Acts of the Apostles
ROMANS I. 1—4.
The Gospel of God, which He had promised afore by His Prophets in the holy Scriptures, concerning His Son Jesus Christ our Lord, which was made of the seed of David according to the flesh, and declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the Spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead.
Most persons are struck with the very great prominence which is given to the life and journeys of St. Paul in the Acts of the Apostles. They do not wonder at such a peculiarity in a writer whom they have always heard of as the companion of St. Paul. It was natural enough that all the twelve who were so conspicuous in the Gospels should sink to nothing in his eyes before the teacher of the Gentiles from whom he had imbibed his wisdom, with whom he had lived and suffered. “But does not this importance attached to the person of a man, who was not marked out by our Lord while on earth as one of the heralds of His kingdom, belie the title of the book, clash with other parts of the New Testament, and indicate that there was a distinct Pauline element in the Church, which interfered with the authority if not with the doctrine of the elder Apostles, though awkward attempts might be made in later times to bring them into harmony, and though through the artifice of later compilers or some tendency to compromise in the mind of Luke himself, the early part of the book was brought in to qualify the later?” Some such questions as these may have suggested themselves to the minds of readers in all ages; they have in recent days taken a formal shape, and are entitled to the most grave consideration.
I think I have in a measure considered them already. I have admitted most distinctly the difference between St. Luke and St. Matthew as Evangelists: I have inquired wherein that difference consists, so far as its nature can be ascertained from a careful comparison of the two documents as they have come down to us. The difference has seemed not to be this, that St. Matthew affirms less distinctly, less uniformly than St. Luke, that Jesus is the Son of God and the King of men; but that the one exhibits His Sonship especially in the acknowledgment of a divine Father, the other in the gift of a divine Spirit to men; that the one looks upon Christ’s kingdom as the fulfilment of a peculiar dispensation, the other as the form of a universal one. In the first a Hebrew character was visible; a human character was shining through that. In the latter, the great object seemed to be to present the Gospel-kingdom as the kingdom originally designed for mankind. At the same time we have found St. Luke, not once or twice, not by accident, but continuously, through his whole Gospel, and especially through that long and memorable series of discourses which follows the account of the Transfiguration, connecting all intimations respecting the future with Jerusalem, with the claim of Jesus to be King over that city, and with the rejection of that claim by its rulers.
Supposing these points to have been made out, supposing this to have been the continuous tenor of St. Luke’s first treatise, I cannot find it at all out of place, I cannot trace the signs of patch-work in the fact, that the new treatise should open with the Ascension, which St. Luke appeared to regard as the necessary sequel to the Resurrection, as the proof of Christ’s claim to universal dominion; or that the witnesses to that Ascension should be the Apostles whom He had chosen; or that these Apostles should feel it necessary to complete the number which our Lord had originally fixed, and which answered to the twelve tribes of Israel; or that they should be met at a great Jewish festival at which men were gathered from all parts of the Roman and Parthian empires; or that the descent of the Spirit should be declared to be the witness of the Sonship and Kingdom of Jesus; or that this Spirit should be said to manifest Himself by enabling Galilæans so to speak of the wonderful works of God, as to make themselves understood by the keepers of the feast each in the dialect wherein he was born; or that the society which had this early pledge of universality, should yet be limited for a time to the city in which it came into existence; or that it should prove its humanity there by no man counting that which he had as his own; or that it should spread; or that different circumstances, apparently accidental, should lead to exercises of discipline in the new community; or to its more perfect organization: or that a deacon should discover even before an apostle that the temple and the customs which Moses delivered would not always continue; or that he should be the first martyr of the new kingdom; or that his death should be the means of spreading it into Samaria; or that being there it should pass soon into Syria; or that a Hebrew of the Hebrews should be filled with intense rage against the new church for breaking down the barrier between Jews and the outlying world; or that he should be taught by revelation that he was a sinner as much as the Gentiles, and that Gentiles had a share in Christ as well as himself; or that yet another apostle, not the friend and teacher of St. Luke, should be the first preacher to the Gentiles, he having been taught that what God had cleansed he was not to call common; or that Saul should be for a long time learning at Antioch in a society of Jews sprinkled with some Greeks, and beginning to be known by the name of Christians, what his work was to be; or that at last he should be directly designated to that work; or that thenceforth the history of the way in which he declared a universal kingdom to Roman governors in Cyprus, to Lycaonian savages, to the Asiatic Greeks, to Macedonians, to philosophical Athenians, to the worshippers of Aphrodite in Corinth, to the worshippers of Diana in Ephesus, should be the main subject of the book; that it should be illustrated by a narrative of his journey to Jerusalem, to defend the rights of the Gentiles to the privileges of the new covenant, without their being compelled to submit to the form of the old; that it should contain the account of another journey to Jerusalem, in which he declared that Christ had commanded him to go to the Gentiles, and thus drew upon himself the conspiracy of zealots and the condemnation of the high priest; or that the historian should dwell upon his examinations before Gentile governors till at last he was brought a prisoner to the Capital of the world.
