CRITICAL NOTES
Romans 11:15.—The apostle awaits a boundless effect of blessing on the world from the future conversion of the Jews, which will be as life from the dead.
Romans 11:16.—Firstfruit denotes the representative offerings by which the whole mass is consecrated to God.
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.— Romans 11:13-22
The right method of magnifying.—St. Paul was no empty boaster. No vain words fell from his lips. He was humble, and yet his humility did not prevent him asserting rightful claims and vindicating his position. He magnified his office by deeds as well as words. He here says: I magnify my office so that the Gentiles may be encouraged and the Jews have no reason to be disheartened. St. Paul magnifies his office:—
I. By identifying himself with his hearers.—He speaks to the Gentiles, not as an exclusive Jew, but as one of themselves. He goes down to their position in order to raise them to his own high level. He is a Jew, and yet the apostle of the Gentiles. The preacher must identify himself with his hearers by love, by genial sympathy, by manly effort, if he is to do them good.
II. By seeking the salvation of some.—“And might save some.” The impelling idea of apostolic ministration. One might listen to some preachers Sunday after Sunday, and never discover that the gospel was a remedial scheme for the salvation of men. One might suppose that Christ had come on a useless errand when He came to give His life a ransom for many. The salvation of some should be the consuming desire of every preacher.
III. By entertaining a large hope.—Despairing men cannot make the best preachers. The general without hope is on the way to defeat. A preacher without hope cannot successfully rescue the perishing. St. Paul had large hope. The casting away of the Jewish nation was a ground of hope. He does not wail amid the ruins, but rises by their means to joyful expectations. The casting of them away is the reconciling of the world. The view expands before his eager vision. The receiving of them is life from the dead. A bright era is in the happy future. The valley of apostolic vision is not a valley of dry bones. The world is not to be for ever a vast moral sepulchre. Spiritual life shall animate the race; moral wastes shall quickly become gardens of the Lord; spiritual deserts shall speedily rejoice and blossom as the rose. Let hope animate the preacher, and he will lead to great successes.
IV. By investigating divine methods.—Some preachers have only one text. Other preachers, with several texts, have only one sermon. Other preachers, with several sermons, have only one round of elementary topics. St. Paul keeps prominent the way of salvation by faith. Christ crucified is central, and other topics are circumferential. St. Paul can give milk to babes, and meat for strong men. Indeed, the men must be very strong who can assimilate St. Paul’s strong meat. How skilfully he treats the subject of the breaking off the Jewish branches? The unbelieving Jews are broken off, while the believing Gentiles are grafted in. The wild olives become fruit-bearing and glorious because the root and fatness of the eternal olive tree are imparted—a beautiful figure of the working of divine grace. Wild olives are both grafted and changed. “If any man be in Christ, he is a new creation.” Successfully to graft requires skill; but what skill is required to graft a wild olive and make it rich! This skill is only possible to the Divine. Philosophy, education, ethical systems, cannot graft and change. The wild olive retains its wildness. Divine grace can and does both graft and change. Wild olives become part of the fruitful tree. Even hearts of stone are turned to flesh.
V. By considering the totality of the divine nature and the divine proceedings.—“Behold therefore the goodness and severity of God.” The God of some preachers is maimed. He is fashioned according to their tastes or their peculiar theological tenets. Severity hides the goodness, or goodness is made to obliterate the severity. The modern theologian has an all-father for a God,—an all-father whose children rule the world; an all-father who is never to be seen, and who exists merely for the happiness of His family, the word “happiness” referring mostly to present benefits. True to the perfection of the divine nature and to the reading of history and of providence, we are compelled to behold both the goodness and the severity of God.
VI. By making deep subjects have a practical bearing upon life’s morals and manners.—Teachers of homiletics tell us that the conclusion is the proper place for application in every style of treatment. Can the earnest preacher wait for his conclusion? Can he always restrain the swelling tides of his soul by the weak barriers of homiletical rules? Can a St. Paul preach for an hour, if modern light and leading would allow him to speak so long on the sublimest themes, and then say, “And now a few words by way of application”? St. Paul is always applying. After a few sentences he cautions against unseemly pride: “Boast not against the branches.” He proceeds a little further, and then cautions against presumption: “Be not high-minded, but fear.” He may preach election and predestination; but according to some he is not logically consistent, for he appends, “if thou continue in His goodness.” Is burning love ever logically consistent?
Romans 11:22. The goodness and severity of God.—Man is often so perverse as to tempt God to strike, and then God must strike sternly. It seems as if we were bent on challenging God to do His utmost to try how much we can endure. Yet the goodness of God is everywhere manifest.
