divine will discovered beneath and at the root of all things. Our minds reel and stagger if they do not fall prostrate in the contemplation of it. But if they do, they discover what St. Paul is teaching them, that it is a will of absolute righteousness and mercy, a will of long-suffering to those who have resisted it, a will of grace and compassion to those who are not asking for it. For the prophets of old have taught St. Paul to believe that God will manifest this mercy and grace of His to a people who have not sought after Him, but whom He had never forgotten. He says in Hosea, “I will call that which is not my people, my people, and her that is not beloved, beloved:” an assertion which does not in the least annul but confirm the assertion made by Isaiah, that God would preserve a remnant of Israel, that the nation in its truest, highest, divinest sense, should never perish. The result then, so far as we have got, is, that the Gentiles have obtained righteousness, that righteousness which comes out of faith, the righteousness that comes out of believing in God’s righteousness and trusting in it and yielding to it. In other words, a righteousness has been revealed to men, which those who claim it in the only way a spiritual possession can be claimed, become endued with really and substantially. But Israelites constantly aiming at a law of righteousness, putting it forth as their property, boasting of it, have not obtained it, have not become righteous, but have become unrighteous and hard-hearted. Why? Because they have not believed in God’s righteousness as the ground of their own, but have tried to create a righteousness by their selfish acts. God has laid a foundation for them to build upon and rest upon; He has revealed His Son as the great centre and corner-stone of humanity: those who have stumbled at that stone, lose their place in the spiritual temple; those who confess it, will not be confounded.
Chapter X
These last words of Isaiah seem to be very deeply fixed in the Apostle’s mind. He recurs to them in the next chapter; the spirit of them goes through that chapter. He does not confine himself however to them as the support of his great proposition, that the Jewish Scriptures are throughout asserting a righteousness which lies at the foundation of things; which the law did not create but which is the foundation of the law; which men’s works do not create, but which is the foundation of men’s works; which belongs as much to Gentile as to Jew. Moses, he says, has clearly distinguished that kind of righteousness which consists in the observation of precepts; “he that doeth these things shall live in it” (Lachmann reads αὐτῇ, which perhaps is better than the common reading, though that yields a good and not a very different sense). On the other hand he describes that righteousness which is the object of faith, in the words, “Say not thou, Who shall go up into the heaven? who shall go down into the deep. The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth, and in thy heart.” A wonderful passage indeed, and one which throws the clearest light upon all that the Apostle has been saying. The righteousness in which a man believes, is not at a great distance from him, not far off in some heaven, not down in some abyss; it is close to him, it is with him. He stands upon it; his faith is the confession of it as the ground of his existence. So much Moses had said; and speaking thus, the Apostle declares he had spoken of Christ, he had declared Him who was the ground of that righteousness of which the law is the outward expression. But yet that desire of ascending into the heaven and going into the deep, was a natural and human desire. All nations had felt it. All had asked what that firmament above which man was made to look up to and to gaze upon, signified to him, how he could ascend to claim the rights which he seemed to have there. All had asked what that deep beneath is which man dreams of with his spirit, that grave into which his body descends, that dark infinite which is continually proclaiming itself as the beginning and end of all things. Here come in the facts of the Gospel in connection with the principle of it. Christ hath descended into the grave and hell, Christ hath ascended into heaven. The Lord your righteousness, the Divine Word, the Son of God and the Son of Man, has penetrated the regions which you have longed to penetrate; He knows them all, He has claimed them all as His father’s possession. Believing in Him, you may be perfectly delivered from that restlessness to which Moses knew that his own people and all people would be prone.
I am quite aware that in the sentence which follows the “word” is ῥῆμα not λόγος. The word of faith which the Apostle preached was, “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.” There was to be an open proclamation to the whole world, that this Man was the Lord of men. If that word did not go forth, if it was choked and suppressed, the man would not believe that Jesus was his Lord. But along with this there must be the belief in the heart, that God had raised Him from the dead, the belief that this Lord was indeed the conqueror of death, otherwise there could not be salvation from the fear of death; from the tyranny of man’s great enemy. “For with the heart,” he says, “there is a belief unto righteousness; but with the mouth there is a confession unto salvation.” Within the heart man believes in his righteous King and Deliverer, and so becomes righteous. He joins with his mouth in the confession of Him, and so he is fully set free from his oppressors. We have here the revelation I conceive of the mysterious law which declares that we are members of one body, and therefore that though it is altogether an inward and spiritual process to become partaker of righteousness, it is not and cannot be a mere individual process; we can only be saved from our evil, so large a portion of which consists in our selfishness and isolation when we confess a common Saviour and centre. The Apostle appears to connect this principle as well as the whole doctrine which he has been unfolding with the common and equal privileges of Jew and Greek. When he quotes Isaiah again, he evidently lays the emphasis on the “every one;” “for the Scripture saith every one that believeth in Him shall not be ashamed. For there is no difference between the Jew and the Greek; for the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon Him. For whosoever shall call on the Name of the Lord shall be saved.”
