Conclusion: Two Ways

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks from Matthew 7:13-28 on the topic of the two ways we can go to our final destination.

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I would like to say how I’ve enjoyed the privilege of trying to expound the Sermon on the Mount to you these six weeks. My chief regret is that I don’t know more of you personally. I am getting to know more and more faces, but I’m afraid I still know very few names. Occasionally, I zoom down the street on my bicycle and somebody smiles from the pavement.

I cheerfully smile back, but I’m afraid I don’t usually recognize them, and I’m rather embarrassed by that, but those of you whom I have gotten to know and have fellowshipped with and often prayed with, I assure you I am very much in your debt. It’s not the other way around. These three years in Cambridge have certainly been among the most happy and contented in my life, and I’ve enjoyed the privilege and fellowship of worshiping with you.

I get the impression, very frankly, talking with CICCU [Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union] Christians that many don’t realize what a thing you have here. To be quite honest, I don’t know any university anywhere with such a high percentage of Christians and so many of that number really keen to know and love the Lord. That’s not flattery. If all it’s going to do is fill your head, then I shouldn’t have said it, but on the other hand, it should be used of God to stop complaint and that form of introspection which is always critical.

I have worked and studied in universities with 28,000 to 30,000 students and a group of 100 meeting. Here you have 10,000 and you collect 500 together on a Saturday night. I think these are things for which to be profoundly grateful to the Lord and also things for which to examine one’s own responsibility before him in terms of how you can then touch others.

There’s a tremendous strength here, and you will never have it perhaps so easy in your Christian experience in the sense of having so many peers of roughly the same intelligence and roughly the same outlook who are committed to Christ and on whom you can drop for advice and help. It is really a marvelous thing. It should not be used as a crutch but as a jumping-off spot to greater things.

Having expressed my indebtedness to you, let me direct your attention to this passage. During the last four weeks, I have tried to devote a little bit of time at the beginning of each session to relating the Sermon on the Mount to other parts of God’s Word, and I would like to do that this evening as well.

The reason for this approach is quite simple. The Word of God as a whole is to be believed, not just some part of it. It is not Paul, or it is not John who, by himself, declares what is normative Christianity, but it is the totality of God’s propositional revelation. They approach Scripture falsely, on the one hand, who try to make it a textbook of systematic theology, or on the other hand, who try to pit one part against another.

In point of fact, God the Holy Spirit chose to give us his inscripturated Word in a different way. He took individual men and molded them and made them and filled them with the Spirit and providentially overruled in what they said, yet, all in his sovereign ways without transgressing their personalities, as it were.

John still writes like John. Paul still writes like Paul. When you get to know the Greek language, you find they have their own idioms, their own peculiar ways of putting things, their own phraseology, their own vocabularies, and their own interests. John doesn’t stress the same things Paul does, and Matthew doesn’t stress the same things Mark does. Yet, the whole thing when it comes out gives us not only a corpus of God’s infallible truth but also it gives us the full-orbed range of it, as it were.

It’s not all designed for the timid person who is very fearful about the status of his soul before God. There is encouragement for him, but there is also something for the cocky, know-it-all who needs to be put down, and there is something else for the person who is attracted by John’s simple and yet profound language, and something also for the person who is challenged by the crucial, logical, step-by-step argument of Paul in Romans.

There is hortatory injunction, and there is rebuke. There is doctrine, and there is practice. There is example. There is debate. All of these things all together constitute the Word of God. It is important when we read the Word of God, therefore, to listen to each part as it stands and then try to relate it to the other parts without prostituting the individual parts.

Tonight I want to say something very quickly about Paul. We’ve been noticing in these three chapters Jesus has had a great deal to say about morality and its roots in the fear of God and in the right perspective that comes from seeking his glory and his reign above all things. It would be easy to deduce from that that a person enters the kingdom on the merits of his obedience. It would be a false deduction, but it would be an easy one.

When you turn to Paul, you discover it emphatically declared that men are saved without works and by grace alone. Paul declares, in effect, that men cannot please God. None ever have since the fall, and none can. Indeed, even our good deeds, and Paul acknowledges we do some, are tainted with self and independence, so vis-a-vis God, even these things are sinful.

If we could do perfectly good deeds, how would they pay for the bad ones when, after all, we’re supposed to do the good ones anyway? The whole New Testament fights against that form of merit theology where I sort of balance up all my credits on this hand and balance up all my debits on the other hand and hope I squeak through into the kingdom.

There just isn’t any of that in the New Testament. Indeed, Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels as well, castigates this form of approach to God that thinks you have some hallowed claim on God. In Luke 18, he makes this very clear, for example. Paul stresses men are saved by God’s sheer grace without works. God has given us his Son. God has sent his Spirit. God convicts us. God gives us faith. God is the source of all of our salvation, and it is of his sheer grace he draws us to himself and we believe, and he makes us to be his own.

