The free, personal style of the following pages is due to the fact that they were originally prepared and delivered in the form of lectures to the students of the Bible School. The desire of the students themselves and the belief that the lectures might prove helpful to others account for their publication in their present form.
As given, there were four lectures, but in revision for publication the final one has, for greater clearness and fullness, been divided into two. I trust that this arrangement will be acceptable and that the study of the great subject of which the series treats will bring as much blessing to others as their preparation has brought to me.
Sincerely yours,
G. P. TASKER
April, 1921
Lecture I.
St. Paul and His Gospel
The cordial welcome extended to all to attend these lectures needs only to be amplified by the request that you keep in mind the fact that they have been designed especially for delivery to the students of the Bible School and may therefore not be quite so well adapted to the minds of a more general audience.
A subject therefore has been chosen which ought to yield us all a valuable return for the time and thought we shall devote to it together here this week. We want something that shall lay hold of us and stay with us, —something that will be a help and inspiration to us in all our future work. God grant we be not disappointed.
The subject we have chosen is “St. Paul and His Gospel,” and if the lectures should be found to have something of a missionary savor about them, it is nothing more than ought to be expected, for they will have to do with the soul and the thoughts of the greatest of our Lord’s apostles, —his chosen messenger to the Gentiles and the most successful of missionaries. Surely we of today, if we only may, would find inspiration where he found it and give our minds over to the same ideals that controlled his.
And who was this man St. Paul? And out of what experience came the inspiration and ideals that controlled his life?
Parentage and Early History
Saul, a Jew of Tarsus in Cilicia, born (very likely about the same time as our Lord) a free citizen of Rome and yet a “Hebrew of the Hebrews,” was the son of a devout Pharisee. Blest by birth with a nature so intense that he never could do anything by halves, and knowing himself the member of a race which God had specially chosen and to whom he had revealed himself at a time when all around them worshipped idols, it is no wonder that the strict moral and religious training he would receive in a home of the straitest sect of his religion would lead him as a youth to turn from purely secular pursuits to devote himself to the religion and the hope of his own people, —the people of the true and living God.
Tarsus, Saul’s birthplace, was a center of Greek culture and the seat of an important university. It was also a center of commerce. But neither father nor son saw anything there to compare with the ancient and coming glory of their own capital and the religious institutions of their own race.
As Dr. Stalker puts it so tersely in his Life of Paul, “Although the youth could not but receive innumerable and imperishable impressions from the city of his birth, the land and the city of his heart were Palestine and Jerusalem; and the heroes of his young heart were not Curtius and Horatius, Hercules and Achilles, but Abraham and Joseph, Moses and David, and Ezra. And as he looked back on the past it was not over the confused annals of Cilicia that he cast his eyes, but he gazed up the clear stream of Jewish history to its source in Ur of the Chaldees. And when he thought of the future, the vision that rose upon him was that of the kingdom of the Messiah enthroned in Jerusalem and ruling the nations with a rod of iron.”
And so it came about in due time that Saul’s father, as befitted a pious Jew, sent his son while yet a youth to Jerusalem to be “brought up at the feet of Gamaliel,” one of the most famous teachers the Jews have ever had since the spirit of prophecy was withdrawn from that race. He was called by his contemporaries “the Beauty of the Law” and is still remembered among the orthodox as “the Great Rabbi.” From their own traditions and also from the brief mention of him in the Book of Acts, where he gives the advice to his fellow-members in the Sanhedrin that they should let the apostles alone in their work (Acts 5:34–40), we know that he was a man of high character and enlightened, liberal mind. As a Pharisee, of course, he would be strongly attached to the religious traditions of his people, but like Nicodemus he was not intolerant of the opinions of others or hostile even to the followers of the Nazarene, as were most of his narrower associates.
The influence of the mind of such a man upon the youthful Saul must have been very great indeed. And although for a time the pupil afterwards became an intolerant zealot, the cause lay elsewhere, and the teacher’s example had doubtless something to do, though all unconscious to them both, in preparing Saul’s heart and mind for the crisis that turned the mad persecutor into the fervent apostle of the Lord Jesus. To that crisis and the steps that led to it, let us now devote our attention; for out of it were born both St. Paul and his gospel.
Contemporary Beliefs
Of the temper of mind in the “young man named Saul” just prior to his persecution of the Christians, I think we can gather a very clear conception from his own words as we set what he says against the background of some of the known beliefs of his time.
It was the well-nigh universal belief among the Jews of that period, that the Messiah would only come to a nation keeping the law. This belief was doubtless largely due to the nature of the message of Malachi, the last of their prophets, and it helps to explain to us how it was that “multitudes” of men, before the days of Pentecost and evangelical conviction of sin, flocked to John’s baptism of repentance. It would be hard to account for such a general movement at that time were it not for the prevalence of this belief, —that the Messiah would only come to a nation keeping the law.
Jesus also alluded to the same idea when he said, “Think not that I came to destroy the law or the prophets: I came not to destroy but to fulfill. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth shall pass away, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass away from the law till all things be accomplished. Whosoever, therefore, shall break one of those least commandments, and shall teach men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I say unto you, that except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven.” (Matt. 5:17–20.) They often said and did not.
