Romans xv. 14-33
THE Epistle hastens to its close. As to its instructions, doctrinal or moral, they are now practically written. The Way of Salvation lies extended, in its radiant outline, before the Romans, and ourselves. The Way of Obedience, in some of its main tracks, has been drawn firmly on the field of life. Little remains but the Missionary's last words about persons and plans, and then the great task is done.
He will say a warm, gracious word about the spiritual state of the Roman believers. He will justify, with a noble courtesy, his own authoritative attitude as their counsellor. He will talk a little of his hoped for and now seemingly approaching visit, and matters in connexion with it. He will greet the individuals whom he knows, and commend the bearer of the Letter, and add last messages from his friends. Then Phœbe may receive her charge, and go on her way.
Ver. 14.
But I am sure, my brethren, quite on my own part (καὶ αὐτὸς ἐγώ), about you, that you are, yourselves, irrespective of my influence, brimming with goodness, with high Christian qualities in general, filled with all knowledge, competent in fact (καὶ) to admonish one another. Is this flattery, interested and insincere? Is it weakness, easily persuaded into a false optimism? Surely not; for the speaker here is the man who has spoken straight to the souls of these same people about sin, and judgment, and holiness; about the holiness of these everyday charities which some of them (so he has said plainly enough) had been violating. But a truly great heart always loves to praise where it can, and, discerningly, to think and say the best. He who is Truth itself said of His imperfect, His disappointing followers, as He spoke of them in their hearing to His Father, "They have kept Thy word"; "I am glorified in them" (John xvii. 6, 10). So here his Servant does not indeed give the Romans a formal certificate of perfection, but he does rejoice to know, and to say, that their community is Christian in a high degree, and that in a certain sense they have not needed information about Justification by Faith, nor about principles of love and liberty in their intercourse. In essence, all has been in their cognizance already; an assurance which could not have been entertained in regard of every Mission, certainly. He has written not as to children, giving them an alphabet, but as to men, developing facts into science.
Ver. 15.
Ver. 16.
But with a certain boldness (τολμηρότερον) I have written[250] to you, here and there,[251] just as reminding you; because of the grace, the free gift of his commission and of the equipment for it, given me by our (τοῦ) God, given in order to my being Christ Jesus' minister sent to the Nations, doing priest-work with the Gospel of God, that the oblation of the Nations, the oblation which is in fact the Nations self-laid upon the spiritual altar, may be acceptable, consecrated in the Holy Spirit. It is a startling and splendid passage of metaphor. Here once, in all the range of his writings (unless we except the few and affecting words of Phil. ii. 17), the Apostle presents himself to his converts as a sacrificial ministrant, a "priest" in the sense which usage (not etymology) has so long stamped on that English word as its more special sense. Never do the great Founders of the Church, and never does He who is its Foundation, use the term ἱερεύς, sacrificing, mediating, priest, as a term to designate the Christian minister in any of his orders; never, if this passage is not to be reckoned in, with its ἱερουργεῖν, its "priest-work," as we have ventured to translate the Greek. In the distinctively sacerdotal Epistle, the Hebrews, the word ἱερεὺς comes indeed into the foreground. But there it is absorbed into the Lord. It is appropriated altogether to Him in His self-sacrificial Work once done, and in His heavenly Work now always doing, the work of mediatorial impartation, from His throne,[252] of the blessings which His great Offering won. One other Christian application of the sacrificial title we have in the Epistles: "Ye are a holy priesthood," "a royal priesthood" (1 Pet. ii. 5, 9). But who are "ye"? Not the consecrated pastorate, but the consecrated Christian company altogether. And what are the altar-sacrifices of that company? "Sacrifices spiritual"; "the praises of Him who called them into His wonderful light" (1 Pet. ii. 5, 9). In the Christian Church, the pre-Levitical ideal of the old Israel reappears in its sacred reality. He who offered to the Church of Moses (Exod. xix. 6) to be one great priesthood, "a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation," found His favoured nation unready for the privilege, and so Levi representatively took the place alone. But now, in His new Israel, as all are sons in the Son, so all are priests in the Priest. And the sacred Ministry of that Israel, the Ministry which is His own divine institution, the gift (Eph. iv. 11) of the ascended Lord to His Church, is never once designated, as such, by the term which would have marked it as the analogue to Levi, or to Aaron.
Is this passage in any degree an exception? No; for it contains its own full inner evidence of its metaphorical cast. The "priest-working" here has regard, we find, not to a ritual, but to "the Gospel." "The oblation" is—the Nations. The hallowing Element, shed as it were upon the victims, is the Holy Ghost. Not in a material temple, and serving at no tangible altar, the Apostle brings his multitudinous converts as his holocaust to the Lord. The Spirit, at his preaching and on their believing, descends upon them; and they lay themselves "a living sacrifice" where the fire of love shall consume them, to His glory.
Ver. 17.
I have therefore my (read τὴν) right to exultation, in Christ Jesus, as His member and implement, as to what regards God; not in any respect as regards myself, apart from Him. And then he proceeds as if about to say, in evidence of that assertion, that he always declines to intrude on a brother Apostle's ground, and to claim as his own experience what was in the least degree another's; but that indeed through him, in sovereign grace, God has done great things, far and wide. This he expresses thus, in energetic compressions of diction: