THE GOSPEL OF THE KINGDOM.
Mr. Editor:
I desire above all things to understand you on the subject of “the Gospel of the Kingdom.” I think sometimes I understand you. But I live close by one who says, he cannot understand, and I then conclude, “may be I do not.” But from what you say about “Elpis Israel,” I live in hopes of seeing it, and of learning all that is necessary for me to know in order to salvation.
I know you have no time to trifle away, else I would ask you to write a few lines to me on the subject, stating the facts of the gospel as you would if presenting to a congregation in order to faith.
N. ANTHONY.
Tennessee, 1851.
THE GREAT SALVATION.
“How shall we escape if we neglect so great salvation which assumed a beginning to be spoken by the Lord? -Paul
The Anglo-Saxon word GOSPEL is euanghelion in the Greek. This is a word compounded of eu, an adverb of quality signifying good; and anghelia, a message delivered in the name of any one: eu-anghelion, therefore, signifies a good message, which becomes good news to those previously unacquainted with it. It is styled “the gospel of God”-Romans 1: 1 because it is a good message emanating from Him. It is also called “the glorious gospel of the blessed God”-1 Timothy 1: 11, because it is a good message of future glory on account of which all that partake in it will call him blessed. It announces a good time coming, when “the knowledge of the glory of the Lord shall fill the earth as the waters cover the sea”-Habakkuk 2: 14: for Jehovah sware to Moses, saying, “As truly as I live, all the earth shall be filled with the glory of the Lord”-Numbers 14: 21. This is glorious good news from God to every one that believes it.
God’s gospel is styled “the gospel of the kingdom”-Matthew 4: 23; 24: 14; Mark 1: 14-15; Luke 8: 1-because he purposes to manifest his glory and blessedness through a kingdom he declares He will set up in the land lying between the Euphrates, Mediterranean, and Nile.
The gospel of the kingdom, and the “great salvation spoken of by the Lord,” are the same thing. This is evident from the fact, that the Lord Jesus when he began to preach did not make two separate proclamations. Throughout his ministry he preached but one thing, which is variously expressed in the history of his career. Sometimes it is simply styled “the gospel;”-Mark 1: 15; 8: 35; 13: 10; Luke 4: 18-at others, “the kingdom of God”-Luke 4: 43; 9: 2, 6: and Peter in recalling the recollection of it to Cornelius’ mind, says,
“That Word ye know, which was published throughout all Judea, and began from Galilee, after the baptism which John preached.”-Acts 10: 37.
In the previous verse, he reminded him who began to preach this word from Galilee, and speaks of it as a message. His words are,
“The Word which God sent unto the children of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ, who is Lord of all; that word, I say, ye know.”
When we turn to the history “of all that Jesus began both to do and teach,” we find that when he began to speak the great salvation he commenced preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God in Galilee. The following is the testimony-
“Now when Jesus had heard that John was cast into prison, he departed into Galilee. From that time Jesus began to preach, and to say, Repent; for the kingdom of the heavens is at hand. And he went about all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing all manner of sickness”-Matthew 4: 12, 17, 23.
The word sent, the gospel of the kingdom, and the great salvation, it is clear, all began to be preached by Jesus at the same time, and in the same region of country; they must therefore, and can only be, the same thing under different modes of speech. A word sent is a message; that word sent by Jesus Christ constitutes him THE MESSENGER-Malachi 3: 1: a messenger sent of God with good news to the children of Israel about a kingdom, which they did not then possess, preaches that kingdom to them as a matter of promise, and therefore of hope; so that the gospel of the kingdom is also styled “THE HOPE OF ISRAEL,” for which Paul said he was “bound with a chain”-Acts 28: 20.
The kingdom of God is the great salvation, because through that kingdom the blessedness preached to Abraham as the gospel-Galatians 3: 8-is to come upon all the nations of the earth, and by which they are to be saved from the power of those who destroy them, and to be placed under a righteous administration of divine law. God’s kingdom is to save them; for it is to “grind to powder and bring to an end all kingdoms,” to fill the whole earth as a great mountain, and itself to stand for ever-Daniel 2: 35, 44. This kingdom can only be set up by overthrowing “the powers that be;” and as there can be no peace and blessedness for the nations until they are broken, the operation which abolishes them establishes the destroying Stone-power, and saves the world with a great and glorious salvation. Who can doubt it when the scriptures say, referring to that era,
“The king’s son, O God, shall judge thy people with righteousness, and thy poor with judgment; he shall save the children of the needy, and shall break in pieces the oppressor. In his days shall the righteous flourish, and abundance of peace as long as the sun endureth. He shall have dominion also from sea to sea, and from the river to the ends of the land. They that dwell in the wilderness shall bow before Him, and his enemies shall lick the dust. The kings of Tarshish and of the Isles (the British) shall bring presents; the kings of Sheba and Seba shall offer gifts. Yea, all kings shall fall down before him (being subdued:) all nations shall serve him. His name shall be continued as long as the sun: and they shall be blessed in him-all nations shall call him blessed. Blessed be the Lord God, the God of Israel, who only doeth wondrous things. Blessed be his glorious name for ever: and let the whole earth be filled with his glory”-Psalm 72.
