Matthew 7:28-8:1

²⁸ And when Jesus finished these sayings, the crowds were astonished at his teaching, ²⁹ for he was teaching them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes. ¹ When he came down from the mountain, great crowds followed him.

Reactions to sermons can be fascinating things.  In Luke 4, the crowd responds to Jesus’ sermon in the synagogue by trying to throw him off a cliff.  In Acts 7, Stephen’s sermon leads to his immediate execution at the hands of an angry mob.  In Acts 20, we find that a young man named Eutychus responded to a long sermon by Paul in Troas by falling out of an upper story window to his death.  It is reported that Jonathan Edwards’ sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” caused people to weep, faint, and white-knuckle their pews.

Some reactions to sermons are humorous.  On January 11, 1629, Fray Hortensio Paravicino de Arteage preached a sermon that so irritated the playwright Calderon that he promptly wrote some extra lines for the character of the Fool in his play, “The Constant Prince,” in which the Fool speaks of a sermon he heard that was “a sermon full of nonsense” and names the preacher by name.[1]  Personally, I once preached a sermon in which a lady, at the back door of the church, said, as she was leaving, “Frankly, my dear…” leaving me to fill in the rest of the sermon.

Yes, reactions to sermons can be fascinating things.  That was certainly the case with the crowd’s reaction to the Sermon on the Mount.  The reaction reveals much about both Jesus and His hearers.

I. The Message of Christ is Astonishing (v.28)

The most obvious reaction was one of astonishment.

²⁸ And when Jesus finished these sayings, the crowds were astonished at his teaching.

Indeed, there is something astonishing about the first words of verse 28, though this particular facet is only evident to those of us who read the gospel and was not evident to Jesus’ first hearers.  “And when Jesus finished” is a formula that is used five times in the gospel of Matthew.  It is always used at the end of a major discourse from Jesus.  The five usages of this formula to these discourses can be found:

• at the conclusion of His Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 7:28,
• at the conclusion of His missionary sermon in Matthew 11:1,
• at the conclusion of His parables on the Kingdom in Matthew 13:53,
• at the conclusion of His “community discipline discourse” in Matthew 19:1,
• and at the conclusion of His prophetic message in Matthew 26:1.

Many New Testament scholars believe that the five-fold use of this formula is intentionally mirroring the use of the same formula that is used to describe the conclusion of Moses’ discourses in Deuteronomy.  Indeed, the structuring of Matthew around five major discourses may be alluding to the Pentateuch itself, the first five books of the Old Testament.  New Testament scholar Craig Evans believes this is deliberate and that this “provides conclusive evidence that [Matthew] has indeed arranged Jesus’ teaching into five major blocks of material, probably as part of a Moses typology.”[2]

So there is something astonishing about the way Matthew has framed the conclusion of the sermon.  However, more importantly, the sermon was immediately astonishing to those who first heard it.  A.T. Robertson said that the Greek word translated “astonished” here literally means “were struck out of themselves.”[3]

In a moment we will consider why they were astonished, but the reaction itself is what we first notice.  The message of Christ is inherently flabbergasting, amazing, astonishing.  It struck His first century hearers that way, and it strikes us that way as well.  In fact, whenever Jesus preached His message tended to drive people either to outrage or overwhelming joy.  Such is the incendiary message of the Son of God that nobody could be indifferent to it.

Of course, many of us have become indifferent to it because we have heard it so often.  Familiarity breeds contempt.  But this is a not a compliment to us.  It is a sad commentary on the human capacity to domesticate even the most earth-shaking truths that so many of us have lost our sense of astonishment at hearing the gospel of Christ.

Consider:  were it not for Christ Jesus, we would be heading for an eternity of separation from God in Hell.  When is the last time somebody asked you, “How are you today?” and you responded, “I’m fantastic.  I could be in Hell right now!”  Or when is the last time you were tempted to complain, but, instead, said, “As bad as this is, it’s better than Hell!”

I am not trying to joke.  On the contrary, there is a serious bottom line reality that should compel us to daily astonishment:  we were lost and bound for hell and now we are not…all because of Jesus.  It is intriguing to note how often those who beheld Jesus felt a sense of awe at Him.

Matthew 27:54

When the centurion and those who were with him, keeping watch over Jesus, saw the earthquake and what took place, they were filled with awe and said, “Truly this was the Son of God!”

Luke 5:26

And amazement seized them all, and they glorified God and were filled with awe, saying, “We have seen extraordinary things today.”

Acts 2:43

And awe came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles.

Hebrews 12:28

Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe

Yes, the people who beheld Jesus, and the early church in general, were bathed in awe, amazement, and astonishment.  How about you?

II. The Message of Christ is Uniquely Authoritative (v.29)

The primary reason for their amazement was the nature of Jesus’ teachings.

²⁹ for he was teaching them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes.

There was something different and unique about the way this Jesus taught.  To understand why, we need to understand the nature of the preaching that first century people were accustomed to hearing.  New Testament scholar Charles Quarles explains:

First-century Jewish teachers appealed to the authority of their rabbinic predecessors in their teaching.  The Jerusalem Talmud notes that Rabbi Hillel lectured on a controversial topic all day but that his followers did not accept his teaching until he cited the authority of his predecessors Shemaiah and Abtalion.[4]

R. Kent Hughes gives further helpful examples.

Their teachers, mostly Pharisees, were in bondage to quotation marks – they loved to quote authorities.  For example, R. Elieser affirmed in the Talmud:  “Nor have I ever in my life said a thing which I did not hear from my teachers.”  The same was said of R. Johanan B. Zakkai:  “He never in his life said anything which he had not heard from his teachers.”  Thus their teaching was a chain of references:  “R. Hillel says…but also R. Isaac says…”  It was secondhand theology – labyrinthine, petty, legalistic, joyless, boring, and weightless.[5]

This is significant, this reliance upon earlier tradition for the establishment of present day authority.  What it means is that none of the preachers that first century Jews would have listened to would have dared attempt to ground the authority of their message in their own persons.  The authority of their messages hinged on the past tense.  The authority of their message hinged on their ability to say, “You should believe this because I am speaking in agreement with the earlier rabbis.”  Never would they have said, “You should believe this because I am speaking.”

But that is precisely what Jesus did say.  He spoke consistently and confidently of His own word and how life and death for His hearers hinged on their response to His word as His word.  Meaning, Jesus’ authority resided in who He was, not who He quoted.  It is a powerful and jarring contrast.  It sets Jesus not only apart from the other teachers, but above them.  It sets Jesus on a wholly different plane.

Friends, Jesus’ voice was not one of opinion or persuasive conjecture.  His voice was one of inherent and unrivaled authority.  Christ and Christ alone can say, “Believe it because I said it.”  Even Christian preachers today dare not say that.  Our authority, such as it is, rests only in our faithful conveyance of His words, never in our own word.

Do you know that when you hear the word of Christ you hear the word of truth?  Do you know this?  Do you know that His word is trustworthy because it is His word?

The great tragedy of the modern age is the absence of any solid foundation of authority, any objective basis on which we can stand and say, “This is it.”  But Jesus claimed to be just such a foundation.  He did not come to allude but to reveal.  He did not come to quote but assert.  His word is the word that silences all others.

III. The Message of Christ Presents the Hearers With a Choice (8:1)

Furthermore, His word demands a choice.  It demands a choice about Jesus Himself.  We see this in the reaction of the crowd.

¹ When he came down from the mountain, great crowds followed him.

“Great crowds followed him,” though, no doubt, some of that crowd was just caught up in the moment.  That is always how it goes with crowds and Jesus.  Even so, the important thing to see is that the crowd understood that the words of Jesus demanded a choice and that choice centered around the person of Jesus.  Jesus’ original hearers understood that you could not separate the message of Christ from the authority of Christ that is itself rooted in the person of Christ, the divine Son of God.  Modern people often try to do this, claiming they like the message of Jesus but do not buy all that is claimed about the person of Jesus.

John Stott has passed on a couple of examples of this.  An adherent to Hinduism once said to Stanley Jones, “The Jesus of dogma I do not understand, but the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount and the cross I love and am drawn to.”  Another man, a Muslim Sufi teacher, similarly said that while he could not believe all that the New Testament said about Jesus, he was nonetheless “could not keep back the tears” when he read the Sermon on the Mount.[6]

It is understandable, of course, that people would be moved by the Sermon on the Mount, but the effort to embrace the Sermon without embracing the Sermon Giver is a futile effort.  The One who preached the Sermon on the Mount was Christ Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, the eternal Lamb of God.  This is important because the choice that the Sermon compels us to consider is a choice about whether or not to follow this Jesus.

Notice that we have no record of anybody hearing the Sermon on the Mount and saying, “Hmmm, neat sermon.  Little long though.”  No, they understood that they were being presented with something epoch-shaping, something world-altering, something life-changing.  They understood that this message was like no other precisely because this Messenger was like no other.  That is why their reaction to the Sermon was to marvel at the One who delivered it, Jesus.

And so, I think, we are faced with the same choice.  The Sermon on the Mount presents us with an alternative vision of reality that we need either to embrace or reject.  I am struck by the following reflection on the Sermon on the Mount from Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

I think I am right in saying that I would only achieve true inward clarity and sincerity by really starting work on the Sermon on the Mount.  Here alone lies the force that can blow all this stuff and nonsense sky-high, in a fireworks display that will leave nothing behind but one or two charred remains.  The restoration of the Church must surely depend on a new kind of monasticism, having nothing in common with the old but a life of uncompromising adherence to the Sermon on the Mount in imitation of Christ.  I believe the time has come to rally men together for this.[7]

Yes, the way forward is an “uncompromising adherence to the Sermon on the Mount in imitation of Christ.”  Not that these words have primacy over His other words, but rather that the words of this Sermon present us with the most compelling collection of the words of Jesus in all of Scripture.

We are faced, then, with the same choice with which His first hearers were faced:  the choice of embracing this incendiary message of revolution, or the choice to shrug these words off as just unapproachable ideals that, yes, we should be cognizant of, but, no, we should not truly seek to embrace with our lives.  And then, beyond the words, we are faced with the choice of accepting or rejecting the Jesus who said these words.

I ask you:  what do you intend to do with this Jesus?  What do you intend to do?

The Jesus who spoke the Sermon on the Mount is waiting for you right now, right here.

Will you come to Him?

Will you?

Matthew 7:24-27

²⁴ “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. ²⁵ And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. ²⁶ And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. ²⁷ And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.”

Imagine with me that you are a Jewish child in the first century.  You have grown up being taught the Old Testament.  Time and again you have been taught from God’s Word that obeying the words of Yahweh God will bring life and disobeying His words will bring death.

For instance, you have heard the words of Deuteronomy 28, which name blessings and cursings on the basis of whether or not you heed and obey the commands of the one true God.  Thus, your parents read this verse to you from that chapter:

24 The Lord will make the rain of your land powder. From heaven dust shall come down on you until you are destroyed.

If you do not obey the words of Yahweh God, He will send a destructive rain upon you.  Then, in verse 30, you hear these words:

^30b You shall build a house, but you shall not dwell in it.

These words stay with you:  if I obey the Lord God I will be blessed.  If I do not obey the Lord God, He will send a rain that will destroy me.  In particular, He will send a rain that will make the house I have built uninhabitable.  If I do not obey God, I will build a house that will be unable to withstand the coming rains.

And imagine with me that you hear this idea reinforced in popular preaching.  One rabbi tells a story in which a man who studies and obeys the Torah, the Word of God, is compared to “a builder who erected a foundation of stones and then built walls of bricks on the stone foundation so that floodwaters would not dissolve the bricks and cause the house to fall.”  On the other hand, this rabbi compares a man who hears God’s Word and does not obey it to “a man who built his home with mud bricks on the ground.  Even a small amount of water dissolved the bricks and caused the walls to collapse.”[1]

There’s that idea again:  the man who hears and obeys God builds a house that can withstand the rains.  The man who hears but does not obey God builds a house that is destined to collapse.

Then imagine with me that you, a young Jewish boy or girl who has been nurtured on the Word and Law of Almighty God, the God of Israel, the true God of all, hears another teacher teaching one day.  He is standing there, surrounded by people.  He is saying something truly amazing and truly terrifying.  He is talking about carrying a cross.  You creep closer so that you can hear.  This is what you hear:

²⁷ Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. ²⁸ For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? ²⁹ Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, ³⁰ saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish.’ (Luke 14)

What can this mean?  Two things disturb your young ears.  The first is the disturbing image of carrying a cross.  After all, a cross was an instrument of torture on which Roman soldiers nailed the worst of the worst criminals.  What could this teacher mean, “carry your cross if you want to be my disciple.”  But, secondly, that thing He said about a man building a tower…that sounded familiar to what you were taught in the Old Testament.  But this teacher says that if a man started building something without counting the cost of building it before beginning, he would not finish it and would look like a fool.  That sounded strangely like the idea you were taught that if you heard but did not obey God’s commands, the house of your life would collapse.

You go home chewing on these things.  Who was that strange teacher who spoke of crosses and building projects?  And what was this strange feeling you had stirring in your heart.  You try to put all of it out of your mind.  However, about a week later, as you are walking with your father, you stop.  There’s his voice again:  the voice of the teacher from the week before.  He is surrounded by a very large crowd.  His voice is raised and He is teaching again.  This time, His words stop you cold.

²⁴ “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. ²⁵ And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. ²⁶ And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. ²⁷ And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.”

What did He say?  What did this man say?  You have been taught your whole life that the rains will come and the house of your life will collapse if you do not obey the words of Almighty God, Yahweh, the covenant-keeping, delivering, saving, God of Israel.  But here is this man saying, “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock…”

How can this be?  Who is this man who would dare put His words on the level of the words of God Himself, who would use the popular image of building a house on a foundation and of the rains of judgment in relation to His own self?  Who would dare do such a thing?  Who could do such a thing?

Disturbed and stunned, you tug at your daddy’s sleeve.  “Papa,” you ask, “who is that man?  Who is the man who is teaching there.”

Your father looks down at you and then back at the teacher.  “They say His name is Jesus.”

I. Everybody is Building Their Lives on a Foundation (v.24,26)

Church, let us begin with a simple acknowledgment:  everybody is building their lives on a foundation.  This is assumed in the words of Jesus found in our text.

²⁴ “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock.

²⁶ And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand.

“A wise man who built his house…a foolish man who built his house.”  Both are building.  All are building.

Now, for any who suffer from a malady of excessive literalism, let me point out that the “house” mentioned here is really our very lives.  We are building our lives on something.  Everybody is building on something.  It may be a foundation of despair, or blind optimism, or entitlement, or self-reliance.  Or it may be a foundation of Jewish theology, Muslim theology, Buddhist philosophy, atheism, or political idealism.  It may be a foundation of materialism or asceticism.  It may be a foundation of hedonism, in which the pursuit of pleasure drives you.  It may be a foundation of fatalism in which you think that nothing you do in life really matters.  It may be a foundation of nihilistic despair, in which you feel that there is no real meaning or purpose in the universe.  It may be a foundation of materialism, in which the accumulation of goods is your all-consuming desire.  It may be a foundation of upward mobility, in which doing a little bit better for yourself each year is the goal.  It may be a foundation of meaning-through-relationship, in which having a romantic attachment defines you and your sense of self-worth.  It may be a foundation of hypochondriac fear, of political ambition, of drug addiction, or of health.

It may be any number of things, but it is something.  Knowing and naming our foundation is vitally important to the living of our lives.  We must know that on which we are building.  And we must not allow our own confessions to deceive us.  There are people who say that Christ is their foundation, but He really is not.  Jesus warned about this very thing in Matthew 7:21, which we considered last week.  We may deceive ourselves about the reality of our true foundation.  We may tell ourselves that it is Christ when it is not.

Let me ask you a question:  when is the last time you looked up under the foundation of your own life in order to evaluate the foundation on which you are building?  Do you know your foundation?  If we are honest, we all do.

