An All-Sufficient Reason

Wuo hath saved us, and called us with an holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began; but is now made manifest by the appearing of our Saviour Jesus Christ, who hath abolished death, and hath brought life and immortality to light through the gospel. A.V.

Who did save us, and did call us with holy calling, not according to our works but according to his own purpose, and to the grace which was given us in Christ Jesus before eternal times began, but which was manifested in the event (vv) through the appearing of our Saviour Christ Jesus, annulling death as He did, and casting light upon life and immortality through the Gospel. Str. Pavt is still intent upon lifting Timothy’s soul 2 Tim. i. aloft to the full courage of faith. To do so to the 9, IO. utmost he here carries him backward and upward, Redemption

in Purpose to the deep past of eternal Love, and to that supreme and in Act. crisis when the Love unveiled itself in the facts of our redemption. Let the troubled and almost broken servant of God, seeing toil, sorrow, and solitude before him, recollect the sovereign grace which had thought of him before the universe began to be. Let him remember that in that most ancient ‘covert of the Almighty’ the believing Church, and he as one of its members, had been already provided for ‘in Christ Jesus,’ his Surety and Head. Then let him think on that great stream of historical mercy which had fiowed for his salvation from those hidden springs. Let him grasp again the absolute fact that D 49

2 Tim. 1
9, 10.

How the

Gospel meets

our Needs.

‘ Jesus died and rose again,’ the Son of the Father’s love, the Saviour of the believer’s being. Let him reflect that death, which seemed not only to darken but to ruin everything round him, was itself a thing for him ‘annulled’; its actual extinction was now secured in Christ. Let him gaze on the now certain glories of a ‘life’ present already within him and soon to burst into open ‘immortality’; remembering that this was now no half-seen thing, dimly visible at best, as in the comparative dusk of the Old Testament revelation; no, it was now ‘brought out into the light’ (so we may paraphrase the radiant Greek); it was made plain for faith to see, as faith rested on a victorious Saviour, risen again to die no more.

In the power of these supreme truths, while he ‘fanned his grace-gift into flame,’ Timothy was to walk, even through his valley of tears, like one who already

‘Saw as in a vision
The land Elysian,
And in the heavenly City heard
Angelic feet
Fall on the golden flagging of the street.’

We have a noble illustration here of that characteristic of the Gospel, its power to bring to bear the supreme and inmost truths of eternity upon the most concrete and practical experiences of time. For labours alike and for sorrows, for the things which seem to fill the path of the pilgrimage so often with stones and thorns, not to speak of snares, the Gospel delights to give us this antidote, at once so loving and so sublime, the revealed facts of an eternal Purpose,

An All-Sufficient Reason

the long-prepared and now for ever finished Sacrifice 2 Tim. i. and Victory of the very Son of God. It is content 9 10. with no prosaic secret in which to meet even our

most prosaic needs. It understands those needs in

all their depressing reality. But it knows how to transfigure not only us but them, to sanctify the

pilgrim and also to glorify the pilgrimage, with the

light and with the holy fire of an eternal love, embodied in a Saviour historically risen and now

alive for evermore.

It is moving to see St. Paul thus, in his last He repeats messages, taking up again, one by one, very briefly, Meccare with little of his old wealth of words but with all the certainty of the prophet, the truths which glowed so brightly as he unrolled them in other days to the Romans, the Galatians, the Ephesians. He soars once more in the mysterious upper light of that Purpose which willed the salvation of sinners before the first star, the first nebula, the first film or tremor of what we call matter, came to be. He sees there a sovereignty, the sovereignty of love, granting to us sinners, foreseen in our awful fall, a rescue and a bliss which indeed was ‘not according to our works’; wholly uncaused by one shadow of meriting will or meriting act in us; to be explained only and for ever by the Love that willed it. He hears ‘the pleasant voice of the Mighty One’ calling, ‘with a holy calling,’ the lost sinner to his Lord and Life; that ‘ calling’ which means here, as always in the Epistles (see e.g. 1 Cor.

i, 23-28), the invitation which does not only reach

the ear but decides, with tenderest magnetism, the

will. He sees the wonderful store of ‘grace suf-Q; Io. ficient,’ ‘given us in Christ Jesus’; lodged for us in Him (a safe Depository!) and then disclosed, liberated, conveyed to us, ‘through His appearing’ for us here in His great triumph over sin and death, so that the eternal life itself shines on us, a celestial sunrise, from His empty sepulchre.

So the aged Apostle, beside his own grave, bids his beloved one live already ‘in the heavenly places’ and beyond the tomb. There, through that same grace, in our own day of trial, we too will live, ‘waiting for the adoption’ (Rom. viii. 23).