S. PAUL'S GOSPEL OF JESUS

PAUL’S GOSPEL OF JESUS TEXT: But I went into Arabia. - Galatians 1:17. The harmonists are accustomed to place in parallel columns what are called the four gospel narratives of the life of our Lord Jesus Christ, by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. They ignore the greatest and the completest of the gospels-the Gospel of Paul. No harmony of the life and teachings of our Lord may be regarded as at all complete that does not place parallel with the other gospels what Paul had handed down of the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. In comparing these different histories of our Lord we are much impressed with the way in which the several authors received the information which they impart in their respective histories. We know that Matthew and John were eye-witnesses, being of the twelve, being with our Lord for three years of His earthly life. But Mark was not one of the twelve. He can not write as an eye-witness. According to tradition he gets his facts mainly from Peter, and hence, it is called the Gospel of Peter by Mark. Luke, who was not an eye-witness, in the beginning of his history of our Lord is careful to state with what painstaking care he gathered up the historical material from authentic sources and embodied it in his treatise. The Apostle Paul received his gospel, not as Mark did, from Peter’s teachings; he did not know the Lord Jesus Christ in the days of His flesh, and hence can not give His history as Matthew and John gave it. He does not attempt at all to write a history after the method of Luke. But he expressly declares that the gospel which he received from our Lord as to its facts and as to its doctrines was by direct revelation from the risen Lord. No angel, as in the case of the giving of the Law, was the medium of communication.

Matthias was nominated by the other apostles to take the place of Judas, and hence, instrumentally, men had something to do with his being put into the apostolic office. But the Apostle Paul declares that he did not receive his office from men. He did not gather it from histories. He was not taught it as you are taught it. But directly, immediately, face to face with God, he received every fact which he records, and every doctrine which he teaches. Our Lord stated to the twelve just before His crucifixion that it was impossible for Him to give them a complete revelation, because they were not able to receive it. There were many additional things concerning His kingdom that needed to be set forth, but they, in their state of mind, were incapable of appreciating and understanding the full revelation of God to man. It was not a matter of accident, therefore, but of the divine prevision, that the complete revelation of God’s will to man should be made through another and independent apostle. When we read Acts 9:1-43, with that text only before us, the natural impression is made upon the mind that just as soon as Saul of Tarsus was converted he entered into Damascus, and after the three days of darkness and his baptism, he straightway commenced to preach in Damascus. That its the natural impression, but we must compare scripture with scripture, and when we read the first chapter of the letter to the Galatians we are perfectly sure that he did not preach in the city of Damascus until after his return from Arabia. It was three years after his conversion before he began to preach. And why? He had nothing to preach. He was ignorant as yet in every true sense of the matter of the gospel, and wholly unprepared to state it in its final and complete revelation.

We now get at the object of his going into Arabia. As the twelve companied with our Lord Jesus Christ for three years to gather from His lips what He taught and how they must teach it, go it was necessary for Paul to be segregated from his fellows, to go alone in nature’s deepest solitude and there meet his Lord, and in lesson after lesson gather by direct revelation what he was to preach.

It was not only necessary that there should be time for the communication of the matter of his ministry, but according to human nature as it is, there must be time for him to assimilate the new doctrine that burst upon his mind with the suddenness of a clap of thunder out of a cloudless sky. He must think through it. He must compare this new revelation with that which had seemed to him to be the very perfection of Law. No man by sudden wrench, by abrupt transition, passes from one state of life into another state of life. He had to receive the discipline from his Master before he could go and preach His gospel to others. But why should he retire into Arabia? He had been, as he tells, a Pharisee of the Pharisees. The most sacred event of Jewish history to him was the giving of the law on Mount Sinai through the ministration of angels; and the highest embodiment of human excellence, in his judgment, was Moses, who received the law and who gave it to the chosen people. No name under heaven had been to him as the name of Moses. The creation of the world itself was regarded as inferior to the giving of the Law. The deluge that swept over the earth in devastating power, was not comparable, in his judgment, to the desolation that would follow the infraction of that law upon Mount Sinai. He saw it now in all its true relations. He saw it as a covenant to which there were two parties ¾ God upon the first part and the children of Israel as a nation upon the second part, and they jointly and severally entered into this covenant, which was announced upon Mount Sinai. This law was not merely a standard of right. It was to them the way of life. They took on themselves its obligations. They admitted that they forfeited its privileges and incurred its penal censure, subjecting themselves to all of the depths of its condemnation, if they failed by one jot or tittle to observe all the things that are written in the law to do.