II. The Strength of Every Foundation Will Be Tested By Storms (v.25,27)

Everybody builds on a foundation and every foundation will be tested.

²⁵ And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock.

²⁷ And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.”

That is a simple fact.  Jesus names different foundations but common circumstances:  rain, floods, wind.  We might interpret these storms in two ways.  In one sense they can refer to the trials of life, the trying times that befall all human beings.

It is fascinating how the trials of life reveal the integrity of our true foundations.  The storms of life will indeed come and, when they do, they will test the strength of our foundations.  So I ask you:  have you built your life on a foundation able to withstand the brutal hardships of life?  When you are hammered with cancer, will your house stand?  When you are hammered with deep, painful disappointment, will your house stand?  When you are hammered with abandonment, with betrayal, with violence, with a crime committed against you, will your house stand?  Will your house stand when he says, “I don’t love you anymore.”  Will your house stand when the doctor says, “You’ve got 3 weeks, maybe.”  Will your house stand when the voice on the other line says, “I’m in jail.”  Will your house stand when she says, “There’s something I have to tell you, and it’s going to hurt.”

Will your house stand when you hurt yourself, when you look in the mirror and realize that you have dropped the ball, that you have really messed up, that you have let everybody down?  Will it stand when you fall?  Will it stand when you are drunk on the euphoria of some great success, some great blessing?  Will your foundation withstand the storm of really good things?

Clarence Jordan observed thus:

            All around us we are hearing the crashing of our civilizations, as one tornado after another rips it apart.  Individuals, homes, communities, and nations are collapsing at an alarming rate.  If the experiences of the last fifty years prove anything, they prove that we moderns, in spite of our tremendous scientific achievement, haven’t found a decent way of life.  We have learned to build houses, but we don’t seem to understand the nature of foundations.  We are skillful, but we aren’t wise.[2]

These storms may indeed refer to the storms of life.  But what of the ultimate test, the coming storm of judgment?  When you stand before God, will your house stand?  Have you built on a foundation that is so sure that that it passes that test?  “What can that mean,” you ask?  “What is the foundation that can stand even under the eye of a perfect and holy God?”

III. Jesus is the Only Solid Foundation for Life (v.24)

There is one, brothers and sister.  There is one foundation that can withstand even that…and it can withstand it because it, this foundation I am speaking of, was given as a gift from God.  The foundation I am speaking of is Christ.  Here is what Jesus says in verse 24:

²⁴ “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock.

There is the foundation:  “who hears these words of mine and does them.”  Hearing, accepting, and doing the words of Jesus is the foundation.  Jesus Christ is the only solid foundation for life. That foundation is laid not by mere observation of Jesus.  I will remind you of the chilling words of James in James 2.

¹⁸ But someone will say, “You have faith and I have works.” Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works. ¹⁹ You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder! ²⁰ Do you want to be shown, you foolish person, that faith apart from works is useless?

Satan observes the work of Jesus.  Satan is also utterly orthodox in his theology.  Meaning, Satan knows that Jesus is the second person of the Trinity, that He was virgin-born, that He was God incarnate, that He laid down His life for His sheep on the cross of Calvary, that he rose from the dead, that He ascended on high, that He is seated at the right hand of the Father, that He intercedes for the saints, that He is coming again one day, and that His rule will be eternal.

Satan knows all of that.  He knows the Bible front and back.  He knows the truth.  He has seen it.  He has observed it.  He knows it inside and out.  But he has not trusted in it and he does not walk in it.  The Devil’s knowledge is just that:  knowledge.  He knows but he does not follow.  He observes but he does not walk in the ways of the Lord.

No, Jesus said that the true foundation is hearing and doing His words.  There it is.  That is what the Bible calls faith:  trust and obedience.  To hear the words of Jesus and to do them is the one, true foundation on which our lives can be built.  What this means is that any attempt to live life outside of a walk with Jesus Christ is doomed for failure, for only Christ gives us the a foundation sure enough and strong enough to handle what life throws at us.

Perhaps you have heard of William Golding’s novel, The Spire.  It is the story of a man, Dean Jocelin, who is obsessed with building a 404-foot spire on the cathedral of which he is Dean.  He is warned time and again that the foundation of the cathedral is insufficient to handle the extra weight of so high a spire.  Regardless, Jocelin persists.  In the end, he is left with broken relationships, the destruction of worship within the cathedral, and a spire that sinks and settles crooked on the cathedral.  He becomes the laughingstock of the entire area because he tried to build big on an insufficient foundation.

This is what Jesus is warning us about in the parable:  trying to build on an insufficient foundation.

Is your life crooked?  What is your foundation?

Is your life skewed?  What is your foundation?

Has your life not turned out as you thought it would?  What is your foundation?

Church, hear me:  there is only one foundation worthy of building a life upon, and His name is Jesus.

Matthew 7:21-23

²¹ “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. ²² On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ ²³ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’

A fascinating article appeared in The Wall Street Journal in August of last year by Sue Shellenbarger entitled, “The Case for Lying to Yourself.”  The article concerned recent psychological studies on the issue of self-deception or how human beings lie to and deceive themselves.  The article was saying that most human beings, to some capacity, lie to themselves and that, in the opinion of some psychologists, this can be a good thing if it causes us to try to live up to the lie we believe about ourselves.  I would disagree with that second part, but the first part seems clear enough:  most human beings do indeed lie to themselves.  And I suspect that, when we do lie to ourselves, we usually lie in the positive, thinking more of ourselves than we should.  Of course, the opposite is, at times, true:  there are people who truly hate themselves.  But, on the main, I suspect the human ego tends more towards glossing our own faults than playing them up.  The studies cited in the article would seem to confirm that.  For instance:

Many people have a way of “fooling their inner eye” to believe they are more successful or attractive than they really are, Dr. Trivers says. When people are asked to choose the most accurate photo of themselves from an array of images that are either accurate, or altered to make them look up to 50% more or less attractive, most choose the photo that looks 20% better than reality, research shows.

One more example:

For some people, self-deception becomes a habit, spinning out of control and providing a basis for more lies. In research co-written by Dr. Norton and published last year in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, college students who were given an answer key to an intelligence test, allowing them to cheat, scored higher than a control group. They later predicted, however, that they also would score higher on a second test without being allowed to cheat. They were “deceiving themselves into believing their strong performance was a reflection of their ability,” the study says.

Giving them praise, a certificate of recognition, made the self-deception even worse: The students inflated their predicted future scores even more.[1]

Lying to ourselves comes with the Fall.  Eve had to be willing to tell herself the serpent’s lie, that she would not die if she ate the forbidden fruit.  Adam had to tell himself the same thing.  And every human being since then has told themselves the same lie.

All of us want to downplay the unpleasant reality of the human condition, convincing ourselves that we are not, in fact, lost, in need of salvation.  This reality even leads some people to tell themselves that they are saved when in fact they are not.  Jesus put it like this:

²¹ “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. ²² On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ ²³ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’

R. Ken Hughes writes, “Sadly, it is really quite easy to be accorded the status of an evangelical Christian without being born-again.”  He then astutely gives three ways that a person can do this, can convince himself or herself and others that he or she is a believer when he or she really is not a believer at all.

• “First, work on your vocabulary.”  That is, learn the Christian buzzwords of the church of which you are a part so that people will be impressed.
• “Second, emulate certain social conventions.”  That is, learn the cultural mores of the church of which you are a part so that people will think you are good.
• “Third, have the right heritage.”[2]  That is, try to be born to Christian parents, preferably famous and devout ones, so you can convince yourself and others that you must be a Christian as well.

Yes, it is actually easier than we might think to delude ourselves about the nature of our walk with Jesus.  Jim Elliff writes that “the unconverted church member may well be the largest obstacle to evangelism in our day.”[3]

Before we consider two facts about this, let me say that I suspect there are two equal and opposite extremes when it comes to being secure in your salvation.  The one extreme is never being secure, never resting in the promises of Christ, never simply accepting that the God who says He will save us in Christ did, in fact, do so when we came to Christ in repentance and faith.

The other extreme is a cheap and shallow naivete about salvation, simply assuming you are right with Christ without any reflection on whether or not you have ever truly embraced the cross.  I am talking about the kind of cheap easy-believism that can make no sense of Paul’s words in Philippians 2.

¹² Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, ¹³ for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.

Let me be abundantly clear:  I believe completely in the security of the believer.  When Christ saves you, He will never let you go.  But the salvation in which we are secure is valuable enough to be sure about.  That is what I would like for us to consider today.

I. Not Every Person Who Thinks He or She is Saved is, in Fact, Saved.

Let us start with the basic premise behind the words of Jesus in our text:  not every person who thinks he or she is saved is, in fact, saved.  Jesus says there will be people who stand before Him who will be utterly shocked to be informed that Christ does not know them.

²¹ “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. ²² On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ ²³ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’

Notice that these people had a verbal confession:  “Lord, Lord!”  Notice that they had powerful ministries:  “did we not prophesy in your name.”  Notice that they had a kind of power:  “and cast our demons in your name.”  Notice that their resumes contained truly awesome accounts of their accomplishments:  “and do many mighty works in your name.”

You might say, “How can this be?  How can a person seemingly accomplish so much in the name of Christ but not truly know Christ?”  It can be because Jesus is, for these people, only a name, indeed, only a word.  They do not have a relationship with Jesus.  They do not know Him.  Most importantly, He does not know them.

They have deceived themselves, deluded themselves.  They have told themselves they are Christians, and they have adoring fans who tell them the same.  But being applauded for being a disciple of Jesus is not the same thing as actually being a disciple of Jesus.

That great preacher of yesteryear, D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, lists “the common causes of self-deception” followed by evidences that we might have deceived our own selves on this importat matter.  First, some common causes of self-deception.

• A false doctrine of assurance based on mere words.
• A refusal to examine oneself.
• The danger of “living on one’s activities.”
• “The tendency to balance our lives by putting up one thing against another.”  (Here, Lloyd-Jones is talking about the human tendency to downplay our failures to follow Christ and what those failures may reveal about the true condition of our hearts by counterbalancing them with our supposed successes.  That is, he is referring to the temptation to shield ourselves from the truth by telling ourselves that, after all, we cannot be that bad.)
• “Our failure to realize that the one thing that matters is our relationship to Christ.”

Next, let us consider Lloyd-Jones’ evidences of self-deception.  He can we know that we might be deceived?

• “An undue interest in phenomenon.”  (Here we may think of Christians who are particularly enamored with the more unusual gifts, speaking in tongues, etc.)
• “An undue interest in organizations, denominations, particular churches, or some movement or fellowship.”
• An undue interest “in the social and general rather than in the personal aspects of Christianity.”
• An undue interest in “apologetics, or the definition and defence of the faith, instead of in a true relationship to Jesus Christ.” (Many people love theology more than they love Jesus.)
• Having “a purely academic and theoretical interest in theology.”
• An “over interest in prophetic teaching.”
• A fixation on the Bible to the neglect of Jesus.
• A fixation on sermons to the neglect of Jesus.
• “Playing grace against law and thereby being interested only in grace.”[4]

I believe this is very helpful and profoundly true.  Many people are so enamored with this or that aspect of Christianity, aspects that are very good in and of themselves (i.e., scripture, gifts, doctrine, theology, the church, the ordinances, etc.), that they miss Christ.

Let us understand a chilling truth:  it is possible to love the Bible without loving Jesus.  It is possible to love the church without loving Jesus.  It is possible to love doctrine without loving Jesus.  It is possible to love missions without loving Jesus.  It is possible to love sermons without loving Jesus.  It is possible to love preaching sermons without loving Jesus.  It is possible to love singing hymns without loving Jesus.

Yes, it is possible to love the great things of the faith without loving the greatest.

Friends, ask yourselves, “Do I love Jesus?  Do I know Jesus?  Have I embraced Jesus?”

II.  The Evidence of Salvation is Sincere Faith Resulting in True Works.

What, then, is the evidence of genuine salvation?  Hear our text again.

²¹ “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.

The evidence of salvation is sincere faith resulting in true works.  Perhaps this makes you uncomfortable.  Perhaps you think, “I thought we are saved by grace through faith and that not of works?  What can this mean, ‘the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven’ ‘will enter the kingdom of heaven’?”

To this I would reply, yes, we are in fact saved by grace through faith, but true, saving faith is faith that opens the heart to Jesus, who comes in, takes up residence, and then works through us.  Saving faith is faith that works.  James put it like this in James 2:

¹⁴ What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? ¹⁵ If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, ¹⁶ and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? ¹⁷ So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.

¹⁸ But someone will say, “You have faith and I have works.” Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works.

Do you see?  We receive God’s unmerited favor through faith.  We do not earn our salvation.  But true faith is laboring faith, working faith.  James Montgomery Boice once spoke of faith and works as the two sets of oars on the ship of a person’s life.  You cannot truly claim to have one if you do not have the other.  Then he offered this helpful illustration.

            In one of the great battles that took place between the Greeks and the Persians just prior to the Greek Golden Age, there was an incident that perfectly illustrates this principle.  The Persian fleet had sailed from the Bosporus out along the Macedonian coast and then down the edge of Greece to Attica.  It finally met the Greek ships in the bay of Salamis just off Athens.  The Greek ships were lighter and quicker; the Persian ships were cumbersome.  So, in the battle that followed, the Greeks made short work of the Persians.  In on particular encounter a Greek ship managed to sail close to a large Persian vessel and brush by its side.  Because it had done this quickly, the Persian oarsmen did not have time to draw their oars in, although the Greeks did.  The result was that the Greek ship broke off all of the oars on that side of the Persian vessel.  Few on the Persian ship realized what had happened, and because the oarsmen on the other side continue rowing, the ship swing around in a circle leaving a fresh set of oars visible to the Greek captain.  The Greeks then reversed their ship, trimmed off the other set of oars, and sank the enemy.

            It must have been a humorous sight, the great ship going around in circles.  But it is an illustration of what happens when there is faith without works or works without faith.  Oh, we can generate a big storm with one oar.  We can get attention.  But we will just be going around in circles spiritually.  Real Christianity is a personal relationship with Jesus Christ through faith resulting in a new life that goes forward and that is increasingly productive in good works.[5]

Do you feel that you are going in circles?  Do you feel that you never progress in Christ?  It could be many things.  It could be that you are simply walking through a valley, that God is teaching you something as you walk a hard road.  It could be this.  But if you find that your life never bears fruit for Christ, that you are not transformed, let me simply ask you this:  have you truly trusted in Christ?  Have you truly accepted Him?  Do you know that you know Him.

Brothers, sisters, it is worth being sure about, and we can be sure about it.  Give your life to Christ.  Trust in Christ.  Run to Christ.

He is waiting with open arms.

Matthew 7:15-20

¹⁵ “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. ¹⁶ You will recognize them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? ¹⁷ So, every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit. ¹⁸ A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit. ¹⁹ Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. ²⁰ Thus you will recognize them by their fruits.

Let me introduce you to Rev. David Hart.

Rev. Hart is a priest in the Church of England.  He is also a convert to Hinduism.

Let me repeat:  he is a priest in the church of England and also a convert to Hinduism.

In 2006, The Times, of London, published a picture of Hart offering puja to the Hindu god Ganesha in front of his house in Thiruvananthapuram, India.  As you can imagine, this sparked quite a controversy.  When asked how a Christian priest could convert to Hinduism and still claim to be a Christian, Hart shrugged off any notion that this was a problem.  Here is what he said.

Becoming a Hindu has not brought about any change in my spiritual status. The act has not shaken my Christian beliefs by even one per cent…Asking me to express my preference for any particular faith is like asking me to choose between an ice-cream and a chocolate. Both have their own distinct taste.[1]

Let me also introduce you to Pastor Thorkild Grosboll.

