The Mysteries of
the Kingdom of Heaven
2. THE KINGDOM IN THE HANDS OF
MEN.
The kingdom in its present form is established and ruled
by the word of an absent King. Being absent, it is clearly His word which
speaks for Him,- which represents His authority. His kingdom is a kingdom of
truth, according to His own words to Pilate, who asks Him, "Art Thou a king,
then?" And He answers, "Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I born,
and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the
truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth My voice" (John 18:37).
"Master"- or "Teacher"-"and Lord" are necessarily associated in thought. "Ye
call Me Master and Lord; and ye say well, for so I am" (John 13:13). "Master"
implies of necessity, an authority, in Him absolute: and in this full sense He
says to His disciples, "One is your Master, even Christ" (Matt. 28:8). To
receive His word is thus to bow to His authority: His word is, as in the
parable (Matt. 18:19), "the word of the kingdom." His subjects are thus nothing
else than His disciples, and discipling is now into the kingdom of heaven
-"every scribe which is instructed into the kingdom of heaven," in the end of
the same chapter (v. 52), is literally "discipled."
The Sphere of
Discipleship
In the parables of the kingdom thus we find pictured the
sphere of discipleship embracing true and false alike. There are tares and
wheat, fishes good and bad, wise and foolish virgins, guests that have not on
the wedding-garment, servants that have never truly served at all. The end
declares the difference; and in the end the Son of Man purges out of his
kingdom all things that offend and them which do iniquity. Till the harvest
(which is "the end of the age"- not "world"), the tares and wheat, the good and
the evil, are found together.
The kingdom, then, covers the whole field of
profession. Those in it may be or may not be what they assume to be; and thus
blessings of it are conditional accordingly. People may enter it in two ways;
there is an outer and an inner sphere, as it were, in the kingdom itself. There
is a mere outward belonging to it, not in heart: there is an inward and real
entering in, to which salvation attaches: "Whosover shall call upon the Name of
the Lord shall be saved." It is here, of course, not merely a "Lord, Lord," but
a true subjection of soul to Him.
All this will come out more as we go on
with our subject. Yet it is well to realize it at the outset; for it makes
simple much that otherwise would be dark and difficult enough. The
conditionality of every thing is in accord with the general idea of a kingdom,
where government, though it be gracious, is not yet pure grace and where grace
is shown, not in setting aside requirement, but in enabling for its
fulfillment.
This is how the children of God, as subjects of the kingdom,
manifest themselves; and there is a whole class of passages in Scripture which,
speaking in this manner, are often misread alike, yet in two opposite ways, by
those who would maintain and those who refuse the full reality of divine grace
toward men. The one class would take Paul's expression, "I keep under my body,
and bring it into subjection,lest after having preached to others I myself
should be a castaway", as meaning only that his service might be disapproved;
while the others will have it that Paul fears here for his ultimate salvation.
Neither view is correct: the term "castaway" is that translated "reprobate" in
2 Cor. 13 and it is of himself he speaks, and not his service. While the New
Testment assures us, in its whole testimony in many concurrent lines of careful
teaching, that true Christians "are not of them that draw back to perdition,
but of them that believe to the saving of the soul" (Heb. 10:39)
Binding and Loosing
The kingdom of heaven, then, in the form in
which we are now considering it, is a kingdom of the truth, by subjection to
which its true disciples are manifested. We are now to look at it as committed
into the hands of men, the Lord being absent. It is plain that He uses men to
minister "the word of the kingdom," and that a certain administration of its
affairs is intended in the words, "whatsoever ye shall bind on earth shall be
bound in heaven," "whose sins ye remit, they are remitted to them." The nature
and limit of these assurances we shall have to inquire into immediately, but
that the disciples are in some sense commissioned to represent their Lord, is
clear and unequivocal.
The first of these we find for the first time in a
promise given to Peter, when in the midst of nearly universal unbelief he
confesses his faith in Christ as the Son of the living God: "Blessed art thou,
Simon bar Jonah," replies the Lord, "for flesh and blood hath not revealed it
unto thee, but My Father which is in heaven. And I say unto thee that thou art
Peter, and upon this rock I will build My Church, and the gates of hell shall
not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of
heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and
whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven" (Matt.
16:17-19).
The keys of the kingdom are symbolic of authority over it; and
almost the same language the Lord uses of Himself in the address to
Philadelphia -"He that hath the key of David; that openeth and no man shutteth,
and shutteth and no man openeth." The Pharisees He denounces for shutting up
the kingdom of heaven against men: "Ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer
ye them that are entering to go in" (Matt. 23:13). And to the lawyers He says
similarly (Luke 11:52), "Woe unto you, lawyers! for ye have taken away the key
of knowledge: ye entered not in yourselves, and them that were entering in ye
hindered." All this agrees with what we have before seen - that the kingdom is
a kingdom of the truth: thus the key speaks of entrance into the kingdom, and
the entrance into such a kingdom is by the key of knowledge. The key speaks
thus really, if not exclusively, of the power of discipling.