Yet, for Paul, this does not mean Christians are free from responsibility. He points out the law has pointed the sin out in man. Then he talks about grace. Then he asks the question, “All right, then. If there’s lots of sin and there’s great grace that covers the sin, does this mean we should have lots of sin and sin more and more so we can have more and more grace?” Paul, at the beginning of the sixth chapter, says, “That’s silly. God forbid. Shall we sin that grace may abound?”

But there is another function yet to law. Paul does not mean only that Christians are not to sin but that because they are transformed and made new by God’s grace, therefore, in chapter 8, they fulfill the law in a deeper way by the inward work of the Spirit within them. They do please God. They do serve God. They do fulfill the law as it is interpreted by Christ. Therefore, in this sense, God’s standards have not been a bit lowered but fulfilled in us who then live according to the Spirit.

Still, Paul uses the law yet another way. He points out to men their lostness by examining the details of the law. In other words, it’s when the law is applied to people and they see how far short they come from God’s standards that they begin to see they really are guilty. Paul uses this in two ways.

In Galatians, he uses it for the race of the Jews as a whole. The law was given for one whole period of time to teach men God’s ways. It was like a slave in the old system of education that brought the child along to school and made him learn, as it were. So the law did that to us. It didn’t save us, but in terms of what it did in God’s plan of saving history and God’s plan of redemption through the ages, it taught men what God was like and what sin was like and how they couldn’t meet God’s standards.

This is also true at the individual level. The point is a man won’t ask to be saved until he’s assured he is lost. A man won’t ask to be pardoned until he knows he’s condemned. A man won’t ask to be forgiven until he knows he’s guilty. It seems to me that a great part of our witness really ought to be around this business of showing men where they are before God.

There’s no point talking about the marvelous grace of God if the person doesn’t feel any need of grace. Therefore, Paul lays out in the structure of his epistle to the Romans the fact of how men are all under the law or else they are sinners anyway apart from the law until they’re all hemmed in and all condemned, then he introduces grace. Indeed, if you examine the preaching of the greatest preachers through the ages, you will find this comes out very strongly.

John Wesley, writing to a young preacher who wanted to know how to preach the gospel, says in one of his letters:

This is how I preach the gospel when I come to a new place. First, I make a general declaration of the love of God. Secondly, I preach the law as searchingly as I possibly can. Then, and only then, when men are beginning to feel the conviction of their own sin and cry out in despair do I introduce the grace of Jesus Christ. Then after they become Christians and they’re in danger of lapsing, I reintroduce the law.

Paul lays this out very clearly, and it’s perhaps just a little bit like this. If our approach to men in trying to draw them into the kingdom is to suck them, as it were, into this bait end by telling them all of the advantages that are in Christ Jesus but not dealing with the problem of sin, not tackling the problem of repentance, then as they get a little farther down the passageway, it gets very confining, and pretty soon there is an eruption. They just blow up. They just move on. It’s not their thing.

If, on the other hand, men begin the other way and they discover they can’t come into the kingdom unless they are stripped of everything because the way is so narrow and the gate is so tight, then once they have come inside, they discover the largeness that is opening out in Christ Jesus.

I’m not trying to lay down some simple rule for evangelism. It is true that some people are attracted and drawn and converted by declarations of the love of Christ. It is because deep down they have already sensed the need they have, but if you are dealing with people who sense no need, then general declarations and specific declarations of the grace of God just are not sufficient.

Therefore, you find Jesus himself, for example, saying things that sound very harsh to our ears until we have accepted this principle. At the end of Luke, chapter 9, “As they were walking along the road, a man said to him, ‘I will follow you wherever you go.’ Jesus replied, ‘Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.’ ” He makes it difficult for them. He doesn’t say, “Oh, terrific! Come on down to the river. I’ll get one of my men to baptize you.” He immediately starts weighing up the costs.

“He said to another man, ‘Follow me.’ But the man replied, ‘Lord, first let me go and bury my father.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God.’ Still another said, ‘I will follow you, Lord; but first let me go back and say good-by to my family.’ Jesus replied, ‘No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.’ ”

Thus speaks the Master. You see, when Jesus answers particular people with particular problems, he goes right to their particular problem. For example, to the rich young man, he does not say, “You must be born again.” He tells him to go and sell all he has and give to the poor, because that man’s god was his money. Jesus honed in on the sore spot, as it were.

Again, there was the woman at the well of Sychar in Samaria in John 4. She was quite willing to talk about religion. “Your fathers say we should worship here; our fathers say we should worship there.” But Jesus says, “Go, call your husband.” What transpired was she was a woman guilty truly, truly of adultery five times over. He deals with the particular problem she has.

Nicodemus comes, and he makes a pretense of claiming to know something. “Master, we perceive that you are indeed a teacher sent from God, for no man could do these miracles except God be with him.” Jesus tells him, in effect, he hasn’t seen anything. He claims to have seen these signs.

