The kingdom of Heaven has a strange fulness of meaning in the Scriptures, and must be understood to signify something quite different from the company of those who may call themselves saints, or may truly be saints, in any particular age. These last are "the children of the kingdom," but do not define its limits. It is a state; as real and complex as earthly commonwealths; it is the government of a King over masses of various character and worth.
I. The Creator is already the rightful King of all the human beings in the world. This may seem to many a superfluous truism; but there is a theology which leads to the impression that the revolted world had been abandoned by its sovereign, and was made over by him to the prince of evil, to govern and torment at his will. God has never renounced His rights, has never ceased to treat the devil as an usurper; prophets have never ceased to prophesy that the tyrant would be driven from his usurped dominion, and that the reign of the true King would be restored. God sent His Son to declare His forgotten Name, and to recover His lost sway over human hearts.
II. Christ was the newest King. He claimed an empire over a world which He had saved by suffering, and redeemed by a bloody death. Christ was the oldest King. The races over which He sought to establish a spiritual empire had been His from the first hour of their birth. The kingdom which He establishes by the proclamation of His Name as King and His right of rule is but the resurrection in a diviner, a transfigured, form of the most ancient reign of God over all His worlds. The essential character of the Kingdom of Christ is spiritual; it subsists in the personal conscious relation of the individual soul to Him, its Redeemer and its Lord. But it cannot forget the older, universal reign of God over creation which sin had spoiled; it yearns to re-establish it, and claims, in right of that elder kingdom, vast multitudes as its subjects who have not yet accepted its conditions and vowed fealty to its King. A consideration of the parables of the seed-field, the net, the virgins, the servants, will show that within the broad circle of the kingdom of Heaven are to be found men of all classes and characters lovers of Christ and haters of Christ, faithful servants and false, wise bridemaidens and foolish to an extent which it appears to me can only be explained upon the supposition that wherever the Gospel of the kingdom is proclaimed Christ considers that His kingdom is set up, and that men enter into new and more solemn relations of responsibility, through knowing the name, character, and claims of the one true King.
J. Baldwin Brown, Christian World Pulpit,vol. ix., p. 65.
The Work of the Kingdom of Heaven.
I. Every member of the community in this Christian land sustains most solemn and pregnant relations to Christ, belongs to Him by the most sacred of obligations, and wrongs Him of His own by refusing to heed His voice and obey His word. That poor ragged beggar who runs before you to sweep the specks of mud out of the crossing, or hangs outside the door while you take your noonday meal, is mixed up with you inextricably in the great system of the Gospel dispensation; he has new relations, responsibilities, and destinies, because that Gospel which makes you a man, a partaker of the Divine nature, has come here. Regard him tenderly, regard him reverently; for such an one Christ died, and to such an one Christ is opening His arms and crying: "Come hither, and I will give thee rest." The outcasts in a Christian country are Christ's poor.
II. With such, the kingdom of Heaven has specially concerned itself in all countries and in all ages of the Gospel dispensation. Up to the dispensation of the kingdom of Heaven there had been a constant drawing off of the wise and earnest from the poor, ignorant, and depraved, who were left pitilessly by the pagan system to their hopeless lot. Under the "kingdom" there has been a constant drawing up of the poor, ignorant, and depraved into the higher brotherhoods of humanity; and class after class, stratum after stratum of the lower levels of manhood have been built in with the finest, to the strengthening of the unity and the embellishment of the beauty of the temple of the Church.
III. The great instrument of Christ in raising them, the organ of administration and government in His Kingdom, is the loving voice and the helping hand of the Church. I regard the spiritual men and women in England as His government and administration in His kingdom; by whose wise efforts His subjects are to be instructed, elevated, purified, and brought to submit personally, with free, willing hearts, to His loving rule. Wherever He proclaims His Kingdom He makes provision for its complete subjection to Himself. Christ has agencies at His command, and under His control, for the work of the Kingdom, for making a complete conquest wherever He has proclaimed His name; and these agencies have one feature in common they are all living souls, and use only a man's instruments: eye, voice, and hand.
J. Baldwin Brown, Christian World Pulpit,vol. ix., p. 88.
Reference: Matthew 25:1 Homiletic Quarterly,vol. iv., p. 138.