Lecture 1.―Continued.
BUT the gospel comes to all; and, to begin with, in this world there were two great divisions of mankind―Jews and Gentiles. The Jew would say, I do not understand about this gospel conning to everybody, what about the Jews? They were God’s peculiar people, and are they all going to be ignored? Are you going to bring in these Gentiles on exactly the same ground as God’s chosen people? Well, there were promises, and most blessed promises, made to the Jews; promises, too, which will be fulfilled in a far better way than under the law, but the Jews had forfeited these promises. They boasted of the law, and yet they did not keep the law; and as we know in the history of Israel in the Book of Exodus, they made a golden calf and forfeited every blessing that God had given them.
Then God said to Moses, I will sweep them all away, and instead of them I will make of you a great nation. What a picture we get then! Moses reminds God that His name and His promises to Abraham would be set aside, and he intercedes for the people, and then God says, “Verily, I will have mercy,” and in the future all their blessings must be on the ground of mercy. “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy” (Ex. 39; Rom. 9). It is the sovereign mercy of God which is the only ground on which any man can obtain blessing from God. And if mercy, why should not the Gentiles get it as well as the Jews? If God is going to act towards man according to His own sovereign mercy, why then should not God show that mercy to the Gentiles as well as to the Jews? The Jew might say, that is all true, but what about the Messiah? The Christ of God, what about Him? Well, what did you do with Him? He has come to you, and you have cast Him out and crucified Him. You have forfeited all your blessings in every way—both on the ground of law and on the ground of the promised Messiah. God has sent the Messiah, but He has been rejected, and now the One that the gospel is about is that very Messiah. We get it noticed in the third verse, “concerning His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, which was made of the seed of David according to the flesh.” That is the subject of this gospel that Paul preached: it includes the promised Messiah, for this very Person that the gospel is about was made of the seed of David according to the flesh. But He was something far more than that which He was according to the flesh, important as that is, and He will get His rights on that ground too. The Lord Jesus Christ will yet, as the Son of David, get all that is prophesied in Old Testament Scriptures concerning the Messiah.
But He is more than the Son of David, and that is what we get in the next verse: He is “declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead,” and what a thought that is! This Christ that the gospel tells us about is not a mere man. He was a man and a perfect man. As was said by one whom many of us used to know, “far more truly a man than any of us, because He was a perfect man and we are fallen sinful men.” But was He only a man? He was God manifest in the flesh. As we see the Lord Jesus Christ passing through this world, whom do we see? We see God in this world, for the blessed Lord, though perfectly a man, was yet declared to be the Son of God. He was declared to be the Son of God, so that there is no possibility of making a mistake; and every man is left without excuse, for all ought to have discerned who He was. We are told in the Epistle to the Corinthians that the princes of this world, had they known it, would not have crucified the Lord of Glory. But was that an excuse for them? Certainly not, they ought to have known it.
First of all, He was declared to be the Son of God with power. There was not a miracle that He wrought that did not manifest His divine power. When He fed the five thousand with five loaves, was not that a manifestation of His divine power? As the Lord says when it was a question of raising Lazarus to life, “this sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God might be glorified thereby” (John 11:44When Jesus heard that, he said, This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God might be glorified thereby. (John 11:4)). Man was left without excuse if he did not bow to the evidence that was before his eyes of who He was. And what is the next thing? “According to the spirit of holiness.” As Jesus walked through this world, where sin abounded on every hand, and where its defilements affect us so much, did they defile Him?
If He touched the poor leper, did that defile Him? If He came in contact with death; if, as we read in the 7th of Luke, the Lord Jesus came and touched the bier, was He defiled with the touch of death? It is wonderful to see how every word and every act of the Lord Jesus is a constant witness, if men had only had eyes to see who He was. But man would not see it, he was blinded by sin and Satan and hardness of heart. Yet there was ample witness in every act and step of His life that He was the Son of God. As He says, elsewhere, John “bare witness unto the truth.” John said, “Behold the Lamb of God,” and “on whom thou shalt see the Spirit descending and abiding on Him, the same is He that baptizeth with the Holy Ghost. And I saw and bare record that this is the Son of God.” And then He says, the “works that I do bear witness of Me” (John 5:3232There is another that beareth witness of me; and I know that the witness which he witnesseth of me is true. (John 5:32), &c.). I daresay we have all dwelt on the four witnesses of the 5th of John—the witness of John, the witness of Christ’s miracles, the witness of the Father’s voice from heaven, and then the witness of the Scriptures.
Here in Romans 1:44And declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead: (Romans 1:4), we get three ways in which the Lord Jesus was declared to be the Son of God― by power, by the spirit of holiness, and by the resurrection from the dead. He could not be holden of death. That is a wonderful testimony! ―He could not be holden of it. We know, too, that by His mighty power we shall be raised from the dead; the resurrection by-and-bye will manifest the glory of the Son of God, but He has Himself been raised by the glory of the Father. Well, all these are witnesses of the glory of this blessed Person who is the subject of God’s gospel. The source of it is God’s heart, the subject of it is God’s Son, and where is the sphere of its activity? To whom does it come? For whom are these blessings that God has devised? Are they to be limited to any particular class, are they to be sent to one nation only?
The gospel overleaps every dispensational barrier. This is what Nicodemus could not understand. He could 1hve understood if Christ had spoken about blessing coming to Israel. But what staggered Nicodemus was that the love of which the Lord Jesus Christ spoke there was a love that flowed over every barrier that God Himself had set up. The gospel which tells us about God’s love cannot be narrowed down to any particular nation. If God loved, He loved the world, and if God saves, it is salvation for the lost, no matter whether he be a Jew or a Gentile who is lost. “By whom we have received grace and apostleship, for obedience to the faith among all nations.” There is no limit to it, the gospel is world-wide in its application. The source of it is God’s heart, the subject of it is God’s Son, and the sphere through which it spreads itself to bestow all the blessings of which it speaks stretches wherever man is―it goes among all nations. The righteousness of God is unto all—it is world-wide in its application, so that nobody can say, it is not for me. Nobody can say that it is not unto all; but in its application it is only upon all them that believe, and that is what is brought out here. It is on the ground of faith.