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Matthew |
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| Chapter 1 | Prayer | Devotional | Chapter 15 | Prayer | Devotional | |
| Chapter 2 | Prayer | Devotional | Chapter 16 | Prayer | Devotional | |
| Chapter 3 | Prayer | Devotional | Chapter 17 | Prayer | Devotional | |
| Chapter 4 | Prayer | Devotional | Chapter 18 | Prayer | Devotional | |
| Chapter 5 | Prayer | Devotional | Chapter 19 | Prayer | Devotional | |
| Chapter 6 | Prayer | Devotional | Chapter 20 | Prayer | Devotional | |
| Chapter 7 | Prayer | Devotional | Chapter 21 | Prayer | Devotional | |
| Chapter 8 | Prayer | Devotional | Chapter 22 | Prayer | Devotional | |
| Chapter 9 | Prayer | Devotional | Chapter 23 | Prayer | Devotional | |
| Chapter 10 | Prayer | Devotional | Chapter 24 | Prayer | Devotional | |
| Chapter 11 | Prayer | Devotional | Chapter 25 | Prayer | Devotional | |
| Chapter 12 | Prayer | Devotional | Chapter 26 | Prayer | Devotional | |
| Chapter 13 | Prayer | Devotional | Chapter 27 | Prayer | Devotional | |
| Chapter 14 | Prayer | Devotional | Chapter 28 | Prayer | Devotional |
Prayers
Lord God, grant that we would see Jesus Christ rightly in Your Word. He is the fulfillment of Your every promise. You have granted many kings to reign over Your people, but Jesus is far above them all. We thank You for the wonder of His two natures, for He is both human and divine. In His one person He has fully saved us from our sins. He is not only the Son of Mary. He is God with us. In Him we have been given a most excellent and secure heritage.
Father, why have men hated Your Son even before He was known by them? What kind of spirit causes a Herod to pretend to be a worshiper of the one that he seeks to destroy? Yet this Jesus is the hope of even Gentiles who were seeking the coming of the Holy One as they looked to the skies. You have protected Your Son from powerful and evil men who hated His coming. Yet He was born to die according to Your own plan of salvation. Grant us more life in Him even now, for though He died, yet He lives forever.
Sovereign Lord, there is so much for us to learn from Your Word. It is there plainly for us to hear and receive, but what will the condition of our hearts be when we hear the truth preached to us? Will we be willing to repent of our sin? Your Son had a complete commitment to fulfill all righteousness in the depths of His being. Grant to us this same Spirit, that we might be eager to hear and obey Your Word. Our Savior is fully pleasing to You. In Him we are Your beloved children.
Glorious Lord, we do not understand the minds of men. How can we fathom the thoughts and actions of angels? Yet men and angels are all perfectly known by You. By Your Word Your Son resisted the temptations of Satan. He would not be distracted from His mission. Thank You for the light that has dawned upon us in the life and work of our King. We have been granted eyes to see Him as our hearts have been made alive by Your Spirit. When He called us to follow Him, we were given the grace to leave the world behind, and to serve our Messiah. Remind us day by day of the greatness of the One we serve, lest we foolishly return to the way that leads to death.
Lord God, Your Son came to teach us and then to die for us. There is a perfect connection between His instruction and His cross. He has blessed us greatly and we are glad, even though men may hate us. We look to the age to come according to Your promise. Grant that we would have in us a taste of the resurrection and the light of a glory that shall one day be fully revealed. Your Son has obeyed all Your commandments for us. He calls us to follow Him in the way of righteousness. Grant us a heart that loves Your Law, so that we will not grieve Your Spirit. Teach us to be aware of the slavery of sin. We long to live forever in the light of Your great holiness. Show us how to live now in the simplicity of love. This way of life need not be mysterious to us, for Your Son has displayed to us the way.
Father God, bless us with a deep desire for secret opportunities to do what is good. Teach us to pray as those who love Your smile more than the praise of men. We seek now the glory of Your Name, the progress of Your Kingdom, and the beauty of Your holy will. As we serve You day by day, we humbly ask that You would supply our needs, forgive our sins, and lead us away from every snare of evil. We willingly forgive everyone who has ever sinned against us. We mourn our own sin and weakness, and we seek the power of Your presence among us. Will we be caught again in the clutches of love for money? We claim that we are free from such base impulses, yet we are easily anxious about food and clothing when there is even a slight danger of poverty among us. Teach us to seek first Your Kingdom and Your righteousness. We know that You will take care of us now and forever.
Sovereign Lord, we feel the weight of our own sin, and we mourn. Teach us how to live as forgiven sinners in a world full of sin. We truly repent and come now to You for help. We ask for You. We seek You. We knock at Your door. Fill us with Your Spirit. You are the Father of Your people, and we know that You will give us good gifts when we approach You through Your Son. Grant us perseverance in the way that leads to life. Bless us with true and lasting fruitfulness. Above all, we ask that we would be known by You on the Day of Judgment that is coming upon the world. We stand in union with Your Son upon the rock of Your holy Word. In Him we not only hear Your Word, we also do what you command. Have mercy on us in our foolish doubts and wanderings.
Father God, You have made us clean from the leprosy of sin. Though we were not worthy of having You come to dwell with us, You have come to us and have helped us. We are very thankful. Touch us even now. May the sickness of unbelief be driven far from us. We need to be up and serving You. May nothing stand in our way. You are strong to turn away every obstacle from our hearts and minds. You are powerful over the world and over every proud adversary who would try to defy You. Help us, O God! Save us by Your mighty presence and by Your matchless Word.
O God, give us faith even for those in need all around us. Why should men and women everywhere not rise and walk? Your Son has come, and He is still calling all kinds of people to follow Him. We need You. We are those who are sick, and You are the most powerful doctor. We rejoice in the presence of Your Son, but we long for Your coming again. We have already received much grace, and we taste the blessings of the age to come. Nonetheless, we cannot be satisfied without the full arrival of the age of resurrection. We believe that You are able to do this. Open our eyes even now. Give us the words to speak, that we might rightly live out the gospel of the kingdom. Send forth many laborers into Your harvest field. May many captives of sin and death be freed by Your Word of truth.
Lord God, You are building Your kingdom on the cornerstone of Your Son and the foundation of apostles and prophets. We rejoice in Jesus Christ and in His glorious Word. Use Your servants as messengers of life in a dangerous and dying world. Grant Your Spirit to Your servants that they might speak the truth with power and love. We need You. Bring to light all that is necessary for the conversion of many. May many people acknowledge You before men, for it is a horrible thing to deny You. We take up our cross and follow Your Son. We gladly receive Your children and care for their needs. This world is passing away, and all of its pride, but Your kingdom is forever.
Great God, You sent Your Son preaching and teaching. He performed the signs of the Messiah. We will not be offended by Him. John the Baptist prepared the way for Him as a great Prophet. Now we have been brought into Your Kingdom, and we have seen things in Your Word that prophets of old longed to see. We have heard of Your Son’s mighty works, and we believe that He is the Anointed One. We are Your children through faith in this Christ. We have come to Him, and in Him we have found rest for our souls.
Glorious Lord, Your Son understood Your Law perfectly. Even more than this, He obeyed Your Law perfectly. He came as the One who was greater than the temple. He is the Lord of the Sabbath. He is the Messiah King. You have given us a powerful expectation of the fullness of Sabbath life in Him. Help us to believe in the coming resurrection, and to live as those who have already been made alive through Jesus Christ. He is the Son of David. He defeats all the works of Satan. It is a glorious privilege to be a part of His Kingdom, O God. Teach us how to gather people for Your Son. Help us to walk in the goodness and love that comes from above, and to speak as those who know and honor the truth. Thank You for the glorious sign of Your Son’s resurrection. In Him we have the greatest gift known to man. Shall we have life again through the Man who rose from the dead? Shall we have the wisdom of the Holy Spirit through the One who is wiser than Solomon? We hear His Word, and we believe. We have been given new life, and we shall follow You.
Lord of Glory, You have spoken Your Word through Your servants. We pray that we might be good soil, fruitful for Your service. Father, there is an enemy who is ready to take away the Word before we would even hear it. Keep him far from our hearts. There is a world of distraction all around us. Clear away the rocky ground of our minds. Keep out the thorns that would hide the glory of Your Word. Though Your church may contain both weeds and wheat in this present age, You shall surely make a distinction between them at the harvest. Have mercy, O Lord. Forgive our sins. Build up Your kingdom over these centuries for the glory of Your Name. Bring into Your home all of Your elect. We long for the day when the righteous will shine like the sun in Your kingdom. We should prefer Your kingdom to everything that the world would offer to us. Eternal life is so important. Grant us clarity of thought, speech, and action on these matters. Take away from us all the fogginess and confusion of sin. We honor You, O God. Do many works of blessing through the people who long for Your Son’s appearing.
Father God, the fact of an uneasy conscience cannot be wished away. Only through the blood of Your Son can we truly have peace. Have compassion upon us, O Lord. Help us to know true forgiveness and restoration. Feed us with bread from heaven. Speak to our hearts in a way that will satisfy our deepest needs and desires. Send us forth in peace that we may serve You. Teach us to pray with a secure faith, for we know that You control all things. Come to us in our moments of fear. Take hold of us when we doubt and keep us from sinking under the weight of many cares. We long for the day when sickness and disease will be far away from all of Your people. Until the trumpet sounds and the new life of resurrection appears, keep our eyes fixed upon the face of our Redeemer.
Lord of Glory, help us to distinguish between the traditions of men and the Word that comes from You. Cleanse us from within, that we would no longer be filled with evil thoughts. Have mercy upon us and upon our children. Defeat the forces of evil that oppress us. Grant to us a crumb from the table of the kingdom in the midst of this world of death. Thank You for Your kind compassion upon us in our time of need. Use us day by day as agents of Your abundant mercy.
Great God, why have we been so slow to love You and to follow You? Why do we approach Your Word with doubt? Please grant to us a fuller measure of faith. The leaven of false teachers and hypocrites too easily finds a ready ear among us. Send us the Christ, Your holy Son. Build Your church. Move us forward with the message of the forgiveness of sins. Help us to boast in the cross. We too easily move in the direction of the ways of men. Set our hearts upon Your ways, and show us Your glory.
Father, when Your Son ministered in this world of death, You gave us an amazing glimpse of His glory in the Transfiguration. How we long for that vision today! How can we live by the light of resurrection glory when we never see that kind of glorious sight with our eyes? Teach us how to see with the eyes of faith and how to live by faith. Move us ahead in works of faith according to Your commandments. Without faith it is impossible to please You. Thank You for Your Son’s great work of faith that was fulfilled through the cross. By that cross we who were so far off have been made sons of the Kingdom. What looked like utter failure in the sight of the world was truly the greatest of victories for Your people.
Sovereign Lord, make us like children in every appropriate way, that we might know what it is to walk by faith in Your kingdom. We turn away from all sin. We lift up to You the young ones in our midst, and we pray that You would lead them in paths of righteousness for Your Name’s sake. Make us wise in dealing with offenses in our midst. Restore those who repent. We need to be a people of extravagant forgiveness, for we have been forgiven a massive debt. Our sin against You was a burden that we could never bear. We have found peace with You only through Your merciful grace. Will we now treat others as if peace could come to us through law? We will truly forgive one another from our hearts even now, for we have been completely forgiven through the grace of Your Son.
Our Father, You have granted to many in Your church the joy of having lifelong partners in marriage. What a blessing is this one flesh relationship. Why do we engage in entangling sins that are destructive of this great gift? There is so much sadness around us. We mourn our sinful thoughts, words and actions. We regret the seed of hate that has brought about the destruction of many marriages, particularly in Your church. We pray that You would help us to find life again after such significant loss. Father we hear Your call to us, that we should follow You in this and in every way. We offer up to You now all that we are and everything that we possess. Your call to obedience is absolute and complete. We confess that this seems impossible to us. Yet You have the power to do things that men cannot do. You will give us the fullness of Your kingdom. Grant to us even now the wisdom of complete devotion to You.
Lord God, Your kingdom has come to us by Your sovereign gift. We should always receive it with the greatest joy and gratitude. Yet we find a disturbing tendency in our hearts. We act as if we have been given the kingdom as a wage, when it is clearly the best gift that anyone could ever receive. Remind us again of the meaning of the cross. Let our eyes be opened to the wonder of Your love, that we might believe the gospel and follow Your Son. Change our thinking about Your kingdom, so that we embrace the suffering that You have ordained for us. Your Son came to serve. We offer up our lives in His service.
Father God, You are in charge of every detail of our salvation. In the most important week of human history, You brought Your Son into Jerusalem in complete fulfillment of all prophecy. Your Son cleansed the temple. The salvation that He brings is wonderful. We ask You to purify our worship and to make us whole in body and soul. We look for fruitfulness in Your church even now. Grant us faith that is able to move mountains of unbelief. Help us to submissively hear the Word of Your Son and to obey. Cast out of us any spirit of arrogance or evil. We want to follow You, O Lord, not only with our words, but especially with our lives. Bring many into Your kingdom even today. Why should we be hypocrites, when You have done a powerful work of redemption in our lives? Make us faithful in Your service. We build our lives upon the Stone that the builders rejected. He is the one source of eternal life.
Father, the cross is a great story of love, but it is also a horror to us. You sent Your Son to die. He suffered greatly. Through the shedding of His own blood, He provided for us the holy garments of righteousness necessary for us to have peace with You. Yet men of malice tried to trap the One who came to die for our sins. Others thought that they could make Him look like a fool. How wrong they were. He is Your wisdom and Your power. We thank You for this Word of life given to us. He loved You with all His heart, soul, mind, and strength; and He loved His neighbor as Himself. Here is the fulfillment of all the Law and the Prophets. Thank You for this holy Messiah who is both David’s Son and David’s Lord.
Lord of Hosts, we reject the Pharisaic way. We must know You and we must be known by You. We must love You, and we must be loved by You. We cannot have peace with You through law. We need Jesus. We have ways of serving ourselves while acting like we are serving You. Come and save us. We are in a battle between the gospel and religious hypocrisy. We will only win if Your Son is with us as One who lives in us. Cast away from us all false pretense of holiness. We know our need. We can only have righteousness and mercy as Your gifts to us through the blood of the Lamb. Please help us now. If we do not have Your presence, we have nothing, and we cannot move forward in Your service.
Glorious God, You are building a wonderful living temple. Your Son is that temple, and we are a true temple in Him. We want no false prophets or false Messiahs. We need Christ. The love of many has grown cold. There is much trouble all around us. Thank You for warning us that these days would come. Thank You also for cutting short these days, for You know our weakness. Come, O God! Come, Lord Jesus Christ! Shine upon us in Your glorious return with all Your great host. Let us see the resurrection. Though we do not know the day and hour, we know You. Though we do not yet see the resurrection kingdom in glory, we see Your Son through Your Word. May the gospel be preached everywhere, and may we be found faithful and fruitful, as those who endure to the end.
God of Glory, when You come in judgment, will we be ready? Will we be waiting with expectation? Please do not exclude us from that marriage feast. You have given us certain gifts and graces according to Your will. We want to use what we have been given for Your glory. Beat back the enemy who desires that we would have no fruit. We will not bury the gifts that we have been given. We long to hear the words that You will speak on that day when You would call us good and faithful servants in Jesus Christ. Lead us by Your presence within us, so that we will serve the least among us with joy. We love You, Lord God, and we love Your church. We long for the day of our bodily entrance into the world of eternal life. We commit to Your care our riches, our friends and loved ones, even our own lives, and we look for the day of Your Son’s glorious coming.
Father God, the entirety of our faith is about Jesus Christ. People plotted to arrest Him and to kill Him, but so few understood what was actually happening. He gave His body. He shed His blood. He did this in faith, assuring us that He will eat and drink with us in His coming kingdom. We could not have saved ourselves. We would have denied Him. We would not have been able to watch and pray even for one hour. Yet His time was at hand according to Your sovereign will. He was betrayed with a kiss. His enemies seized Him. They accused Him falsely. They sentenced Him to death. They abused Him. Yet He was and is the Christ, our Redeemer.
Lord God, the events of the cross are overwhelming. Who killed our Lord? Was it the Romans? Was it the chief priests and elders? Was it Judas? Was it Pilate? Was it the crowd? Was it the soldiers? Was it not me? It was our sins that brought Him to this atoning death. It was Your will to save us. There was no other way. Be glorified, O Lord. We cannot claim to be innocent of the blood of Jesus. What is left for us to do? We will carry His cross, for He is our King. Father God, remember us. Your Son died for us. We have been delivered from death and hell. He was forsaken that we might live forever. He yielded up His Spirit that we might have the gift of Your Spirit. He is most certainly Your eternal Son. Yet He was buried in a tomb for us. What wondrous love is this!