I. The history of God’s dealings with the Jews a great parable of mercy to man.—Through all the ages of their history they were the children of sparing, delivering, redeeming mercy. Their national history was zooted in redemption. Every defeat, every captivity, was not unto death, but life. Paul, summing up the whole history, breathes the same strain. But there is a dark side. Life is not the one thing needful. It may be the most terrible of gifts. And the Jews, spared, endured sharpest agonies. Their final overthrow is the saddest act in the tragedy of history. Mark their modern persecutions. The world’s outcasts.
II. The principle of the divine method in which the goodness and the severity are thus intertwined.— Psalms 99:8 expounds it. The goodness is for us; the severity is for the sins and follies. This involves a principle little in tune with those who hold that man is homogeneous.
1. Man’s nature is in an unnatural condition, lapsed, fallen under the dominion of an alien power. There is strong internal discord. “Flesh lusteth against.” etc.
2. God has declared Himself man’s helper in the grand enterprise of life. God is really the author of the enterprise. It is God’s revelation of Himself which reveals sin (Romans 7:7-13), God kindles in the soul the hope of conquering it.
3. The severity is the hand of help which He brings to us in the working out of the great problem of our lives. He distinguishes between us and our sins, and He trains us to distinguish. The one He crushes, the other He saves. No light treatment of sin in the Bible. Modern philosophy says, Do not trouble too much about sin. Heaven’s philosophy says, Be in anguish about sin, because God lives to trouble it; and the soul that loves it drinks to the dregs life’s cup of bitterness.
4. It is with you to hail the severity and convert it to mercy, or to cling to your sin and convert it to doom. The severity not inconsistent with abounding mercy. God does not, will not, in our state of trial, recognise that our sins and ourselves are one. If deliverance from sin be the end of it, what matters the anguish of the moment? But if you continue with sin, you hate your own soul and love the gates of death.—J. Baldwin Brown.
SUGGESTIVE COMMENTS ON Romans 11:22, etc
Final perseverance not Paul’s doctrine.—The above section is a complete and designed disproof of the doctrine held by Calvin and others, but not by Augustine, that all who have been justified will be saved. For after assuming (chaps, Romans 5:9; Romans 8:16-17) that his readers are already justified and adopted as sons and heirs of God, Paul here solemnly and emphatically warns them that unless they continue in faith and in the kindness of God they will be cut off. The words “broken off,” used of the unbelieving Jews, evidently denote a “separation from God,” which, if it continue, will end in eternal death. Hence Paul’s sorrow. That the words “cut off,” used as a warning to the believing Gentiles, have the same sense is proved by the comparison of Jews and Gentiles, and by the contrast of being “cut off” and continuing in the kindness of God. Dr. Hodge asserts under Romans 11:22, but without proof, that Paul speaks, not of individuals, but “of the relation of communities to the Church and its various privileges.” But of this Paul gives no hint whatever. And as yet he has not mentioned in any way either the Church or its privileges, but has spoken only of the relation of individuals to Christ. On the other hand, the words “some of them” (Romans 11:14), “some of the twigs” (Romans 11:17), “they that fell” (Romans 11:22), point us to individuals. The word “thou,” which does not always refer to an individual, is proved to do so here by its contrast with “some of the twigs.” Can we conceive that Paul would support this urgent and personal appeal by warning the Roman Christians that if they do not continue in faith, although they will themselves be brought back and be finally saved, the Roman Church will perish? It has been suggested that Paul speaks of that which is possible in the abstract, but which will never actually take place. But could a mere abstract possibility call forth the earnest tones of Romans 11:20-22? The warning would have no force to readers who believed that God had irrevocably purposed to exert upon them irresistible influences, which would secure without fail their final salvation. He tells them to “fear.” But an intelligent man will not be moved by fear of that which he knows will not happen—that certain lines of conduct lead towards a certain goal will not affect us if we are sure that the goal will not be reached. We may be moved by consequences which lie on the way to the goal, but only by such as lie within the range of possibility. There are many serious considerations which, even if Calvin’s doctrine were true, would prompt us to cling to faith. But to seek to deter his readers from unbelief by speaking of what both he and they knew could never come would be unworthy of an apostle. I notice that Acts 27:31—a passage very different from that before us—is the only instance given by Dr. Hodge of the mode of speech which he supposes that Paul here adopts. He says that “it is very common to speak thus hypothetically.” But I do not know of a similar instance in the Bible. It may be said that Paul refers to a personal and possible, but only temporary, separation from Christ, and that those who fall will be certainly restored. I admit that such a separation would be exceedingly hurtful, though not fatal, and would be worthy of Paul’s warning and his readers’ “fear.” But we cannot accept this important limitation without plain Scripture proof; and I hope to show that no such proof exists. Moreover the contrast between this temporary fall, which on this supposition is all that could happen to the Gentiles, and that which happened to the Jews would destroy the parallel on which the argument rests, and would increase rather than lessen the high-mindedness of the Gentiles. We now ask, Has Paul said anything elsewhere which compels us to set aside what all would admit to be the plain meaning of his words if they stood alone? Hodge says that “Paul has abundantly taught in chap. 8 and elsewhere that the connection of individual believers with Christ is indissoluble.” I thankfully acknowledge that chap. 8 supplements the teaching of this section and guards it from perversion. But we have seen that it does not contradict or modify in the least the plain meaning of the words before us. And I do not know of any other passage in the epistle which even seems to teach the doctrine in question. This doctrine is also contradicted by Romans 14:15, which assumes the possibility of the perdition of a “brother for whom Christ died.”—Beet.
