Sunday School | Matthew

Introduction

Alright. Cindy Lou needs Matthew. Two. Cindy Lou needs two Matthew. Alright. Good morning, friends. Welcome. Glad you're back. It's good to be with you. If you didn't already get them, what we're doing this morning, what we're doing broadly, is doing one-week overviews of every book in the New Testament, and this morning we're on Matthew.

A couple of guys have them. Chuck's got them. Bob's got them. They're up here. Anybody you're gonna want this sheet. Lots of information on the sheet. So if you need one, everybody good? Over here. There'll be more up here if you want to sneak up. And up here in this accordion file is every week we've already done. So if you wanna add to your collection, they are all right there.

Okay. One thing before we jump into Matthew. We have a new class of fellows coming in. They will arrive in about three weeks, whenever Labor Day is. We have homes for all but one of them. We have one male fellow that's going to need a home. If you are at all intrigued by the possibility of having a godly 22-year-old living in your house for nine months, we would be intrigued to talk to you about that. It would be a joy to tell you what that entails. Talking about it in no way obligates you to follow through on it, but I would love to kinda paint a picture for you of what that would look like as we trust the Lord to provide yet more radical hospitality to these guys.

And that was that was a little better. Alright. So simmer down. Okay. So we're gonna be this morning, but I'd love you to talk to me about that. You can text me or call me or talk to Kelly, anything. We'd love to talk to you about that. So we're gonna be in Matthew.

Purpose and Approach for the Study

So our, you might recall that I, I've said this a hundred times, but for those of you that maybe haven't been here for all 100 times, the whole purpose of this little experiment we're doing, these one-week overviews, is to help and encourage people to spend daily time in the scriptures.

I think the absolute fundamental need that we have is to be routinely, regularly in the scriptures for a long, long, long, long time. And if you wanted to read the New Testament, it's about 250 pages long, which is not very long. If you read five pages a day, which will not take you very long at all, you can read the whole thing in fifty days. If you wanna — if that feels like a sissy goal and you wanna read 10 pages a day, you could do it in less than a month.

Right? So twenty-five days. And what I'm trying to do here with these things is just to give you, to equip you to know what am I looking for as I'm reading through Matthew, I'm reading through First Peter, as I'm reading through whatever, just want it to be like I want it to pop more for you. So we're just trying to give you some insights, things to look for.

These are not meant to be replacements to your time in the scriptures. Like a high school kid who reads the cliff notes but not the book, right? But rather to facilitate you and help you to jump into it.

And in general, I recommend that you read them in this order: start with Luke, Acts, Romans. Luke, Acts, Romans will give you, like, a gospel, the history of the church, and the theological foundation. And then read any group of letters you want. Read five or six, seven, whatever, letters. And then read another gospel, then a bunch of letters, then another gospel, a bunch of letters, and save Hebrews and Revelation for the end because they're just weird and hard, and we'll save the deep end of the pool for once we're better swimmers.

Right? So, and so, what we're gonna do this morning is Matthew, which suggests we're through our first chunk of letters. We did Luke, Acts, and Romans, a bunch of epistles, and now we're gonna do Matthew, and then we will do a bunch of epistles. We'll follow that that general pattern that I set.

And so this will be our second gospel. We did Luke's gospel as we started. We're gonna do Matthew now. And so, without cheating, let's just get, let's just kinda lay the foundation. Let's find out what's, what's in the kinda common knowledge already about Matthew. So, anything at all that you know about Matthew that you think might be helpful for somebody else as they're reading through it, things to be aware of. What is going on with this, what we call the first gospel? Any insights you wanna throw onto the table?

Wait. Somebody say Tax. Okay. Stuart, say it loud. Tax. Tax collectors. Tax. Okay. So, Stuart is saying that the author of Matthew, and this is almost, this is harder to prove honestly, from within the text. We tend to try to, we try to, like, make all of our assertions be drawn from the text. This is harder to do, but our general, very, very early unanimous agreement of the early church fathers is that Matthew is written by the disciple who is sometimes called Matthew and is sometimes, what's his other name? Levi. Levi. And his profession was? Tax collector. That's the same guy. So Matthew, named Levi, the tax collector, all the same dude.

No historical evidence that he was autistic, by the way. Okay? None at all. However, if you're watching The Chosen and the character on that show that has autism, was the tax collector, fastidiously takes notes of everything—that's our guy. That's a little bit of creative license in The Chosen, which tends to be the way that show works. They make up a bunch of stuff that might not be true, and then they come out with these haymakers that are so beautiful, so on point.

