For the Apostles these were days of immense importance as days in which they were compelled to reconstruct their whole view of the meeting of our Lord’s mission and of their relation to it.  They came to these days with their settled notion about the renewed Kingdom of Israel and of our Lord’s reign on earth which His teaching hitherto had not been able to expel; but now they are compelled to see that the Kingdom of God of which they are to be the missionaries is a Kingdom in another sense than they had so far conceived it.  It differs vastly from their dream of an Israelite empire.  It is no doubt true that this mental revolution is of slow operation, and that even when certain truths are grasped it will still take time to grasp them in all their implications.  For long their Judaism will impede their full understanding of the meaning of the Kingdom of God.  It will be years before they can see that it is a non-Jewish fact and that other nations will stand on an equality with them.  But they will by the end of the Forty Days have grasped the fact that they are not engaged in a secular revolution and are not entering on a career of worldly power.  They will be ready for their active ministry after Pentecost, a ministry of spiritual initiation into the Kingdom of God.  When in response to their preaching men asked the question:  “Men and brethren, what shall we do?” They were ready with their answer:  “Repent and be baptised every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost.”

So the Forty Days were filled with new meanings emerging from the old teaching, of suddenly grasped significance in some saying of our Lord that they had assumed that they understood but in reality had attributed little meaning to.  It is one of the striking things about our relation to spiritual truth that we can go on for long thinking that we are attaching a meaning to something which in fact, it turns out, has meant almost nothing to us.  Some day a phrase which we have often read or repeated suddenly is lighted up with a significance we had never dreamed of.  We have long been looking some truth in the face, but in fact it has never laid hold of us; we have made no inferences from it, deduced no necessity of action, till on a day the significance of it emerges and we are overwhelmed by the revelation of our blunder, of our stupidity.  The fact is that we assume that our conduct is quite right, and we interpret truth in the light of our conduct rather than interpret conduct in the light of truth.  It is the explanation, I suppose, of the fact that so many people read their Bible regularly without, so far as one can see, the reading having any effect upon their conduct.  The conduct is a settled affair and they are finding it reflected in the pages of the Gospel.  Their minds are already definitely made up to the effect that they know what the Gospel means, and that is the meaning that they put into the Bible.  One does