_THE WRITER AND HIS READERS_
ROMANS i. 1-7
[Sidenote: Ver. 1.] =Paul, a bondservant of Jesus Christ.= So the man
opens his Lord's message with his own name. We may, if we please,
leave it and pass on, for to the letter-writer of that day it was as
much a matter of course to prefix the personal name to the letter as
it is to us to append it. But then, as now, the name was not a mere
word of routine; certainly not in the communications of a religious
leader. It avowed responsibility; it put in evidence a person. In a
letter of public destination it set the man in the light and glare of
publicity, as truly as when he spoke in the Christian assembly, or on
the Areopagus, or from the steps of the castle at Jerusalem. It tells
us here, on the threshold, that the messages we are about to read are
given to us as "truth through personality"; they come through the
mental and spiritual being of this wonderful and most real man. If we
read his character aright in his letters, we see in him a fineness and
dignity of thought which would not make the publication of himself a
light and easy thing. But his sensibilities, with all else he has,
have been given to Christ (who never either slights or spoils such
gifts, while He accepts them); and if it will the better win attention
to the Lord that the servant should stand out conspicuously, to point
to Him, it shall be done.
For he is indeed "_Jesus Christ's bondservant_"; not His ally merely,
or His subject, or His friend. Recently, writing to the Galatian
converts, he has been vindicating the glorious liberty of the
Christian, set free at once from "the curse of the law" and from the
mastery of self. But there too, at the close (vi. 17), he has dwelt on
his own sacred bondage; "the brand of his Master, Jesus." The liberty
of the Gospel is the silver side of the same shield whose side of gold
is an unconditional vassalage to the liberating Lord. Our freedom is
"in the Lord" alone; and to be "in the Lord" is to belong to Him, as
wholly as a healthy hand belongs, in its freedom, to the physical
centre of life and will. To be a bondservant is terrible in the
abstract. To be "Jesus Christ's bondservant" is Paradise, in the
concrete. Self-surrender, taken alone, is a plunge into a cold void.
When it is surrender to "the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself
for me" (Gal. ii. 20), it is the bright home-coming of the soul to the
seat and sphere of life and power.
This bondservant of His now before us, dictating, is =called to be an
Apostle.= Such is his particular department of servitude in the "great
house." It is a rare commission--to be a chosen witness of the
Resurrection, a divinely authorized "bearer" of the holy Name, a first
founder and guide of the universal Church, a _legatus a latere_ of the
Lord Himself. Yet the apostleship, to St Paul, is but a species of the
one genus, bondservice. "To every man is his work," given by the one
sovereign will. In a Roman household one slave would water the garden,
another keep accounts, another in the library would do skilled
literary work; yet all equally would be "not their own, but bought
with a price." So in the Gospel, then, and now. All functions of
Christians are alike expressions of the one will of Him who has
purchased, and who "calls."
Meanwhile, this bondservant-apostle, because "under authority,"
carries authority. His MASTER has spoken to him, that he may speak. He
writes to the Romans as man, as friend, but also as the "vessel of
choice, to bear the Name" (Acts ix. 15) of Jesus Christ.
Such is the sole essential work and purpose of his life. He is
=separated to the Gospel of God;= isolated from all other ruling aims
to this. In some respects he is the least isolated of men; he is in
contact all round with human life. Yet he is "_separated_." In Christ,
and for Christ, he lives apart from even the worthiest personal
ambitions. Richer than ever, since he "was in Christ" (xvi. 7), in all
that makes man's nature wealthy, in power to know, to will, to love,
he uses all his riches always for "this one thing," to make men
understand "_the Gospel of God_." Such isolation, behind a thousand
contacts, is the Lord's call for His true followers still.
"_The Gospel_": word almost too familiar now, till the thing is too
little understood. What is it? In its native meaning, its eternally
proper meaning, it is the divine "Good Tidings." It is the
announcement of Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour of men, in whom God
and man meet with joy. That announcement stands in living relation to
a bright chain of precepts, and also to the sacred darkness of
convictions and warnings; we shall see this amply illustrated in this
Epistle. But neither precepts nor threatenings are properly _the
Gospel_. The Gospel saves from sin, and enables for holy conduct. But
in itself it is the pure, mere message of redeeming Love.