We estimate God by ourselves.—In the prosecution of this discourse we shall first endeavour to expose the partiality, and therefore the mischief, of two different views that might be taken of the Godhead; and, secondly, point your attention to the way in which these views are so united in our text as to form a more full and a consistent representation of Him. We shall then conclude with a practical application of the whole argument.
I. One partial and therefore mischievous view of the Deity is incidental to those who bear a single respect to His one attribute of goodness.—They look to Him as a God of tenderness, and nothing else. In their description of Him they have a relish for the imagery of domestic life, and in the employment of which they ascribe to Him the fondness rather than the authority of a father. It may be thought that surely He at whose creative touch all loveliness has arisen must Himself be placid as the scene or gentle as the zephyr that He causes to blow over it. At present we do not stop to observe that, if the divinity is to be interpreted by the aspects of nature, nature has her hurricanes and her earthquakes and her thunder, as well as those kindlier exhibitions in which the disciples of a tasteful and sentimental piety most love to dwell. Throughout all the classes of society, in fact, it is this beholding of the goodness without a beholding along with it of the severity of God that lulls the human spirit into a fatal complacency with its own state and its own prospects. Independent of all lofty speculation, and aside from the mysteries which attach to the counsels and determinations of a predestinating God, there is abroad on the spirits of men a certain practical and prevalent impression of His severity, to which we believe that most of this world’s irreligion is owing. Beholding the severity alone without the goodness, you feel it more tolerable for to live in the oblivion rather than in the remembrance of Deity. There is both a goodness and a severity; and this brings us to the second head of discourse, under which we proposed to point your attention to—
II. The way in which these two views of the Godhead were so united in the gospel of Jesus Christ as to form a more full and consistent representation of Him.—First, then, there is a severity. There is a law that will not be trampled on; there is a Lawgiver that will not be insulted. The great delusion is that we estimate God by ourselves, His antipathy to sin by our own slight and careless imagination, of the strength of His displeasure against much evil only by the languid and nearly extinct moral sensibilities of our own heart. We bring down heaven to the standard of earth, and measure the force of the recoil from sin in the upper sanctuary by what we witness of this recoil either in our own bosom or in that of our fellow-sinners upon this lower world. Now if we measure God by ourselves, we shall have little fear indeed of vengeance or severity from His hands. But along with this severity there is a goodness that you are also called upon to behold; and if you view both aright, you will perceive that they do meet together in fullest harmony. It is this, in fact, which constitutes the leading peculiarity of the gospel dispensation, that the expression of the divine character which is given forth by the severity of God is retained and still given forth in all its entireness in the display and exercise of His goodness. Were we asked to state what that is which impresses on the mercy of the gospel its essential characteristic, we should say of it that it is a mercy in full and visible conjunction with righteousness. The severity of God because of sin was not relaxed, but only transferred from the head of the offenders to the head of their Substitute; and in the depth of Christ’s mysterious sufferings has He made as full display of the rigours of His inviolable sanctity. That severity of God, on which we have so much insisted, so far from lessening or casting a shade over His goodness, only heightens and enhances it the more.
We must now conclude with a short practical application.—And, first, such is the goodness of God, that it overpasses the guilt even of the most daring and stout-hearted offender amongst you. Let him even have grown grey in iniquity, there is still held out to him the offer of that peace-speaking blood in which there resides the specific virtue of washing it utterly away. There is none whose transgressions are so foul and so enormous as to be beyond the reach of the Saviour’s atonement. But, again, in very proportion to this goodness will be the severity of God on those who shall have rejected it. There is reconciliation to all who will; but if ye will not, the heavier will be the vengeance that awaiteth you. The kindness of God is still unquenched, even by your multiplied provocations of His broken law; but quenched it most assuredly will be if to this you add the tenfold provocation of His rejected gospel. And, finally, let us warn you all, that no one truly embraces Christ as their Saviour who does not submit to Him as their Master and their Lord. No one has a true faith in His promises who is not faithful in the observation of His precepts. No one has rightly taken refuge in Him from the punishment of a broken law who still heedlessly and presumptuously gives himself up to the violation of that law; for then shall he be judged worthy of a severer punishment, seeing that he has trodden underfoot the Son of God, and accounted the blood of the covenant an unholy thing.—Chalmers.