I. The warning contained in the text is not unnecessary. For though few or none, I suppose, consciously hold in the grossest sense that God is a respecter of persons, yet in all things, from supposed religious enlightenment down to the smallest advantages of personal gifts or outward circumstances, we see men under temptation to act as if they thought so. In other words, we see them accepting privileges of all kinds with a certain complacency which betrays no sense of a correspondingly enhanced responsibility. If we recognise this, the commemoration of Christian verities which we make on Trinity Sunday ought to be much more than a technical exposition of beliefs. It can hardly be less than a call to a higher morality. What we want, as Frederick Robertson truly says, is a gospel for the guilty. And this is what assuredly comes to believers in the revelation of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.
II. Let us remember that even when we seem to be using our gifts profitably, we may be using them in a spirit of blindness and presumption before God, as unlovely as that of those who more openly misuse them. High intellectual culture, good as it is and stimulating, often carries with it an element of moral weakness in developing a man's acuteness out of all proportion to his training in judgment and moral strength. It has a tendency, especially in early life, to lead to a very false estimate of qualities so common as mere cleverness, or even cleverness combined with learning, to overrate them as possessions, and as keys to unlock what is really deepest in human life, to make a man overlook the fact that others whom he perhaps despises for their beliefs, are able to rest in them, not because they are less acute than their critics, but because they are of a more earnest mood and a finer spirit. May God keep us all from yielding to the temptations to which our several temperaments or circumstances may most naturally incline us from idleness and selfish indulgence from coldness and vanity that none of these things may ever blind us to our true position and duty as in the sight of the great Judge who is no respecter of persons.
D. Hornby, Oxford Review and Journal,May 24th, 1883.
This statement cannot mean (1) that God cares for no man; (2) that God treats all men alike; (3) that God exercises no sovereignty of choice in the communication of His grace to men. If the text does not mean these things, what does it mean?
I. First, that Jehovah is not God of the Jews only, but of the Gentiles also.
II. Next, the God of the whole earth had regard to all nations in the gift of His Son. He excluded or excepted no people, or nation, or kindred no section, or class, or family of the human race, in the provision that He made in the gift and sacrifice and resurrection of Christ for human salvation.
III. Again, the gospel of that salvation is to be preached in the power of the Spirit unto all nations. There is no difference in the need that all nations have of that gospel. We all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. As the old world needed it, so also does this modern world; as the Eastern world, so the Western world, all round, the world wants this salvation, and God, who is no respecter of persons, would have His Church more impartial than she has been hitherto in making known to all the world the gospel of His grace.
IV. In His present providential government, God's thoughts and ways are not partial and unjust. The exterior aspect of things is so much to us, while it is nothing at all to Him. It is only in so far as we have the mind of God that we penetrate the superficial skin of things and are able to judge righteously.
V. In the great day of the judgment of men, God will render to every man according to his works. Every work or fact of a man's life will be estimated in the full light of all the surrounding circumstances, the temptations if it were evil, and the inducements if it were good, and with God's unerring knowledge of the spirit in which it was done, and the real motives from which it proceeded. And when things are thus laid bare in God's light, shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?
D. Fraser, Penny Pulpit,No. 426.
References: Acts 10:34. J. Pulsford, Three Hundred Outlines on the New Testament,p. 113; G. Brooks, Five Hundred Outlines,p. 329; Homilist,vol. vi., p. 406. Acts 10:34; Acts 10:35. T. T. Munger, The Freedom of Faith,p. 47. Parker, Cavendish Pulpit,vol. i., p. 75; M. Nicholson, Communion with Heaven,p. 339. Acts 10:35. Preacher's Monthly,vol. ix., p. 44.Acts 10:36. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xvi., No. 952; Christian World Pulpit,vol. v., p. 73; G. T. Coster, Ibid.,vol. xvi., p. 189. Acts 10:38. Ibid.,vol. xi., No. 655; vol. xvi., No. 929; Bishop Ryle, Contemporary Pulpit,vol. i., p. 294; Christian World Pulpit,vol. vi., p. 127; Church of England Pulpit,vol. xvii., p. 277; G. Litting, Thirty Children's Sermons,p. 90.