Verse-by-Verse Bible Commentary
Matthew 22:11

Spurgeon's Verse Expositions of the Bible

Making Light of Christ

August 17, 1856

by

C. H. SPURGEON

(1834-1892)

"They paid no attention and went off - one to his field, another to his

business." [Matthew 22:5 ]

Man is not much changed since the days of Adam. In his bodily frame he

appears to be exactly similar, for skeletons many hundred years' old are the

exact counterparts of ours; and sure enough that which was recorded in

history as having been done by man centuries ago, might be written again, for

"there is nothing new under the sun." The same class of men is still to be

discovered (although, perhaps, differently dressed) as that which existed

ages long gone by. There are still men today who have the same disposition as

men in the Savior's day. "They paid no attention and went off - one to his

field, another to his business," making light of the glorious things of the

gospel.

I am certain I have many such characters here tonight, and I pray the Lord

that I may be enabled to discourse to them very solemnly and very clearly.

And I must ask all of you who understand the heavenly art of prayer, to pray

that God would be pleased to send home every thought into the breast where he

intends it to lodge, that it may bring forth the soft fruit of righteousness

in the salvation of many souls. "They paid no attention;" so do too many in

this day; and so will a large portion of my hearers tonight. I believe that

to pay no attention to Christ is a sin; and at all risks of being falsely

called legalist, or "free-willer," by those who consider themselves wiser

than what I have written, I will instruct you as such, for I hope I will

never belong to that class of Calvinists who do the devil's work by excusing

sinners in their sins.

In the first place, we shall have a few words with you, concerning "what it

is that the sinner pays no attention to; secondly, how it is that he pays no

attention; and thirdly, why it is that he pays no attention to it. Then a

general observation or two, and we will not weary you.

In the first place, WHAT IS IT THAT THE SINNER PAYS NO ATTENTION TO?

According to the parable, the person alluded to paid no attention to a

marriage banquet which a king had provided, with all kinds of delicacies, to

which they were freely invited, and from which they willfully stayed away

from. The spiritual meaning of this is easy to discover. Sinners who pay no

attention to Christ express their contempt of a glorious banquet which God

has provided at the marriage of His Son. This is solemn ground to tread upon.

Oh! for the teachings of the Holy Spirit.

Taking this parable as the basis of our remarks, we may observe, first, that

the sinner pays no attention to "the messenger who brings him the news that

the marriage supper is prepared." These men refused to come; they went-"One

to his field, another to his business," and so paid no attention to the

messenger; and every sinner who neglects the great salvation of Jesus Christ,

pays no attention to the gospel minister, which is a big insult in God's

estimation. It is never considered a small offense by our great nation, if

our ambassador is treated with indifference; and take it for a truth, it is

no light thing with God if you despise the ambassadors he sends to you. But

this is comparatively little; the ambassadors are men like yourselves, who

can well afford to be condemned, if that were all. In fact, we would be glad

to forgive you if it were in our power to do so, and if this were all your

guilt.

But these people "despised the feast." Some of them fancied that the fattened

cattle, and other provisions that would be on the table, would be no better

than what they had at home. They thought that the royal banquet would be no

big thing for which to give up their business for a day, or to renounce their

farming even for an hour. Oh! sinner, when you neglect the great salvation,

think about what you are despising; when you pay no attention to God's

gospel, you pay no attention to justification by faith; you pay no attention

to washing in the blood of Jesus; you pay no attention to the Holy Spirit;

you pay no attention to the road to heaven; and then you pay no attention to

faith, and hope, and love; you pay no attention to all the promises of the

eternal covenant, of all the glorious things that God has laid up for them

that love him, and of everything which he has revealed in his Word as being

the promised gift to those who come to him. It is a serious thing to pay no

attention to the gospel, for in that Word, God's gospel-good news, is summed

up in all that human nature can require, and all that even the saints in

bliss can receive. Oh! to despise the gospel of the blessed God, how mad! how

worse than folly! Despise the stars, and you are a fool; despise God's earth,

with its glorious mountains, with its flowing rivers, and its fair meadows,

and you art a maniac; but despise God's gospel, and you are ten thousand

maniacs in one. Pay no attention to that, and you are far more foolish than

he who sees no light in the sun, who beholds no fairness in the moon, and no

brilliancy in the starry sky. Trample, if you please, his lower works; but

oh! remember, when you pay no attention to the gospel, you are paying no

attention to the masterpiece of your great Creator-that which cost him more

than to create a myriad of worlds-the bloody purchase of our Savior's

agonies.

And, again, these people "paid no attention to the King's Son." In was his

marriage, and inasmuch as they stayed away, they dishonored the glorious One

in whose honor the supper was prepared. They slighted him whom his Father

loved. Oh! sinner, when you pay no attention to the gospel, you pay no

attention to Christ-that Christ before whom glorious celestial spirits bow

themselves-that Christ at whose feet the exalted archangel thinks it is

happiness to cast his crown; you pay no attention to him with whose praise

all of heaven rings; you pay no attention to him whom God makes much of, for

he has called him, "God over all, forever praised!" [Romans 9:5 ] Yes, it is a

solemn thing to pay no attention to Christ. Despise a prince, and you will

have little honor at the king's hand for it; but despise the Son of God, and

the Father will have vengeance on you for his slighted Son. Oh! my dear

friends, it seems to me to be a sin, not unpardonable, I know, but still most

heinous, that men should ever despise my blessed Lord Jesus Christ and treat

him with cruel scorn. Pay no attention to You, sweet Jesus! Oh! when I see

You with Your shirt of blood, wrestling in Gethsemane, I bow myself before

You, and I say, "O, Redeemer, bleeding for sin, can any sinner ever ignore

You?" When I behold him with a river of blood rolling down his shoulder,

beneath the cursed flogging of Pilate's whip, I ask, "Can a sinner refuse to

pay attention to such a Saviour as this?" And when I see him later, covered

with his blood, nailed to a cross, expiring in torture, shrieking, "Eli, Eli,

lama sabachthani," I ask myself, "Can anyone refuse to pay attention to

this?" Oh, if they do, then, indeed, it is a sin enough to damn them, if they

have no other sin-that they have lightly esteemed the Prince of Peace, who is

glorious and altogether lovely. Oh! my friend, if you pay no attention to

Christ, you have insulted the only one who can save you-the only one who can

carry you across the Jordan-the only one who can unbolt the gates of heaven,

and welcome you. Let no smooth talking preacher persuade you that this is not

a crime. O, sinner, think of your sin, if you pay no attention to him, then

you are paying no attention to the King's only Son.

And yet again, these people "also paid no attention to the King" who had

prepared the banquet, Oh! little do you know, O sinner, when you ignore the

gospel, you are insulting God. I have heard some say, "Sir, I do not believe

in Christ, but still I am sure I try to reverence God; I do not care about

the gospel, I do not wish to be washed in Jesus' blood, nor to be saved with

free grace; but I do not despise God; I am a very religious person!" No sir,

but you do insult the Almighty, inasmuch as you deny his Son. Despise a man's

offspring, and you have insulted the man himself; reject the one and only Son

of God, and you have rejected the eternal one himself. There is no such thing

as true religion apart from Christ; it is a lie and a falsehood, it is the

refuge of a man who is not brave enough to say he hates God, but it is only a

refuge of lies; for he who denies Christ in that act offends God, and shuts

heaven's gates against himself. There is no loving the Father except through

the Son; and there is no acceptable worship of the Father, except through the

Great High Priest the Mediator, Jesus Christ. Oh! my friend, remember you

have not merely despised the gospel, but you have despised the gospel's God.

In laughing at the doctrines of the Bible, you have laughed at God; in

scorning the truth of the gospel, you have scorned God himself, you have

shook your fist in the face of the Eternal; your blasphemy have not fallen on

the church, they have fallen on God himself. Oh! remember, you that mock the

message of Christ! Oh! remember, you that turn away from the ministry of

truth! God is a mighty one; how severely "can" he punish! God is a jealous

God; oh! how severely "will" he punish! Pay no attention to God, sinner? Why,

this above all things is a damning sin, and in committing it, it may be you

will one day sign your own death-warrant; for paying no attention to God, to

Christ, and to his holy gospel. You are destroying your own soul, and rushing

headfirst into hell. Oh! unhappy souls, most unhappy must you be, if you live

and die paying no attention to Christ, and preferring your farms and your

businesses to the treasures of the gospel.

Again, remember my poor, pitiable friend, that when you pay no attention to

all the things I have mentioned, "you are paying no attention to the

seriousness of eternity." The Man who pays no attention to the gospel pays no

attention to hell; he thinks its fires are not hot, and its flames not such

as Christ has described them; he pays no attention to the burning tears that

scald despairing cheeks forever; he pays no attention to the screams and

shrieks that must be the wretched songs and terrible music of perishing

souls. Oh! it is not wise to pay no attention to hell.

Consider again: you who pay no attention to heaven-that place to which the

blessed ones long to go, where glory reigns without a cloud, and bliss

without a sigh. You put the crown of everlasting life beneath your feet; you

tread the palm-branch of eternal peace beneath your unholy foot and you think

it not important to be saved, nor to be glorified. "Oh! poor soul, once you

are in hell, and when the iron key is turned forever in the lock of

inevitable destiny, you will find hell to be something easy to despise; and

when you have lost heaven and all its bliss, and can only hear the song of

the blessed, sounding faintly in the distance, increasing your misery by

contrast with their joy, then you will find it a very serious error to have

paid no attention to heaven. Every man who pays no attention to Christianity

pays no attention to these things. He misjudges the value of his own soul,

and the importance of its eternal state.

This is what men make light of, "Oh! sir," says one, "I never indulge in any

words hostile to God's truth, I never laugh at the minister, nor do I despise

the Sabbath." Stop, my friend, I will acquit thee of all that; and yet I will

solemnly lay to thy charge this great sin of making light of the gospel. Hear

me then!

II. HOW IS IT THAT MEN MAKE LIGHT OF IT?

In the first, it is making light of the gospel and of the whole of God's

glorious things, when men go to hear and yet do not attend. How many frequent

churches and chapels to indulge in a comfortable nap! Think what a fearful

insult that is to the King of heaven. Would they enter into Her Majesty's

palace, ask an audience, and then go to sleep before her face? And yet the

sin of sleeping in Her Majesty's presence, would not be so great, even

against her laws, as the sin of wilfully slumbering in God's sanctuary. How

many go to our houses of worship who do not sleep, but who sit with vacant

stare, listening as they would to a man would could not play a lively tune

upon a good instrument. What goeth in at one earth goeth out at another.

Whatever entereth the brain goeth out without ever affecting the heart. Ah,

my hearers, you are guilty of making light of God's gospel, when you sit

under a sermon without attending to it! Oh! what would lost souls give to the

hear another sermon! What would yonder dying wretch who is just now nearing

the grave, give for another Sabbath! And what will you give, one of these

days, when you shall be hard by Jordan's brink, that you might have one more

warning, and listen once more to the wooing voice of God's minister! We make

light of the gospel when we hear it, without solemn and awful attention to

it.

But some say they do attend. Well, it is possible to attend to the gospel,

and yet to make light of it. I have seen some men weep beneath a powerful

sermon; I have marked the tears chase each other-tears, blessed tell-tales of

emotions within. I have sometimes said to myself, it is marvellous to see

these people weep under some telling word from God, which is alarming them,

as if Sinai itself were thundering in their ears. But there is something more

marvellous than men's weeping under the word. It is the fact that they soon,

too soon, wipe all their tears away. But ah! my dear hearer, recollect that

if thou hearest of these things and shakest off a solemn impression, thou

art, in doing that, slighting God and making light of his truth; and take

heed how you do that, lest your own garments be red with the blood of your

soul, and it be said, "Oh, Israel, thou hast destroyed thyself."

But there are others who make light of it in a different fashion. They hear

the word and attend to it; but, alas! they attend to something else with it.

Oh! my hearer, thou makest light of Christ, if thou puttest him anywhere save

in the centre of thine heart. He who gives Christ a little of his affections,

makes light of Christ; for Christ will have the whole heart or none at all.

