ALTHOUGH the Apostle Paul was in the fullest sense the human author of all those epistles of the New Testament into which his name is inscribed, yet we learn from those epistles themselves that it was not his usual habit to write his epistles with his own hand, that in writing his epistles he made use of an amanuensis, or one that wrote to his dictation. In this method, Paul was not singular among inspired writers. We know that Jeremiah made use in this way of Baruch, a man like-minded with himself. Peter similarly made use of Silvanus, a man like-minded with him, and Paul, so far as this particular Epistle to the Romans is concerned, made use of Tertius, evidently a man like-minded with himself. But although that was the Apostle’s general method—the Epistle to the Galatians, which, he says, he wrote with his own hand, is the only certain exception—we have reason to think that no letter issued from him to any of the Churches without his writing the closing words of the letter with his own easily-identified hand, and this became the token of authenticity and genuineness in all the epistles. That is what is meant by what one reads at the seventeenth verse of the third chapter of second Thessalonians: “The salutation of Paul with mine own hand, which is the token in every epistle.” Doubtless the same token of authenticity was given in the case of this great Epistle to the Romans, and we are not speaking without warrant when we conclude that just at the twenty-fifth verse of the last chapter of Romans, where our text begins, the Apostle Paul did take the pen in his own hand, and, as the remainder of the epistle to the end forms from this commencement but one sentence altogether, that just the words of our text, the fitting conclusion to the epistle as a whole, were the actual words written by the Apostle in his own hand—a token of the authenticity of the epistle as a whole. Now, this one great sentence which constitutes our present text is extremely rich in content, and we may hope that, with the blessing of the Holy Spirit, an examination of its contents may serve us a useful purpose.
This striking conclusion to the Epistle to the Romans is easily seen to be essentially of the nature of an offering of thanksgivings unto God, for so the construction runs: “Now to Him that is of power to establish you . . . be glory through Jesus Christ for ever. Amen;” and, indeed, it is hard to think of any gracious soul, who with some measure of intelligence had followed the Apostle Paul closely in the powerful statement on behalf of the gospel which he submits to his readers in this great epistle, who would not at its close be disposed to join with the Apostle in offering unto God a similar offering of thanksgiving for His works of wonder done in virtue of the gospel dispensation unto the sons of men. The act of thanksgiving may be said to move outwards in ever-extending concentric circles, with the gospel itself as centre.
When in our text the Apostle speaks of the gospel as “my gospel,” he does not of course mean that the gospel is his in the sense of his being the author of it, or of his having invented it. The gospel to Paul has none other for its author but God. It is in that sense the gospel of God; but Paul was an accredited herald of it, and, as an Apostle, had an infallible understanding of what the gospel of the grace of God means, and it was given to him besides to set forth that understanding which he had of the gospel to others infallibly, and on this account he speaks of it as “my gospel.”
He adds, “and the preaching of Jesus Christ”; which we should take to intimate to us that these two words, Jesus Christ, constituted for Paul the sum of the glad tidings. That Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Mary, who was crucified between two robbers on the cross of Calvary, was the very Messiah for whom the Church of God had been looking those four thousand years, the Son of God in whom all the promises of the Old Testament were yea and amen—this was to Paul the sum of the glad tidings, and the thought is, in the present case, the centre about which the action in this offering of thanksgiving moves. There was a time, indeed, when Paul or Saul stumbled at the thought that Jesus of Nazareth, whom His disciples said was the Messiah, met with such an ignominious death; but that was before he really knew himself to be a guilty sinner that had incurred the intolerable wrath of God. When he did come to know that he was a sinner by nature and practice, he was the more ready to appreciate one that would make atonement for him, and when in the Person of Jesus of Nazareth upon the cross of Calvary he, through grace, identified the God-man who, by His self-sacrifice, turned away for him the wrath of that God whose displeasure as of his Judge he had incurred—well, he would henceforth glory only in the cross of Christ. That was the heart of hearts of the Gospel to Paul.
Now, there were certain aspects of this gospel which were of the profoundest interest to Paul, and upon these aspects he touches with exquisite beauty and taste when, at the close of this great epistle, he offers this offering of thanksgiving unto God, and to these aspects—they are the ever-enlarging rings or circles of which we have spoken—would we now seek to draw attention. The gospel, then, which in briefest form means the preaching of Jesus Christ, the Apostle Paul loved to think of:—
I.—As a mystery which had been kept secret from the beginning of the world.
