Bible Dictionaries
Ideas (Leading)

　　IDEAS (LEADING).—The leading ideas of our Lord may be divided into two classes, Moral and Religious. This is not an artificial division: it corresponds to two stages in His public teaching which are very clearly marked in the Gospels. The earlier stage is prevailingly ethical, and finds its most characteristic utterance in the Sermon on the Mount. The later is, in comparison, distinctively religious, and deals with the relation of God to man. Yet we are not to separate the two elements, for they inter-penetrate one another. They are inter-dependent, and form together an organic whole.

　　 i. Moral ideas.

　　1. The Kingdom.

　　2. The Pure Heart.

　　3. The infinite Value of the human Soul.

　　4. The Law of Love.

　　5. The Universality of Love.

　　6. The Great Example.

　　7. Self-renunciation.

　　 ii. Religious Ideas.

　　1. The Fatherhood of God.

　　2. The Son.

　　3. Faith.

　　4. The Coming of the Kingdom.

　　5. The Paraclete.

　　i. Moral ideas

　　1. The Kingdom.—This idea must be placed first on account of its position in our Lord’s teaching. ‘Repent ye; for the kingdom of heaven is at hand,’ was the message of the Baptist and the first public utterance of Jesus (Matthew 4:17, Mark 1:15). From the beginning the idea of the Kingdom may be traced throughout the Gospels, and everywhere it will be found to indicate the supreme blessing which comes to man from God. In Mt. it is usually termed the Kingdom of Heaven. Elsewhere the phrase Kingdom of God is uniformly employed.

　　The idea of a Kingdom of God does not appear first in the NT. in the OT, the sovereignty of God is a fundamental conception. Jehovah was regarded as King over His chosen people. Israel was a theocracy. Always, whether under judges, kings, prophets, or priests, the human leaders were looked upon as representatives or agents of Jehovah, the true King. The natural tendency was to regard this as the exclusive privilege of the chosen people. Nevertheless, in the OT is to be found the vision of a great world-wide Kingdom of God. In the Book of Daniel especially we find how, to the prophetic mind, there was opened the glorious prospect of a universal Divinely-established sovereignty. Daniel 2:44; Daniel 7:13-14 are the clearest. The latter of these two passages is especially important, because from it, most probably, our Lord adopted the title ‘Son of Man’ by which He usually described Himself. It was therefore a passage much in His thoughts, and it is scarcely possible to believe that, as He proclaimed ‘the kingdom,’ He had not clearly in mind the words ‘His dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed.’

　　It is plain that among the Jews in our Lord’s time there was a widely spread expectation of some great person who was to be leader of the chosen people, and through whom that people were to be established as a great world-power. The Jews of that age were looking for a kingdom. And to them came John the Baptist and then Jesus of Nazareth, proclaiming the coming of a Kingdom. As our Lord’s ministry and teaching developed, He made it quite clear that the Kingdom He proclaimed was very different from the kingdom of popular expectations. Yet the two conceptions cannot be wholly unrelated. Our Lord would not have used the popular language if His meaning had no relation to the ideas of the popular mind.

　　This consideration is important, because of late years there have been efforts to show that the Kingdom, as conceived by our Lord, had no social content whatever; that, by the Kingdom of God, He meant a spiritual illumination in the heart of the individual (Harnack, What is Christianity? Lect. iii. He holds that our Lord shared the eschatological ideas of the Jews of His time, but that the essence of His teaching is that the Kingdom is the rule of God in the heart of the individual). This view rests mainly on a single text, Luke 17:21 ‘The kingdom of God is within you,’ and is supported by the consideration that the primary meaning of the word which is translated ‘kingdom,’