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Brothers and Sisters,

Many of you might wonder why I placed this article in the Bible Prescription Shop. I think that you'll understand pretty quickly when you see the subject matter. The Apostle Paul many times made contrasts between GOD'S Ideals and the reality of what man could reach. Paul spoke of his own failures, shortcomings, and warfare going on inside himself between the old man of flesh and the NEW CREATION IN CHRIST. Paul's warfare continued to the end of his ministry, and our warfare will be likewise in this short life. Much of this sounds negative, but it isn't.

Paul also describes VICTORY IN CHRIST. Many Christians consider Romans 8 to be one of the most precious, beautiful, and encouraging portions of Scripture in the Bible. John MacDuff is one of those Christians, and this article is John MacDuff's attempt to compare Romans 8 with Solomon's Song. John MacDuff is one of my favorite authors even though he lived long ago. His exposition of Romans 8 is quite beautiful, and he gives a more exhaustive look at REAL HOPE AND THE PROMISES OF GOD.

We life in a day and age where we are bombarded with evil from every side. It's fairly easy for even Christians to become negative and feel defeated in these evil days. HOWEVER, the REAL HOPE AND PROMISES OF GOD haven't changed. GOD'S Grace and LOVE are still just as GREAT, and we need to concentrate on these things for strength and encouragement. I sincerely hope and pray that you enjoy this as much as I did.

Love In Christ,
Tom

The following pages were specially composed during hours of leisure in the quiet of the study. Their design is to unfold and illustrate, however inadequately, one of the most precious portions of Holy Scripture. The writer fulfills a long cherished desire to awake a few slumbering chords of this New Testament "SONG OF SONGS."

In entering on the exposition of the eighth chapter of Romans, we listen to the music of the greatest of the Church's prose-minstrels. It is a Gospel enshrined in the most precious of the Epistles--an epitome of divine truth. Though blended with other chords, let it be noted at the outset, that the Love of God, and the Security of the Believer, constitute the special dual strain intoned by our Apostle in his sublime Canticle.

"The Eighth Chapter of Romans is the Masterpiece of the New Testament."--Luther.

1. Keynote of the Song

2. Song of Victory

3. Dual Strains

4. I shall rise again

5. the Child-song and its Lullaby

6. A Song in the Night

7. The Dirge of Creation

8. An Elegy; or the Harp on the Willows

9. A Song of Hope

10. Broken Harmonies and the Divine Agent in Their Restoration

11. A Lullaby

12. Anthem of the First-born

13. Songs of Degrees

14. Crescendo

15. Paean of Assured Victory

16. Hallelujah Chorus



1. THE KEY-NOTE OF THE SONG

Let us listen to it--"There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus" (v. 1).

The remarkable opening and ending of our chapter have often been observed; what, in accordance with the name of this Book, I may call the Antiphon. The Voice or Harp-note begins with "NO CONDEMNATION." It is answered in the close of the chapter with "NO SEPARATION." The key is struck by the inspired musician. This is followed by an ever-augmenting volume of melody, until it culminates in an anthem "like the voice of a great multitude and the sound of many waters." It reminds us of another Master of sacred Song (Haydn)--with his "Let there be Light!"--and the Light broadens and deepens into the perfect day of heaven.

"No condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus." This first proposition is ushered in with "Therefore." It is the summing up--the great inference from the preliminary thesis of the earliest and best of Christian Apologists. And this initial thought of consolation and peace, like a golden thread, is interweaved throughout the chapter.

"In Christ Jesus." We cannot now pause to expound and illustrate all which these pregnant words imply. They set forth, in a flash of thought, the personal, vital union or incorporation of the Believer with his living, loving Lord; transforming the old into "the new man which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness." The expression is explained and unfolded in the sixth chapter (4-11). It is a favorite and often recurring formula which permeates the writings of him who specifically calls himself "A man in Christ" (2 Corinthians 12;2). "In Christ"--safely immured in Him who is "the refuge from the storm and the covert from the tempest." I have read, in the terrible story of the Crimean War, when rampart after rampart, bastion after bastion of the doomed city were being stormed and battered into shapeless ruin--deep down in the foundations of one of the grim fortresses was a hold, where the wounded were conducted safe from the iron hail--away too from the din and roar of artillery which in that battle of giants made night as hideous as day. There they were, for the time, safe and sheltered--"The weary to sleep and the wounded to die."
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Christ is that sheltering Covert. He is "the Stronghold in the day of trouble" (Nahum 1;7). "In Him"--in the clefts of this Rock of Ages--within this Citadel of faith I am safe. The law and its avenging thunders crash against me in vain. Crippled and wounded in the stern struggle hours of life--sin-stricken and sorrow-stricken--assailed with temptation and legion foes--principalities and powers--spiritual wickedness in high places; I can listen to the voice of the Great Rest-giver as amid the shot and shell of battle He thus speaks--"Come unto Me!" "Come, My people, enter into your chambers, and shut your doors about you, and hide yourself for a little moment until the indignation be overpast." "The peace of God which passes all understanding shall keep (as the word means in a citadel or garrison) your hearts and your thoughts in Christ Jesus." (Philippians 4;7).

"In Christ." It was the vital truth so beautifully enforced by the Divine Master Himself in His valedictory Parable of the vine and its branches--"Without Me"; out of Me; severed from Me, you are nothing, and can do nothing. Out of Christ, apart from Him, each soul is like a stranded vessel--mastless, sailless, rudderless, the sport of ocean forces--lying high and dry on the sands, away from its buoyant element. But the tidal wave flows--the rocky inlets and creeks are one by one filled--the "abandoned" is set once more a living thing on the waters--anew "compassed by the inviolate sea."

That is the man "in Christ." Environed with this new element--life in his living Lord with its ocean fullness and unsounded depths--he is safe, joyous, happy. No cyclone above, no submerged rocks beneath; a halcyon calm around. "In Me you shall have peace." Not in vain did the early Christians--even in the midst of their great fight of afflictions--"the sea and the waves roaring and their hearts failing them for fear"--write on the slabs of their catacombs--IN CHRISTO--IN PEACE.

Enough now farther to say, that grasping thoroughly the phrase in its full evangelical meaning, all the varied succeeding affirmations of our chapter become at once comprehensible and luminous. It is the "Basket of Silver" in which "Apples of Gold" are inserted. Let us keep this in mind all through our exposition, as affording the guarantee of every covenant blessing--specially the two already distinctively indicated. It forms Paul's security and the security of all believers as he utters the closing challenge and "persuasion" --"Shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is IN CHRIST JESUS our Lord."

"No condemnation in Christ Jesus!" How blessed the thought, if we are participants in what Dean Alford calls "the bringing in of life by Him, and the absolute union in time, and after time, of every believer with Him!" "Condemn" or "Not condemn;" "Condemnation" or "No condemnation" are no longer open questions--indeterminate and unsettled. He the Great Redeemer and Lord--the Brother in my nature has taken me into living membership and fellowship with Himself. In Him the debt is cancelled--liquidated. In Him I am pardoned and accepted. These are the words of the divine Pardoner (none more precious in all Holy Scripture)--"I will be merciful to your unrighteousness; your sins and your iniquities will I remember no more." Paul, we must bear in mind, was now writing to Romans; who were familiarized with the forensic terms he uses. They knew well what was the significance of the proclamation "Condemno," or "Non condemno," as it rang through their pillared basilicas. Happy for those who have listened, as here, to the Great Absolution from the lips of the Just, yet the Justifier. Happy for me if, feeling my new covenant position in Christ, I can go forth to the world--to my daily work and business--amid "the loud stunning tide of human care and crime," and hear this chime of heavenly music ringing through it all--"No condemnation."

And to have the full comfort of this opening strain of the song, let me think of it, too, as denoting a present discharge--a present immunity. Not the limited and partial thought of being one day called to the tribunal of a Judge to receive the sentence and assurance of remission; but "There is therefore, NOW, no condemnation." The absolution is already pronounced from which there is no appeal. "I AM pacified towards you" (Ezekiel 16;63). "We who have believed do enter into rest" (Hebrews 4;3). "He that believes shall not come into condemnation, but is passed from death unto life" (John 5;24). "Beloved, now are we the sons of God" (1 John 3;2).

The Prodigal in the parable is not ordered to undergo probation--to tarry outside as a dependent among the menials of his father's house and halls, before restoration is accorded. The robe, the ring, the sandals, the welcome, are his at once. Let me accept the same lofty consolation, that the blessedness is even now mine of those whose iniquities are thus forgiven and their sin covered--that I am now a chartered citizen of that heaven of which the subsequent portions of this "Song of Songs" tell me I am to be a glorified inhabitant.

Yes, in beginning these successive cadences of Paul's sacred Cantata, I can appropriately take up the words of other and older singers--"O Lord, I will praise You; for though You were angry with me, Your anger is turned away and You comfortest me" (Isaiah 12;1).

"He has put a new Song in my mouth, even praise unto our God'' (Psalms 40;3).
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2. SONG OF VICTORY

I do not break up the clauses which follow. I group them as one prolonged strain, and call it "The Song of Victory, or Song of Redemption." For it is a Song unique in itself, complete, all-comprehensive--an anthem as of a multitude of the Heavenly host over the night-plains, not of Bethlehem, but of the world, praising God and saying--

(V. 3, 4.) "For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh; that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit."

[Let no Reader (may I here premise in a word), be repelled by the somewhat doctrinal tone of this and the earlier chapters. We must enter by the outer courts before reaching the innermost shrine. The foundations must be laid before the crowning super-structure be reared.]

The theme of this portion of the SONG, epitomized, is this. The demands of the law, in themselves impossible of fulfillment, have been satisfied through the atoning work of Christ; and those alone can take up the triumphal notes continued to the end of the chapter, who have thus absolutely renounced all legal ground of justification in the sight of God, and have accepted the gratuitous offers of pardon provided by the Divine Surety--"Christ the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believes."

The first clause of these verses--the first strain of this opening Redemption-Hymn is "The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus."

What are we to understand by this? It may have other latent side-meanings, but we may take it, in its simplest acceptation, as an equivalent term for the Gospel method of salvation; forgiveness, peace, eternal life, as the gift of God through Jesus Christ. It is the glorious provision of the Life-giver--"In Him was life;"--Him--alike the Author of Redemption and the Bestower of the new principle of life in the heart of the believer.

The remaining assertion of the verse is in contrast, or contradistinction--"Has made me free from the law of sin and death." It speaks of the old decalogue of Sinai with its rigid, inflexible demand, "Do this and live." The two statements are brought together elsewhere in the concise epigrammatic sentence--"The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life."

Then follows (verse 3) a remarkable epitome of the Redemption-work; "What the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh." "Weak." There was no weakness, no inherent defect or feebleness in the law itself. As the expression of the mind and will of the Great Lawgiver, it resembled one of the pillars of the ancient Temple ("Jachin")--STRENGTH. It had the Divine Holiness and Justice, Omnipotence and Immutability to rest upon. But its high, uncompromising demands were beyond the perfect obedience of the fallen creature. This alone constituted its "weakness." In its own majestic requirements it was potent. As a ground of human merit and a procuring cause of salvation, it was impotent. Amid the thunders and lightnings of the Mount comes the dread deliverance from which there is no escape or appeal--"by the deeds of the law, shall no flesh be justified." Moreover, let it be noted, in connection with the present argument of the Apostle, that this impossibility extended beyond what (to use a forensic term) I may call the major count of the indictment. There was the great outstanding fact of original sin--the human nature fallen and under condemnation; the depravity and corruption of the heart. That heart and its experience we have found faithfully portrayed--photographed--in the immediately preceding chapter. The holiness and sanctification of the believer even at the best are an unrealized and unrealizable ideal--no more. The most saintly image comes out blurred--the fight--the life-long encounter between the lower and the higher nature, as we have also seen, leaves behind the inevitable scars of battle. "For in me," says this noblest of spiritual combatants, "that is, in my flesh, [my weak flesh] dwells no good thing." He feels, that while one moment he may be the soaring eagle, the next he may be the groveling worm. Paul may in this be thought to take a pessimistic view of human nature generally. Yet who that knows his own heart and life experience can demur to the stern reality?

Here then, in this opening proposition, he reasserts what had been logically expanded in the previous lengthened context, the powerlessness and inefficacy, alike on the ground of nature and practice, of the law to give "LIFE."

He proceeds to unfold the great remedial measure of God's own sovereign devising--"God sent His Own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh."

We have spoken of the "Weakness;" now comes the contrasted "Strength;" "Christ the power of God unto salvation to every one that believes." A law, powerless either to justify or to sanctify, becomes both in Him. As the Apostle elsewhere with singular force and brevity, yet fullness, expresses it--"For if there had been a law given which could have given life, verily righteousness would have been by the law. But the scripture has concluded all under sin, that the promise by faith of Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe" (Galatians 3;21, 22). "GOD sending." The purpose of Love was His own--one undreamt of by human reason; beyond the conception and device either of man or of Angel.

And there is a farther notable emphasis in the appended word. "The stress," says Dean Alford, "is on 'His own,' and the word is pregnant with meaning." His own Son, spotless in His holiness; in Nature and Person immaculate as the law whose debts He came to discharge and its precepts to fulfill. This sinless Son is in marked antithesis to "the sinful flesh" in whose likeness He came. "Likeness;" for though in all respects tempted and tried as the Brother in our nature, it was "yet without sin." One single spot or stain in the Incarnate humanity would have vitiated the efficacy of His atonement. But He was "holy, harmless, undefiled, and separate from sinners." He could make the unanswerable challenge to His adversaries--"Which of you convinces me of sin?"
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"And for sin" (marg., "by a sacrifice for sin;" R.V., "as an offering for sin") "condemned sin in the flesh."

Much of the true meaning of this important clause must be determined by what is implied in the word "condemned." It seems to us capable of but one interpretation--the vicarious sufferings and death of the Son of God for us men and for our salvation. In case of any verbal misapprehension, we reject the harsh and unwarrantable rendering given by an otherwise admirable commentator (Haldane), when he ventures to translate it by the term "punished." We cannot for a moment accept the word, if in the remotest form it suggests or embodies the thought of the loving Father of heaven punishing "the Son in whom He declares Himself well pleased." Such be it said at once would be altogether unworthy, abhorrent, blasphemous; distinctly at variance, it may, moreover, well be added, with the creed of so distinguished and reliable a student of Scripture.

And yet we dare not eliminate the implied truth of an Expiatory Offering.

Another commentator to whom the Church of Christ owes much (Barnes), suggests an alternative rendering, probably the nearest to the truth, while evading the objectionable punitive term--"God passed a judicial sentence on sin in the person of Christ." He condemned sin in the flesh, that is, in His own assumed, human, fleshly nature, Incarnate God.

Should we retain the accepted rendering in both Authorised and Revised Versions ("condemned"), there may possibly be implied another antithesis between this and the word of the first verse, for they are in the Greek the same, "condemnation." There is condemnation by the law. There is no condemnation by the substitution of the immaculate Redeemer.

Then comes the grand result (v. 4). "That the righteousness" (or, marginal, requirements) "of the law" (that which the law demands) "might be fulfilled in us;" fulfilled by the meritorious life and death of the Son of God, and through our mystical union with Him.

Reader, are you and I able to accept, and accepting to repose on this great truth, what the old Divines call "THE SATISFACTION." We know how in modern days it is a doctrine slighted and discredited. In the language of Reuss, who may be taken as a leader in the so-called "advanced school," "there is not a word of all this weighing and calculating scheme to be found in the writings of Paul." While refusing to accept the German's depreciatory definition of our Apostle's "systematic theology," I conclude far otherwise. I feel I must reject the teachings of this Epistle and of all his other Epistles--as well as the teachings of his inspired contemporaries; I must reject my Bible itself, before I can repudiate so cardinal an article of the faith. That there is mystery, profound mystery, in this dogma of Divine Substitution and Suretyship none can deny. But I would ask those who discard it, calmly to read without cavil or prejudice the following among many assertions (not by any means exclusively Pauline)--and say if their plain, unambiguous meaning can be evaded?

To begin with Christ's own testimony, "The Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many" (Matthew 20;28 ). Omitting for the present the prophetical writings, His Apostles and other inspired penmen repeat and rehearse the assertions of their Lord. "He has made Him to be sin for us who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him" (2 Corinthians 5;21). "Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us" (Galatians 3;13). "Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many" (Hebrews 9;28 ). "He Himself bore our sins in His own body on the tree" (1 Peter 2;24). "Who loved me and gave Himself for me" (Galatians 2;20). "Christ also once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God" (1 Peter 3;18 ). "It became Him" (that word "became" is solemnly emphatic; there was a necessity laid on God, arising out of His own nature--than which we can conceive no stronger necessity) "of whom are all things, and by whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the Captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings" (Hebrews 2;10). "To Him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in His own blood" (Revelation 1;5).

You may strive, by a forced exegesis, to get rid of the meaning wrapped up in these and kindred passages on the Suretyship of Christ; but a literal acceptance can alone give explanation and consistency to the reasoning of the Apostle in this verse on which we are now meditating. God, in the Person, and work, and atoning death of His dear Son, has thrown the luster of a glorious vindication around every requirement of His law and every attribute of His nature. Christ, by a holy life, obeyed the law's precepts, and by a holy death of self-surrender and sacrifice endured its penalty. The law says, "Do this and live." I cannot do it. But I listen to the words of Him who can do it--who has done it. "Lo, I come, I delight to do Your will, O my God" (Psalms 40;7, 8 ). "When the fullness of the time was come, God sent forth His Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem those who were under the law" (Galatians 5;4).

O blessed Savior, I desire with simple unwavering faith to look to You thus--to You only--wholly, and forever. I desire to behold You as the great Antitype of the Jewish Scapegoat, bearing away the load of transgression into a land of oblivion and forgetfulness, so that "as far as the East is distant from the West," so far have You "removed our transgressions from us." I look to You, indeed, also in the beauty of Your Character and Work, as the perfect Example, the great Ideal of Humanity. In this acceptation of the word, I know that You did oppose and overcome the forces of evil. I know in a similar manner, too, You may be said to have "condemned sin in the flesh;" overcome it, and conquered it in Your own pure, stainless human nature. You could say in a real, what our Apostle could only utter in a qualified sense, "I have fought the good fight; I have vanquished, and thereby have I given a pledge of sin's final subjugation." But this is not all I need. I must look to You as the Atoning Sacrifice--the Sin-offering. "O Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world, have mercy upon us!" "O Lamb of God, that takes away the sin of the world, grant us Your peace!" I shall not go to the Temple without the Altar, or to the Altar without the Sacrifice. Thanks be to the dying, ever living love of the divine Surety, if I am enabled with the heavenly harpers spoken of in Revelation (5;8, 9) to "sing the new song"--the Song whose strains gave them their golden harps and golden vials and crowns of victory--"You were slain, and have redeemed us to God by Your blood out of every kindred and tongue and people and nation!"
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I close with one verse from an earlier chapter of this same Epistle. It has been purposely kept by itself and to the last. It is culled from the midst of Paul's cogent argument. But it seems to express, in a brief sentence, the peerless truth on which we have now been dwelling. Olshausen, by a metaphor not less truthful than happy, calls it "The Acropolis of the Christian faith," "Whom God has set forth to be a Propitiation through faith in His blood, to declare His righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God" (Romans 3;25).

Propitiation (margin, RV., "Propitiatory"). The reference, as is well known, is to the lid of the Ark of the Covenant, in the Tabernacle or Temple--the Mercy-Seat. The tables of the law, the two tables of stone were deposited within that Sacred Ark--the eternal decalogue with its unrepealed, unabrogated demands, and solemn requirements. It spoke condemnation--"The soul that sins, it shall die." But the blood besprinkled "Shield" resplendent with gold and fragrant with acacia wood (significant type and emblem of the divine Surety), interposed between it and the officiating High Priest--the Representative of Covenant Israel in all ages. Christ--the true "Propitiatory" stands between the living and the dead, that the great plague of sin might be stayed. Or, to give a different illustration, we recall the host of Assyrian warriors in ancient Jewish story, "their cohorts gleaming with purple and gold"--their banners "floating proudly at sunset"--


Each hand grasped a sword, but was impotent to wield it. Even so; the law retains, in all their force, the deadly weapons of condemnation. But a mightier than created Angel has come down and paralyzed its arm--"stilled the enemy and the avenger." The sharp, keen-edged swords slumber powerless in their scabbards. "Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ."

These remarks ought appropriately to close this section. But one practical thought dare not be omitted--one note is needed for the full cadence and harmony of this Redemption-Song. If the law is impotent to save--if its claims have to be fulfilled and its penalties borne by Another, are we to disregard it as a rule of life?

This is answered in the closing saying of the passage. It is a brief but necessary restatement of the Apostle's preceding and fully discussed question; "Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound?" "Who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit" (v. 4). We cannot enter on the wide subject here. It will come in course, and be amplified in next chapter. Enough to say, that the love of God, in the gift of His Son, has, as its result, in the case of the believer, the imparting of a new life of love. To quote the words of a Brother Apostle (1 John 4;9)--"In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because God sent His only Begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him." Or Paul's own equally cogent saying (Romans 6;18 )--"Being then made free from sin, you become the servants of righteousness." (Ver. 22)--"But now being made free from sin, and become servants to God, you have your fruit unto holiness, and the end everlasting life." The Gospel message of free pardon through the merits and righteousness of Christ, acts as a dominating influence--a new pervading principle of action, permeating and energizing the whole being. The hospices which crowd the pilgrim way lead up to the pure and serene atmosphere of the everlasting hills. The Temple-stairs, not of the Law but of Grace, conduct to the Holy of Holies. A stray note from the Savior's greatest "Song of Songs"--His own Beatitude-chapter, is on the lips of every worshiper, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God."



3. DUAL STRAINS.

It is common in Paul's writings--in none more so than in this Epistle to the Romans, for one subject to suggest what follows. As with the musical Composer one note suggests another--as with the skilled and practiced Orator one topic or idea suggests another--so it is here. The last strain of our inspired Harmonist was--"Who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit." The theme is now amplified--the note is prolonged. Retaining our song-metaphor, the identical terms of the couplet "flesh and Spirit" are over and over antithetically intoned.

"Those who live according to the sinful nature have their minds set on what that nature desires; but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires. The mind of sinful man is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace; the sinful mind is hostile to God. It does not submit to God's law, nor can it do so. Those controlled by the sinful nature cannot please God. You, however, are controlled not by the sinful nature but by the Spirit, if the Spirit of God lives in you. And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Christ. Therefore, brothers, we have an obligation--but it is not to the sinful nature, to live according to it. For if you live according to the sinful nature, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live" Romans 8;5-9, 12-13
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I shall not attempt expounding, clause by clause, in consecutive order, but rather group these together, combining and interchanging; the better thus to grasp what is the scope and meaning of the writer.

Taking it generally, the entire passage is a plea for the higher spiritual life, as contrasted with the lower. It is a step in advance of our Apostle's thesis already adverted to in ch. 7. To use a familiar figure, the latter may be likened to the swing of the pendulum; while the present may rather be compared to the magnetic needle, which despite of tremulous vibrations is pointing true to its pole. The animal nature--"the flesh with its affections and lusts" (the disturbing cause)--is deflecting from God and holiness. But its normal condition is, notwithstanding, strictly under the influence of diviner principles, renewed motives and affections.

The two first, and we may regard them as leading clauses in these couplet verses, are rendered in the margin--"Minding of the flesh" and "Minding of the Spirit" (v. 5). The former opens up not an inviting subject. But for the sake of the contrasted theme we must for a few moments dwell upon it. It is the picture of mankind in their natural unregenerate state--the 'Harp with its thousand strings' out of tune, the song with its marred and discordant melodies; the soul "alienated from the life of God;"--under vassalage to sin. The desires, inclinations, tastes--have not only a downward tendency; but, as we know too well, there is a dynamic force in the carnal nature corresponding to the momentum of the material law. That moral momentum is ever on the increase. Indulged and permitted evil--the despot rule of the flesh–leads to an ever sadder bondage, and deadens the sense of right and wrong. In the simile of our Lord's Gospel Parable, the house "swept and garnished," yet unsurrendered to the Spirit, becomes more and more devil-haunted; so that "the last state of that man is worse than the first." Hear another Apostle's description of the terrible progression or decadence in this "minding of the flesh;"--"Earthly, sensual, DEVILISH" (James 3;15). The sirens in league with the fallen and corrupt nature, lure with the charm of their voluptuous song, only to surer destruction.

And the saddest feature in the delineation--the saddest taint in this fleshly nature is here specially noted. The head and front of its offending is--"The carnal mind is enmity against God" (v. 7). God--the God of unspotted holiness, purity, and righteousness is distasteful and abhorrent to the "mind of the flesh." "It is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be." This, in the truest sense, is "Atheism." "The fool" (that is, the impersonation of the carnal mind) "has said in his heart, 'No God for me'" (Psalms 14;1); for such is the energy and emphasis of the original. There are undoubtedly times when the most callous and indifferent--those of the earth earthy, cannot--dare not, thus utter the scoffer's creed, "No God!" All nature in its majestic sequences, its exquisite mechanisms, its intricate yet simple laws, repudiates the disavowal. It has its own "Song of Songs" chanted day and night in endless chorus, sublime refrain--"The Lord reigns." Yes, and this is still more emphatically and solemnly countersigned by conscience within, the authoritative viceregent--conscience asserting its own cadences, despite of all inner discord that would attempt to mar divine, godlike harmonies.

Yet alas! the recognition of God--the God of the Gospel and of Revelation is incompatible with the "desires of the flesh and of the mind." Hence the altar is erected, not with the old Athenian inscription "To the Unknown God," but "No God FOR ME." The votary of the flesh can without scruple give his adhesion to the creed of Pantheist or Materialist. But a great moral Lawgiver and Governor to whom he is responsible, and to whose Will his whole principles and actions are antagonistic, he cannot tolerate. His state may be summed up in the one expressive word--"Ungodliness."