The kingdom of God founded by Jehovah and his Christ is to establish this great salvation in the earth-a thorough and complete social regeneration of the world. The kingdom is the cause, the great salvation the result of its institution in the land promised to the fathers. But the greatness of the salvation is not restricted to the future generations of the nations only; it comprehends in the magnitude of the deliverance it vouchsafes, the generations of the righteous among the dead from Abel to the coming of Israel’s king in the clouds of heaven in power and great glory. It saves the cloud of witnesses of whom the world was never worthy with an everlasting salvation in the kingdom; and saves the nations from their temporal miseries and degradation with a joyous and glorious redemption of a thousand years. “How shall we escape if we neglect so great a salvation” as this? Impossible; escape there is for none who are not included in it.
Now, the Bible reveals no other salvation than this-a deliverance of the righteous from “the pit in which there is no water” by a resurrection from the dead; a transformation of the living saints who may be contemporary with the second advent; a restoration of the kingdom again to Israel under the New Covenant; and a redemption of the nations from the social, civil, and spiritual evils which now press so heavily upon them. This is the only salvation of which the gospel treats. It meets the necessities of the world. Humanity needs no other, and therefore none else has been provided. When the salvation has triumphed, it will be the accomplished fact of a thousand years, during which-
“The ends of the world shall remember and turn unto the Lord; and all the kindreds of the nations shall worship before Him. For the kingdom is the Lord’s; and he the Governor among the nations”-Psalm 22: 27-28.
When Jesus stood at Caesar’s bar Pilate asked him, “Art thou the King of the Jews?” He answered,
“My kingdom is not of this world; if it were, then would my servants fight that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but my kingdom is not from hence now.”
Pilate therefore said to him,
“Art thou a king then?”
Jesus answered,
“I was born for this, (eis touto,) and for this I came into the world, that I might witness to the truth. Every one who is of the truth hears my voice.”
Pilate said unto him, “What is truth?”-John 18: 37. Ah, Pilate, thou, like myriads beside thee, knewest not that voice though it was witnessed in thy presence! The truth was confessed- (1 Timothy 6: 13)-before thee, but thou didst not understand it, because thou wast not of the truth. Let the reader hear the voice of the king,
“I came into the world that I might witness to the truth.”
Now hear what he saith in another place,
“I am sent to preach the kingdom of God”-Luke 4: 43.
He did so. He preached it through the length and breadth of Judea, announcing to the people the kingdom of God, and that he was the king thereof. He filled the land with the sound of his claims to the throne of David as the “born King of the Jews”-Matthew 2: 2. The people heard him gladly; and, admitting his pretensions to be just, were ready for revolt against Caesar, and to make him king-John 6: 15. The chief priests became alarmed at the current of the popular mind, and apprehended the interference of the Romans-John 11: 48. They procured his apprehension at length, and accused him before Pilate of perverting the nation from its allegiance to Caesar-Luke 23: 2, and affirming that he was “King of the Jews”-John 19: 21. By the passage above quoted, we find Pilate endeavouring to elicit from him the truth of the matter. As if he had said, “They charge you with saying that you are an Anointed One, a king, even the King of the Jews; is this the truth?” Jesus confessed, and denied not; although it was hazardous at the bar of Caesar, the de facto king of the Jews-John 19: 15, to aver that he was himself king by right. His life had been jeopardised thirty-five years and three months before by the inquiry “Where is he that is born King of the Jews?” Herod, the reigning king of the Jews, who knew that the nation was expecting the birth of a Son of David who was to reign over them for ever, was alarmed at the intimation that He was actually born. He saw that the right of David’s Son and the interests of the Herodian dynasty, were inimical. He therefore determined to destroy him, and so secure the kingdom to his own family by the Christ, or Anointed One’s destruction. The same policy was at work at the condemnation of Jesus. Pilate was not only the representative of the Roman Majesty which had superseded the Herodian in Judea; but the conservator of the rights of the reigning Caesar as King of the Jews. Satisfied that it was mere envy that moved the chief priests to accuse Jesus of treason against the Roman power, his policy was to release him, and to appease their clamor. But the policy of the priests and elders was opposed to this. They saw clearly that if Jesus ascended the throne of David he would permit them to have no share in the honours and emoluments of the State. Hence it was with them, as with Herod, all important to prevent him getting possession of the throne. They saw Pontius Pilate’s unwillingness to condemn him, and concluded that the only way they could succeed in overcoming it would be to treat him hypothetically as a partaker in the Nazarene treason, and consequently a traitor to Caesar’s rights which it was his business to conserve. This was their policy. Hence, said they to the Procurator,
“If thou let this man go, thou art not Caesar’s friend: whosoever maketh himself a king speaketh against Caesar.”
