_NEED FOR THE GOSPEL: GOD'S ANGER AND MAN'S SIN_
ROMANS i. 18-23
We have as it were touched the heart of the Apostle as he weighs the
prospect of his Roman visit, and feels, almost in one sensation, the
tender and powerful attraction, the solemn duty, and the strange
solicitation to shrink from the deliverance of his message. Now his
lifted forehead, just lighted up by the radiant truth of Righteousness
by Faith, is shadowed suddenly. He is not ashamed of the Gospel; he
will speak it out, if need be, in the Cæsar's own presence, and in
that of his brilliant and cynical court. For there is a pressing, an
awful need that he should thus "despise the shame." The very
conditions in human life which occasion an instinctive tendency to be
reticent of the Gospel, are facts of dreadful urgency and peril. Man
does not like to be exposed to himself, and to be summoned to the
faith and surrender claimed by Christ. But man, whatever he likes or
dislikes, is a sinner, exposed to the eyes of the All-Pure, and lying
helpless, amidst all his dreams of pride, beneath the wrath of God.
Such is the logic of this stern sequel to the affirmation, "_I am not
ashamed_."
[Sidenote: Ver. 18.] =For God's wrath is revealed, from heaven, upon
all godlessness and unrighteousness of men who in unrighteousness hold
down the truth.= "_God's wrath is revealed_"; Revealed in "the holy
Scriptures," in every history, by every Prophet, by every Psalmist;
this perhaps is the main bearing of his thought. But revealed also
antecedently and concurrently in that mysterious, inalienable
conscience, which is more truly part of man than his five senses.
Conscience _sees_ that there is an eternal difference between right
and wrong, and _feels_, in the dark, the relation of that difference
to a law, a Lawgiver, and a doom. Conscience is aware of a fiery light
beyond the veil. Revelation meets its wistful gaze, lifts the veil,
and affirms the fact of the wrath of God, and of His judgment coming.
Let us not shun that "revelation." It is not the Gospel. The Gospel,
as we have seen, is in itself one pure warm light of life and love.
But then it can never be fully understood until, sooner or later, we
have seen something, and believed something, of the truth of the anger
of the Holy One. From our idea of that anger let us utterly banish
every thought of impatience, of haste, of what is arbitrary, of what
is in the faintest degree unjust, inequitable. It is the anger of Him
who never for a moment can be untrue to Himself; and He is Love, and
is Light. But He is also, so also says His Word, consuming Fire (Heb.
x. 31, xii. 29); and it is "a fearful thing to fall into His hands."
Nowhere and never is God not Love, as the Maker and Preserver of His
creatures. But nowhere also and never is He not Fire, as the judicial
Adversary of evil, the Antagonist of the will that chooses sin. Is
there "nothing in God to fear"? "Yea," says His Son (Luke xii. 5), "I
say unto you, fear Him."
At the present time there is a deep and almost ubiquitous tendency to
ignore the revelation of the wrath of God. No doubt there have been
times, and quarters, in the story of Christianity, when that
revelation was thrown into disproportionate prominence, and men shrank
from Christ (so Luther tells us he did in his youth) as from One who
was nothing if not the inexorable Judge. They saw Him habitually as He
is seen in the vast Fresco of the Sistine Chapel, a sort of Jupiter
Tonans, casting His foes for ever from His presence; a Being _from_
whom, not _to_ whom, the guilty soul must fly. But the reaction from
such thoughts, at present upon us, has swung to an extreme indeed,
until the tendency of the pulpit, and of the exposition, is to say
practically that there is nothing in God to be afraid of; that the
words hope and love are enough to neutralize the most awful murmurs of
conscience, and to cancel the plainest warnings of the loving Lord
Himself. Yet that Lord, as we ponder His words in all the four
Gospels, so far from speaking such "peace" as this, seems to reserve
it to Himself, rather than to His messengers, to utter the most
formidable warnings. And the earliest literature which follows the New
Testament shows that few of His sayings had sunk deeper into His
disciples' souls than those which told them of the two Ways and of the
two Ends.
Let us go to Him, the all-benignant Friend and Teacher, to learn the
true attitude of thought towards Him as "the Judge, strong and
patient," "but who will in no wise clear the guilty" by unsaying His
precepts and putting by His threats. He assuredly will teach us, in
this matter, no lessons of hard and narrow denunciation, nor encourage
us to sit in judgment on the souls and minds of our brethren. But He
will teach us to take deep and awful views for ourselves of both the
pollution and also _the guilt_ of sin. He will constrain us to carry
those views all through our personal theology, and our personal
anthropology too. He will make it both a duty and a possibility for
us, in right measure, in right manner, tenderly, humbly, governed by
His Word, to let others know what our convictions are about the Ways
and the Ends. And thus, as well as otherwise, He will make His Gospel
to be to us no mere luxury or ornament of thought and life, as it were
a decorous gilding upon essential worldliness and the ways of self. He
will unfold it as the soul's refuge and its home. From Himself as
Judge He will draw us in blessed flight to Himself as Propitiation and
Peace. "_From Thy wrath, and from everlasting condemnation, Good
Lord_--Thyself--_deliver us_."