II.—As manifested fully in His own time.
III.—As being now made known to all the nations.
IV.—As laying a certain obligation upon every one that hears it.
V.—As being, after all, but an instrument in the hands of God.
I.—The gospel is the revelation of a mystery which had been kept secret or silent from the beginning of the world, that is, from eternal ages, for so the words, “from the beginning of the world,” are more literally rendered.
The same thought is conveyed when, in 1 Cor. ii. 7, the Apostle speaks of the gospel as “the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory,” or, in Eph. iii. 9, he speaks of “the mystery which from the beginning of the world hath been hid in God.” To speak of the gospel as a mystery is not to say that from its very nature it must for ever be altogether unintelligible to finite beings, and so to man; for then no man could be saved. But it does mean that the gospel is a great deep which can only in part be ever understood of finite beings, that from all eternity it formed the counsel of God, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; that this counsel or divine purpose was not discoverable by human reason, and that, even after in an objective sense it has been revealed, fallen men are not, apart from the unction which comes from the Holy One, capable of appreciating it so as to be saved by it. This purpose, then, these counsels, these inter-communications between the Persons of the Godhead concerning the way in which God was to be glorified in the salvation of sinful men was kept silent so far as a creaturely audience were concerned for ages which were measurable to the eternal God only. Now that thought suggests to us that the gospel must have meant much to God Himself. The gospel as it means pardon of sin and renewal of the nature in time, and as it means a hope of never-ending blessedness treasured up for believers in heaven, is a magnificent thought or scheme. But not, even so, if we restricted our conception to these precious aspects of it, would the gospel have that comprehensiveness which characterised Paul’s gospel. He thought of it as in the present, he thought of it as in the future, but he thought of it also as in the past—and such a past, ages immeasurable to man. And the fact that he so thought of it with great delight suggests to us that the gospel should be regarded, not merely from the point of view of what it is fitted to be to sinful men who are appointed to die, and after that to come to the judgment, but also from the point of view of what it has ever been to God Himself. Sometimes the question is put by men sceptically inclined, What was God doing before He created the world? Calvin, following Augustine, quotes with apparent approval the somewhat tart answer which an ancient disciple gave to a sceptic, who pressed him with that very question, in the form that He was preparing a hell for the inquisitive. To us it seems an ample reply to say that, from eternal ages the heart and mind of the Trinal-God was occupied with a purpose, the presuppositions of which were the manifesting of Himself as Creator and as Lawgiver, but a purpose which in the main meant the glorifying of every perfection of the divine nature in connection with the revelation of Himself as the Saviour of an innumerable company of natural rebels of the human race. God is the all-sufficient One, and it was from no sense of want within Himself that He purposed salvation; yet it was the good pleasure of His will in some way to identify the blessedness that appertained to His Trinal life with the manifestation of His love, of His wisdom, of His power to sinful men. I reckon that what the Wisdom of God, who is none other than the Word, the Son of God, says in the eighth chapter of the book of Proverbs, bears one out in this: “From everlasting I was set up, from the beginning, or ever the earth was . . . Then I was by Him as one brought up with: and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him”—which is as much as to say that the Father’s eternal blessedness was in the fellowship of the Son, and that the Son’s blessedness in turn was in the fellowship of the Father. But when He takes up those two words (“delight” and “rejoicing”), in which the inter-penetrating mutual blessedness of the Persons of the Godhead finds expression in human speech, and uses them to set forth His interest in sinful creatures, as when He goes on to say: “Rejoicing in the habitable parts of his earth, and my delights were with the sons of men”—does He not in some manner identify His own blessedness with His purpose to reveal Himself as the Saviour? It is in the direction of the doctrine that we are at present handling that those wonderful words which occur in Christ’s intercessory prayer also look—”For Thou hast loved them as Thou hast loved Me.” And the same interpretation fits well to many other passages of holy writ which might be instanced, but time would fail us. Let me repeat, however, that the gospel was a mystery that was kept silent, or it had no audience beyond the Three Persons of Godhead, from eternal ages, and in that very circumstance we are taught that it is not of the nature of an afterthought with God, that it was not as something suddenly sprung upon man with the rising of an emergency; on the contrary, it was long and well weighed in all its innumerable aspects, applications and ramifications, it is, in a word, as David put it long ago, a covenant well ordered in all things and sure. Let none of the people of God, therefore, in any extremity of circumstances into which they may have fallen, imagine that they were not well provided for by their God in the provisions and arrangements of this mystery hid for ages with God Himself. And let not any one whose heart the gospel, that meant so much to God, never filled, think that he is taught of God.