The repentance of the people under John was plainly a repentance turning them from their transgressions of the law in order to prepare the way for the kingdom of the Messiah which was at hand. Matt. 3:1, 2, 11, 12. The Pharisees as a body were breaking the real spirit of the law while endeavoring to keep it and they were too blinded and proud to acknowledge the facts of the case and be baptized by John like the common herd of transgressors of whom they said, “This multitude that knoweth not the law are accursed.” John 7:49.
Then again, these very Pharisees, our Lord’s denunciations of the many hypocrites among whom are recorded in the Gospels, were that party among the Jews of the time which most zealously insisted upon the strict observance of the law, for it stood in their eyes as the one absolute expression of God’s will, very much as the Quran stands in the eyes of Moslems today. Theirs being largely a codified, unspiritual, external conception of religion, they plainly, like many Moslems, had a very superficial sense of sin and a very good opinion of their own righteousness and standing with God.
Nicodemus, Gamaliel and Saul, however, may be taken as examples of what must have been a goodly number of men among them of a better type. Paul himself does not speak disparagingly of the Pharisees, which might suggest to us that his associates were not of the hypocrite class. He at any rate was no hypocrite. He was not of those who said and did not. He was in earnest. With him righteousness was the great question, —“How can man be just with God?”
The Supreme Quest
To him, and even to all the rest, though in a far less controlling sense, it was an understood thing that the true felicity of man and the goal of life eternal were attainable only in the enjoyment of the favor of God. The question was how to secure that. Devout Pharisees, of course, all believed that the favor of God was attainable only by the strict observance of his law. But this would surely bring it, for had not Jehovah declared, “Ye shall keep my statutes and mine ordinances, which if a man do, he shall live thereby?” Lev. 18:5. And so we see this passionately-in-earnest youth early giving himself up to the law, mind and soul, undismayed by all its rabbinical amplifications and assured that it would bring him the coveted boon. The law became central in his life.
And with what result? There could be but one result on such a basis. Like the rich young ruler who could in all good conscience tell Jesus he had “observed all these things” from his youth, Saul, too must come to the confession of a still remaining “lack.” Despite all he could do, the coveted assurance of favor, the coveted rest of soul, still eluded him.
But worse than that. A man of Saul’s moral earnestness and deep sincerity who tries to meet God’s approval is sure to find that though he may be “blameless” as to his outer life in the fulfillment of the law’s requirements in that respect, he can not by it quell those “motions of sins” which he finds asserting themselves within his nature against the spiritual claims of the law in his own mind. In short, the man finds himself in bondage, —“the slave of sin,” as in after years Paul expressed it in characteristic metaphor. Describing the struggle in the terms of personal experience he puts it in effect thus: “I find then the law or constant rule of experience that to me who would fulfill God’s will evil within is the only thing I am conscious of. For I delight in the law of God after the inward man, but I see a different law in my outward man warring against the law of my mind and bringing me under the law of sin which is in my members. Wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me out of this body of death?” Rom. 7:14–25 gives us the struggle, seen in retrospect through Christian eyes, but in all its essential features true to life as it was before his conversion.
This sketch of the inner experience of this earnest young Jew is no mere picture of our own vain fancy. We are tracing the history of a soul, —a history that many of us here tonight can follow and can understand.
Casting about, then, for a reason for this non-attainment of the righteousness and peace and fellowship with God we know he was seeking for, two reasons would most naturally present themselves to his mind.
1. “I have not struggled with sufficient earnestness against my sinful nature.”
2. “I have not sufficiently honored the teachings of God’s law.”
Saul was not of the morally indolent class, or of those who, face to face with obstacles in the way of life, give up and go back to Egyptian flesh pots. He was in dead earnest. So the question would readily arise in his mind, “Is there no service I may perform for God by which I may more perfectly show my devotion to his law, and in the performance of which I may at last attain that standing with him which I covet?”
The Crisis of Saul’s Life
Such thoughts may well indicate for us the spiritual temper of Saul about the time the stoners of Stephen laid down their clothes at his feet. He is back in Jerusalem, most likely from Tarsus where he may have been teaching, and he is ready for anything in the service of the God of his fathers. To him the opportunity now afforded was plain and his duty clear. The repeal of the law and the subversion of its institutions, which seemed to be implied in the teachings of the Hellenist Stephen, were in his eyes a blasphemy against the divinest national hope of Israel, —a hope inspired by prophetic word and pictured in vision as an universal dominion beneath the whole wide heaven.
Besides, has not the infallible scripture declared that “He that is hanged is accursed of God?” Deut. 21:23. How, then, can the Nazarene be Israel’s King? Perish the thought! Away with the blasphemers! “And there arose on that day a great persecution against the church,” and Saul is its leader. In the vivid language of the Book of Acts, he “lays waste the church.” Entering into the synagogues and private homes on every hand he drags forth both men and women and commits them to prison. Acts 8:1–4. “Exceedingly mad” against the Nazarenes and verily thinking within himself that he ought to do many things contrary to the name of Jesus, he persecutes them even unto foreign cities. Acts 26:9–11. It is the final stage in his preparation for apostleship!
