The context provides us with an answer. We read the next verses and this is what we find : " And he said unto the disciples, The days will come, when ye shall desire to see one of the days of the Son of man, and ye shall not see it. And they shall say to you, Lo, there ! Lo, here ! go not away, nor follow after them ; for
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as the lightning, when it lighteneth out of the one part under the heaven, shineth unto the other part under heaven ; so shall the Son of man be in his day." Now, surely, these later verses explain the earlier. The disciples themselves, the Lord seems to say, will in the days to come raise the same question as the Pharisees have raised, and raise it with a longing desire which even the Pharisees do not know. By the disciples, indeed, the coming of the Kingdom will be bound, up with the coming of the Son of Man ; the fulfilment of all their loftiest hopes will rest with Him. But they, too, in their longing desire, will be tempted to " follow wandering fires," and the Lord bids them resist that temptation. When the Son of Man does come to bring the Kingdom, the lightning itself will not be plainer, or more sudden in its coming, than He. Can we doubt, then, that our Lord's words to the Pharisees had a similar meaning ? They, too, are eschatological, as the words to the disciples are. They, too, warn us that the Kingdom of God will come very suddenly, and that we must ever be ready for it.
2. Let us first try to understand what the Kingdom is, and then let us interpret its coming as both present and future, that is to say, as already in a certain sense among us, and yet in another sense only to come at the end of all things. The idea of the Kingdom as " within," or its inward and spiritual nature will be reserved for another sermon.
^ The translation of the last clause is most uncertain. In the Authorized Version it is " Behold, the kingdom of God is within you"; or, as the margin reads, "among you." The Eevised Version has it : " The kingdom of God is within you," with " in the midst of you " in the margin. Dr. Muu'head, in his Eschatology of Jesus, thinks that our Lord expressly chose an ambiguous expression, not committing Himself to the statement that the Kingdom of God was within the Pharisees, and yet not missing the opportunity of suggesting its essential inwardness.
I.
The Kingdom.
The true conception of the Kingdom of God will not neces- sarily be the conception which is most easy to grasp, or the
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conception which the earliest Gospel might most easily suggest to us; it will be the conception which can take its place in actual history. We know from the Old Testament what the Kingdom of God meant, and was found to be, before the Lord came. We know from the New Testament, and from our own experience, what it meant and has been found to be in the life of the Church. Our Lord's conception of it must surely have been the conception which can link the one with the other without breach of continuity. That conception may have been complex, like His own wonderful personality. Because it is complex, we may wish to simplify it by sacrificing to one element in it all the rest. But that is a temptation which we shall be bound to resist, and to resist precisely because we desire to be true to history. Neither thought nor life is simple, and we must accept them as they are.
1. What, then, did the Kingdom of God mean to Israel before our Lord came ?
(1) In the Bible the Kingdom of God is in no way concerned with physical boundaries. The Kingdom of God means the rule of God . and that not just as an abstract idea, but in a concrete form, the rule of God as it takes shape in the sphere where it is actually exercised. To be ruled by God is the greatest blessing which men can enjoy ; it brings with it every possible blessing. The misery of the world to-day, and every single unhappiness of our own, result simply from this, that neither we nor our cu'cum- stances are ruled by our Heavenly Father as they ought to be. Far too much they are either the sport of our own wilful impulses, or under the foolish rule of people as foolish and wilful as our- selves. And always where there has been true spu'itual insight, men have known where the source of the evil lay, and longed for its removal. What was needed, they knew, was not a diflerent kind of human rule, but the rule of God.
(2) But the best minds in Israel went further than that. They were certain that God's purpose did exactly correspond to man's need. Israel itself was in God's intention the sphere of God's rule. As Samuel expressed it, the Ix)rd their God was their King. Just in so far as Israel frankly accepted the Divine rule and obeyed the Di^vdne commands it found in its own experi- ence the unspeakable blessing which they brought.