FOOTNOTES:

FOOTNOTES:[74]For the antithesis of “you” and “we,” comp. vv. 11–18, ch. i, 12, 13; also Rom. iii. 19, 23 (For there is no distinction), Gal. ii. 15.[75]Ποιοῦντες τὰ θελήματα τῆς σαρκὸς καὶ τῶν διανοιῶν(ver. 3).[76]Perhaps this double rendering may bring out the force ofκατὰ τὸν αἰῶνα τοῦ κόσμου τούτου.[77]In the posthumousErklärung des Briefes Pauli an die Epheser—a valuable exposition, marked by Beck’s theological acumen and lucidity.[78]Theφύσειof verse 3 thus corresponds to theἐξουσία τοῦ ἀέροςof verse 2. “Sin entered intothe world” (κόσμος), Rom. v. 12, which signifies more than the nature of individual men.[79]I John iii. 8; comp. John viii. 41–44.

[74]For the antithesis of “you” and “we,” comp. vv. 11–18, ch. i, 12, 13; also Rom. iii. 19, 23 (For there is no distinction), Gal. ii. 15.

[75]Ποιοῦντες τὰ θελήματα τῆς σαρκὸς καὶ τῶν διανοιῶν(ver. 3).

[76]Perhaps this double rendering may bring out the force ofκατὰ τὸν αἰῶνα τοῦ κόσμου τούτου.

[77]In the posthumousErklärung des Briefes Pauli an die Epheser—a valuable exposition, marked by Beck’s theological acumen and lucidity.

[78]Theφύσειof verse 3 thus corresponds to theἐξουσία τοῦ ἀέροςof verse 2. “Sin entered intothe world” (κόσμος), Rom. v. 12, which signifies more than the nature of individual men.

[79]I John iii. 8; comp. John viii. 41–44.

“That in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace have ye been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves,it isthe gift of God: not of works, that no man should glory. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God afore prepared that we should walk in them.”—Eph.ii. 7–10.

The plan which God has formed for men in Christ is of great dimensions every way,—in its length no less than in its breadth and height. He “raised us up and seated us together [Gentiles with Jews] in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, thatin the ages which are coming onHe might show the surpassing riches of His grace.” All the races of mankind and all future ages are embraced in the redeeming purpose, and are to share in its boundless wealth. Nor are the ages past excluded from its operations. God “afore prepared the good works in which” He summons us to walk. The highway of the new life has been in building since time began.

Thus large and limitless is the range of “the purpose and grace given us in Christ Jesus before times eternal” (2 Tim. i. 9). But what strikes us most in this passage is the exuberance of the grace itself. Twice over the apostle exclaims, “By grace you are saved”: once in verse 5, in an eager, almost jealousparenthesis, where he hastens to assure the readers of their deliverance from the fearful condition just described (vv. 1–3, 5). Again, deliberately and with full definition he states the same fact, in verse 8: “For by grace you are saved, through faith; and this is not of yourselves, it is the gift of God. It does not come of works, to the end that none may boast.”

These words place us on familiar ground. We recognize the Paul of Galatians and Romans, the dialect and accent of the apostle of salvation by faith. But scarcely anywhere do we find this wonder-working grace so affluently described. “God being rich in mercy, for the great love wherewith He loved us—the exceeding riches of His grace, shown in kindness toward us—the gift of God.”Mercy,love,kindness,grace,gift: what a constellation is here! These terms present the character of God in the gospel under the most delightful aspects, and in vivid contrast to the picture of our human state outlined in the beginning of the chapter.

Mercydenotes the Divine pitifulness towards feeble, suffering men, akin to those “compassions of God” to which the apostle repeatedly appeals.[80]It is a constant attribute of God in the Old Testament, and fills much the same place there that grace does in the New. “Of mercy and judgement” do the Psalmists sing—of mercy most. Out of the thunder and smoke of Sinai He declared His name: “Jehovah, a God full of compassion and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy and truth, keeping mercy for thousands.” The dread of God’s justice, the sense of His dazzling holinessand almightiness threw His mercy into bright relief and gave to it an infinite preciousness. It is the contrast which brings in “mercy” here, in verse 4, by antithesis to “wrath” (ver. 3).[81]These qualities are complementary. The sternest and strongest natures are the most compassionate. God is “richin mercy.” The wealth of His Being pours itself out in the exquisite tendernesses, the unwearied forbearance and forgivingness of His compassion towards men. The Judge of all the earth, whose hate of evil is the fire of hell, is gentler than the softest-hearted mother,—rich in mercy as He is grand and terrible in wrath.

God’s mercy regards us as we are weak and miserable: Hisloveregards us as we are, in spite of trespass and offence, His offspring,—objects of “much love” amid much displeasure, “even when we were dead through our trespasses.” What does the story of the prodigal son mean but this? and what Christ’s great word to Nicodemus (John iii. 16)?—Graceandkindnessare love’s executive. Grace is love in administration, love counteracting sin and seeking our salvation. Christ is the embodiment of grace; the cross its supreme expression; the gospel its message to mankind; and Paul himself its trophy and witness.[82]The “overpassing riches” of grace is that affluence of wealth in which through Christ it “superabounded” to the apostolic age and has outdone the magnitude of sin (Rom. v. 20), in such measure that St Paul sees future ages gazing with wonder at its benefactions to himself and his fellow-believers. Shown “inkindnesstoward us,” he says,—in a condescending fatherliness, thatforgets its anger and softens its old severity into comfort and endearment. God’s kindness is the touch of His hand, the accent of His voice, the cherishing breath of His Spirit. Finally, this generosity of the Divine grace, this infinite goodwill of God toward men, takes expression inthe gift—the gift of Christ, the gift of righteousness (Rom. v. 15–18), the gift of eternal life (Rom. vi. 23); or—regarded, as it is here, in the light of experience and possession—the gift of salvation.