He pastored a church in Tarbaek, Denmark, until his retirement a few years ago.  Some years before his retirement, Gosboll said this:  “I do not believe in a physical God, in the afterlife, in the resurrection, in the Virgin Mary.”  He continued:  “I believe that Jesus was a nice guy who figured out what man wanted. He embodied what he believed was needed to upgrade the human being.”  Later, he said this:  “God belongs in the past. He is actually so old fashioned that I am baffled by modern people believing in his existence. I am thoroughly fed up with empty words about miracles and eternal life.”

His Bishop, Lise-Lotte Rebel, removed him from his post after all of this became clear.  She removed him, however, not so much because what he said was heresy that undermined the gospel, but because, as a Danish Lutheran, he is paid by the state and has a responsibility not to confuse people.  Seriously.  That was her objection.

Anyway, Pastor Grosboll objected to her objection.  Most tellingly, so did his congregation.  They were incensed that their atheist pastor would be the subject of discipline.  They loved him and wanted him left alone.  Thus, they turned out in shows of public support for him.  All of this eventually went to the courts, who….wait for it…removed Bishop Rebel from her oversight of the pastor.  There were some further wranglings over Grosboll, but, in the end, he was allowed to keep his church and pulpit so long as he…wait for this too…no longer shared his opinions with the press.  He retired in February of 2008.[2]

It is a tragic but certain fact that the bride of Christ has had to deal with false teachers in her midst for her entire existence.  Jesus warned of precisely this in our text this morning.

¹⁵ “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. ¹⁶ You will recognize them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? ¹⁷ So, every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit. ¹⁸ A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit. ¹⁹ Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. ²⁰ Thus you will recognize them by their fruits.

Let us listen closely to our King and consider well His warning about the threat of false teachers in the church.

I. The Devil Sends False Prophets to Confuse and Derail Followers of Jesus (v.15a)

The first point is obvious in the words of Jesus:  the devil sends false prophets to confuse and derail followers of Jesus.  When Jesus says, “Beware of false prophets,” He is assuming their reality and their danger.  Disciples of Jesus will have to contend with false teachers teaching false doctrines that undermine the gospel of Jesus.  The teachers are dangerous, their teachings are dangerous and we must beware of them and guard against them.

As we consider false prophets, let us look at five biblical truths concerning them.

First of all, there are a lot of false prophets.  There always have been and there always will be.  In Matthew 24:11 Jesus said, “And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray.”

Second, false prophets, in general, are impressive people.  The reason they have large followings is because they are charismatic figures, attractive figures, compelling figures.  In Matthew 24:24, Jesus said, “For false christs and false prophets will arise and perform great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect.”

Notice that these people have a kind of power.  They have seemingly impressive results.  They get big numbers and can dazzle a crowd.  They are not boring.  They are not dull.  They are flashy, provocative, humorous, suave, and effective.

Third, they have large followings.  In Luke 6:26, Jesus said, “Woe to you, when all people speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false prophets.”  Do you see?  “All people,” Jesus said, “speak well” of false prophets.

You can see this today in ostensibly Christian publishing.  Sometimes books are popular because they seem to be blessed by God.  They are God-honoring and biblically faithful.  But just because a book is popular does not mean that is the case.  In fact, I have seen in my lifetime numerous titles that were bestsellers among Christians that had terrible theology, that were not biblically faithful, and that presented false teachings.  So too with popular preachers.  Sometimes preachers are popular because they are saying what people want to hear.  A large following does not mean that a teacher is a good teacher.  It may mean that he is a false prophet.

Fourth, false prophets offer an appealing message, but it is inevitably one that covers up the truth.  In Ezekiel 22, false prophets are condemned with these words:

²⁸ And her prophets have smeared whitewash for them, seeing false visions and divining lies for them, saying, ‘Thus says the Lord God,’ when the Lord has not spoken.

That is a provocative and compelling phrase:  “they have smeared whitewash for them.”  That means that these false prophets cover up the truth, but they cover it up with an attractive veneer.  What they say sounds so very true, so very wise, so very right.  However, what they say is not the truth, but a lie.

Fifth, false prophets are destined for destruction and will receive the wrath of God.  In Ezekiel 13, the Lord announces the coming judgment of these false teachers.

⁸ Therefore thus says the Lord God: “Because you have uttered falsehood and seen lying visions, therefore behold, I am against you, declares the Lord God. ⁹ My hand will be against the prophets who see false visions and who give lying divinations. They shall not be in the council of my people, nor be enrolled in the register of the house of Israel, nor shall they enter the land of Israel. And you shall know that I am the Lord God.

“I am against you…My hand will be against the prophets…They shall not be in the council of my people, nor be enrolled in the register of the house of Israel, nor shall they enter the land of Israel.”  It is a terrible thing to pervert the truth of the living God.  Paul put it like this in Galatians 1:

⁶ I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel— ⁷ not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. ⁸ But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed. ⁹ As we have said before, so now I say again: If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed.

Church:  cursed be anybody who would seek to take the pure gospel of Jesus and distort it, perverting it with false teachings and strange doctrines.  Why?  Because the gospel is life.  The gospel is salvation.  The gospel points us to the very heart of God.  We dare not pervert it!

When, in the 19^th century, Soren Keirkegaard wrote his series of letters to the Danish church chastising the church for her abandonment of the way of Jesus, he said this about false teachers who had come in among God’s people:

Imagine that the people are assembled in a church in Christendom, and Christ suddenly enters the assembly.  What dost thou think He would do?

            He would turn upon the teachers (for the congregation He would judge as He did of yore, that they were led astray), He would turn upon them who “walk in long robes,” tradesmen, jugglers, who have made God’s house, if not a den of robbers, at least a shop, a peddler’s stall, and would say, “Ye hypocrites, ye serpents, ye generation of vipers”; and likely as of yore He would make a whip of small cords and drive them out of the temple.[3]

Christ will indeed deal with false teachers in the midst of the body of Christ!

II. These False Prophets Never Operate Openly, but are Almost Always Disguised as Friends and Fellow Disciples of Jesus (v.15b)

Perhaps the most pernicious attribute of false prophets is their penchant for disguising their true intentions.  False prophets never operate openly, but are almost always disguised as friends and fellow disciples of Jesus.  To communicate this fact, Jesus employed a startling image in our text.

¹⁵ “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves.

Imagine a wolf that dresses as a sheep so that he might sneak into the flock and kill at will.  It is a horrifying image, for it suggests that these false teachers are hard to spot but that the failure to spot them will result in devastation.  They never declare themselves outright.  They come dressed as one of God’s people.  Everything they say sounds pretty good.  There is nothing obvious about them that would reveal their pernicious intentions.

Turning to Kierkegaard again, he said this about the way that Christianity was being perverted in Denmark:

The apostasy from Christianity will not come about openly by everybody renouncing Christianity; no, but slyly, cunningly, knavishly, by everybody assuming the name of being Christian, thinking that in this way all were most securely secured against…Christianity, the Christianity of the New Testament, which people are afraid of, and therefore industrial priests have invented under the name of Christianity a seetmeat which has a delicious taste, for which men hand out their money with delight.[4]

That is true enough, and a wise warning, but let me go one step further.  I am convinced that the majority of false teachers honestly do not think that they are false teachers at all.  In other words, they themselves need to be shown this fact.  The definition of the word “Christian” has become so fluid in our day that it is now possible to hold to utterly heretical ideas and not believe that your ideas are heretical at all.  In fact, I honestly suspect that many heretics who are teaching false doctrines truly believe they are honoring God and helping the church.

I am thinking here of a man like Bishop John Shelby Spong, the retired bishop of the Episcopal Church who has made quite a nice living off of skewering the cardinal, biblical doctrines of Christianity.  A few years ago, Spong publically issued his twelve theses for a new reformation in the church.  Here they are:

1. Theism, as a way of defining God, is dead. So most theological God-talk is today meaningless. A new way to speak of God must be found.

2. Since God can no longer be conceived in theistic terms, it becomes nonsensical to seek to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the theistic deity. So the Christology of the ages is bankrupt.

3. The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense.

4. The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ’s divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.

5. The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity.

6. The view of the cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God and must be dismissed.

7. Resurrection is an action of God. Jesus was raised into the meaning of God. It therefore cannot be a physical resuscitation occurring inside human history.

8. The story of the Ascension assumed a three-tiered universe and is therefore not capable of being translated into the concepts of a post-Copernican space age.

9. There is no external, objective, revealed standard writ in scripture or on tablets of stone that will govern our ethical behavior for all time.

10. Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.

11. The hope for life after death must be separated forever from the behavior control mentality of reward and punishment. The Church must abandon, therefore, its reliance on guilt as a motivator of behavior.

12. All human beings bear God’s image and must be respected for what each person is. Therefore, no external description of one’s being, whether based on race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, can properly be used as the basis for either rejection or discrimination.[5]

Now, it is clear that these twelve theses, by and large, present a basically atheistic view of reality, though I do not think Spong thinks of himself as an atheist.  Regardless, the overall thrust of these theses wars against biblical Christianity.  That is tragic, but, unfortunately, it is not surprising given Spong’s consistent efforts to undermine the faith.  But what I want to make most clear is this:  these theses are coming from a man who calls himself a Christian, sincerely believes he is a Christian, and sincerely believes that these theses will help the church.  In his mind, these theses do not constitute false teachings.  They constitute good teachings.  And the point is that he really does believe that these ideas are good.

He is a wolf in sheep’s clothing who really believes he is a sheep.  When he eats some of the sheep, he honestly believes he is helping the fold.

Please understand this point:  it may just be that the first person who needs to be convinced of false teaching is the one teaching it!

III. However, a Close Inspection of Fruit Will Always Reveal the Source of Any Prophet’s Message (v.16-20)

How then do we know when a person is a false prophet, a false teacher?  Jesus says that we can tell by the kind of fruit the prophet produces.

¹⁶ You will recognize them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? ¹⁷ So, every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit. ¹⁸ A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit. ¹⁹ Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. ²⁰ Thus you will recognize them by their fruits.

Their “fruit” means two things:  their lives and their teachings.  It is oftentimes the case that false teachers are advancing their teachings for some kind of personal gain.  In time, the true desires of the false teachers, often sensual in nature, will become clear.  Oftentimes this bad fruit is related to either money or physical pleasures.  Jude drew a direct connection between false teachers and sensuality.

³ Beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints. ⁴ For certain people have crept in unnoticed who long ago were designated for this condemnation, ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into sensuality and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ.

Yes, their bad fruit may be ignoble and impure desires, for wealth or pleasure or fame or control.  But fruit, biblically, also refers to teaching.  For instance, in Matthew 12, John the Baptist said this:

³³ “Either make the tree good and its fruit good, or make the tree bad and its fruit bad, for the tree is known by its fruit. ³⁴ You brood of vipers! How can you speak good, when you are evil? For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. ³⁵ The good person out of his good treasure brings forth good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure brings forth evil. ³⁶ I tell you, on the day of judgment people will give account for every careless word they speak, ³⁷ for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.”

Do you see?  The bad fruit of the brood of vipers condemned by John the Baptist was their “careless word[s],” words that would ultimately condemned them.  Friends, beware the words of false teachers.  What words constitute false teaching?  John tells us in 1 John 4.

¹ Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world. ² By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, ³ and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already.

When a teacher fails to exalt Jesus, to honor Christ as God in flesh, to draw men and women to Jesus, and to put the spotlight on Jesus, he or she is a false teacher.  More than that, he or she is channeling the spirit of the antichrist.  False teachers are doing the work of the devil.

Our church has committed itself to four canons: (1) An authentic family (2) around the whole gospel (3) for the glory of God (4) and the reaching of the nations.  That second canon is critical:  around the whole gospel.  That is our doctrinal canon, our canon of belief.  We are bound to the gospel of the living Christ.  We dare not, indeed we cannot abandon the gospel.  It is a rock-solid commitment of this church that this pulpit should only and ever promote the gospel of Christ.  It is a rock-solid commitment of this church that our Sunday School classes promote the gospel and reject anything that would pull us away from it.  Furthermore, it is a conviction of this church that whatever is done or said in this place must be in harmony with the gospel of Christ.

I believe in my heart of hearts that Satan does not want Central Baptist Church to disappear.  Rather, he wants us to remain where we are but abandon Christ while we are here.  He gets the victory if people continue to gather but gather around things other than Christ.  If Satan can sow false teachings, he can mock the one, true, living God.

Oh God!  Keep us close to the cross.  Keep us close to our King.  Keep us close to the gospel.  May we never abandon the truth for a lie.

Genesis 1:26-28

²⁶ Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” ²⁷ So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. ²⁸ And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

When I was in high school, my mom took a group of Latin students on a tour of some cities in Italy.  It was an amazing trip.  My favorite part, hands down, was getting to see Michelangelo’s statue of David in the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence.  What an amazing piece of work!  Michaelangelo sculpted it from 1501 to 1504.  It stands seventeen feet high and, truly, must be seen to be believed.

You approach the statue by walking down a long corridor at the end of which is a dome under which the statue stands.  It amazed me when I saw it.  It amazes me still.  However, when I first saw it, what I was first struck by was not the statue itself but the other Michelangelo pieces lining the corridor on either side as you approach it.  On either side of the corridor are large pieces of marble out of which partially revealed figures appear to be straining to break free.  Here you see a leg, there an arm, there a torso and head.

They are still contained in the marble, but are partially freed from it.  Michelangelo was the liberator, as he saw it, of the figures who were already within the marble but who needed to be freed by a master sculptor.  He saw his job as removing the bonds of the marble around the figures so that they could exist unhindered.

Some see these as unfinished works of art.  Others suggest that Michelangelo knew exactly what he was doing in leaving them unfinished, that he was making a statement about the bondage of man and man’s struggle to be free, to exist.  Regardless, there can be no doubt that the contrast between Michelangelo’s “Prisoners” and Michelangelo’s David makes an amazing impact on the viewer.  At least it did on this viewer.

I think often of the haunting Prisoners in that hallway.  They strain against the marble that contains them to your left and your right as you walk down the corridor.  All the while, there stands the finished work, David, at the end.  It is almost as if the Prisoners are saying, “We could be more.  We might even be like David.  He too was once imprisoned in marble.  But we are still bound here, unfinished and unformed, slaves to the elements that entrap us.”

When thinking about the image of God, I thought about those statues and I thought about David.  There is a theological point in this.  We are like Michelangelo’s Prisoners:  we exist, we have potential, we have dignity, we have worth.  In part, that dignity and worth can still be seen.  We bear the image of a Master Sculptor.  We can see what we should be.  But we are bound by sin, but the elements of the world that enslave and entrap us.  We strain to be free.  And there is Jesus, the free man, the true man, man unbound by the Fall…a man, but also God.  We see Him in His perfection.  We bear the image of the Father who sent Him.  Yet we struggle here.  We bear the image, but it is oftentimes concealed by the elements to which we are enslaved.  We are the prisoners…but Christ came to make us free!

Let us tonight consider what it means to bear the image of God and how Christ comes to set us free.

I. Man Bears the Image of God (v.26a,27)

We begin with the basic biblical assertion that we do, in fact, bear the image of God.  We find it in Genesis 1.

^26a Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness…²⁷ So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

What can this mean?  Let us first offer two things that it does not mean.

The “image of God” does not refer to physical likeness.  In John 4:24, Jesus said, “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”  God is non-corporeal.  He does not have flesh.  He has been revealed as “Father” in scripture.  We should defend the masculine pronoun.  However, He is not a physical man.  He is God!  Furthermore, let us note that both men and women were created in the image of God.  Thus, if “image” is taken to mean “physical likeness,” then we have some very big problems indeed!

Furthermore, the “image of God” does not refer to our bearing the image of God in the exact way that Jesus bore the image of God, thereby making us equal with Jesus.  There is a sense in which Christ is called “the image of God” in a way that we are not.  We find this in 2 Corinthians 4:4.