What a picture! How wondrous are God’s ways!
“Crucify him, crucify him,” was the cry that gave us redemption: a maddened persecution gives us its greatest preacher.
But had he no doubts, this noble young rabbi? Was he sure he was right? Ah! religious prejudice is an awful thing. It blinds the mind. And Scripture, too, is a wonderful buttress when it seems to justify us in a course that cuts across the grain of our better judgment. Even the horrors of the Inquisition were justified by the words “Gather up first the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them.”
Then again, Saul’s own reverence for the objects which the Nazarene heresy seemed to imperil would help to shelter him against any doubts as to the righteousness of the work he was engaged in. And if at the deaths of the “heretics” his natural feelings suffered—for Paul could never have been a really hard-hearted man—would he not be consoled by the thought that such a sacrifice of feeling made the merit of his service all the greater? No doubt he would. We cannot think, however, that he never had any doubts about the matter. Even some inquisitors had, but they smothered them with their religion.
The Journey to Damascus
At all events we see Saul now, armed with authority and commissioned by the chief priests to root out the heresy, setting out for Damascus. Can we picture him as he goes along? May we follow his reflections? He has time for reflection in a journey of six long days, and God’s providences, we know, usually coincide with conditions favorable to their fulfillment. Without a doubt Saul is thinking deeply. He has been “breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord” and he is thinking of them—of the Christians, though he knows them not yet by that name. Nor if he had ever heard it would he have honored them with the title of his nation’s Messiah. No, they are “Nazarenes.”
But as he thinks and hurries along he is conscious of a rising feeling that all may not be so well as he had hoped. He has lately been “kicking against the pricks” of a subtle consciousness that something is wrong about his course. And as he reflects, the face of the dying Stephen arises before him shining like that of an angel, and he hears again that ecstatic testimony, “Behold, I see the heavens opened and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God.” Acts 7:56.
With a shudder he puts away the blasphemous picture. But there comes another. It is that of the simplicity and piety of the homes he has entered to seize the unresisting disciples of the Crucified. Can such people really be the enemies of God?
Then he hears again their martyr testimonies and defense as they tell of their Master’s character and teachings. How different were these accounts from what he had heard from the chief priests and rulers of the people! He recalls too their powerful quotations from the prophets in confirmation of their testimony to a suffering but now triumphant Messiah about to return from heaven in power and great glory.
Such sights and sounds haunt the chambers of his memory as he journeys along. What can it all mean? His essentially honest mind is whispering to him, “How do you account for so much good fruit if the tree be really bad?” But such thoughts are “dangerous,” so with resolution he dismisses them all as morbid suggestions, —suggestions of the evil one, and presses forward in the mid-day heat, for he sees in the distance the roofs of Damascus shining in the meridian sun. No time or inclination has he to rest at noon as do all but the most impatient native travelers in the East. He will rest when his work is over.
Saul’s Conversion to Christ
But let us turn for a moment now to the saints in Damascus. Tidings have certainly gone ahead of Saul, warning the little flock of the approaching wolf. They are in prayer, beseeching God that in some way the coming destroyer may be stopped. God’s interpositions and the preparation of men’s hearts are nearly always joined to prayer. The Good Shepherd is listening. They are praying for their persecutor as he had taught them they should do. Many a petition have the saints sent up for Saul. The hour has come for them to be answered.
From his throne of grace the Savior rises, not now to receive a martyr but to gain a soul, not to destroy the persecutor but to make him an apostle and a witness of His resurrection unto the ends of the earth. In the midst of a blaze of heavenly glory, in all the radiance of his spiritual humanity, Jesus appears to Saul, who, stricken blind by the indescribable brightness of the sight, drops to the ground. There upon his face he hears a voice saying in the Hebrew tong, “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? It is hard for thee to kick against the goad.”
What a gracious word was this! No denunciation. Only mercy! No wonder we hear him say in after years when he is now “Paul the aged,”—“Faithful is the saying and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief. Howbeit, for this cause I obtained mercy, that in me as chief might Jesus Christ show forth all his long-suffering, for an ensample of them that should thereafter believe on him unto eternal life.” 1 Tim. 1:15, 16.
May we tell what passed through the soul and mind of Saul in that moment of his vision of the Lord? Perhaps not altogether. Some things we know, however. The old regime was dissolved. All things were new. In that single instant a whole new world was born for Saul. Dr. Stalker analyses the event and pictures the scene so well that I feel I can not do better than quote here a slightly altered portion of what he says.
“It is but a clumsy way we have of dividing time, by the revolution of the clock, into hours and minutes, days and years, as if each portion so measured were of the same size as another of equal length. This may suit well enough for the common ends of life, but there are finer measurements for which it is quite misleading. The real size of any space of time is to be measured by the amount it contains of the soul’s experience. No one hour is exactly equal to another and there are single hours that are larger than months. So measured, this one moment of Paul’s life was perhaps larger than all his previous years. The glare of revelation was so intense that it might well have scorched the eye of reason or burned out life itself, as the external light dazzled the eyes of his body into blindness.
