Gods Sabbath

T HE J EWISH T RAGEDY

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would annihilate them on their behalf. They did not know that He loved the Romans as much as He loved the Jews, and that He would never exterminate one nation to please another with whom His affections were as equally bound. Christ had come to save the entire world, not just the Israelites. This was beyond their comprehension, because of their preconceptions. These factors placed Christ in the position where He could not accept or implement the Jewish plans. Furthermore, He did not need their faulty plans, because His Father had already devised perfect solutions for every problem. Had Christ deviated in any way from the divine arrangements, there would have been no point in His coming to earth. But, fortunately, despite the inter minable pressure placed upon Him by the people among whom He lived and worked, He utterly refused to operate outside the Father’s purposes. “Most assuredly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of Him self, but what He sees the Father do; for whatever He does, the Son also does in like manner.” John 5:19 (NKJV). The nature and principles of the kingdom the Father had sent His Son to establish were spelled out in the Sermon on the Mount (see Matthew chapter 5). It was a beautiful and glorious revelation of divine light and power, but it was not what the peo ple had come to hear. Yet Christ did not at this point of time openly attack their wrong concept. “Christ disappointed the hope of worldly greatness. In the Sermon on the Mount He sought to undo the work that had been wrought by false education, and to give His hearers a right con ception of His kingdom and of His own character. Yet He did not make a direct attack on the errors of the people. He saw the mis ery of the world on account of sin, yet He did not present before them a vivid delineation of their wretchedness. He taught them of something infinitely better than they had known. Without combating their ideas of the kingdom of God, He told them the conditions of entrance therein, leaving them to draw their own conclusions as to its nature. The truths He taught are no less The Sermon on the Mount