I cannot conceive a more orderly and coherent history than this, one of which all the parts explain themselves more naturally by that fundamental idea which we have traced in the writer’s mind. That his circumstances as a companion of St. Paul fitted him to be the writer of such a history, I have not denied, but eagerly asserted. Only I cannot discover that his personal friendship drew him one step from the line and object of his history. If he wished to describe how a human kingdom, which had been lying at the root of the Jewish kingdom, unfolded itself by the will of God through human agents, through human opposition—how men were prepared to assist in its establishment by a series of divine arrangements which they could not control, and very imperfectly understood—this would certainly be the kind of narrative we should look for, one which puts no honor upon individual men, which exhibits their errors and weaknesses, which shows how mighty they became when they confessed a calling and were content to fulfil it.
That the name, Acts of the Apostles, very inadequately describes the nature of this book I am ready to admit. If we look for biographies of the eleven whom St. Luke, as much as any other Evangelist, says that our Lord called to be ministers of His kingdom, to sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel, we are utterly disappointed. We must trust to vague ecclesiastical traditions for reports of the countries into which they travelled, of the mode in which they preached, of the deaths which they died. The Scriptural Historian is silent on these points. He speaks very little even of those whom our Lord honored with the most special signs of His favor. Andrew is not mentioned except in the list in the first chapter. The martyrology of James the brother of John is contained in a single sentence. The beloved disciple himself is only mentioned in conjunction with St. Peter as healing the impotent man, once as appearing before the Sanhedrim, once in Samaria.
These omissions are, I conceive, the most decisive evidence of a purpose which cannot be lost sight of for a moment, to gratify the curiosity of any reader. Whatever concerns the growth of the universal society out of the Jewish is carefully and minutely noted. The works of human agents are referred to just so far as they are necessary for the illustration of this subject; the highest honor that could be paid an apostle was to suppose that he lived and died only for the kingdom of God, and that if he fulfilled the work which was given him to do, he cared nothing whether his name was written in brass or utterly obliterated.
This second treatise of St. Luke is invaluable as an introduction to the Epistles of the New Testament; not because it supplies a great many particulars respecting the lives of the writers which we could not gather from themselves; (for their letters are their best biographies;) but because it removes an impression respecting them which we fall into very naturally, and which I believe grievously darkens their meaning to us. We assume that they are intended to set forth the Christian religion; by which words we very commonly understand a certain doctrine concerning the state after death, and the means by which a man may make that state a blessed one for himself. Having assumed this to be the great subject of the Epistles, we inquire with much earnestness how it comes that these documents, which are to be the guides of our thought and conduct, should present views apparently so diverse; how one apostle should speak of faith as that which saves, another should say, “Can faith save?” These words seem to bewilder the inquirer on the very point on which he is most earnest for information. A man thoroughly possessed with the one truth, feeling it to be the very staff of his life, the ground of the Church’s existence, indignantly rejects the other; no canonical authority can induce him to bear with it. Less energetic men feel that there is some truth implied in both assertions, and cannot persuade themselves to cast away either, though it is only at certain periods of their lives that the ingenious explanations of divines really take hold of them and are practically adopted. Bolder thinkers, falling on a critical age, are ready enough to accept the solution which seems to them far simpler, that those who enunciated such different propositions were heads of opposing schools or factions, each maintaining its own theory of the way in which the rewards of a future life were to be secured.
