Mark 1:14

Mark 1:14

Two things appear on the surface in the Psalmists' interpretation of the idea of the kingdom of God.

I. One is its moral purpose. The kingdom of God is indeed exhibited in the Psalms in all its magnificence; in all its breadth; over nature and man; over the stars of the sky, and the cattle upon a thousand hills; over the storms of the desert and the waterfloods; over the march of history and the destinies of nations, and the secrets of the heart of man; over all that vast, inconceivable universe beyond the most distant star. But the impressiveness and the awe and the wonder with which the Psalmists dwelt on what was outward and tangible, makes all the more striking the clearness, the strength with which they discerned amid all the might and majesty of God's everlasting dominion; amid all its beauty and all its terrors, the supreme and governing power of a moral purpose of the law of holiness and righteousness and truth. There is a conviction about the kingdom, which, from the first Psalm to the last, knows no blessedness but the blessedness of righteousness, of innocence, of pardon; it is a kingdom far above man's power to influence; far above man's capacity to comprehend or measure; which is revealed to man only that he may understand that the law which never can be broken more firm than the round world, which cannot be moved, than the heavens so far above us the law which no change can touch, no might can alter, is the eternal law of right and wrong.

II. Equally noticeable is the breadth with which the Psalmists assumed and announced the universal character of the kingdom of God; for they were not insensible to the privileged position of the chosen people; they had all an Israelite's feeling that God dwelt and ruled in Israel as He did nowhere else; their hearts swelled at the remembrance of the greatness of their fortunes, at the pathetic vicissitudes of her most wonderful history. But though they were so conscious of their own wonderful election, the heathen are not, in their thoughts, excluded from the kingdom of God. He who dwelt in Zion or Jerusalem was yet God of all the families of the earth; and for the blessing of all the families of the earth was the blessing given to Abraham and his seed. That vast sea of nations which surged around the narrow bounds of Israel, so utterly unlike it in language, in worship, in history; separated from it as widely as if they had been inhabitants of another world, was yet saved and ruled by the All-Holy, whom they worshipped. They, the first fruits, the firstborn of mankind, were but the leaders in the song of praise.

R. W. Church, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxviii., p. 385.