That there is a righteousness for men, for all men, a righteousness which they know of, and against which they revolt, has been the truth which St. Paul has been unfolding from the beginning of his epistle. He is now driven back upon the question which arose at the very commencement of it. “But how could the Gentiles call upon One of whom they had not heard? And how could they believe unless there was some preacher to them? And how could there be a preacher if one was not sent forth?” He meets this question by quoting the words of Isaiah: “How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace, and bring glad tidings of good things.” These words undoubtedly declared that the Jews were appointed as heralds of blessings to the people of the earth. Undoubtedly the message was not heeded by the great body of those to whom it was sent; for Isaiah said, “Lord, who hath believed our report?” words clearly intimating that there is a hearing which precedes faith, as there is a word or report of Christ which is the ground of hearing. But had there not been a hearing, and a word or report, which might have been the ground of faith? What meant, then, the language of the 19th Psalm: “Their voice hath gone out into all the earth, and their words into the ends of the world?” Whether Jews preached or not, the sun, moon, and stars had been preaching to all men everywhere. “What, preaching of Christ?” one of our learned theologians will exclaim. Yes, sir, preaching of Christ. The Apostle taught us so in the 1st chapter; he said that God’s works were not declaring a designer, not addressing subtle arguments to the understanding, but preaching to the common heart and conscience of mankind, of a God whom they were to obey, of a God near them, of a God against whom they were rebelling when they were proud, sensual, covetous. They were preaching then of a Lord of man, of a Lord of his spirit; they were preaching of that Lord, who, in the fulness of time, had taken flesh, and dwelt among them. And were not Israelites told this in their scriptures? Was it a new thing, which the Apostle was proclaiming for the first time, that other nations might be acquainted with the truths of which the Jews were the stewards? How then did they interpret the words of Moses, “I will stir you up to jealousy with that which is not a nation; with a foolish nation will I provoke you?” Did not that signify that people of other nations, not within the covenant, were admitted to the knowledge of truths against which the Jews closed their ears and hearts? Or, again, what did they make of that audacious saying of Isaiah: “I have been found,” actually found, “by those that were not seeking me; I have been made manifest to those that were not asking after me;” whereas he says to Israel, “All the day long have I stretched out my hands to a people that is disobedient and contradictory.”
Chapter XI
The question then recurs which cost the Apostle such infinite distress: “Hath God cast away His people?” “That cannot be,” is the answer; “for I am an Israelite, of the seed of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin.” How is this an answer? Certainly a very poor one if St. Paul thought as so many of his interpreters think, that his salvation was an exceptional thing, a blessing conferred on the individual Saul of Tarsus because it pleased God of His pure sovereignty that he should not suffer the doom to which the race, by the same sovereignty, had been consigned. People being used in the ordinary sense of the word, St. Paul could not be considered as the representative of the people; his preservation could be no proof of the fidelity of God’s promises to them. But if Israel were called out by God to represent the true state of man, to declare man’s relation to God, to declare that the relation is a spiritual and not a carnal one, then any person who took his own standing upon that spiritual relation of man to God, who repudiated the carnal ground of confidence, who preached to Gentiles as well as Jews, that they were spiritually related to God, such a person was not a mere fragment rescued from a rejected race; he embodied in himself the very principle of the race, the very purpose for which it had been called out. Though he were alone, the nation would survive in him. St. Paul however has no proud thought that he is alone. He recollects the case of Elias, how it seemed to him as if he were the last survivor of a God-worshipping tribe, as if the whole people were bowing to the Baal of Phœnicia; how he was taught that there were 7000 men in the land of Ahab, in the land where there was no temple-worship, who were trusting in the Lord God of their fathers.