The opposition ofgiftanddebt, of gratuitous salvation through faith to salvation earned by works of law, belongs to the marrow of St Paul’s divinity. The teaching of the great evangelical epistles is condensed into the brief words of verses 8 and 9. The reason here assigned for God’s dealing with men by way of gift and making them absolutely debtors—“lest any one should boast”—was forced upon the apostle’s mind by the stubborn pride of legalism; it is stated in terms identical with those of the earlier letters. Men will glory in their virtues before God; they flaunt the rags of their own righteousness, if any such pretext, even the slightest, remains to them. We sinners are a proud race, and our pride is oftentimes the worst of our sins. Therefore God humbles us by His compassion. He makes to us a free gift of His righteousness, and excludes every contribution from our store of merit; for if we could supply anything, we should inevitably boast as though all were our own. We must be content to receive mercy, love, grace, kindness—everything, without deserving the least fraction of the immense sum. How it strips our vanity; how it crushes us to the dust—“the weight of pardoning love!”

Concerning the office offaithin salvation we havealready spoken in Chapter IV.[83]It is on the objective fact rather than the subjective means of salvation that the apostle lays stress in this passage. His readers do not seem to have realized sufficiently what God has given them and the greatness of the salvation already accomplished. They measured inadequately the power which had touched and changed their lives (i. 19). St Paul has shown them the depth to which they were formerly sunk, and the height to which they have been raised (vv. 1–6). He can therefore assure them, and he does it with redoubled emphasis: “Youare saved; By grace you are saved men!”[84]Not, “You will be saved”; nor, “You were saved”; nor, “You are in course of salvation,”—for salvation has many moods and tenses,—but, in the perfect passive tense, he asserts the glorious accomplishedfact. With the same reassuring emphasis in chapter i. 7 he declared, “We have redemption in His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses.”

Here is St Paul’s doctrine of Assurance. It was laid down by Christ Himself when He said: “He that believeth on the Son of God hath eternal life.” This sublime confidence is the ruling note of St John’s great epistle: “We know that we are in Him.... We know that we have passed out of death into life.... This is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith.” It was this confidence of present salvation that made the Church irresistible. With its foundation secure, the house of life can be steadily and calmlybuilt up. Under the shelter of the full assurance of faith, in the sunshine of God’s love felt in the heart, all spiritual virtues bloom and flourish. But with a faith hesitant, distracted, that is sure of no doctrine in the creed and cannot plant a firm foot anywhere, nothing prospers in the soul or in the Church. Oh for the clear accent, the ringing, joyous note of apostolic assurance! We want a faith not loud, but deep; a faith not born of sentiment and human sympathy, but that comes from the vision of the living God; a faith whose rock and corner-stone is neither the Church nor the Bible, but Christ Jesus Himself.

Greatly do we need, like the Asian disciples of Paul and John, to “assure our hearts” before God. With death confronting us, with the hideous evil of the world oppressing us; when the air is laden with the contagion of sin; when the faith of the strongest wears the cast of doubt; when the word of promise shines dimly through the haze of an all-encompassing scepticism and a hundred voices say, in mockery or grief, Where is now thy God? when the world proclaims us lost, our faith refuted, our gospel obsolete and useless,—then is the time for the Christian assurance to recover its first energy and to rise again in radiant strength from the heart of the Church, from the depths of its mystic life where it is hid with Christ in God.

You are saved!cries the apostle; not forgetting that his readers have their battle to fight, and many hazards yet to run (vi. 10–13). But they hold the earnest of victory, the foretaste of life eternal. In spirit they sit with Christ in the heavenly places. Pain and death, temptation, persecution, the vicissitudes of earthly history, by these God means to perfect that which He has begun in Hissaints—“if you continue in the faith, grounded and firm” (Col. i. 23). That condition is expressed, or implied, in all assurance of final salvation. It is a condition which excites to watchfulness, but can never cause misgiving to a loyal heart. God is for us! He justifies us, and counts us His elect. Christ Jesus who died is risen and seated at the right hand of God, and there intercedes for us.Quis separabit?[85]

This is the epistle of the Church and of humanity. It dwells on the grand, objective aspects of the truth, rather than upon its subjective experiences. It does not invite us to rest in the comforts and delights of grace, but to lift up our eyes and see whither Christ has translated us and what is the kingdom that we possess in Him. God “quickened us together with the Christ”: He “raised us up, He made us to sitin the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.” Henceforth “our citizenship is in heaven” (Phil. iii. 20).

This is the inspiring thought of the third group of St Paul’s epistles; we heard it in the first note of his song of praise (i. 3). It supplies the principle from which St Paul unfolds the beautiful conception of the Christian life contained in the third chapter of the companion letter to the Colossians: “Your life is hid with the Christ in God”; therefore “seek the things that are above, where He is.” We live in two worlds at once. Heaven lies about us in this new mystic childhood of our spirit. There our names are written; thither our thoughts and hopes resort. Our treasure is there; our heart we have lodged there, with Christ in God.Heis there, the Lord of the Spirit, from whomwe draw each moment the life that flows into His members. In the greatness of His love conquering sin and death, time and space, He is with us to the world’s end. May we not say that we, too, are with Him and shall be with Him always? So we reckon in the logic of our faith and at the height of our high calling, though the soul creeps and drudges upon the lower levels.

“With Him we are gone up on high,Since He is ours and we are His;With Him we reign above the sky,We walk upon our subject seas!”

In his lofty flights of thought the apostle always has some practical and homely end in view. The earthly and heavenly, the mystical and the matter-of-fact were not distant and repugnant, but interfused in his mind. From the celestial heights of the life hidden with Christ in God (ver. 6), he brings us down in a moment and without any sense of discrepancy to the prosaic level of “good works” (ver. 10). The love which viewed us from eternity, the counsels of Him who works all things in all, enter into the humblest daily duties.

Grace, moreover, sets us great tasks. There should be something to show in deed and life for the wealth of kindness spent upon us, some visible and commensurate result of the vast preparations of the gospel plan. Of this result the apostle saw the earnest in the work of faith wrought by his Gentile Churches.

St Paul was the last man in the world to undervalue human effort, or disparage good work of any sort. It is, in his view, the end aimed at in all that God bestows on His people, in all that He Himself works in them. Only let this end be sought in God’s way and order. Man’s doings must be the fruit and not the root of hissalvation. “Notofworks,” but “forgood works” were believers chosen. “This little wordfor” says Monod, “reconciles St Paul and St James better than all the commentators.” God has not raised us up to sit idly in the heavenly places lost in contemplation, or to be the useless pensioners of grace. He sends us forth to “walk in the works, prepared for us,”—equipped to fight Christ’s battles, to till His fields, to labour in the service of building His Church.

