Romans 1

Notes.Division 1. (Romans 1:1-32; Romans 2:1-29; Romans 3:1-31; Romans 4:1-25; Romans 5:1-11)Righteousness of God in Christ towards all, and over all believers. The righteousness of God in Christ is the theme of the first division of Romans; the forensic character of the epistle suiting as well the people addressed as it does the subject. Rome means “strength,” or “force;” and to the many sufferers under its sway, it might seem to represent brute force only; but it never could have attained the supremacy in which it stood so long, had not that force been a disciplined, law-governed one: to law it must needs submit as first condition of any great success. Roman law accordingly still stands for us as almost the ideal of law; and this means necessarily the ideal of right also, -at least in certain respects: for though the blunders (or worse) of legislators may make us sometimes have to put in contrast law and equity, yet if the two were not in the main one, the purpose of law could not be accomplished. Error and evil are but revolutionary forces -divisive and unstable: no will of man can make them other. Because the world is under moral government, homage must be paid to it by some sort of submission; and thus it can be said of any of the powers of the world, “he is the minister of God to thee for good.” Corrupt and evil as any governor on earth may be, he knows that he must pay a certain tax in this way to the right; and those most without law are, as judged in the court of their own conscience, a “law unto themselves.” According to a consent which may be held for universal therefore, in God is the fount of righteousness; and if in their highest deities the heathen world did not find a satisfying expression of this, they had to invent other, special gods to fill the gap. Thus Paul preaches to the conscience of the mass when he proclaims the righteousness of God. But when, under a conviction wrought by the Spirit, the general persuasion of man’s sinfulness becomes an agonizing realization of personal guilt, then with the apprehension of this character in Him there comes a need for the preaching of the righteousness of God for comfort and not for alarm: the Righteousness of God as revealed in the gospel! Here is the key to the meaning of a term about which there has been so much perplexity, and so great a variety of thoughts. God Himself is limited in a certain way, as we all realize. He cannot lie; He cannot repent. This is no limit indeed, save that of His own perfections: He cannot act in contradiction to His attributes. Thus, though He be Love itself, yet love cannot with Him, even in the least degree, overbalance justice. “He that justifieth the wicked, and he that condemneth the just, even they both are abomination to the Lord” (Proverbs 17:15). So His own Word declares, and how can He then clear the guilty? Did He not, when He gave the law, say distinctly that He could not? (Exodus 34:7.) Thus the righteousness of God is what is of first moment in the gospel; and we can see that it is His attribute of righteousness that is in question: “that He may be just and the Justifier of him that believeth in Jesus,” as the apostle shows us (Romans 3:26), states the difficulty which the first part of the epistle meets triumphantly. That the gospel can set the very righteousness of God itself upon our side, and make it the peaceful assurance of the anxious soul, is a marvel of divine love and wisdom.

Romans 1:1-17

Subdivision 1. (Romans 1:1-17.)This the power of God to salvation in a gospel all of Him. At the outset therefore the apostle sets forth this as the very power for salvation: a gospel which is entirely of God, as it is Christ who is the substance of it. Only one Man is competent to be our Saviour, who in His own Person has united God and man. We, to whom it is the gospel, have but to hear, to bow to God’s wondrous grace, and be made glad; for the gospel is “glad tidings.”