Now, this man, more than any other man of his own or any preceding or succeeding age, was profoundly convinced that Arabia, on Mount Sinai, while that mountain trembled and smoked and was illumined by the flashes of lightning accompanying the storm that rocked the entire plain, was the scene of earth’s greatest transaction. I say that Mount Sinai was to him the most sacred spot on earth. And if an entirely new conception is to enter into his mind; if an entirely new way of life is to be presented, not merely for his acceptance, but that he might preach it to the whole world; if a way of life that disregarded the national distinctions established at Mount Sinai; a way of life that leaps over all barriers of race and caste and custom and age and sex and condition, and touches the whole wide world upon the plane of its simple humanity-if that way of life was to be preached, the place for him to learn was at Mount Sinai.

We hear him saying, "Oh! must I never again preach Moses? Must I go before my own people and tear down the sacred wall of partition that shut out the Gentile world from them, and on whose top they had delighted to stand, wrapping the mantle of their exclusiveness about them, and looking down with scorn upon the ’Gentile dogs’ upon the outside? If I must do this, let me go to the very place where the angels came, where Israel stood before God. Let me listen again to the lingering echoes of the mighty thunderings of that eventful day. Let my imagination bring up before me as a living thing the enormous events of that great transaction. And let the Lord Jesus Christ tell me what it all meant "What is the significance of Mount Sinai? What means the law? Wherefore serveth the law? If I must go out and preach a new gospel that overturns every cherished and fond recollection of my heart, let me see it plainly; let me think it through, and then I will be prepared to preach."

I am just as sure as of my own existence that the Apostle Paul could not, three days after his conversion, have set forth the gospel which he afterwards preached with so much power. There must be a place for the change. There must be a revelation of the matter which he is, to present to the world. When we read through this letter to the Galatians, he tells us some of the lessons that he learned there in Arabia: that Mount Sinai corresponds to Hagar the bondwoman, and that it gendereth to bondage as her condition gave bondage to her children, and that it answereth to the Jerusalem which now is - that Jerusalem in which he had gloried, that Jerusalem whose feasts he had attended, and in whose celebration he had rejoiced, was even then under the impending doom pronounced upon it by the Son of God.

He learned further, that within the lifetime of a man not one stone of its temple would stand upon another; its streets would be ensanguined with the blood of a million of its citizens; desolation would come upon it without any mitigation for age after age; how long he himself could not exactly tell., But he saw all that under Mount Sinai, and that what had seemed to him to be the very perfection of religion was a system designed of God as a transitory matter, as educational in its nature in order to accomplish certain particular things.

It was added because of transgressions; that is, that written law on Mount Sinai was given in order to discover sin, and not merely to discover it, but to develop it, to incite it, to bring out whatever latent force there was in it, lest people looking at the germ only-not considering the extent if its potentiality ¾ might not be aware of the extremes to which it would go when developed to its logical ends and consequences; in order that sin, under the light of the law, might show itself to be not some innocent and beautiful thing, but uncoil and stretch out its long serpentine length, and grow to its full stature and secrete its poison under the fangs of the serpent and glitter in the basilisk eye of that snake, and when it stood out before men in all of its beastly and ghastly and horrible and devilish form, it would be seen to be sin and exceedingly sinful. That was the object of the law: to discover sin, to develop it, and then to condemn it; to pronounce sentence upon it. There was no way of life in it. It gendered to bondage. It gendered to death. What a message to put into this man’s mouth! What a message to carry back to Jerusalem! To say that this Holy City, with all of its services, with its sacred temple, with its feasts and its ceremonies, with its imposing ritual, with its offering up of sacrifices, with its incense going up like clouds to the sky-that the Holy City, the whole of it, and in its most sacred relations, is no more than Hagar, the bondwoman, gendering to bondage, and that it must be cast out, and then it can net bring by any certificate of its own excellence one single child into the true covenant of God - not one.