It is "_the Gospel of God_"; that is, as the neighbouring sentences
shew it, the Gospel of the blessed FATHER. Its origin is in the
Father's love, the eternal hill whence runs the eternal stream of the
work of the Son and the power of the Spirit. "God loved the world";
"The Father sent the Son." The stream leads us up to the mount.
"Hereby perceive we the love of God." In the Gospel, and in it alone,
we have that certainty, "God _is_ Love."
Now he dilates a little in passing on this dear theme, the Gospel of
God. He whom it reveals as eternal Love was true to Himself in the
preparation as in the event; [Sidenote: Ver. 2.] He =promised= His
Gospel =beforehand through His prophets in (the) holy Scriptures.= The
sunrise of Christ was no abrupt, insulated phenomenon, unintelligible
because out of relation. "Since the world began" (Luke i. 70), from
the dawn of human history, predictive word and manifold preparing work
had gone before. To think now only of the prediction, more or less
articulate, and not of the preparation through general divine dealings
with man--such had the prophecy been that, as the pagan histories tell
us,[4] "the whole East" heaved with expectations of a Judæan
world-rule about the time when, as a fact, Jesus came. He came, alike
to disappoint every merely popular hope and to satisfy at once the
concrete details and the spiritual significance of the long forecast.
And He sent His messengers out to the world carrying as their text and
their voucher that old and multifold literature which is yet one Book;
those "holy writings," (our own Old Testament, from end to end,) which
were to them nothing less than the voice of the Holy Spirit. They
always put the Lord, in their preaching, in contact with that
prediction.
In this, as in other things, His glorious Figure is unique. There is
no other personage in human history, himself a moral miracle, heralded
by a verifiable foreshadowing in a complex literature of previous
centuries.
"The hope of Israel" was, and is, a thing _sui generis_. Other
preparations for the Coming were, as it were, sidelong and altogether
by means of nature. In the Holy Scriptures the supernatural led
directly and in its own way to the supreme supernatural Event; the
Sacred Way to the Sanctuary.
What was the burthen of the vast prophecy, with its converging
elements? [Sidenote: Ver. 3.] It was =concerning His Son, Jesus Christ
our Lord.= Whatever the prophets themselves knew, or did not know, of
the inmost import of their records and utterances, the import was
this. The Lord and the Apostles do not commit us to believe that the
old seers ever had a _full_ conscious foresight, or even that in all
they "wrote of Him" they knew that it was of Him they wrote; though
they _had_ insights above nature, and knew it, as when David "in the
Spirit called Him Lord," and Abraham "saw His day." But they do amply
commit us to believe, if we are indeed their disciples, that the whole
revelation through Israel did, in a way quite of its own kind,
"concern the Son of God." See this in such leading places as Luke
xxiv. 25-27; John v. 39, 46; Acts iii. 21-25, x. 43, xxviii. 23.
A Mahometan in Southern India, not long ago, was first drawn to faith
in Jesus Christ by reading the genealogy with which St Matthew begins
his narrative. Such a procession, he thought, must lead up a mighty
name; and he approached with reverence the story of the Nativity. That
genealogy is, in a certain sense, the prophecies in compendium. Its
avenue is the miniature of theirs. Let us sometimes go back, as it
were, and approach the Lord again through the ranks of His holy
foretellers, to get a new impression of His majesty.
"_Concerning His Son._" Around that radiant word, full of light and
heat, the cold mists of many speculations have rolled themselves, as
man has tried to analyse a divine and boundless fact. For St Paul, and
for us, the fact is everything, for peace and life. This Jesus Christ
is true Man; that is certain. He is also, if we trust His life and
word, true Son of God. He is on the one hand personally distinct from
Him whom He calls Father, and whom He loves, and who loves Him with
infinite love. On the other hand He is so related to Him that He fully
possesses His Nature, while He has that Nature wholly from Him. This
is the teaching of Gospels and Epistles; this is the Catholic Faith.
