Chapter VIII. 12-17 - The
life of sonship.
St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans: A Practical Exposition
by Charles Gore, M.A., D.D.
(Volume I, London, 1899)
We are now in the Spirit. The divine Spirit dwells within
us, and restores our nature to its proper balance by giving us control
over our lower nature. The moral meaning and obligations of such
a condition are plain, and St. Paul proceeds to enforce them. When
our impulses and appetites solicit us to let them have their own way, we
must give them to understand that they are making a claim which we cannot
recognize and which, if we did, would lead us the way of death. On
the contrary, it is these merely physical tendencies – the practices of
the body when left to itself – that we must put to death by the power of
the Spirit. And if we do this we are on the way of life. Why
so certainly? Because we are sons of God – nothing less. Those
who thus act under the Spirit’s guidance are all of them sons of God.
Further if we ask ourselves what sort of spirit we received when we became
Christians, we know that it was not a spirit appropriate to slaves and
calculated to bring us again into a condition of terror under a law.
It was a spirit appropriate to those who have been adopted for sons of
God, and it is in the power of that spirit that we cry out to God by the
name of Abba, Father, in our familiar supplication. We have thus
in our own spirits the sense that we are sons; and behind that and reinforcing
it, the divine Spirit, by putting the word Father into our lips, bears
the same witness. Well then, if we are thus children of God, we have
the child’s prospect of entering into our inheritance. Christ, our
elder brother, has already entered into it, and we shall enter into it
with Him, if we are content to take the Christian maxim for true, and suffer
with Him on this side of death, that we may share His glory beyond.
There are several phrases in this passage which we shall do well to
notice.
1. If by the spirit ye mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall
live. Mortification is absolutely necessary, and at every stage
of the Christian life. It is the carrying into effect in detail of
the fundamental law of our new life – the law which the baptismal ritual
was intended to teach – life by means of death. For the body had
gained the upper hand : it had come to control the weakened spirit.
Therefore the reinvigorated spirit must react upon the body and its impulses.
It must make its government felt, and the physical tendencies must be checked,
pruned, cut back. This is the Christian circumcision. And as
Christ was first born, then circumcised the eighth day; so each new birth
in Christ must be followed by a like circumcision of the luxuriance of
animal appetites. We learn the lesson when we are children: we expect
to be restrained and curbed: and unless we are very foolish we learn the
lesson only more deeply in later life. There is no single faculty
or function of our being which can escape this law. No friendship
can be cemented without mutual self-denial. No marriage, however
founded on affection, can be blessed without the mutual pain of self-repression
and concession. No art or science can be mastered by mere intelligence
without moral discipline. No gift can be consecrated in its natural
luxuriance. ‘Every branch in Christ that beareth fruit, He pruneth
it that it may bring forth more fruit.’
2. As many are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of
God. The New Testament language would have us regard all the
baptized as regenerate and sons of God, but it will not let us mistake
the meaning of this teaching. In any effective sense it is they,
and only they, who are really controlled by the divine Spirit who can call
themselves sons. As St. John says, freedom from sin is the only test
of divine birth [1 John 3:9]. And the best way to make our new birth
effective is to meditate on the gift which we, when we became Christians,
did actually receive. We who, like the first Christians, received
baptism with the laying-on of hands, did then and there receive (such is
the implication of St. Paul’s language – ‘Ye received’ at a particular
time, not ‘Ye have received’) a spirit proper not to slaves but to sons
of God, qualifying us to call on God as our Father, and to co-operate in
the purposes of His kingdom. It remains for us to claim these powers
and privileges of our sonship, and to claim them to the full. Yet
how many anxious-minded Christians of our day would appear to have received
nothing more nor less than the spirit of slaves! They realize their
religion as a restraint, a responsibility, a cause of fear. And such
a servile religion is no doubt better than a hypocritical sense of sonship
unaccompanied by the fear of sin. The wise man remarks that ‘a servant
that dealeth wisely shall have rule over a son that causeth shame, and
shall have part in the inheritance among the brethren’ [Prov 17:2].
But the spirit of the slave is not what we are called to. If we had
more religion, if we would give it freer course, if we would consent to
think less of our circumstances and more of God and His gifts, there would
be less fear and more joy both in our work and our prayer.
3. Abba, Father. Our Lord, speaking in Aramaic, the
vernacular of Palestine, is recorded by St. Mark in His hour of agony to
have said Abba. And even in the Greek-speaking churches of St. Paul’s
day, that sacred word was still used side by side with its Greek equivalent,
according to the witness of this and the parallel passage, Gal. 4:6.
