Bible Commentaries

Chapter66

Readers of the Outside

Matthew 16:1-12

The Pharisees and the Sadducees had looked upon the whole demonstration of evidence applied by Jesus Christ in the course of his varied and exciting ministry, and were exactly in the same condition of unbelief and disguised or avowed hostility as before. No impression had been made upon them of a vital kind. They had been dazed and stunned by a succession of miracles, but had not been convinced. Allowing that great and wonderful cures had been performed, they were piously anxious that now some sign should be shown to them from heaven. You can understand the unctuousness with which they pronounced that sacred word. They would now change the field of proof: a token from heaven would be exactly after the temper of their pious and noble mind. They had observed the wonderful deeds which had been done, which were of a material and sensational kind, and which were adapted in a kind of broad manner to a certain low type of mind—but they desired a sign from heaven. The earth had been enough, and now they, wrapping their religious cloaks closely around them, desired a sign from heaven. Pious, sweet-souled, godly men, who were alive on the heavenly side of their nature, and who would accept any hint or claim that came from the sky, in infinite preference to the cures of the leprous, the dumb, the deaf, the blind, and the maimed.

This is a common and holy trick in all corrupt Churches. Give them what you may, they always want miracles of another kind. Their hearts are determined in unbelief, therefore do their minds affect to find fault with the evidence, or if not to find direct fault with it, to suggest supplementary demonstration of a totally different kind, and the corrupt Church is never so near its total damnation as when it affects its most unctuous piety and" wants a sign from heaven.

We want sermons of another kind, when the devil is twisting his fingers further and further round us. We admire the sermons that are delivered, but we would see a sermon from heaven. Such people grant the intellect but they affect to pine for the feeling. They do not deny the genius but they desire more spirituality. They do not doubt that good has been done in certain cases and to a certain class of minds, but they desire to see good of another kind done. This is a stock temptation of the old serpent. He says, "What you have to eat is all very good, but you ought to ask for something if not better, yet different. You cannot deny that notable miracles have been done, and that wonderful doctrine has been propounded. Admit all that: appear ever to be generous in your concessions, but ask for something different, play the pious trick." Old serpent, cunning—and yet his cunning ought now to be so transparent that we should mock it and reject it with bitter scorn.

How did Jesus Christ treat this pious inquiry, this high spiritualism of desire? The answer which he returned was itself a sign from heaven had they who received it but have understood its scope and its purport. It was a two edged sword—no other man in all human history could have made that reply. Observe its moral discernment. "O ye hypocrites." Unhappily we have only the cold ink to represent that word: we miss the atmosphere of its utterance, the emphasis which carried it straight into the guilty heart. "O ye hypocrites." Was not their pious speech about heaven, was not their question simple and direct, is there any one word in it that could give reasonable offence did they not belong to the spiritual section of the Church, the sighing, crying and sky-desiring section of the great family of human students and religious inquirers? "O ye hypocrites,"—that was a sign from heaven, to know them through their disguises, to accost the devil when he wore an angel's livery, to take him with mocking familiarity by the face and call him devil, notwithstanding his clothes—that was a sign from heaven.