The “workmanship” of our Version suggests an idea foreign to the passage. The apostle is not thinking of the Divine art or skill displayed in man’s creation; but of the simple fact that “God made man” (Gen. i. 27). “We are Hismaking, created in Christ Jesus.” The “preparation” to which he refers in verse 10 leads us back to that primeval election of God’s sons in Christ for which we gave thanks at the outset (i. 3). There are not two creations, the second formed upon the ruin and failure of the first; but one grand design throughout. Redemption is creation re-affirmed. The new creation, as we call it, restores and consummates the old. When God raised His Son from the dead, He vindicated His original purpose in raising man from the dust a living soul. He has not forsaken the work of His hands nor forgone His original plan, which took account of all our wilfulness and sin. God in making us meant us to do good work in His world. From the world’s foundation down to the present moment He who worketh all in all has been working for this end—most of all in the revelation of His grace in Jesus Christ.

Far backward in the past, amid the secrets of creation, lay the beginnings of God’s grace to mankind. Far onward in the future shines its lustre revealed inthe first Christian age. The apostle has gained some insight into those “times and seasons” which formerly were veiled from him. In his earliest letters, to the Thessalonians and Corinthians, St Paul echoes our Lord’s warning, never out of season, that we should “watch, for the hour is at hand.”Maran athais his watchword: “Our Lord cometh; the time is short.” Nor does that note cease to the end. But when in this epistle he writes of “the ages that are coming on,” and of “all the generations of the age of the ages” (iii. 21), there is manifestly some considerable period of duration before his eyes. He sees something of the extent of the world’s coming history, something of the magnitude of the field that the future will afford for the unfolding of God’s designs.

In those approaching æons he foresees that the apostolic dispensation will play a conspicuous part. Unborn ages will be blessed in the blessing now descending upon Jews and Gentiles through Christ Jesus. So marvellous is the display of God’s kindness toward them, that all the future will pay homage to it. The overflowing wealth of blessing poured upon St Paul and the first Churches had an end in view that reached beyond themselves, an end worthy of the Giver, worthy of the magnitude of His plans and of His measureless love. If all this was theirs—this fulness of God exceeding the utmost they had asked or thought—it is because God means to convey it through them to multitudes besides! There is no limit to the grace that God will impart to men and to Churches who thus reason, who receive His gifts in this generous and communicative spirit. The apostolic Church chants with Mary at the Annunciation:“For, behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed!”

Never was any prediction better fulfilled. This spot of history shines with a light before which every other shows pale and commonplace. The companions of Jesus, the humble fraternities of the first Christian century have been the object of reverent interest and intent research on the part of all centuries since. Their history is scrutinized from all sides with a zeal and industry which the most pressing subjects of the day hardly command. For we feel that these men hold the secret of the world’s life. The key to the treasures we all long for is in their hands. As time goes on and the stress of life deepens, men will turn with yet fonder hope to the age of Jesus Christ. “And many nations will say: Come, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob. And He will teach us of His ways; and we will walk in His paths.”

The stream will remember its fountain; the children of God will gather to their childhood’s home. The world will hear the gospel in the recovered accents of its prophets and apostles.

FOOTNOTES:[80]Rom. xii. 1; 2 Cor. i. 3; Phil. i. 8, ii. 1; comp. Luke i. 78. Theοἰκτιρμοὶ τοῦ Θεοῦ, σπλάγχνα καὶ οἰκτιρμοί, rendered in our Version “mercies of God,” denotes something even more affecting,—God’s sense of the woefulness of human life,—“the pitying tenderness Divine.”[81]Comp. Rom. ix. 22, 23.[82]Ongrace, comp.The Epistle to the Galatians(Expositor’s Bible), Chapter X.[83]Compare also, on Faith,The Epistle to the Galatians(Expositor’s Bible), Chapters X.–XII. and XV.[84]Ἐστὲ σεσωσμένοι: for the peculiar emphasis of this form of the verb, implying a settled fact, an assured state, compare ver. 12,ἢτε ... ἀπηλλοτριωμένοι; Col. ii. 10; Gal. ii. 11, iv. 3; 2 Cor. iv. 3, etc.[85]Rom. viii. 31–39; comp. vv. 9–17; also 1 Thess. v. 23, 24; 2 Thess. iii. 3–5; 1 Cor. i. 4–9; Phil. i. 6, iii. 13, 14; 2 Tim. i. 12, iv. 18, for St Paul’s doctrine of Assurance.

[80]Rom. xii. 1; 2 Cor. i. 3; Phil. i. 8, ii. 1; comp. Luke i. 78. Theοἰκτιρμοὶ τοῦ Θεοῦ, σπλάγχνα καὶ οἰκτιρμοί, rendered in our Version “mercies of God,” denotes something even more affecting,—God’s sense of the woefulness of human life,—“the pitying tenderness Divine.”

[81]Comp. Rom. ix. 22, 23.

[82]Ongrace, comp.The Epistle to the Galatians(Expositor’s Bible), Chapter X.

[83]Compare also, on Faith,The Epistle to the Galatians(Expositor’s Bible), Chapters X.–XII. and XV.

[84]Ἐστὲ σεσωσμένοι: for the peculiar emphasis of this form of the verb, implying a settled fact, an assured state, compare ver. 12,ἢτε ... ἀπηλλοτριωμένοι; Col. ii. 10; Gal. ii. 11, iv. 3; 2 Cor. iv. 3, etc.

[85]Rom. viii. 31–39; comp. vv. 9–17; also 1 Thess. v. 23, 24; 2 Thess. iii. 3–5; 1 Cor. i. 4–9; Phil. i. 6, iii. 13, 14; 2 Tim. i. 12, iv. 18, for St Paul’s doctrine of Assurance.

“Wherefore remember, that aforetime ye, the Gentiles in the flesh, who are called Uncircumcision by that which is called Circumcision in the flesh, made by hands; that ye were at that time separate from Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world: but now in Christ Jesus ye who sometime were far off are made nigh in the blood of Christ.”—Eph.ii. 11–13.