1. To this gospel Paul had been set apart, an apostle of it by the call of Him to whom he thankfully owns himself a bondman. For the grace that had set him free had made him His for ever. The peculiarity of his call we have seen elsewhere; he does not now speak of it, nor of where he had seen His glory of whom he speaks. He carries us back, rather, to His revelation of Himself on earth; for his purpose is to show how in His own Person He to whom the ages had been looking forward had bridged over the distance which the fall had brought in between God and man. Not that this alone could have removed the distance for man. It made God’s purpose apparent to do so, and showed the strength of the hands to which this purpose was entrusted. The promise had been in the mercy of God given from the beginning. The broken echoes of it are heard far and wide among the traditions of the nations: broken indeed, for man cannot be trusted to keep what is of most vital importance to him without corruption. Thus the prophets -themselves as the special men of God in their days the witness of general departure -had preserved it in scriptures which bore in their character as “holy” scriptures the evidence of their origin from the Holy One; and the “prophets” vindicate their title by the fact that they “speak forth” what is a message from God. How great the mercy of a written Word, and how plainly has this been always in the mind of the All-wise for men! None the less surely that, to keep it for them, God had to separate to Himself a people from the idolatrous mass, and make them the depositaries of it. There it was as the voice of divine Wisdom in the highways of the nations, available for those who sought at least, little as men might seek or care. Now the One so heralded had come, of the seed of David according to the flesh, -His line marked out more precisely as the years went on, the stream of prophecy becoming wider and fuller as the years lengthened, and deferred hope might make the heart grow sick. Of royal seed, Himself a King, -such a “Ruler over men” as David’s own last words foretold; yet that was His lesser and lower glory: that was “according to the flesh,” and the word is used which intimates all the weakness of humanity in its lowest part; not that which declared man’s place in creation as the offspring of God, but which linked him with all the life of which he was the head. And this, just as such, has for us how much blessing: it is the end of the Bethel ladder let down to earth; and bringing with it blessing and lifting up for the whole system with which man is connected! With flesh comes what love covets and could not find in any sphere above it: by that will which He came to do, “we are sanctified, through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ.” (Hebrews 10:10.) But He is also Son of God in a way that Adam unfallen could not have claimed to be. Amid all the lowliness of a real humanity such as flesh would argue, He is marked out as Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by resurrection of the dead. “A Spirit of holiness” (there is no article to “Spirit”) is taken by many as the Lord’s divine nature, which, they urge, is the proper antithesis here: “according to the flesh,” “according to the spirit;” but there is no similar language used elsewhere in Scripture for the divine nature of our Lord, and the passages appealed to (2 Corinthians 3:17; 1 Timothy 3:16; Hebrews 9:14; 1 Peter 3:18) do not apply. If exact definition were intended, “a spirit of holiness” would not even really distinguish a nature truly divine, which the title “Son of God,” in contrast with “come of David according to the flesh,” sufficiently indicates. Paul from the beginning of his ministry, and in distinction from the first apostolic preaching given us in the Acts, “preached Jesus in the synagogues, that He is the Son of God” (Acts 9:20). Here we shall find what the apostle refers to, if we remember how at Jordan after His baptism, the Spirit came upon our Lord as the Father’s voice proclaimed Him His beloved Son, to anoint Him for the work to which His baptism in the river of death has pledged Him. The Baptist saw it, as he tells us, and bore twofold testimony that He was both the Lamb of sacrifice and the Son of God (John 1:29-34). From this His ministry among men publicly begins, with works of power which show Him master of death itself; into which He went but to dispel it. Thus He raises the dead: Lazarus comes forth at His call, in attestation that He is the Son of the Father, whom the Father always hears (John 11:4; John 11:41-43). And this power to raise the dead, exercised in this way, is power over the sin which has brought in death, and which by and by His own resurrection fully manifests. He has taken our sins upon Him, and rises free from all the burdens He has assumed; the glory in His Face that which is now gospel for us all, and which characterizes in a special way Paul’s gospel. This then is He of whom the gospel speaks; a message which for its importance must have messengers devoted to it to make it known in all the world, and press it upon the attention of the most unwilling. Under the law there had been nothing of this kind outside of Israel; inside only exceptional prophetic voices, the call of solitary watchers in the night, for long silent, till renewed by the voice crying in the wilderness. But now it is a message of the morning passing on from lip to lip, where one who wakens, wakens up his fellow to repeat it. To start such music Paul “received grace and apostleship for obedience of faith among all the nations for His Name’s sake;” -obedience not legal, but springing out of faith: for faith is the great worker, and if it have not works, is dead, not living faith. This faith the grace of the gospel awakens in the soul which God opens to it; he who had received grace in its most perfect expression was the suited apostle of it, and that in its widest range of blessed ministry. All nations were now to be the recipients of God’s salvation; among whom already were these at Rome -saints by the call of grace.