⁴ In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.

Christ is the image of God in terms of equality with God.  The usage of the term in that context is quite distinct from how it is used of us.  We bear qualities that reflect God’s glory and creative power, but we ever remain the creature and God the Creator.  The Son bears the image of God in perfect unity and equality.  He is God.

What the image of God does refer to are those qualities stamped on humanity that reflect the glory of God and that are not and cannot be shared by animal life.  We see the image of God in humanity’s capacity for intelligence, abstract thought, communication, creative ability, selfless love, imagination, and wisdom.  Man is not divine, and it is wrong to suggest that he is, but he does indeed bear the mark of his divine Creator.

The fundamental implication of the image of God is that this image grants dignity, value, and worth to man.  It is important to remember that all human beings, all men and women, bear this image.  That image has been covered and clouded by the Fall, but it is still there and the evidence of it can still be seen.  In Genesis 9, the Lord said this in His covenant with Noah:

⁶ Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed,
for God made man in his own image.

The significance of that verse rests in the fact that it is said (a) of all human beings and (b) of fallen human beings.  There are no worthless human beings.  Man has dignity.  The image of God rests on all of humanity.  That image is not a saving image.  Fallen man bearing the marred image needs redemption.  But it means that even fallen, unredeemed man bears evidence that he was created by a mighty God.

Thus, all life is sacred.  All life has value.  Our value is not dependent upon our productivity or our social status.  Our value does not rest in what we own.  Our value is not a matter of race or nationality or gender.  Our value rests in this simple fact:  that man is unique and bears the image of God Himself.

There is a scene in William Faulkner’s novel, The Hamlet, in which some men sitting on a front porch observe a severely mentally disabled man shuffling down the street, dragging a wooden block in the dust behind him.  As they watch him pass, one of the men, Ratliff, comments on the disabled man with thinly disguised contempt and has a telling and tragic conversation with his friend, Bookwright.

Ratliff watched the creature as it went on – the thick thighs about to burst from the overalls, the mowing head turned backward over its shoulder, watching the dragging block.

“And yet they tell us we was all made in His image,” Ratliff said.

“From some of the things I see here and there, maybe he was,” Bookwright said.

“I don’t know as I would believe that, even if I knowed it was true,” Ratliff said.[1]

Yes it is true:  all mankind bears the image of God.  All mankind.  No man or woman has more value in the eyes of God than any other man or woman.  We are tempted to forget this fact when we demonize others or try to reduce their worth or see only their flaws and sins.  Joseph Ratzinger put it like this.

Indeed, it is hardly the case that we always and immediately see in the other the “noble form,” the image of God that is inscribed in him.  What first meets the eye is only the image of Adam, the image of man, who, though not totally corrupt, is nonetheless fallen.  We see the crust of dust and filth that has overlaid the image.  Thus, we all stand in need of the true sculptor who removes what distorts the image; we are in need of forgiveness, which is the heart of all true reform.[2]

We scoff at Michelangelo’s Prisoners because they do not yet look like David.  We scoff at the problems of others, dehumanizing them in the process, denying the image of God within them.  This is a great act of evil.  This is a great sin.  Everybody has value.  Everybody has worth.  Instead, we should see everybody as valuable and should pray that all people put themselves back in the hands of the Sculptor who can bring us back into being the masterpiece we were intended to be.

II. That Image Distinguishes Man from Animal Life (v.26,28)

Another clear implication of the image of God is that it distinguishes man from animal life.  This is clear in our text’s teaching that man has dominion over animal life.

²⁶ Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”…²⁸ And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

Man’s dominion over animal life is not a boundless license allowing man to do whatever he wants.  For example, hunting animals for food would seem appropriate.  Senselessly butchering animals just to watch them die, however, is a sign of the Fall in the heart of man.  Man has dominion, but man still answers to God.

The value of human life over animal life needs to be stressed in our post-Darwinian culture.  In our culture, we are consistently taught that we are simply animals.  We are taught that we might be a higher form of animal life, to be sure, but we remain animals nonetheless.  This notion has the twin results of devaluing man and overvaluing animals.  Animals have been almost humanized in our culture and humans have been animalized.  We see this in a thousand different ways in popular culture and in the higher arts as well.

The attempt to reduce man to an animal stands in direct conflict with a truly biblical anthropology.  The Bible teaches that man is unique and valuable.  He must not be reduced to an animal.  Furthermore, he must not be reduced to anything less than man who bears the image of Almighty God.  Throughout human history there have been numerous attempts to reduce the dignity of man.

Dr. James Leo Garrett, Jr., the Emeritus Professor of Theology at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, TX, and my theology professor in seminary, wrote this in his Systematic Theology:

Once human beings are seen as being “in the image of God and after his likeness,” human beings find that the various reductionist views of human life are less convincing or less satisfying.  These include (1) Marxism’s view of man as an economic animal with class struggle, not God or man, as the basis for ethics; (2) Freud’s view of humans as primarily and essentially the product of sexual drives and as dominated by aberrant sexual activity; (3) totalitarianism’s view of human beings as the political tools of the omnicompetent civil state; (4) racism’s view that racial/ethnic differences and conflicts are a very important aspect of human life and that superior and inferior races are to be differentiated; (5) naturalism’s view that a human being is “the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms”; and (6) postmodernism’s denial of any absolute truth and of linguistic coherence.[3]

That is helpful.  It reminds us of the ways in which society has tried to strip man of the image of God.  But man is not an animal, nor does he occupy any of these lesser stations.  He is a human being, and his value rests in the fact that God Himself has created him in His image.

III.  That Image Means that We Only Have True Integrity When We Live in Union With the God Whose Image We Bear

There is a final implication to the image of God.  If God has made us, and if we bear His image, then that means we will never know true integrity and true inner peace unless and until we live in harmony with our God.  The hope of the gospel is that, through the salvation and life Christ gives us, the image of God can be restored as the Holy Spirit strips away those things that obscure it and tempt us to deny it.  In Romans 8, Paul put it like this.

²⁹ For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. ³⁰ And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.

Believers in Christ have been “predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son.”  He is making us into the image of Christ.  We are becoming more like Jesus, who Colossians 1:15 describes as “the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.”  What this means is that the image of God is restored in us as we walk with Jesus.  Paul described that process wonderfully in 2 Corinthians 3:

¹⁷ Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. ¹⁸ And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.

I love that:  “we…are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.”  The image of God is being daily restored in us.  We are becoming, in Christ, what we are intended to be.

Thomas Merton passed on the following story in his collection of sayings and stories from the desert fathers:

An elder was asked by a certain soldier if God would forgive a sinner.  And he said to him: Tell me, beloved, if your cloak is torn, will you throw it away?  The soldier replied and said:  No.  I will mend it and put it back on.  The elder said to him: If you take care of your cloak, will God not be merciful to His own image?[4]

Yes, God will indeed be merciful to His image.  Men and women bear that image.  He has given Christ so that His image-bearers can be saved, can be forgiven, can be born again to life anew and eternal.  The image has been distorted, but it has not been obliterated.  In Christ, it is restored and renewed.  In Christ we are able to come to the One whose image we bear as blood-bought sons and daughters.

Matthew 7:13-14

¹³ “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. ¹⁴ For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.

Some years back we stopped at “Rock City” on Lookout Mountain in Georgia.  If you have driven around that area you know what I’m talking about:  endless “See Rock City” signs encouraging you to go to this rocky, mountain top, tourist attraction.  It was pretty neat, as far as tourist attractions go.

I remember one part of the path you take as you walk through Rock City that stands out.  They call it “Needle’s Eye.”

It is a very narrow portion of the trail that you might find a little trying if, like me, you are a bit claustrophobic.  At the time, I could get through Needle’s Eye, though I found the experience a little too close for comfort.  It’s a narrow path between two high walls of rock.  It was narrow, to say the least!

I thought of Needle’s Eye when working on our text for today, for that image is the kind of image Jesus evoked when He wanted to describe the nature of the Christian life.  This is what He said:

¹³ “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. ¹⁴ For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.

I like John Stott’s summary of this text.  He put it like this:

…there are according to Jesus only two ways, hard and easy (there is no middle way), entered by two gates, broad and narrow (there is no other gate), trodden by two crowds, large and small (there is no neutral group), ending in two destinations, destruction and life (there is no third alternative).[1]

I am going to use those four divisions in looking at our text today:  two gates, two ways, two crowds, and two destinations.  They are the natural divisions within these words of Jesus, and each is important, communicating essential truths.

This text is a series of two’s.  It is fascinating to observe how often Scripture depicts the ultimate issues of salvation in terms of two’s.

See, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil. (Deuteronomy 30:15)

And if it is evil in your eyes to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your fathers served in the region beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you dwell. But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. (Joshua 24:15)

When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left. (Matthew 25:31-33)

He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son (Colossians 1:13)

There is a basic dichotomy to life, a division between the things of God and the things that war against God.  This division presents itself to every human being, asking which we will choose:  life or death, forgiveness or condemnation, salvation or judgment, light or darkness?  We stand confronted by these two’s and we must make a decision.

I. Two Gates:  Narrow and Wide

The first of these two’s are the two gates.

¹³ “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. ¹⁴ For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.

There is a narrow gate and there is a wide gate.  Interpreters often discuss what the gate is intended to be, but it would appear to be the entryway onto the two paths that lead either to salvation or destruction.  In other words, every human being is faced with the choice of going into one of two doors, or one of two gates.  Those gates ultimately lead to very different places.

But what is the narrow gate, the gate leading to life, and why is it narrow?  We find the answer to the identity of the gate in John 10:9.  There, Jesus said, “I am the door. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved and will go in and out and find pasture.”  Christ Jesus is the gate, the door.  The decision we make concerning Christ and whether or not to trust in Him will determine the direction of our lives.

Every human being stands before two gates.  One gate is the acceptance of Jesus and it leads to life.  The other gate is the rejection of Jesus and it leads to destruction.  What is telling is that Jesus says there are only two gates.  There is not a third.  In fact, in Revelation 3, Jesus expresses His contempt for third ways in general.  This is what He says to the church of Laodicea:

¹⁴ “And to the angel of the church in Laodicea write: ‘The words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of God’s creation. ¹⁵ “‘I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot! ¹⁶ So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. ¹⁷ For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. ¹⁸ I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire, so that you may be rich, and white garments so that you may clothe yourself and the shame of your nakedness may not be seen, and salve to anoint your eyes, so that you may see. ¹⁹ Those whom I love, I reprove and discipline, so be zealous and repent. ²⁰ Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me. ²¹ The one who conquers, I will grant him to sit with me on my throne, as I also conquered and sat down with my Father on his throne. ²² He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.’”

There is no third way.  There is no via media when it comes to Jesus.  You have not “kind of” accepted Christ.  You have not “kind of” rejected Jesus.  You have either accepted him or rejected Him.  He is either Lord to you or He is not.  This morning, right now, right here, right where you are sitting, you have either accepted Christ as Lord and Savior or you have rejected Jesus.  You may tell yourself that are still in the middle.  There is no middle!  Not to have accepted Him is to have rejected Him.

It is interesting to note that people are apparently less likely to accept Christ the older they get, according to some research done some years back, anyway.

The probability of people accepting Jesus Christ as their personal Savior drops off dramatically after age 14, a new study by the Barna Research Group has found.  Data from a nationwide sampling of more than 4,200 young people and adults indicate that youth from ages 5 through 13 have a 32 percent probability of accepting Christ as their Savior.  Young people from the ages of 14 through 18 have a 4 percent likelihood of making that choice, while adults ages 19 and older have a 6 percent probability of doing so.[2]

Perhaps this means that the longer you go on rejecting Christ, the harder your heart gets.  Obviously, this is not a hard and fast rule.  In this very church are numbers of people who were gloriously saved later in life.  Some of the greatest heroes of the faith were saved later in life.  If you are here today and you are hearing the gospel, it is not too late for you.  So long as you have breath in you it is not too late.  You can accept Jesus this very day.

There are two gates, but they are not the same size:  one is narrow and one is wide.

¹³ “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. ¹⁴ For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.

Why is this so?  It is so because it seems that many more people reject Christ than accept Him. Even so, let no one say that the gate to glory is too narrow for them.  It is narrow, but it stands before every human being, and anybody who so desires can enter in.  If you desire to come to Jesus, you can.  If you desire to be saved, you will not find the narrow gate locked.  The key to the gate is the grace and mercy of Jesus.  We reach for the gate through the act of repentance and faith.

I have mentioned in the past how, as a kid, I went to Camp Ambassador on Lake Waccamaw in North Carolina.  While there, they gathered us all around the campfire one night where a wonderful, elderly lady who we all referred to as “Aunt Sarah” told us a story.  The story she told us was John Bunyan’s story Pilgrim’s Progress.  In the story, Christian is journeying to the Celestial City, but first, he must pass through what Bunyan called “the wicket gate.”  The wicket gate is a narrow gate, but it is the gate that opens to the path leading to eternal life.  Here is Bunyan’s description of Christian going through the narrow gate.

So, in process of time, Christian got up to the gate. Now, over the gate there was written, “Knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” Matthew 7:7

He knocked, therefore, more than once or twice, saying,

“May I now enter here? Will he within

Open to sorry me, though I have been

An undeserving rebel? Then shall I

Not fail to sing his lasting praise on high.”

At last there came a grave person to the gate, named Goodwill, who asked who was there, and whence he came, and what he would have.

Christian: Here is a poor burdened sinner. I come from the city of Destruction, but am going to Mount Zion, that I may be delivered from the wrath to come; I would therefore, sir, since I am informed that by this gate is the way thither, know if you are willing to let me in.

Goodwill: I am willing with all my heart, said he; and with that he opened the gate.[3]

There are two gates:  one narrow and one wide.  Have you passed through the narrow gate?  Have you trusted in Christ?

II. Two Ways:  Hard and Easy

There are also two ways:  one hard and one easy.  The hard way is the way to which the narrow gate opens.  The easy way is the way to which the wide gate opens.

¹³ “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. ¹⁴ For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.

Now this is a fascinating thing for Jesus to say.  It also appears to be problematic, at first glance, because of something that Jesus said in Matthew 11.

²⁸ Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. ²⁹ Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. ³⁰ For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

What can this mean?  In our text Jesus says that “the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life,” but in Matthew 11 He says, “My yoke is easy, and My burden is light.”  Which is it?  Is the way of Jesus easy or hard?

The answer to that question is, “Yes!”  That is to say, the yoke and way of Jesus is a paradox.  It is a blissful burden.  It is a freeing enslavement.  It is a light burden, but a burden nonetheless, as Jesus acknowledges.  All of this is to say that the way of Jesus is a path of joy but also a path of laying down our lives.  The way of Christ is a way of liberation, but it is a liberation from sin that constantly pesters and hinders us.

You will perhaps recall that I have earlier spoken of the Kingdom of God as the “already/not yet” Kingdom.  That is a well-known phrase that has great explanatory power.  The Kingdom of God is “already” in that it exists, it has a King, Jesus, and it has citizens, those who have come to the Father through the Son.  But the Kingdom of God is “not yet” in that we still struggle with sin, still see through a glass dimly, and are still in the difficult process of becoming what we need to become in Christ.  It is “already” in that we have been justified, declared free and forgiven in Christ.  It is “not yet” in that we still must confess our sins as we daily struggle.

We also see the “already/not yet” Kingdom in the way the Lord spoke of His path.  It is “already” in that it is easy:  we walk with Jesus in victory and a song fills our hearts.  It is “not yet” in that it is hard:  we struggle under the temptation to abandon the path, under the burden of having to learn to think and live differently, and under the strain of being rejected by the dominant systems of the world in which we live.

Indeed, there is a sense in which following Jesus is hard.  It is hard when it is contrasted with the infinitely easier though tragically deceitful path of simply thinking what everybody else thinks, doing what everybody else does, talking like everybody else talks, and believing as everybody else lives.