That show is kind of like, I don't know what to do with it. Because some of their scenes are so outrageously good. And they basically what they what they do in that show with Matthew is, they're the reason I think they write him as having autism, is because Matthew, the actual real Matthew, gives us such a fastidious record of what happened. And I think he's trying to explain, like, how could anybody remember this? And, like, well, maybe he's had a peculiar capacity to focus intensely on things. That's kind of what they're doing with that, which I appreciate. And they're, and they're just also pointing out that this record here is an extraordinary thing.

So, yes, written by a guy, sometimes called Matthew, sometimes called Levi, occupation tax collector, who comes to know Jesus and makes a record. So great, Stuart. What else do you know about Matthew?

Don: When we studied religious, we tended to focus on Jesus as a man.

That's right. That's right. Okay. So what Don is alluding to is, of the four gospel records, we've, we've tended to say, and I and I think this is apt, although it's useful to know why we say this, that each of the four gospels, while without contradicting one another, nevertheless writes from a distinct perspective. And whereas Luke is really portraying Christ in his humanity, there's a great degree of focus on Jesus the man.

Matthew focuses on Jesus really as, well, there's a couple of things here, but on Christ as king and in particular as the Jewish king. Okay?

So if you, if you go through, one of the ways that we can draw this—there's a number of different data points—but if you read Luke's genealogy of Jesus, it traces it all the way back to Adam because he's trying to say he's one of us. You're a descendant of Adam. He's a descendant of Adam. He's a human being.

Matthew's genealogy does not go back that far. It actually goes only to Abraham, but he makes a very distinct point of stopping at David on the way. And so he's picking out, like, he is a Jew of Jews of Jews of Jews all the way back to the father of the Jews because Matthew is writing his gospel to a very Jewish audience.

Right? So if you happen to have friends today that are Jewish, very often if we wanted to share the gospel with somebody and we want to invite them into the scriptures, which book would you tend to go to?

What do we most often use as the evangelistic gospel message? Usually we go to John. Right? And there's very good reasons for that. We'll talk about that when we get to John. But honestly, if you're writing to a Jewish audience, I think Matthew is your way to go. It's literally written distinctly to a Jewish audience about a Jewish messiah, and the genealogy is one of the one of several different clues into what Matthew is doing.

So, excellent. What else do you guys know about Matthew?

Yeah. John?

Excellent. Okay. Very good. So what John is saying is, if you were to read Matthew's gospel, you might discover that it kind of organizes into five sections. Okay?

Now what John is saying is absolutely what you're gonna read if you read any commentary, they're gonna tell you this, this fivefold section, five divisions, five main speeches. And I've used—I'll show you that in a second here.

But let me, I'll just tell you, if you read Romans, it splits so obviously where it splits. If you read Ephesians, it splits so obviously where it splits. I mean, it's just, it's like opening an orange. You have no—if you, if you peel open an orange, you're gonna have no difficulty being like, okay, this section is different from this section. Right? It's very clear.

Matthew is not like that. You could read Matthew all your days and be like, I never noticed the five divisions. It's just honestly not that clear. It's present, but it's not nearly as obvious as some commentaries might make, might lead you to believe.

So it is five sections. The five main sections, really, what defines each section is Jesus' speeches. Matthew has Jesus talking a lot.

One of those sections is super obvious. When you think of Jesus talking in Matthew, what do you think of?

Sermon on the Mount. Okay. That is one. That's a whole unit.

And if you're reading, if you're going along, you're like Matthew five, Matthew six, Matthew seven, if you happen to have a red letter Bible and you flip through Matthew, you're gonna find there's just a ton of red letters. And so you can generally see, like, oh, a bunch of red, then some black stuff. A bunch of red, then some black stuff. But it's not that neat and it's not that tidy, but certainly the Sermon on the Mount is one of those.

We'll walk through all five of those in just a couple of minutes, and I'll show you where they are. But when you read through it, I just think you're going to have to look for it. It's just not that, it's not that bright and obvious, at least not to me.

Okay? So five sections. Yes.

And the final thing that that John mentioned is worth pointing out when we're talking about this is a book written about a Jew to a group of Jews, that why would that number five be meaningful? Do you know why this is?

Who said it?

Say it loud.

Pentateuch. Okay. So, the Torah or the Pentateuch—the first five books of Moses—is five books.

Penta means five.

Pentagon, pentagram, pentatuke.

So Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

And so there's speculation that Matthew is doing a number of things intentionally to say, hey, look, he's a Jew. Not only that, but oh, look, he's the new Moses. Oh, look, he's building the new nation of Israel that he records his book as having five sections.

Just like Moses' book had Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Jesus' book has these five sections. Okay?

Again, it's not that obvious, but I do think it's true. It's just not easy to see it. And that fiveness is perhaps an homage to the five books of Moses.

Okay? So, for where it's worth, you can notice that.

Anything else you wanna hit before we start running through this? Things you notice about the book of Matthew.

Yes, sir.

Upping the ante.

Say it again?

Upping the ante. Okay. How so? What do you mean by that?

Jesus is always saying, you have the rich.

Yes. Making everything harder.

Yes. More strenuous, not, oh, everything's gonna be easy.

Yes. Okay. So this is true. And so, and this fits very well into this idea. When Jesus comes, he is not just a new Moses, he is—as Hebrews would say—he's a new and better Moses. And he's gonna constantly say, you've heard it said, but I say to you. And that's—that's one of the distinguishing features of that first speech, the Sermon on the Mount, is he's gonna just, as you said, he's gonna keep upping the ante.

And it's because he's offering himself as something better than. When we finally get to Hebrews at the end of this series, Hebrews has a very similar vibe of Jesus is better than this and better than that and better than everything. He's got a better temple and a better resurrection and everything's better.

Matthew has all of those clues laid into it. He's doing something of enormous significance.

Excellent. Okay. One more—I think you're sitting on it. You're burning.

John?

That's right.

Hebrew.

Go a little louder.

There's no way these guys can hear you.

He—he's writing to a Jewish audience who can speak Hebrew. Hebrew used letters in the alphabet for numbers, and Hebrew also did not write the vowels.

So the name David had three consonants. They had—they added up to 14, the numeric value.

Yep.

Two would have seemed David, David.

Okay. So what is—and I didn't know the David part. It's certainly the case that he, when he does his genealogy, he chases it back into these 14-person groups, back to the exile, the Babylonian exile, and then from the exile to David, then from David to Abraham.

So he's doing a little bit of telescoping. He's more interested in the organization and in the precision of these things. And he is tracing it back to David via the exile, all to say that Jesus is the messianic king.

The David thing I did not know, but that would make sense because Jesus is not only the new and greater Moses, but he is the new and greater David. He is the son of David.

Okay? So take all that together. Here's what Matthew is doing, you guys. If we go back to the kind of the high-level view of Matthew, he's writing to a Jewish audience about a Jewish person to argue that he is the Jewish Messiah.

To that end, his focus on Christ as Messiah is that Jesus is—do you know what? King.

King.

Absolutely.

This is the book of Christ as king. And that is why if you go through the book of Moses, you're gonna find so much language about kingdom.

In fact, just open up to the middle here, and we'll do this first. We'll do this kind of the middle of this before we do the first page. Everything on your left page is language of kingdom.

Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.
Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom.

I couldn't even fit them all. If you've to go to the back and you see there's even more kingdom.

Over and over and over again, everything Jesus talks about is Jesus as kingdom. And the distinguishing feature of a kingdom is that it has a king.

Jesus is good news. The gospel according to Matthew is overwhelmingly the message that there's about to be a brand new king.

If you ever heard—I love to teach on this notion of Jesus becoming king—because we have a tendency to assume that Jesus has always been king. It's not that is not accurate. Jesus has always been God.

In beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

But he became king at a moment in time.

And so, Matthew is describing this whole thing, all on Jesus' lips, the way that he organizes things, the way that he depicts the crucifixion. His crucifixion is the μόνο way you can aptly capture the crucifixion of Christ is that it is a coronation.

They dress him in a robe. They give him a crown. They hail him. It's all in mockery, but it's all real. And he is becoming king.

He is dethroning this ruler who has usurped everything and has brought ruin to the world. He's defeating him, and he himself is becoming king.

Which is why, in the Great Commission when it's all—when the story is all over and Jesus says,

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.

—Matthew 28:18–20

You could paraphrase that by saying, all authority in heaven and earth has just been given to me. He's saying, guess what? I have become king.

By means of his death and resurrection, he has been crowned as king.

Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them, teaching them to obey all that stuff.

It's because he's king.

Matthew has a very, very strong focus on Christ as king.

So if you're going through Matthew, you're reading it five pages a day or ten pages a day, just underline every time you see king, every time you see kingdom. Watch the stories he tells about king. Watch the number of times he frames the good news. The good news is that Jesus has become king.