Everywhere we see in the very forefront of the epistle -in this opening salutation, the stamp of divine sovereignty, which is nothing else than divine love that will not be restrained by all the obduracy of man’s heart. This call is the voice of the Creator: “I call unto them, they stand up together” (Isaiah 48:13); but now bringing forth a new creation, which with gladness proportioned to the pains He has taken to produce it, He claims and declares His own.

Those called are therefore saints by calling -a people sanctified to Himself. This is the fundamental meaning of “saint,” which therefore all His people are, set apart to Himself. This the blood of Christ has made us as redeemed to Him; this the work of the Spirit makes effective holiness. Let us notice the “beloved of God,” which precedes and accounts for this: God has set His heart upon us; therefore He will have us for Himself. To these at Rome therefore the apostle sends his salutation of grace and peace: -not a mere wish, nor even a prayer, but a comforting assurance of blessing from God revealed as Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ upon the Father’s throne. 2. He hastens to let them know, writing to them of the gospel as he is, that he means no possible discredit of their faith. On the contrary, he thanks God through Jesus Christ, who had drawn them to Himself, that their faith was being everywhere spoken about. Such a report, contrary to the custom, perhaps, with most of us, seems always to have engaged the apostle’s prayers in an especial manner for those of whom he heard it. Accordingly, as one serving God in his spirit in the gospel of His Son, he was continually making mention of these Roman disciples when he was in prayer, not merely that they might be blessed, but as himself desiring to come to them. Indeed it was the longing of his heart to see them, that he might impart to them some spiritual gift, for their establishment.

He speaks in the consciousness of that with which God had endowed him, and as realizing that the sincerest faith was never beyond the need of help. And indeed he rejoiced in and would be comforted by their faith as they by his. Besides, there was a special link between all. Gentiles and himself as the apostle of the Gentiles. He would not neglect any part of the field which, as that, was committed to his care; and had purposed often to come to them that he might have fruit among them as well as elsewhere. We see that the assembly at Rome was essentially a Gentile assembly, and thus was reckoned to belong to his sphere of labor. Rome herself, long after this, and to the present time, claims the apostle of the circumcision as its own, making nothing of Paul’s assertion here. It is characteristic of those who “say they are Jews, and are not” (Revelation 2:9), and natural for those who after the Jewish manner cling to succession from apostles, which Paul’s call and mission so decisively broke through.

Had it been Peter who had written to the Romans, how this would have been urged! The incontrovertible fact that Peter left the Gentile field to Paul (Galatians 2:9) goes for nothing with them. As for Paul, it is as a responsibility that he recognizes the place in which he has been put, an obligation to all classes to declare to them the gospel. Before God there were in fact but two classes, the believer and the unbeliever. The Jew had the offer first, but if salvation be by faith in it, the believing Gentile was on as sure ground, and in blessing as full as ever the Jew could be. But he comes here to what is now the great theme before him. He was not ashamed of the gospel: he had no reason to be of that which was the power of God to salvation for men. (What a contrast of the “power” for which the very name of Rome stood, and with which as mistress of the world it was identified!) Faith, which the grace of God invited on the part of all, was the common principle of blessing for all. But what made the gospel to be so divine a power? The revelation of the righteousness of God in it. He does not say, the love or the mercy of God, but His righteousness: because, as we have seen, without permission of righteousness love and mercy cannot act; every act of God must be justified by all His attributes. No sinner was ever afraid of the love of God, or of His mercy; His righteousness is another thing. Consequently it is just the righteousness of God which, if it can be revealed in gospel -in good news to sinners -then we have what indeed has power to save. But what then is this good news? a gospel of works? there can be none; and that for a very simple reason. “All have sinned;” and “if we say we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His word is not in us.” But, if then, we could henceforth yield Him unsinning obedience, that is due to Him already, and cannot atone for the sins of the past. Yet who could promise this even for the future? who would dare? Men would compromise with doing their best; but here again they do not mean just what they say. Who ever did his best? Who would dare to meet God on this ground that he had done his very best, even for a week? It would be folly indeed to think of doing so.