Discipleship is hard, brothers and sisters, but the yoke of Jesus is still easy.  What a beautiful privilege it is to be on this narrow, hard path!  What an honor to set our feet on this way!  It requires us to lay down our lives, but we lay them at the feet of the Jesus who loves us.  The martyrs all suffered and sealed their testimony with their blood, but they did so singing praises to the Savior Who first laid down His life for them.

III. Two Crowds:  Few and Many

There are also two crowds:  one large and one small.

¹³ “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. ¹⁴ For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.

The large crowd passes through the wide gate onto the easy path.  The small crowd passes through the narrow gate onto the hard path.  Friends, most people will reject the path of life.  That means that, in most cases, the crowd will be wrong.

I think about this when I think about our kids at school.  Kids, when you are in the classroom or the cafeteria, and that topic of religion or right-and-wrong or truth comes up, and you realize that you are the only one at the table who holds the biblical position, the true position, take heart:  Jesus said that His people would almost always be in the minority.  The church is the minority in the world.  Those who have trusted in Christ are in the minority when compared to those who have rejected Him.

I take that to mean that the majority of viewpoints that I encounter on TV will likely be false.  I take that to mean that the majority of viewpoints I read online will likely be false.  I take that to mean that our calling is to uphold the minority, rejected, despised truth of the gospel in the dominant culture of darkness that has rejected it.  Indeed, I take that to mean that it is an honor to hold up the despised truth.  It is an honor to be the only one at the lunch table who speaks up, with love but with clarity, and says, “Guys, I’m a Christian, and, as a Christian, I do not agree with what you just said.  In fact, Jesus said…”  That, friends, is an honor!

It is also a calling and a burden.  If you do not speak the truth at that table, that table will not hear the truth.  If you do not speak the truth, adults, at that dinner party, that dinner party will not hear the truth.  If you do not speak the truth at that ballgame, the people at that ballgame will not hear the truth.

Dear Christian, I plead with you:  do not grow silent before the majority.  Jesus said the majority is on the path to destruction.  The few are on the path of life.  The few have come into the Kingdom and the few must represent the interests of their King.

Let me also say that this truth should motivate us to plead with the many to come to Christ.  The point of this teaching is not that we write the many off to destruction.  The point is that we should realize the reality of how the world is, but then embrace the challenge of calling the world to Christ.

IV. Two Destinations:  Life and Destruction

Jesus finally spoke of two destinations.

¹³ “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. ¹⁴ For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.

The two paths, the easy and the hard one, end somewhere.  There are two final destinations to life.  Jesus referred to these two destinations as “life” and “destruction.”  One path leads to eternal life and the other leads to eternal destruction.  The path leading to eternal life is the path of Jesus.  The path leading to eternal destruction, eternal death, is the path of the world without Christ.

Jesus consistently spoke of people reaching either one of two final destinations.  For instance, in Matthew 25, Jesus gave this picture of the final judgment:

³¹ “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. ³² Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. ³³ And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left. ³⁴ Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. ³⁵ For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, ³⁶ I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ ³⁷ Then the righteous will answer him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? ³⁸ And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? ³⁹ And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’ ⁴⁰ And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’ ⁴¹ “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. ⁴² For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, ⁴³ I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ ⁴⁴ Then they also will answer, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?’ ⁴⁵ Then he will answer them, saying, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ ⁴⁶ And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

Again, in Luke 14, he told a parable about a great banquet that ends in a simple division of people around two final destinations.

¹⁶ But he said to him, “A man once gave a great banquet and invited many. ¹⁷ And at the time for the banquet he sent his servant to say to those who had been invited, ‘Come, for everything is now ready.’ ¹⁸ But they all alike began to make excuses. The first said to him, ‘I have bought a field, and I must go out and see it. Please have me excused.’ ¹⁹ And another said, ‘I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I go to examine them. Please have me excused.’ ²⁰ And another said, ‘I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come.’ ²¹ So the servant came and reported these things to his master. Then the master of the house became angry and said to his servant, ‘Go out quickly to the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in the poor and crippled and blind and lame.’ ²² And the servant said, ‘Sir, what you commanded has been done, and still there is room.’ ²³ And the master said to the servant, ‘Go out to the highways and hedges and compel people to come in, that my house may be filled. ²⁴ For I tell you, none of those men who were invited shall taste my banquet.’”

One more example.  In Matthew 25, Jesus told a story about some virgins who go out with their lamps to meet the coming bridegroom.

¹ “Then the kingdom of heaven will be like ten virgins who took their lamps and went to meet the bridegroom. ² Five of them were foolish, and five were wise. ³ For when the foolish took their lamps, they took no oil with them, ⁴ but the wise took flasks of oil with their lamps. ⁵ As the bridegroom was delayed, they all became drowsy and slept. ⁶ But at midnight there was a cry, ‘Here is the bridegroom! Come out to meet him.’ ⁷ Then all those virgins rose and trimmed their lamps. ⁸ And the foolish said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out.’ ⁹ But the wise answered, saying, ‘Since there will not be enough for us and for you, go rather to the dealers and buy for yourselves.’ ¹⁰ And while they were going to buy, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went in with him to the marriage feast, and the door was shut. ¹¹ Afterward the other virgins came also, saying, ‘Lord, lord, open to us.’ ¹² But he answered, ‘Truly, I say to you, I do not know you.’ ¹³ Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.

Do you see Jesus’ constant allusions to two final destinations?  One path ends in life and the other in destruction.  The sheep end in eternal life and the goats end in eternal destruction.  The later-invited guests end up in the banquet hall and the originally-invited guests end up outside the hall.  The wise virgins end up at the marriage feast and the foolish virgins end up on the wrong side of the shut door.

Let us be very clear about the fact that scripture is very clear:  every human being will end up in either an eternal heaven or an eternal hell, and the determining issue in that is whether or not we trust in Jesus and accept what He has done for us.  There is a heaven and there is a hell, and every person will find themselves in one or the other.

It is becoming increasingly unfashionable to speak of hell, though the Lord Jesus spoke of it in very clear terms.  There is a place of eternal torment reserved for those who reject the salvation that will keep us from that place.  I will simply point out that it makes no sense to say that Jesus came to save us and then to deny that from which He came to save us.  It makes no sense to say that Jesus laid down His life for our sins and then to deny that there is a price for our sins that we would otherwise have to pay.  It makes no sense to say that Jesus was tormented but that, ultimately, it would not have really mattered, since we would never have faced torment ourselves.

If you abandon hell, you gut the cross of meaning.  Jesus came to save us from something.

That early pastor and preacher, John Chrysostom, once commented on the fact that people find talk about hell to be unpleasant.  This is what he said:

And I know, indeed, that there is nothing less pleasant to you than these words.  But to me nothing is more pleasant…Let us, then, continually discuss these things.  For to remember hell prevents our falling into hell.[4]

Indeed, there is a benefit to being aware of hell.  Jesus came to save us from it.  Jesus is the only thing standing between us and hell.  Would you be saved?  Would you like for your path to end in life instead of destruction?  The decision is simple:  trust in Christ.  Jesus is the narrow gate leading to the path of life.  Paul put it like this in Romans 10:

⁹ because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. ¹⁰ For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.

Have you trusted in Jesus?  Have you walked through that gate?

I pray that it is so.  I plead with you to trust in Christ today.

Exodus 13:1-16

¹ The Lord said to Moses, ² “Consecrate to me all the firstborn. Whatever is the first to open the womb among the people of Israel, both of man and of beast, is mine.” ³ Then Moses said to the people, “Remember this day in which you came out from Egypt, out of the house of slavery, for by a strong hand the Lord brought you out from this place. No leavened bread shall be eaten. ⁴ Today, in the month of Abib, you are going out. ⁵ And when the Lord brings you into the land of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, which he swore to your fathers to give you, a land flowing with milk and honey, you shall keep this service in this month. ⁶ Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread, and on the seventh day there shall be a feast to the Lord. ⁷ Unleavened bread shall be eaten for seven days; no leavened bread shall be seen with you, and no leaven shall be seen with you in all your territory. ⁸ You shall tell your son on that day, ‘It is because of what the Lord did for me when I came out of Egypt.’ ⁹ And it shall be to you as a sign on your hand and as a memorial between your eyes, that the law of the Lord may be in your mouth. For with a strong hand the Lord has brought you out of Egypt. ¹⁰ You shall therefore keep this statute at its appointed time from year to year. ¹¹ “When the Lord brings you into the land of the Canaanites, as he swore to you and your fathers, and shall give it to you, ¹² you shall set apart to the Lord all that first opens the womb. All the firstborn of your animals that are males shall be the Lord’s. ¹³ Every firstborn of a donkey you shall redeem with a lamb, or if you will not redeem it you shall break its neck. Every firstborn of man among your sons you shall redeem. ¹⁴ And when in time to come your son asks you, ‘What does this mean?’ you shall say to him, ‘By a strong hand the Lord brought us out of Egypt, from the house of slavery. ¹⁵ For when Pharaoh stubbornly refused to let us go, the Lord killed all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both the firstborn of man and the firstborn of animals. Therefore I sacrifice to the Lord all the males that first open the womb, but all the firstborn of my sons I redeem.’ ¹⁶ It shall be as a mark on your hand or frontlets between your eyes, for by a strong hand the Lord brought us out of Egypt.”

Flannery O’Connor once said this about writing:

When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs as you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock, to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind, you draw large and startling figures.

That’s an interesting insight, and a true one.  “Making our vision apparent by shock” is something we all must do for those unaccustomed or unprepared to receive what we need to say and what they need to hear.  This may be especially true in the raising of children!  It is most certainly true in the way that the Lord God teaches us.  We are the hard of hearing who need a shout.  We are the almost-blind who need startling images drawn.

That is true of us and it was true of Israel as well.  Coming out of Egypt, the Lord needed to impress certain truths upon His children.  These truths were identity-forming and salvation-bringing insofar as they prepared the hearts of the people of God for the eventual coming of  the incarnate Christ.  They were truths that had to do with the reality of sin, forgiveness, deliverance, salvation, holiness, consecration, and community.

We have looked already at the institution of the rites of Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread.  In our text tonight we see another expression of the Feast of Unleavened Bread as well as instructions on the consecration of the firstborn sons of Israel.

I. The Divine Counterpart to the Divine Curse: The Firstborn of Israel (v.1-2,11-16)

Provocatively, our text begins and ends with instructions concerning the firstborn sons of Israel.

¹ The Lord said to Moses, ² “Consecrate to me all the firstborn. Whatever is the first to open the womb among the people of Israel, both of man and of beast, is mine.”

I say this is provocative because it clearly stands as a counterpart to the death of the firstborn sons of Egypt.  The firstborn sons of Egypt were killed whereas the firstborn sons of Israel would live lives consecrated to God.  The firstborn sons of Egypt were under a curse.  The firstborn sons of Israel were under the promise of salvation.

To consecrate is to set aside as holy.  Israel is told to consecrate to the Lord “all the firstborn” and “the first to open the womb…both man and beast.”  “They are mine!” declares the Lord.  The firstborn of Egypt were the Lord’s too, and were the objects of His wrath.  The firstborn of Israel were the Lord’s and were the objects of His special affection.  In truth, all the children of Israel were the Lord’s, set apart by Him and for Him.  In a general sense, of course, all the peoples of earth belong to the Lord insofar as He creates us all and we bear His image, marred by the Fall though it is.

This consecration of the firstborn sons of Israel was unique, though.  It highlighted the salvation that was Israel’s.  The consecration of the firstborn of Israel was a symbol of all of Israel’s consecration to God.  Speaking of the consecration of the livestock of Israel, Honeycutt suggests that “by the principle of ‘pars pro toto,’ the part may stand for the whole.  Offering the firstborn symbolized the effectual giving of the entire future offspring for man’s consumption.”[1]  The same principle would apply to the consecration of the firstborn child.  The firstborn stand for all.  Verse 11 and following revisits this consecration.

¹¹ “When the Lord brings you into the land of the Canaanites, as he swore to you and your fathers, and shall give it to you, ¹² you shall set apart to the Lord all that first opens the womb. All the firstborn of your animals that are males shall be the Lord’s. ¹³ Every firstborn of a donkey you shall redeem with a lamb, or if you will not redeem it you shall break its neck. Every firstborn of man among your sons you shall redeem.

In giving these instructions, the Lord is making His vision apparent by shock, to return to O’Connor’s phrase.  Essentially, the consecration of the firstborn went like this.  All the firstborn sons of the people and the firstborn of the animals were to be consecrated.  Those animals deemed clean were to be sacrificed to the Lord.  Unclean animals, of which the donkey is specified in our text, were to be redeemed.  That is, they were to be consecrated, but could be redeemed, bought back, for a price.  In this way, they would not be killed, and could be used again.  Thus, the unclean donkey would be consecrated, but not sacrificed.  The options for the donkey, as well as for all unclean animals, were two:  (a) they could be redeemed for a price or (b) they could be killed.  These were the only two options for unclean animals.  Thus, the consecrated donkey could be bought back or its neck could be broken.  In this way, God’s rights over the firstborn were acknowledged, either through the sacrifice of the consecrated clean animals, the redemption of the consecrated unclean animals, or the death of the consecrated unredeemed animals.  In any case, God’s sovereign rights were acknowledged.  The firstborn, in place of all, belonged to God.

Most interestingly, the Lord says that “every firstborn of man among your sons you shall redeem.”  This is as fascinating as it is telling.  In practice, the firstborn sons are placed in the same category as the donkey:  consecrated, unclean, and in need of redemption.  Child sacrifice was forbidden by the Lord, of course.  The Lord would not have His people kill their sons like they may have to kill their unredeemed donkeys.  No, the firstborn sons of Israel were to be redeemed.  The price of redeeming the firstborn son was five shekels.  We see Joseph and Mary honoring this law with Jesus in Luke 2.

²² And when the time came for their purification according to the Law of Moses, they brought him up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord ²³ (as it is written in the Law of the Lord, “Every male who first opens the womb shall be called holy to the Lord”)

Now, the Lord Jesus was without sin, but it was still important that He not be in violation of the Law.  So He was presented to the Lord.  But all the other firstborn sons of Israel needed to be redeemed because, like they donkey, they were unclean…which is to say – and this is key – we are unclean.

In other words, we see in these instructions the truth of human depravity.  We are unclean and in need of purification.  We are sinners in need of salvation.  Remember:  the firstborn sons of Israel stood for the whole of Israel, indeed, for the whole of humanity.  The theological importance of this will be immediately evident:  we are all unclean and we are all in need of redemption.  The options available to us are the same as the options available to unclean animals:  death or redemption.

Do you see the deep, ancient, theological seeds that were sown into the consciousness of these early Jews in order to prepare Israel and the world for the coming of Christ?  Lost, unclean man needs to be redeemed.  If he is not redeemed, he is condemned.  But who could pay the price of redemption for the sins of the world?  Who could offer redemption to all?  Is there a sacrifice that could accomplish this?  Is there a payment large enough for this price?

Praise God, church!  There is!  Jesus is the payment for our redemption, the perfect Lamb whose death and resurrection makes us unclean sons and daughters clean again.  We need not die!  We need not be judged!  We need not be condemned!  Our Jesus has paid the price for us!  For you!  For me!

Have you trusted in the Lamb who paid the redemption price for you?  Have you called on His name?  Can you say that you are His?

These truths we now know in full were previously presented in the startling image of consecration and redemption.  Israel was instructed to do these things so that their faith could be passed down.  We see this beginning in verse 14.

¹⁴ And when in time to come your son asks you, ‘What does this mean?’ you shall say to him, ‘By a strong hand the Lord brought us out of Egypt, from the house of slavery. ¹⁵ For when Pharaoh stubbornly refused to let us go, the Lord killed all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both the firstborn of man and the firstborn of animals. Therefore I sacrifice to the Lord all the males that first open the womb, but all the firstborn of my sons I redeem.’

