← Back to the beginning of The Alien Righteousness
We could not have a better illustration of this than in the passage now before us. The whole of it is suffused with an emotion which is far deeper and far purer than polemic zeal. Nowhere do Paul’s polemics burn more fiercely. Nowhere is his language sharper or his expressions more “extreme.” But nowhere is it clearer that his heart is set on higher things than on the refutation of errorists whom he would correct; and nowhere is it less legitimate to pare down his expressions to the level of mere controversial violence. The Apostle as he opened the third chapter of this Epistle was contemplating drawing it to a close. “Finally, my brethren,” he says, using the familiar formula for introducing the concluding words,—“finally, my brethren,” he says, closing the letter, as is his wont, with some striking fundamental thought that would abide in the mind of his readers as a last message to their souls,—“finally, my brethren, let your joy be in the Lord.” This is no mere formula of farewell, as some, misled by the “rejoice”—which is to be sure an ordinary formula of epistolary salutation—have imagined. The conception of Christian rejoicing is a fundamental note of this letter, and here it has all the emphasis that this gives it. And it is not merely the idea of rejoicing that is here emphatic, but the added idea of rejoicing “in the Lord.” “Finally, my brethren,” says the Apostle, “let your joy be in the Lord.” Ah, this is where the Apostle’s heart is as he opens this paragraph—this is the thought he would leave with his readers. “Let your joy be in the Lord”—not in yourselves, but in the Lord. We should say, perhaps, rather, Let your boast be in the Lord; let your glorying be only in the Lord. It means fundamentally the same thing. The Apostle would bring his letter to a close by reminding his readers of the very core of the saving proclamation. They are saved—not self-saving souls. Let them rejoice, let them continually joy, in the Lord!
This is not a new theme with the Apostle. It is rather one of his favourite subjects, this of boasting in Christ Jesus. He is conscious that he harps on it. But he is not ashamed of harping on it; it is the heart of the Gospel and he is not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ. But he makes a quasi-apology for so harping on it. “I know this is repetitious,” he says at once, “but I like to say it, and it may be useful to you.” “To write the same things to you, to me on the one hand is not irksome, but to you on the other it is safe.” It is a joy to Paul to cry over and over and over again, “Let your joy be in the Lord”; in Him only put your boasting; in Him alone do your glorying; and it is a safe thing to impress on his readers. At the mention of this, the floods of polemics rush in. Paul remembers those who were endangering the purity of this attitude of dependence on the Lord alone in his flocks, and remembering them, what can he do but burst out with renewed warnings?
So the letter does not close, after all, at this point, but instead, we have the sharp exhortation, “Mark ye the dogs! Mark ye the evil workers! Mark ye the concision!” Why does his polemic burn so hotly against these men? Simply because they endangered that attitude which he was impressing on his readers, and in which the whole Gospel consisted for him—the attitude of entire dependence on Christ to the exclusion of everything in themselves. Accordingly his rapid and clearly cut speech leaps at once into the reason: “Mark ye the concision,—the concision I say, the mere imitation; for we are the circumcision, the real sealed ones to God, who worship by the Spirit of God and boast in Christ Jesus, and put no confidence in the flesh.”
We do not need to follow the subsequent turns of the polemic into which the Apostle here enters. It is enough for us to note that the language abundantly confirms the interpretation of the drift of the paragraph and the intent of its opening words on which we have insisted. Paul exhorts his readers “to let their joy be in the Lord,” and he repudiates the concision on the express ground that their claims are antagonistic to a purely spiritual worship, to boasting in Christ Jesus alone and the withdrawal of all confidence from the flesh. This is that to which the Apostle is engaged in exhorting his readers therefore—boasting in Christ Jesus alone and the removal of all confidence in the flesh. We all know how richly he develops this idea in the following words—enumerating his own high claims in the flesh and asserting roundly that all of them are but as refuse to him in the matter of salvation. Christ Jesus is all. The language of our text is but the elaboration of this vital idea in other and more precise language. All that he is, all that he has sought after, all that he has done,—though from a fleshly point of view far superior to what most men can appeal to—all, all, he counts (not merely useless but) loss, all one mass of loss, to be cast away and buried in the sea, “that he may gain Christ and be found in Him.” On the one side stand all human works—they are all loss. On the other hand stands Christ—He is all in all. That is the contrast. And this is the contrast re-expressed more formally in our text: “not having my own righteousness that is out of law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness that is from God on faith.”
