Luke 8:10

Unto you it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of GOD--

The mysteries of the kingdom

A mystery, as the word is used in Scripture, is nothing more than an unknown thing.

It has no reference to anything obscure, or awful, or difficult to understand. The most simple truth may be called a mystery so long as it is concealed. That a Gentile could be converted to Christ was a mystery to the Jews--an unknown thing, not a thing difficult to be understood. Read the text, “Because it is given unto you to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given,” and the meaning is plain and complete.

I. Let us endeavour TO DISTINGUISH THE TWO CLASSES,--on the one hand, those to whom it was given to know the mysteries of the kingdom; on the other, those to whom it was not so given. Some have interpreted this passage as a judicial sentence of perpetual ignorance and unbelief. I am more disposed to interpret it as a description of a hardened and obdurate state of mind--a wilful ignorance connected with gross stupidity. Because their hearts had waxed gross, and their ears were dull, and their eyes were closed--wilfully closed--the Lord left them to the mystery of the parables, but expounded the interpretation to His disciples in their more private intercourse. Jesus had spoken His parables from a ship on the Sea of Galilee to vast multitudes who collected to hear Him from the neighbouring towns and country. We have, then, abundant illustration of the character of this multitude. They came from the places in which He had done most of His mighty works--Capernaum, Chorazin, Bethsaida, and the neighbourhood. In their synagogues Jesus had expounded the Holy Scriptures and showed their fulfilment in Himself. But these people had seen His wonderful works as though they saw them not, and heard His words of wisdom and love as though they heard not. The application is to you, and an affecting application it is. Take heed how ye hear. See that ye refuse not Him that speaketh from heaven. The dreadful shadow of the second death had fallen upon the multitude, and no beams from the Light and Life of the world could dispel its gloom. And oh, consider that the men of the neighbourhood where Jesus chiefly taught were those denied the interpretation of the parable. Exalted to heaven by their privileges, they were debased and brought near to hell by the abuse of them. Now let us look to those to whom Jesus gave the interpretation. The inquiry is, What had they which the others had not? If the disciples had not knowledge, they had the desire to obtain it, and the spirit to make it productive.

1. They had the desire to obtain it. In learning the mysteries of the kingdom (as in everything else) the docile disposition and the acquisition of knowledge are inseparably connected. What cared the multitude for the hard sayings of Jesus? Gratify their vain curiosity, amuse them with signs and wonders, feed them with loaves and fishes, and they are content. But the disciples--that is, the learners--longed to know the whole meaning of the Saviour’s lessons. They heard the parables, and they sought the interpretation. They felt that they lacked wisdom; they hungered and thirsted after the knowledge of righteousness, and with the docility of children they desired to learn the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven. To them it was given to know--to them, having the teachable disposition, the instruction was readily and freely afforded. Multitudes are still ignorant of the truths of the Gospel, even in the midst of this bright day of clear, evangelical, heavenly light; but the ignorance of every one of them amidst so many means of instruction is to be attributed to their own wilful indisposition to learn. To how many among us is the Bible enveloped in thick darkness! its great truths are still to them mysteries of the kingdom--secrets hidden from their view, as with a Pharisaic contempt, or a sinfuldislike, they pass their wandering eyes over the words of the sacred page. They read, but understand not what they read. They have no interpreter. The Holy Spirit they have resisted and repelled. The avenues by which pure, Divine, holy truth might reach their hearts they have closed by the corruptions of the flesh and the cares of the world. But some of you have otherwise learned Christ. You were impelled by an ardent desire, and you went with humility, like children, to sit at the feet of Jesus to learn of Him. His words, read in the letter of Scripture, became much more than letter as you read them; they became spirit and life. You felt their spiritual quickening power. Imploring by earnest prayer the light of heaven, that light shone upon the Book of God, and you saw as you had never seen before, wonderful things out of His law. Thus to you much has been given. But--

2. The disciples had a spirit to make their knowledge productive. They did not neglect or abuse the knowledge they had. The good seed in their hearts brought forth its own fruit in its season. How often have the elements of scriptural knowledge been abused, and how often have they been suffered to lie neglected in the heart! And abuse or neglect will always prevent a clear and believing perception of the mysteries of the kingdom. If this be so, no one ought to utter a word of complaint respecting his ignorance of the mysteries of the Gospel. Why do they remain hidden from him? The answer is at hand: because he is not faithful to the little light he already has obtained. Men often see not the doctrine, because the present duty, always plain, it disregarded by them. You may think you know little of the mysteries. But do you not know that you ought to seek more earnestly than you have sought? to practise more self-denial than you have yet practised? to do many things you have not done, and to refrain from doing much that you continue to do? It is no wonder that you should remain still in ignorance of many things, seeing you have already more light than you follow in the practical part of religion.

