_JEWISH UNBELIEF AND GENTILE FAITH: PROPHECY_
ROMANS x. 1-21
The problem of Israel is still upon the Apostle's soul. He has
explored here and there the conditions of the fact that his brethren,
as a mass, have rejected Jesus. He has delivered his heart of its
loving human groan over the fact. He has reminded himself, and then
his readers, that the fact however involves no failure of the purpose
and promise of God; for God from the first had indicated limitations
within the apparent scope of the Abrahamic Promise. He has looked in
the face, once for all, the mystery of the relation between God's
efficient will and the will of the creature, finding a refuge, under
the moral strain of that mystery, not away from it but as it were
behind it, in the recollection of the infinite trustworthiness, as
well as eternal rights, of man's MAKER. Then he has recurred to the
underlying main theme of the whole Epistle, the acceptance of the
sinner in God's own one way; and we have seen how, from Israel's own
point of view, Israel has stumbled and fallen just by his own fault.
Israel would not rest upon "the Stone of stumbling"; he would collide
with it. Divine sovereignty here or there--the heart of Jewish man, in
its responsible personality, and wholly of itself, rebelled against a
man-humbling salvation. And so all its religiousness, its earnestness,
its intensity, went for nothing in the quest for peace and purity.
They stumbled--a real striking of real wayward feet--at the Stumbling
Stone; which all the while lay ready to be their basis and repose.
He cannot leave the subject, with its sadness, its lessons, and its
hope. He must say more of his love and longing for Israel; and also
more about this aspect of Israel's fall--this collision of man's will
with the Lord's Way of Peace. And he will unfold the deep witness of
the prophecies to the nature of that Way, and to the reluctance of the
Jewish heart to accept it. Moses shall come in with the Law, and
Isaiah with the Scriptures of the Prophets; and we shall see how their
Inspirer, all along from the first, indicated what should surely
happen when a salvation altogether divine should be presented to
hearts filled with themselves.
[Sidenote: Ver. 1.] =Brethren,= he begins, =the deliberate desire
(εὐδοκία) of my heart,= whatever discouragements may oppose it,[167]
=and my petition unto God for them,[168]= is =salvationwards.= He is
inevitably moved to this by the pathetic sight of their earnestness,
misguided indeed, guiltily misguided, utterly inadequate to constitute
for them even a phantom of merit; yet, to the eyes that watch it, a
different thing from indifference or hypocrisy. He cannot see their
real struggles, and not long that they may reach the shore.
[Sidenote: Ver. 2.] =For I bear them witness,= the witness of one who
once was the type of the class, =that they have zeal of God,= an
honest jealousy for His Name, His Word, His Worship, =only not in the
line of spiritual knowledge (κατ' ἐπίγνωσιν).= They have not seen
all He is, all His Word means, all His worship implies. They are sure,
and rightly sure, of many things about Him; but they have not "seen
HIM." And so they have not "abhorred themselves" (Job xli. 5, 6). And
thus they are _not_, in their own conviction, shut up to a salvation
which must be altogether of Him; which is no contract with Him, but
eternal bounty from Him.
Solemn and heart-moving scene! There are now, and were then, those who
would have surveyed it, and come away with the comfortable reflection
that so much earnestness would surely somehow work itself right at
last; nay, that it was already sufficiently good in itself to secure
these honest zealots a place in some comprehensive heaven. If ever
such thoughts had excuse, surely it was here. The "_zeal_" was quite
sincere. It was ready to suffer, as well as to strike. The zealot was
not afraid of a world in arms. And he felt himself on fire not for
evil, but for God, for the God of Abraham, of Moses, of the Prophets,
of the Promise. Would not this do? Would not the lamentable rejection
of Jesus which attended it be condoned as a tremendous but mere
accident, while the "_zeal of God_" remained as the substance, the
essence, of the spiritual state of the zealot? Surely a very large
allowance would be made; to put it at the lowest terms.