And what a picture is this, of those who are unrenewed in the spirit of their minds! "The natural man (the flesh) receives not the things of the Spirit of God." "For when we were in the flesh, the sinful passions, which were through the law, wrought in our members to bring forth fruit unto death" (Romans 7;5).

"Unto death." In the verses we are now considering the same sad climax is reached. "To be carnally minded is death" (v. 6). "If you live after the flesh you shall die" (v. 13). The original meaning is here, too, emphatic. It is not that this fleshly tendency leads to death; but it is death. Death, gloomy-visaged, spiritual death sways its iron scepter over the moribund soul. It is dead to the only true life--the life of God--"Without God and without hope in the world!"

Turn now for a little to the opposite pole--from muffled peals to spiritual life-chords. Listen to Paul's series of counterpart statements.

(V. 10) "If Christ be in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the Spirit is life because of righteousness." (V. 12) "Therefore, brethren, we are debtors." "If you through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, you shall live." (V. 6) "To be spiritually minded is life and peace."
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"We are debtors." The key-note of the song considered at the beginning of these meditations (v. 1) interprets this assertion for us. Once in "condemnation;" bankrupt, nothing to pay--sin-condemned and law-condemned. But Christ the Law fulfiller has paid all and remitted all, granting to the insolvent a full discharge; "Therefore, brethren, we are debtors;" debtors to Him who has Himself furnished the ransom--opened the prison doors and set us free. Hence the infinite obligation under which we are laid to Redeeming love. Hence the supreme incentive to sanctification of heart and life. As He died for sin, so must we die to sin.

At this point of the Apostle's argument, a new divine Influence or Factor is revealed; a new slumbering chord of the Song is made to vibrate. God has made gracious provision to secure, on the part of His ransomed people, a holy walk and obedience; and that, not through their own strength, but through the strength and power of His indwelling Spirit. By that Spirit we are not only renewed, but "led" (v. 14)--sweetly constrained to walk in harmony with the divine will, and the impulses of our regenerated natures. We have here what Chalmers happily calls "the expulsive power of a new affection." It is a plant which our Heavenly Father plants. Not indigenous to the natural soil of the human heart; it is of supernatural growth.

Christ Himself in His interview with Nicodemus expressly speaks of a "new birth"--a being "born of the Spirit"--"born from above. ABOVE; "translated into the Kingdom of His dear Son." ABOVE--we breathe a purer atmosphere. Away from the mists and clouds of the nether valley, faith takes us to its own rocky heights; and bathed in its own bright paradise, puts one of its new songs into our lips--"He shall dwell on high; his place of defense shall be the munitions of rocks." The life originally forfeited in the first Adam is more than restored. "I came," says the great federal Head of the New Covenant, "that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly" (John 10;10).

In all this, however, let us specially note, at the risk of repetition, the divine Agent and Agency. For while the expression "the Spirit," may be more than once descriptive of the new moral condition of the soul, in contradistinction to "the flesh;" it undoubtedly has a preponderating reference to the Holy Spirit--the Third Person in the adorable Trinity--the Author, Inspirer, Energizer of divine life; in accordance with Christ's own valedictory promise to His Church--"For He dwells with you and shall be in you" (John 14;17). "But you are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you" (v. 9).

If we have seen that the state of those "minding the things of the flesh" may be expressed by one word--ungodliness; this new, heaven-born life may similarly be described by the one word "spiritual mindedness." This spiritual mindedness--the Holy Spirit's work in the heart--like all the processes in God's material and moral government, is step by step and progressive. The power of sin becomes slowly weaker and weaker. The power of grace, slowly--it may be imperceptibly, becomes stronger and stronger. Paul's own word (v. 13) implies not a sudden and instantaneous, but a gradual transformation; "If you through the Spirit, do MORTIFY the deeds of the body, you shall live." It is in accordance with a similar and equally expressive simile of our Apostle elsewhere--"Those who are Christ's have crucified the flesh with its affections and lusts." Crucified--it is a slow, lingering death--a "striving against sin" (Hebrews 12;4); though the strife and conflict are not dubious, but lead ultimately to assured victory.

Reader, have you and I, in any feeble measure, been able to realize the presence and power of this "Indwelling Spirit"? conscious of the surrender of heart and life to Christ? implying the gradual conquest of sin; the expulsion of whatever is base and impure, corrupt and selfish, grasping and covetous, unloving and unholy--our wills blending in greater harmony with the divine? Is this our happy history; can we endorse this testimony as our own experience--"The grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men; teaching us, that denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously and godly in this present world?" (Titus 2;11, 12). Not, moreover, as a hard rule of compulsion--a reluctant concession to stern duty and obligation, but saying with a cheerful feeling of self-surrender--"I delight in the law of God after the inward man"?

There is no description truer than that asserted in one of the antithetical clauses already quoted--"to be spiritually minded is life and peace." PEACE! that holy tranquility--that "fruit of the Spirit," specially noted in Galatians 5;22. Like God's own metaphor of it, the river may not be always untroubled. The stream may at times flow amid rough boulders and environing rocks, fretted and broken into foam by the cataract. But gradually it resumes its customary calm, reflecting the serene heavens, and at last sleeping with waveless tranquility in the bosom of the lake where it has sped its way.

Nor let this phrase, "the Indwelling Spirit," be taken by us as a mere theological expression. No; it is a deeply solemn reality. "Don't you know that you are the Temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?" (1 Corinthians 3;16). O, what a constant preservative against sin--what an ever-present incentive to holiness were this conviction more habitually present with us--"My soul is a shrine tenanted and consecrated by the Holy Spirit!" How the thought evokes the blush of conscious shortcoming and unworthiness, in recalling the past! How it demands self scrutiny for the present and watchfulness for the future! How crowded becomes the memory with the remembrance of impure imaginations, unamiable tempers, vain aspirations, "winged ambitions,"--selfish ways, passionate words, unloving deeds! Humbled, softened, saddened at the retrospect, be this our prayer--the prayer of one who, far more than Paul, realized the terrible combat between flesh and spirit--one who fell sorely wounded in the battle--but yet as God's accredited and honored soldier rose from his fall--though carrying the scar of ignoble defeat and failure to the last--"Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. Take not Your Holy Spirit from me. Restore unto me the joys of Your salvation, and uphold me with Your free Spirit " (Psalms 51;10, 11, 12).
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Let me listen, daily, hourly, to the divine admonition--"Walk in the Spirit and you shall not fulfill the lusts of the flesh." How many venture to walk--but it is to walk dangerously near the precipice straying on doubtful or forbidden ground; with a faltering will; holding parley with sin; tampering with the sensitiveness of conscience and with the treacherous allurements and base compliances of the world; thus "grieving the Holy Spirit of God, whereby we are sealed unto the day of redemption."

Lord, bring me to live more and more constantly under the sovereignty of that lofty motive to walk and act so as to please You; to exercise a jealous scrutiny over my truant, treacherous, deceitful heart. Specially in my daily business and daily duties and daily temptations and daily perplexities, may I seek to be led by Your Spirit. Let me keep free of whatever influences would deflect the needle from its pole, and prevent the love of God from being shed abroad in my heart by the Holy Spirit given unto me. Beholding, as in a glass, the glory of the Lord, may I be changed into the same image from glory to glory, by the Lord the Spirit (2 Corinthians 3;18 ). Free from the bondage of the law--the law of sin and death, let me become a willing slave to the new bondage of Christ's service. Recognizing the ultimate end of Redemption to be Sanctification, may I yield myself and my members servants to righteousness unto holiness (Romans 6;19).

Here is our Apostle's main incentive to the leading of this higher spiritual life and this diviner spiritual walk--"For Christ's love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again (2 Corinthians 5;14, 15). "Since you have been raised to new life with Christ, set your sights on the realities of heaven, where Christ sits at God's right hand in the place of honor and power. Let heaven fill your thoughts. Do not think only about things down here on earth. For you died when Christ died, and your real life is hidden with Christ in God" (Colossians 3;1-3). "To be spiritually minded is life and peace" may be taken as the summary of this passage and chapter. As a responsive and appropriate chord to Paul's Song of the renewed mind, let us close with an old prophetic strain, celebrating the City of Salvation with the Gates of righteousness and peace we have just been surveying–"In that day, everyone in the land of Judah will sing this song: Our city is now strong! We are surrounded by the walls of God's salvation. Open the gates to all who are righteous; allow the faithful to enter. You will keep in perfect peace all who trust in you, whose thoughts are fixed on you!" Isaiah 26:1-3



4. I SHALL RISE AGAIN.

In the verses now to claim our thoughts, we have again two antithetical clauses; or, repeating our figure, antiphonal strains.

"And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit, who lives in you. Therefore, brothers, we have an obligation--but it is not to the sinful nature, to live according to it." Romans 8:11-12

"The body is dead because of sin;"--"Shall also quicken your mortal bodies." Other topics already touched upon, are embraced in the passage. We shall therefore confine ourselves to these contrasted words--answering chords--"dead" and "quicken." It is Death in conjunction with Life--or rather with Life as its sequel and triumph. It recalls the burial sentences so familiar to many, when standing by the grave--"Man that is born of a woman has but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He comes up and is cut down like a flower; he flees as it were a shadow, and never continues in one stay. In the midst of life we are in death." Followed by the inspiriting words--"In sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life…Our perfect consummation and bliss, both in body and soul, in Your eternal everlasting glory."

Or there may be brought before the mental vision of some of us, the impressive and never to be forgotten spectacle of a soldier's--a Christian soldier's funeral. The procession slowly pacing the streets, amid the wailing of the "Dead-march"--with the accompaniment of muffled drum--"the body is dead." But when the concluding volley is fired--the ordinary tribute borne by the brave to the brave; the dirge-notes are merged into some jubilant strains, possibly dear to the departed as he was passing through the last mortal strife.
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The same antithesis as that of our present verses, often occurs throughout Sacred Scripture--"The voice said, Cry; and he said, What shall I cry? all flesh is grass, and all the goodness thereof is as the flower of the field" (Isaiah 40;6). The voice said Cry--"Verily, verily, I say unto you, The hour comes, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God; and those who hear shall live" (John 5;25 ).

Let us briefly meditate on the two themes.

"The body is dead." Some have considered this expression figurative or symbolic. It is in every respect more in harmony with the Apostle's meaning and argument, to take it in its simple and natural acceptation. His reference is to the dissolution of the mortal framework (2 Corinthians 5;1). Indeed any other interpretation we think is inadmissible. The "body"--were we by that to understand "the flesh"--the animal nature, is not thus "dead because of sin." Such would unsay and contradict the repeated assertions of the seventh chapter--negative the writer's humbling lamentations over his own dual experiences. Even when most subdued, the fires of corruption and evil smoulder to the last; and death alone puts the extinguisher upon them.

It is then, as may be strongly asserted, this human body of flesh and blood, which sooner or later undergoes the doom of dissolution, of which he speaks. And this, too, even though "Christ be in you" (v. 10). There is no exemption from the universal law. Christianity and Paganism are on the same footing here. It is the testimony of wide humanity, "We must needs die." Believer and unbeliever--the children of light and the children of darkness are served heirs alike to the "covenant with death."

And, "the body is dead because of sin." "Death has passed over all men for that all have sinned!" It is sin which wrote that primal sentence from which there is no appeal--involved in that warfare from which there is no discharge--"Dust you are, and unto dust you shall return." DEATH!--we dare not mock our deepest, holiest feelings by attempting to soften your terrors. Death!--which so often, like an avalanche, comes crashing down in the midst of summer skies and smiling fields. You are indeed the great Destroyer--the disrupter of closest bonds, the unsparing implacable foe of human happiness; leaving behind you weeping eyes and broken hearts. If there were not other inspiring music, of which we shall presently speak, there could be no "Song of Songs" to wake into life and hope these hushed and gloomy corridors--nothing but unstrung harps. We could only be mute in such bewildering moments, as we wail out the dirge-notes of the insoluble mystery--"How is the strong staff broken, and the beautiful rod!"--the severance, the void, the blank, the silence! In the words of the Laureate--


But I willingly leave the shadows of this picture, and pass to its glorious lights--from the sob in the darkness to the "Song in the night."

(V. 11) "Shall also QUICKEN your mortal bodies." It is the first introduction--the first faint warbling, in the inspired Canticle, of the believer's future triumph--the first pencilled ray, which, as the chapter closes, "breaks and broadens into glorious day."

"Our vile body" (lit., the body of our humiliation, Philippians 3;21), is to assume an incorruptible form--quickened from the dust of mortality into everlasting life. "Life in Paul's writings," says Dean Howson, "is scarcely represented adequately by 'Life.' It generally means more than this, that is, Life triumphant over death." And let us note very specially with what, in the mind of the Apostle, that quickening is associated. It is with the Resurrection of the believer's Lord--"He that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies." Paul had discoursed to the Athenians at Mars Hill, on "Jesus and the Resurrection." He does so now with his Roman converts. He brings before their minds that great Resurrection day, on which the buried Conqueror had met His first followers with the "all hail" (Matthew 28;9); and when the glad tidings were afterwards borne from lip to lip--"The Lord is risen!" This, indeed, is the chief note of our Apostle's present Golden Song, and of all the after Songs of Christendom, including the greatest uninspired Song of the ages--"When you had overcome the sharpness of death, You did open the Kingdom of Heaven to all believers." "If Christ be not risen," he elsewhere affirms, "your faith is vain, and you are yet in your sins." "But now has Christ risen from the dead, and become the first-fruits of those who slept" (1 Corinthians 15;17, 20). "It is a faithful saying. For if we be dead with Him, we shall also live with Him" (2 Timothy 2;11).
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Am I able to appropriate this transcendent truth, that in a partial sense now, and in a full sense hereafter, I am sharer in the Resurrection-life of my divine Redeemer? The great problem of all time has been--"If a man die shall he live again?" Paganism with its elysium, mingling with a dim land of shadows (Tartarus and Acheron)--gave a feeble, trembling response, like,


The noblest intellect of the olden world says, hypothetically--"If there be a life beyond?" Even Athens, with all her boasted enlightenment, had one of her favorite altars in the Temple of Minerva Polias dedicated to 'Oblivion'. Nature presents, in her great parable-book, some significant guesses and types, but nothing more--of "the secret hidden from ages and generations." In the upspringing of the seed buried under the clods and snows of winter; or the bursting of the insect from its cocoon prison-house, soaring to heaven on wings of purple and gold. But all these oracles were unsatisfactory and ambiguous, until Christ came. Rolling back the stone from the sepulcher of Golgotha, He proclaimed Himself--"I am the Resurrection and the life;"--coupling with this a guarantee for the life and resurrection of His people--"Because I live, you shall live also." He, the first fruits, was presented before the Heavenly Altar, the pledge of the vast harvest that was to follow--"Afterward those who are Christ's at His coming." We need not wonder at the Apostle's emphatic words in a subsequent strain which we shall come to consider--"It is Christ that died, yes rather, that is risen again."

Blessed Savior! may I be enabled to "know You, and the power of Your resurrection" (Philippians 3;10). I would enter by faith Your vacant tomb, and hear the angel-announcement--"He is not here, He is risen as He said; come, see the place where the Lord lay." No, more; I would see in all this, what disarms the sting in the first clause of the passage now before us--"the body is dead because of SIN;"--for I see, in You, death and sin alike doomed. In You the grave has become the robing-room for immortality. So completely has Your dying vanquished the last enemy and his dominion, that You are said to have "abolished death," and to have "brought life and immortality to light." I can understand now the meaning of Paul elsewhere, when, in enumerating the contents of the Christian's charter--the roll and record of the believer's privileges, he includes the startling entry--"All things are yours…DEATH" (1 Corinthians 3;22). He was writing to the world's Metropolis--to those familiar with their Appian Way--the long street of tombs, ending in the Via Sacra with the Forum and Capitol. Earth in a wider sense is one long Appian Way--a vista and avenue of sepulchers, with the universal inscription--"Sin has reigned unto death." But, through Him who has raised up Christ from the dead, it resolves itself into a "Sacred Approach," leading to the City whose walls are salvation and its gates praise--on whose entrance--its triumphal arch--the words are emblazoned--"And there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain, for the former things are passed away" (Revelation 21;4).

Meanwhile, in the prospect of that glorious quickening, when His people will be changed into "the body of His glory,"--may it be my longing and aspiration, that "the spirit"--the renewed, quickened, and regenerated spirit--may be "life because of righteousness." May I be imbued with a spirit instinct with holiness. Above all, desiring to be "like" my risen Lord. The exhortation of the Apostle of love seems the appropriate one in this longing after purity and consecration of heart and life--"And every man that has this hope in Him purifies himself, even as He is pure" ( 1 John 3;3). It is a solemn test and touchstone which ushers in our present verses--"IF Christ be in you!" Is my life now "hidden with Christ in God"? Is His love enthroned in my heart, and is it expelling all less worthy aspirations? Partaker of this Resurrection-life of Jesus, let me so rise above the fear of natural death, that seen in the morning light of the great coming Easter it may appear like a "going home."

And may not all this be deepened and intensified, when I think of it in connection with the beloved dead? Those rayless eyes will be lighted again. The music of that hushed voice will be awakened again. In the certainty of that quickening, we are lifted far above the poor Xaipe (the farewell) on Pagan tombs. As we pace these dark and doleful realms of death, the sound as of the silver trumpet is heard. It is a Song of Songs in long antecedent years, sung by no Apostle but by the Lord of life Himself; as looking down the vista of ages, He exclaims--"I will ransom them from the power of the grave; I will redeem them from death; O death, I will be your plague; O grave, I will be your destruction" (Hosea 13;14). "Your dead shall live;…awake and sing, you that dwell in dust" (Isaiah 26;19).
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Hear how, in other beautiful words of comfort, our Apostle connects the Resurrection of Christ with the glorious awaking of His sleeping saints. It is not the poet's "Sleep, the sleep that knows no waking." "Brothers, we do not want you to be ignorant about those who fall asleep, or to grieve like the rest of men, who have no hope. We believe that Jesus died and rose again and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. According to the Lord's own word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left till the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever." (1 Thessalonians 4;13-17). "Together with them;" and "forever with the Lord!" Death is the transmuting and transforming of human relations into a life which is impossible in the earthly sphere. It is, with reverence we call it--a Transfiguration on the Mount of Heaven.

This meditation cannot be more appropriately closed, than by quoting two passages which seem written as if an express comment on the verses which have claimed our attention--two sweet melodies in full harmony with our Song of Songs;

"All honor to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, for it is by his boundless mercy that God has given us the privilege of being born again. Now we live with a wonderful expectation because Jesus Christ rose again from the dead." 1 Peter 1:3

For our perishable earthly bodies must be transformed into heavenly bodies that will never die. When this happens - when our perishable earthly bodies have been transformed into heavenly bodies that will never die - then at last the Scriptures will come true:


For sin is the sting that results in death, and the law gives sin its power. How we thank God, who gives us victory over sin and death through Jesus Christ our Lord! 1 Corinthians 15:53-57



5. THE CHILD-SONG AND ITS LULLABY.

"For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. So you should not be like cowering, fearful slaves. You should behave instead like God's very own children, adopted into his family - calling him "Father, dear Father." For his Holy Spirit speaks to us deep in our hearts and tells us that we are God's children. And since we are his children, we will share his treasures - for everything God gives to his Son, Christ, is ours, too. But if we are to share his glory, we must also share his suffering." Romans 8:14-17

Another prolonged note of the divine music; and again suggested by one preceding.

The Apostle had just been dwelling on the Holy Spirit and His operations as the active Force in the regenerated nature; awaking, inspiring, invigorating, perpetuating "life" (vers. 9, 10, 11, 13). This leads, by a natural transition, to a yet higher strain in the symphony. The subject, in itself entirely new, forms a distinct advance in the argument of the chapter. To use a different figure, we may regard it as a golden gate, like that on the eastern wall of Zion, leading to the privileges of the true Spiritual Temple. All the benefits of the New Covenant with which the chapter closes, which have their crown and culmination in the triumph of divine love, spring out of the relationship here disclosed--Sons of God.

Among the Bible truths which owe their fuller development and acceptance to these later decades, prominently is the divine Fatherhood and sonship. They form the essential doctrine--the dual "Song" of New Testament times and Gospel story. God, under the Old Covenant, was revealed as Jehovah--the Almighty, the Shepherd, the Stone (or Rock) of Israel (Genesis 17;1, 49;24). It was reserved to the Author and Finisher of the faith--Himself the divine Son, to be the revealer of the more endearing name of Father. How He loves to dwell upon it, and to enshrine it in discourse, and parable, and miracle! It is breathed by Him in His own mountain Oratories, whether by the shores of Gennesaret or on the green slopes of Olivet. It forms the opening word and key-note of His own appointed prayer, "Our Father in heaven!" It is repeated in His great Valedictory and in His great Intercessory prayer; in the hour of superhuman conflict in Gethsemane--the hour of superhuman darkness on the Cross. It is consecrated in the first Easter words--a possession for His Church in all time--"I ascend unto My Father and your Father; and to My God and your God!" (John 20;17).
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Who can wonder that Paul here catches up a strain that had so divine a warrant? We may well call the verses now to be considered, "the Song of the adopted children." No loftier cadence can rise from the lips of the holy Church throughout all the world– "For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. So you should not be like cowering, fearful slaves. You should behave instead like God's very own children, adopted into his family - calling him "Father, dear Father." For his Holy Spirit speaks to us deep in our hearts and tells us that we are God's children. And since we are his children, we will share his treasures - for everything God gives to his Son, Christ, is ours, too. But if we are to share his glory, we must also share his suffering." Romans 8:14-17

In this singularly beautiful passage, the Apostle's object seems, to show the highest ground on which believers may rest their spiritual privileges and eternal safety. Not merely, as he had already pointed out, by being invested with a new spiritual life infused and quickened by the Holy Spirit, but as the sons and daughters of the Lord Almighty--God's own children by adoption. As such, their rights are inalienable. "Why you are no more a servant, but a son; and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ" (Galatians 4;7).

He begins with the customary antithesis; contrasting the spirit of bondage and the spirit of sonship. "The spirit of bondage again to fear." The law and its inexorable demands generates this apprehension--"it genders to bondage." It is Sinai with its "blackness and darkness and tempest; the sound of a trumpet and the voice of words;" and whose natural expression is--"I exceedingly fear and quake." Is not this servile dread, even in the case of God's own children, at times unhappily nurtured and strengthened by a repellent theology--unwise and unscriptural teaching; inspiring, of necessity, a joyless faith; while with morbid or sensitive natures, self-introspection deepens the gloom,

"And conscience does make cowards of us all."

Paul's belief was very different. It was the echo of his great Master's utterances; the unfolding of a tender, sympathetic FATHER--the human tie which binds child to parent, having its archetype in this higher relationship. As the earthly child in the hour of fear and danger rushes to its parent's arms and (in the expressive Greek word of our present passage) "cries" "Father;"--feeling its need of guardianship and protection, and knowing that that loving protection is assured; so is it with the believer and his Father-God. Away with all harsh theories; all the misconceptions which had their gloomy origin in the mythology of those Romans to whom this Epistle was written--whose dominant thought was deity to be propitiated--not deity to be reverenced and trusted and loved.

"God," says Bernard; and he is the interpreter of the earlier, in contrast with the mediaeval centuries--"God is not called the Father of Vengeance, but the Father of Mercies." We do not thus set aside or minimize the Law and its demands. It must ever occupy its own important place in the divine economy. It demonstrates the deficiency and defilement of our best obedience, the hopelessness of any effort of ours to meet its requirements, satisfy its exactions and pay its penalties. But in the Gospel system, as unfolded in all its length and breadth in this eighth of Romans, we are taught to regard it as "a schoolmaster to bring us to Christ" (Galatians 3;24). It is not the great motive principle in the renewed nature. That new dominating motive is the sweet constraint of filial love, by which we are drawn to the Father. The "You shall" of Sinai, with its stern impossibilities, is changed for the words echoed from Calvary--"We love Him because He first loved us."

O wondrous privilege! O marvelous sonship! Prodigals by nature--bondaged slaves--now, to use the expression of an old writer, "within the house." In accordance with the New Covenant, the deed of release is signed and sealed by the divine Ransomer--"Now therefore you are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellow-citizens with the saints, and of the household of God" (Ephesians 2;19). This is what the Apostle here calls in the corresponding antithetical clause, "the spirit of adoption." Even the freed slave in ancient times dared not address his master as a son. But Christ's ransomed freeman can. "If the Son makes you free, then you shall be free indeed." Yes, "free," as Paul here adds--free to address the mightiest and holiest of all Beings by the endearing name, "ABBA!" "Abba" is the Syro-Chaldaic form of the Hebrew word for Father. It was more familiar to Paul, as a Hebrew of the Hebrews, than the foreign Greek [word], and would be the more genuine expression of his newborn filial devotion and consecration. Perhaps, too, in harmony with Luther's rendering of it--as "dear Father," it might be the avowal of familiarity and loving trust. Or, add to this, may it not have been like the superscription on the Cross, in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin--to bring the sacred name by an emphatic conjunction, home to Jew and Greek; the Father-Head of one vast united family? No strain in this Song of Songs is sweeter or more divinely musical. It is like a serenade of Angels--no rather, a lullaby from Him who is spoken of "as one whom his mother comforts" (Isaiah 66;13)
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But then comes, with solemn urgency, the all-important, all-momentous question--"How do I know that this sonship is mine? How can I establish my claim to these lofty privileges and immunities."

The Apostle proceeds to reply. There is, first, the "leading" of the Spirit. In the solemn emphasis of the original Greek in v. 14--"As many as are led by the Spirit of God, they" (these and these only,) "are the sons of God." Then, secondly, there is the witness of the Spirit--the inward evidencing power of this divine Agent in the soul. "The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God" (v. 16).