In John’s language, that means he claims to see but there is deep spiritual significance in what Jesus is doing by his miracles. Jesus says, “You can’t see them! You can’t see the kingdom of God in operation until you are born again.” Nicodemus comes with a claim to him, and Jesus rebukes him and tells him something must happen to him.

The reason I’ve gone this roundabout way, to sum it all up, is while Paul is explaining how these doctrines of grace, and yet responsibility that leads to repentance, work out, Jesus preaches that way. Paul lays it out in Romans, but Jesus is actually doing it in the Sermon on the Mount. Hence, for example, in the Sermon on the Mount you find general declarations of God’s love.

In 5:45, “He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” Chapter 7, “If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!” There are these numerous declarations of God’s love, of God’s benevolence. Yet, at the same time, Jesus issues searching demand after searching demand until any person who has any ethical and moral sensitivity at all is crushed beneath the burden of sin that crops up as he meditates on the implications of the Sermon on the Mount.

All this, as we have seen, is with a view to poverty of spirit, the very first beatitude in Matthew 5, verse 3. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Then he concludes with a command to enter the kingdom. It is this we now turn our attention to in Matthew 7:13 and following.

“Enter through the narrow gate.” Yet, as the law itself provided something of a threat, so also Jesus still here concludes with a threat. Notice this. Verse 13: “Broad is the road that leads to destruction.” Verse 19: “Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” Verse 23: Those who do not do the will of the Father, he will dismiss as evildoers. Verse 27: “The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.”

Let me tell you, we’re not going to end this term on a cheerful note. We shall see the cheer and the hope behind it at the end, but the full weight of the threat, the full weight of the alternatives must be felt or else we have not seen what Jesus is doing by enunciating these claims as he pronounces on the essential nature of the kingdom of God.

He proceeds by a number of comparisons, as it were. Two roads in verses 13 and 14, two trees in verses 15 to 20, two claims in verses 21 to 23, and two houses or two builders in verses 24 to 27. Two ways and only two. This motif of two ways is a common one even in the Old Testament. We do not have time to look up all the passages, but let me just mention one.

Deuteronomy, chapter 30, verses 15 to 20. In particular, verse 19. Moses speaks to the people of Israel and says, “I call heaven and earth to witnesses against you today that I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. So choose life, in order that you may live.” Two ways. Think of how the Psalter opens. Psalm 1 begins with a contrast of two ways.

“Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly nor stands in the way of sinners nor sits in the seat of the scornful.” Thus, he is described negatively. The good man is described as to what he does not do. “But his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night.” Thus, he is described positively, what the good man is like.

In verse 3, the conclusion to this is given. “He shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, which brings forth its fruit in season and whose leaf also shall not wither. Whatever he does will prosper.” Then the psalm changes gears. “The ungodly are not so! They are like the chaff that the wind drives away. Therefore they shall not stand in the day of judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous.” Two ways and only two ways.

1. Two roads (verses 13-14)

Picture the two roadways here that are given to us. The one has a wide entrance gate, and it is a broad road itself. The RSV’s easy is a bad translation. Not easy but broad, spacious, roomy. It has many people on it. It is a well-traveled road, but its end is destruction. The other road has a small entrance gate. It is narrow, not hard. It is narrow. It is confined. It is pressed together. There are few people on that road, but it leads to life, which is here a synonym for the kingdom. What do these things mean?

A) God’s way is not spacious but confining.

There is a caveat to that. There is the joy of the Lord, of course, and there is the freedom that is in Christ Jesus, freedom from sin and free to do right. On the other hand, the entrance to it and to any man who feels the oppressive weight of sin, as all Christians must, is in that sense, confining. It is a narrow road. It is a straight road. That is why the very first beatitude demands poverty of spirit.

B) God’s way cannot be established by appeal to majority opinion.

This is not the popular way. Indeed, with Paul, a Christian says, “Let God be true and every man a liar.” If someone then asks directly, “If everybody else is going the other way, does this mean there are only a few who are saved?” Indeed, someone asks Jesus this question specifically in Luke, chapter 13.

Reading from verse 22, “Then Jesus went through the cities and villages, teaching as he made his way to Jerusalem. Someone asked him, ‘Lord, are only a few people going to be saved?’ He said to them, ‘Make every effort to enter through the narrow door, because many, I tell you, will try to enter and will not be able to. Once the owner of the house gets up and closes the door, you will stand outside knocking and pleading, “Sir, open the door for us.” But he will answer, “I don’t know you or where you come from.”

Then you will say, “We ate and drank with you, and you taught in our streets.” But he will reply, “I don’t know you or where you come from. Away from me, all you evildoers!” There will be weeping there, and grinding of teeth, when you see Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God, but you yourselves thrown out.’ ”

Strong words spoken preeminently to the Jews of his own day who were rejecting their own Messiah, but strong words. In other words, he demands not speculation on the precise numbers of those who go in but that the person who asks the question be more concerned about entering in himself because it is a narrow way.