Yet such was not the view of St Paul, himself once the most honest and
disinterested Jewish zealot in the world. He had seen THE LORD. And so
he had seen himself. The deadly mixture of motive which may underlie
what nevertheless we may have to call an _honest_ hatred of the Gospel
had been shewn to him in the white light of Christ. In that light he
had seen--what it alone can fully shew--the condemnableness of all
sin, and the hopelessness of self-salvation. From himself he reasons,
and rightly, to his brethren. He knows, with a solemn sympathy, how
much they are in earnest. But his sympathy conceals no false
liberalism; it is not cheaply generous of the claims of God. He does
not think that because they are in earnest they are saved. Their
earnestness drives his heart to a deeper prayer for their salvation.
[Sidenote: Ver. 3.] =For knowing not the righteousness of our (τοῦ)
God,= His way of being just, yet the Justifier, =and seeking to set up
their own righteousness,= to construct for themselves a claim which
should "stand in judgment," =they did not submit to the righteousness
of our (τοῦ) God,= when it appeared before them, embodied in "the
Lord our Righteousness." They _aspired_ to acceptance. God bade them
_submit_ to it. In their view, it was a matter of attainment; an
ascent to a difficult height, where the climber might exult in his
success. As He presented it, it was a matter of surrender, as when a
patient, given over, places himself helpless in a master-healer's
hands, for a recovery which is to be due to those hands alone, and to
be celebrated only to their praise.[169]
Alas for such "ignorance" in these earnest souls; for such a failure
in Israel to strike the true line of "knowledge"! For it was a guilty
failure. The Law had been indicating all the while that their
Dispensation was not its own end, but one vast complex means to shut
man up to a Redeemer who was at once to satisfy every type, and every
oracle, and to supply "the impossible of the Law" (viii. 3), by giving
Himself to be the believer's vicarious Merit. [Sidenote: Ver. 4.] =For
the Law's end,= its Goal, its Final Cause in the plan of redemption,
=is--Christ, unto righteousness,= to effect and secure this wonderful
acceptance, =for every one who believes.= Yes, He is no arbitrary
sequel to the Law; He stands organically related to it. And to this
the Law itself is witness, both by presenting an inexorable and
condemning standard as its only possible code of acceptance, and by
mysteriously pointing the soul away from that code, in its quest for
mercy, to something altogether different, at once accessible and
divine. [Sidenote: Ver. 5.] =For Moses writes down (γράφει)= thus
=the righteousness= got =from the Law, "The man who does[170] them,
shall live in it"[171]= (Levit. xviii. 5); it is a matter of personal
action and personal meriting alone. Thus the code, feasible and
beneficent indeed on the plane of national and social life, which is
its lower field of action, is necessarily fatal to fallen man when the
question lies between his conscience and the eternal Judge.
[Sidenote: Ver. 6.] =But the righteousness= got =from faith,= the
acceptance received by surrendering trust, =thus speaks= (Deut.
xxx. 12-14)--in Moses' words indeed, (and this is one main point in
the reasoning, that _he_ is witness,) yet as it were with a personal
voice of its own, deep and tender; ="Say not in thy heart, Who shall
ascend to the heaven?" that is, to bring down Christ,= by human
efforts, by a climbing merit; [Sidenote: Ver. 7.] ="or, Who shall
descend into the abyss? that is, to bring up Christ from the dead,="
as if His victorious Sacrifice needed your supplement in order to its
resurrection-triumph. [Sidenote: Ver. 8.] =But what does it say? "Near
thee is the utterance,= the explicit account of the Lord's willingness
to bless the soul which casts itself on Him,[172] =in thy mouth,= to
recite it, =and in thy heart,"= to welcome it. And =this= message =is
the utterance of faith,= the creed of acceptance by faith alone,
=which we proclaim;= [Sidenote: Ver. 9.] =that if you shall confess in
your mouth Jesus as Lord,[173]= as divine King and Master, =and shall
believe in your heart= that God =raised Him from the dead,= owning in
the soul the glory of the Resurrection, as revealing and sealing the
triumph of the Atonement, =you shall be saved.= [Sidenote: Ver. 10.]