But shall we offer Him less than this? How much less, then? That would necessarily mean the trusting to mercy without knowing how far mercy could be shown; and in no sense would righteousness be revealed in it at all. Man cannot furnish, then, for God what would be righteousness before Him; good news there cannot be for man upon that principle; good news there cannot be, founded upon man’s doing. God has another, and a very different one; the righteousness of God is revealed in the gospel, not the righteousness of man in anywise, save the Second Man; and the gospel being all about Christ, we need not doubt, even if we knew no more, that it is consistent with righteousness. What is left for man to do is to justify God in all this by bowing to receive His grace as grace. Faith is thus the principle upon which His grace can be shown, or (what is the same thing) His righteousness be revealed in good news to sinners. “By faith, to faith,” is here the manner of the revelation. The good news is all about Christ, as the apostle has declared; faith is that in which the soul turns away from self to Christ, and the revelation being made to faith, the believer has full title to that which is revealed. Here the Old Testament adds its confirmation also to the New: if according to the law, “the man that doeth (the commandments) shall live in them,” the prophet announces the contrary principle as in fact the way of blessing, “The just shall live by faith.” (Hebrews 4:1-16.) Thus there is nowhere any real contradiction in God’s ways with men, any more than between the plowing and the sowing.

The plow of law had to do its very different work before the sowing of the gospel seed could be. That the plowing should give way to the sowing does not make light of the plowman’s work. If the seed be once sown, the work of the plow will be merely devastation. Subdivision 2. (Romans 1:18-32; Romans 2:1-29; Romans 3:1-20.)Creation and Law witnessing against Gentile and Jew. We have now reached the body of the epistle, which proceeds in orderly progress to the full exposition of what has just been announced. If the righteousness of God is what the gospel reveals, and this on the principle of faith, then it has first to be shown, in the fullest and most careful way, that on man’s part nothing else could at all avail for him. God had been working this out in the long ages preceding Christianity; and His slow, patient manner of work shows the importance of the question, as it shows also how obstinately man cleaves to some righteousness of his own, and how hard it is to bring him to repentance. Nay, the greatest pretension to righteousness that could be made was there where God had labored most. The Pharisee has become for us the very symbol of it. Everything that God had done for Israel, from the taking up of Abraham himself, in whom God’s principle of faith was fully announced, when as yet there was no law to burden it with conditions, the Pharisee turned to his own account as based upon human merit; while the law, interpreted as applying merely to external conduct, could be made to serve an opposite purpose from that for which it was given. But in the law itself was the remedy for all this, as the apostle shows. His argument covers the whole ground, bringing Gentile and Jew, with revelation and without, alike as hopeless, save in God’s mere grace. His judgment, while taking account of all differences, will yet leave all without excuse; the Jew, most favored, guiltiest of all, and with an accuser just in that in which he most confidently trusts.

Romans 1:18-2

Section 1. (Romans 1:18-32; Romans 2:1-16.)The Gentile, left to himself, in lawless independence. The case of the Gentile is that which Paul first reviews. The witness of creation to the glory of God is sufficient to condemn him for the gross idolatry to which he has turned from the actual knowledge of the true God, with which he started. The story of heathenism is that of men who with their back to the light walk necessarily in their own shadow. The moral obliquity which manifests itself in their ways is but the sure result of this departure. The fine pictures which men could draw of virtue were competent enough to show only the wilfulness of the evil which disgraced their lives, and for which their own conscience threatened them with judgment to come, -a judgment which the gospel did not ignore, but declared plainly; where the Jew would be first, as he was in privilege, but all would receive the exact award of righteousness.