The apostle’sWhereforesums up for his readers the record of their salvation rehearsed in the previous verses. “You were buried in your sins, sunk in their corruption, ruined by their guilt, living under God’s displeasure and in the power of Satan. All this has passed away. The almighty Hand has raised you with Christ into a heavenly life. God has become your Father; His love is in your heart; by the strength of His grace you are enabled to walk in the way marked out for you from your creation.Wherefore remember: think of what you were, and of what you are!”

To such recollections we do well to summon ourselves. The children of grace love to recall, and on fit occasions recount for God’s glory and the help of their fellows, the way in which God led them to the knowledge of Himself. In some the great change came suddenly. He “made speed” to save us. It was a veritableresurrection, as signal and unlooked for as the rising of Christ from the dead. By a swift passage we were “translated from the power of darkness into the kingdom of the Son of His love.” Once living without God in the world, we were arrested by a strange providence—through some overthrow of fortune or shock of bereavement, or by a trivial incident touching unaccountably a hidden spring in the mind—and the whole aspect of life was altered in a moment. We saw revealed, as by a lightning flash at night, the emptiness of our own life, the misery of our nature, the folly of our unbelief, the awful presence ofGod—God whom we had forgotten and despised! We sought, and found His mercy. From that hour the old things passed away: we lived who had been dead,—made alive to God through Jesus Christ.

This instant conversion, such as Paul experienced, this sharp and abrupt transition from darkness to light, was common in the first generation of Christians, as it is wherever religious awakening takes place in a society that has been largely dead to God. The advent of Christianity in the Gentile world was much after this fashion,—like a tropical sunrise, in which day leaps on the earth full-born. This experience gives a stamp of peculiar decision to the convictions and character of its subjects. The change is patent and palpable; no observer can fail to mark it. And it burns itself into the memory with an ineffaceable impression. The violent throes of such a spiritual birth cannot be forgotten.

But if our entrance into the life of God was gradual, like the dawn of our own milder clime, where the light steals by imperceptible advances upon the darkness—if the glory of the Lord has thus risen upon us, our certainty of its presence may be no less complete, and ourremembrance of its coming no less grateful and joyous. One leaps into the new life by a single eager bound; another reaches it by measured, thoughtful steps: but both arethere, standing side by side on the common ground of salvation in Christ. Both walk in the same light of the Lord, that floods the sky from east to west. The recollections which the latter has to cherish of the leading of God’s kindly light—how He touched our childish thought, and checked gently our boyish waywardness, and mingled reproof with the first stirrings of passion and self-will, and wakened the alarms of conscience and the fears of another world, and the sense of the beauty of holiness and the shame of sin,—

“Shaping to truth the froward willAlong His narrow way,”—

such remembrances are a priceless treasure, that grows richer as we grow wiser. It awakens a joy not so thrilling nor so prompt in utterance as that of the soul snatched like a brand from the burning, but which passes understanding. Blessed are the children of the kingdom, those who have never roamed far from the fold of Christ and the commonwealth of Israel, whom the cross has beckoned onwards from their childhood. But however it was—by whatever means, at whatever time it pleased God to call you from darkness to His marvellous light,remember.

But we must return to Paul and his Gentile readers. The old death in life was to them a sombre reality, keenly and painfully remembered. In that condition of moral night out of which Christ had rescued them, Gentile society around them still remained. Let us observe its features as they are delineated in contrastwith the privileges long bestowed on Israel. The Gentile world wasChristless,hopeless,godless. It had no share in the Divine polity framed for the chosen people; the outward mark of its uncircumcision was a true symbol of its irreligion and debasement.

Israel had aGod. Besides, there were only “those who are called gods.” This was the first and cardinal distinction. Not their race, not their secular calling, their political or intellectual gifts, but their faith formed the Jews into a nation. They were “the people of God,” as no other people has been—oftheGod, for theirs was “the true and living God”—Jehovah, the I AM, the One, the Alone. The monotheistic belief was, no doubt, wavering and imperfect in the mass of the nation in early times; but it was held by the ruling minds amongst them, by the men who have shaped the destiny of Israel and created its Bible, with increasing clearness and intensity of passion. “All the gods of the nations are idols—vapours, phantoms, nothings!—but Jehovah made the heavens.” It was the ancestral faith that glowed in the breast of Paul at Athens, amidst the fairest shrines of Greece, when he “saw the city wholly given to idolatry”—man’s highest art and the toil and piety of ages lavished on things that were no gods; and in the midst of the splendour of a hollow and decaying Paganism he read the confession that God was “unknown.”

Ephesus had her famous goddess, worshipped in the most sumptuous pile of architecture that the ancient world contained. Behold the proud city, “temple-keeper of the great goddess Artemis,” filled with wrath! Infuriate Demos flashes fire from his thousand eyes, and his brazen throat roars hoarse vengeance against the insulters of “her magnificence, whom allAsia and the world worshippeth”! Without God—atheists, in fact, the apostle calls this devout Asian population; and Artemis of Ephesus, and Athené, and Cybelé of Smyrna, and Zeus and Asclepius of Pergamum, though all the world worship them, are but “creatures of art and man’s device.”

The Pagans retorted this reproach. “Away withthe atheists!” they cried, when Christians were led to execution. Ninety years after this time the martyr Polycarp was brought into the arena before the magistrates of Asia and the populace gathered in Smyrna at the great Ionic festival. The Proconsul, wishing to spare the venerable man, said to him: “Swear by the Fortune of Cæsar; and say, Away with the atheists!” But Polycarp, as the story continues, “with a grave look gazing on the crowd of lawless Gentiles in the stadium and shaking his hand against them, then groaning and looking up to heaven, said,Away with the atheists!” Pagan and Christian were each godless in the eyes of the other. If visible temples and images, and the local worship of each tribe or city made a god, then Jews and Christians had none: if God was a Spirit—One, Holy, Almighty, Omnipresent—then polytheists were in truth atheists; their many gods, being many, were no gods; they were idols,—eidola, illusive shows of the Godhead.

