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CHAPTER VIII.
SAVED FOR AN END

“That in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace have ye been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God: not of works, that no man should glory. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God afore prepared that we should walk in them.” – Eph. ii. 7–10.

The plan which God has formed for men in Christ is of great dimensions every way, – in its length no less than in its breadth and height. He “raised us up and seated us together [Gentiles with Jews] in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the ages which are coming on He might show the surpassing riches of His grace.” All the races of mankind and all future ages are embraced in the redeeming purpose, and are to share in its boundless wealth. Nor are the ages past excluded from its operations. God “afore prepared the good works in which” He summons us to walk. The highway of the new life has been in building since time began.

Thus large and limitless is the range of “the purpose and grace given us in Christ Jesus before times eternal” (2 Tim. i. 9). But what strikes us most in this passage is the exuberance of the grace itself. Twice over the apostle exclaims, “By grace you are saved”: once in verse 5, in an eager, almost jealous parenthesis, where he hastens to assure the readers of their deliverance from the fearful condition just described (vv. 1–3, 5). Again, deliberately and with full definition he states the same fact, in verse 8: “For by grace you are saved, through faith; and this is not of yourselves, it is the gift of God. It does not come of works, to the end that none may boast.”

These words place us on familiar ground. We recognize the Paul of Galatians and Romans, the dialect and accent of the apostle of salvation by faith. But scarcely anywhere do we find this wonder-working grace so affluently described. “God being rich in mercy, for the great love wherewith He loved us – the exceeding riches of His grace, shown in kindness toward us – the gift of God.” Mercy, love, kindness, grace, gift: what a constellation is here! These terms present the character of God in the gospel under the most delightful aspects, and in vivid contrast to the picture of our human state outlined in the beginning of the chapter.

Mercy denotes the Divine pitifulness towards feeble, suffering men, akin to those “compassions of God” to which the apostle repeatedly appeals.⁸⁰ It is a constant attribute of God in the Old Testament, and fills much the same place there that grace does in the New. “Of mercy and judgement” do the Psalmists sing – of mercy most. Out of the thunder and smoke of Sinai He declared His name: “Jehovah, a God full of compassion and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy and truth, keeping mercy for thousands.” The dread of God’s justice, the sense of His dazzling holiness and almightiness threw His mercy into bright relief and gave to it an infinite preciousness. It is the contrast which brings in “mercy” here, in verse 4, by antithesis to “wrath” (ver. 3).⁸¹ These qualities are complementary. The sternest and strongest natures are the most compassionate. God is “rich in mercy.” The wealth of His Being pours itself out in the exquisite tendernesses, the unwearied forbearance and forgivingness of His compassion towards men. The Judge of all the earth, whose hate of evil is the fire of hell, is gentler than the softest-hearted mother, – rich in mercy as He is grand and terrible in wrath.

God’s mercy regards us as we are weak and miserable: His love regards us as we are, in spite of trespass and offence, His offspring, – objects of “much love” amid much displeasure, “even when we were dead through our trespasses.” What does the story of the prodigal son mean but this? and what Christ’s great word to Nicodemus (John iii. 16)? —Grace and kindness are love’s executive. Grace is love in administration, love counteracting sin and seeking our salvation. Christ is the embodiment of grace; the cross its supreme expression; the gospel its message to mankind; and Paul himself its trophy and witness.⁸² The “overpassing riches” of grace is that affluence of wealth in which through Christ it “superabounded” to the apostolic age and has outdone the magnitude of sin (Rom. v. 20), in such measure that St Paul sees future ages gazing with wonder at its benefactions to himself and his fellow-believers. Shown “in kindness toward us,” he says, – in a condescending fatherliness, that forgets its anger and softens its old severity into comfort and endearment. God’s kindness is the touch of His hand, the accent of His voice, the cherishing breath of His Spirit. Finally, this generosity of the Divine grace, this infinite goodwill of God toward men, takes expression in the gift– the gift of Christ, the gift of righteousness (Rom. v. 15–18), the gift of eternal life (Rom. vi. 23); or – regarded, as it is here, in the light of experience and possession —the gift of salvation.