How does the Spirit thus bear witness? Here we tread on difficult and delicate ground, the borderland of mysticism and faith. One thing we know, "The Spirit of God is not straitened." He can act how, and where, and when, and as He pleases. Moreover, the means He employs vary with the individual feelings and idiosyncrasies of those who are the subject of His divine operations. We must take special care, however, not to mistake the character of these. Especially should we be jealous of the demand which not a few make, of pronounced outward manifestations--the display of vehement emotion--"sensationalism." Such tests are often unsafe and unreliable; the hallucination of excited feeling and overwrought temperament. Far less are we to look for the witness of the Spirit in mere mechanical rites; the alleged efficacy of sacramental symbol. His normal operations are rather thus beautifully described by lips of sacred authority--"The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound thereof, but can not tell whence it comes, and where it goes; so is every one that is born of the Spirit" (John 3;8 ). Or again, He is likened to the dew--silently distilling on the earth; hanging its pearl-drops on leaf of tree or spire of grass--without noise or premonition. "The kingdom of God comes not with observation." Yes; "not with observation;" and yet, in a very real sense, with observation--subjective, yet at the same time objective. His witness may be most safely described as evidenced in daily life--"known by its fruits." These fruits are not left for our conjecture. They are specially enumerated; they are specially called "the fruits of the Spirit,"--"love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance" (Galatians 5;22, 23). The indwelling of the Spirit is authenticated and countersigned by a holy, pure, consistent, heavenly character. These are evidences patent to every honest "seeker after God;" that, too, despite of many mournful alienations and deflections--the ever-present painful consciousness of coming so far short of the divine ideal.

O God--my Father-God!--have I been enabled in any feeble measure to realize this my sonship, and to have the inward, divine, responsive witness of the Spirit? Have I been able to dismiss the old slavish fear of You? Am I among the number of those of whom the Savior speaks, who "will" (desire) "to do Your will?"--saying, "Your Spirit, O God, is good, lead me to the land of uprightness?" Can I stand such simple tests as these--do I love the Word? do I prize the privilege of prayer? When affliction comes, and the divine hand is heavy upon me, am I "led" by this Spirit of Yours to own the rectitude of Your dispensations; and just because of conscious sonship am I able to say, it may be through tears, "Even so, FATHER! for so it seemed good in Your sight; and, as Your son, I shall not permit it to be evil or unrighteous in mine!" There are few tokens of the Spirit's "leadings" more frequently or more beautifully evidenced than this latter; when He is visibly seen to come down, as predicted, "like rain upon the mown grass, and as showers that water the earth." The human soul, mowed by the scythe of affliction, humble, stricken, lies withered and faded. But the heavenly Agent descends--faith and love and devout resignation go up like a cloud of fragrant incense to the Father's throne and the Father's heart.

"As many as are led." It was the Savior's own promise--"He will guide you into all truth…He will show you things to come" (John 16;13). Just as some of us may recall, in early days, the guide over Alpine glaciers and crevasses, terrains and boulders; then up the jagged precipices that conducted above mist and cloud to "the blue skies," with boundless prospect of "everlasting hills." That experienced conductor, of strong muscle, and eagle eye, and unerring footstep, is a feeble type of the Infallible GUIDE of His Church, alike individually and collectively.

Blessed Spirit! whose office and mission was thus announced by the departing Christ, do lead me! Let me strive to do nothing that would grieve the gracious Agent, by whom I am "sealed unto the day of redemption." Enable me to curb passion, restrain temper, subdue and mortify pride and vainglory. Attune my life and heart to an Old Testament Song, which has its sweetest cadence in the New--"He LEADS me beside the still waters. He restores my soul; he leads me in the paths of righteousness for His name's sake." Nor let me be satisfied with negative results; but rising to the dignity and glory and responsibility of sonship, give me increase of holiness--gradual conformity to the divine mind. Waking up from spiritual sloth and ease, help me to rebuild the collapsed purpose, and consecrate fresh energy in the heavenly service, aiming to live and walk so as to please You. Specially enable me to follow the footsteps of the Great Example. When, from His divine lips comes still, as of old, the solemn heart-searching question--"Do you love Me?" may it be mine to reply, even though under a trembling apprehension of my own vacillation and instability--"Lord, You know all things, You know it is my desire to love You!"
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And it may be a help to those who are most feelingly alive to this fitfulness of their love and the inefficacy of their obedience, that that sonship is not dependent on their capricious frames and feelings. Like all else in the everlasting covenant, it is divinely secured, ratified, sealed. For thus runs their charter deed--"Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, wherein He has made us accepted in the beloved" (Ephesians 1;5, 6). The glory of that sonship, with all its concomitant blessings, is rendered sure by a God that cannot lie--"I have called you by your name; you are Mine!" (Isaiah 43;1). "But I said, How shall I put you among the children, and give you a pleasant land, a goodly heritage of the hosts of nations? And I said, You shall call me, My Father; and shall not turn away from me" (Jeremiah 3;19). "I will be to them a God, and they shall be to me a people" (Hebrews 8;10).

It is to this the Apostle now leads us in the present verses; "And, if children, then heirs." It is a heritage from which nothing can cut us out or cut us off.

What is the heritage thus spoken of and promised? His words are remarkable. They can be best left to their own mystic, divine interpretation. The ideas they embody are untransferable by the poor vehicle of human language. They are among those he elsewhere describes as being "impossible for a man to utter" (2 Corinthians 12;4)--"Heirs of God!"--"partakers of the divine nature." We have recalled the like symbol in the Book of Revelation describing the indescribable glories of the Redeemed; "And I saw no Temple therein, for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the Temple of it" (Revelation 21;22). "And there shall be no night there, and they need no candle, neither light of the sun; for the Lord God gives them light, and they shall reign forever and ever" (Revelation 22;5 ). "Him that overcomes will I make a pillar in the temple of my God, and he shall go no more out; and I will write upon him the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God, which is new Jerusalem, which comes down out of heaven from my God; and I will write upon him my new name" (Revelation 3;12).

"Heirs of God!" In these three words are comprehended all the blessings Omnipotence can bestow. Every attribute of the divine nature is embarked on my side and pledged for my salvation--Power, Wisdom, Faithfulness. ABBA!--a Father's house--a Father's halls--a Father's love--a Father's welcome--a Father's presence forever and ever! "This," says Luther, "far passes all man's capacity, that God should call us heirs, not of some rich and mighty Prince, not of the Emperor, not of the whole world merely, but of Himself, the Almighty Creator of all things. If a man could comprehend the great excellency of this, that he is indeed a son and heir of God, and with a constant faith believe the same, he would abhor all the pomp and glory of the world in comparison of the eternal inheritance." (Watchwords from Luther," p. 334.)

Nor is this all. These peerless blessings are confirmed and ratified by the farther guarantee--"joint-heirs with Christ." Christ, as the Brother in my nature, has made the heritage doubly sure "for us miserable sinners, who lay in darkness and the shadow of death, that He might make us the children of God, and exalt us to everlasting life." He, indeed, in His divine essence, occupies a place and realm all His own. He is "Heir," by virtue of His essential dignity; what the old writers call His "Crown rights." He is "the First-born among many brethren"--a name is given Him which is above every name. "He has on His vesture and on His thigh a name written, King of Kings and Lord of Lords" (Revelation 19;16). We, on the other hand, are heirs by adoption and grace, by virtue of our living union with our living Head. This heritage is ours, first and partially in possession--"Beloved, now are we the sons of God." Its full blessings are ours in future possession, when Christ's own words, uttered, not in the days of His humiliation, but in His exaltation at the right hand of power, will be fulfilled"--To him that overcomes will I grant to sit with Me (a fellow heir) on My throne" (Revelation 3;21).

Oh wondrous endowment!--and as free and gracious as it is wondrous! Under the Hebrew code, the law of first-born was rigidly observed. The, eldest-born received the inheritance. Isaac was Abraham's heir; and while the other children of the patriarch had their limited portions meted out to them, he, as the recognized son of the promise, entered on his father's goods and possessions. It is different with the spiritual Israel. There is no law of first-born in the Church of God's first-born. All are on divine equality here. All are warranted and welcome to enter on the purchased heritage--to claim the adoption of sons and the co-heirship with Christ. There is but one condition--"And IF CHRIST'S--then are you Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise" (Galatians 3;29).
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The remaining clause of the verse is needed to complete this Adoption-Song, though we shall reserve its fuller consideration for the kindred one which follows, and which will demand a separate treatment. (V. 17) "If so be that we suffer with Him, that we may be also glorified together." Observe it is not only, that suffering is the law of the kingdom, but that we SUFFER WITH HIM.

Elevating and inspiring surely is the thought to all sufferers whatever the diverse causes of affliction may be, that they and their great Lord pass through the same ordeal; that He has drunk of every sorrow-brook by the way (Psalms 110;7). "Perfect through suffering" is the characteristic alike of the Head and the members. In all their afflictions He was afflicted; in all their tears "Jesus wept." "With Him!" How the assurance disarms trial of its sting--"I am undergoing the experience of the Son, who 'learned obedience by the things which He suffered.'" Who knew better than Paul the boon, and blessing of this identity of suffering with his suffering Master? Hear his testimony in the Mamertine dungeon, with certain death hanging over him, "All men forsook me; notwithstanding, the Lord stood with me and strengthened me; and I was delivered out of the mouth of the lion" (2 Timothy 4;16, 17).

This suffering culminates in glory--"That we may be also glorified together" (v. 17). "If we suffer, we shall also reign with Him" (2 Timothy 2;12). "Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened unto you; but rejoice, inasmuch as you are partakers of Christ's sufferings; that, when His glory shall be revealed, you may be glad also with exceeding joy" (1 Peter 4;12, 13). No words in the Redeemer's intercessory prayer are more elevating and comforting than those, in which the Father's name is linked with the bliss of His ransomed people--"FATHER, I will that they also, whom You have given Me, be with Me where I am; that they may behold My glory" (John 17;24). Following their Lord's example, and echoing His utterance, the inspired writers seem to love thus to repeat the filial name and recount the adoption privileges. In selecting from one of these, let us, in closing, put emphasis on the words of John's apostrophe, and make them the refrain of this Redemption Song--"How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him." 1 John 3:1



6. A SONG IN THE NIGHT.

Here we have another Antiphon; suggested, moreover, as we have found in the case of other strains, by the one immediately preceding.

The Apostle's new theme is that chief of forces fetched from a distant future, by which Christianity sustains the soul in its great fight of present afflictions. (V. 18 ) "For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us."

We found, in the previous verses, the inspired writer expatiating on the name and character of believers, as "heirs of God and joint-heirs with Christ." But as he contemplates this wealth of privilege--a difficulty--a mystery--presents itself. How can the Fatherhood of God be reconciled with the existence of present suffering? And, be it observed, the sufferings and sorrows of which he speaks are not those to which all flesh is heir; but the afflictions of His own dear children. If the Father welcomes His prodigals home--calls them "sons"--gifts them with best robe and ring and sandal--making His halls resonant with music; how can we account, alongside of this, for the many "songs of a heavy heart"? How can we account for beds of pain and tearful eyes; for the badges–pictures of dead ones surmounting the household porticoes of those who cling most lovingly to the paternal name and relationship? He had just revealed to us in elevating words the glow of a summer sky. How can it be permitted or ordained that dark clouds should dim its azure? Why in a valley flushed with flowers of heavenly beauty and fragrance, allow these chill avalanches to descend, blighting all loveliness? Why permit these grating 'life-discords' into the believer's Song of Songs? That Song here moans and sobs itself away in a dirge.
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In our last meditation, we had one answer given--or at all events had stated one glorious compensation; that, as heirs of the kingdom, His people are honored and privileged to be fellow sufferers with their great suffering Head--"If so be that we suffer with Him." Christians in their deepest experiences of sorrow and trial are identified with the King of Sorrows--"Unto you it is given in the behalf of Christ, not only to believe on Him, but also to suffer for His sake" (Philippians 1;29). Truly, when He is seen rejected, despised, homeless--forsaken of trusted friends--bowed in anguish; scourged, spit upon--nailed to the cruel Cross; what are His servants' severest trials?--dust in the balance compared with His. In one dreadful sense can He exclusively use and appropriate the words--"I have trodden the wine-press alone." Yet, too, in a very real manner, are they called and permitted to enter as He did, within the portals of sorrow, and to listen to His own words--"Tarry here (under the shadow of these gloomy olive-trees) and watch with Me!"

Yes, tried believer, may it not well disarm suffering (your suffering) of its sting, to know that the same afflictions appointed for you, were appointed to Him before you? In your deepest Gethsemanes of trial there is consecration in the thought "He suffered!" "Christ also has suffered for us (yes, suffered with us), leaving us an example that you should follow His steps." Those called, in v. 14, "sons of God," and led by the Spirit to cry Abba, Father, have, as their transcendent solace--"the fellowship of His sufferings;" while words, elsewhere recorded for the special encouragement of God's children, may well repress all rebellion and hush all murmurs--"Consider Him who endured such contradiction of sinners against Himself, lest you be wearied and faint in your minds" (Hebrews 12;3).

But in the verse now before us the Apostle proceeds to state another reason for accepting affliction and trial. He makes these the subject, so to speak, of divine arithmetic--a question of heavenly proportion. Or, as implied in the other figurative expression of the verse, he weighs the two opposites in his balance. In the one scale he puts "the sufferings of the present time." And it is noteworthy that, different from the other verses of our chapter, he seems to detail here his own personal, individual experience. It is, if I may so venture to call it, a Solo in this inspired Song, "I reckon." Few so well qualified to make the calculation. Few so able to load that scale as he! "What great things he must suffer for My sake," were the terms of his commission--his "marching orders" at the outset of his apostolic campaign. How bravely he accepted them; and how faithfully he discharged them--from the first hour of midnight flight; through storms of land and sea--the outer types of far fiercer moral hurricanes that swept over his sensitive yet dauntless spirit--on to the close of all, when from dreary dungeon he was hurried outside the Ostian Gate to encounter the executioner's axe and undergo a martyr's death! Yes, I repeat, few were in a position to put down, as he could, one portion of the figures in this summation--"the sufferings of the present time!"

If we may surmise that he had others also of the family of affliction in his eye, none could well be more conspicuous than those to whom he now wrote. They knew already, and they were before long to know in more terrible form, what suffering was. If we are correct in assigning A.D. 57, or spring of 58, as the date of the writing of this Epistle, it was the fourth year of the reign of Nero--a name suggestive of horrors and ferocities in their most revolting shape. Though the worst of these cruelties associated with his "reign of terror" were not yet reached (the circus and garden-fires occurring a few years later), he was already beginning to develop the barbarous instincts of "the lion" in its savagery (2 Timothy 4;17). The martyr era, at all events, was at hand--so that by anticipation Paul could call on his Roman converts and their infant church to prepare for a speedy reckoning of "the sufferings of this present time."

With us the age of martyrdom is over. Bigotry has meanwhile closed her iron dungeons. But sorrow, trial, in their thousand forms and phases, still remain as they ever were, to load the Apostle's scale and give point to his question of proportion. "All that live godly in Christ Jesus will suffer," if not persecution, at all events affliction. Suffering has ever been, and ever will be, God's appointed discipline. The King's highway is paved with trial. "We must, through much tribulation, enter into the kingdom of God" (Acts 14;22).

We now turn to the other scale in the balance--"the glory that is to be revealed in us." Or, reverting to his other figure as a question of divine calculation; he puts down a unit--that unit represents present suffering. But he adds countless ciphers, to represent the contrast. The two are not to be compared. They are incomparable--out of proportion. This apostolic reckoner had obtained, through "visions and revelations," a glimpse of the inner glory. Darkness gives place to the brightness of eternal day.
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This, then, is the second explanation of the otherwise baffling mystery of suffering; that, as he otherwise expresses it--compared with "the ages of the ages," it is "our light affliction, which is but for a moment" (2 Corinthians 4;17). He sees, close by, a few Marah-drops of earth's bitter pool. He looks onward, and beholds "a river, the streams whereof make glad the city of God." It is "a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory." "A far more exceeding;"--the expression in the original Greek is difficult to render with sufficient intensity--"More and more exceedingly" is the R.V. The Apostle sees glory rising on glory. The weight of the Cross may be great, but it is nothing to the weight of the Crown.

Taking this, then, as his deliberate, truthful summation, "Not worthy to be compared;" let us, aided by Paul's few suggestive words, farther analyze his "reckoning."

Sorrowing believer–

(1) "Reckon" that your sufferings are LIMITED to " this present time;"--"After you have suffered awhile." They are finite; and as such, cannot be compared with their corresponding glory, which is infinite. The sorrows of earth thus restricted in duration, when seen from "the glory revealed," will be but as the visions of a troubled dream in the night, which the morrow's dawn has dispelled. And yet, be it remarked in passing, let us not from this, and through any unworthy, morbid feeling, diminish the importance of time and of the present time. In this great question of divine arithmetic, if it be but a unit, it is the significant unit which gives the figures which follow all their value. It is standing on the all-momentous platform of the present, that we can say of the outlook on the Great Beyond--"The world passes away, and the lust thereof; but he that does the will of God abides forever" (1 John 2;17).

(2) "Reckon," that your afflictions and sorrows are METED OUT, appointed, controlled by your Father in heaven. Affliction springs not from the dust nor trouble from the ground. He does not conceal His hand--"I bring a cloud over the earth" (Genesis 9;14). It is no capricious dealing of fate, or accident, or cruel misfortune. They are the words of our "Abba, Father"--"I have chosen you in the furnace of affliction." "Wearisome nights" are "appointed." "I will afflict you in measure."

(3) "Reckon," that this divine Chastener--this Father-God--will not allow His afflictions to go TOO FAR. He would not permit the Adversary to touch the life of His servant Job (Job 2;6). He held him as in a chain, saying, "Thus far shall you go, and no farther." He "stays His rough wind in the day of His east wind;"--"tempering the wind to the shorn lamb." There is no such thing as superfluous or unnecessary suffering. In quaint Hebrew symbolism, "He puts my tears into His bottle" (Psalms 56;8 ). He metes out drop by drop--tear by tear. "If need be, you are in heaviness" (1 Peter 1;6).

(4) "Reckon," that in sufferings here there are always SOLACES--sweet drops in the bitter cup, lulls in the fiercest storm--silver linings in the darkest cloud--gracious alleviations and mitigations. This, too, carrying out the figure of the Apostle, is another question of proportion--"As you are partakers of the sufferings, so shall you be also of the consolation" (2 Corinthians 1;7). When God allures us into the wilderness, it is not to abandon us there; but it is to "speak comfortably unto us," and to "make the valley of Achor a door of hope" (Hosea 2;14, 15). He takes Jacob to the wild uplands of Bethel and gives him a hard stone for his night-pillow; but He makes the solitary place glad, He peoples his dreams with a ladder of angels and visions of glory. "I will sing," says the Psalmist, "of mercy and judgment; and he puts the mercy first. God's judgments may be "a great deep." But Your mercy, O God, is vaster still; for it is "in the heavens; and Your faithfulness reaches unto the clouds" (Psalms 36;5, 6).

(5) "Reckon," yet once more, and, chiefly, that suffering is the pledge of a Heavenly Father's love. This is the point dominating all, and to which the previous verses, descriptive of the believer's heritage, lead up. "Whom the Lord loves He chastens." "What son is he whom the Father chastens not?" "As many as I love I rebuke and chasten."
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O strange, yet true! Suffering--a covenant privilege, a covenant badge; one of the insignia of sonship--a turn in the believer's "Song of Songs!" O gracious triumph in this divine reckoning, that we can fall submissive at the feet of the great Chastener and say--"Even so, FATHER; for so it seems good in Your sight;" "I know that Your judgments are right, and that in faithfulness You have afflicted me." He is ever employing His angels of affliction "to minister to them that are heirs of salvation." He will not permit His people to settle on their lees. Rather does He see fit ever and anon to "empty from vessel to vessel." He puts a thorn in the nest to drive to the wing. When, at times, a Father's footsteps fail to be traced and a Father's love fails to be apparent--when the hands hang down and the knees grow feeble and the weights of sorrow burden and oppress the spirit, let us try to place in the other scale the wealth of glory to be revealed in that sinless, sorrowless, tearless world, where there are no fiery trials, no debasing corruptions or overmastering temptations--no baffled schemes or thwarted plans, or divided friends or carking cares, or unsolved mysteries or sceptic doubts.

The two antithetical words of our verse--"suffering" and "glory"--seem specially to remind us of an element peculiar to the bliss of the redeemed in heaven--a joy which the unfallen angels cannot share. It is the glory and the joy of contrast. "What are these which are arrayed in white robes, and whence came they?" The answer points to the contrasted earthly condition. The brightness is all the greater from its background of gloom. "These are they which came out of great tribulation" (Revelation 7;14). And may there not, here too, have been an implied word of encouragement and heart-cheer to Paul's Roman converts--the revelation of the true, in comparison and contrast with the false and spurious glory? Glory was a word familiar to the Romans--they boasted of their proud roll of heroes, their imperial triumphs, above all of their eternal city. But he now reveals "glory" in its best, highest, only real sense. Not the tinsel of earth--the flash of an hour, the tinted bubble dancing its little moment on the stream then vanishing forever--but the glory whose birthright is in the divine counsels and its duration eternity--the purchased inherited glory of God's own sons! He pointed those to whom he wrote, away from the Ichabod that was soon to be written on their fallen military colossus--the ruin of earth's greatest capital, to "the city which has foundations whose builder and maker is God."

And in order to leave nothing untouched in the verse forming the theme of our present meditation, note, once more, its brief remaining words, "the glory which shall be revealed IN US;" not only "to us," but "in us." It is thus a glory which will be manifested also to others. In the skies of an endless future it is to be a reflected radiance. The satellite or satellites are to reflect the brightness of the great central Sun! "To the intent that now unto the principalities and powers in heavenly places might be known by the church the manifold wisdom of God" (Ephesians 3;10).

Who can tell how much affliction--"the sufferings of this present time" like the facet cuttings of the diamond, will have to do with the superlative glories described in the words--"Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father."

There is a legend of the nightingale that it "sings" loudest when a thorn pierces its breast. May it not be so with the glorified, and their great "SONG OF SONGS" in heaven? The memory of earth's piercing thorns (for it can be no more then), will most sweetly attune ransomed lips to the Music of Eternity!



7. THE DIRGE OF CREATION.

This new strain in our Song, as it stands in the A.V., is, to say the least of it, perplexing, if not unintelligible. The authors of the R.V. have endorsed the much preferable translation of other scholars. The perplexity is caused by giving the Greek word (Ktisis) the double rendering of "creation" and "creature." If we adopt the former alone, and slightly alter the termination and punctuation of the 20th verse--putting the full stop after "same;" moreover, if we link the "in hope" with the verse following, all is at once made perspicuous. Any discordant sound is brought into harmony. It becomes then a unique creation-anthem, consisting of two parts. The first is dirge over Paradise Lost--the second, a paean over Paradise Regained. It resolves itself, moreover, again into an Antiphon. The wail of nature is answered by a hymn of deliverance; tears are turned into songs.

Let us now quote the passage in full, availing ourselves of the R.V.

"For the earnest expectation of the creation waits for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to vanity, not of its own will, but by reason of him who subjected it. In hope that the creation itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the liberty of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans and travails in pain together until now" (v. 19-22).

1st. It is the "PARADISE LOST" which here takes precedence in his description--creation "made subject to vanity;"--under "the bondage of corruption;"--"groaning and travailing in pain."

Strange statements at first sight are these--grim chorus this in the Apostle's Canticle--surely, we are apt to think, an exaggerated symbolism as applied to the beautiful world surrounding us; with its pastures clothed with flocks, and its valleys covered with corn! Here the verdure of spring, there the mellowed stores of autumn. Here are its groves resonant with melody; there the silvery ripple of its brooks. Here is its sapphire skies; there the deep calm of its lakes reduplicating the drapery of rock and fern and birchen tresses. Here are the mountains and their crowns of snow--flushed alternately with morning gold and evening crimson--there is the great temple of night burning ten thousand altar-fires! How can "lost," or "vanity," or "bondage," be inscribed on the portico of such a sanctuary as this? How can there be dirge or discord in this its own ever-varying Song of Songs?
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He who wrote thus of material nature could himself speak as he conjured up image on image from life's retrospect. The loveliness of creation had been familiar to him, ever since, as a boy, he had roamed by the banks of the Cydnus, and gazed upon the vine-clad heights and tapering cypresses which encircled his native Tarsus. He had been for many years of youth spectator of the mountains round about Jerusalem. He had watched often the gleam of evening light on the Moab precipices, as on a long bastion of ruby and amethyst. He had traversed the valleys of Samaria and Naphtali, with their streams rushing through tangled thickets of olive and oleander. He was familiar with all that was most picturesque about "the roots of Hermon." He had crossed that great barrier mountain of northern Palestine, and gazed at a distance on the wealth of groves and gardens of Damascus--he had witnessed--never to be forgotten by any who have been privileged to contemplate them--the glorious sunsets on the Isles of the Archipelago. He had stood on Acro-corinthus--with its wide outlook east and west. He had wandered among its pine-groves, from which were gathered the corruptible crowns for the athletes in the plain below. He had stood on the Areopagus, under the charm of an Atticus sky, and there beheld nature and are in their most wonderful combination. In one sense, to him it must have seemed a travesty and misnomer to speak of all that diversified creation as "bondaged"--a slave with the doom of "vanity" branded on its fair brow!

And we too, who have been in any measure taught to admire its beauty and note its harmonies, may well at first refuse to see such widespread evidences of corruption, or listen to the wail of thraldom or travail pang. We behold in this great "building of God"--this Temple of His glory--the "gold and silver and precious stones." We look in vain for "the wood and hay and stubble."

