Godbey's Commentary - Acts - Romans - Enter His Rest

the dynamite of conviction, regeneration and sanctification through their humble instrumentality.
Reader, will not you be one?
17. “For the righteousness of God is revealed in him from faith unto faith,” i.e., from the faith
of justification unto the faith of sanctification, and downward to glorification, whether through
translation, if so fortunate as to be on the earth when the Lord takes up his Bride, or resurrection,
bearing us on to an eternal participation of the transfiguration glory. “As has been written: but the
just shall live by faith.” This is the battle shout of God’s saints in all ages and dispensations. So long
as the lion’s mouth and the burning stake kept Christianity low down at the feet of Jesus, she was
more than a match for the world, the flesh and the devil, and so proved the first three centuries.
When the Emperor Constantine suddenly promoted the church from bloody martyrdom to the
imperial palace, it marks an awful epoch of retrogression in her history, plunging heedlessly into the
paganized heresies of debauched Romanism, ere long eclipsing every ray from the glorious Son of
Righteousness, burying every grand cardinal truth of God’s precious Word deep in the rubbish of
priestcraft and legalistic idolatry. You must not think that God’s true people were not found on the
earth in all by-gone ages. They were; but after the Constantian apostasy, outside of the Catholic
Church, anathematized by the popes and persecuted unto death; first called Novations, A.D. 251; at
a later date Waldensees, Albigenses and still later Moravians, who were instrumental in the
conversion and sanctification of John Wesley. God used Martin Luther and his compeers to dig up
out of papal rubbish the great cardinal truth of justification by the free grace of God, through Christ,
received and appropriated through faith alone independently of popery, prelacy and priestcraft. This
glorious truth flashed into his mind while doing penance at Rome under the eye of the pope, while
on his bare and bleeding knees, climbing up and down the stone stairway of Pilate, up which Jesus
walked when He stood at Pilate’s bar, and which they claim had been transported from Jerusalem
to Rome during the Crusades. Meanwhile climbing up and down this stairway a supernatural voice,
as he said and always believed, rang out from heaven this familiar Scripture: “The just shall live by
faith.” That moment Luther abandoned all of his castigatory penances, left Rome, returned to
Germany, and shook the whole world by preaching this great law of God’s kingdom, utterly
upsetting all the chicanery of intriguing priests who for centuries had held the world in a dark
delusion. Luther spent his life in the establishment of this great fundamental doctrine. John Wesley
was converted while listening to the reading of Luther’s preface to Romans, beautifully and
triumphantly setting forth this great fundamental Bible doctrine. God used him not to spend his life
in the old tracks of Luther, his gospel father, but to move on with his fire-baptized contemporaries
in the grand evolution out of legalistic dry-bones, restoring to the world the precious vital truth of
entire sanctification by the free grace of God in Christ, received and appropriated by faith alone. It
is the glory of the present holiness movement not only appreciatively to walk in the track of our
gospel predecessors, but under the leadership of the Holy Ghost, sitting meek and lowly at the feet
of Jesus, still deeper to explore the wonders of revealed truth, bringing to the light the beautiful
scriptures expository of the Lord’s return to the earth, the glorious millennial theocracy, the final and
triumphant restitution under the mediatorial reign; at the same time encouraging woman’s ministry
and divine healing, so prominent in the apostolic age.