II. LET US CONSIDER THE MEANS BY WHICH THESE MYSTERIES WERE REVEALED TO THOSE TO WHOM IT WAS GIVEN TO KNOW HIM.

1. A plain and easy way of giving the true knowledge is made apparent. We have the admonitions of Christ as well as His teaching. Our duty is not mysterious. We can seek wisdom, and seek it in the path of obedience.

2. The mysteries are revealed in their appropriateness to ourselves and their application to our wants: revealed to our hearts, according to our need. Show the man himself, a sinner ready to perish--the suitable Saviour for him is revealed by His paying the penalty of sin.

3. The mysteries are revealed in succession, as they prove useful, not to gratify curiosity. (R. Halley, D. D.)

The mysteries of the kingdom of heaven

God is always undoing mystery. He keeps no mystery for the sake of the mystery. He is never withholding, but always giving. His work in relation to us has been from the first an unfolding. He is the God that giveth truth. I say again, He does not put forth His will to hide, but ever and always to reveal. The mysteries of God are the things that the wise and prudent so often turn aside from--they take them as matters of course; and many besides the wise and prudent, many fools likewise, many who are wise in their own eyes--let me say all who are wise in their own conceits. “Of course, of course,” they say; “we know all about that; but we want to understand this, and we want to know what that means; and we want to see how you can account for this, and whether or not you can put this and that and the next thing in your scheme,” when all the time things are crying out in them and around them which they think are too common, too simple, puerile perhaps; “they do not interest us,” they say. That which God requires of men is lust to attend to the thing, whatever it is, that He requires of them, as revealed in their heart, in their feeling, in their sense, that they are not doing altogether right, that they are not being altogether right. And while they are speculating, perhaps, upon what they call the mysteries, what the theologian calls the mysteries, the thing that is a mystery to them is the thing that every simple child-heart can understand. When God calls His children it is that they respond as children in obedience--in obedience. The Lord in His parable is telling us something that perhaps has ceased to be looked upon as at all a mystery with us. Do you know what St. Paul so often calls the mystery that he has to reveal? It looks to us a simple thing enough. It was a very hard thing for many at that time to receive it, and now m other forms it is hard still for certain kinds of minds to receive it. It was just that God loved the Gentile as much as the Jew, that God was no respecter of persons, that He cares for the poor man as much as for the rich. That was the mystery. We think not very mysterious after the common use of the word, but the mystery is the simple truth, the fact of relationship that lies deepest and uppermost and everywhere throughout nature, making life worth living, and men worth being. That kind of mystery is a thing that it is so difficult somehow to wake up the minds of men to see. Try to show any man his duty and he will immediately begin to ask you questions about theories. To get man or woman to acknowledge--I do not mean by word of mouth, but by act of soul, by powerfulemotion of the spirit, of themselves, of their will--to acknowledge, I say, that there is between their hearts and the infinite, all-pervading, unseen force of life, that there is a heart thinking about their hearts, and wanting to have them, that there is a father-love at the heart of things that is looking down and brooding over the hearts of His children, and drawing them to lift up the heart to God, and be in His presence a live thing opening door and window to the reception of that which He is continually trying to give--this is the mystery, the absolute simplicity of life to which it seemsscarcely possible sometimes--I mean it sometimes seems scarcely possible--to wake up one’s own flesh and blood to understand and feel, for we are all one family in Him in whom the whole family in heaven and earth are named. Some would think it a grand thing to be told they could increase their life twofold, tenfold, and live for hundreds of years. God knows if I would turn that leaf to gain that. I should simply scorn it. Whatever is true in any of these things, whatever is true is mine; but I do not want it except by growing to it in the natural progress of the law of Him who is the root of my being, and who has told me that I inherit with Jesus Christ that which my Father has to give. I would put my hand forth, I say, to take no glory of existence save what the natural process of His developing of an obedient child comes to me in its own free, simple form. If you want to attain anything in the shape of true moral, physical, spiritual progress, I say, be the simple disciple of Jesus Christ. That is what you are born men and women for, not to make money, but to know God; and to know Christ is the only way to know God. You