"With Him we are gone up on high, Since He is ours and we are His; With Him we reign above the sky, We walk upon our subject seas!"
In his lofty flights of thought the apostle always has some practical and homely end in view. The earthly and heavenly, the mystical and the matter-of-fact were not distant and repugnant, but interfused in his mind. From the celestial heights of the life hidden with Christ in God (ver. 6), he brings us down in a moment and without any sense of discrepancy to the prosaic level of "good works" (ver. 10). The love which viewed us from eternity, the counsels of Him who works all things in all, enter into the humblest daily duties.
Grace, moreover, sets us great tasks. There should be something to show in deed and life for the wealth of kindness spent upon us, some visible and commensurate result of the vast preparations of the gospel plan. Of this result the apostle saw the earnest in the work of faith wrought by his Gentile Churches.
St Paul was the last man in the world to undervalue human effort, or disparage good work of any sort. It is, in his view, the end aimed at in all that God bestows on His people, in all that He Himself works in them. Only let this end be sought in God's way and order. Man's doings must be the fruit and not the root of his salvation. "Not _of_ works," but "_for_ good works" were believers chosen. "This little word _for_" says Monod, "reconciles St Paul and St James better than all the commentators." God has not raised us up to sit idly in the heavenly places lost in contemplation, or to be the useless pensioners of grace. He sends us forth to "walk in the works, prepared for us,"--equipped to fight Christ's battles, to till His fields, to labour in the service of building His Church.
The "workmanship" of our Version suggests an idea foreign to the passage. The apostle is not thinking of the Divine art or skill displayed in man's creation; but of the simple fact that "God made man" (Gen. i. 27). "We are His _making_, created in Christ Jesus." The "preparation" to which he refers in verse 10 leads us back to that primeval election of God's sons in Christ for which we gave thanks at the outset (i. 3). There are not two creations, the second formed upon the ruin and failure of the first; but one grand design throughout. Redemption is creation re-affirmed. The new creation, as we call it, restores and consummates the old. When God raised His Son from the dead, He vindicated His original purpose in raising man from the dust a living soul. He has not forsaken the work of His hands nor forgone His original plan, which took account of all our wilfulness and sin. God in making us meant us to do good work in His world. From the world's foundation down to the present moment He who worketh all in all has been working for this end--most of all in the revelation of His grace in Jesus Christ.