There never was such a battle fought in the world as Paul fought on that subject. There were those that still clung to the flesh, and now they prided themselves that they had seen the Lord in the days of His flesh! We hear them saying, "We talked with Jesus. We ate with Jesus. We handled Jesus. We had a personal acquaintance with the Son of God as He walked by the shores of the Sea of Galilee, as He traveled through the villages and cities of Samaria, as He stood upon the streets of

Jerusalem, and in its Holy Temple. And here, according to the flesh, is His brother James. Now because he is the brother of the Lord let us make him the bishop of the church at Jerusalem. Let us make him the first pastor in Christianity, and let his be the deciding voice in any conference concerning the gospel of Jesus Christ." In my judgment there never was a greater danger in the young and rising Christianity than from the pastorate of James at Jerusalem ¾ that James who was the brother of our Lord according to the flesh, and who never did, to the end of his life, get completely out of the Jewish swaddling clothes that wrapped him, who never did see the height of the divine glory of the gospel of his Divine Brother, whom he had never recognized as the Son of God until after His resurrection from the dead.

Now Paul must meet those people and say to them, "I did not know Jesus according to His flesh, and if I had known Him I would forget it. I would put it out of my mind. Henceforth I would no longer know Him according to the flesh. But I have seen my risen Lord. I have seen my glorified Redeemer. I have seen Him no longer with the limitations of Jewish blood, but as crowned King of kings and Lord of lords, and I have received from Him direct the gospel which I preach unto you."

"O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you? What wizard with his enchantments has been able to beguile and seduce you so soon from the true gospel of the Son of God, to induce in you desire to stand again under Mount Sinai and cower there as bondmen under a law which can discover and condemn sin, but cannot blot out sin? O foolish Galatians! I marvel, I marvel that so soon you are turned away." An invasion swept from Gaul, what we now call France, over into Rome, led by Brennus, and captured the city, and later another tribe of this mercurial population crossed the Hellespont into Asia, and there established themselves as a permanent power for many ages; the same people, exactly, from which the Irish and Welsh of the present day are descended; Celts, Gauls, Galatians, quick of apprehension, lively in imagination, soon to see a thing, rapidly to adopt it, and just as speedily to turn away from it. O ye unstable people! Ye mercurial population, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was set forth as evidently crucified before you, why do you turn back to the obsolete and beguiling elements of the world? The gospel of Jesus Christ is meant for man as man, for the barbarian, for the Scythian, for the cultured Greek, for the Roman, for the Jew, for all men. Tear down the walls of the partition that separates the nations and scatter its dust, and bring the long parted, long alienated members of the family of man into one commonwealth of Jesus Christ, and on one broad plane of humanity. That was Paul’s mission. He says, "Now, I did not learn it from Peter. He never had opportunity to tell me that. I never saw him until three years after my conversion. I was only a fortnight in Jerusalem with him at that time. I did not then go up to get any information from him. I wanted recognition on the part of the apostles in Jerusalem, of my gospel and my mission, but not a shred of its authority, not one fact of its history, not one item of its doctrine, came to me through any of them. I got it direct from my Lord. I went to Arabia."