II.—We proceed to another aspect of the gospel which was of such consummate interest to the inspired Apostle.
What was hidden or kept silent for eternal ages was at length manifested, and were it not that it was manifested it had availed nothing for any of us. When he says that the mystery is now manifested, the sense obviously is that he is referring to that ultimate and perfect dispensation of the gospel which was vouchsafed to the children of men in the Apostle’s own days. Yet we are by no means to infer from that up to the days of the Apostles there had been absolute silence concerning this mystery in the world. The whole context of our text makes it very plain that rather we should say that the meaning is that a process of revelation which began with the first promise of a Saviour in Eden reached its culmination in the Incarnation, obedience unto death, resurrection, glorification, of the Son of God, and in the giving of the Holy Spirit, as the fruit of Christ’s entering heaven with His own blood, as on the day of Pentecost, and in other remarkable evidences of His presence. Those things of which we have the record, from the historical standpoint, in the four Gospels and in the Acts of the Apostles, are the manifestation of that mystery which was kept secret from eternal ages which the Apostle Paul here in the main intends, but those very things stand related to the promise of a Saviour in the Old Testament Scriptures as a key does to a lock. Well, this manifestation ought to be regarded by us as really not less wonderful in itself than was the purpose of which we have already said so much. That “eternal life which was with the Father” was none other than the Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, by whom He made the worlds, the brightness of His glory, the express image of His Person, who held up all things by the word of His power, considered as set apart from all eternity in the purpose to be a sacrifice, and this eternal life was manifested in the Person of the Living One, who became dead, and is alive for evermore, and who has implemented His promise concerning the giving of another Comforter who should abide with His Church as Christ’s vicar until Christ the second time come for His bride. In this wonderful manifestation there is given us the saving knowledge of God. We do not know God savingly except we know Him in His love, neither can we know Him in His love, except we know Him in His gifts, or rather, one would say, in His two-fold gift, the gift, the unspeakable gift, of His own Son, and the gift, the immeasurable gift, of the Spirit of that same Son. But this is the knowledge which is vouchsafed to sinful creatures in virtue of the gospel. This is the manifestation of which Paul writes.
III.—Although the mystery was manifested after a perfect manner with the coming of the day of Pentecost, yet up to and at that time the gospel audience, so to put it, were comparatively few.
But it was not God’s purpose that the audiences should, for long after the perfect manifestation had been given, remain few, and to this circumstance concerning the making known of the mystery, a circumstance also full of profoundest interest to Paul, we would now in the third place seek to draw your attention. In the matter of publicity, and, so far as human audience is concerned, the gospel mystery is considered by Paul as given us at three stages. In the first stage, which is coterminous with eternal ages, there was no human audience; at the second stage, it had a comparatively small nation for audience; but at the third stage, the stage at which the middle wall of partition was brought down, the gospel has potentially the whole world as its audience. “It is,” says our text, “made known by the scriptures of the prophets according to the commandment of the everlasting God to all the nations.” It was a great wonder to Paul that the Messiah should have come to His ancient Church. But it was a still greater wonder that he himself should be the chosen vessel to bring the unsearchable riches of Christ to the door of the Gentiles. He, in fact, spent his whole strength in order that the manifested mystery might be heard tell of by the whole world. In this effort of his he met much opposition. But there were two things that sustained him. In the first place, the same Old Testament scriptures which had foretold the coming of the Son of God into the world, foretold that, with the coming of Messiah, a process would be set agoing whereby the law of the Lord from Mount Sion, the word of the Lord from Jerusalem, should ultimately embrace the whole earth. And in the next place, there was the direct order of the King of kings, of the Lord of lords, the commandment of the everlasting God, directly given, that the Gentiles, without becoming Judaised, should be made partakers of the gospel. Had not the Lord of glory Himself given His marching orders to the eleven in these words: “Go ye, therefore, and teach all nations”? Had not the Apostle Paul himself his commission, in the same sense, from the same Lord, when it was said to him: “I will send thee far hence unto the Gentiles”? This process, although there be now no living infallible preachers, is still going on, and it will go on until the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the channels of the deep, and so at length Christ shall see of the travail of His soul and be satisfied. Of this gospel, for the making known of which he used all his gifts and graces, Paul was not ashamed. He knew that there was not that human being upon the earth that could afford to do without it, that could escape everlasting destruction apart from it. That on the one hand. On the other hand, he believed that there was not a man or woman so abandoned, so heavily loaded with the wrath of God upon this earth, if he or she embraced the Christ of God, brought near to sinners in the preached gospel, but would by this be infallibly saved, delivered from that death which means so much more than temporal death in order to enter upon and enjoy a life that is so much more than temporal life, life that shall never end.
