The aim of the epistle is didactic rather than polemic, though it acquires a polemic flavor in its opposition of Christianity to legalism. It is distinguished among the epistles by its systematic character Its object is to present a comprehensive statement of the doctrine of salvation through Christ, not a complete system of christian doctrine. Its theme is, The gospel, the power of God unto salvation to Jew and Gentile alike; a power because of its revelation of a righteousness of God for believers.

In the development of this theme Paul shows that Jew and Gentile are alike violators of divine law, and are consequently exposed to the divine wrath, from which there is no deliverance through works or ordinances, but only through the Gospel of Jesus Christ accepted by faith.

In insisting upon this universal condition of salvation, God neither violates His original covenant with Israel, nor deprives Himself of the right to judge sin.

The truth of justification by faith is an Old-Testament truth, illustrated in the case of Abraham, and applicable to both Jews and Gentiles. The true seed of Abraham are those who follow him, not in circumcision but in faith. The saving provision in Christ is coextensive with the results of the fall in Adam, and assures present and future salvation to its subjects. The office of the law was to develop and manifest the sin which originated in Adam's fall, and thus to give full scope to the redemptive work of Christ.

This truth neither encourages immorality nor convicts God of unfaithfulness to His covenant with Israel. Justification by faith involves personal union with Christ, and consequent death to sin and moral resurrection to newness of life. Grace does not imply liberty to sin, but a change of masters and a new obedience and service. Grace does not do away with God's holy law, but only with the false relation of the natural man to that law; in which sin made use of the law to excite man's opposition to it, and thus to bring him into bondage and death. This is illustrated from Paul's own experience.

The deliverance from this bondage, which the law could not effect, is wrought by the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus, which frees from condemnation and initiates a life of sonship inspired and controlled by the Spirit of God. The power of this life appears in the assurance of hope which it imparts amid the trials of this mortal state, a hope founded in the divine election.

To the claim that God cannot reject the unbelieving Jew without breaking His own covenant and stultifying His decree, is opposed the doctrine of absolute divine sovereignty, unconditioned by human merit or service, but exercised in perfect righteousness and mercy, which are vindicated by God's forming for Himself a people of believers, both Jew and Gentile. It is further shown that this divine economy includes the operation of human free agency no less than of divine sovereignty, and that the rejection of Israel was therefore due to their blind reliance on their original election, and their refusal of the righteousness which is through faith in Christ. This rejection is only partial and temporary. God has not cast off His people, but has overruled their unbelief for the salvation of the Gentiles, who, in turn, shall be the means of the restoration of the Jews. See note at the end of ch. 11.

The practical and hortatory portion of the epistle, which begins with ch. 12, treats of the cultivation of different graces, civil duties, the right of private judgment, and the doctrine of christian expediency in its relations to weak faith.

The epistle is characterized by system, masculine vigor, logical acuteness, copiousness of thought, and depth of feeling. Logic is backed by history, and christian doctrine and precept are illumined from the Prophets and Psalms. Neither personal feeling nor national sentiment is allowed to turn the keen edge of truth. The opening theme - all alike under sin - is evolved with remorseless sternness. The picture of the moral condition of the pagan world is the work of an eye-witness, and is terrible in its stark realism. Yet the logic is aglow with intense feeling, which rises at times toward the level of the Ephesian epistle. The emotion is as deep as in Second Corinthians, but less turbulent. The irony of that epistle is almost wholly absent. The opening of the ninth chapter is a veritable sob. The personal expressions are affectionate and laudatory, but the companion and friend who appears in First Thessalonians, Philippians, and Philemon, mostly gives place to the apostle and teacher. The powerful dramatic element in the epistle is overlooked in the popular impression of a hard theological treatise. It appears in the forensic moulds in which the great spiritual processes are occasionally cast; in the embodiment of the antagonism of sin and holiness in a personal struggle; in the introduction of objections as by an interlocutor; in the vivid contrasts of life and death, spirit and flesh, bondage and freedom, condemnation and acquittal: in the impersonation of the whole creation groaning and travailing for deliverance from the bondage of corruption.

The epistle must be grasped entire. No portion of the New Testament lends itself to more dangerous distortions of truth through fragmentary use. No one of Paul's epistles is so dependent for its just effect upon the perception of the relation of its parts to the whole. Its logic and its feeling are inseparable. It answers the highest test of eloquence in stimulating emotion with profound thought, and in fusing thought in feeling.