In the case of Jesus Christ we must always judge the question by the answer which he returns. We do not say everything in words: the big lie is in the heart and not in the speech. Christ answers the question we want to ask, and not merely the inquiry which we actually put in words. Was not this penetration of character a sign from heaven? Was he ever much grander and nobler than when he faced the Pharisees and Sadducees and answered the question about heaven by a charge of personal and unmixed hypocrisy? Did this Man palter with his age, did this Man pay a high price for popularity? Was this the way to increase his fame and his comfort? Would it not have been better for him to have taken the Pharisees and Sadducees into some quiet and sacred place and shown them tricks from heaven? Mark the stern and invincible consistency of this Man: he will have no compromise with hypocrisy. He will not enter into partnership on forbidden terms and with forbidden people. This is the eternal miracle of truth: it pierces us, being sharper than any two-edged sword. This is the proof of its inspiration which the Bible always gives. Do not find its inspiration in its literary conscientiousness, in its mechanical consistency, in its artistic finish—find whether it is inspired or not by its moral penetration, moral omniscience, moral authority. In any right reading of this Book we stand in a holy place, cut off from everything else, made solemn by an unspeakable quietness, so quiet that a whisper is as thunder, so holy that a sigh may pollute the awful sanctity. So come to the question of the inspiration of Christ, and the inspiration of the Scriptures. Understand what the Bible is in its moral tone and moral claim, and as it warns off all generations of vipers and broods of serpents, and will have nothing to do with hypocrites and masked men and visored faces, learn that it is the very judgment of God amongst men, no more to be trifled with than is fire.

The moral discernment of Christ's answer justified the judicial tone by which he mocked the hypocritical inquirers. "When it is evening, ye say it will be fair weather, for the sky is red, and in the morning it will be foul weather today, for the sky is red and lowering." They were weather-wise, and nothing more, they mistook the sky for heaven, and the weather for a revelation. This is the perpetual mistake of men who have no inward and spiritual life. The temptation of today is that men should study the barometer. Such study has attained almost the dignity of a science—the barometer is now a Bible. Jesus Christ does not condemn this study of the weather, he says it makes a man foolish if he can only do so much and do no more. A man's knowledge may itself be an argument against him if it stops short of wisdom; if the light that is in a man be darkness, how great is that darkness! Jesus allows that they who questioned him could read the face of the sky, but he charges them with inability to discern the signs of the times.

What would you say about a man who knew all the letters of the alphabet, but could not put them into words? How would you estimate the claim of any man to wisdom who knew every word in the English language, and yet never could arrange those words into sentences? It looks as if a man were certainly learned when he knows instantly every letter of the alphabet—what more can any man know? He can repeat the alphabet backwards, forwards, onwards from any given letter—what more can be desired? Yet as there are those who know the letters but cannot shape them into words, so are there men who can count upon their fingers the great dogmas of Christianity but cannot run them into musical utterance, or mass them into grand practical argument, or translate them into noble and beneficent life. They are weather-wise, letter-wise, and nothing more. Herein is the great difficulty of all-expanding Matthew 16:13-23

13. When Jesus came into the coasts of Csarea Philippi (the ancient Leshem), he asked his disciples, saying, Whom do men say that I the Son of man am?

14. And they said, Some say that thou art John the Baptist; some, Elias; and others, Jeremias, or one of the prophets.

15. He saith unto them, But (the decisive moment!) whom say ye that I am?

16. And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.

17. And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon (obedient hearer) Matthew 16:24-28

24. Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will (This "will" is more than a mere auxiliary) come after me, let him deny (empty) himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.

25. For whosoever will save his life (the same as soul in the next verse) shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.

26. For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?

27. For the Son of man shall come in the glory of his Father with his angels; and then he shall reward every man according to his works.

28. Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death (an idiomatic expression, death being represented as a goblet full of bitterness) till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom.

The Law of Christ-Following

How differently this passage reads when taken in connection with all that has gone before, from what it is often made to appear when taken out of its setting and made the basis of a discourse upon the value of the soul. Jesus Christ did not deliver these words as a sermon to the people, or as his abstract statement of the soul's worth. He was not speaking about immortality, he did not probably bring within his purview the term soul as it is often theologically and evangelically construed. He himself was the Man spoken of, his own soul was the soul which he set against the whole world's value. Peter had just said to him, when he had spoken of going to Jerusalem to suffer and to be killed, "This be far from thee, Lord." Peter could not bear that his Lord should expose himself voluntarily to all the indignity and suffering which Jesus Christ detailed. The reply of the Saviour was based on the suggestion of Peter: "Peter bids me turn aside and escape the destiny which I came to fulfil. Taking short and narrow views, Peter tells me in effect to save myself—but I came into the world expressly to do this very work and no other. This is my soul, my life, this is the very reason of my incarnation. What then should I be profited if I gained the whole world and insulted the very genius of my being and perverted the destiny which I was born to realize?"