Elijah went there once. He went to that mountain once to study its problems, and I am inclined to think our Lord Jesus Christ went to that mountain; that He, too, looked upon the mountain, when He went into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil, and from that mountain in Arabia, that stood for the Mosaic covenant, our Lord Jesus Christ came back to preach an entirely new gospel.

Now, watch this man when he comes back from his retirement. There is no longer any hesitation. He knows what he is going to preach. He has been three years learning it. He has been receiving revelation after revelation. It was just as clearly mapped out to his mind on his return from Arabia as it was at any later period of his life. You see it in the first letters that he wrote to the Thessalonians, and then to the Corinthians, and then next in order comes this letter, the letter to the Galatians, which Martin Luther made the very sword of the Spirit in bringing about the Reformation in Germany; and then immediately followed his letter to the Romans, in which he embodied the full plan of the salvation which he preached in all of its departments and respective relations. But it was a terrible battle.

He finds when he comes to Jerusalem a chilling reception. Only after Barnabas relates his Christian experience is Paul permitted to go in and out among them. And there in the temple his Lord speaks to him and says, "This is not thy place. I send thee far hence to the Gentiles. You must carry my gospel to the-nations that have never heard this Word, to all of the outlying populations of the earth, and as you go you must tell them who is Jesus. He is God manifest in the flesh; though veiled in the flesh, authenticated by the Spirit; though veiled in the flesh, recognized by the angels; though veiled in the flesh, preached unto the nations; and though veiled in the flesh, believed on in the world, and finally received up into glory." "Yet have I set my King upon the holy hill of Zion." ’The Lord saith unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool."

He tells them that he came to preach that Jesus of Nazareth was the revelation of the Father; that He was the express image of His person; that He was the radiation of His glory; and that by Him the world was created, and that because He condescended to be a bondman, stooped from high heaven to the slavery of earth and became obedient unto death, that God had highly exalted Him and given Him a name above every other name. That at the name of Jesus every intelligence should bow, whether Jew or Gentile, on earth; whether demons in the pit or angels in heaven through whom came the ministering of the law. Every intelligence of the earth should bow to Jesus of Nazareth as King of kings and Lord of lords.

I never got the right conception of the gospel of Jesus Christ until I studied Paul’s life and teachings of Jesus. Then I understood why it was that He looked upon the disciples with such sadness, and complained of blindness, and hardness and slowness of heart to believe, making it impossible for Him to set forth the gospel in its fullness and in its power and in its glory.

We see Paul pass to Antioch, and there, under his ministrations, for the first time after the resurrection of Jesus Christ, an impression was made upon the outside world in a certain direction. I am sure that many people miss seeing how much there is in the fact that the disciples were first called Christians in Antioch.

I say that in Jerusalem Christ’s people never could have been called Christiansnever, because under the leadership of James they kept up the observance of all the temple laws. Under the leadership of James, Christianity was but a Jewish sect, only one of its many schools. But over yonder where Paul went, over into Antioch, the world on the outside saw a strange thing by watching the followers of Paul and Barnabas. They said, "There is a difference between the Jews and these people." And the disciples were called Christians first at Antioch.

