Expositions of Holy Scripture : St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIIIMaclaren, Alexander
Religion
Expositions of Holy Scripture : St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII
Maclaren, Alexander
Bible -- Commentaries; Bible. Matthew IX-XXVIII -- Commentaries
Hence its universal adaptation to mankind. It alone of all so-called
faiths overleaps all geographical limits and lives in all centuries.
It alone wins its trophies and bestows its gifts on all sorts and
conditions of men. Other plants which the 'Heavenly Father hath not
planted' have their zones of vegetation and die outside certain
degrees of latitude, but the seed of the kingdom is like corn, an
exotic nowhere, for wherever man lives it will grow, and yet an
exotic everywhere, for it came down from heaven. Other food requires
an educated palate for its appreciation, but any hungry man in any
land will relish bread. For every soul on earth this living dying
love of the Lord Jesus Christ addresses itself to, and satisfies,
his deepest wants. It is the bread which gives life to the world.
And one of the constituents of that company by the Galilean lake was
children. It is one great glory of Christianity that its merciful
mysteries can find their way to the hearts of the little children.
Its mysteries, we say--for the Gospel has its mysteries no less than
these old systems of heathenism which fenced round their deepest
truths with solemn barriers, only to be passed by the initiated. But
the difference lies here--that its mysteries are taught at first to
the neophytes, and that the sum of them lies in the words which we
learned at our mother's knees so long ago that we have forgotten
that they were ever new to us: 'God so loved the world that He gave
His only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not
perish, but should have eternal life.' The little child who has
learned his earliest lessons of what father and son, loving and
giving, trust and life mean, by the sweet experiences of his own
father's home and his own mother's love, can grasp these blessed
words. They carry the deepest mysteries which will still gleam
before us unfathomed in all their profundity, unappropriated in all
their blessedness, when millenniums have passed since we stood in
the inner shrine of heaven. Wonderful is the word which blesses the
child, which transcends the angel before the throne!
This is the bread for the world--meant for it, and one day to be
partaken of by it. For these ordered fifties at their Christ-provided
meal are for us a prophecy of the day that shall surely dawn, when
all the hunger of wandering prodigals is over, and the deceived
heart of the idol-worshipper no longer drawing him aside to feed on
ashes, they shall come from the East and from the West, and from
the North and from the South, and sit at the feast which the Lord
hath prepared for all nations, and when all the earth shall be satisfied
with the goodness of His house, even of His holy temple.
III. The Bread which is given to the famishing is multiplied for the
future of the Distributors.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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