James Nisbet's Church Pulpit Commentary
Luke 10:9
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE MESSAGE
‘Say unto them, the kingdom of God is come nigh unto you.’
It was a simple message that Christ entrusted to His earnest, expectant band of young field-preachers: ‘The kingdom of God is come nigh unto you.’ Twice He repeated it in the final short epitome of instructions with which He armed them for the delightful experiment they were about to make.
I. Directness of statement.—The heart of Jesus was glad within Him at the utter simplicity and directness of the message. The wise and prudent would have composed it into an elaborate system, and fitted it in with schemes of philosophical thought which would have required years of study for anybody to understand. And their systems would have presented so many points of disagreement, argument, and attack, that all their energies would have been expended in polishing their own thought, refining their unintelligible jargon, and, by reducing each other’s views to absurdity, proving their own intellectual superiority.
II. Singleness of purpose.—The kingdom on earth was begun. The call had been given. The meaning of it would be seen when He died and when He rose. Henceforth it could never be spoiled. From time to time it might be overlaid by human inventions and accretions. But there would be the original message to call men back to the truth as it is in Jesus. The attempt to dress up the truths of the Gospel in the tight-fitting clothes of human speculation, or to express its simple ideas in the jargon of current philosophy, has always been disastrous. The great Christian writer, Origen, tried to combine the Gospel with Platonism, but though his views are singularly beautiful and attractive, they led him far astray into the field of fantastic speculation, and prevented him from being recognized as a father of the Church. What was it that trammelled the life of Christendom so heavily in the Middle Ages? It was the painful labours of the schoolmen in translating the Gospel into the language of the system of Aristotle, and making it the vehicle for conveying opinion and speculation on every subject. And in the present day nothing is more discouraging than to hear ingenious preachers toilingly disguising the glad tidings of Redemption in the theories of Hegel, or striving to explain away the Atonement in a manner that would remove the offence of the Cross from a fastidious world, or depressing one doctrine and distorting or exaggerating another in order to place God’s message on a level with the accepted philosophies of the hour.
III. Simplicity of ideal.—In all our preaching we need the simple truths of the Lord Jesus Christ, put forth on His authority, and urged with all the warmth and earnestness of convinced and redeemed and believing hearts. The old appeal on the broad, simple principles of sin, redemption, faith, obedience, love, grace, glory, and immortality will always have the old results. Wherever an evangelist goes forth in the power of the Lord Jesus Christ to say to his hearers ‘The kingdom of God is come nigh unto you,’ there he will be able to return to His Master’s side, when wearied with the day’s toil and craving a Divine rest and refreshment, and will be able to say to Him with humble and adoring gratitude, ‘Lord, even the devils are subject to us through Thy Name.’
Archdeacon W. M. Sinclair.
Illustrations
(1) ‘What a confusion and indefinite postponement there would have been if our Lord had summoned to His side Plato and Aristotle, Epicurus and Zeno, Cicero and Seneca, Bacon, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibnitz, Hume, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Comte, and Mill! To the end of their days they would have been discussing the source of knowledge, the nature of belief, the meaning of the world of sense, the composition of the human mind, and all those other theoretical puzzles by which the intellectual giants of the human race have sublimated thought and influenced speculation. That was not what our Lord wanted. He would never have got His Gospel preached. He had a simple word straight from Almighty God to simple hearts. That simple word was the Kingdom of God among men.’
(2) ‘It was to be a kingdom of simple spiritual truths once uttered on His own authority in the name of the great Father of all things, and to be taken by even the most ignorant of men into their very heart of hearts. Our Lord looked forward at that moment to the unlettered slave in some West Indian plantation, free with a Divine internal freedom beyond the thrones of emperors, and comforting his soul under savage lash and fettering chains with hymns of grace and glory. He foresaw the boys of Madagascar willingly thrown from the rock of death on the mangling stones below, for the joy of the truths which had saved them from sin. He had before Him the heavenly peace that would fill the mind of the rustic aged Highland woman on her lonely island, where the loud echoes of the world never sound; or the grandsire as with the sonorous voice of absolute faith and entire reverence he conducts the daily worship of his little family; or the brooding of the Holy Spirit in some whitewashed barn of a building, where hearts that have never learned to doubt ponder with quiet certainty the things of God. He saw the London artisan, that overwhelmed unit in the unprecedented surroundings of five millions of busy and bustling atoms of humanity, all crowded together into one bewildering struggle of conflicting voices, gathering himself together into classes for the study of that Divine Word which alone has brought peace and patience to the soul of man.’