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John R Mackay - The Jews in New Testament Prophecy

The whole New Testament is prophecy in the sense that the writers thereof were organs of the Holy Spirit. Whether, then, the writers narrated events that belonged to the remote past, or whether they expounded the significance of the Incarnation of the Son of God which had come to pass in their own day, or whether they predicted events that were destined to come to pass after they wrote, they spoke as the very mouth of God; in the largest sense of the term, they prophesied. But in popular speech, as sometimes in the Scriptures themselves, prophecy is taken in the sense of prediction, one of the several forms which prophecy, in the Biblical sense, may assume; and it is in that narrower and popular sense that we use the term prophecy here. For the present, indeed, it is proposed merely to draw attention to one single oracle of the New Testament which relates to the future of the Jews, and to what that future means for all mankind: ‘If the cutting away of them be the reconciliation of the ...
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Access to God - Horatius Bonar

‘For through Him we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father’ (Ephesians 2:18). It is ‘access’ that we all have, says the apostle; and this means not only an open door, but entire liberty of entrance; nay, a welcome; nay, an introduction to God; such an introduction as a friend at court gives, into the presence of the sovereign. The apostle’s statement gives us three points of discourse, and these connect themselves with the whole Godhead in its three persons, Father, Son, and Spirit, for each of the blessed Three is concerned in the matter; and we learn here not merely the love of Christ, but the love of the Father and the Spirit. To whom, through whom, by whom, we have access; these are the apostle’s three heads. 1. To whom. To ‘the Father;’ to Him whose name, in the fullest sense of the word, and in all different aspects, expresses paternity or fatherhood. He is the Father, as the first Person of the Trinity, the representative of Godhead. He is the Father of Spirits, and ‘we ...
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The Benefits of Public Worship – David Welsh

‘I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the house of the Lord’ (Psalm 122:1) In these words, we have the expression of a condition of feeling, along with a statement of the occasion by which it was induced. The feeling was one of holy joy; and the occasion of it was an invitation to enter into the courts of the Lord. The Jews were directed to hold their three great yearly feasts in the city of the Lord; and from all quarters of Judea upon these solemn seasons, the inhabitants went up in companies, or, in the words of the Psalm before us, ‘the tribes go up, the tribes of the Lord, unto the testimony of Israel, to give thanks unto the name of the Lord,’ that is, according to the injunctions of the testimony – or in compliance with the precepts of their law. And the Psalmist, in the words of the text, expresses his joy upon being called upon by his brethren to join in their sacred bands. There are many differences between the outward worship under the Jewish and under the Chr...
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The Lord’s Supper – Robert Balmer

Blessed are they who are called unto the marriage supper of the Lamb (Revelation 19:9). This declaration will probably suggest to you a scene more magnificent and blissful than any that will ever be realised on earth. It will not unnaturally lead your thoughts upward to heaven, and forward to that glorious era when the redemption of the church will be consummated, and when all her members, being collected into one harmonious and happy society, shall be admitted by the Captain of their salvation to eat and drink with him in his Father’s heavenly kingdom. To these events the figures in the text itself are elsewhere applied; for Jesus Christ is often represented as the husband, and the church as his bride and his spouse; and, in allusion to a nuptial solemnity and a marriage supper, it is said that, having ‘sanctified and cleansed her’, he will at the last ‘present her to himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle, or any such thing; but holy and without blemish.’ But, howeve...
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