Lord of Hosts, Your Son is risen! The stone is rolled away and the tomb is empty. More than this, our Risen Savior has met with His disciples. All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Him. We must go forth and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the Triune Name. We will teach and do what He has commanded. Our confidence is in His presence, for He is with us always, even to the end of the age. Cast far away from us all doubt. Strengthen us by Your Spirit that we might stand firm in the face of every foe, for Jesus is Lord, forever and ever.
Devotionals
When God sent a Messiah King to atone for our sins and to be our everlasting Lord, He sent someone with a heritage. Consider for a moment all of the preparation that went into this new start for humanity. The Lord prepared us for Him through much ceremonial Law performed by many priests over a number of centuries. He also gave us prophets, several of whom left a written record with important information concerning the coming Redeemer. But especially as we start Matthew’s gospel, we are captured by the fact that God sent His Son as our King, and as a man who came from a line of kings. Jesus Christ is not only the Man who fulfilled the important promises that God gave to Abraham 2000 years before the Messiah was born. He was especially the descendant of David the King of Israel, the fulfillment of a specific promise that the Lord gave to this man, that one of David’s descendants would reign forever.
This important fact is communicated to us in the organization of the genealogy of Jesus of Nazareth. Like the great majority of those who called themselves Jews, Jesus was descended from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. This Jacob had his name changed by God to “Israel.” The offspring of his twelve sons formed the tribes of Israel. Jesus was a descendant of one of those sons, Judah. At the end of Jacob’s life, when he was giving his blessings to his sons, he gave this cryptic message to Judah: “The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor the ruler's staff from between his feet, until tribute comes to him; and to him shall be the obedience of the peoples.” That was spoken long before God had even authorized the existence of a king in Israel. Not only is it an amazing revelation that the line of the kings will go through this one son, there is also an indication that there is some terminus to the line, some final king who will receive tribute and the obedience of the peoples. The Hebrew expression in Genesis 49:10 is challenging, but there is no doubt about the use of the word “until.” There would be a line of kings until some final king who seemed to be the point of that message given so long ago.
It would be several generations later in the genealogy when the great King David was given by the Lord’s own mysterious choice. We should notice that the tribe of Judah in the day of Jacob would not have been an obvious one for the ruler over his brothers. He was neither the first son nor the favorite son. The Lord chose Judah. Then centuries later, the Lord chose David. This young man was such an unlikely choice compared to his older brothers that they did not even bother to call him when the great Samuel came to anoint a king. David was God’s choice, but he had to be summoned to the occasion because he was tending the sheep. The story of David’s sons was not entirely positive. In the line between David and the deportation of the southern kingdom to Babylon we have the amazingly capable and successful Solomon, and two especially faithful men, Hezekiah and Josiah. Many of the descendants in this genealogy were not said to be good kings.
After the return of the people from exile, they were longing for another king in this line, but their hopes were frustrated. None of the men in the genealogy from Shealtiel to Joseph were kings. We know so little about these individuals. It would be understandable if the people of God had lost all hope that there would yet be a descendant of Judah, a descendant of David, who would be that great king who would deliver us from our enemies, rule over us in righteousness, and subdue all potential future foes. But of all the possible descendants of David, it should be most evident that Jesus of Nazareth was a very unlikely choice, and that He was a King given at a time when no one might have been looking for any king to come at all.
To this Joseph, an unknown descendant of David betrothed to another unknown descendant of David named Mary, a child was born. The way that all of this happened seems almost designed to lead to humiliation and shame, rather than to exaltation and praise. Before they were married, Joseph found out that Mary was pregnant. Joseph knew that he was not the father of this child. The truth of this child had to be revealed to him by an angel, a messenger from heaven itself. Naturally, everyone would have assumed that this child was the illegitimate offspring of an immoral woman and an unknown father, born into a family of poverty from a part of the world that was not respected by anyone.
The truth was that this son of Mary, who would seem to borrow the genealogy of His stepfather Joseph, was actually the long expected child of promise. This descendant of Judah, this son of David was the Son of God, conceived by the Holy Spirit. He was the fulfillment of the words of Isaiah the prophet who long ago had written that a virgin would conceive and bear a son who would be God with us – Immanuel.
This great Son of David is our Prophet and our Priest, but especially here we remember that, though He was born in such a low condition, He is our King. It was necessary for this King to die on a cross, as we shall see in due course. Yet no one should come to the erroneous conclusion based on His humble beginning that He is someone less than a King. He has come to reign over us not only for a season, but for an eternity, and not in such an insignificant place as the capital of some worldly empire, but as the sovereign over a renewed heaven and earth. He has come to save His people from their sins through His atoning death, and He has come to reign over us with perfect wisdom, power, and love as the eternal King of kings. There is a connection between these two ideas of salvation from sin and everlasting life. Remember that death entered the world through sin. When sin is truly forgiven by our Savior, we should expect that the result would be everlasting life. This is what Christ our Lord has done for us, and He shall reign forever and ever.
It was necessary that Jesus would fulfill all Old Testament prophesies concerning the coming Messiah. One of the topics that came up in many of the prophetic oracles was the fact of a coming day when Gentiles would joyfully worship the God of Israel. There are certain hints of this even in the days of the prophets themselves, and there are more glimpses into this reality during the life of Jesus, but it is especially after His ascension into heaven that the ministry of the Word to the Gentiles begins in earnest. Even after the pouring out of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, it was not an easy thing for Jewish Christians to realize that the Lord Jesus had come to save not only the circumcised, but also the uncircumcised. The hints of this worldwide role of the Messiah begin to be seen from His earliest years, when wise men probably coming from the powerful empires to the east saw signs of His arrival, and came to worship Him.
They may have expected to find everyone sympathetic to their search for the true king of the Jews. In any case, they picked the wrong man to talk to concerning their mission when they went directly to Herod speaking about a star in the heavens that they believed to be a signal of His appearing. This Herod hated any thought or possibility of a supposed Messiah King.
He was troubled by these visitors and all Jerusalem with him. This city of the great king apparently did not want the real King to come at this time. Nor did the priests and the scribes. They rightly informed Herod from Scripture concerning the birthplace of the Messiah, namely the town of Bethlehem, the city of David, not far from Jerusalem. Herod summoned the wise men again to tell them the news, claiming that he too wished to worship this child. Of course his plan was entirely different from his false declaration.
These wealthy Gentile men from afar were soon delighted at the renewed appearance of the star that had guided them, which now the Lord used to bring them to the very house where our Savior was living. There they saw His mother Mary and they fell down and worshiped him, giving Him gifts of great worth, as one day the wealth of many Gentiles would be freely offered to this King of the Jews. The life of the Savior of the world was protected through a dream, and these men returned to their land by another route, avoiding any further encounter with Herod. At the time, a heavenly messenger warned Joseph concerning the murderous intentions of the king, and the family was kept in Egypt in safety in imitation of the flight of the family of the Old Testament patriarch Jacob where he met a different Joseph so many centuries earlier.
There this little flock of three remained until the death of Herod, when God would call His Son out of Egypt, as He had done so long ago through the ministry of Moses. The Son of God was living out the pathway of God’s covenant people, identifying with them in their need, and fulfilling an amazing word from the Scriptures, now shining brightly with a more particular meaning, since it was truly the Son of God individually who was being called out of Egypt, and not just the nation spoken of as a “son” of God. In the meantime, before His death, Herod had ordered the heartless murder of all of the toddler boys two years old and younger anywhere near Bethlehem. Such was his hatred of the Lord’s Messiah. Here we see an antichrist spirit, and a contest between two kings. Yet the more obviously powerful king was soon dead, and the young boy Messiah was kept alive, and again was divinely protected through an angelic messenger to His stepfather, leading the family to return to the land that was the home of Mary and Joseph prior to the birth of Jesus, Nazareth in the region of Galilee.
In all of these things we see the fulfillment of Scriptural jewels tucked away in various Old Testament writings by the Lord Himself. These are blessings recorded for us who read the account of the life of Jesus in Matthew’s gospel. The entire New Testament church is strengthened by these words that assure us that the Son of Mary is truly the Son of God. This would have been a great surprise to almost every observer from that day, yet it was not a surprise to the Almighty who had planned these events and had placed markers of His faithfulness and wisdom in the words of holy men of old.
Even men from among the Gentiles knew enough to interpret the signs in the heavens surrounding the arrival of a great King. They not only found Him, they also worshipped Him. Surely they were moved by the hand of the same Almighty God who inspired the writing of the Hebrew Scriptures. At great cost to themselves, and at the risk of their lives, they travelled far to find the King of kings, who would one day reign over a far greater kingdom than Herod could have ever imagined.
The death of the children of Bethlehem provides us with an early glimpse of something we will see more fully in another chapter of this story, for this baby King would not enter the fullness of His reign without facing more of the hatred of many men against the Lord and against His Anointed. Even His death would be a central part of God’s good plan for the display of His glorious mercy and His wonderful justice. This King would die for us, and many Gentiles, as well as many Jews, would serve and worship Him forever.
The history of the Old Testament prophets is an ancient one. It begins even before Moses, when God told Abimelech in a dream that the patriarch Abraham was a prophet. This was somewhat unexpected, since God was giving Abimelech the special dream. We usually expect the prophet to be the one receiving the dream from God. The thing that made Abraham the true prophetic figure of these two men was that he, and not Abimelech, was the authoritative spokesperson of the Word of God. Prophets do not always predict things, and they do not always have dreams from the Lord, but they do always speak for God.
After several hundred years of prophetic silence, God sent John the Baptist as the final Old Testament prophet. His ministry as a spokesman for God was a ministry of preparation. In both Isaiah and in Malachi we hear of one who will prepare the way for the coming of the Son of God. At just the right time, John the Baptist came preaching in the wilderness of Judea. His message was a call to repentance in light of the coming of the kingdom of heaven.
To repent is to turn away from evil and to turn toward God. In every generation there is a great need for repentance. The Law has revealed to us something of the character of God. If we have that Law, we should not need any messenger to remind us to stop sinning and to turn to God. Yet our sinful natures are so set upon evil and so insensitive of the way of righteousness. We need to be roused from our sinful stupor and shown the way out of wickedness toward God.
After so many years without a true prophet of the Lord, God raised up John the Baptist for this task. He was not a man of power or influence. He was simply the one chosen by God to give the message that needed to be preached at the close of the Old Covenant era just before the dawning of a new day. His ministry was not by itself surprising. What was amazing was that so many people were made to respond to a man that did not appear to be personally appealing or to have something to say that would attract a large crowd. Yet he demanded that many take stock of their dangerous condition and change their ways, and they did. The fact that so many people were willing to come out to the wilderness and to hear John, and then to confess their sins and be baptized can only be explained by the power of God. The time had come for the gift of the Messiah. Therefore God moved within the hearts of some to prepare the way for His arrival with a surprising movement of repentance and an expectation of the arrival of a new kingdom.
Not everyone who came to hear John was truly sincere. There were many leading religious figures that apparently came out to see what all the fuss was about, having no intention of actually turning away from sin. Some went so far as to present themselves for baptism. John spoke to them frankly about their need for a true change of life that would be displayed in the fruit of real obedience to the revealed will of God. It would not do to try to cling to their positions of influence or to their descent as children of Abraham. John identified these men as those who were in great danger as the new King would come with the power of His kingdom.
His expectation seems to be that judgment from the new Messiah King would be swift and sure against unrepentant sinners. He knew that he was unworthy to even be the lowest servant of this great and holy King who would separate the wicked from the righteous. Imagine how surprised he was when Jesus came to be baptized by him. Our Lord insisted that it was necessary for Him to be baptized in order to fulfill all righteousness.
John would need to stand back as a perplexed Old Testament prophet and make way for a Man and a message that were well beyond His understanding. Yet there was a voice from heaven that day representing One who did understand. This voice from the realms of heaven said what only He could say. This One Man who had presented Himself as united to sinners in His baptism by John was the true sinless Son of God. This Jesus was announced to the assembled host as one who was well-pleasing to the Lord God Almighty.
This display from the heavens was as wonderfully impressive as John’s message could objectively be evaluated as unattractive or repellent. Why would anyone come out to the wilderness to hear that they were sinners? But to hear the voice of God and to see the manifestation of the Spirit of God come down upon the Messiah Son of God would have be an amazing thing for anyone who was permitted to see and hear such an display of glory.
We should, however, be more impressed by the facts concerning Jesus than by any spectacle that could have captured our attention that day. This One Israelite chosen by God was truly pleasing to Him. Here was one who was far above Abraham, Moses, or John the Baptist. Here was the one Man who did not need to repent of sin. Yet He came to identify Himself with those who were full of sin as He prepared to be revealed as the Sin-bearing Lamb of God, and the Hope of the coming kingdom of heaven. Here is one that all of heaven and earth should rightly worship. He is more than a prophet. John was an authoritative and courageous spokesman of God’s Word, but Jesus is the Word of God incarnate, and the hope of all who would repent and believe. He is our righteous Savior and our loving Lord.
The great Son of God identified with us in our sin through His death on the cross in order to bring us eternal salvation. In His life of suffering He identified with us in all our troubles and He also fulfilled all righteousness. It was necessary for Him as the second Adam to listen to the voice of His Father above all else. For that reason He faced a horrible challenge at the outset of His public ministry as a necessary step in accomplishing all His holy purposes. Jesus came to crush the head of the serpent. To accomplish this would eventually mean the bruising of His own heel in His death on the cross. Jesus did not merely wander into the wilderness and happen across evil and danger. He was led there by the Spirit for our salvation.
The environment of temptation for Jesus was very different than that faced by the first Adam. Adam was in a beautiful garden with his wonderful wife and everything necessary for joyful living. Jesus was in a desert land. There he fasted for forty days and forty nights and He was hungry. Adam faced his test before sin entered the world. Jesus was tempted in a world of people already full of sin and misery. Yet Adam sinned, and Jesus successfully resisted temptation. The result was good news for even Adam. Adam believed God after his fall. He believed that there would come an offspring of the woman who would win a very powerful victory over Satan, over evil, over sin, and over death. This Adam named his wife Eve, the mother of all the living, thus acting upon the faith that He had been granted by the Father. This was his “Amen” to God’s promise. By this same faith we have been justified. Our faith is in this second Adam, Jesus Christ, who accomplished our salvation by His obedience and by His death.
The victory of our Lord in this first battle after His baptism is displayed to us in three parts, all involving the Scriptures. The tempter begins his address to the eternal Son of God, our Immanuel King, with the word, “if.” Would this fallen angel attempt to sow the seed of doubt and unbelief in the very heart of the second person of the Godhead, now made man to suffer the death that was necessary for our redemption? Jesus displays His strength not through anything that looks like a miracle, but through the way that any of His followers could respond to the enticements of the world and the flesh. He quotes from the Scriptures. The Israel of the Lord had faced testing in the wilderness before. When Moses reflected on their failure, he spoke these words recorded in Deuteronomy 8:3, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Jesus quotes this verse after the simple words, “It is written.” Here is the source of authority for us, and it is spoken by the Word of God Himself.
In the second place Matthew tells of the devil’s misuse of the Scriptures. Taking our Lord somehow to the hotspot of God’s presence in the Old Testament world, the temple in Jerusalem, our Lord is brought to a place of precarious danger, as His adversary quotes Psalm 91:12. This seems to be an attempt to lure Jesus into proving Himself on Satan’s terms, but it may also be a more subtle temptation to lunge into an untimely fight of some kind against the plan of the Father. The reason for such a suspicion is that the devil has quoted a passage with a very provocative context. The next verse contains these words, “The serpent you will trample underfoot.” The response of our Lord puts the focus back on God in a wonderfully measured response from Deuteronomy 6:16, “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.”
The third temptation listed by Matthew appears to be an overreach of evil. Is it not a fact that evil men and empires throughout history have often brought about their own early demise by overreaching? Isn’t it also a fact that wicked nations cannot be counted on for honesty in their negotiations with others? Does the devil now offer the world to the One through whom it was made, and through whose divine power it is sustained moment by moment? He is sent off with another word from Deuteronomy 6, “You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve.” The serpent of old will soon be kept bound so that he will not be able to utterly deceive the nations during the gospel age. Jesus will have the world, but He will have it heaven’s way, through the gathering of the elect, and the coming of the present heaven to the present earth at the time of the great resurrection age.
It is time now for God’s work. The gospel age has its beginnings in the preaching of the great King of the kingdom. The people who were far-off from God in all the nations of the world will soon begin to see a new light in the Word of the Messiah, preached through the agency of men, as the church that the Lord will establish will go forth to baptize and to teach. The great light of that church will be Jesus Christ, presented with a demand of surrender contained in the word “repent” and with a promise of glory contained in the phrase “the kingdom of heaven.”
The Lord of glory would bring the message of the land of angels to men, not directly through the ministry of angels, but through the agency of simple men called to preach the truth of Christ and the resurrection. They would be fishers of men. Instead of being caught in the net of God’s judgment, they would find themselves to be vessels of His mercy for eternal life.