He who gives Christ a portion, and the world a portion, despises Christ, for

he seems to think that Christ does not deserve to have the whole. And

inasmuch as he says that, or thinks that, he hath mean and unholy thoughts of

Christ. Oh! carnal man, thou who art half religious, and half profane; thou

who art sometimes serious, but as often frivolous; sometimes apparently

pious, but yet so often unholy, thou makest light of Christ. And ye who weep

on the Sunday, and then go back to your sins on the Monday; ye who set the

world and its pleasures before Christ, ye think less of him than he deserves;

and what is that but to make light of him? Oh! I charge you, ask yourself, my

hearer this night, art not thou the man? dost thou not thou thyself make

light of Christ? The self-righteous man who sets himself up as a partner with

Christ in the matter of salvation, notwithstanding all his trumpery good

works, is such a ringleader among despisers, that I would gibbet him in the

very middle of them, and bid all like him tremble, lest they also be found

slighters of Jesus.

He makes light of Christ, again, who makes a profession of religion, and yet

does not live up to it. Ah! church members, ye want a great deal of sifting;

we have an immense quantity of chaff now mixed with the wheat; and sometimes

I think we have something worse than that. We have some in our churches that

are not so good as chaff, for they do not seem to have been near the wheat at

all; they are nothing better than tares. They have come into our churches,

just as they would into a trade-association, because they think it will

improve their business. It gives respectability to their name to take the

sacrament; it makes them esteemed to have been baptized, or to be a member of

a Christian church; and so they come in by shoals after the loaves and

fishes, but not after Jesus Christ. Ah! hypocrite, thou makest light of

Christ if thou thinkest that he is a stalkinghorse to get thee wealth. If

thou dreamest that thou art to saddle and bridle Christ, and ride to wealth

upon him, thou makest a grand mistake, for he was never meant to carry men

anywhere except to heaven. If you suppose that religion was intended to gild

your homes, to carpet your floors, and line your purses, you have greatly

erred. It was intended to be profitable to the soul; and he who thinks to use

religion to his own personal advantage thinks lightly of Christ: and at the

last day this crime shall be laid to his charge-that he has made light of

it;" and the King shall send his armies to cut him in pieces, among those who

have despised his Majesty, and would not obey his laws.

III. And now, in the third place, I will tell you WHY THEY MADE LIGHT OF IT.

They did so from different reasons.

Some of them made light of it because they were ignorant; they did not know

how good the feast was; they did not know how gracious the king was; they did

not know how fair the Prince was, or else they might have thought

differently. Now, there are many present to-night, I dare say, who think

lightly of the gospel, because they do not understand it. I have often heard

people laugh at religion; but ask them what it is, and they know no more

about religion than a horse, and worse than that, for they believe untruths

about it, and a horse does not do that. They laugh at it, simply because they

do not comprehend it; it is a thing beyond them. We have heard of a foolish

man who, whenever he heard a piece of Latin mentioned, laughed at it, because

he thought it was a joke, at any rate it was a very outlandish way of

talking-and so he laughed. So it is with many when they hear the gospel; they

do not know what it is, and so they laugh at it. "Oh!" they say, "the man is

mad." But why is he mad? Because you do not understand him. Are you so

conceited as to suppose that all wisdom and all learning must rest with you?

I would hint to you that the madness is on the other side. And though you may

say of him, "Much learning hath made thee mad;" we would reply, "It is quite

as easy to be made mad with none at all." And those who have none, and

especially those who have no knowledge of Christ, are the most likely to

despise him. Well did Watts say-

"His worth, if all the nations knew,

Sure, the whole earth would love him too."

Oh! dear friends, if you once knew what a blessed master Christ is, if you

once knew what a blessed thing the gospel is, if you could once be brought to

believe what a blessed God our God is, if you could only have one hour's

enjoyment such as the Christian experiences, if you could only have one

promise applied to your heart, you would never make light of the gospel

again. Oh! you say you do not like it! Why, you have never tried it? Should a

man despise the wine of which he has never sipped. It may be sweeter than he

dreams? Oh! taste and see that the Lord is good, and so sure as ever you

taste, you will see his goodness. I will venture to say, again, that there

are many who make light of the gospel, simply through ignorance; and if that

is so, I am somewhat in hopes that when they are a little enlightened by

sitting under the Word, the Lord may be pleased graciously to bring them to

himself; and then I know they will never make light of Christ again. Oh! do

not be ignorant, "for that the soul be without knowledge is not good." Seek

to know him whom to know aright is life eternal; and when you know him you

will never make light of him.

Other people make light of it because of pride. "What is the good," said one,

"of bringing me that invitation? Step into my house, my man, I will show you

a feast quite as good as any you can tell me of. Look here! there is good

cheer for you; my table is as well spread as any man's; begging his Majesty's

pardon, the King cannot give a better feast than I; and I do not see why I

should drag my bones about to get nothing better than I can get at home." So

he would not go, out of pride. And so with some of you. You want to be

washed! No, you were never filthy; were you? You need to be forgiven! Oh no!

you are rather too good for that. Why, you are so awfully pious in your own

conceit, that if it were all true, you would make even the angel Gabriel

blush to think of you. You do not think even an angel capable of holding a

candle to you. What! you seek for mercy? It is an insult to you. "Go and tell

the drunkard," you say, "go and fetch the harlot; but I am a respectable man;

I always go to church or chapel; I am a very good sort of fellow; I may

frolic now and then, but I make it up some other day; I am sometimes a little

slack, but then I rein the horses in, and make up the distance afterwards;

and I dare say I shall get to heaven as soon as anybody else. I am a very

good sort." Well, my friend, I do not wonder that you despise the gospel, for

the gospel just tells you that you are entirely lost. It tells you that your

very righteousness is full of sin. That, as for any hope of your being saved

by it, you might as well try to sail across the Atlantic on a sere leaf as

try to get to heaven by your righteousness. And as for it being a garment fit

to cover you, you might as well get a spider's web to go to court in, and

think it a dress fit to appear in before her Majesty. Ah! my hearer, I know

why thou despisest Christ; it is because of thy Satanic pride. May the Lord

pull the pride out of thee; for if he do not, it will be the faggot that

shall roast thy soul for ever. Take heed of pride; by pride fell the angels-

how can men, then, though the image of their Maker, hope to win by it? Shun

it, flee from it; for so sure as thou art proud, wilt thou incur the guilt of

making light of Christ.

Perhaps quite as many made light of the good news, because they did not

believe the messenger. "Oh!" said they, "stop a moment. What! a dinner to be

given away? I do not believe it. What! the young Prince going to be married?

Tell that to fools, we do not believe any such thing. What! we all invited?

We do not believe it; the story is incredible." The poor messenger went home

and told his Master that they would not believe him. That is just another

reason why many men make light of the gospel, because they do not believe it.

"What!" they say, "Jesus Christ died to wash men from their sins? We do not

believe it. What! A heaven. Who ever saw it? A hell! Who ever heard its

groans? What! Eternity. Who ever returned from that last hope of every

spirit. What! Blessedness in religion? We do not believe it-it is a moping,

miserable thing. What! Sweetness in the promises? No there is not; we believe

there is sweetness in the world, but we do not believe there is any in the

wells the Lord has digged." And so they despise the gospel, because they do

not believe it. But, I am sure, that when a man once believes it, he never

thinks lightly of it. Once let me have the solemn conviction in my heart by

the Holy Spirit, that if unsaved, there is a gaping gulf that shall devour

me; do you think I can go to rest till I have trembled from head to foot?

Once let me heartily believe that there is a heaven provided for those who

believe on Christ, do you think I could give sleep to my eyes, or slumber to

my eyelids, till I have wept because it is not mine? I believe not. But

damnable unbelief thrusts his hand into the mouth of an, and plucks up his

heart, and so destroys him, for it will not let him believe, and, therefore,

he cannot feel, because he believeth not. Oh! my friends, it is unbelief that

makes men think lightly of Christ; but unbelief will not do so by-and-bye.

There are no infidels in hell; they are all believers there. There are many

that were infidels here, but they are not so now; the flames are too hot to

make them doubt their existence. It is hard for a man, tormented in the

flame, to doubt the existence of the fire. It would be difficult for a man,

standing before the burning eyes of God, to doubt the existence of a God

after that. Ah! unbelievers, turn ye, or rather, may the Lord turn you from

your unbelief, for this makes you think lightly of Christ; and this is it

that is taking away your life, and destroying your souls.

Another set of people thought lightly of this feast because they were so

worldly; they had so much to do. I have heard of a rich merchant who was

waited on one day by a godly man, and when he stopped him, he said to him,

"Well, sir, what is the state of your soul?" "Soul!" he said, "bother you, I

have no time to take care of my soul; I have enough to do to take care of my

ships." About a week after, it so happened that he had to find time to die,

for God took him away. We fear he said to him, "Thou fool! this night thy

soul shall be required of thee; then whose shall those things be which thou

hast hoarded up for thyself?" Ye merchants of London, there are many of you

who read your ledgers more than your Bibles. Perhaps you must, but ye do not

read your Bibles at all, while ye read your ledgers every day. In America, it

is said, they worship the almighty dollar; I believe that in London many men

worship the almighty sovereign; they have the greatest possible respect for

an almighty bank note; that is the god which many men are always adoring. The

prayer-book they carry so religiously in their hands is their cash-book. Even

on Sunday, there is a gentleman over there, he does not think his foreman

knows it, but he was sitting in doors all this morning, because it was wet,

casting up his accounts; and now he comes here in the evening, because he is

a very pious man-extraordinarily so. He would shut the parks up on a Sunday,

he would-he would not let a soul get a breath of fresh air, because he is so

pious, but he himself may sit for half-a-day in the counting-house and yet

think it no sin. But many are too busy to think of these things. "Pray!" they

say, "I have no time for that; I have to pay. What! read the Bible? No I

cannot; I have to be looking over this thing and that thing, and seeing how

the markets go. I find time to read the Times, but I could not think of

reading the Bible." It will be marvellously unfortunate for some of you, that

you will find the lease of your lives rather shorter than you expected. If

you had taken a lease of your lives for eighty-eight years from this date,

you would be foolish enough, perhaps, to spend forty-four in sin. But

considering that you are a tenant at will, and liable to be turned out any

day, it is the height of folly, the very climax of absurdity, excelling all

that the fool, with his cap and bells, ever did, to be living just to gather

up the pelf of this world, and not for things to come. Worldliness is a demon

that hath wrung the neck of many souls; God grant that we may not perish

through our worldliness!

There is another class of people that I can only characterize in this way:

they are altogether thoughtless. If you ask them concerning religion, they

have no opinion at all about it. They do not positively detest it, they do

not mock at it; but they have not a thought about it. The fact of it is, they

intend thinking about it by-and-bye. Theirs is a kind of butterfly existence;

they are always moving about, never doing anything, neither for others or

themselves. And these are very amiable people, who are always ready to give a

guinea for a charity; they never refuse anybody, and they would give their

guinea all the same, whether it was for a cricket match or a church. Now, if

I were forced to go back to the world, and had to chose the character I would

wish to be, the last position I would wish to occupy would be that of the

thoughtless man. I believe thoughtless persons are in the most danger of

being lost of any class I know. I like, sometimes to get under the word a

thoroughly stout, stiff, hater of the gospel, for his heart is like a flint,

and when it is struck with the hammer of the gospel the flint goes to pieces

in a moment. But these thoughtless people have india-rubber hearts-you hit

them, and they give way; you strike them again, and they give way. If they

are sick, and you visit them, they say "yes." You talk to them about the

importance of religion; they say "yes." You talk to them about escaping from

hell and entering heaven, they say "Yes." You preach a sermon to them when

they are better, and remind them of the vows they made in their sickness; "it

is quite right, sir," they say. And they say the same whatever you may tell

them. They are always very polite to you; but whatever you say to them is put

aside. If you begin talking to them about drunkards; oh! they are not

drunkards; they may have accidently got drunk once, but that was a little

thing out of the usual way. And bring whatever sin you like to them, you may

hit them, and hit them, but it is no good, for they are not half so easily

broken (speaking after the manner of men) as the real stout-hearted hater of

the gospel. Why, there is a sailor comes rolling home from sea, swearing,

blaspheming, cursing; he comes into the house of God, and almost the first

word is applied by the Spirit for the breaking of Jack's heart. Another young

man says, "I know as much as any minister can tell me; for my own mother

taught me, and my old father used to read the Bible to me till, I believe, I

have got every bit of it in my head. I go to chapel out of respect to his

memory, but I really don't care at all about it; it is very good for old

people, it is quite right for old women, and those who are dying, and in time

of cholera. It is a very good thing, but I don't care anything about it just

now." Now, I tell you, careless people, most solemnly, that you are the very

devil's lifeguards; you are his reserve; he keeps you away from the battle,

he does not send you out like he does a blasphemer, for he fears that a shot

may haply light upon you, and you may be saved. But he says, "Stand by here,

and if you have to go out I will give you an inpenetrable coat of mail." The

arrows go rattling against you; they all hit you; but alas! there is not one

of them that penetrates your heart, for that is left elsewhere. You are only

an empty chrysalis, and when you come to God's house, and his word is

preached, you make light of it, because it is your habit to be thoughtless

about everything.

