The Covenant Made With David To Be Realised In The Re-Establishment of the Kingdom of Israel Under Christ, continued

These predictions will not be realised in the absence of Jesus Christ from the earth. This appears upon the face of the testimonies themselves, but is proved in a way that excludes the possibility of mistake, by Peter's declaration, recorded in Acts 3v 20-21:

" He shall send Jesus Christ, which before was preached unto you whom the heaven must receive UNTIL the times of restitution of all things, WHICH GOD HATH SPOKEN BY THE MOUTH OF ALL HIS HOLY PROPHETS SINCE THE WORLD BEGAN. "

From this it follows that the work of restoration so abundantly described by the prophets does not occur till Jesus returns and reappears on earth. This will account for Paul's connecting Christ's appearing and kingdom as coincident events, in the words " Jesus Christ shall judge the quick and the dead at his appearing AND his kingdom " (II Tim. 4v 1). When he appears, his kingdom will come; for it is his return to the earth that causes his kingdom to be established. Hence we can understand the statement that " when the Son of man shall come in his glory, THEN shall he sit upon the throne of his glory " (Matt. 25v 31). This statement Jesus repeats in another form, which only makes its identification with the reestablishment of the kingdom of Israel more certain. He said to his disciples:

" Verily, I say unto you, that ye which have followed me, in the regeneration (which is equivalent to the restitution spoken of by Peter) WHEN the Son of Man shall sit in the throne of his glory, ye also shall sit upon twelve thrones, JUDGING THE TWELVE TRIBES OF ISRAEL " (Matt. 19v 28.)

When this comes to pass, there will be a fulfillment of the words addressed to Mary: " And he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end " (Luke 1v 33). And when these words are verified, the covenant made with David will find a fulfillment over which no obscurity can be cast.

The covenant guarantees the Messianic establishment of David's kingdom in David's presence. The words are, " Thine house and thy kingdom shall be established for ever before thee " . As we have seen, this was partially fulfilled in David witnessing Solomon's ascension to the throne before his own death; but it is easy to see how much more completely and substantially it will be fulfilled in the kingdom of David in the hands of Jesus. The kingdom of Israel, as ruled by Christ, will be the kingdom of God. The promise to all the faithful is that they shall inherit the kingdom of God (Luke 22v 29, 30; Matt. 19v 28; James 2v 5; Luke 13v 28, 29; 12v 32, 36; II Peter 1v 11). Hence David, who was a man after God's own heart, will be among those of whom Jesus says, in one of the foregoing list of references, that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and all the prophets - of whom David was one - will be seen in the kingdom of God.

This cannot mean heaven; for Peter expressly says, " David is not ascended into the heavens " (Acts ii. 34). It is the kingdom to be set up in the territory of the Promised Land, when the little stone descends from heaven to break in pieces all other kingdoms. David, looking forward to this time, said in prayer, immediately after hearing the words of the covenant, " Thou hast spoken also of Thy servant's house for a great while to come. . . . Therefore now let it please Thee to bless the house of thy servant, that it may continue for ever before thee " (II Sam. 7v 19-29). This prayer is answered in the words of Jeremiah (chapter 33v 17, 25, 26): " For thus saith the Lord: DAVID shall never want a man to sit upon the throne of the house of Israel.... If my covenant be not with day and night, and if I have not appointed the ordinances of heaven and earth, then will I cast away the seed of Jacob; and DAVID MY SERVANT, so that I will not take any of his seed to be rulers over the seed of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. For I will cause their captivity to return, and have mercy on them. "

The time for this is now not far off, and David himself will be in the land, rejoicing in the greatness of his son, who will be a triumphant witness of the truthfulness of Jehovah's word. Every nation will come to an end, except the nation of Israel (Jer. 30v 11), and every royal family will disappear and be forgotten, except the family of David, which will be in everlasting remembrance, because an everlasting and glorious institution, in the ransomed inhabitants of the globe. Thus will be fulfilled the promise that the house of David shall continue for ever.

We have next to observe a feature of the covenant which few modern readers of the Bible have been able, in any sense, to apply to Jesus. We refer to the first clause of the thirteenth verse: " He shall build an house for my name. " Understanding this to mean the erection of a place in the earth for the worship of Jehovah, it may be considered incredible that such a performance should form any part of Christ's work. At first sight such a thing may seem preposterous and degrading to the dignity of Christ, but, looking closely into the subject, we discover a different complexion in it. We shall see that not only is the building of a temple, to which nations may periodically repair for worship, one of the incidents of the age to come, but that the performance of this work is connected with the noblest mission of the kingdom of God.