=For with the heart faith is exercised, unto righteousness,= with
acceptance for its resultant; =while (δὲ) with the mouth confession
is made, unto salvation,= with present deliverance and final glory for
its resultant, the moral sequel of a life which owns its Lord as all
in all. [Sidenote: Ver. 11.] =For the Scripture says= (Isai. xxviii. 16),
="Everyone who believes on Him shall not be ashamed,"[174]= shall
never be disappointed; shall be "kept, through faith, unto the
salvation ready to be revealed in the last time" (1 Pet. i. 5).
We have traversed here a tract pregnant of questions and mystery. We
have to remember here also, as in previous places, that the Scripture
is "not a sun, but a lamp." Much, very much, which this passage
suggests as problem finds in its words no answer. This citation from
Deuteronomy, with its vision of ascents and descents, its thoughts of
the heaven and the abyss, what did it mean when aged Moses spoke it in
the plains of Moab? What did it mean _to him_? Did he see, did he
feel, Messiah in every clause? Had he conscious foreviews, then and
there, of what was to be done ages later beyond that stern ridge of
hills, westward of "the narrow stream"? Did he knowingly "testify
beforehand" that God was to be born Man at Bethlehem, and to die Man
at Jerusalem? We do not know; we cannot possibly know, until the
eternal day finds Moses and ourselves together in the City of God, and
we better understand the mysterious Word, at last, in that great
light. If our Master's utterances are to be taken as final, it is
quite certain that "Moses wrote of Him" (John v. 46). But it is not
certain that he always knew he was so writing when he so wrote; nor is
it certain _how far_ his consciousness went when it was most awake
that way. In the passage here cited by St Paul the great Prophet may
have been aware only of a reference of his words to the seen, the
temporal, the national, to the blessings of loyalty to Israel's
God-given polity, and of a return to it after times of revolt and
decline. But then, St Paul neither affirms this nor denies it. As if
on purpose, he almost drops the personality of Moses out of sight, and
personifies Justification as the speaker. His concern is less with the
Prophet than with his Inspirer, the ultimate Author behind the
immediate author. And his own prophet-insight is guided to see that in
the thought of _that_ Author, as He wielded Moses' mind and diction at
His will, CHRIST was the inmost purport of the words.
We may ask again what are the laws by which the Apostle modifies here
the Prophet's phrases. "_Who shall descend into the abyss?_" The Hebrew
reads, "_Who shall go over_ (or _on_) _the sea?_" The Septuagint
reads, "_Who shall go to the other side of the sea?_" Here too "we
know in part." Assuredly the change of terms was neither unconsciously
made, nor arbitrarily; and it was made for readers who could challenge
it, if so it seemed to them to be done. But we should need to know the
whole relation of the One inspiring Master to the minds of both His
Prophet and His Apostle to answer the question completely. However, we
can see that Prophet and Apostle both have in their thought here the
antithesis of depth to height; that the sea is, to Moses here, the
antithesis to the sky, not to the land; and that St Paul intensifies
the imagery in its true direction accordingly when he writes, "_into
the abyss_."
Again, he finds Justification by Faith in the Prophet's oracle about
the subjective "_nearness_" of "_the utterance_" of mercy. Once more
we own our ignorance of the conscious purport of the words, as Moses'
words. We shall quite decline, if we are reverently cautious, to say
that for certain Moses was not aware of such an inmost reference in
what he said; it is very much easier to assert than to know what the
limitations of the consciousness of the Prophets were. But here also
we rest in the fact that behind both Moses and Paul, in their free and
mighty personalities, stood their one Lord, building His Scripture
slowly into its manifold oneness through them both. He was in the
thought and word of Moses; and meantime already to Him the thought and
word of Paul was present, and was in His plan. And the earlier
utterance had this at least to do with the later, that it drew the
mind of the pondering and worshipping Israel to the idea of a contact
with God in His Promises which was not external and mechanical but
deep within the individual himself, and manifested in the individual's
free and living avowal of it.