Now, if they had been at Jerusalem, they would not have eaten with the Gentiles. There would have been nothing in their external observances that would have created any impression that they were anything but a sect of the Jews. But look! Here at Antioch is a man who has never been circumcised; he has never even been a proselyte of the gate, much less a proselyte of righteousness, and by the power of God he has been converted, and Paul admits him into the kingdom of heaven, without submitting to one Jewish ceremony, and then sits down at the table and eats with him. And just look at them there when they gather and have their love feast! There they all are eating together their common meal, and when they come up to the Lord’s table, every member of that Antioch church, without regard to nationality, partakes in common fellowship of that memorial or ordinance of our Lord Jesus Christ, and those descendants of the kingdom of Antiochus say, "These are not Jews." These outside people say, "These are Christians. Here is something different from anything we have ever seen before in the world." And that very difference evoked the sleeping prejudices at Jerusalem, and deputations came down and wanted to undo the work that had been done, and make these Christians just Christian Jews. They wanted ¾ and as well might they have attempted to dam up the Nile with bulrushes-they wanted to run the great, broad current of eternal life for all men into a narrow Jewish channel. And Paul stood there and said, "You can’t do this. I have seen the Lord. I was at school under Him for three years. I stood under the Mount Sinai, which once rocked with the presence of the angels and thundered with the storm of that great enunciation, and I tell you the law was transitory. The law was but an educator. The law was but a slave to lead you to Christ, and in Christ Jesus there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither male nor female, neither Scythian, bond, nor free, but you are all one in Jesus Christ." And that terrible battle followed, as recorded in Acts 15:1-41, and James, the brother of our Lord, and John and Peter, the apostles, acknowledged that Paul had received an independent gospel, and was sent upon an independent mission that they had no right to supervise it, the proof of whose sermons never had to be submitted to them for revision and emendation, whose statements of life came from inspiration in its perfection. They admitted it and gave the hand of fellowship on it. But that did not end it. Wherever he went the battle had to be fought-in Syria, in Cilicia, in Phrygia. And when from Troas he had crossed the intervening sea in response to an appeal from Europe, and when at night he slept and in a vision looked across the sea, and way over yonder on the European shore there stood up a man and beckoned and pleaded, "Come over into Macedonia and help us," and when he went into Europe and in the Roman colony at Philippi established a church upon the broad principles of humanity, there also he had to renew this fight, and when he passed from Philippi to Thessalonica, and from Thessalonica to Berea, and from Berea to Athens, and from Athens to Corinth, and from Corinth back again to Antioch and all the succeeding tours, everywhere he had to fight the same battle: "I received my gospel direct from the Lord Jesus Christ. It is a complete gospel. Peter is not my pope. It is for all men, and the terms of eternal life are simple enough for a child to understand them."

One man said not long ago, "A proof that your Scriptures are not inspired is this: The best part of them, the most interesting part of them, are the books written by Paul. He wrote about half the New Testament, and nearly the whole of it is based upon a conflict that ended within a few years, with the destruction of Jerusalem. Now if it had been intended as a revelation for all time, why take up so much space to tell about this battle between the law and the gospel which ended with that sensation? What do we care about it now?"

Ah! God is wiser than this questioner, and Paul’s battle was not won when he died. When he was martyred, over his very grave came the same enemy, and in the succeeding ages superimposed upon Christianity the rites and ceremonies and liturgies and priesthood of the Old Testament, and every foot of Christendom today is under the shadow of Mount Sinai. More than half of the professing Christians of the world today look to Mount Sinai rather than to Calvary. That is why so much of the New Testament is given to it. Then again, it is there because it is to be made the instrument of the culminating act of redemption. The last battle that is to be fought, when Israel shall be saved, when the descendants, the children and the kindred of Montefiore and Zangwill, when all of these are to be brought to see, as see they will, that Mount Sinai is the bondwoman, they will turn to the Lord, and the veil that is on their eyes will be taken away, and they will see Jesus, their Messiah. The gospel of Paul is to be the instrument under God for the salvation of the Jewish race.

So, then, the world not only needed that gospel in that form, in the beginning of Christianity, but it was needed in the Reformation; it was needed in the days that brought about the dark ages; it is needed now. And you can seldom now find a man who will get up in the pulpit and preach the gospel that Paul preached; that will allow God by His Spirit to reach the heart.

