Luke 16:16-18

THE KINGDOM OF GOD

Luke 16:16-18. “The law and the prophets were till John; since that time the kingdom of God is preached, and every one passeth into it.” These Pharisees hung on His track like lightning on the skirts of the clouds, barking and snapping at everything He said; because the red-hot truth which Jesus preached was awfully repellent to these galvanized hypocrites, who, with their preachers to help them, were laboring incessantly to justify themselves, and were professedly great sticklers for the law and the prophets; i.e., the O. T. Scriptures. Jesus here informs them that the old dispensation actually wound up with John the Baptist, the last of the prophets, who formally superseded it by introducing Jesus to the world, and ceremonially inaugurating Him into His official Messiahship. As He is Mediatorial King, His very office, preaching, and presence normally introduce the kingdom whithersoever He goes. Hence He announces to them that the kingdom of God has superseded the law and the prophets, and every truly. awakened soul is pressing into it. It is equally true this day.

The kingdom of God is all and in all to every true heart, and throughout the evangelical world there is a constant pressing into it. We enter it through the narrow gate of regeneration, and are established in it by the stupendous work of entire sanctification.

“But it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than one item of the law to fall.” Though we live in the dispensation of the gospel kingdom, which superseded that of the law and the prophets, as our Savior well reminds us, we must not conclude that a solitary. item of the law is ignored or becomes null and void. The ceremonial law of bloody sacrifices, symbolizing the vicarious atonement, was all fulfilled, when Jesus bled and died on the cross. The vast expurgatory watery. ablutions, symbolizing the sanctification of the Spirit, were fulfilled when the Holy Ghost descended in fiery baptisms on the day of Pentecost. The supersession of the law and the prophets by the kingdom of God is only affected so far as the O. T. symbolism is verified in N. T. experiences.

“Every one putting away his wife, and marrying another, committeth adultery; and every one marrying her who has been put away by her husband, committeth adultery.” The Jews had very loose views on the marriage relation, frequently sending away the wife for a diversity of trivial causes, supplying her place by another. They claimed that they had a right under the law of Moses to do those things; meanwhile they set great store on those privileges. Jesus, knowing the hearts of those corrupt, bigoted Pharisees, exposes their spiritual obliquity by these plain deliverances in reference to the marriage relation. Those scribes and Pharisees had ingeniously manipulated the Scriptures of Moses mad the prophets, misconstruing them in the defense of their iniquitous lives.