St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans: A Practical Exposition. Vol. I

We all feel deeply the imperfection of our prayers: how weak, how ignorant they are! And St. Paul consoles us with the belief in an intercession – perfect, all-knowing, divine – which supports and sustains and, we may say, includes ours. The 'intercession of the Spirit' in our behalf, carried on, it is implied, 'in the hearts' of the saints which only God searches, is mentioned nowhere in the New Testament but here. But it is not to be separated from the intercession of Christ which is mentioned just below243. Christ's intercession is 'at the right hand of God,' but also He has by the Spirit taken us up into His own life. He dwells in us by His Spirit. By His Spirit we are knit into one and made His body. Doubtless, then, dwelling thus by the Spirit in the body, Christ intercedes for us. This is the intercession of the Spirit, which is also the intercession of Christ – an intercession gathering up into one, and sustaining and connecting and perfecting, all the imperfect prayers of all the saints.

This interceding Spirit is in Himself perfectly conscious of God's mind and purpose, and God is perfectly conscious of His. He intercedes 'according to God.' This intercession is but a form of the perfect divine life. But in the heart of the Church this desire of the Spirit can make itself felt only in groanings for the divine manifestations which, like the aspirations which music suggests or expresses, are too deep to admit of articulate utterance. St. Paul, when he speaks of groanings which cannot be put into words, is perhaps thinking of the 'tongues' in which the spiritual emotion of the first Christian churches found expression. And we should think of some earnest act of corporate Christian worship when, under the workings of the one Spirit, the strong desire after what is holiest and highest possesses men, and binds them together with a sense of longing for the divine manifestation which could not be put into definite words.

St. Paul speaks of the groaning of suffering nature (ver. 22), and the groaning of the individual Christians (ver. 23), and also the groaning of the divine Spirit in the Church (ver. 26). No word could express more powerfully the intense desire after the manifestation of the divine kingdom which, in St. Paul's mind, should lie at the heart of true Christian prayer.

And the true prayer of the Spirit – the prayer which is according to God – is described (ver. 27) as 'on behalf of saints244' – on behalf of a separated and consecrated body. It follows, that is to say, the lines of Christ's own prayer – 'I pray not for the world, but for those whom thou hast given me.' It is through the sanctified life that the divine influences are to spread over the world: and by praying for the consecrated body we are praying that that life may be exhibited more and more perfectly amongst men so as to strike their consciences and move them to conversion; that through our good works which they now behold they may glorify God in the day when they themselves are visited. The New Testament method of praying for the world is thus in great part indirect. But the direct method is also enjoined. We are also to pray directly 'for all men245.'

iv

There is, I think, no point on which St. Paul has been more misrepresented than on his teaching about predestination. He teaches plainly that it is God's purpose to 'have mercy upon all': that He 'willeth that all men should be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth246.' But He works towards this universal end through a method of selected human instruments – through an elect body. Such an elect body had been the Jewish nation – selected, we cannot tell why, but very possibly in part because of its capacity for coherence and toughness, coupled with a singular aptitude for simple religious ideas – qualities which in themselves of course were the gift of God. This nation might have expanded, as was intended, into a catholic church. But, as it refused to correspond with its vocation in this respect, in fact the catholic Church appears in history as taking its place, even while it was developed out of it – an elect body gathered out of 'every nation and all tribes and peoples and tongues.' The election of this catholic body to be the heirs of salvation and to bear the name of God in the world was, it would have been held, a self-evident fact. St. Paul reasons not up to this fact but from it. He uses the admitted fact to strengthen its individual members under stress of trial. They must bear earthly troubles because they form the appointed discipline for the individuals who form the select body. Let men but love God, and then all outward things whatsoever work together for good for them. The fact that they love God is the sufficient evidence of their election. Those who love God are also those who are 'called according to His purpose.' But, we ask, Have none received the call and rejected it? were none called, who do not love God? is it not true, that 'Many are called and few chosen'? St. Paul says not a word to the contrary. But that is not the question he is considering. The members of the Christian Church, devoted to God, to whom he is writing have been called. This call of which they have become the subject is, St. Paul assures them, no afterthought, no momentary act of God, which as it came into being in a moment so may pass away. It is not a being taken up by God and then perhaps dropped again. His gifts and calling are without repentance on His side, because they represent an eternal will. In the eternal mind God 'foreknew' this chosen body. To 'know' as used of God (in contexts where it is implied that others are not 'known') means to 'take knowledge of or mark out for a divine purpose, as God said of the Jews, 'You only have I known of all the families of the earth247,' that is, your nation only have I singled out or designated248. This divine marking out then was an eternal act. God eternally marked out certain persons, those presumably whom a certain preparatory discipline and moral education, Jewish or heathen, should have made apt for His purpose, such aptitude being of course again His gift. Anyway, for reasons which we cannot probe, God did eternally foreknow or mark out beforehand a body of men to be His catholic church. And those so marked out were in the eternal counsels appointed for a high spiritual vocation, to be made like the divine Son, who was to be made man, so that, with Christ as heir and elder brother, they together might represent in the world the divine ideal for man. And upon those so marked out and foreordained, in due time the divine call came by the apostolic preaching. And, at the first movement of corresponsive faith, they had been acquitted of all their old sins and planted all at once upon a new basis in Christ Jesus. And those thus set upon the new basis God also had already in His divine counsels clothed with glory, their share in the glory of the divine Son which is only waiting to be fully manifested. Every Christian therefore who has felt a movement of God in his heart, under which he has become a Christian, knows that he is in God's keeping. God will not fail him. He who has begun the good work will perform it. Trouble and anxiety within or without need not alarm him. He has but to keep himself, joyful and confident, in God's hands. The movement of God upon him and within him, as it proceeds out of the eternal mind, so it passes securely on into the eternal issue. No doubt St. Paul would say they might tear themselves by utter wilfulness out of the divine hand, as for the time at least the Jews had mostly done. But short of that they are safe. The movement of God, the protection of God, the purpose of God, is upon them and around them, and goes before them preparing their way, individually and corporately.

