"Who was delivered up; who was raised up." When? About twenty-five years before Paul sat dictating this sentence in the house of Gaius. There were at that moment about three hundred known living people, at least (1 Cor. xv. 6), who had seen the Risen One with open eyes, and heard Him with conscious ears. From one point of view, all was eternal, spiritual, invisible. From another point of view our salvation was as concrete, as historical, as much a thing of place and date, as the battle of Actium, or the death of Socrates. And what was done, remains done.
"Can length of years on God Himself exact,
And make that fiction which was once a fact?"
[55] In Uganda, 1893.
[56] We attempt thus to represent the perfects, κεκένωται, κατήργηται.
[57] Read οὗ δὲ not οὗ γάρ.
[58] It is impossible to convey in English the point of the word ἔθνη here, with its faint reference to the Gentiles (in the sense common in later Judaism), spiritually "naturalized" among Abraham's descendants.
[59] Observe the characteristically fragmentary quotation, which assumes the reader's knowledge of the context—the context of the stars. Compare Heb. vi. 14, which similarly quotes Gen. xxii. 16, 17.
[60] Μὴ ἀσθενήσας:—we attempt to convey the thought, given by the aorist, that he then and there was "not weak."
[61] We render this clause as literally as possible. It is as if he would have written "On the promise of God he relied," but changed the expression to one more ample and more forcible. "His unbelief": τῇ ἀπιστίᾳ. Not that Abraham had unbelief actually, but he had it potentially; he might have disbelieved. In that sense unbelief was "his."