Everyone else in the whole world has been living their lives under this tyrannical ruler who brings misery and death.

This old—it’s called the domain of darkness in Paul's letters.

And Jesus is saying, yeah, yeah, yeah. I have come to wipe out the domain of darkness, to establish a new kingdom, and to invite subjects from the old kingdom to leave it.

And if they will leave the old kingdom and bend the knee before this new king, we will grant full amnesty, all will be forgiven, and you will live in a completely new way.

That is what the book of Matthew is about.

He sees the gospel through the lens of Christ the king, who is establishing a new kingdom, an entirely new way of being. It just absolutely permeates the letter.

So watch for the language of king. Watch for the language of kingdom. And that's gonna help you understand Matthew.

I keep passing out.

Right? Does it keep going? Where's Bob? Bob, you got a battery in your pocket? Okay.

Thank you. Bob carries batteries around for this very purpose.

Okay. Just like a boss.

Over and over. There's even more Old Testament. Just look at some of these.

Everything on the right column—and then again I couldn't fit them, so I had to drill on to half of the back page—is Old Testament quotes.

He does this over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

Again, it makes sense that he's writing to a Jewish audience that would regard the scripture, saying, your own book makes the case. Jesus is fulfilling these Old Testament promises. He's behaving consistently with what it said.

Over and over again, it is this—it is this legitimate.

This is this—is him doing what was what we should have expected him to do, but what we didn't expect him to do.

I watched a video this week. Do you guys know who William Lane Craig is?

Is that meaningful to you?

He's smarter than anyone you've ever met. He is like he's this—he's basically a Christian, what do you call him? An apologist? Theologian? Apologist?

He's super, super bright.

And in this conversation—should go watch it. It's excellent. He is interviewing—not interviewing, he's having a conversation with Ben Shapiro, who you might know.

Ben Shapiro is a conservative Jewish political commentator.

And William Lane Craig and Ben Shapiro sit down and have this conversation in which William Lane Craig is explaining why he believes in the historicity of the resurrection.

And it's really great because Shapiro says something to the effect of, well, reason I disagree with you is I don't think that Jesus is the Messiah. We, we think that when the Messiah comes, he's gonna be a political ruler.

He makes the point of the anticipation of Christ as a of the not Jesus, but of the Messiah as coming in a political sense.

And this guy Jesus of Nazareth disappointed that, so we don't think he's who he is. He just doesn't meet the standard.

Well, what Matthew's gospel is written to do is to say, well, you were looking for the wrong thing. Like, no, that's what you were looking for.

Right?

I understand that. However, reread the book. Reread the Hebrew scriptures. Reread this because in so many ways, yes, there were surprises. Yes, there were things that our nature bends us away from.

But do you see how remarkably Jesus fulfills not just these passages, but frankly, the entire book?

And so, Matthew has a very keen interest in picturing Christ not just as the king, although he is certainly that, but as the fulfillment of the Hebrew scriptures.

So when you, when you read through it, again, you could highlight those, maybe circle those or underline those or put an asterisk in your margin over and over and over again.

Matthew was going to point to the Old Testament scriptures. And when he does, here's what I would, here's a habit, maybe a new habit for some or an old habit for others: but whenever you're reading the New Testament and it quotes the Old Testament, stop.

It's not a race. I know we're talking about you're reading five, five pages a day, blah, blah, blah. Okay. Fine. Take an extra day and slow down and go back and look at the Old Testament passage that he's quoting. Right?

That would be a really good habit. Maybe you don't do it with every single thing, every single time, but if you will just be curious, like, why does Matthew quote Isaiah 7? Why does Matthew quote so many—I won't even name them all. Why does he quote this? What is going on there?

What you'll find is he's never going to merely take the words of that passage and apply them arbitrarily. When you pull up the words, you take the meaning. The root is gonna be the meaning. So he pulls on the words, he grabs the roots, the meaning, and then he applies that to Christ.

So if you will develop that habit of going back, I'm gonna see what these are.

This is—I thought about listing all the Old Testament references here, but your Bible will probably list the Old Testament references.

If you look down your footnote or your center column, if you get any kind of helps, almost always a print Bible will have the Old Testament allusion to it.

That would be a fantastic thing. Just to—I’m just gonna see what is Matthew drawing from.

If you will notice king and kingdom, if you will really notice how he's using the Old Testament, that is gonna bring an awful lot of flourishing life to your understanding of what's going on in Matthew.