This is the moral use St. Paul makes of the doctrine of predestination. And it is to do egregious violence to his general teaching to suggest that he entertained the idea of persons created with an opposite predestination – to eternal misery. St. Paul is dealing here only with what God has already shown of His purpose in the actual vocation of some. Ultimately he assures us all men share the divine purpose for good249. But, on the other hand, he never suggests that they may not resist it, or allows us to say that so far as concerns themselves they may not defeat it.

DIVISION III. § 10. CHAPTER VIII. 31-39.

Christian assurance

St. Paul has brought his great argument to an end. And before he passes to its manifold application in the later parts of his epistle, he applies it in words which spring glowing from a heart on fire with the gospel he loves, to reassure disheartened and nervous Christians. It was a natural feature of the apostolic age that the disciples should lose their first courage and become afraid, when the hard experience they were to expect became plain to them. The Epistle to the Hebrews is written full in face of this failure of courage among Jewish Christians. For the Gentiles whom St. Paul has more particularly in view there were manifold causes of alarm – fears derived from their own weakness, from spiritual uncertainty, and from their precarious position. It was not only that outward calamity – famine and pestilence – might come on them like other people. They plainly felt – St. Paul plainly felt, as he thought of the bitter hostility of the Jews actually ready to break out upon the Church, and of the jealousy of the Empire, not yet hostile but easily capable of becoming so – that times of persecution were at hand: that the Christians were truly in the world as 'lambs in the midst of wolves.' Therefore he would have them realize the whole secret of that invincible strength, that power to endure and triumph, which ought to be theirs.

What is to be our practical conclusion, he asks, from all this theology, from all this consideration of revealed facts and truths? The sum of it all is that God is not our taskmaster and critical judge. He is altogether on our side. And if this be so, whose hostility can by comparison come into consideration at all? God showed His mind toward us by the greatest possible act of self-sacrifice, the giving up of His own divine Son to die for us. And, plainly, if of His free love He gave us His greatest gift, He will not fail to accompany it with everything that love can suggest. Or, to put the matter in another way, if God, in full knowledge of what we were thought proper to take us for His chosen people and to put us in a position of acceptance with Him, who can with any hope of success bring a charge against us or pass condemnation on us? For we know the mind of the only judge. Or, once again, what can be so reassuring as to consider the person of our advocate or mediator? It is Christ Jesus, God's own Son in our nature, who died a sacrifice for our sins, but so far from being conquered by death, was raised from among the dead, and exalted to the right hand of God, and there is occupied in presenting Himself before the Father in intercession for us – covering all our approach to God with His acceptableness. Out of the protecting power of this love of Christ, then, who shall tear us? It is quite true that troubles may beat upon us – outward affliction, or inward trouble, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword. We may find that only the words of the Psalmist250 suit our case, 'For thy sake are we being put to death the whole day: the estimate formed of us is that of sheep meant for slaughter.' But in all these contingencies the love of Christ can supply us with a more than victorious power. For this is St. Paul's conviction, that no conceivable power of life or of death, or of the angelic hierarchy, nothing in present circumstances or future destiny, no possible force, neither the highest height of heavens or the deepest depth of hell, no possible creation of God other than what we now know to exist, shall be able to tear us from that which holds us in a grasp stronger than the strongest – the love of God which is in Christ Jesus, who is our Lord.

