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‘He shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end.’
Luk_1:33
I. The Kingdom.—The Baptist’s work was to prepare men by repentance to enter into ‘the Kingdom.’ And Christ Himself preached on the same topic (Mat_4:17; Mat_10:7).
II. The Jews’ expectation.—The Jews, at the time when John preached, were full of expectation of the coming of the Messiah. They thought that all false religions would be swept away, and all nations brought to worship the true God; but alongside with this spiritual idea came the more sordid conception of the Kingdom. The Jews panted to massacre and plunder the Gentiles.
III. What Christ taught.—In Matthew 15 we are given six parables of the Kingdom. Their purport is to enforce the great preciousness of the privilege of membership of the Catholic Church, the Kingdom of Christ that He was about to found. It was to be through the Jews, not apart from the Jews, that the world was to pass under the sceptre of Christ. But the Jews rejected Christ and, then, but not till then, was the offer made to the Gentiles. How rapid, how triumphant would have been the march of the Gospel through the world had the Jews accepted and carried out the Divine plan we can only conjecture. Now all we can do is to pray, ‘Thy kingdom come.’
—
Rev. S. Baring-Gould.
Illustration‘We are too apt to read the Gospel story with our minds charged with twentieth century ideas, to read it as we would like it to be, and as we presume it ought to be. We accordingly insist on the Kingdom being so purely spiritual as to be inorganic, unsubstantial and shapeless. But if to the Jews, and afterwards to the world, it had been frankly stated that all the prophecies led up to and found their fulfilment in a general diffusion of pious sentiment among a thousand sects which agreed to differ on most points in matters of faith and practice, who had no cohesion, no organic structure binding into one body, then almost certainly the Jew would have said, “We have been completely hoaxed by the Prophets. The reality is not attractive, it is not worth a rush.” ’