But to acquire such a grasp is no easy task, especially for the English reader. It requires far more than close grammatical analysis, and adjustment of the special theological problems raised by the epistle. The letter must be studied in the light of the whole body of the Pauline writings, and with the largest possible acquaintance with the logical and rhetorical habits of the apostle. The fullness and impetuosity of his thought sometimes render him careless of its arrangement. Suggestions, striking into the main line of reasoning, are pursued with an eagerness and to a length which may easily divert the reader from the principal track. Possible qualifications of a truth are temporarily neglected in the concentration of thought upon a single aspect. It is not always easy to discover where the matter of a parenthesis gives place to the resumption of the main thought; sometimes indeed the parenthesis is carried on as if it were the main thought. The first member of a proposition often acquires a headway which makes him forget to offset it with its complementary member. His antitheses are not always evenly balanced, and one member may be literal and the other metaphorical. Certain expressions depend for their force upon word-plays which cannot be translated, and prepositions are accumulated with reference to shades of meaning which tax the utmost resources of the translator and commentator.

These chapters, as they are the most difficult of Paul's writings, have been most misunderstood and misapplied. Their most dangerous perversion is that which draws from them the doctrine of God's arbitrary predestination of individuals to eternal life or eternal perdition.

It can be shown that such is not the intent of these chapters. They do not discuss the doctrine of individual election and reprobation with reference to eternal destiny. The treatment of this question is subordinate to a different purpose, and is not, as it is not intended to be, exhaustive.

At the time when the epistle was written, this question was not agitating the Church at large nor the Roman church in particular. Had this been the case, we may be sure, from the analogy of other epistles of Paul, that he would have treated it specifically, as he does the doctrine of justification by faith, in this epistle, and the questions of idol-meats and the resurrection in first Corinthians.

Such a discussion would not have been germane to the design of this epistle, which was to unfold the Christian doctrine of justification by faith, as against the Jewish doctrine of justification by works.

The great question which was then agitating the Church was the relation of Judaism to Christianity. Paul declared that Christianity had superseded Judaism. The Jew maintained, either, that the Messiah had not come in the person of Jesus Christ, and that Christianity was therefore an imposture, or that, admitting Jesus to be the Messiah, He had come to maintain the law and the institutions of Judaism: that, therefore, entrance into the messianic kingdom was possible only through the gate of Judaism; and that the true Christian must remain constant to all the ordinances and commandments of the law of Moses.

The discussion in these three chapters fits perfectly into this question, It is aimed at the Jews' national and religious conceit. It is designed to show them that, notwithstanding their claim to be God's elect people, the great mass of their nation has been justly rejected by God; and further, that

God's elective purpose includes the Gentiles. Hence, while maintaining the truth of divine sovereignty in the strongest and most positive manner, it treats it on a grander scale, and brings it to bear against the very elect themselves.

What Is the Place of These Chapters in the Order of the Argument?

Notwithstanding these facts, the Jew claimed that because he was a Jew God could not reject him consistently with His own election and covenant promise. If the Gospel were true, and Jesus really the Messiah, the promises made to the Jewish people, who rejected the Messiah, were nullified. Or, if the election of God held, Israel was and forever remained the people of God, in which case the Gospel was false, and Jesus an impostor. “Thus the dilemma seemed to be: either to affirm God's faithfulness to His own election and deny the Gospel, or to affirm the Gospel, but give the lie to the divine election and faithfulness.” (Godet.)

In studying Paul's treatment of this question, mistake and misconstruction are easy, because the truths of divine sovereignty and elective freedom require to be presented in their most absolute aspect as against man's right to dictate to God. The parallel facts of man's free agency and consequent responsibility, which are equally patent in these chapters, are, at certain points, thrown into the shade; so that, if the attention is fastened upon particular passages or groups of passages, the result will be a one-sided and untruthful conception of the divine economy, which may easily run into a challenge of God's justice and benevolence. The assertion God must act according to my construction of His promise and decree, can be met only by the bare, hard, crushing counter-statement God is supreme and does as He will, and has the right to do as He will. This assertion, we repeat, does not exclude the element of individual freedom; it does not imply that God will do violence to it; it is consistent with the assumption of the most impartial justice, the most expansive benevolence, the tenderest mercy, the purest love on God's part. The argument merely sets these elements aside for the time being and for a purpose, only to emphasize them at a later stage. As Meyer aptly says:

That the factor of human freedom has full scope in the divine economy is too obvious to require proof. It appears in numerous utterances of Paul himself, and in the entire drift of Scripture, where man's power of moral choice is both asserted, assumed, and appealed to; where the punishment of unbelief and disobedience is clearly shown to be due to man's own obstinacy and perverseness. Were this not the case, if human destiny were absolutely and unchangeably fixed by an arbitrary decree, the exhortations to carry out our own salvation, to obedience and perseverance in rightdoing, the cautions against moral lapse, the plain suggestions of the possibility of forfeiting divine blessings, the use of the divine promises themselves as appeals to repentance and holiness, the recognitions of the possibility of moral transformation, would assert themselves as a stupendous farce, a colossal and cruel satire.

It must suffice for us that these two factors of divine sovereignty and human freedom are both alike distinctly recognized in Scripture. Their interplay and mutual adjustment in the divine administration carry us out of our depth. That matter must be left with God, and faced by man with faith, not with knowledge. That there is a divine election - the act of God's holy will in selecting His own methods, instruments, and times for carrying out His own purposes - is a fact of history and of daily observation. It appears in the different natural endowments of men; in the distribution of those natural advantages which minister to the strength or weakness of nations; in the inferiority of the Ethiopian to the Caucasian; in the intellectual superiority of a Kant or a Descartes to a Chinese coolie.

Such election must needs be arbitrary; not as not having good and sufficient reasons behind it, but as impelled by such reasons as are either beyond human apprehension or are withheld from it in God's good pleasure. All that we can say in our ignorance of these reasons is: God did thus because it pleased Him. Certain it is that, could we penetrate to these reasons, we should come, in every case, at last, upon perfect wisdom. and perfect love, working out along hidden lines to such results as will fill heaven with adoring joy and wonder.

The Course of the Argument

This we shall follow in detail through ch. 9, and in general outlines through chs. 10 and 11.

This last statement, on its face, appears to be the assertion of a rigid, inexorable predeterminism. But let it be at once said that Paul commits himself to no such theory. For to interpret this passage as meaning that God takes deliberate measures to harden any man against holy and gracious influences, so as to encourage him to sin in order that He may show His power in destroying him, is:

1. To ascribe to God the most monstrous cruelty and injustice, according to the standard of His own revealed character and law.

2. To make God the author and promoter of sin.

4. To contradict the facts in Pharaoh's own case, since God gave Pharaoh abundant warning, instruction, and call and inducement to repentance.

The key-note of the discussion must be kept clearly in mind as shaping this particular form of statement. To repeat: Paul is striking sharply at the assumption of the Jew that God must dispense messianic blessing to him, and must not exclude him, because he is a Jew. Paul meets this with the bare statement of God's sovereign right to dispose of men as He will. He does not ignore the efforts which God makes to save men from blindness and hardness of heart, but the attitude of the Jew does not call for the assertion of these: only for the assertion of God's absolute sovereignty against an insolent and presumptuous claim.

And yet the operation of these forces did not exclude moral agency or moral freedom. No irresistible constraint compelled Pharaoh to yield to this pressure toward evil. His power of choice was recognized, assumed, and appealed to. He could not plead ignorance, for God instructed him through Moses. He could not plead doubt of God's power, for God wrought before his eyes an unexampled series of wonders. If any “visitings of nature” could have power over him, the misery of his slave population was before his eyes. Only when all these influences had been repelled, and all opportunities for yielding scornfully rejected, did God have recourse to judgment. God raised up Pharaoh in order to show His power; but two opposite exhibitions of God's power in Pharaoh were possible. If he had yielded, he would have been a co-worker with God in the evolution of the Jewish commonwealth. God's power would have been displayed in the prosperity of his kingdom, as it was through the presence of Joseph. He resisted, and God's power was terribly manifested in his torment and final destruction.