Very briefly I must touch another case, and then I must dismiss you. You may

make light of the gospel out of sheer presumption. They are like the foolish

man who goes on, and is punished; not like the prudent man, who "forseeth the

evil, and hideth himself." They go on; that step is safe-they take it; the

next step is safe-they take it; their foot hangs over a gulf of darkness; but

they will try one step, and as that is safe, they think they will try the

next; and as the last has been safe, and as for many years they have been

safe, they suppose they always shall be; and because they have not died yet,

they think they will never die. And so out of sheer presumption, thinking

"all men mortal but themselves," they go on making light of Christ. Tremble,

ye presumptuous, you will not always be able to do that.

And, lastly, I fear there are a great many who make light of Christ because

of the commonness of the gospel. It is preached everywhere, and that is why

you make light of it. You can hear it at the corner of every street; you can

read it in this widely circulated Bible; and because the gospel is so common,

therefore, you don't care for it. Ah! my dear friends, if there were only one

gospel minister in London that could tell you the truth; if there were only

one Bible in London, I believe you would be rushing to hear that Bible read;

and the man who had the message would have no sinecure of it, he would be

obliged to work from morning to night, to tell it out to you. But now,

because you have so many Bibles you forget to read them; because you have so

many tracts you pack up any article in them; because you have so many sermons

you do not think anything at all of them. But what is that? Dost thou think

the less of the sun because he scatters his beams abroad? Dost thou think the

less of bread because it is the food which God gives to all his children?

Dost thou think the less of water, when thou art thirsty, because every rill

will afford it to thee? No. If thou wert athirst after Christ, thou wouldst

love him all the better, because he is preached everywhere; and thou wouldst

not think lightly of him because of that.

"They made light of it." How many of my hearers to-night, I ask again, are

making light of Christ? Many of you are, no doubt. I will give you, then,

just one warning, and then farewell. Make light of Christ, sinner! let me

say, again, to thee, and thou wilt rue the day, when thou comest on thy

death-bed. It will go hard with thee when the bony monster has got the grip

of thee, and when he is bringing thee down to the river, to steep thee in the

lake of death. It will go hard with thee, when thy eye-strings break, and

when thy death-sweat stands upon the brow. Remember, last time thou hadst a

fever; ah! how thou didst shake. Remember, last night, how thou didst quake

in thy bed, when flash after flash of lightning came through thy window; and

how thou didst tremble when the deep-mouthed thunder spake out the voice of

God. Ah! sinner, thou wilt tremble worse then when thou shalt see death for

thyself, and when the bony rider, on his white horse, shall grasp his dart

and plunge it in thy bowels. It will go hard with thee if thou hast despised

Christ, and shalt die a despiser. See that flying angel? his wings are made

of flame, and in his hand he grasps a sharp two-edged sword. O angel,

wherefore dost thou wing thy speedy flight? "Hark!" says he, "this trump

shall tell you." And he puts a trumpet to his lips, and

"Blows a blast so loud and dread,

Ne'er were prophetic sounds so full of woe."

Look! the sheeted dead have started from their graves. Behold, the cloudy

chariot of wheeled along by cherub's hand. Mark! there upon the throne there

sits the King-the Prince. O angel, what in this terrible day must become of

the man that has thought lightly of Christ? See there, he unleashes his

sword. "This blade," says he, "shall find and pierce him through. This blade,

like a sickle, shall reap each tare from the wheat, and this strong arm shall

bind him up in his bundle to be burned; and this great arm of mine shall

grasp him, and hurl him down, down, down, where flames for ever burn, and

hell for ever howls." It will go hard with you then. Mark this man's word to-

night; go away and laugh at it; but remember, I say to you again, it will be

a solemn thing for you when Christ shall come to judgment, if you have made

light of him, and worse than all, if you should ever be locked up in the

caverns of despair, if you should ever hear it said, "Depart ye cursed," if

you should ever mingle your awful shrieks with the doleful howls of lost

myriads, if you should see the pit that is bottomless, and the gulf that has

walls of fire. It will be a fearful thing to find thyself in there, and to

know that thou canst ne'er get out again! Sinner, this night I preach the

gospel to thee. E'er thou goest, hear it, and believe it; may God grant thee

grace to receive it, so thou shalt be saved. "He that believeth and is

baptized, shall be saved. He that believeth not," so saith the Scripture,

"shall be damned." To believe, is to put your trust in Christ; to be

baptized, is to be plunged in water in the name of the Lord Jesus, as a

profession that you are already saved, and that you love Christ. "He that

believeth, and is baptized, shall be saved, and he that believeth not shall

be damned." O may you never know the meaning of that last word. Farewell!

Kelly Commentary on Books of the Bible

We now enter on the Lord's final presentation of Himself to Jerusalem, traced, however, from Jericho; that is, from the city which had once been the stronghold of the power of the Canaanite. The Lord Jesus presenting Himself in grace, instead of sealing up the curse which had been pronounced on it, makes it contrariwise the witness of His mercy towards those who believed in Israel. It was there that two blind men (for Matthew, we have seen, abounds in this double token of the Lord's grace), sitting by the wayside, cried out, and most appropriately, "Have mercy on us, O Lord, thou Son of David!" They were led and taught of God. It was no question of law, yet strictly in His capacity of Messiah. Their appeal was in thorough keeping with the scene; they felt that the nation had no sense of its own blindness, and so addressed themselves at once to the Lord thus presenting Himself where divine power wrought of old. It is remarkable that, although there had been signs and wonders given from time to time in Israel, miraculous cures wrought, dead even raised to life, and leprosy cleansed, yet never, previously to the Messiah, do we hear of restoring the blind to sight. The Rabbis held that this was reserved for the Messiah; and certainly I am not aware of any case which contradicts their notion. They appear to have founded it upon the remarkable prophecy of Isaiah. (Isaiah 35:1-10) I do not affirm that the prophecy proves their notion to be true in isolating that miracle from the rest; but it is evident that the Spirit of God does connect emphatically the opening of blind eyes with the Son of David, as part of the blessing that He will surely diffuse when He comes to reign over the earth.

What appears further here is, that Jesus does not put the blessing off till His reign. Undoubtedly, the Lord in those days was giving signs and tokens of the world to come; and it was continued by His servants afterwards, as we know from the end of Mark, the Acts, etc. The miraculous powers which He exercised were samples of the power which would fill the earth with Jehovah's glory, casting out the enemy, and effacing the traces of his power, and making it the theatre of the manifestation of His kingdom here below. Thus our Lord gives evidence that the power was in Himself already, so that they need not lack because the kingdom was not yet come, in the full, manifest sense of the word. The kingdom was then come in His own person, as is said by Matthew (Matthew 12:1-50) as well as Luke. Still less did the blessing tarry for the sons of men. Virtue went forth at His kingly touch: this, at least, did not depend on the recognition of His claims by His people. He takes up this sign of Messiah's grace the opening of the eyes of the blind, itself no mean sign of the true condition of the Jews, could they but feel and own the truth. Alas! they sought not mercy and healing at His hands; but if there were any to call on Him at Jericho, the Lord would hearken. Here, then, Messiah answers to the cry of faith of these two blind men. When the multitude rebuked them, that they should hold their peace, they cried the more. The difficulties presented to faith only increased the energy of its desire; and so they cried, "Have mercy on us, O Lord, thou Son of David!" Jesus stands, calls the blind men, and says, "What will ye that I should do?" "Lord, that our eyes should be opened." And so it was according to their faith. Moreover, it is noted that .they follow Him, the pledge of what will be done when the people, by-and-by owning their blindness, and turning to Him for eyes, receive sight from the true Son of David to see Himself in the day of His earthly glory.

Matthew 21:1-46. The Lord thereon enters Jerusalem according to prophecy. He enters it, however, not in the outward pomp and glory which the nations seek after, but according to what the prophet's words now made good literally: Jehovah's King sitting on an ass in the spirit of humiliation. But even in this very thing, the fullest proof was afforded that He was Jehovah Himself. From first to last, as we have seen, it was Jehovah-Messiah. The word to the owner of the ass and colt was, "The Lord hath need of them." Accordingly, on this plea of Jehovah of hosts, all difficulties disappear, though unbelief finds there its stumbling-block. It was indeed the power of the Spirit of God that controlled his heart; even as to Christ "the porter opened." God left nothing undone on any side, but so ordered that the heart of this Israelite should yield a testimony that grace was at work, spite of the lamentable chill that stupefied the people. How good it is thus to raise up a witness, never indeed to leave it absolutely lacking, not even on the road to Jerusalem alas! the road to the cross of Christ. This, as we are told by the evangelist, came to pass that the word of the prophet should be fulfilled: "Tell ye the daughter of Zion, Behold, thy King cometh unto thee, meek [for such meekness was the character of His presentation as yet], and sitting upon an ass, and a colt the foal of an ass." All must be in character with the Nazarene. Accordingly, the disciples went and did as Jesus commanded. The multitudes, too, were acted on a very great multitude. It was, of course, but a transient action, yet was it of God for a testimony, this moving of hearts by the Spirit. Not that it penetrated beneath the surface, but was rather a wave that passed over men's hearts, and then was gone. For the moment they followed, crying, "Hosanna to the Son of David: Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest!" (applying to the Lord the congratulations of Psalms 118:1-29)

Jesus, according to our evangelist's account, comes to the temple and cleanses it. Remark the order as well as character of the events. In Mark this is not the first act which is recorded, but the curse on the barren fig tree, between His inspection of all things in the temple and His ejection of those who profaned it. The fact is, there were two days or occasions in which the fig tree comes before us, according to the gospel of Mark, who gives us the details more particularly than any one, notwithstanding his brevity. Matthew, on the contrary, while he is so careful in furnishing us frequently with a double witness of the Lord's gracious ways toward His land and people, gives only as one whole His dealing with both the fig tree and the temple. We should not know from the first evangelist of any interval in either case; nor could we learn from either the first or the third but that the cleansing of the temple occurred on His earlier visit. But we know from Mark, who sets forth an exact account of each of the two days, that in neither case was all done at once. This is the more remarkable because, in the instances of the two demoniacs, or the two blind men in Matthew, Mark, like Luke, speaks only of one. Nothing can account for such phenomena but design; and the more so as there is no ground to assume that each succeeding evangelist was kept in ignorance of his predecessor's account of our Lord. It is evident that Matthew compresses in one the two acts about the temple, as well as about the fig tree. His scope excluded such details, and, I am persuaded, rightly so, according to the mind of God's Spirit. It may render it all the more striking when one observes that Matthew was there, and Mark was not. He who actually saw these transactions, and who therefore, had he been a mere acting human witness, would peculiarly have dwelt on them; he, too, who had been a personal companion of the Lord, and therefore, had it been only a question of treasuring all up as one that loved the Lord, would, naturally speaking, have been the one of the three to have presented the amplest and minutest picture of the circumstance, is just the one who does nothing of the kind. Mark, as confessedly not being an eye-witness, might have been supposed to content himself with the general view. The reverse is the fact unquestionably. This is a notable feature, and not here alone, but elsewhere also. To me it proves that the gospels are the fruit of divine purpose in all, distinctively in each. It establishes the principle that, while God condescended to employ eye-witness, He never confined Himself to it, but, on the contrary, took full and particular care to shew that He is above all creature means of information. Thus it is in Mark and Luke we find some of the most important details; not in Matthew and John, though Matthew and John were eyewitnesses, Mark and Luke not. A double proof of this appears in what has been just advanced. To Matthew, acting according to what was given him of the Spirit, there was no sufficient reason to enter into points which did not bear dispensationally upon Israel. He therefore, as often elsewhere, presents the entrance into the temple in its completeness, as being the sole matter important to his aim. Any thoughtful mind must allow, if I do not greatly err, that entrance into detail would rather detract from the augustness of the act. The minute account has its just place, on the other hand, if it be a question of the Lord's method and bearing in His service and testimony. Here I want to know the particulars; there every trace and shade are full of instruction to me. If I have to serve Him, I do well to learn and ponder His every word and way; and in this the style and mode of Mark's gospel is invaluable. Who but feels that the movements, the pauses, the sighs, the groans, the very looks of the Lord, are fraught with blessing to the soul? But if, as with Matthew, the object be the great change of dispensation consequent on the rejection of the divine Messiah, (particularly if the point, as here, be not the opening out of coming mercy, but, on the contrary, a solemn and a stern judgment on Israel,) the Spirit of God contents Himself with a general notice of the painful scene, without indulging in any circumstantial account of it.