1. The apostle does not overlook the difference as to light therefore; his argument is, that the light man has he is not true to. The knowledge of the heathen is ample to test which way his heart inclines. He is not judged by the darkness which he cannot help, but by the light which he refuses. How can he plead his lack of that from which he turns wherever he finds it? Man’s course has not been, as he would vainly have it, the evolution of a creature whom God has burdened with difficulties, yet who struggles upward under the burden, but of one whose struggles are with the God who made him, and against the Hand that would even now relieve him of a burden self-imposed. (1) Thus the wrath of God is revealed from heaven upon all impiety and unrighteousness of men who hold the truth in unrighteousness. If one can find a person then who has no truth to hold, he cannot come under this wrath revealed. “Impiety” is the characteristic of that for which men are condemned: a heart away from God, and which on that account deals perversely with whatever truth it has. That is the indictment; and it is broad enough to cover the whole race of fallen man. There are not two classes in this statement, as some have thought: for the express argument of the apostle here is that Gentiles who have not revelation have truth sufficient to make them without excuse. Wrath is thus upon all; though love may seek and act at the same time: “we,” says the apostle, speaking of himself and believers in general," were . . . children of wrath, even as others" (Ephesians 2:3). Thus he immediately goes on now to say of the Gentiles outside of revelation that they have nevertheless a constant manifestation of God before their eyes.

Thus they “hold the truth in unrighteousness; because what may be known of God is manifest among them: for God has manifested it unto them.” And he proceeds at once to speak of creation. It is a testimony that we think too little about, even as Christians, and naturally do not credit it with much power of appeal to heathen minds.

The very glory of the Christian revelation makes all else seem dull indeed. We argue back also from the condition of the heathen into which, whatever the testimony of nature, they yet lapsed, to depreciate that which could not keep them from lapsing. But this, forcible as it may appear, is no real argument. It is exactly the same as that which the heathen might and do urge against Christianity itself from the condition of numbers under the light of it. In this way what bears witness of the evil in man is made to discredit the wisdom and goodness of God. The apostle would say, “Let God be true and every man a liar.” Surely that is the proper view, which nature itself confirms: the clouds are from the earth which conceal the brightness of the heavens. Allow that there is sin in man which could make him reject and crucify the Son of God Himself, you cannot accept an argument which would equally deny the glory of God in Him because men “saw no beauty in Him, that they should desire Him.” Yet “the heavens display the glory of God, and the firmament showeth His handiwork.” So said the psalmist; and the apostle is not a whit behind him here: “For the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are perceived, being understood by the things made, even His everlasting power and divinity, so as to make them inexcusable.” And indeed there are testimonies enough of what the natural effect of these things is upon men brought face to face with them, before yet they have hardened themselves by long opposition. In the infancy of the nations, though we cannot reach back by tradition to their true beginnings, we know enough to know (what the infidel man of science often enough reminds us of) that the tendency was rather to see God in everything than to see Him nowhere. Even idolatrous Greece peopled the fountain and stream, the mountain and forest, with its multitudinous gods; and the common nature worship which so infected the nations testifies at once to the power of nature to preach of the divine, and the perversion by men of that which they could not ignore. The apostle’s words by no means intimate that this witness of nature could ever do the work of the gospel: that is not the point. Nature does indeed bear witness to the gospel; but in that parabolic form for which is needed an interpreter outside itself. And the traditions of the nations show, spite of all their corruptions, that God had not left them without the knowledge of Himself, which might have in the main interpreted nature to them, if they had cared to go on with the Divine Teacher; but they cared not. The knowledge of the everlasting power and divinity of their Creator should have made them at least turn to Him; but they turned away. (2) And thus the idolatry which had overspread the nations was explained, and could only be explained, by this insane desire to forget God; which hid Him in His works, instead of discovering Him in them. Rejecting the true God, they pictured one according to their tastes, likening Him to corruptible man himself, and even to the animals below man. In which their folly, they yet imagined themselves wise; all their reasonings being made vain by a senseless and unthankful heart. They had an “occult” wisdom, as men style it now, upon which they prided themselves, and which was confessedly a groping in the dark, ignoring the plainest facts. Such is heathenism: a worship of bestial and degraded forms, the imaginations and manufacture of their worshipers. Reason and conscience unite in the condemnation of that which nevertheless under the light of Christianity is ever coming in afresh in winking Madonnas and the virtue of dead men’s bones, and wafer-gods, transformed by a few magical words into soul, body, and divinity of Him whom they call their Saviour! (3) In this dishonor done to God they must necessarily degrade themselves also. The worshipers must become assimilated to what they worship. As their lusts had turned them away from the Holy One, so their new gods were made to sanction the lusts which had created them, and to which He whom they had forsaken gave them up. Man without God, whom it is his distinctive glory to recognize, becomes as the beast which has none. But the beast is therefore not a moral creature; man degraded to the beast becomes immoral. It is a necessary, but righteous retribution, in which man inflicts the punishment upon himself.

