Religious Admiration

While the disciples held in religious admiration the buildings of the temple, we have a like occasion of the rebuke which the mind of man met from the mind of God. "As He went out of the temple, one of His disciples saith unto Him, Master, see what manner of stones and what buildings are here! And Jesus answering said unto him, Seest thou these great buildings? there shall not be left one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down." Mark 13:1, 2.
This has the same moral character in it. It is the erring judgment of man, spending its delight and wonder on what the righteous judgment of God has already and solemnly renounced. The Lord was as the Watcher and the Holy One of the prophet, delivering the sentence of heaven upon the boast and pride of the heart of man, found, too, in the place o religion. Does this not have a voice in the ear of this present generation?
The case, however, which above all should fix on: mind at this time is that in Luke 19 the multitude was following the Lord on His way from Jericho to Jerusalem, and we are there told of them that "they thought that the kingdom of God should immediately appear" v. 11. This tells us of the expectation of man's heart. The people judged that the present scene, the world as in man's hand, could get its sanction from God. They thought the kingdom would be set up at once. But this can never be. Christ cannot adopt man's world. Through repentance and faith man must take up with Christ's world, and not think that Christ can take up with his. The kingdom cannot come till judgment shall have cleared the scene of man's iniquities and pollutions. But this is not what man calculates at all. He judges that the kingdom may immediately appear—or be set up—without any purifying or change. Man assumes that all that is wanting is to advance a few steps farther, as from Jericho to Jerusalem, a little more progress in the growing scene and all will be the kingdom fit for God's adoption.