Jesus Christ is God, is Divine, truly and fully. He is implicitly
called by the incommunicable Name (compare John xii. 41 with Isa.
vi. 7). He is openly called God in His own presence on earth (John
xx. 28). But what is, if possible, even mere significant, because
deeper below the surface--He is regarded as the eternally satisfying
Object of man's trust and love (_e.g._ Phil. iii. 21, Eph. iii. 19).
Yet Jesus Christ is always preached as related Son-wise to Another, so
truly that the mutual love of the Two is freely adduced as type and
motive for our love.
We can hardly make too much, in thought and teaching, of this Divine
Sonship, this Filial Godhead. It is the very "Secret of God" (Col.
ii. 2), both as a light to guide our reason to the foot of the Throne,
and as a power upon the heart. "He that hath the Son hath the Father";
"He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father"; "He hath translated us
into the kingdom of the Son of His Love."
=Who was born of the seed of David, according to the flesh.= So the
New Testament begins (Matt. i. 1); so it almost closes (Rev. xxii. 6).
St Paul, in later years, recalls the Lord's human pedigree again
(2 Tim. ii. 8): "Remember that Jesus Christ, _of the seed of David_,
is risen from the dead." The old Apostle in that last passage, has
entered the shadow of death; he feels with one hand for the rock of
history, with the other for the pulse of eternal love. Here was the
rock; the Lord of life was the Child of history, Son and Heir of a
historical king, and then, as such, the Child of prophecy too. And
this, against all surface appearances beforehand. The Davidic "ground"
(Isa. liii. 2) had seemed to be dry as dust for generations, when the
Root of endless life sprang up in it.
"_He was born_" of David's seed. Literally, the Greek may be rendered,
"_He became, He came to be_." Under either rendering we have the
wonderful fact that He who in His higher Nature eternally _is_, above
time and including it, did in His other Nature, by the door of
_becoming_, enter time, and thus indeed "fill all things." This He
did, and thus He is, "_according to the flesh_." "Flesh" is, indeed,
but a part of Manhood. But a part can represent the whole; and "flesh"
is the part most antithetical to the Divine Nature, with which here
Manhood is collocated and in a sense contrasted. So it is again below,
ix. 5.
[Sidenote: Ver. 4.] And now, of this blessed Son of David, we hear
further:--=who was designated to be Son of God;= literally, "_defined
as Son of God_" betokened to be such by "infallible proof." Never for
an hour had he ceased to be, in fact, Son of God. To the man healed of
birth-blindness He had said (John ix. 35), "Dost thou believe on the
Son of God?" But there was an hour when He became openly and so to
speak officially what He always is naturally; somewhat as a born king
is "made" king by coronation. Historical act then affirmed independent
fact, and as it were gathered it into a point for use. This
affirmation took place =in power, according to the Spirit of Holiness,
as a result of resurrection from the dead.= "Sown in weakness," Jesus
was indeed "raised in" majestic, tranquil "power." Without an effort
He stepped from out of the depth of death, from under the load of sin.
It was no flickering life, crucified but not quite killed, creeping
back in a convalescence mis-called resurrection; it was the rising of
the sun. That it was indeed day-light, and not day-dream, was shown
not only in His mastery of matter, but in the transfiguration of His
followers. No moral change was ever at once more complete and more
perfectly healthful than what His return wrought in that large and
various group, when they learnt to say, "We have seen the Lord." The
man who wrote this Epistle had "seen Him last of all" (1 Cor. xv. 8).
That was indeed a sight "in power," and working a transfiguration.
So was the Son of the Father affirmed to be what He is; so was He
"made" to be, for us His Church, the Son, in whom we are sons. And all
this was, "_according to the Spirit of holiness_"; answerably to the
foreshadowing and foretelling of that Holy Spirit who, in the
prophets, "testified of the sufferings destined for the Christ, and of
the glories that should follow" (1 Pet. i. 11).