Jesus Himself began this ministry in the land of Galilee. There He proclaimed the gospel of the kingdom and healed every disease and every affliction among the people. He spent three years with men that He called to be with Him for this great purpose. They saw tokens of His resurrection power as He healed those oppressed by demons, epileptics, paralytics, and all kinds of other people touched by the sin and misery that came into the world through one man.
At the end of those three years the disciples that He called to Himself would be scattered. One would betray Him, another would deny Him, and the crowds would yell for His death. The victory of the kingdom would move forward through the death and resurrection of the King. Then the promise of the Father would be poured out upon the nations, and centuries of suffering love would be offered up by the Lord’s faithful ones, until the Morningstar from on high would appear in all the greatness of His eternal glory. This was the Father’s plan for the Kingdom. It has always been far superior to the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil.
As we begin the Sermon on the Mount, we enter into the most famous statement of the teaching ministry of the Messiah, one of several large discourses in this gospel. It is not as if the few phrases that we have received from the Lord’s mouth in the prior chapters of this gospel have been insignificant. In chapter three He indicated that it was necessary for Him to fulfill all righteousness. In chapter four we have His words against the devil in His settled determination to establish the kingdom God’s way. Towards the end of that chapter we read the powerful summary of His preaching in a call to repentance and an announcement of the kingdom of heaven. He also tells Simon and Andrew to follow Him, promising to make them fishers of men. Each of these little statements is a weighty springboard for the display of the whole counsel of God. Yet in the extended message that begins in this chapter we have more than a few powerful phrases. We have three chapters full of the words of Christ to us helping us to understand the life of the gospel age for those who would be a part of the kingdom of heaven.
The first thing recorded in this message is about the present suffering in this age and the future reward that will be ours in the age to come. There is a glory to this, not only in the future part, but in the present trials, because of the certainty of faith. Isn’t it true that if God the Son says something is a certain way, then it is that way? He is explaining to us what the gospel age will be like. We should not be surprised if we feel weak and poor, if we mourn and are lowly, if we are longing for a better day of greater righteousness, if we face the challenge of seeking purity and peace in a world where these may seem rare, if we face the physical and emotional turmoil of being persecuted or just ignored. Jesus tells us that this kind of life should not only be our expectation, we should also consider ourselves blessed when things like this happen to us and to those we love. The reason that He gives, is that there is another age coming. In that age, we shall be in the kingdom of heaven. There we will be comforted. At the resurrection we will inherit the earth. We shall be satisfied with the richness of God’s provision in the age to come. Even now we experience the Lord’s mercy, and we are able to know God. But in that coming day, we shall see God, and we will be openly acknowledged to be the sons of God. Our reward will be great even in the present heaven. How wonderful will it be when we are living in the glory of the resurrection age when Christ returns?
Until that day we are to be much more interested in being imitators of our Savior than being just like the perishing world all around us. We are here now in order to be different in a good way. This holiness of life and desire for the truth and mercy of God will be good not only for us, but also for the places where we live. Though only Christ could bear the burden of our sin, He does not call us to a life of continuing in sin, but to a life of radical holiness and blessedness. He who has fulfilled the Law and the Prophets is in perfect continuity with the life of godliness summarized in the Ten Commandments. This makes Him very different from the religious leaders of His day, and we must follow in this way, or we will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
If we are using our knowledge of the grace of God as an excuse to denigrate the Law of God, then we do not understand the heart of Christ at all. Far from minimizing the common understanding of obedience to the Ten Commandments, our Lord makes it very clear that the Pharisaic way was not really a way of law-keeping, but a minimization of the true and weighty matters of the Law. Jesus was not about to overturn eternal commandments against murder, adultery, and false witness. Instead, He instructs His hearers in the fact that the Law is far more extensive and demanding upon them then they had considered. God was never impressed with perfunctory outward displays of obedience, but expected the holy motions of renewed hearts from those whom He would count to be His sons.
Not only are we required to keep the whole moral law of God summarized in the Ten Commandments, the duty of love that we have is far beyond the simple words of any statute. He is the way that we are to live. He is what makes the command to love a “new commandment.” Does the world hate you? Love them in return. Do they slap you? They slapped Him first. Turn the other cheek. Do they make you walk a mile? They made Him carry a cross, a cross that He came willingly to bear. He says, “Follow me.” Don’t just love your friends. That is not the way of the kingdom. The King came to love us when we were His enemies.
What our Savior reveals here is that our God expects and demands from us nothing less than perfection. It is therefore a tremendous comfort for us to reflect on the fact that ultimately what God demands, God will certainly get. We first see the pleasure of God in the obedience of His Son, with whom He is well-pleased. When such a One dies a sinner’s death, we know that this death cannot be for the One who knew no sin. He must be the Lamb of God, the One who saves His people from their sins. Further, we know that the place where we are destined to go is in no way a place of sin. In that place we will truly obey in the fullest way all of the holy commandments that our Lord reveals. We will do His will by the fullness of a new power at work within us. This perfection that the Lord seeks, He will surely bring about, and we will be greatly blessed in that day when the meek in Jesus Christ shall inherit the earth.
In one generation after the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the religious sanctuary atop Mount Zion was destroyed by Roman armies. With the end of temple life in Jerusalem came an eclipsing of the Sadducees as a powerful religious group. There remained two very important Jewish groups. One of these, the Pharisees, was especially identified with synagogues scattered all over the Mediterranean world. The other group were the Jewish followers of Jesus Christ, increasingly joined by large numbers of Gentiles who learned that they did not need to follow the Old Testament ceremonial laws in order to have peace with God, but that their righteous standing before God was due entirely to the merit of Christ their Redeemer, and had been received through faith alone.
This doctrine of justification by faith put the Christians at great odds with the Pharisees, who pursued their particular version of Law as if they could secure their standing with God through the performance of works. The true facts are that Jews and Gentiles can only have peace with God because of the works of the Lord. We trust in Him and are justified. Yet those who truly do trust in Him are moved from death to life and are called upon to perform good works.
While we are not saved by works, good works of humble service are an important display of the grace that is ours as those who have a living faith in the Messiah. Those works are something that God has prepared for us. They are best performed in as humble a way as possible to give all glory to God, and not to draw attention unnecessarily to ourselves. Showiness was unfortunately a big problem in the Pharisaic world. It is safe for us to add that it is not only Pharisees who are tempted to practice acts of righteousness in front of other people in order to be seen by them. The Lord assures us that there is no heavenly reward for those who are only seeking the applause of men.
It is a fact that giving to the needy, praying, and fasting are things that are good for us to do, but not if our goal is to look religious, or generous to others. We should remain unimpressed with ourselves concerning the good things that we are privileged to be able to do. These things are best done in secret, for the eyes of the One who knows the secrets of our hearts and is not impressed with the showiness of hypocrites.
Concerning our prayers toward God, the Lord instructs us that kingdom prayer should not be loaded with empty phrases and useless words. The Lord gives His disciples a simple pattern of prayer that has informed the Christian church for centuries. This prayer begins with the glory of His name, the coming of His great kingdom, and the seeking of His will above our own. Then the matters of our daily provision, forgiveness for our sins, and our protection from evil are brought to the Lord as a secondary matter. There is a particular emphasis on forgiveness, for Christ has come to deal with our sins at great cost to Himself. It is unseemly when His people are pushy with their own ideas, or even worse, are unwilling to forgive others when Christ has paid such a heavy price in His life and death to secure our eternal blessedness.
Our Lord also addresses the issue of money and the place of riches and financial security in our daily lives. Once again, the view of the kingdom on these matters was in strong contrast to the problem of secret greed among the Pharisees. Greed is corrosive to the soul. It is not merely a weakness for those who are fearful. It is a display of idolatry, showing that we prefer the temporary medium of exchange in this passing world to the One who is Lord not only of this earth, but also of heaven. A greedy eye will blind us to the life of resurrection glory. As we grasp more and more for things that perish, the matters of eternal worth seem of smaller and smaller consequence to our hearts. This way of living leads to darkness, not to light. We should use our wealth to express before God our love for His Word and His kingdom.
There is a way of life that is so common among men in every society that we can lose track of how wrong and harmful it is. I speak here of the life of worry. This world is a place of scarcity, and many people would have us give ourselves over to fear. When we do this we miss some of the obvious lessons of the Lord’s providence all around us. He feeds the birds, and He cares even for the flowers. Don’t we know that He will take care of us too? When our time comes to leave this world and to go to higher realms where angels dwell, are we not aware of the fact that He will take care of us in that place even more wonderfully than He takes care of us now?
All of this worry does nothing good for us. We are not able to keep our bodies alive even one extra hour by worrying. In fact, it is very obvious that unnecessary fears take years off of our life expectancy, and give us nothing but grief in return. This kind of anxiety betrays a lack of trust in the Lord. Through that way of life we display an undue attachment to the things of this creation, rather than an overwhelming affection for the Lord and His heaven.
There is a better way to live. It is that life that is lived moment by moment in the awareness that God is real, that He has captivated us with the love of Christ, and that whatever miseries me may face in this age cannot follow us beyond the grave if we are in Jesus Christ. This is the way that our Savior lived. He was the One who was always seeking first God’s kingdom, and God’s good definition of all righteousness. He was able to sleep well in the stern of a boat when the disciples were overwhelmed by the possibility of drowning. If we know that there is something good waiting for us beyond this life, we can greet the unnatural fact of death, though an enemy, as yet a foe who unwittingly takes us to the home of our greatest and most powerful friend. Christ suffered for us, but He put away all anxiety after His solemn request to His Father in the Garden of Gethsemane. There was no other way than the cross. He went there with no sinful worries. He willingly suffered for the glory that was set before Him. It was a day of great trouble for Him, yet by it He won for us a great weight of surpassing glory. Such a Savior can be fully trusted.
We do flatter ourselves. We imagine that we are great imitators of Jesus Christ. When I consider some of the sentiments of holiness, concern, humility, and generosity that I have professed, I am no longer sure how true they actually were. Do we really wish that we could take away the physical, emotional, and relational pain of others by having it fall on us? Are we really as content with things in our lives as we say we are? Is it possible that we really don’t think of others as better than ourselves, and that we may have falsely convinced ourselves that we forgive those who have done us wrong wishing them only the very best? We know the Christian answers to some degree, but it is not clear that we fully live up to our own words.
It is quite a thing to consider that our Savior actually was faithful, not only to all of His own words, but to all of the great demands of God’s Law. Because of this, He is surely the one who is capable of righteous judgment. The rest of us would do well to avoid premature pronouncements of personal victory in our battles against sin, and especially that we would be careful in our judgments against others. Too often it may be the case that in the very area where we would judge another, we may find ourselves just as guilty of that same offense. The answer is not for us to simply settle on lawlessness, but to actually turn away from sin, to avoid hasty assessments of our own Christ-likeness, to be extremely careful concerning our thoughts and words against others, and to be very appreciative that our great Messiah not only claimed to love and serve His Father with a full heart. He actually did it. It is a good thing for us to take the speck out of someone else’s life, provided that we have taken the log out of our own.
All of this is enough to make those who have teaching duties within the church simply stop speaking. (Well, maybe not.) The fact is there are many occasions when it would be best for us to say nothing at all. Then we will not only be following our Lord’s advice, we will also be doing what He Himself did in certain situations where speaking would have done more harm than good. It is not wise to throw pearls at animals that don’t have a taste for fine jewelry.
The problem with all of this is that there actually are times when we simply must speak the truth in love, even though we may find ourselves in the dangerous situation that Stephen faced in Acts 7. What this means is that we need wisdom from above in order to discern those times when we should speak, and those times when speaking the truth may be immoral speech, unwise to blurt out and perhaps even callous defiling of the truth that works against the One who is the Truth. We need not only courage from God; we also need His gifts of wisdom if we are to speak the truth seasonably. For this and for all the gifts that would enable us to be truly more like Christ, we need to ask the right being, seek the right path, and knock on the right door. God will give us good things. He is a Father who truly loves His children.
We live in a very challenging age since the resurrection of Christ. The things that we desire are not always holy, and we actually know this, though we do not like to admit the truth. The ways that we would walk are often laced with secret sin, and may lead to a trap that will be hard for us to get out of. When our conscience keeps on bothering us about something that looks outwardly holy but we inwardly suspect it to be less than holy, it may help to look at the matter from another angle. Is the thing that we want to say or do in accord with what we would like others to say or do to us if we were in their shoes? Jesus says this kind of thinking really is the Law and the prophets, rather than just an outward display of superficial holiness.
The kind of living that Christ shows to us in Matthew 5-7 is kingdom living, even resurrection living. It is the real way, and only our Savior has done it in the way that it needs to be done. That does not excuse us from loving this beautiful way of life and truly seeking this righteousness as we should. There is a sense that the gate of true perfection is so narrow that only one Man could enter through it. Yet because our King has successfully gone through the gate of the Law and the Prophets, and because we are united to Him, we are counted as righteous, and are given powerful help from on high to live in this way of righteousness. There may be few that travel that road, particularly in times of societal disintegration, but the rightness of any path has never been based on the number of people travelling it.
True godly living has always been challenging, especially for those who would speak for God as His ambassadors. There have been many false prophets throughout history, just as there are many false teachers in our day. It is a wonderful thing to consider that there is one genuinely solid Cornerstone on which The Lord’s church has been built. He is solid in His righteousness and gentle and merciful in His regard for those whom He has called. Not only has He provided us all the holiness necessary for our right standing with His Father, He has also taken away the weighty debt caused by all our hypocrisy and lawlessness through His death on the cross. His resurrection insists that He has not only journeyed into harm’s way for us; He has actually come out on the other side of that ordeal victorious and alive. We would do very well to receive Him, to truly hear His words, and to follow them by the grace that He supplies.
Leprosy is a horrible disease caused by massive numbers of microorganisms that destroy nerve function in their human host. It is this loss of nerve function that results in collateral damage that is associated with the disease, as the patient faces injury and infection without having the adequate sensory capabilities in the extremities to care for the body in a normal way. The result is the disfiguring effects that can be readily seen, but the underlying problem comes from the microorganisms that cannot be seen by the casual observer. As a disease, it is a powerful metaphor for the problem of sin in our lives. We have a corruption within us that often is a secret matter, but it will eventually lead to choices that often have horrible consequences.
Jesus Christ was able to heal lepers. Consider the kind of miracle-working power that overturns not only the obvious external effects of the disease, but also removes the internal trouble at the root of the problem. Even more amazing, God sent His Son into the world to heal sin, a tremendous display of not only divine love, but also of divine power. The reason Jesus healed lepers was to show to us the kind of world He would bring when He has fully taken away all of the root and fruit of sin that has caused so much trouble all over a creation that was once declared to be very good. Jesus can fix this if He wants to. He says, “I will. Be clean.”
Jesus sent the Jewish leper, now healed, to the priest to fulfill the appropriate provisions of the Law of Moses in such a situation. But did Jesus come to heal Jews only, or did His plans extend to the healing of the world. We hear of His help for the servant of a centurion who was lying at home paralyzed. The centurion was conscious of His unworthiness as a Gentile to have the Jewish Messiah within his gates. Yet this Gentile soldier approached Jesus with great faith, more faith than Jesus had seen from the Jews. The Gentile man knew that Jesus had such authority over all things that His Word would make things so. And it did. If God has plans for Jews and Gentiles in the kingdom of heaven, He is surely able to bring these about. A small down-payment of this unusual mercy is shown in the healing of this paralyzed man. A bigger victory is pictured in this metaphor as well, for one day when the world is healed, many who have been bound in sin and misery will be set free from that paralysis that currently gives them so much trouble, and they will be truly and wonderfully free.
Even now, we are being freed in our spirits, as we are made alive in Christ. What do people do when they have been freed by God? When Peter’s mother-in-law was relieved of a fever by the touch of Jesus, she rose and began to serve him. Another metaphor… This world so oppressed by demonic wickedness is bound in some crazed darkness. But when He takes our trouble upon Himself, then we shall be fully healed, and we will all serve the One we should rightly love, the One who has carried our sorrows.
It is our great privilege to follow the Son of God. We may be momentarily confused by our attachments to the things that are precious to us now, but there is no doubt that the joy of serving Him is worth everything that we have. When He came to win our heaven for us, He did at the cost of His comfort. He came as one who had almost nothing in earthly comforts, and who eventually would face pain, torment, and the wrath of His Father against our sin. This love tells us something about the One who created the world and sustains us. This God is a God of justice and of love. He is great in all that He does, and the glory and blessing of the victory that He won for us at the cost of His beloved Son must be so very wonderful as to rightly justify the price that He was willing to pay in order to bring it all to pass.
Nonetheless, we are infected with horrible doubts, worries, and rebellion. We find it hard to trust the One who calmed the seas with a simple command. Can’t we believe Him when He assures us that faith in Him will not be misplaced? What are we like in this state of foolish frenzy? One more metaphor… We are like desperate, crazy, dangerous men living around a cemetery, men who do not even have the sense to ask for the help that we need. But one word from our Savior King, and we can be delivered.