No, not in vain. The superficial listening to this dirge of the Apostle, is soon recognized to be in sad keeping with the reality. The gilded frame encloses an only too truthful picture of "lamentation and mourning and woe.'' Like the shifting scenes in a panorama, the one, bathed in summer sunshine we have just been gazing upon, changes into the chill and darkness of winter night. We need look no farther than on its outer physical conditions. That azure sky is at times swept with tempest or turned into battlements of thundercloud. The pestilence walks in darkness--the destruction wastes at noonday. Ever and anon, its fairest climates are desolated with earthquake--the sirocco careers in wild havoc over its deserts, the tornado lays its cities in ruins and "discovers its forests." The volcanic fires slumbering beneath its crust demand safety-valves for their lava and flame, accompanied with widespread destruction. Look at her seas--the highway of the nations; yet how often roused to madness--their surface heaving with demon rage--strewed with wrecks, and deaf to the shrieks of perishing crews. Think of the myriads that lie sleeping unshrouded, uncoffined, unepitaphed in their depths--the hapless owners and tenants of "a wandering grave!" Look at her fields, abandoned to blight and curse; and which but for the unceasing toil of man would make perpetual surrender to the dominion of thorn and thistle, and noxious weed! Think how her productions have been prostituted to every foul and debasing purpose. The iron dug for weapons of war--the ploughshare defrauded of its benignant use, that its material may be fabricated into instruments of mutual destruction. Corn and wine, too, graciously and beneficently designed, if employed in moderation--one of these "the chalice of God"--His own selected sacramental symbol, alienated to ruin soul and body, dethroning reason and degrading to the brute-level--the cup of blessing turned into the cup of devils!

Then ponder, further, the universal reign of "change and decay." The very vegetation--a conspicuous source of creation's beauty--bursting into perfection only to wither. We see spring and summer breaking out into a leafy and floral resurrection. But these, before long, have to succumb to the iron grasp of winter, or are bound in its frosty chains. The lowlier tribes bow to the same inexorable law; while superadded in their case is the startling anomaly of mutual destruction--the stronger preying on the weaker; Nature in ceaseless rapine, "red with beak and claw;"--the suffering of the brute-tribes often aggravated by the neglect or cruelty of man. Then, conspicuous above all, is the mystery of human pain and sorrow--the cry of slavery--so well known by those to whom Paul now wrote, ever ascending from the outraged and despairing--the pangs of martyrs at the stake--the shrieks of those "butchered to make a Roman holiday" in circus and amphitheater. And apart from this--where there is no trace of human tyranny--there is the suffering of sick beds, the agony of bereavement, the sudden close of lives of promise--bright suns going down before they have reached the meridian--human ties formed only to be sundered, births succeeded by deaths, marriage chimes followed by the funeral-bell. The wailing lamentation has risen for six millenniums--"Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return there!" Yes, say as we will--earth--while a home of beauty--the vestibule of heaven, may be described, with equal truth, as a vast hospital of anguish--a cemetery and receptacle for the dead!
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There is a special emphasis in the closing word of the Apostle in our present passage--"The whole creation groans and travails in pain together." TOGETHER. It is a united, universal pang--one long lamentation, in which the human wail is perhaps the loudest, and with no favored exceptions to the doom of mortality. That orator who held captive the ear of listening senates--his tongue is silenced! That monarch who gathered around him at his bidding vassal princes, has himself to own a sterner vassalage! That warrior who made the world to tremble--the terror of kings--has himself to bow to the King of Terrors! "Vanity"--is the one loud agonizing miserere--waking responsive echoes all around--"Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, all is vanity."

And what, in a word, is the true history and explanation of it all! Let those call it myth and legend who please; it is the only rational interpretation of the oracle, otherwise so baffling and ambiguous--"By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death has passed over all men, for that all have sinned" (Romans 5;12).

II. We now turn from the dirge to the SONG--from the wail of bondage, "the still, sad music of humanity"--to the strain of anticipated emancipation. Let us merge the pessimistic in the optimistic.

"The earnest expectation of the creation waits for the manifestation of the sons of God…In hope that the creation itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the liberty of the glory of the children of God" (v. 21).

Note, in passing, that this bondage of creation is here described as involuntary. It is expressly said that the degradation is borne "not willingly." It was "subjected to the same." The Apostle employs one of these bold but beautiful figures of frequent occurrence in Scripture, by which inanimate nature--God's outer materialism, is represented waking up from her silent thraldom. As if unable to remain mute under the insult she has been constrained to bear, she would utter a loud protest at being fettered. She sighs for deliverance, like the Israelites of old in their bondage, crying for freedom from the hand of the Egyptians.

In our opening verse the creation is spoken of as in "earnest expectation." The Greek word is there remarkable and significant. It implies bending forward with outstretched neck, like the runners in the Isthmian games--the head in advance, as they pressed on to the mark for the prize. Unwillingly chained and hampered, she is in eager expectation of her own deliverance; the crown and consummating glory of that deliverance being the "manifestation of the sons of God" and the coming of the Christ. Her cry, could her stifled voice put the invocation into words, would be--"Why tarry the wheels of His chariot?"--"Make haste, my Beloved, be as a young roe or a young deer on the mountains of Bether!"

Yes, let us take comfort in the thought that the present condition of our world was never designed to be final. There is a second Genesis--a golden age in store--"the restitution of all things," "the times of refreshing," when present evil will be exterminated from her tribes, every trace of dislocation and catastrophe removed; the old saying and promise fulfilled--"You shall be in league with the stones of the field; and the beasts of the field shall be at peace with you" (Job 5;23). Above all--when the last enemy shall be vanquished; when this long dismal tolling of funeral bells shall cease; when there shall be no longer the pathetic announcement, that God's own creature, fashioned after His own likeness, has passed away into the "great silences" of death--claiming strange brotherhood and sisterhood with corruption. Death shall be swallowed up in victory, and the Creator's own final, as was His primal aim completed, when He pronounced all that He had made "very good."

Into speculations regarding the future of the new creation, we shall not now enter--avoiding the ranks of too confident soothsayers. With some, indeed, it is a favorite picture--and not one assuredly to be rashly dismissed, that this very world in which we live--re-beautified and re-adorned--with sin and sorrow purged from its borders, may become the future heaven of the glorified. Dr. Chalmers has said all that can be said on such a subject, and said as no other could say it, in his great sermon. While there is no ground for positive affirmation, there is certainly, I repeat, nothing to negative this "physical theory of another life." If these two gloomy factors just mentioned, sin and sorrow (and we may add death), were eliminated, there is nothing to prevent associating our present material world with "the new heavens and the new earth" whose characteristic is "righteousness." Untie from our globe these three swaddling-bands, and there is nothing to hinder her going forth from the couch of her degradation--"the bondage of corruption"--walking and leaping and praising God!

But meanwhile, we prefer leaving in its own undefined golden haze the Apostle's declaration. It is enough for us to know that there is a "new world" in store for our terrestrial abode, the nature and extent of which we can only feebly surmise. Earth is being furnished and prepared as a reception-hall for God's children. It is meanwhile "waiting for their manifestation"--"the liberty of their glory."

Spirit of God! who brooded at first over creation, in its chaos--come and make all things new! Hasten the blessed era when "the light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun, and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold!" Come! and let another bright picture by the same prophet have its full and perfect realization; when "the present evil world," with all her wrongs rectified and redressed, will enter on her promised jubilee--"You shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace; the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. Instead of the thorn shall come up the fir tree, and instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle tree, and it shall be to the Lord for a name, for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off" (Isaiah 55;12, 13). Then, no one SONG of a solitary inspired singer--but song upon song will spread their harmonies through a renovated creation, yes, through a rejoicing universe. The key-note may possibly be struck in this our planet where Redemption was won. Deepest in the center, it will circulate to the circumference of being. The morning stars will, once more, sing together, and all the sons of God shout for joy!
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8. AN ELEGY; OR THE HARP ON THE WILLOWS.

The subject dwelt upon by the Apostle in the preceding passage, not unnaturally leads him to a prolongation of the same theme. The wailing and travail-pangs of material nature and of the irrational creation, have their climax in the groans of the human spirit and its cry for deliverance. Though these have already claimed our consideration, we shall so far pursue the topic, in connection with the "adoption" and "redemption" now brought before us--a new Antiphon, in the deeper, sadder music of which the voiceless material world can only very partially participate.

In the first part of the verse to which our thoughts are here invited, we have, what may be called (carrying out the simile of our volume), "The Harp on the Willows." In the second, that Harp is taken down, and its broken strings renewed, in order to warble one fresh and superlatively glorious strain in the believer's Song.

(V. 23) "And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body."

"THE FIRST FRUITS OF THE SPIRIT."

No ceremony of the Jewish nation was more imposing or picturesque than when (some time during the interval between the Feast of Pentecost and Tabernacles) groups of Israelites, from different parts of the land, were seen approaching the Temple with their offering of "first fruits." These were carried in baskets--from the golden basket of the prince or chief, to the wicker one of the peasant. A sacrificial ox with gilded horns and crowned with an olive branch, preceded by pipe and tabret, formed part of the procession. Each member of these little companies, with his basket on his shoulder, was met in the Temple area by Levites singing an appointed Psalm of welcome; while the officiating priest waved the offering before the altar, on the steps of which it was finally placed by the worshiper before returning to his home.

Such, in our present verse, is the typical reference to a custom whose occurrence, during his residence in Jerusalem, must have been familiar to the Apostle, as well as to many of those to whom he now wrote.

The spiritual life, begun on earth, is only the pledge of the far nobler, fuller life beyond; its first feeble pulsations. The basket of first fruits graciously bestowed by Him who is the divine Agent in their sanctification--"the Spirit who bears witness with their spirits, that they are the children of God"--is laid by them on the steps of the earthly altar, as the pledge of the great harvest and harvest-home of glory; that reaping-time of heavenly bliss, when the words of the evangelical prophet will obtain their true and everlasting fulfillment--"They rejoice before You according to the joy in harvest, and as men rejoice when they divide the spoil" (Isaiah 9;3). Most commentators on the passage have been led to quote the Apostle's parallel one in the Epistle to the Ephesians--"And now you also have heard the truth, the Good News that God saves you. And when you believed in Christ, he identified you as his own by giving you the Holy Spirit, whom he promised long ago. The Spirit is God's guarantee that he will give us everything he promised and that he has purchased us to be his own people. This is just one more reason for us to praise our glorious God." (Ephesians 1;13, 14). The one verse interprets the other.

From neither, however, are we to infer, that the believer's adoption is in itself, in the present state, partial and incomplete--a blessing only to be received in heaven. Not so. The words, in the immediately preceding context, distinctly assert--"The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirits, that we ARE the children of God." But, though complete in kind, it is partial in degree; and these first fruits--the graces and virtues of the new life (confessedly imperfect) which the Holy Spirit has wrought in the soul, are the pledges of a perfected state, when the bud of earth, liable to be nipped and blighted with hail and frost and storm, will expand into full flower; when the sips at the earthly fountain, will be followed by full draughts from "the river of the water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding from the throne of God and of the Lamb." All the graces manifested in the present economy of being are only heralds and harbingers--voices crying in the wilderness--"When that which is perfect has come, then that which is in part shall be done away" (1 Corinthians 13;10).

It is under the acute--the terrible consciousness of this present shortcoming, that believers are here represented as "groaning within themselves." "Groaning;"--a word, in the original, expressive of deep anguish and depression. "We that are in this tabernacle groan, being burdened." And though, as we have seen in our last, there are manifold other causes for suffering and heart-pang, the deepest--most intense to God's children--are the pangs of conscious sin--the pangs of grieving that Holy Spirit of God whereby they are "sealed unto the day of Redemption;"--the pangs of daily offending the Father who has adopted them and the Son who has redeemed them. True, most true, the Christian--the member of the ransomed family--is the owner of a peace which passes understanding--a peace which the world with all its treasures cannot give, and which the world with all its tribulations cannot take away.
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The Apostle, near the close of this same Epistle to his Roman converts, speaks of them as being filled with "peace and joy in believing;" "abounding in hope through the power of the Holy Spirit" (Romans 15;13). But this can be said only relatively in a world of evil. We are encroaching on what has been already dwelt upon in previous pages, when we repeat that the new life of the spirit does not release or disentangle from the old temptations. The spell of these, the fascination of these, may be broken--but the demons of unbelief and passion still wield their iron weapons. You may refuse to bow to them, but you cannot hurl them from their pedestals. As little as the scientist can remove the disturbing forces in the planetary system--as little can you negative and neutralize existing moral perturbations. The voice of the siren call of sin may be, and is, sternly resisted, but it remains unstifled. It was not to defiant unbelievers, but to God's own children, the warning words were addressed--"Why, let him who thinks he stands, take heed lest he fall" (1 Corinthians 10;12).

The "groanings" of the Christian may, moreover, be intensified by the very keenness of his spiritual sensibilities. While he feels, on the one hand, that there is ever much remaining pollution in his own heart to be expelled--while in himself he has cause perpetually to mourn over the ungirded loins and the waning lamps, and the lack of vigilant watchfulness, it is equally true that the instincts of his new-born nature make him more alive to the turpitude of sin in general, and his own sins in particular--leading him, in familiar words, to confess that "the remembrance of them is grievous, the burden of them is intolerable." This spiritual probing and analysis becomes more acute with the advance of years. The figure, thank God, regarding the Christian, is generally as accurate as it is beautiful, when the close of life is spoken of as a golden sunset--"The path of the just is like the shining light which shines more and more unto the perfect day." But it is equally true that the shadows deepen and lengthen towards evening. Memory, dulled to other things, is quickened and energized as the tent-pegs are beginning to loosen and "the clouds return after the rain." In this and in many other ways, to dwell upon which would only be to reiterate--"Even we ourselves groan within ourselves."

But why prolong the gloomy strain, when it is the Apostle's present purpose to discard broken harp-strings and sing a true "Excelsior;"--to lead from pang and groaning, death and dissolution, to a perfection of bliss undreamt of, until HE came who revealed Himself as "the Resurrection and the Life." We must pass at once to the antithetical clause with which our verse closes--"Waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body."

WAITING. It is the watcher on tower or mountain waiting in eager expectation of the morning dawn. It is the son, knowing that he is a son--the child knowing of his adoption and its privileges, waiting for the summons within the father's home, to be delivered all the blessings of the purchased inheritance--"to be clothed upon with his house which is from heaven."

It is at once apparent that "the redemption of the body" is here represented as the consummation of the Christian's adoption. It is not the mere revelation of heavenly happiness; it is not the echo of the Apostle's assertion elsewhere--the most often quoted perhaps of his epigrams--"to die is gain." That is indeed a glorious assurance. It is a blessed hope, whether for ourselves or our departed, that when the spirit takes its arrowy flight at the supreme hour of all, it is not to pass into dreary solitude--dim shadowy regions of silence--but "to be with Christ which is far better." Yes, and with more than mere surmise, we can think of spirit re-linked with spirit--the loved and lost mutually rejoined and restored; together embarked in that spirit-land on lofty ministrations--the activities of the glorified.

This mere continuity of existence, however, in the state beyond, is not the theme for contemplation now, and which absorbs our thoughts in the present chapter. It is the truth certified at the sepulcher of our risen Lord--the Resurrection, or "Redemption of the body;" that the day is coming when "those who are in their graves shall hear His voice and shall come forth;" when earth shall be resolved into the prophet's wide valley of vision; when bone shall come to bone and sinew to sinew; when the same divine Spirit here spoken of shall "breathe upon the slain that they may live;" and when "they shall stand upon their feet an exceeding great army" (Ezekiel 37.). Let us lay the emphasis, where the Apostle intended it, upon the BODY. Without this miracle of miracles--a glorified material frame, there would not be a complete salvation. There would be elements of bliss lacking, which go so far to brim even the cup of earthly happiness. If no glorified body in heaven, how could I know or recognize, how could I hold converse and fellowship with the company of redeemed? It is the visible countenance, the tones of voice--the loving word or the loving deed, which here below reveal the personality.

"The Communion of Saints" is one of the cherished articles in the creed of the Church militant. Is it to be expunged the moment we enter the Church triumphant? No, rather, we believe that with that "redemption of the body" there will be the remolding, only in deathless shape and beauty, of the cherished lineaments of earth--the resumption of personal identity--the face of the resuscitated dead lighted by the familiar terrestrial smiles; brother linked again with brother; husband with wife, parent with child; friend with friend. And if the old skeptic question be mooted--"How can these things be?" If science--and never more than in the present day, affects to discard all as phantasy and legend palmed on human credulity and ignorance--a figment incompatible with the elementary principles of chemistry--at war with all needful conditions, whether of absorption, or transformation, or assimilation, in the physical economy; it is enough to reply, "With God all things are possible." This world of His, guided and governed as unquestionably it is by a reign of law, is nevertheless crossed and traversed with ten thousand mysteries which bring what otherwise might well be called anomalies within that region of the possible. With the subtle questions and sophistries of the schools, we have no concern. We accept the explicit testimony of God's Holy Word. We leave all difficulties, and perplexities, and conceded discrepancies with Him. And when the doubter, with sinister look and accent, advances the defiant query--"Son of man, can these bones live?"--Our safe answer--our only answer is--"O Lord God, YOU know!"
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But leaving the mere dogma--let us rather look at its comfort and solace as an accepted truth of Revelation.

There is a twofold consolation which the Redemption of the body imparts. First, regarding ourselves; and secondly, regarding our beloved dead.

(1) Ourselves. Mortality is an dreadful fact--a stern reality--which not one of us can lightly dismiss. There is the natural fear of death which Christian valor at its best cannot altogether overcome. No human philosophy can transform the last enemy into an angel of light. We cannot gaze without awe on the inspired realistic picture--man going to his long home, and the mourners going about the streets--the silver cord loosed--the golden bowl broken, the dust returning to the earth as it was. It is not on Roman or Athenian tombs alone, on which gloomy emblems may be carved. The spirit is hushed into solemn silence as we tread even the fairest of "God's acres" with their inscriptions of elevating hope and promise. It is not the voice of poetry but of nature; it is not the voice of fallen humanity alone but redeemed humanity also--which utters the words--

"It is a dread and dreadful thing to die!"

Then, turning from individual anticipations and musings; who that has stood by the deathbed and grave of their loved ones; of those, too, whose present bliss was felt to be most assured, but must have realized the terribleness of disrupted ties--the hushed voice--the denied touch of "the vanished hand," nothing left but the silent photograph, or the portrait greeting with speechless inanimate smiles on the wall. Infinite gain to them. Yes, but infinite loss to us!

Oh, is that grave to refuse ever to give back its sacred treasure? It is not the soul of which we now speak. That is safe. We confidently believe--the reverse is not questioned, that it has entered into bliss--"crossed the bar" and reached the stormless haven. But what of the earthly framework? When Paul, in his first letter to the Thessalonians, wrote a special page of comfort to some family of mourners in their midst, it was this he dwells on. He takes for granted the solace they have in the old doctrine which even their Pagan systems taught them--of the immortality of the soul. But he who analyzed human nature and human feelings so well, knew that the problem of all problems--that which would most exercise their bereaved and desolate spirits would be–"The Jewel itself is safe, but what of the dear and precious casket which enclosed it? what of that body so lately laid in the catacomb or rocky tomb; or whose dust is treasured in the cinerary urn? Is it lost to sight forever? Can He who in Palestine reanimated the dead; who restored the son to the widowed mother at Nain, and the Bethany brother to his mourning sisters--can He not do for myriads what He did for individuals? Himself the Lord and Giver of life, can He not"--may we farther suppose that bereft Thessalonian to say–"draw near to me in this script Grecian home of mine, and dry my tears with the brief message of the old Hebrew prophet--Your dead shall live"?

Yes, in that pastoral message of comfort, our Apostle does so bind up those brokenhearted ones. He speaks of "those who are asleep" (laid asleep, as the word may mean) "by Jesus"--God "bringing them with Him." "The dead in Christ," he continues, "shall rise first." Then, "together with them." "Together." With this thought of eternal reunion and fellowship and "ever with the Lord" he winds up in a postscript--a postscript intended for all bleeding souls and vacant homes--"Therefore comfort one another with these words."

In closing, I would recur for a moment to a special clause in our present verse--that of "the first fruits." Some of the Jews in Rome who read the Apostle's letter to the city of the Caesars, may, in the significant type, have had the possibility, at all events, of the body's redemption whispered to them. The analogy, we know, did not escape the mind of the writer himself. Take the most familiar of these offerings--the first sheaf of corn reaped in the fields near Jerusalem. What a silent preacher and sermon in that early tribute borne to the Temple on Zion! Our blessed Lord Himself selected it--consecrated it. "Except a grain of wheat fall into the ground and dies, it abides alone; but if it dies, it brings forth much fruit." We have here the most frequently repeated of all nature's parables, the death of the grain-seed. That inert--if you will, that unsightly particle, is deposited in the ground and if the eye could follow it to its burial-place, it would see it becoming more repulsive in its first vital struggles with the dark mold to which it was temporarily consigned. But the insignificant, deteriorating seed watered by the early and latter rains, and nurtured by the summer sun, bursts forth in due time in strange vitality, "first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear."
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Paul, as we well know, caught up and expanded his Lord's parable in perhaps the best known chapter of all his writings--that repertory of immeasurable comfort contained in the 15th of 1st Corinthians. "But someone will say, How are the dead raised up? and with what body do they come? You fool, that which you sow is not quickened, except it dies. And that which you sow, you sow not that body that shall be, but bare grain, it may be of wheat, or of some other grain; but God gives it a body as it has pleased Him, and to every seed his own body…So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body…For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality."

In all this our Apostle shows, how, by an eternal sequence, life will spring, sooner or later, out of death. And if such be the great law of the universe, will it be departed from--will it have its only exception in the case of the fairest and noblest work of His hands? Shall golden ears and sheaves be reaped from the most insignificant grains, and shall the truest golden corn fail to fructify in heaven and fill immortal garners? No! impossible. It is with the body's resurrection in his thoughts that he closes with the challenge which is one day to wake the echoes of the universe--Christianity's special "Song of Songs"--the theme left unrevealed--the Song left unsung, until Christ Himself sounded the glorious note--"O death, where is your sting? O grave, where is your victory?" The cry of the Apostle and of the Church of the ransomed is not to ascend unheeded and unresponded to--"Not that we would be unclothed, but clothed, that mortality might be swallowed up of life. Now He who has wrought us for this same thing is God" (2 Corinthians 5;4, 5).

With these triumphant words in our ears, let us conclude this meditation--seeking to look forward with joyful heart and hope to the true "manifestation of the sons of God;" when He "shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto His glorious body." Thus shall I be enabled not only to triumph personally over the fear of death but with Paul's words in my ears, and feeling the elevating assurance that He who redeemed the soul redeemed the body too--in calm serenity and confidence, I can draw near to the couch around which the herald symptoms of dissolution are gathering. I can follow the funeral crowd and stand by the grave, while I take the Harp from the Willows and sing the Lord's Song--the Song which the living Redeemer, the Conqueror of Hades, has warranted me to employ--"He that goes forth and weeps bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him."

"Sleep," says Luther, "is nothing else than a death, and death a sleep. For as through sleep all weariness and faintness pass away and cease, and the powers of the spirit come back again, so that in the morning we arise fresh and strong and joyous; so, at the Last Day, we shall rise again as if we had only slept a night, and shall be fresh and strong…It is best that the Potter should take the vessel, break it in pieces, make it clay again, and then make it altogether new…All that we lost in Paradise, we shall receive again far better and far more abundantly…There the saints shall keep eternal holiday, ever joyful, secure, and free from all suffering; ever satisfied in God."



9. A SONG OF HOPE.

In treating the preceding portions of the chapter, we have had frequent occasion to note, how one prominent thought or idea leads to an expansion of the same; how one strain in the Song suggests a prolonged note. It is again so here. "Waiting for the adoption," formed the central theme in the former verse. That grace of "Waiting" is to be farther dwelt upon and developed. It is described by an equivalent word; a word which, in itself, represents one of the mightiest and most stimulating of spiritual forces, that word is HOPE.

(V. 24, 25) "For we are saved by hope; but hope that is seen is not hope; for what a man sees, why does he yet hope for? But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it."

We may venture in this passage to personify HOPE, and regard it as a beautiful Incarnation. Not an old Sybil (an ancient Greek prophetess) scattering the leaves, or weaving the web of destiny--but the Inspirer of all good thoughts--animating, strengthening, energizing.

Looking even to its every-day and material aspect, what would this world of ours have been, or be, without Hope? Milton sings of,

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A hundred illustrations will readily occur. The author of "The Pleasures of Hope" has so far written before us. The mother bending over the cradle of her infant--her heart palpitating with new joy--has no eye for anything but a bright and gracious future. Hope admits of no cloud in her horizon. The same mother, in after years, follows her boy amid winter storms--"in cradle of the crude imperious surge." But Hope will allow her to see no stormy bird heralding tempest and disaster--but rather pictures the wilderness of waters as one vast "Pacific,"--the vessel borne on by propitious breezes, and "many ports exulting in the gleam of her mast."

Hope--the same guardian-angel, watches by the soldier at his camp fire; and in his broken dreams throws prismatic rainbows athwart coming battlefields and stormed stronghold. Hope is the true warder in the captive's cell, which opens iron doors, and restores to the sweets of liberty. Hope is the invisible companion that walks side by side with the Alpine climber, and keeps before his mental vision the lodging looming amid the blinding storm, whose opened gates he may never be destined to reach. Hope is the strength and inspiration of the ingenuous youth, as well as the spectacle of manhood in encountering life's sterner battles. Hope is the cheerer of old age; which puts bars of amber and gold in the sunset sky.


But the HOPE the Apostle here speaks of is not the apotheosis of the secular poet. But "the Hope of the Gospel,"--"the Hope full of immortality"--"the Hope laid up for us in heaven." "The Hope of eternal life, which God that cannot lie promised before the world began."