We will first call the reader's attention to the evidence which proves that what is affirmed in the covenant made with David will be realised in the kingdom of Christ. It begins with a statement in Zech. 6v 12, to the following effect:

" Behold the man whose name is the Branch, and he shall grow up out of his place, and he shall build the temple of the Lord.....and he shall bear the glory, and shall sit and rule upon his throne; and he shall be a priest upon his throne. "

The applicability of this to Jesus might be doubted from the context were it not that the statement cannot be understood of any other than he who bears the title occurring in it. The Messiah is uniformly described as THE BRANCH, and he alone is to be " a priest upon his throne, " combining in himself, like Melchizedek, the double function of rule in temporal matters and intercession in things pertaining to God. Were this the only consideration, however, to justify the application of the prophecy to Jesus, it would fall short of proving the point. We therefore proceed to weightier considerations.

It is said of the time when Jesus shall reign on the throne of his father David, that " many people and strong nations shall come to seek the Lord of Hosts in Jerusalem, and to pray before the Lord " (Zech. 8v 22). This is expressed by Jeremiah as a gathering of the nations to the name of the Lord to Jerusalem; in consequence of which they walk no more in the imagination of their evil heart (Jer. 3v 17); and by Isaiah, as the going of many people, saying, " Let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, TO THE HOUSE OF THE GOD OF JACOB; and He will teach us of His ways, and we will walk in His paths " , (Isa. 2v 3). Zechariah describes this in the following language:

" And it shall come to pass that every one that is left of all the nations which came against Jerusalem shall even go up from year to year, to worship the King, the Lord of Hosts, and to keep the feast of tabernacles " (Zech. 14v 16).

That these things are true of Christ's reign on earth and nothing else, must be evident from the fact that they are associated with a time when the nations shall cease from war, and when men shall no longer follow the bent of their evil inclinations. Such a state of things has never been realised in the history of the world. If then nations are to go periodically to Jerusalem for the purpose of worship, it stands to reason that there will be a place in which this act can have suitable effect. It is not to be imagined that a motley assemblage of people could conveniently, comfortably, or profitably bring their devotion to bear without those customary means of approach, which in all past times God has furnished to those whom He has invited to do homage to Him. Why should nations come to Jerusalem, if there were no temple there? If their worship was simply to consist of the sentiment of devotion, this could as well be cultivated in the countries they inhabit as at the holy city.

The necessity of the case requires that there should exist a machinery of worship adequate to the grandeur of the dispensation, in which Jerusalem is the religious metropolis of the whole world. It is evident from attention to the limited testimony quoted, that this will exist. Mark, for instance, the expression, " Let us go up to the house of the Lord. " Again, " the pots in the Lord's house shall be like the bowls before the altar " (Zech. 14v 20). " The glory of THIS LATTER HOUSE shall be greater than of the former, saith the Lord of Hosts: and IN THIS PLACE will I give peace " (Hag. 2v 9). " Then shall Jerusalem be holy.... And a fountain shall come forth of THE HOUSE OF THE LORD and shall water the valley of Shittim " (Joel 3v 17, 18).

We quote these indirect evidences not so much to prove the point in question as to introduce the great and crowning evidence before which all others pale into insignificance. We now refer to the vision of Ezekiel, contained in the last nine chapters of the book bearing his name. This portion of the Scripture has baffled all Bible commentators, for the simple reason that popular theology can make no use of it. To what purpose is the establishment of a temple ritual at Jerusalem, if death sends men for final weal or woe, to God or the devil; and if the presumed millennium is simply to be a prevalence of " evangelical religion " ?

The chapters referred to were written after the destruction of Solomon's temple by Nebuchadnezzar, and disclose a state of things which has never since that time existed under heaven. The temple was rebuilt at the return of the Jews from Babylon. But Ezekiel's prophecy was not realised in that event, as may be seen by a comparison of Ezekiel's prophecy with the facts connected with the second temple. The rebuilt temple, so far from being greater than the first, was vastly inferior to it. This cannot be better proved than by quoting the following passage from Ezra 3v 12, 13:

" But many of the Priests and Levites, and chief of the fathers, who were ancient men, that had seen the first house, when the foundation of this house was laid before their eyes, wept WITH A LOUD VOICE; and many shouted aloud for joy: so that the people could not discern the noise of the shout of joy from the noise of the weeping of the people: for the people shouted with a loud shout, and the noise was heard afar off. "

Ezekiel's temple is to be contemporary with a division of the promised land to the twelve tribes of Israel (Ezekiel 48v 20). The educated reader does not require to be informed that this has never taken place since the day of the Babylonish captivity. The restoration from Babylon was but a return of the two tribes of Judah and Benjamin, and but a small portion of them. The ten tribes constituting the Kingdom of Israel, were removed by Shalmaneser the king of Assyria, to countries beyond the river Euphrates, and have never returned. The conclusion is selfevident, the land has never been divided to the twelve tribes of Israel, as it is to be when Ezekiel's temple is reared.

