II. Reminds them of the contempt with which they had been treated by the Jews.—The Jews, instead of improving the distinction of their circumcision to gratitude and obedience, perverted it to pride, self-confidence, and contempt of mankind. They not only excluded other nations from the benefit of religious communion, but even denied them the common offices of humanity. One of their greatest objections to the Gospel was that it offered salvation to the Gentiles.
III. They were without Christ.—To the Jews were chiefly confined the discoveries which God made of a Saviour to come. From them in their captivities and dispersions the Gentiles obtained the knowledge they had of this glorious Person. This knowledge was imperfect, mixed with error and uncertainty, and at best extended only to a few. The Gentiles, contemplating the Messiah as a temporal prince, regarded His appearing as a calamity rather than a blessing.
IV. They were aliens from the commonwealth of Israel.—To the forms of worship instituted in the Mosaic law none was admitted but Jews and such as were proselyted to the Jewish religion. All uncircumcised heathens were excluded as aliens.
V. They were strangers from the covenants of promise.—The discovery of the covenants of promise until the Saviour came was almost wholly confined to the Jews. How unhappy was the condition of the Gentile world in the dark, benighted ages which preceded the Gospel!
VI. They had no clear hope of a future existence.—Many of them scarcely believed or thought of a life beyond this. They had no apprehension, hardly the idea of a restoration of the body. Those who believed in a future state had but obscure and some of them very absurd conceptions of it. Still more ignorant were they of the qualifications necessary for happiness after death.
VII. They were atheists in a world in which God was manifest.—The heathens generally had some apprehension of a Deity; but they were without a knowledge of the one true God and without a just idea of His character. There are more atheists in the world than profess themselves such. Many who profess to know God in works deny Him.—Lathrop.
Ver. 12. Hopeless and Godless.—The soul that has no God has no hope. The character of the God we love and worship will determine the character of our hope. 1. The heathen religion was the seeking religion. Their search arose out of a deeply felt want. They felt the need of something they did not possess; and the finest intellects the world has ever known bravely and anxiously devoted all their colossal powers to the task of fathoming the mysteries of life. The hope of discovery buoyed them up and urged them onwards; but their united endeavours brought them only to the borderland of the unseen and the unknown, where they caught but glimmerings of a truth that ever receded into the great beyond. “The world by wisdom knew not God,” and therefore had no hope. 2. The Hebrew religion was the hoping religion. Favoured with a revelation of the only true God, their hope expanded with every advancing step of the progressive revelation. Their hope was based on faith, as all true hope must be—faith in the promises of God. They had the promise of a Deliverer whose wisdom should excel that of Moses and Solomon, and whose power should surpass that of Joshua and of his heroic successors in the most brilliant period of their military career; and, through the centuries of prosperity and decline, of scattering and captivity, and amid unparalleled sufferings which would have extinguished any other nation, hope fastened and fed upon the promises till the true Messiah came, whom St. Paul justly described as “the Hope of Israel, the Hope of the promise made of God unto our fathers.” 3. The Christian religion is the complement and perfection of all previously existing systems; it is the grand realisation of what the heathen sought, and the Hebrew hoped for. It is in Jesus we have the clearest, fullest, and most authoritative revelation of God, and it is in Him, and in Him alone, that the loftiest hope of man finds its restful and all-sufficient realisation. The apostle Paul refers to Jesus specifically as our Hope—“Our Lord Jesus Christ, which is our Hope” (1 Tim. i. 1). 4. In the light of this great and indubitable truth the words of our text may be clearly and unmistakably interpreted, and they assume a terrible significance. To be without Christ is to be without God and without hope. (1) Hope is not simply expectation. We expect many things we do not hope for. In the natural course of things we expect difficulties, we expect opposition and misrepresentation—“black wounding calumny the whitest virtue strikes”—we expect infirmities and disabilities of age; but we are none of us so fond of trouble for trouble’s sake as to hope for any of these things. (2) Hope is not simply desire. Our desires are as thick and plentiful as apple blossoms, few of which ever ripen into the fruit they promise. We desire uninterrupted health, we desire wealth—the most dangerous and disappointing of all human wishes—we desire pleasure, success in life, and the realisation of the most ambitious dreams; but we have no reasonable ground for hoping that all our desires will ever be attained. (3) Hope is the expectation of the desirable, and it must have