You may see churches now gathered for a meeting of days, and they will begin to prescribe: "O Lord, we have picked out this man for you to convert. He is worth a half million dollars, or a million. O Lord, we want you to convert this man. He is a great scholar. He is a mighty teacher. His intellectual influence would be worth so much to the church of Jesus Christ. And this lady, Lord - she is a leader of fashion. Her influence among the prominent women of the city is so great. Lord, convert her." When Paul preached he left it to God, and if God chose to convert the hostler instead of the owner of the horses that the hostler curried, Paul took the hostler. And if God converted the servants, Paul took the servants. If God converted those whose chains jangled as they walked, he took those convicts, for he said to them, "Such were some of you. You were thieves. You were liars. You were adulterers." He preached the gospel to the poor, and did not for a moment suppose that Lord Chesterfield was the author of the gospel instead of Jesus Christ. When Paul organized a church, he organized it for the capturing of the cities, and we have fallen short on that. We have turned back from Paul on that. He could go to Ephesus, the capital of Proconsular Asia, with its Temple of Diana, with its festivals, with idolatry fastened on the business interests and tradesmen’s guild; he could go to that city and could call out 10,000 converts in a meeting. And when magic, with her books and other evil literature attempted to overturn the simple gospel that he preached, he saw those books piled in the street and burned, and their sparks going up to tell the stars that the Book of God was prevailing and that the books of the devil were burning.

Something is wrong, radically wrong, with our present method, or else we would not fail to reach the cities. Paul reached Ephesus. He reached Corinth. Paul reached Thessalonica. Paul reached Rome, the imperial city and capital, and the empire was captured by the gospel which he preached.

I think that it would do some of us good to take a trip to Arabia, to go into the wilderness a while for retirement, to learn that repentance toward God and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ is the gospel of life and of eternal salvation to Jew or Gentile. I am glad he went. I am glad that on Paul’s gospel there does not fall the shadow of any other man. I am glad that he had to submit his interpretation to no Jerusalem clique, but that he got it fresh from the Master and gave it to us as our heritage.

One thing I know, brethren, that when God converted me that was the kind of Savior I met ¾ the Lord Jesus Christ ¾ and from that time until now it has seemed to me the highest honor under heaven to hold up before all men, irrespective of their past habits of vice or virtue, irrespective of race, or age, or sex, the Lord Jesus Christ as the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believes in Him. Jonah went to Nineveh at last. The reason that he refused to go the first time was that he knew that God was long-suffering and gracious and forbearing. He knew that if he went and preached and a single man repented God would forgive him, and he plainly told God so. We can almost hear him saying, "That is the reason I would not go. Now, if you had sent me to preach them into hell, I would have gone joyfully, because here in your Book is the prophecy that Nineveh is going to overthrow my people, and I want Nineveh to die, but I knew that if you sent me to preach, they would repent, and then you would forgive them."

Oh! We want to get into the spirit of Paul, that man who by day and night hungered for the salvation of men, of all men, of any man, of any woman, any child, anywhere, no matter how crimson with sin, scarred all over with its defacing marks, groaning under its bondage, bound hand and foot by its fetters.

O imprisoned and imperiled soul, God in Jesus Christ, in one moment of time, can turn you from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God. Oh! If you will go and preach that way, if you will read what Paul said to the elders of the church at Ephesus (let the city churches put that on their walls), and carry out that method, we will capture the cities as Paul captured the cities.

I bless God for the five gospels. I bless Him most of all for the fifth, the last, the complete gospel. I commend it to you, brethren. I commend it to you not only as a lamp to shine on your pathway in the valley of the shadow of death, but as your comfort, your consolation when your heart is riven with sorrow.

I commend it to you as God’s culminating revelation of His unspeakable love, intended to lift you up from the depths of wretchedness and mire of your sin, and to plant your feet upon the firm foundation, the everlasting rock of eternal salvation, and to put in your mouths a new song-a song of praises, that can no more be hushed than you can hush the babbling of a fountain which God has unsealed-a fountain of praise that will seek heaven in its upward trills and in its rhythm and melody, though you may be in a dungeon, and your back covered with stripes, and your feet in stocks, and give you a joy that all outside sorrows in the world can never eclipse. God give it to you to take into your heart the gospel of Paul!