Now without at present considering any of these suggestions, we are bound to say that if we take the simple words of St. Luke for our guide, still more the context of his history, we shall not accept the popular statement as expressing adequately the views which any of these apostles can have entertained of his divine function. The book which we call the Acts of the Apostles, so far as we have been able to consider it, is the history of a kingdom actually set up in this world, not limited to it undoubtedly, by its very nature and principle connecting the visible with the invisible, the temporary with the eternal, the earthly with the heavenly, the human with the divine; but not referring to the future more than to the present. The preaching of every Apostle and teacher of the church, so far as St. Luke reports it, tends to the same conclusion. When St. Peter opens his lips on the day of Pentecost, it is to declare that Jesus, whom the rulers of the Jews had given up to be crucified, was both Lord and Christ; that the Son of God was risen from the dead, because it was not possible that death could hold him. But those who were pricked to the heart by these words were not told of some distant punishment or distant blessedness: they were told to repent and be baptized that they might receive remission of their sins and the gift of the Holy Ghost; they were told to save themselves from that untoward generation. So again, when St. Peter is addressing those who were wondering at the miracle upon the lame man, he tells them that all the prophets had foretold of these days; he speaks of God fulfilling the covenant which He had made to Abraham, that in him all the kindreds of the earth should be blessed; he speaks of God having raised up His Son Jesus to bless them and turn away every one of them from his iniquities. He speaks, that is, of a present blessing, of an immediate deliverance; of future blessings and future deliverances only so far as they were implied in this, and were the results of it. The joy and singleness of heart which is said to have distinguished the first community at Jerusalem, arose, if we are to judge from St. Luke’s account, from the feeling that they were then brothers of each other, and of a common Lord, not from some dreams or calculations of what might happen to them in another world. Their thanksgiving and prayer when they went from the Sanhedrim to their own company, when the house was shaken where they were assembled, arose from their conviction that Jesus was that King of whom David had spoken, against whom the Gentiles had gathered together and the people imagined a vain thing, of whose kingdom they were to testify by acts and words of healing; language surely denoting the joy in an accomplished deliverance which they were permitted to declare to others as well as themselves, not the expectation of some good which they might receive, of some evil which they might escape, after death. Stephen when his face shone as an angel’s we might suppose would dwell much upon the prospects which awaited him; but his defence is a history of the gradual manifestation of God’s kingdom upon earth, and of his countrymen’s resistance to it. The sight which cheers him before he falls asleep is of Christ standing at the right hand of God, a Conqueror and a King. The great joy which Philip the deacon causes to the Samaritans, is not by telling them of what shall be, but of that which is, by preaching Christ to them the giver of that Spirit, the living power of which the enchanter had tried to imitate, and would have been glad to purchase. The revelation to St. Paul who had cried, “Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” and who in the school of Gamaliel may have been continually exercised with questions concerning a world to come, was not of some means by which he could better his state hereafter, but of Jesus the deliverer from present sin, from an evil conscience which abode with him; of Jesus who had brought reconciliation to Gentile as well as Jew. And therefore when he speaks most awfully in the synagogue of Antioch in Pisidia, of the fear lest if his countrymen continued despisers they might wonder and perish, the message he delivers is, “that a work has been worked in these days which they would not believe, and that God had fulfilled the promise which he had made the fathers, to them their children”—Jesus being raised from the dead, not as we might expect He would say, to prove that they would rise, but as a proof that He was the only-begotten Son, to whom were given the sure mercies of David. To the Lycaonians Paul does not speak of punishments or rewards hereafter, but of God who made the world and had been doing them good, and was now bidding them turn from their vanities to serve Him. To the Athenians he speaks of a God in whom they were then living, and moving, and having their being, of men being His offspring, of His having winked at their ignorance, but now of His calling upon all men to repent. He adds, no doubt, “because He has appointed a day in which He will judge the world by that Man whom he has ordained, whereof He has given assurance in that He has raised Him from the dead.” A very clear assertion that a judgment was coming upon the earth, and that all men, the wise and the unwise, the worshippers of gods known and unknown, would be subject to it. But certainly not the kind of information respecting the future which those who had heard of a Tartarus and an Elysium, and would have welcomed any new doctrine about either, would have expected from the new teacher. A present God, a present King, a present Judge, was his proclamation here and everywhere.