“When his companions recovered themselves and turned to their leader, they discovered he had lost his sight, and they had to take him by the hand and lead him into the city. But what a change had taken place! Instead of the proud Pharisee riding through the streets with the pomp of an inquisitor, —a stricken man, trembling, groping, clinging to the hand of his guide, arrives at the house of entertainment amid the consternation of those who receive him, and getting hastily to a room where he can ask them to leave him alone, he sinks down there in the darkness.
“But though it was dark without, it was bright within.” The reason for the blindness may well have been to seclude him from all outward distractions and help him to concentrate his thought on the objects now being presented to the inner eye. For the same reason he neither ate nor drank for three days. He was too absorbed in the thoughts that crowded on him thick and fast. In those three days, it may be said with confidence, he got at least a partial hold of all that gospel which he afterwards proclaimed to the world, for his entire theology is nothing but the explication and unfoldment of what was involved in his own conversion.
The Elements of His Gospel
“First of all, in that one vision of the Lord his whole previous life fell down in fragments at his feet. It had appeared to him to be a consistent deduction from the highest revelation he knew, and in spite of its imperfections he had felt that it lay in the line of the holy will of God. But instead of this, that life had been rushing in diametrical opposition to the will and revelation of God and it had now been brought to a sudden stop and smashed into pieces by the collision. What had appeared to him to be the perfection of service and obedience had really involved him in the sin of blasphemy and innocent blood. Such had been the outcome of his whole-souled seeking of righteousness by the works of the law. And at the very moment when his righteousness seemed at last to be turning to the whiteness so long desired, it was caught in the blaze of this new revelation and whirled away in shreds of shriveled blackness.
“It had all been a mistake, then, from first to last. Righteousness was not to be obtained by the law, but only guilt and doom. This was the unmistakable conclusion, and it became one of the two poles of Paul’s theology.
“But while his theory of life thus fell in pieces with a crash that might by itself have shaken his reason, in the same moment an opposite experience befell him. Not in wrath and vengeance did Jesus of Nazareth appear to him, as he might have been expected to appear to the deadly enemy of his cause. His first word might have been a demand for retribution, and his first might then have been his last. But instead of this his face had been full of divine benignity and his words full of consideration for his persecutor. In the very moment when the divine strength cast him down to the ground Saul felt himself encompassed by the divine love. Here in realized experience, then, was the prize he had for years and years been struggling for in vain, and now he has grasped it in the very moment in which he has discovered that his struggles have been fightings against God. He is lifted up from his fall in the arms of God’s love. He is reconciled and accepted forever.”
It was a wonderful experience. He found himself placed by Christ, without effort of his own, in that position of peace and favor with God that he had striven in vain to reach before. And this became the other pole of this theology—that righteousness and strength are found in Christ alone, without man’s works, by mere trust in God’s grace and acceptance of his free gift.
There were many other things involved in this experience which it required time to work out; but within these two poles, —that righteousness was not to be obtained by the law or the legal principle it embodied, and that righteousness and strength are to be found in the free grace of God in union with the living Christ and him alone, —the whole system of Paul’s thinking ever afterwards revolved.
Saul’s conversion left Jesus the Christ central to his new world as the Law had been to his old. Christ simply replaced the Law as the element of his being, and henceforth for him, Christ instead of the Law was the controlling principle of life and the one medium of all relations between God and man. The old things had passed away. Behold, all things had become new. Everything now became summed up in Christ and henceforth his one mission was to make him known to the world of Jews and Gentiles. “He straitway preached Jesus in the synagogues that he is the Son of God.” Acts 9:20.
This was the only possible thing for a man of his sincerity and temper to do. Christ had his soul now, as the law and the power of sin had possessed it before, and out of the fulness of his fresh and burning experience of God’s wonderful grace his lips were bound to speak. “And all that heard him were amazed, and said, Is not this he that in Jerusalem made havoc of them that called on this name? And he had come hither for this intent that he might bring them bound before the chief priests?” Acts 9:21.
Development of His Gospel
But Paul was a thinker. It was not enough for him to experience anything. He must comprehend its meaning and implications. He must understand the matter and be able to relate the new experience and the new order of things it implied to all that Divine revelation which had preceded it and of which the Jews had been made the custodians. He must, therefore, have time to think and to pray. So after a short season at Damascus he tells us he went away into the south country, to Arabia, from whence in due course he returned again to Damascus, and from there, three years after his conversion, he returned once more to Jerusalem. This visit, he says, was in order to see Peter, and he tarried there with him fifteen days. Gal. 1:11–23.