a foundation on which the expectation rests and an object to which the desire can rise. The foundation of hope is Christ, and the object of hope is to live with Him in eternal glory. To be without hope and without God does not mean that hope and God do not exist. The world is full of both; they are among you, they surround you, the very air vibrates with the ever-active presence of these grand realities; but they are as though they did not exist for you unless you know and feel they do exist within you. (4) Hope presupposes faith; they cannot exist apart. Faith discovers “the only foundation which is laid, which is Christ Jesus,” fastens the soul to and settles it on this foundation, and faith and hope rouse all the activities of the soul to build on this foundation a superstructure which shall grow in solidity, in symmetry, and in beauty, until it becomes a perfect marvel of moral architecture, richly ornamented with the most delicate tracery and shimmering and flashing with the resplendent glory of God. (5) Hope is the balloon of the soul, soaring majestically into the heavens, scanning scenes of beauty and grandeur never beheld by our earth-bound senses, and faithfully reporting to the soul the state of affairs in the skies; but it is a captive balloon, and the connecting cords are firmly held in the hand of faith. The loftiest flights and the swing of what might seem the most eccentric gyrations of hope are held in check by the friendly, the sympathetic, but unswerving grasp of faith. “My dear Hope,” Faith says, “it is very nice for you to be up there, basking in the cloudless sunshine and drinking in the melody of the ascending lark as it ripples up the heights; and I like you to be there. I could never get there myself; and you tell me of things I should never otherwise know, and they do me good. But, remember, I cannot let you go. We are linked together in the sacred bonds of a holy wedlock. We are necessary to each other and cannot do without each other. If you were to break away from me, you would vanish like vapour into space, and I should be left forlorn and powerless.” And Hope replies: “I know it, my dear Faith. Divorce would be fatal to us both, and our union is too sweet and precious ever to dream of separation. I live in these upper regions purely for your sake. You know I have cheered you up many a time and will do so again. My joy is to brighten your life of toil and conflict down there. When the soul has done with you it will have done with me, and when my work is finished I shall be content to die.” Thus, faith and hope are essentially united, and both are wedded together by the soul’s living union with Christ. (6) A false hope is really no hope. It rests on no solid foundation; it is not justified by sound reason. It is but the blue light of a frantic conjecture generated amid the restless tumults of a soul in the last stages of despair. At the best a false hope is but a beautiful dream spun from the gossamer threads of a busy and excited fancy, a dream of what we wish might be, and, like all other dreams having no substantial basis, it dissolves into space under the first touch of reality. A false hope lures its victims on to destruction, as the flickering lights of the marsh gases seduce the belated traveller into the dismal swamps from which there is no release.
A State of Sin a State of Ungodliness.—1. Men do not recognise the existence of God. 2. They do not acknowledge His moral government. 3. They do not seek His favour as their chief good. 4. They do not delight in His communion. 5. They do not anticipate their final reckoning with Him. 6. They do not accept His own disclosures concerning the attributes of His nature and the principles of His administration.—G. Brooks.
Man without God.—He is like a ship tossed about on a stormy sea without chart or compass. The ship drifts as the waves carry it. The night is dark. The pilot knows not which way to steer. He may be close to rocks and quicksands. Perhaps a flash of lightning falls on a rock, or he hears the waves breaking over it. But how shall he escape, or how prepare to meet the danger? Shall he trust in providence? What providence has he to trust in? Poor man! He is without God. Shall he throw out an anchor? But he has no anchor. He wants the best and only safe anchor, hope—the anchor of the soul. Such is the state of man when he is far off, without a God to trust in, without hope to comfort and support him. But give the man a true and lively faith in Christ, tell him of a merciful and loving Father who careth for us and would have us cast all our care upon Him, show him that hope which is firm to the end, and straightway you make a happy man of him. You give him a course to steer, a chart and compass to guide him, an anchor which will enable him to withstand the buffeting of every storm. You insure him against shipwreck, and you assure him of a blessed haven where at length he will arrive and be at rest.—A. W. Hare.
Practical Atheism.—If it had been without friends, without shelter, without food, that would have made a gloomy sound; but without God! That there should be men who can survey the creation with a scientific enlargement of intelligence and then say there is no God is one of the most hideous phenomena in the world.