His train of thought seems to be this (if we may venture on a paraphrase)--"I have recently spoken of the sufferings of the present time. These are mysterious--often utterly baffling to sight and sense--beyond our 'why and wherefore.' But be not discouraged. I have recently adverted to your rank in the heavenly hierarchy and household, as sons of God and joint-heirs with Christ. Sufferings, prolonged and severe, may seem to you strangely inconsistent with these exalted titles and so magnificent a heritage. But be not discouraged. I have just brought before your thoughts 'the first fruits of the Spirit.' Have these pledges failed to assure you? Can you, under these gloomy skies and battering storms of suffering, see no pledge of the promised golden harvest? Be not discouraged. No, rather, hope against hope. Seek to submit with calm acquiescence to the divine will. 'Commit your way unto the Lord; trust also in Him, and He shall bring it to pass. And He shall bring forth your righteousness as the light, and your judgment as the noonday.' We may be unable to see the needs be; 'but if we hope for what we see not, then (knowing the faithful promise and the Faithful Promiser) do we with patience wait for it.'"

Hope has well been defined by Tholuck as "Faith in its prospective attitude." Faith and Hope, in the Spiritual Temple, are twin pillars; they cannot be dissevered. Hence they are so frequently grouped together by the inspired writers. "Now faith is the confidence (or assurance) of things hoped for" (Hebrews 11;1). They are spoken of elsewhere by Paul as the two wings which bear Love to the gate of heaven. They accompany her no farther; they are no longer needed, where faith is lost in sight, and hope in fruition (1 Corinthians 13;13).

When Columbus was approaching his yet undiscovered "Treasure Trove"--the mighty continent he was destined in due time to claim as his own--stray branches, or fragments of branches with berries which here and there floated on the waves, and the land birds circling round his vessel, formed the earliest indications of unknown shores. These may be regarded as appeals to his faith. Hope--the Apostle's impersonation, had a different evidence to substantiate these expectations. She, seated as it were at the vessel's prow, could see nothing. "Hope that is seen is not hope." But she "hoped for that she saw not," and "with patience waited." She strained her eyes along the blue troughs of the ocean, for the evidence of things not seen, until, at last, faintly in the far distance was discerned the streak of shore, studded with dwarf-palm, and heard the music of the breakers. Faith and Hope could then sing together in concert their "eureka." "The shipmen deemed that they drew near to some country" (Acts 27;27).
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So with the believer. In his case also, "Hope that is seen is not hope." The hope of the Christian deals with an unseen Lord and an invisible future. "He walks by faith, not by sight." That muffled future is nevertheless a verity. Despite of the haze and the darkness, he knows that the morning comes. The star of Hope is hovering over the eastern horizon. He has implicit reliance in the Bible chart, and steers with confidence through blinding fog and buffeting waves. He claims a heritage in his Lord's beatitude--"Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet have believed."

That same Hope, under a new and familiar symbol, is described as "an Anchor sure and steadfast--entering into that within the veil," and imparting "strong consolation to lay hold on the hope set before us." The anchor (I speak of the earthly emblem) is unseen by the mariner. It grasps the rock or shingle far down out of view. But he knows how safe he is. While other ships--unmoored--may be plunging and heaving around him, he has no thought of danger. His vessel is as secure as if it were sleeping on its shadow in summer seas. That anchor, in the divinely spiritual sense, cast into the Rock of Ages will ride out all storms.

Thus then, as the Apostle here expresses it--"We are saved by hope." "Saved;"--that word must not be misleading. It has been preferably rendered by "kept," "preserved," "sustained" (Barnes). "Saved "--Salvation, in the true and only Gospel sense of the term, we have seen traced to a very different procuring cause, unfolded in the previous context, specially at the opening of the chapter. Let Peter testify in his words of simple grandeur--"Neither is there SALVATION in any other; for there is none other name under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved" (Acts 4;12). No other Oracle but one can give us the response for which the soul craves. We might go to the Angel of Hope, as the weeping women did of old to the Angels of the Sepulcher, but like them we would be left weeping; until, like them too, we meet our risen Lord and get His benediction--the blissful assurance of a completed salvation, in His atoning work and sacrifice. In Him we have "everlasting consolation and good hope through grace."

Perhaps some who trace these words may be unable to realize the strength and certainty and consolation of this hope. The anchor, "sure and steadfast," may not appear to be holding them. Theirs at least may be fitful alternations of doubt and despondency, with the agonizing quest, "Where is now my God?" This is exactly what we have previously seen the Apostle recognizing in the composite dual nature. It is exactly what he implies in our present verses, when he speaks of the need of "patience" and the need of "waiting." The people of God have, in every age, been subject to seasons of hopelessness and depression. We have dolorous strains mingling amid the strong and victorious accents of the ancient Patriarch of Uz. We hear the plaintive cry on the lips of the great Elijah as he lay feeble and panic-stricken in the desert. We hear David wailing out his dirge, now in the ascent of Olivet, now amid the glens of Gilead, now under the cedar-roof of his Zion palace. We hear tremulous accents from the lips of the faithful Baptist within the walls of Machaerus prison, when his lips seemed mysteriously and prematurely silenced, and hope extinguished. We have heard Paul himself uttering a piteous miserere--as a "wretched man"--with the body of sin and death hampering and impeding his spiritual progress. And thousands since his age, and these, too, not Little Faiths, but Great Hearts, have had similar experience. The eagle eye of faith gets filmed, and the drooping wings refuse to soar. "Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disturbed within me?" There is but one answer--"Hope in God, for I shall yet praise Him, who is the health of my countenance and my God" (Psalms 42;11 ).

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Reader, should you now be undergoing a doleful experience--should the music and ripple of spiritual life for the time be gone--the haze of the skies blurring the splendors of the Great Sun--doubt and unbelief projecting their evil shadow--it may even be, materialistic views taking the prismatic colors out of Hope's rainbow; accept as the surest and best of antidotes, a more habitual, realizing view of Christ as a personal, all-sufficient Savior--"Christ in you, the hope of glory." The slabs taken from the Roman catacombs, seen in the Museum of the Vatican, show unmistakably what kept alive drooping faith in the hearts of the early Christians--"Hope in Christ-God".

What are the hopes of the world compared with this? transient, illusory; beacons often changed into balefires; bubbles on life's ocean sparkling their little moment--then vanishing forever! Even Wordsworth, who seldom indulges in the minor strain, thus takes up the parable on worldly hopes--

Let it not be so with you. Having access into this grace wherein we stand, rejoice in hope of the glory of God--making Paul's motto and watch-word your own--"We look not at the things which are seen; but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal." May that good and gracious Spirit who gives pledges and first fruits of the coming heavenly inheritance renew and quicken you with fresh ardor; enabling you to catch up, like the Isthmian runners in the night-race, the torch of hope which other beloved hands have dropped. Be it yours to say in the words of one of the sweetest singers of the far west--


There are many such nesting-boughs if we would only soar to them and make them our perch. The future, aye, even the future of the world, is replete with hope. Let others take a pessimistic view of things coming on the earth, there is much too to brighten and gladden. There is hope for the future of humanity--the deliverance of a groaning creation. He has hopes, too, nobler, better, more enduring, far-reaching. There is a description well-known to all, of Hope "lighting her torch at Nature's funeral pile," and shedding her beams through the eternal ages. The Valley of Achor, the valley of the shadow of death, thus becomes "a door of hope." Through faith in death's great Conqueror, "mortality is swallowed up of life." Then there is the hope--the delighted confidence, which we were led to refer to in the previous meditation, of meeting the departed--reunion with "the beloved long since and lost awhile." Add to this the culmination of all--the hope of assimilation to the divine image; the hope, amid present faults and defeats and failures, of complete holiness--the realization of another Apostle's dearest wish and exhortation--"And let every one that lath this hope in Him purify himself even as He is pure" (1 John 3;3).

Thus does the Bell of Hope, in varying cadence, ring Paul's chime--"With patience wait for it." Weeping, in another similar beautiful personation, is represented by the Psalmist as a tearful angel-watcher. "Weeping may tarry for the night; but joy comes in the morning" (Psalms 30;5).

Lord! I shall seek, in calm expectancy, to tarry for that blessed hope and blessed day-dawn! I shall take down my harp from the willows and sing the midnight melody, "I wait for God, my soul does wait, and in His word do I hope" (Psalms 130;5); listening to our Apostle's double prayer and benediction; "Now our Lord Jesus Christ Himself and God, even our Father, which has loved us, and has given us everlasting consolation and good hope through grace, comfort your hearts and establish you in every good word and work" (2 Thessalonians 2;16, 17). "Now the God of Hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that you may abound in hope through the power of the Holy Spirit" (Romans 15;13).

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10. BROKEN HARMONIES, AND THE DIVINE AGENT IN THEIR RESTORATION.

The Apostle, as he adds note after note in his inspired Song, and specially as the Song advances, seems desirous of proclaiming with deepening cadence the PRIVILEGES which belong to the believer in Christ.

In our last meditation he had described Hope and her sister-spirit Patience, as graces in the Christian's possession--invigorating, quickening influences--the one inspiring the other. He now speaks of a new sustaining power of religion--a superhuman element of strength, consolation, and endurance, enjoyed by "the heirs of God and joint-heirs with Christ." He introduces it by the word "Likewise" ("in addition"--"in the same way"), "also, the Spirit helps our infirmities."

This last word seems indeed, at first, rather to indicate a note of discord. But it is only a passing jar in the divine music, leading, as it does, to the contemplation of the special consolatory agency now to be unfolded. That agency was incidentally brought before us in more than one preceding verse; but it here rises to a climax. If we have for the moment suggested the Harp unstrung, it is only to be immediately assured of restored harmonies.

"And the Holy Spirit helps us in our distress (or infirmities). For we don't even know what we should pray for, nor how we should pray. But the Holy Spirit prays for us with groanings that cannot be expressed in words. And the Father who knows all hearts knows what the Spirit is saying, for the Spirit pleads for us believers in harmony with God's own will." Romans 8:26-27

"Infirmities"--these are not unfamiliar to us in the preceding portion of this volume. They are, so far at least, an equivalent for "the things of the flesh,"--"the carnal mind,"--"the deeds of the body,"--the outcome of the sin-tainted, unrenewed, unregenerate nature. "Infirmities"--"compassed with infirmities," we have previously seen, is the too truthful description of God's people in all ages--that the very heroes of sacred story bear sad attestation to the evil heart of unbelief--the fickleness of the noblest purposes. We have recorded episodes in their lives, of defeat, and cowardice--temporary, but at the time disastrous and humiliating. The warning bell sounds, in deepening tones, "Take heed, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief, in departing from the living God" (Hebrews 3;12).

It is one of the most mournful memories of the ancient Christian Church--the age of all others when love and loyalty might be expected to have been strongest--that there was a traitor in the apostolic band, and two convicted liars and perjurers in the earliest membership. If these "pledge-sheaves" of the ripe grain--what are called in a preceding verse "the first fruits of the Spirit," were laid thus mildewed on the newly consecrated altar, can we wonder that in the Church of later times (or, what is truer and sadder, in our own individual souls), there should be the taint and blight of often "infirmity,"--weariness, faint-heartedness--the successful power of besetting sins--worldly fascinations--overmastering temptations--all drags and hindrances in running the pilgrim race--not to speak of overt acts of fouler transgression and wrong-doing, that bring a tear to the eye and a pang to the heart.

Frequently these infirmities are the result of physical causes--the suffering body has its cruel revenge on the depressed soul. But the suffering is on that account none the less real. The prolonged gloom of the sick-chamber induces and aggravates the darkness of the mind--fostering morbid thoughts--injecting "devil-born doubts,"--murmurings at the divine dispensations--impeachments of the divine veracity and love--"If the Lord is with us, why has all this befallen us?" Oh, who is there among us who fails to plead guilty?--Who, confronted with the past--each with his or her own dominant sin and frailty, is not ready to take up the words of Asaph in that Psalm of his, so true to the deeper consciousness of fallen humanity--"This is my infirmity!" (Psalms 73.).

There is a great--a divine Helper here disclosed. THE SPIRIT--the Comforter--the Paraclete--the Heavenly Agent whose coming and "power from on high" is represented by the divine Savior Himself, as more than compensating the Church for His own absence--"If I go not away the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart I will send Him unto you." The Gospel age--the age of the Incarnation--was melted and merged into what is familiarly known as "the dispensation of the Spirit." Among the manifold blessings, of which He was to be the dispenser, one was conspicuous--that of being the Bearer of His Church's and His people's infirmities; imparting to burdened souls needed grace; and perfecting strength in weakness.
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These infirmities are far beyond catalogue or enumeration. Paul in our present verses selects one, as a sample of the rest--one he knows to be of universal incidence and application--one that has been endorsed and countersigned by every child of God--from the struggle-hour of old by the brook Jabbok--the wrestling of spirit with spirit all through the gloom of that eastern night, until the sun broke on the desert horizon--on to his own times and experience; for, champion as he was, his personal failings and frailties are here included. "OUR infirmities." "WE know not." "Intercession FOR US."

The illustrative instance adduced, is as applicable to the Christendom and Britain of today, as to patriarchal or apostolic age. Who has not felt it?--the weakness--the poverty--shall I call it the Paralysis of Prayer--the aimless wandering of thought, the frigidity of faith--the stammering sentences, the feeble nerveless grasp of the divine promises; the unrealized verities of heaven and the soul, of spiritual and eternal things! Not only so, but baffled and perplexed with the very subjects of prayer; petitions we know not whether they be wise or unwise--the fearfulness of asking what may not be in harmony with the mind of God; the mental reservations, when seeking, or professing, to resolve our wills into His--"The prayers (in accordance with an old writer) that would need to be prayed for; the confessions of sin that would need themselves to be confessed;"--"We know not what we should pray for as we ought."

What a comfort the assurance, that amid these frailties and perplexities there is a great, all-wise, omnipotent Helper at our side, who can enter into our infirmities--participate in them--make allowance for them--extricate us from them. "Helps;" the word literally applies to aiding and assisting one under a burden; taking part in giving support when the burden-bearer is too weak to carry his load alone--while the other expression, rendered here "makes intercession," occurs nowhere else in the Greek Testament. The Romans, to whom the Apostle now wrote, would understand well the reference to the "Advocate" at the Bar or in the Basilica-court--the Instructor of their clients in legal difficulties; making needful suggestions in the conduct of each case. It is indeed a wondrous picture that is here brought before us.

We are familiar with a kindred truth, the intercession of our divine Redeemer and Savior. "He ever lives to make intercession for us." Whether in the sanctuary or the closet, He lets down His censer full of much incense, that therein we may place our polluted and unworthy prayers, to be perfumed with the incense of His adorable merits. No, not only so. There is a peculiarly consolatory feature in His mediation at His Father's right hand; that being Himself the Brother-man, He can enter with tenderness into the frailty and imperfection of our supplications, having been Himself "compassed with infirmity." As if, however, to complete this divine provision, we have here unfolded to us an Intercessor--not on the distant throne--the upper sanctuary of heaven--but "present"--"ever present with us," in the Temple--the Sanctuary of the soul on earth. It is an amazing boon, in accordance with the Savior's own word and promise, "I will ask the Father, and He shall give you another (Advocate), who will abide with you forever; even the Spirit of truth" (John 14;16, 17). Whether we kneel at our bedside in the quiet of the chamber--or bow in the midst of "the Great Congregation"--there is an ineffable PRESENCE by us--close to us--dictating or guiding our thoughts, stimulating our desires, inspiring our lips, "helping our infirmities," fetching the live coal from off the heavenly altar--"the Spirit of light and the Spirit of burning." Thus have we--as frail petitioners--needy suppliants, a double advocacy--the Advocate passed into the heavens, and the Advocate in the lower Court of the Church below. Christ interceding above; and the Holy Spirit interceding within.

And note that His presence is here specially promised to His people in their exigencies. He makes intercession for them, when theirs are "groanings which cannot be uttered;" or rather, groanings that are "not uttered." When they are pleading with strong crying and tears--when the lip fails the heart--when all is speechless, inarticulate--then the needed aid is supplied, and He pleads for those who cannot plead for themselves!
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The day would come, when at least the children of these Romans would comprehend and appreciate the reality of this supernatural support, in sufferings, which, with the exception of those at the fall of Jerusalem, have had no parallel since the world began. When the cry "to the lions!" would be heard bursting from ten thousand lips in the Amphitheater, a mighty unseen PRESENCE would be given to these hapless victims, and inspire them with heroism not their own. The great painters have introduced angels bending over the Colosseum martyrs with crowns of gold and wreaths of palm. But mightier would be the ministration of strength revealed in the words before us, when with filming eyes uplifted beyond the horrors of the present; to a painless, deathless world, they would be able to testify, "The Spirit helps our infirmities." "Your Spirit, O God, is good; lead us to the land of uprightness!"

But we do not require to go to the arena and its martyrs to know and understand the realities of this divine support and sustaining force. Every subject of severe trial can bear corresponding witness; in the hour of overwhelming affliction, and specially that of lacerating bereavement. At other times, and in the ordinary circumstances of life, much of what we have just said might appear mystical, the devout phantasy of devotees and enthusiasts. We concede that the theme which has engaged us is undoubtedly a deep and mysterious one. It baffles interpretation, transcends comprehension. We cannot fully understand it. We must kneel and adore! But, I repeat, there is one occasion when it becomes a profound reality. It is the season of that deepest of trials when the spirit knows too well what is meant by inarticulate groanings of anguish. When life's dreams of joy have vanished like the flash of summer lightnings, and we are left to brood over a past, the memories of which are all that remain. Was there no mysterious Helper who at that hour, not with the often noisy babble and gush of earthly comforters, but like the quiet dew or gentle rain, in a mystery of divine silence, drew near to us, spoke to us, consoled, relieved us of the burden, sustained, strengthened us; aye, and in accordance with Paul's own word here, interceded for us; curbed despairing thoughts, invested God's promises with new meaning, brightened the future with glorious hope; put prayers and breathings of submission into dumb lips; forcing us to say in the divine human words of the mighty Sympathizer, "Somebody has touched me!" (Luke 8;46).

The Spirit of God has been brooding over us in our chaos of darkness. Oh, it is more than Jacob's vision of Bethel angels. There seems a new beauty and meaning in the utterance of the same patriarch, spoken figuratively in our case, with affliction's stony pillow and the sun of life setting--"This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven!"

I can only add, in one sentence, that this "helping of individual infirmities" by the Holy Spirit, has often and again had its wider, more potent and startling illustration, in the Church collectively, from the early outpouring at Pentecost, to the aid, amid manifold infirmities, so conspicuously displayed at the era of the Reformation; when the groanings and travailings of burdened souls had their outcome in "the liberty of the glory of the sons of God." The day of Pentecost presented alike the first and the most signal--an irresistible testimony to this "power of the Holy Spirit," as a Spirit of intercession. We see the effects of that divine influence on the whole company then met "for prayer and supplication." On none more so, than their acknowledged leader. Peter is not the same man after that hour that he was before. His vacillation, timidity, rashness, cowardice are gone. "Out of weakness he has been made strong." And if you ask himself the reason, he will be ready with the reply, "The Spirit also helps our infirmities."

The divine picture we have given is completed by a yet further revelation in the succeeding verse; "And the Father who knows all hearts knows what the Spirit is saying, for the Spirit pleads for us believers in harmony with God's own will." (verse 27). We have thus the divine Trinity in unity encompassing each believer as with a shield. We have spoken of the pleading Son and the interceding Spirit. Here we have the divine Father, the "Searcher of hearts," interpreting through the Spirit the longings and groanings of His praying and afflicted people. It is the Three in One in covenant for our redemption; all securing that the petitions of the human supplicant are accepted and answered, because they are "according to the will of God." Father, Son, and Holy Spirit seem to draw near to every child and every place of prayer saying--"I will be to them a little sanctuary."

O Interceding Spirit! come, in all the plenitude of Your gifts and graces! "Awake, O north wind; and come, O south wind; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out. Let my Beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits" (Solomon's Song, 4;16). Breathe upon me and say, "Receive the Holy Spirit!" Strengthen me in feebleness! Endue me with power from on high! Fulfill the promise, "You shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit and with fire." I feel Your potency in every prayer that ascends from my lips acknowledging the need of the Apostle's counsel and safeguard--"Praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, and watching thereunto" (Ephesians 6;18 ). "It is the Spirit who quickens." By Him I am "chosen to salvation" (1 Thessalonians 2;13). By Him I am "strengthened with might in the inner man" (Ephesians 3;16). By Him my prayers and petitions are assimilated to the divine will. What is averred, by the beloved disciple, of the Second Person in the Trinity may be equally applied to the Third--"And this is the confidence that we have in Him, that, if we ask any thing according to His will, He hears us" (1 John 5;14).
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To recur, in closing, to the thought with which we set out; If, at times, humbled and saddened at the imperfection of our approaches to the throne, be this our comfort, that the great Searcher will make allowance, "because of the infirmity of our flesh," for poverty of language, verbal shortcomings, inarticulate yearnings, sighs and groans. He says to us, as He said to His servant David--"Forasmuch as it was in your heart to build an house for My name, you did well in that it was in your heart" (2 Chronicles 6;8 ). "You understand my thoughts afar off" (Psalms 139;2). "The work," says Archbishop Leighton in his "Exposition of the Lord's Prayer"--"The work of the Spirit is, in exciting the heart at times to prayer, to break forth in ardent desires to God, whatever the words be, whether new or old, yes possibly without words; and then most powerful when words are least, but vents in sighs and groans that cannot be expressed. Our Lord understands the language of these perfectly, and likes it best; He knows and approves the meaning of His own Spirit; He looks not to the outward appearance, the shell of words as men do."

May the gracious indwelling Spirit pardon my frequent infirmities, unseal my closed lips, attune my stammering tongue! My mouth is silent and my heart silent too, without His inspiration. I need His divine teachings in order to have revealed to me the beauties of holiness. A Sonata of Beethoven is unintelligible to the man destitute of the inner ear for music--the sweetest chords of harmony are to him a crash of discords. But You, Inspirer of all good thoughts, You can, You do awaken the soul to these higher, diviner melodies. Yes, if I am myself, through lack of words, speechless at the Mercy-Seat--Come, Dove of Peace! lift my poor petition on the wing of Your mighty intercession, and ensure a response to the Voiceless Prayer,

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11. A LULLABY.

The Apostle, in the verse preceding, had unfolded a mighty--may we not rather say the mightiest agency in the spiritual life of the believer--the work and "intercession" of the Third Person in the blessed Trinity. We found the Spirit of truth specially revealed as the "Helper of infirmities,"--acting, not as we do often, blindly, erroneously, with wayward capricious impulses, but "according to the will of God."

In the present note of his Song, Paul prolongs and deepens the cadence. It is a Lullaby by which, with "mother-love," God hushes His children to rest. It is not in one thing but in "all things" we are called to own and recognize the gracious influence which the Searcher of hearts--who "knows what is the mind of the Spirit"--exercises on His Church and people.

"For we know that all things work together for good to those who love God; to those who are the called according to His purpose" (v. 28 ).

Though it be "all things," whether prosperous or adverse, joyous or sorrowful, which combine and co-operate for our present and everlasting well-being; it is doubtless the season and discipline of affliction which are here mainly adverted to. "All things,"--"all for good." It is a luminous rainbow set in the cloud with its full complement of prismatic colors. He had in a preceding verse spoken of sonship, and the wealth of glory associated with it. He would wish to assure his readers in every age, that afflictions were not incompatible with so lofty a heritage. He would enforce and strengthen his recent affirmation--"The sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed." All events are under God's sovereign control, from the fall of the sparrow to the fall of an empire--but very specially does His supervision extend to the kingdom of grace and those who are its subjects and residents. We have already, more than once, mentioned the surmise, that at the very time these words were written--the gardens of the Quirinal may have been the scene of the infernal orgies of Nero. If so, whether the torments had already been undergone, or were only too surely in prospect, the utterance of our verse would prove a wonderful key-note of comfort to the martyr's death-Song. We can only think of the possibility of anguished sufferers seeking to support and cheer each other with the strain.

Let us proceed now to speak of these suffering children of the Kingdom. Their special CHARACTER and their special PRIVILEGE are conjointly described.

(1) One notable and distinguishing characteristic is, that they "Love God." As Dean Alford remarks, "This is a stronger designation of believers than any yet used in the chapter." It is indeed a brief but most perfect portraiture of the divine family--we may add, a beautiful description of true religion.

How often is this latter travestied and misrepresented by selfish theories; as if it consisted in a life-long requirement to follow what is right, and to hate what is sinful. By doing so to escape future retribution, and be recompensed at last with some indefinite rewards in heaven. How much more blessed and elevating the Apostle's definition of believers in the present verse--"Those who love God." Loving Him for the sake of His own perfect and supreme loveliness; loving Him on account of the love He has lavished on the unworthy and undeserving; the love with which He loved me before I loved Him--the love which loved me when an enemy! What can stay the enmity, and evoke the responsive affection of the human spirit like this? The mother's heart may be found so dead to feeling as to thrill with no gratitude towards the man who at the risk of life plunged into the seething flood and laid her rescued child at her feet. The slave's heart may be found so dead to feeling as not to love the master who has struck off his fetters and set him free. But the soul to which has been revealed, in all its wondrous reality, the love of God in Christ, cannot, dare not, resist the impulse to love the Divine Being who has first loved, and so loved. Conscious in some feeble measure of its length and breadth and depth and height, in answer to the question, "Do you love Me?" the recipient of "Love so amazing, so divine," can say, amid felt frailties and mournful shortcomings--"Lord, You know all things, You know that I love You!" As the rays of the sun falling on a polished mirror are returned again to the fountain of light, so God's love falling on the soul takes the love it has enkindled back to the Great Fountain of Love. Religion is thus restored to its proper place, as essentially a thing of the heart, inward, subjective. No outward church or organization can make a Christian, except in name. You may try, by external appliances or artificial devices, to induce a man to love God; just as it has been said, you may tie branches or fruit on a living tree and give for a while the semblance of life; but it is the semblance only. There is no vital union with the stem--the energizing principle, permeating every fiber, is lacking--"The love of God shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who is given unto us." His true children love Him, because His own ineffable love has vitalized, influenced, interpenetrated their whole being.
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To use a different figure and illustration regarding them--we see in vigorous action, not the centrifugal force of many harsh theological creeds and systems, where Deity is fled from, evaded, dreaded; but rather the centripetal force, drawing souls to the Parent Orb, as the Sun does erratic planets and satellites, by the gravitation power of love. "God is love, and he that dwells in love dwells in God, and God in him."

