Acts 17:7 Whom Jason has received: and these all do contrary to the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, one Jesus. 1. "There is another King." Alas! for the world, alas! for us all, if there be not. The hope of the world is a Christendom in which Christ shall reign. A Christendom in which He does not reign we see, and have seen enough of. Men are getting weary of the preaching of Jesus and His gospel, while Christian races are wasted by vice, poverty, and war. Along with all our Christianity we still need men to preach "another King, one Jesus"; to whom all the selfishness of our politics, the craft of our diplomacy, the fierce contention of our industry, are hateful; a King who has left "A new commandment, That ye love one another," and in one aspiration, "That they all may be one," the key to His hope and effort for mankind. The world has yet to try what Jesus can do for it. 2. Christ foretold that His method would try the patience and weary the hope of man. There is nothing in England or in Europe which is sadder than the picture which He Himself draws of the development of His kingdom in Matthew 24. But He saw beyond that which moved Him to pour out His soul unto death. "And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto Me." And this is the rebuke of all our faithless doubts and dreads. Mark the patience with which through unnumbered ages the Lord of the world has been elaborating the chirping apparatus of a cricket, the feather of the pinion of a bird, or the spots on the gay plumage of a butterfly's wing — and yet we faint and lose heart because in a few centuries this great world is not converted to Jesus, and the harvest, for the sake of which the whole creation has been groaning and travailing through well-nigh infinite ages, is not yet reaped and garnered on high. 3. The fundamental question is, Why should man want another king? Why should we not leave the secular spirit to take charge of the interests and to guide the progress of human society? and I answer — (1) That something like the form of Christ's kingdom is implied in and prophesied by the very structure of human society. When we say that man is a social being, we mean something differing entirely in kind, and not only in degree, from what we mean when we speak of the social instincts and habits of the ants or the bees. The key to man's life is to be sought in heaven and not in the dust. In entering the sphere of human society we come under a higher law and enter a higher world. Consider the fact that all man's most exquisite pleasures and griefs arise out of his relations with others, out of his social habits and affections, of which the richest elements connect themselves with his duties and ministries to the poor, the weak, the helpless; can we believe with all this before us, that man's life as a social being is still to be but the struggle for existence in another form, of which self-seeking and not self-devotion must be the law? I can see no possible beauty, joy, or hope in human society, except "bear ye one another's burdens" be the law. And I can see no basis for that law, and no assurance of its supremacy, but in the contemplation of His life and His living energy who came from heaven "not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give His life a ransom for many." Just as a skilled naturalist, looking at the structure of an animal, can forecast its habit and habitation, even so, as we look at the structure of man as a social being, we can affirm with certainty that the habit of his life was meant to be obedience to the law of Christ, and the home of his life and theatre of its development is the kingdom of heaven. (2) And what seems implied in man's constitution is exemplified in his history. Among all peoples there are visions of which this is the substance. Man's ideal of society everywhere takes this form; he seems to feel instinctively that only in such a world as the kingdom of heaven can he truly and nobly live. All the world's great thinkers lead on its thoughts to a time when that reign of truth, righteousness, and love, which the Bible associates with Messiah's kingdom, shall be realised, and all the woe and waste and wrong of the world shall be stayed. 4. But then, it may be said, if men are dreaming about this and are aiming at this, why not leave them alone to work out their idea? The answer to this is that God did leave man in the Gentile world alone, that he might discover whither the course of things would drift him, and might be prepared through disappointment and suffering to accept at length the helping Hand which would be held out to him from on high. Caesar was the result of man's development as a social being. The world's work for itself ends in ruin. The march of the ages resulted in a condition of the Roman Empire which, but for the restoring power brought to bear upon it by Christianity, nothing but a second deluge could have cured. Let the state of India before the English came to it, let the state of China and Africa at this moment, exhibit the result which comes inevitably to peoples when they try — or do not try, for this is what it ends in — to work out their own salvation for themselves. We need only look round us at this moment in Europe to form some just estimate of Caesar and his work. We have had modern Caesars in our day, enthroned in the centres of civilisation; and the end of their sway has everywhere been wreck. Blessed be God that there is another King, "one Jesus"; for man's experiments in government are failures, and must be failures. But is it not a stain on God's righteous government, does it not reveal a flaw in His will or in His power, that things in human society, thus left to themselves, tend to dissolution? Surely not: it was never intended in the scheme of Providence that man should work out his own salvation or the salvation of society. 5. What is the relation of this other King to the kingdoms of this world? The officers of Caesar were naturally alarmed. This is what perplexed and alarmed Pilate. There was little that was kinglike in Jesus, in Pilate's sense of kingship. And yet he was anxious and afraid, though why he could not tell. Men are slow to believe in a kingship which makes no sign before the world. The true kingdom is a kingdom which penetrates and purifies all other kingdoms, just as the electric force pervades creation, everywhere felt, never touched and seen. We do nothing contrary to the decrees of Caesar in preaching that there is "another King, one Jesus." He works entirely from within; what of blessing can come to the world by making men wiser, purer, more unselfish, more brotherly, that He bestows. But this breaks up nothing which the progress of humanity, however realised, would not break up; it consolidates everything on earth which stands square with truth, righteousness, and God. 6. Christ has one way of working out the regeneration of human society; Caesar, under all the various shapes and forms of government, has another. The one works purely from the inward outward, and heals and cleanses at the spring. The other cleanses for awhile the outside, but finding itself powerless to cleanse the inward, finally gives up its work in despair. How many times through the ages has society been broken up, reconstructed, reformed, redressed, only to fall back again more hopelessly into the darkness. Guilt is oppressing, sin is corrupting, and selfishness is wasting humanity everywhere. The King whom we preach cares nothing for His Royalty, save in so far as it can lift that burden, heal that corruption, stay that waste. (J. Baldwin Brown, B. A.) Parallel Verses KJV: Whom Jason hath received: and these all do contrary to the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, one Jesus. |
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