We may ask again what are the laws by which the Apostle modifies here the Prophet's phrases. "Who shall descend into the abyss?" The Hebrew reads, "Who shall go over (or on) the sea?" The Septuagint reads, "Who shall go to the other side of the sea?" Here too "we know in part." Assuredly the change of terms was neither unconsciously made, nor arbitrarily; and it was made for readers who could challenge it, if so it seemed to them to be done. But we should need to know the whole relation of the One inspiring Master to the minds of both His Prophet and His Apostle to answer the question completely. However, we can see that Prophet and Apostle both have in their thought here the antithesis of depth to height; that the sea is, to Moses here, the antithesis to the sky, not to the land; and that St Paul intensifies the imagery in its true direction accordingly when he writes, "into the abyss."
Again, he finds Justification by Faith in the Prophet's oracle about the subjective "nearness" of "the utterance" of mercy. Once more we own our ignorance of the conscious purport of the words, as Moses' words. We shall quite decline, if we are reverently cautious, to say that for certain Moses was not aware of such an inmost reference in what he said; it is very much easier to assert than to know what the limitations of the consciousness of the Prophets were. But here also we rest in the fact that behind both Moses and Paul, in their free and mighty personalities, stood their one Lord, building His Scripture slowly into its manifold oneness through them both. He was in the thought and word of Moses; and meantime already to Him the thought and word of Paul was present, and was in His plan. And the earlier utterance had this at least to do with the later, that it drew the mind of the pondering and worshipping Israel to the idea of a contact with God in His Promises which was not external and mechanical but deep within the individual himself, and manifested in the individual's free and living avowal of it.
As we quit the passage, let us mark and cherish its insistence upon "confession," "confession with the mouth that Jesus is Lord." This specially he connects with "salvation," with the believer's preservation to eternal glory. "Faith" is "unto righteousness"; "confession" is "unto salvation." Why is this? Is faith after all not enough for our union with the Lord, and for our safety in Him? Must we bring in something else, to be a more or less meritorious makeweight in the scale? If this is what he means, he is gainsaying the whole argument of the Epistle on its main theme. No; it is eternally true that we are justified, that we are accepted, that we are incorporated, that we are kept, through faith only; that is, that Christ is all for all things in our salvation, and our part and work in the matter is to receive and hold Him in an empty hand. But then this empty hand, holding Him, receives life and power from Him. The man is vivified by his Rescuer. He is rescued that he may live, and that he may serve as living. He cannot truly serve without loyalty to his Lord. He cannot be truly loyal while he hides his relation to Him. In some articulate way he must "confess Him"; or he is not treading the path where the Shepherd walks before the sheep.
The "confession with the mouth" here in view is, surely, nothing less than the believer's open loyalty to Christ. It is no mere recitation of even the sacred catholic Creed; which may be recited as by an automaton. It is the witness of the whole man to Christ, as his own discovered Life and Lord. And thus it means in effect the path of faithfulness along which the Saviour actually leads to glory those who are justified by faith.
That no slackened emphasis on faith is to be felt here is clear from ver. 11. There, in the summary and close of the passage, nothing but faith is named; "whosoever believeth on Him." It is as if he would correct even the slightest disquieting surmise that our repose upon the Lord has to be secured by something other than Himself, through some means more complex than taking Him at His word. Here, as much as anywhere in the Epistle, this is the message; "from faith to faith." The "confession with the mouth" is not a different something added to this faith; it is its issue, its manifestation, its embodiment. "I believed; therefore have I spoken" (Psal. cxvi. 10).
This recurrence to his great theme gives the Apostle's thought a direction once again towards the truth of the world-wide scope of the Gospel of Acceptance. In the midst of this philo-judean section of the Epistle, on his way to say glorious things about abiding mercy and coming blessing for the Jews, he must pause again to assert the equal welcome of "the Greeks" to the Righteousness of God, and the foreshadow of this welcome in the Prophets. |Ver. 12.
