Romans 9:1,2

“ I say the truth in Christ, I lie not, my conscience bearing me witness in the Holy Ghost, that I have a great grief and a continual lamentation in my heart. ”

No connecting particle joins this part to the preceding. The asyndeton is here, as always, the evidence of a lively emotion which breaks, so to speak, the logical bond; but this form attests at the same time with all the more energy the profound relation of feeling which unites this piece to the preceding. And is it not in fact one and the same feeling in the two contrasted aspects, that emotion of triumphant joy expressed at the end of the previous chapter, when, after conducting poor condemned and lost creatures through the righteousness of faith and sanctification by the Spirit, he has brought them to the threshold of glory and the grief which he feels at seeing his Israel loved above all, yet deprived of such blessings? He has just been following a people of elect and glorified ones rising from the midst of fallen humanity, and Israel is wanting from among the number! There is between these two parts a bitter contemplation in which the misery of rejected Israel appears to him like the sombre reverse of the incomparable blessedness of the faithful who are adopted in Jesus Christ.

The apostle does not pronounce the word which expresses the cause of his grief. It is not an oversight, as Reuss thinks; but it costs him too much to pronounce the fatal word; every reader will divine it from his very silence.

The words: in Christ, must be joined to the preceding: I speak the truth, and not to what follows: I lie not. To make Paul say: “in Christ I lie not,” would be to put into his mouth a poor commonplace. Romans 9:2, and especially Romans 9:3, will tell what the fact is which he is concerned to affirm so solemnly.

A man, even a truthful man, may exaggerate his own feelings; but in the eyes of Paul there is something so holy in Christ, that in the pure and luminous atmosphere of His felt presence no lie, and not even any exaggeration, is possible. The parenthesis following: “I lie not”..., might be taken as a second declaration in a negative form, parallel to the affirmation which precedes. But it is difficult in this case to understand what the testimony of his conscience and of the Holy Spirit can add to the security already given by the words in Christ. It seems to me, then, that this parenthesis should be regarded as a confirmation of those first words themselves: “I do not lie in affirming that it is under the view of Christ that I declare what I there say.” It is therefore on this declaration: “I speak in the communion of Christ,” that the testimony of his conscience bears; and even this testimony, as too human, does not suffice. Paul declares that he feels at the same instant, through the Holy Spirit, the whole intimacy of this communion. The σύν, with, in the verb συμμαρτυρεῖν, to testify with, signifies: in concert with my own declaration. “In the mouth of two or three witnesses shall every word be established;” it seems as if Paul wished to confirm his affirmation by a double testimony, that of his conscience and that of the Holy Spirit. Why so much solemnity in entering on his subject? We understand the reason when we think what he has in view: the rejection of Israel. Was he not the man whom the Jews accused of being moved in his whole work by a spirit of hostility to his people? But here is the expression of his real feelings attested by all he counts sacred, however extraordinary what he is about to say (Romans 9:3) may appear.