d in all St. Paul's epistles, beginning
with his earliest to the Thessalonians, He is God's Son, His own or
proper Son[11]. His blood, as shed for our ransoming, is God's own
blood, or {23} (possibly) the blood of one who is 'His own'[12]. He
subsisted eternally in the form, or essential attributes, of God, and
in possession of equality with Him; and He possesses now, as glorified
in humanity, the divine name of universal sovereignty, the object of
universal worship[13]. Therefore He is in the strictest sense divine;
and whatever or, I should say, whoever is essentially divine and proper
to the being of God, can rightly be called God. For, indeed, there is
nothing in the strict sense divine but God Himself. It was then merely
a question of time when Christians would become sufficiently familiar
with the new revelation of the threefold name to apply the word God to
the Son and the Spirit as naturally as to the Father. And there is
nothing really to surprise us in St. Paul here applying it to
Christ[14]: nothing certainly to warrant us in doing violence to the
sentence, in order to obviate the conclusion that he did so, by putting
a full stop after 'flesh,' and then supposing an abrupt exclamation 'He
who is over all is God blessed for ever[15]!'

{24}

Let it be recognized, then, that St. Paul here plainly speaks of Christ
as 'over all,' i.e. in His glorified manhood, and also as 'God blessed
for ever'--that is, as the one proper and eternal object of human
praise; and that he speaks of Him again elsewhere[16], as 'our great
God and Saviour.' It was only because He was essentially and eternally
'God' that He could, in our manhood and as the reward of His human
obedience, be exalted to divine sovereignty and be 'over all.'

4. In the rest of the section St. Paul is arguing with a Jew, who
makes the claim that because of the divine covenant God is bound to the
Israelites, and to all Israelites for ever. 'We have Abraham to our
father,' and that is enough[17]. The higher prophetic spirit of the
Old Testament had already realized that God's election of Israel was a
challenge to her to prove herself worthy of an undeserved
privilege[18], and that, though a faithful remnant would {25} never
fail, yet unfaithfulness in the bulk of the nation would bring
destruction upon them and loss of God's favour[19]. The prophetic
spirit had realized also that God's servant Israel was not 'called' for
his own selfish honour's