ROMANS, EPISTLE TO THE
EO.MANS, EPISTLE TO THE 29f
for mankind. Laid dovm by God as the condition of man's coiiiniunion witli Himself, it could not be set uside by any subsequent covenant. Man could only appear before God a.s a faithful doer of the Law. St. Paul in reply had addressed himself to two main points: (1) to prove that the Law could not, and tiiat faith alone could, make man right- eous in God's siylit ; (2) to show the true position of the Law in the history of God's dealinj^s with man. llighteousness, he argues, is a free gift from God to man, and as such was accorded to Abraham on the sole condition of faith in an unconditional promise. The inheritance of this promise passes not by any earthly law of succession, but to those who resemble Abraham in his faith. The Law, bein" of long subsequent dat« to the Promise, could not be meant to atl'ect its fulfilment. It was given for a temporary purpose, pending the fulfil- ment of the Promise, namely, to prepare men for the fulfilment by bringing out and making men feel their essential sinfulness and helpless inabilitj- to approach God with any claim to righteousness of their own. The righteousness which they could not earn is accorded as the fulfilment of the promise to Abraham's faith in Christ. Like the promise itself, it is unconditional, demanding nothing on our part but faith. To go back to circumcision is to abandon the attitude of faith, and to refuse to see that in Christ the Law has fulfilled its pur- pose, and has an end. ' Behold, I Paul say unto j'ou, that if ve accept circumcision, Christ shall profit you notliin"' (Gal 5^ cf. the whole of ch. 3). This is the central thought worked out in Romans, but fortified and enlarged by a wider outlook upon history, a iirofound api>licatioii to the principles of the moral life, and a coniprelieusive piiilosophy of the history of revelation. In this latter part of our Kpislle (chs. 9-11) the school of Uaur saw its principal purpose. This is a mistake. But it is essential to St. Paul's argument to show that the righteousness of faith, by excluding the Jewish ' boast,' does not involve a reversal of God's ' gifts and calling.'
iv. Ar.GUMENT OF THE EPI.STLE, AND ANALYSIS. — The theological part of the Kpistle extends from 1'° to the end of ch. 11. It treats successively the Theology of (1) Redemption (l"-5), (2) of the Christian life (6-8), and (3) of history (9-11). The Theologj' of Redeiiii)tion comprises two themes, summed up and contrasted in 5'-'''", viz. the ' wrath ot Cod' (l"'-3-") and the rji^'hteousness of God (3^'-5"). The wrath of God is the correlative of man's need of redeiMjjtion. ' first comes the state- ment that the world uji to that moment had been, morally speaking, a failure' (Mozley, Mirmles, Lect. vii., a remarkable passage on our Epistle). A moral creed w.os there, but not a corresponding life. Among Jews and Gentiles alike the facts are the same : ' knowledge without action.' The utmost the knowledge of right could do for man was to confound him with a sense of utter self- condeniiiatiun. And this self-condemnation was but the perception of an awfully real fact — the wrath of God revealed in all its fearful intensity, not caly upon the careless Gentile, but upon the
iirivileged Jew, whose privilege (none the less real lecause of his apostasy, 3'"") only heightened his personal guilt. But God's dealings with men, His Belf-revealed character, had not only led men to fear His holiness, but had also from the first led men to look upon Him as a Saviour. His long series of mercies to His people had led them to look forward to something in the future, some deliverance more final, more complete, more mar- vellous, than His mighty works of old. God was ^lLdged to redeem, and God was righteous (see jclow, § vi. (I)). The OT revelation had led men to hold to the righteousness of God as containing
r,:
the promise of salvation ; the "ospel declares it as an accomplished tact. And the universality of the wrath ot God before Christ only brings out that redemption, when it came, was the .sole out- come of the righteousness of God, and not in any degree the achievement of man. God's righteous- ness has as its correlative the/ac< of Redemption. The redeeming work of Christ, then, wherein God appears as ' righteous and making righteous ' (3^), humbles man even more completely than did the antecedent revelation of wrath — their boast is shut out, not (only) by a law of works, but (even more completely) by a law of faith. The privilege of the Israelite has no place in the sight ot God.
And this strange result, so far from revoking the word of God in the OT, is really its fullilment. This gospel of faith, this levelling of privilege, was preached before the Law, before any characteristic institute of Judaism was ordained. The whole story of Abraham — the boasted father of Jewish privilege — makes this clear (ch. 4). 'Well, then, my readers,' the apostle concludes, ' let us all make this gift of God our own' (see Beet on Ixoi/J-^y, 5'). Peace with God is ours, founded on the certainty of God's love for us— a certainty created in our hearts by the Spirit of God Himself, but no mere subjective certainty ; for actual recorded fact speaks plainly to us of that love — a love transcend- ing all probable limits of human devotion. We can trust God to complete what He has begun, and live in joyful hope, however the appearances of life are against us.