may learn of the power of God, but the power of God is not God. God is love, and until we love with our whole souls we do not know God. We may know Him a little, less or more, in proportion as we are capable of loving; or rather, not as we are capable of it, but as we do it--we know God. And in this spirit let us look at the parable that our Lord had just spoken about as containing mystery. Well, God knows it is to me the deepest of all mysteries, even in the common sense of mystery, a thing that utterly perplexes me, and I just stop there and cannot understand it, and that is, the point when the heart of man, the child of God, stops turning its back upon Him, and begins to wheel round the other way; the point when the prodigal, who is the type of every one who goes away from God, and loves anything better than God. God, it seems to me, alone can see and know that, but that this turning takes place we know, and plenty of testimony could you have to the fact. And so in this parable about the seed sown. And looking at all the parables of Christ, what I find in them is this, that He is doing what He can just so to wake up the soul of man, and to cause this change to be begun in the soul of man. He does not speak the parables for the purpose of concealment. Neither does He speak them for the purpose of instructing the intellect and the understanding about things. That is not His work, though all that follows is. Ah, you would know something, friends--let me speak to my young friends present--you would know something of the glory of a life that was independent of outside things. If you just set yourselves to be the thing God meant you to be, set yourselves to obey Him whom the Father sent just to make you shine in the very light, the supernal light, that is all about at the root of everything, wisdom and knowledge, everything that the heart of man falsely worships, precious as it is, freely worships at your command, and if you would but be Divine as you are meant to be, if you will be earthy, if you will be poor creatures, if you will be what Dante calls “insects in whom the formative power is lacking, defective insects that cannot pass into the glorious butterfly”; he says--and I am speaking now of what one of the greatest of men said six hundred years ago--“Do you not know,” he says, “that you are worms that are meant to go forth as the angelic butterfly?” “O foolish man,” he says, “why do you seek low things? Why are you content to be unborn in the cocoon, or in the chrysalis of the worm?” The Lord speaks, I say, in all His parables to wake up that power of life in us that makes a man put everything aside and look up and feel that he has but to be, and he must be, he must be the thing that the Eternal Father made His child to be, else we are but the defective insect we may be born. So what do I find? Here is the story of sowing seed. It falls on different soils, and at last it comes on good soil, and the Lord does not say a word about anything that the soil can do. But He seeks to make us think it and feel it and weigh it in our minds, and speaks of something that we have got to do with it--the hard-trodden ground by the wayside and the poor soil on the rock, with the corn hanging its head, drying up with the drought, and the corn that would look over the tops of the thistles--that would say, “I am bad soil, but I cannot help it; the seed has fallen, but what have I got to do with it?” But there is good soil, and that soil knows that it has got to do with it, and that is just the difference. When the truth of God comes to a true heart--and God claims that the heart should be true, and if the heart is not true there is its condemnation already--when the word drops into the true heart, the true heart says, “I must keep that: I must mind what I am about, I must see to this thing or that,” and so it grows and grows. There was one man I heard sometimes when I was a youth, and I cared more to hear him than all the rest put together. When I came out from hearing him perhaps I could not tell you a word he had said, but I knew I had something to mind; and you may make that a test whether you have been the true ground or not, when anything true has come to your consciousness as truth. The great trouble is, first, with those who never know that anything has anything to do with them. The time has not come, somehow. There may be good soil underneath, but the top is hard-trodden. There is something that seems to prevent any form of the truth getting down to the growing part of them. But when there is a sense of any call that you have not obeyed, made haste to obey it, that you may the sooner come forth into the light. Then there are some, you know, that are the picture of the different kinds of people. Well, I will not say it is wonderful, because it comes from the wonderful. Look how simple it is. There are those when they get moved with feeling begin to grow. They start very fast, you think, as though they would take heaven by storm, but the storm takes them; they are beaten down. They do not like to suffer. Well, we do not any of us like to suffer; but