(2) The second characteristic of believers here described is, that they are "the called according to His Purpose."

On this, however, I shall not now enlarge, as it will come to be considered more appropriately and in order, where the theme is reverted to by the Apostle in the subsequent context; one of the links in a golden chain of blessings. Enough to remark that it is an additional reason--indeed the initiatory reason for believers' love to God, that they are the objects and recipients of His free, sovereign, unmerited goodness. "It is not of him that wills, nor of him that runs, but of God that shows mercy." We might, moreover, write pages of comment, but nothing could be so pertinent and comprehensive as the words of Paul in the last of his pastoral epistles--"Who has saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according to His own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began" (2 Timothy 1;9). Being thus "called according to His purpose," nothing can thwart or nullify that divine decree--nothing dispossess us of our patrimony as "joint-heirs with Christ." In one word--salvation is secure.

We pass now, from the twofold character and description of believers, to the assurance of an inestimable PRIVILEGE. "And we know that all things work together for good."

The phraseology of this verse always strikes us as being alike natural and peculiar. It is one of the Apostle's personal avowals--an article in his own individual creed--at all events, he includes himself in the assertion. But how does he formulate the privilege so claimed? Specially observe, he does not say "we see," but "we know." Had he adopted the former expression, he would have averred what was not the case. He would have contradicted himself. Inasmuch as he elsewhere distinctly states--to take one of several similar assertions--"Now we see through a glass darkly." And in this he only anticipates the honest, heartfelt experience of every Christian. We often see things apparently not working for good--no, rather, working the opposite; startling irregularities in God's providential dealings--the saying of the Patriarch--the rash saying, but which to us seems at the time a true one--"All these things are against me." We discern no "bright light in the clouds." Often all is blurred and murky and fog-like, not infrequently in apparent infringement of goodness and wisdom and righteousness. We impeach the divine rectitude, and question the dealings of the Supreme Disposer. But how so? Simply because we are faithless, and blind ourselves to the ulterior purposes of the Almighty. We are hasty and premature in our judgments. We have not, to use the phrase of a preceding verse, "the patience to wait" the final outcome of the great drama, the "needs be," that will sooner or later be made manifest.

To take a purely secular illustration which occurs at random. Go back to ancient Greece or Italy. Take your stand under the slopes of Pentelicus, or the ridges of the Apennine Carrara. In both cases, why these unsightly gashes in the fair mountain forms? Why these blocks rudely dislodged from where they have rested undisturbed since the last upheaval long ages ago of earth's surface; yokes of patient oxen dragging them within city walls to the studios of Athenian and Tuscan sculptors? Suspend your verdict until after years of toil, Phidias has chiseled his Pentelican into the richly ornamented Parthenon--or until Michael Angelo has wrought out his Florentine "Night and Morning," or the Pieta of Peter's. The insensate blocks have been transfigured into breathing forms which have educated the world and proved the pride and despair of the ages. The result was doubtless what few of their contemporaries or fellow-citizens could comprehend at the time. But the great artists themselves were confident. They saw, underneath these cumbrous masses of stone or marble, shapes of angels and heroes; and were content to wait until genius and its cunning tools had worked them out.
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Or, take a Gospel memory. Go to the village on the slopes of Olivet which had for days been darkened by the shadow of death. A beloved brother has been mysteriously removed. Two lone sisters are left in a paroxysm of grief--and the saddest element in their trial is--that "the Master" is absent. That long descent to the Jordan, and farther still, some of the hills of Peraea, separate them from the only Being in the wide world who could have stemmed their pulsing tide of grief, and averted the terrible catastrophe to home and heart. The wild soliloquy during the long hours is ever on their lips--If HE had only been here, our brother would not have not died! Perhaps, stranger still, when they sent a messenger with speed down these Judean passes and across Jordan to acquaint the absent Savior with the bereavement; instead of, at once, in responsive sympathy obeying their summons and hastening to their support--the narrative gives this unexpected extinguisher to their hopes--"When He had heard, therefore, that he was sick, He abode two days still in the same place where He was!" Who could dare say, on the first reading of that poignant Gospel episode--that "all these things were for good"? They seemed the terrible reverse--a very mockery of their dearest hopes and prayers; "Why is He so long in coming?--Why tarry the wheels of His chariot?" Wait the sequel. "At evening time there shall be light." The hour, long delayed, arrives at last, when they rejoice over a restored brother, and a present Master and Friend. The Sun that had for days waded through clouds, sets in crimson and gold on that home of Bethany.

Do we duly consider, in rehearsing this touching narrative, what the Church--what individual believers--above all, what sorrowing ones would have lost, but for that episode of tarrying love--that strange frustration of hope during these two mysterious days, when the ear of mercy seemed heavy that it could not hear? What lessons of trust and patience and submission would have been forfeited, had there not been preserved to us these shadows in the divine picture, all needed to bring out in bold relief its wonderful lights? If Martha--with her rash, outspoken, impulsive nature, ventured in the climax of her grief and despair to upbraid her Lord for His absence--so unlike Himself--His past kindnesses--when trial afterwards overtook her, as doubtless in many forms it did--we think these memories of the absence, and the lingering beyond Jordan, would put a different soliloquy in her lips--could it fail to be this--"And we know that all things work together for good!"

Yes, we may well trust our loving Father-God and gracious Savior, when we fail to trace their dealings with us. All things "work together." The Song is made up of separate parts, combined tones. It is a piece of "concerted music." The shuttles are here and there weaving their dark threads; but it will only be, by contrast of color, for the perfecting of the pattern. Each thread is needful--the black and somber as well as the bright.

Perhaps the time of all others when we most fail to understand the mysteries of the divine dealings with us, is that very hour we have just described in the experience of the family of Bethany--an hour sadly familiar to most, if not to all--the hour when lives that have made our own hearts glad and the world beautiful--angel-faces and angel-hearts have vanished--when the shuttles of life we have spoken of have been mysteriously arrested and stilled--leaving a blurred tapestry--an unfinished web. It is Heaven and the Great Beyond which can alone suggest and supply the true solution. The pattern left uncompleted here, will be finished there. "Good"--the good of our verse "will be the final goal of all apparent bad"--


Meanwhile, it is not death but life that concerns us. In its manifold and complex phases--in all its changes and chances, let us feel that we are protected by "the wings of God." And even if it be the shadow of His wings--under these let us take our refuge, until earth's calamities be overpast.


There is a gracious discipline underlying what is outwardly adverse; and an enlarged and deepening experience will teach us so. Paul seems as if he could have written his present words with even greater confidence in a future year. He could emphasize them with the advance of his life. We all remember how, when his dearest aspirations seemed crossed and baffled--when chained to a soldier of the imperial barracks or within the gloomy walls of the State prison, he could say with buoyant confidence--"The things that have happened unto me have fallen out rather to the furtherance of the Gospel." If we may quote the words of one in many ways a contrast to our Apostle, yet who has left his name in the present age--"As to the very trial itself," says Newman, "there is nothing in any way to fear. 'All things work together for good to those who love God.' I am firmly and rootedly persuaded of this. Everything that happens to them is most certainly the very best, in every light, that could by any possibility have happened. God will give good…I have nothing to apprehend. This is indeed a privilege, for it takes away all care as to the future."
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Can we, by anticipation--or rather with something of the faith that Paul had, feel the same, and say the same? Reverting to our sculpture illustration, can we adopt our Apostle's words elsewhere--"Now He who has wrought (chiseled, polished) us for the self-same thing is God" (2 Corinthians 5;5). And if it be some very exceptional and mysterious trial, can we add with him--continuing the same figure--"Our light affliction…WORKS for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory"? Let us accept with unmurmuring lips the dealings of the Divine Chastener, whatever these may be. He will not impose upon us burdens that we are unable to carry. It is His own gracious promise, "I will correct you in measure" (Jeremiah 30;11.) "For all there were so many, yet was not the net broken." The hour assuredly is coming, when whatever befalls us will be seen to be not only for the best, but the best; the retrospect of life a retrospect of love--every tongue of His ransomed Church brought to confess--"He has done ALL THINGS well." The remembrance of the crucible will only be the removal of the dross and alloy, and the transforming into pure gold.

In closing, let us emphasize the lesson of the present meditation--that of simple, unhesitating, unfaltering TRUST.


Trust Him in great things, trust Him in little things. Trust Him in the battle of life, whether for yourself, or for those near and dear to you whom you have seen, it may be with tremulous misgivings, going down into the fray. Augustine's mother, that never-to-be-forgotten night, when, first in the chapel of the Martyr Cyprian, and then by the seashore, she made the lonely hours echo with her doleful lamentations, could never believe that God was making things combine for good, when her beloved but wayward son had eluded her watch, and, aided by prosperous breezes, taken ship to Rome. She could only conjure up the fierce temptations that would assail an impressionable and still vacillating nature, in the great Babylon. When nothing else could avail her, prayer remained. But these prayers were answered in a way undreamt of. The day came when mother and son together could take down the harp from the willows and adore the same Providence which, three centuries previously, had permitted a fanatic Pharisee to pass through the northern gate of Jerusalem and to "journey towards Damascus." In both cases, the fiery ardent souls--"the called according to God's purpose"--were translated, by reason of those very journeyings, out of the kingdom of darkness, and flooded with "a light above the brightness of the sun."


Trust Him in DEATH! As in life the promise of our present meditation has been again and again realized--so also and conspicuously so at life's close. It has formed the "Swan-Song"--the departing cadence of not a few, before joining the minstrelsy of the skies. The last words of Chrysostom were these--as if catching inspiration from the Apostle's saying--"Glory to God for ALL THINGS." The same occupied the closing thoughts of the Scottish Reformer John Knox. "When his sight failed him," his biographer relates, "he called for the large Bible; caused one of his family to put his finger on the 28th verse of the eighth chapter of Romans, and told those who not only he died in the faith of what was in the chapter, but firmly believed that all things, and death itself, should work together for his good; and in a little he slept in Jesus."

Shall it be so, reader, with you and me? Shall this sweet snatch of harmony in Paul's Song of Songs, ever consoling--ever precious as we have described it in seasons of mystery and darkness--an anodyne amid the present fret and fever of the world, be at last a soothing strain and monotone hushing to rest in the hour of departure?--"All things"…and "All things for good!"--"So He Gives His Beloved Sleep."
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12. ANTHEM OF THE FIRST-BORN.

Another suggested and prolonged note of the great Choral Song.

In the preceding verse, the Apostle had spoken of a second privilege of God's redeemed family--that they are "the called according to His purpose." This thought--a new argument for their present and final salvation, he expands; linking it at the same time with one of the most sublime truths of redemption--their brotherhood and sisterhood in Christ--their exaltation in Him, the ever living head. No strain in the divine music, at all events up to this point, is more elevated and elevating. We may well give it the name at the head of this chapter, "The Anthem of the First-Born."

(V. 29) "For whom He did foreknow, He also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the first-born among many brethren."

In the opening clauses of the verse we have one of the unsounded depths alike of philosophy and theology. We have no desire--we have no ability to sink the plumb-line. "We have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep." Such a theme would not even be incidentally adverted to, but for its prominent presentation in the chapter. There is a boundary between the knowable and the unknowable; and beyond it is presumption to cross. The attempt is, and ever has been, vain, to reconcile the decree of God with the freewill of man--predestination, with human responsibility. In the familiar words of the poet of "Paradise Lost," those who have--
"reasoned high


Happy for us that all which is absolutely needful for our own salvation is revealed with such clarity, that he who runs may read. Man's part, alike objectively and subjectively, is plain. It is around God's part--the part with which we have no concern, there hovers the mist and the mystery. The rebuke which the Savior gave of old to the presumptuous casuist is full of meaning and instruction to us--"Master, are there few that shall be saved?" Note, He neither directly answers nor evades the question. His reply is virtually this--"You have nothing to do with abstract truths and problems. Life is practical. Look to yourself--"YOU strive to enter in at the strait gate" (Luke 13;24).

That God's foreknowledge and foreordination--His unalterable plans and purposes are necessities of the divine nature, arising out of His own prescience and perfection, we dare not deny. To do so, would be to undeify the Supreme. With Him there are no successive, far less contingent events. The past, present, and future are one eternal now. Over all occurrences, alike in the natural and moral world, the words are written--"To do whatever Your hand and Your counsel determined before to be done" (Acts 4;28 ). But we may be well content to leave alone metaphysical sophistries and speculative difficulties--or (recalling the figurative name of our volume) even apparent disharmonies. While baffling to reason on the one hand, there are, on the other, gracious lessons of comfort in this very thought of the absolute decrees of an absolute God--that nothing is independent of His control--His sovereign will and pleasure. Nothing is fortuitous--nothing the result of haphazard or chance. All is regulated by a "reign of law." He speaks and it is done. The sudden lightning-flash, the sunken reef, the assault of fever and pestilence, the iron missile of battle--each of these have their appointment and commission from the Great Ruler of men.

The writer of these lines can never forget in the most appalling bereavement of early youth--when accident--what seemed cruel and preventable accident--blighted in a moment hearth and home, and left an aching blank in many hearts--the first angel-message of consolation which rocked the wild waves to rest, came from the lips of an aged relative of rare gifts and piety. In solemn tones, without note or comment, he repeated the words so familiar at all events to Scottish ears--"The decrees of God are His eternal purpose, according to the counsel of His own will, whereby, for His own glory, He has foreordained whatever comes to pass." I never read or heard these epigrammatic sentences, but the image occurs of a mighty river. Its source "the counsel of His own will;"--the river itself--"whatever comes to pass"--the ocean where it flows "His own glory." "Of Him, and through Him, and to Him, are all things." The sovereignty of divine grace in predestination is a doctrine continually presented to us in Holy Scripture, alike by prophets, and psalmists, and by diviner lips still. Even in the description of the final judgment in His own great parable-chapter, the Speaker brings out, prominently, "the election of God" in the ages of a bypast eternity--"Come, you who are blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world."
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If, however, these and kindred truths be beyond human grasp and range, there are others, which faith can unfalteringly accept. The latter, indeed, are wondrous and mysterious, only by reason of the blessing they confer on the guilty and undeserving. If we stagger through unbelief, it is only because, in the words of a sceptic of last century, "They are far too great, they are far too good to be true."

Let us pass then, from the fact of God's predestinating love, to its object as here set forth. It is "to be conformed to the image of His Son."

We are confronted at once with a practical test--an answer to the question which not a few with anxious and anguished hearts are seeking to propound--'Am I among the number of the predestinated?--am I among the favored election to eternal life?' Let it rather take the alternative form which the Apostle here gives it--'Am I conformed to the image of God's Son? Am I walking in His footsteps, imbibing His Spirit, reflecting His image? Is it at all events my heartfelt desire and aspiration to keep Him ever before me as my ideal--following Him in His humility, and kindness, and unselfishness, and purity? Am I feeling like the copyist of a great picture, how sad the shortcoming as compared with the matchless Original--yet undeterred by failure, endeavoring to add, by faithful assiduous toil, touch to touch, until the lineaments have been faithfully caught up and transferred to the canvas?' In accordance with the significant word employed by the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, "Therefore, holy brethren, partakers of the heavenly calling, consider the Apostle and High Priest of our profession, Christ Jesus" (Hebrews 3;1). "CONSIDER!" Literally "gaze upon Him," with the artist's intent mental vision--until something at least of the living personality be embodied in the heart and life; the human soul, however inadequately, glowing with the features of the Divine Redeemer! We are reminded, in its practical application, of a reference by the Bishop of Durham to a great father of the early Church, who rebuked the well-meaning Christian females in Constantinople for embroidering on their dresses the mere outward form of the Savior; and not rather seeking to carry His divine image in their souls.

We know well, and these are not the times when this conviction should be dimmed or overlaid with any other views of the Savior's work on earth, that His pre-eminent mission, was to atone for sin. The sacrificial element, let it again be said, must not be deposed from its primary place in the plan of salvation. The leading strain, "no condemnation in Christ," cannot be displaced by other or minor cadences. But neither can we forget the great complementary object of the Incarnation--Jesus the Exemplar and Pattern of His Church and people. We are invited to study that peerless "Image" as revealed in the Gospel narratives, and obtain from it a touchstone whereby to try our own character and state before God. How varied are these pictures of divine-human kindness and love thus enshrined by the evangelists! Now, it is healing the sick; now, it is sympathizing with the bereaved; now, it is solving anxious doubts; now, it is feeding the hungry; now, it is sheltering the outcast--breaking not the bruised reed nor quenching the smoking flax; now, it is speaking peace and forgiveness to the troubled; now, it is returning injury with blessing; now, it is the merciful apology for unwatchfulness; now, it is pardoning the treachery of trusted friends; now, it is stooping to the most menial office, in order to inculcate the lesson of humility; now, it is folding little children in His arms! And in all this we are called to contemplate the most complete self-abnegation, the most perfect submission to His Father's will--unmurmuring acceptance of trial--heroism in duty, calmness in death--not so much as one faltering or deflection in His path, until He could utter at the close of all--"I have glorified You on the earth; I have finished the work which You gave me to do."

Do we not seem to hear our Apostle speaking, as he elsewhere does, "Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus;" "Be therefore followers (imitators) of God as dear children." We seem prepared, now, with an answer to the query--'Is my name written in the Lamb's Book of life?' Yes, if you can appropriate the words of that same inspired Book--"These are they who follow the Lamb wherever He goes" (Revelation 14;4). It is the saying of the blessed Master and Teacher Himself--"He that does the will of My Father who is in Heaven, the same is My mother, and sister, and brother."

Then comes the concluding note in this Song-verse. Its final clause seems to put a crown on all that precedes--that He might be the First-born among many brethren.
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We have here the exaltation of the Elder Brother of the ransomed brotherhood of humanity. The glorious and glorified family are invited to look to Him as their living Head--His mark on their foreheads--He their Leader and Forerunner showing them the path of life. The first-born among the Hebrews had many exceptional privileges, as we more particularly noted when speaking, in verse 17, of the joint-heirship of Christ and believers. Let me only recall, in passing, what was there said, that primogeniture, with the Jewish nation, had a fullness and meaning unknown among others. It was a dim reflection of the prerogatives of God's "First-born"--His eternal Son--"The Only Begotten of the Father full of grace and truth--"The Prince of the Kings of the Earth," who, as He surveys the fruit of the travail of His soul, can say now, and will say with deeper and more exultant triumph on the Great Day of His appearing--"Behold, I, and the children which God has given Me."

And let us never forget that in this predestinating love and purpose of God, all is of grace. There is nothing in His people which led to their selection as "vessels of glory." "It is not of him that wills, nor of him that runs, but of God that shows mercy." "Being justified freely by His grace, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus." "Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace." "By grace you are saved, through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God." Salvation is a glorious rainbow--one limb of the arc resting on the divine decree; the other in the eternal bliss and happiness of the saved.

Reader, I close by repeating the practical observation--Do not on the one hand entangle yourself in the mazy labyrinth of foreordination and predestination. Do not attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable. Neither, on the other hand, by a wild fatalism question your own personal interest in the benefits of the Gospel. Be very sure of this, that God wishes "all to be saved." "He is not willing that any should perish." In the infinite yearning of His heart He says, as if absolute decrees existed only in the systems of stern theologians--"Why will you die, O house of Israel?" In another view of the subject, you may well rejoice that His plans and purposes are thus immutable--that your final salvation depends on no human contingency or peradventure. It is the "determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God." Thus runs your title-deed--"God, who cannot lie, promised before the world began." The First-born, in the glory of His Person and the all-sufficiency of His atoning work, is Surety for the "many brethren."

In the Syrian version, our verse is rendered--"From the beginning He knew them, and sealed them with the image of His Son." O how much more glorious is God's theory and ideal than that of Christian schools and apologists! These latter (as we have seen) often represent salvation as a gigantic scheme of deliverance from wrath; while His end and object is "conformity to the image of His Son." "According as He has chosen us in Him, before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy, and without blame before Him in love" (Ephesians 1;4). "Christ also loved the Church, and gave Himself for it; that He might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the Word; that He might present it to Himself a glorious Church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish" (Ephesians 5;25-27). Rejoice that in Him all penalties have been paid--all debts cancelled--and now nothing is left but the assurance and the welcome, "Him that comes unto Me, I will in no wise cast out." Let not the opening doctrine of our verse lead to despairing and desponding views. Let the thought of that love of God, in election and foreordination, rather have a quickening and stimulating influence. "Why the rather, brethren, give diligence to make your calling and election sure; for if you do these things you shall never fall; for so an entrance shall be ministered unto you abundantly into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ" (2 Peter 1;10, 11).

Seek after a gradual but very real conformation to the image of Christ. Individually, as single stars in the great heavenly skies, endeavor to reflect the glory of the Central Sun--and then rise to the realization, as given here, of the Church collectively--one of many brethren--one of a mighty planetary system moving in harmonious heavenly orbits, all owning relation and loyalty to the "First-born." There is unassailable safety in Him. He promises a life commensurate with His own--"Because I live, you shall live also;"--"Changed into the same image from glory to glory." The grandeur of the kingdom--"Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun." Its numbers--"A multitude which no man can number." Its perpetuity--"As the stars forever and ever."
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13. SONGS OF DEGREES.

The familiar "Songs of degrees" contained in the Psalter from Psalms 120 to 134 inclusive, were probably the "national anthems" used by the Jewish pilgrims of old on the way to their feasts. We can imagine the highways and valleys of Palestine resounding with these jubilant melodies. On the occasion of the greatest annual celebration, the groups traveled by the Paschal moonlight to escape the heat of the sun (Isaiah 30;29). "They go from strength to strength," or, as that may mean, "company added to company," until "every one of them in Zion appears before God" (Psalms 84;7). They left their distant homes among pine and olive groves on the spurs of Hermon, by the shores of Gennesaret or on the hills of Nazareth, and as they approached the end of the journey, they would with confidence sing (may it not have been their, as it still is our favorite "Song of degrees")--"I will lift up my eyes unto the hills, from whence comes my help" (Psalms 121;1). Then, that loved Song of Hope and Trust, chanted to the music of pipe and tabret, was in due course followed by "the Psalm of realization," on reaching the city of solemnities (Psalms 122;1, 2)--"I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the House of the Lord. Our feet shall stand within your gates, O Jerusalem."

This picturesque and sacred memory of the covenant land suggests a befitting name for the present chapter, in connection with the verse which now comes in course.

(V. 30) "Moreover, whom He did predestinate, them He also called; and whom He called, them He also justified; and whom He justified, them He also glorified."

The God who conducts His spiritual Israel will never leave them until He brings them safe to the heavenly Zion. From predestination to glorification is a long and wondrous journey--"the path of life"--a true way of holiness. But He who has begun a good work will carry it on and "perform it until the day of Jesus Christ." There are, as it were, successive pausing-places here indicated–"Predestination" being the starting-point. "Called" is the first encampment of the Christian pilgrim. "Justified" is the next. The final one--the glorious end and consummation--is "Glorified." So that our Apostle might translate his verse of prose into the glowing poetry of the prophet--"But the people of God will sing a song of joy, like the songs at the holy festivals. You will be filled with joy, as when a flutist leads a group of pilgrims to Jerusalem - the mountain of the Lord - to the Rock of Israel." (Isaiah 30;29).

There is no need of multiplying figure or illustration, but were we tempted to do so, we might add yet this, that here we have A PYRAMID OF GRACE. It recalls one of the pyramids in Egypt, rising from the sands of Sakkarah, called "the step pyramid," from its being built in six stages. Its foundation of primeval granite is predestination. But tier on tier is added, until the apex is reached of glorification. Yes, a pyramid of grace. For it is grace that is conspicuous throughout. Grace lays every stone. The immutable foundation-stones are of grace. Grace lays all the subsequent stones, and when the top stone is "brought forth with shouting," this great "Building of God" will claim the concluding ascription of Zechariah--"Grace, grace unto it" (Zechariah 4;7).

Having already in the preceding meditation spoken of predestination--we shall pass at once to the second theme in the inspired sequences--the second strain in the Song--the second layer in the pyramid--"Them He also CALLED."
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Almost every writer on this verse has distinguished between the two "callings" spoken of in Scripture. The first is the OUTER call of the Gospel. That invitation is addressed to all indiscriminately. The personified true "Wisdom,'' is represented as standing on the steps of the Temple of Grace--the entrance of the pyramid--proclaiming with a voice of infinite compassion, "Unto you, O men, I call, and My voice is to the sons of man" (Proverbs 8;4). Here there is no exclusiveness as there is no condition. "Whoever will" is the motto engraven on the entrance. You can make the sun your chariot and travel the wide expanse of earth--there is not the nation nor the solitary individual to whom that message of peace and reconciliation may not be addressed; so that "as far as the east is from the west," so far will God remove our transgressions from us. That is the outer call to which each one who traces these lines must again and again have listened. Millions are listening to it daily, hourly. The Church has echoed and re-echoed it, ever since, eighteen centuries ago, she received the authoritative commission from her great Head--"That repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem" (Luke 24;47). Never perhaps was that external call louder than at the present day. It is proclaimed from pulpit and platform, from press and book and magazine. It would almost seem as if the Angel of the Apocalypse were beheld flying through the midst of heaven, with this open book in his hand--"the everlasting Gospel;" while a Mightier than created angel exclaims with pleading importunate voice--"Now therefore hearken unto me, O you children, for blessed are those who keep My ways. Hear instruction, and be wise, and refuse it not. Blessed is the man that hears Me, watching daily at My gates, waiting at the posts of My doors. For whoever finds Me finds life, and shall obtain favor of the Lord" (Proverbs 8;32-35).