This settled the question in Pilate’s mind. Though convinced of the innocence of Jesus, and of their malignity, self-preservation was a stronger law of his nature than justice. He concluded that it was better for Jesus to suffer death, though unworthy of it, than that he should lose his procuratorship, and perhaps his life, for misprision of treason. Had Jesus not confessed the truth, but repudiated all pretensions to the throne of Israel, Pilate could not have condemned him; nay, would not, for there would have existed no ground upon which the priests and elders could have predicated his want of friendship or loyalty to Caesar. It is true, they said-
“We have a law, and by our law he ought to die, because he made himself the Son of God.”
They regarded this as blasphemy; but the Roman law took no cognisance of questions in Jewish theology. It had ceased to be lawful for the Jews to put any man to death-John 18: 31; so that however guilty he might have been of blasphemy in saying that he was the Son of God, neither the Jews not the Roman law could have taken his life on that account. The good confession, therefore, he made before Pilate-“the truth” to which he testified in his presence and for which he was condemned and executed, was not that he was the Son of God. Though true, it was not the truth-it was not the ground of his sentence unto death.
“Art thou the King of the Jews?” Had Jesus replied, “I am the Son of God,” it would have been an evasion of the question, as every one not judicially blinded must see. If one were to ask another, “Are you a physician?”-would it be answering the question to say “I am the son of my father?” King of the Jews is an official dignity; Son of God personal nativity. Who is the King of the Jews? He that says he is the Son of God, or some other person? To assert that he was God’s Son did not bring Jesus into collision with Caesar’s rights; but to affirm that he was Christ a king, that is, the Anointed King of the Jews, constituted him at once Caesar’s rival in Judea.
Though so dangerous a question Jesus did not equivocate, or seek to evade the hazard it involved. When Pilate said “Art thou the King of the Jews?”-he met his question by referring boldly and immediately to the truth about his kingdom He had been proclaiming this truth from Galilee throughout all Judea to Jerusalem, where he then stood-he had heralded it forth from one end of the land to the other for three years and a half in fulfilment of his mission; for he came into the world to witness to the truth concerning the kingdom of God of which he was the christened or anointed king-and he was then prepared with the full assurance that it would cost him his life, to confess before Pilate that he was the King of the Jews. Pilate so understood him when he said in answer to his question “My kingdom.” Jesus was a Jew, and a Jew could have no claim to any kingdom but that of his own nation. King of the Jewish Nation. Thus Pilate, the Roman soldiers, and the Chief Priests and Scribes-Mark 15: 31-32; John 19: 3, 19-22, understood him to confess; and therefore the reason of his condemnation to death-the title he assumed-was labelled to his cross in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, “Jesus of Nazareth THE KING OF THE JEWS.”
In suffering death because of his claim to the throne of Israel, Jesus, the Son of God and Son of David, sealed “the gospel of the kingdom,” and the Covenant of that kingdom, with his blood. He was born to be King of Israel, and he suffered death because he maintained his right to the royalty. He was anointed to be king, and as a prophet to preach the gospel, or glad tidings of his reign over the Twelve Tribes of Israel, and the obedient nations of the earth for a thousand years. With him and his apostles, to “preach the kingdom of God” was to “preach the gospel.” There could be no gospel without the kingdom-even this same particular kingdom, this Jewish kingdom in Palestine, than which the living God has caused to be evangelised no other. A gospel of a kingdom or kingdoms beyond the skies-of an everlasting kingdom there for disembodied ghosts, and a present church-kingdom of grace among carnal, scoffing, faithless, professors here-we deliberately, and under pain of eternal damnation if in error, we boldly, conscientiously, and confidently, affirm, that there is no such a gospel to be found in the oracles of God. Such a gospel as this-the popular gospel of the age-was never preached to Jew or Gentile by John, Jesus, or the apostles. The Lord of Israel bore witness to no such gospel before Pilate. He did not testify that he was a king of a sky-kingdom; but king of the Jewish nation upon earth, where alone it exists, or ever will exist. His is the royalty of this nation taking its root in the Covenant made with David, which is everlasting, and can never be annulled; for Jehovah hath declared,
“Once have I sworn by my holiness that I will not lie unto David. His Seed shall endure forever, and his throne as the sun before me”-Psalm 89: 35-36.