The Messiah who can do such things is displaying the greatness of His glorious plans for His children. He has already paid the price for the glory that is waiting to be revealed at the last day. There is nothing left for us to pay, no remaining debt that we need to hang on to. Yet many who think of themselves as sensible people, people who suppose that they are in their right minds would refuse His entreaties, and would ask Him earnestly to leave their region. Such hard-hearted spiritual deadness is the worst kind of disease with which people can be afflicted. May God deliver many, even now, from the foolishness of stubborn unbelief.
When we considered the healings that Christ performed recorded for us in Matthew 8, we made the connection between the physical trouble that people face and the spiritual problem of sin. Is this idea of physical predicaments as metaphors for spiritual troubles too speculative? Does Jesus make the connection between His merciful acts that relieve physical difficulties, and His role as the One who saves His people from their sins? In the opening of this ninth chapter we have a very memorable account that makes just that connection. Some friends of a paralytic brought the ailing man to the Savior so that the man could be physically healed. They were hoping that Jesus could make the man walk. I wonder if they were disappointed when the Lord said to him, “Take heart, my son; your sins are forgiven.”
There were others, some of the scribes who were there at the time, that were very alarmed by what the Lord said, but for a different reason. They thought that it was blasphemous. They considered Him to be making an inappropriate claim to be God, thinking that only God could forgive sin. Jesus knew what was in their hearts, and went ahead then to do what the man himself surely wanted. He said, “Rise, pick up your bed and go home,” and the man did! But before He said these words, He explicitly connected this miracle to the fact that He had the authority to forgive sins.
The next story that Matthew records takes us away from the metaphors of physical healing, and moves us to the root issue of sinners finding a place in the Lord’s kingdom. The sinner in view was Matthew, the author of this gospel. We know nothing of any ailment he had, or of any demonic attack that was affecting him. All we know is that he belonged to the class of men that were considered traitors to their people, and abusive of the poor, the tax collectors. Matthew was a Jewish agent of Roman interests who made his money enforcing the taxation system on his own people, a nation that was under the subjugation of the Roman Empire. This man would have been considered utterly corrupted by Gentile contact, and was certainly morally suspect. Yet Jesus called Him to be one of His disciples with the simple words, “Follow me.” Not only did Matthew listen as an individual; we hear that many tax collectors and others who were considered outside of the purity of covenant life were soon eating with Jesus.
Once again, there were those who were puzzled by the Lord’s actions. The Pharisees needed to accept the concept that the Messiah would come to call and to save sinful people, rather than simply vindicating those who were very convinced of their own righteousness before God. Even the disciples of John the Baptist wondered about the behavior of the one that John had referred to as the Lamb of God. Jesus told them that He was right to celebrate with His disciples, since He had come as the Bridegroom, as the loving Messiah of a new world of resurrection celebration. Of course there would be changes from the way of life under the Age of the Law, when the people were awaiting the coming of the King. Now the King was here, and He referred to His holy love of His people using the language of a Husband with His betrothed bride.
Whether healing a woman who secretly touched the fringe of His garment, or even raising a little girl from the dead, or giving sight to two blind men, there can be no doubt that there was something very new, powerful, and wonderful in the works of Jesus Christ. The report about Him could not possibly have been contained. This had to be the Son of David, but the people seemed to be largely unaware of the Scriptures that Christ was fulfilling in these great actions of healing and deliverance. Here was a very amazing man, but who was He? Could He actually be the long-expected one who would sit on David’s throne? Would this man take over Jerusalem? Why was He doing the things He was doing? Why was He saying the things He was saying? Why was He upsetting the people He was upsetting? More fundamentally, if He was the Messiah, why was He so humble, and why was He so good?
The Pharisees simply could not accept Him as their Messiah. This Man was a challenge to their position. The disdain and secret envy that they had for Jesus of Nazareth was very hard for them to entirely hide or contain. As the empty tomb would one day demand an answer that they could not really admit to, the resurrection-age glimpses shining forth in His ministry of divine healing demanded some kind of explanation. When He healed a mute man by casting out a demon from him, they suggested that His power to cast out demons came from the prince of demons. This was the biggest lie that could be told, but it does display that something obviously was happening in the ministry of Jesus, and that they did not have any better answer than this that they could come up with to explain what seemed to them to be unexplainable.
This powerful opposition to the work of the Messiah could in no way stop the far more powerful demonstration of the kingdom in the life of the King. This kingdom was moving forward in the Lord’s amazing teaching, and in the way that he healed every disease and affliction. Eventually the kingdom would move forward through the agency of men who would preach a message as laborers for the Lord’s harvest. The ultimate gathering of the Lord’s good fruit of elect people would eventually call for the compassionate work of multitudes in His church over many centuries. But something even more powerful than these healing miracles of Christ and the preaching miracles of His church needed to take place in between these two miracles. The Son of God needed to deal with our sin through His own death as the Lamb of God. This dying and rising of Jesus is the powerful hinge between His miracles of healing and His use of His church in gathering sinners. This cross and resurrection, and the God-Man who accomplished them, is our only hope in our every need. He has forgiven our sins. We shall truly rise up from the grave and live forever in our eternal home.
It is one of the amazing facts of the Lord’s plan of redemption that He has chosen to work through the agency of men. This fact is all the more surprising when we consider that there is no absolute necessity for God to work through any means at all. He is the One who created the heavens and the earth from nothing. If He wanted to use means for the proclamation of His truth, it is still a wonder that He would use sinful men when He has holy, wise, powerful, and impressive angels who will do His bidding. Yet it has generally been the Lord’s plan to announce salvation through the lives and words of men.
This surprising choice is reflected in the Lord’s use of twelve disciples to be agents of His kingdom power throughout Israel. These men, including the one who would betray Him, are given authority to cast out demons, and to heal every disease and affliction among men. We have seen the Lord do these things Himself over the last two chapters in this gospel. Will He now work wonders through a group of twelve weak men?
These twelve are sent only to the lost sheep of Israel. This is not yet the New Testament gospel mission which will come after pouring out of the special gift of the Holy Spirit upon the church. That later ministry will also use the work of men, but the apostles and others who will follow after them will then be told to go to the nations, and not just to Israel. The Matthew 10 mission is a final Old Testament era announcement of the coming of a resurrection kingdom, a kingdom where, not only will the sick be healed, but the dead will be raised imperishable.
The present work of these original disciples is not to be scoffed at or ignored. The kingdom of heaven is at hand. Here we find a true taste of Judgment Day. There is blessing for those who receive the emissaries of the Lord and curse for all who would oppose them.
The Lord uses the context of this mission to Israel to teach His disciples some things that especially relate to that later gospel work of the church, the work of going to all the nations. He teaches these men that the proclamation of the kingdom of heaven will entail much danger, yet there will also be a great provision of the Spirit of God for this important enterprise.
If they have called the King Beelzebul, we should not be surprised when the ambassadors of the kingdom are treated the same way. This is not to suggest in any way that the church is to cower in fear before the powers of the world. We are to be bold, even though we know that those who are against us in some places and times may indeed kill the body. It is some comfort for us to know that these enemies of the gospel do not have the authority to cast body and soul into hell. God does have that power. Therefore our safety comes in following Him. He considers us to be a precious possession, redeemed through the incomparable cost of the blood of His Son. He cares for us in every detail of our lives. To deny Him would be a horrendous act of foolishness. To speak of Him boldly is an enormous privilege, attendant with even heavenly acknowledgements and blessings.
This coming gospel age mission of the New Testament church will be one that teaches men about the only way of peace with God through the cross of Jesus Christ. Despite that message of peace, the preaching of the kingdom itself will often be an occasion of the most intense conflict, even dividing members of households against one another.
Because of this kind of strain and severe testing, it is important for each person who would belong to the kingdom of heaven to consider seriously the message he is preaching. If it is a Christian message, it is a story of hope through a cross. It is a message that demands that we embrace the suffering love of the Son of God in such a way that we consider all other human relationships to be less than this one sustaining bond.
In this cross of Christ we have found our eternal life, and we are unwilling to give up either the message of the cross or the man who died there for us. The Lord promises us that we will be truly blessed forever because of our support of this one great Man, His message, and His people. We simply must not turn away from Him.
Our Lord indicates in His actions and in His words that He came, not only to display great signs of miraculous kingdom power, but also to preach and teach regarding the kingdom. Despite all of His preaching and teaching it appears that very few people were able to understand either the kingdom that He was representing, or His own unique role in that kingdom as both the King and the Sacrifice by which the subjects of the kingdom would themselves be counted as sons of God.
While we might have expected that there would be many people who would not have seemed to understand the Old Testament testimony regarding the coming Messiah, if we had to pick one of Jesus’ contemporaries who we would have guessed to be the most aware of what the Lord was doing, it would have been John the Baptist. He clearly knew that Jesus of Nazareth was to be highly exalted as one far superior to himself, and he also was very aware that Jesus would be the real sacrificial lamb. Despite his awareness of these very important facts, John sent messengers from his prison cell to the disciples of Jesus to ask this important question: “Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?” What was His confusion? John seems to have anticipated an almost immediate judgment and the full establishment of the kingdom of God. Instead he hears of great deeds of mercy being performed by the Messiah, and he wonders…
Our Lord sends a reassuring message back to John, who is about to be beheaded. He points to the actions that are being fulfilled through His ministry as was prophesied in Isaiah concerning the coming Messiah. The God who was to come in vengeance, the God whom John expected, according to Isaiah 35:5-6 would demonstrate who He was by fulfilling these words, “Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then shall the lame man leap like a deer, and the tongue of the mute sing for joy.” This is what Jesus was doing. The timing of His vengeance would be in accord with the will of God. It would be the duty of all who would be His followers to trust Him on these matters, rather than to be offended that He had not yet destroyed the ungodly.
Though this John may have had some points of confusion concerning the matter of the timing of kingdom judgment, our Lord indicated publicly that this great prophet had fulfilled his ministry well. He was not meant to be a pampered prince, or a spokesman for God that tried to figure out what everyone wanted to hear. He was a bold representative for the Almighty, the expected Elijah, who would prepare the way for the coming of the God-Man Messiah. This made Him superior to all the prophets who came before Him, yet inferior to those who would have the privilege of greater clarity concerning the coming kingdom throughout the Age of the Gospel after the pouring out of the Holy Spirit. It was time now for those who would hear the word of truth to take heaven by the force of godly prayer and holy living, even if they would have to suffer at the hands of evil men.
Though there would be many who would want to criticize John for being too much of an ascetic, and others who might want to criticize Jesus for doing too much celebrating, it is a fact that those who were being called to a new life of kingdom wisdom would be able to receive John’s ministry as one of preparation characterized by heartfelt repentance, and Jesus’ ministry as the coming of a new age of glorious life. Many rejected both men, even those who saw dramatic miraculous signs and who were unwilling to respond with true repentance and faith. They would have to answer on the Day of Judgment for their rejection of the Word of God spoken by both of these extraordinary men.
Yes, many great people would miss the facts of the kingdom entirely. Some were unwilling to let the Age of the Law come to a perfect fulfillment in the obedience of Christ and His death on the cross as the longed-for holy Lamb of God. Others were filled with great knowledge of philosophical thoughts circulating among the intelligent, but had no place in their minds for a powerful Savior who would display His greatness in the weakness of the cross. Yet to those who were known and loved by the Father and the Son, the Son would be revealed as the only Savior of Sinners; as Jesus, the wisdom and power of God, and the true Lord of heaven and earth.
It is still the wisest thing for all sorts of people to come to this one Savior. It is in Him alone that we can find rest for our souls. If we would work our way to the afterlife with imagined good deeds and the approval of men, we will live a life that is an unworkably heavy burden. We will be crushed by the weight of our own intentions, and more importantly by the true burden of the Law of God that we must keep if we are to have fellowship with the Almighty. Yet Christ provides a far better way of peace and rest. The One who is gentle and lowly in heart knows our weakness, and He has a plan for us that will yield the fullest rest for our tired souls. His yoke is easy, and His burden is light. It is ours simply to believe in Him and to follow. He is present with us to strengthen and to forgive.
Earlier in this gospel, our Lord gave us a very helpful exposition of the moral law as part of the Sermon on the Mount. In that message it was obvious that Jesus was not casual about the requirements of the Law of God. It was plain from his treatment of several of the Ten Commandments that He believed that the requirements of the Law were more substantial and far-reaching than most observers considered. He did not come to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it. How is it, then, that Jesus is made to look as if He were light on law when compared to the Pharisees?
The case before us at the beginning of Matthew 13 provides us with a helpful display of the difference between Jesus and His detractors on this point. Both of them claimed to believe in the fourth commandment, “Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.” This law goes on to command six days of labor per week, and a seventh day of a special spiritual and restorative resting. The Pharisees had become very specific about this and many other divine commands in an effort to make the Law more clearly keepable. In doing this they had taken from the tradition of commentary from rabbis over the generations, and had begun to treat these words as if they were from God Himself. Therefore, they considered the casual plucking of grain for the relief of hunger to be harvesting, and therefore working, and therefore prohibited.
The Lord’s response to this challenge was to direct them back to the Scriptures and then to His own person. David, when he was being harassed by Saul, had recognized that feeding His men took precedence over the matter of restricting the eating of holy bread to the priests. Also, the priests needed to work in the temple on the Sabbath, so everyone would have to acknowledge that the prohibition of work on the Sabbath was not intended by God to be absolute. The temple was more important than Sabbath in a sense. The needs of the temple had to be met, even if that meant working on the Sabbath. Before them now was Temple, Priest, and King. His disciples were an extension of Him, just as David’s companions were an extension of him. Even if one granted the idea that this plucking of grain was working, it was wrong for the Pharisees to miss the duties of mercy, duties that were above the ceremonial requirements of sacrifice. The disciples were guiltless. The Pharisees were guilty for condemning them. This was the word of the Man who knew Himself to be Lord of the Sabbath, an amazing, if subtle, claim of divinity.
He went on to fulfill the Sabbath through His great acts of heavenly restoration. The Pharisees were so far from appreciating the kingdom of heaven that they could not grasp the wonder of what Jesus was doing in restoring the health of the weak. Our Lord did not back down from the truth and beauty of the Law of God for even a moment. Those who were so sure that they were keeping the Law rightly became increasingly determined to kill an innocent man who was bringing true Sabbath wholeness to the oppressed. He was the fulfillment of prophetic Messianic expectations. He was the true Servant of the Lord, who would bring justice and peace even to the Gentiles. A bruised reed He would not break. The true Son of David and His apostolic team would move forward to resurrection victory.
The Pharisees became increasingly desperate concerning Jesus, anticipating what would be the major religious conflict in the Jewish world after the ascension of Christ, the conflict between Pharisaic Judaism and Christian Judaism. These two movements had a very different understanding of the identity of Jesus of Nazareth, and very different opinions concerning the definition, interpretation, and right use of divine Law. In their desperation they once again claimed that Jesus was an emissary of Satan who was casting out demons by the power of the Lord of demons. The silliness of this kind of thinking was easily exposed. It was the Pharisees that were showing their dedication to evil in their careless and foolish words.
Standing before them was One who would show who He was through His resurrection, referred to here cryptically as the sign of Jonah. Christ would come forth from the grave as Jonah came forth from the belly of a great fish. He would go to the grave as a result of His work as our propitiatory sacrifice. Yet the grave would not be able to hold Him. Here was one greater than Jonah, and greater than Solomon. This evil generation and her leaders would have to answer to God for their rejection of the only Savior for sinners.
Jesus was displaying Himself to be the Word of God, coming from the perfection of the Father’s heart of love and justice. Out of the abundance of His heart God had spoken, and the Word was the Lord Jesus. The Pharisees were a very different word, coming from a lawless source.
The choice between these two movements could not be clearer. The answer for any who would follow God must always be to truly hear and obey His Word. Those who will be moving toward safety are the ones who will do this. There must finally come a time for all of us when we will decide whether we will try to condemn the Lord with His enemies, or whether we will obey Him with His friends. May His mercy so rule in our lives that we will yield to the One who is the glorious and final Word.
Jesus taught using parables. He was not the first to do so. We find examples of parables in the Old Testament prophets. What was unique about the way that our Lord used parables was that He did not explain their meaning to the crowds, but only to His apostles.
The Lord had attracted great crowds because of His amazing healing ministry. He was displaying truths about the kingdom of heaven through great acts of mercy. But when the time came to speak about the kingdom, His method of teaching was often in a certain kind of judgment speech, a way of teaching that concealed as much as it revealed. He began by telling a story about a farmer planting seed in four different soils, but He only explained the story to His disciples later in the passage. The crowds were left without any real understanding of the story.
