Be it known therefore unto you, that the salvation of God is sent unto the Gentiles.
The salvation of God
I. The salvation of the gospel is “the salvation of God.”
1. It emanates from God. It is the product of His power and wisdom. It is the great display of His holiness and of His justice. It stands eternally secure in His unchangeableness and in His truth. It is the stream of mercy that floweth from the God of mercy.
(1) There was everything in man, to check the stream of God’s mercy. If we look at him as falling in the first Adam, it was so. But besides the fall, in which we were all involved, there was man’s own personal sin. It is no right view of sin, to look at it merely as a disease, as a source of misery. It is rebellion against God; it is opposition to His holiness; it is provocation to His justice.
(2) There was much in God to check it. One knows not of any one perfection belonging to Jehovah, that did not close the door of mercy, save only His love. But it is His grace that opened the door; and it is His grace that keeps that door open.
2. It is the gift of God. He gives it “without money and without price.” It is His munificent, magnificent gift in Christ Jesus, to the very chiefest of sinners.
3. It is the salvation of God in our nature; who, if He had not been man, could never have suffered--and if He had not been God, could never have merited; in whose atonement there is all the glory of Deity, and in whose humanity there is all the perfection of obedience.
4. It is “the salvation of God,” and the Spirit of God can alone convey it to our hearts. It is not education, reason, argument, the tears of parents, moral influence, but the Spirit of God.
II. This salvation is worthy of God.
1. God never can act below Himself. All that He does, He does worthily. His Book of creation is a Book in which He manifests forth His glory; so with His Book of Providence. But it is in “the salvation of God,” we read that glory in the most distinct and wondrous characters.
(1) There we see perfections that never would have been known but for this salvation. Man might have guessed, imagined, that there was that goodness in God that would blot out sin; but never could he have known it, in all the mysteries of creation, and in all the wonders of Providence.
(2) There we find the perfections of God in all their harmony. A note may be beautiful; but how much more a chord! Many chords may be beautiful; but how much more all those chords in one grand chorus! And what is the glory of that chorus, that doth unite God’s glorious perfections in one song--“Glory be to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will towards men!” See how it meets all the varied cases of sinners. Not one so vile, but there is a pardon in Jesus enough for him. None so unrighteous, but there is enough in Jesus for his righteousness. No case so hopeless, but there is hope here.
2. But this salvation is worthy of God as being most just.
(1) This is its peculiarity, and sets it apart from all false religions in the world.
(2) It is infinitely holy. The doctrines, the promises, the precepts, are all holy. If God’s people are chosen “to be holy.” If they are redeemed, it is that they may be “redeemed from all iniquity.”
(3) The only source of all solid happiness?(J. Harrington Evans, M. A.)
Salvation etymologically considered
There are few things which distinguish the gospel as the spiritual power and significance which it has been able to infuse into the common possessions of human nature. The revelations of God have not been so much creative as adaptive, taking the things which already exist, and giving to them a fresh meaning and force. Nothing illustrates this more than the way in which the truth of the gospel has infused itself into human vocabularies. It brought new ideas which the apostles clothed in the old words to which they gave a fresh meaning. Human speech would have been weakened, and would have lost its wealth, but for what the gospel has done for the dictionary. Take the word salvation.
I. Salvation is safety. A man rescued from imminent peril is safe, saved, has found salvation. Jesus Christ has come to make us safe.
1. The peril from which salvation delivers us is that of the penalties of broken law, and that of the inner results of the nature which has been abused by sin.
2. Christ brings salvation because--
(1) He has so acted in relation to external law, in respect of guilt, that we are delivered from the penalty and are safe.
(2) But there is not only this justifying of man in the sight of God. Christ has set man right in his internal relations by delivering him from sin.
II. Salvation is health. The word is connected with “salutary” and “heal.” Jesus Christ is called the Great Physician, not simply because He went about healing the body, but because He is the Physician of the soul. The former is the symbol of the latter. He takes away sin which is the soul’s disease, and restores the proper condition of our spiritual nature. How little do we feel the power of this full salvation! We want to escape hell. What we need to escape is the sin sickness of the soul, that restlessness, that feverishness, that wild disturbing passion of our lower nature.
III. Salvation is wholeness. When a man was healed the old English version says he was “made whole.” And Christ went about making men whole.
1. There is no health if there be no wholeness. There is no perfect cure of the nature if Christ does not restore it to its completeness. Sin is a maimed condition of our nature. Christ comes as the Minister of mind, soul, and body.
2. Let us be careful in our application of this gospel to the wants of our times, to the growth of our Church, to our individual character, to our families, to the life of society and of the State, that we do not present a maimed gospel.
IV. Salvation is happiness. The word was employed as a greeting. Salve. It is a salutation, a wish for joy. We have not come to its full meaning until it has swung itself round this whole sphere of human nature in blessedness and gladness. There is a place for sorrow, but if the gospel does not take you beyond sorrow you have only partly learned Jesus. God is the God of joy and not of sadness. (Ll. D. Bevan, D. D.)
The Churches warned
I.These Jews, like us, had long been in possession of exclusive privileges, and accustomed to survey without emotion the great mass of mankind deprived of them. They were in exclusive possession of the Scriptures, a pure worship, and an authorised ministry. So are Christians now, as compared with millions of heathen, and the Protestant Churches, in comparison even with millions of nominal Christians. But let us not, in looking at the resemblances, overlook the marked points of diversity. The exclusive privileges of the ancient Jews were theirs by an express Divine appointment. Their adherence to the old restrictions, after the set time for their removal had arrived, was indeed an act of flagrant unbelief and disobedience; but until that time came they were shut up to the necessity of standing aloof. Does our situation correspond with this? The enclosures which have shut us in are human structures, reared by selfishness and cemented by apathy, and differ wholly from the walls by which the ancient Zion was encompassed.
