Paul's Song Of Songs (Romans 8)

[nChrist]

PAUL'S SONG OF SONGS
A Practical Exposition of the Eighth Chapter of Romans
by John MacDuff, 1891

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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[nChrist]

PAUL'S SONG OF SONGS
A Practical Exposition of the Eighth Chapter of Romans
by John MacDuff, 1891

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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[nChrist]

PAUL'S SONG OF SONGS
A Practical Exposition of the Eighth Chapter of Romans
by John MacDuff, 1891

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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[nChrist]

PAUL'S SONG OF SONGS
A Practical Exposition of the Eighth Chapter of Romans
by John MacDuff, 1891

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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[nChrist]

PAUL'S SONG OF SONGS
A Practical Exposition of the Eighth Chapter of Romans
by John MacDuff, 1891

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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[nChrist]

PAUL'S SONG OF SONGS
A Practical Exposition of the Eighth Chapter of Romans
by John MacDuff, 1891

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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[nChrist]

PAUL'S SONG OF SONGS
A Practical Exposition of the Eighth Chapter of Romans
by John MacDuff, 1891

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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[nChrist]

PAUL'S SONG OF SONGS
A Practical Exposition of the Eighth Chapter of Romans
by John MacDuff, 1891

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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[nChrist]

PAUL'S SONG OF SONGS
A Practical Exposition of the Eighth Chapter of Romans
by John MacDuff, 1891

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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[nChrist]

PAUL'S SONG OF SONGS
A Practical Exposition of the Eighth Chapter of Romans
by John MacDuff, 1891

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,

"White-handed Hope,
A hovering angel girt with golden wings."

Or a later minstrel,
"Through the sunset of Hope.
Like the shapes of a dream,
What Paradise Islands of glory gleam?"

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[nChrist]

PAUL'S SONG OF SONGS
A Practical Exposition of the Eighth Chapter of Romans
by John MacDuff, 1891

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.

"Hope whispers over the cradled child
Fast locked in peaceful sleep,
Before its pure soul is sin-beguiled,
Before sorrow bids it weep.
'Tis heard in manhood's risen day,
And nerves the soul to might,
When life shines forth with fullest ray
Forewarning least of night.
It falls upon the aged ear,
Though deaf to human voice,
And when man's evening closes drear,
It bids him still rejoice."

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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[nChrist]

PAUL'S SONG OF SONGS
A Practical Exposition of the Eighth Chapter of Romans
by John MacDuff, 1891

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 ).

"And as in sparkling majesty a star
Gilds the bright summit of some gloomy cloud,
Brightening the half-veiled face of heaven afar;
So, when dark thoughts my boding spirit shroud,
Sweet HOPE! celestial influence, round me shed,
Waving your silver pinions over my head."

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[nChrist]

PAUL'S SONG OF SONGS
A Practical Exposition of the Eighth Chapter of Romans
by John MacDuff, 1891

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".

"There, behold how radiantly
Beams the Star of Hope divine,
Yesterday it shone for thee,
And today it still shall shine;
Ask no aid the world can give,
LOOKING UNTO JESUS--live!"

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--

"Hopes, what are they? beads of morning
Strung on tender blades of grass;
Or a spider's web adorning."

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--

"Wherever my path
On earth may lead; I'll keep a nesting-bough
For Hope the song-bird, and with cheerful step
Hold on my pilgrimage."

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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[nChrist]

PAUL'S SONG OF SONGS
A Practical Exposition of the Eighth Chapter of Romans
by John MacDuff, 1891

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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[nChrist]

PAUL'S SONG OF SONGS
A Practical Exposition of the Eighth Chapter of Romans
by John MacDuff, 1891

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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