Such, we repeat, is the outward call, but it is worth nothing, unless it be accompanied with the inner response, "Behold, here am I!" "Lord, what will You have me to do?" To use the conventional language of theologians, that is "EFFECTUAL CALLING." By the vitalizing energy of the Spirit of God, the ear not only catches the external invitation, but the heart listens with sympathetic joy and accepts the offers of a free salvation; "I will hear what God the Lord will speak, for He will speak peace unto His people and to His saints."

It is vain for us to pry into the divine secrets, and by unlocking the archives of heaven endeavor to explore the mysteries of God's predestination and calling--why one selected and not another--why Zaccheus the grasping extortioner and not Judas the consecrated Apostle; why Lazarus the beggar and not Dives the rich; why Saul the persecutor and not Elymas the sorcerer; why Onesimus the slave and not the stoic philosophers on Mars' Hill; why, of the two robbers, one taken and the other left? God Himself--the Great Supreme--gives the sole reason; and all we can do is to fall down and reverentially adore--"I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy." "No but, O man, who are you that replies against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why have you made me thus? Has not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honor and another unto dishonor? What if God, willing to show His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much patience the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction. And that He might make known the riches of His glory on the vessels of mercy, which He had afore prepared unto glory" (Romans 9;20-23).

The Redeemer, in the course of His ministry, seems to avoid all needless disputations and superfluous questions. His one aim and desire appear ever to be the proclamation of the Gospel--the good news to sinners; that for the lost sheep wandering on the Dead Sea shores, there is the shepherd-love of God waiting and willing to rescue it--that for the prodigal who had deserted his home, squandered his substance and herded among the degraded and vile of a far country, there is ready the outstretched arms of unrequited parental affection--robe and ring and sandals, and the jubilee of the festal hall. But, at times, when force of circumstances, or the curiosity or presumption of His followers force Him to speak--almost compelling reference to the mystery behind the veil--He does not scruple to enunciate some such solemn reflection as the following--"At that time Jesus answered and said, I thank You, O Father, Lord of Heaven and earth, because You have hid these things from the wise and prudent, and have revealed them unto babes. Even so, Father; for so it seemed good in Your sight" (Matthew 11;25, 26).

Does He call some, and there is no response? Here is the explanation--His own explanation--"You will not come unto Me that you may have life." Happy those (are we among them?) to whom His own words apply--"He CALLS His sheep by name and leads them out." Let us not be disobedient to the heavenly voice and vision, if He is addressing us, as He did the writer of this great Canticle when He put a new Song into His lips--"Go your way, for you are a chosen vessel unto Me" (Acts 9;15).
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But we are led to the third strain in this "Song of degrees"--"Whom He called, them He also justified."

JUSTIFICATION is a Pauline term; or at all events an apostolic one. We do not hear it on the lips of Christ. It has no place or reference in the Sermon on the Mount. Yet it is in perfect keeping and harmony with His teachings. We need go no further than the "pearl of parables" just alluded to--that of the prodigal son; where we have set forth, in the liveliest terms and imagery, this "act of God's free grace." One reason, perhaps, for the difference in the formula of the Great Master and the greatest of His successors is, that the One spoke more immediately to Jews, who comprehended little of such forensic allusions, as compared to Romans. Roman law had a worldwide repute. Roman justice, equity, righteousness, survived in the kingdom of iron, when other signs of decadence and corruption marred its imperial splendor. Our Apostle in his theological system, as specially enunciated in the opening chapters of this Epistle, has helped us in our conceptions of the moral government of God. He is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity. His throne has the pillars of immutability to rest upon. True, His uncontrolled omnipotence could do anything. His love and power combined could readily grant a free pardon and amnesty; but they must act in divine harmony with truth and rectitude. He can by no means clear the guilty. Here intervenes the work of the great Surety-substitute. Around His cross mercy and truth have met together, righteousness and peace have embraced each other. "He has made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him" (2 Corinthians 5;21). And "being justified by faith," faith in this sin-bearing, sin-atoning Savior, "we have peace with God." Justification--acceptance with Him, thus becomes not only possible but assured. For in Christ, not only have the demands of the law been met and satisfied, but the law itself is magnified and made honorable; God the just God and yet the Savior--just, in the very act of justifying the unjust.

Paul in saying this and much more to the same purpose, described his own personal experience. From the hour of justification, a new constraining influence and principle dominated his life, as it does that of all his faithful followers. "I am crucified with Christ; nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me." Not only did the citadel capitulate, but all the rare stores and treasures of his soul were freely surrendered to the Lord who died for him. "What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ--the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith." (Philippians 3;8, 9).

And note through the chords and concords of this varying music, the keynote of our Song of Songs is ever asserting itself in pure, lofty cadence. "By the grace of God, I am what I am." "Who has saved us and called us with an holy calling, not according to our works, but according to His own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began" (2 Timothy 1;9).

We have now reached the top-stone of the Pyramid. The earthly Songs of degrees are merged in the triumphant hosannas of the ransomed. The predestinated, the called, the justified, are now the GLORIFIED. All has been tending to this, that "they which are called might receive the promise of eternal inheritance" (Hebrews 9;15). The "Songs in the night" of God's true Israel, like those of the Palestine pilgrims, have reached their closing anthem--when, after hill and valley and highway have been trodden, the morning light breaks on the walls of the heavenly Jerusalem. "The ransomed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion with Songs, and everlasting joy upon their heads. They shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away" (Isaiah 35;10). Then shall be fulfilled the prayer of the Pilgrim of pilgrims--that dirgeful Song He sang in the deepest night of darkness, but whose strains of hope doubtless mitigated the gloom--"Father, I will that they also whom You have given me, be with me where I am, that they may behold my glory" (John 17;24). It is the consummation of the believer's bliss, in the sinless, sorrowless, tearless, deathless land. "These," said a dying saint to the writer, "are but Your negatives--what, O God, will be Your positives?"

Let us leave them in the undefined grandeur of the words--"In Your presence is fullness of joy, at Your right hand are pleasures for evermore." Aye, perhaps even then (can we doubt it?) there will still be "Songs of degrees" deepening anthem-peals--swelling, from the sound of a great multitude to the voice of many waters, until they become as the voice of mighty thunderings. Tier on tier will be ever added to the pyramid--yet the apex will be ever unreached--the bliss of the redeemed, like that of the God they adore, being "unspeakable and full of glory"--Heaven a true and everlasting Excelsior! Shall we be among the number of the crowned and glorified? the possessors and wearers of that three-fold coronal--Paul's "crown of righteousness"--James's "crown of life"--Peter's "crown of glory"?
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And now, in closing, let us, as the leading lesson from this elevating theme, exult in the assurance that all will come true. Indeed, this seems the connection of our present verse with those which precede. Paul would wish to certify to all his converts, that their salvation was sure--that nothing can thwart God's purpose so as to imperil their final safety. If predestination tells us anything it is this--that the Author of predestination cannot lie--that being the Author He will be the Finisher. He cannot deny Himself. He is the faithful, covenant-keeping, covenant-ratifying God. All is guaranteed.

There may be those who make light of what is called the Calvinistic doctrine of "the perseverance of the saints." It is a doctrine which dare not be allied with party names. It is no party shibboleth. It is one of the precious sayings of Christ, and dare not be eliminated from the Church's creed. "I give unto them eternal life, and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand" (John 10;28 ). "Having loved His own which were in the world, He loved them unto the end" (John 13;1). To use human language, He would never take all that pains--an expenditure of word and promise, if there were involved either contingency or failure--if predestination were to come short of glorification. Paul seems to re-iterate and emphasize his own words elsewhere, "God is faithful by whom you were called" (1 Corinthians 1;9). "THE CALLED OF GOD"; what a name, and honor, and destiny! We cease to wonder at another saying of Christ on earth, when, on the occasion of returning from their first missionary journey, the seventy disciples gave vent to a spirit of joy not unalloyed with vain glory, on account of casting out devils in the Master's name. His words were--"Notwithstanding in this rejoice not, but rather rejoice because your names are written in heaven" (Luke 10;17-20).

We have seen that God is faithful; but, on the other hand, we must remember--"He that shall endure (and persevere) unto the end, the same shall be saved." Let this be our coveted beatitude--"Blessed are those who do His commandments, that they may have right to the tree of life, and may enter in through the gates into the city" (Revelation 22;14). No one link in the golden chain will be broken or give way. We may have, we must have our seasons of weakness, despondency and depression, when faith is apt to fail and hope to wither. But, like the river temporarily lost in the sands, all will emerge again in "the full flood of God." Predestinated, called, justified, adopted, sanctified, glorified. Let us grasp anew our pilgrim-staff, and with fresh heart and hope resume the pilgrim journey. Let us sing now our earthly "Song of degrees"--the Song of the faithful runners in the pilgrim-race, with the heavenly goal in view, and the certainty of reaching it at last--"Forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus" (Philippians 3;13, 14).



14. CRESCENDO.

With the last verses, we might have been led to conclude, that the Apostle would terminate his theme. Farther, it would almost seem he could not go. He has attained with "glorification" the height of his high argument; the gates of glory are reached, and his Master's words are ringing in his ear, "Enter into the joy of your Lord."

But he appends to his dissertation a triumphant postscript; or, rather, he breaks forth into a lofty rhetorical speech. With the last of the successive links of the chain of salvation in his hands, the language of the hitherto logical reasoner expands into an oratorical conclusion. Calm, passionless, philosophic, his didactic prose blossoms into poetry, and that too in "the white heat of intensity." With four interrogations he winds up the long thesis--with four choral strains he terminates the sustained Song. That Song is now in its full flood--

"What shall we then say to these things?"

"Who shall lay anything to the charge of God's elect?"

"Who is he that condemns?"

"Who shall separate us front the love of Christ?"

We shall now confine ourselves to the first three.
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"What, then, shall we say in response to this? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all--how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. Who is he that condemns? Christ Jesus, who died--more than that, who was raised to life--is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us." (v. 31-34). Many of the truths here enumerated having been already considered at some length, we shall only lightly evoke the slumbering tones. We offer little more than a few suggestions to aid and stimulate reflection.

His first query is, "What shall we then say to these things?" "These things." He takes a hurried yet comprehensive retrospect of the preceding clauses of the chapter. The keynote "no condemnation;"--the deliverance in and from the law of sin and death--the provided righteousness of the Great Surety--the gift of the indwelling Spirit--the privilege of adoption, and the consequent heritage of God's children--the needful discipline of suffering (that strange anomaly in the world)--the groans of a travailing creation--the mystery of pain and trouble--the "subjection to vanity," leading up to the final consummation in "the liberty of the glory of the sons of God." Meanwhile, believers are fenced and safeguarded by the assurance that all things are working together for their good.

"What shall we say" to that wondrous catalogue of covenant and covenanted blessings? Surely if that Omnipotent Father, the Head--the Originator of Redemption--pledges His own name and oath and promise that He is "with us and for us," we may well utter the challenge which our Apostle makes in the first of the present verses and expands in a succeeding one--Who in earth, in heaven, in hell, can be against us? He makes no concealment that there are many against us; yes, a battalion of spiritual foes, under the comprehensive trinity of forces, "the world, the flesh, and the devil." But if the enemy is legion, numerically strong and formidable, the believer has ONE on his side (One, alone--but though alone, Omnipotent). "God is for us." "This conclusion of the chapter," a writer well remarks, "is a recapitulation of all the Apostle's former arguments, or rather the reduction of them to one, which comprehends them all--"God is for us." (Dr. Hodge.)

"We have no might," he seems to say, "against this great multitude, neither know we what to do, but our eyes are upon You." "God is for us." It is this assurance which has formed the strength and inspiration of His most favored people in all ages of the Church. "God is for us" emblazoned on their shields, they could inscribe underneath, "Though an army should encamp against me, my heart shall not fear; though war should rise against me, in this will I be confident."

Take one or two examples.

"What am I?" was the exclamation of Moses, overpowered by the thought of the vast army of insubordinate slaves he had to lead through the desert, and feelingly alive to his own incapacity for the onerous task. Jehovah revealed Himself as the Great "I AM," with the all-sufficient guarantee, "Certainly I will be with you" (Exodus 3;12). Joshua stands faint and discouraged before the walls of the greatest of the Canaanite fenced cities but the same Angel-Jehovah appears with "a sword drawn in his hand"--the assured emblem and pledge of victory; renewing a previous guarantee, "The Lord your God is with you wherever you go." The royal Psalmist, at a time of imminent peril--one of the many crisis-hours of his life, "when the Philistines took him in Gath," recorded, in the retrospect, the brief assurance--a star-gleam in the night of darkness--"This I know--that God is for me" (Psalms 56;9). Hezekiah trembled, as well he might, when the thundering legions of Sennacherib threatened his kingdom and capital; but there was One, mightier than that "Cedar of Lebanon," under whose divine shadow he took refuge. The central stanza in the battle-hymn of deliverance written on that momentous crisis was this--"Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we will remember the name of the Lord our God." When one of the cities of northern Palestine was hemmed in by the victorious army of the King of Syria, the eyes of the panic-stricken servant of Elisha were opened in the dawn of morning to behold the mountain near by, covered with horses and chariots of fire--a visible confirmation of the pacifying assurance already given him by his master--"Fear not; for those who be with us are more than those who be with them." A Greater Master, in a later age, came to His own tempest-tossed disciples, and hushed their misgivings with the reassuring word--"Fear not, it is I; be not afraid." Paul himself, in many a personal experience, could testify to the same truth, that with God for him, no one could be against him. Take his final testimony, though more than once already referred to, when as a lonely prisoner, deserted by the friends who had smiled on him in prosperity, he was immured in the Roman dungeon--"All men forsook me;" "Nevertheless the Lord stood with me and strengthened me,…and I was delivered out of the mouth of the lion."
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It would be easy to add corroborative testimony from eminent Christians in modern times. Let two be recalled. It was one of the three last memorable sayings of John Wesley on his deathbed, but it was repeated twice over, and is fittingly inscribed on his monument in Westminster Abbey--"The best of all is, that God is with us." They formed the favorite motto-words of Bersier, the most distinguished orator of the French Protestant Church. They may be seen accompanying his signature--"If God is for us, who can be against us?"


We pass to the next clause. May we venture to trace or suggest its connection with the previous?

The thought might obtrude itself--May not God, despite of all these abstract assertions, backed and countersigned by so many attestations of His fidelity to His promises, grow weary of His people? May He not, absolute in power and volition, come in time to feel that those who resist His will--who attempt to baffle His purposes and distrust His Word, are unworthy of such lavish devotion and unceasing love? The surmise may occur, with other reference than to the Jewish race--"Will God cast off His people whom He has foreknown?" The Apostle cites one unanswerable reply; with it every reclaiming voice may well be stopped. "He who spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?" Here, in order to give emphasis to his assertion, Paul employs a peculiar mode of expression. In several passages of the New Testament we find used the "a fortiori argument," a method well known in the schools; where one fact or conclusion is strengthened by a preliminary statement--a minor proposition or premiss establishes the major. In the case of our Apostle himself, we require not to go beyond the present Epistle. "For if through the offence of one many died, much more the grace of God, and the gift by grace, which is by one Man, Jesus Christ, has abounded unto many" (Romans 5;15). "For if when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by His life" (v. 10). Take a similar example from the unknown author of the Epistle to the Hebrews--"For if the blood of bulls and of goats, and the ashes of an heifer sprinkling the unclean sanctifies to the purifying of the flesh; How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the Eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?" (Hebrews 9;13, 14). While a still more familiar employment of the same argument is furnished from the words of our Redeemer Himself; "If you then being evil know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to those who ask Him?" (Matthew 7;11).

The process of reasoning in the present case is reversed. Though the Apostle takes the one clause to strengthen and enforce the other, he argues, not from the minor to the major, but from the greater to the less. He speaks of the mightiest gift which Omnipotence could bestow--the gift of His own dear Son, as the pledge of all other blessings. If we may paraphrase the words--although to do so is only to spoil their terse and pithy power and beauty--'Hush any such surmise regarding God's non-fulfillment or forgetfulness of His eternal decree with reference to the fallen. How dare the thought be entertained? He, who in the plenitude of His sovereign grace and boundless compassion spared not His own, His only Son, but gave Him up to a life of suffering and a death of shame, has in that unparalleled deed of sacrifice, given the indestructible assurance that He will, with Him also, carry on to its completion the stupendous plan of a world's redemption. We have, in Gethsemane's garden and Calvary's cross, the blessed impossibility of His withholding any lesser blessing. After the gift of Christ we can fear nothing; we can expect everything--all things which sovereign power can bestow. Redemption is unassailable. The tenderest earthly love may fail--brother may be estranged from brother--sister from sister--friend from friend. Even a mother's love, earth's tenderest type of yearning affection, may fail. "Yes--they may forget, yet will I not forget you" (Isaiah 49;15). I have spared not my Son to die for sinners. With that one argument every mouth must be stopped. I, the Author, cannot fail to be the Finisher. I am unable to give you a greater or diviner proof that "I have loved you with an everlasting love." You may without fear or apprehension, risk your safety on this one peerless thought. Can I, could I, the Omnipotent Jehovah, possibly come short in purposes of mercy, after giving the most fearful summons which ever broke the trance of eternity--"Awake, O sword, against my Shepherd and against the man who is my fellow; smite the Shepherd"?' (Zechariah 13;7).

We come to the second challenge and interrogation. The preceding one was personal and relative. It was a question addressed to believers and in which Paul included himself--"What shall WE say then to these things?"--'We (if we may again expand his words), who have tasted and seen that the Lord is gracious; we, who are the partakers of these present privileges and heirs of that heavenly heritage.' But in the succeeding query he challenges a different auditory, made up of legion foes. The first interrogation is that of a father gathering his family round him and asking them to unite in the glad attestation of a common experience--the conscious avowal of immunity from all real evil, and the possession of all real good. Now, he is like a man seated on a rock-summit, the wild waves surging at its base. Billow after billow rushes on. But they are beaten back confounded, and scattered in a shower of harmless spray. Paul sees an ocean of such moral and spiritual breakers, each, as it recoils, gathering afresh the spent forces for a new assault. He himself, personating the Church and believers in every age, reiterates the challenge--'Who among you, you spiritual powers of evil--mighty phalanx though you be, can "lay any thing to the charge of God's elect?"'
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He prolongs the defiant challenge. "It is God who justifies; who is he that condemns?" The spiritual cast-away who has fled to the Rock may at times be the prey of unworthy fear, and tremble for his safety. But the Rock itself is immovable--it is the Rock of Ages.

There is a four-fold answer and rebuke to any such charges--a four-fold armor for the spiritual warrior in an otherwise unequal conflict--a four-fold ground of triumph and safety. "Who shall condemn?" "Who shall separate?" None. For


A famous historical "Quadrilateral" no longer exists--a single campaign demolished it--erased it from the map of Europe. But here is a defenced city "which lies four-square." Salvation, the salvation of God's dear Son, has He "appointed for walls and bulwarks." Or, adhering to our figure, it is a symphony in the midst of the Song, in four parts.

(1) None can condemn; for "it is Christ who DIED." He reverts to the foundation truth of all, without which not one of the privileges enumerated in the previous context could have been ours. Every spiritual blessing emanates from, and revolves around the Cross! Hear how the Apostle commences that other chapter which alone is parallel to the present in power, beauty, and comfort (1 Corinthians 15;3). "For I delivered unto you, first of all, that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures." All that mystery of suffering connected with the typical sacrifices of the ancient dispensation has its explanation in Him, who is "the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world." On that ever memorable evening when the orphaned disciples met in the twilight of the upper chamber, what was the special revelation which dispersed their fears, imparted peace and joy, and assured triumph? It was the sight of Him who DIED for them--the sight of the Crucified. For it was after He had pointed to the signs of death on His own glorified body; it was after He had "shown them His hands and His side," we read--"Then were the disciples glad when they saw the Lord;"--"Christ crucified, the power of God unto salvation."

(2) None can condemn--for Christ has RISEN. "Yes rather, that is, risen again." In one very emphatic sense no utterance that ever ascended from earth to heaven can compare in its momentousness with the one solitary cry--the shout of triumph waited for by all time, and which is to go echoing on through eternity--"It is finished!" But if I would have this great fact corroborated and confirmed, I must go in the dim dawn of that Jerusalem morning, to the empty sepulcher, and hear the angel-message, "He is not here, He is risen." If God the eternal Father had not accepted the work of His Son; or, had one sin laid to the charge of His elect been unatoned for, the overlying stone would still have been there--the weeping watchers would have been weeping still. Not the angels of hope, but gloomy warders would have wailed their dirge of despair over a world unredeemed. In the citadel of Christianity the Resurrection of Jesus is the key of the position--that lost, all is lost. "If Christ be not raised, your faith is vain, you are yet in your sins. But now is Christ risen from the dead and become the first-fruits of those who slept. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive" (1 Corinthians 15;17, 20, 22). He has burst the bands of death, and triumphed over principalities and powers. Every true believer can respond to the beauty of the vision in the greatest poem of Germany, when the despondent hero awakes to life, hope, and joy, as he listens on Easter morn to the bells of the adjacent cathedral mingling their chimes with a choir of voices--"The Lord is risen!" "Who was delivered for our offences, and was raised again for our justification" (Romans 4;25).

Note, yet once more the emphatic word, "Yes, rather, who is risen again." It was not a dead, but a living Christ that was the central article in the creed of the early Church. The dead Christ who has been made so familiar to us by the great mediaeval painters, was a thought repellent to the faith of these earlier ages. The crucifixion and its accessories which became so painfully realistic in future centuries, and perpetuated in revolting form in Continental way-side shrines, was absolutely unknown in the etchings and mosaics of the Catacombs. The Crucifix is unrecognized before the sixth century. Its more extended form in the delineation of the great hour of agony, had not existence before the ninth. Not "Jesus dead," but "Jesus lives," was the key-note of homily, creed, and Song. They celebrated, not the triumph of, but the glorious victory over, "the last enemy."

(3) None can condemn, for Christ "is even at THE RIGHT HAND OF GOD." Resurrection was the pledge on earth of completed atonement. Entrance within the gates of glory furnished the assurance that Jesus not only had "overcome the sharpness of death," but that He had "opened the kingdom of heaven to all believers." In the majesty of His ascension glory, the roll of Providence in which was inscribed the destinies of His Church is confided to His keeping. All power is committed unto Him, both in heaven and in earth. "He must reign until He has put all enemies under His feet." As in the case of His beloved Apostle in Patmos, He lays on each ransomed head His right hand--the hand of power--saying "fear not; I am He who lives and was dead, and behold I am alive for evermore."
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(4) None can condemn. For as the concluding ground of confidence and joy, "He also MAKES INTERCESSION for us." The type of the old economy is complete. The great High Priest has entered into the Holiest of all--the Mighty Pleader in behalf of His Church, bearing on His breastplate the names of His Covenant people. The worshipers of Israel, on the day of their greatest ceremonial, crowded the outer courts of the Temple, listening in profound reverence for the sound of the golden bells on the fringe of the High Priest's official garments. The chime of these formed the sure evidence that he was engaged ministering before the mercy-seat, proceeding with, and perfecting the great Oblation as the nation's Representative. We may spiritually do the same. The ear of faith may listen to the voice and intercession of Him who ever lives and ever loves--Who has "entered, not into the holy places made with hands, which are the figures of the true, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us" (Hebrews 9;24).

These are cursory thoughts that might well be expanded into a volume--for they are in truth an epitome of the work of Redemption. But to enlarge would be out of place here. They form a four-fold chain, whose links cannot be broken. They give the Apostle's triumphant answer to every doubt and cavil as to the fidelity of God to His promises. Every impeachment of His love is silenced. Heart and lip are attuned to the patriarch's Song, as he rushes into the divine Rock-cleft from the gathering storm--"Though He slays me, yet will I trust in Him." For, be it observed, in closing, that in answer to suggested questionings, it is on the divine side, and the divine side alone, the believer in these verses takes his stand. He fetches his arguments for present peace and final safety from what God and Christ have done for him. He pleads not a word of his own; no weapons are taken from the armory of earth; they are all fetched from that of heaven; they are God's decrees, God's purposes, God's gift. It is Christ the Surety-substitute responsive to His Father's will. It is His doing, His dying, His rising, His session at the right hand of the Majesty on high. He is "the Prince who has power with God and prevails." Faith can rest with the greater confidence in her triple challenge--


"Believe, O man," says Clement of Alexandria in one of his glowing utterances, "in Him who suffered and was adored, the living God. Believe and your soul shall receive life…in Him, the Bearer of peace, the Reconciler, the Word--our Savior; a Fountain giving life and peace poured out over all the face of the earth; through whom, so to speak, the universe has become a seed of blessings." Jesus with us and for us! then perish every desponding thought! Heart and flesh may faint and fail, but He, a loving changeless Savior, is the strength of our heart and our portion forever.

Let these concluding cadences in this Song of Songs inspire us with the music of His own last words when about to ascend to His Father's presence, "Lo, I am with you aways, even unto the end of the world." Let us bow at His feet and exclaim--"This God shall be our God forever and ever; He will be our guide even unto death."



15. PAEAN OF ASSURED VICTORY.

Yes, "Paean." The shout of victory, similar to what Israel raised of old amid the palms of the Arabian shore, when Miriam and her sisterhood of minstrels awoke timbrel and harp over the submerged hosts of Pharaoh, and they sang of Him who had triumphed gloriously, casting the horse and his rider into the depths of the sea. The believer, too, with the consciousness of every spiritual foe vanquished--the legion-hosts of Satan discomfited--death itself, the last enemy, left a discrowned and unsceptred king--can exclaim, "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written, For Your sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter. No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us" (v. 35, 36, 37).