To this it is I attribute the palpable difference in this place of Matthew as compared with Mark, and with Luke also, who omits the cursed fig tree altogether, and gives the barest mention of the temple's cleansing (Matt. 19: 45). The notion of some men, especially a few men of learning, that the difference is due to ignorance on the part of one or other or all the evangelists, is of all explanations the worst, and even the least reasonable (to take the lowest ground); it is in plain truth the proof of their own ignorance, and the effect of positive unbelief. What I have ventured to suggest I believe to be a motive, and an adequate motive, for the difference; but we must remember that divine wisdom has depths of aim infinitely beyond our ability to sound. God may be pleased to vouchsafe us a perception of what is in His mind, if we be lowly, and diligent., and dependent on Him; or He may leave us ignorant of much, where we are careless or self-confident; but sure I am that the very points men ordinarily fix on as blots or imperfections in the inspired word are, when understood, among the strongest proofs of the admirable guidance of the Holy Spirit of God. Nor do I speak with such assurance because of the least satisfaction in any attainments, but because every lesson I have learnt and do learn from God's word brings with it the ever accumulating conviction that Scripture is perfect. For the question in hand, it is enough to produce sufficient evidence that it was not in ignorance, but with full knowledge, that Matthew, Mark, and Luke wrote as they have done; I go farther, and say it was divine intention, rather than, as I conceive, any determinate plan of each evangelist, who may not himself have had before his mind the full scope of what the Holy Ghost gave him to write about it. There is no necessity to suppose that Matthew deliberately designed the result which we have in his gospel. How God brought it all to pass is another question, which, of course, it is not for us to answer. But the fact is, that the evangelist, who was present, he who consequently was an eyewitness of the details, does not give them; while one who was not there states them with the greatest particularity thoroughly harmonious with the account of him who was there, but, nevertheless, with differences as marked as their mutual corroborations. If we might rightly use, in this case, the word "originality," then originality is stamped upon the account of the second. I affirm, then, in the strictest sense, that divine design is stamped upon each, and that consistency of purpose is found everywhere in all the gospels.

The Lord then goes straight to the sanctuary. The kingly Son of David, destined to sit as the Priest upon His throne, the head of all things sacred as well as pertaining to the polity of Israel, we can understand why Matthew should describe such an One visiting the temple of Jerusalem; and why, instead of stopping, like Mark, to narrate that which attests His patient service, the whole scene should be given here without a break. We have seen that a similar principle accounts for the massing of the facts of His ministry in the end of the fourth chapter, and also for giving as a continuous whole the Sermon on the Mount, although, if we enquired into details, we might find many and considerable intervals; for, as undoubtedly those facts were grouped, so I believe also it was between the parts of that sermon. It fell in, however, with the object of Matthew's gospel to pass by all notice of these interstices, and so the Spirit of God has been pleased to interweave the whole into the beautiful web of the first gospel. In this way, as I believe, we may and should account for the difference between Matthew and Mark in this particular, without in the smallest degree casting the shadow of an imperfection upon one any more than on the other; while the fact, already pressed, that eye-witnessing, while employed as a servant, is never allowed to govern in the composition of the gospels, bespeaks loudly that men forget their true Author in searching into the writers He employed, and that the only key to all difficulties is the simple but weighty truth that it was God communicating His mind about Jesus, as by Matthew so by Mark.

Next, the Lord acts upon the word. He finds men selling and buying in the temple (that is, in its buildings) overthrows their tables, and turns out themselves, pronouncing the words of the prophets, both Isaiah and Jeremiah. But at the same time there is another trait noted here only: the blind and the lame (the "hated of David's soul,"2 Samuel 5:8; 2 Samuel 5:8) the pitied of David's greater Son and Lord) find a friend instead of an enemy in Him who loved them, the true beloved of God. Thus, at the very time He showed His hatred and righteous indignation at the covetous profaning of the temple, His love was flowing out to the desolate in Israel. Then we see the chief priests and scribes offended at the cries of the multitude and children, and turning reproachfully to the Lord, who allowed such a right royal welcome to be addressed to Him; but the Lord calmly takes His place according to the sure word of God. It is not now Deuteronomy that is before Him ( that He had quoted when tempted of Satan at the beginning of His career). But now, as they had borrowed the words of Psalms 118:1-29 (and who will say they were wrong?), so the Lord Jesus (and I say He was infinitely right) applies to them, as well as to Himself, the language ofPsalms 8:1-9; Psalms 8:1-9. Its central truth is the entrance of the rejected Messiah, the Son of man by humiliation and suffering unto death, into heavenly glory and dominion over all things. And this was just the point before the Lord: the little ones were thus in the truth and spirit of that oracle. They were sucklings, out of whose mouth praise was ordained for the despised Messiah soon to be in heaven, exalted there and preached here as the once crucified and now glorified Son of man. What could be more appropriate to that time, what more profoundly true for all time, yea, for eternity?

Matthew, as we have seen, crowds into one scene all mention of the barren fig tree (ver. 18-22), without distinguishing the curse of the one day from the manifestation of its accomplishment on the day following. Was it without moral import? Impossible. Did it convey the notion of a hearty and true reception of the Messiah, with fruits meet for His hand who had so long tended it, and failed in no care or culture? Was there anything answering to the welcome of the little ones who cried Hosanna, the type of what grace will effect in the day of His return, when the nation itself will contentedly, thankfully take the place of babes and sucklings, and find their best wisdom in so owning the One whom their fathers rejected, the man thereon exalted to heaven during the night of His people's unbelief? Meanwhile, another picture better suits them, the state and the doom of the fruitless fig tree. Why so scornful of the jubilant multitude, of the joyous babes? What was their condition before the eyes of Him who saw all that passed within their minds? They were no better than that fig tree, that solitary fig tree which met the Lord's eyes as He comes from Bethany, entering once more into Jerusalem. Like it, they, too, were full of promise; like its abundant foliage, they lacked not fair profession, but there was no fruit. That which made its barrenness evident was the fact that it was not yet the time of figs. Therefore, the unripe figs, the harbinger of harvest, ought to have been there. Had the season of figs been come, the fruit might have been already gathered; but that season having not yet arrived, beyond controversy the promise of the coming harvest should, and indeed must, have been still there, had any fruit been really borne. This, therefore, represented too truly what the Jew, what the nation, was in the eye of the Lord. He had come seeking fruit; but there was none; and the Lord pronounced this curse, "Henceforth let no fruit grow on thee for ever." And so it is. No fruit ever sprang from that generation. Another generation there must be; a total change must be wrought if there is to be fruit-bearing. Fruit of righteousness can only be through Jesus to God's glory; and Jesus they yet despised. Not that the Lord will give up Israel, but He will create a generation to come wholly different from the present Christ-rejecting one. Such an issue will be seen to be implied, if we compare our Lord's curse with the rest of the word of God, which points to better things yet in store for Israel.

But He adds more than this. It was not only that the Israel of that day should thus pass away, giving place to another generation, who, honouring the Messiah, will bear fruit to God; He tells the wondering disciples that, had they faith, the mountain would be cast into the sea. This appears to go farther than the disappearance of Israel as responsible to be a fruit-bearing people; it implies their whole polity dissolved; for the mountain is just as much the symbol of a power in the earth, an established world-power, as the fig tree is the special sign of Israel as responsible to produce' fruit for God; and it is clear that both figures have been abundantly verified. For the time Israel is passed away. After no long interval, the disciples saw Jerusalem not only taken, but completely torn as it were from the roots. The Romans came, as the executioners of the sentence of God (according to the just forebodings of the unjust high priest Caiaphas, who prophesied not without the Holy Ghost), and took away their place and nation, not because they did not, but because they did, kill Jesus their Messiah. Notoriously this total ruin of the Jewish state came to pass when the disciples had grown up to be 'a public witness to the world, before the apostles were all taken away from the earth; then their whole national polity sunk and disappeared when Titus sacked Jerusalem, and sold and scattered the people to the ends of the earth. I have no doubt that the Lord intended us to know the uprooting of the mountain just as much as the withering of the fig tree. The latter may be the simpler application of the two, and evidently more familiar to ordinary thought; but there seems no real reason to question, that if the one be meant symbolically, so too is the other. However this may be, these words of the Lord close that part of the subject.

We enter upon a new series in the rest of this chapter and the next. The religious rulers come before the Lord to put the first question that ever enters the minds of such men, "By what authority doest thou these things?" Nothing is more easily asked by those who assume that their own title is unimpeachable. Our Lord answers them by another question, which soon disclosed how thoroughly they themselves, in what was incomparably more serious, failed in moral competence. Who were they, to raise the question of His authority? As guides of religion, surely they ought to be able to decide that which was of the deepest consequence for their own souls, and for those of whom they assumed the spiritual charge. The question He puts involved indeed the answer to theirs; for had they answered Him in truth, this would have decided at once by what, and by whose, authority He acted as He did. "The baptism of John, whence was it (asks the Lord), from heaven, or of men?" There was no singleness of purpose, there was no fear of God, in these men so full of swelling words and fancied authority. Accordingly, instead of its being an answer from conscience declaring the truth as it was, they reason solely how to escape from the dilemma. The only question before their minds was, what answer would be politic? how best to get rid of the difficulty? Vain hope with Jesus! The base conclusion to which they were reduced is, "We cannot tell." It was a falsehood: but what of that, where the interests of religion and their own order were concerned? Without a blush, then, they answer the Saviour, "We cannot tell;" and the Lord with calm dignity strikes home His answer not, "I cannot tell," but, "Neither tell I you by what authority I do these things." Jesus knew and laid bare the secret springs of the heart; and the Spirit of God records it here for our instruction. It is the genuine universal type of worldly leaders of religion in conflict with the power of God. "If we shall say, From heaven, he will say unto us, Why did ye not, then, believe him? But if we shall say, Of men, we fear the people; for all hold John as a prophet." If they owned John, they must bow to the authority of Jesus; if they rejected John, they feared the people. They were thus put to silence; for they would not risk loss of influence with the people, and they were determined at all cost to deny the authority of Jesus. All they cared about was themselves.

