Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 28:111 (Jul 1871)
Article: Characteristics Distinctive Of Christ’s Kingdom As Created By Redemption From The World, Or The Kingdom Of Satan
Author: Samuel Harris

BSac 28:111 (July 1871) p. 523

Characteristics Distinctive Of Christ’s Kingdom As Created
By Redemption From The World, Or The Kingdom Of Satan

Samuel Harris

Part I.—The Antagonism Of Christ’s Kingdom To The World Or The Kingdom Of Satan

Christ’s kingdom is created out of the world by God’s action redeeming men from sin. It exists and grows by God’s redeeming grace delivering sinful men from the power of darkness and translating them into the kingdom of his Son. It implies a perpetual process of transforming the world into itself.

The first thought which flows from this fundamental conception, and is now to be our subject, is this: Christ’s kingdom is in antagonism to the world or the kingdom of Satan. God’s redeeming grace and the kingdom which it calls into being are in perpetual conflict with the power and kingdom of evil for the deliverance of man.

This kingdom of evil is called in the Bible the power of darkness, as opposed to the kingdom of God’s dear Son; the kingdom of Satan, as opposed to the kingdom of Christ; the world, as opposed to the kingdom of heaven. The last is the most frequent designation, not because the world is conterminous with the reign of evil, but because it is subject to it, and the part of it immediately in contact with the kingdom of righteousness. It is only as we understand this use of “the world,” as representing the kingdom and power of darkness in its direct antagonism to Christ’s kingdom, that we get the full significance of many of the sayings of Christ and his apostles. We miss their power if we suppose “the world,” as they often use it, means only earthly goods.1

BSac 28:111 (July 1871) p. 524

This antagonism appears in the opening of Genesis. Man sinless in Eden is encircled and protected by the law which prohibits him from evil. When by transgression he has overleaped the law, which encircled and protected him, into the midst of circumjacent evil, the law becomes a sword of fire shutting him out from good, himself a victim of the power of evil, and henceforth a part of it. Nor was the antagonism that of the law only, but deliverance from the curse of the law is itself to come through conflict and suffering: “it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.” Men are not represented here as each in an isolated individuality, but as related to powers of good and of evil which existed before man existed, and the scope of whose action outreaches the sphere of human life. This is in analogy with nature. A man’s health does not depend altogether on his personal care of it. There are cosmic agencies under which the earth itself sickens and belches out pestilential miasmata; and the black death, the cho...