The fault of interpretation at this point lies in construing Paul's answer as a counter-argument; whereas Paul does not entertain the objector's words as an argument at all. He neither admits, denies, nor answers them as an argument. His reply is directed solely at the objector's attitude as a challenger of God. It is a rebuke of the creature for charging his sin upon the Creator. Paul is not dealing with the objector's logic, but with the sublime impudence of the objector himself. He is not vindicating God against the charge, nor exposing the falsity of the charge itself.

For if this answer of Paul, with the similitude of the potter and the clay, is to be taken as an argument for God's right to harden men at His arbitrary pleasure, then Paul is open to rebuke quite as much as his opponent. For, in the first place, the answer is a tacit admission of the Jew's premise, and, in the second place, regarded as an answer to an argument, it is a specimen of the most brutal dogmatism, and of the most fallacious and shallow logic, if it can be called logic at all. This is the case, in brief. The Jew. “God hardens at His arbitrary will and pleasure. If, therefore, He hardened me so that I could not believe, He is to blame, not I. Why does He find fault with me for not believing? If He is supreme, who can resist His will?” Paul. “Suppose He did harden you so that you could not believe, what have you to say about it? Shut your mouth! God does as He pleases with you. You are simply a lump of clay in the hands of a potter, and must be content to be what the potter makes you.”

From this point of view it must be said that the objector has the best of it, and that Paul's answer is no answer. Regarded as an argument, it is an argument from an analogy which is no analogy. Man, on God's own showing, is not a lump of senseless clay. He is a sentient, reasoning being, endowed by God with the power of self-determination. God Himself cannot and does not treat him as a lump of clay; and to assert such a relation between God and man made in God's image, is to assert what is contrary to common sense and to God's own declarations and assumptions in Scripture. The objector might well turn upon Paul and say, “Well, then, if man is only a lump of clay, and therefore without right or power to reply, who, pray, art thou that repliest for God? Thou art, on thine own showing, a lump of clay like myself. If clay cannot and must not reason nor answer, what is the peculiar quality of thy clay which entitles thee to speak as God's advocate?”

It is quite safe to say that Paul is too good a reasoner, and too well acquainted with the character, the word, and the economy of God as displayed in the history of his own race, to be betrayed into any such logical absurdity as this; too thoroughly humane, too mindful of his own deep doubts and questionings, too transparently candid to meet even a conceited and presumptuous argument with a counter-argument consisting of a bare dogma and a false analogy. Paul does not admit that God made the Jew sin. He does not admit that God made the Jew incapable of believing. He does not admit that the responsibility for the Jew's rejection lies anywhere but with himself.

Yet even the figure of the potter and the clay, properly understood, might have suggested to the angry Jew something beside the thought of sovereign power and will arbitrarily molding helpless matter.

The Potter and the Clay

The illustration is a common one in the Old Testament, and it is reasonable that Paul's use of it should be colored by its usage there.

This is on the same line with the hardening of Pharaoh's heart. It is ascribed to the direct agency of God. But immediately there follows the statement of their own responsibility for their sin. The people have removed their heart from the Lord and worship Him with the lips only. Therefore, God will proceed to do marvelous and terrible works among them. O your perverseness! Think you can hide your counsel from God? “Surely your turning of things upside down shall be esteemed as the potter's clay, for shall the work say of him that made it, 'He made me not?' or shall the thing framed say of him that framed it, 'He hath no understanding?'” In other words, why do men think that they can escape God by hiding their purposes from Him? Shall God (the potter) be accounted as clay (the man)? Shall man ignore the fact that he was made by God, and act as if God had no understanding? The parallel between this utterance and that in Romans 9 will be evident at a glance.

Along with these declarations of absolute sovereignty, which silence the lips of men, stand exhortations which assume the power of free choice. “I said not unto the seed of Jacob 'Seek ye me in vain.'” “Assemble yourselves and come.” “Let them take counsel together.” “Turn ye unto me and be ye saved.”

