And it is to do egregious violence to his general teaching to suggest
that he entertained the idea of persons created with an opposite
predestination--to eternal misery. St. Paul is dealing here only with
what God has already shown of His purpose in the actual vocation of
some. Ultimately {320} he assures us all men share the divine purpose
for good[22]. But, on the other hand, he never suggests that they may
not resist it, or allows us to say that so far as concerns themselves
they may not defeat it.
[1] iii. 17-19; v. 29.
[2] xxiv. 5-7.
[3] i.e. Messiah, son of David, son of Pherez (Ruth iv. 18).
[4] _Bereshith Rabbah_, xii. 5.
[5] Isa. lxv. 17, lxvi. 22; cf. 2 Pet. iii. 13; Rev. xxi. 1; Acts iii.
21.
[6] _Book of Enoch_, xlv. 4, 5.
[7] St. Paul's word 'creation' (verses 30-22) is used in St. Paul's
sense in Wisd. xvi. 34, xix. 6.
[8] 2 Pet. i. 16-19.
[9] Cf. Latham, _Service of Angels_ (Cambridge, 1894).
[10] Eph. ii. 5.
[11] Rom. viii. 24.
[12] 1 Cor. xv. 2; 2 Cor. ii. 15. (The present tense in both cases.)
[13] Rom. v. 9, 10; xiii. 11: cf. 1 Tim. iv. 16; 2 Tim. iv. 18.
[14] Andrew Murray's _With Christ in the School of Prayer_ (Nisbet
1891), p. 71.
[15] 2 Cor. xii. 8: cf. Phil. i. 22, 'What I shall choose I wot not.'
[16] Verse 34.
[17] Not 'the saints' in the Greek.
[18] 1 Tim. ii. 1.
[19] Rom. xi. 32; 1 Tim. ii. 4.
[20] Amos iii. 2: cf. Ps. i. 6; Hos. xiii. 5; Matt. vii. 23.
[21] Cf. Hort on 1 Pet. pp. 19, 80.
[22] See especially Rom. xi. 29-33.
{321}
DIVISION III. Sec. 10. CHAPTER VIII. 31-39.
_Christian assurance._
St. Paul has brought his great argument to an end. And before he
passes to its manifold application in the later parts of his epistle,
he applies it in words which spring glowing from a heart on fire with
the gospel he loves, to reassure disheartened and nervous Christians.
It was a natural feature of the apostolic age that the disciples should
lose their first courage and become afraid, when the hard experience
they were to expect became plain to them. The Epistle to the Hebrews
is written full in face of this failure of courage among Jewish
Christians. For the Gentiles whom St. Paul has more particularly in
view there were manifold causes of alarm--fears derived from their own
weakness, from spiritual uncertainty, and from their precarious
position. It was not only that outward calamity--famine and
pestilence--might {322} come on them like other people. They plainly
felt--St. Paul plainly felt, as he thought of the bitter hostility of
the Jews actually ready to break out upon the Church, and of the
jealousy of the Empire, not yet hostile but easily capable of becoming
so--that times of persecution were at hand: that the Christians were
truly in the world as 'lambs in the midst of wolves.' Therefore he
would have them realize the whole secret of that invincible strength,
that power to endure and triumph, which ought to be theirs.
What is to be our practical conclusion, he asks, from all this
theology, from all this consideration of revealed facts and truths?
The sum of it all is that God is not our taskmaster and critical judge.
He is altogether on our side. And if this be so, whose hostility can
by comparison come into consideration at all? God showed His mind
toward us by the greatest possible act of self-sacrifice, the giving up
of His own divine Son to die for us. And, plainly, if of His free love
He gave us His greatest gift, He will not fail to accompany it with
everything that love can suggest. Or, to put the matter in another
way, if God, in full knowledge of what we were thought proper to take
us for His chosen {323} people and to put us in a position of
acceptance with Him, who can with any hope of success bring a charge
against us or pass condemnation on us? For we know the mind of the
only judge. Or, once again, what can be so reassuring as to consider
the person of our advocate or mediator? It is Christ Jesus, God's own
Son in our nature, who died a sacrifice for our sins, but so far from
being conquered by death, was raised from among the dead, and exalted
to the right hand of God, and there is occupied in presenting Himself
before the Father in intercession for us--covering all our approach to
God with His acceptableness. Out of the protecting power of this love
of Christ, then, who shall tear us? It is quite true that troubles may
beat upon us--outward affliction, or inward trouble, or persecution, or
famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword. We may find that only the
words of the Psalmist[1] suit our case, 'For thy sake are we being put
to death the whole day: the estimate formed of us is that of sheep
meant for slaughter.' But in all these contingencies the love of
Christ can supply us with a more than victorious power. For this is
St. Paul's conviction, that no conceivable power {324} of life or of
death, or of the angelic hierarchy, nothing in present circumstances or
future destiny, no possible force, neither the highest height of
heavens or the deepest depth of hell, no possible creation of God other
than what we now know to exist, shall be able to tear us from that
which holds us in a grasp stronger than the strongest--the love of God
which is in Christ Jesus, who is our Lord.
What then shall we say to these things? If God _is_ for us, who _is_
against us? He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for
us all, how shall he not also with him freely give us all things? Who
shall lay anything to the charge of God's elect? It is God that
justifieth; who is he that shall condemn? It is Christ Jesus that
died, yea rather, that was raised from the dead, who is at the right
hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us. Who shall separate
us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or anguish, or
persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? Even as it
is written,
For thy sake we are killed all the day long;
We were accounted as sheep for the slaughter.
Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that
loved us. For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor
angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor
powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to
separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
There is not much that needs comment in these verses. We may notice
the contrast {325} between the tone of the Psalmist quoted by St.
Paul--weighed down, like many a servant of the older covenant, with the
unintelligible experience of the persecution of God's faithful
people--and the exultant faith of St. Paul which finds no difficulty in
the experience at all. Again, we do well to observe that among the
forces enumerated by St. Paul which cannot tear us out of the hand of
God, he does not include our own wills, and we could not even conceive
him so including them. Once again, we take note how 'the love of
Christ' (ver. 35) is resolved (ver. 39) into the 'love of God in Christ
Jesus.' Christ's love is God's love, as Christ is truly proper and
essential to the being of God, His own very Son.
These words, I say, need very little comment, but they thrill our souls
as hardly any other words of St. Paul. They are the real summary of
this epistle, and show us how the glorious apostle of Christian liberty
would have us view our life. We are not to build the edifice of a life
which at the top is to be within sight of God. We are to start from
God who from eternity and all along has been beforehand with us: in His
external personal love predestinating, creating, calling, pardoning,
holding, and keeping us {326} in continual growth for eternal glory.
And the one power of religion is therefore faith, that faculty by which
we look continually out of ourselves, and starting from God, committing
ourselves wholly to God, raise the fabric of life, in the community of
a true human brotherhood, upon the secure basis of the love of Him who
created us, and will satisfy utterly the being which He has given us.
This is the summary lesson of the great epistle.
[1] Ps. xliv. 22.
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