The contrast is between the righteousness which a man can make for himself and the righteousness that God gives him. And the contrast is absolute. On the one, in the height and the breadth of its whole idea—we cannot exaggerate here—Paul pours contempt, as a basis or, nay, even the least part of the basis, of salvation. On the other, exclusively, he bases the totality of salvation. The outcome is, that not merely polemically but fundamentally, he founds salvation solely on an alien righteousness, with the express exclusion of every item of our own righteousness. The whole contents of the passage demands this as Paul’s fundamental thought.
Now, it is not necessary for us, on this occasion, to stop to analyze in its details Paul’s thought; to show by detailed exposition how utterly the righteousness rejected by him is rejected and how exclusively the righteousness laid hold of by him is trusted in, and how completely the ground of our trust is cleansed by Paul from every scintilla of human works. It will suffice for the present to accept the discrimination he makes in the large and to try to realize how fully to him the totality of the Gospel lay just in this discrimination. The Gospel, to Paul, consists precisely in this: that we do nothing to earn our salvation or to secure it for ourselves. God in Christ does it all.
It is easy, of course, to brand such an assertion as immoral. Men were not slow to brand it as immoral in Paul’s day, and men are not slow to brand it as immoral (“unethical” is their way of phrasing it) to-day. “What,” they say, “we are to do nothing! Christ does it all! Nothing depends on us! Not even our believing! Then, let us eat, drink and be merry!” They do not stop to consider that the repetition against those who draw this doctrine from Paul’s teaching, of precisely the same charge that was urged against Paul, is the last thing which could be needed to prove that Paul has not been misunderstood when he is interpreted as advancing by set purpose just this doctrine. Paul does not meet the charge by explaining that he wishes his words concerning the exclusion of all our righteousness from the ground of salvation to be taken cum grano salis; but by explaining that, being saved not indeed “out of works” but certainly “unto good works,” we cannot walk in sin and yet be saved. This positing of a new antithesis, not out of works but unto good works, clinches the essence of his doctrine, and may be adopted by us as the sole defence it needs against the accusations of men.
You remember how Mr. J. A. Froude in a famous essay adduced as a speaking evidence of the “immorality of Evangelicalism,” the well-known revival hymn beginning:
“Nothing either great or small, Nothing, sinner, no; Jesus did it, did it all, Long, long, ago.”
What was particularly offensive to him was the assertion that
“Doing is a deadly thing, Doing ends in death”;
and the consequent exhortation
“Cast your deadly doing down, Down at Jesus’ feet, Stand in Him, in Him alone, Gloriously complete.”
It is, nevertheless, the very cor cordis of the Gospel that is here brought under fire. The one antithesis of all the ages is that between the rival formulæ: Do this and live, and, Live and do this; Do and be saved, and Be saved and do. And the one thing that determines whether we trust in God for salvation or would fain save ourselves is, how such formulæ appeal to us. Do we, like the rich young ruler, feel that we must “do some good thing” in order that we may be saved? Then, assuredly, we are not yet prepared to trust our salvation to Christ alone—to sell all that we have and follow Him. Just in proportion as we are striving to supplement or to supplant His perfect work, just in that proportion is our hope of salvation resting on works, and not on faith. Ethicism and solafideanism—these are the eternal contraries, mutually exclusive. It must be faith or works; it can never be faith and works. And the fundamental exhortation which we must ever be giving our souls is clearly expressed in the words of the hymn, “Cast your deadly doing down.” Only when that is completely done is it really Christ Only, Christ All in All, with us; only then, do we obey fully Paul’s final exhortation: “Let your joy be in the Lord.” Only then do we renounce utterly “our own righteousness, that out of law,” and rest solely on “that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness of God on faith.”