Bible Commentaries

The Law of Faith

Romans 3:1). Somebody must have an advantage. All men cannot begin at the same point. What is the advantage which God has allotted to some? Is it a vital difference, or is it only an initial privilege, carrying with it a great responsibility, and meant to be shared by all the world? Is God a partisan, a darling-maker? Has he made some men to be saved, and others to be damned? The Apostle undertakes to discuss these great questions, and to discuss them in a way which has been in too many instances absolutely misunderstood. It is amazing to find how often the Apostle has been taken in the exactly contrary sense to that which he meant to establish. There is nothing narrow about Paul; he has no heaven filled with little darlings, pet saints—favoured ones, on whom God for some inscrutable reason has set peculiar marks of favour. The Apostle says God is no respecter of persons. The Apostle is not indiscriminating; he knows that the Jews had advantages, and great advantages; but he acknowledges these, and then proceeds to show that the Jews were as bad as anybody else. The Apostle is very erratic in all this epistolary discussion: he cannot keep to the point two moments. The genius of his mind is revealed in this epistle characteristically. He will not follow out any one line of thought; the Apostle's was a fervent, erratic, ardent, and often uncontrollable genius. The Apostle Paul had not time to finish sentences; he scarcely began one sentence before he saw the opening of another, and he plunged after it by no recognised law of movement. In this very chapter he says "in the first place," but he never says "in the second place"; he forgets that he had proposed to himself an arithmetical enumeration. The book is the better for this. It is not mechanical; it is not a piece of art in clay: this is a mind on fire, a mind let loose amid the radiant mysteries of God; and now the mind is here, and now there, and before anything is rounded into spherical, completeness and harmony, the mind bounds off again in some other direction; so that chapter iii. is completed in chapter ix.: and yet who would not rather have this Paul-like rush and tumult of thinking, with its million points of suggestiveness, than some smooth and easily forgotten insignificance? Those who have a partisan heaven have no vindication of it in the Epistle to the Romans 3:10-18 :—

"As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one: there is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God. They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one. Their throat is an open sepulchre; with their tongues they have used deceit; the poison of asps is under their lips: whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness: their feet are swift to shed blood: destruction and misery are in their ways: and the way of peace have they not known: there is no fear of God before their eyes." ( Romans 3:10-18)

That is his impeachment. The charge is not made against Jews as Jews, nor is it made against Gentiles as Gentiles; it is made against Jews and Gentiles as men. How energetic he could be! "There is none righteous, no, not one." What of that white-robed priest that stands there as if an incarnation of righteousness? He is as bad, originally, natively, as the man who has not yet begun to pray. "There is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God." Nor is the charge metaphysical, remote, dealing with certain subjectivities that lie beyond common knowledge and general apprehension. The men are not sinners only, they are criminals; "their throat is an open sepulchre," a yawning chasm, opening its jaws in the hunger of hell; "with their tongues they have used deceit:" rather, "with their tongues they are using deceit": the action is immediate and continued; there is no escape from the grammar in the verb which the Apostle used. We may throw our accusations into the perfect and the pluperfect, anyway to get rid of them, by depositing them in some grammatical hole, but the Apostle's verb is a verb of continuance:—they are using, now using, always using, deceit; they are a lie. "The poison of asps"—the poison bag is under the particular tooth with which they bite most severely. This was Paul's conception of human nature. No wonder he wanted a real Gospel. Some of us prefer Paul's account of human nature to any other. I should be glad to contradict the Apostle if I could do so honestly, but I am bound when his accusation has ceased to roll its thunders to say, There is one man at least of whom that is a full-length portrait. Modify the letters as you may, twist the account into new shape as you may be able ingeniously to do, you cannot alter the heart of it; the whole accusation is in one sentence—"there is no fear of God before their eyes"; and lost reverence is lost character; a lost standard of righteousness, living and eternal, is a lost manhood.