If you keep these remarks in recollection, you will be prepared, I think, to read the letters of the Apostles, and to find that in them, as in their preaching, the doctrine has reference to an actual kingdom to which men were invited to belong, or of which they had already become members. If so, we ought to understand the positions of the different writers in reference to this kingdom; that knowledge may remove some perplexities and contradictions which we have tried in vain by other means to clear away. There are, so far as we know, but five writers who have contributed to the canon of the New Testament besides the Evangelists; St. James the less, his brother St. Jude, St. Peter, St. Paul and St. John. I take them in the order in which I have named them. I put St. James first, because it is evident, from the 15th and 21st chapters of the Acts of the Apostles, that he occupied that position which all antiquity has assigned him, that either because the other Apostles had left Jerusalem, or from some cause unknown to us, he became the overseer of the Mother-Church of the world. I proceed at once to inquire what aspect of the Gospel his Epistle presents to us.
St. James
It has been shown I think clearly, that this Epistle cannot have been written to qualify or counteract any hard sayings in the Epistles of St. Paul; that they were directed to quite different persons, that those who read the one in the first century were not likely to read the other, that in all probability that of St. James was the earlier in point of time. These facts, however, do not prove that there is not a very great difference between the mind and objects of the two Apostles. The difference presents itself to us on the surface of their letters. We shall understand it more completely the more we penetrate into the heart of them. The question we have to consider is, whether this difference affects the unity of the books of the New Testament in their testimony to Christ and to His Church? Is St. James in his Epistle not speaking of a Son of God? Is it not the leading idea which he is bringing out before us?
St. James calls himself a servant of Jesus Christ. The name occurs but two or three times in the letter. That is one of its most remarkable peculiarities. Next he writes to the twelve tribes; whatever we may say in this day about the loss of ten tribes, and the restoration of two, he recognizes no such distinction. He regards the Jewish nation as a whole, constituted as it was originally in the descendants of Jacob. But why, you may ask, does he the Christian address himself to a nation the greater part of which had rejected Jesus as their king? I can only take the words as I find them. He writes to the twelve tribes. He at the same time confesses himself distinctly the servant of Jesus Christ. It is the fact, whether I understand it or not. But I own at the same time that I could not understand his taking any other course. He felt that his belief in Jesus Christ was the sign of his being a true Israelite. That belief enabled him to appreciate his position. What he desired was, that his brethren should understand and appreciate their position; that they should feel themselves to be indeed twelve tribes, a united nation, and that they should understand how and why they were so. Instead therefore of making them insensible to their privileges, his great desire was that they should be more alive to them, more ready to acknowledge what was involved in them.
Do I suppose then that he was addressing himself only to those who had not been baptized into the holy Name, who did not confess Jesus to be the Christ? I suppose no such thing. He could not exclude the Jewish believers from the twelve tribes, if he had wished it. They gloried in their national position. He had taught them to prize it. And he could make the best use of their claim to share the privileges and responsibilities of the Old Covenant. He could make it the best means of instructing them in the nature and principles of the new.