It should not surprise us that the Lord’s disciples were puzzled by this teaching ministry. They asked Him why He taught in parables. His answer, quoting the prophet Isaiah, was very clear and forthright, yet we still find it puzzling because we have trouble agreeing with it. We cannot fathom why the Lord would teach in such a way that would leave so many without real understanding. He told His disciples that He taught this way because it had not been given generally to the crowds to understand the message of the kingdom. To get the message was a gift, and only the disciples had been given that gift. In fulfillment of Isaiah, this teaching was a part of the Lord’s plan of judgment against His Old Covenant people. It was not God’s intention to continue the Old Covenant way of life. It was not His intention to heal their nation at that time. Thus He intentionally taught them in such a way that would leave many confused.
He did explain the parable of the sower and the soils to His disciples. The story was about hearing God’s Word. Not everyone who would hear the Word of the kingdom clearly proclaimed would receive it in the same way or with the same fruitfulness. Four responses were contained in the story. The first group did not understand the message. The evil one snatched away the Word from the consideration of the hearer before it could have any fruit. In the next two cases the Word was heard, but there was no lasting yield. In one case, trouble and persecution came, and the person fell away. In the other case, the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches crowded out the Word before there was any real good that came from it. It was only in the final case of the good soil that the Word had its way. The yield would still vary in that case, but there would be a yield. In all cases the Word was the same, but only in the final case was there any lasting kingdom fruit.
Other parables were also recorded in Matthew 13. The Lord talked about wheat and weeds, about a mustard plant where birds found a home, about a woman hiding leaven in a flour container, and about many other things. In teaching in this way, Christ was speaking great truths that had been hidden since the foundation of the world, but He was doing it in such a way that was consistent with the sovereignty of God, revealing His truth to those whom he had chosen. In a way this was very much like the prophets. These stories, like so much prophetic material, were given largely for our benefit. These were things that would be much more fully understood once the kingdom had more fully come, after the events of the cross, the resurrection, and the pouring out of the Holy Spirit upon the church. The meaning of these parables of the kingdom became more obvious after years of preaching the gospel, just as many prophetic texts were also easier to consider after much progress of the Lord’s kingdom throughout the world. The parables still teach us truths about the church, truths concerning matters that would have been very difficult for anyone to understand until the church had more fully arrived.
Now we do see some very important principles of kingdom life in these verses. We know that within the baptized church there will be some who are not elect. This matter will certainly be corrected when the Lord returns at the final resurrection, when He comes with His angels in judgment and salvation. Until that day, we have been forewarned that the devil will be working much mischief right within the church. We are told of the great worth of the kingdom, despite its small beginnings. We learn that the kingdom plans of the Lord will be overwhelmingly successful, and that we would be wise to give up everything that we have for the prize of heaven and the great resurrection age to come.
The disciples claimed to understand many of these things when they were privately instructed, yet the time would eventually come when this great Teacher of parables would be abandoned, even by them. It was then that the most important kingdom seed would be planted through the willing gift of the Lord of the kingdom for our salvation.
The message of the kingdom, and of the great events necessary for our redemption, was wonderfully displayed and concealed in the Lord’s parables, just as it was in the entirety of the Old Testament Scriptures. We have the privilege now of considering these truths in the light of the cross, the resurrection, and even centuries of gospel proclamation. We are blessed to be able to use these good words, both new and old, for the glory of God. What was once a matter that was largely concealed, can now be all the more wonderfully revealed through the preaching of the Word and the gathering and perfecting of the elect who are being brought into the kingdom of heaven.
Jesus was becoming a well-known person because of the miracles that He performed. These miracles were signs of who He was and of the resurrection kingdom that He would bring, but these things were of less interest to people than the prospect of immediate relief from their troubles. This is what most people wanted from Jesus. There was at least one person who was not interested in Jesus for this reason. His biggest issue was his own guilty conscience. When he heard of the miracles that Jesus was performing, he became convinced that Jesus was somehow John the Baptist, the man that he had killed, now risen from the dead.
Herod had a guilty conscience concerning John because he knew that when he ordered the beheading of John, he had sent a man to his grave who did not deserve to be put to death by the civil authorities. John was a nuisance to Herod. He had tried to interfere through his preaching with Herod’s marriage to Herodias, the wife of his brother Philip. Herod was afraid of John while he was living, and he was afraid of John after he died. This is not because John was a man of obvious power. It was because Herod knew that John was a prophet, and he was apparently afraid of what a righteous prophet might be able to do, even after he was dead. Here we discover another thing about Herod’s belief system: he believed that a righteous man could rise from the dead, and this comfort him, it frightened him.
The details of the death of John are disgusting. His story is an object lesson in how entanglements with immoral women destroy a man, and leave him weak and afraid. Here was the mighty Herod being ruled by his passions, whether by his dancing sort of step-daughter or by his scheming sister-in-law now become wife. Before long a great servant of God was dead, and the man who wore the crown, was apparently afraid that he might come to life again.
These upsetting events are a display of the wickedness of this world, a place where a righteous man may die at the hands of a powerful tyrant who is actually ruled by a dangerous woman as a result of his own lust. The death of John the Baptist sent the Lord of glory, Jesus Christ, off by Himself to pray. It is easy to imagine how that would be the case. Jesus was a man of prayer, and trials are like signals to such men that send them toward God and not away from Him. Yet it was not easy for Jesus to be alone anymore, since so many people were turning to Him as their answer for their considerable immediate problems. They followed Him, and He had compassion on them. He healed them. This is good news for us. His displays of power did not come because the crowds were so smart in their understanding of Jesus, but because the Son of God was compassionate toward them in their need. This is our Savior and King. He cares for you.
This care included not only the taking away of their infirmities. He fed them when they were hungry. He did this through the miraculous provision of food from the most meager supplies. He was showing something to us of the life to come. There we will not be left hungry. Today many people are hungry, and they sometimes find themselves without the means to care for their families. Jesus knows this, and He will provide for us, though we may suffer greatly in very many ways in this age. His care and His power will surely meet our needs according to the dictates of His wisdom at just the right time, and He certainly will bless us with food. Even now He is the bread of life to us, but there is much more blessing that He has already secured for us that we will yet see in the resurrection age that is coming.
This Christ who assures of great future blessings is powerful to bring about all of the promises of God. He displays His control over creation by walking on the water, that water that symbolizes the tumultuous world that we now live in after the fall of mankind in Adam. We can turn to Him even now and have courage and hope. When Peter and the other disciples saw Him walking on the water, this did not comfort them; it frightened them. The only way that any peace came from this situation was through the hand of Christ taking hold of the sinking frame of His follower, Simon Peter. We who believe can still cry out to Him, “Lord, save me.” He is still able to calm our hearts. We do not realize the strength of unbelief and doubt even within the lives of those who are followers of Jesus Christ. We are only kept from foolishness and dissipation by His hand that is still powerful to save.
This hand has especially reached out to lift us up through the cross of Christ. There we were saved from a trouble that we could not handle. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, knew what we needed, and He provided for us in ways that no one else ever could. While He can grant us immediate relief from everything that ails us, He normally has His sights set on a bigger goal than our present ease. He has come into our lives to heal our guilty consciences, and to give us a hope of participation in resurrection blessings when we will have the fullest communion with Him. His plan for the achievement of that greater goal often includes our embracing some measure of present discomfort with faith in the One who has reached down to us and embraced us in our sin. Through Him we have been made well, not only for a moment, but forever.
The religion of the Pharisees and the scribes had become a religion full of man-made traditions. Especially prominent among these traditions were rituals concerning washing. These were so firmly imbedded within the mindset of religious Jews, that it was generally thought by the people of the day that this way of cleansing was the God-fearing way of life. This is why people were asking Jesus about this issue. It seemed obvious to them that the leader of a movement that professed allegiance to Israel’s God would certainly keep the established traditions of the elders concerning ceremonial washing.
In answering their concerns, the Lord first exposes the fact that they have grown used to preferring their traditions to the explicit commandments of God. We need to notice that Christ is showing again the depths of God’s Law, while the Pharisees are emphasizing outward rituals that could easily be followed by those who had no real love for God or for people. He turns to the fifth commandment, and rather than minimize the obligations of the Law through traditions that defined ways of guaranteeing that someone could be sure to look holy, Jesus teaches us that our obedience to God includes caring for our elderly parents when they are in need. It is the height of anti-religion to figure out outward ceremonies that feign devotion to the Lord, and then to allow one’s parents to suffer without any help that could have been given to them.
This is not following the heart of a God of mercy, it is man-made hypocrisy. Such things were frequently spoken against in the Old Testament prophetic books. Jesus is saying nothing new here in exposing this kind of behavior. Isaiah had forcefully pressed this point centuries earlier when He had distinguished between the Law of God and the commandments of men. Those who focus on the latter at the expense of the former misrepresent God, and are only pretending to serve Him when their hearts are very far from Him.
He then returns to the matter of unclean hands which was the specific issue that the Pharisees had addressed. Our Lord indicates that the uncleanness that they need to concern themselves with is not the supposed outward uncleanness that comes from a lack of attention to ceremonial washing traditions, but the inward uncleanness of sin that originates in our depraved hearts, an uncleanness which soon finds expression in our speech and our lives. This is the most serious problem of being unclean that we could ever have, and no amount of water-sprinkling will ever take such a deep problem away.
The disciples of Jesus were very concerned that the words of Christ had offended the Pharisees. It should be of far greater concern to all of us that we offend God when we give ourselves over to idolatry and man-made ceremonies. Jesus speaks plainly about the dead-end pathway of Pharisaic Judaism. It is not the way of life. It is the way of blind men leading other blind men, all the while pretending that they can see better than anyone else. One of the purposes of Christ in His ministry is to show to all that the way of the kingdom of God is very different than this.
In contrast to those who are so sure of their righteousness, but are actually far from the kingdom, Matthew then relates the story of a woman who is not a Jew, a woman who is desperate for the mercy of Jesus Christ. At first it appears that she will be rejected precisely because she is not of the Israelites. Yet it quickly becomes clear that our Lord has only seemed to dismiss this woman, and His initial response has brought forth from her a wonderful humble statement of faith in Him. Yes, she knows that she belongs with the dogs, yet the dogs around the table of Jesus could certainly lick up the crumbs of the floor, and a crumb from the table of this Jewish Messiah is all that she would need that day. She finds not rejection, but abundant mercy. She was not alone in finding help. Matthew tells us that there were so many desperate people who were receiving powerful healing as our Lord displayed His love and mercy to the weak.
Not only were their afflictions removed by the Messiah, but once again a large crowd of people found their needs supplied, as the Lord gave bread to thousands. All of these miracles were great displays of the glory of Christ and the bounty of His coming kingdom. Where does all this powerful help for the unworthy come from? The God who extends mercy to us through His Son is not only a God of compassion; He is also a God of justice. The same Christ who healed the sick, and who gave us glimpses of a much better day beyond the curse, was the Jesus who would fulfill all righteousness, and then died as the perfect Lamb of God.
It is only from the blood of this Lamb that we can be truly clean. It is only from His great work of sacrificial love that we can know anything close to permanent healing. The proper attitude of the one who wishes this kind of extravagant blessing is not a proud insistence on some supposed claim of ceremonial righteousness, but a great cry of thanksgiving. Such praise can only come from the humble who are poor in spirit, those who recognize they have no recommendation in themselves that could justify such a glorious redemption, and who see the great worth of even a crumb of mercy granted to us from the table of the Son of God.
The Lord Jesus Christ, in the days of His earthly ministry, was attracting large crowds because of the tremendous healings that He was performing. Any blind man by the side of the road would probably have known who to turn to by now in order to receive sight. People had heard that there was a man from God who was doing amazing works. Yet the leaders of the Jews spoke to Jesus as if He had done nothing to demonstrate who He was. They asked Him to show them a sign from heaven, as if he had not already cleansed lepers, and caused the lame to leap for joy.
The Lord could have performed an amazing miracle at that very moment, but He did not come in order to stand before a Board of Approval from the Pharisees and Sadducees, so He did not comply with their wishes. He did use this opportunity to say that they were unable to see the signs of the time of the Messiah all around them. They prided themselves in being able to predict the weather, but they could not see that a new gospel age was being born in front of their faces. The ultimate sign would soon come, the resurrection of Jesus Christ, an event he refers to cryptically here as the sign of Jonah. That Old Testament prophet spent time like a dead man in the belly of a fish and began a new life when he found himself again on dry land. Christ’s body would soon rest briefly in the grave, but the sign of a new age would come with an empty tomb.
The Pharisees did not understand what he was saying, but then there was much that the Lord’s disciples did not understand, and Jesus spoke to them more plainly. Our Lord warns his disciples that they must beware of the teaching of the leading Jewish parties of their time. In different ways these religious groups had embraced such serious errors that their teaching could not be safely received. It was a dangerous leaven that could soon spread throughout the Lord’s followers. As Christ warned His disciples on this matter, they very mistakenly came to the conclusion that He was making some point about their need for physical bread; this after the Lord has now twice shown His ability to supply bread to thousands of people.
Yet it was at this moment, when the disciples seem to be so confused, that Peter actually confessed Jesus as the Christ, the Messiah, and the Son of the living God. This was absolutely right, and was something that could only have come to him by God. The church would be built upon Christ, the true and only Rock, as both Peter and Paul would later write in their letters. He is the cornerstone, and the apostles will be the foundation aligned with that one perfect Stone, rejected by men, but chosen and precious in God’s sight, Jesus Christ. The church that is built upon that apostolic foundation has been granted by her Lord the sacred task of receiving people into her number, and declaring their sins to be forgiven according to the Word of Christ. All who would believe in Him are called to profess their faith before God and man, for this Jesus is the divine Messiah, who alone can save us from our sins through His atoning death for us.
It is this last part that Peter immediately rejects, for when Christ speaks to His disciples about His coming suffering, His death, and His resurrection, Peter takes Him aside and has the audacity to rebuke the one He just called the Son of God for suggesting that He would soon die. Jesus is uncompromising in His rejection of Peter’s unholy sentiment. His earlier confession had come from heaven, but this rejection of the cross comes from hell, and the one who speaks it, speaks for Satan.
The cross is the way of God for the Messiah and His followers, but it is not the way of the world. The true followers of Jesus must travel in this way of the cross. They will embrace the death of Christ for them as their only hope, and they will follow in a kind of sacrificial living, since the call of our King will be a call to suffering and even death. They are willing to face loss now, since they believe that the Son of Man has not only died for us, but He is coming back for us from heaven. He will come with angels in the glory of God, and He will judge the living and the dead, repaying them according to their deeds.
This is the story of the real Kingdom of God. That kingdom will one day come in glory, a glory that a few of the disciples will shortly see with their own eyes at the transfiguration of Christ. That miracle was a glimpse into heavenly light. We do not live in heaven right now, but we live with the assurance that heaven is real, and that it is better to be in the number of those who are headed toward heaven than to have all that the world can offer us many times over.
The theology of the Pharisees and the Sadducees would never lead anyone to a cross. They surely wanted the crown, but they would get that crown through careful obedience to their own laws or through the cultivation of relationships of influence with the right sort of people. But this is not the way that the kingdom of heaven comes to men. That kingdom comes through a cross and a resurrection. This is the life that has saved us, and it is the life that we are called to live even now, a life that was most powerfully testified to through the real sign of Jonah.
The Lord Jesus Christ has promised us a glorious kingdom. We believe; help our unbelief. We perhaps think that it might help our faith if we could see a glimpse of that kingdom now. This is precisely what Jesus gave to Peter, James, and John. The last words of the prior chapter were, “There are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.” The fullness of the Lord’s coming in his kingdom will not occur until He returns. Peter, James, and John tasted death a long time ago. But only six days after Jesus made them this promise, He gave them a wonderful glimpse of the glory of His coming and the glory of His kingdom in this event called the transfiguration.
In this kingdom-coming miracle, Moses and Elijah appeared with Jesus Christ, who shined as a personification of the glory cloud of God. At this time, the era of the Law was coming to a close, and the new prophetic Elijah, John the Baptist, had already completed his work of pointing to the Messiah. Yet Moses and Elijah were still alive in some other realm. Somehow their presence was known that day and was visible to the disciples, who clearly did not know what to do. Unless this appearance was completely misleading, we must concluded that heaven is a real place as we know and experience places now, a place from which visitors could come, though a place that we cannot normally see. Men like Moses and Elijah appeared to be aware enough about the events of redemption transpiring at this turn of the ages for them to have a conversation about these things with the Son of God.
The glory cloud of God then was suddenly manifest as a separate presence from the Son of God, and the voice of the Father spoke in their hearing. The words were very important for our consideration. The Father confirmed that the man known to many as Jesus of Nazareth, presumed to be the son of a man named Joseph, was in fact the Son of our heavenly Father. This Jesus was called the beloved Son. There was nothing lacking in Him or offensive about Him that would cause His Father to turn away from this Son. The Father was well-pleased with Him, and apparently wanted His disciples to know this, and to hear His explicit instruction: “Listen to Him.” It is amazing, then, that the Father would later turn away from the Son, when atonement was made for our sins.
