and its inclusion in the Father.
As the Father knoweth me, so know I the Father
.
It would have been against the general rule of Scripture prophecies, and the intention of the revelation in Christ, that the first Christians should have been so influenced in their measures and particular actions, as they could not but have been by a particular foreknowledge of the express and precise time at which Jerusalem was to be destroyed. To reconcile them to this uncertainty, our Lord first teaches them to consider this destruction the close of one great epoch, or
as the type of the final close of the whole world of time, that is, of all temporal things; and then reasons with them thus:—"Wonder not that I should leave you ignorant of the former, when even the highest order of heavenly intelligences know not the latter,
; nor should I myself, but that the Father knows it, all whose will is essentially known to me as the Eternal Son. But even to me it is not revealably communicated." Such seems to me the true sense of this controverted passage in Mark, and that it is borne out by many parallel texts in St. John, and that the correspondent text in Matthew, which omits the
conveys the same sense in equivalent terms, the word