The more thoughtful and pious among the heathen felt this already. When the apostle denounced the idols and their pompous worship as “these vanities,” his words found an echo in the Gentile conscience. The classical Paganism held the multitude by the force of habit and local pride, and by its sensuous and artistic charms; but such religious power as it once had was gone. In all directions it was undermined by mysticOriental and Egyptian rites, to which men resorted in search of a religion and sick of the old fables, ever growing more debased, that had pleased their fathers. The majesty of Rome in the person of the Emperor, the one visible supreme power, was seized upon by the popular instinct, even more than it was imposed by state policy, and made to fill the vacuum; and temples to Augustus had already risen in Asia, side by side with those of the ancient gods.

In this despair of their ancestral religions many piously disposed Gentiles turned to Judaism for spiritual help; and the synagogue was surrounded in the Greek cities by a circle of earnest proselytes. From their ranks St Paul drew a large proportion of his hearers and converts. When he writes, “Remember that you were at that timewithout God,” he is within the recollection of his readers; and they will bear him out in testifying that their heathen creed was dead and empty to the soul. Nor did philosophy construct a creed more satisfying. Its gods were the Epicurean deities who dwell aloof and careless of men; or the supreme Reason and Necessity of the Stoics, theanima mundi, of which human souls are fleeting and fragmentary images. “Deism finds God only in heaven; Pantheism, only on earth; Christianity alone finds Him both in heaven and on earth” (Harless). The Word made flesh revealsGod in the world.

When the apostle says “without Godin the world,” this qualification is both reproachful and sorrowful. To be without God in the world that He has made, where His “eternal power and Godhead” have been visible from creation, argues a darkened and perverted heart.[86]To be without God in the world is to be in the wilderness, without a guide; on a stormy ocean, without harbour or pilot; in sickness of spirit, without medicine or physician; to be hungry without bread, and weary without rest, and dying with no light of life. It is to be an orphaned child, wandering in an empty, ruined house.

In these words we have an echo of Paul’s preaching to the Gentiles, and an indication of the line of his appeals to the conscience of the enlightened pagans of his time. The despair of the age was darker than the human mind has known before or since. Matthew Arnold has painted it all in one verse of those lines, entitledObermann once more, in which he so perfectly expresses the better spirit of modern scepticism.

“On that hard Pagan world disgustAnd secret loathing fellDeep weariness and sated lustMade human life a hell.”

The saying by which St Paul reproved the Corinthians, “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,” is the common sentiment of pagan epitaphs of the time. Here is an extant specimen of the kind: “Let us drink and be merry; for we shall have no more kissing and dancing in the kingdom of Proserpine. Soon shall we fall asleep, to wake no more.” Such were the thoughts with which men came back from the grave-side. It is needless to say how depraving was the effect of this hopelessness. At Athens, in the more religious times of Socrates, it was even considered a decent and kindly thing to allow a criminal condemned to death to spend his last hours in gross sensual indulgence. There is no reason to suppose thatthe extinction of the Christian hope of immortality would prove less demoralizing. We are “saved by hope,” said St Paul: we are ruined by despair. Pessimism of creed for most men means pessimism of conduct.

Our modern speech and literature and our habits of feeling have been for so many generations steeped in the influence of Christ’s teaching, and it has thrown so many tender and hallowed thoughts around the state of our beloved dead, that it is impossible even for those who are personally without hope in Christ to realize what its general decay and disappearance would mean. To have possessed such a treasure, and then to lose it! to have cherished anticipations so exalted and so dear,—and to find them turn out a mockery! The age upon which this calamity fell would be of all ages the most miserable.

The hope of Israel which Paul preached to the Gentiles was a hope for the world and for the nations, as well as for the individual soul. “The commonwealth [orpolity] of Israel” and “the covenants of promise” guaranteed the establishment of the Messianic kingdom upon earth. This expectation took amongst the mass of the Jews a materialistic and even a revengeful shape; but in one form or other it belonged, and still belongs to every man of Israel. Those noble lines of Virgil in his fourth Eclogue[87]—like the words of Caiaphas, an unintended Christian prophecy—which predicted the return of justice andthe spread of a golden age through the whole world under the rule of the coming heir of Cæsar, had been signally belied by the imperial house in the century that had elapsed. Never were human prospects darker than when the apostle wrote as Nero’s prisoner in Rome. It was an age of crime and horror. The political world and the system of pagan society seemed to be in the throes of dissolution. Only in “the commonwealth of Israel” was there a light of hope and a foundation for the future of mankind; and of this in its wisdom the world knew nothing.

The Gentiles were “alienated from the commonwealth of Israel,”—that is to say, treated as aliens and made such by their exclusion. By the very fact of Israel’s election, the rest of mankind were shut out of the visible kingdom of God. They became mereGentiles, ornations,—a herd of men bound together only by natural affinity, with no “covenant of promise,” no religious constitution or destiny, no definite relationship to God, Israel being alone the acknowledged and organized “peopleof Jehovah.”

These distinctions were summed up in one word, expressing all the pride of the Jewish nature, when the Israelites styled themselves “the Circumcision.” The rest of the world—Philistines or Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, or Barbarians, it mattered not—were “the Uncircumcision.” How superficial this distinction was in point of fact, and how false the assumption of moral superiority it implied in the existing condition of Judaism, St Paul indicates by saying, “those who arecalledUncircumcision by that which iscalledCircumcision, in flesh, wrought by human hands.” In the second and third chapters of his epistle to the Romans he exposed the hollowness of Jewish sanctity, andbrought his fellow-countrymen down to the level of those “sinners of the Gentiles” whom they so bitterly despised.

The destitution of the Gentile world is put into a single word, when the apostle says: “You were at that timeseparate from Christ”—without a Christ, either come or coming. They were deprived of the world’s one treasure,—shut out, as it appeared, for ever[88]from any part in Him who is to mankind all things and in all.—Once far off!

“But now in Christ Jesus ye weremade nigh.” What is it that has bridged the distance, that has transported these Gentiles from the wilderness of heathenism into the midst of the city of God? It is “the blood of Christ.” The sacrificial death of Jesus Christ transformed the relations of God to mankind, and of Israel to the Gentiles. In Him God reconciled not a nation, but “a world” to Himself (2 Cor. v. 19). The death of the Son of man could not have reference to the sons of Abraham alone. If sin is universal and death is not a Jewish but a human experience, and if one blood flows in the veins of all our race, then the death of Jesus Christ was a universal sacrifice; it appeals to every man’s conscience and heart, and puts away for each the guilt which comes between his soul and God.

