im. He who has
begun the good work will perform it. Trouble and anxiety within or
without need not alarm him. He has but to keep himself, joyful and
confident, in God's hands. The movement of God upon him and within
him, as it proceeds out of the eternal mind, so it passes securely on
into the eternal issue. No doubt St. Paul would say they might tear
themselves by utter wilfulness out of the divine hand, as for the time
at least the Jews had mostly done. But short of that they are safe.
The movement of God, the protection of God, the purpose of God, is upon
them and around them, and goes before them preparing their way,
individually and corporately.

This is the moral use St. Paul makes of the doctrine of predestination.
And it is to do egregious violence to his general teaching to suggest
that he entertained the idea of persons created with an opposite
predestination--to eternal misery. St. Paul is dealing here only with
what God has already shown of His purpose in the actual vocation of
some. Ultimately {320} he assures us all men share the divine purpose
for good[22]. But, on the other hand, he never suggests that they may
not resist it, or allows us to say that so far as concerns themselves
they may not defeat it.

[1] iii. 17-19; v. 29.

[2] xxiv. 5-7.

[3] i.e. Messiah, son of David, son of Pherez (Ruth iv. 18).

[4] _Bereshith Rabbah_, xii. 5.

[5] Isa. lxv. 17, lxvi. 22; cf. 2 Pet. iii. 13; Rev. xxi. 1; Acts iii.
21.

[6] _Book of Enoch_, xlv. 4, 5.

[7] St. Paul's word 'creation' (verses 30-22) is used in St. Paul's
sense in Wisd. xvi. 34, xix. 6.

[8] 2 Pet. i. 16-19.

[9] Cf. Latham, _Service of Angels_ (Cambridge, 1894).

[10] Eph. ii. 5.

[11] Rom. viii. 24.

[12] 1 Cor. xv. 2; 2 Cor. ii. 15. (The present tense in both cases.)

[13] Rom. v. 9, 10; xiii. 11: cf. 1 Tim. iv. 16; 2 Tim. iv. 18.

[14] Andrew Murray's _With Christ in the School of Prayer_ (Nisbet
1891), p. 71.

[15] 2 Cor. xii. 8: cf. Phil. i. 22, 'What I shall choose I wot not.'

[16] Verse 34.

[17] Not 'the saints' in the Greek.

[18] 1 Tim. ii. 1.

[19] Rom. xi. 32; 1 Tim. ii. 4.

[20] Amos iii. 2: cf. Ps. i. 6; Hos. xiii. 5; Matt. vii. 23.

[21] Cf. Hort on 1 Pet. pp. 19, 80.

[22] See especially Rom. xi. 29-33.

{321}

DIVISION III. Sec. 10. CHAPTER VIII. 31-39.

_Christian assurance._

St. Paul has brought his great argument to an end. And before he
passes to its manifold appli