As we quit the passage, let us mark and cherish its insistence upon
"_confession_," "_confession with the mouth that Jesus is Lord_." This
specially he connects with "_salvation_," with the believer's
preservation to eternal glory. "_Faith_" is "_unto righteousness_";
"_confession_" is "_unto salvation_." Why is this? Is faith after all
not enough for our union with the Lord, and for our safety in Him?
Must we bring in something else, to be a more or less meritorious
makeweight in the scale? If this is what he means, he is gainsaying
the whole argument of the Epistle on its main theme. No; it is
eternally true that we are justified, that we are accepted, that we
are incorporated, that we are kept, through faith only; that is, that
Christ is all for all things in our salvation, and our part and work
in the matter is to receive and hold Him in _an empty_ hand. But then
this empty hand, holding Him, receives life and power from Him. The
man is vivified by his Rescuer. He is rescued that he may live, and
that he may serve as living. He cannot truly serve without loyalty to
his Lord. He cannot be truly loyal while he hides his relation to Him.
In some articulate way he must "_confess Him_"; or he is not treading
the path where the Shepherd walks before the sheep.
The "_confession with the mouth_" here in view is, surely, nothing
less than the believer's open loyalty to Christ. It is no mere
recitation of even the sacred catholic Creed; which may be recited as
by an automaton. It is the witness of the whole man to Christ, as his
own discovered Life and Lord. And thus it means in effect the path of
faithfulness along which the Saviour actually leads to glory those who
are justified by faith.
That no slackened emphasis on faith is to be felt here is clear from
ver. 11. There, in the summary and close of the passage, nothing but
faith is named; "whosoever _believeth on Him_." It is as if he would
correct even the slightest disquieting surmise that our repose upon
the Lord has to be secured by something other than Himself, through
some means more complex than taking Him at His word. Here, as much as
anywhere in the Epistle, this is the message; "from faith to faith."
The "confession with the mouth" is not a different something added to
this faith; it is its issue, its manifestation, its embodiment. "I
believed; _therefore have I spoken_" (Psal. cxvi. 10).
This recurrence to his great theme gives the Apostle's thought a
direction once again towards the truth of the world-wide scope of the
Gospel of Acceptance. In the midst of this _philo-judean_ section of
the Epistle, on his way to say glorious things about abiding mercy and
coming blessing for the Jews, he must pause again to assert the equal
welcome of "the Greeks" to the Righteousness of God, and the
foreshadow of this welcome in the Prophets. [Sidenote: Ver. 12.] =For
there is no distinction between Jew and Greek= (wonderful antithesis
to the "no distinction" of iii. 23!). =For the same Lord is Lord of
all, wealthy to all who call upon Him,= who invoke Him, who appeal to
Him, in the name of His own mercies in His redeeming Son.
[Sidenote: Ver. 13.] =For= we have the prophecies with us here again.
Joel, in a passage (ii. 32) full of Messiah, the passage with which
the Spirit of Pentecost filled Peter's lips, speaks thus without a
limit; ="Every one, whoever shall call upon the Lord's Name, shall be
saved."= As he cites the words, and the thought rises upon him of this
immense welcome to the sinful world, he feels afresh all the need of
the heathen, and all the cruel narrowness of the Pharisaism which
would shut them out from such an amplitude of blessing.
[Sidenote: Ver. 14.] =How then can[175] they call on Him on whom they
never[176] believed? But how can they believe= on Him =whom they never
heard? But how can they hear= Him =apart from a proclaimer?=
[Sidenote: Ver. 15.] =But how can they proclaim unless they are sent,=
unless the Church which holds the sacred light sends her messengers
out into the darkness? And in this again the Prophets are with the
Christian Apostle, and against the loveless Judaist: =As it stands
written= (Isai. lii. 7), ="How fair the feet of the gospellers of
peace, of the gospellers of good!"[177]=
Here, as an incident in this profound discussion, is given for ever to
the Church of Christ one of the most distinct and stringent of her
missionary "marching-orders." Let us recollect this, and lay it on our
own souls, forgetting awhile, for we may, the problem of Israel and
the exclusiveness of ancient Pharisaism. What is there here for us?
What motive facts are here, ready to energize and direct the will of
the Christian, and of the Church, in the matter of the "gospelling" of
the world?