There appears to be some obscurity here as to the exact order of events in this connection, it being difficult to fit the account given by Luke in The Acts with the details given by Paul himself in Galatians. But, our concern is not with that. The point for us to note is that Paul in the thinking out of his gospel conferred with no man, not even with the apostles at Jerusalem, but arrived at it alone with God through the revelation of Jesus Christ within him. The full working out of its principles in some directions, at least so far as their application was concerned, has had to be left largely till a later day, as, for instance, in the matter of slavery, temperance reform and female emancipation. And even so far as the working out of those principles in more directly spiritual matters in his own day is concerned, it also doubtless came about somewhat gradually, under the stimulus of the varied circumstances of his ministry. For the reaction of the Christian consciousness of Spirit-filled men and of the church itself against the many recurring forms of error that have been felt to be contrary to it has been the means that God has most generally used to impart larger and clearer views of the truth to his people. We have learned the breadth and inexhaustible riches of the gospel of Christ as we have been led to dig, and conflict has ever forced our views and principles into their clearer expression. The same is doubtless true in a measure of Paul himself as affected by the experiences of his ministry.
At all events, by whatever means it came about, the most notable of all the outstanding characteristics of this most remarkable man is undoubtedly the clearness and fulness of his vision of divine truth. He was indeed “a chosen vessel unto the Lord,” prepared and qualified for a special purpose, —to bear Christ’s name “before the Gentiles and kings, and the children of Israel.” Acts 9:15, 16.
Lecture II.
Paul’s Influence Upon Christianity
The influence upon Christianity of Paul’s ministry and writings simply can not be measured. Some scholars have even gone so far as to say that but for him and his interpretation of the gospel, Christianity would never have broken away from Judaism but would have remained a sect of that religion. This, of course, is saying too much. The Lord would have raised up other agencies to save his gospel from such a fate if it had been necessary. But it is certain, as a fact of history, that Paul’s ministry had a controlling effect in establishing the pure untrammeled faith of Christ in the earth.
He found the essential message of Jesus still wrapped in the swaddling bands of Judaism. With the greatest difficulty the people to whom it had been first committed were able even to think of a Gentile becoming one of the people of God except by first identifying himself with Israel by circumcision or at least doing so after he had believed on Jesus the Messiah. And all who have studied the writings of the apostolic age, know well that Paul and those that saw with him had an awful time to secure the full liberty of Gentile believers on a plane of full equality with Jewish believers.
Not even Peter had grasped the full import of the Messiah’s death in relation to the whole Jewish system, —that those who are in union with Christ are free from it entirely. Paul was the first to see it clearly in all its implications, so far as we know. The more simple attitude of Galilean fisherman and tax gatherers toward the law, as compared with that of a zealous Pharisee and student of the law, could, in the nature of things, hardly suggest to them in the same vivid way the problem, of its dispensational relation to the Messiah. He saw it clearly from the start, from the time of his conversion, and he applied it fearlessly throughout his entire ministry. He had tried the law to the limit and found the legal principle wanting as a means of securing inward righteousness and peace. He had found Christ and proved his all sufficiency. There was no mixing of the two for him. Believers are dead to the law by the body of Christ, that body which had borne its curse and ended its reign, in order that they might be joined to the living Prince of Life through whom they could be filled with the fruits of true righteousness. Phil. 1:11.
This was no mere doctrinal or theological conception with Paul. It was a living experience which experience it was the privilege of all to enjoy in the spirit even though it might not be for all to have that objective vision of Jesus which had put Saul on the same plane of apostleship with the twelve. From the time of that vision without and within, on the Damascus road and in the house of Judas in the street called Strait when he was filled with the Holy Ghost, Paul had but one message and one remedy for all the needs of the human soul. It was Christ’s “unsearchable riches.” God had revealed his Son within him that he might preach him among the nations. Christ became his unfailing text.
As regards the old order of things to which Messiah had died, Paul’s whole ministry was one long conflict, with those who would bind such things upon his converts, and with those who, even if they did not themselves really depend upon the law for justification with God, at least felt that the observers of it were thereby more to God and superior to those who did not observe it. The battle had all been fought out first within his own breast, and in combating the legalists it was only Paul the Christian confronting Saul the Pharisee. On the other hand his conflict with those who wrested his gospel to their own destruction by assuming they were free to walk after the flesh because they were not under the law, was the corollary of his conflict with the legalists, and he powerfully and conclusively refuted their contentions in his Epistle to the Romans which we shall consider in these lectures.
The Passing of Jewish Christianity
Conservative Jewish Christianity of the type we see so prominent in the Jerusalem church, as shown by the remarkable statement in Acts 21:20 and by the whole legalistic controversy of those days, survived indeed until the second century, but it finally snuffed out with the death of those obscure sects, the Ebionites and the so-called Nazarenes. God was with the progressives. The full sweep of the divine movement was to take in all nations. The “time of reformation” had come. The middle wall of partition was down. The Spirit was being poured out upon all flesh. Not Levitical ordinances of external value but the holy Spirit of God himself sanctified the “unclean” Gentiles. All men must come to Christ.
With the end of the first century, we are already in the final stage of the evolution of Christianity from its Jewish envelope, when the question no longer is whether those who do not keep the law can be saved but whether those who do keep it can be regarded as Christians at all. Our theme, however, does not take us beyond the days of Paul himself, and our purpose here is to understand him and his gospel. For to think after him and to have something of the same outlook and ideas he had, can not but be a wonderful help to us in our own Christian life and varied ministries.