This was a terrifying and deeply impressive experience for these men, one which definitely Peter, and probably also John referred to in their writings that were recorded for us in the New Testament. It was Christ that was able to calm them at that time, and He spoke of His coming resurrection. The Son of Man would be raised from the dead. They would be witnesses not only of this glorious transfiguration, but of post-resurrection appearances of Christ as well.
These men were confused about the timing of future events, and they were trying to make sense of it all. They had seen Elijah on the mountain, but was not Elijah to come first before the Messiah? The expectation that people rightly had of a preparatory Elijah-like ministry was correct, but this had already happened in the prophetic work of John the Baptist. People did not recognize him for who he was, and they did to him what their forefathers had done to the earlier prophets. John’s suffering and death needed to inform their expectations concerning what would happen to Jesus, for He too would soon suffer at the hands of men. They needed to listen to the Son of God about this, and about everything, as the Father had commanded from heaven.
Soon they were down again with the rest of the disciples and with people who needed healing. The contrast between the present heaven and the present earth was well displayed in these events. Moses and Elijah do not live here any more, but we do. And there are other people here, and they need held. Here we have the effects of the fall and of God’s curse. Here we also have opportunities to walk by faith, to obey God, and to serve Him. It was not easy for Jesus to be here, and it will never be easy for people of faith to live in a faithless and twisted place. If we are to be followers of our Lord, we must hear what He has said and listen to Him. We need the kind of listening that moves out in love, seeing God do the impossible, and even using us.
No matter how God would choose to work wonders through His church today, this earth still awaits the glory of the Lord, the glory that we will go to when we die, the glory that will descend upon the earth from on high when Christ returns. Until that time, this is still the place where the Son of Man was killed by men, but it is also the place where He put a stake in the ground for the resurrection age to come by rising from the dead. It is the place where the rulers of this world collect taxes to do what they will do, and we try our best to be peaceful and law-abiding. But it is a fact that we are the sons of the coming kingdom, a kingdom that is in some ways here already in the resurrection of Jesus Christ and in the subsequent movement of His gospel across the entire globe.
If we could just climb a mountain to get to heaven now, we would do so. We could be with our reigning Lord, the One who is the visible glory of the invisible God. We could see people like Moses and Elijah, and talk to those who are alive in that place, embrace them as completely healed people, eat with them, laugh with them, work with them, and rest so very well. But there is no mountain like that for us to climb. Yet Christ Himself is with us and in us, and He is the One upon whom angels from heaven descend to earth and ascend back to that realm above. We are in Him, and He is in us. Therefore glory is not so far away after all, and today is another day to walk in faith, a day for waiting and serving in a glorious hope, a hope perfectly secured for us in the Word of Christ, and in His death and resurrection.
It is not an easy thing for us to think about the kingdom of heaven. Every breath that we have ever taken has been on an earth where there is much sin and misery. What might it be like to breathe the air of a place that is fully captivated by the holiness and glory of God? What would it mean to be great in such a place, even the greatest?
This was the question that the disciples brought to Jesus. His answer to them had to be surprising. He called over a child, someone who would not have been thought of as the greatest in their culture in any sense of word. Did the disciples want to even enter the kingdom of heaven? Then they would have to be like this child.
Of course there would be many things about a child that would have nothing to do with heaven and might not be worthy of imitation in any way. His specific point was that they needed to humble themselves before God. This is closely connected to true faith. They needed to hear God’s Word and believe. The posture of humility is so different than that of pride, pride that will not hear, pride that knows better than the Lord God Almighty and refuses to obey.
Those who humble themselves before God will receive their brothers and sisters in Christ as beloved children of God. People who would take advantage of the weak and the ignorant and lead them astray are of a very different spirit, and are acting as if the Lord does not see what they are doing, or does not care for His own. This kind of way of life is diametrically opposed to the life of faith. It is unbelief working itself out in actions of great ugliness. These kind of impulses rising up within us must be dealt with according to the greatest severity, since we know that they are utterly inconsistent with the kingdom of heaven.
God who reigns in heaven over men and angels will use all His resources for the ultimate vindication of those who belong to Him. He is like a shepherd who knows every one of His sheep well, and will rescue the one who goes astray. It is not His will that any of those who belong to Him shall perish. This is the value system of heaven, and it informs the way that we are to care for one another within the church on earth.
Our Lord is more aware than anyone in the church that His body is comprised, not of those who are already perfectly righteous, but of those who easily go astray. He faced the wrath that was due against us in His death on the cross. He has felt the eternal consequence of our sins in ways that we never will. He is the one who tells us what to do when one of the beloved sins against us. We are to address these matters as personally as possible, working toward the most blessed resolution possible in this world of misery and trouble here below, seeking both the peace and purity of the Lord’s house.
As God will not quickly abandon those who are weak and broken, we are to be those who keep on forgiving, knowing that we have been forgiven by one who had a very good case against us, but was unwilling to give us over to hell. He has released us from such an overwhelming debt. Will we then be quick to condemn one another for smaller offenses, whether real or imagined? This is the attitude of ungrateful servants, not of the sons of God.
Our willingness to forgive is a testimony to our understanding of what Christ has done for us. This is the only way for forgiveness to be a delightful privilege for sinful people. We must see it as our testimony to the greatness of the cross. Our Savior has loved us, and He loves us still. It is not a pleasing thing for Him to hear of small-minded and petty grudges that we hold against others.
The thing that we must increasingly resolve in our hearts and minds is that we wish to live on earth even now as those who believe in heaven. If we truly believe in heaven then we can show that faith by honoring the God of heaven through the pursuit of the ethic that He commands. Then we will seek the humility of faith as the wonderful gift granted to all of heaven’s children, a humility that hears and believes; a humility that believes and follows. If we believe in heaven then we will love the weakest ones who have the songs of heaven in their hearts and on their lips, and we will care for the child of even one believing parent, for we look to see each of those little ones claimed by the same Father who has captivated our hearts. If we believe in heaven we will seek peace and purity in the Lord’s house on earth, and we will thank God for every opportunity that we have to forgive.
To live this way now, is to believe now. The one who pursues this life with humility and mercy will not always be considered to be great by some on earth. Nonetheless, such a person need not regret a life lived in grateful imitation of Christ, the greatest Son of the Father in the kingdom of heaven.
Everywhere that Jesus was going, He was healing people. What was that all about? Why does Jesus not heal everybody now? I understand the loss that people feel when they pray earnestly and then something worse happens to them than they even imagined. How can this be? God does answer prayer, and I am convinced that many of the things that we have asked for on earth are waiting for us in the kingdom of heaven even now, but Jesus was doing something very special in His healing ministry when He came to die for our sins. He was displaying signs of the kingdom of heaven, where the fullness of healing is a reality. He was showing us something about our life to come.
We want things to go well. Especially in our marriages and in our family we want things to go well. We don’t want to be planning for things to fail. Christ came displaying signs of a kingdom of great wellness, of the fullest shalom. This kingdom of heaven is displayed in marriage, since the final and eternal realm of life involves the most blessed marriage between Christ and His people. There were others all around Christ who were schooled in a different way of religious thinking. Even though they believed in the coming age of resurrection, their religious way of life, and their understanding of how they could be right with God was sadly deficient. That led them to be thinking of ways that God’s Law could be used so that they could be sure that they were right with God through their own obedience. They sometimes faced problems in their families, sometimes very serious problems, like everyone else in this world. That meant that some of them for a variety of reasons faced the unhappy reality of broken relationships.
We understand that. Yet since they felt that their peace with God came through Law, and since their consciences were probably bothering them concerning their own part in breaking up what God had joined together, they wanted to find a way to justify themselves in light of the painful reality of their broken marriages. They were trying to find a loophole either in the Bible or in their traditions that would allow them to say that they were in the right, since they thought their own success in being in the right with God was the only way that they could ever know peace with God. Jesus does not give them any out. He was speaking of resurrection shalom. He was thinking of one man (Himself), and one woman (the church), and He did not want any way out, even though staying in this plan for marriage was going to lead Him to the cross. He wanted them to see the privilege of living out that bigger story in their own life of intimacy, even when that may at times and for seasons seem to be for worse, rather than for better.
They did not like this answer, so they brought Him a passage from the Bible that they felt gave them a loophole. Moses in the Old Testament Law did make provision for a certificate of divorce. That was for the protection of the abandoned party, so that she could be declared free from the one who abandoned the intimacy that was a gift to them both. God had not commanded the loss of marriage, but there was a recognition that sometimes that loss happened, and that in marriages there were always sin problems. God knows about our sin. Why else did Jesus die on the cross, if not to take care of our sin? God knows about sin, and He knows about people getting hurt by sin. He had provided some help for hurting people through the certificate of divorce in the Mosaic Law. The Pharisees, who thought that their peace with God depended on their own obedience wanted to use that provision to make it seem like they had not sinned. Jesus’ answer to their question made that very difficult.
They were not the only uncomfortable people there that day. Jesus’ own disciples started to think that it might not be a good idea for anyone to marry. But our Lord has made it clear from the beginning of the Bible that most people are not gifted for the single life. It is a good thing to find a partner for life. It is a rich blessing to rejoice together, and even to suffer together as that becomes necessary. It is a good thing to be able to appreciate things just because your loved one likes them. It is a good thing to be blessed with children. Our Lord showed that the little ones were important to Him, and He would not allow His disciples to keep the kids away. Once again, He began talking about heaven, a real world that we cannot usually see, but without which nothing makes sense. Jesus, who knows all about heaven, says that heaven belongs to children, and therefore He belongs to children. He is happy to bless them, and happy to bless marriages.
This did not change the stubborn fact that there will still many people thinking that the way that you could be part of a resurrection world, the way that you could have peace with God, was through keeping Law. Like the rich young man in our reading, they had looked for loopholes in all of God’s laws, so that at the end of the day they could say that they had kept them all. It was, in fact, necessary for someone to entirely keep the commandments, in order for anyone to enter heavenly life. Jesus knew this, because He knew that His death for us would have no meaning unless He first became our Substitute in His perfect obedience for us. For us to understand and embrace this way of being right with God, through the obedience and death of Jesus, rather than through some way of law, we need to see that we have not obeyed the Law of God, that Law which Jesus perfectly obeyed. Sometimes we need to have God speaking directly to us, telling us to give up our everything for Him, in order for us to come to grips with the fact that we have not loved Him as the only God. The first commandment: “You shall have no other gods before Me.”
There simply is no way for anyone to get to that best of all marriages, that heavenly peace with God, while we still cling to something other than the Christ of the cross and the resurrection. You have arms for only one husband, and not for your own way of being right. That’s why we finally surrender to His love, and we follow Him. That’s the way that the impossible becomes possible; with God. With God all things are possible. With God it is possible for guilty people to be forgiven. It is possibly for abandoned people to find a home. It is possible for shy people to be comfortable. It is possible for sick people to be well. It is possible for people on earth to enter heavenly shalom.
These disciples who were nothing would be something in heaven. These ones who would lose so much to continue to testify to the truth of the resurrection of one man, would themselves have resurrection life, in a new society without sin, and with the best of all governance. Of course we cannot understand all of that now. Some who seem to be first here will be very happy to be last there. Others who seem last now will be shocked to be first there. But all who give up anything now for this marriage, for this husband, will receive a hundredfold. And we will be with Him. We can only imagine… and then by His grace, we can believe, and we can follow.
What is heaven going to be like? We know that those who have turned to Christ as our safe haven from the judgment to come, and are living as a part of His church community throughout the world, calling upon the name of the Lord in worship, experience something of the heavenly life even now. We do so by faith, and not by sight. Our sins have already been forgiven, but we do not yet live in the complete freedom of holiness that is ours in Christ. We have been called to worship by the Lord of the kingdom. We are working in His vineyard, but we sometimes seem unaware of the great blessings that belong to us. We return to our question: What is heaven like?
Of course this is a very big question, but the Lord is continually shedding light on this topic through His miracles and through His parables. As He speaks to His disciples at the opening of Matthew 20, He teaches them in greater detail what He had said at the end of the previous chapter, “(The) first will be last, and the last first.” Everyone serves the Lord with a hope of heavenly blessings, yet some may come to the life of the kingdom earlier and others later. Is the life of heavenly reward like receiving wages, so that those who work longer are owed more?
The parable of the vineyard teaches us that the Lord is the sovereign Distributor of all the blessings of heavenly life. The arrangement that He has made with us is simply this: All who call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. We are to believe in our hearts in Christ and the resurrection and confess this before God and man as a part of the church. Any work that the Lord has for us and any reward that He determines is solely a matter of His own great generosity. We are counted as righteous by faith, and our service of our King is a privilege. We cannot complain against the Lord for the way He treats us, or for the richness of His blessing to others.
It may seem to us that the most obviously faithful servants of God are not being fairly treated when we consider the greatness of heavenly blessings that will be given to others who may come to exercise faith in ways that make us wonder if they have served the Lord at all. We do not understand the system of gracious rewards that is such an important part of the kingdom of heaven. If we demand to be treated as workers who should be given the wages that we deserve, then we are insisting that we receive the Lord’s eternal judgment against us, since as workers demanding wages, this is what we deserve. That wage was paid by Christ on the cross. We need to understand that anything that we receive beyond hell is all an expression of the tremendous generosity of God. In heaven, we will not complain about the Lord’s gracious blessing of those who seem to be among the last. We will rejoice with God in the wisdom of His bountiful displays of mercy. We will count our own lives as ransomed from a pit of unbelief and hypocrisy. We will be happy just to be doorkeepers in the Lord’s house. We will marvel that we who have been unworthy servants are now counted as sons of God. What is heaven like? It is a place where the citizens will be eternally delighted to see the most wonderful mercy of God to the most unlikely and unworthy sinners.
There is one Worker who has won for us all the blessings of heaven. He is the one that went to His death in Jerusalem. He was delivered over to hostile religious authorities, leaders of both temple and synagogue life. He was condemned to death. He was turned over to the Gentiles, mocked, flogged, and crucified. He did this for us. But He also was the one who rose again on the third day.
The lessons of the cross and the Lord’s sovereign mercy in the kingdom of heaven are not easy things to embrace. They bother our flesh. The sons of Zebedee, John and James, and their mother, wanted to be the greatest in a place where being the greatest is under God’s control alone, and where the cross is the way to the crown. Though they claimed to understand the workings of the kingdom, they did not yet understand the kind of sacrifices that were ahead of them in the years that would follow.
The other disciples were really the same. They showed their confusion by being indignant about the requests of their compatriots for special glories. The example for us was clearly presented to the apostles in their day. This kingdom of heaven would not be like the places of normal power struggles in the existing worlds of politics or commerce. The greatest in heaven was the one who served. The one who gave His life as a ransom for many was surely the greatest of all. There is not normally a long line of people waiting for the privilege of dying a death that takes away the sins of others. In any case, there was only one man who could rightly stand in that line, since only one man had what was necessary to accomplish our redemption. He is the only man of merit in the kingdom of heaven. Everyone else there lives off of His generosity.
The humble are brought to understand this. They cry out for mercy, not for what they deserve. At the end of Matthew 20, two blind men show forth the zeal of heaven’s people for the grace of God. Though everyone around them might like them to give up on their pleas for the kindness of Jesus, they continue to cry out to the descendant of David who is heaven’s eternal King. They are granted sight by our compassionate Lord. It is passages like this one that persuade us that God will have mercy on the unworthy. May we see the kingdom of heaven rightly, and may we rejoice with those who live in heaven now at the greatness of our King’s favor upon the unworthy.
We have come to the final days of our Lord’s earthly ministry. Consider the eternal plan of God to bring glory to His Name through both His greatest acts of justice and His greatest acts of mercy. Then think back to the story of mankind, and consider all of the events that have taken place since sin entered the world through Adam. Finally meditate on the Lord’s promises, and imagine all that is ahead of us in the age to come because of what Christ has done for us. Without a doubt, the events of Matthew 21 through 28 describe the most important happenings in the history of men and angels. We have here the dramatic turning point in the glorious progress of God’s grace. Christ will come into Jerusalem in humility, but He will be the great King spoken of in Zechariah 9:9. Everyone will play their part in these days, and every detail will be under the perfect sovereign control of Almighty God.
Even the crowds will be under the Lord’s majestic authority. They will fulfill their part from Psalm 118. There are many psalms that use the Hebrew plea to God, “Save me!” or “Save us!” This is what “Hosanna!” means. It is a cry for help. As we see from the specific actions and words of the crowd that day, it is especially Psalm 118 that is in view here, a psalm used in preparation for the Passover. Jesus is recognized as the coming King, the Messiah, the Son of David. He comes in the name of the Lord, and He is the Lord. Little do they know that the way He will save will be through His death as the Passover Lamb, a point that is marvelously tucked away in the ending of Psalm 118 itself. Now they praise Him and call on Him for help. In just a few short days, another crowd will shout out different words: “Crucify Him! Crucify Him!”