Another fact proving the futurity of the prophecy is that at the time foreseen by Ezekiel a portion of the country, measuring at the least forty miles by forty, is to be set apart for divine purposes as " a holy oblation " (Ezek. 14v 1, 4). In this stand the temple, the holy city, and the habitation of the priests. Such a thing, as everyone knows, has never happened in the history of the Holy Land; from which it follows that the state of things depicted in the chapter under consideration lies in the future. This conclusion is established beyond all question by the concluding statement of the prophet; that " the name of the city from that day shall be, THE LORD IS THERE. "

In view of the certainty that Ezekiel's prophecy is unfulfilled, it becomes interesting in the highest degree to glance at what Ezekiel describes. He says, in the visions of God he was brought into the land of Israel, and set upon a very high mountain, from which he beheld the frame of a city to the south. He finds himself in the company of a man, " whose appearance was like the appearance of brass, with a line of flax in his hand, and a measuring reed. " This man, whom he sees standing in the entrance gate of the temple enclosure, addresses him as follows:

" Son of man, behold with thine eyes, and hear with thine ears, and set thine heart upon all that I shall show thee; for to the intent that I aught shew them unto thee, art thou brought hither; declare all that thou seest to the house of Israel " (Ezek. 40v 4).

Ezekiel then becomes attentive to his guide's operations, and beholds him proceed with a series of measurements which he records with great minuteness, in the first five chapters. Without following the intricacies of these, let us briefly state that Ezekiel is shown a temple exceeding anything ever realised in the history of Israel or any other nation. The temple is a gigantic building, with every appliance required in the worship of which it is the centre. The outside wall (measuring about a mileandaquarter each way), is pierced with many gates, each gate being flanked with chambers for the temple service, and entered by an upward flight of steps. Mounting the steps, the prophet sees an inner wall, about 150 feet nearer the temple; the space lying between the inner and the outer wall being described as " the outer court, " and forming a spacious promenade or pavement. The inner wall has gates after the pattern of those in the outer wall. These gates open by eight steps into the inner court, in which stands THE TEMPLE - an immense circle of lofty arched and latticed building, capable of holding a million worshippers. This is the centrepiece of the vision. For height, breadth, and elaborateness, it exceeds anything devised in human architecture, and is only surpassed in interest by the event which the prophet witnessed after surveying the external approaches to the building. This event, which he saw from the eastern gate of the outer wall, he describes in the following language:

" Behold the glory of the God of Israel came from the way of the east, and His voice was like a noise of many waters, and the earth shined with His glory.....And the glory of the Lord came into the house by the way of the gate whose prospect is toward the east " (ch 43v 2, 4).

Ezekiel is then conveyed by the spirit into the inner court, standing in which he beholds the house filled with the glory of the Lord. He then hears the divine voice addressing him as follows:

" Son of Man, the place of my throne, and the place of the soles of my feet, where I WILL DWELL IN THE MIDST OF THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL FOR EVER, and my holy name shall the house of Israel no more defile; neither they nor their kings, by their whoredom, nor by the carcases of their kings in their high places " (verse 7).

Afterwards, Ezekiel is taken back by the way of the eastern gate, and observes that it is shut, in reference to which the following explanation is given:

" This gate shall be shut, it shall not be opened, and no man shall enter in by it, because the Lord, the God of Israel, hath entered in by it, therefore it shall be shut. It is for the prince; the prince, he shall sit in it to eat bread before the Lord; He shall enter by the way of the porch of that gate, and shall go out by the way of the same " (ch. 44v 2, 3).

At a later stage, Ezekiel received the following information in reference to the same gate:

" The gate of the inner court that looketh toward the east shall be shut the six working days; but on the Sabbath it shall be opened, and in the day of the new moon it shall be opened. And the prince shall enter by the way of the porch of that gate without, and shall stand by the post of the gate, and the priests shall prepare his burnt offering and his peace offerings, and he shall worship at the threshold of the gate; then he shall go forth, but the gate shall not be shut until the evening. Likewise the people of the land shall worship at the door of this gate before the Lord, in the Sabbaths and in the new moons " (ch. 46v 1, 2, 3).