The opposition of gift and debt, of gratuitous salvation through faith to salvation earned by works of law, belongs to the marrow of St Paul’s divinity. The teaching of the great evangelical epistles is condensed into the brief words of verses 8 and 9. The reason here assigned for God’s dealing with men by way of gift and making them absolutely debtors – “lest any one should boast” – was forced upon the apostle’s mind by the stubborn pride of legalism; it is stated in terms identical with those of the earlier letters. Men will glory in their virtues before God; they flaunt the rags of their own righteousness, if any such pretext, even the slightest, remains to them. We sinners are a proud race, and our pride is oftentimes the worst of our sins. Therefore God humbles us by His compassion. He makes to us a free gift of His righteousness, and excludes every contribution from our store of merit; for if we could supply anything, we should inevitably boast as though all were our own. We must be content to receive mercy, love, grace, kindness – everything, without deserving the least fraction of the immense sum. How it strips our vanity; how it crushes us to the dust – “the weight of pardoning love!”

Concerning the office of faith in salvation we have already spoken in Chapter IV.⁸³ It is on the objective fact rather than the subjective means of salvation that the apostle lays stress in this passage. His readers do not seem to have realized sufficiently what God has given them and the greatness of the salvation already accomplished. They measured inadequately the power which had touched and changed their lives (i. 19). St Paul has shown them the depth to which they were formerly sunk, and the height to which they have been raised (vv. 1–6). He can therefore assure them, and he does it with redoubled emphasis: “You are saved; By grace you are saved men!”⁸⁴ Not, “You will be saved”; nor, “You were saved”; nor, “You are in course of salvation,” – for salvation has many moods and tenses, – but, in the perfect passive tense, he asserts the glorious accomplished fact. With the same reassuring emphasis in chapter i. 7 he declared, “We have redemption in His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses.”

Here is St Paul’s doctrine of Assurance. It was laid down by Christ Himself when He said: “He that believeth on the Son of God hath eternal life.” This sublime confidence is the ruling note of St John’s great epistle: “We know that we are in Him… We know that we have passed out of death into life… This is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith.” It was this confidence of present salvation that made the Church irresistible. With its foundation secure, the house of life can be steadily and calmly built up. Under the shelter of the full assurance of faith, in the sunshine of God’s love felt in the heart, all spiritual virtues bloom and flourish. But with a faith hesitant, distracted, that is sure of no doctrine in the creed and cannot plant a firm foot anywhere, nothing prospers in the soul or in the Church. Oh for the clear accent, the ringing, joyous note of apostolic assurance! We want a faith not loud, but deep; a faith not born of sentiment and human sympathy, but that comes from the vision of the living God; a faith whose rock and corner-stone is neither the Church nor the Bible, but Christ Jesus Himself.

Greatly do we need, like the Asian disciples of Paul and John, to “assure our hearts” before God. With death confronting us, with the hideous evil of the world oppressing us; when the air is laden with the contagion of sin; when the faith of the strongest wears the cast of doubt; when the word of promise shines dimly through the haze of an all-encompassing scepticism and a hundred voices say, in mockery or grief, Where is now thy God? when the world proclaims us lost, our faith refuted, our gospel obsolete and useless, – then is the time for the Christian assurance to recover its first energy and to rise again in radiant strength from the heart of the Church, from the depths of its mystic life where it is hid with Christ in God.

You are saved! cries the apostle; not forgetting that his readers have their battle to fight, and many hazards yet to run (vi. 10–13). But they hold the earnest of victory, the foretaste of life eternal. In spirit they sit with Christ in the heavenly places. Pain and death, temptation, persecution, the vicissitudes of earthly history, by these God means to perfect that which He has begun in His saints – “if you continue in the faith, grounded and firm” (Col. i. 23). That condition is expressed, or implied, in all assurance of final salvation. It is a condition which excites to watchfulness, but can never cause misgiving to a loyal heart. God is for us! He justifies us, and counts us His elect. Christ Jesus who died is risen and seated at the right hand of God, and there intercedes for us. Quis separabit?⁸⁵

This is the epistle of the Church and of humanity. It dwells on the grand, objective aspects of the truth, rather than upon its subjective experiences. It does not invite us to rest in the comforts and delights of grace, but to lift up our eyes and see whither Christ has translated us and what is the kingdom that we possess in Him. God “quickened us together with the Christ”: He “raised us up, He made us to sit in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.” Henceforth “our citizenship is in heaven” (Phil. iii. 20).