Jesus Christ thus enters the sanctuary of great principles, and builds his life-house upon a rock. He looked to duty, and did not exercise his inventiveness in finding escapes from it. He kept his eyes steadily upon the beckoning Destiny, and whither it beckoned he went, and whosoever sought to hinder his advancement was Satan, and was ordered behind. To this end was Jesus born, for this purpose he came into the world, and knowing this he hardened his face that he might go unto Jerusalem. There is a beautiful artistic completeness about the statement well worthy of note. Jesus said unto his disciples how that he must GO—so we read in verse twenty-one—in the twenty fourth verse we read, "Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will COME"—that is completeness. First, he himself must go, and in the second instance, if any man will come.

This is the setting of the divine grace, in all the solemn order of providence and in all the outgoing of the divine decree. Sovereignty and spontaneity, lordship and liberty, destiny and voluntary acceptance or rejection of the great challenge. There is no asking, "Shall we go—will it not be well to go—ought we not to consider whether we should go?" The first tone shatters the air, "I MUST" the next falls upon the air like a pleading gospel, like a gracious appeal, "If any man will come." Would he then have gone, if no man had answered, "Lord, I will come?" Certainly. All this will come up again in the great audit: he is laying the basis and the foundation of judgment as well as the basis and foundation of redemption; the cross would be set up, the sorrow, the suffering would be endured if no answering heart called him Lord and Saviour. Sin must be encountered, a divine answer must be given to a Satanic challenge and a human apostasy, and that divine answer could be given only through the medium of the tragic cross. What an if is this—"If any will come"!—and yet in another mood he says, "And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me." Still, even in that bold declaration of sovereignty, it is drawing, not driving—alluring by the sweet compulsion of infinite love, and not scourging with iron rods or stinging scorpions.

Here is a great gospel invitation, the tender thing we call the love of God. Standing before us in figured image, it says, "If any man will come." And yet the artistic completeness does not terminate there. Jesus said how he must go unto Jerusalem and suffer and be killed. "If any man will come after me let him take up his cross." Here is the balance of the picture, this is the symmetry of the grand delineation—Jesus at the head yonder with a great cross crushing him, and the next man at an infinite distance with his lesser cross, and then the crowd, and then the great innumerable throng which no man can number, but every man with his own cross, every man going to be killed, but going to be killed with Christ, and therefore not to be killed at all!

The sublime reply of Jesus Christ to his generous but mistaken disciple contains a whole philosophy of life. Jesus Christ tells Peter that self-protection on narrow lines is self-destruction. He startled Peter by his paradox, "Whosoever shall save his life will lose it, and whosoever shall lose his life for my sake shall find it." A shrewd Peasant, a marvellous thing for a carpenter's Matthew 16:19.—To have the keys, is the sign of administrative authority: to bind and to loose, are figures for the exercise of such authority. The Apostles expected to be rulers in an earthly kingdom, and to have their acts sanctioned and supported by an earthly king. They were assured of a higher dignity than this. Not that the will of God would change to agree with their will; but that their will would be brought to agree with his, and their agency be employed in teaching and governing.

Matthew 16:20.—The verbal declaration would now only promote popular excitement.

Matthew 16:22.—Peter supposed that his Lord was unduly discouraged, and elated by the commendation just received, he presumed to speak as if he were wiser; thinking the predictions of the Old Testament made the death of Christ impossible. He had been named a stone for building, he now became a stone of hindrance. What was appointed and approved of God, was different from what was expected and desired by men, and it was much better. Christ spoke first of his own sufferings, and then of those of his disciples. He would not call them to death, till he could bid them in this also follow him.