It is evidently assumed that those whom he was addressing were passing or were likely to pass through great afflictions. That circumstance would not in the least limit the application of the letter to converts. They often suffered much from their countrymen, but not sorer trials than the whole body of Israelites underwent in every part of the empire during the quarter of a century immediately before the destruction of the city. St. James addresses these sufferers, whoever they were, in most paradoxical language. “Count it all joy,” he says, “when ye fall into divers temptations.” Our translators, I conceive, have adopted a right word, though they have often been censured for not preferring another. St. James’s meaning is lost if we suppose that the trials of which he speaks were not temptations. Those who were brought into them would be tempted to distrust God, to think that He had deserted them. And because they would be so tempted, the state into which they were come was a good one for them. For if there was an enemy who was turning their circumstances to the ruin of their faith, there was a friend who was using them for awakening and calling forth their faith. God who was ordering all things for them was not tempting them to evil; let none of them fancy that. He was cultivating their trust and their patience. Their own lusts were drawing them aside and enticing them. But every gift was coming down, good and perfect, from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness or shadow of turning.
Here is the beginning of St. James’s message to the twelve tribes. The God of Abraham, the God of their fathers, is the source of perfect unmixed good. No evil can come from Him. Every circumstance which befalls them is to be welcomed as His instrument for conferring good upon them. They are yielding to something else than him, something opposite to Him, if any thing that befalls them leads them wrong. No lesson could be so necessary for a Jew of that time. If he had believed in Jesus of Nazareth, he had need to be reminded of this truth; for it was the only foundation on which His belief could rest. If he had not believed, the truth remained a truth. To acknowledge it was the first step to the confession of Jesus as the Christ.
St. James goes on: “Of His own will begat He us with the word of truth, that we should be a kind of first-fruits of his creatures.” Every thing is here referred to the will of God as the ground of their calling. They had not chosen themselves; He had chosen them. The assertion would be recognized by every Jew acquainted with his own Scriptures as describing the source from which their covenant and history were derived. A believing Jew was bound still more thankfully to refer every privilege to this origin. But how would it be with the next word, He begat us? Evidently the idea of paternity introduces itself here. A believer in Jesus would say at once, if he understood the meaning of his baptism, the glory of the new covenant; “Yes, we have not merely the calling of servants, but the adoption of children.” Still there was nothing in such language which a reader of Isaiah or Malachi could stumble at. “I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against me;” “Have we not all one Father?” How can such words be realized, how can we claim the I AM, Him in whose sight the angels are not pure, as our Father? This was the question which St. James would have wished to excite in the readers of the prophets; he would have wished equally that the members of the Church should feel that they had not some special privilege then for the first time by some new and magical operation conferred upon them, but that their highest privilege was fully to know that relation which God had been gradually revealing to their fathers, without which they could not understand or act out their position as Israelites.
St. James adds, “they were begotten by the word of truth.” I do not at all insist upon this expression being interpreted as an Alexandrian Jew would of course have interpreted it, by the great passage in the 8th chapter of the book of Proverbs; I do not insist that the word of truth must mean a person. St. James might not intend directly to raise that question by his language; it had been raised already by the language of the Old Testament. The Jews were full of conscious questionings whether the Word or Wisdom who was with the Lord as one brought up with Him, and whose delights from the first had been with the sons of men, must not be a living bond between men and God, the organ of all spiritual communications. Taking the phrase in its lowest sense, it imported to every Jew that the unseen God whom he might not contemplate in any image, had held converse with his mind and heart, had spoken continually to that which was within him. Whatever more the word of truth may signify, it can import nothing less than that God by communications to His creature had brought him out of his natural darkness, his pursuit and worship of visible things, that he might be under a spiritual guidance. The circumcision of the Israelite, the cutting off of his flesh, his separation from the surrounding nations, betokened this. Lawgivers and prophets were continually explaining this as the intent of it. Surely it was most needful that the believer in Jesus should not fancy that his privilege was of a different kind, that he had come into a more outward economy, that he was not the subject of an inward government. At the same time St. James takes occasion to remind the Jew, that if he understood the privilege which belonged to him aright, if he claimed it according to the divine sense and interpretation of it, he could only look upon himself as begotten to be a kind of first-fruits of God’s creatures. The covenant to Abraham could not be fulfilled, if in him and in his seed all the families of the earth were not blessed. But could any hint be more valuable to the converted Jew, than that his little sect of Nazarenes was only the first-fruits of a vast harvest, which would be gathered in?