This is the inspiring thought of the third group of St Paul’s epistles; we heard it in the first note of his song of praise (i. 3). It supplies the principle from which St Paul unfolds the beautiful conception of the Christian life contained in the third chapter of the companion letter to the Colossians: “Your life is hid with the Christ in God”; therefore “seek the things that are above, where He is.” We live in two worlds at once. Heaven lies about us in this new mystic childhood of our spirit. There our names are written; thither our thoughts and hopes resort. Our treasure is there; our heart we have lodged there, with Christ in God. He is there, the Lord of the Spirit, from whom we draw each moment the life that flows into His members. In the greatness of His love conquering sin and death, time and space, He is with us to the world’s end. May we not say that we, too, are with Him and shall be with Him always? So we reckon in the logic of our faith and at the height of our high calling, though the soul creeps and drudges upon the lower levels.

 
“With Him we are gone up on high,
Since He is ours and we are His;
With Him we reign above the sky,
We walk upon our subject seas!”
 

In his lofty flights of thought the apostle always has some practical and homely end in view. The earthly and heavenly, the mystical and the matter-of-fact were not distant and repugnant, but interfused in his mind. From the celestial heights of the life hidden with Christ in God (ver. 6), he brings us down in a moment and without any sense of discrepancy to the prosaic level of “good works” (ver. 10). The love which viewed us from eternity, the counsels of Him who works all things in all, enter into the humblest daily duties.

Grace, moreover, sets us great tasks. There should be something to show in deed and life for the wealth of kindness spent upon us, some visible and commensurate result of the vast preparations of the gospel plan. Of this result the apostle saw the earnest in the work of faith wrought by his Gentile Churches.

St Paul was the last man in the world to undervalue human effort, or disparage good work of any sort. It is, in his view, the end aimed at in all that God bestows on His people, in all that He Himself works in them. Only let this end be sought in God’s way and order. Man’s doings must be the fruit and not the root of his salvation. “Not of works,” but “for good works” were believers chosen. “This little word for” says Monod, “reconciles St Paul and St James better than all the commentators.” God has not raised us up to sit idly in the heavenly places lost in contemplation, or to be the useless pensioners of grace. He sends us forth to “walk in the works, prepared for us,” – equipped to fight Christ’s battles, to till His fields, to labour in the service of building His Church.

The “workmanship” of our Version suggests an idea foreign to the passage. The apostle is not thinking of the Divine art or skill displayed in man’s creation; but of the simple fact that “God made man” (Gen. i. 27). “We are His making, created in Christ Jesus.” The “preparation” to which he refers in verse 10 leads us back to that primeval election of God’s sons in Christ for which we gave thanks at the outset (i. 3). There are not two creations, the second formed upon the ruin and failure of the first; but one grand design throughout. Redemption is creation re-affirmed. The new creation, as we call it, restores and consummates the old. When God raised His Son from the dead, He vindicated His original purpose in raising man from the dust a living soul. He has not forsaken the work of His hands nor forgone His original plan, which took account of all our wilfulness and sin. God in making us meant us to do good work in His world. From the world’s foundation down to the present moment He who worketh all in all has been working for this end – most of all in the revelation of His grace in Jesus Christ.

Far backward in the past, amid the secrets of creation, lay the beginnings of God’s grace to mankind. Far onward in the future shines its lustre revealed in the first Christian age. The apostle has gained some insight into those “times and seasons” which formerly were veiled from him. In his earliest letters, to the Thessalonians and Corinthians, St Paul echoes our Lord’s warning, never out of season, that we should “watch, for the hour is at hand.” Maran atha is his watchword: “Our Lord cometh; the time is short.” Nor does that note cease to the end. But when in this epistle he writes of “the ages that are coming on,” and of “all the generations of the age of the ages” (iii. 21), there is manifestly some considerable period of duration before his eyes. He sees something of the extent of the world’s coming history, something of the magnitude of the field that the future will afford for the unfolding of God’s designs.

