Romans 10:12-21 For there is no difference between the Jew and the Greek: for the same Lord over all is rich to all that call on him.… From an account of the plan of salvation as faith in and confession of a risen Saviour, the apostle, in the verses now before us, proceeds to consider the natural history of the faith which Jew and Gentile are led to place in the one Lord. For it is most important to know how faith is induced. And here we notice - I. THE RISEN LORD IS WITHIN EVERY ONE'S CALL. (Vers. 12, 13.) There is no difference in his accessibility to both Jew and Gentile. "He is rich unto all that call upon him." With the sovereigns of this world court-favourites are the rule, and I suppose there is no exception. Only certain individuals get near the king, and are favoured with an audience. But this risen Lord over all can be rich unto every one that cares to call upon him. Let Jew or Greek only cry to him, and the needful help will come. This suggests the following comforting thoughts. 1. The throne on which our Lord now sits is a throne of grace. He is to sit, indeed, one day on a throne of judgment; meanwhile let us rejoice that he sits on a "throne of grace." It is to help the needy and the lost that he now sits enthroned. We are now under a "reign of grace." We hear a good deal in the present day of a "reign of law:" what consolation it is to think that, so far as Christ is concerned, we are all under a "reign of grace"! 2. He can hear directly every one that calls upon him. Of course, such a fact implies that our risen Saviour is indeed Divine. By virtue of his Divinity, he can hear everybody, whether Jew or Gentile, who cares to call upon him, and can deal directly with them. The many-voiced cry of lost and tempted souls reaches his ear and is all interpreted. It is easy to state the case of Christ hearing prayer, but it is overwhelming to imagine what such an arrangement demands from the blessed Being upon the throne. Yet it is sober fact - the whole cry of the race, the bitter cry of lost and tried souls, enters the sympathizing mind of our Divine Saviour and King. 3. He is rich to all the petitioners. Just as when on earth he allowed no one to go empty away, so from his throne of grace on high there is no real petitioner dismissed without relief. He encourages Jew and Gentile alike to call upon him, and then treats us in a way that becomes a King. He does far more "exceeding abundantly for us above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us." If we ask him to save us, he does so with an everlasting salvation. If we ask him to pardon us, he does so with overflowing love. If we ask him to sanctify us, he enables us to die daily unto sin and to live unto righteousness. If we ask him to make us useful, he opens doors of usefulness for us of the most surprising character. In short, "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him. But he hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit" (1 Corinthians 2:9, 10). II. BUT AN OMNIPRESENT SAVIOUR NEEDS THE BEAUTIFUL FEET OF HIS HERALDS TO BE UPON ALL THE MOUNTAINS IF MEN ARE TO KNOW HIS NEARNESS. (Vers. 14, 15.) We have seen that the risen Saviour is within every one's call. But he is not palpable to sense. He is unseen. His presence is spiritual. Only by heralds going forth to proclaim the glad tidings of his presence are men led to call upon him. And the heralds address the ears of men. By this particular avenue of hearing does the message come. If men never hear of Jesus, they cannot be expected to realize his presence or to trust him. And so a propaganda is necessary, and the missionary enterprise is just such a propaganda to bring before Jew and Gentile the splendid fact that a risen Saviour is within each man's call. The natural history of faith is, then, this: "'Faith' - the faith which, overcoming the world, justifies and purifies and saves - 'cometh by hearing,' cometh in the way of communication from man to man, as distinguished from any natural reflective enlightenment; while that 'hearing cometh by the Word of God,' ariseth out of an express revelation uttered from heaven, in contrast to every system, device, or imagination of unassisted human reason," This being so, we can understand how the apostle quotes the rapturous words of the prophet about the beautiful feet of the heralds of glad tidings. The institution of the preaching of the gospel is the most beautiful now existing among men. III. THE GLAD TIDINGS HAVE NOT HAD A UNIVERSAL RECEPTION. (Vers. 16-18.) In some cases the heralds have had small success. As Esaias cries, "Lord, who hath believed our report?" so has many a minister lamented his scant success. For, amid the multitude of competing things and persons palpable to sense, an unseen Saviour gets ignored by many. The problem was not, in the missionary age of Paul, as to many not hearing of a Saviour at all - rather was it that so many heard of him, yet gave no heed. For the apostle in this passage quotes what in the nineteenth psalm is applied to nature, as if the gospel message, at least in his day, had been as widely proclaimed as the limits of the world allowed. And when we consider the population of the world in Paul's time, and how it was practically within the grasp of the Roman empire, and that information filtered clown to the distant colonies more surely perhaps than, though not so speedily as, news does nowadays; and when we add to this the magnificent missionary spirit which animated Paul and his associates, he had reason to take up the