C) The narrow way cannot be pursued as long as we are motivated by a desire to please the mass of men.

The mass goes that way. The narrow is a little lonelier. Again, we can see how Jesus is summing up the Sermon on the Mount. In the very first part in the Beatitudes, there is this constant reference to blessing. “Blessed is the one who does this and blessed is the one who does that.”

We noticed that the prime meaning of blessed is approved of God. It raises the question of whose approval we seek. Then again, in Matthew, chapter 6, the very essence of religious hypocrisy according to Jesus is the effort to please men rather than pleasing God even by our outward acts of piety.

Here it comes down to the nitty-gritty, as it were. The Christian way is a narrow way. It’s not popular. You’re not going to be hailed as a great leader of mighty moments, certainly not in the world, not if you live righteously. It is unpopular, so you find men like Joshua standing up and saying, “Choose you this day whom you will serve. But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”

Or Athanasius, that great Christian defender in the fourth century, who at the low ebb of his career would have seemed as if the church was just being sucked into the vortex of heterodox theology. He was told, “Athanasius, the whole world is against you.” He said, “Then it’s Athanasius against the whole world.”

It is a narrow way, and you will find in particular after you leave this comfortable university, this well-populated Christian union. You may be in some village where it’s not popular to be a Christian and where the churches are very weak. Perhaps the man there in the pulpit has no high view of Scripture at all, and you’re finding your soul drying up, and you find two or three or four other Christians, and you wonder, “Should we start a Bible study group?”

Or perhaps, “I don’t want to rock the boat. It’s a small town, and there are pressures on me in my office. I don’t want people to think I’m too fanatical or something.” The pressures of the world begin to drop the standard until all the high resolves that are made sitting in the Christian Union at Cambridge in the third term of this year suddenly disappear. I don’t promise you popularity. By the authority of Jesus, I promise you a narrow road with not so many people on it as you might like.

D) There are also eternal prospects in view.

The one road leads to destruction. Suddenly now everything is reversed. What seemed like a nice, spacious, roomy road with lots of friends has suddenly ended up in destruction. What was narrow and confining has suddenly exploded into life, the arrival of the kingdom.

E) There are only two ways.

In other words, it’s not just a question of being for Jesus or pretty much for him but with a few reservations or for the occasion, especially on Sunday, or dead-set against him. It’s a question of either for or against. There are only two ways. In other words, passive resistance is still the broad way. Nonchalance and apathy? These are still the broad way. This means the habits we establish now in walking the narrow way will either bless us or haunt us as long as we live, but there are only two ways.

F) The command to enter is binding and demands expenditure and committed effort.

This again is something I think we have tended to overlook in modern forms of evangelism. There is a feeling among some, especially I confess freely, in North American evangelism that you sort of approach Christ in a way as if you’re almost doing him a favor and you receive his certified check for eternal life against which you pay in a certain amount of commitment, without overdoing it.

Yet, I don’t sense that is Jesus’ way at all in the pages of the New Testament. Indeed, when you examine the testimonies of many, many of the great saints in bygone ages, you discover they come to their point of crisis conversion, if that is indeed the way they were converted, and this was not an easy thing for them. There is struggling sometimes for days and weeks and months and sometimes even for years.

Read John Bunyan’s autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, or Wesley or Whitefield or Luther or whoever your particular interest is in the annals of church history. You will find in the vast majority of cases these men have come to this crisis point of conversion with a painful self-examining effort that hasn’t been a sort of walking up to Jesus and picking eternal life.

It has been coming under conviction of sin and of need, of fighting the Lord with everything that is within me and wanting my own way and drawing out and coming back and pursuing the Lord for peace and finding that the heavens and then entering in and discovering the Lord’s mercy. Again, I feel I must put in caveats. I don’t want to paint a dark, gloomy picture of the Christian’s life.

Jesus also says things like, “The person who gives up father or mother or brother or sister or wife or husband for my sake in the kingdom will, in this life, have life and have them a hundredfold.” You will find new Christian friends who replace these losses. You will find new perspectives and new joys.

I wouldn’t want to minimize these great blessings for anything, but first count the cost. It’s a narrow way. From the perspective of someone standing out and looking at it, it’s a narrow way, and Jesus demands the whole commitment be thought of in these terms. This means a person does not sort of drift along the Christian pathway. He doesn’t just happen to become holy or happen to become more prayerful or accidentally become a little more spiritual.

Rather, he’s committed to that. He prays more because he is determined to pray more. He becomes more holy because he’s determined to become more holy. I know ultimately it is the grace of God prompting him, but it is not a sort of happenstance whereby he just sort of drifts and hopes in a few more years to somehow become a little more spiritual. It is a committed entry into a narrow way.

