MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.— Romans 8:32
Love resolving, performing, and revealing.—The argument employed by St. Paul in this verse is one from the greater to the less. It is a self-evident principle that the greater implies and includes the less. The greater gift is that of the well-beloved Son; the less is the “all things” which are included. If all things are given into the Saviour’s hands, then it must be true that believers are in possession of those things which are placed in the Saviour’s hands for their spiritual well-being. Christians have many fears and doubts by the way, but they are groundless, for Jesus Christ is surely the pledge of a Father’s love and watchful care. Jesus Christ is the gift which proclaims that every other needful blessing will be bestowed. Yes, Jesus is the name fraught with joy and comfort to every child of God. Let us, then, no longer doubt that infinite Goodness which gave the unspeakable gift. Let us no more dream that there can be poverty in the divine bestowals, for God “spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all.”
I. Love resolving.—When did divine Love resolve not to spare the Well-beloved? Before the mighty rocks, which count their formative processes not by years but by centuries, began their solidifying methods—before time commenced its solemn march—in the vast æon of the eternal past did divine Love consider man’s ruined condition, and resolve not to spare the greatest gift which either time could know or eternity could produce. Here it may not be improper to contemplate divine Love pausing between love for the Son and pity for the fallen sons of men. What a momentous pause! What a solemn hiatus! What an important crisis! When the owner of the vineyard sent servant after servant to the husbandmen, and they slighted the opportunities of regaining a forfeited position, and boat the servants, and sent them away empty, it would have been natural for the lord of the vineyard to have said to himself, What shall I do? Shall I at once destroy those wicked husbandmen, or shall I venture among them my son and heir? God saw the people in ruin and in rebellion—saw with forevision. The interests of His moral government required the sacrifice of the well-beloved Son if a way of escape were to be devised for the rebellious. God loves the race, and yet He loves the Son. Between these conflicting loves, which shall prove victorious? Will God spare the Son, and not spare the race? Will God spare the race, and not spare the Son? What a solemn pause in the considerations of infinite Love! What will divine Love resolve? The pause, if there were a pause, was not of long continuance. What marvellous love to mankind is here revealed!—a love stretching, not only over the long centuries of time, but through the æons of eternity—a love anticipating the vast need before it had arisen! Infinite Love resolves to give up the dearest object of love to promote the welfare of guilty creatures. God has many sons both on earth and in heaven. Some are God’s sons by creation, and some in a higher sense by obedience to the divine commands, by submission to the righteous will of the Eternal, by the possession and manifestation of God-like qualities. The patriarchs are God’s eldest sons in time, who with giant-like mien walked the green carpet of the newly made earth—holy men of old who “spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.” Patriarchs, seers, prophets, kings, priests, apostles, reformers, and martyrs are God’s noble sons; but none of the noblest born and most highly gifted of earth would be adequate to the requirements of eternal righteousness. Angels and archangels are the sons of God. We cannot tell the period of their birth. They came forth in a manner inexplicable to our finite understandings. But they reflect the glory of the Eternal, partake in the highest degree of the divine nature, are clothed in light, are all good and pure. Here surely may be found a messenger who could become incarnate and conduct the race out of sin’s darkness into the dazzling light of eternal righteousness. No. All are willing, but not one is fully qualified. God resolves to give neither the noblest of earth’s great sons nor the brightest seraph who dwells with unshrinking spirit and calm delight near the eternal light, but His own well-beloved Son.
