Bible Commentaries

The Gospel According to Paul

Romans 2:16

You have heard of the Gospel according to Romans 2:6) we read "According to my gospel." Was that a slip of the pen? It is singular that if it were a lapse of the pen it occurs again in Romans 16:25 :—"According to my gospel." Is there food enough in Paul's gospel to be going on with? Will he lack bread who sits at Paul's table? The Apostle was always intensely individual, so much so that persons who do not understand the exact definition of the terms have relieved their minds (pardon the irony) by describing Paul as egotistical. Some persons ought not to know even that much elementary Latin; it is dangerous to trust some speakers with even the alphabet of a dead language. The Apostle Paul had a gospel; he hesitated not to call it "my gospel." In very deed, every Christian believer must have his own gospel; every worshipper must have his own God: that is to say, his own conception of the Gospel, his own conception of God, his own peculiar and incommunicable experience of Divine life in the soul. I live, said Paul, yet not I: it is my Gospel, yet not mine; it is my God, yet no invention or creation of my imagination. Thus does he intensely and usefully personalise the abstract; thus does Paul appropriate the riches of history, and turn them into the available treasures of the immediate day.

It will be interesting to read the Gospel according to Paul. The other Gospellers are always telling stories, relating incidents or anecdotes, recording miracles, and the like; until John comes, who, being a man of another altitude and quality of mind, takes a course peculiarly his own, so spiritual, intuitional, penetrating, divine. He is succeeded by Paul, the only man who could succeed him. He must be a very skilful speaker who follows the Apostle John; it will be easy after such a writer to perpetrate an anti-climax. To some men conclusions properly belong. They must have no successors on the immediate occasion; it is theirs by, as it were, Divine prescription to utter the climacteric word. Whenever John might have come, even chronologically, he comes in the right place after the three Synoptic narrators; and Paul comes in the right place after John. Paul was excelled in nothing. Whatever the subject was, Paul is chief. Once with supposed egotism he says, "I was not a whit behind the very chiefest apostles." How true that is is not a matter of personal testimony, but a matter of literary criticism. Here are the words of Matthew and Romans 3:23—"For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God." Who are we that we should contradict Paul? He did more for the race than we have ever done; he did not write critical articles against other people's charity: he spent and was expended for Christ; he said "For me to live is Christ." If men get into their subjects by passion and sacrifice and intense and burning sympathy with them, then Paul was in Christ. No man studied Christ so completely, obeyed Christ so lovingly, and served Christ with so faithful a constancy. He was not a student of the letter, he was a companion of the soul of Christ: and this man says, "All have sinned, and come short of the glory of God." In other words, all men need a Saviour, all men need their very righteousness to be helped or completed. When we have done our utmost, we are still immeasurably far from God, and therefore God himself must do the rest, carrying up our purposes to a blessed and everlasting fruition.

But Paul was a discriminating theologian. He classified the nations, giving some to God, and leaving some out of God. He partitioned the globe according to his own theological imagination or conviction, so that God was here but not there; God spake one language, but not another. Never! It is exactly the contrary that Paul does. He was a Jew: he was not ashamed of his lineal descent; yet this same man says, "Is he the God of the Jews only?" ( Romans 3:29.) How can you have a larger charity? How can there be a nobler catholicity? "Is he not also of the Gentiles?"—and understand by "Gentiles" ourselves, those counted heathen, Pagan, alien, outcast. "Yes, of the Gentiles also: seeing it is one God, which shall justify the circumcision by faith, and uncircumcision through faith." Who will now make Paul a partisan? Who will venture in face of such declarations as these to make Paul a bigot? If ever there was a man who wanted to show that redemption was as large as creation, it was Paul. If ever there was a man who did show that where the horizon ends grace only seems to begin, because of its infinite abundance, it was Paul. If ever there was a man who looked at the sun so as to see its real dimensions or magnitude, and so looked at grace to see that it was not a geometrical term, having cubic dimensions and proportions, it was Paul; for, said he, "Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound," as an ocean abounds over a streamlet, as the sky over-domes the earth. Paul was therefore a believer in universal departure from God, and in the possibility of universal return to God.

Yet the Apostle will not have faith abused. He says, I see plainly that some of you think you would be easily released from duty if it were a mere question of faith; you are prepared to believe anything: faith is easier to you than obedience: but in talking so recklessly and wantonly, you are misunderstanding the very meaning of faith; you do not know what the word "belief" covers:—"Do we then make void the law through faith?"—are we making the gate wider that leads into heaven? "God forbid: yea, we establish the law." When a man becomes really conversant with the whole mystery of grace, he will go back to the law, a more willing scholar, a more obedient slave; he will take up the whole round of duty, and God's statutes shall become his songs in the house of his pilgrimage. And thus Paul's gospel rolls on. Yet it was interrupted by some who misunderstood it. They took occasion to say, If this metaphysical conception of things is all, why then we are released from moral obligation; if we are called upon to cudgel our brains and get hold of some intellectual conception of God and his kingdom, that will be better; we thus get rid of the Decalogue, and we get rid of the whole law, that scheme of regulation and restraint and penalty and reward within which we have been living: I think we shall go over to this metaphysical conception of things. And the Apostle, with that wonderful interrogative power of his, in which he makes the mark of interrogation do the whole work of an argument, shouts, "What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid." It is so true that every great offer of grace is also a great temptation to the evil spirit that is in man. Man cannot receive God's love without trying to make it an open door into possible disobedience; he says, If the love be so great, what does it matter what I do? If the grace is so infinite in proportion to the sin, what does my little iniquity amount to? What does it matter whether I am a John the Divine, or a Judas Iscariot, in the presence of this infinite abundance of grace? Paul says, Shall we continue in sin, that we may tempt the grace of God, try it, and challenge it, whether it be not greater than our sin; shall we study and graduate to become Judas Iscariots, that we may prove to the world how great and grand is the grace of God? The Apostle's answer is, "God forbid." There is no grander answer. He implores God to save souls from such blasphemy.

This is the Gospel according to Paul. It is the same as all the other Gospels. These are all extracts from one grand concerted piece of music. A wondrous concert: here a solo, there a single chord; here a chorus, and yonder a trembling note that can hardly live we think, but that must live because it belongs to eternity. And when these are brought together, what have we but the old Bible, grandest of books, treasure-house of God; having in it all things we want,—a wheatfield, a vineyard, a garden of delights, a fountain of life. O Matthew , Mark , Luke , John , Paul, it is thy Gospel, yet not thine: for all good news starts from heaven.