2. Two trees (verses 15-20)

“Watch out for false prophets.” False prophets and false teachers have always been a difficult problem. They were such in the Old Testament. They were such in Jesus’ day. They are such now, and especially are they difficult when they appear to belong to the flock.

So we read, “These come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves.” You see, Christians don’t really have much problem with anarchists who are advocating the armed overthrow of the government. Christians aren’t likely to be sucked in by that. Christians aren’t likely to be sucked in by that form of amoralism which says, “You may do as you please,” and, “There’s nobody to which you are to be responsible.”

Christians aren’t likely to be fooled by that, but you get a teacher who has all the marks of a Christian, who has the language of a Christian, who really seems to belong to the flock, a lovely chap, and he can pray, and he goes to church regularly. You get a teacher like that who is a false teacher and you have problems.

Indeed, the New Testament is full of warnings against just such. Jesus himself predicts they’ll come. In Matthew, chapter 24, verse 11, we read, “Many false prophets will appear and deceive many people.” Paul looks at his life’s ministry, and he sees how he’s founded this church and founded that church. He speaks to the Ephesian elders, and he warns them of what he knows is going to happen in their own fellowship.

He says in Acts, chapter 20, verses 29 and following, “I know that after I leave, savage wolves will come in among you and will not spare the flock. Even from your own number men will arise and distort the truth in order to draw away disciples after them. So be on your guard! Remember that for three years I never stopped warning each of you night and day with tears.” Again, in 2 Peter, in a whole chapter full of warnings against false teachers of which I give you but brief excerpts.

“But there were also false teachers among the people …” That is, in the Old Testament. “… just as there will be false teachers among you. They will secretly introduce destructive heresies, even denying the sovereign Lord who bought them—bringing swift destruction on themselves. Many will follow their shameful ways and will bring the way of truth into disrepute. In their greed these teachers will exploit you with stories they have made up. Their condemnation has long been hanging over them, and their destruction has not been sleeping. […]

These men are springs without water and mists driven by a storm. Blackest darkness is reserved for them. For they mouth empty, boastful words and, by appealing to the lustful desires of sinful human nature, they entice people who are just escaping from those who live in error. They promise them freedom, while they themselves are slaves of depravity—for a man is a slave to whatever has mastered him.

If they have escaped the corruption of the world by knowing our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and are again entangled in it and overcome, they are worse off at the end than they were at the beginning. It would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than to have known it and then to turn their backs on the sacred command that was passed on to them. Of them the proverbs are true: ‘A dog returns to its vomit,’ and, ‘A sow that is washed goes back to her wallowing in the mud.’ ”

Read through the epistles and you discover warning after warning after warning against false teachers within the confines of the professing flock. Sometimes false teachers can be identified easily by their doctrines. Paul identifies some such, but sometimes that is not the case, and that is so here.

Verses 16 to 18: “By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? Likewise every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit.” This way of excluding all possibilities is a Semitic way of thinking, giving a thing negatively and giving a thing positively, such that all possibilities of confusion are excluded.

In other words, nature will out. What a person believes will ultimately show itself in his life. This is not a judgmental, heresy-hunting attitude that is being recommended. We just read last week, “Do not judge, or you too will be judged,” at the beginning of Matthew 7. Yet, false teachers must be identified, and if they are not identified by their doctrine, per se, they must be identified some way.

The way Jesus gives, then, is their life, their fruit. He presupposes an indissoluble link between life and conduct. Yet, this text is not to be superficially applied. There are possibilities of good “pagans.” Then the test has to be applied with great care. One must look not only at whether or not he gives to the relief fund for a foreign disaster and whether or not he goes to church, but also, whenever possible, why? Also questions of piety. Also questions of real humility. Questions of prayerfulness.

Some people seem to present themselves to the evangelical world on the basis of their self-presentation of their own godliness, and I’m always suspicious when I run across it. I believe the great Anglican bishop J.C. Ryle was correct when he said, “True men of God in the Scriptures and in the annals of church history are known not only by their great victories and their great peace but by their great struggles.”

I read in a recent piece of American literature a person advertising himself as a preacher who virtually was promising results with his vast years of experience and great spirituality. “You shall know them by their fruit.” It doesn’t seem to be the sort of fruit that is coming out of the Sermon on the Mount.

Yet, even apart from these subtle things, sometimes the truth will out in a far more painful way. There was recently a German American theologian who died. He was of, more or less, the existentialist belief and was well known for his denials of virtually every doctrine cardinal Christendom had held dear for 2,000 years. Yet, he was reputed in his life to be a godly man.

After he died, there were paeans of praise in several of the journals which I read. Now his wife has written a book through a ghost writer as well. It transpires there is another whole side of his life that was simply sodden with sin. Nobody saw that side before. Sometimes it takes time to spot false teachers, but the truth must out.