In those approaching æons he foresees that the apostolic dispensation will play a conspicuous part. Unborn ages will be blessed in the blessing now descending upon Jews and Gentiles through Christ Jesus. So marvellous is the display of God’s kindness toward them, that all the future will pay homage to it. The overflowing wealth of blessing poured upon St Paul and the first Churches had an end in view that reached beyond themselves, an end worthy of the Giver, worthy of the magnitude of His plans and of His measureless love. If all this was theirs – this fulness of God exceeding the utmost they had asked or thought – it is because God means to convey it through them to multitudes besides! There is no limit to the grace that God will impart to men and to Churches who thus reason, who receive His gifts in this generous and communicative spirit. The apostolic Church chants with Mary at the Annunciation: “For, behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed!”

Never was any prediction better fulfilled. This spot of history shines with a light before which every other shows pale and commonplace. The companions of Jesus, the humble fraternities of the first Christian century have been the object of reverent interest and intent research on the part of all centuries since. Their history is scrutinized from all sides with a zeal and industry which the most pressing subjects of the day hardly command. For we feel that these men hold the secret of the world’s life. The key to the treasures we all long for is in their hands. As time goes on and the stress of life deepens, men will turn with yet fonder hope to the age of Jesus Christ. “And many nations will say: Come, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob. And He will teach us of His ways; and we will walk in His paths.”

The stream will remember its fountain; the children of God will gather to their childhood’s home. The world will hear the gospel in the recovered accents of its prophets and apostles.

CHAPTER IX.
THE FAR AND NEAR

“Wherefore remember, that aforetime ye, the Gentiles in the flesh, who are called Uncircumcision by that which is called Circumcision in the flesh, made by hands; that ye were at that time separate from Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world: but now in Christ Jesus ye who sometime were far off are made nigh in the blood of Christ.” – Eph. ii. 11–13.

The apostle’s Wherefore sums up for his readers the record of their salvation rehearsed in the previous verses. “You were buried in your sins, sunk in their corruption, ruined by their guilt, living under God’s displeasure and in the power of Satan. All this has passed away. The almighty Hand has raised you with Christ into a heavenly life. God has become your Father; His love is in your heart; by the strength of His grace you are enabled to walk in the way marked out for you from your creation. Wherefore remember: think of what you were, and of what you are!”

To such recollections we do well to summon ourselves. The children of grace love to recall, and on fit occasions recount for God’s glory and the help of their fellows, the way in which God led them to the knowledge of Himself. In some the great change came suddenly. He “made speed” to save us. It was a veritable resurrection, as signal and unlooked for as the rising of Christ from the dead. By a swift passage we were “translated from the power of darkness into the kingdom of the Son of His love.” Once living without God in the world, we were arrested by a strange providence – through some overthrow of fortune or shock of bereavement, or by a trivial incident touching unaccountably a hidden spring in the mind – and the whole aspect of life was altered in a moment. We saw revealed, as by a lightning flash at night, the emptiness of our own life, the misery of our nature, the folly of our unbelief, the awful presence of God– God whom we had forgotten and despised! We sought, and found His mercy. From that hour the old things passed away: we lived who had been dead, – made alive to God through Jesus Christ.

This instant conversion, such as Paul experienced, this sharp and abrupt transition from darkness to light, was common in the first generation of Christians, as it is wherever religious awakening takes place in a society that has been largely dead to God. The advent of Christianity in the Gentile world was much after this fashion, – like a tropical sunrise, in which day leaps on the earth full-born. This experience gives a stamp of peculiar decision to the convictions and character of its subjects. The change is patent and palpable; no observer can fail to mark it. And it burns itself into the memory with an ineffaceable impression. The violent throes of such a spiritual birth cannot be forgotten.

