Romans 9:3

3. I could wish Not I did wish, nor I do wish; but, if it were a thing permissible, either in the fact or in the wish, then I could wish. The apostle, then, does not rally form or entertain the wish, but he comes as nigh to it as the right allows. (See note on Matthew 26:39.)

Accursed The Greek would be, I could wish myself an anathema from Christ. An anathema in the Jewish ritual was a thing consecrated to God. It was thereby God’s own property, no longer man’s. Hence it was required to be destroyed, and could not be redeemed. (Leviticus 27:28-29.) Cities, edifices, and their inhabitants were thereby devoted to destruction, as Jericho, (Joshua 6:17; Joshua 6:21,) and as, also, were the cities of the Canaanites. They were “sacred to perdition.” So in the New Testament Christ is made a curse, an anathema for us.

What the apostle, therefore, in his human affections could wish is, that he might take the place of his race and suffer an equivalent of its sufferings in its stead, that the race might be saved from them. This would not be wishing to commit their sin nor contract their guilt any more than Christ so did (as Revelation Gilbert Haven in the “Methodist Quarterly” has ably shown) for the human race. It simply would have sought to be their substitute in suffering. As to the question whether he included all the sufferings of eternal death, we may say that in a human hypothetical wish of this nature we are not to suppose that all the literal results are specifically thought through. Doubtless the example of Christ was most present to his mind, whose suffering was not eternal.

Even to the present day the Arabians will say, let my soul be a ransom for thee. The whole ritual system of substitutive victims dying for the sinner kept the eastern mind in full possession of the solemn thought of substitutive suffering. And so Paul’s deep human heart would have said to Israel, Think you I predict your future woes from hatred? I would go with you through the whole mass of misery, and suffer it in your stead.

From Christ In separation from him, as the Jews were; or (as Mr. Haven strikingly develops it) separated from Christ as Christ in his hour of darkness was from God.

My brethren, my kinsmen By this tender reiteration the apostle bespeaks his deep affection.