What do these false prophets teach? It is not stated here, but in context they appear as sheep, and this suggests they are not overtly wildly heretical. Rather, set in the context of righteousness throughout this sermon, it seems they keep quiet about the difficult, hard sayings of Jesus, as it were. They are the ones who say, “All is well; God loves you,” but never say, “Sin no more.”

Sometimes they are false teachers not by what they say but by what they don’t say. They sound a bit like those described in Jeremiah 8. Prophet and priest are dealing falsely, and God says, “They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, ‘Peace, peace …’ ” (That is, “God’s peace is upon you. God is with us.”) “ ‘But there is no peace. Were they ashamed because of the abomination they had done? They were not ashamed at all; they did not even know how to blush. Therefore, at the time I punish them, they shall be cast down,’ says the Lord.”

That’s why we read, “Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” There is punishment for such. “Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them.” In other words, these verses (verses 15 to 20) are not given primarily as a rebuke to false teachers. It would be false to understand them as such. They are not written with that intention. They are written, rather, not against false teachers but toward ordinary men and women to help them to discern who the false teachers are.

This again, I suggest, is perhaps particularly important for some of you who are going down. Some of you will go into places where there is very little church life of any description at all, places where there is virtually spiritual bankruptcy. You will face genuine difficulties in trying to decide what you should to, to what church you should commit yourself.

Perhaps you will compromise by going to some church where you know there is very little love for the Lord and the whole thing seems to be going downhill but you have found just a handful of believers there where you can also have fellowship yourself and get together in a Bible study for reading the Scriptures and studying it and praying together and building one another up in your most holy faith, but be careful of false teaching.

It’s not popular to say things like this today. I can see some scowls. “It’s terribly intolerant. This is the day when pluralism prevails and everybody has a right to his own opinion,” and with that I agree. Everybody has a right to his own opinion, but that doesn’t mean all opinions are right. Jesus’ answer is, “Beware of false prophets. By their fruit you will know them.” He is giving this in connection with an invitation to press on into the kingdom, so at stake is not only just the threat that is hanging over their heads but the spiritual destiny of you. “Beware of false prophets.”

3. Two claims (verses 21 to 23)

On the one hand, there are those who say, “Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?” On the other hand, there are those who simply do the Father’s will. These verses warn against false peace, spurious faith. These people address Christ properly. Perhaps they have orthodox belief. “Lord, Lord.” They prophesy. They proclaim.

Incidentally, the word prophesy in the New Testament has a vast range of meanings. Sometimes it means to prophesy in the sense of foretelling, sometimes it means to prophesy in the sense of ecstatic utterance, and sometimes it means forth-telling in the sense of preaching. These people prophesy. They preach in Christ’s name which suggests they have biblical content and are able to witness. They have power to exorcise demons. They perform miracles.

Furthermore, these things are actually done. It’s not just that they claim to have done them. It seems they have actually done them. Jesus does not deny they have done them (verse 33), but what he says instead is these things are not sufficient conditions for entering the kingdom. Sometimes, of course, such people are caught out.

There are the seven silly sons of Sceva in Acts, chapter 19, who get chased down the street by one particular demon, but whether or not they are caught out now, they will be caught out on that day (verse 22). “Many will say to me on that day …” The reference to that day is to the last day, the day of judgment, the day of separation.

What, then, characterizes the true believer? Not loud profession but true obedience. These people perform the will of the Father. That’s a lovely expression. You will recall in the Lord’s Prayer itself these people have already prayed, “Your will be done on earth as in heaven,” and now they do the Father’s will.

We cannot forget Jesus has already said at the end of the first section, “Anyone who breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called the least in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.”

They practice obedience. Here the Father’s will is done. It is not just admired and praised for its high ethical tones. It is not just debated and theologically constructed. It is not just analyzed. It is done. The Father’s will is done. This was recognized as a test for true faith in the very early church in a document called the Didache (also known as, the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles), a document dating to the beginning of the second century. There is this statement: “But not everyone who speaks in the Spirit is a prophet, except he have the behavior of the Lord.”

In other words, what the Lord is all about here is the danger of self-deception, allowing unconscious self-hypocrisy. It’s when we sort of start going through the religious motions, when we enjoy praying and we enjoy studying the Word and we enjoy witnessing and we examine ourselves and we are walking with the Lord. Then we keep going to church, and the light begins to darken a little, and we accumulate some sins we haven’t confessed and decide to become a little more materialistic, and we want a promotion at work.

We continue going to church and we continue praying. Of course, we don’t seem to be enjoying it quite as much anymore, and we don’t pray quite as fervently and perhaps not quite as often. Sometimes I miss now. “I didn’t make it to church last night because there was a good program on TV.”