We take note first of what is written last, the moral beauty and glory
of the enterprise. "_How fair the feet!_" From the view-point of
heaven there is nothing on the earth more lovely than the bearing of
the name of Jesus Christ into the needing world, when the bearer is
one "who loves and knows." The work may have, and probably will have,
very little of the rainbow of romance about it. It will often lead the
worker into the most uncouth and forbidding circumstances. It will
often demand of him the patient expenditure of days and months upon
humiliating and circuitous preparations; as he learns a barbarous
unwritten tongue, or a tongue ancient and elaborate, in a stifling
climate; or finds that he must build his own hut, and dress his own
food, if he is to live at all among "the Gentiles." It may lay on him
the exquisite--and prosaic--trial of finding the tribes around him
entirely unaware of their need of his message; unconscious of sin, of
guilt, of holiness, of God. Nay, they may not only not care for his
message; they may suspect or deride his motives, and roundly tell him
that he is a political spy, or an adventurer come to make his private
gains, or a barbarian tired of his own Thule and irresistibly
attracted to the region of the sun. He will often be tempted to think
"the journey too great for him," and long to let his tired and heavy
feet rest for ever. But his Lord is saying of him, all the while, "How
fair the feet!" He is doing a work whose inmost conditions even now
are full of moral glory, and whose eternal issues, perhaps where he
thinks there has been most failure, shall be, by grace, worthy of "the
King in His beauty." It is the continuation of what the King Himself
"began to do" (Acts i. 1), when He was His own first Missionary to a
world which needed Him immeasurably, yet did not know Him when He
came.
Then, this paragraph asserts the necessity of the missionary's work
still more urgently than its beauty. True, it suggests many questions
(what great Scripture does not do so?) which we cannot answer yet at
all:--"Why has He left the Gentiles thus? Why is so much, for their
salvation, suspended (in our view) upon the too precarious and too
lingering diligence of the Church? What will the King say at last to
those who never could, by the Church's fault, even hear the blessed
Name, that they might believe in It, and call upon It?" HE knoweth
_the whole_ answer to such questions; not we. Yet here meanwhile
stands out this "thing revealed" (Deut. xxix. 29). In the Lord's
normal order, which is for certain the order of eternal spiritual
right and love, however little we can see all the conditions of the
case, man is to be saved through a personal "calling upon His Name."
And for that "calling" there is need of personal believing. And for
that believing there is need of personal hearing. And in order to that
hearing, God does not speak in articulate thunder from the sky, nor
send visible angels up and down the earth, but bids His Church, His
children, go and tell.
Nothing can be stronger and surer than the practical logic of this
passage. The need of the world, it says to us, is not only
amelioration, elevation, evolution. It is salvation. It is pardon,
acceptance, holiness, and heaven. It is God; it is Christ. And that
need is to be met not by subtle expansions of polity and society. No
"unconscious cerebration" of the human race will regenerate fallen
man. Nor will his awful wound be healed by any drawing on the shadowy
resources of a post-mortal hope. The work is to be done now, in the
Name of Jesus Christ, and _by_ His Name. And His Name, in order to be
known, has to be announced and explained. And that work is to be done
by those who already know it, or it will not be done at all. "There is
none other Name." There is no other method of evangelization.