We need to study the life and letters of this man, for next to Christ’s own life and teachings they are basic for Christianity. Their study with mind alert will produce the conviction that in him we have Christianity’s greatest interpreter and that in the providence of God he, like his divine Master, actually lived and taught as much for the people of our times as he did for those of his own, and possibly even more so, for both Jesus and Paul are certainly better understood today than they were in the first centuries.
Paul was Christianity’s greatest defender and most successful exponent in those early days and his writings, more than any others, have influenced the minds and souls of the great reformers and leaders in the church of God ever since. It was his words that lit such a fire in the breast of Martin Luther that it spread into a conflagration the embers of which still burn in the world. And if I read the literature of our own times aright, it is Paul above all other writers that God is using to revive his work in our day and clarify the vision of his people. For instance, but for him where would we have got that profound idea of the church as the body of Christ? It is not in James, nor in Peter, nor in John, nor in Jude. The nearest figure we have to it in all the New Testament is that of the vine and the branches, found only in the Gospel of John.
Paul and His Own Time
How much greater Paul was than the general thought of his own time may be seen from a number of facts. I will mention two.
1. The opposition he encountered all his life, not from the heathen, for that was to be expected, but from those who felt themselves to be the people of God. “False brethren,” no doubt, many of them were, “desiring to be teachers of the law” among his converts and also traducing both his apostleship and his gospel of liberty. In the Galatian and Corinthian epistles we see the struggle with these men at its height, but there are echoes of it in all his letters, excepting in that charming personal note to Philemon. Its sound may be heard all through the book of Acts.
And where he did not meet with direct opposition he often met with coldness and want of sympathy. For evidence of the latter in both Jewish and Gentile churches, we only need to read his touching appeal to the saints in Rome to pray that the offering for the poor of the church in Jerusalem, which he was taking to them from some of his Gentile churches, might be “acceptable to the saints.” Rom. 15:30, 31. The pathos that lies back of that request may only be appreciated by those who have been able to catch the prevailing feeling of Christian Palestinian Judaism toward the uncircumcised, “unclean” Gentiles, even if they were the converts of Paul. These “alms” from the Gentile churches were a veritable peace offering to the saints in Jerusalem. “I beseech you, brethren, pray that it may be acceptable,” says Paul. People as a rule find gifts acceptable. We would surely think there was a powerful lack of sympathy somewhere if an apostle should find it necessary to beseech us to pray that an offering he was bearing from the churches in India to the poor in the church at Anderson might be acceptable to the saints at the latter place.
At the very end of his life, too, in Rome, where he had so many acquaintances at the time he dictated the long list of names we find in the last chapter of his epistle to the church there, he met, with great lack of sympathy. From his own letters, and also from Luke’s graphic touch in Acts 28:15 where he tells how the weary prisoner of Jesus Christ “thanked God and took courage” when he saw the Roman brethren come to meet him at the Appii Forum and the Three Taverns, we know that Paul had looked for sympathy from the Christians of the great metropolis. But from the same epistles we also know that he looked largely in vain. All Paul’s grace and magnanimity can not hide from us the facts. We hear a note of sadness amid all the joy of the letter he writes from there to his beloved Philippians. The epistle to the saints at Philippi has been called the Epistle of Joy. It is the most “joyous” writing in the whole New Testament. But the very emphasis Paul puts upon joy in this letter suggests the soul’s victorious reaction against its joyless environment—a chain, a prison, a coming trial before the monster Nero, and a disappointing condition in the local church. Two selections from his Philippian letter will be sufficient. The first is ch. 1:12–17; the second, ch. 2:19–21.
“I would have you know, brethren, that the things which happened unto me have fallen out rather unto the progress of the gospel; so that my bonds became manifest in Christ throughout the whole praetorian guard, and to all the rest; and that most of the brethren in the Lord, being confident through my bonds, are more abundantly bold to speak the word of God without fear. Some, indeed, preach Christ even of envy and strife; and some also of good will: the one do it of love, knowing that I am set for the defense of the gospel; but the other proclaim Christ of faction, not sincerely, thinking to raise up affliction for me in my bonds.”—certainly not a very sympathetic attitude toward Paul on the part of at least some of even the local preachers.
But hear again what he says, “I hope in the Lord Jesus to send Timothy shortly unto you, that I also may be of good comfort, when I know your state. For I have no man like-minded, who will care truly for your state. For they all seek their own, not the things of Jesus Christ.” “No man”—evidently not much real sympathy there with his outlook and interests.