Gradually, we go through the forms of piety, so we struggle a little harder. Then we become faithful again, and we think, “I’ve not been faithful to the Lord. I’ll try a little harder. I’ll get involved with the Covenanters and I’ll help those children. I’ll pull my weight in society, and I’ll try.” People look at him and think, “My, that John Smith. What a fine Christian. Do you know Monday night he’s at Covenanters, and Wednesday night he comes to the prayer meeting, and Sunday he’s there twice? Do you know? They’re talking of putting him on the PCC.”

The whole thing somehow has become just formal. The person has lulled himself into self-hypocrisy, self-deceit. I heard of a chap who had a marvelous experience of grace in which he, as it were, was brought with Paul into the highest of the heavens, into the third heaven, and he felt he had communed with the Lord intimately.

Some time later as the memory of this was still strong in his mind, he decided he should write it down as his testimony. He wrote it up and typed it up in a manuscript. Weeks passed and someone came to see him. Things moved around to the area of spiritual conversation, and he said, “Oh, let me show you something.” He pulled out the manuscript. He said, “Read that. That’s my testimony of the Lord’s grace to me.”

Then the months rolled by and he didn’t seem to be walking so much with the Lord anymore. Yet, he still kept hauling out this manuscript to assorted visitors from time to time. It was something he sort of looked back on now with a bit of nostalgic pride. As the months tripped by and then years, it sort of dwindled into his mind and churchgoing became rather patchy.

Some years later, a vicar came and dropped in on him and started talking to him. The chap said, “Actually, let me show you something.” He sent his wife to go and get his paper called “My Experience.” She went upstairs and pulled open a drawer and discovered moths had been in it. She yelled down the stairs, “Dear, your experience is moth-eaten!”

There’s that danger. In fact, these people here are even keeping up all the outward forms. It’s not just as if they looked back on that experience way back then, but they even kept up all the outward forms and seemed to do it with a spectacular display of power, but where is their obedience? Where is that personal relationship with the Lord that is stamped by obedience and increasing conformity to him?

How does Jesus see these self-diluted spiritual phonies? We read in verse 23, “Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you; away from me, you evildoers.’ ” The word for evildoer is quite literally you who practice lawlessness. “Away from me, you who practice lawlessness.” The key issue involved has been their disobedience. They have not been obedient, so he calls them “those who practice lawlessness.” They have not adopted to themselves the law of God revealed in Christ Jesus, so they are dismissed as practicing lawlessness.

Perhaps it is our generation which is beginning to find out again what lawlessness means. Society finds these things out through cycles it seems. Having rejected the fact that God has given to us a propositional revelation of his own demands, having rejected the fact that there is a law of God, people then discover the laws of society are not enough.

There are no foundations. The foundations have been destroyed. Either society comes to it by consensus or by a pressure group or by the drifting norms of what is popular or by the influence of the mass media, but there is no law anymore. There is only lawlessness. That brings us to the last contrast.

4. Two builders (verses 24-27)

Here this picture of the importance of foundations is made explicit. “Everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.”

Picture these two houses, if you will, standing side by side. To an outsider it would be very difficult to tell the difference between them. They are both very well built. They’re both quite attractive and have new fresh coats of paint. Both have brand new aluminum siding on the weather side. They have lovely heavy teak wood shingles. Very expensive. Nothing but the best.

But on one of them the dirt has been scraped away down to the bedrock and there’s a solid foundation. The other one is just sitting there on a slab. It takes a very serious test to show that one of them is solid and the other is a mass of fabricated super fluid, just nothing, like a bit of marshmallow. It just goes away.

“Everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man.” These words of mine is emphatic in the original. The mine is emphatic. It denotes, again, Jesus’ authority, his repeated, “I say unto you.” But also, these words of mine has nuance in the original that insists the ethical teaching is not detached from the life of the one who gives this teaching and with whom it is congruous.

That is, these words of his, these teachings of Jesus are really also what Jesus is. Jesus is not standing before a crowd as I am standing before a crowd. I tell you what Jesus says, and his standard is impeccably high, but I stand with you as a fellow sinner, but when Jesus stands and says, “I say unto you,” and gives the very high standards of God’s purity, he stands with God, for he also is congruous with his own teaching.

The wise man not only hears these things but puts them into practice. He does them, and that is his foundation. The other man has no foundation to the structure he has built. He has built a structure, but there is no foundation. The tempest is often a symbol, especially in the Old Testament, but elsewhere also in Jewish writings, for God’s judgment and particularly God’s judgment at the end, God’s eschatological judgment, the final judgment.

You will find an example of that, for example, in Ezekiel 13. The reference is that here to the last judgment. Have you noticed how often in there have been these allusions to the last judgment? Four times in these verses. What shall we say then? Shall we say Jesus is trying to frighten people into the kingdom? Is that what we shall say?

