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

this day filled with this fatal “going about,” running themselves down, working up their human
institutions to glorify God with the little filthy lucre which He does not need, instead of magnifying
Him with the glory of holiness, which is alone acceptable in His sight.
5. “For Moses thus describes the righteousness which is from law, which a man having done,
shall live in the same.” None but the unfallen angels and Adam in Eden ever could keep the perfect
law and have spiritual life in so doing. Hence, after the Fall, there has never been a human being on
the earth, except Jesus of Nazareth, who was competent to keep the law. He kept it for all of us, and
we, by perfect submission and doubtless faith, avail ourselves of His substitutionary obedience,
actively in life and passively in death, to perfectly satisfy the law in our behalf, Opening the pearly
gates to our happy ingress.
6. “For the righteousness of faith speaketh thus: Say not in thy heart, Who shall ascend up into
heaven? (that is, to bring Christ down;)
7. “Or, Who shall descend into the abyss? (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead.)
8. “But what saith the Scripture? The word is nigh thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart: that is,
the word of faith, which we preach.
9. “That if thou mayest confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in thy heart that God
hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.
10. “For with the heart it is believed unto righteousness, and with the mouth it is confessed unto
salvation.” When our Savior gave the commission (Matthew 28:20), He said, “Lo, I am with you
alway, even unto the end of the age.” While the glorified man Christ is up in heaven interceding for
us, the spiritual Christ is on earth and omnipresent. “Deep”. in E.V. is “abyss” in the Greek, which
literally means “bottomless,” applicable to the center of the earth, which is evidently the fiery
location of hell, and the only locality which is bottomless. Thither the human soul of our Savior
descended while His body lay in the tomb, proclaiming His victory in the pandemonium, and
crossing the intervening chasm into the intermediate paradise, “Abraham’s bosom,” meeting the thief
the same day he was crucified, and “leading captive” all the Old Testament saints, there waiting in
joy ineffable the completion of the redemptive scheme and the sealing of the Abrahamic covenant
with His blood, leading them up with Him, invisible, because they did not have their bodies:
accompanying Him for forty days on earth previous to His resurrection, and ascending with Him into
glory, the first fruits of the triumphant Mediatorial kingdom (1 Peter 3:19; Ephesians 4:8-10; Acts
2:27-31). In this grand culminating argument, Paul affirms the beautiful facility of the salvation plan,
since Christ, our only and omnipotent Savior, is omnipresent, and we have nothing to do but believe
“with the heart unto salvation,” i.e., heart faith, believe into it, keep on believing until you get it.
Then, when you do conscientiously receive it, confess it with your mouth to all the world,
perpetuating your unfaltering testimony through time and eternity. We must remember that we are
not saved through mental faith, such as wicked men and devils have, but through the real spiritual
faith of the heart. The popular churches are filled up with people who have nothing but intellectual
faith, like the devils in hell, who are very orthodox, giving us a perpetual illustration of the
unsalvability peculiar to intellectual faith, otherwise they would all be saved and get out of there in