When the Greeks in Passion week desired to see Him, He exclaimed: “I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will drawallunto me.” The cross of Jesus was to draw humanity around it, by its infinite loveand sorrow, by the perfect apprehension there was in it of the world’s guilt and need, and the perfect submission to the sentence of God’s law against man’s sin. So wherever the gospel was preached by St Paul, it won Gentile hearts for Christ. Greek and Jew found themselves weeping together at the foot of the cross, sharing one forgiveness and baptized into one Spirit.

The union of Caiaphas and Pilate in the condemnation of Jesus and the mingling of the Jewish crowd with the Roman soldiers at His execution were a tragic symbol of the new age that was coming. Israel and the Gentiles were accomplices in the death of the Messiah—the former of the two the more guilty partner in the counsel and deed. If this Jesus whom they slew and hanged on a tree was indeed the Christ, God’s chosen, then what availed their Abrahamic sonship, their covenants and law-keeping, their proud religious eminence? They had killed their Christ; they had forfeited their calling. His blood was on them and on their children.

Those who seemed nigh to God, at the cross of Christ were found far off,—that both together, the far and the near, might be reconciled and brought back to God. “He shut up all unto disobedience, that He might have mercy upon all.”

FOOTNOTES:[86]Rom. i. 19–23; comp. John i. 10: “He [the true Light] wasin the world, and the world knew Him not.”[87]Magnus ab integro sæclorum nascitur ordo.Jam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna;Jam nova progenies cœlo demittitur alto.Tu modo nascenti puero, quo ferrea primumDesinet, ac toto surget gens aurea mundo,Casta, fave, Lucina.[88]Observe the perfect participleἀπηλλοτριωμένοι, which signifies an abiding fact or fixed condition. Similar is the turn of expression in ch. iii. 9, and in Col. i. 26, Rom. xvi. 25, Matt. xiii. 35.

[86]Rom. i. 19–23; comp. John i. 10: “He [the true Light] wasin the world, and the world knew Him not.”

[87]Magnus ab integro sæclorum nascitur ordo.Jam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna;Jam nova progenies cœlo demittitur alto.Tu modo nascenti puero, quo ferrea primumDesinet, ac toto surget gens aurea mundo,Casta, fave, Lucina.

[87]

Magnus ab integro sæclorum nascitur ordo.Jam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna;Jam nova progenies cœlo demittitur alto.Tu modo nascenti puero, quo ferrea primumDesinet, ac toto surget gens aurea mundo,Casta, fave, Lucina.

[88]Observe the perfect participleἀπηλλοτριωμένοι, which signifies an abiding fact or fixed condition. Similar is the turn of expression in ch. iii. 9, and in Col. i. 26, Rom. xvi. 25, Matt. xiii. 35.

“For He is our peace, who made both one, and brake down the middle wall of partition, having abolished in His flesh the enmity,eventhe law of commandmentscontainedin ordinances, that He might create in Himself of the twain one new man,somaking peace; and might reconcile them both in one body unto God through the cross, having slain the enmity thereby: and He came and preached good tidings of peace to you that were far off, and peace to them that were nigh: for through Him we both have our access in one Spirit unto the Father.”—Eph.ii. 14–18.

Peace, peace—to the far off, and to the near!Such was God’s promise to His scattered people in the times of the exile (Isai. lvii. 19). St Paul sees that peace of God extending over a yet wider field, and terminating a longer and sadder banishment than the prophet had foreseen. Christ is “our peace”—not for the divided members of Israel alone, but for all the tribes of men. He brings about a universal pacification.

There were two distinct, but kindred enmities to be overcome by Christ, in preaching to the world His good tidings of peace (ver. 17). There was the hostility of Jew and Gentile, which was removed in its cause and principle when Christ “in His flesh” (by His incarnate life and death) “abolished the law of commandments in decrees”—i.e., the law of Moses as it constituted a body of external precepts determining theway of righteousness and life. This abolition of the law by the evangelical principle “dissolved the middle wall of partition.” The occasion of quarrel between Israel and the world was destroyed; the barrier disappeared that had for so long fenced off the privileged ground of the sons of Abraham (vv. 14, 15). But behind this human enmity, underneath the feud and rancour existing between the Jews and the nations, there lay the deeper quarrel of mankind with God. Both enmities centred in the law; both were slain by one stroke, in the reconciliation of the cross (ver. 16).

The Jewish and Gentile peoples formed two distinct types of humanity. Politically, the Jews were insignificant and had scarcely counted amongst the great powers of the world. Their religion alone gave them influence and importance. Bearing his inspired Scriptures and his Messianic hope, the wandering Israelite confronted the vast masses of heathenism and the splendid and fascinating classical civilization with the proudest sense of his superiority. To his God he knew well that one day every knee would bow and every tongue confess. The circumstances of the time deepened his isolation and aggravated to internecine hate his spite against his fellow-men, theadversus omnes alios hostile odiumstigmatized by the incisive pen of Tacitus. Within three years of the writing of this letter the Jewish war against Rome broke out, when the enmity culminated in the most appalling and fateful overthrow recorded in the pages of history. Now, it is this enmity at its height—the most inveterate and desperate one can conceive—that the apostle proposes to reconcile; nay, that he sees already slain by the sacrifice of the cross, and within the brotherhood of the Christian Church. It was slain in the heartof Saul of Tarsus, the proudest that beat in Jewish breast.

In his earlier writings the apostle has been concerned chiefly to guard the position and rights of the two parties within the Church. He has abundantly maintained, especially in the epistle to the Galatians, the claims of Gentile believers in Christ against Judaic assumptions and impositions. He has defended the just prerogative of the Jew and his hereditary sentiments from the contempt to which they were sometimes exposed on the part of the Gentile majority.[89]But now that this has been done, and that Gentile liberties and Jewish dignity have been vindicated and safeguarded on both sides, St Paul advances a step further: he seeks to amalgamate the Jewish and Gentile section of the Church, and to “make of the twain one new man, so making peace.” This, he declares, was the end of Christ’s mission; this a chief purpose of His atoning death. Only by such union, only through the burying of the old enmity slain on the cross, could His Church be built up to its completeness. St Paul would have Gentile and Jewish believers everywhere forget their differences, efface their party lines, and merge their independence in the oneness of the all-embracing and all-perfecting Church of Jesus Christ, God’s habitation in the Spirit. Instead of saying that a catholic ideal like this belongs to a later and post-apostolic age, we maintain, on the contrary, that a catholic mind like St Paul’s, under the conditions of his time, could not fail to arrive at this conception.