“Even so,” he says, “there is a remnant according to the election of grace;” a remnant in Isaiah’s sense, in the sense of all the prophets, not the least in the sense of the modern predestinarian; a remnant which testifies that the root of the nation has not perished, that the substance of the oak and the teil-tree remains, though the branches have perished; not one which proves that the great majority of branches have been lopped off, and a few preserved by an arbitrary decree. But the Apostle insists upon his old doctrine. How has this remnant been preserved? Surely by the grace of God; by the grace of that loving, gracious Being from whom all good in His creatures proceeds; not by some works or deserts of theirs. It was not necessary to reassert this principle in answer to the Jew who rejected the Gospel. He had been confuted enough already. It had been demonstrated that he could only claim any election at all, any superiority to the Gentile, in virtue of God’s calling, and that when he set up any boast of superiority to the Gentiles, when he said that he was better than they, he renounced that claim, and chose a test, which, unless all his history was false, must condemn him. But it was very necessary for the sake of the Christian Church, the Gentile portion of it as well as the Jewish, that this principle should be reiterated, enforced, driven home. It was perfectly certain that in the Christian Church there would arise the same lying thought which had arisen in the Jews’, “In ourselves, in virtue of some acts of ours or of our covenant, we are better than other men,” and that this would produce worse fruits in the time to come than it had produced already. Therefore St. Paul must lay his axe to the root of the delusion; he must show the Gentiles what the meaning, cause, and conditions, of the Jewish rejection and apostasy were, that they might understand how the like rejection and apostasy might befall themselves. How does the case stand then? Israel, the Israel after the flesh, those who have stood upon their fleshly privileges, have sought something which they have not found. But the election, those who have stood on the spiritual ground, those who have asserted their spiritual privileges, have obtained what they sought. The rest have been obdurated. They are those to whom the words of Isaiah apply; God has given them a spirit of slumber, eyes not to see, ears not to hear. A fearful sentence surely, the most fearful that can befall a man or a nation; but a sentence which shows that there is something to see, something to hear. They are in the light, or their blindness would mean nothing; there is a voice speaking to them, or you could not impute deafness to them. Every charge against the Jews supposes ignorance of a state which actually belonged to them, ignorance brought on by a wilful struggle against a divine Guide and Teacher who was seeking to make them know themselves and Him. Every dreadful malediction, such as that which St. Paul quotes from the 109th Psalm, is a malediction upon a race of proud, self-righteous, self-seeking men, who have become brutal and cruel, because they have broken loose from a gracious and merciful Ruler, who must learn what it is to be left to stumble and prowl about in the darkness which they have chosen.
“They have stumbled,” continues St. Paul. “But is it in order that they should fall?” He answers boldly, “By no means.” And then he proceeds with an argument which is based upon the truth he has been asserting in so many ways in this Epistle, that neither Jews nor Gentiles were holy in themselves, that they were holy only because the root was holy; that the Jew could not boast against the Gentile; still less could the Gentile boast against the Jew; that each lived only so long as it abided by faith in the root; that each not abiding in the root, might be cut off. On the other hand, there is in the root a life and sap and fructifying power, which can restore and regenerate that which is decayed and dead. Israel not abiding in the root, claiming some independent virtue for itself, has been cut off. The like cause will produce the like effect in the case of any nation. But let the Gentiles receive and acknowledge this mystery, however hard the apprehension of it may be; that blindness has happened to Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles has entered in. And so all Israel shall be saved, as it is written, “there shall come a Deliverer out of Zion, and shall turn away iniquities from Jacob.” Mercy to the Gentiles in this way becomes the final cause of the Jewish fall, in order that the same mercy may reach to them; for “God hath concluded them all in unbelief, that He may have mercy on all.” I can give no interpretation of these words. I must simply leave them to interpret themselves to the mind of the reader. St. Paul did not profess to understand them himself. But he knew that they were true. He could realize their truth when he said, “Oh the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God.” He did not try to sound a love which he found to be unfathomable; he was content to be lost in it.