The Lord goes on and meets parabolically a wider question than that of the rulers, gradually enlarging the scope, till He terminates these instructions inMatthew 22:14; Matthew 22:14. First, He takes up sinful men where natural conscience works, and where conscience is gone. This is peculiar to Matthew: "A certain man had two sons; and he came to the first, and said, Son, go work today in my vineyard. He answered and said, I will not: but afterward he repented, and went." He comes to the second, who was all complacency, and answers to the call, "I go, sir: and went not. Whether of them twain did the will of his father? They say unto Him, The first. Jesus saith unto them [such is the application], Verily I say unto you, That the publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you. For John came unto you in the way of righteousness, and ye believed him not: but the publicans and the harlots believed him: and ye, when ye had seen it, repented not afterward, that ye might believe him." (Matthew 21:28-32.) But He was not content with merely thus touching conscience in a way that was painful enough to the flesh; for they found that, spite of authority or anything else, those who professed most, if disobedient, were counted worse than the most depraved, who repented and did the will of God.

Next, our Lord looks at the entire people, and this from the commencement of their relations with God. In other words, He gives us in this parable the history of God's dealings with them. It was in no, way, so to speak, the accidental circumstance of how they behaved in one particular generation. The Lord sets out clearly what they had been all along, and what they were then. In the parable of the vineyard, they are tested as responsible in view of the claims of God, who had blessed them from the first with exceeding rich privileges. Then, in the parable of the marriage of the king's son, we see what they were, as tested by the grace or gospel of God. These are the two subjects of the parables following.

The householder, who lets out his vineyard to husbandmen, sets forth God trying the Jew, on the ground of blessings abundantly conferred upon him. Accordingly we have, first, servants sent, and then more, not only in vain, but with insult and increase of wrong. Then, at length, He sends His Son, saying, They will reverence my Son. This gives occasion for their crowning sin the utter rejection of all divine claims, in the death of the Son and Heir; for "they caught him, and cast him out of the vineyard, and slew him." "When the lord therefore of the vineyard comes," He asks, "what will he do unto these husbandmen?" They say unto Him, "He will miserably destroy these wicked men, and let out his vineyard unto other husbandmen, which shall render him the fruits in their seasons."

The Lord accordingly pronounces according to the Scriptures, not leaving it merely to the answer of the conscience, "Did ye never read in the Scriptures, The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner: this is the Lord's doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes?" Then He applies further this prediction about the stone, connecting, it would appear, the allusion inPsalms 118:1-29; Psalms 118:1-29 with the prophecy ofDaniel 2:1-49; Daniel 2:1-49. The principle at least is applied to the case in hand, and, I need hardly say, with perfect truth and beauty; for in that day apostate Jews will be judged and destroyed, as well as Gentile powers. In two positions the stone was to be found. The one is here on the earth the humiliation, to wit, of the Messiah. Upon that Stone, thus humbled, unbelief trips and falls. But, again, when the Stone is exalted, another issue follows; for" the Stone of Israel," the glorified Son of man, shall descend in unsparing judgment, and crush His enemies together. When the chief priests and Pharisees had heard His parables, they perceived that He spake of them.

The Lord, however, turns in the next parable to the call of grace. It is a likeness of the kingdom of heaven. Here we are on new ground. It is striking to see this parable introduced here. In the gospel of Luke there is a similar one, though it might be too much to affirm that it is the same. Certainly an analogous parable is found, but in a totally different connection. Besides, Matthew adds various particulars peculiar to himself, and quite falling in with the Spirit's desire by him; as we find also in Luke his own characteristics. Thus, in Luke, there is a remarkable display of grace and love to the despised poor in Israel; then, further, that love enlarging its sphere, and going out to the highways and hedges to bring in the poor that were there the poor in the city the poor everywhere. I need not say how thoroughly in character all this is. Here, in Matthew, we have not only God's grace, but a kind of history, very strikingly embracing the destruction of Jerusalem, on which Luke is here silent. "The kingdom of heaven is like unto a certain king which made a marriage for his son." It is not merely a man making a feast for those that have nothing that we have fully in Luke; but here rather the king bent upon the glorification of his son. "He sent forth his servants to call them that were bidden to the wedding: and they would not come. Again he sent forth other servants, saving, Tell them which were bidden, Behold, I have prepared my dinner: my oxen and my fatlings are killed, and all things are ready: come unto the marriage." There are two missions of the servants of the Lord here: one during His lifetime; the other after His death. On the second mission, not the first, it is said, "All things are ready." The message is, as ever, despised. "They made light of it, and went their ways." It was the second time when there was this most ample invitation which left no excuse for man, that they not only would not come, going one to his farm, and another to his merchandize, but "the remnant took his servants, and entreated them spitefully and slew them," This was not the character of the reception given to the apostles during our Lord's lifetime, but exactly what transpired after His death. Thereupon, though in marvellous patience the blow was suspended for years, nevertheless judgment came at last. "When the king heard thereof, he was wroth, and sent forth his armies and destroyed those murderers, and burnt up their city." This, of course, closes this part of the parable as predicting a providential dealing of God; but, besides being thus judicial after a sort to which we find nothing parallel in the gospel of Luke ( i.e., in what answers to it), as usual, the great change of dispensation is shown in Matthew much more distinctly than in Luke.

There it is rather the idea of grace that began with one sending out to those invited, and a very full exposure of their excuses in a moral point of view, followed by the second mission to the streets and lanes of the city, for the poor, maimed, halt, and blind; and finally, to the highways and hedges, compelling them to come in that the house might be filled. In Matthew it is very much more in a dispensational aspect; and hence the dealings with the Jews, both in mercy and judgment, are first given as a whole, according to that manner of his which furnishes a complete sketch at one stroke, so to speak. It is the more manifest here, because none can deny that the mission to the Gentiles was long before the destruction of Jerusalem. Next is appended the Gentile part to itself. "Then saith he to his servants, The wedding is ready, but they which were bidden were not worthy. Go ye therefore into the highways, and as many as ye shall find, bid to the marriage. So those servants went out into the highways, and gathered together all as many as they found, both bad and good: and the wedding was furnished with guests." But there is a further thing brought out here, in a very distinctive manner. In Luke, we have no judgment pronounced and executed at the end upon him that came to the wedding without the due garment. In Matthew, as we saw the providential dealing with the Jews, so we find the closing scene very particularly described, when the king judges individually in the day that is coming. It is not an external or national stroke, though that too we have here a providential event in connection with Israel. Quite different, but consistent with that, we have a personal appraisal by God of the Gentile profession, of those now bearing Christ's name, but who have not really put on Christ. Such is the conclusion of the parable: nothing more appropriate at the same time than this picture, peculiar to Matthew, who depicts the vast chance at hand for the Gentiles, and God's dealing with them individually for their abuse of His grace. The parable illustrates the coming change of dispensation. Now this falls in with Matthew's design, rather than Luke's, with whom we shall find habitually it is a question of moral features, which the Lord may give opportunity of exhibiting at another time.

After this come the various classes of Jews the Pharisees first of all, and, strange consorts! the Herodians. Ordinarily they were, as men say, natural enemies. The Pharisees were the high ecclesiastical party; the Herodians, on the contrary, were the low worldly courtier party: those, the strong sticklers for tradition and righteousness according to the law; these, the panderers to the powers that then were for whatever could be got in the earth. Such allies now joined hypocritically against the Lord. The Lord meets them with that wisdom which always shines in His words and ways. They demand whether it be lawful to give tribute to Caesar or not. "Show me," says He, "the tribute money . . . . . And he saith unto them, Whose is this image and superscription? They say unto him, Caesar's. Then saith he unto them, Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's." Thus the Lord deals with the facts as they then came before Him. The piece of money they produced proved their subjection to the Gentiles. It was their sin which had put them there. They writhed under their masters; but still under alien masters they were; and it was because of their sin. The Lord confronts them not only with the undeniable witness of their subjection to the Romans, but also with a graver charge still, which they had entirely overlooked the claims of God, as well as of Caesar. "Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's." The money you love proclaims that you are slaves to Caesar. Pay, then, to Caesar his dues. But forget not to "render to God the things that are God's." The fact was, they hated Caesar only less than they hated the true God. The Lord left them therefore under the reflections and confusion of their own guilty consciences.

Next, the Lord is assailed by another great party. "The same day came to him the Sadducees" those most opposed to the Pharisees in doctrine, as the Herodians were in politics. The Sadducees denied resurrection, and put a case which to their mind involved insuperable difficulties. To whom would belong in that state a woman who here had been married to seven brethren successively? The Lord does not cite the clearest Scripture about the resurrection; He does what in the circumstances is much better; He appeals to what they themselves professed most of all to revere. To the Sadducee there was no part of Scripture possessed of such authority as the Pentateuch, or five books of Moses. From Moses, then, He proved the resurrection; and this in the simplest possible way. Every one their own conscience must allow that God is the God, not of the dead, but of the living. Therefore, if God calls Himself the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, it is not an unmeaning thing. Referring long afterwards to their fathers who were passed away, He speaks of Himself as in relationship with them. Were they not, then, dead? But was all gone? Not so. But far more than that, He speaks as one who not merely had relations with them, but had made promises to them, which never yet were accomplished. Either, then, God must raise them from the dead, in order to make good His promises to the fathers; or He could not be careful to keep His promises. Was this last what their faith in God, or rather their want of faith, came to? To deny resurrection is, therefore, to deny the promises, and God's faithfulness, and in truth God Himself. The Lord, therefore, rebukes them on this acknowledged principle, that God was the God of the living, not of the dead. To make Him God of the dead would have been really to deny Him to be God at all: equally so to make His promises of no value or stability. God, therefore, must raise again the fathers in order to fulfil His promise to them; for they certainly never got the promises in this life. The folly of their thoughts too was manifest in this, that the difficulty presented was wholly unreal it only existed in their imagination. Marriage has nothing to do with the risen state: there they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven. Thus, on their own negative ground of objection, they were altogether in error. Positively, as we have seen, they were just as wrong; for God must raise the dead to make good His own promises. There is nothing now in this world that worthily witnesses God, save only that which is known to faith; but if you speak of the display of God, and the manifestation of His power, you must wait until the resurrection. The Sadducees had not faith, and hence were in total error and blindness: "Ye do err, not knowing the Scriptures, nor the power of God." Therefore it was that, refusing to believe, they were unable to understand. When the resurrection comes, it will be manifest to every eye. Accordingly this was the point of our Lord's answer; and the multitudes were astonished at His doctrine.

Though the Pharisees were not sorry to find the then ruling party, the Sadducees, put to silence, one of them, a lawyer, tempted the Lord in a question of near interest to them. "Master, which is the great commandment in the law?" But He who came full of grace and truth never lowered the law, and at once gives its sum and substance in both its parts Godward and manward.

The time, however, was come for Jesus to put His question, drawn fromPsalms 110:1-7; Psalms 110:1-7. If Christ be confessedly David's Son, how does David in spirit call Him Lord, saying, "Jehovah said unto my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand, till I make thine enemies thy footstool?" The whole truth of His position lies here. It was about to be realized; and the Lord can speak of the things that were not as though they were. Such was the language of David the king in words inspired of the Holy Ghost. What was the language, the thought of the people now, and by whom inspired? Alas! Pharisees, lawyers, Sadducees it was only a question of infidelity in varying forms; and the glory of David's Lord was even more momentous than the dead rising according to promise. Believe it or not, the Messiah was about to take His seat at the right hand of Jehovah. They were indeed, they are critical questions: If the Christ be David's Son, how is He David's Lord? If He be David's Lord, how is He David's Son? It is the turning point of unbelief at all times, now as then, the continual theme of the testimony of the Holy Ghost, the habitual stumbling-block of man, never so vain as when he would be wisest, and either essay to sound by his own wit the unfathomable mystery of Christ's person, or deny that there is in it any mystery whatever. It was the very point of Jewish unbelief It was the grand capital truth of all this gospel of Matthew, that He who was the Son of David, the Son of Abraham, was really Emmanuel, and Jehovah. It had been proved at His birth, proved throughout His ministry in Galilee, proved now at His last presentation in Jerusalem. "And no man was able to answer him a word, neither durst any man from that day forth ask him any more questions." Such was their position in presence of Him who was so soon about to take His seat at the right hand of God; and there each remains to this day. Awful, unbelieving silence of Israel despising their own law, despising their own Messiah, David's Son and David's Lord, His glory their shame!

