[148] Ὁ δικαιῶν: we adopt the interrogative rendering of all the clauses here. It is equally good as grammar, and far more congenial to the glowing context.
[149] Observe the τίς of the question, not τί.
[150] Cp. 1 Cor. iii. 22: "All things are yours, whether life or death."
[151] Strong documentary evidence favours the transference of "powers" to a place after "things to come." But surely rhythm, and the affinity of words, look the other way.
CHAPTER XX
THE SORROWFUL PROBLEM:
JEWISH UNBELIEF; DIVINE SOVEREIGNTY
Romans ix. 1-33
WE may well think that again there was silence awhile in that Corinthian chamber, when Tertius had duly inscribed the last words we have studied. A "silence in heaven" follows, in the Apocalypse (viii. 1), the vision of the white hosts of the redeemed, gathered at last, in their eternal jubilation, before the throne and the Lamb. A silence in the soul is the fittest immediate sequel to such a revelation of grace and glory as has passed before us here. And did not the man whose work it was to utter it, and whose personal experience was as it were the informing soul of the whole argument of the Epistle from the first, and not least in this last sacred pæan of faith, keep silence when he had done, hushed and tired by this "exceeding weight" of grace and glory?
But he has a great deal more to say to the Romans, and in due time the pen obeys the voice again. What will the next theme be? It will be a pathetic and significant contrast to the last; a lament, a discussion, an instruction, and then a prophecy, about not himself and his happy fellow-saints, but poor self-blinded unbelieving Israel.