Do you see?  The consecration of the firstborn was established as an instrument by and through which the successive generations of Israel would learn of the events of the Exodus, particularly the events of the death of the firstborn sons of Egypt in the tenth plague.  They would learn of this tragedy by viewing its glorious counterpart:  the consecration and redemption of the firstborn sons of Israel.  So deliberate was this passing down of the faith that it was to be written upon their very lives.

¹⁶ It shall be as a mark on your hand or frontlets between your eyes, for by a strong hand the Lord brought us out of Egypt.”

These are highly-disputed words.  Were they intended literally or figuratively?  It is likely that this was a figurative expression intended to denote such intimate awareness with the truths of God that it is as if they were written on their very lives.  In time, the Jews came to take this literally, strapping phylacteries to their heads and to their hands.  Phylacteries are sacred little containers holding words from Scripture.  In Matthew 23, Jesus condemned the self-righteous use of such things by some of the Jews.

⁵ They do all their deeds to be seen by others. For they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long, ⁶ and they love the place of honor at feasts and the best seats in the synagogues ⁷ and greetings in the marketplaces and being called rabbi by others.

No, the truth of God’s sovereign rule and His deliverance of Israel from bondage was to be passed down in purity and in truth, not with ostentation.  Why?  Because this truth was preparing Israel for the greater truth to which it pointed:  the coming of Christ.  The consecration of the firstborn sons was intended to point to the coming of the true firstborn Son, the only begotten Son, Jesus the Chrtist.  The church father Tertullian put it like this:

For who is really holy but the Son of God?  Who properly opened the womb but he who opened a closed one?  But it is marriage which opens the womb in all cases.  The Virgin’s womb, therefore, was especially opened, because it was especially closed.[2]

Christ was the firstborn Son for which the world was waiting.  The consecration of the firstborn sons of Israel was intended to prepare the people for and point them to Jesus.

II. The Symbols and the Passing Down of the Faith: Unleavened Bread (v.3-10)

In the middle of our text, in verses 3-10, we find another description of the Feast of Unleavened Bread.

³ Then Moses said to the people, “Remember this day in which you came out from Egypt, out of the house of slavery, for by a strong hand the Lord brought you out from this place. No leavened bread shall be eaten. ⁴ Today, in the month of Abib, you are going out.

The month of Abib “correspond[s] to our late March and early April.”[3]  Douglas Stuart says that “just as modern Westerners learn as little children that Christmas come only in the month of December, ancient Israelites learned early on, from this point in history forward, that the Feast of Unleavened Bread comes only in Abib.”[4]  This was to be a continual remembrance in Israel, a yearly reminder of Israel’s hasty exit from Egypt once the Lord opened the door of deliverance.

⁵ And when the Lord brings you into the land of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, which he swore to your fathers to give you, a land flowing with milk and honey, you shall keep this service in this month. ⁶ Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread, and on the seventh day there shall be a feast to the Lord. ⁷ Unleavened bread shall be eaten for seven days; no leavened bread shall be seen with you, and no leaven shall be seen with you in all your territory. ⁸ You shall tell your son on that day, ‘It is because of what the Lord did for me when I came out of Egypt.’ ⁹ And it shall be to you as a sign on your hand and as a memorial between your eyes, that the law of the Lord may be in your mouth. For with a strong hand the Lord has brought you out of Egypt. ¹⁰ You shall therefore keep this statute at its appointed time from year to year.

We have discussed the Feast of Unleavened bread already and how the absence of leaven spoke of the purity and holiness of God’s people.  It was itself a symbol of consecration, a reminder that Israel belongs to God and not to Egypt or any other power.  In fact, it reminded Israel that they did not belong even to themselves.  They were God’s, and they were to walk in a pure love and relationship with their Deliverer God.

What is most interesting in our text is the repeated call for Israel to hold to these rites and symbols – Passover, Unleavened Bread, the consecration of the firstborn – as intentional efforts at faith transmission.  Terence Fretheim put it well when he said this about our verses:

            The basic rhythm of the text is thus not that of memory and hope but of memory and liturgical responsibility…As with passover (see 12:1-28), the concrete and replicative nature of each of the rituals indicates that they are vehicles in and through which God effects salvation for each new generation…The concern is not that God be properly thanked but that the redemptive experience be a living reality for each Israelite in every age.[5]

Yes, the redemptive experience does need to be a living reality for God’s people in every age.  That is why God gave Israel these remembrances.  This is also why you and I are to bring our children into consistent contact with the sacred remembrances of the church:  the preaching of the gospel, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper.

The sacred remembrances the Lord gave to Israel were intended to prepare God’s people for the actualization of that to which they pointed:  the coming of the Redeemer, the Lamb of God, the second and greater Moses who would lead His people out of sin, death, and Hell.  They were constant reminders that Israel had been liberated, freed from bondage in Egypt.  It was a reminder that they did not have to stay in Egypt.

The Lord Jesus stands today to say that we do not have to stay in the Egypt of sin, death, and Hell.  We can be free.  Israel’s hope is now our living and present reality.  Christ has come.  Christ reigns.  He has come to set us free.

Do not stay in Egypt.

You do not have to stay in Egypt.

The Savior, Jesus, has come to lead you home.

The Lamb of God has paid the redemption price for you.

Trust in Him and live.

Matthew 7:12

¹² So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.

Around the year 20 B.C., somebody asked the Rabbi Hillel to stand on one leg and teach him the whole law.  The “stand on one leg” part had to do with seeing if the Rabbi could answer the profound question quickly and deftly, thinking on his foot as it were.  Hillel did so.  He stood on one leg and said, “What is hateful to you, do not do to anyone else.  This is the whole law; all the rest is only commentary.”[1]

That will likely sound very familiar to many of you:  “What is hateful to you, do not do to anyone else.  This is the whole law; all the rest is only commentary.”  It will sound familiar because it is so very similar to the words of Jesus in Matthew 7:12, words which we know as The Golden Rule.

¹² So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.

Yes, those are very similar sayings, and I should note that other sayings similar to the Golden Rule were said even earlier in history.  Even so, there is something unique about the Golden Rule.  It was said by Jesus Himself.  Like all of Jesus’ words, they have content and weight because of Jesus’ work on the cross and in the empty tomb.  What Jesus has done, in other words, makes His words unique, even if similar sayings were made by others.

The context of the Sermon on the Mount adds particular meaning to the Golden Rule as well.  If the Sermon on the Mount is a depiction of how citizens of the Kingdom of God who are current residents of the fallen kingdom of the world are to live (which it is), then this commandment is necessarily integral to our lives as followers of Jesus.  As such, I would like for us to consider two crucial truths about this important teaching.

I. The Golden Rule is NOT an Isolated, Humanistic Ethic of Kindness:  It Grows Out of the New Testament Vision of Who God Is.

One of the temptations we feel when approaching the Golden Rule is the temptation to remove it from its wider theological context and reduce it to an ethical maxim, thereby reducing it to a humanistic ethic of kindness.  In other words, there are those who take these words as the lowest common denominator of all religions and argue on that basis that this rule is all that really matters.  In this way of thinking, the Christian claims concerning the deity of Christ, His crucifixion, His resurrection, His ascension, and His promised return do not really matter.  All that matters are these words of His:  “So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.”

Many people feel this way, religious and irreligious.  For instance, I recently saw where somebody had asked this question on “Yahoo! Answers”:  “What is the purpose of life?”  This posted response intrigued me.

The purpose of life is to learn to love yourself and others. The golden rule is all that matters and every religion has that. It’s also about learning and growing in knowledge and good character.[2]

That is a typical approach:  forget religious differences and focus on this one rule.  Even atheists have argued this.  In a debate with Rick Warren, the popular American atheist Sam Harris argued that the Golden Rule, which he calls “a wonderful moral precept,” is a good thing that anybody can follow “without lying to ourselves or our children about the origin of certain books or the virgin birth of certain people.”[3]

Do you see?  Sam Harris says we can forget God and forget even the supernatural so long as we hold to the ethic of the Golden Rule.  Furthermore, popular religion author, Karen Armstrong, was asked in an interview if all that mattered in religion was the Golden Rule.

Dave: That everything boils down to the Golden Rule.

Armstrong: I’m convinced of it. It’s in all the traditions, and it’s what the world needs now more than religious certainty, more than doctrinal statements or more rules about what people can do in the bedroom and who can get married and who can be bishops or priests. All this is like fiddling while Rome burns.[4]

So we do not even need religious certainty.  All we need is this Rule, interpreted generally to mean, “be nice.”  Of course, that raises the question of how we can be certain of even the Golden Rule if we cannot have religious certainty.  But many religious people seem to agree with this approach.  I do not normally quote Wikipedia, but the Wikipedia page noted this about The Golden Rule:

The “Declaration Toward a Global Ethic” from the Parliament of the World’s Religions (1993) proclaimed the Golden Rule (“We must treat others as we wish others to treat us”) as the common principle for many religions.  The Initial Declaration was signed by 143 respected leaders from all of the world’s major faiths, including Baha’i Faith, Brahmanism, Brahma Kumaris, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Indigenous, Interfaith, Islam, Jainism, Judaism, Native American, Neo-Pagan, Sikhism, Taoism, Theosophist, Unitarian Universalist and Zoroastrian.[5]

This, of course, appeals to the ecumenical and pluralistic spirit of the age.  After all, who would not love to see all religions get along?  Who would not love to see an end to religious strife?  So maybe this is the answer:  we should all agree on one common rule and disregard all of our differences as irrelevant religious details.

I would like to suggest that, though such an idea may be attractive to our modern, secular impulses, it is disastrous.  It should not be an attractive option for Christians, for whom the totality of Christ’s teachings and life is sacred.  In point of fact, the Golden Rule is not an isolated, humanistic ethic of kindness.  Instead, it grows out of the New Testament vision of who God is.  This means it must remain in its proper place precisely there:  in the center of all that Jesus taught and all that Jesus is.

Part of what tempts people to want to detach the Golden Rule from the whole counsel of God’s word is that it appears to be detached in its lack of an explicit reference to God.

¹² So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.

At first reading, the Gold Rule actually appears to reduce the essence of faith to treating people nicely.  However, two aspects of the Rule mitigate against such an idea.  The first is the word “so” in the ESV or “therefore” in the KJV.  That word is significant because it links the Golden Rule to that which was said just before it.  That may mean it is connected to the beginning of chapter 7 and the warning against sinfully judging others lest we be judged.  If it is connected to those words, it is a kind of concluding thought to, “Judge not, that you be not judged” (Matthew 7:1).  Put together, that would sound like this:  “Judge not, that you be not judged…So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.”  But what is most significant is that Matthew 7:1 ties its warning to the reality of the final judgment of God.  In other words, we judge not because we realize that there is but one Judge capable of making true judgment:  the Lord God.

But if that “so” or “therefore” refers to what immediately precedes the Golden Rule, then it is linked to the teaching on prayer:  asking, seeking, and knocking.  In this sense, we should treat others with kindness not only because we wish to be treated with kindness, but because, as the text immediately preceding this says, we have been treated with kindness by our good God.

Either way, the first word of the Golden Rule harkens us back to the reality of God.  It is therefore theological, not ethical.  It cannot be reduced to a mere statement about how we should treat people.  Whatever the Golden Rule means, it means something about the life to which God, not human solidarity, calls us.

Furthermore, the concluding statement of the Golden Rule also keeps us from divorcing it from the other truths of God and reducing it to a relational rule.

¹² So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.

That statement is significant:  “for this is the Law and the Prophets.”  It is significant because we have heard Jesus say it before, and this other usage of the term helps us understand how He intends it here, because it is a fuller statement.  The shorter should be interpreted in light of the fuller.  The fuller usage of this phrase was used in Matthew 22

³⁴ But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together. ³⁵ And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. ³⁶ “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” ³⁷ And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. ³⁸ This is the great and first commandment. ³⁹ And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. ⁴⁰ On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

Ah!  Now things become clearer.  In Matthew 22, Jesus defines the greatest commandment in a two-fold manner:  Love God and love your neighbor as yourself.  You will immediately note that loving our neighbor as ourselves is a shortened form of the Golden Rule:  do to others as you would have them do to you.

What this means, then, is that Matthew 7:12 must be interpreted in light of Matthew 22:40.  The grand motivation behind the practice of the Golden Rule is therefore love of God, the first part of the greatest commandment.  In truth, we are only able to love others as we love the Lord God.

The theological core of the Golden Rule is also evident, of course, in the fact that Jesus, in both Matthew 7:12 and 22:40, sees this as the essence of all that the Law and the Prophets sought to do.  The Law and the Prophets are, at heart, about the union of man with God.  Whatever the Law and the Prophets were about, they were not about some mere effort to get people to be nice to each other.  Thus, the Golden Rule cannot be just about having people be nice to each other, for the Law and the Prophets which it epitomizes were not merely about that.  They were about union with God.  This union with God is what lies behind the Golden Rule.  Stanley Hauerwas put it well when he said:

Oddly enough…when the rule is isolated from the eschatological context of the sermon, indeed when the rule is abstracted from Jesus’ ministry in order to ground ethics, it is made to serve a completely different narrative than the one called the kingdom of God…Jesus knows nothing of a realm that Kant called “ethics.”  That we are to do to others as we would have others do to us is not ethics.  According to Jesus it is the summation of the law and the prophets…Jesus calls us to live faithful to the particularity of Israel’s law and prophets.  Jesus does not say that now that we know the Gold Rule – the rule was known prior to Jesus – we no longer need to know the law and the prophets.  On the contrary, we must know the law and the prophets if we are to know how to act toward others.  Let us not forget that this is the same Jesus who told us earlier in the Sermon on the Mount that he has not come to abolish the law and the prophets, but to fulfill them.[6]

Is the essence of Christianity therefore simply being nice to people?  Clearly not!  That is not what Jesus intended.  Again, this Rule is given in the Sermon on the Mount.  It is a Rule for the redeemed, born again, blood bought people of God.  This is what life in the Kingdom of God looks like.  Therefore it is about that other-worldly kindness that grows out of redeemed hearts.

That raises an interesting question:  can a non-Christian really follow the Golden Rule?  Can a person whose heart has not been redeemed truly treat others as they wish to be treated?  In a surface sense, the answer is yes.  Non-Christians can be kind and, regrettably, Christians can be brutally and tragically unkind.  But in another sense, we must see that a heart that has been captivated and indwelt by the risen Son of God, Jesus Christ, has a depth of love and kindness and goodness and magnanimity that an unredeemed heart cannot understand.  Which is simply to say that the cross makes a difference in how people treat other people.  At least it should.  Christian cruelty to others is a violation of that most sacred core of our faith:  the cross and empty tomb.

Placed in the mouth of Jesus, the Golden Rule is a Rule for how followers of Christ live out His presence in kindness and goodness to others.  This comes from a heart that has been born again.  Billy Graham was recently asked the following question.

As far as I’m concerned the most important thing about religion is following the Golden Rule and treating people kindly. After all, isn’t that what Jesus told us to do? We’d have a lot fewer problems in the world if everyone did this, in my opinion. — W.W.

Graham’s answer was characteristically insightful.

Yes, the world certainly would be a better place if everyone put the Golden Rule (as it’s commonly called) into practice. Jesus’ words are just as relevant today as they were when He first spoke them: “In everything, do to others what you would have them do to you” (Matthew 7:12).

But why don’t we put it into practice? Why is there so much conflict and evil in the world? The problem isn’t ignorance; most people, I suspect, know they ought to treat people with respect and kindness, even if they can’t quote Jesus’ words exactly. And yet they fail to do it — and so do we.