What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not also with him freely give us all things? Who shall lay anything to the charge of God's elect? It is God that justifieth; who is he that shall condemn? It is Christ Jesus that died, yea rather, that was raised from the dead, who is at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or anguish, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? Even as it is written,

    For thy sake we are killed all the day long;    We were accounted as sheep for the slaughter.

Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us. For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

There is not much that needs comment in these verses. We may notice the contrast between the tone of the Psalmist quoted by St. Paul – weighed down, like many a servant of the older covenant, with the unintelligible experience of the persecution of God's faithful people – and the exultant faith of St. Paul which finds no difficulty in the experience at all. Again, we do well to observe that among the forces enumerated by St. Paul which cannot tear us out of the hand of God, he does not include our own wills, and we could not even conceive him so including them. Once again, we take note how 'the love of Christ' (ver. 35) is resolved (ver. 39) into the 'love of God in Christ Jesus.' Christ's love is God's love, as Christ is truly proper and essential to the being of God, His own very Son.

These words, I say, need very little comment, but they thrill our souls as hardly any other words of St. Paul. They are the real summary of this epistle, and show us how the glorious apostle of Christian liberty would have us view our life. We are not to build the edifice of a life which at the top is to be within sight of God. We are to start from God who from eternity and all along has been beforehand with us: in His external personal love predestinating, creating, calling, pardoning, holding, and keeping us in continual growth for eternal glory. And the one power of religion is therefore faith, that faculty by which we look continually out of ourselves, and starting from God, committing ourselves wholly to God, raise the fabric of life, in the community of a true human brotherhood, upon the secure basis of the love of Him who created us, and will satisfy utterly the being which He has given us. This is the summary lesson of the great epistle.

END OF VOL. I

1

Acts xx. 23.

2

Hort's Prolegomena to Romans and Ephesians (Macmillan, 1895), p. 9.

3

Sanday and Headlam's Commentary (T. & T. Clark, 1895), p. xxviii. This commentary is henceforth referred to as S. & H.

4

See Rom. ii. 17; iii. 9, &c.

5

See Rom. i. 13; xi. 13-32; xv. 14-21.

6

Rom. xvi. 3.

7

See Rom. vi. 17, and remarks p. 234; cf. S. & H., p. xli.

8

Acts xv. 1-35.

9

Gal. ii. 1-10.

10

Rom. xv. 25-32.

11

Hort, l.c., p. 44.

12

Rom. i. 10, 11; xv. 22-24.

13

1 Macc. ii. 42; vii. 13 ff.

14

John v. 44.

15

Matt. xv. 6; xxiii. 23.

16

Rom. x. 3.

17

Acts xv. 10.

18

Rom. vii. 7.

19

See the argument of Gal. iii. 15-22. 'God is one' in a sense which excludes the idea of any relatively independent contracting party over against Him.

20

Acts xxvi. 14.

21

Col. ii. 20-22.

22

2 Tim. i. 12.

23

Rom. x. 5-8.

24

Cf. iii. 22, 26, &c.

25

2 Cor. v. 19; Rom. iv. 25.

26

1 Pet. i. 21. It is of course the case that the name God in the New Testament is generally reserved for the Father, though the proper divinity of Son and Spirit is constantly implied.

27

See below, p. 124.

28

Matt. xviii. 23-35.

29

2 Pet. i. 9.

30

Rom. v. 9-11.

31

1 Cor. vi. 11.

32

Cf. Hort, First Ep. of Peter (Macmillan, 1898), p. 70.

33

It is noticeable that St. Paul never uses the verb translated 'to be sanctified' of persons in the present tense. It always describes an already existing state rather than a process.

34

Rom. v. 18, but cf. later, p. 202.

35

Hort, l.c., p. 24.

36

Eph. v. 25; Tit. ii. 14; cf. Acts xx. 28.

37

Ritschl, Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung, ii. p. 217 ff. Cf. S. & H., p. 122; and Orr, Ritschlian Theology (Hodder and Stoughton, 1898) p. 169 ff.

38

The subject comes forward especially in connexion with chapters ix-xi.

39

I know that any brief statement about Luther's doctrine may be disputed, for his own statements vary considerably. But I think the tendency of his teaching is fairly represented above.

40

'Acceptance' is already acquittal; but only in view of the new life of the body of Christ which is to emancipate man from the power of sin. Thus it is only as incorporated into Christ that he finds his former sin 'put away.' 'I believe in one baptism for the remission of sins.'

41

He should say, if he would represent St. Paul, 'works,' not 'good works.'

42

Essay on 'Righteousness by Faith,' in Epistles of St. Paul (Murray, 1894), vol. ii. p. 264. The whole essay is very characteristic and very interesting, but not very Pauline.