It was his confidence in the victory of the cross over all strife and sin that sustained St Paul throughthese years of captivity. As he looks out from his Roman prison, under the shadow of Nero’s palace, the future is invested with a radiance of hope that makes the heart of the chained apostle exult within him. The world is lost, to all outward seeming: he knows it is saved! Jew and Gentile are about to close in mortal conflict: he proclaims peace between them, assured of their reconcilement, and knowing that in their reunion the salvation of human society is assured.

The enmity of Jew and Gentile was representative of all that divides mankind. In it were concentrated most of the causes by which society is rent asunder. Along with religion, race, habits, tastes and culture, moral tendencies, political aspirations, interests of trade, all helped to widen the breach. The cleavage ran deep into the foundations of life; the enmity was the growth of two thousand years. It was not a case of local friction, nor a quarrel arising from temporary causes. The Jew was ubiquitous, and everywhere was an alien and an irritant to Gentile society. No antipathy was so hard to subdue. The grace that conquers it, can and will conquer all enmities.

St Paul’s view embraced, in fact, a world-wide reconcilement. He contemplates, as the Hebrew prophets themselves did, the fraternization of mankind under the rule of the Christ. After this scale he laid down the foundation of the Church, “wise master-builder” that he was. It was destined to bear the weight of an edifice in which all the races of men should dwell together, and every order of human faculty should find its place. His thoughts were not confined within the Judaic antithesis. “There is no Jew and Greek,” he says in another place; yes, and “no barbarian, Scythian,bondman, freeman, male or female. Ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”[90]Birth, rank, office in the Church, culture, even sex are minor and subordinate distinctions, merged in the unity of redeemed souls in Christ. That which He “creates in Himself of the twain” isone new man—one incorporate humanity, neither Jew nor Gentile, Englishman nor Hindu, priest nor layman, male nor female; but simplyman, andChristian.

At the present time we are better able to enter into these views of the apostle than at any intervening period of history. In his day almost the whole visible world, lying round the Mediterranean shores, was brought under the government and laws of Rome. This fact made the establishment of one religious polity a thing quite conceivable. The Roman empire did not, as it proved, allow Christianity to conquer it soon enough and to leaven it sufficiently to save it. That huge construction, the mightiest fabric of human polity, fell and covered the earth with its ruins. In its fall it reacted disastrously upon the Church, and has bequeathed to it the corrupt and despotic unity of Papal Rome. Now, in these last days, the whole world is opened to the Church, a world stretching far beyond the horizon of the first century. Science and Commerce, those two strong-winged angels and giant ministers of God, are swiftly binding the continents together in material ties. The peoples are beginning to realize their brotherhood, and are feeling their way in many directions towards international union; while in the Churches a new, federal catholicity is taking shape, that must displace the false catholicism of external uniformity and the disastrous absolutism inheritedfrom Rome. The spread of European empire and the marvellous expansion of our English race are carrying forward the world’s unification with enormous strides,—towards some end or other. What end is this to be? Is the kingdom of the world about to become the kingdom of our Lord and His Christ? and are the nations preparing to be “reconciled in one body unto God”?

If Christendom were worthy of her Master and her name, this question would be answered with no doubtful affirmative. The Church is well able, if she were prepared, to go up and possess the whole earth for her Lord. The way is open; the means are in her hand. Nor is she ignorant, nor wholly negligent of her opportunity and of the claims that the times impose upon her. She is putting forth new strength and striving to overtake her work, notwithstanding the weight of ignorance and sloth that burdens her. Soon the reconciling cross will be planted on every shore, and the praises of the Crucified sung in every human language.

But there are dark as well as bright auguries for the future. The advance of commerce and emigration has been a curse and not a blessing to many heathen peoples. Who can read without shame and horror the story of European conquest in America? And it is a chapter not yet closed. Greed and injustice still mark the dealings of the powerful and civilized with the weaker races. England set a noble example in the abolition of negro slavery; but she has since inflicted, for purposes of gain, the opium curse on China, putting poison to the lips of its vast population. Under our Christian flags fire-arms are imported, and alcohol, amongst tribes of men less able than children to resist their evils. Is this “preaching peace to those far off”?It is likely that the commercial profits made in the destruction of savage races as yet exceed all that our missionary societies have spent in saving them. One of these days Almighty God may have a stern reckoning with modern Europe about these things. “When He maketh inquisition for blood, He will remember.”

And what shall we say of ourselves at home, in our relation to this great principle of the apostle? The old “middle wall of partition,” the temple-barrier that sundered Jew and Gentile, is “broken down,”—visibly levelled by the hand of God when Jerusalem fell, as it had been virtually and in its principle destroyed by the work of Christ. But are there no other middle walls, no barriers raised within the fold of Christ? The rich man’s purse, and the poor man’s penury; aristocratic pride, democratic bitterness and jealousy; knowledge and refinement on the one hand, ignorance and rudeness on the other—how thick the veil of estrangement which these influences weave, how high the party walls which they build in our various Church communions!

It is the duty of the Church, as she values her existence, with gentle but firm hands to pull down and to keep down all such partitions. She cannot abolish the natural distinctions of life. She cannot turn the Jew into a Gentile, nor the Gentile into a Jew. She will never make the poor man rich in this world, nor the rich man altogether poor. Like her Master, she declines to be “judge or divider” of our secular inheritance. But she can see to it that these outward distinctions make no difference in her treatment of the men as men. She can combine in her fellowship all grades and orders, and teach them to understand and respect each other. She can soften the asperities and relieve many of the hardships which social differencescreate. She can diffuse a healing and purifying influence upon the contentions of society around her.

