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

Alexander’s loss was simply nothing. This awful defeat sent panic throughout the Persian Empire.
King Darius gives the matter personal attention. An innumerable army is rendezvoused from the one
hundred and twenty-seven States of the Empire. The sons of royalty from the diversified kingdoms
encourage the army with their personal presence. King Darius is on hand, commander-in-chief. The
powers of earth are combined against the paradoxical foe they find in the haughty young Grecian.
They meet on the plains of Arbela, which, I trow, proved the greatest battle the world ever saw. It
lasts a solid week. Rivers of blood deluge the fields. Mountains of the dead accumulate. Three
hundred thousand Persian warriors are left dead on the field. The Greek is everywhere triumphant.
Darius flies for his life, his vast army utterly demolished and disorganized. Alexander overtakes the
fugitive monarch on the banks of the Indian Ocean. Darius now pleads for his crown, proposing to
Alexander that they divide the world half and half. Alexander points to the sun, then in his noon-day
glory. “Do you see that sun? Could the world endure two suns? You know they would burn it up.
So this world can not have two kings. I must have it all.” Now, account for the fact that this boy of
one and twenty, with no money and a handful of men, conquered all the world and wept because he
couldn’t find another one to conquer. God was in it. This wonderful Greek language, the finest the
ages ever knew, the culmination of that climacteric Greek learning in which they excelled all nations,
astonishing the ages with their achievements in poetry, oratory, philosophy and the fine arts, thus
eclipsing all the nations of the earth and becoming the honored teachers of the young kings resorting
thither from every land and clime to learn wisdom at the feet of the Greek philosopher. Why these
great wonders? God, through these poets, orators, philosophers and scholars, was manufacturing the
Greek language, the beauty, precision, and vivacity of those mechanism is the riddle of modern
scholarship. God thus prepared it — His chosen vehicle, in which to preach the gospel to every
nation. He gave Alexander the conquest of the world that he might turn over every government on
the globe to the cultured Greeks, who established their wonderful language in the learned circles of
every nation under heaven, thus through these wonderful providences preparing the world for the
reception of the gospel. Again we have the significant fact that in the early centuries of the Christian
era this wonderful language was taken out of the mouths of all nations like the Hebrew of the Old
Testament at an earlier day, lest the nations of the earth might corrupt them. Therefore we have the
inspired archives of the Hebrew and Greek kept in their pristine purity, locked up in these dead
languages, whither we can all go and find the unadulterated truth as it is in Jesus, and transmit it to
the world. Oh, the wonders of the divine administration!
THE DEACONATE.
2-5. God is a great Organizer. Hence He has given the New Testament Church a simple, perfect
and beautiful organization. The bishop is the leader of the holiness band [for such were all of the
Apostolic churches], while the deacon has charge of all the temporal interests of the church in every
respect, and the eldership, originally in Israel consisting of seventy, instituted by Jethro, the father-inlaw
of Moses, when he visited the children of Israel in the wilderness, and transferred by the apostles
into the Christian dispensation. Spiritual seniority constitutes the basis of the New Testament
eldership, which is a judicatory body having charge of the general interest of the church. Hence the
church is not a democracy, but has an organized government. The deaconate is prominent among the
Baptists, who give that office its Scriptural attitude. If they would only adhere to first principles and
invest none with the deaconate unless they are “full of the Holy Ghost and wisdom,” verse 3. The
Presbyterians give prominence to the eldership, honoring the New Testament in that office. If they