"_And was raised up because of our justification_;" because our acceptance had been won, by His deliverance up. Such is the simplest explanation of the grammar, and of the import. The Lord's Resurrection appears as, so to speak, the mighty sequel, and also the demonstration, warrant, proclamation, of His acceptance as the Propitiation, and therefore of our acceptance in Him. For indeed it _was_ our justification, when He paid our penalty. True, the acceptance does not accrue to the individual till he believes, and so receives. The gift is not put into the hand till it is open, and empty. But the gift has been bought ready for the recipient long before he kneels to receive it. It was his, in provision, from the moment of the purchase; and the glorious Purchaser came up from the depths where He had gone down to buy, holding aloft in His sacred hands the golden Gift, ours because His for us. A little while before he wrote to Rome, St Paul had written to Corinth, and the same truth was in his soul then, though it came out only passingly, while with infinite impressiveness. "If Christ is not risen, idle is your faith; you are yet in your sins" (1 Cor. xv. 17). That is to say, so the context irrefragably shews, you are yet in the guilt of your sins; you are still unjustified. "In your sins" cannot possibly there refer to the moral condition of the converts; for as a matter of fact, which no doctrine could negative, the Corinthians _were_ "changed men." "In your sins" refers therefore to guilt, to law, to acceptance. And it bids them look to the Atonement as the objective _sine quâ non_ for that, and to the Resurrection as the one possible, and the only necessary, warrant to faith that the Atonement had secured its end. "_Who was delivered up; who was raised up._" When? About twenty-five years before Paul sat dictating this sentence in the house of Gaius. There were at that moment about three hundred known living people, at least (1 Cor. xv. 6), who had seen the Risen One with open eyes, and heard Him with conscious ears. From one point of view, all was eternal, spiritual, invisible. From another point of view our salvation was as concrete, as historical, as much a thing of place and date, as the battle of Actium, or the death of Socrates. And what was done, remains done. "Can length of years on God Himself exact, And make that fiction which was once a fact?" [55] In Uganda, 1893. [56] We attempt thus to represent the perfects, κεκένωται, κατήργηται. [57] Read οὗ δὲ not οὗ γάρ. [58] It is impossible to convey in English the point of the word ἔθνη here, with its faint reference to the _Gentiles_ (in the sense common in later Judaism), spiritually "naturalized" among Abraham's descendants. [59] Observe the characteristically _fragmentary_ quotation, which assumes the reader's knowledge of the context--the context of the stars. Compare Heb. vi. 14, which similarly quotes Gen. xxii. 16, 17.