As, then, he had regard to the glory of God, and to the wellbeing of his fellow-sinners, he found it his meat and drink to make this mystery which had been kept silent from eternal ages, but which was perfectly manifested in the Apostle’s own days, fully known to every creature that is under heaven. In doing this his activities were in unison with God’s plan and programme touching the gospel. But he knew that God would raise up many other heralds to enter in a sense into his labours, and this thought, which was so full of interest to Paul, ought also to be full of interest to us, and, in fact, will be so, if the grace we have be of the same quality as his.
IV.—But that brings us to speak briefly concerning the gospel as laying an obligation upon every one to whom it comes as read or preached.
The mystery manifested is made known to sinners for the obedience of faith. You see the covenant of grace no less than the covenant of works, the gospel no less than the law comes to us demanding obedience. But it is with a difference. The obedience which the gospel demands is called here the obedience of faith. What is that? Well, it may be put in this way. The law as covenant demands works of our own as the condition of our obtaining life. In fact, if we had been able to render such works, life would have been ours by the covenant of works, and in no other way. But works involve strength to perform them, and so, as under the curse of God’s law and naturally without His Spirit, we are without strength. Of course, not every one has that conviction; in fact, no one that thinks it would be wrong of God to give him his everlasting portion with the Murderer and the Father of lies has that conviction. Hence is it necessary that the genuine and now impossible claims of God’s law should be pressed upon us, that we might learn our hopelessness under the law as a covenant. What then? Is there no hope? None by the way of getting a reward for works done by us. But there is by the way of receiving a gift, an absolutely free gift. The gift of God is eternal life, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Now, this receiving of this gift is that obedience of faith to which in the first instance the gospel invites us sinners. What is a gift? A gift is of such a nature that, when offered to you, there is no condition attaching to it in order that it should be your own, but that you would receive it as it was offered to you. If you add any other condition save this, you begin to buy the gift, that is to make it not a gift at all. But it must be received. It matters not however precious the thing offered be, nor how suited to your needs the thing offered is, if you refuse it, if you will not receive it, you are nothing the better for the gift; it may be, from your insulting the person offering, that you may be very much the worse for it. And here we would observe that great wrath is incurred within the gospel audience, as I may call sinners hearing the gospel, because of the doubting and contemptuous way in which God’s most precious gift of His own Son, together with pardon and an inalienable title to life in and through Him, is despised and refused by many. There are many, and the language of their heart is: “Oh, I don’t know what mind God has towards me, although I hear that this gift is being urged upon me that I might accept it, and therefore I’ll have nothing to do with this gift.” If even a fellow-creature like myself were sincerely to offer to another fellow-creature such a trifling matter as an orange or an apple, and that other fellow-creature would assume the attitude of one saying, “I don’t know what mind you have towards me, although you are making me this offer, and I’ll have none of it,” would I not feel wronged? I certainly would. And will not God feel wronged if, when He sincerely offers, yea, rather urges you to take His Son, brought nigh to you in virtue of the gospel, as a gift in which He should be doing infinite good against your evil, you, instead of welcoming that gift, turn round and say, “Oh, I don’t know what mind He has towards me, and I’ll have none of His gift.” By Himself he hath sworn that what is naturally pleasing to Him is to see men accept His Son and live! But the gift, to enrich us, must be received by us. Not upon the palm of the hand, as, say, a florin might be received, but into the heart, with our understanding, intellectual and moral, with our will we must receive Him. And, if we do so receive the gift as He is sincerely offered to us, we shall find that with the Son we have pardon, and a sense of love made ours with which our eternal destruction