And His fame went throughout all Syria:  and they brought unto Him all sick people that were taken with divers diseases and torments, and those which were possessed with devils, and those which were lunatick, and those that had the palsy; and He healed them. 25.  And there followed Him great multitudes of people from Galilee, and from Decapolis, and from Jerusalem, and from Judaea, and from beyond Jordan.’—­MATT. iv. 17-25.

In these verses we have a summary of our Lord’s early Galilean ministry.  The events are so presented and combined as to give an impression as of a triumphal progress of the newly anointed monarch.  He sweeps through the northern regions, everywhere exercising the twofold office of teaching and healing, and everywhere followed by eager crowds.  This joyous burst of the new power, like some strong fountain leaping into the sunshine, and this rush of popular enthusiasm, are meant to heighten the impression of the subsequent hostility of the people.  The King welcomed at first is crucified at last.  It was ’roses, roses, all the way’ in these early days, but they withered soon.  There are three points in these verses:  the King acting as His own herald; the King calling His first servants; and the King wielding His power and welcomed by His subjects.

I. In verse 17 we have a striking picture of the King as His own herald.  The word rendered ‘preach’ of course means, literally, to proclaim as a herald does.  It is remarkable that this earliest phase of our Lord’s teaching is described in the same words as John’s preaching.  The stern voice was silenced.  Instead of the free wilderness, John had now the gloomy walls of Machaeus for the bound of his activity.  But Jesus takes up his message, though with a difference.  The severe imagery of the axe, the fan, the fire, is not repeated, as it would seem.  Sterner words than John’s could fall hot from the lips into which grace was poured; but the time for these was not yet come.  It may seem singular that Christ should have spoken of the kingdom, and been silent concerning the King.  But such silence was only of a piece with the reticence which marked His whole teaching, and was a sign of His wise adaptation of His words to the capacity of His hearers, as well as of His lowliness.  He veiled His royalty by deigning to be His own herald; by substituting the proclamation of the abstract, the kingdom, for the concrete, the King; by seeming to careless hearers to be but the continuer of the forerunner’s message; by the simple, remote region which He chose for His earliest work.  The belief that the kingdom was at hand was equally necessary, and repentance equally indispensable as preparation for it, whoever the King might be.  The same law of congruity between message and hearers, which He enjoined on His followers, when He bade them be careful where they flung their pearls, and which governed His own fullest final revelations to His truest friends, when He said, ’I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot carry them now,’ moulded His first words to the excited but ignorant crowds.