Okay? Groovy? Okay. That's what all that stuff in the center is.

But here's, let's take a look at these five discourses.

Okay? What's the first one?

Sermon on the Mount.

Can you name any others or any other speeches in Matthew's book meaningful to you as a group?

Can you think of what they might be?

Can you?

Can you?

Olivet.

Olivet Discourse would also—that would be, I would say, that.

I would say, Sermon on the Mount would be number one, most obvious.

Olivet Discourse is number two.

What is the Olivet Discourse, Bob?

End times.

So it's basically Matthew 24, Matthew 25, depending on how you look at it.

And we call it the, why do we call it the Olivet Discourse? The Mount of Olives.

Jesus liked to give speeches on mountains. Right?

The Sermon on the Mount, he's up on a hill.

The Olivet Discourse, he's on the Mount of Olives.

And so, you might know Matthew 24 as a unit, the Olivet Discourse as a chunk.

It's where he talks about the son of man returning.

It's very lot of language there. The parables of the virgins that are trimming their wicks and they don't have enough time to come back, all that stuff, that's all of that discourse.

Now, when you go through, those two are relatively obvious because they've got circles.

The clue that you're looking for to find the end of a speech, and the thing that gives me the most confidence that this fivefold organization of Matthew is true, is that Matthew uses a repetitive phrase.

I've listed it here for you.

Every one of these sections, look at how they end.

For the Sermon on the Mount, that passage ends,

When Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were amazed at his teaching.

And then the next speech, after Jesus had finished instructing his 12 disciples, he went on from there to teach.

The third one, when Jesus had finished these parables, he moved on from there. His speech to the disciples,

When Jesus had finished saying these things, he left Galilee and went in blah blah blah.

And then after the Olivet Discourse, when Jesus had finished saying all these things, he said to his disciples.

That's the clue. Okay? When an author uses this recurring phrase, you might underline that or draw a line across the column and say, oh, the end of a section, end of a section, end of a section.

That's what he's doing here. Those five phrases that are very, very similar to each other are Matthew's way of saying end of the section, end of the section, end of the section.

Problem is, like I said, they're pretty sloppy endings. There's a lot of other stuff that he does in these sections, but that's your basic thing.

Okay?

So the first speech, Sermon on the Mount, is upping the ante. You have heard it said, but I say to you.

It is Jesus. It's probably—I don't know if this I'll agree with myself after I say this—but I think the Sermon on the Mount might be the clearest gospel presentation in the book of Matthew. Probably.

You notice the reason that we tell have people share John's gospel is because John is so sound bitey. Right?

There's all these different events that happen, and he's like, so God so loved the world that he gave us one, to God, and his Son. Never believes in him and not perishes but has eternal life.

There's lots of things that are easy.

But you won't find a lot of gospel tracks, a lot of summaries of the gospel that quote Matthew or Mark or Luke, for that matter.

Does that—does that scandalous to you? Does this make sense?

It's harder to do because Jesus tends to talk more about the kingdom than about the forgiveness of sins. Right?

It's not as clear as you're gonna get. And John makes it such a layup.

But if there's any point in Matthew's gospel that's clear, it's probably gonna be in the Sermon on the Mount, and in particular, it's gonna be the Beatitudes.

So turn there for just a second, I'll show you what I think.

And I will yield. If you got a better passage or a clearer passage or something that might be easier than this, then show it to me and I will change my claim here.

But look at what he does in what we call the Beatitudes. That's the blessed are the so-and-so's, blessed are the so-and-so's. You know this?

It's Matthew 5, part of that sermon on the mount.

What he's describing in the Beatitudes is the progression of someone coming to faith in Christ.

Just watch how it works.

He says,

Blessed are the poor in spirit.

That is, there's something good, there's a blessing, there's something happy about poverty, but in particular, spiritual poverty.

That if you come to recognize your bankruptcy before God, that's a good thing. Right?

Step one is I recognize, I see, I'm aware that I am broke, that I'm spiritually bankrupt.

Step two, blessed are those who mourn.

If you recognize your condition and you hate it and you wish it were otherwise, that you're conscious of your guilt, you're conscious of your inadequacy, you regret what has come of your life—that's a happy thing.

First, you're poor in spirit. Second, you mourn.

Step three, blessed are the meek.

If your response to that is not arrogance and presumption, but humility and lowliness, then you are positioning yourself to receive.

And that's crucial.

So, with spiritual poverty, that we grieve, that makes us humble, the next step in verse six, blessed are those, happy are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.