Moses, the ideal chief and legislator, was, after all, human--"compassed with infirmity." By reason of that infirmity neither he nor Aaron were permitted to conduct the pilgrim multitude into the land of promise. In both cases, in answer to the question, "Who shall separate?" Mount Nebo and Mount Hor were ready with a doleful reply. But Christ "is counted worthy of more glory than Moses." "This Man, because he continues forever, has an unchangeable priesthood." Israel, in crossing the Jordan with their final burst of praise, had to mourn the withdrawal of both their venerated leaders. But the Christian, amid the manifold chequered scenes of his wilderness journey, yes, on the banks of the typical Jordan itself, can utter the challenge regarding his Lawgiver, Priest, and King--"Who shall separate from the love of Christ?"
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With the special enumeration of trials and afflictions here given, in v. 36, we cannot doubt that the Apostle had again very specially his Roman converts in view. Too faithfully had coming events cast their shadows before. Already, if Nero's most ferocious edicts had not yet gone forth, there were abundant indications that the storm-cloud would before long burst. His unscrupulous tribunals and lying witnesses and flagrant miscarriage of justice were the tremors preceding the earthquake which was to wreck (if human daring or diabolical wilfulness could succeed in wrecking) the fortunes of the early church. But the imperial savage had to reckon with a stronger than he--"The Lion of the tribe of Judah." The terror inspired by the one had its triumphant counterpoise in the power and love of the other. In spite of of barbarous cruelties--hecatombs of dead and dying, there were those who, even in their dungeons of despair, could cheer themselves and their fellow victims with the words "Who shall separate?"

They knew full well that hidden to the human eye, yet cognizant to the eye of faith, there was a living Redeemer who would judge righteous judgment, and attune the lips of the doomed and incarcerated to "Songs in the night." A beautiful saying in the days of the Incarnation would carry its parable of comfort to not a few of these smitten hearts--"Behold Satan has desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat; but I have prayed for you, that your faith fail not" (Luke 22;31). What a consolatory assurance for all ages, specially for the ages of martyrdom--Christ with His people in every season of affliction--the frail bark tempest-tossed in the angry sea, but an invisible chain of grace linking it within the veil; telling of an Omnipotent Savior "who makes the storm a calm, so that the waves thereof are still."

"Sword"--"Sheep for the slaughter;" the words seem to indicate a terrific forecast in the breast of this champion of the faith--himself one of the foredoomed. But how true also his prognostications of triumph--the victory of endurance--"more than conquerors." Scarcely another two centuries would pass before multitudes, unswerving in their loyalty to Christ and His truth, would be ready to confront persecution in its direst forms. No intensity of torture would be spared. Before long the sword would have done its cruel work on the Apostle's own aged frame. The forlorn hope, so nobly led, would see him fall mangled in the hour of victory. We may have read the testimony of Ignatius of Antioch, "That I may attain unto Jesus Christ--come fire, and iron, and grappling with wild beasts,…come cruel torture of the devil to assail me; only be it mine to attain unto Jesus Christ." Tens of thousands thus met unflinching the Lybian lions in the Roman amphitheater, and gave truth and inspiration to the familiar strain in the Church's best uninspired Song--"The noble army of martyrs praise You!"

It has been made a question, and there are not lacking names on either side--what the opening challenge of the verse imports. Is it "Who shall separate our love from Christ?" or "His love from us?"

The former is indeed a beautiful thought and in many cases as true as it is beautiful--the fidelity of the believer to his faithful Lord--that unswerving allegiance, never more conspicuous than in the case of Paul himself, who with self-renouncing lowliness, yet with fearless confidence and sincerity of heart could say, "Yes, doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord." He, and not a few who have attained to the same lofty standard, never loved father, mother, brother, sister, friend, as they did the Christ of Nazareth. But the whole drift of the chapter, the whole scope of the previous argumentative discussion, (add to this, the wording of the last verse of all) negate this first suggested meaning.

Each preceding proposition sets forth the believer's security, not arising out of his personal relationship to God, but from the relationship of the Divine Trinity to him--the relation of the Father in election, heirship, final glorification--the relation of the Son in His dying, rising, and ascending to the right hand of the Majesty in the heavens--the relation of the Holy Spirit in making "intercession with groanings which cannot be uttered." The theme of the chapter may be briefly summarized as "the grounds of the Christian's confidence in a triune God." It would be a comparatively poor buttress to the Apostle's argument were he to interrupt its continuity by describing the believer's love (fluctuating at the best) to his Redeemer. But when we read, as described in our chapters, of all that has been achieved by Christ for His people, it seems the most suitable of topics, in drawing to a close, to speak of the utter unchangeableness of that love--the love He bears to us--the love which had its agony and triumph on Calvary, and which now, on the mediatorial throne, is immutably pledged for our salvation. While, therefore, it is a cheering assurance that we shall never forsake Christ, much more cheering, exalting, comforting, strengthening, is the confidence that He will never forsake us.

And note, after the enumeration of existing or possible evils and antagonisms, the Apostle makes the strong affirmation, "No in all these things we are MORE THAN conquerors." This is a remarkable expression. By the use of hyperbole he emphasizes his assurance. It recalls words of his, already quoted, nearly allied though not exactly parallel (2 Corinthians 4;17), where he speaks of "a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory." The verse might be rendered "more exceeding," or, "still more surpassing conquerors." The dying utterance of an ever revered friend and Christian patriarch come appropriately to memory--"Sin abounded--grace super-abounded."
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"More than conquerors."--It is a wonderful but faithful testimony to the influences and results of trial--not as some would naturally think to cool ardor, eclipse faith, and un-nerve heroism--like the children of Ephraim, who, carrying bows, turned faint in the day of battle. The whole history of the Church and its martyrology gives a distinctly different verdict. It represents faith, and love, and devotion, and soul-consecration, as being, on the contrary, inspired, developed, expanded, in the midst of adverse circumstances. We see this illustrated in the sufferings of the Roman Christians. Not only victims in the strength of manhood and in the feebleness and decrepitude of age, but the willing self-surrender even of tender youthful heroines, such as Blandina, Perpetua, and Felicitas. Their bravery had its counterpart in distant centuries, in the Vaudois Valleys of Lucerna, Perosa, and San Martino, the dungeons by the Rhone and Danube, the martyr roll-call of Spain and France, Holland and Britain. We see it conspicuously in modern times. To take one out of many examples, from the soldiers of the cross who "foremost fighting fell" in Central Africa. Be it Bishop or Evangelist, no sooner is one struck down by fever or sword or spear, than another is ready to fill the gap and bear in true apostolic succession the honored banner. The trumpet in that stern battle seems never to sound retreat, but onward!--"Speak unto the children of Israel that they go forward." "Out of weakness they are made strong, wax valiant in fight, and turn to flight the armies of the aliens." They are divinely strengthened for superhuman endurance. The device on that banner tells the secret--"Made more than conquerors through Him who loved us."

Though we have just quoted the writer of our verse as a notable illustrative example, we may well linger on the singular corroborative testimony he bore to these twin-clauses; "more than conqueror"-- "through Him that loved us." He had everything, humanly speaking, to quench his zeal, impair his ardor, undermine his constancy--nothing perhaps more so, than the loneliness of a life that so often showed its yearning need of human sympathy and genial companionship. There is much comprehended in the terse, bitter wail, "all men forsook me"! But the lessening of human friendships, the removal of human props, the discovery of the treachery and desertion of "summer friends" only seemed to strengthen his faith and deepen his love for One "who sticks closer than a brother." Man may fail me--man has failed me; but, "Who shall separate me from the love of Christ?" And the conscious love for him of that Brother-man on the throne, quickened his sensibilities. Love begat love. His own weakness was perfected in Almighty strength. He gloried in his infirmities, for the power of Christ thereby rested more abundantly upon him. He felt its reality, its stability. "Such a one as Paul the aged" was "made more than conqueror," through the exalted sympathy of the once Prince of sufferers. Aye, and when he saw the gleam of the "sword"--the weapon with which he ends his enumeration in the passage we are considering, he could raise the Victor's Song--"I know whom" (not in whom, but WHOM--the living Person of his loving Lord)--"I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I have committed unto Him against that day."

We shall close with two thoughts.

(1) Let us advert, once more, to the designation here given to Christ--it is "Him that loved us." We cannot fail to recall the parallel--indeed the identical words in the opening verses of the book of Revelation. John (himself the Apostle of love) appears to deem it needless to name which Person in the Holy Trinity it is to whom he refers in his dedication. "Unto Him that loved us and washed us from our sins in His own blood" (Revelation 1;5). Let us think of that name and title in its sacred relation to ourselves. "Him that loved us" would often be poorly descriptive of human friends and friendships. That may be a fitful affection, the memory of which is all that remains. In His case, loving once He loves forever. It is love incapable of diminishing or decay. The opening challenge will be prolonged and deepened through eternity--"Who shall separate?"

(2) Take it in another aspect? The noblest of earthly heroes may fail in their exploits; heroic efforts may be confronted and covered with defeat. Khartoum will always have its mournful associations and memories in British annals, where a noble soul--an ideal warrior, man, Christian, dared all and lost all. Like the mother of Sisera, it is at times vain and delusive counting up spoils and trophies never to be ours. Arbitrary and capricious often are the so-called "fortunes of war." So it may be under the noblest and ablest of human champions. But with Christ failure is impossible, triumph is assured. "Who is this that comes from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah? this that is glorious in His apparel, traveling in the greatness of his strength? I that speak in righteousness, mighty to save" (Isaiah 63;1).

Let that name and the assurance it conveys stimulate us. Christ--He who thus loved us, might have made our wilderness journey one of triumphant and unchequered progress, without Red Sea, or Marah-pool, or fiery serpent--the way without a thorn--the sky without a cloud--no enemy to be seen or encountered. He has well and wisely ordered it otherwise. We are happily ignorant of, and exempt from, the stern and dreadful trials which belonged to the primitive Roman Church; though in other forms and modified shapes, distress, peril, tribulation still cast their shadows. The apostolic words are unrescinded and unrevoked--"We are in heaviness through manifold temptations." The "tribulation"--the "tribulum" so well known in the Roman threshing-floor--the root-word, as Trench has pointed out, of the tribulation of our verse, has still, and ever will have, its reality, in connection with the divine dealings. Stroke after stroke is needed. But, as in the hands of the Roman husbandman, the "flail" was used to sift and separate the husk from the grain; so, that tribulum of God in His threshing-floor is designed for the same purpose in a higher sense, to remove moral husks and incrustations, to fit the grain of wheat for its place in the garner, or it may be to aid its germinating power in the earth for the better bringing forth of fruit to His glory. "We must through much tribulation enter into the kingdom." If such be our present experience, let us meet all sufferings and trials as Paul met them, "more than conquerors." Tribulation, Distress, Persecution, Famine, Nakedness, Peril, Sword--that music of winds and waves, the deep bass of the Song, should only make us exult more in "the impregnable Rock."
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Changing the figure, let us listen to the prolonged trumpet-peal in another place, summoning not to tent or camp, but to arms and battle--"Be strong in the Lord and in the power of His might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Therefore take unto you the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all to stand" (Ephesians 6;10-13).

And if he and they of whom he here speaks, counted not their lives dear unto them--if they have fought the good fight, finished the course and kept the faith, let us hear their voices gliding down from heaven in beautiful cadence--"Be not slothful, but followers of them who through faith and patience inherit the promises." While we respond, in the paean of eternal victory, "thanks be to God who always causes us to triumph in Christ."



16. HALLELUJAH CHORUS.

In the preceding strains of this Song of Songs, we have been listening to deep-sea music. Now the billows are resonant on the Eternal Shore!

"Christ Jesus our Lord." These are the four words which end our chapter, the closing note of Paul's Golden Canticle; a reigning Christ in the midst of His ransomed Church--"Hallelujah…He shall reign forever and ever."

"Christ Jesus our Lord!"--Befitting finale for the Song of the Redeemed on earth--befitting refrain for the Anthem of the Church glorified--"Strong Son of God, Immortal Love!"

The "No condemnation in Christ," has now reached its climax in "No separation from Christ." With these concluding strains, the outcome of all that have preceded, he defies the confederate forces of the material and spiritual Creation--the foes of "a present evil world,"--the principalities and powers of heaven and hell; the heights above, the depths beneath--all space, all time, all eternity, to hush that everlasting chorus and separate from that everlasting love!

"In Christ Jesus." "Is this," says Leighton, "he that so lately cried out, 'O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me?' who now triumphs 'O happy man, who shall separate me from the love of Christ?' Now he has found a deliverer to whom he is forever united. So vast a difference is there between a Christian taken in himself and in Christ." The author of The Christian Year--adopting the figure of our volume, thus appropriately sings of the Apostle ever after the hour of his conversion--


Let us give the words now to be considered in full.

"For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come; nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord" (v. 38--39)

These successive clauses, to vary the metaphor, are like so many perches in the writer's upward flight, as with the eagle-wing of his brother Apostle of love he soars to the seventh heaven, and sinks into the clefts of the true Rock for ever!

"Christ Jesus our Lord." Yes, but neither may the terminating words be dissevered from those which precede them. It is the combination which makes a full Gospel-harmony. They form a divine epigram of comfort and consolation--"the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." The love of the Father is here co-ordinated with the love of the Son. It is the apostolic echo of the Great Master's own saying--the saying which of all He uttered was most descriptive of His mission; the saying which perhaps of all He uttered we would be the most loath to part with--"God so loved the world, as to give His only Begotten Son."

We have presented to us in this brief sentence of our concluding meditation not only the stream of Salvation in Christ, but we are conducted to the fountainhead in the Infinite love and sovereign grace of the First Person in the Blessed Trinity. In the original that love is emphasized--the special love. In the previous portion of his Epistle, what we may call its forensic or dialectic chapters, Paul had of necessity to vindicate the character of God in His dealings with sinners, as the Righteous, the Holy, the Just--the Moral Governor, whose laws dare not be violated with impunity. But here, after the sublime unfolding of Redemption, he singles out, for his terminating note of triumph, the attribute which spans the life of every believer like a divine rainbow, from his predestination to his glorification. He had immediately before sounded the defiant note--"Who shall separate?" There seems to be a momentary hush. He waits, so to speak, to hear if a response be given. There is no reply. The silence is broken by an answer from his own lips. The answer declares separation to be impossible--that nothing can frustrate God's purpose, or alter His affection for His Church and people. With Him, in the outgoings of that love, "tomorrow will be as today, and much more abundant." The flower of grace, here often battered with wind and rain, shall never cease to bloom in heaven. The great ocean-tide will then roll on without ebb "through the ages of the ages."
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But let us enter the arena and listen to our Apostle-herald as he sounds his challenges, and utters his assertions, in succession.

"DEATH shall not separate." Alas, in one sense, too sadly, too truly, Death does separate. Too sadly, too truly, is Death the severer of bonds. The very name is allied and associated with pain, suffering, dissolution. There is one inscription common to all ages and generations--"They were not allowed to continue by reason of death." The world is full, day by day, of aching hearts. Long and loud is the wailing strain--the dirge over buried love! Those are not to be credited with sincerity, or with the tenderest instincts of humanity, who affect to speak lightly of such severances. The cold icy river seems to cut us off at once from the land of love--the love of earth and the love of heaven. But, in another and elevated sense, the sense inspired by gospel faith, there is no absolute separation in the case of those united to Christ. Our life is "hid with Christ in God." "It is He alone," says Pere Didon, at the close of the Introduction to his great Work, "who pours into the soul a divine life which no pain can overwhelm, which trial only strengthens, and which can despise death, because it permits us to face it with the fullness of immortal hope."

To the true Believer, the Gate of Death is the Gate to the second Paradise. It is the Exodus of the Soul from its bondage--the entrance into the beatific vision--the fullness of God. Death is pictured to our thoughts under the Bible figure of a lonely Valley. Nor is it strange that the idea of solitude and solitariness should be blended with the emblem. But there can be no real solitude to him who can sing at his death bed--"YOU are with me; Your rod and Your staff they comfort me." In the words of a sainted and saintly writer "Death is a leap into the arms of Infinite love." So far from being the separator from God, it is the "Beautiful Angel" who leads home to Himself. Then shall come to pass the saying that is written--"Death is swallowed up in Victory." "Right dear in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints" (Psalms 116;15, Prayer Book Version).

"LIFE shall not separate." Life, with its vivid realities and engrossing interests, and enthralling fascinations on the one hand; Life with its depressing cares and anxious struggles--its gnawing heartaches and bitter bereavements on the other; Life with its April day of fitful alternation--cloud and sunshine, shall not blur the "Summer of the Soul" and dim the divine--the Eternal sunshine. The Christian engaged in its urgent duties--grappling with its stern difficulties and fiery trials, feeling that he is "appointed thereunto," has truly his citizenship in heaven. His heart and home are in one sense on earth; in an equally truthful, more exalted sense, he can sing as the chartered citizen of glory--"Who has raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ." "Whether we live we live unto the Lord; or whether we die we die unto the Lord; whether we live therefore or die we are the Lord's" (Romans 14;8 ).

"ANGELS, PRINCIPALITIES AND POWERS shall not separate." Not Angels--the living creatures with whom alike poetry and Scripture have made this earth to teem "both while we sleep and while we wake." It is the most impossible of impossible things, that a loyal heaven shall conspire in strange league of hostility against the children of the kingdom. The Apostle here makes the unlikeliest of suppositions, simply to strengthen the believer's confidence. Not demons--not the host of heaven and hell combined in gigantic conspiracy against the believer's peace. Persecutors and persecutions--the base abettors of cruelty and wrong-doing who did their utmost in the Apostle's time, and would do their utmost still, to deflect from the path of allegiance to the Gospel; tempting to abjure faith, instilling doubts, and lording it over conscience. These are the "Spiritual 'wickednesses' in high places," led on by Apollyon "the Destroyer." But God's true people will be fortified against their combined assaults by the same Power that is pledged for their salvation. "I saw Satan fall as lightning from heaven" (Luke 10;18 ).

"THINGS PRESENT AND THINGS TO COME shall not separate." The Apostle comes down again from the ideal to the actual--from a hypothetical impossibility to life's realities. This world of change has its blighted hopes and frustrated schemes--"things present"; the future--that unrevealed future has, with many, its pale and ghastly shadows--the ghosts of dreaded evil--"the fear of the fearful"--"things to come." But one divine assurance there is, beyond vacillation. No time with its ages and millenniums and cycles can affect or diminish the love in the heart of God. All else may and must change; but "He is faithful."

"NOR HEIGHT, NOR DEPTH, NOR ANY OTHER CREATURE can separate." As all time and all eternity are challenged, so is all space. The herald roams creation; he roams the universe. Mountain might be piled on mountain, planet might be added to planet, star conjoined to star, if a barrier could thus be reared between the soul and God. Or, take a different supposition. Our own earth, by some strange erratic impulse or some diabolical plot, might be sent wandering into the depths of the infinite to accomplish separation and isolation from its divine Creator. But each of its redeemed inhabitants, conscious of the same unchanging love, could utter the challenge--"If I ascend up into heaven, You are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, behold You are there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; even there shall Your hand lead me and Your right hand shall hold me" (Psalms 139;8, 9, 10). I defy all time, all place, all space, all possible combinations and contingencies; all heights of prosperity, all depths of adversity; the giddy eminences of rank and power, the extremes of poverty and need--the roll and revolution of ages, when "time shall be no longer"--to separate me from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus my Lord!
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And all this of which we have now been speaking was no occasional confidence of Paul. (Latin Vulgate "I am certain"). Here is what theologians call "the assurance of faith" in its noblest form. No wavering or incertitude. A triumphant testimony. It is as if, after the many gracious assertions of the chapter--the successive clauses, comprehensively setting forth the believer's creed--some had ventured to interpose and say--"All this is abstract truth cogently stated in logical and dogmatic shape. But it may be purely conjectural. Who can bear personal witness to the reality, the inner experiences?" "I," replies the Apostle, as if putting his own seal and endorsement to every foregoing proposition--"I am persuaded!" It recalls a similar personal attestation in the Old Testament Scriptures. We find this glowing delineation of the believer's happiness and peace--his abiding strength and joy, in one of the most beautiful of the Psalms--"The righteous shall flourish like the palm-tree; he shall grow like a cedar in Lebanon. Those that be planted in the house of the Lord shall flourish in the courts of our God. They shall still bring forth fruit in old age, they shall be fat and flourishing; to show that the Lord is upright." But, as if some one, here too, had ventured the question--who can bear individual testimony that all this is true?--"I" replies the Psalmist, "He is MY Rock, and there is no unrighteousness in Him" (Psalms 92;12-15). Both Old and New Testament saints, "chief musicians"--could say and sing with the assured confidence of another sacred writer--"We have known and believed the love which God has to us" (1 John 4;16).

Let us close with TWO PRACTICAL THOUGHTS.

(1) We are occasionally in these modern times confronted in print and in speech with the cynical query--"Is life worth living?" This Song of Songs, in its varied notes and harmonies, supplies surely an amply sufficient answer. Not indeed an answer to those whose hopes and aspirations are bounded by time--those who are of the earth, earthy. The chapter to such has but one solemn word in reply--"The carnal mind is enmity against God; for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. So then those who are in the flesh cannot please God." But to all who can, in some feeble measure, claim a saving interest in the Gospel Repertory of faith and love, hope and promise, which this Great Canticle so abundantly supplies--to all who have listened to the divine absolution--"no condemnation,"--to all who have been brought under the regenerating influences of the Holy Spirit, and quickened, through Him, to a life of righteousness--to all who have the happy consciousness of being "heirs of God"--ushered into "the liberty of the glory of His children;"--who, it may be amid manifold outward trials, have been able to grasp the assurance, that all things are working together for their spiritual good; and that the sufferings of the present time are utterly insignificant compared with the glory yet to be revealed--put to them also the question, "Is life worth living?" Conscious of the love of God shed abroad in their hearts, the reply will be instantaneous--"He asked life of You, and You gave it to him, even length of days forever and ever" (Psalms 21;4).

(2) Seek, reader, as the final lesson of the chapter--the golden note of this Song of Songs--to live now under the influence of that changeless love of God manifested in Christ. Make it the dominating power--the impelling force of your new nature. Let these be your sacred mottoes and watchwords--"I am not my own, I am bought with a price." "The love of Christ constrains me." "I live; yet not I, but Christ lives in me…I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me."

There is a tradition regarding Ignatius of Antioch, that when the sword of the executioner had hewn his heart in pieces, each separate fragment had the name of "Jesus" upon it in glowing letters. The myth might well be a reality in the case of every true believer. We have spoken indeed in the earliest part of the volume, of faltering purposes and unreached ideals--the presence and power of two antagonistic principles. "These are contrary the one to the other, so that you cannot do the things that you would." Jubilant songs are alternated with plaintive dirge-notes. But if it be your constant and growing aim to "keep yourself in the love of God,"--to have your will concurrent with the divine, setting Christ ever before you as your great Example and Pattern, you may rely on the promised aids of the Spirit to strengthen your purposes and help your infirmities. The prophetic strains of the dying Jacob regarding one of the Palestine tribes will, in a figurative sense, be true of every believing Israelite--"Gad, a troop shall overcome him, but he shall overcome at the last" (Genesis 49;19).

Afflictions you must have. Storm and cloud will appear suddenly in brightest skies; whatever else may be escaped, there is the terminating encounter of the pilgrimage--the last fight of all; and "there is no discharge in that war." But above tempest and din of battle, that ancient Rock of Ages is still the same. A million of suns have risen and set on a world seething with change. But HE remains. The Immutable cannot alter. The deathless love of God in Christ is a wondrous crown to halo the brow of every pilgrim. It is told, if I may employ the words of a distinguished Divine, only substituting one quoted verse for another, "that when Bishop Butler drew near his end, he asked his chaplain if he also heard the music which filled his own heart. The music was not unreal, because the untrained ear could not catch its harmonies. And it may be that if our whole being is henceforth set heavenwards, we shall hear when we are crossing to waste places, as it seems in loneliness and sorrow and inward conflict, the great hosts by whom we are encompassed taking up our human psalm."--(our Song of Songs) and saying…"who shall separate from the love of Christ?" "HE has said, I will never leave you nor forsake you." Or, as these words have been paraphrased to impart the energy of the original--"Never, no NEVER, no NEVER!" That love is guaranteed by divine oath and promise. To the challenge "Shall anything separate?" the reply, the symphonies of the blest--will go echoing down the ages--"Never! no NEVER! no NEVER!" The Miserere is heard no more; the Te Deum is the Song and the ascription of Eternity.

Let, then, one mighty orchestra be summoned in--a fervent impassioned song; not in its pagan, but in its divine Christian sense--this closing Hallelujah--the Hosanna of Immortal love. In appropriate words from Dante "Let the earth for once hear the music of heaven." Let the myriads of Redeemed below, unite with the Ransomed above. Let ministering seraphim and burning cherubim combine with "the glorious company of the Apostles, the goodly fellowship of prophets, the noble army of martyrs, the holy Church throughout all the world,"--and let this be the ever-deepening chorus--"WHO SHALL SEPARATE?" Let the notes ripple on forever.


Now unto Him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy, the only wise God, our Savior, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever, AMEN.

Brothers and Sisters,

I wanted to add that John MacDuff was not a Calvinist, but he did point out some glorious truths associated with the terms that are used in Calvinism.

I hope that you read and listened to the entire SONG because that's the only way to really appreciate and understand it. Romans 8 also makes for a wonderful Bible Study and beautiful references in many other portions of Scripture. I want to close this with quoting two different Versions of Romans 8:  The King James Version and The Amplified Bible Version. Romans 8 is truly beautiful, and it contains the foundation for our ETERNAL HOPE!

Love In Christ,
Tom