Can anything exceed this in interest? Who can fail to see in the fact here recorded that it was the loving desire of the heart of God to reach every creature under heaven with the sweet story of His grace? The world had rejected the Son of God, had crucified and slain Him; but no sooner had He taken His seat at the right hand of God than down came the august Witness, God the Spirit, to speak to man—to every man—to speak to him, not in accents of withering denunciation, not in the thundering anathemas of judgment, but in accents of deep and tender love, to tell him of full remission of sins through the blood of the Cross.
True, He called on man to judge himself, to repent, to take his only true and proper place. Why not? How could it be otherwise? Repentance is—as we have already fully shown and earnestly insisted upon in these papers—a universal and abiding necessity for man. But the Spirit of God came down to speak face to face with man, to tell him in his own mother tongue of the wonderful works of God. He did not speak to a Hebrew in Latin, or to a Roman in Greek; but He spoke to each in the very dialect in which he was born, thus proving to a demonstration—proving in the most affecting manner possible—that it was God's gracious desire to make His way to man's heart in deepest, richest, fullest grace. All homage to His name!
How different it was when the law was to be published from mount Sinai! If all the nations of the earth had been assembled round that fiery mount, they could not have understood one word—unless, indeed, any one happened to know the Hebrew tongue. The law was addressed to one people, it was wrapped up in one language, it was enclosed in the ark. God took no pains to publish the record of man's duty in every language under heaven. But when grace was to be published, when the glad tidings of salvation were to be sounded abroad, when testimony was to be borne to a crucified, risen, ascended and coming Saviour and Lord, then, verily, God the Holy Ghost came down, for the purpose of fitting His messengers to speak to every man in a tongue which he could understand.
Facts are powerful arguments, and assuredly the above two facts, in reference to the law and the gospel, must speak to every heart, in a manner the most convincing, of the matchless grace of God. God did not send forth heralds to publish the law to "all nations." No—this was reserved for "the great commission" on which we have been dwelling, and which we now earnestly commend, with all its great subjects, to the serious attention of every reader.
C. H. M.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The two Greek words to which we have alluded in the text are, πλεονεξια (pleonexia—the desire to get more), and φιλαργυρια (philarguria—the love of money). Now it is the former that occurs in Col. iii. 5—"Covetousness, which is idolatry;" and there it stands in the terrible category with some of the very vilest sins that stain the pages of human history.
[2] It is remarkable that both in Eph. vi. and Col. iii. the address to servants is far more elaborate than to any of the other classes. In Titus ii. servants are specially singled out. There is no address to husbands, none to masters, none to children. We do not attempt to account for this, but we cannot help noticing it as a very interesting fact; and most assuredly it teaches us what a very important place is assigned in Christianity to one who, in those early days of the Church's history, occupied the place of a slave. The Holy Ghost took special pains to instruct such an one as to how he was to carry himself in his most trying sphere of work. The poor slave might think himself shut out from the service of God. So far from this, he is sweetly taught that by simply doing his duty as in the sight of God he could adorn the doctrine of God his Saviour, and bring glory to the name of Jesus. Nothing can exceed the grace that shines in this.
[3] The "prophets," in this passage, are those of the New Testament. This is evident from the expression, "Now revealed." He could not speak of a thing being "now revealed" to men who had been dead for hundreds of years. Besides, had the apostle meant Old Testament prophets, the order would assuredly have been "Prophets and apostles." We have a similar expression in Eph. ii. 20: "Built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets." He does not say, "prophets and apostles." The truth is that the apostles and prophets formed the first layer of the foundation of the Church of which Jesus Christ is the chief Corner-stone; and this is an additional proof that the Church had no existence save in the secret counsels of God until our Lord Christ, having accomplished the work of redemption, ascended into the heavens, and sent down the Holy Ghost to baptize believers—Jews and Gentiles—into one body.
The reader may also refer with real profit and interest to Rom. xvi. 25, 26: "Now to Him that is of power to stablish you according to my gospel, and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery, which was kept secret since the world began, but now is made manifest, and by the scriptures of the prophets (literally, by the prophetic writings, that is, of the New Testament), according to the commandment of the everlasting God, made known to all nations for the obedience of faith."