As the Lord moves toward Mount Zion, it is not immediately clear that everyone understands what the uproar is all about. Word begins to spread that this is Jesus of Nazareth who is thought to be a great prophet from Galilee. He soon enters the temple area, and does again what He did at the beginning of His ministry. John’s gospel tells us about the first cleansing of the temple that set in motion the Christ’s public work over the following three years. Now as the three years come to a close, Matthew’s gospel records for us the second cleansing, as our Lord prepares to die for sinners. Once again He is moving in complete authority in a way that simply cannot be explained. He is overturning tables and pronouncing judgment on those who have misused God’s provision of this house of prayer. In fulfillment of Jeremiah 7:11, our Lord declares His judgment against His people, for they have turned the place of God’s presence into a den of robbers. In contrast, He is there as the one who is the Temple of God, and the one who will make us, united to Him, into the perfect resurrection temple. How appropriate that He not only cleanses the old temple, but also heals the blind and the lame as the great new Temple, the Messiah King.
As they were shocked by Him the first time He did this, once again the religious authorities begin to question Him. They have noticed His wonders that He is performing and the reaction of the crowd to these displays of glory, but they are indignant, rather than in awe. He answers them by referring to Psalm 8, for He is not only the Son of Man, He is the Lord who receives praise, even from infants. This is what God has ordained, and it is happening.
Something old is going away. The Lord’s plant of Old Testament Israel has been declared fruitless and cursed, for the Age of the Law must come to an end. Yet something new has come in its place, a people who will call upon His Name, not only of the Jews, but even of the nations. They will pray and be heard, and a mountain of unbelief throughout the world will be cast into the seas. The new people of God will soon hear the Word and proclaim it everywhere. They will be a people of faith who know about the real Temple of God, the true Passover Lamb.
The leaders of the Old Covenant community stood against this Messiah. They continued to question Him concerning the source of His authority. He would not answer them, for they were unwilling to even acknowledge the fact that God had sent John the Baptist. If they could not see John’s mission as divinely ordained, what point would there be in talking about the One for whom John prepared the way, the One who would shower the church with the Holy Spirit? They claimed to love and obey God, but they did not obey Him, they opposed Him; this while obvious covenant-breakers, tax collectors and prostitutes, would be making their way into the kingdom of heaven ahead of these leading men. God’s grace would be victorious, and the way of true righteousness would be revealed; a righteousness that would come through Christ alone.
Their day in the Lord’s vineyard had come and gone, and Old Testament Israel had proven herself unworthy. They had no fruit for the Lord, and they had abused and killed the prophets. Finally, they were preparing to put the Son of God to death, imagining that this would serve their own agenda. Instead, they too were playing their part in the fulfillment of Psalm 118. The turning of the age from the era of the Law to the age of the gospel would happen in their midst. They would reject the Rock of Ages, but in their act of rejecting Him, He would become the cornerstone of a new temple of the Lord. Here was the sacrifice appointed to bear the guilt of all who would be a part of the kingdom of God. All of this was not merely through the plans of evil men, but according to the eternal purpose of God who would fulfill His great decrees. This was marvelous in His eyes. It is our joy that we have come to see this despised Messiah as our Lord, and have been welcomed into a new kingdom, a kingdom that will yield the greatest fruitfulness and blessings of grace ever known among men.
Our Lord is going to the cross. He is dying for the true Israel of God, the elect Israel that is composed of Jews and Gentiles who have taken refuge in Him. All these will be a part of the coming kingdom of heaven. The old kingdom of Israel is ending. For many centuries there has been no true king in Israel. Yet it remained the hope of some that God would reestablish the old kingdom again. This was not to be. God is doing something different now with His Son. Jesus will be the King, but He is bringing in the kingdom of heaven. The old subjects of the old kingdom of Israel have rejected the true Son of David. The new kingdom is coming with a glorious wedding feast, where God’s Son will be shown to be united to His bride. Israel was largely unwilling to come to that feast. They had demonstrated this over many years in their unwillingness to receive the Word of God. Even now, people all over the world are regularly deciding that they are too busy to meet the Lord of the kingdom of heaven and to hear His Word.
God is not pleased with those who murder His prophets. He is similarly displeased with those who would spurn His Son. Those who will not see the kingdom for the jewel that it is, those who would despise the Son of God and refuse to call upon His Name, are not worthy of the glorious kingdom. The sad fact is that we would all fall into such a despicable group without the Lord’s grace. Even in the life of the most godly servants of King Jesus, there is ample proof that we have violated the Lord’s great commandments, for we have not loved Him with all our hearts, and we have not love one another. By His grace He sends forth messengers of the Word far off into Gentile lands. Throughout the world, everyone is invited to believe in the Son of God and to hope in the resurrection. The Lord will fill His great wedding hall with guests.
We make a serious error if we think that God has dismissed His concern for righteousness concerning our participation in His kingdom. Our Lord has always demanded the fullest obedience from those who would desire to be with Him forever. The key to the system of grace that comes through Christ is this: Christ has become our clothing of righteousness before the Father. He is our wedding garment, for He has stained His own garments with the bloody mess of our sin, and He has granted to us the perfect spotless clothing of His righteousness. This is true grace. Many are called through the preaching of the Word, but only those who find their perfect righteousness in Christ will display the fact that they have truly been chosen by God.
This is the time for Israel to hear the Word of the true King, and to embrace Him. They should see His holiness, and admire His works of power. They should seek Him and find, laying their burden of sin upon Him for the fullest redemption. Instead the various groups arrayed against our Lord are trying to trap Him, to embarrass Him, and to cause Him harm. The Pharisees and the Herodians attempt to flatter Him, with hopes that He will then speak against Roman taxation. They are unsuccessful. He affirms the proper role of civil authorities, but asserts the higher duty that we have to submit to God, as the one in whose image every man has been created.
The Sadducees attempt to show the Lord of wisdom to be a fool. They deny the hope of the resurrection which has been so central a teaching throughout the entire Old Testament. They think themselves too smart to agree with a bodily life beyond the mortality of this world. They attempt to expose what they imagine to be insurmountable problems with such a physical realm. In playing their insulting game they provide us with an interesting bit of historical evidence: It is obvious from their attack of the Lord on this matter that the teaching of a coming resurrection was understand by many to be a central doctrine of our Lord’s ministry. He refutes their unbelief concerning this doctrine based on two points. First, they do not understand the Scriptures, and second, they do not know God and His power. The Scriptures promise the coming resurrection of the dead. The fact of God’s power displayed in the Lord’s great healing miracles assures us that the One who created all things out of nothing is able to bring about the hope of the righteous in a great work of physical regeneration.
In His answer to the Sadducees, our Lord also demonstrates that He knows things about the present heaven that His adversaries have no experience with. He knows how angels relate to one another. In revealing to us that we will not enter into new marriages in heaven, he says that we will be like the angels in heaven in some way on this matter of relationships. Of course we have only a few hints in the Scriptures concerning relationships between and with angelic beings, but Jesus knows all about angels. We have no record that anyone asked Him the interesting question of how we will be like the angels in heaven. They were too busy trying to make the only one there with firsthand experience of heaven look like a fool. Abraham is still alive. So are Isaac and Jacob. They are in the present heaven, and the way that they exist even now is apparently great evidence concerning the resurrection of the dead. Jesus knows all about this.
Before them that day was the answer to our longing for eternal life. Here was David’s Son and David’s Lord. Here was the one who knew not only the obvious testimonies to a coming resurrection age, like Ezekiel’s vision of dry bones coming back to life, but also the thousands of more subtle references to the Lord’s eternal plan of physical life, like the simple identification of Yahweh as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Here was the one who not only knew how to speak about the Law of God in its two great headings, but who had Himself fulfilled these commandments entirely. Why could they not have asked Him the many questions that could have come to Him that day from a true heart of faith?
Yet this was His day and not theirs. When they thought that He was trapped, they were only following the script of His loving Father’s design, a script that He had agreed to before the foundation of the world. This Jesus who died and rose again is the Lord of glory. He is currently at the right hand of the Father reigning in heaven. God will put all His enemies under His feet. He is certainly not a fool. He is the wisdom and power of God.
The great conflict within Judaism of the first century would be between the Pharisees and the Christians. The temple-oriented Sadducees would see their day come to something of an end with the crushing fact of the Roman attack against Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple in AD 70. It would be the Pharisees and the Christians who would live on to fight the battle for the hearts and minds of the Jews and for that segment of the gentile world that had shown strong interest in the ways of the Jewish synagogues. The ascendancy of a Christ-centered Judaism that came to be known as the Christian church would be a great humiliation to those who had a series of fundamental disagreements with the One who came as the true King of the Jews. This chapter, from beginning to end, is one of the best statements of the fatal flaws of the Pharisaic way, presented by the One who by His own blood, founded the faith that became their chief rival. He chooses here not to focus as much upon their teaching as He does upon their lives.
Their way of understanding the Law, their mingling of divine Law and tradition, and their suggestion that peace with God could come through Law, these things were all very wrong. But what was maddening about it all, is that after constructing a complex system of burdensome law-keeping, they were content to see people fall under the weight of it, and would not help them in their struggle with the evil and misery that we face in this life. They have nothing of real resurrection power to offer the weak.
Rather than being moved by true compassion for others who needed some way of peace with God and real hope beyond death, they were motivated to be seen. They wanted to be seen as the first and not the last; they wanted to be seen as holy and not the unrighteous; they wanted to be seen as knowledgeable and not ignorant; they wanted to be seen as good and not bad. These are not specific problems associated with one race or type of people. They are human problems. Self-righteous displays of religiousness are not the answer for us. They are the proof of our deep need for rescue that can only come from the righteousness, love, and power of God.
This way of self-promotion was not the way of Christ, and it must not be the way of His church. Our passion is for the exaltation of our Father in heaven, not for the applause of men on earth. Our Instructor is the Anointed One, the Christ, who was despised and rejected by men. Our way of life is to be humble servants, following in the path of a Servant-King, but we should really admit that we can so easily play the same games as the Pharisees did.
The Pharisees believed in an afterlife, and they certainly believed in eternal rewards, but they pursued resurrection goals through self, rather than through substitution. Once again, this does not distinguish them from the rest of the humanity. Whether expressed or unexpressed, this seems to be the way of all flesh. The thing about the Pharisees is that their way was very much expressed. They worked to convert others to a system that could not bring life, but only seemed to breed further hypocrisy among men. At all costs it was necessary to convince others, and even yourself, that you were religiously in the right. This is a foolish game for sinners to play.
How did their system of being right work? It was a system loaded down with man-made rules that had the appearance of great dedication to God, to holiness, and to the Law, without actually helping in any way with the deep problem that we all have with indwelling sin. Being a person with a true heart is difficult, so the Pharisees had a system of truth-telling where the truth of your promise depended on the form of your words. If you swore by the temple, that was nothing, but if you swore by the gold in the temple, you had really promised. They did not see the connection between God, to whom we must give account, and all of creation which He owns. Everything comes back to this God, so we must be true to our word. But this is hard, and would require an admission that we are in the wrong, as well as a willingness to turn away from what is wrong. A system of surface scrupulousness is more appealing to the one who is dedicated to being right through his own law-keeping. Better to tithe even on your spices, than to deal with the necessity of showing justice, mercy, and faithfulness in a broken world. This is simply the way of death, where a finish coat of righteous paint covers a structurally unsound bridge over the grave.
The way of the Pharisees did not solve greed, self-indulgence, and lawlessness. A person could follow the Pharisaic philosophy very closely, and still justify killing a true prophet of God who had come to expose the sins of the people and point to the way of true life. The Pharisaic heart cannot bear to have sin exposed, and would rather find a way to kill the messenger of righteousness, than to listen to the word spoken and then turn away from sin.
This has always led to much suffering for those like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah, and Amos who brought the truth from God to the beloved people. The way of the Pharisee is a dangerous way. It cannot cover the guilt of sin, and it has no power to truly reform the sinner. What it can do is teach a man to murder, while keeping his hands clean. It can show a man how to kill the innocent, in order to defend an appearance of righteousness. The way of Christ is different. It teaches a man how to die, in order to save the unrighteous. This is what Jesus has done for us. While Old Testament Jerusalem largely would not have Him, He gave His life to save the Jerusalem that is above, that Jerusalem that has learned that true blessing can only come through a Substitute, the righteous Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.
The temple was an amazing building, easily the most impressive structure in Jerusalem. Yet in the day when our Lord was preparing to die for our sins, the time for this impressive structure was coming to a close. The reason was that the entire age of the Law, the age of Old Testament Israel, was about to be fulfilled in the death of the Messiah. Here was the only Law-Keeper, but He would be cut down by God’s justice that stood against us, paying our great debt to God. Though this great edifice would exist for a few more years, the entire age of the Law was essentially over in the events that took place between Passover and Pentecost that year. In that short period one age was gone forever, and a new age, an age of gathering the people of God into a new temple, a temple of people connected to the Messiah, was coming into being.
The disciples did not entirely understand about the age of the gospel. This age, in which we now live, is a time when people are being given new life in Christ through the proclamation of the cross and the resurrection and the gift of the Holy Spirit. Though souls are being made alive, bodies are still dying. This is necessary in order for the Lord’s plan for the proclamation of the gospel to have time to take place. Eventually, when Christ returns, the gospel age will be over, and the fullness of the eternal resurrection age will have come. The disciples do not seem to understand that gospel age. They seem to expect that the close of the age of the Law will mean that the reign of Jesus as a resurrection King over a resurrected Jerusalem will immediately begin. They simply want to know when will be the destruction of the temple, and when will be the close of this time of mortality. They do not seem to imagine that these are two questions that have a complex answer. The temple will be destroyed in AD 70 by the Romans, but even today, Christ has not yet returned with the fullness of the resurrection age.
The Lord begins to patiently prepare them for a long period that He calls the “birth pains.” The new baby that is being born is the resurrection temple, made up of Jews and Gentiles who are filled with the Spirit of God. But during this very long period of troubling labor pains, there will be time for kingdoms to come and go, and all kinds of natural disasters to occur, none of which are a sure sign that the return of Christ will be immediate.
During this entire period there will be trouble for the church, trouble inside from false prophets, and trouble outside from religious and political persecution. Many will fall away during these birth pains, but many others will be gathered into this new temple of people, the church. One thing is certain about this gospel age, this gospel of a coming resurrection kingdom where the Messiah reigns, must be preached as a testimony to all nations. Then, and only then, will our Lord return, and the gospel age will be over. Then the fullness of the resurrection will be here as heaven comes to earth and brings us the great delight of a renewed earth, a world of love, without any sin, but a true physical world with great beauty, order, goodness, and truth.
Before that time, something referred to in Daniel as the abomination that brings desolation, must take place. This refers to the defiling of the temple by some gross offense within her. Naturally we are not talking about something that might defile the Old Testament temple on Mount Zion. That has already happened many times. We are talking about the New Testament temple of the people of God. The coming of those who pretend to love God and His worship, but who reject Messiah and His mercy, this is an abomination in any time and place when it happens. It happened prior to the coming of Christ, and Daniel spoke of it. It happened in the first century church when those who should have embraced the Messiah, such as the Pharisees that Jesus has spoken of in the prior chapter, reject the King of Israel. It will happen again, according to the Apostle Paul in a more worldwide manifestation throughout the Lord’s church, as there is a great apostasy connected to a central figure who is seductive and persuasive to many, one who looks to be worshipped in the Lord’s church. One manifestation of this abomination prophesy came in the years after the ascension of Christ in the conflicts recorded in the New Testament when Jewish authorities that hated Christ and the gospel persistently persecuted the church. There will be a more global appearance of this same antichrist spirit before our Lord’s return. Here we learn that our God, who knows our weakness, will cut any period of testing short, that we might have strength to continue in the faith, lest all testimony of Christ be removed from the earth.
The final coming again of our Lord will be sudden, and, for many, unexpected. The Lord is not telling us when this will happen, but He is telling us that it will not be missed. There will be no secret arrival of the Messiah again. The elect will be gathered and together with the resurrected saints who come with the angels of heaven, we will be a part of the great victory that Christ died to win. This age (a better translation choice than “generation” in verse 34), this gospel age will not pass away until all these things take place: the preaching of Christ to all nations, a long period of birth pains, a dramatic worldwide apostasy in the church centered around a particular figure, and finally the coming again of the Lord with all the host of heaven.
It is not ours to figure out exactly when Christ will return, or to suppose that we know things about the end of this age that God has not revealed. The key is to be ready for our Lord’s coming at a time of His choosing. We must see the love of our King who was willing to die for our salvation. We must remember that His death was successful, and that the coming resurrection age is sure. We must live with the reality of the present heaven filling our hearts as we serve God fruitfully on the present earth, and we must not be part of any abomination in the church that rejects our only Savior, bringing death and destruction in its wake, rather than healing and life.
