The apostles had asked (Matthew 24:3), "When shall these things be?" Christ does not now expressly answer this question; he puts forth strongly the uncertainty in the knowledge of these great events, and how this ignorance is disciplinary.
Of that day (de die illa, Vulgate) and hour, viz. when Christ shall appear in judgment, The expression plainly, implies that a definite day and moment are fixed for this great appearing, but known only to God.
Knoweth no man, no, not ( οὐδε Ì, not even) the angels of heaven. A kind of climax. Man is naturally excluded from the knowledge; but even to the angels it has not been revealed. A further climax is added in St.
Mark, and from that Gospel has been introduced by some very good manuscripts into this place, neither the Son (the Revised Version admits the clause). The words have given occasion to some erroneous statements.
It is said by Arians and semi-Arians, and modern disputants who have followed in their steps, that the Son cannot be equal to the Father, if he knows not what the Father knows. Alford says boldly, "This matter was hidden from him."
But when we consider such passages as "I and my Father are one;" "I am in the Father, and the Father in me" (John 10:30; John 14:11, etc.), we cannot believe that the time of the great consummation was unknown to him.
What is meant, then, by this assertion? How is it true? Doubtless it is to be explained (if capable of explanation) by the hypostatic union of two natures in the Person of Christ, whereby the properties of the two natures are interchangeably predicated.
From danger of error on this mysterious subject we are preserved by the precise terms of the Athanasian Creed, according to which we affirm that Christ is "equal to the Father, as touching his Godhead; and inferior to the Father, as touching his manhood .
one altogether; not by confusion of substance, but by unity of Person," etc. If, then, Christ asserts that he is ignorant of anything, it must be that in his human nature he hath, willed not to know that which in his Divine nature he was cognizant of.
This is a part of that voluntary self-surrender and self-limitation of which the apostle speaks when he says that Christ "emptied himself" (Philippians 2:7). He condescended to assume all the conditions of humanity, even willing to share the imperfection of our knowledge in some particulars.
How the two natures thus interworked we know not, and need not conjecture; nor can we always divine why prominence at one time is given to the Divine, at another to the human. It is enough for us to know that, for reasons which seemed good unto him, he imposed restriction on his omniscience in this matter, and, to enhance the mysteriousness and awfulness of the great day, announced to his disciples his ignorance of the precise moment of its occurrence.
This is a safer exposition than to say, with some, that Christ knew not the day so as to reveal it to us, that it was no part of his mission from the Father to divulge it to men, and therefore that he could truly say he knew it not.
This seems rather an evasion than an explanation of the difficulty. But my Father only. The best manuscripts have "the Father." "But" is εἰ μη Ì, except. So Christ said to his inquiring apostles, "It is not for you to know the times or seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power" (Acts 1:7).
These words do not exclude the Son's participation in the knowledge, though he willed that it should not extend to his human nature. With this and such-like texts in view, how futile, presumptuous, and indeed profane, it is to attempt to settle the exact date and hour when the present age shall end!"