The Apostle now proceeds to say a good deal about law. Perhaps we have been misled as to the meaning of his reasoning by this little word "the"; strike out that word, and the whole argument is made broader and stronger. "Now we know that what things soever the law saith"—read, "Now we know that what things soever law saith." "Therefore by the deeds of law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight: for by law is the knowledge of sin." The Apostle is not referring to anything that is written and is to be found within four corners, he is referring to a certain epoch in the evolution of human nature and human thought; he is referring to the particular time when men began to shape their conduct by statute and precept and code of behaviour, as that they should rise at this hour, and work so long, and within the given hours should do so many deeds, and that such deeds should be rewarded, and such other deeds should be punished: that is law: a mechanical contrivance, an arrangement of discipline, an economy by which men try to train themselves. The thought was a noble one; and it loses nothing of its nobility from the fact that it is not complete in itself. Here is human nature beginning to see that disorder will not do; tumult, incohesiveness, mutual repulsion will no longer satisfy the growing instinct and the growing intelligence of man: there must be something constructive, architectural; some things must be elevated into honour, and other things hitherto permitted must be trampled under foot as base: here we open the page that begins the development of law, order, cosmos, the shaping and regulation of things. The Apostle does not condemn this, but looking upon it he says, you will find this utterly insufficient when you come to vital matters: the law can have no reference to yesterday; law can only begin when itself is made known; the law we did not know yesterday we cannot be judged by: "By law is the knowledge of sin." Law catalogues human actions, enumerates them, indicates their quality, points out all their issue and meaning; without the law there is no sin; sin is the transgression of law; now, continues this mighty reasoner, if you want your souls made right you will have to drop all your little codes of discipline, all your pedantic arrangements, and mechanical contrivances, and rise from law to faith,—a mystery, a miracle, not to be explained in words, but to be felt after the soul has taken that infinite leap.

Thus the Apostle's argument is cumulative and historical. He begins at the beginning; he knows that the Jews have certain advantages of a temporal kind, he then proceeds to outline human nature as it appears to the eyes of God; then he puts the great question, How to escape from this nature into the new nature? And in that action he lays down the rule or doctrine that all further progress, all upward movement is to be inspired by, directed by, and crowned by, the action or Ministry of Faith. He will not allow the Jew to come in by one way and the Gentile to come in by another way; he does not say to the Jew, You shall come up the front avenue, you shall drive to the portals of your father's house in chariots drawn by steeds of fire, wearing harness of gold; and you Gentiles must come in at midnight by some unfrequented path, that will be pointed out to you by some condescending person. He says, "There is no difference; for all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God." How is it to be then? To be? By ransom, by sacrifice, by propitiation, "through faith in his blood." Are there those who would have it explained? They must be denied. Are there those who think of blood, in some narrow, common, vulgar, debasing sense? Then they do not take God's view of the meaning of the term blood: this is not a murder, it is a sacrifice; this is not a measurable quantity of hot fluid rushing from the fountains of life, this is an offering—never to be explained in cold words, yet to be felt when the heart is most tender, penitent, broken, self-helpless; when the heart is in that receptive mood it will know the meaning of the words, "Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world." Where is boasting then? Gone! Who can find it? None. By what law is it excluded? The law of works? No, but by the law of faith,—the new law, diviner, higher, larger law. You thought law was a matter of conduct and discipline, and you based certain measurable economies upon law; now you must grow into the further truth that the true law is faith, and faith is the true law. "Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid." Where that word "God forbid" occurs substitute the word "impossible,"—a thing necessarily excluded from the whole line of thought and action. "Yea, we establish the law:" it is because we have come into a higher law through the medium of the lower law, and that lower law has often been a necessary medium, lying on the way to the higher law, the broader and grander law. We do not work now against our strength, as if spending ourselves in fruitless labour; we are not Sisyphus-like, rolling up a stone which comes back faster than we can roll it; on the contrary, having now the spirit of faith, the inspiration of faith, we come back upon all the moralities, and do them easily, musically, lovingly; we establish the law, because we live under the ministry of a higher inspiration. If any man wants to get rid of law he cannot be a Christian: if any man says, Now I can come from the Cross of Christ to do the law more easily and lovingly and obediently,—then we know that he has tasted the bitterness of death with Christ, and has tasted with him the joy of resurrection.

Thus Paul is an Evangelist of the world. He will have all men to be saved. "Is he the God of the Jews only? Is he not also of the Gentiles? Yes, of the Gentiles also." Is that a man likely to partition heaven off into so many tents and arbours for the accommodation of certain inhabitants of Europe to the exclusion of the whole population of Africa? Is that a man who was likely to say to the Gentiles, Nothing can be done for you; the whole universe was constructed for the Jews, and to the Jews it must be given. Hear him: "Is he the God of the Jews only? Is he not also of the Gentiles? Yes, of the Gentiles also." Yet this is the man whose name is often quoted as sanctioning the blasphemy that God has predestined some men to be lost.