Lecture 1.―the Gospel of God.
MY object in announcing the subject of the Epistle to the Romans was that we might, as the Lord may enable us, get a short outline of the epistle as a whole; not by any means to go into it in an exhaustive way or in detail, but to get such an outline as may be a help to any who may not be familiar with the epistle, to study it in their own homes. I believe meetings of this kind entirely fail in their good results if they do not help us to a more diligent study of the Scriptures. We may go to hear and like what we hear, but I do not think that any permanent good will come to our souls unless we are helped to search the Scriptures more diligently and more prayerfully in our own closets.
The teaching in the epistle is indeed most important, for it treats of fundamental truths. It presents the gospel to us in its first principles, stating most clearly the ground upon which the soul can have relations with God. The apostle Paul had never been to Rome although he was the Apostle of the Gentiles. He tells us in the second chapter of the Galatians that “He that wrought effectually in Peter to the apostleship of the circumcision, the same was mighty in me towards the Gentiles.” He was the apostle for the Gentiles, and that is remarkable when we come to the Epistle to the Romans, because the Church of Rome looks upon Peter as the one with whom they have the greatest links; but the striking thing is that, instead of Peter having a special link with Rome, it was Paul. Peter, as we know, was chosen by God to open the door at the first to the Gentiles, and of course there was great wisdom in choosing Peter to do so; but when he had opened the door in the house of Cornelius, Peter seems to have had little more to do with the Gentiles, and Paul comes upon the scene to preach the gospel to the uncircumcision.
It is important for us to remember that, when it is a question of the sinner having to do with God, it is and must be an individual matter. I have no doubt that we have often, most of us at any rate, observed that we get very little in the Epistle to the Romans about the Church. It is alluded to (ch. 12:4, ch. 16:25), but it is not the main subject of the Epistle to the Romans, because this epistle treats of man’s condition before God, and of how the sinner can be brought into relationship with a God of righteousness and holiness. That is the great subject-matter of the Epistle to the Romans, and that is the important question for every soul, no matter whether he be a Jew or a Gentile. How can a sinner have to do with God? God is a God of justice, a God of holiness, a God who cannot put up with sin, and how then can man be just with God? This was Job’s great difficulty (Job 9). Job had learned that the heavens were not pure in His sight, and how much less man! The question was raised but never answered until now. Job got no answer to it. Job saw no solution to his great difficulty, “How can a man be just with God?” but God gives us an answer in this Epistle to the Romans.
In the first verse Paul states the ground on which he claims the attention of these Romans; he gives the reason why he can speak with authority. It is not, it will be observed, what is so much spoken of to-day, namely, the authority of the Church; it is God speaking to the soul, and he uses the apostle as His instrument, and so Paul here states the ground on which he addresses these Romans. He says, I am the “servant of Jesus Christ,” that is the first claim he has; but there is something more than that; he says, I am an “apostle.” Now a man might be a servant, as indeed I trust all who know the Lord Jesus Christ desire to be, very feebly in these days, no doubt, compared with Paul. I trust we all desire to be servants of the Lord Jesus Christ, but Paul says, I am an apostle of the Lord, and that, too, in a very distinct way. He was called of God, and became an apostle by that very call. This brings us back to the journey that he took down to Damascus, when he was haling men and women and casting them into prison. The Lord Jesus Christ shines down upon Saul of Tarsus and makes Himself known to him, and that not in the same way as the other apostles had known Him; Paul had to do with Him as a glorified Christ; that is where he starts from. His first link with the Lord Jesus Christ was with a Christ in the glory of God, and he says, That is whence I date my authority to address you Romans. I am a servant of the Lord Jesus Christ, and I am an apostle called by Him from the glory.
But there is a third thing in these verses, he says, I am “separated” ―I have nothing else before me; and that is a wonderful thing, because Paul was a man and only a man, a very faithful man, doubtless, but still he was a man, and he says, I am “separated unto the gospel.” There is nothing in my life but that one thing. It was so in a very especial way in the case of Paul, there was nothing else he lived for. He lived for one thing only, and that was the gospel; and no matter what happened to him in his life, whether he was beaten with rods or cast into prison, he says, My one concern is that Christ may be magnified, whether it be by life or by death. He has nothing else to live for, as he says in the ninth verse, “God is my witness”: it was not merely what he could boast of before man, but “God is my witness, whom I serve with my spirit in the gospel of His Son.” His whole life was taken up with but one thing, and what an authority that was with which to go and speak to people about their souls! His life was given up to this one thing—the gospel of God.
