Then he turns again with new regrets and yearnings to the thought of that wonderful Gospel which was meant for Israel and for the world, but which Israel rejected, and now would fain check on its way to the world. Lastly, he recalls the future, still full of eternal promises for the chosen race, and through them full of blessing for the world; till he rises at length from perplexity and anguish, and the wreck of once eager expectations, into that great Doxology in which he blesses the Eternal Sovereign for the very mystery of His ways, and adores Him because He is His own eternal End.
[Sidenote: Ver. 1.] =Truth I speak in Christ,= speaking as the member of the All-Truthful; =I do not lie, my conscience, in the Holy Ghost,= informed and governed by Him, =bearing me concurrent witness=--the soul within affirming to itself the word spoken without to others--[Sidenote: Ver. 2.] =that I have great grief, and my heart has incessant pain,= yes, the heart in which (v. 5) the Spirit has "poured out" God's love and joy; there is room for both experiences in its human depths. [Sidenote: Ver. 3.] =For I was wishing, I myself, to be anathema from Christ,= to be devoted to eternal separation from Him; awful dream of uttermost sacrifice, made impossible only because it would mean self-robbery from the Lord who had bought him; a spiritual suicide by sin--=for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen flesh-wise.= [Sidenote: Ver. 4.] =For they are (οἵτινές εἰσιν) Israelites,= bearers of the glorious theocratic name, sons of the "Prince with God" (Gen. xxxii. 28); =theirs is the adoption,= the call to be Jehovah's own filial race, "His son, His firstborn" (Exod. iv. 22) of the peoples; =and the glory,= the Shechinah of the Eternal Presence, sacramentally seen in Tabernacle and Temple, spiritually spread over the race; =and the Covenants,= with Abraham, and Isaac, and Levi, and Moses, and Aaron, and Phinehas, and David; =and the Legislation,= the holy Moral Code, =and the Ritual,= with its divinely ordered symbolism, that vast Parable of Christ, =and the Promises,= of "the pleasant land," and the perpetual favour, and the coming Lord; [Sidenote: Ver. 5.] =theirs are the Fathers,= patriarchs, and priests, and kings; =and out of them, as to what is flesh-wise, is the Christ,--He who is over all things, God, blessed to all eternity. Amen.[152]=
It is indeed a splendid roll of honours, recited over this race "separate among the nations," a race which to-day as much as ever remains the enigma of history, to be solved only by Revelation. "_The Jews, your Majesty_," was the reply of Frederick the Great's old believing courtier, when asked with a smile for the credentials of the Bible; the short answer silenced the Encyclopædist King. It is indeed a riddle, made of indissoluble facts, this people everywhere dispersed, yet everywhere individual; scribes of a Book which has profoundly influenced mankind, and which is recognized by the most various races as an august and lawful claimant to be divine, yet themselves, in so many aspects, provincial to the heart; historians of their own glories, but at least equally of their own unworthiness and disgrace; transmitters of predictions which may be slighted, but can never, as a whole, be explained away, yet obstinate deniers of the majestic fulfilment in the Lord of Christendom; human in every fault and imperfection, yet so concerned in bringing to man the message of the Divine that Jesus Himself said of them (John iv. 22), "Salvation comes from the Jews." On this wonderful race this its most illustrious member (after his Lord) here fixes his eyes, full of tears. He sees their glories pass before him--and then realizes the spiritual squalor and misery of their rejection of the Christ of God. He groans, and in real agony asks how it can be. One thing only cannot be; the promises have not failed; there has been no failure in the Promiser. What may seem such is rather man's misreading of the promise.