Chapter XII
But that revelation of Mercy and Love, however deep and infinite, was not less the foundation of practical life. “I beseech you, Brethren,” he says, “by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a sacrifice, living, holy, acceptable to God, that reasonable service of yours; and not to be conformed to this world, but to be transformed by the renewing of the reason, in order that you may test what is that Will of God, the good and acceptable and perfect.” Rebellion against a perfect Will which has been manifesting itself in acts of love to all creatures, which has been exhibiting its power, its redeeming power, over them and through them and in them, has been the misery of Jew as well as Gentile. This has been the cause of the blindness, the incapacity of discerning the nature of that Will, which has come upon both. Simple submission, an entire surrender of the man’s self to God, is that reasonable sacrifice by which the man puts himself in the right state, claims his true relation, acquires the capacity of seeing that which had been hidden from him or had been inverted. Offering up that sacrifice, there would be no more that self-exaltation, that boasting of one above another, which is the destruction of Christian fellowship. “For,” he continues, “as we have many members in one body, but all the members have not the same function, so we, the many, are one body in Christ, and we are each severally members of one another.” We shall have this illustration,—this parable of parables, this which explains the very nature of parable,—of the intimate relation between the constitution of each individual and the constitution of society, so that each suggests and represents the other, drawn out at much greater length, into a greater variety of detail, in the Epistle to the Corinthians. Here it has especial reference to that renewing or re-casting of the mind, that deliverance from the form of this world, of which the Apostle had just been speaking. Jews and Gentiles had each been striving for superiority on one ground or another. The Jewish pride had trampled upon the Gentile pride, the Gentile pride had lifted itself against the Jew. The discovery that they had nothing of their own, that they were simply living upon God’s free and equal grace, distributed in measures and proportions according to the capacity of each, for the good of all, showed the absurdity of this pride; the giving up of themselves as sacrifices was the renunciation of it. The foundation of the new economy is laid in the manifestation of the God of righteousness and grace; it is carried out in the reconciliation which God has effected for the race by giving up His Son for all; it is consummated when the Spirit of grace and love enables each man to live and act as the member of a body and to give up himself. With that sacrifice begins the faithful performance of all assigned tasks and offices, the knowledge on the part of each man of what he is meant to be, the cheerful doing of his own work as God’s work without intruding upon the work of his brother. Humility in this sense becomes not an ornamental virtue of the individual, but a necessary condition of his place in the commonwealth. Out of it flow all other graces, zeal, fervency, hope, patience, prayer, hospitality, forgiveness of persecutors, sympathy, the abandonment of vengeance to God, the effort to subdue the evil of an enemy by good.
Chapter XIII
The 13th chapter opens with words which are very familiar to us, as being the motto of sermons on the duties of subjects to their rulers; but which we do not perhaps habitually connect with those which precede or those which follow them. That submission to the divine and gracious Will, which the Apostle has been enjoining, that acknowledgment of offices and capacities assigned to each member of the commonwealth, that breaking down of the ambitious, grasping, self-exalting spirit, makes the precept, “Let every soul be subject to the higher powers, for there is no power but of God; the powers that be are ordained of God,” the assertion of a beautiful order extending from the highest to the lowest, through every rank of creatures, man being the one who has the power of disobedience, the privilege of cheerful, voluntary, obedience. On this ground it has been contended by some, that the powers spoken of here are ecclesiastical powers, not according to the common notion, civil rulers. “Only in a church,” they say, “organized according to the apostolical idea, could there exist that spiritual authority and spiritual subjection which are here enjoined. To talk of Nero’s power as spiritual or divine is monstrous. It might be submitted to from conscience as well as fear, as an appointed scourge; it could never be confessed as an ordinance of God.”
This is a plausible, but I apprehend a mistaken view of the case. The common one, though dry and often defended on very false grounds, is nearer to the Apostle’s mind. Deriving his idea of authority from the Church, and not from the Empire, regarding this as exhibiting the principle of which that exhibited the perversion and distortion, he was obliged to affirm all power whatsoever as ordained of God, that he might protest against all arbitrary use of power, all claim of a man to be absolute, as hateful and ungodly. The Apostle could not limit his principle to the Church without destroying the claim of the Church to affirm the true principle of all human society.