43

Rom. v. 1.

44

Acts xxiii. 26.

45

The salutation of the First Epistle to the Thessalonians, the earliest epistle, is the most nearly formal. Those to the Romans and to Titus are the fullest and richest.

46

Num. vi. 25, 26; see Hort, First Ep. of Peter, p. 25.

47

2 Tim. ii. 8.

48

Cf. 1 Tim. iii. 16, 'justified in the spirit,' where the use is approximately the same.

49

See 1 Thess. v. 23; 1 Cor. v. 5; James ii. 26; Matt. v. 3; xxvi. 41; 1 Pet. iii. 18; Mark viii. 12.

50

Luke xxiv. 39; Heb. xii. 23; i. 14; Matt. viii. 16, &c.

51

Matt. iii. 16; Luke x. 21, R.V. &c.

52

John iv. 24.

53

John vi. 63; Rom. ii. 29; 2 Cor. iii. 6.

54

Rom. xv. 29.

55

'To encourage' and 'encouragement' are probably the best words to translate what in our Bible is rendered by 'comfort.'

56

Hadrian and Trajan: see C.I.G. vol. ii. p. 1068, No. 2349 m.; vol. iii. p. 170, No. 4339, p. 191, No. 4380. These references I owe to Mr. H. W. B. Joseph, of New College.

57

Hab. ii. 4; cf. app. note A on meanings of the word 'faith.'

58

Rom. xv. 25 ff.; Acts xx. 22.

59

Rom. xv. 19.

60

1 John iii. 4. The Greek phrase implies exactly that all sin is lawlessness, and all lawlessness is sin.

61

Rom. v. 13, 14.

62

Cf. Wisd. xiii. 1-9: 'For verily all men by nature were but vain who had no perception of God, and from the good things that are seen they gained not power to know him that is, neither by giving heed to the works did they recognize the artificer… For from the greatness of the beauty even of created things in like proportion does man form the image of their first maker… But again even they are not to be excused. For if they had power to know so much … how is it that they did not sooner find the Sovereign Lord of these his works?' Apoc. Bar. liv. 17, 18: 'From time to time ye have rejected the understanding of the Most High. For his works have not taught you, nor has the skill of his creation which is at all times persuaded you.'

63

Isa. xliv. 18-20.

64

Wisd. xi. 15; xiii, xiv, xv. St. Paul's debt to the Book of Wisdom is apparent (1) in the kinds of idols he mentions; (2) in the way in which the thought of idolatry leads on to that of uncleanness and sexual immorality; and (3) in the idea of retribution by the natural law of results.

65

1 Thess. ii. 16.

66

Butler's Analogy, part i. ch. 2.

67

Pirqé Aboth, iv. 2 (cited by S. and H.).

68

S. and H. p. 49.

69

He implies, as Dr. Farrar points out, 1 Cor. v. 9-10, that pure society did not exist in Corinth.

70

See my Ephesians, pp. 91, 92, 255.

71

Rom. ii. 13-15.

72

Rom. ii. 26.

73

See also app. note E on physical science and the fall.

74

Cf. F. B. Jevons, Introd. to the Hist. of Religion (Methuen), pp. 394, 395: 'Everywhere it is the many who lapse: the few who hold right on. The progressive peoples of the earth are in a minority.' 'Though evolution is universal, progress is exceptional.'

75

Cf. Huxley, Evolution and Ethics (Romanes Lecture, 1893, Macmillan), p. 36: 'The theory of evolution encourages no millennial anticipations. If, for millions of years, our globe has taken the upward road, yet, some time, the summit will be reached, and the downward route will be commenced.'

76

The allusion is to (1) Jevons (op. cit. cap. xxv), who seems to think some 'amorphous' form of monotheism may very probably lie behind totemism. He strongly repudiates the notion that the lower form is necessarily the older. (2) Andrew Lang, Making of Religion (Longmans, 1898), chaps. ix and xv. Cp. also Orr's Christian view of God and the World (Elliot, 1893), pp. 212 ff., and notes E, F, G.

77

Cf. Eccles. viii. 11: 'Because sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of men is emboldened to do evil.' Ps. x. 11: 'He saith in his heart, God hath forgotten.' Wisd. xi. 23: 'Thou overlookest the sins of men to the end they may repent.' Ecclus. v. 4: 'Say not, I sinned, and what happened unto me? For the Lord is longsuffering.' 2 Pet. iii. 9: 'The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some count slackness; but is longsuffering to youward, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.' Cf. also Isa. lvii. 11.

78

Or rather 'their own conscience bearing witness with them and, in their mutual relations, their reflections accusing or even excusing them.'