The scribes were uncertain, timid, and formal: Jesus was earnest, clear, unhesitating, authoritative. The scribes feared and taught by a human standard -- the tradition of the elders.

"for he taught them as one having authority and not as the scribes."

They taught thus, not as a matter of individual conviction, but as the accepted rule with which it was convenient to comply: Jesus taught with the emphasis of knowledge, divinely derived, and with the ardour of a pure love, and the clearness and dignity of a noble purpose. Jesus knew what he was about: the others did not. Solomon says,

...The situation is somewhat reversed now. It is in writing and not in speaking that we have to make the acquaintance of the words of Christ -- by reading, not by hearing. It is the matter rather than the manner by which we have to judge, and a right judgment on this head will engender the same astonishment that the listener felt at his manner. The matter is truly sublime. The difficulty of estimating it aright, arises from familiarity.

Nazareth Revisited Ch 17

6 Because to every purpose there is time and judgment, therefore the misery of man is great upon him.

Time and judgment

It is a sad thing that the millions that form the population of the earth should be so out of fit with their God; for He is their God in so far as He is their Maker. All their ways belong to Him. It is a very sad spectacle, in all towns, in all countries, to see so many perishing hopelessly from the fact that they know not God. It is so very sad that if we did not impose limits upon our sadness, our sadness would be liable to become too sad, too utterly distressing.

It would be so sad and distressing as to incapacitate a man for a reasonable and joyful attitude in God. We must look all round to get away from this effect.

...We are God's workmanship; beautiful workmanship - the finest piece of mechanism under the sun - constructed for a certain purpose. Every part of the machine has its perfect place. The law of God defines the place, when we set aside this law, the machine gets out of gear, and there is derangement and misery.

This is what happened at the start. Adam sinned, and everything got out of order and brought death. It is all to be put right by-and-by; but not yet, and therefore we suffer.

"Because to every purpose there is time and judgment, therefore the misery of man is great upon him."

If for everything there is a time, then there is a time for what we are suffering now, a time for evil and misery, because it is a time of sin - a time when God is disobeyed, and has been so long disobeyed.

...Now is the time for evil. God has a purpose in the earth, and the realization of that purpose requires that the evil now present should be the rule. It is what Paul says in Rom. 8, –The creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but

"by reason of Him who hath subjected the same in hope."

God has subjected us to misery "in hope". That is the explanation, the full explanation, the perfectly satisfactory explanation of the presence of evil and death in the earth. God has done it; and there is hope in connection with it.

Seasons 2.12.

8 There is no man that hath power over the spirit to retain the spirit; neither hath he power in the day of death: and there is no discharge in that war; neither shall wickedness deliver those that are given to it.

Brightening powers in the article of death.

Doth the flaring up of an expiring wick indicate that combustion is not the result of chemical action? And why not? In some cases, the brain is the last organ but one to die. In this event, all the energy of the expiring man is concentrated on the heart and brain, and increased action is the temporary result.

The cerebral manifestations become exalted, and the ordinary thinking of the brain is brightened, and its folly, or wisdom, if it had any, finds a more brilliant expression than when its vitality was more generally diffused. This seems to me the physiology of the matter, in which I can discern no evidence at all of a spark of immortality peculiar to the animal man. His candle goes out, and in departing he flares up in the socket, and is gone.

Herald of the Kingdom and Age to Come, May 1855