CRITICAL NOTES
Romans 11:25.—πλήρωμα is a word specially applied to ships. The full complement of the Gentile world shall enter the sacred vessel of the Church, the ark of salvation.
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH— Romans 11:23-28
Dual aspects.—The gifts and calling of God are without repentance, and therefore God is unchangeable. There is no change in God, though there may appear change to men. God joins, then separates, then joins again. But faith is the cementing clay by which the branches are united to the vine. Faith lost, the sap ceases to flow and the branches fall off. Divine purposes work along the lines of human faith and human obedience. God is able to graft without faith, for we must not limit His ability—if we did, we might suppose Him grafting without faith, and yet not being able to make such branches fruitful. They might be united to the good olive tree, and yet not be possessed of any spiritual fatness. The promise is to faith; the blessing is obtained by believing. Let us be afraid of continuing in unbelief. Be not high-minded, but fear. If the natural branches were cut off, how careful should we be who were once branches wild by nature!
I. A dual method of working.—God’s ability is such that He can work both contrary to nature and in harmony with nature. God has grafted contrary to nature; how much more in accordance with nature! Many wild oleaster branches have been grafted, and have been wondrous specimens of the power of divine grace. Some of the noblest branches of the Christian tree have been wild Gentile branches. The ecclesiastical tree, primitive, mediæval, and modern, is crowded with many glorious branches of Gentile origin that suggest the most honoured names in the roll of the Church’s history. God can work contrary to nature, as nature is seen and described by short-sighted men. Miracles are contrary to nature—contrary to man’s nature, not contrary to God’s nature. Man’s nature is a circumscribed sphere, cribbed, cabined, and confined by men’s petty notions, which they call laws, and declare to be immutable and inexorable. God’s nature is a boundless sphere. His footsteps tread the vast unknown. The laws of men are only inductions from a part of the divine ways. The laws of God are hidden away in the infinite abyss. The laws of God, like the ways of God, like the sublime being of God, are unknowable. Our laws of nature are limited, for they are the expressions of limited minds—the readings of nature’s methods by finite intellects. For aught we know the laws of God are unlimited, being the expressions of an unlimited intellect. We do not know all the laws of God, even those expressed in nature’s operations. It does not become finite man to be wise in his own conceits. He should seek to be wise in the light of divine teaching and divine revelation.
II. A dual method of concealing and revealing.—God has His divine arcana. We remember a preacher discoursing in order to show that it was not to the glory of God to conceal a thing. Perhaps the proverbs of Solomon contained more wisdom than the utterances of the modern popular preacher. The glory of the Infinite is concealment. How can an infinite Being reveal Himself in fulness to a finite creature? What glory would there be about a God whom I could comprehend and reduce to my own level? The hero-worshipper ceases his homage when the hero appears to be stripped of transcendent and almost super humanqualities. Some ask for a knowable God—a being without any secrets, any mysteries, any hidden purposes. The reverent aspirations of my worshipping nature go out and up towards an unknowable God. The God of mystery is the God of sublime glory. The expanding and inquiring soul, even through eternal cycles, will fail to comprehend all the mysteries of the divine nature and the divine purposes. This is but to say that our littleness cannot contain God’s greatness, that the finite cannot receive and possess the Infinite. But God has mysteries which He reveals and explains; and the revelation tends to unfold the greatness of God, and to impress the receptive mind with a feeling of its own littleness. The revelation of one mystery opens out a wide prospect. Part of the divine ways is known, and we consider the dark unknown with profound awe. We ascend one mountain peak. It is very high, and its immensity subdues us with the sense of our own littleness as we see vaster heights beyond, as we consider that alps of divine nature on alps arise, and that it is hopeless for us to attempt to scale the divine altitudes. “For I would not, brethren, that ye should be ignorant of this mystery, lest ye should be wise in your own conceits.” The mystery of partial blindness to Israel is in a measure explained by the fact that it tends to the enlightenment of the Gentiles. The blindness is not final. The rejection of the Jews has two ends—the proximate and the final. “The proximate end was to facilitate the conversion of the Gentiles; the final end is to restore the Jews themselves by means of the converted Gentiles, and that to bring down at length on the latter the fulness of the divine blessing.”