Now lastly, in the Greek of the sentence, as if pausing for a solemn
entrance, comes in the whole blessed Name; =even Jesus Christ our
Lord.= Word by word the Apostle dictates, and the scribe obeys. JESUS,
the human Name; CHRIST, the mystic Title; OUR LORD, the term of
royalty and loyalty which binds us to Him, and Him to us. Let those
four words be ours for ever. If everything else falls in ruins from
the memory, let this remain, "the strength of our heart, and our
portion for ever."
[Sidenote: Ver. 5.] =Through whom,= the Apostle's voice goes on, =we
received grace and apostleship.= The Son was the Channel "through"
which the Father's choice and call took effect. He "grasped" Paul
(Phil. iii. 12), and, joined him to Himself, and in Himself to the
Father; and now through that Union the motions of the Eternal will
move Paul. They move him, to give him "_grace and apostleship_"; that
is, in effect, grace for apostleship, and apostleship as grace; the
boon of the Lord's presence in him for the work, and the Lord's work
as a spiritual boon. He often thus links the word "_grace_" with his
great mission; for example, in Gal. ii. 9, Eph. iii. 2, 8, and perhaps
Phil. i. 7. Alike the enabling peace and power for service, and then
the service itself, are to the Christian a free, loving, beatifying
gift.
=Unto obedience of faith among all the Nations.= This "_obedience of
faith_" is in fact faith in its aspect as submission. What is faith?
It is personal trust, personal self-entrustment to a person. It "gives
up the case" to the Lord, as the one only possible Giver of pardon and
of purity. It is "_submission_ to the righteousness of God" (ch.
x. 3). Blessed the man who so obeys, stretching out arms empty and
submissive to receive, in the void between them, Jesus Christ.
"_Among all the Nations_," "all the Gentiles." The words read easy to
us, and pass perhaps half unnoticed, as a phrase of routine. Not so to
the ex-Pharisee who dictated them here. A few years before he would
have held it highly "unlawful to keep company with, or come unto, one
of another nation" (Acts x. 28). Now, in Christ, it is as if he had
almost forgotten that it had been so. His whole heart, in Christ, is
blent in personal love with hearts belonging to many nations; in
spiritual affection he is ready for contact with all hearts. And now
he, of all the Apostles, is the teacher who by life and word is to
bring this glorious catholicity home for ever to all believing souls,
our own included. It is St Paul pre-eminently who has taught man, as
man, in Christ, to love man; who has made Hebrew, European, Hindoo,
Chinese, Caffre, Esquimaux, actually one in the conscious brotherhood
of eternal life.
=For His Name's sake;= for the sake of the Lord Jesus Christ revealed.
The Name is the self-unfolded Person, known and understood. Paul had
indeed come to know that Name, and to pass it on was now his very
life. He existed only to win for it more insight, more adoration, more
love. "The Name" deserved that great soul's entire devotion. Does it
not deserve our equally entire devotion now? Our lives shall be
transfigured, in their measure, by taking for their motto also, "For
His Name's sake."
Now he speaks direct of his Roman friends. [Sidenote: Ver. 6.] =Among
whom,= among these multifarious "Nations," =you too are Jesus Christ's
called ones;= men who belong to Him, because "_called_" by Him. And
what is "_called_"? Compare the places where the word is used--or
where its kindred words are used--in the Epistles, and you will find a
certain holy speciality of meaning. "Invited" is no adequate
paraphrase. The "called" man is the man who has been invited _and has
come_; who has obeyed the eternal welcome; to whom the voice of the
Lord has been effectual. See the word in the opening paragraphs of
1 Corinthians. There the Gospel is heard, externally, by a host of
indifferent or hostile hearts, who think it "folly," or "a stumbling
block." But among them are those who hear, and understand, and believe
indeed. To them "Christ is God's power, and God's wisdom." And they
are "the called."
In the Gospels, the words "chosen" and "called" are in antithesis; the
called are many, the chosen few; the external hearers are many, the
hearers inwardly are few. In the Epistles a developed use shews the
change indicated here, and it is consistently maintained.