But clearest and saddest of all in this connection is what we find in the last epistle that left his pen, —Second Timothy. He is still a prisoner in Rome, but more alone than ever. Only Luke now is with him. Demas is gone. Titus, Timothy and other faithful members of his own little company have been sent on missions to distant places. And now he turns to pen a last letter, a letter to his “dear son Timothy.” He says, “0 Timothy, I adjure you, preach the word; keep at it in season and out of season, refuting, checking and exhorting men, never lose patience with them, and never give up your teaching; for the time will come when people will decline to be taught sound teaching and will accumulate teachers to suit themselves and tickle their own fancies; they will give up listening to the truth and turn to myths. Whatever happens, be self possessed, flinch from no suffering, do your work as an evangelist, and discharge all your duties as a minister. The last drops of my own sacrifice are falling; my time to go has come. I have fought in the good fight; I have run my course; I have kept the faith.” But he can also say, like the Spirit of his Master as it moved in the soul of the ancient prophet, “I have trod the wine press alone, and of the people there was none with me.” All his Asian friends have turned their backs upon him, and of his Roman friends not one had stood with him on the occasion of his defense before the authorities. All had forsaken him. (1:15; 4:16.) “May it not be laid to their account” he prays. He is drinking of his Master’s cup.
Time and a better understanding of Paul’s real size as a man and of his unique place in history and in the counsels of God, have given him an honor he seldom received in his own day. As we look back on him now we seem to see a halo about his head. He wore no halo then, —not even among the Christians. Today we fully and cordially acknowledge his gospel and apostleship. He had to defend them both then, and he did it vigorously. The Galatian and Corinthian epistles thrill us with their burning words in this connection.
2. The other fact I would mention that indicates that Paul largely outvisioned the people of his day, is the suddenness with which his distinctive gospel was forgotten after his death. The Fathers quote him, but it is altogether evident from the tone and emphasis of their writings that they had not understood him at all, nor assimilated his conception of the Christian life. Their legalism, creedalism, ritualism and ecclesiasticism are all in strange contrast to the freedom, life and power we see in Paul and the throb and inspiration of which we feel in all his letters.
The reason for this difference, I believe, lies in a different experience of Christ. In the Gospels and The Acts, we see a living Personality at work. Christ is central, present and active throughout all these books. The life and power of the same divine Being pulsates in Paul’s epistles and is seen working in his churches. But as time passes and we leave the writings of Paul and John we seem to leave farther and farther behind us that vital sense of the living presence and power of Jesus in the soul and in the church. Both as relates to a victorious life in the individual and as relates to the Divine government of the church, Christ is plainly felt to be at a distance. We seem to be getting away from the light. The sun is becoming obscured and the shadows of the dark ages are falling upon us. But as in our day the church emerges again into the light of evening time, the sun’s clearer and clearer shining is bringing more and more warmth to our souls, clearer and clearer understanding to our minds and fuller and deeper realization of Christ in our lives. Thus it will be, thank God, until we see him as he is with the dawning of that eternal day just ahead of us.
“Face to face with Christ my Savior,
Face to face! what will it be!
When with rapture I behold Him,
Jesus Christ who died for me!”
Paul a Theological Prophet
Paul is undoubtedly the first and greatest theologian of Christendom, but if we look for a theological system in his writings we shall look in vain. His mind did not run in that direction. He was an Israelite, steeped in the religious literature of his own people, a people whose genius lay in the realization of God, not in the rational or logically ordered arrangement of abstract truth concerning Him. As one writer puts it, “Paul’s mind was fundamentally Semitic. It seized on one truth at a time, penetrating to the underlying principle with extraordinary power and viewing it successively from various sides. But, unlike a Greek thinker, he did not labor to reduce the sum of his principles to formal harmony in a system.” No, Paul’s mind and interests, like those of all the other Scripture writers from Moses down to John, did not run in that direction. He was a prophet. He had a message from God, and he burned to deliver it.
You will get very little in the Bible, my brethren, that appeals to intellect, but its words have a tremendous pull on the heart. That knowledge of truth which its writers everywhere seek to convey is not doctrinal but experimental, not theoretical but practical. Doctrine, as Paul and Jesus used the word, was teaching rather than dogma, instruction of the soul, rather than information of the mind. All their interests were practical. And this is a point for us worth noting. As Christian teachers and ministers of the gospel word today, we may congratulate ourselves upon the “sound doctrine” we have, and we do, using the term in a sense that is perhaps more common with us than it is in the Scriptures. But we do well I think to keep also in mind the emphasis of Jesus and Paul and judge ourselves and our work thereby. Failure to follow Christ closely in this respect has in the past greatly hindered the real work of the kingdom in some places by producing a type of convert which happily is not so often met with today as formerly, a type that perhaps can not better be described than by calling them “proselytes.” They are folks that have been brought over to our views and professions but have not been baptized into Christ. They have not been saturated in the Christian spirit—the Spirit that makes men and women like Jesus in disposition and outlook. We must guard against this sort of thing in ourselves and our people, remembering that even if we possess the gift of prophecy and are versed in all mysteries and all knowledge, if we are destitute of love, we count for nothing as God reckons values.