The power of
binding and loosing, according to the Rabbinical writings, belonged to and
described the office of a teacher. "The Rabbi set apart to 'loose or bind'
might authoritatively declare what was binding on the conscience and what not;
and in Talmudical writings, the phrase continually recurs by which a teacher or
a school is said to loose or to bind,-i.e., to declare something obligatory or
non-obligatory." It is plain, then, that if the power of the keys speaks of
entrance or admission into the kingdom,- of discipling,- that of binding and
loosing applies to the regulation of the conduct of those already admitted or
discipled, whatever may be the limits of this power. The latter naturally
connects itself with the former, and follows it.
There remains the
question, Was the power of the keys personal to Peter only? The Romanist, it is
well known, not only makes him the rock upon which the Church is built, but
gives him in a special way the keys of heaven. The Church is, however, as
distinct from the kingdom as the kingdom of heaven from heaven itself. With the
former we have nothing to do just now: as to the latter, it is well to remark
that the promise itself limits itself to earth as the sphere of this binding or
loosing. "Whatsover thou shalt bind on earth" does not mean "whatsoever thou,
being on earth, shalt bind," but just what it says. The earth is where only the
binding applies; and "shall be bound in heaven" means simply that heaven being
for the kingdom the seat of authority, it would confine the act of its
representatives on earth. On earth,- for earth alone is there - power, though
he who rebels against it rebels against the authority of heaven. It is as where
the Lord says, "He that receiveth you receiveth Me" (Matt. 10:40). The
delegated power on earth represents the authority behind it.
But even for
Rome, the keys belong not simply to Peter. There are successors to his chair.
And the Protestant view, in which they represent the power of administering the
Word and sacraments, must of course admit others as participants in this. Nor
need there be a doubt that as Peter's faith was but the faith of the other
disciples, so they as well as he participate in this promise. No doubt as his
energy makes him foremost in confession, so also he retains a foremost place
through on and so at Pentecost he opens the kingdom of heaven to the Jews, as
afterward he is chosen of God to open it the Gentiles in the person of
Cornelius. But we scarcely think of these two instances as being the use made
of the keys of the kingdom. The power of binding and loosing which is here also
explicitly promised to Peter, we find in the eighteenth chapter of the same
gospel (v. 18) extended to others also; and if the power of the keys be the
power of administration or of discipling into the kingdom as we have seen, then
the commission in the closing chapter explicitly extends this also: "And Jesus
came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto Me in heaven and
earth,"-the kingdom was just ready to begin, - "go ye, therefore, and teach"
(or, as the margin and the Revised Version now, "make disciples of") "all
nations." And that here successors are contemplated is plainly taught in the
closing words: "Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world."
Thus the administration of the kingdom is committed to men. They are to
initiate and receive others into it; they are to regulate it for and under Him.
So completely is it intrusted to their care, that in the gospel of Mark the
Lord represents the kingdom of God to be "as if a man should cast seed into the
ground, and should sleep and rise night and day, and the seed should spring and
grow up, he knoweth not how" (chap. 4:26, 27). Not, of course, that His care
over His people sleeps; but outwardly things happen in that which is
professedly in subjection to Him without any open interference on His part.
"But when the fruit is brought forth" (or "ripe" in the R.V.) "immediately He
putteth in the sickle, because the harvest is come." So will He presently put
in the sickle; for, spite of man's doing, the harvest comes in its due
season.
Yet in the meanwhile the kingdom takes strange shapes, and because
it is true that He will have His harvest, and because it has been forgotten
that the seed springs and grows up He knoweth not how, it has been taken for
granted that if the kingdom of heaven is in the Word of God said to be "like"
such and such things,- "like" mustard-seed, or "like" leaven in a woman's hand,
- this decides that all is according to His mind. In fact, it is far otherwise;
for this expression, "He knoweth not how," if it does not mean to convey, as we
know it does not, any real ignorance, then does certainly imply that the growth
spoken of is strange, irregular, as if He knew not. So it is said, "The Lord
knoweth the way of the righteous, but the way of the ungodly shall perish" (Ps.
1:6). And if it he the fact of course that He knoweth the:; proud, yet to
distinguish it from this approving knowledge it is added, "The proud He knoweth
afar off" (Ps. 138:6). So of the growth of His kingdom in man's hand it may be
truly said, He knoweth it not, or He knoweth it afar off; no new thing, alas!
of that which comes of man's responsibility; here the words of the Psalmist
surely apply, if any where, "Man being in honour abideth not" (Ps. 49:12).
Dispensation after dispensation has illustrated this rule: none have
confirmed it more signily than the present.
Thus in the second parable of
Matt. 13 it is "while men slept, the enemy came and sowed tares among the
wheat" (v. 25). Thus, "while the bridegroom tarried," the whole company of
professed watchers, wise as well as foolish, "all slumbered and slept" (Matt.
25:5). Bu the history of this declension we shall look at, if the Lord will, at
another time. We have yet more precisely to see first how the kingdom of heaven
is entered, and wha are the divine regulations for it. To appreciate the
disorder, we must learn first of all the order; for it is plain that God has
not committed it to man's mere will, but to his charge. He is to bind and
loose, not despotically, but as himself in subjection to the will of Another.
We must return, therefore, now to the subject of the keys.
3. The Keys Of The Kingdom.
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