St. Paul appears to be referring to some occasion on which the Church was
in the habit of calling on God with the Aramaic and Greek words side by
side, and it is more than likely that he is making a definite reference
to the Lord’s Prayer, as recited by the Roman and Galatian Christians in
the form prescribed for us in St. Luke’s version, beginning ‘Father.’
The retention by Greek Christians of an Aramaic word in a familiar religious
formula, is like the later retention by the Latins of the Greek prayer, Kyrie eleison, or the retention by us of the names
Te Deum, Magnificat,
&c. St. Paul’s meaning would come home to us better if we were
to read – ‘whereby we cry Our Father.’
4. ‘The Spirit himself beareth witness with our spirit, that
we are children of God.’ This is a very important passage for
showing that St. Paul did not in any way confuse the divine Spirit and
the human, and that in his belief the divine indwelling did not in any
way annihilate the human personality. Even in the closest union God
remains God and man man. But the passage is at least as important
as opening up a special avenue of insight into St. Paul’s conception of
Christian worship and spiritual life generally. He speaks first of
a witness of the individual spirits of Christians to the fact of their
divine sonship; and he distinguishes from it something greater, a witness
of the divine Spirit, supporting the human. What exactly does he
mean by this witness of the divine Spirit as distinct from the consciousness
which – under the leading of the divine Spirit – Christians are led themselves
to form? How are we to distinguish the Spirit’s witness from the
witness of our own hearts inspired by Him? Is it merely that the
‘consciousness (of the individual) is analyzed, and its data are referred
partly to the man himself, partly to the Spirit of God moving and prompting
him?’ I do not think that a closer examination will lead us to be
satisfied with this.
The witness of the divine Spirit is apparently fixed by the context
to consist in the supply to us of the phrase ‘Abba, Father’. It is
the Spirit ‘in whom we cry’ (or, as the passage in the Galatians says,
‘who Himself comes into our hearts crying) Abba, Father,’ who thus, by
suggesting this cry to us, bears witness with our own spirits that we are
sons of God. Thus the supporting witness of the Spirit lies especially
in a certain mode of address to God or formula of prayer which He supplies.
But this ‘cry’ or prayer the Spirit supplies to the hearts of the Church
as a whole. The whole Church, and not the individual soul only, is
the Spirit’s home. ‘Know ye not that ye are (corporately) a temple
of God, and the Spirit of God dwelleth in you’ [1 Cor. 3:16] ? The
witness of the Spirit is thus a witness borne in the whole Church, which
supports and sustains the witness of the individual soul. This is
a thought full of consolation. The life of the individual Christian
reposes upon, and is infolded by, the larger life of the whole body.
Behind his own spiritual consciousness, with all its vicissitudes, lies
the inspired consciousness of the whole body, the witness of the Spirit;
and this in part expresses itself in inspired formulas – the Lord’s Prayer,
the psalms, the creeds of the divine name, the Church’s worship; and these
formulas, representing our best self, are to sustain us in our fluctuations
of feeling, and carry us over our periods of dryness and insensibility.
‘The Spirit Himself beareth witness with our spirit.’
5. ‘The inheritance’ of the children of God, which the Old Testament
begins by meaning the Holy Land, was spiritualized into meaning [ed. note:
or rather seen for what it truly pointed to] the kingdom of the Messiah.
‘They shall inherit the land for ever’ [Isa. 60:21]: ‘the meek shall inherit
the earth’ [Matt. 5:5]. And this kingdom of the Messiah is an eternal
kingdom: ‘they shall inherit eternal life’ [Matt. 19:29] – that is to be
our inheritance as the chosen people of the Lord. And it is an inheritance
not only incorruptible but inexhaustible: all share in it to the full of
their capacities, and the abundance of those who share diminishes nothing
from the richness that remains.
And into that inheritance Christ is ‘the way.’ His life shows
the law by which it is to be won. It was a current Christian saying
– ‘a faithful saying’ – ‘if we died with Him, we shall also live with Him;
if we endure, we shall also reign with Him’ [2 Tim. 2:11]. And whenever
we are inclined to complain at anything we may have to suffer, there is
one thought capable at once of quenching all murmuring, because of its
indisputable reasonableness – ‘It is enough for the disciple that he be
as his Master.’