The answer is yes. You see, there are many ways in which a person might be drawn to Jesus. “Come unto me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” That person might be drawn just because the rest of Christ is so utterly attractive, but some people will only see the gravity of their sin when they see it is a broad road that leads to destruction, when they see at the other end of life is hell, that the whole house is going to crash and it’s fall will be great.

You don’t speak of, “Is Jesus trying to frighten people?” When you draw a simple analogy and picture a man rushing to his neighbor’s house which is burning down, and the man is sleeping inside, and the neighbor bangs on the door and says, “Wake up! Wake up! Your house is burning!” Is he trying to frighten him out of his house? Do you see the point? It’s true!

There is a hell to be shunned and a heaven to be gained. Therefore, if I stand here and utter platitudinous phrases in front of you and forget to declare that this hell is there and it’s waiting for all those who do not know Christ Jesus, I’m not only a liar, but I’m calling Jesus a liar. He himself speaks twice as often about hell in the pages of Scripture as he does heaven.

If the resources of language are exhausted in God’s book to describe the wonders and the glories and the freedom and the beauty and the holiness and the privilege of heaven, let me tell you frankly, the resources of languages are also exhausted in trying to describe the terror and horror of hell. It’s the place of utter darkness. It’s the place where the worm doesn’t die.

People speak of going to hell because their friends are there. There are no friends in hell. I’m not trying to put hell on a map or give you coordinates in space. All I know is just as I can’t describe heaven to you except using the metaphors of Scripture, so I can’t describe hell to you except by using the metaphors of Scripture. You find them again and again and again, not only in the teaching of Jesus but throughout the New Testament.

Listen to the way it ends up in the book of Revelation in chapter 6. “Then the kings of the earth, the princes, the generals, the rich, the mighty, and every slave and every free man hid in caves and among the rocks of the mountains. They called to the mountains and the rocks, ‘Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb! For the great day of their wrath has come, and who can stand?’ ”

I dreamed that the great judgment morning

Had dawned, and the trumpet had blown;

I dreamed that the nations had gathered

To judgment before the white throne;

From the throne came a bright shining angel,

And he stood on the land and the sea,

And he swore with his hand raised to Heaven,

That time was no longer to be.

And O, what a weeping and wailing,

As the lost were told of their fate;

They cried for the rocks and the mountains,

They prayed, but their prayer was too late.

The moral man came to the judgment,

But self righteous rags would not do;

The men who had crucified Jesus

Had passed off as moral men, too;

The soul that had put off salvation,

“Not tonight; I’ll get saved by and by,

No time now to think of religion!”

At last they had found time to die.

The rich man was there, but his money

Had melted and vanished away;

A pauper he stood in the judgment,

His debts were too heavy to pay;

The great man was there, but his greatness,

When death came, was left far behind!

The angel that opened the records,

Not a trace of his greatness could find.

And O, what a weeping and wailing,

As the lost were told of their fate;

They cried for the rocks and the mountains,

They prayed, but their prayer was too late.

As I read these verses, I sense here no cheap malicious glee at the prospect. You find that in some Jewish literature of the period, a consigning everybody else to hell cheerfully. I sense none of that here. I sense, rather, a Master who later was to stand on the hill over Jerusalem and weep. “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often would I have gathered you to myself as a hen gathers her chickens, but you wouldn’t.”

He displays the alternatives. There are two ways. There is this way and there is that way. That’s where that way goes. It is warning and entreating. But I will not end on that note because within the context of Matthew’s gospel it is not just that Jesus is then pushing people toward entering the narrow confines of the kingdom.

Matthew begins this gospel with this glorious statement in the first chapter. “Mary will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus because he will save his people from their sins.” The last word is not this pressing toward this issue, the keeping up of conviction, but it is this: Jesus saves. There is this ultimate reality to be faced. There is the bar of God’s justice which does stand beyond you.

There are two ways there. There is this way, and there is that way. There is a broad way and a narrow way, but as sure as Jesus stands true, you will one day stand before the bar of God’s justice. Jesus has come to save his people from their sins. Which will be the way that you go to stand before the bar of his justice?

The sermon ends. “When Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were amazed at his teaching, because he taught as one who had authority, and not as their teachers of the law.” The scribes, the teachers of the law, taught derivatively, repetitively. They taught the opinions and applications of the law passed by the rabbis through oral tradition. They regularly said, “Rabbi So-and-so said that Rabbi So-and-so said that Rabbi So-and so said that the passage means this.”

Jesus comes through, and he says, “You have heard that it was said.… But I say unto you …” and the crowds were amazed that he spoke to them. This amazement seems to be a combination of awed admiration, profound religious shock, and a deepening conviction. God help us as we contemplate the Sermon on the Mount, not only to be amazed at Jesus’ authority and to see before us the implacable demands of perfect purity but also that Jesus is the Savior who came to save his people from their sins and to join the crowds not only with amazement but to sing worshipfully, “May Jesus Christ be praised.”