By all these Old-Testament passages the idea of God dealing with men as lifeless clay, shaping them to eternal life or death according to His arbitrary will, is contradicted. The illustration points away from God's causing unbelief, to God's bearing with man's voluntary and persistent disobedience, and to His making of him the best that can be made consistently with divine justice and holiness. So far from accentuating rigid narrowness of purpose, arbitrary and inexorable destination of individuals to honor or dishonor, the illustration opens a vast range and free play of divine purpose to turn evil to good, and to shape men into obedient and faithful servants through divine chastisements. The potter does not make vessels in order to shiver them. God does not make men in order to destroy them. God ordains no man to eternal death. He desires to honor humanity, not to dishonor it; and the fact that men do become vessels unto dishonor, merely proves the power which God has lodged in the human will of modifying, and in a sense defeating, His sovereign purpose of love. He “will have all men to be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth;” yet Christ comes to His own, and His own receive Him not, and He weeps as He exclaims, “Ye will not come unto me that ye might have life.”

This could easily be shown from the case of the Israelites them selves and of Pharaoh.

Did not this endurance imply opportunity to repent, and assume that destruction was not God's arbitrary choice, but theirs?

Still further, what if God, through this same endurance, was working, not only to save the Jewish people if possible, but also to carry out a larger purpose toward a people which, in His eternal counsels, He had destined for the glory of the messianic kingdom?

Here He introduces the subject of the inclusion of the Gentiles in the messianic kingdom. God is merciful in carrying out His will, but in His mercy He none the less carries out His will. Both His sovereignty and His mercy will be vindicated in His making a people for Himself from the Gentiles and from the believing Jews. What has Israel to say? The word of God has not been brought to nought by his rejection. The principle of divine selection which operated in Abraham and Jacob is carried out in the selection of believing Israel from the unbelieving mass, and in the call of the Gentiles. The elective purpose of God was broader than Israel thought. In choosing Israel God was contemplating the salvation of the world, and did not abdicate His liberty to reject unbelievers, or to call others not Jews.

The reason why the Jews were rejected was because they did not seek after the righteousness which is by faith, but clung to the law, and sought to be justified by its works. The Gentiles, who had no revelation, and who therefore did not seek after righteousness in the New-Testament sense, nevertheless attained it, accepting it when it was offered, and not being hindered by the legal bigotry and pretension of the Jew; but Israel, following after the law, which, in itself, is holy and just and good, and which was intended to lead to Christ, pursued it only as an external standard of righteousness, and on the side of legal observance, and so found a stumbling-block in the very Messiah to whom it led them.

Chapter 10

Thus the argument is, Israel is responsible for its own rejection. In blind reliance on its original election, it has claimed a monopoly of divine favor, has made a stand for legal righteousness, and has rejected the gospel message of salvation by faith. It has thus repelled the offer of a free and universal salvation. For this it is without excuse. It was warned by its own Scriptures of the danger of being superseded by the Gentiles, and the salvation of Christ was offered to it along with the Gentiles by Christ's ministers.

Chapter 11

In ch. 9 it is shown that when God elected Israel He did not abjure the right to reject them for good reason.

In ch. 10 this reason is shown to be their unbelief.

The question now arises: Is this rejection complete and forever? Paul proceeds to show that the rejection is not total, but partial; not eternal, but temporary; and that it shall subserve the salvation of mankind and of the Israelitish nation itself.

In virtue of His free grace displayed in His original election, God has not left the nation without a believing remnant. The elective purpose holds, though operating in a way different from Israel's vain and narrow conception of its nature and extent. The preservation of this remnant is a matter of God's free grace, not of Israel's merit.

It is to be observed that, in those very chapters, the full responsibility of those who are punished is asserted; and that, in citing the Psalm, Paul renders the Hebrew for those who are in security by the words for a recompense, thus indicating a just retribution.

(10:16-11:24) The Gentiles, however, are warned against entertaining contempt for the Jews on account of their own position in the messianic kingdom. However lapsed, Israel still retains the character of God's holy nation impressed in its original call; and this original call, represented in the fathers, implies its future restoration. So far from despising them, the Gentiles are to remember that they themselves are not the original stock, but only a graft; and to take warning by the history of Israel, that the called may be rejected, and that they, by unbelief, disobedience, and rebellion, may, like Israel, forfeit their high privilege. “If God spared not the natural branches, take heed lest He also spare not thee.” “Behold, therefore, the goodness and severity of God: on them which fell, severity, but toward thee goodness, if thou continue in His goodness; otherwise thou also shalt be out off” Israel, too, shall be restored to its place in God's kingdom, graffed in again, if they continue not in unbelief; much more, since they are natural branches, and the tree is their own native stock.