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Ver. 15.|For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek (wonderful antithesis to the "no distinction" of iii. 23!). For the same Lord is Lord of all, wealthy to all who call upon Him, who invoke Him, who appeal to Him, in the name of His own mercies in His redeeming Son. For we have the prophecies with us here again. Joel, in a passage (ii. 32) full of Messiah, the passage with which the Spirit of Pentecost filled Peter's lips, speaks thus without a limit; "Every one, whoever shall call upon the Lord's Name, shall be saved." As he cites the words, and the thought rises upon him of this immense welcome to the sinful world, he feels afresh all the need of the heathen, and all the cruel narrowness of the Pharisaism which would shut them out from such an amplitude of blessing. How then can[175] they call on Him on whom they never[176] believed? But how can they believe on Him whom they never heard? But how can they hear Him apart from a proclaimer? But how can they proclaim unless they are sent, unless the Church which holds the sacred light sends her messengers out into the darkness? And in this again the Prophets are with the Christian Apostle, and against the loveless Judaist: As it stands written (Isai. lii. 7), "How fair the feet of the gospellers of peace, of the gospellers of good!"[177]
Here, as an incident in this profound discussion, is given for ever to the Church of Christ one of the most distinct and stringent of her missionary "marching-orders." Let us recollect this, and lay it on our own souls, forgetting awhile, for we may, the problem of Israel and the exclusiveness of ancient Pharisaism. What is there here for us? What motive facts are here, ready to energize and direct the will of the Christian, and of the Church, in the matter of the "gospelling" of the world?
We take note first of what is written last, the moral beauty and glory of the enterprise. "How fair the feet!" From the view-point of heaven there is nothing on the earth more lovely than the bearing of the name of Jesus Christ into the needing world, when the bearer is one "who loves and knows." The work may have, and probably will have, very little of the rainbow of romance about it. It will often lead the worker into the most uncouth and forbidding circumstances. It will often demand of him the patient expenditure of days and months upon humiliating and circuitous preparations; as he learns a barbarous unwritten tongue, or a tongue ancient and elaborate, in a stifling climate; or finds that he must build his own hut, and dress his own food, if he is to live at all among "the Gentiles." It may lay on him the exquisite—and prosaic—trial of finding the tribes around him entirely unaware of their need of his message; unconscious of sin, of guilt, of holiness, of God. Nay, they may not only not care for his message; they may suspect or deride his motives, and roundly tell him that he is a political spy, or an adventurer come to make his private gains, or a barbarian tired of his own Thule and irresistibly attracted to the region of the sun. He will often be tempted to think "the journey too great for him," and long to let his tired and heavy feet rest for ever. But his Lord is saying of him, all the while, "How fair the feet!" He is doing a work whose inmost conditions even now are full of moral glory, and whose eternal issues, perhaps where he thinks there has been most failure, shall be, by grace, worthy of "the King in His beauty." It is the continuation of what the King Himself "began to do" (Acts i. 1), when He was His own first Missionary to a world which needed Him immeasurably, yet did not know Him when He came.
Then, this paragraph asserts the necessity of the missionary's work still more urgently than its beauty. True, it suggests many questions (what great Scripture does not do so?) which we cannot answer yet at all:—"Why has He left the Gentiles thus? Why is so much, for their salvation, suspended (in our view) upon the too precarious and too lingering diligence of the Church? What will the King say at last to those who never could, by the Church's fault, even hear the blessed Name, that they might believe in It, and call upon It?" He knoweth the whole answer to such questions; not we. Yet here meanwhile stands out this "thing revealed" (Deut. xxix. 29). In the Lord's normal order, which is for certain the order of eternal spiritual right and love, however little we can see all the conditions of the case, man is to be saved through a personal "calling upon His Name." And for that "calling" there is need of personal believing. And for that believing there is need of personal hearing. And in order to that hearing, God does not speak in articulate thunder from the sky, nor send visible angels up and down the earth, but bids His Church, His children, go and tell.
Nothing can be stronger and surer than the practical logic of this passage. The need of the world, it says to us, is not only amelioration, elevation, evolution. It is salvation. It is pardon, acceptance, holiness, and heaven. It is God; it is Christ. And that need is to be met not by subtle expansions of polity and society. No "unconscious cerebration" of the human race will regenerate fallen man. Nor will his awful wound be healed by any drawing on the shadowy resources of a post-mortal hope. The work is to be done now, in the Name of Jesus Christ, and by His Name. And His Name, in order to be known, has to be announced and explained. And that work is to be done by those who already know it, or it will not be done at all. "There is none other Name." There is no other method of evangelization.