The occurrence of that subject exactly here is true to the inmost nature of the Gospel. The Apostle has just been counting up the wealth of salvation, and claiming it all, as present and eternal property, for himself and his brethren in the Lord. Justifying Righteousness, Liberty from Sin in Christ, the Indwelling Spirit, electing Love, coming and certain Glory, all have been recounted, and asserted, and embraced. Is it selfish, this great joy of possession and prospect? Let those say so who see these things only from outside. Make proof of what they are in their interior, enter into them, learn yourself what it is to have peace with God, to receive the Spirit, to expect the eternal glory; and you will find that nothing is so sure to expand the heart towards other men as the personal reception into it of the Truth and Life of God in Christ. It is possible to hold a true creed—and to be spiritually hard and selfish. But is it possible so to be when not only the creed is held, but the Lord of it, its Heart and Life, is received with wonder and great joy? The man whose certainties, whose riches, whose freedom, are all consciously in Him, cannot but love his neighbour, and long that he too should come into "the secret of the Lord."
So St Paul, just at this point of the Epistle, turns with a peculiar intensity of grief and yearning towards the Israel which he had once led, and now had left, because they would not come with him to Christ. His natural and his spiritual sympathies all alike go out to this self-afflicting people, so privileged, so divinely loved, and now so blind. Oh that he could offer any sacrifice that would bring them reconciled, humbled, happy, to the feet of the true Christ! Oh that they might see the fallacy of their own way of salvation, and submit to the way of Christ, taking His yoke, and finding rest to their souls! Why do they not do it? Why does not the light which convinced him shine on them? Why should not the whole Sanhedrin say, "Lord, what wouldst Thou have us to do?" Why does not the fair beauty of the Son of God make them too "count all things but loss" for Him? Why do not the voices of the Prophets prove to them, as they do now to Paul, absolutely convincing of the historical as well as spiritual claims of the Man of Calvary? Has the promise failed? Has God done with the race to which He guaranteed such a perpetuity of blessing? No, that cannot be. He looks again, and he sees in the whole past a long warning that, while an outer circle of benefits might affect the nation, the inner circle, the light and life of God indeed, embraced "a remnant" only; even from the day when Isaac and not Ishmael was made heir of Abraham. And then he ponders the impenetrable mystery of the relation of the Infinite Will to human wills; he remembers how, in a way whose full reasons are unknowable, (but they are good, for they are in God,) the Infinite Will has to do with our willing; genuine and responsible though our willing is. And before that opaque veil he rests. He knows that only righteousness and love is behind it; but he knows that it is a veil, and that in front of it man's thought must cease and be silent. Sin is altogether man's fault. But when man turns from sin it is all God's mercy, free, special, distinguishing. Be silent, and trust Him, O man whom He has made. Remember, He has made thee. It is not only that He is greater than thou, or stronger; but He has made thee. Be reasonably willing to trust, out of sight, the reasons of thy Maker.
Then he turns again with new regrets and yearnings to the thought of that wonderful Gospel which was meant for Israel and for the world, but which Israel rejected, and now would fain check on its way to the world. Lastly, he recalls the future, still full of eternal promises for the chosen race, and through them full of blessing for the world; till he rises at length from perplexity and anguish, and the wreck of once eager expectations, into that great Doxology in which he blesses the Eternal Sovereign for the very mystery of His ways, and adores Him because He is His own eternal End.
Ver. 1.
to
Ver. 5.
