Expositor's Bible: The Gospel of MatthewGibson, John Monro
Religion
Expositor's Bible: The Gospel of Matthew
Gibson, John Monro
Bible. Matthew -- Criticism, interpretation, etc.
In the development of the principle the Master's thought has been
enlarged so as to include not teachers only, but all His disciples;
and His range of view has been extended so as to embrace the last
things. The great day of Judgment is before him. He sees the
multitudes gathered around the throne. He foresees that there will be
many on that great day who will discover, when it is too late, that
they have allowed themselves to be deceived, that they have not been
careful enough to test their spiritual guides, that they have not been
careful enough to try themselves and make sure that their fruits were
such that the Lord of the vineyard could recognise them as His own. He
is filled with sympathy and sorrow at the prospect; so He lifts up His
voice in earnest warning, that, if possible, none of those to whom the
words will ever come may allow themselves to fall into so fatal an
error: "Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into
the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of My Father which
is in heaven."
How naturally, and as it were unconsciously and inevitably, He has
passed from the Teacher to the Judge! Not as a personal claim. In His
earliest teaching He kept personal claims as much in the background as
possible. But now it is impossible to avoid some disclosure of His
divine authority. He must speak of the Judgment; and He cannot speak
of it without making it appear that He is Judge. The force of this is
all the greater that He is, as it were, surprised into it; for He is
evidently not thinking of Himself at all, but only of those who then
were or would afterwards be in danger of making a most fatal mistake,
leading to consequences awful and irreparable. We can well imagine
that from this point on to the end there must have been a light on His
face, a fire in His eye, a solemnity in His tone, a grandeur in His
very attitude, which struck the multitude with amazement, especially
at the _authority_ (ver. 29) with which He spoke: "Many will say
to Me in that day, Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy by Thy name, and by
Thy name cast out devils, and by Thy name do many mighty works? And
then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye
that work iniquity" (R.V.).
Again, observe the form the warning takes, revealing the consciousness
that to depart from Him was _doom_--one of the many tokens
throughout this discourse that none else than the Lord of life and
glory could possibly have spoken it. Yet how many vainly think that
they can accept it without acknowledging Him!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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