I think that little expression, the “gospel of God,” is the great key to the Epistle to the Romans. The expression, “the gospel,” has got to be such a commonplace sort of thing that people think that everybody knows what you mean when you use it. But it is very important to distinguish the different ways in which the gospel is spoken of. There is the “gospel of the grace of God,” and “the gospel of the glory of Christ,” and the “gospel of the kingdom,” and it is well that we should understand the difference between these expressions. Here, however, it is the “gospel of God,” and that is what I wanted to speak a little of to-night, There are three things that I would like to present to you in reference to this “gospel of God.” The first is, what is the source of it? It is altogether from God, it is of God; but that is not what man thinks of when he speaks of the gospel. He thinks of it as that which meets his own need, and surely it does; it meets us just where we are, and it brings us just what we need. If I am a guilty sinner, the gospel brings me forgiveness and justification; and if I am an anxious soul, the gospel brings me peace. It brings us just what we need, and a blessed thing for us that it is so. But when we have believed, we want to get to God’s side of the matter, and to see that it all originated in God’s heart.
Where does this gospel come from, and at what stage of the world’s history did God begin to speak of His gospel? Well, we all know the history of the world, such as God gives it to us in His Word, from Eden right on. What a history it was! How man got worse and worse from the moment that sin came into the world! That is very different from the thoughts of men. They look upon the world as getting better and that man is improving. They think the state of things is infinitely better than it was years ago, and that man has improved and developed, and that he is going to get better yet, but God’s Word gives us a very different picture. Man had been getting worse and worse from Eden right on, and God’s last test was when the Lord Jesus Christ was sent into the world. As we find it put in the 21st chapter of Matthew: one servant had been stoned, another had been beaten, and at the last the owner of the vineyard said, They have refused all my messengers, and would not listen to a word they had to say: I have one thing left, they will surely reverence my son. The coming of the Lord Jesus Christ into this world was God’s last test of man, and they said, “This is the heir, come, let us kill him!” They cast Him out, and that is the stage at which God begins to speak about His gospel.
The gospel of God came out from His heart after man had done his very worst. Man had proved himself to be what he was in sinfulness and in enmity against God, as we read in the 15th chapter of John: “If I had not done among them the works which none other man did, they had not had sin”―that was what man was proved to be by the coming of the Lord Jesus into this world, not only a sinner but a positive enemy of God. It is not merely a question of keeping the law; we are told later on in the epistle that “the carnal mind is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be,” so that on the ground of law man is hopelessly lost, but the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ has proved that the carnal mind is enmity against God. Somebody was saying a little while ago, comparing the 21st and 22nd chapters of Matthew: in the 21st there is the Son coming into the world, and the husbandmen saying, “This is the heir, come, let us kill him” ―there was forgiveness even for that; but in the 22nd after man had crucified Christ, and said, “Away with Him,” what does God do with Him? He raises Him from the dead and puts Him at His own right hand, and He says, I am going to have a marriage for My Son, and He invites poor sinners like you and me to come and have a part in it, but man says, I will not have it. There is no forgiveness for that― the despising of grace. There was forgiveness even for the sin of crucifying the Lord of Glory, but none for the sin of refusing the salvation that God offers through His death.
If I think of the gospel―that is the glad tidings―I say, there is something which comes from the heart of God. We are told in the second verse, that God had “promised it afore by His prophets in the holy Scriptures” It was promised before, but the gospel as now revealed had not been preached by the prophets. They prophesied of the grace that should come, &c. (1 Pet. 1:1-13). It was when the fullness of the time had come that God sent forth His Son.
Now, if the source of this gospel is the heart of God, what is the subject of it? If you were to ask many people what the gospel is about, they would say, “It is God’s way of salvation.”
If you press them further they would say, “It tells us how poor sinners like we are may be saved.” Another will say, “I consider that the gospel is a message from God to tell a poor worm of the dust how his sins may be forgiven.” But when God tells us what the gospel is about, He raises it to a very much higher level than that, He says, it is the gospel of God “concerning His Son,” and not merely concerning our blessings. The source of the gospel is God’s heart, and the subject of the gospel is God’s Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. It takes us out of ourselves altogether, and occupies us with a theme that we can dwell upon and never get any harm in dwelling upon, whereas if we dwell upon ourselves, we get into a low state, but we cannot dwell upon Christ and get into a low state. We were singing just now: ―
“No more to see Thy chosen few,
In selfish strife divided.”
I do not think that there would be any selfish strife if every heart were full of Christ and occupied with Him. How would there be room for all the things that so darken the history, not only of the professing Church, but of the true children of God here? Ah, dear friends, that is a thing which displaces everything else. “Concerning His Son Jesus Christ our Lord.”
(To be continued.)