His service of the creature is but his own gratification; which is but of the lusts which war against the soul. He feeds but the serpent-brood, which sting and torture him; and the world becomes thus a dreadful scene of suicidal warfare, the secret heart of which is blacker than its deeds declare. (4) The ways of men in this condition the apostle* pictures: disgraceful violations of nature, and crimes that walked openly in the heathen darkness; while men who realized the judgment of God upon their abominations, not only walked defiantly in them but had sympathetic pleasure in those who did so.
2.(1) Such then was the condition of the Gentile world: one to which the Gentiles themselves bore witness in strong decisive words; but to witness against it was one thing, to escape or deliver from it quite another. In the day of judgment, says the apostle, the ability to judge another will be of no avail in behalf of him whose own deeds will be in question, when conscience, kept down by self-interest in the present time, will as in a moment resume its sway over the terrified and convicted soul, and it will be searched out under the light of absolute holiness. It is a strange and startling fact, the ability we have to see and condemn the evil in another, while yet in ourselves, where we should know it best and recognize it most readily, we can ignore it as we do. But this self-ignorance is a voluntary one; and when the conscience is allowed to act, we at once discern it to have been so, and our guilt in this voluntariness. The ability to judge is only a testimony to the responsibility which attaches to us. The inexcusability of judging proceeds from our own inability to stand before God in judgment. It is our Lord’s reproof of those who brought to Him the adulteress, that he who was without sin should cast the first stone at her. To judge sin is, of course, always right, and we should not be in a right condition if we did not do it. Nor is the apostle here touching the question of the magistrate’s duty as such, any more than that of the Christian assembly to “judge them that are within” (1 Corinthians 5:12). He is not dealing with the relation of Christians to the world, but with that of men as men everywhere under the eye of God, where none can stand in the judgment -to strip every one of the vain thought of establishing his own righteousness by some fancied superiority over his neighbor.

