our nature as we inherit
it, before we have had the opportunity of personal wrong doing. But
the application of the phrase by St. Paul is to describe rather the
state of _actual_ sin in which Jew and Gentile alike 'naturally' lived.
It implies not that God hated them, for in the whole context St. Paul
is emphasizing 'the great love wherewith he loved them'; but that there
was a necessary moral incompatibility between them as they then were,
and God as He essentially and permanently is. God is so necessarily
holy that His being is, and must be, intolerable to the unholy. It
must be the case that at the bare idea of the divine coming, 'sinners
in Zion' should be 'afraid,' and should say one to another, 'who among
us shall dwell with the devouring fire, who among us shall dwell with
everlasting burnings[4]?' God necessarily presents Himself as a terror
to the godless; and from the point of view of God that means that our
sinful nature is the subject of His necessary wrath. He resents the
{97} perversion, the spoiling, of His own handiwork in us. He cannot
tolerate uncleanness, rebellion, unbelief. This wrath of God, in the
case of those whose wills are set to 'hate the light,' is directed
against men's persons. But so far as sin is only in our natures, and
is something of which we are the unwilling subjects, it appeals only to
God's compassion to lead Him to apply effective remedies. His wrath is
so far against sin, not against sinners; and none could know better
than these Asiatic Christians what lengths of resourcefulness and
self-sacrifice the divine compassion had gone in order to redeem men
from its tyranny. Thus St. Paul continues:--

But God, being rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us,
even when we were dead through our trespasses, quickened us together
with Christ (by grace have ye been saved), and raised us up with him,
and made us to sit with him in the heavenly _places_, in Christ Jesus:
that in the ages to come he might shew the exceeding riches of his
grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus: for by grace have ye been
saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: _it is_ the gift of
God: not of works, that no man should glory. For we are his
workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God afore
prepared that we should walk in them.

[Sidenote: _The method of redemption_]

Here is St. Paul's description of the method of God in dealing with men
when they