For three years and a half Jesus fulfilled his mission as prophet to Israel in preaching the gospel of the kingdom. He began, as we have seen, in Galilee soon after his being anointed of God with the Holy Spirit and power-Acts 10: 38. He visited the synagogues, and among them that at Nazareth. Being there on a certain occasion, he read from the sixty-first of Isaiah the words recorded in the fourth of Luke. Alluding to his anointing he read,
“The Spirit of Jehovah is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor-to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.”
Jehovah’s anointing him to preach the gospel is equivalent to saying, Jehovah sent him to preach. There is no necessity to prove this. It is obvious. In sending him then to preach the gospel, what was he sent to preach as the basis of the good news to the poor? This question is answered in two places in this chapter; he was sent to preach the acceptable year of the Lord; or, which is the same thing, he was “sent to preach the kingdom of God”-verse 43. Peter told Cornelius that he was sent to preach this word to the children of Israel. Hence it is styled “the Word of the Kingdom”-Matthew 13: 19-upon the understanding of which men’s salvation is predicated-Mark 16: 15-16. But, why is the gospel of the Kingdom and acceptable year of the Lord, or Age to Come, preached to the poor, rather than to the rich? The reason is, because-
“God hath chosen the poor of this world, RICH IN FAITH, to be the Heirs of that Kingdom which he hath promised to them that love him.”-
“He fills the hungry with good things; and the rich he sends empty away;”-because the present life is the season of their enjoyment-James 2: 5; Luke 1: 53; 16: 25.
When Paul was writing about “the great salvation which began to be spoken by the Lord”-Hebrews 2: 1-5, he says he was speaking about “the future habitable” (oikoumeneen teen mellousan) which is to be subjected to the Son, and not to angels as it is at present. Speaking of the present habitable, or “civilised” part of the earthy, he says,
“But now we see not yet all things put under him.”
No; if we did, we should see him King over the whole earth-Zechariah 14: 9. All the kingdoms of the world would be his, and “all nations would serve him”-Revelation 11: 15. The future habitable subjected to the Son, is the dominion of the acceptable year of the Lord; when the kingdom shall be existent in the plenitude of its glory, ruling over all. Jesus and his brethren, all Sons of God and the Seed of David by adoption through Jesus, though recipients of evil things in their primary existence, will possess the dominion of the future habitable “under the whole heaven,” not above it “beyond the skies.” This is good news to the poor-the gospel Jesus was anointed to preach; the great salvation confirmed by the apostles who heard it preached; and attested of God by signs, wonders, divers miracles, and distributions of the Holy Spirit, manifested through them.
The context of the testimony from which Jesus selected the reading in the synagogue at Nazareth exhibits the glad tidings or gospel of the kingdom he preached to the meek of the children of Israel. It promises them “beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; that they might be called Trees of Righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that he might be glorified.” This series of beautiful antitheses present to us in contrast the present and future states of the poor who receive the gospel of the kingdom. Now, but mourning, heavy-hearted, dust and ashes, in the Age to Come they shall be beauteous and joyous, giving praise and glory to the Lord as immortals only can bestow it. Then with respect to their nation, for the word was primarily sent to Israel, -
“They shall build the old wastes, they shall raise up the former desolations, and they shall repair the waste cities, the desolations of many generations. And foreigners shall stand and feed your flocks, and the sons of the alien shall be your ploughmen, and your vinedressers. But ye shall be named the priests of the Lord; men shall call you the Ministers of our God: ye shall eat the riches of the Gentiles, and in their glory shall ye boast yourselves.”
Let the inquirer read from the twentieth verse of the fifty-ninth of Isaiah to the end of the sixty-second chapter and he will read the good things promised to Israel, and evangelised in the Word sent to them of God by Jesus Christ. They are but a sample of the good things in store for their nation, which in its future glory is the Sarah, the princess of nations, the married wife, of its Creator. Then-
“Jehovah will make an everlasting covenant with them. And their Seed shall be known among the Gentiles, and their offering among the people: all that see them shall acknowledge them, that they are the seed which the Lord hath blessed.”
This joy and blessedness of the nations is inseparable from the glory of their king. To him under Jehovah they will owe all the peace and happiness they enjoy. The rejoicing will be mutual. The nation will rejoice in its king, and “as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall He rejoice over Jerusalem,” the Holy City of his realm. In view of the great deliverance Jehovah bestows upon his king, he that was anointed to preach the gospel to Israel saith,
“I will greatly rejoice in Jehovah, my soul shall be joyful in my God; for he hath clothed me with the garments of salvation, he hath covered me with the robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom decketh himself with ornaments and as a bride adorneth herself with her jewels. For as the earth bringeth forth her bud, and as the garden causeth the things sown in it to spring forth; so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring forth before all nations,”-when the righteous dead shall bud and spring forth of the earth to praise and glorify his name.
