Bible Commentaries

Unto All Nations

Psalm 37:2

A Church which is in no sense a Missionary Church is really dead.

I. The spiritual prosperity of the Church at home becomes a fountain to feed missions abroad. The Gospel in its essence is remedial. It claims to be the one means of healing for the common malady of human nature. We may say that all missions are medical missions. The Gospel contemplates the whole world as one vast hospital full of sick souls and wounded hearts, and warped and diseased wills.

II. And therefore this Catholic evangel claims all nations and kindreds and people and tongues for its inheritance. Too often indeed, we hamper its energies and retard its conquests because we assume that pure Christianity necessarily involves any of the external features of our own civilization. Yet surely Asiatics and Africans can find "saving health" in the New Testament, without being inoculated with the restless fever which we call "progress".

III. Those who look forward in faith to the fulfilment of God's missionary promises and the victory of Christ's Cross, anticipate a Church of the future which will certainly be no mere copy of the Church of the present. It is a strange and marvellous thing that "Christianity has for so long a period been confined mainly to the white people, but its mission is to mankind, and mankind is not in any large proportion white. And surely there are great neglected Christian ideas, ignored and forgotten truths and graces which will be recovered and come to their own in the fullness of time, when Hindu theologies and Chinese mystics and negro saints bring their own characteristic gifts to the Church's common treasury.

—T. H. Darlow, The Upward Galling, p321.

References.—LXVII:3.—H. Alford, Quebec Chapel Sermons, vol. i. p334. LXVII:5 , 6.—G. A. Sowter, Sowing and Reaping, p49. LXVII:6.—Spurgeon, Morning by Morning, p118. LXVII.—International Critical Commentary, vol. ii. p92.