This wrath, holy, passionless, yet awfully personal, "_is revealed,
from heaven_." That is to say it is revealed as coming from heaven,
when the righteous Judge "shall be revealed from heaven, taking
vengeance" (2 Thess. i. 7, 8). In that pure upper world He sits whose
wrath it is. From that stainless sky of His presence its white
lightnings will fall, "_upon all godlessness and unrighteousness of
men_," upon every kind of violation of conscience, whether done
against God or man; upon "_godlessness_," which blasphemes, denies, or
ignores the Creator; upon "_unrighteousness_," which wrests the claims
whether of Creator or of creature. Awful opposites to the "two great
Commandments of the Law"! The Law must be utterly vindicated upon them
at last. Conscience must be eternally verified at last, against all
the wretched suppressions of it that man has ever tried.
For the men in question "_hold down the truth in unrighteousness_."
The rendering "_hold down_" is certified by both etymology and
context; the only possible other rendering, "_hold fast_," is
negatived by the connexion. The thought given us is that man, fallen
from the harmony with God in which Manhood was made, but still keeping
manhood, and therefore conscience, is never naturally ignorant of the
difference between right and wrong, never naturally, innocently,
unaware that he is accountable. On the other hand he is never fully
willing, of himself, to do all he knows of right, all he knows he
ought, all the demand of the righteous law above him. "_In
unrighteousness_," in a life which at best is not wholly and cordially
with the will of God, "_he holds down the truth_," silences the
haunting fact that there is a claim he will not meet, a will he ought
to love, but to which he prefers his own. The majesty of eternal
right, always intimating the majesty of an eternal Righteous One, he
thrusts below his consciousness, or into a corner of it, and keeps it
there, that he may follow his own way. More or less, it wrestles with
him for its proper place. And its even half-understood efforts may,
and often do, exercise a deterrent force upon the energies of his
self-will. But they do not dislodge it; he would rather have his way.
With a force sometimes deliberate, sometimes impulsive, sometimes
habitual, "_he holds down_" the unwelcome monitor.
Deep is the moral responsibility incurred by such repression. For man
has always, by the very state of the case, within him and around him,
evidence for a personal righteous Power "with Whom he has to do."
[Sidenote: Ver. 19.] =Because that which is known of God is manifest
in them; for God manifested= (or rather, perhaps, in our idiom, =has
manifested=) =it to them.= "_That which is known_"; that is,
practically, "_that which is knowable, that which may be known_."
There is that about the Eternal which indeed neither is nor can be
known, with the knowledge of mental comprehension. "Who can find out
the Almighty unto perfection?" All thoughtful Christians are in this
respect agnostics that they gaze on the bright Ocean of Deity, and
know that they do not know it in its fathomless but radiant depths,
nor can explore its expanse which has no shore. They rest before
absolute mystery with a repose as simple (if possible more simple) as
that with which they contemplate the most familiar and intelligible
event. But this is not not to know Him. It leaves man quite as free to
be sure that He is, to be as certain that He is Personal, and is Holy,
as man is certain of his own consciousness, and conscience.
That there is Personality behind phenomena, and that this great
Personality is righteous, St Paul here affirms to be "_manifest_,"
disclosed, visible, "_in men_." It is a fact present, however
partially apprehended, in human consciousness. And more, this
consciousness is itself part of the fact; indeed it is that part
without which all others would be as nothing. To man without
conscience--really, naturally, innocently without conscience--and
without ideas of causation, the whole majesty of the Universe might be
unfolded with a fulness beyond all our present experience; but it
would say absolutely nothing of either Personality or Judgment. It is
by the world within that we are able in the least degree to apprehend
the world without. But having, naturally and inalienably, the world of
personality and of conscience within us, we are beings to whom God can
manifest, and has manifested, the knowable about Himself, in His
universe.
[Sidenote: Ver. 20.] =For His things unseen, ever since the creation
of the universe, are full in (man's) view, presented to (man's) mind
by His things made--His everlasting power and Godlikeness together--so
as to leave them inexcusable.= Since the ordered world was, and since
man was, as its observer and also as its integral part, there has been
present to man's spirit--supposed true to its own creation--adequate
testimony around him, taken along with that within him, to evince the
reality of a supreme and persistent Will, intending order, and thus
intimating Its own correspondence to conscience, and expressing Itself
in "things made" of such manifold glory and wonder as to intimate the
Maker's majesty as well as righteousness. What is That, what is He, to
whom the splendours of the day and the night, the wonders of the
forest and the sea, bear witness? He is not only righteous Judge but
King eternal. He is not only charged with my guidance; He has rights
illimitable over me. I am wrong altogether if I am not in submissive
harmony with Him; if I do not surrender, and adore.
