To insist upon this immense privilege is altogether to St Paul's purpose here. For it is a privilege which evidently carries an awful responsibility with it. What would be the guilt of the soul, and of the Community, to whom those Oracles were--not given as property, but _entrusted_--and who did not do the things they said?
Again the message passes on to the Israel of the Christian Church. "What advantage hath the Christian? What profit is there of Baptism?" "Much, in every way; first, because to the Church is entrusted the light of revelation." To be born in it, to be baptized in it, is to be born into the sunshine of revelation, and laid on the heart and care of the Community which witnesses to the genuineness of its Oracles and sees to their preservation and their spread. Great is the talent. Great is the accountability.
But the Rabbinist goes on. [Sidenote: Ver. 3.] =For if some did not believe,= what of that? =Will their faithlessness cancel God's good faith?= These Oracles of God promise interminable glories to Israel, to Israel as a community, a body. Shall not that promise hold good for the whole mass, though some (bold euphemism for the faithless multitudes!) have rejected the Promiser? Will not the unbelieving Jew, after all, find his way to life eternal for his company's sake, for his part and lot in the covenant community? "_Will God's faith_," His good faith, His plighted word, be reduced to empty sounds by the bad Israelite's sin? [Sidenote: Ver. 4.] =Away with the thought,[27]= the Apostle answers. Any thing is more possible than that God should lie. =Nay (δὲ), let God prove true, and every man prove liar; as it stands written= (Psal. li. 4), ="That Thou mightest be justified in Thy words, and mightest overcome when Thou impleadest."[28]= He quotes the Psalmist in that deep utterance of self-accusation, where he takes part against himself, and finds himself guilty "without one plea," and, in the loyalty of the regenerate and now awakened soul, is jealous to vindicate the justice of his _condemning_ God. The whole Scripture contains no more impassioned, yet no more profound and deliberate, utterance of the eternal truth that God is always in the right or He would be no God at all; that it is better, and more reasonable, to doubt anything than to doubt His righteousness, whatever cloud surrounds it, and whatever lightning bursts the cloud.
But again the caviller, intent not on God's glory but on his own position, takes up the word. [Sidenote: Ver. 5.] =But if our unrighteousness exhibits, sets off, God's righteousness,= if our sin gives occasion to grace to abound, if our guilt lets the generosity of God's Way of Acceptance stand out the more wonderful by contrast--=what shall we say? Would God be unjust, bringing His (τὴν) wrath to bear= on us, when our pardon would illustrate His free grace? Would He be unjust? Would He _not_ be unjust?
We struggle, in our paraphrase, to bring out the bearing, as it seems to us, of a passage of almost equal grammatical difficulty and argumentative subtlety. The Apostle seems to be "in a strait" between the wish to represent the caviller's thought, and the dread of one really irreverent word. He throws the man's last question into a form which, grammatically, expects a "_no_" when the drift of the thought would lead us up to a shocking "_yes_."[29] And then at once he passes to his answer. =I speak as man,= man-wise; as if this question of balanced rights and wrongs were one between man and man, not between man and eternal God. Such talk, even for argument's sake, is impossible for the regenerate soul except under urgent protest. [Sidenote: Ver. 6.] =Away with the thought= that He would _not_ be righteous, in His punishment of any given sin. =Since how shall God judge the world?= How, on such conditions, shall we repose on the ultimate fact that He is the universal JUDGE? If He _could_ not, righteously, punish a deliberate sin because pardon, under certain conditions, illustrates His glory, then He could not punish any sin at all. But He _is_ the Judge; He _does_ bring wrath to bear!