1. If we refer to another occasion upon which Christ used this metaphor of the keys, we shall find that Christ was accustomed to associate with the expression knowledge and the specific power that comes from knowledge. To the lawyers He said, " Ye took away the key of knowledge." The reference here can only be to the knowledge that unlocks the gates leading into the Kingdom of Heaven. That was Christ's future gift to Peter. Putting this side by side with the fact that Christ has just been speaking of a knowledge of His own person and character that had been given to Peter, what can the knowledge that Christ would by and by give be but the knowledge of the Father, of which He was the one only spring and channel amongst men ? It was through that knowledge that Peter was to open the way for men into the Kingdom of Heaven. " To bind " and " to loose " was to teach and to rule in the Kingdom of Heaven, in harmony with the
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knowledge received from the Father. We observe that the promise deals more immediately with things, not persons; with truths and duties, not with human souls. The Apostles dealt with souls as all other disciples of Christ deal with them, inter- mediately, through the truths and precepts on which the salvation of souls turned. The power of the keys, of binding and loosing, was in reality the power of knowing the essential truths of God's character and will.
(1) It is the power of a teacher. Among the Jews, when a scribe was admitted to his office a key was given to him as the symbol of the duties which he was expected to perform. He was set apart to study with diligence the Book of the Law, and to read and explain it to the people. Jesus Christ reproved the Eabbis and Pharisees of His day for having taken away the key of knowledge, and for shutting up the Kingdom of Heaven against men, that is, trying to lock good men out. They knew little of the spirit of the law which they taught, and their teaching produced evil fruits in the lives of their countrymen.
There is a sense in which all who faithfully preach the word of the Kingdom hold the keys. When we say that we have got the key to a difficulty, or that an army holds the key to a position, we mean that, however long it may be before the proof of the power is manifested, yet it is there. So with those who proclaim the truth as it is in Jesus. Their word may be derided, their warnings scorned, their entreaties mocked at; yet as the word they speak is not their own but the word of God, so shall that word loose or bind, shut up or set free. But it is the Lord who does this; man is but His agent for declaring His message. Every command or threat is heard by conscience, but the thing that is declared may be long a-coming. It will come, however. So with every word of the gospel : the truth in Jesus is the key of the Kingdom : the decisive proof we may be long in discovering, but early or late every one must find a barred or an abundant entrance, according as he has given heed to or neglected the word of life.
Tf When Luther opened the long-closed Bible in the Gospels
and Epistles, he was bringing forth out of his treasury things new
and old. He was binding and loosing the consciences of men.
When Andrew Melville, in Scottish history, took King James by
ST. matt. — 20
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the sleeve as that pedant was arrogating to himself a spiritual power which was his neither by law nor by grace, and called him "God's silly vassal," reminding him that there were two kings and two kingdoms in Scotland, he may have been lacking in courtesy, but he was proving himself a scribe of the Kingdom. When John Brown of Harper's Ferry stooped to kiss the negro child in its slave mother's arms as he passed to his death, men of vision might have seen the keys of the Kingdom at his girdle. All men now realize that in his own rude way he taught the things of Christ to his own generation. Wherever and whenever the Christian Church, through its ministers and people and its inspired saints, shall stand to proclaim some high duty or to renounce some hoary wrong, they shall bind and they shall loose, and they shall fulfil the function of the Church in the Kingdom of God.1
(2) Again, we are reminded that knowledge is necessary to life ; we believe and then do. The great principle is taught that the morality of Christianity flows directly from its theology, and that whoever, like Peter, grasps firmly the cardinal truth of Christ's nature, and all which flows therefrom, will have his insight so cleared that his judgments on what is permitted or forbidden to a Christian man will correspond with the decisions of heaven, in the measure of his hold upon the truth which under- lies all religion and all morality, namely, " Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God." These are gifts to Peter indeed, but only as possessor of that faith, and are much more truly under- stood as belonging to all who "possess like precious faith" (as Peter says) than as the prerogative of any individual or class.