The current gospel age is very significant, because it is the last age for this world of mortality. At the close of this age, there will be a great renewal of the earth. In the end of most of the prior ages in the Lord’s saving work, the change from one period to the next was not easily seen as dramatic or important. Abraham began an era known as the promise, Moses began the age of the Law, and Christ brought to us the age of the gospel. Yet all of these major moments of very serious change were easily missed by the great majority of people living in their day. Those who study the Bible and engage in discussions of these matters may even disagree about the reality or meaning of each of these epochs. But no one will miss the end of the age of the gospel, and the concurrent coming of the fullness of the resurrection age. The analogous fact in any of our individual lives is our physical death. It cannot be missed. There is a distinct end coming, and the life that we have beyond that moment, while having some continuity with our way of life now, will be very different from our experiences across all the prior ages of mortality.
Our Lord here forces us to consider these matters personally, and not just as questions of theological debate concerning events that may seem unreal to us, or at least far away. No, there were ten virgins that were claiming to be waiting for a great wedding day, but five of them were foolish, and they had not considered adequately the reality of the coming return of the bridegroom. They were not prepared for the sound of His arrival. Consequently they were lacking the oil that was necessary to go out into the darkness to meet Him, and there was nothing that they could do at that point, the point of His return, to make up for a life of thinking about His coming like a far-off dream. Those who act this way must be the ones that Jesus spoke of in the last chapter, who do not keep their charge in the church, as if the day of their death did not mean a point of reckoning with their God, or as if the day of the Lord’s return was just a myth with little practical significance for their actions among those for whom our Lord shed His blood.
Such people who call themselves servants of the Lord, and who claim to be working for Him, if they are not using the talents that He has given to them with an expectation that the King will come, that their lives will end, and that the Christ is coming again to judge, will surely fall into wrong thinking about a God who they imagine to be so far away as to have little resemblance to the Lord who has revealed Himself in Scripture to be the God of sacrificial faithfulness. They cannot expect that they will be commended for their faith and life, or that they will be entrusted with great responsibilities in the present heavens and in the resurrection age to come, for they imagine a Christ who is cruel and distant, a hard man who would use His power to take from us the fruitfulness that has come from the sweat of our brows. Is this the same Christ who died on the cross for our sins? Is the real Christ so lacking in merit that He needs to steal some from us, or is it not instead the case that everything that we could ever do for Him is an expression of the gifts that we have received from Him? To bury our talents is just an excuse for our wickedness and laziness. It is stealing from the One who expects us to use these gifts that are entirely His to begin with, in such a way that we show our appreciation for the great Lover of our souls.
The Lord of heaven and earth will return. Beyond the fact of the coming unknown day of the end of the gospel age, and the end of ages of mortality, each person must deal with the truth of the end of his life. We will die, and we will stand before the Judge of all the earth. He is so kind to us, that He has not only provided for us all the merit necessary for our safety in communion with Him and with His Father forever, but He has also determined to count our smallest acts of grace-born obedience as a reason for heavenly celebration. For those who are His sheep, there is no talk of the overwhelming evidence that could have been brought forward of our wickedness, laziness, poor attitude, poverty of fortitude, nastiness, and all our small-minded and foolish decisions that have hurt others who needed us. Instead, He has determined to treat us like heroes of grace, like those who have consistently given our lives away for others, based on the smallest pieces of evidence that He has planted within our lives, evidence of true gospel charity, evidence of love for Him, evidence so small that we hardly seem to know what He is talking about.
But for those who have not loved Him and His people, who have hated the story of a Redeemer, who have not embraced the wretched Christian that Jesus counts as His own brother, what will be the fate of such a one? What will be the fate of the one who has thought of this Christ as only a distant figure who would never return? What will be the destiny of the one who thought that he was safe abusing the ones for whom Christ gave His blood. We shudder to think of what these words “eternal punishment” mean. There will be an eternal society of devils, demons, and depraved men. As I have reflected on the horrors of such an existence, chief among them is the knowledge, without any doubt, of the existence of another place, a place of perfect communion with God, the holy angels, the redeemed of the Lord, those many who were killed as unwanted or despised on this earth, or who suffered relentless attacks of pain, disease, famine, and abuse, and were yet counted as children of God through Jesus Christ our Lord. To know of the existence of such a society of perfect blessing, and to be cut off from it, this may be the worst horror of hell, and it is enough to yield great weeping and gnashing of teeth in that place. It is best for us to lack all experiential knowledge of hell. It is enough for us that Christ has faced the pains of divine punishment for us. Let us love Him who is coming. Let us follow Him in faith and suffering now, with the confident expectation that we shall be with Him forever in eternal life, by the grace of this same Lord, knowing that He is even now near to those who call upon His Name.
Jesus knew that He had come to die for us as the Passover Lamb, and He taught His disciples clearly about the fact that He would suffer and be crucified. In Matthew 26 we see this great truth through the stories of two weak men who were close followers; Peter, who denied our Lord, and Judas, who betrayed Him, handing Him over to those who sought to kill Him.
The immediate initiating event that led to the cross is presented here as an encounter between Jesus and a woman who anointed His body for burial. She poured out upon His head a very expensive ointment. This disturbed many of the disciples, but it was apparently a turning point in the life of Judas. It was after this extravagance that Judas went to the chief priests, who were looking for an opportunity to quietly arrest Jesus away from the eyes of a sympathetic crowd. They offered Judas thirty pieces of silver to turn over the Messiah to those who were determined to end His life. The wheels of human injustice were now clearly in motion. It only remained for Judas to find the right opportunity to betray the Christ.
That opportunity came at the time of our Lord’s choosing. All of these events were in His sovereign control. It was on the night associated with the Passover, when Jesus instituted the sacrament of His body and blood, that Jesus would bring up the topic of betrayal. He said, “One of you will betray Me.” He knew that Judas was that one. Judas would do what was determined for him to do, despite the warning that this act of betrayal would be worthy of God’s sure judgment, and that it would have been better for him if he had never been born.
What Judas and the chief priests sought to secretly accomplish, Christ was willing to do openly by His own holy will. They wanted to see Him dead, and He was willing to die. He was going to the cross in order to obey His Father, and to shower us with the greatest love, for He would take the debt of our sins off our broken backs and carry the load for us. Jesus gave His body for us. He shed His blood for us. This would be a fulfillment of the necessary requirements of the covenant of grace, so that our sins might be atoned for.
The disciples supposed themselves to be spiritually strong men who were ready to die rather than deny Jesus. They rejected the clear word of Christ that night that they would all be scattered. Especially Peter insisted that he would never abandon Jesus, even if all the rest fled.
The sufferings of Christ were devastating. He was near to death from His own grief, even before His arrest. He understood what was ahead of Him, and He asked His Father if there was any other way. The answer was clear. There was no other way for the requirements of the covenant to be met. There was no other way for heaven to be won for redeemed sinners. All this could never have been accomplished by the goodness, wisdom, or the power of men. When Christ was in anguish in the garden, His three closest disciples could not even stay awake and pray according to His instruction. Only our Messiah could work our redemption, and that salvation could only have come through His death. He was resolved to do His Father’s will.
What other alternative could there have been? It can be our unholy impulse to assume that we, as disciples of Christ, could have won peace with God through our own dedication to Him. What about those original followers of the Lord? Would they not have easily had the same foolish impulse? Could a Judas save? Could the one who betrayed the Lord with a kiss bring blessing to anyone? What about Peter? He was ready to use the sword to bring about the kingdom. Could this have brought us heaven? He was not even able to stand firm as an observer of the awful proceedings that would follow, and he denied the Lord three times in one evening. The Scriptures would be fulfilled. All the disciples fled from the King of the church. He would save us by His own righteousness and love.
There certainly were many powers that seemed to be arrayed against Jesus that night. Yet it would not be the lies of false witnesses or the plots of powerful religious leaders that would be the ultimate causes of our Lord’s death. Jesus, the Christ, the Son of God, from before the foundation of the world, consented willingly to this extreme humiliation, this suffering that lead to the height of God’s glory. The One who died on the cross is now at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory. He did not have to be pushed to die, or trapped by His enemies. He was willing to suffer and save.
The pains of our Messiah have become for us a part of His glory. Was He despised by men? Did they spit in His face? Did they slap Him and mock Him? Did one of His friends betray Him? Did His leading disciple claim to have no knowledge of Him? These disturbing events have somehow become our boast. They remind us of His unique power and love, and motivate us in His service. Judas could not save anyone, neither could Peter, and neither can we. We will not boast in any man’s gifts or accomplishments, but we will boast in Jesus Christ, especially in His suffering love.
The official verdict against the Son of God, the Savior of Israel, was delivered by those who were in charge of the religious courts of the covenant people of God. The Messiah had come to the descendents of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and their chief priests and elders had determined that He should be put to death. For this reason they brought Him to Pilate, since the Roman civil authorities would be the ones to oversee his execution if they determined Him to be a capital criminal.
Meanwhile, the betrayer of our Lord from His own close disciples, Judas, was filled with hatred of himself for his actions. He knew that Jesus was innocent, and he knew that he, Judas, had sinned greatly by betraying the Lord to the chief priests and the elders. He went to these men directly, an amazing act of boldness, but when they refused to get their hands dirty with his ugly situation, he executed his own justice against himself. Throughout all of these events we see the fulfillment of the words of the Psalms and the prophets, for God had decreed these important events. He did so not out of hatred, envy, or greed, but out of love, and covenant faithfulness.
Jesus was now in the hands of the Roman authorities, but it did not at all seem certain that He would be put to death. In fact the Roman Governor, Pilate, was trying to prevent His execution, in part based on information from his wife who had been troubled in a dream concerning the One she called “that righteous man.” First Pilate looked to Jesus to defend Himself against His accusers. Then he looked to the crowd to have them ask for His release. Shockingly, they went along with the venom of their religious leaders, and demanded the release of a dangerous prisoner instead of Jesus. Even more than this, they were the ones now insisting loudly on the crucifixion of the One who came to die for the sins of His people. When Pilate protested that he was innocent of the blood of Jesus, it was the crowd that insisted that the blood be upon, not only their own heads, but upon the heads of their children! The truth is that the guilt of the cross is upon the heads of all who are covered by the saving blood of Christ. Whether Jew or Gentile, our common confession is this: Jesus died for our sins. Our sins brought Him to the cross.
When Pilate consented to their demands, the Lord was handed over to those who would exactly fulfill the facts of Psalm 22, written so many centuries before, long before any evidence of any crucifixion. It was not Jews who were performing these detailed actions according to some strange scheme to work out a gruesome fulfillment of this ancient Hebrew song. It was Gentile soldiers who were doing things described there, things that were hidden in its verses, things that only God could have known. But Jesus knew. That is why He quoted the first verse of this psalm from the cross before His death. “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”
On the way to that death, the facts of Psalm 69 were also accomplished, as those who were watching gave the Son of God gall and bitter wine. Isaiah 53 was accomplished as Jesus was crucified with the wicked, as well as another detail from Psalm 22 in the dividing of His garments, as the soldiers casts lots for them. But especially it was the fact of crucifixion, detailed amazingly in Psalm 22, that captivates our attention, as our Lord faces what was written so long ago. All three of these substantial passages contain two other important truths in a very prominent way. First, this was happening not only through the hands of wicked men, but according to the decree and action of God. It was God’s plan that was fulfilled here, for God’s good purposes. Second, this death was not to be the end of the story, either for Jesus or for us. He would be set on high, and would give hope to those trusting in Him (Psalm 69); He would be a victorious warrior, dividing the spoils of war with His comrades (Isaiah 53); He would be heard by God and would live, and He would bring our worship as His resurrected brothers before His Father in heaven, even the worship of those who had lived long before Him, and the worship of a people that had not yet been born (Psalm 22), all to the eternal glory of God.
For any of this to be accomplished it was necessary for Him to stay on the cross. It was necessary for the One who could have commanded legions of angels in His defense, to die, so that the penalty that stood against us would be fully paid, and so that heaven above, and the coming age of resurrection, would be filled with redeemed worshippers of God, worshippers whose sins were atoned for by the Lamb of God. This is what He did. He yielded up His spirit. He died, and He was buried in a rich man’s tomb, fulfilling Isaiah 53 yet again.
Because He did this, death could not have the final say over the dead. Graves would be opened. Because of Him and His cross, we have bold access into the heavenly sanctuary of Almighty God. The curtain of separation between God and His people was torn from top to bottom. Because of Jesus and the good news of His life, death, and resurrection, millions have been able to confess that this Man truly was, and is, the Son of God. No guard of soldiers would ever be able to keep Him in the tomb. His Spirit was in Paradise, in the place of His own Almighty power. In a matter of a few short days, He would be the firstfruits of the Age of Resurrection.
The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the beginning of a whole new era. In His rising from the dead, our Lord has very deliberately granted to us the greatest sign of the blessing that is coming for all who are in Him. This is one event in a series of events that marked the end of the Old Covenant era of the Law and the beginning of the New Covenant. These included the birth, baptism, transfiguration, death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ, as well as the pouring out of the Holy Spirit upon the church, and the eventual destruction of the Old Testament temple. It was very fitting that our Lord rose from the dead on Sunday, the day that would become the gathering day of worship for all who believe in Him. One Sabbath was over, the one associated with the Law, and a new Sabbath had begun, now associated with the gospel and resurrection. It was early in the morning on this first day of the week when the women who had been witnesses of the death and burial of Christ, would now become witnesses of the fact of the risen King.
Matthew reports that an earthquake took place and that an angelic messenger from heaven had descended and had rolled back the stone, revealing the empty tomb that would be such a powerful point of evidence concerning the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Throughout this gospel of the King, Jesus has been proclaiming something He called “the kingdom of heaven.” Now someone from heaven was there to speak to these women. The angel brought a message of peace to them, and announced to them the fact of the resurrection. He was aware of what they had come to do that morning, and he invited them to examine the empty tomb. There is no good explanation for the empty tomb if one insists that there can be no resurrection from the dead. The angel sent them on their way, on the path that would quickly lead to the next piece of important evidence.
They had already seen the tomb, and had heard the angelic declaration, but now they saw and heard Him, and He was most definitely alive. They came there expecting only the dead body of the man that they loved, but now they saw Him, they heard His voice, they touched Him, and they knew that He knew them. He spoke to them of peace and gave instructions concerning a meeting that would take place in Galilee with those He calls His brothers.
The guards who had been sent to secure this grave were also there, and they were overwhelmed by what they saw. How much they actually witnessed that day is hard to ascertain. They were said to be like dead men, presumably in shock or passed out from the fear of the moment. Soon they had recovered enough to make their way back into the city, where they would have to deliver what would be seen as awful news, the news of an empty tomb, a tomb that they were supposed to have guarded with their lives. A meeting was held in order to come up with a plausible reason for the empty tomb. They would say that his disciples came by night and stole away His body while they were sleeping. It is amazing that men who claimed to be sleeping would also claim to know who had stolen the body. Despite the obvious problems with this story, there were apparently many people who were willing to believe it for some reason. Though the guards reported about the earthquake, the stone-moving angel, and the empty tomb, those who heard this report felt the freedom to come up with a lie rather than investigate the truth. What happened in the resurrection assured to us the victory of the cross, and the certainty of the promises of God. How sad it is when that is received as bad news, rather than good news.
Eventually the disciples did meet with Jesus in Galilee according to His instruction. The power of unbelief even among these men was displayed in the fact that while some worshiped Him, others among them doubted. This meeting was the beginning of the commissioning of the church by her risen King.
The time had now come for the message of that King and His kingdom to be taken to the entire world. The world and the powers of the world are not always receptive to the preaching of Jesus and the resurrection. Some have even taken it upon themselves to prohibit the spreading of this Word. For those who must press forward with the Lord’s command, it is helpful to remember that we serve One who has all authority in heaven and on earth. He is the King of a kingdom that cannot ultimately be stopped.
Our Lord has given to us the task of making disciples, those who would hear the Word of the cross and the resurrection, and would surrender to the promises of God in Christ. These would be marked with the sign of covenantal union with Jesus, and would be taught to be His followers. This would not be something merely for the city of Jerusalem or the region Judea. This message would go to all nations, and the Lord Himself promised His presence among the people of this Word. Just as He had filled the temple in Jerusalem in the time of the Law, His worshiping people called by His Name, the one Name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, would now have the presence of Jesus Christ with them throughout the entire gospel age. At the end of that age the Lord will bring the complete fulfillment of the kingdom that He had preached about in their hearing, the resurrection kingdom for which He shed His blood.
This is the King that we must follow now above all other kings, for His is the eternal kingdom that is above all the kingdoms of this world. We bow before Him who died the death that we deserved, and who rose from the dead as the firstfruits of the coming Resurrection Age.