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

prayer is answered and the herd comes roaring along near by. He fires away and downs a fat heifer.
Running, he cuts out some meat and satisfies his awful hunger by eating it blood-raw. Then
supplying himself with some of the food to eat on his journey, his heart turns back with incorrigible
sympathy for those poor people he had left to die. Consequently, loading himself with the meat, he
wends his way back to the wigwam, arriving at nightfall, and saluted by the venerable chief, lying
on his back, “O, my son, I knew you would bring it today. Oeneah (the name of his God) told me
so.” Smith wanted to hand him some of it raw to eat at once. “O, no, my son, I am not in a hurry.”
“Well,” says Smith, “I will broil you some on the coals.” “O, no, I prefer it stewed. While it is
cooking I want you to sit down that I may talk to you about the great spirit, Oeneah, who always
takes good care of his children.” Smith felt himself a missionary among them, and had been teaching
them the Christian religion the best he could from the Bible. Now he finds, to his surprise, that the
old Indian, who had spent his life in savagedom, knew much more about the Lord, and his salvation,
than he did. I mention this to demonstrate a case of a heathen who was intelligently saved, walking
with God and bearing the fruits of the Spirit. A multitude of Scriptures intelligently corroborates this
great truth, that all the people in the world can be saved if they will, having nothing to do but walk
in the light which God gives them, as in that case, in the glorious ultimatum, the “blood of Jesus
Christ his Son cleanseth them from all sin” (1 John 1:7). This is true of all the people in the world,
whether heathen, Moslem, Papist or Protestant (John 1:9 and Titus 2:11). Then why send the
heathens the gospel if they can be saved without it?
(a) Because God has commanded us to go and preach the gospel to every creature. We must obey
or fall under condemnation.
(b) Because the more light they have, the greater the probability that they will walk in it and be
saved. For the same reason we keep on preaching to people in gospel lands, not because they can not
be saved without it, but because they will not. In all cases it is a question of will and probability
rather than privilege and possibility.
21. “Therefore knowing God, they did not glorify him as God nor were they thankful, but they
became vain in their reasonings, and their foolish heart was darkened.” All the heathens in the
world are but the apostasy of the Patriarchical church, having the true light in the days of Noah; the
Mohammedans and Jews, the apostasy of the Mosaic church, and the Roman Catholics, the fallen
Apostolic church; while the great Protestant denominations are going at racehorse speed the same
downward trend into spiritual darkness, formality, hypocrisy, legalism and idolatry. Paul in this verse
describes the first stage of apostasy from God, i.e., landing them in intellectualism; the second stage
subsequently described, putting them in idolatry, and the third and last in brutality. The heathens are
now in the last stage, i.e., brutality, and the Romanists in idolatry, and the Protestants in
intellectualism, seeking the power of natural talent and education instead of the spiritual dynamite
which constitutes the only definition of gospel in the Bible.
22. “Saying that they were wise they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible
God into the likeness of corruptible man, birds, quadrupeds and creeping things.” The Greeks
worshipped gods in human form, and the Egyptians in the form of many animals; the former reached
idolatry and the latter brutality.