THIRD SECTION.

PREACHING OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD IN

GENERAL-continued.

CHAP. VI.

RELATION OF JESUS' IDEA OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD TO THE REVELATION OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.

I. IN course of the discussion in the preceding chapter, we have been already led to indicate briefly the consciousness of Jesus in regard to the relation of the kingdom of God, as taught by Him, to the kingdom of the Old Testament promises. The idea of the kingdom of God already required that Jesus should base, upon a certain conception of the relation of the kingdom to the Divine revelation of the Old Testament, His certainty that He truly preached this kingdom of God. This certainty was, on the one hand, founded on the assurance that the kingdom, as He viewed it, stood in fundamental harmony with the Old Testament revelation of the character, will, and saving grace of God, and with the Old Testament promises of the salvation to be accomplished in the latter day. On the other hand, it was founded on a definite explanation and justification of the actual difference of the kingdom in His sense from that

VOL. II.

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depicted in the Old Testament revelation. At first sight it might seem the most methodical way, in a treatise on the teaching of Jesus, to begin with an account of its relation to the traditional elements of the Old Testament revelation, and then proceed to give an account of His own revelation of the kingdom, as founded on the former, which it renovated and extended. But a closer consideration shows that this

is not the proper and practical way. For Jesus Himself did not frame His conception of the kingdom of God only after attaining, and on the ground of attaining, a full and complete knowledge of the relation to be adopted towards the Old Testament revelation. Nay; for although He proceeded upon a conviction of the truth of that Old Testament revelation, and although He had continual regard to it as a determining factor of His development, yet He did not acquire and develop His conception of the true nature and advent of the kingdom of God merely out of the Old Testament, but from His own immediate experience of a revelation of Divine grace in Himself. Thus, by comparing the contents of the new revelation in Himself with that recorded in the Old Testament, He could rightly judge how far the latter possessed enduring truth and value, and how far it was superseded and extended by the new and higher revelation of which He was the medium. Thus also, in our account of the teaching of Jesus, we must indeed proceed upon the knowledge that He took for granted the general truth of the Old Testament revelation, and found in it the conscious foundation for His doctrine of the kingdom of God; but we

can only gain a full and accurate understanding of the utterances in which Jesus indicated His relation to the Old Testament revelation, when we have formed. an idea of the peculiar contents of His view of the kingdom of God. In a preliminary exposition of the utterances of Jesus in regard to His relation to the Old Testament, one may already presuppose and employ definite ideas in regard to the contents of His view of the kingdom of God.

We find an indication of the view entertained by Jesus of the Old Testament revelation, first of all in the fact that, in many cases, He ascribes Divine authority to the written word of Scripture, both when dealing with adversaries and when establishing and defending His own doctrine. He reproached the Pharisees because, in their zeal for observing ceremonies to the neglect of neighbourly duties, they set aside the commandment of God in favour of human tradition (Mark vii. 8-13), and fulfilled the smaller matters of the law to the neglect of the weightier (Matt. xxiii. 23). And when the Sadducees, founding their arguments on a Mosaic statute, sought to make the resurrection-hope appear absurd, He replied that they did not know the Scriptures; and, in quoting the book of Moses, He referred to it as the Word of God (Mark xii. 24, 25). Not only did He combine two commands of the Pentateuch into the double commandment of love to God and our neighbour, in the case where the question of the scribes expressly required that He should give the greatest commandment contained in the Old Testament (Mark xii. 28-31); but also, when the rich man asked what he

should do to inherit eternal life, He referred him to the decalogue as a summary of the Divine commands (Mark x. 19). Also, in the narrative of the rich man. and Lazarus, He speaks of Moses and the prophets as the media of the revelation of the Divine will upon earth, to whom men must give heed in order to escape rejection by God in the life to come (Luke xvi. 29, 31). He defends Himself against the reproach that He and His disciples broke the Sabbath, by referring to the Scripture record of what David did, when, being hungry, he ate the shewbread along with his followers (Mark ii. 25 f.). He also pointed to the work prescribed by the law to the priests in the temple (Matt. xii. 5), and to that word of God in the prophets: "I will have mercy and not sacrifice" (Matt. xii. 7). He founded His command in regard to the indissolubility of the marriage-bond upon the Divine decree at creation in regard to the union of man and woman (Mark x. 6 ff.). And He condemned. the greedy traffic in the temple by an appeal to the word of Scripture, that the house of God would be called the house of prayer for all peoples (Mark xi. 17). He expressly declared that His ministry and the dispensation of blessing which He was establishing, was in harmony with the prophetic promises of the latter-day dispensation which God was to bring in (Luke iv. 17-21; Matt. xi. 5); and He based His assurance of His Messiahship and the necessity of His sufferings on the fact that the Old Testament promises found their fulfilment in Him (Mark ix. 12; xii. 10 f., 36 f.; xiv. 21, 27, 49; Luke xxii. 37). In one instance, namely, at His last solemn entrance into

Jerusalem (Mark xi. 1 ff.), He Himself arranged the external circumstances to make them correspond with a Messianic prophecy (Zech. ix. 9), and to make the fulfilment of that prophecy clearly manifest.

But along with those appeals to the Divine authority of Scripture, we find passages in which Jesus, directly or indirectly, indicated a divergence of His teaching from that of the Old Testament. In the great discourse in regard to the true nature of righteousness, He adduces a series of examples, to bring out the difference of the righteousness which He taught from the inferior kind prescribed to "them of old time;" and He emphatically sets His own authority, not only over against that of the scribal traditions, but also over against that of the Old Testament legislative records (Matt. v. 21 ff.). In the controversy concerning Sabbath observance, He certainly appeals to the Scripture account of David's mode of conduct towards the established ritual; but at the same time He lays down a general principle in regard to the purpose of the Sabbath, from which a wider consequence is deducible than the mere right to break the Sabbath ordinance in an exceptional case and under urgent necessity. He claimed the right freely to determine how and in what measure the Sabbath is to be used for the good of man; and, accordingly, He declared Himself Lord also of the Sabbath, thus repudiating for Himself and His disciples an absolute subjection to the Sabbath ordinance sanctioned in the Old Testament law (Mark ii. 27 f.). Immediately after reproaching the Pharisees because they set aside the Divine command