Lectures on the Gospel of Matthew Author:William Kelly Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: from the very first. This is the story of man. The after chapters will shew us the glorious consequences which God, in His grace, causes to flow even from the re... more »jection of His own Son. Upon that happier theme we may dwell on other occasions. CHAPTER III. We are now carried forward, from the return of our Lord into the holy land, to the days when John the Baptist came insisting upon the grand essential truth of repentance. But here John's ministry is viewed entirely in connection with the Lord's relation to Israel. It is interesting to compare the different ways in which the gospels present John himself, as illustrating the manner in which the Holy Ghost uses His own divine right to shape and group the materials of our Lord's history according to the exact object in view. A casual reader might scarcely recognize that John the Baptist of the last gospel was the Baptist of the first. The manner in which they are viewed, and the discourses that are recorded, take their form from the particular book in which the Holy Ghost has given them. This, so far from being imperfection, is a part of that admirable method in which God impresses the design which He has in view, and which suits the place which each portion of scripture has to fill. And what can be of deeper interest or more strengthening, than to find that the very passages on which unbelief puts its finger and alleges as proofs of the imperfection of scripture (varieties of statement insuperable to the mind of man), on the contrary, when viewed as part of God's plan for commending His beloved Son, all assume their own place in this great scheme, which is to the glory of Christ. This is the true key to all scripture; and if that key be of great value from Genesis to Revelation, there is no place, perhaps, where its value is so...« less