love of man surpassed by the love of God. He commends, or rather makes good, presents in its true and unmistak- able character (for σνυνίστησιν, cf. iii. 5, 2 Cor. vi. 4, vii. 11 ; Gal. ii. 18), His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, etc. éavrov is an emphatic His: His, not as opposed to Christ’s (as some have strangely taken it), but as opposed to anything that we can point to as love among men: His spontaneous and characteristic love. ἔτι ἁμαρτωλῶν ὄντων ἡμῶν: they are no longer such, but justified, and it is on this the next step in the argument depends.
Ver. 9 {. πολλῷ οὖν μᾶλλον: The ar- gument is from the greater to the less. The supreme difficulty to be overcome in the relations of man and God is the initial one: How can God demonstrate His love to the sinner, and bestow on him a Divine righteousness? In com- parison with this, everything else is easy. Now the Apostle has already shown (iii. 21-30) how the Gospel meets this diffi- culty: we obtain the righteousness τε- quired by believing in Jesus, whom God has set forth as a propitiation through faith in His blood. If such grace was shown us then, when we were in sin, much more, justified as we have now been by His blood, shall we be saved from wrath through Him. ἀπὸ τῆς ὀργῆς: the wrath to come: see note oni, 18. This deliverance from wrath does not exhaust Paul’s conception of the future (see ver. 2), but it is an important aspect of it, and implies the rest. Verse 1ο rather repeats, than grounds anew, the argument of ver. g. εἰ yap ἐχθροὶ ὄντες: this is practi- cally equivalent to ἔτι ἁμαρτωλῶν ὄντων ἡμῶν, The state of sin was that in which we were ἐχθροί, and the whole connection of ideas in the passage re- quires us to give ἐχθροί the passive meaning which it undoubtedly has ‘in xi. 28, where it is opposed to ἀγαπητοί. We were in a real sense objects of the Divine hostility. As sinners, we lay under the condemnation of God, and His wrath hung over us. This was the situation which had to be faced: Was.
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gi Thess. i. αὐτοῦ, σωθησόµεθα δι αὐτοῦ ἀπὸ τῆς ἕ ὀργῆς.
10,