II. Love performing.—Divine resolution is coincident with divine performance. There may be an interval, but no hesitation. There is neither time nor space to the Infinite, so that the word “coincident” has a wider and different meaning in the divine vocabulary from what it has in the human. There is cause and effect in human affairs; but can the same be predicated of divine affairs? What are the words “antecedent” and “consequent” to Him unto whom all things, past, present, and future, are present as in one group! Oh, how inadequate is human language when we discuss divine movements! We must content ourselves with the remark that with God to resolve is with Him to perform. God delivered up His Son to become incarnate. Divinity enshrined itself in the temple of our humanity. How great an act of love to the human race was that when God gave up His Son to become a man amongst men!—not merely a man amongst the richest, wisest, and noblest of mankind, though He was noblest of all—not a man to be fondled on the lap of luxury, to be crowned with the laurels of fame, to wield the sceptre of power, to revel in the light region of fancy where glowing visions entrance the soul, to glide sweetly down the pearly waters amid enchanting landscapes and gentle gales that waft to the senses richest music—but a man despised and rejected, “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” God delivered up His Son so completely that He seemed to leave Him in solitude and sickness of heart, in weariness, thirstings, and hungerings. God is the father of the clouds, and yet He permitted Him to thirst who came to remove the moral thirst of mankind; God clothes the valleys with corn and feeds the young ravens when they cry, and yet He left Him to hunger who came to be bread from heaven for starving men. How complete the deliverance we gather from that mournful scene on Calvary when Jesus cried out, “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” How mysterious a revelation of divine love to the race have we in the crucifixion of the Son of God! This is indeed a profound mystery that God should seem to love His people so well as to forsake His only begotten Son. There is in the mediatorial scheme a combination of loves. We see both the love of God and the love of Jesus working and uniting in the great scheme of redemption. God “spared not His Son,” and how the words impress themselves on the mind! God “delivered Him up for us all,” and what a deliverance we had in that solemn hour—the world’s one hour amid the almost countless hours of time—when the heavens gathered blackness and the stable earth reeled in sympathy with the divine Sufferer! These words do not set before us the act of an unfeeling father, but the deed of One whose name and whose nature is love. God “spared not.” What do the words import? The word “spare” in this connection acquires new and untold significance. God did not refuse to deliver up His Son. What an appalling deliverance! Is a God capable of sacrifice in our sense of the word? If so, what a sacrifice when He delivered up His Son! Is a God capable of grief? If so, a burst of grief must have disturbed the divine repose when the Saviour’s cry on the cross pierced the heavens and reached the heart of infinite Love. If ever the music of heaven were hushed, if ever a cloud were brought over and darkened the joy of the celestials, if ever there were an oppressive silence around the throne of the Infinite, it was when Jesus trod alone the winepress of His last earthly suffering.
III. Love revealing.—It may seem strange that God, who is sovereign Lord of all, should have a feeling to spare and yet should overcome the emotion. If in this mysterious work of human redemption it may be declared that even Christ pleased not Himself, so we say with becoming reverence that God pleased not Himself in delivering up His Son, except in so far as He desired to show His great love unto rebellious men, and thus win them back from sin and uphold the interests of His moral government. Here in the passage we have the unlimited nature of divine love revealed. The gift of Jesus Christ Himself is a clear demonstration of the vastness of divine love; but we may understand it more perfectly and feel it more vividly by expanding the apostle’s thought that God’s great gift of Jesus implies the gift of all things. How boundless are those words! Imagine, if we can, a limit to all things, and then may we hope to comprehend the overpowering vastness of divine love. Grasp, if we can, the mighty range expressed in the simple words “all things”; let us travel, if we can, where all things terminate—let us soar on eagles’ wings and scale the heights, fathom the depths, and get below their influence; and then may we trust to be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth and length and depth and height of that love which passeth knowledge. Science has not yet found out all the things which are even in the visible creation, and which are waiting the time of their discovery; and of those things which have been already revealed it is scarcely too much to say that one human mind cannot tell them all by name; and as yet they are not all arranged in satisfactory scientific order. All the things of science, philosophy, politics, religion, nature, revelation, the past, the present, and the future—all the things in this world of ours, and all the things, if need be, of those myriad worlds which are but guessed at by the imagination of man—are for our spiritual welfare. There can be no greater charter than this. It surpasses every other charter of blessings. We can stand nowhere out of the reach of God’s blessed “all things.” The atmosphere appears to be an all-pervading force, and almost everywhere are we surrounded by its beneficial agency; but God’s “all things” go even further, and are more enduring. Friends may depart, relatives may become indifferent, even my father and my mother may forsake, riches may take to themselves wings and fly away, a good name may be blighted, earthly prospects may be withered and dead, health may decline, sickness may shatter and death destroy, but God’s “all things” abide to the Christian amid every change and in the midst of every disaster. We may fancy that sickness and trouble take us out of the sphere of God’s “all things,” but they are a more blessed part than we now believe of God’s “all things.” We may suppose that, when struggling alone in the valley of temptation, we are far from God’s “all things,” but let us be assured that even the feeling of desolateness which has overwhelmed and chilled may be God’s way of blessing. We may imagine, when on the bed of death and the devil tries and we experience divine hidings, that God has forsaken us; but God is there in the darkness though we see Him not. God giveth all things with the gift of His Son. What shall we more say? “For all things are yours; whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come; all are yours; and ye are Christ’s; and Christ is God’s.” What more could we have? Who would not be a Christian, if he be a man of such large possessions as those indicated by St. Paul? “All things are yours.” We are rich beyond the power of human estimation. There are no title-deeds in this world which map out such extensive possessions.
