Matthew 19:28 - Ellicott's Commentary On The Whole Bible

In the regeneration. — In the only other passage in the New Testament in which the word occurs, it is applied to baptism (Titus 3:5), as the instrument of the regeneration or new birth of the individual believer. Here, however, it clearly has a wider range. There is to be a “new birth” for mankind as well as for the individual. The sorrows through which the world was to pass were to be as the travail-pangs of that passage into a higher life. (See Note on Matthew 24:8.) Beyond them there lay, in the thoughts of the disciples, and, though after another pattern, in the mind of Christ, the times of the “restitution of all things” (Acts 3:21), the coming of the victorious Christ in the glory of His kingdom. In that triumph the Twelve were to be sharers. Interpreted as they in their then stage of progress would necessarily interpret them, the words suggested the idea of a kingdom restored to Israel, in which they should be assessors of the divine King, not only or chiefly in the great work of judging every man according to his works, but as “judging,” in the old sense of the word, the “twelve tribes of Israel,” redressing wrongs, guiding, governing. As the words that the Son of Man should “sit on the throne of His glory” recalled the vision of Daniel 7:14, so these assured them that they should be foremost among those of “the saints of the Most High,” to whom, as in the same vision, had been given glory and dominion (Daniel 7:27). The apocalyptic imagery in which the promise was clothed reappears in the vision of the four-and-twenty elders seated on their thrones in Revelation 4:4, in the sealing of the hundred and forty-four thousand of all the tribes of Israel in Revelation 7:4, and the interpretation of the words here is subject to the same conditions as that of those later visions. What approximations to a literal fulfilment there may be in the far-off future lies behind the veil. They receive at least an adequate fulfilment if we see in them the promise that, in the last triumphant stage of the redeeming work, the Apostles should still be recognised and had in honour, as guiding the faith and conduct of their countrymen; their names should be on the twelve foundations of the heavenly Jerusalem (Revelation 21:14); they should be sharers in the throne and glory of its King. The thought on which St. Paul dwells, that the “saints shall judge the world” (1 Corinthians 6:2), in like manner refers not only or chiefly to any share which the disciples of Christ shall have in the actual work of the final judgment, but to the assured triumph of the faith, the laws, the principles of action of which they were then the persecuted witnesses. We must not ignore the fact that, in at least one instance, the words, absolute as they were in their form, failed of their fulfilment. The guilt of Judas left one of the thrones vacant. The promise was given subject to the implied conditions of faithfulness and endurance lasting even to the end.