You're hungering and thirsting for righteousness because you come to a deeper understanding that you don't have it.

You hate that. You know that you're inadequate.

I can't generate this, but I long for it. I need it. I'm hungry.

And then you are filled.

And as a result of this—this is where I think conversion takes place right here in verses seven and eight.

Blessed are the merciful.

Right?

When you come to an experience of having been shown mercy, you become merciful.

We love him because he loved us.

We forgive others because he forgave us.

We show grace and mercy to others because he's shown grace and mercy to us.

We develop— we know we don't develop. We are given a new heart.

This is where conversion happens.

Verse nine, blessed are the peacemakers.

Those that have gone through this process of spiritual poverty to mourning and hungering and new heart, and then they come up and they wanna become peacemakers.

This is basically evangelism because the very necessity, if you are reconciled, you become a reconciler.

And now we are moving to help other people discover what we have.

And then the final step is kind of a drag.

Verse 10, blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness.

And he's just letting us know, by the way, first Peter is coming.

Right?

By the way, it's just normal for Christians to suffer unjustly. That's just the deal.

So welcome to the club.

It's gonna be worth it.

Okay?

That, do you see it? That's the gospel message.

Okay?

So if I were to share the Gospel out of Matthew, I'd probably go here and walk somebody through that.

There's plenty of other passages that add depth, brightness to the thing, but it's not nearly as clear as you're gonna find in John.

Okay?

Sermon on the Mount.

Everybody good?

Okay.

Watch that when you go through it.

His next big speech is sending out the 12.

Not as clear, not as stark, not as crisp, but it's what he's gonna tell the 12, but he's gonna begin to send them on mission because Christianity is not a spectator sport.

Christians are not supposed to be—you've heard the football description of, like, whatever, like 16 men desperately in need of rest, being observed by 50,000 people desperately in need of exercise.

Right?

Right?

That's not Christianity. We get on the field. And so, very early in the game, Jesus sends out the 12 and says, let's go do it.

Right?

And then you have grouping of his parables.

If you read Matthew 13, you might be surprised at the number of parables he shoves in there.

And as often he does, lots of parables about the king.

The kingdom of heaven is like.

The kingdom of heaven is like.

So when you go through Matthew 13, watch that third thing, and then you're gonna see he has this speech to the disciples.

Something important happens before chapter 18.

Okay?

Anybody know why Jesus, this would be a little bit obscure knowledge.

Anybody know why Jesus has this speech with the disciples in chapter 18?

What led to this?

I don't think I captured this anywhere on this.

Sort of.

A little bit, but not really.

Transfiguration.

Okay.

The transfiguration is going on, but that's not the—that's not the reason.

What's what's happened?

Transfiguration.

Yeah.

That—that that's happening, but there's some, there's not the—the reason he pulls back.

You know why he pulls back?

Make a guess.

There's a major theme in Matthew.

I probably should have added that somewhere.

Is his rejection by the nation of Israel.

Okay?

So Matthew is picturing here he is.

Let me prove to you that he's the Messiah.

He's fulfilling all these things. He's teaching all these things. He's healing all these people.

And the people say, boo. We don't like him.

Okay?

Huge theme of rejection, Matthew.

Not only that, he does that he gets obviously—as we get rejected at the cross, but his rejection is being anticipated all along the way.

It's where Matthew—oh, in fact, I did list this.

Matthew, they have Jesus predicting his death.

So look at what happens in, in '16.

From that time on, Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, chief priests, the teachers of the law, and he must be killed and on the third day be raised.

In chapter 17, when they came together in Galilee, he said to them, the son of man is going to be betrayed into the hands of men. They will kill him. On the third day, he'll be raised to life.

There's a major theme of the Jews rejecting Christ. He's come to be their king. He's come to heal them. He's come to love them, and they don't want it.

So what happens here, in this fourth speech, in Matthew 18, is Jesus pulls back.

Everything he's been doing up to now has been public ministry with the crowds, healing the people, teaching the masses. They don't want it.

He's like, all right.

And he just steps back.

Huddle up, boys.

And then what you get in that fourth speech is Jesus just talking to the disciples.

It's time to prepare them, to get them ready because his crucifixion is coming, and he kind of moves back.

Now he's still here for the crowd. He's still going to die for the crowd.

As the crowd is crucifying him, he's gonna say,

Father, forgive them. They know not what they do. — Luke 23:34

Right?

