Verse of the day · September 15
Why does Paul break into praise at the end of Romans 11?
Every other kind of riches has a bottom you can see.
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O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!
Romans 11:33
Paul has spent the greatest part of this chapter reconciling one thing with the divine goodness: God's own people had, in the main, not received the message, and outsiders had. He has taken it in three parts — the casting off of the Jews, the calling of the Gentiles, and a purpose to take the Jews in again in due time — and he has just written that God shut them all up in unbelief, so that he might have mercy upon them all. Then the argument stops, and what comes out of him is a cry, uttered as one astonished.
He is not a man short of information. He had the mysteries of grace by revelation, had been caught up into the third heaven, and had heard things unutterable. If a depth was unsearchable and past finding out by so great a man as the apostle, John Gill reasons, how much less is it to be fathomed by anyone else. He was as well acquainted with the mysteries of the kingdom of God as ever any mere man was, and yet, Matthew Henry writes, confesses himself at a loss in the contemplation. Despairing to find the bottom, he humbly sits down at the brink and adores the depth. Those who know most, he adds, are most sensible of their short-sightedness.
Both pictures in the verse are water. Depth in the Scriptures is said of anything vast and incomprehensible: as the abyss or the ocean is unfathomable, so the word stands for what words cannot express. Men's riches of all kinds are shallow, Henry says, and you may soon see the bottom; God's riches are deep, and thy judgments are a great deep. Past finding out is anexichniastoi, he notes, and it means what cannot be traced: God leaves no prints nor footsteps behind him, and does not make a path to shine after him. Albert Barnes finishes in the same element, with a path laid in the sea and the waves closing immediately behind it. It is known that he has passed, but there is no way of tracing his goings.
The trail belongs to something narrower than God in general. The exclamation is not so much about the perfections of the divine nature, Gill says, nor even about the display of them in creation and providence; it is about the effects of them, the counsels and decrees of God, so wisely laid as not to fail of their accomplishment. The judgments here are his decrees or plans, and the ways are the method by which he carries them into effect.
The commands of God are sometimes called his judgments too, and those are all plain, and may be easily searched out in his word. Henry keeps the two sorts apart with a road: the judgments of his mouth, and the way of our duty, are plain and easy, and it is a high-way; the judgments of his hands, and the ways of his providence, are dark and mysterious. Paul asks in the next line who has known the mind of the Lord, and elsewhere answers that believers have the mind of Christ; so though we do not know the mind of the Lord, if we have the mind of Christ we have enough.
Gill treats the two nouns as one and the same thing. Adam Clarke divides them: wisdom refers to the designs of God, knowledge to the means he employs to accomplish them. The designs are the offspring of infinite wisdom, and therefore they are all right; the means are the choice of an infinite knowledge that cannot err. So a man may safely credit the goodness of the design and rely on the accomplishment of the end without following one step of it. The scheme just given in the chapter is one such design: salvation coming to the Gentiles through the fall of the Jews, and the restoration of the Jews standing to the Gentiles as life from the dead. These are things out of our reach and comprehension.
Paul had been discoursing at large of the counsels of God concerning man, sifting the point with a great deal of accuracy. After all of it he concludes with the acknowledgment of the divine sovereignty, in which alone the mind can safely and sweetly rest. This is, Henry writes, if not the scholastic way, yet the Christian way, of disputation: whatever are the premises, let God's glory be the conclusion. When we come to talk of the divine counsels and actings, it is best to turn our arguments into awful and serious adorations.
He never does get to the bottom of it. The chapter ends in a doxology: to whom be glory for ever, Amen. The glorified saints, who see furthest into these mysteries, never dispute. They praise to eternity.
Drawn from Matthew Henry, John Gill, Albert Barnes, Adam Clarke, the Geneva Bible notes and the Jamieson-Fausset-Brown commentary. How these teachings are made