Here is the great principle, as I conceive, of St. James’s Epistle. Here is the truth from which all his exhortations and warnings are corollaries. It is a Jewish principle, no doubt, as I have been trying to show. But is it less an evangelical principle? Would St. James have been a more spiritual teacher if he had continually repeated the name Jesus Christ, instead of thus leading his countrymen to study the very nature of His government? I think if he had taken the course which his modern critics would have considered the most apostolical, and the highest proof of his advancement, he would have proved that his apprehension of the Gospel was more nominal than substantial. I do not mean, as I hope I shall presently show, that the name Jesus Christ has not a precious significance and reality, and that there were not teachers, some even who are often carelessly classified with St. James, whose special office it was to bring out this Name in its fulness and power, to present the acts of the Man Christ Jesus as objects of faith, as uniting His work on earth to His work in heaven. But I believe that the important task which was committed to them would have been inadequately fulfilled, if there had not been a St. James to exhibit first and most prominently Him of whose mind the divine word was the utterance, that Jews might be led to ask, how all the prophecies of their old covenant, that he should one day prove Himself to be their Father, could actually and indeed be fulfilled.
Does the apparent confusion of two classes of Jews, so utterly different in all their feelings and habits of mind, seem very strange to the reader of the Epistle in our day? I dare say that it does. I do not wonder that it should be so. But I will ask him first to consider whether I am putting it into the letter, whether the superscription of it, and very much of the character of it, do not compel me to take this view of it? Next, whether each of these classes did not learn something which it was greatly concerned to learn, by means of this apparent confusion? Lastly, whether those passages which do obviously point directly to the believer in Jesus Christ, are not warnings against evils which the church was adopting and inheriting from the Jew, which there was great hazard of its preserving and transmitting, and which were most criminal in it because they were especially treasons against the Man of Sorrows.
Let us consider these questions a little. St. James goes on to say, that “as God had begotten them by the Word of truth, they should be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath. They should receive with meekness the engrafted Word, which was able to save their souls. But they must be doers, not hearers only. Because whoever was only a hearer was like a man beholding the form of his generation (the original after which he was created) in a mirror, and then who went away and forgot what manner of man he was.” All these exhortations arise naturally from the truth, that there was a divine Lord and Teacher near, whose voice they were drowning with the noise of their own words and the tumult of their own passions, who was ready to implant in them the seed of a new life, after whose image they were formed, by doing whose commands they were proving that they confessed their relationship to Him and His authority over them. Such an invisible government every Jew instructed in the law of his forefathers, who entered into the meaning of the Psalms and the Prophets, acknowledged. Such was the preparation for acknowledging the divine Teacher who had spoken with human lips, but had spoken directly to the inner mind, and had called upon that to submit to His government. On the other hand, how little could a believer in Jesus understand his rights and position, if he merely confessed a certain teacher who had been born at Bethlehem, and died on Calvary, and did not own Him as the secret ruler of his heart and reins.
St. James being convinced that the believer in Jesus was the true Jew, was bound to practise all the religious observances which his position in Jerusalem enabled him to practise. The Acts of the Apostles, and the passages respecting him in Josephus, can leave no doubt upon our minds that he was, in the Jewish sense of the word, the most religious man of the city. Yet here we have him saying, that “if any man seem to be religious and bridleth not his tongue, that man’s religion is vain;” and that “pure religion and undefiled before God is to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.” A more remarkable testimony, coming from such a quarter, believing or unbelieving Jews could scarcely receive. The latter, who were always tempted to make devotion consist of observances, were told that these observances themselves meant, that there was an invisible Ruler, who was conversing with the heart and exercising dominion over it. The others, who were disposed enough to make their privileges, as children of Abraham, a reason for separation from their Gentile brethren, were led at once to the inward principle and practical result, which alone made their privileges of any value.