But if our entrance into the life of God was gradual, like the dawn of our own milder clime, where the light steals by imperceptible advances upon the darkness – if the glory of the Lord has thus risen upon us, our certainty of its presence may be no less complete, and our remembrance of its coming no less grateful and joyous. One leaps into the new life by a single eager bound; another reaches it by measured, thoughtful steps: but both are there, standing side by side on the common ground of salvation in Christ. Both walk in the same light of the Lord, that floods the sky from east to west. The recollections which the latter has to cherish of the leading of God’s kindly light – how He touched our childish thought, and checked gently our boyish waywardness, and mingled reproof with the first stirrings of passion and self-will, and wakened the alarms of conscience and the fears of another world, and the sense of the beauty of holiness and the shame of sin, —

“Shaping to truth the froward will

Along His narrow way,” —

such remembrances are a priceless treasure, that grows richer as we grow wiser. It awakens a joy not so thrilling nor so prompt in utterance as that of the soul snatched like a brand from the burning, but which passes understanding. Blessed are the children of the kingdom, those who have never roamed far from the fold of Christ and the commonwealth of Israel, whom the cross has beckoned onwards from their childhood. But however it was – by whatever means, at whatever time it pleased God to call you from darkness to His marvellous light, remember.

But we must return to Paul and his Gentile readers. The old death in life was to them a sombre reality, keenly and painfully remembered. In that condition of moral night out of which Christ had rescued them, Gentile society around them still remained. Let us observe its features as they are delineated in contrast with the privileges long bestowed on Israel. The Gentile world was Christless, hopeless, godless. It had no share in the Divine polity framed for the chosen people; the outward mark of its uncircumcision was a true symbol of its irreligion and debasement.

Israel had a God. Besides, there were only “those who are called gods.” This was the first and cardinal distinction. Not their race, not their secular calling, their political or intellectual gifts, but their faith formed the Jews into a nation. They were “the people of God,” as no other people has been – of the God, for theirs was “the true and living God” – Jehovah, the I AM, the One, the Alone. The monotheistic belief was, no doubt, wavering and imperfect in the mass of the nation in early times; but it was held by the ruling minds amongst them, by the men who have shaped the destiny of Israel and created its Bible, with increasing clearness and intensity of passion. “All the gods of the nations are idols – vapours, phantoms, nothings! – but Jehovah made the heavens.” It was the ancestral faith that glowed in the breast of Paul at Athens, amidst the fairest shrines of Greece, when he “saw the city wholly given to idolatry” – man’s highest art and the toil and piety of ages lavished on things that were no gods; and in the midst of the splendour of a hollow and decaying Paganism he read the confession that God was “unknown.”

Ephesus had her famous goddess, worshipped in the most sumptuous pile of architecture that the ancient world contained. Behold the proud city, “temple-keeper of the great goddess Artemis,” filled with wrath! Infuriate Demos flashes fire from his thousand eyes, and his brazen throat roars hoarse vengeance against the insulters of “her magnificence, whom all Asia and the world worshippeth”! Without God —atheists, in fact, the apostle calls this devout Asian population; and Artemis of Ephesus, and Athené, and Cybelé of Smyrna, and Zeus and Asclepius of Pergamum, though all the world worship them, are but “creatures of art and man’s device.”

The Pagans retorted this reproach. “Away with the atheists!” they cried, when Christians were led to execution. Ninety years after this time the martyr Polycarp was brought into the arena before the magistrates of Asia and the populace gathered in Smyrna at the great Ionic festival. The Proconsul, wishing to spare the venerable man, said to him: “Swear by the Fortune of Cæsar; and say, Away with the atheists!” But Polycarp, as the story continues, “with a grave look gazing on the crowd of lawless Gentiles in the stadium and shaking his hand against them, then groaning and looking up to heaven, said, Away with the atheists!” Pagan and Christian were each godless in the eyes of the other. If visible temples and images, and the local worship of each tribe or city made a god, then Jews and Christians had none: if God was a Spirit – One, Holy, Almighty, Omnipresent – then polytheists were in truth atheists; their many gods, being many, were no gods; they were idols, —eidola, illusive shows of the Godhead.

The more thoughtful and pious among the heathen felt this already. When the apostle denounced the idols and their pompous worship as “these vanities,” his words found an echo in the Gentile conscience. The classical Paganism held the multitude by the force of habit and local pride, and by its sensuous and artistic charms; but such religious power as it once had was gone. In all directions it was undermined by mystic Oriental and Egyptian rites, to which men resorted in search of a religion and sick of the old fables, ever growing more debased, that had pleased their fathers. The majesty of Rome in the person of the Emperor, the one visible supreme power, was seized upon by the popular instinct, even more than it was imposed by state policy, and made to fill the vacuum; and temples to Augustus had already risen in Asia, side by side with those of the ancient gods.

