THE HOPE OF ISRAEL - The Preterist Archive

60 The Hope of Israel: What Is It?
king over them; and he also foretold what would be
the consequence thereof (Deut. 28:36). That wicked
act on their part was to be the culmination of apostasy ;
for it meant their repudiation of the sovereignty of
Jehovah. We have His own word for this ;
for He said
to Samuel, when commanding that prophet to give
them their desire, "They have not rejected thee; but
they have rejected Me, that I should not reign over
them" (I Sam. 8:7). That kingdom therefore was not
"the kingdom of God," preached by John and Christ.
So far from its being the kingdom of God, the truth
is that its establishment involved the setting aside of
the kingdom of God. And it was not "the kingdom of
heaven," for what the people demanded was a kingdom
of earthly character, "like all the nations." It is strange
indeed, therefore, that any Christian expositor should
regard the proclamation of Christ and His forerunner
as the announcement of the restoration of that kingdom,
born of apostasy and rebellion; and the more so
after God had plainly spoken concerning it, saying, "I
gave thee a king in Mine anger, and took him away in
My wrath" (Hos. 13:11).
Moreover, this ending of that odious kingdom is precisely
what Moses had foretold long before it came into
existence. For his words were, "The Lord shall bring
thee, and thy king which thou shalt set over thee, unto
a nation which neither thou nor thy fathers have
known" (v. 36). That, of course, was the Babylonian
captivity. The kingdom ended then, but not the nation.
And in agreement with this historical fact, the prophecy
of Moses goes on to speak of the subsequent experience
of the nation, as an experience of continued
servitude to, and oppression by, other nations. It
shows too that the post-captivity period was to be an