Romans 2:12

Romans 2:12

(with Romans 5:20)

The Doctrine of Sin.

In these passages we have stated or implied St. Paul's doctrine concerning sin.

I. Sin is boldly represented to have issued from the action of God, to have come to pass in some sense through Him; He and His operation are assumed to have been in some sense answerable for it. Speaking of Jews and Gentiles as comprehending between them the entire human world, St. Paul says, "God hath concluded them all in disobedience," or, literally, has shut them all up together into disobedience, the image underlying the word being the collection and enclosure of a multitude in one spot to which they have been driven or conducted. Thus, the idea of the writer would not be, by any means, that God had pronounced them all guilty of disobedience, or proved and convicted them of disobedience; such may be his thought elsewhere, but here his thought is evidently that God had somehow involved them in disobedience, had somehow occasioned their subjection to it.

II. How can the Pauline view of sin be justified? This ugly and miserable thing how can it be shown and seen, as occurring under the plan, as accompanying and inevitably bound up with the process of the work of God? Sin comes originally from the Divine awakening in man of that spiritual germ, that moral element in which he surmounts and transcends the animal, from the Divine superinducing upon his first lower nature of a second higher nature; and it is a temporary accompaniment of the conflict between these two, an incident in the course of progress towards a proper and happy adjustment of the relations between them. The end of the Lord is a glorious humanity, emerging at length from the confusion and travail, and the history of the ages is the history of the war between that flesh and spirit, that old and new man which He has conjoined in us for the accomplishment of His grand end. He means to have mercy on all, or He would not, could not, have sown in us what has led to the concluding of all in sin.

S. A. Tipple, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxxi., p. 104.