III. A dual method of salvation.—Salvation for the Gentiles through the Jews; salvation for the Jews through the Gentiles. There shall come out of Zion a Deliverer. A mighty Deliverer has come out of the heavenly Zion to the earthly plains. He spoke in righteousness, travelling in the greatness of His strength, for He was mighty to save. And again in manifest and more victorious manner shall the Deliverer come out of the heavenly Zion and turn away ungodliness from Jacob; and Jew and Gentile shall embrace each other beneath the banner of mediatorial love. The Deliverer came with noiseless tread, with the silent but pervasive power of nature. And it may be that in the final ingathering there will be no miraculous interventions. All things will seem to be moving as before, until one day the Church will wake up to find herself pressed on all sides with ingathering adherents. Gladsome time when Jews and Gentiles shall love and worship the world’s great King—when the vast races of humanity shall bow, as one great army of the living God, beneath the spell of omnipotent and redeeming love!
IV. A dual emotional aspect.—“Enemies for your sakes. Beloved for the fathers’ sakes.” God is not a series of cold abstractions. God is emotional. Let us not be wise in our own conceits by pretending to explain the motions of hatred and love in a God. Perhaps, however, we may say divine hatred is the projection of human wrongdoing. Divine love is the projection of the divine attribute into humanity, removing human enmities, and filling the world with a new light. Let us fear lest we invoke divine enmity. Let us supplicate divine love. “Beloved for the fathers’ sakes.” Good fathers are a blessed heritage to their children. Here learn the greatness of man. He possesses a dual nature: one aspect stirs the divine enmity; another aspect elicits the divine love. God looks at the man and drives him from the divine presence. God looks again at the man and embraces him as beloved. Even in the expulsion there is a force of outreaching love. Is it not thus that we often appear to ourselves? We shrink with utmost loathing from one aspect, and then we taste some little comfort by the contemplation of another aspect. But oh to be beloved for the Son’s sake! The fathers of the race, the elected of God, were noble and beloved; but rising above all, and nobler than all, and more beloved than all, is the only begotten Son. Beloved for the Son’s sake! “He that spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things!”—the needful, ofttimes more than the needful, in the present; the pleasant, the joy-inspiring, in the blessed future.
SUGGESTIVE COMMENTS ON Romans 11:23-28
Providence a school of virtue.—That the fulfilment of these prophecies is still to come, it appears pretty obvious that a great national movement towards Christianity on the part of the Jews, and their actual adoption of a faith which they have so long held in detestation, must tell with mighty and decisive effect on the rest of the world. If the very existence of the Jews as a separate people be in itself the indication of a providence, a singular event in history which demonstrates the part taken by Him who overrules all history in the affairs of men, how much more impressive will the evidence become when this same people shall describe the actual evolution which it was predicted they should do more than two thousand years ago, shall after the dispersions and the desolations of many generations reach at last the very landing-place to which the finger of prophecy has been pointing from an antiquity so high as that of the patriarchal ages! We know not if this splendid era is to be ushered in by palpable and direct miracle. But should there be no such manifestation of the divine power conjoined with this marvellous fulfilment, there will at least be such a manifestation of the divine knowledge as will incontestably prove that God has had to do with it, and so as that history shall of itself perform the office of revelation, or men will trace the finger of the Almighty in the events which are sensibly passing before their eyes. And besides we have reason to believe of these converted Jews that they will become the most zealous and successful of all missionaries; or, like Paul before them, the preachers of that faith which they persecuted in times past and once laboured to destroy. It is said of a single Christian that he may be “the light of the world.” How much more will be a whole nation of Christians! Verily, like Paul, the great prototype of the Jews, they will pre-eminently be the apostles of the Gentiles; and there will be a light to lighten these Gentiles in the very glory of the people of Israel. We must look to futurity for this great accomplishment, for, most obviously, it has not yet been realised. It will be “in the last days, that the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established in the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow unto it. And many people shall go and say, Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; and He will teach us of His ways, and we will walk in His paths: for