Then follows a passage in which there is a direct allusion to the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory. And what occasions this apparent departure from the general method of the Epistle? This faith, he says, is not to be held with respect of persons. For if a man came into their assemblies with a gold ring and with goodly apparel, and there came in a poor man in vile raiment, and they had respect to the man in gay clothing, and said to him, “Sit thou here in a good place,” and said to the poor, “Stand thou here, or sit under his footstool,” would not they be partial in themselves and judges of evil thoughts? No doubt such things had occurred and were occurring in Christian assemblies; no doubt they had excited the especial notice and contempt of unbelieving onlookers, who thought themselves great worshippers of Mammon, at once perceived the contradiction when it was presented to them in the Nazarenes. St. James at once, for the sake of both classes of his brethren, admits and proclaims the contradiction. He allows that it is much grosser in those who confess Him who was called the Carpenter’s Son, who took upon him the form of a servant, than in all others. And hence he is able to show by a new argument how Jesus Christ fulfilled the law. Why ought they not, if they believed in Him, to treat any poor man as beneath them? Because he came to embody in himself, and to enable them to exhibit in themselves, the royal law, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” A royal law indeed, the very law in the heart of the king, to which if they would not submit, they came under the penalty and terror of another law, a law which must be fulfilled in every point, a law of slavery; whereas they might obey the law of liberty, the law by which they would be judged, if they did not choose the other in preference to it. What a fine way of teaching a Jew the very meaning of his own book of Deuteronomy! How wonderfully does the Christian’s sin become a lesson, as to the need which a Jew had of Christ, that the law might not be destroyed, but fulfilled.
The famous argument respecting faith and works follows most naturally upon all that has been said already. “What doth it profit, my brethren, though a man say he hath faith and have not works? can faith save him?” We fancy this was a Christian temptation. It was also most emphatically a Jewish one. The instance St. James gives, explains the nature of it clearly. “Thou believest there is one God.” Thou thinkest thou art not as other men are. Thou dost not worship visible things, a multitude of idols. That is excellent. The devils also believe and tremble. Faith in a God who tempts us for our good, from whom cometh every good and perfect gift, who of his own will begat us, this St. James had been putting forward as the very pillar of life. It was faith and trust in a living Being, who would work in them to do all right things. But faith that there is one God, or faith that there is a Christ, or faith that Jesus is the Christ, faith not in a living Being but about one, could this save any human being? could it raise any one out of sin? could it make him better than he was before? No; like the devils he would believe and tremble, utterly separated from the Being whom he confessed, rising to no thankful apprehension or worship of Him, receiving no energy or operation from Him. Abraham believed God—not that there is one God—and so he offered Isaac his son upon the altar, because God wrought with him, and by works his faith was made perfect. For as the body without the breath is dead, as the body requires a quickening influence to make it move and exert itself, so faith which does not attach itself to a living person, and receives a vital breath from Him which enables it to work, is dead also. Faith is not and cannot be, according to St. James’s way of looking at it, the spirit or quickening principle; that must be what responds to faith, God’s power working in the man who trusts Him.
The next passage, on the government of the tongue, is in strict accordance with all this teaching. “What an insignificant, unevangelical subject for an Apostle to write upon,” says, with his lips or with his heart some Pauline partisan. Yes, if the dominion over the inner man, the government of the heart and reins and will—which is implied in the government of the tongue, which St. James directly connects with it—belongs to mere legal doctrine, St. James is essentially legal. But there may be persons to whom any illumination upon that subject seems in the highest degree spiritual, who feel that this is just the knowledge which takes them out of the circle of letters and laws that have reference to conduct, that merely restrains evil, and carries them to the springs and sources of all true and divine life. Here especially do we find that which St. James is so evidently endeavoring to set forth, the law of social life, whether in the nation or the Church, under the new economy or the old. It was the same unbelief in the actual government of God over the inner man, the same bitter envying and strife in the heart, which was destroying Jerusalem, which was threatening the Christian community in that day, which would threaten it in all days. All good things come from above. But the wisdom, the craft, which set them plotting one against another, was not from above, but was earthly, sensual, devilish. Yet there was the other wisdom. It was given them, though they might pervert it to evil; the wisdom which is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality and without hypocrisy.