SUGGESTIVE COMMENTS ON Romans 8:32
“How shall He not,” etc.—Looking back at the cross, Paul triumphantly asks, If God has already bestowed the one gift, compared with which all other gifts are nothing, how can we conceive Him to withhold any other gift? The words “all things” are limited only by God’s wisdom and love. Whatever God withholds He withholds for our good. And the reasons which now prompt Him to withhold some pleasant things will soon pass away. The time is coming when these words will be fulfilled in their widest sense. “Also with Him.” The gift of all things is pledged by the gift of His Son; and therefore the other gifts are inseparably linked with the one gift. “Give by His grace”: as in Romans 1:11, Romans 5:15. “All things”. recalls the same words in Romans 8:28. When we sec God giving up to shame and death His Son, that we may surround that Son in everlasting glory, we are sure that God will keep back from us no good thing, and that the ills of life, which result from the withholding of things commonly supposed to be good, are really blessings in disguise.—Beet.
The best being given, the least will not be denied.—It was a greater act to be in Christ reconciling the world than to be in Christ giving out the mercies He hath purchased. If He hath overcome the greatest bank that stopped the tide of mercy, shall little ones hinder the current of it? Justice and the honour of the law were the great mountains which stood in the way. Since those are removed by a miraculous wisdom and grace, what pebbles can stop the flood to believing souls? If God be the author of the greatest blessings, will He not be of the least? If He hath not spared His best treasure, shall the less be denied? It is the apostle’s arguing, “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?” He cannot but be as free in the least as He was in the greatest; there were more arguments to dissuade Him from that than there can be to stop His hands in other things. If anything you desire be refused by God, know it is your Saviour’s mind you shall not have it; for God would deny Him nothing of His purchase. Oh, how little do we live in the sense of those truths! how doth our impatience give God the lie, and tell Him He is a deadly enemy, notwithstanding His reconciling grace!—Charnock.
God given His best.—“What shall we then say to these things?” Having spoken of the love of God, such a sea of love came upon Him as overcame Him. And what follows? “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?” Do but consider the words a little. “He spared not His Son”; the word implies that God was sensible enough what it was to give such a Son, it implies the greatest tenderness; He felt every blow, yet He gave the blows Himself. Even as when of loving parents it is said they do not spare their children, when out of the greatest tenderness they do correct them. And He is said not to “spare His own Son,” who is more His own Son than our sons can be, which are differing from ourselves, but Christ of the same substance with Himself. And the truth is, none knows how to value the gift but God Himself that gave Him, and Christ Himself that was given. And He did do it freely too: the word that is used, χαρίσεται, imports it; with Him He shall graciously give us; He gives Christ, and all things else freely with Him; therefore it implies that He gave Him up freely also. Abraham gave his son, but he was commanded to do it; but God gave His Son freely, and it pleased the Lord to bruise Him. And to show that this was the greatest gift that God could give, or had to give, what follows? Now He had given us His Son, Take all things else, saith He. I do not value heaven now I have given My Son for you; therefore take that. I do not value grace, nor comfort, nor creatures: take all freely, even as you had My Son. “If He spared not His Son,” saith He, “how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?” He hath given the greatest pawn of His love, in giving us His Son, that ever was.—Goodwin.