out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.” This is all yet to come, else how could it be spoken, as an immediate sequence of its fulfilment, that “He shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people”? In a school of virtue one chief end were the enforcement of great moral lessons; and this perhaps were best effected by bringing out in boldest possible relief the evil of sin, and in all their beauty and brightness the characteristics of highest moral perfection, or, which is tantamount to this, the high and holy attributes of Him in whom all perfection, as well as all power, have had their everlasting dwelling-place. Now providence is pre-eminently a school of virtue; and we may therefore expect that history, and in a more especial manner sacred history, where the manifestations of providence are seen in nearest connection with the designs of grace, will abound in such lessons. And accordingly such is the manifest purpose of many revealed evolutions or passages in the history of the divine administration, of God’s dealings with the world. One main end of the divine policy in the government and final destiny of men seems to be manifestation, that both heaven and earth might learn thereby the more to hate all evil, to love and admire all worth and goodness and true greatness, whether in themselves or as exemplified by Him in whom all greatness and goodness are personified. In harmony with this view we read of the Lord Jesus being revealed with His mighty angels on that dread occasion when the glory of His power and sacredness shall be displayed in the destruction of sinners, and the glory of His infinite love for the holy in the triumph and happiness of the saints. And so His disposal of the Church does not terminate in but has an ulterior object to itself, even “to the intent that now unto the principalities and powers in heavenly places might be known, by the Church, the manifold wisdom of God.”—Chalmers.
ILLUSTRATIONS TO CHAPTER 11
Romans 11:24-25. Beholding the deliverer.—On the occasion of President Lincoln’s visit to Richmond, as soon as his arrival became known, the coloured people whom he had delivered from bondage crowded around in wild enthusiasm. They gazed upon the wonderful man; they shouted, they danced; waved their handkerchiefs and hats; they cheered enthusiastically. Some cried, “Glory, glory!” others, “Thank you, dear Jesus, for this!” others, “God bless you, Massa Linkum!” others, “Bless de Lord!” What triumphal entry into Rome ever equalled this entry into Richmond by our delivering President? But ere long we shall all gaze on a Greater than he, with even greater satisfaction than those redeemed ones experienced.
Romans 11:24-25. Let us pray for the restoration of Israel.—Oh, shall we not lament the long rejection of the ancient people of God? Their seventy years in Babylon was nothing to this; yea, their four hundred and thirty years’ bondage in Egypt was nothing to this. Alas! how long—how long shall God’s anger last against that people? How long shall they be under the guilt of the blood of Christ, which they imprecated upon themselves and their posterity, saying, “His blood be upon us and our children”? Oh, pray—pray for that ancient people of God! Oh, pray that the blood of Shiloh may cleanse them from blood-guiltiness! When they were in favour with God, the believers among them had mind of us poor Gentiles, when we were the little sister that had no breasts; and now, when we are sucking at the breasts of gospel ordinances and sacramental solemnities, oh! shall we not mind them when “their breasts are cut off,” and we that were of “the wild olive tree,” are grafted in to partake of the root and fatness of the good olive tree? Oh, let us not boast against the branches!—“for if thou boastest, thou bearest not the root, but the root thee.” Let us not boast, but let us beg that they may be grafted in; “for if the casting away of them be the reconciling of the world, what shall the receiving of them be but life from the dead?” The day of the return and conversion of the Jews will be a day of greater gathering to Shiloh, even among the Gentiles, than we have yet seen; and it would fare better with us if we were more employed in praying for them.
Romans 11:28-32. Providence always at work.—God’s work of providence is “His most holy, wise, and powerful preserving and governing of all His creatures and all their actions.” It has no Sabbath, no night suspends it, and from its labours God never rests. If, for the sake of illustration, I may compare small things with great, it is like the motion of the heart. Beating our march to the grave since the day we began to live, the heart has never ceased to beat. Our limbs grow weary; not it. We sleep; it never sleeps. Needing no period of repose to recruit its strength, by night and day it throbs in every pulse, and constantly supplying nourishment to the meanest as well as to the noblest organs of our frame, with measured, steady, untired stroke, it drives the blood along the bounding arteries without any exercise of will on our part, and even when the consciousness of our own existence is lost in dreamless slumber