Romans 3:29

THE GOD OF THE GENTILES

‘Is He the God of the Jews only? is He not also of the Gentiles? Yes, of the Gentiles also.’

Romans 3:29

These words give us the basis of the Apostle’s missionary career. God is not the God of the Jews only, that is, He belongs equally to all men. On this principle must ultimately rest the claims of the missionary enterprise. This great truth that God belongs to all men involves two others—

I. The infinite dignity and worth of every human being.—The dignity of man is to be judged not by his present condition, but by what he is capable of. Now to say that God belongs equally to all men, implies that there is in every man a capacity for knowing and loving God, and it is this capacity which confers the highest and most lasting dignity and glory on our nature. It was the gospel that first taught the value of individual man, thereby placing all men on an equality, and it did this by revealing that in every human soul there is a capacity for all that is great and noble, which manifests itself even in the worst and most degraded. Now it is this fact alone which will lead us to be interested in our fellow-men.

II. The unity of the race.—For if God belong to all, all are one, children of the same Father. It was thus the gospel fused the antipathies and jealousies of mankind. The whole system of the old world was based on inequality and separation; for it is the mournful result of sin, not merely to separate man from God, but to separate him from his fellow-man as well. Hence every circumstance was seized upon as a pretext for setting up some new barrier: race, creed, culture, social position, and even sex, were all made the lines of division and exclusion. The gospel not only leaped over these barriers, but broke them down. They utterly disappeared before it. All classes met and joined hands around the table of the Lord. The fire of His love burned to ashes their feuds and antipathies. This fact, familiar as it is, brings with it responsibilities and duties which we are still unwilling to admit.

Illustration

‘Sydney Smith sneered at the early advocates of missions as “apostates of the loom and the anvil.” He put Carey and such as he in the pillory, and then hurled at them the mockery of a pitiless ridicule. To-day the Church, and the world too, bows in homage before the name and memory of these humble working men who left the shoemaker’s bench, the weaver’s loom, the blacksmith’s forge, the shepherd’s calling, like the primitive apostles called from the lake-side and the tax-collector’s bench, to undertake a world’s evangelisation. The apostates of the anvil and the loom have become the apostles of a new and grand era of worldwide missions, and Sydney Smith is now in the pillory. The retributions of history are sometimes very rapid, and the Nemesis of Providence has a scourge of scorpion stings.’