But if man was silent, it was the Lord's place not merely to question but to pronounce; and in Matthew 23:1-39 most solemnly does the Lord utter His sentence upon Israel. It was an address both to the multitude and to the disciples, with woes for Scribes and Pharisees. The Lord fully sanctioned that kind of mingled address for the time, providing, it would appear, not merely for the disciples, but for the remnant in a future day who will have this ambiguous place; believers in Him, on the one hand, yet withal filled, on the. other, with Jewish hopes and Jewish associations. This seems to me the reason why our Lord speaks in a manner so remarkably different from that which obtains ordinarily in Scripture. "The scribes," He says, "and the Pharisees sit in Moses' seat. All, therefore, whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do; but do not ye after their works: for they say, and do not. For they bind heavy burdens, and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men's shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers. But all their works they do to be seen of men." The principle fully applied then, as it will in the latter day; the Church scene coming in meanwhile as a parenthesis. The suitability of such instruction to this gospel of Matthew is also obvious, as indeed here only it is found. Then, again, our souls would shrink from the notion, that what our Lord taught could have merely a passing application. Not so; it has a permanent value for His followers; save only that the special privileges conferred on the Church, which is His body, modify the case, and, concurrently with this, the setting aside meanwhile of the Jewish people and state of things. But as these words applied literally then, so I conceive will it be at a future day. If this be so, it preserves the dignity of the Lord, as the great Prophet and Teacher, in its true place. In the last book of the New Testament we have a similar combination of features, when the Church will have disappeared from the earth; that is, the keeping the commandments of God and having the faith of Jesus. So here, the disciples of Jesus are exhorted to heed what was enjoined by those who sat in Moses' seat to follow what they taught, not what they did. So far as they brought out God's commandments, it was obligatory. But their practice was to be a beacon, not a guide. Their objects were to be seen of men, pride of place, honour in public and private, high-sounding titles, in open contradiction of Christ and that oft-repeated word of His "Whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall bumble himself shall be exalted." Yet, of course, the disciples had the faith of Jesus.

Next the Lord* launches out woe after woe against the Scribes and Pharisees. They were hypocrites. They shut out the new light of God, while zealous beyond measure for their own thoughts; they undermined conscience by their casuistry, while insisting on the minutest alliteration in ceremonializing; they laboured after external cleanness, while full of rapine and intemperance; and if they could only seem righteously fair without, feared not within to be full of hypocrisy and lawlessness. Finally, their monuments in honour of slain prophets and past worthies were rather a testimony to their own relationship, not to the righteous, but to those who murdered them. Their fathers killed the witnesses of God who, while living, condemned them; they, the sons, only built to their memory when there was no longer a present testimony to their conscience, and their sepulchral honours would cast a halo around themselves.

*The most ancient text, represented by the Vatican, Sinai, Beza's Cambridge, L. of Paris (C. being defective, as well as the Alexandrian), and the Rescript of Dublin, omits verse 14, which may have been foisted in from Mark 12:40 and Luke 20:47. This leaves the complete series of seven woes.

Such is worldly religion and its heads: the great obstructions to divine knowledge, instead of living only to be its channels of communication; narrow, where they should have been large; cold and lukewarm for God, earnest only for self; daring sophists, where divine obligations lay deep, and punctilious pettifoggers in the smallest details, straining at the gnat and swallowing the camel; anxious only for the outside, reckless as to all that lay concealed underneath. The honour they paid those who had suffered in times past was the proof that they succeeded not them but their enemies, the true legitimate successors of those that slew the friends of God. The successors of those that of old suffered for God are those who suffer now; the heirs of their persecutors may build them sepulchres, erect statues, cast monumental brasses, pay them any conceivable honour. When there is no longer the testimony of God that pierces the obdurate heart, when they who render it are no longer there, the names of these departed saints or prophets become a means of gaining religious reputation for themselves. Present application of the truth is lacking, the sword of the Spirit is no longer in the hands of those who wielded it so well To honour those who have passed away is the cheapest means, on the contrary, for acquiring credit for the men of this generation. It is to swell the great capital of tradition out of those that once served God, but are now gone, whose testimony, is no longer a sting to the guilty. Thus it is evident, that as their honour begins in death, so it bears the sure stamp of death upon it. Did they plume themselves on the progress of the age? Did they think and say, If we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets? How little they knew their own hearts! Their trial was at hand. Their real character would soon appear, hypocrites though they were, and a serpent brood: how could they escape the judgment of hell?

"Wherefore, behold," says He, after thus exposing and denouncing them, "I send unto you prophets, and wise men, and scribes: and some of them ye shall kill and crucify; and some of them shall ye scourge in your synagogues, and persecute them from city to city." It is most eminently a Jewish character and circumstance of persecution; as the aim was the retributive one, "that upon you may come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel, unto the blood of Zacharias, son of Barachias, whom ye slew between the temple and the altar. Verily, I say unto you, all these things shall come upon this generation." Yet, just as the blessed Lord, after pronouncing woes on Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum, that had rejected His words and works, turned at once to the infinite resources of grace, and from the depth of His own glory brought in the secret of better things to the poor and needy; so it was that even at this time, just before He gave utterance to these woes (so solemn and fatal to the proud religious guides of Israel), He had, as we know from Luke 19:1-48, wept over the guilty city, out of which, as His servants, so their Lord could not perish. Here, again, how truly was His heart towards them! "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not! Behold, your house is left unto you desolate." It is not "I have," but your house is left unto you desolate; "for I say unto you, ye shall not see me henceforth [what bitterness of destitution theirs Messiah, Jehovah Himself, rejecting those who rejected Him!] till ye shall say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord."

Thus we have had our Lord presenting Himself as Jehovah the King; we have had the various classes putting themselves forward to judge Him, but, in fact, judged themselves by Him, There remains another scene of great interest, linking itself on to His farewell to the nation just noticed. It is His last communication to the disciples in view of the future; and this Matthew gives in a very full and rich manner. It would be vain to attempt an exposition of this prophetic discourse within my assigned limits. I will, therefore, but skim its surface now, just enough to indicate its outlines, and specially its distinctive features. It is evident that the greater completeness here exhibited beyond what appears in any other gospel is according to special design. In the gospel given by the other apostle, John, there is not a word of it. Mark gives his report very particularly in connection with the testimony of God, as I hope to show when we come to that point. In Luke there is peculiar distinctness in noticing the Gentiles, and their times of supremacy during the long period of Israel's degradation. Again, it is only in Matthew that we find direct allusion to the question of the end of the age. The reason is evident. That consummation is the grand crisis for the Jew. Matthew, writing under the Holy Ghost's direction for Israel, in view both of the consequences of their past unfaithfulness and of that future crisis, furnishes alike the momentous question and the Lord's special answer to it. This, too, is the reason why Matthew opens out what we do not find in either Mark or Luke, at least in this connection. We have here very comprehensively the Christian part, as it appears to me ( i.e., what belongs to the disciples, viewed as professing Christ's name when Israel rejected Him). This suits Matthew's view of the prophecy; and the reason is plain. Matthew shows us not only the consequences of the rejection of the Messiah to Israel, but the change of dispensation, or what would follow on their fatal opposition to One who was their King, yea, not only Messiah, but Jehovah. The consequences were to be, could not but be, all-important; and the Spirit here records this portion of the Lord's prophecy most appropriately to His purpose by Matthew. Would not God turn the Jewish rejection of that glorious Person to some wondrous and suitable account? Accordingly this is what we find here. The order, though different from that which obtains elsewhere, is regulated by perfect wisdom. First of all, the Jews are taken up, or the disciples as representing them, where they then were. They had not got beyond their old thoughts of the temple, those buildings that had excited their admiration and awe. The Lord announces the judgment that was at hand. Indeed, it was involved in the words said before "Behold, your house is left unto you desolate." It was their house. The Spirit was fled. It was no better than a dead body now. Why should it not be carried out speedily to burial? "See ye not all these things? Verily I say unto you, There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down." All would soon be over for the present. "And as He sat upon the mount of Olives, the disciples came unto Him privately, saying, Tell us, when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?" In answer the Lord sets before them a general history so general, indeed, that one might hardly gather at first whether He did not contemplate even here Christians as well as Jews. (vv. 4-14.) They are viewed really as a believing but Jewish remnant, which accounts for the breadth of the language. Then, from verse 15, come the details of Daniel's special last half week, whose prophecy is emphatically appealed to. The establishment of the abomination of desolation in the holy place would be the sign for the instant flight of godly ones, like the disciples, who will then be found in Jerusalem. For this is to be followed by great tribulation, exceeding any time of trouble since the beginning of the world up to that day. Nor will there be outward affliction only, but unparalleled deceits, false Christs and false prophets showing great signs and wonders. But the elect are here warned graciously of the Saviour, and far, far beyond any guards afforded in the prophecies of the Old Testament.

"Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall, the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heaven shall be shaken: and then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory."Matthew 24:29; Matthew 24:29. The appearing of the Son of man is a grand point in Matthew, and indeed in all the gospels. The once rejected Christ will come in glory as the glorious Heir of all things. His advent in the clouds of heaven will be to take the throne, not of Israel only, but of all people, nations, and languages. Returning thus, to the horror and shame of His adversaries, in or out of the land, the first thing spoken of here is His mission of His angels to gather together His elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other. There is no hint of resurrection or of rapture to heaven here. The elect of Israel are in question, and His own glory as Son of man, without a word of His being Head; nor of the Church His body. What we find here is a process of gathering the chosen, not merely of the Jews, but of all Isaiah, as I suppose, from the four winds of heaven. This interpretation derives support, then, if that be needed, from the parable that immediately follows (verses 32, 33). It is the fig tree once more, but used for a far different purpose. Be it curse in one connection, be it blessing in another, the fig tree typifies Israel.

Then comes, not what may be called the natural, but the scriptural, parable. As that alluded to the outside realm of nature, so this was taken from the Old Testament. The reference here is to the days of Noah, applied to illustrate the coming of the Son of man. So should the blow fall suddenly on all its objects. "Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left, Two women shall be grinding at the mill; the one shall be taken, and the other left." They must not imagine that it would be like an ordinary judgment in providence, which sweeps here, not there, and sweeps here indiscriminately. In such the guiltless suffer with the guilty, without any approach to an adequate personal distinction. But it will not be so in the days of the Son of man, when He returns to deal with mankind at the end of the age. To be without or within will be no protection. Of two men in the field; of two women grinding at the mill, the one shall be taken, and the other left. The discrimination is precise and perfect to the last degree. "Watch therefore," says the Lord, in conclusion of it all; "for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come. But know this, that if the goodman of the house had known in what watch the thief would come, he would have watched, and would not have suffered his house to be broken up. Therefore be ye also ready: for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of man cometh."

This transition, in my judgment, leads from the part particularly devoted to the destinies of the Jewish people, and opens into that which concerns the Christian profession. The first of these general pictures of Christendom, which drop all reference to Jerusalem, the temple, the people, or their hope, is found in verses 45-51. Next follows the parable of the ten virgins; then, last of these, is that of the talents. Let me observe, however, that there is a clause in Matthew 25:13 which has a little falsified the application. But the truth is, as is well known, that men, in copying the Greek New Testament, added the words, "Wherein the Son of man cometh," to this verse, which is complete without them. The Spirit really wrote, "Watch therefore, for ye know not the day nor the hour." To those versed in the text as it stands in the best copies, this is a fact too familiar to demand many words said about it. No critic of weight considers that these words have any just claim to be in the text that is founded on ancient authority. Others may defend the clause who accept what is commonly received, and what can only be defended by modern or uncertain manuscripts. Surely those I now address are the last men who ought to contend for a mere traditional or vulgar basis in anything which pertains to God. If we accept the traditional text of the printers, we are on this ground; if, on the contrary, we reject human meddling as a principle, assuredly we ought not to accredit such clauses as this, which we have the strongest grounds to pronounce a mere interpolation, and not truly the word of God. But this being so, we may proceed to notice how strikingly beautiful is the effect of omitting these words.