In this despair of their ancestral religions many piously disposed Gentiles turned to Judaism for spiritual help; and the synagogue was surrounded in the Greek cities by a circle of earnest proselytes. From their ranks St Paul drew a large proportion of his hearers and converts. When he writes, “Remember that you were at that time without God,” he is within the recollection of his readers; and they will bear him out in testifying that their heathen creed was dead and empty to the soul. Nor did philosophy construct a creed more satisfying. Its gods were the Epicurean deities who dwell aloof and careless of men; or the supreme Reason and Necessity of the Stoics, the anima mundi, of which human souls are fleeting and fragmentary images. “Deism finds God only in heaven; Pantheism, only on earth; Christianity alone finds Him both in heaven and on earth” (Harless). The Word made flesh reveals God in the world.

When the apostle says “without God in the world,” this qualification is both reproachful and sorrowful. To be without God in the world that He has made, where His “eternal power and Godhead” have been visible from creation, argues a darkened and perverted heart.⁸⁶ To be without God in the world is to be in the wilderness, without a guide; on a stormy ocean, without harbour or pilot; in sickness of spirit, without medicine or physician; to be hungry without bread, and weary without rest, and dying with no light of life. It is to be an orphaned child, wandering in an empty, ruined house.

In these words we have an echo of Paul’s preaching to the Gentiles, and an indication of the line of his appeals to the conscience of the enlightened pagans of his time. The despair of the age was darker than the human mind has known before or since. Matthew Arnold has painted it all in one verse of those lines, entitled Obermann once more, in which he so perfectly expresses the better spirit of modern scepticism.

 
“On that hard Pagan world disgust
And secret loathing fell
Deep weariness and sated lust
Made human life a hell.”
 

The saying by which St Paul reproved the Corinthians, “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,” is the common sentiment of pagan epitaphs of the time. Here is an extant specimen of the kind: “Let us drink and be merry; for we shall have no more kissing and dancing in the kingdom of Proserpine. Soon shall we fall asleep, to wake no more.” Such were the thoughts with which men came back from the grave-side. It is needless to say how depraving was the effect of this hopelessness. At Athens, in the more religious times of Socrates, it was even considered a decent and kindly thing to allow a criminal condemned to death to spend his last hours in gross sensual indulgence. There is no reason to suppose that the extinction of the Christian hope of immortality would prove less demoralizing. We are “saved by hope,” said St Paul: we are ruined by despair. Pessimism of creed for most men means pessimism of conduct.

Our modern speech and literature and our habits of feeling have been for so many generations steeped in the influence of Christ’s teaching, and it has thrown so many tender and hallowed thoughts around the state of our beloved dead, that it is impossible even for those who are personally without hope in Christ to realize what its general decay and disappearance would mean. To have possessed such a treasure, and then to lose it! to have cherished anticipations so exalted and so dear, – and to find them turn out a mockery! The age upon which this calamity fell would be of all ages the most miserable.

The hope of Israel which Paul preached to the Gentiles was a hope for the world and for the nations, as well as for the individual soul. “The commonwealth [or polity] of Israel” and “the covenants of promise” guaranteed the establishment of the Messianic kingdom upon earth. This expectation took amongst the mass of the Jews a materialistic and even a revengeful shape; but in one form or other it belonged, and still belongs to every man of Israel. Those noble lines of Virgil in his fourth Eclogue⁸⁷– like the words of Caiaphas, an unintended Christian prophecy – which predicted the return of justice and the spread of a golden age through the whole world under the rule of the coming heir of Cæsar, had been signally belied by the imperial house in the century that had elapsed. Never were human prospects darker than when the apostle wrote as Nero’s prisoner in Rome. It was an age of crime and horror. The political world and the system of pagan society seemed to be in the throes of dissolution. Only in “the commonwealth of Israel” was there a light of hope and a foundation for the future of mankind; and of this in its wisdom the world knew nothing.