1. Matt. 8:12 reads: "But the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness; there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth." I am unable to reconcile the above verse with the one preceding it.
2. Luke 14:26 says: "If any man come to Me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he can not be My disciple." Are we to understand the word "hate" as it is commonly used modernly?
1. It is not our part of the work to "reconcile" texts of Scripture. We are to study them until we see the perfect harmony that is always in the Word of God. The Jews of the time of Christ's first advent called themselves the "children of the kingdom" of God. They posed as the chosen and favored people, but they had so far departed from God that He no longer recognized them as His. And so these children "shall be cast out," and others who are willing to accept the righteousness that God gives are taken in their stead. And when the "children of the kingdom" realize, in the great and final day, what they have lost, the text says "there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth." The keen disappointment because of the realization of their loss—and the loss, too, of what they have had urged upon them but they have refused—is doubtless the cause of the greater part of their "weeping and gnashing of teeth."
2. In the very nature of things God would not command us to "hate" anything or anybody in the sense in which we now use the word. The use of the original word from which "hate" is here translated will bear us out in the statement that the Master's teaching is that we are not to suffer father, mother, sister, or brother to stand between us and the kingdom of God. But we ourselves could not enter God's kingdom while hating any one in the sense in which we commonly speak of hatred. The whole tenor of the Scriptures from beginning to end shows this to be so.