Let us labour unweariedly for this, and let our meeting at the Lord’s table be a symbol of the unreserved communion of men of all classes and conditions in the brotherhood of the redeemed sons of God. “Heis our peace”; and if He is in our hearts, we must needs be sons of peace. “Behold the secret of all true union! It is not by others coming to us, nor by our going over to them; but it is by both them and ourselves coming to Christ” that peace is made (Monod).

Thus within and without the Church the work of atonement will advance, with Christ ever for its preacher (ver. 17). He speaks through the words and the lives of His ten thousand messengers,—men of every order, in every age and country of the earth. The leaven of Christ’s peace will spread till the lump is leavened. God will accomplish His purpose of the ages, whether in our time, or in another worthier of His calling. His Church is destined to be the home of the human family, the universal liberator and instructor and reconciler of the nations. And Christ shall sit enthroned in the loyal worship of the federated peoples of the earth.

But the question remains: What is the foundation, what the warrant of this grand idealism of the apostle Paul? Many a great thinker, many an ardent reformer before and since has dreamed of some such millennium as this. And their enthusiastic plans have ended too often in conflict and destruction. What surer ground of confidence have we in Paul’s undertaking than in those of so many gifted visionaries and philosophers? The difference lies here: his expectation rests on theword and character of God; his instrument of reform is the cross of Jesus Christ.

God is the centre of His own universe. Any reconciliation that is to stand, must include Him first of all. Christ reconciled Jew and Gentile “both in one bodyto God.” There is the meeting point, the true focus of the orbit of human life, that can alone control its movements and correct its wild aberrations. Under the shadow of His throne of justice, in the arms of His fatherly love, the kindreds of the earth will at last find reconciliation and peace. Humanitarian and secularist systems make the simple mistake of ignoring the supreme Factor in the scheme of things; they leave out the All in all.

“Be yereconciled to God,” cries the apostle. For Almighty God has had a great quarrel with this world of ours. The hatred of men towards each other is rooted in the “carnal mind which is enmity against God.” The “law of commandments contained in ordinances,” in whose possession the Jew boasted over the lawless and profane Gentile, in reality branded both as culprits.

The secret disquiet and dread lurking in man’s conscience, the pangs endured in his body of humiliation, the groaning frame of nature declare the world unhinged and out of course. Things have gone amiss, somehow, between man and his Creator. The face of the earth and the field of human history are scarred with the thunderbolts of His displeasure. God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ and the King of the ages, is not the amiable, almighty Sentimentalist that some pious people would make Him out to be. The men of the Bible felt and realized, if we do not, the grave and tremendous import of the Lord’s controversy with all flesh. He is unceasingly at warwith the sins of men. “God islove”—oh yes; but then He is also “a consuming fire”! There is no anger so crushing as the anger of love, for there is none so just; no wrath to be feared like “the wrath of the Lamb.” God is not a man, weak and passionate, whom a spark of anger might set all on fire, burning out His justice and compassion. “In His wrath He remembers mercy.” Within that infinite nature there is room for an absolute loathing and resentment towards sin, in consistence with an immeasurable pity and yearning towards His sinful children. Hence the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Look at it from what side you will (and it has many sides), propound it in what terms you may (and it translates itself anew into the dialect of every age), you must not explain the cross of Christ away nor cause its offence to cease. “The atonement has always been a scandal and a folly to those who did not receive it; it has always contained something which to formal logic is false and to individualistic ethics immoral; yet in that very element which has been branded as immoral and false, has always lain the seal of its power and the secret of its truth.” The Holy One of God, the Lamb without spot and blemish, He died by His own consent a sinner’s death. That sacrifice, undergone by the Son of God and Son of man dying as man for men, in love to His race and in obedience to the Divine will and law, gave an infinite satisfaction to God in His relation to the world, and there went up to the Divine throne from the anguish of Calvary a “savour of sweet smell.” The moral glory of the act of Jesus Christ in dying for His guilty brethren outshone its horror and disgrace; and it redeemed man’s lost condition, and clothed human nature with a new character and aspectin the eyes of God Himself. “Now therefore there is no more condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus.” The mercy of God, if we may so say, is set free to act in forgiveness and restoration, without any compromise of justice and inflexible law. No peace without this: no peace that did notsatisfy God, and satisfy that law, deep as the deepest in God, that binds suffering to wrong-doing and death to sin.

Perhaps you say: This is immoral, surely, that the just should suffer for the unjust; that one commits the offence, and another bears the penalty.—Stay a moment: that is only half the truth. We are more than individuals; we are members of a race; and vicarious suffering runs through life. Our sufferings and wrong-doings bind the human family together in an inextricable web. We arecommunists in sin and death. It is the law and lot of our existence. And Christ, the Lord and centre of the race, has come within its scope. He bound Himself to our sinking fortunes. He became co-partner in our lost estate, and has redeemed it to God by His blood. If He was true and perfect man, if He was the creative Head and Mediator of the race, the eternal Firstborn of many brethren, He could do no other. He who alone had the right and the power,—“Onedied for all.” He took upon His Divine heart the sin and curse of the world, He fastened it to His shoulders with the cross; and He bore it away from Caiaphas’ hall and Pilate’s judgement-seat, away from guilty Jerusalem; He took away the sin of the world, and expiated it once for all. He quenched in His blood the fires of wrath and hate it kindled. He slewthe enmitythereby.

Still, we are individuals, as you said, not lost afterall in the world’s solidarity. Here your personal right and will must come in. What Christ has done for you is yours, so far as you accept it. He has died your death beforehand, trusting that you would not repudiate His act, that you would not let His blood be spilt in vain. But He will never force His mediation upon you. He respects your freedom and your manhood. Do you now endorse what Jesus Christ did on your behalf? Do you renounce the sin, and accept the sacrifice? Then it is yours, from this moment, before the tribunal of God and of conscience. By the witness of His Spirit you are proclaimed a forgiven and reconciled man. Christ crucified is yours—if you will have Him, if you will identify your sinful self with the sinless Mediator, if as you see Him lifted up on the cross you will let your heart cry out, “Oh my God, He dies forme!”

Coming “in one Spirit to the Father,” the reconciled children join hands again with each other. Social barriers, caste feelings, family feuds, personal quarrels, national antipathies, alike go down before the virtue of the blood of Jesus.

Back to Index Next