God's ways with the nations.
Attention is called to the sentence, "Who, in times past," or in bygone generations, "suffered all nations," or all the heathen, "to walk in their own ways." On this sentence Olshausen writes, "In the first place, Paul contrasts the present time, as the time of the Messiah, with former times, in which the heathen world, with no such light as the Jewish nation possessed, lived on in their own ways. In this thought is to be found the apology for the design of the people of Lystra, so blasphemous considered in itself. But again, this situation of the Gentile world was not sufficient to free them altogether from guilt, for Nature herself, with all the wonderful arrangements which she exhibits, furnished the means of rising to the idea of the true God, who summoned the whole fabric into being."
I. GOD HAD "WAYS WITH THE NATIONS." A common sentiment has long prevailed that God altogether left the heathen nations alone, doing nothing for their intellectual or their moral life, and only preserving their physical being by his providence. It is a sentiment which can only be cherished so long as men do not think, and so long as they limit the teachings of the Divine Word by their prejudices. "The God of the whole earth must he be called," and "all souls are his." If they are his, he must be concerned in their well-being in every respect, and can never have stood aloof from their mental, moral, and spiritual needs. It pleased God to grant a special revelation to the Jews for the whole world's sake; but this does not assume that he gave no revelations at all to others. In comparison, God's ways with the nations may be called a "leaving them to their own devices;" but he watched over them while thus carrying out self-devised plans, and overruled even this to become a kind of preparation for that gospel revelation which could be made to the whole world. Each nation worked out a great experiment; we cannot always be sure what each experiment was, but we can see it precisely in some cases. It may have been—Can man's final good come through his imagination, or through his intellect, or through his artistic taste, or through his governmental faculties, or through his activities and energies? Put generally, we may say that God's ways with the nations were to let them be free to find out for themselves whether in man's own nature there was any power by which he could free himself from sin and secure the perfection of his being. Such an experiment or series of experiments had to be made in the interests of the whole race, and only when the failure of all such experiments was well proved could the revelation of salvation for men by a Divine intervention be made. Man must find out that he cannot save himself before he will be willing to look up and say, "Lord, help me!" The following passage from F. W. Robertson expresses the same view of God's ways with the nations in another and a suggestive form:—"Recollect that the Bible contains only a record of the Divine dealings with a single nation; his proceedings with the minds of other peoples are not recorded. That large other world—no less God's world than Israel was, though in their bigotry the Jews thought Jehovah was their own exclusive property—scarcely is, scarcely could be, named on the page of Scripture except in its external relation to Israel. But at times, figures as it were cross the rim of Judaism, when brought in contact with it, and passing for a moment as dim shadows, do yet tell us hints of a communication and a revelation going on unsuspected. We are told, for example, of Job; no Jew, but an Arabian emir, who beneath the tents of Uz contrived to solve the question to his heart which still perplexes us through life—the coexistence of evil with Divine benevolence; one who wrestled with God as Jacob did, and strove to know the shrouded Name, and hoped to find that it was love. We find Naaman the Syrian, and Nebuchadnezzar the Babylonian, under the providential and loving discipline of God. Rahab the Gentile is saved by faith. The Syro-phoenician woman by her sick daughter's bedside, amidst the ravings of insanity, recognizes, without human assistance, the sublime and consoling truth of a universal Father's love in the midst of apparent partiality. The 'Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world' had not left them in darkness." How this may be applied to God's ways with heathen nations now requires to be thought out. The universal revelation in Christ Jesus yet requires to be universally made known.
II. GOD'S WAYS WITH THE NATIONS WILL BE ULTIMATELY VINDICATED. To their view and to our view there is much that seems to need vindicating. For instance,
1. We are getting fuller and worthier conceptions of the Divine Being himself, which bring a most restful assurance that what he does for all his creatures is more than right, is lovingly right.
2. Philosophy is helping us to a truer knowledge of the individual man, and of the purpose of race and climatic diversities of man, and enabling us to conceive how God may deal with humanity as a whole, and with each part in the interests of the whole.
3. The Christian revelation declares that the mystery of earth will be unfolded by-and-by, and will even pass out of our thought as we contemplate the exceeding glory of its perfected redemption.
4. Christian missions are spreading the one saving revelation of God amongst the nations in a way that assures of the coming fulfillment of our largest hopes. Till the day of vindication fully dawns, we must strive to understand better God's ways, and above all to make full present response to God's grace in Christ Jesus as revealed unto us.—R.T.