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Bible Dictionaries
People
Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament
or PEOPLE.—This collective term, which occurs about 120 times in the Gospels, is used to denote sometimes in a lesser or more general way the people (λαός) among whom Christ lived and fulfilled His mission, but oftener the smaller or larger crowds of people (ὄχλος) who, from time to time, and in the various scenes of His labour, waited upon His ministry (see art. Crowd). But ‘people’ (λαός) is several times employed in the religious sense that attaches to such phrases as ‘the people of God,’ or ‘Christ’s people’ (Matthew 1:21; Matthew 2:6, Luke 1:17; Luke 1:77; Luke 2:32; Luke 7:16). It is only in this latter sense that the word calls for special notice, and as so viewed it possesses considerable importance.
The most noteworthy thing in regard to the religious use of the word in the Gospels is, that it is never in any of them employed by Christ Himself. All the instances in which it is found are in narratives connected with His birth and infancy, except the one in Luke 7:16; and in this case it was the people who beheld the restoration of the widow’s son to life who said, ‘that a great prophet is risen among us; and that God hath visited his people.’ The fact that Christ discarded the use of the word ‘people’ in its religious sense cannot be regarded as a matter of little or no consequence. In doing so He must have acted with deliberate purpose, and for reasons considered by Himself to be valid. This view is evident from a variety of considerations: (1) The religious sense of the phrase ‘the people of God’ had occupied a place of high importance in the historical relation between God and the Hebrew race. (2) It had been organically associated by the OT revelation with the prospective advent of the Messiah and His Kingdom. (3) According to Messianic prophecy, the one people of God would eventually consist of all the peoples of the earth united in a common relation to Him. (4) Christ was aware of these facts. He knew that He was Himself the Jewish Messiah and the Saviour of the world. And He was inspired and controlled by the idea that the object of His mission was to bring the true and full sense of the phrase ‘the people of God’ to perfect realization in the Kingdom of heaven. (5) If He had chosen to do so, it would have been easy for Him to express all the essential truths of His message to mankind in terms of ‘the people of God.’ Moreover, this phrase could not be without attractions for Him. Why, then, did He never let it fall from His lips when addressing His audiences in public and in private?
One of His reasons must have been the significance of the phrase as it presented itself to His own mind. The ideas with which He would charge it may be inferred from the essential nature of the truths embodied in the message He left behind Him. In thinking of God and His people, He would think of Him as a moral Being and of them as moral beings. He would think of the relations between Him and them as moral, and therefore as founded in this direct inward relation to them as individuals. He would think also of His relation to them as absolutely impartial, and of their relations to Him as absolutely equal. And for all these reasons He would think of the relation between God and His people, as His people, as in no sense legal, and as not permitting Him to show towards any people in particular either national favour or political privileges. Finally, all this implies that Christ would think of God and His people in terms of purely moral universality. But if such is the meaning that He would attach to the phrase alluded to, does not that seem to favour His use of it, and to make His rejection of it still more difficult to understand? Quite the reverse, as another reason shows.
As a teacher, Christ had to consider not only the meaning that He attached to the phrase Himself, but also the meaning attached to it by the Jews among whom He taught, and who believed that they themselves were the people of God, and they alone of all the peoples or mankind. The people of Israel were the people of God. This was one of the most essential and distinctive dogmas of the fully developed, orthodox, and official Judaism with which our Lord everywhere and always had to reckon as a teacher; and this dogma, adhered to and upheld by the fanatical zeal of the rigid and conservative devotees of Judaism, was the most embarrassing that He had to reckon with as a teacher sent from God. For what did the dogma in question mean and imply? It rested upon a denial of the essential oneness of the relation of God to all the peoples of the world, and of the essential oneness of the relation of all the peoples of the world to Him. It was founded in the notion that the relation between God and His people was national, and that the nature of the national bond was not moral but legal. For Divine righteousness and the obedience of faith, the only real and permanent, because moral, conditions on which the relations between God and His people repose, it substituted ancestral descent from Abraham, and the observance of the national rite of circumcision. And the only way, it contended, for Gentiles to obtain admission within the circle of the people of God, was to become Jews by observing this national rite. It is manifest, then, that the ideas of Judaism and the ideas of Christ on the subject of ‘the people of God’ were in direct and complete antagonism to one another. This fact Christ had to consider, and it was necessary for Him as a teacher to weigh the question as to what the inevitable consequences would be for Himself and His cause, if He attempted in the course of His teaching to present and explain His ideas on the subject of ‘the people of God’ in their real and inherent antagonism to the ideas on the same subject which had become fixed and hardened in the perverted Judaism of His time. Evidently He came to the conclusion that the handling of this subject would involve Himself and the interests of His mission in great risks and dangers. It is certain that such would have been the case. For if He had taught and insisted on the acceptance of the truths of moral unity and universality that belong to the relations between God and His people as He understood them, the bigoted adherents of Judaism would have forthwith resented His teaching and made Himself the object of their fanatical and malignant hostility. He therefore persistently ignored the phrase ‘the people of God.’ It was highly expedient for Him to do so.
But the adoption of this course did not entail any compromise of those truths of moral unity and universality that are of the essence of the relations in which God stands to His people and they to Him. He showed His sense of the greatness and validity of these as well as of other moral truths, and secured the interests attaching to them, by two other vastly important things that He did as a teacher. In the first place, He embedded all the truths of moral unity and universality referred to in His parables, which He spoke as illustrative of the rich and diversified order of ideas presented by Him under the designation of ‘the kingdom of God.’ His reason for couching these ideas in parabolic forms He Himself explained (Matthew 13:10-16). His explanation implies that He would have preferred to employ a more explicit way of communicating the ideas in question if circumstances had permitted; that the hearts of the adherents of the existing perverted Judaism had been blinded and hardened by the influence of their system; that it was impossible for them to see the truth and validity of these ideas; and that they were not in a mood to extend to them or to Himself toleration. Such was His reason for speaking of the Kingdom of heaven in parables. The true meaning of the latter was veiled from the enemies of the truth by the blindness of their eyes. But, on the other hand, the parables, He knew, would preserve the essence of the truth as He had taught it, and to all who were of the truth the latter would in due time become revealed.
But, secondly, Christ guarded and effectively secured the interests of the truths of moral unity and universality, which are of the essence of His gospel, in another way. In the Kingdom of God and in the relations between God and His people, moral unity and moral universality are founded on their human side on moral individuality. In any case, therefore, it would have been necessary for Christ to give to moral individuality a place of supreme importance in His teaching. And this is precisely what He did. He knew and never lost sight of the truth that moral unity and universality can never come to actual realization in the Kingdom of heaven, or, in other words, in the relations between God and His people, unless in so far as men are saved, and become morally perfect as individuals. And therefore He not only gave His just and constant consideration to the individual, but held up before His disciples the moral perfection of God, their Father in heaven, as the ideal which they should strive individually to realize in their own character and life (Matthew 5:43-48). This is the basis on which moral unity and universality are realized in the relations of men to God as His people.
W. D. Thomson.
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Hastings, James. Entry for 'People'. Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/hdn/p/people.html. 1906-1918.