First, then, in the Christian part, came the parable of the household servant. He who, faithful and wise, met the wishes of his Lord that set him over His household to give them meat in due season, being found so doing, when He comes, is made ruler over all His goods. The evil servant, on the contrary, who settled in his heart that his Lord was not coming, and so yielded to overbearing violence and evil commerce with the profane world, shall be surprised by judgment, and have his portion with the hypocrites in hopeless shame and sorrow.

It is an instructive sketch of Christendom; but there is more. "Then shall the kingdom of heaven be likened unto ten virgins, which took their lamps, and went forth to meet the bridegroom. And five of them were wise, and five were foolish. They that were foolish took their lamps, and took no oil with them: but the wise took oil in their vessels with their lamps. While the bridegroom tarried, they all slumbered and slept." Thus Christendom entirely breaks down. It is not only the foolish who go to sleep, but the wise. All fail to give a right expression to their waiting for the Bridegroom. "They all slumbered and slept." But God takes care, without telling us how, that there shall be an interruption of their slumber. Instead of remaining out to wait, they must have gone in somewhere to sleep. In short, the original position is deserted. Not only have they not discharged their duty of awaiting the return of the Bridegroom, but they are no longer in their true posture. When the hope revives, the position is recovered, not before. At midnight, when all were asleep, there was a cry, "The bridegroom cometh: go ye out to meet him." This acts on the virgins, wise and foolish. So it is now. Who can deny that foolish people enough speak and write about the Lord's coming? An universal agitation of spirit goes on in all countries and all towns. Spite of opposition, the expectation spreads far and wide. It is in no way confined to the children of God. Those who are in quest of oil, going hither and thither, are disturbed by it as certainly as those who have oil in their vessels are cheered to go out once more while waiting for the, Bridegroom's return. But what a difference! The wise were prepared with oil beforehand; the rest proved their folly in doing without it. Let me particularly call your attention to this, The difference consisted not in expecting the Lord's coining or not, but in the possession or the lack of oil (i.e., the unction from the Holy One). All profess Christ; they are all virgins with their lamps. But the want of oil is fatal. He who has not the Spirit of Christ is none of His. Such are the foolish. They know not what has made the others wise unto salvation, whatever they may profess; and their restless search, after that which they have not, finally severs them even here from the company of those they started with as looking for the Lord.

The notion that they are Christians who lack intelligence in prophecy seems to me not false only, but utterly unworthy of a spiritual mind. Is the possession of Christ less precious than a correct chart of the future? I cannot conceive a Christian without oil in his vessel. It is clearly to have the Holy Ghost, whom every saint that submits to the righteousness of God in Christ has dwelling within him. As John teaches us, the least members of God's family are said to have that unction not the fathers and young men but expressly the babes. Of course, if the youngest in Christ are so privileged, the young men and fathers do not want. Therefore I do assert, with the fullest conviction of its truth, that, as the oil in the parable sets forth, not prophetic intelligence, but the gift of God's Spirit, so every Christian, and no other, has the Holy Ghost dwelling in him. These, then, are the wise virgins who make ready for the Bridegroom, and go in with Him to the marriage at His coming. As that hour draws near, the others, on the contrary, are more and more agitated. Not resting on Christ for their souls by faith, they have not the Spirit, and seek the inestimable gift among those who sell it, asking who will show them any good of whom they may buy this priceless oil. The Lord meanwhile comes, they that were ready go in with Him to the wedding, and the door was shut; the rest of the virgins are excluded. The Lord knew them not.

Let me say in passing, that these virgins are distinguished from those who will be called in the end of the age by broad and deep differences. There is no ground to believe that the sufferers in that crisis will ever become heavy with sleep, as saints have done during the long delay of Christendom. That brief season of unprecedented trial and danger does not admit of it. Next, as little ground is there in Scripture to predicate of these latter-day sufferers the possession of the Holy Ghost, which is the peculiar privilege of the believer since the rejected Christ took His place as Head in heaven. The Holy Ghost is to be poured out on all flesh for the millennial day, no doubt; but no prophecy declares that the remnant will be so characterized till they see Jesus. And, again, there is the third point of distinction, that these sufferers are nowhere set forth as going out to meet the Bridegroom. They may flee away because of the abomination that makes desolate, but this is a contrast rather than a similar feature.

The third of these parables presents another phase again. During the absence of the Lord, before He appears to take the kingdom of the world, He gives gifts to men different gifts, and in different measures. This pre-eminently belongs to Christianity and its active testimony in peculiar variety. I am not aware of anything exactly answering to it in its full character in the latter day (which will be distinguished by a brief energetic witness of the kingdom). These gifts ofMatthew 25:1-46; Matthew 25:1-46 seem to me the thorough expression of the activity of grace, that goes out and labours for a rejected and absent Lord on high. However, I may not dwell upon minuter points, which would, of course, frustrate the desire to give a comprehensive sketch in a short compass.

The latter scene of the chapter is, to a simple mind, evident enough. "All the nations" or Gentiles are in question: there can be no mistake as to this. The Jew has already come before us, and at the beginning of the Lord's discourse, because the disciples were then Jews. Next, as disciples emerged from Judaism into Christianity, we have in this very distinctly the reason why the Christian parenthesis comes second in order. Then, in the third place, we find "all the nations" who are formally designated as such, and distinguished in the clearest manner from the two others, both in terms and in the things said of them. They come up and are visibly dealt with as Gentiles at the close, when the Son of man reigns as king over the earth. The question which comes before His throne, and decides their eternal lot, does not consist of the secrets of the heart then laid bare, nor their general life, but of their behaviour to His messengers. How had they treated certain persons that the King calls His brethren? It is an appraisal then, founded on their relation to a brief testimony rendered at the close of the present dispensation (I doubt not, by Jewish brethren of the King, when all the world wonders after the beast, and in general men go back to idols, and fall into Antichrist's hands); a testimony suited to the crisis, after the Christian body has been taken to heaven, and the question of the earth is raised once more. Thus these nations or Gentiles are dealt with according to their behaviour to the messengers of the King, just before and up to the time that the King summons them before the throne of His glory. To own His despised heralds when the time of strong delusion comes, will demand the quickening work of the Spirit; which, indeed, is needful for receiving any and every testimony of God. It is not a question of any general issue that would apply to a course of ages, as to the present preaching of God's grace, or to the ordinary current of men's lives. Nothing of the sort appears to be the ground of the Lord's action with either the sheep or the goats.

Matthew 26:1-75. Formal teaching is over now, whether practical or prophetic. The scene above all scenes draws near, on which, however blessed, I cannot say much at this time. The Lord Jesus has been presented to the people, has preached, has wrought miracles, has instructed disciples, has met all the various classes of His adversaries, has launched into the future up to the end of the age. Now He prepares to suffer, to suffer in absolute surrender of Himself to the Father. Accordingly, in this scene it is no longer man judging Him in words, but God judging Him in His person on the cross. Grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. So it is here. He maintains, too, every affection in its fulness. Here, aside from the crowd, the Lord for a season takes whatever of rest might be vouchsafed to His spirit. The active work was done. The cross remained a few brief hours, but of eternal value and unfathomable import, with which indeed nothing can compare.

At the house of Bethany Jesus is now found. It is one of the few scenes introduced by the Spirit of God into all the gospels save Luke, in contrast with, yet in preparation for, the cross. Was the Spirit of God then acting mightily in the heart of one who loved the Saviour? At this very time Satan was pushing on the heart of man to dare the worst against Jesus. Around these were the parties. What a moment for heaven, and earth, and hell! How much, how little was man seen! for if one feature be prominent in His foes more than another, it is this, that man is powerless, even when Jesus was the victim, exposed to every hostile breath as it might appear. Yet does He accomplish everything, when He was but a sufferer; they nothing, when free to do all (for it was their hour, and the power of darkness) nothing but their iniquity; but even in their iniquity doing the will of God, spite of themselves, and contrary to their own plans. They did their will in point of guilt, but it was never accomplished as they desired. First of all, as we are told, their great anxiety was, that the deed on which their heart was set, the death of Jesus, should not be at the passover. But their resolution was vain. From the beginning God had decided that then, and at no other time, it should be. They assembled, they consulted, "that they might take Jesus by subtilty and kill him." The upshot of their deliberations was only "Not on the feast day, lest there be an uproar among the people." Little did they foresee the treachery of a disciple, or the public sentence of a Roman governor. Again, there was no uproar among the people, contrary to their fears. Yet did Jesus die on that day according to God's word.

But let us turn aside to the company of our Lord for a little while at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper. There was poured out the worship of a heart that loved Him, if ever there was one. She waited not for the promise of the Father; but He who was soon after given to overflowing, even then wrought in the instincts of her new nature. "There came unto him a woman having an alabaster box of very precious ointment, and poured it on his head as he sat at meat." This, John lets us know, she had kept; it was no new thing got up for the occasion; it was her best, and spent on Jesus. How little it was in her eyes, how precious in His, spent on one whom she loved, for whom she felt the impending danger; for love is quick to feel, and feels more truly than man's most sharpened prudence. So it was, then, that this woman pours her ointment on His head. John mentions His feet. Certainly it was poured upon both. But as Matthew has the King before him, and it was usual to pour on, not the feet of a king, but his head, he naturally records that part of the action which was suitable to the Messiah. John, on the contrary, whose point is that Jesus was infinitely more than a king, while lowly enough in love for anything John most appropriately tells us that Mary poured it on His feet. It is interesting, too, to observe, that love, and a profound sense of the glory of Jesus, led her to do that which a sinner's heart, thoroughly broken down in the presence of His grace, prompted her to do. For Luke mentions another person. In this case it was "a woman in the city, who was a sinner," a totally different person, at another and earlier time, and in the house of another Simon, a Pharisee. She too anointed the feet of Jesus with an alabaster box of ointment; but she stood at His feet behind, weeping, and began to wash His feet with tears, and wiped them with the hairs of her head, and kissed His feet. There are thus many added circumstances in harmony with the case. All I would point out now is, the kindred feeling to which is led a poor sinner that tasted His grace in presence of her proved unworthiness, and a loving worshipper, filled with the glory of His person, and sensitive to the malice of His foes. However that may be, the Lord vindicates her in the face of murmuring disaffected disciples. It is a solemn lesson; for it shows how one corrupt mind may defile others, incomparably better than its own. The whole college of the apostles, the twelve, were tainted for the moment by the poison insinuated by one. What hearts are ours at such a season, in the face of such love! But so it was, alas! is. One evil eye may too soon communicate its foul impression, and thereby many be defiled. It was Judas at bottom; but there was also that in the rest which made them susceptible of similar selfishness at the expense of Jesus, although there was not in them the same allowance of diabolical influence which had suggested thoughts to Judas. The example is surely not without serious admonition to ourselves. How often care for doctrine cloaks Satan, as here care for the poor! Morally, too, this connects itself with Christ's sufferings that should follow. The devotedness of the woman is used of Satan to push Judas into his last wickedness, so much the more determined by the outflow of what his heart could not in the smallest degree appreciate. Thence he goes to sell Jesus. If he could not manage to get the box of precious ointment, or its worth, he would, while he could, secure his little profit on the sale of Jesus to His enemies. "What will ye give me," says he to the chief priests, "and I will deliver him unto you?" Accordingly the covenant takes place a covenant with death, and an agreement with hell. "They covenanted with him for thirty pieces of silver" man's, Israel's, worthy price for Jesus!

