όο8
τῷ Θεῷ.
Ill.
20. διότι ἐξ ἔργων νόµου οὐ δικαιωθήσεται πᾶσα capt
ἐνώπιον αὐτοῦ: διὰ γὰρ νόµου ἐπίγνωσις ἁμαρτίας.
tions from Psalms (Ixxxii. 6, xxxv. 19). At first sight there seems a disparity between the two parts of the verse. How does the fact that those who are under the law are impeached and con- demned by such utterances of the law as those just quoted subserve the Divine intention to stop every mouth and make all the world answerable to God? We must suppose that all other men—that is, the Gentiles, who are not under the law—are convicted already; and that what is needed to prepare the way for the universal Gospel of grace is that those who have been under law should admit concerning themselves, what they are prompt enough to assert of all others (‘‘ sinners of the Gentiles”: Gal. ii. 15), that they have not a word to say, and are liable to God’s judgment. ὑπόδικος is a classical word, found here only in the N.T. Sanday and Headlam remark its ‘* forensic ’’ character.
Ver. 20. διότι means “‘ because,” not “therefore,” as in A.V. The rendering ‘therefore’ is perhaps due to the diffi- culty which the translators had in putting an intelligible meaning into ‘‘ because”’. The sense seems to be: Every mouth must be stopped, and all the world shown to be liable to God’s judgment, because by works of law no flesh shall be justified before Him. This last pro- position—that no flesh shall be justified in this way—is virtually an axiom with the Apostle: it is a first principle in all his spiritual thinking, and hence every- thing must be true which can be deduced from it, and everything must take place which is required to support it. Because this is the fundamental certainty of the case, every mouth must be stopped, and the strong words quoted from the law stand where they do to secure this end. The explanation of this axiom is to be found in its principal terms—flesh and law. Flesh primarily denotes human nature in its frailty: to attain to the righteousness of God is a task which no flesh has strength to accomplish. But flesh in Paul has a moral rather than a natural meaning; it is not its weakness in this case, but its strength, which puts justification out of the question; to justify is the very thing which the law cannot do, and it cannot do it because it is weak owing to the flesh (cf. viii. 3). But the explanation of the axiom lies not only in “flesh,” but in “Ίαν”. “ By the law
comes the full knowledge of sin.”
(ἐπίγνωσις, a favourite Pauline word: ° fifteen times used in his epistles.) This
is its proper, and indeed its exclusive
function. There is no law given with
power to give life, and therefore there
are no works of law by which men can
be justified. The law has served its
purpose when it has made men feel to
the full how sinful they are; it brings. them down to this point, but it is not for
it to liftthem up. The best exposition
of the passage is given by the Apostle
himself in Gal. ii. 15 f., where the same
quotation is made from Ps. cxliii. 2, and
proof given again that it applies to Jew
and Gentile alike. In ἐξ ἔργων vépov,
vopos, of course, is primarily the Mosaic
law. As Lipsius remarks, no distinction
is drawn by the Apostle between the
ritual and the moral elements of it,. though the former are in the foreground
in the epistle to the Galatians, and the
latter in that to the Romans. But the truth would hold of every legal dispensa-
tion, and it is perhaps to express this. generality, rather than because νόμος is
a technical term, that the article is. omitted. Under no system of statutes,