The problem is far deeper: The problem is within our own hearts and minds. Down inside, we are selfish and demand our own way — and this brings us into conflict with others (who are just as selfish). Almost every headline bears witness to this truth. Jesus said, “For from within, out of men’s hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly” (Mark 7:21-22).

This is why we need Christ, for only He can take away our stubborn selfishness and replace it with His love and compassion. And He will, as we confess our sins to Him and submit our lives to His control. Don’t trust in your own goodness (which has its roots in pride — which is a sin). Instead, turn to Jesus and commit your life to Him today.[7]

I repeat:  the Golden Rule is not an isolated, humanistic ethic of kindness.  Instead, it grows out of the New Testament vision of who God is.  And the New Testament vision of who God is is a vision of His redeeming, forgiving, and declaring righteous lost humanity as it turns, repents, and receives His grace.

II.  The Golden Rule is a Practical Demonstration of Inner Transformation Through the Indwelling Presence of Christ.

It follows, then, that the Golden Rule is a practical demonstration of inner transformation through the indwelling presence of Christ.  It is, in other words, a Christian Rule.  It is the Rule of Jesus.  We do to others only that which we would have done to us because what has been done for us in Christ is so immeasurably infused with shocking love.  We love because we have been loved!

Living out the Golden Rule is therefore an act of mission.  It is an incarnation in our own treatment of others of the love that we have been shown by Christ.  We treat others as we would be treated.  We treat others as we have been treated.  The Golden Rule is unintelligible without the love of Christ.

In Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, Prince Myshkin makes the following observations about kindness and charity:

In scattering the seed, scattering your “charity,” your kind deeds, you are giving away, in one form or another, part of your personality, and taking into yourself part of another; you are in mutual communion with one another, a little more attention and you will be rewarded with the knowledge of the most unexpected discoveries.  You will come at last to look upon your work as a science; it will lay hold of all your life, and may fill up your whole life.  On the other hand, all your thoughts, all the seeds scattered by you, perhaps forgotten by you, will grow up and take form.  He who has received them from you will hand them on to another.  And how can you tell what part you may have in the future determination of the destinies of humanity?[8]

There is truth in this.  We do unto others as we would have done to us because of what Christ has done for us.  But in doing so we share the love of Christ with others, we share the presence of Christ with others through acts of love and kindness, effecting them in turn, leading them to contemplate this love that they have been shown and, behind it, the Lover who has shown us the love that makes our love possible.  Kindness, then, becomes a door for the gospel.  Love because an avenue for the cross.

¹² So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.

It is the Law and the Prophets for the Law and the Prophets both point to Christ and are both fulfilled in Christ.  To follow the Golden Rule, then, is to be Christ to others, to love with the love of Christ.  Practically speaking, then, the person who is indwelt by Christ will love like this.  The person who does not love like this, no matter what they may say of Christ, may, in fact, not be indwelt by Him at all.

Can you be cruel to others with no inner disturbance, no agitation of or by the Spirit of the living God?  Then perhaps you are not indwelt by Him.

Can you speak viciously to others without feeling as if you are betraying your King, Jesus?  Then maybe it is because you do not know Jesus the King.

Are you harsh, unforgiving, judgmental, bitter, and hateful?  If so, then can you say that Christ lives within you?

But do you treat others with love?  With mercy?  With compassion?  With understanding?  With grace?  With tenderness?  With kindness?  With love?  And do you do so because you yourself have been shown such love by Christ?  Do you act out of the storehouse of your own gratitude over the fact that you have received such love?

It must be so with followers of Jesus.  It must be so with citizens of the Kingdom of God.  It must be so with people who are indwelt by Christ and who are being slowly transformed by the indwelling presence of Christ.

Would you love like this?  Then trust in Jesus.  Repent of your sins and come to Jesus.  He will pour this kind of love into your heart.

Christian, are you not loving like this?  Then repent and return to your first love, Christ.

Matthew 7:7-11

⁷ “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. ⁸ For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. ⁹ Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? ¹⁰ Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? ¹¹ If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!

The following article appeared in the June 4, 1899 edition of The New York Journal.

The lack of rain on Long Island has worried the farmers all month.  On Saturday, those living at Northport formed a committee, and calling on the pastors of all the churches, asked them to pray for showers.

The clergymen did as they were requested, and in a few hours a thunderstorm came.  There was a magnificent display of lightning and a heavy fall of thunderbolts.

The lightning did great damage.  The house and barn of George P. Lewis (who was a member of the committee who asked the pastors to pray for a storm) was struck; the barn and its contents were wholly destroyed.

At Bay Shore, where prayers were also said for rain, William Gunther’s carriage house was struck and burned.  George Tilley’s barn, at Jericho, was destroyed.

The same storm was felt at Spring Valley.  Farmer Benjamin Baker was burned out of house and home.  Lightning knocked him and his wife senseless.

Grace Episcopal church, at Nyack, was struck by lightning during Sunday Night’s services.

A house at Orangeburg, near Nyack, was destroyed.  Several houses, barns and trees in the vicinity also suffered.

This prayer thing is apparently dangerous business!  In all honesty, though this story strikes us as shocking and, in parts, perhaps even humorous, there is a powerful truth here, is there not?  Prayer is powerful.  Prayer can also be, from our perspective, frustrating.  Sometimes we pray and God answers in ways that we find pleasant and wonderful and, to our minds, timely.  Other times we pray and He does not appear to answer at all.  At yet other times, His answer is in forms that we could not foresee, like in the article mentioned above.

If you are like me, you struggle with prayer.  Sometimes I pray easily.  Sometimes it is work.  Usually I simply do not pray enough to put an adjective on it.

To be confessional for a moment, I often feel real frustration over my own prayer life.  I know it is valuable.  I know it should be the natural habit of the believer’s heart.  Yet I take comfort in the fact that Jesus had to teach His own disciples how to pray.  They, too, had to learn, and they walked with Jesus!

And then there are those times when I pray and become aware of the fact that my prayers sound so very consumeristic.  Try as I might to pray for others or, even better, simply to rejoice in the glory and sovereignty of God in prayer, I find that I keep asking for things…not material things, usually, but things nonetheless.

Of course, in our text this morning, Jesus tells us to ask, seek, and knock.  But for what?  If the entire Sermon on the Mount is a depiction of life in the Kingdom, it must mean that I am asking, seeking, and knocking for those things that advance the Kingdom.  Calvin Miller was right when he said, “the best of saints have seldom prayed to get stuff from God.  Instead, they are after union with Christ.”[1]

That is true, but then Jesus did instruct us to ask for “daily bread,” a material need.  So surely not all asking is selfish.  And, of course, asking for another’s good is an act of selflessness and care, indeed of Christlikeness.  So it would seem that there are things for which we should not ask and things for which we should ask.  It would also seem that God’s answers often come dressed in unexpected garb.

But what of our asking?  What of our praying?  I believe our text offers us the fundamental, theological truths to help us make sense of the great gift of prayer.

I. Prayer is to be active, diligent, and persistent (v.7-8)

To begin, there is much in this text about the quality of our prayers, the marks of biblical prayer.  Verses 7 and 8 are filled with verbs.  Let us listen.

⁷ “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. ⁸ For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened.

Ask.  Seek.  Knock.  Here is a charge to active, diligent, persistent prayer, the kind of prayer that never quits, that never stops, that never gives up.  This is the prayer of intensity, the prayer of utter abandonment to God, the prayer of principled devotion and trust.  These verbs are all present imperatives.  What they really say is this:  “Keep on asking…keep on seeking…keep on knocking.”  Don’t stop!  Don’t give up!  Don’t quit!

There is a purpose and a meaning to prayer.  Prayer matters.  There are people who do not think prayer matters.  They believe the universe operates by chance.  They would see any alleged answer to prayer as mere coincidence.  For my part, I rather like Bishop William Temple’s response to the charge of coincidence.  He once said, “When I pray, coincidences happen.  When I don’t pray, coincidences don’t happen.”[2]  Tongue planted firmly in cheek, what Bishop Temple was saying was this:  prayer matters.  We must continue to pray!

Jesus commends unceasing, unquitting, unreleting prayer.  In Luke 11, we find an interesting preface to our text this morning.

⁵ And he said to them, “Which of you who has a friend will go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves, ⁶ for a friend of mine has arrived on a journey, and I have nothing to set before him’; ⁷ and he will answer from within, ‘Do not bother me; the door is now shut, and my children are with me in bed. I cannot get up and give you anything’? ⁸ I tell you, though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, yet because of his impudence he will rise and give him whatever he needs. ⁹ And I tell you, ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. ¹⁰ For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. ¹¹ What father among you, if his son asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent; ¹² or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? ¹³ If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”

How fascinating!  We might almost call this impudent prayer, though, of course, we should not be impudent with God.  The friend keeps banging on the door until it is opened!  Jesus told a similar parable in Luke 18:

¹ And he told them a parable to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart. ² He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor respected man. ³ And there was a widow in that city who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Give me justice against my adversary.’ ⁴ For a while he refused, but afterward he said to himself, ‘Though I neither fear God nor respect man, ⁵ yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will give her justice, so that she will not beat me down by her continual coming.’” ⁶ And the Lord said, “Hear what the unrighteous judge says. ⁷ And will not God give justice to his elect, who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long over them? ⁸ I tell you, he will give justice to them speedily. Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”

Be like the friend who will not stop knocking!  Be like the lady who will not stop coming before the judge!  The point of the latter parable is not that God is an unjust judge.  No, this is what’s called an a fortiori argument.  He is arguing from something lesser to something great.  His point is this:  if an unjust judge will relent before a persistent widow, how much more will a good God do so?

Oftentimes Christians struggle with the questions of why their persistent prayers are not answered.  As we will see, even these words are not a blank check for a selfish people’s consumer desires.  Even so, they do promise the answer of God.  Sometimes it does happen that Christians pour out their hearts in prayer and do not perceive that God has answered, and do not see the answer He has given.  That does not mean He has not answered, by the way.  We do, after all, see “in a mirror dimly” (1 Corinthians 13:12).  But sometimes we must wait for His answer.

That is true, but is it not more often the case that we are unable to perceive His answer, not because He has answered enigmatically, but because we have not prayed persistently?  Be truthful with yourself:  are you persistent and unyielding in prayer?  Do you storm the gates of Heaven in prayer?  Do you cry out, day after day, in prayer?  Or are you like Granny in William Faulkner’s The Unvanquished?

“And the mules,” Ringo said; “don’t forget them.  And dont yawl worry about Granny.  She cide what she want and then she kneel down about ten seconds and tell God what she aim to do and the she git up and do hit.  And them that dont like hit can git outen the way or git trompled.”[3]

Are you like that?  You get down for ten seconds and tell God what you aim to do?  The great heroes of the faith were heroes because they persisted in prayer.  They did…not…stop.

For instance, Daniel 6 records Daniel’s reaction when he heard that King Darius signed a proclamation decreeing that nobody could pray to any god other than himself:

¹⁰ When Daniel knew that the document had been signed, he went to his house where he had windows in his upper chamber open toward Jerusalem. He got down on his knees three times a day and prayed and gave thanks before his God, as he had done previously.

Daniel would not stop, even to save his own life.

Even children can learn to pray like this.  When Ludwig von Zinzendorf was six-years-old, he was sitting in his room in the Gross-Hennersdorf castle in Saxony reading his Bible and praying.  All of a sudden, the door burst open and a detachment of Swiss soldiers stormed into the room.  When they did so, young Zinzendorf glanced up at them for a moment and then returned to praying.  The soldiers stared at him for a moment then left.  When his grandmother, Baronness von Gersdorf, ran into the room a moment later with his Aunt Henriette in tow, they wanted to know what Zinzendorf had said to the soldiers.  They reported that the soldiers had left, saying that they could not ransack a castle that was so protected by God.  Zinzendorf replied, “Nothing.  I just kept praying.”

Do you pray persistently?  Do you pray with passion?  Do you pray unrelenting prayers?  It was said of Arsenius the Desert Father that he prayed so intensely that he appeared to be on fire.[4]  How do we appear when we pray?

II. Our Confidence in Prayer Rests in the Goodness of God (v.9-10)

It must be understood that persistence in prayer is not a mere act of mental or spiritual exertion.  On the contrary, it is grounded in the rock-solid verities of the character of God.  Specifically, we persist in prayer because God is good.  It is telling that Jesus follows His words about persistence with a theology of the goodness of God.

⁹ Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? ¹⁰ Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent?

There is a reason we keep praying:  the goodness of God.  There is a reason we persist:  the goodness of God.  There is a reason we go to the Lord time after time after time:  He is good!

If we persist in prayer because God is good, does that mean the opposite is true:  we are weak in prayer because we suspect He might not be?  Perhaps, at times, to our shame, that is the case.

Have you prayed for something that you believe is in His will?  Have you called out for a movement of His Spirit?  Does it seem that He is not listening, that He is not responding?  I assure you He is.  Listen:  do not stop!  Persist!  Ask!  Seek!  Knock!  The God to whom you are praying loves you more than you can know.  He seeks your good, not your ill.  He is your heavenly Father, the One who gave His Son for you.  Do not let doubts cripple your prayers!

Bill Hybels tells a fascinating story about a lady who learned this very lesson.

Some years ago we had a baptism Sunday where many people publicly affirmed their decision to follow Christ.  I thought my heart would explode for joy.  Afterward, in the stairwell, I bumped into a woman who was crying.  I couldn’t understand how anyone could weep after such a celebration, so I stopped and asked her if she was alright.

“No,” she said, “I’m struggling.  My mother was baptized today.”

This is a problem? I thought.

            “I prayed for her every day for twenty years,” the woman said, and then she started to cry again.

“You’re going to have to help me understand this,” I said.

            “I’m crying,” the woman replied, “because I came so close – so close – to giving up on her.  I mean, after five years I said, Who needs this? God isn’t listening.  After ten years I said, Why am I wasting my breath?  After fifteen years I said, This is absurd.  After nineteen years I said, I’m just a fool.  But I guess I just kept praying, even though my faith was weak.  I kept praying, and she gave her life to Christ, and she was baptized today.

            The woman paused and looked me in the eye.  “I will never doubt the power of prayer again,” she said.[5]

Ah, friends!  Don’t give up!  Those twenty, thirty, forty years of prayer are not wasted years.  God is not toying with you.  He is doing something within you as you pray for that other person, even as you pray for yourself.  He is at work in you.  He is building faith in you.  He is building trust in you.

III.  However, the Goodness of God Includes Both His “Yes!” and His “No!” (v.11)

Divorced from its wider context, we might conclude that Jesus is teaching a kind of “name-it-claim-it” theology whereby we ask and God must therefore give us what we want.  But that is not the case at all.  We just read verses in which the example of loving, earthly fathers was appealed to in an effort to demonstrate a larger truth about prayer.  Listen to those verses again, this time with Jesus’ conclusion in verse 11.

⁹ Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? ¹⁰ Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? ¹¹ If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!

Ah!  So God promises to give us what is good.  However, it is often the case that what we think is good in a moment of prayer really is not good.  Have you ever, like Garth Brooks, thanked God for unanswered prayers?  Have you ever seen a request as a great good in the moment, only to see it months or years later as shortsighted and foolish?  I certainly have.

No, Jesus is not teaching a kind of divine blackmail whereby we pray, trap God, and He must do as He’s told or He’s broken His Word.  Instead, He is teaching that a good God gives good things to His children.  But do you know what those good things are?  Do I?  Paul answered that question beautifully and poignantly in Romans 8.

²⁶ Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. ²⁷ And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. ²⁸ And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.

We always complain about God’s answer without ever thinking carefully about our request.  “We do not know what to pray for as we ought!”  That is telling, and it puts certain qualifications on Jesus’ ask, seek, and knock.  It now means, in light of the full teaching of Christ, that we should ask, seek, and knock for God’s good will in our lives, knowing that He will give it.  We may, as faithful children, bring our specific requests in light of this, but we do so now humbly, carefully, understanding that we do not even know what those good things are much or even most of the time.