It is one of the strangest, and yet one of the commonest of excuses. Evens the comparative estimate is sure to be wrong, -for without the knowledge of the secrets of the heart we have not the means of making it, while in his own cause no human law could allow a man to be his own judge. If the comparative estimate also could be truly made, it would avail nothing before Him whose standard of right is not a relative but an absolute one. The soul also who was honestly seeking to get into God’s Presence as to its own condition could never think of another than itself. The occupation with another’s evil is therefore one of the surest signs of being oneself away from God. Judging another and judging sin are in the way the apostle is speaking here incompatible things. The judgment of God is against every one who practises evil; and there is no remedy but in turning to God, whose goodness is continually inviting to repentance; while yet His forbearance how often causes men to despise the riches of that goodness; so that if judgment against an evil work is not speedily executed, the heart of the sons of men is thoroughly set in them to do evil (Ecclesiastes 8:11). With Pharaoh that which hardened his heart was just God’s forbearing mercy (Exodus 8:15; Exodus 9:34); and so that which should be for good is turned again and again to evil through the revolt of man’s will against his Maker; treasures of mercy are stored up for futurity as treasures of wrath, and a day of wrath must come for those upon whom all His goodness has been ineffectual for good. That wrath will be a revelation of righteous judgment -a measurement of good and evil divinely perfect, according to the principle upon which men insist, of works. Those who in a path of righteousness persistently seek for glory, honor, and incorruption, shall obtain eternal life; those who in contentious controversy with God disobey the truth, upon them shall be wrath and indignation, tribulation, and anguish. To the workers of good, it is emphatically repeated, shall be glory, honor, and peace. In all this the Jew comes in along with the Greek (or Gentile); and his especial privileges may even give him a first place; but the same exact award will be to each. There can be no favoritism with the righteous Judge. What a day to test all the pretension of man, and show the consistent, equal ways of God with him, which now he so bitterly arraigns! Who could face it steadfastly without terror, if that were all? These then are the principles of the judgment; nothing is said as yet of results, nor has the gospel been as yet brought in: God’s way is not to mix together things so different. The day spoken of is a day of wrath and judgment, the reward of righteousness being introduced without any intimation whether righteous there shall be found in the way indicated. We shall have directly all possible assurance with regard to this. (2) Notice then that while we have not as yet come formally to the case of the Jew, the mention of God’s equal dealing with all has brought him in. Nay, he appears in a prominent place, though with a solemn reminder for the self-confident. If first in privilege, he will be first in judgment too: can he face the responsibility entailed by the wonderful things which God has done for him? He will be judged by that law which it is his privilege to possess. Not only so, but the law has actually pronounced sentence, though that is not referred to here. But the Gentile without law shall be judged apart from law: he will not be held responsible for a knowledge he has not possessed.

