Page 74 - The Divine Unfolding of God's Plan of Redemption

Peter tells us of the themes of the prophets. “Of which salvation the prophets have
inquired and searched diligently, who prophesied of the grace that should come unto

you: searching what, or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ which was in them
did signify, when He testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ and the glory that
should follow.” Christ Himself in the Emmaus-road conversation, after the two had
despairingly remarked, “But we trusted that it had been He which should have

redeemed Israel,” exclaimed at their slowness of heart, “Ought not Christ to have
suffered these things, and to enter into his glory?” Whereupon He began at Moses and
all the prophets and explained to them the things concerning Himself. Their slowness
of heart consisted not in their looking for One Who should reign over a restored Israel

but in their failure to see that suffering must precede glory.

The prophetic Scriptures indeed contained vastly more material dealing with the
glory than with the sufferings, but the blindness that happened to Israel lay in their

failing to grasp the spiritual significance of the myriad blood sacrifices that they and
their ancestors had been commanded to offer. They fell short of an understanding of
the facts that the two lines of prophecy concerning the Suffering Lamb and the
Glorified King were to meet in the same individual but at different times.

Israel had an eye only for the Glorified King and rejected the necessity of the
Sufferer. Christendom has gone to the other extreme and denied that there will be a
Glorified King.

The ecclesiastical machinery of what used to be Protestantism has sold out, lock,
stock, and barrel to Marxian Socialism. They have perverted the teaching of the cross
and have completely denied the possibility of the visible earthly reign of Christ. There

are yet many who have not followed this iniquitous stampede and hold to the atoning
blood of the cross of Christ as God‟s only ground for the justification of sinners but
they spiritualize or vaporize the earthly reign of Christ in such a way as to render
meaningless a vast bulk of Old and New Testament prophecy, to belie the words of the

angel Gabriel and the plain statements of the Lord Jesus Christ. After He had informed
the Roman governor that His kingdom was not “out of” this world-system and said,
“Now is my kingdom not from hence!” Pilate still asked, “Art thou a king then ?”

Obviously this Roman pagan had no reference to some sort of nebulous, spiritual
kingdom in the heavenlies but used the word in its accepted sense of earthly monarchy.
The reply came back strong and clear, “Thou sayest it, because I am a king!”

After listening to the report of Peter concerning the preaching of the gospel to the

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