universal terms and apply them to the propagation of the gospel. So that the gospel was more widely proclaimed in the first century in proportion to the population of the globe than it is as yet in the nineteenth. The contrast which now obtains between the revelation of God in nature and the revelation of God in the gospel in their respective relations to mankind - the one being universal, the other partial in its application - has been largely, if not entirely, due to the lack of enterprise and missionary spirit on the part of the Church. And yet too much may be made of this contrast, and men may fail to see that the proclamation of a revealed religion is the one way in which God is likely to receive attention from his creatures. The following quotation from Archer Butler upon the point will be welcome. "If God were to interfere at all, they [the deists] maintain, it would be by some universal agency, simple, general, and obvious, as the laws of his visible creation. They smile at the notion of God's greatest exhibition of his will to man being acted upon the reduced theatre of a petty province, and made dependent on the chances of human testimony. 'In the moral as in the physical world,' exclaims the leader of the sentimental school of deism, 'it is ever on a great scale, and by simple means, that Deity operates.' But what if we retort that it is those very laws of nature 'on a great scale' - those very 'simple means' - that have caused God to be forgotten? Not justly, we admit; for they ought eminently to have convinced men of his presence and power: but what of that? We are not now speaking of argumentative propriety, but of actual fact; not of man as he ought to be, but of man as he is. And it is an undeniable fact that it is the permanence and uniformity of the natural laws of the creation that have beguiled men into speculative, and, still more, into practical atheism; that it is the very perfection of the laws which has hidden the Legislator. The hand that God has constructed so wondrously can write, 'There is no God;' let it be smit with sudden paralysis, and the notion of an intervening Avenger will arise; nay, let us at any time behold some strange unique in any of the departments of experience, and it startles our habitual slumber. That is to say, as long as the work is perfect, we recognize no worker; but the moment it becomes deficient (the very thing which ought logically to produce the doubt), we begin to conceive and admit his reality. The more apparently capricious the works of nature, the more they resemble man's; and the more they remind us of direct agency analogous to the human. Now, if this be so, could it be expected that, to produce an acknowledgment of his being and attributes, the Deity would continue to employ the same medium of regular and ordinary laws, the same vast and uniform processes in the physical and moral world, which in all ages have tended (such the miserable subjection of man to an unreasoning imagination) to render his agency suspected by some, and practically forgotten by the many? To make himself felt he must disturb his laws; in other words, he must perform or permit 'miracles.' But then he must likewise exhibit them sparingly, as, if they continued to appear on assignable principles of stated recurrence, and in definite cycles, nay, if they appeared frequently, though unfixedly, - they would enter, or seem to enter, into the procession of the laws of nature, and thus lose their proper use and character. What follows? It follows that miracles cannot be presented to every successive age, far less to each individual person; they must, then, be presented only to some particular age or ages, and to some particular personal witnesses. But we have seen that they ought to be publicly and continually known; therefore (there being but one way of transmitting past events to present times) revealed religion and the knowledge of God, which we have seen is only thus to be practically and influentially attained, must he dependent upon human testimony. There is no step of this deduction which might not be made by a man who had never heard of any actual revelation having been given to man; it is purposely built upon the simplest principles of our common nature This seems to me to amount to something not unlike demonstration, that a traditional revelation, built on testimony transmitted from man to man - that is, of a Bible and sermon religion - far from being improbable (as the impugners of an 'historical creed' so eloquently insist), is actually the form of religion imperatively demanded by the very structure of human nature. IV. THE RECEPTION OF THE GOSPEL BY THE GENTILES HAS BEEN PROVIDENTIALLY ORDERED AS A STIMULUS TO THE JEWS. (Vers. 19-21.) The faith which has come by hearing the gospel to the Gentile nations was intended to rouse to holy jealousy the unbelieving Jews. The one section of mankind has been and is being played off against the other in the all-wise providence of God. And nothing is more certain than that the Jews shall yet surrender to the claims of our risen Saviour, and enter the Christian Church as obedient followers of the once crucified but now exalted Messiah. Let us, then, have confidence in our Lord, not only regarding our personal salvation, but also regarding the ingathering of the nations. - R.M.E. Parallel Verses KJV: For there is no difference between the Jew and the Greek: for the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon him. |
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