But his strategic ministry goes from public proclamation into a private huddle with the 12 to get them ready because he's not here much longer.

Okay? So, when you get to chapter 18, you might watch for that, that it changes to the disciples.

And then you get this whole Olivet Discourse where he's talking about his coming.

And again, if you read the Olivet Discourse, it is riddled with language of rejection.

It's a major theme throughout.

So watch that. You're watching for the kingdom stuff.

You're watching for the Old Testament stuff.

Watch for all the rejection stuff as you read through it.

And that's going to, I think, help you see all these things.

Okay?

John?

How shows—

Yes.

Yes.

And so, Bob is saying, this is not unique to Matthew. And of course, it shouldn't be unique to Matthew because Matthew's not making this up. He's simply recording what happened.

Right?

Now, not all of the gospel readers are gonna organize things or gospel writers are gonna organize things in the same way.

But Matthew is not inventing this phenomenon. He's simply describing it.

And so, it shouldn't surprise us if other of the gospel writers also point out, oh, wow.

He, you know, public ministry here, then he retreats back.

And what the way that John captures that is, what we call, the upper room discourse.

And we'll do John in, like, a couple of months. And you'll see that this long—if you look at John, if you have a red letter Bible, there's this huge section that is, like, all red letters for pages and pages and pages, and that's what we call the upper room discourse.

Right before Jesus dies, he shows all this personal teaching.

Okay?

Got all that?

Okay.

A couple of things that'll be a little bit more obscure but that I think are still present and are interesting to see.

When I say this thing at the bottom of the page, okay, Jesus' life recapitulates the life of Israel.

We is that familiar? Have we done this in this room?

Okay.

So, here's, you could go nuts.

You could go completely insane trying to make sense of the way that Matthew uses prophecy if you don't understand this simple idea.

Maybe this idea. Maybe it's not simple.

We have a tendency to think of prophecy as all direct prediction.

When the Messiah comes, he will jump through this hoop. And then Jesus jumps through the hoop and you're like, check. There it is.

Okay?

That is sometimes—that's what happens.

But very rarely is that the way it works.

Overwhelmingly, the prophecies that Jesus fulfills are not quite so hoop jumpy as all of that.

And in particular, maybe this one that will drive you to distraction the most would be the statement that Matthew makes in his birth narrative.

He says, out of Egypt, I called my son.

Let's look at that very quickly, and we'll use that as a representation for this whole thing.

So, go to Matthew, Matthew 2.

And when Jesus gets driven out of, when Jesus is a baby, his family gets driven out of Israel. And it says in verse 13,

When they had gone, the angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. Get up, he said. Take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.

So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night, and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod.

Now pause right there.

Okay?

You got me?

So Herod's trying to kill him. Angel says, Joseph, take your kid. Get out of town. Go to Egypt and hide. Boom.

Now, does the Old Testament predict that when the Messiah comes, he will have to flee to Egypt to escape for his life? It does not.

There is no passage anywhere in the Old Testament that says, you will know the Messiah by this: he will flee to hide in Egypt.

Okay?

Given that absolute truth, why is the next sentence, where he stayed until the death of Herod, and so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet, out of Egypt I called my son?

Matthew is claiming that Jesus' flight to Egypt was, I quote, the fulfillment of what the prophet said. And when he says it, he quotes Hosea 11.

Now, if you go back to Hosea 11, remember—if you follow that habit of—I'm going to go look and see what the Old Testament said and what was being used—this one will drive you bonkers if you don't know what's going on.

Look at Hosea 11, verse 1.

When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son.

There's your line.

But the more they were called, the more they went away from me. They sacrificed to the bales, burned incense to images.

It was I who taught every man to walk, taking them by the irons.

But I didn't realize it was I who healed them.

I led them with cords of human kindness, with ties of love, blah blah blah.

And he goes on, they're gonna turn to Egypt.

If you read through this, there's nothing—there is not anything messianic about Hosea 11.

And so, on what basis does Matthew quote Hosea 11 and say that it was about Jesus?

Okay?

If you read nobody, nobody, no Jew, nobody would have ever read Hosea 11 and said, oh, prediction of Messiah. I promise you, they never would have said that.

That's not what Matthew is saying.

Everything's okay.

I'm not denying Matthew. I'm just telling—I'm gonna explain what he's doing.

Okay?

So Hosea 11 is not a forward look about the Messiah. It is a backward look about Israel.

It's a reminder that God drew them into Egypt as a place of salvation.

Why did they go to Egypt in the first place?