But now, as the woman had her token for Jesus, and in it her own memorial, wherever, whenever the gospel of the kingdom is preached in the whole world, so Jesus next institutes the standing, undying token of His dying love. He founds the new feast, His own supper for His disciples. At the paschal feast He takes up the bread and the wine, and consecrates them to be on earth the continual remembrance of Himself in the midst of His own. In the language of its institution there are some distinctive features which may claim a notice when we have the opportunity of looking at the other gospels. From this table our Lord goes to Gethsemane, and His agony there. Whatever there was of sorrow, whatever there was of pain, whatever there was of suffering, our Lord never bowed to any suffering from men without, before He bore it on His heart alone with His Father. He went through it in spirit before He went through it in fact. And this, I believe, is the main point here. I say not all that we have; for here He met the terrors of death and what a death! pressed on Him by the prince of this world, who nevertheless found nothing in Him. Thus at the actual hour it was God glorified in Him, the Son of man, even as, when raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, He forthwith declares to His brethren the name of His Father and their Father, of His God and their God, both nature and relationship. Here His cry still is simply to His Father, as in the cross it was, My God, though not this only. However profoundly instructive all this maybe, our Lord in the garden calls upon the disciples to watch and pray; but this is precisely what they find hardest. They slept, and prayed not. What a contrast, too, with Jesus afterwards, when the trial came! And yet for them it was but the merest reflection of that which He passed through. For the world, death is either borne with the obduracy that dares all because it believes nothing, or it is a pang as the end of present enjoyment, the sombre portal of they know not what beyond. To the believer, to the Jewish disciple, before redemption, death was even worse in a sense; for there was a juster perception of God, and of man's state morally. Now all is changed through His death, which the disciples so little estimated, the bare shadow of which, however, was enough to overwhelm them all, and silence every confession of their faith. For him who most of all presumed on the strength of his love, it was enough to prove how little he yet knew of the reality of death, spite of his too ready boasts. And yet what would death have been in his case compared with that of Jesus! But even that was incomparably too much for the strength of Peter; all was proved powerless, save the One who showed, even when He was weakest, that He was alone the Giver of all strength, the Manifester of all grace, even when He was crushed under such judgment as man never knew before, nor can know again.

Matthew 27:1-66. We next see our Lord, not with the disciples, failing, false, or traitorous, but His hour come, in the power of the hostile world, priests, governors, soldiers, and people. What was attempted by man completely broke down. They had their witnesses, but the witnesses agreed not. Failure everywhere is found, even in wickedness failure not in men's will, but in its accomplishment. God alone governs. So now Jesus was condemned, not for their testimony, but for His own. How wondrous, that even to put Him to death they needed the witness of Jesus; they could not condemn Him to die but for His good confession. For His testimony to the truth they consummated their worst deed; and this doubly, before the high priest as well as before the governor. Warned of his wife (for the Lord took care that there should be providential testimony), as well as too keen-sighted to overlook the malice of the Jews and the innocence of the accused, Pontius Pilate acknowledges his prisoner to be guiltless, yet allowed himself to be forced to act contrary to his own conscience, and according to their wishes whom he wholly despised. Once more, ere Jesus is led out to be crucified, the Jews showed what they were morally; for when the coarse-minded heathen put before them the alternative of releasing Jesus or Barabbas, their instant preference (not without priestly instigation) was a wretch, a robber, a murderer. Such was the feeling of the Jews, God's people, toward their King, because He was the Son of God, Jehovah, and not a mere man. With bitter irony, but not without God, wrote Pilate the accusation, "This is Jesus, the King of the Jews." But this was not the only testimony which God gave. For from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land unto the ninth hour. And then when Jesus, crying with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost, that ensued which particularly would strike the heart of the Jew. The veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom, and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent. What could be conceived more solemn to Israel? His death was the death blow to the Jewish system, struck by one who was unmistakably the Maker of heaven and earth. But it was not the dissolution of that system only, but of the power of death itself; for the graves were opened, and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, and came out of the graves after His resurrection, the witness of the value of His death, though not declared till after His resurrection. The death of Jesus, I hesitate not to say, is the sole groundwork of righteous deliverance from sin. In the resurrection is seen the mighty power of God; but what is power for a sinner, with God before his soul, compared with righteousness? What with grace? And this is precisely what we have here. Hence, it is the death of Jesus alone that is the true centre and pivot of all God's counsels and ways, whether in righteousness or in grace. The resurrection, no doubt, is the power that manifests and proclaims all; but what it proclaims is the power of His death, because that alone has vindicated God morally. The death of Jesus alone has proved that nothing could overcome His love rejection, death itself, so far from this, being only the occasion of displaying love to the uttermost. Therefore it is that, of all things even in Jesus, there is none that affords such a common and perfect resting-place for God and man as the death of Jesus. When it is a question of power, liberty, life, no doubt we must turn to the resurrection; and hence it is, that in the Acts of the apostles this necessarily comes out most prominently, because the matter in hand was to afford proof, on the one hand, of manifested but despised grace; on the other hand, of God's reversing man's attainder of Jesus by raising Him from the dead and exalting Him to His own right hand on high. The death of Jesus would be no demonstration of this sort. On the contrary, His death was what man appeared to triumph in. They had got rid of Jesus thus, but the resurrection proved how vain and short-lived it was, and that God was against them. The object was to make evident that man was wholly opposed to God, and that God even now manifested His sentence on it. The raising up Him whom man slew renders this unquestionable. I admit that in the resurrection of Christ God is for us, for the believer. But the sinner and the believer must not be confounded together, for there is an immense difference between the two things. Whatever the witness of perfect love in the gift and death of Jesus, for the sinner there is not, there cannot be, anything whatever in the resurrection of Jesus save condemnation. I press this the more strongly, because the recovery of the precious truth of Christ's resurrection exposes some, by a kind of reaction, to weaken the value which His death has in God's mind, and ought to have in our faith. Let those, then, who prize the resurrection, see to it that they be exceedingly jealous for the due place of the cross.

The two things we find remarkably guarded here. It was not the resurrection, but the death of Jesus, that rent the veil of the temple; it was not His resurrection that opened the graves, but His cross, though the saints rose not till after He rose. It is just so with us practically. In point of fact, we never do know the full worth of the death of Christ, until we look upon it from the power and results of the resurrection. But what we contemplate from the side of resurrection is not itself, but the death of Jesus. Hence it is that in the Church's assembling, and most properly, on the Lord's day, we do in the breaking of bread show forth, not the resurrection, but the death of the Lord. At the same time, we show forth His death not on the day of death, but upon that of resurrection. Do I forget that it is the day of resurrection? Then I little understand my liberty and joy. If, on the contrary, the resurrection day brings no more before me than the resurrection, it is too plain that the death of Christ has lost its infinite grace for my soul.

The Egyptians would have liked to cross the Red Sea, but they had no care for the doors sprinkled with the blood of the lamb. They essayed to pass through the watery walls, desiring thus to follow Israel to the other side. But we do not read that they ever sought the shelter of the Paschal Lamb's blood. No doubt, this is an extreme case, and the judgment of the world of nature; but we may learn even from an enemy not to value resurrection less, but to value the death and blood-shedding of our precious Saviour more. There is really nothing towards God and man like the death of Christ.

Then, in contrast with the poor but devoted women of Galilee that surrounded the cross, we behold the fears, the just fears, of those who had accomplished the death of Jesus. These guilty men go full of anxiety to Pilate. They feared "that deceiver," and so had their watch, and stone, and seal in vain! The Lord that sat in the heavens had them in derision. Jesus had prepared His own (and His enemies knew it) for His rising on the third day. Women came there the evening before to look at the place where the Lord lay buried. (Matthew 28:1-20) That morning, very early, when there were none there but the guards, the angel of the Lord. descends. We are not told that our Lord rose at that time; still less is it said that the angel of the Lord rolled away the stone for Him. He that passed through the doors, closed for fear of the Jews, could just as easily pass through the sealed stone, despite all the soldiers of the empire. We know that there the angel sat after rolling away the great stone which had closed the sepulchre, where our Lord, despised and rejected of men, nevertheless accomplished Isaiah's prophecy. In making His grave with the rich. The Lord then had this further witness, that the very keepers, hardened and bold as such usually are, trembled, and became as dead men, while the angel bids the women not to fear; for this Jesus which was crucified "is not here: He is risen. Come, and see the place where the Lord lay, and go and tell the disciples, Behold, He goeth before you into Galilee." This is a point of importance for completing the view of His rejection, or its consequences in resurrection, and so Matthew takes particular care of it, though the same fact may be recorded also by Mark for his purpose.

But Matthew does not speak of the various appearances of the Lord in Jerusalem after the resurrection. What he does dwell upon particularly, and of course with his special reasons for it, is, that the Lord, after His resurrection, adheres to the place where the state of the Jews led Him to be habitually, and shed His light around according to prophecy; for the Lord resumed relations once more in Galilee with the remnant represented by" the disciples after He rose from the dead. It was in the place of Jewish contempt; it was where the benighted poor of the flock were, the neglected of the proud scribes and rulers of Jerusalem. There the risen Lord was pleased to go before His servants and rejoin them.

But as the Galilean women went with this word from the angel, the Lord Himself met them. "And they came and held him by the feet, and worshipped him." It is remarkable that in our gospel this was permitted. To Mary Magdalene, who in her desire to pay her wonted obeisance probably was attempting something similar, He altogether declines it; but this is mentioned in the gospel of John. How is it, then, that the two apostolic accounts show us the homage of the women received, and of Mary Magdalene refused, on the same day, and perhaps at the same hour? Clearly the action is significant in both. The reason, I apprehend, was this, Matthew sets before us that while He was the rejected Messiah, though now risen, He not only reverted to His relations in the despised part of the land with His disciples, but gives, in this accepted worship of the daughters of Galilee, the pledge of His special association with the Jews in the latter day; for it is precisely thus that they will look for the Lord. That is, a Jew, as such, counts upon the bodily presence of the Lord. The point in John's record is the very reverse; for it is the taking one, who was a sample of believing Jews, out of Jewish relations into association with Himself just about to ascend to heaven. In Matthew He is touched. They held Him by the feet without remonstrance, and thus worshipped Him in bodily presence. In John He says, "Touch me not;" and the reason is, "for I am not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God." Worship henceforth was to be offered to Him above, invisible, but known there by faith. To the women in Matthew it was here that He was presented for their worship; to the woman in John it was there only He was to be known now. It was not a question of bodily presence, but of the Lord ascended to heaven and there announcing the new relationships for us with His Father and God. Thus, in the one case, it is the sanction of Jewish hopes of His presence here, below for the homage of Israel; in the other gospel, it is His personal absence and ascension, leading souls to a higher and suited association with Himself, as well as with God, taking even those who were Jews out of their old condition to know the Lord no more after the flesh.

Most consistently, therefore, in this gospel, we have no ascension scene at all. If we had only the gospel of Matthew, we should possess no record of this wonderful fact: so striking is the omission, that a well-known commentary, Mr. Alford's first edition, broached the rash and irreverent hypothesis founded upon it, that our Matthew is an incomplete Greek version of the Hebrew original, because there was no such record; for it was impossible, in the opinion of that writer, that an apostle could have omitted a description of that event. The fact is, if you add the ascension to Matthew, you would overload and mar his gospel. The beautiful end of Matthew is, that (while chief priests and elders essay to cover their wickedness by falsehood and bribery, and their lie "is commonly reported among the Jews until this day,") our Lord meets His disciples on a mountain in Galilee, according to His appointment, and sends them to disciple all the Gentiles. How great is the change of dispensation is manifest from His former commission to the same men in Matthew 10:1-42. Now they were to baptize them unto the name of the Father, etc. It was not a question of the Almighty God of the fathers, or the Jehovah God of Israel. The name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is characteristic of Christianity. Permit me to say, that this is the true formula of Christian baptism, and that the omission of this form of sound words appears to me quite as fatal to the validity of baptism as any change that can be pointed out in other respects. Instead of being a Jewish thing, this is what supplanted it. Instead of a relic of older dispensations to be modified or rather set aside now, on the contrary, it is the full revelation of the name of God as now made known, not before. This only came out after the death and resurrection of Christ. There is no longer the mere Jewish enclosure He had entered during the days of His flesh, but the change of dispensation was now dawning: so consistently does the Spirit of God hold to His design from the first to the very end.

Accordingly He closes with these words, "Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world [age]." How the form of the truth would have been weakened, if not destroyed, had we then heard of His going up to heaven! It is evident that the moral force of it is infinitely more preserved as it is. He is charging His disciples, sending them on their world-wide mission with these words, "Lo, I am with you always, all the days," etc. The force is immensely increased, and for this very reason that we hear and see no more. He promised His presence with them to the end of the age; and thereon the curtain drops. He is thus heard, if not seen, for ever with His own on earth, as they go forth upon that errand so precious, but perilous. May we gather real profit from all He has given us.