II. Note the influence of long-continued and exclusive privileges on the opinions and belief of those enjoying them. Advantages possessed by a few for the good of the many may easily come to be regarded as prerogatives belonging to the few, to the entire exclusion of the many. This was the case with the Jews, and it could not fail to produce a general distortion in their doctrinal views. They who could not be persuaded, that “the law must go forth from Zion, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem,” could never be expected to appreciate the truth, that the law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul. They who believed that the truth or mercy of Jehovah existed for themselves alone, could surely never have obtained a glimpse of what His truth and mercy are. Because they were favoured, for a time, with an exclusive revelation, they forgot the very end for which they had received it, and forgetting this, were naturally led to take distorted views of that religion which they thus regarded as exclusively their own forever. So may we, so have we, reaped precisely the same fruit from precisely the same seed, so far as we have sown it. But more specifically take--
1. The great doctrine which divided the apostle of the Gentiles from his Jewish hearers. Common to both was a professed belief in Moses and the prophets, and in the promises of Messiah as the Saviour of His people. But they fatally diverged at an essential point. Paul believes that the Messiah has already come, and that Jesus of Nazareth is He, and as a necessary consequence, that the restrictions of the old economy are at an end, and the diffusion of the true religion through the world the first great duty of God’s people. They, on the contrary, regard the advent of Messiah as still future, and the barrier between Jews and Gentiles as still standing; which indeed led them to look for a Saviour who had never been promised, and could never come. Instead of one who should destroy all national restrictions, they expected a national deliverer. This dream of national advancement could be verified only at the cost of other nations. Their mistake as to the Messiah, therefore, tended directly to cherish a spirit of national exclusiveness, and to suppress all rising of a Catholic charity. And the same connection still exists, and will betray itself between a Jewish doctrine and a Jewish practice. For, although it is impossible that any Christian should embrace the very error of the old Jews, it is easy to embrace one of a similar description by inadequate conceptions of the Christian system. There is great danger of our looking through the wrong end of the telescope, and seeing that diminished which we ought to have seen magnified, the world reduced to a nut shell, and our own house or village swelled into a world. We must begin as the apostles did with the idea of a world to be converted, and from this descend to the particulars included. And then remember that, unlike the Jews, Christians are not intrusted with the oracles of God as an exclusive deposit, even for a time. We have them that we may diffuse them. A great and effectual door into the heathen world is opened, and the voice of God is calling us to enter it. Everything, both at home and abroad--in the teachings of God’s Word, and in the leadings of His providence--in the condition of the heathen and our own--makes us as free to think and act for their conversion, as the old Jews were paralysed and crippled with respect to it. And yet, with all this difference in our favour, may we not be still too Jewish in our spirit and our conduct, with respect to those less favoured than ourselves? The old middle walls of partition have fallen at the blast of the trumpet, but may we not rear up others in their stead?
2. The resemblance which may possibly exist between the cases, with respect to providential retributions. What means that solemn and repeated declaration of the great apostle, that he turns away from the Jews to the Gentiles? That his personal ministry should now take that direction, or that the Gentiles should, in spite of Jewish prejudice and bigotry, become partakers of their once exclusive privileges? This is not enough. There is an evident allusion, not only to a change, but to an interchange of character and state--not only to the culture of the desert, but to the desolation of the vineyard. Left to his cherished notions of hereditary sanctity and safety, and his dreams of a Messiah yet to come, Israel has vanished from his place among the living, to haunt the nations as the restless ghost of a departed people, or to glide about the graveyard where his hopes lie buried, while the dry bones of many nations, who appeared to slumber without hope, have been raised again and clothed with flesh, and new life breathed into their resurrection bodies. To apply this let us dwell on the map of Christendom, as it was at the death of the last apostle, or even fourteen hundred years ago--looking particularly at the western coast of Asia Minor and the northern coast of Asia--not only with their present desolation, but with the actual state of Christianity in Britain and in those climes which have neither name nor place upon the chart of ancient knowledge, is it certain that this process of rotation has been finally arrested? Is it not possible, to say the least, that the vicissitudes yet future may sustain the same relation to extraordinary privilege and culpable abuse of it, as those which are already past? I see not, therefore, why we should refuse to apply the last words of the text to ourselves, in the way of warning. If we are conscious of inadequate exertions and of cold affections in this great cause, let us think of Israel according to the flesh, and of what he was and what he is--remember that if we do not value Christianity enough to share it with the heathen, they may yet become possessed of it at our expense. (J. W. Alexander, D. D.)
The design of the Acts
The last testimony of the apostle throws light on the structure and design of this book. The history is designed to exhibit the transition of the kingdom from Israel to the whole human family. When this transference has been completed, the historian’s work is done. Here, accordingly, the record abruptly closes. The final note, as in other melodies, is the keynote; Christ rejected by Israel to whom He came, is offered to the Gentiles. Henceforth all distinctions are levelled except one, the distinction between those who believe and those who believe not in the Son of God. There is now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus, whether they be Jews or Gentiles, bond or free. (W. Arnot, D. D.)