the question is, whether we will make the effort and even if foiled, make an effort again, to meet the future, or whether we shall let adverse powers, whatever they may be, beat us down to the dust, and we lie in the mud instead of soaring in the free air. What is it you want more than anything else? A good many of you think more about the cares of the world, the deceitfulness of riches; and the desires of other things enter in and choke the word--the word, the truth of God that you have got in you. There is something that you know is your duty. You may not love it very much. You have not seen the glory of it. It is to you like a rough diamond that does not shine. It is very dirty, perhaps. But you have got something in you that you know you ought to use. That is the thing the Lord speaks of; that is the thing that is come out of the heart of God into your heart, and the question is, are you caring about that more than anything else, or are you thinking, “ Well, I mind it just enough not to be cast out. You know it is absurd to ask me to he perfect. I am not perfect. I cannot be perfect,” and the person that says that has not tried enough to know the difficulty of it, but only takes it for granted. Mother, do you think as often about your Father as you think about your child? Oh, I do not want you to love your child less. God forbid. There are very mistakenly wicked things said of that kind. Mothers say, “I love my child too much.” Foolish woman! you never loved your child enough. If you had loved your child aright he would have forced you to lift up your hears to your Father in heaven. You are loving yourself, not your child. No, we cannot love each other too much. Oh, friends, the absurdity of it, that we will give three-fourths to man, and give God a fourth. Are we seeking Him as the business of life, or are we making money the business of life, and thinking of God now and then, sometimes? I do not understand half ways of things. But the people that are in the condition of this corn growing amongst thorns, they are perhaps the last that will understand “it to mean themselves; the strangeness of which is this, that a few more years and all the possibility of my having anything whatever to call my own--I shall have no hand to hold it, not to say no pocket to put it into. Then there is the ground that bears, some fifty, some sixty, and some a hundredfold. You get nothing except you look at that part. It is for yourself. But then perhaps you will say, “ May some bring forth thirty, some sixty, and some a hundredfold?” Yes. “ Does not that imply that the Lord is content to accept an inferior quantity? That some He will take though they only bring Him thirtyfold, and others when they bring Him sixty. But the hundredfold seems to be a maximum, and therefore it seems to imply that, well, perhaps we may bring thirtyfold and we shall be accepted. How low would it go, do you suppose? Twentyfold? Tenfold? How far down would it go? “Well, I think that the disposition that would be content to bring the thirtyfold would prefer to bring one seed or none at all. And I am certain of this, that if it be possible for you to bring forth forty, fifty, or sixtyfold, the Lord will not be content with your thirtyfold. And you will have something to go through yet. For observe this--“Every branch in Me that beareth fruit, He purgeth it.” Why? Because it is bringing forth fruit, why should He be hard upon it? He wants more fruit, and the man who is content with himself anywhere, is just the man that the Lord is not content with. I will tell you your thirtyfold would do very well provided you are not content with it, and you want to make it more. Oh, what a hopeless thing, do you say; we can never get at that? That He will see to, if you see that you want it, and that you are acting as far as you can upon it lie will see to that. Do you think that your Father in heaven will be content to have you, His child, deformed, ugly, lame, worn as with famine, with dirty face and hands, clothed in rags? What kind of a father or mother would it be who would be content to have a child such? Ah, he or she might be exulting unspeaking to have that poor miserable child in his or her arms, but would he be content to see it like that? Friends, do you want it? (G. Macdonald, LL. D.)

A right attitude essential to perceiving God’s truths

An Eastern legend relates that somewhere in the deserts of Arabia there stood a mass of jagged rock, the surface of which was seamed and scarred by the elements; but whenever any one came to the rock in the right way he saw a door shape itself in the sides of the barren stone, through which he could enter in, and find a store of rich and precious treasures, which he could carry away with him. There are some things in God’s universe that seem as barren and unattractive as bare and fissured rocks, but which contain an inwardness of warmth and sweetness inconceivable. The inner holies of God are fast concealed from those who will not come aright, with a heart of love and trust, but open to all who are willing to see and to hear. (Christian Age.)