Truth I speak in Christ, speaking as the member of the All-Truthful; I do not lie, my conscience, in the Holy Ghost, informed and governed by Him, bearing me concurrent witness—the soul within affirming to itself the word spoken without to others—that I have great grief, and my heart has incessant pain, yes, the heart in which (v. 5) the Spirit has "poured out" God's love and joy; there is room for both experiences in its human depths. For I was wishing, I myself, to be anathema from Christ, to be devoted to eternal separation from Him; awful dream of uttermost sacrifice, made impossible only because it would mean self-robbery from the Lord who had bought him; a spiritual suicide by sin—for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen flesh-wise. For they are (οἵτινές εἰσιν) Israelites, bearers of the glorious theocratic name, sons of the "Prince with God" (Gen. xxxii. 28); theirs is the adoption, the call to be Jehovah's own filial race, "His son, His firstborn" (Exod. iv. 22) of the peoples; and the glory, the Shechinah of the Eternal Presence, sacramentally seen in Tabernacle and Temple, spiritually spread over the race; and the Covenants, with Abraham, and Isaac, and Levi, and Moses, and Aaron, and Phinehas, and David; and the Legislation, the holy Moral Code, and the Ritual, with its divinely ordered symbolism, that vast Parable of Christ, and the Promises, of "the pleasant land," and the perpetual favour, and the coming Lord; theirs are the Fathers, patriarchs, and priests, and kings; and out of them, as to what is flesh-wise, is the Christ,—He who is over all things, God, blessed to all eternity. Amen.[152]
It is indeed a splendid roll of honours, recited over this race "separate among the nations," a race which to-day as much as ever remains the enigma of history, to be solved only by Revelation. "The Jews, your Majesty," was the reply of Frederick the Great's old believing courtier, when asked with a smile for the credentials of the Bible; the short answer silenced the Encyclopædist King. It is indeed a riddle, made of indissoluble facts, this people everywhere dispersed, yet everywhere individual; scribes of a Book which has profoundly influenced mankind, and which is recognized by the most various races as an august and lawful claimant to be divine, yet themselves, in so many aspects, provincial to the heart; historians of their own glories, but at least equally of their own unworthiness and disgrace; transmitters of predictions which may be slighted, but can never, as a whole, be explained away, yet obstinate deniers of the majestic fulfilment in the Lord of Christendom; human in every fault and imperfection, yet so concerned in bringing to man the message of the Divine that Jesus Himself said of them (John iv. 22), "Salvation comes from the Jews." On this wonderful race this its most illustrious member (after his Lord) here fixes his eyes, full of tears. He sees their glories pass before him—and then realizes the spiritual squalor and misery of their rejection of the Christ of God. He groans, and in real agony asks how it can be. One thing only cannot be; the promises have not failed; there has been no failure in the Promiser. What may seem such is rather man's misreading of the promise.
Ver. 6.
to
Ver. 12.
But it is not as though the word of God has been thrown out (ἐκπέπτωκε), that "word" whose divine honour was dearer to him than even that of his people. For not all who come from Israel constitute Israel; nor, because they are seed of Abraham, are they all his children, in the sense of family life and rights; but "In Isaac shall a seed be called thee" (Gen. xxi. 12); Isaac, and not any son of thy body begotten, is father of those whom thou shalt claim as thy covenant-race. That is to say, not the children of his (τῆς) flesh are the children of his (τοῦ) God; no, the children of the promise, indicated and limited by its developed terms, are reckoned as seed. For of the promise this was the word (Gen. xviii. 10, 14), "According to this time I will come, and Sarah, she and not any spouse of thine; no Hagar, no Keturah, but Sarah, shall have a son." And the law of limitations did not stop there, but contracted yet again the stream of even physical filiation: Nor only so, but Rebecca too—being with child, with twin children, of one husband—no problem of complex parentage, as with Abraham, occurring here—even of Isaac our father, just named as the selected heir—(for it was while they were not yet born, while they had not yet shewn any conduct (πραξάντων τι) good or bad, that the choice-wise purpose of God might remain, sole and sovereign, not based on works, but wholly on the Caller)—it was said to her (Gen. xxv. 23), "The greater shall be bondman to the less." As it stands written, in the prophet's message a millennium later, "Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated,"[153] I repudiated him as heir.
So the limit has run always along with the promise. Ishmael is Abraham's son, yet not his son. Esau is Isaac's son, yet not his son. And though we trace in Ishmael and in Esau, as they grow, characteristics which may seem to explain the limitation, this will not really do. For the chosen one in each case has his conspicuous unfavourable characteristics too. And the whole tone of the record (not to speak of this its apostolic interpretation) looks towards mystery, not explanation. Esau's "profanity" was the concurrent occasion, not the cause, of the choice of Jacob. The reason of the choice lay in the depths of God, that World "dark with excess of bright." All is well there, but not the less all is unknown.
So we are led up to the shut door of the sanctuary of God's Choice. Touch it; it is adamantine, and it is fast locked. No blind Destiny has turned the key, and lost it. No inaccessible Tyrant sits within, playing to himself both sides of a game of fate, and indifferent to the cry of the soul. The Key-Bearer, whose Name is engraved on the portal, is "He that liveth, and was dead, and is alive for evermore" (Rev. i. 18). And if you listen you will hear words within, like the soft deep voice of many waters, yet of an eternal Heart; "I am that I am; I will that I will; trust Me." But the door is locked; and the Voice is mystery.