shall stand for ever incompatible, impossible. Let us never then forget that the gospel demands obedience. But it is not an obedience of the ordinary run. In order to our rendering it, as reasonable beings, we must have our false confidence of strength, of life and of hope taken from us. So shall we be made glad as beggars to receive a gift, and such a gift! And the longer we shall live receiving it, the more deeply we shall understand that every time we appropriate this gift as our own, God is manifesting Himself to us as One that does us infinite good against our, in a sense, infinite evil. But the gift must be received. Christ in the gospel comes to none in order that He should be despised, trampled under foot, but, instead of that, that He might be a prophet in our understanding, a priest in our conscience, a king in our will and affections, that He might be to us an Head, a Shepherd, an Husband, our all in all. He that so receives Him just in His own Word will be saved; he that will not so receive Him will be damned.
V.—And yet, finally, the gospel is but an instrument in the hands of God, the Holy Spirit.
Doubtless the term, “gospel,” is often used in a wider sense, so as to include its own application. But in our text the Apostle distinguishes the glorious instrument, which is the mystery made known unto all the nations for the obedience of faith, from the agent who really makes that gospel the power of God unto salvation, that agent being God, the Holy Spirit. This is, in a sense, the ring that embraces under it all the other rings which, as we have said, form the concentric circles which have the gospel—the preaching of Jesus Christ—as their centre. “Unto Him who is of power to establish you according to my gospel,” does Paul offer this offering of thanksgiving. The gospel, considered exclusively as an instrument, does not strengthen any believer, much less—may we say—quicken the dead. It is God, by His Spirit, that is of power to strengthen the living and of power to quicken the dead. But God, as an agent, connects Himself with an instrument, and the agent uses but the one instrument, both when we pass from death to life and when we are preserved from repassing from that life to death again; yea, when we are enabled to enjoy life—life more abundantly. And that instrument is the gospel. The Apostle Paul had always a deep consciousness of his dependence upon the Spirit of God, in order that the gospel, of which he was so distinguished a herald, might be the power of God in reality even unto salvation to so much as one of his hearers. He gives emphatic utterance to this conviction and this sense of dependence when, in writing to the Corinthians, he says, although it should be a Paul that planted and an Apollos that watered, it is God alone that gave the increase. Yea, he says that, if looked at apart from the effective agency of the Holy Spirit, the planter and the waterer—be they whom they may—are simply nothing. The increase is from God.
Now, this is not said to take away from the responsibility which Christ in the gospel lays upon every soul, nor from the warrant and freedom which the gospel bestows upon each and all to receive Christ, and pardon and life through Him. Yet it has to be said, in order that we should make bare the misery of the condition in which the Fall and actual sin left us—a condition according to which we are naturally incapable of appreciating Jesus Christ so as to welcome Him in our hearts. It has also to be said in order that we might ascribe praise to God, who not only sent His Son to save us with the infinite price of His own precious blood, but also sends His Holy Spirit to save us with the infinite power which is His. And this power does attend a preached gospel. He promised, saying, “Lo, I am with you always.” It is, in fact, the glory of the gospel that it should not merely be the ministry of righteousness, but also the ministry of the Holy Spirit—the Spirit who is life-giving to the dead because of the righteousness which is brought near to us in the gospel, so that duty and grace are seen here to go hand in hand.
We have thus touched upon some aspects of the dispensation of the gospel which had a peculiar interest to the Apostle Paul. We have room only to ask, in conclusion, Are you yourself now disposed to say of this mystery, which was kept silent from eternal ages, and was fully manifested in the fulness of time, and is being now made known to you in a preached gospel, “It is all my salvation and all my desire”? In so affirmatively answering, you manifest yourself to be a fellow-sharer with Paul himself in the great salvation.