Why is not that Name already at least externally known and reverenced
in every place of human dwelling? It would have been so, for a long
time now, if the Church of Christ had followed better the precept and
also the example of St Paul. Had the apostolic missions been sustained
more adequately throughout Christian history, and had the apostolic
Gospel been better maintained in the Church in all the energy of its
divine simplicity and fulness, the globe would have been covered--not
indeed in a hurry, yet ages ago now--with the knowledge of Jesus
Christ as Fact, as Truth, as Life. We are told even now by some of the
best informed advocates of missionary enterprise that if Protestant
Christendom (to speak of it alone) were really to respond to the
missionary call, and "send" its messengers out not by tens but by
thousands (no chimerical number), it would be soberly possible within
thirty years so to distribute the message that no given inhabited
spot should be, at furthest, one day's walk from a centre of
evangelization. This programme is not fanaticism, surely. It is a
proposal for possible action, too long deferred, in the line of St
Paul's precept and example. It is not meant to discredit any present
form of well-considered operation. And it does not for a moment ignore
the futility of all enterprise where the sovereign power of the
Eternal Spirit is not present. Nor does it forget the permanent call
to the Church to sustain amply the pastoral work at home, in "the
flock of God which is _among us_" (1 Pet. v. 2). But it sees and
emphasizes the fact that the Lord has laid it upon His Church to be
His messenger to the whole world, and to be in holy earnest about it,
and that the work, as to its human side, is quite feasible to a Church
awake. "Stir up, we beseech Thee, O Lord, the wills of Thy faithful
people," to both the glory and the necessity of this labour of labours
for Thee, "that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of it, may
of Thee be plenteously rewarded," in Thy divine use of their
obedience, for the salvation of the world.
But the great Missionary anticipates an objection from facts to his
burning plea for the rightness of an unrestrained evangelism. The
proclamation might be universal; but were not the results partial?
"Here a little, and there a little"; was not this the story of
missionary results even when a Paul, a Barnabas, a Peter, was the
missionary? Everywhere some faith; but everywhere more hostility, and
still more indifference! Could this, after all, be the main track of
the divine purposes--these often ineffectual excursions of the "fair
feet" of the messengers of an eternal peace? Ah, that objection must
have offered no mere logical difficulty to St Paul; it must have
pierced his heart. For while His Master was his first motive, his
fellow-men themselves were his second. He loved their souls; he longed
to see them blessed in Christ, saved in Him from "the death that
cannot die," filled in Him with "life indeed" (ἡ ὄντως ζωή, 1 Tim.
vi. 19). The man who shed tears over his converts as he warned them
(Acts xx. 31) had tears also, we may be sure, for those who would not
be converted; nay, we know he had: "I tell you, _even weeping_ (καὶ
κλαίων), that they are the enemies of the Cross of Christ" (Phil.
iii. 18). But here too he leans back on the solemn comfort, the answer
from within a veil,--that Prophecy had taken account of this
beforehand. Moses, and Isaiah, and David, had foretold on the one hand
a universal message of good, but on the other hand a sorrowfully
limited response from man, and notably from Israel. So he proceeds:
[Sidenote: Ver. 16.] =But not all obeyed[178] the good tidings,= when
"the word" reached them; for--we were prepared for such a mystery,
such a grief--=for Isaiah says= (liii. 1), in his great Oracle of the
Crucified, ="Lord, who believed our hearing" (ἀκοὴ),= the message
they heard of us, about One "on whom were laid the iniquities of us
all"? And as he dictates that word "_hearing_," it emphasizes to him
the fact that not mystic intuitions born out of the depths of man are
the means of revelation, but articulate messages given from the depths
of God, and spoken by men to men. And he throws the thought into a
brief sentence, such as would lie in a footnote in a modern book:
[Sidenote: Ver. 17.] =So we gather (ἄρα) that faith= comes =from
hearing; but the hearing= comes =through Christ's[179] utterance
(ῥῆμα);= the messenger has it because it was first given to him by
the Master who proclaimed HIMSELF the Way, Truth, Life, Light, Bread,
Shepherd, Ransom, Lord. All is revelation, not reverie; utterance, not
insight.
