Hebrews 12:28

Hebrews 12:28

The Immovable Kingdom.

Consider the immobility of the kingdom which we receive and the service which citizenship in this kingdom requires.

I. The immovable character of the kingdom of God. Even a careless observer and superficial thinker will not fail to recognise, in the midst of all the shifting and changing scenes and events of nature and human life, a stable, ceaseless, unswerving principle, which ever emerges, and plainly controls all objects and all actions with resistless sway. All the movements of human life in social and national history lead up to this principle, or work it out in their own peculiar details. History is the illustration of that unity, and the religion of Jesus Christ, the purpose of the grace of God in the salvation of the world, is the final object of all human thought, the conclusion of the whole matter in human life, the all-embracing universal fact of the Church of God, the kingdom of God, which nothing can overthrow, which nothing can remove.

II. The phrase "kingdom of God" is used in two senses, the difference between them consisting in the extent to which the kingdom reaches. In the one case we have that entire government of God which embraces heaven and earth and hell in its sway, controlling alike the natural and the supernatural worlds; the other usage refers to that special department or division of that kingdom which is peculiarly concerned by the work of Jesus Christ in the salvation of the world.

III. It is obvious that anything which can be termed the kingdom of God must be immovable. The kingdom is not the mere work of Jesus, not the mere truth of the Gospel, not the merely external invisible community of the baptized, or even of the believers. But it is that spiritual, that only real, entity, the living faith, and love, and obedience; the loyal acceptance of Jesus Christ; the vital union of devoted souls to each other and to the Master: and this, when received, is the kingdom that cannot be moved.

L. D. Bevan, Christ and the Age,p. 285.

Acceptable Service.

We observe:

I. That our relation to God produced by the Gospel necessarily demands our service.

II. The service which we can render unto God is the continual sense of gratefulness under which we ought to live towards Him.

III. We learn the spirit in which our service should be for ever rendered "with reverent submission and godly fear."

L. D. Bevan, Christ and the Age,p. 299.