Because it was a—they go into Egypt, and then they're in Egypt, and then he draws them out as an act of salvation.

And as soon as they go out, what do they do?

They rebel.

They sin.

They make a golden calf.

They do all this ridiculous stuff.

They wander around the desert.

Right?

Hosea 11 is merely a recap of the faithlessness of Israel when they were—when they went into Egypt and, in particular, when they came out of Egypt.

So, why does Matthew quote it?

The reason that Matthew is quoting this summary of the history of Israel is because he is saying, God has two sons. He has Israel, who is his faithless, disobedient son, and he has a second son.

Jesus is the new and better Moses.

He is the new and better Israel.

He has come to live the life of Israel.

And everything that Israel did badly—a whole bunch of stuff—Jesus is going to do all those same things, but he's going to do them well.

And so, just as Israel was drawn out of Egypt and sinned, Jesus will be drawn out of Egypt and he will live a perfect, righteous life.

He will be the obedient son in contrast to the disobedient son.

And Matthew is going to show this up over and over and over again.

He's very interested in showing that Jesus' life bears this really weird, really surprising, very uncanny similarity to the history of Israel, except that every crucial juncture where Israel crashed and burned, Jesus soars and crushes it.

Okay?

I'll give you the maybe, maybe, the most obvious version of this is Israel went into the wilderness for how long?

Forty years.

Jesus goes into the wilderness for how long?

Forty days.

When Israel's in the wilderness, what do they do?

Grumble.

They grumble, they complain, they sin, they rebel.

When Jesus goes into the wilderness, what does he do?

He is obedient.

He is faithful.

Do you happen to know what book he quotes from when he's in the wilderness?

Okay.

And why?

What he's doing when he's in the wilderness and Satan is sparring with him, he is endlessly gonna cite Israel's time in the wilderness.

But he's going to do it right.

So Israel—the community of Israel—was divided up into how many groups?

12 tribes.

Jesus establishes his new community with how many leaders?

He's doing this on purpose.

He's saying, don't you see? He's the new Moses.

He is the new Israel.

All that he has done is reliving.

He is doing well what they did badly.

So, I've got those three examples listed here.

Don't be freaked out if you read Hebrews 11—sorry, if you read Hosea 11 and Matthew 2 and you're like, I don't understand what's going on here.

It's not a prediction.

It's not trying to be a prediction.

He's simply showing you that just as Israel went into Egypt and got brought out, Jesus goes into the Egypt and gets brought out.

So, Jesus goes into Egypt and is brought out.

But, whereas these ones sinned, this one does it right.

That's what Matthew is trying to show you with that citation.

Cool?

Alright.

How are we doing?

Okay.

Last thing, let's see.

Watch how many times he predicts his death. That's really important.

And then, in particular, I kind of shoved it all into here.

Just watch the crucifixion. I'm telling you, it's his coronation.

Everything is so astonishing.

Jesus gets a scarlet robe.

Jesus gets a crown.

Jesus gets a scepter.

They could have mocked him in any number of ways. They could have just inflicted agony upon him in any number of ways. And frankly, they did.

But God sees fit that this will be depicted as the coronation of his son.

When you read Matthew 27–28, you are reading Psalm 2.

You are watching Daniel 7.

You are seeing the Son of Man enthroned as king.

And the most startling, amazing, incredible thing is that his kingship is one of suffering.

His kingship is one of lowliness.

His kingship is one in which he will be exalted before the world.

Exalted.

And yet not in a sense of power and dominion that serves himself, but in an exercise of power over death, the power to suffer unjustly that benefits the rest of the world.

It is the most inverted kingdom the world has ever imagined.

It is why, in Revelation, when John—you know this—this amazing juxtaposition, where John is told to behold the Lion of Judah.

And he turns and what does he see?

He sees a lamb on his throne.

Right?

That, the way we would think even by that point of Revelation, I mean, let's just get rid of the lamb and let's go with the lion.

But even now, in all of eternity, his reign as king is a lambish king.

For he himself is a lamb-like lion and a lion-like lamb.

And he becomes king not in pomp and circumstance as the kings of the world would do, but in lowliness, humility, and suffering for the good of those who came to save.

That's what you're gonna find if you read through the book of Matthew.

Okay?

Watch for the king language.

Watch for all those things.

And we gotta stop because it's time to go to church.

Alright?

Matthew here.

Grab a sheet if you didn't get one, and all the past ones are up here.

And if you wanna post a fellow, tell me.

I'd love to talk to you.