Then the swift thought turns, and returns again. The prophecies _have_
foretold an evangelical utterance to the whole human world. Not only
in explicit prediction do they do so, but in the "mystic glory" of
their more remote allusions. [Sidenote: Ver. 18.] =But I say, Did they
not hear?= Was this failure of belief due to a limitation of the
messenger's range in the plan of God? =Nay, rather, "Unto all the
earth went out their tone, and to the ends of man's world (ἡ οἰκουμένη)
their utterances"= (Psal. xix. 4). The words are the voice
of that Psalm where the glories of the visible heavens are collocated
with the glories of the Word of God. The Apostle hears more than
Nature in the Sunrise Hymn of David; he hears grace and the Gospel in
the deep harmony which carries the immortal melody along. The God who
meant the skies, with their "silent voices," to preach a Creator not
to one race but to all, meant also His Word to have no narrower scope,
preaching a Redeemer. Yes, and there were articulate predictions that
it should be so, as well as starry parables; predictions too that
shewed the prospect not only of a world evangelized, but of an Israel
put to shame by the faith of pagans. [Sidenote: Ver. 19.] =But I say=
(his rapid phrase meets with an anticipating answer the cavil yet
unspoken) =did not Israel know?= Had they no distinct forewarning of
what we see to-day? =First comes Moses, saying,[180]= in his prophetic
Song, sung at the foot of Pisgah (Deut. xxxii. 21), "=I=--the '_I_' is
emphatic; the Person is THE LORD, and the action shall be nothing less
than His--=I will take a no-nation to[181] move your jealousy; to move
your anger I will take a nation non-intelligent";= a race not only not
informed by a previous revelation, but not trained by thought upon it
to an insight into new truth. And what Moses indicates, Isaiah,
standing later in the history, indignantly explains: [Sidenote: Ver. 20.]
=But Isaiah dares anything (ἀποτολμᾷ), and says= (lxv. 1), ="I was
found by those who sought not Me; manifest I became to those who
consulted not Me."[182]= [Sidenote: Ver. 21.] =But as to Israel he
says,= in the words next in order in the place (lxv. 2), ="All the day
long I spread my hands open,= to beckon and to embrace, =towards a
people disobeying and contradicting."=
* * * * *
So the servant brings his sorrows for consolation to--may we write the
words in reverence?--the sorrows of his Master. He mourns over an
Athens, an Ephesus, and above all over a Jerusalem, that "will not
come to the Son of God, that they might have life" (John v. 40). And
his grief is not only inevitable; it is profoundly right, wise, holy.
But he need not bear it unrelieved. He grasps the Scripture which
tells him that his LORD has called those who would not come, and
opened the eternal arms for an embrace--to be met only with a
contradiction. He weeps, but it is as on the breast of Jesus as He
wept over the City. And in the double certainty that the Lord has felt
such grief, and that He is THE LORD, he yields, he rests, he is still.
"The King of the Ages" (1 Tim. i. 17) and "the Man of Sorrows" are
One. To know Him is to be at peace even under the griefs of the
mystery of sin.
[167] We thus attempt to convey the force of μέν.
[168] So read; not "_for Israel_."
[169] Cp. 1 Pet. i. 2; εἰς ὑπακοὴν ... Ἰησοῦ Χριτοῦυ; an
"_obedience_" which means the decisive _submission_ of the sinner to
the Saviour's _method of mercy_.
[170] Ὁ ποιήσας: the aorist sums up acts into a single idea of action.
[171] Ἐν αὐτῇ: "_in the righteousness_"; such seems to be the true
reading. To "_live in_" a righteousness is to live as it were
surrounded, guaranteed, by it.
[172] Observe that the context in Deut. xxx. is full of the thought
that rebels and law-breakers shall be welcome back when they come
penitent to their God, "without one plea," but taking Him at His word.
[173] Or, with an alternative reading, "_that Jesus is Lord_."
[174] See above, ix. 33.
[175] Throughout these questions we read the verbs in the conjunctive.
[176] We thus represent, with hesitation, the aorist tense.
[177] No doubt the immediate reference of Isai. lii. 7 is to good news
_for_ "Zion" rather than _from_ her to the world. But the context is
full not only of Messiah but (ver. 15) of "_many nations_."
[178] The aorist gathers up the history of evangelization into a point
of thought.
[179] Read Χρισυοῦ, probably.
[180] So we paraphrase πρῶτος (not πρῶτον) Μωϋσῆς λέγει.
[181] So we attempt to give the force of ἐπ' οὐκ ἔθνει, ἐπὶ ἔθνει.
[182] Ἐμὲ is emphatic in both clauses. Ἐπερωτᾶν is used of the
consultation of an oracle. Our translation thus seems better than the
more secondary explanation, "_who sought not to do My will_."