Romans 13:11-14

In the closing verses of the chapter Paul enforces this exhortation to mutual love as the fulfilling of the law by reference to the approaching Parousia. We must all appear (and who can tell how soon?) before the judgment-seat of Christ, that every one may receive the things done in the body: if the awe and the inspiration of that great truth descend upon our hearts, we shall feel how urgent the Apostle's exhortation is. καὶ τοῦτο : cf. 1Co 6:6; 1 Corinthians 6:8. In classical writers καὶ ταῦτα is commoner. It sums up all that precedes, but especially Romans 13:8-10. εἰδότες τὸν καιρόν : ὁ καιρὸς is not “the time” abstractly, but the time they lived in with its moral import, its critical place in the working out of God's designs. It is their time regarded as having a character of its own, full of significance for them. This is unfolded in ὅτι ὥρα ἤδη κ. τ. λ. ἤδη (without waiting longer) is to be construed with ἐγερθῆναι : “it is time for you at once to awake” (Gifford). No Christian should be asleep, yet the ordinary life of all is but drowsy compared with what it should be, and with what it would be, if the Christian hope were perpetually present to us. νῦν γὰρ ἐγγύτερον ἡμῶν ἡ σωτηρία : for now is salvation nearer us than when we believed, ἡ σωτηρία has here the transcendent eschatological sense: it is the final and complete deliverance from sin and death, and the reception into the heavenly kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ. This salvation was always near, to the faith of the Apostles; and with the lapse of time it became, of course, nearer. Yet it has often been remarked that in his later epistles Paul seems to contemplate not merely the possibility, but the probability, that he himself would not live to see it. See 2 Corinthians 5:1-10; Philippians 1:23. ὅτε ἐπιστεύσαμεν : when we became Christians, 1 Corinthians 3:5; 1 Corinthians 15:2; Galatians 2:16.