Thus it has been, according to St Paul, "_ever since the creation of
the universe_" (and of man in it). And such everywhere is the Theism
of Scripture. It maintains, or rather it states as certainty, that
man's knowledge of God began with his being as man. To see the Maker
in His works is not, according to the Holy Scriptures, only the slow
and difficult issue of a long evolution which led through far lower
forms of thought, the fetish, the nature-power, the tribal god, the
national god, to the idea of a Supreme. Scripture presents man as made
in the image of the Supreme, and capable from the first of a true
however faint apprehension of Him. It assures us that man's lower and
distorted views of nature and of personal power behind it are
degenerations, perversions, issues of a mysterious primeval
dislocation of man from his harmony with God. The believer in the holy
Scriptures, in the sense in which our Lord and the Apostles believed
in them, will receive this view of the primeval history of Theism as a
true report of God's account of it. Remembering that it concerns an
otherwise unknown moment of human spiritual history, he will not be
disturbed by alleged evidence against it from lower down the stream.
Meanwhile he will note the fact that among the foremost students of
Nature in our time there are those who affirm the rightness of such an
attitude. It is not lightly that the Duke of Argyll writes words like
these:--
"I doubt (to say the truth, I disbelieve) that we shall ever come to
know by science anything more than we now know about the origin of
man. I believe we shall always have to rest on that magnificent and
sublime outline which has been given us by the great Prophet of the
Jews."[14]
So man, being what he is and seeing what he sees, is "without excuse":
[Sidenote: Ver. 21.] =Because, knowing God, they did not glorify Him
as God, nor thank Him, but proved futile in their ways of thinking,
and their unintelligent heart was darkened.= [Sidenote: Ver. 22.]
=Asserting themselves for wise they turned fools, and transmuted the
glory of the immortal God in a semblance of the likeness of mortal
man, and of things winged, quadruped, and reptile.= Man, placed by God
in His universe, and himself made in God's image, naturally and
inevitably "_knew God_." Not necessarily in that inner sense of
spiritual harmony and union which is (John xvii. 3) the life eternal;
but in the sense of a perception of His being and His character
adequate, at its faintest, to make a moral claim. But somehow--a
somehow which has to do with a revolt of man's will from God to
self--that claim was, and is, disliked. Out of that dislike has
sprung, in man's spiritual history, a reserve towards God, a tendency
to question His purpose, His character, His existence; or otherwise,
to degrade the conception of Personality behind phenomena into forms
from which the multifold monster of idolatry has sprung, as if
phenomena were due to personalities no better and no greater than
could be imaged by man or by beast, things of limit and of passion; at
their greatest terrible, but not holy; not ultimate; not One.
Man has spent on these unworthy "ways of thinking" a great deal of
weak and dull reasoning and imbecile imagination, but also some of the
rarest and most splendid of the riches of his mind, made in the image
of God. But all this thinking, because conditioned by a wrong attitude
of his being as a whole, has had "_futile_" issues, and has been in
the truest sense "_unintelligent_," failing to see inferences aright
and as a whole. It has been a struggle "_in the dark_"; yea, a descent
from the light into moral and mental "_folly_."
Was it not so, is not so still? If man is indeed made in the image of
the living Creator, a moral personality, and placed in the midst of
"the myriad world, His shadow," then whatever process of thought leads
man away from Him has somewhere in it a fallacy unspeakable, and
inexcusable. It must mean that something in him which should be awake
is dormant; or, yet worse, that something in him which should be in
faultless tune, as the Creator tempered it, is all unstrung; something
that should be nobly free to love and to adore is being repressed,
"held down." Then only does man fully think aright when he _is_
aright. Then only is he aright when he, made by and for the Eternal
Holy One, rests willingly in Him, and lives for Him. "The fear of the
Lord is," in the strictest fact, "the beginning of wisdom"; for it is
that attitude of man without which the creature cannot "answer the
idea" of the Creator, and therefore cannot truly follow out the law of
its own being.
"Let him that glorieth, glory in this, that he understandeth and
knoweth Him" (Jer. ix. 24) who necessarily and eternally transcends
our cognition and comprehension, yet can be known, can be touched,
clasped, adored, as personal, eternal, almighty, holy Love.
[14] _Geology and the Deluge_, p. 46 (Glasgow, 1885).