Is that therefore a kind of gospel as to him? Will he be considered as in a sort of irresponsible child-state and be let off easily? The case of the heathen, as the apostle has presented it to us does not encourage any such expectation, and he now adds a word which positively forbids it. He does not simply say that as many as have sinned without law shall be judged apart from law. People are prone to imagine that even the judgment of God can acquit a certain class of sinners, and that to be judged is by no means necessarily to be condemned; -a view which the psalmist has long ago repudiated. “Enter not into judgment with Thy servant, O Lord,” is his cry; “for in Thy sight shall no man living be justified” (Psalms 143:2). And here the apostle puts in a word which as to the outcome of judgment cuts off hope: “For as many as have sinned without law shall also perish without law.” Just there where one might expect a less rigorous dealing, and where, in fact, the responsibility of the Jew who has the law is not to be supposed, just there he yet inserts a word which with regard to the Jew he does not use: the Jew, he says, shall be judged by the law; but the Gentile who sins apart from law shall perish. Does this then justify the Jew in his thought of a different issue as to himself from the condemnation which he readily accords to the Gentile? The apostle’s purpose in all this is one quite opposite: it is to bring in all men guilty before God. And here he goes on to show that a Gentile may be comparatively in a better position than the Jew. The law does not justify hearers (in which case a Jew might indeed congratulate himself) but doers: “the doers of the law shall be justified.” By and by we shall hear the sweeping sentence of the law as to all, and that “by works of law shall no flesh be justified in [God’s] sight: for by the law is the knowledge of sin.” Here he does not as yet say this; but he appeals to the conscience of the Jew, priding himself upon the mere knowledge and possession of that which he had no care to keep, against any comparison of himself with the lawless Gentile such as he was prone to make. “For when the Gentiles who have no law practise by nature the things of the law, these, having no law, are a law unto themselves, being such as show the law’s work written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness therewith, and their thoughts one with another accusing or else excusing.” We must distinguish carefully in these words “the law’s work written in the heart” of a Gentile, from the law written in the heart of a converted Israelite, according to the new covenant (Hebrews 8:10). The confusion here is only part of a system widely held, which would, in direct contradiction to the words of the apostle here, put the whole of mankind from the beginning, with Adam their first father also, under the law of Moses, writing up, “This do, and thou shalt live” over the gate of heaven, and bringing in Christ as also under law, to do that which Adam failed to do, and justify us by His obedience in life, rather than solely “by His blood,” as this epistle teaches. It would take us far out of our way to examine this at the present time, and anticipate that which will come in the scriptural order before us, as we proceed with our subject. As to the point now, the Greek shows conclusively, as our common English version does not, that it is the “work” that is said to be written, not the law itself. The Gentile here is said to have -that is, to be under -no law. It is only put in another form when it is said that he is a law to himself: he defines for himself what his duty is; (it does not mean, of course, that he has none, or has no thought of any, but) he has to gather the intimations of it from his own moral instincts or from his observations of others about him, perhaps also learns by more direct teaching; but precisely the thing which is lacking to him is that code of authoritative precepts which the Jew had in the law. As a law to himself, he recognized himself as under authority, as the Jew did, and under divine authority, for that is all that the apostle has in view, as is plain, just now; but he is under no yoke imposed by God as the Jew was; whatever be the cause of it (which we have seen in part, but which we are not investigating here,) he is a man left to himself. Yet there is that in him which does the work which the law was designed to do in giving the knowledge of sin (Romans 3:20); not indeed in the perfect manner of the law, yet so that he who listens to the inward monitor may well condemn the Jew with his higher privilege and his lower practice. The conscience also of the Gentile bears witness with his works, which are not fortuitous and arbitrary in character, but such that his thoughts argue against or for him, as he violates or follows the injunctions of his guide, just as with the Jew his conscience. Thus while as to the whole neither of them can plead righteousness, the Gentile may stand comparatively higher than the Jew. In neither case is the law written on the heart naturally, as the promise of the new covenant conclusively shows: if it were true of all men naturally, it could not be a special promise to a certain class. The law written on the heart by God implies that those of whom He speaks will have hearts that forbid their forgetting what He has commanded any more; and this surely is not the natural condition of any: it belongs to those only of whom He can further say, “Their sins and iniquities I will remember no more.” The hundred and nineteenth psalm is the fervent expression of a heart so blessed. The three verses closing with the fifteenth are a parenthesis, the apostle returning in the sixteenth verse to announce a day when God shall judge, according to the principles he has stated, the secrets of men. “God,” says the Preacher, “shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil” (Ecclesiastes 12:14). Darkness suits men now, and clouds and darkness compass often the throne of God; His ways are a mystery that we cannot fathom; but while He looks for faith now, He will bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and make all manifest in the day that is at hand. This is as true with regard to saint as sinner, and sinner as saint; although the common thought of the two being judged together, as well as that of the saint coming personally into judgment, confounds what God has separated, and can find no scripture-justification. In what is before us here we must remember that, except in the brief glance in the introduction, the gospel has not yet been considered, nor the place therefore which it accords the believer. The day of judgment of which the apostle speaks is indeed “according to the gospel;” but is the dark background of wrath upon the sinner against which the glory of the gospel shines so wonderfully out. We must accept this judgment, to know what grace is; for God’s only salvation is by judgment borne for us; and we cannot know the mystery of the Cross, until we know the penalty which the Cross has met. It is the consideration of the principles of the coming judgment which has made it necessary to anticipate in some measure the case of the Jew, while it is that of the Gentile which is in fact before us. But it is in that which follows that the Jew comes fully up. He cannot be judged like the Gentile, upon natural grounds simply: we must take into account also his relation to the law, and finally to the promises of God; although this last comes in in a supplementary way, and after the doctrine of the gospel itself, and the position of the believer before God, have been fully established.