<p>11:52 <i>Woe to you lawyers For you took away the key of knowledge-</i></p><p>The Kingdom therefore remained 'locked' to people. We see here that &quot;knowledge&quot; does play a role in coming to the Kingdom. The same figure of the door of the Kingdom being shut but by the Lord, not men is found in Mt. 25:10. The similarity is such that we may be intended to understand the foolish virgins are those who were locked out of the Kingdom because of the Pharisees. Their lack of oil, of personal spirituality, was because their religious leaders had not inculcated this in them, nor any sense of their own fallibility and frailty- in that the reason they ended up locked out of the Kingdom was because they had not considered that their oil would likely fail. They had &quot;the key of knowledge&quot; in a spiritually ignorant and illiterate society which depended upon them for knowledge of God's word. Likewise if the elders / judges of Israel had been wise, the entire people would have entered the land (Dt. 16:20). The whole of Israel would&rsquo;ve stayed in the wilderness and not entered the Kingdom / land if Gad and Reuben hadn&rsquo;t initially gone over Jordan (Num. 32:15). Wrath would come upon all Israel if the Levites weren&rsquo;t encamped around the tabernacle (Num. 1:53). We really can cause others to not enter God&rsquo;s Kingdom by limiting their access to God&rsquo;s word a sin of omission, or by making demands on them in the name of His Kingdom which are too heavy for them to bear a sin of commission. This imparts an urgency and eternal importance to all our interactions with others. No longer can we see the community of believers as a mere social club, nor the world around us as simply the dead furniture of our lives. We have their salvation or stumbling away from it within our power. This fact also denies us from assuming that whether we fail or not in our interactions with others, God will somehow make good our failures and save others anyway. He has delegated His work into our hands, and to some extent the degree to which it prospers or fails is our responsibility. Otherwise the whole language of delegation of His wealth into our hands is somehow meaningless.&nbsp;</p><p><i>You did not enter in yourselves, and those that were entering in, you hindered</i>- As if they kept locked the door in the face of ones eager to enter the Kingdom.&nbsp;If we believe that we ourselves will be there, we will spark off an upward spiral of positive thinking in the community of believers with whom we are associated. Think carefully on the Lord&rsquo;s words to the Pharisees: &ldquo;For you neither go in yourselves, neither suffer you them that are entering to go in&rdquo; (Mt. 23:13). If we don&rsquo;t believe we will be there, we end up discouraging others. There is a sense in which we will enter the Kingdom at the last day (Mt. 5:20; &ldquo;Not every one that says Lord, Lord shall enter into the Kingdom&rdquo;, Mt. 7:21; 18:3; 25:10 s.w.), and yet in another sense we are entering now through the gates (&ldquo;enter in at the narrow gate&rdquo;, Mt. 7:13; 19:17,24). Our lives now are on a path, a journey, which is entering the Kingdom. The significance of life and living could not be more intense.</p><p>The same word for &lsquo;hindering&rsquo; is used about how the disciples &lsquo;forbad&rsquo; children to come to Jesus (Mt. 19:14) and about &lsquo;forbidding&rsquo; baptism (Acts 8:36; 10:47). This is exactly how people can be hindered or not &lsquo;allowed&rsquo; to enter the Kingdom today- by refusing them baptism because of some inadequacy of knowledge or behaviour, or because they are simply felt to be in a category like &ldquo;children&rdquo; were by the disciples who are inappropriate for the Kingdom. These reflections make us realize that the Pharisees were not a mere phenomenon in history, but have their direct equivalents today.</p>