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Save me from the lion's mouth ? (Ps. xxii. 21.) He meant no one by the lion; but by the lion's mouth he meant some great and imminent danger. And that is what we must understand here. All kinds of gratuitous conjectures have been made by those who have insisted on identifying the lion;--the lion of the amphitheatre, to whom the Apostle might have been thrown, had he been condemned; the Emperor Nero, or, as he was possibly in Greece at this time, his prefect and representative Helius; or, the chief accuser; or again, Satan, whom St. Peter describes as
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All these are answers to a question which does not arise out of the text. The question is not,
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Who is the lion? but,
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What is the meaning of the lion's mouth? And the answer to that is,
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and especially
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The Lord will deliver me from every evil work, and will save me unto His heavenly kingdom. Paul's enemies are not likely to be idle during the extension of time granted by the court. They will do their utmost to secure a sentence of condemnation at the second hearing of the case, and thus get the man whom they detest removed from the earth. Whether they will succeed in this or not, the Apostle does not know. But one thing he knows;--that whatever is really evil in their works against him will be powerless to harm him. The Lord will turn their evil into good. They may succeed in compassing his death. But, even if they do so, the Lord will make their work of death a work of salvation; and by the severing of the thread which still binds Paul to this life
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that is, will translate him safe into,
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His heavenly kingdom.
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St. Paul means any weakness or sin into which he himself might be betrayed through want of courage and steadfastness. Even if the lion's mouth could mean Satan, this would not be probable; for it would be Satan's attacks from without, by means of opposition and persecution, and not his attempts from within by means of grievous temptations, that would be meant. What is said above about Alexander the coppersmith shows what kind of
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and what kind of
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is intended in
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means
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There was a time when the Apostle expected, like most other Christians of that day, to live to behold the second coming of Christ. But what we have already seen in this Epistle shows that in St. Paul's mind that expectation is extinct. He no longer thinks that he will be one of those
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(1 Thess. iv. 15, 17); that he will be among the living, who
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rather than among the dead, who
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at the sounding of the last trump (1 Cor. xv. 53). He does not repeat, what seems almost to have been a familiar watchword among the Christians of that day,--
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Maran atha ;
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(1 Cor. xvi. 22; Phil. iv. 5). On the contrary, it is his own hour that is at hand:
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I am already being offered, and the time of my departure is come.