[Sidenote: Ver. 7.] =To all who in Rome are God's beloved ones.=
Wonderful collocation, wonderful possibility! "_Beloved ones of God_,"
as close to the eternal heart as it is possible to be, because "in the
Beloved"; that is one side. "_In Rome_," in the capital of universal
paganism, material power, iron empire, immeasurable worldliness,
flagrant and indescribable sin; that is the other side. "I know where
thou dwellest," said the glorified Saviour to much tried disciples at
a later day; "even where Satan has his throne" (Rev. ii. 13). That
throne was conspicuously present in the Rome of Nero. Yet faith, hope,
and love could breathe there, when the Lord "called." They could much
more than breathe. This whole Epistle shows that a deep and developed
faith, a glorious hope, and the mighty love of a holy life were
matters of fact in men and women who every day of the year saw the
world as it went by in forum and basilica, in Suburra and Velabrum, in
slave-chambers and in the halls of pleasure where they had to serve or
to meet company. The atmosphere of heaven was carried down into that
dark pool by the believing souls who were bidden to live there. They
lived the heavenly life in Rome; as the creature of the air in our
stagnant waters weaves and fills its silver diving-bell, and works and
thrives in peace far down.
Read some vivid picture of Roman life, and think of this. See it as it
is shown by Tacitus, Suetonius, Juvenal, Martial; or as modern hands,
Becker's or Farrar's, have restored it from their materials. What a
deadly air for the regenerate soul--deadly not only in its vice, but
in its magnificence, and in its thought! But nothing is deadly to the
Lord Jesus Christ. The soul's regeneration means not only new ideas
and likings, but an eternal Presence, the indwelling of the Life
itself. That Life could live at Rome; and therefore "_God's beloved
ones in Rome_" could live there also, while it was His will they
should be there. The argument comes _a fortiori_ to ourselves.
=(His) called holy ones;= they were "_called_," in the sense we have
seen, and now, by that effectual Voice, drawing them into Christ, they
were constituted "_holy ones_," "_saints_." What does that word mean?
Whatever its etymology may be,[5] its usage gives us the thought of
dedication to God, connexion with Him, separation to His service, His
will. _The saints_ are those who belong to Him, His personal property,
for His ends. Thus it is used habitually in the Scriptures for _all
Christians, supposed to be true to their name_. Not an inner circle,
but all, bear the title. It is not only a glorified aristocracy, but
the believing commonalty; not the stars of the eternal sky but the
flowers sown by the Lord in the common field; even in such a tract of
that field as "Cæsar's household" was (Phil. iv. 22).
Habitually therefore the Apostle gives the term "_saints_" to whole
communities; as if baptism always gave, or sealed, saintship. In a
sense it did, and does. But then, this was, and is, on the assumption
of the concurrence of possession with title. The title left the
individual still bound to "examine himself, whether _he was_ in the
faith" (2 Cor. xiii. 5).
These happy residents at Rome are now greeted and blessed in their
Father's and Saviour's Name; =Grace to you and peace, from God our
Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.= "_Grace_"; what is it? Two ideas
lie there together; favour and gratuity. The grace of God is His
favouring will and work for us, and in us; gratuitous, utterly and to
the end unearned. Put otherwise, (and with the remembrance that His
great gifts are but modes of Himself, are in fact Himself in will and
action,) grace is God for us, grace is God in us, sovereign, willing,
kind. "_Peace_"; what is it? The holy repose within, and so around,
which comes of the man's acceptance with God and abode in God; an "all
is well" in the heart, and in the believer's contact with
circumstances, as he rests in his Father and his Redeemer. "Peace,
perfect peace"; under the sense of demerit, and amidst the crush of
duties, and on the crossing currents of human joy and sorrow, and in
the mystery of death; because of the God of Peace, who has made peace
for us through the Cross of His Son, and is peace in us, "by the
Spirit which He hath given us."
[4] Percrebuerat Oriente toto vetus et constans opinio, esse in fatis
ut eo tempore (cir. A.D. 70) profecti Judæa rerum potirentur.--Suetonius,
_Vesp._, c. 4. Tacitus (_Hist._, v. 13) says the same, and that the
hope was based on the _antiqui sacerdotum libri_.
[5] The _linguistic root_ seems to point directly not to separation
(as often said) but to worship, reverence.