I hold, therefore, that here, as elsewhere, there is a special appropriateness in the language of the Apostle to the Church which he is addressing, and that this application of his doctrine enables us to understand how all the previous teaching respecting Righteousness and Law, bore upon the condition of the Roman world as well as of the Roman Church. The rest of the chapter, in which he brings out Love as the fulfilling of Law, shows how his doctrine respecting the relation of gospel to law bears upon the condition of society as well as upon the life of individual men. The gospel of God’s love and reconciliation becomes the power of God which saves or delivers a man or society from the power of self-will, and show how both may bring forth fruit to God, the Spirit of life which is in Christ Jesus purifying, quickening, uniting the spirits of those with whom He dwells. And this Spirit of love is calling men’s spirits out of the sleep of death, is bidding them wake up, because the night is far past and the day of Christ is at hand, a day which must scatter all confused images and night-birds, and must show us how near Christ is and has always been to us. To see Him is our salvation from the darkness of the world and of our own nature; every hour that we believe in Him and trust Him must bring nearer the full discovery of Him. And therefore let us act as if the day were with us now, not doing acts of darkness, but putting on the armor of light.
Chapter XIV
None of these principles can be applied to individuals alone. They are all social precepts; and because they are so they are those which most distinctly bear on the conscience and heart of each member of a society. The waking out of sleep is surely a precept addressed to the conscience of a man, if any ever was; but it is to the conscience of a man perceiving that he has not followed the law of love, that he has been living separate from his brethren, living to himself. This law of love is now brought to bear upon a set of obviously social questions, questions concerning meats and drinks, questions about which a Church consisting of Jews and Gentiles, even if there had not been a multitude of local, philosophical, and religious divisions in each of these classes, would be sure to dispute. St. Paul at once declines to settle them. If he had settled them, there would have been no scope for the exercise of the principle, by which alone they could be really settled. As long as any man believed that he could judge his neighbor in this matter, so long the idea of a common Master and a common Spirit was feeble. The truth upon which the Church stood must be imperfectly recognized, in order that certain rules and maxims concerning individual behavior might be dogmatically concluded. But such laws and maxims could be worth nothing, except so far as they were grounded upon the law of love and self-sacrifice, and carried it out. All allowances, all self-restraints which interfered with this were equally ungodly, and the conscience of each man would take vengeance upon him if he trifled with the conscience of another. A man must take good heed of condemning himself in that which he allows himself. These beautiful practical ethics are still grounded upon the great sacrifice to which the Apostle continually returns: “Christ pleased not Himself; for as it has been written, The reproaches of them that reproached Thee fell upon me.”
Chapters XV. and XVI
This appropriation of the words of a Psalm might strike some of his readers as unnatural. Did not the words belong to a Jew? Were not they written long ago? What had they to do with the Gentiles, or with the Christian Church? The Apostle is led, in consistency with all that he has said before, to claim these Scriptures, with the history and revelation that they contain, as belonging to the Gentile no less than the Jew. Christ came as the Minister of circumcision to confirm the promises made to the fathers; Christ came to declare the Gospel to the Gentiles; as the centre of past, and present, and future, as the foundation stone of both Jew and Gentile, the common root of the blessings to both, all these words had their meeting-point in Him; the God of consolation and hope was using them, would use them more and more, to establish the patience, and faith, and hope, and unity, of the whole body.
The Apostle goes on to speak of the hope which he cherished of seeing his Roman brethren, whom he had never seen yet, of his determination to visit them after he had been at Jerusalem, before he went to Spain. He was sure, he said, that he should come to them in the fulness of the blessing of the Gospel of peace. An arrangement strangely defeated, an assurance wonderfully fulfilled. Before he could reach Rome he must be mobbed and beaten in Jerusalem, kept under two successive Pro-Consuls in Cæsarea, brought after a shipwreck to be heard before Nero. Yet the prisoner did come in the fulness of the Gospel of peace. That Gospel spread more widely from his prison through all churches and all times than when he was able to speak freely. And this simple statement of a purpose which was to be frustrated, as far as his conception of it went, to be realized in a better and diviner way, has the same effect as the salutations in the last chapter of the letter. Like them, it does not suffer us to forget that we are reading the actual letter of an actual man, full of personal sympathies, expectations, sorrows, joys,—who often saw but a little way into the future of his own life, who may have often been deceived in other men,—while we are forced to confess that he has discovered to us the mystery of the divine purpose, the ground upon which our right and wrong, our thoughts, acts, and hopes, rest, as no man could who had not a right to say that he was the Apostle of God Himself, and was entrusted with a Gospel for man.