Paul’s writings, then, do not constitute what we would call a Systematic Theology; but if I may so speak, they are themselves the judge of all theologies and constitute today the best exposition and explanation of Christianity there is in the world. Let no one mistake me here. I have not a word against the study of Systematic Theology. Study it by all means. It will do you good, especially under a good teacher. My point simply is that Paul’s writings are supreme. In these lectures, however, we shall confine ourselves pretty much to his epistle to the Romans, for there, in a fulness unknown to any other of his letters, we have his gospel. In fact, just as we have The Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John concerning Jesus Christ the Son of God, so here we have The Gospel according to Paul, which interprets and applies the meaning and significance of those great facts of history which the others narrate and upon which both his and our faith is based.
An Estimate of Romans
The importance to Christians and to Christianity of Paul’s letter to the Romans can scarcely be overdrawn. In it the leading minds of the church from primitive times until now have found both inspiration and the solution of their moral and religious problems. No other single writing, I believe, has furnished the Christian soldier with so many and such telling weapons for the battle of the truth. Here Luther found peace and the word with which he enlightened Europe and overthrew the papacy. Augustine in the 4th century was brought into the light while reading it, and John Wesley, the awakener of England in the eighteenth century, found peace and deliverance while listening to someone reading Luther’s preface to the Epistle. Luther himself thus wrote of it—
“Romans is the true masterpiece of the New Testament and the very purest gospel, which is well worth and deserving that a Christian man should not only learn it by heart, word for word, but also that he should daily deal with it as the daily bread of men’s souls. For it can never be too much or too well read or studied. And the more it is handled the more precious it becomes and the better it tastes.”
It is related of Melancthon, too, that he regarded Romans as the key to the whole Bible and that he expounded it both orally and in writing more often than any other part of the New Testament. That he might the more thoroughly grasp its meaning and scope, he often wrote out the entire letter.
Ulrich Zwingli also found such strength and inspiration in it and Galatians that he made a copy of them and committed them to memory. Paul’s letters were his unfailing arsenal of supplies in the victorious fight he put up against both the unrighteousness of the State and the superstitions of the Church.
For giving us a clear understanding of the gospel, Romans is undeniably the most important book of the whole New Testament. And yet how often we content ourselves with but portions of its treasure, —the 8th chapter, for instance, that raptured “paean of victory,” which begins with “no condemnation” and ends with certain glory.
Is it because we have not understood the Epistle that we do not enjoy it more? It was so with me until at a crisis in my life in India I gave myself up for weeks to the study of it. I was seeking a clearer understanding of the gospel to meet the cry of my heart, the needs of my ministry and the demands of my own mind. I thank God that I found just what I needed in Paul. You will not wonder then at my choice of a topic for these lectures. I know of others, too, that have had a glorious quickening from a study of Paul’s “Gospel.” He who masters its thought knows the Pauline theology and enjoys all that holy enrichment which comes from association with an inspired mind like his. Let me commend it to you, my brethren, if any of you have not hitherto given it the attention it deserves, or have been using it more as a sort of dictionary of proof texts for accepted doctrines than as a distinct piece of literature having its own peculiar message.
Unity In Diversity
It is a great convenience, but I am almost tempted at times to think it is a great misfortune too, that we have in our Bible the writings of so many writers all bound together without each having a separate introduction of its own. In its present shape the divine unity of the precious Volume has too often obscured from us the individuality of its many parts. A dozen different inspired writings have as much distinctive matter in them as the personalities of the dozen different inspired men that wrote them. It is this element of difference that gives me fully as much joy and zest in Bible study as does the evident underlying divine unity of the whole Book. Life in a local church would be awfully tame, wouldn’t it, if we were all exactly alike and reduced by some supernatural power to a dead level of mental and dispositional uniformity? We would all soon be sighing, Oh, for relief from this dull monotony! And God would have to send us a Savior to liberate our personalities.
But I am digressing somewhat. Romans is a hard book for us to understand, I admit. But this is largely due, I believe, to the fact that owing to the circumstances of Paul’s time the exposition of his gospel as we have it in Romans is encumbered with numerous references to feelings, prejudices and beliefs that are long since dead to the interests of Gentile readers. But even as relates to his essential message we might expect to have some difficulty in fully mastering his thought. You would hardly expect it to be just naturally easy to think all the thoughts of Paul, would you?
Many religious books of today provoke too little thought and awaken too little feeling. Having read them once or twice you have exhausted everything the writer says. Paul’s writings are not like that. They awaken feeling in a Christian, but they, especially Romans, are also a challenge to his thought. So if we are to master the epistle we shall have to stir up the mind and soul, lay aside all mental indolence and ask the Lord earnestly for the help of his Spirit in the matter.
Coleridge, the great English poet, and philosopher and the bosom friend of Wordsworth, once described this letter to the Romans as “the profoundest book in existence.” We have to remind ourselves, however, that it was not written to be profound. It was written to elucidate. It is the natural, unaffected production of the Spirit-filled mind and soul of the Apostle to the Gentiles, and the more fully we can feel as he did toward Christ and the more nearly we can come to understanding the particular questions that were confronting him in his ministry at the time he wrote, the more easily we shall grasp and master the thoughts of his letter. One of its greatest difficulties perhaps in our minds, lies in what he says about Israel, but I think we shall get some help on that in our fourth lecture. [ Continued...See Link Below... ]