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The Prayer That Teaches to Pray [The Lord's Prayer].
The Prayer That Teaches to Pray - The Lord's Prayer Author:Marcus Dods 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: III. " Thy kingdom come." When we find an earthly and a heavenly thing sailed by the same name, we are very apt to think of the earthly as that which bette... more »r fills and satisfies the name common to both. When God calls a spiritual thing or a heavenly arrangement by the name of something earthly and well known, we look upon this as merely a mode of illustration, possibly a happy, well-selected illustration, but nothing more. We still look on the earthly as the substantial reality to which the name belongs,'and deem that there is far more in it than will be found in the other. We think that the heavenly is only somewhat like the other, but will fail in some point. Thus, when God speaks to us of His kingdom, we are too ready to view this as but a figure of speech, which may intimate that the government of God over us does in some points resemble the sway of monarchover his subjects; whereas the truth is, that this kingdom is the only one which comes up to the idea of a kingdom, which falls short in nothing of what a kingdom should be. " The Lord is King, not borrowing this title from the kings of the earth, but having lent his own title to them; and not the name only, but having so ordered, that all true rule and government upon earth, with its righteous laws, its stable ordinances, its punishment and its grace, its majesty and its terror, should tell of him and of his kingdom which ruleth over all—so that ' kingdom of God' is not in fact a figurative expression, but most literal: it is rather the earthly kingdoms and the earthly kings that are figures and shadows of the true." What king but one fulfils David's idea of a king, the idea which he seems to have lived to learn, and which, dying, he left as alegacy to his people, and surrounded with an emphatic accumulation of autho...« less