This clause of the Epistle ends with the law of peace, which is preserved by obedience to the divine Spirit of peace. The next opens with the question, “From whence then comes war and fighting among you?” Surely from the lusts in your members, which are striving against this Spirit of peace. Submission to this Spirit is the secret of all quietness; resistance to it, of all discord within and without. All pride, self-glorying, arrangement of plans for the future, proceeds from the same unwillingness to be subject to the inner Ruler, the same unbelief that He is working in us to do the right thing and withstand the wrong.
The last passage in the Epistle, that which is included in our fifth chapter of it, has direct reference to a judgment which the Apostle believed was approaching. The hour was coming when the rich proud man would be called to account for the hire of the laborer which he had kept back by fraud, when the gold and silver would be found to be cankered, when the rust of them would be a witness against the hoarders, and would eat their flesh as it were fire. To Mammon-worshipping Jews, whether they professed to believe in Jesus or to reject Him, the words were equally applicable. St. James was no respecter of persons. He cared not to exempt them or their heathen persecutors; he wished each to take the lesson home; and each too might strengthen himself with the words, “Be patient, therefore, brethren, unto the coming of the Lord.” Had they acknowledged the coming of Christ in the flesh, surely they could not be content, unless it were shown to all that He was the King. Had they not acknowledged Him, were they still looking out for a great king and judge, let them look and wait; only let them ask themselves whether any but such a judge as this, any but One who had cared for men and suffered for men, could be the judge and deliverer they wanted, whether they could bear to look upon any other. The patience of Job, of the prophets, of all that had gone before, had surely been recorded for their encouragement and example. They might be patient as these were. They might check all natural restlessness, and wait for a coming deliverance as these had done. They would not be disappointed. The deliverance was coming. But if they were not waiting, if they were weary, discontented, hopeless…. Jews, Christians, why was that?
Such I think is the tenor of this Epistle, which some would persuade us was written to discourage faith and teach conformity to an outward law. It is, I apprehend, one of the most wonderful exhortations to trust in an inward spiritual teacher, law-giver, life-giver. It is the Sermon on the Mount, re-delivered after that Spirit had descended who could indeed make men perfect as their Father in heaven was perfect. If the writer of it had not acknowledged a Son of God and a Son of Man who had established His kingdom among men, his Epistle would consist of a number of incoherent sentences, utterly ineffectual for any moral use. That faith converts it into a living whole, into one of the most practical discourses, upon which that or any age could meditate.
St. Jude
We know almost nothing of St. Jude. He described himself as the brother of James. That description occurring at the outset of a short Epistle, shows that he desired to acknowledge a relationship with him which was more than one of blood. He must, at all events, have been writing to men familiar with his name, to those who would regard it with a kind of reverence which they felt for that of no other Apostle, perhaps of no other man. Though the form of his superscription is a general one, though its warnings belong to all times, we have a right to assume that he meant them especially for the church at Jerusalem; we are bound to assume that they applied to acts and tendencies which he witnessed in his own day. A reader must have parted with all belief in the sincerity of the inspired writer—I should fear must have parted with his own—who can imagine that language so direct, personal, awful, was merely written in a study for the edification of future times, and was not meant to warn men of his own day, of an approaching judgment and an approaching apostasy. But if it be so, and we are not determined to strike this Epistle out of the canon (and what motive there could be for the later forgery of a document so distinctly referring to that time, it is not easy to understand), we must give up any notions about the purity of the primitive Church, which interfere with the belief that it was shaken to its very centre by the convulsions of the period preceding the fall of Jerusalem, that there was not merely a declension, but a positive apostasy in individuals and churches, that the judgment upon Jerusalem did not merely affect those who had denied the Gospel; but was even a more sifting day to those who had received it. All our Lord’s words would have led us to expect that this must be so. If the plain language of the Epistle to the Hebrews means any thing, it must have been so. St. Jude’s Epistle, coming from a quarter the most different from any whence that Epistle has ever been supposed to come, supplies us with the most distinct confirmation of all its warnings.