I do not know about you, but the fact of my ignorance does not break my spirit in prayer, it strengthens it.  It means that I can now view God not as a genie in a lamp who is enslaved to my own selfish caprice but as an all-knowing, all-loving Father who invites me to bring my feeble requests before Him but will do what is best nonetheless.  When I understand that, I now understand that prayer is a journey in which, through daily transformation to Christlikeness, I can align my own heart more and more closely to His.  Prayer is a recalibration of my own self-centeredness to Christlikeness.

Brothers, sisters:  let us pray like God’s children.  Let us come fervently, feverishly even, before the throne of grace, asking, seeking, and knocking for the good will of our Father.  Let us not be like the haoli.

R. Kent Hughes has noted the fact that visitors to Hawaii from the mainland are called haoli by the islanders.  He then passed on Alice Kaholuoluna’s explanation of the meaning of the term.

Before the missionaries came, my people used to sit outside their temples for a long time meditating and preparing themselves before entering.  Then they would virtually creep to the altar to offer their petition and afterwards would again sit a long time outside, this time to “breathe life” into their prayers.  The Christians, when they came, just got up, uttered a few sentences, said Amen and were done.  For that reason my people call them haolis, “without breath,” or those who fail to breathe life into their prayers.[6]

What an indictment!  What a tragedy!  What a shame!

May our prayers never be “without breath.”  May they instead be filled with the breath of the Spirit of God, working in us and through us to seek the Father’s will.

Exodus 12:29-50

²⁹ At midnight the Lord struck down all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sat on his throne to the firstborn of the captive who was in the dungeon, and all the firstborn of the livestock. ³⁰ And Pharaoh rose up in the night, he and all his servants and all the Egyptians. And there was a great cry in Egypt, for there was not a house where someone was not dead. ³¹ Then he summoned Moses and Aaron by night and said, “Up, go out from among my people, both you and the people of Israel; and go, serve the Lord, as you have said. ³² Take your flocks and your herds, as you have said, and be gone, and bless me also!” ³³ The Egyptians were urgent with the people to send them out of the land in haste. For they said, “We shall all be dead.” ³⁴ So the people took their dough before it was leavened, their kneading bowls being bound up in their cloaks on their shoulders. ³⁵ The people of Israel had also done as Moses told them, for they had asked the Egyptians for silver and gold jewelry and for clothing. ³⁶ And the Lord had given the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians, so that they let them have what they asked. Thus they plundered the Egyptians. ³⁷ And the people of Israel journeyed from Rameses to Succoth, about six hundred thousand men on foot, besides women and children. ³⁸ A mixed multitude also went up with them, and very much livestock, both flocks and herds. ³⁹ And they baked unleavened cakes of the dough that they had brought out of Egypt, for it was not leavened, because they were thrust out of Egypt and could not wait, nor had they prepared any provisions for themselves. ⁴⁰ The time that the people of Israel lived in Egypt was 430 years. ⁴¹ At the end of 430 years, on that very day, all the hosts of the Lord went out from the land of Egypt. ⁴² It was a night of watching by the Lord, to bring them out of the land of Egypt; so this same night is a night of watching kept to the Lord by all the people of Israel throughout their generations. ⁴³ And the Lord said to Moses and Aaron, “This is the statute of the Passover: no foreigner shall eat of it, ⁴⁴ but every slave that is bought for money may eat of it after you have circumcised him. ⁴⁵ No foreigner or hired worker may eat of it. ⁴⁶ It shall be eaten in one house; you shall not take any of the flesh outside the house, and you shall not break any of its bones. ⁴⁷ All the congregation of Israel shall keep it. ⁴⁸ If a stranger shall sojourn with you and would keep the Passover to the Lord, let all his males be circumcised. Then he may come near and keep it; he shall be as a native of the land. But no uncircumcised person shall eat of it. ⁴⁹ There shall be one law for the native and for the stranger who sojourns among you.” ⁵⁰ All the people of Israel did just as the Lord commanded Moses and Aaron. ⁵¹ And on that very day the Lord brought the people of Israel out of the land of Egypt by their hosts.

Samuel Rogers, the 18^th/19^th century poet, wrote these words in his poem, “The Death of the Firstborn.”

‘Tis midnight – ‘tis midnight o’er Egypt’s dark sky,

And in whirlwind and storm the sirocco sweeps by;

All arid and hot is its death-breathing blast, –

Each sleeper breathes thick, and each bosom beats fast.

And the young mother wakes, and arouses from rest,

And presses more closely her babe to her breast;

But the heart that she presses is deathlike and still,

And the lips that she kisses are breathless and chill.

And the young brother clings to the elder in fear,

As the gust falls so dirge-like and sad on his ear;

But that brother returns not the trembling embrace:

He speaks not – he breathes not – death lies in his place.

And the first-born of Egypt are dying around;

‘Tis a sigh – ‘tis a moan – and then slumber more sound:

They but wake from their sleep, and their spirits have fled –

They but wake into life, to repose with the dead.

And there lay the infant still smiling in death,

And scarce heaved its breast as it yielded its breath;

And there lay the boy, yet in youth’s budding bloom,

With the calmness of sleep – but the hue of the tomb!

And there fell the youth in the pride of his prime,

In the morning of life – in the springtide of crime;

And unnerved is that arm, and fast closed is that eye,

And cold is that bosom which once beat so high.

And the fond mother’s hope, and the fond father’s trust,

And the widow’s sole stay, are returning to dust;

Egypt has not a place where there is not one dead,

From the proud monarch’s palace to penury’s shed.

And the hearths of that country are desolate now.

And the crown of her glory is struck from her brow:

But while proud Egypt trembles, all Israel is free –

Unfettered – unbound, as the wave of the sea.[1]

That captures well the sense of terror and dread that gripped the Egyptians in the tenth plague.  The firstborn of all of Egypt are slain in every house whose door has not been marked by the blood of the Passover lamb.  Agonizing fear and grief grip Egypt and Israel begins the Exodus.

I.  The Tenth Plague:  Devastating Judgment and Initial Flight (v.29-33)

The actual execution of the plague is mentioned with startling bluntness.

²⁹ At midnight the Lord struck down all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sat on his throne to the firstborn of the captive who was in the dungeon, and all the firstborn of the livestock. ³⁰ And Pharaoh rose up in the night, he and all his servants and all the Egyptians. And there was a great cry in Egypt, for there was not a house where someone was not dead.

The death of Egypt’s firstborn is, of course, a catastrophic event.  It is the judgment of God.  Of course, Egypt has assaulted God’s son, Israel, threatening it very survival.  Once again we remember that the eradication of Israel would mean the eradication of the people through whom the Savior of the world would come.  God’s deliverance of His people is therefore linked to God’s provision of a Deliverer.

It is interesting to see how many people have struggled with the ethics of the tenth plague.  It is, of course, understandable.  This is an extreme and terrifying act.  However, we must not judge the actions of God by our own perceptions of right and wrong, as if we are in any position to judge God at all!  Roy Honeycutt offers, in my opinion, an unfortunate example of this.  Listen closely to what he says about the tenth plague.

One should face realistically the moral problem raised by the assertion that the Lord smote all the firstborn.  The total witness of the biblical revelation concerning the nature and character of God suggests that while God may utilize fatal epidemics, or other catastrophes in nature, he hardly goes about slaying children.  Thus, either the nature and character of God has changed, or man’s comprehension of that nature has enlarged with the fuller appropriation of God’s self-revelation.[2]

Well, those are interesting options:  either God has changed or our comprehension of God’s nature has evolved.  What Honeycutt does not allow is that the text may mean exactly what it says and that we should accept that the actions of God are right because God did them.  The assumption that a plain reading of this text indicts God of evil (if, indeed, that is what Honeycutt is suggesting) is an assumption grounded in hubris.

The Lord strikes the firstborn of Egypt.  It is terrifying, but it is just.  As a result, Pharaoh and the people of Egypt plead with the Hebrews to leave.

³¹ Then he summoned Moses and Aaron by night and said, “Up, go out from among my people, both you and the people of Israel; and go, serve the Lord, as you have said. ³² Take your flocks and your herds, as you have said, and be gone, and bless me also!” ³³ The Egyptians were urgent with the people to send them out of the land in haste. For they said, “We shall all be dead.”

It is fascinating to see that Pharaoh, after telling Moses to take the people and leave, actually asks for a blessing:  “be gone, and bless me also!”  Philip Ryken says that little scene reminds him of the scene in Fiddler on the Roof in which a young Russian Jew asks the rabbi if he can bless the czar.  The rabbi thinks about it and says, “May the Lord bless the tsar and keep him…far away from us!”  That is likely what Moses felt:  “I hope the Lord blesses you…over here…while we go over there!”

The reaction of the Egyptians to the tenth plague reminds one of the story recorded in Matthew 8 of Jesus delivering two demon possessed men from demonic possession and casting the demons into the pigs of the country of the Gadarenes.  Do you remember the people’s reaction to this deliverance and the destruction of these pigs?  “And behold, all the city came out to meet Jesus, and when they saw him, they begged him to leave their region” (v.34).  It is interesting to observe that the Gedarenes reacted to an act of deliverance the same way that the Egyptians reacted to an act of judgment.  Both instances exhibited the power of Almighty God.  People cannot long stand to be in the presence of God’s power!

II. An Act of Unleavened Consecration and Purity (v.34-41)

We saw in the first half of chapter twelve that the Lord established the Passover feast and the Feast of Unleavened Bread as symbolic rituals and reminders of their deliverance from Israel.  The Feast of Unleavened Bread was to be observed at the conclusion of the Passover.  However, the people were unable to partake, so they took their dough with them to observe it along the way.

³⁴ So the people took their dough before it was leavened, their kneading bowls being bound up in their cloaks on their shoulders. ³⁵ The people of Israel had also done as Moses told them, for they had asked the Egyptians for silver and gold jewelry and for clothing. ³⁶ And the Lord had given the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians, so that they let them have what they asked. Thus they plundered the Egyptians. ³⁷ And the people of Israel journeyed from Rameses to Succoth, about six hundred thousand men on foot, besides women and children. ³⁸ A mixed multitude also went up with them, and very much livestock, both flocks and herds.

Honeycutt proposes that the mixed multitude “was composed of Egyptians who had married Hebrews (cf. Lev. 24:10; also, Moses’ marriage to a non-Hebrew, Num. 12:1 f.), fragments of various ethnic groups who had migrated to Egypt just as had the Hebrews, and prisoners of war employed at forced labor.”[3]  Regardless, it is interesting to note that Israel does not go out alone.  As if, prophetically, to speak of the universal scope of the Savior who will come through Israel’s line, Israel goes with at least some from other nations with them.

It is also interesting to observe the reactions of modern and ancient commentators to Moses’ report that “about six hundred thousand men on foot, besides women and children” left Egypt.  That figure, including women and children, might be somewhere around two to three million.  Many modern commentators struggle before this number, pointing out the improbability of it and trying to figure out some way that that figure means something other than what it appears to mean.  Some ancient commentators, however, saw in that number evidence of the providence of God.  Thus, Gregory of Nazianzus, marveled at it.

Joseph came into Egypt alone, and soon thereafter six hundred thousand depart from Egypt.  What is more marvelous than this?  What greater proof of the generosity of God, when from persons without means he wills to supply the means for public affairs.[4]

It is indeed a marvel!  Israel has grown into a mighty nation, a numerous people.  They are emerging from the nightmare of bondage a powerful throng, a free people.  Their first act is to hold fast to the observance of unleavened bread.

³⁹ And they baked unleavened cakes of the dough that they had brought out of Egypt, for it was not leavened, because they were thrust out of Egypt and could not wait, nor had they prepared any provisions for themselves. ⁴⁰ The time that the people of Israel lived in Egypt was 430 years. ⁴¹ At the end of 430 years, on that very day, all the hosts of the Lord went out from the land of Egypt.

As we have seen, the absence of leaven speaks of the absence of impurities from the lives of God’s people.  They are a free people, and a people committed to God.  Their commitment will not remain pure, but it begins thus.  The eating of unleavened bread is an act of consecration and purity.  They are now a people set apart, a holy people, called out, redeemed, and delivered.

III. An Act of Covenant Identity and Solidarity (v.42-51)

Furthermore, God prescribes an act of covenant identity and solidarity.  The physical mark of covenant belonging is reasserted over Israel.  God reminds them that the Passover is for the His people, and His people are known by bearing the mark of covenant belonging in their flesh.

⁴² It was a night of watching by the Lord, to bring them out of the land of Egypt; so this same night is a night of watching kept to the Lord by all the people of Israel throughout their generations. ⁴³ And the Lord said to Moses and Aaron, “This is the statute of the Passover: no foreigner shall eat of it, ⁴⁴ but every slave that is bought for money may eat of it after you have circumcised him. ⁴⁵ No foreigner or hired worker may eat of it. ⁴⁶ It shall be eaten in one house; you shall not take any of the flesh outside the house, and you shall not break any of its bones. ⁴⁷ All the congregation of Israel shall keep it. ⁴⁸ If a stranger shall sojourn with you and would keep the Passover to the Lord, let all his males be circumcised. Then he may come near and keep it; he shall be as a native of the land. But no uncircumcised person shall eat of it. ⁴⁹ There shall be one law for the native and for the stranger who sojourns among you.” ⁵⁰ All the people of Israel did just as the Lord commanded Moses and Aaron. ⁵¹ And on that very day the Lord brought the people of Israel out of the land of Egypt by their hosts.

This may strike our modern ears as an odd prescription.  Is God xenophobic?  Does he have a fear of foreigners?  Why does He say that only those who have been circumcised can partake of the Passover?

There is, in fact, a deep and important truth here:  there are parameters to being the people of God.  There are boundaries.  As Thomas Oden once said, there can be no center without a circumference.

Almighty God knows that when His people become embroiled with people who do not share a common trust in Yahweh God, the convictions and identity of His people will become diluted.  This is why circumcision is necessary for those outside of Israel to partake in the Passover observance.

For the people of God today, the counterpart to Old Testament circumcision is repentance and faith, not baptism (as some allege).  We, too, have boundaries.  We, too, have parameters.  This is why Baptist Christians have historically practiced what is called “regenerate church membership.”  Membership in the body of Christ, the church, is open to all who have been circumcised of heart, who have repented and come to Christ in faith and trust.  This is the mark of covenant belonging and solidarity that is necessary today.

I have a friend who proposes that the body of Christ does not need boundaries, does not need a concept of membership as traditionally understood.  He says the church should be like a rancher who takes down his fences and digs a deep well.  The livestock, he says, do not need to be defined by a boundary, instead, they will be defined by the presence of life-giving water.  The well will keep them close.  They will not wander far from water.  They will, in other words, stay close to the source of life.

To be sure, the body of Christ must keep Christ at the center of its fellowship.  He is the source of life around which we gather and from which we dare not wander.  But it is a charming naivete that thinks the body of Christ does not need boundaries.  In point of fact, there are numbers of people who will draw near only to poison the well and kill the herd if there are not identity-defining boundaries.  Boundaries protect us, and the boundary for the church is repentance and faith.  The Church does not consist of perfect people, but it does consist of redeemed people who have bowed heart and knee to Christ.  We, too, have a defining boundary:  Christ Himself.  All who are in Christ are the Church.  Any who reject Christ are not.

Once again, we see in Israel the story of Christ and His church written in shadows and types.  There is more here than simply a story of historic deliverance.  There are principles here that, while clothed in strange and foreign elements, speak to the very heart of God that will be revealed definitively and most clearly in Christ Jesus.  In this sense, the Exodus is our story.  It is a preface to the gospel, a setting of the world stage for the eventual coming of Christ.

Let us thank God for the deliverance of His people.  Let us thank Him above all for the Deliverer who will come from this delivered people.