The two Pauline letters provide opportunities to cover a wide range of topics. They include the following: the doctrine of Scripture, the doctrine of election, the doctrine of the second coming of Christ, the resurrection of the dead, the "catching up" of believers, the destruction of Jerusalem and the Jewish temple, and the slaughter and dispersion of the Jews in AD 70, persecution and providence, the Great Commission, "seeker-hostile" ministry, the relation of metaphysics and ethics in apologetics, justice, revenge, and atonement, the sin of slander, the minister's right to financial support, the sin of idleness, and the correct policy toward idlers, cessationism and prophecy, and some observations on hermeneutics. In addition, an outstanding feature of this book is an extended exposition and argument on the matter of whether the Jews murdered Jesus.
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An excerpt from the forthcoming Commentary on 1 & 2 Thessalonians
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Our policy permits you to print, copy, and distribute unlimited copies of our publications for any ministry purpose, such as for your church, study group, or personal outreach.
Our policy permits you to print, copy, and distribute unlimited copies of our publications for any ministry purpose, such as for your church, study group, or personal outreach.
Our policy permits you to print, copy, and distribute unlimited copies of our publications for any ministry purpose, such as for your church, study group, or personal outreach.
Our policy permits you to print, copy, and distribute unlimited copies of our publications for any ministry purpose, such as for your church, study group, or personal outreach.
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Our policy permits you to print, copy, and distribute unlimited copies of our publications for any ministry purpose, such as for your church, study group, or personal outreach.
Second, we must proclaim the confession. Christ promises to build his church, and that the gates of hell will not overcome it. The second part of this promise is based on the first part, bridged by the assumption that Christ will succeed in building the church, since he succeeds in whatever he does, so that all opposition against it shall fail. The second part, then, is a necessary inference from the first, and would be true even if unstated. This observation helps us to perceive that the promise's negative application (that hell shall not overcome) is dependent on its positive thrust. The essence of the promise is positive, and is captured by the words "I will build my church." The church will be as large, prosperous, and influential as Christ wishes to make it.
In other words, the promise implies not only that the church will be able to withstand the gates of hell, but also that the gates of hell will be unable to withstand the advance of the church. Christ indeed defends the church against Satan according to the promise, but this negative aspect of the promise is based on the positive thrust, that he will build his church. This positive thrust necessarily yields a positive implication as well, that the church will continue to be constructed, or to advance, that Satan will be unable to stop Christ from building his church – that is, Satan will be unable to stop the church that maintains and proclaims the confession.
We have orders to not only maintain the confession, but to proclaim it to every part of the world, and we have the promise that Christ will be with us as we do so (Matthew 28:18-20). Therefore, we have the authority and the obligation to be active, aggressive, and even militant in advancing the Christian faith. Of course, I am not referring to the use of physical or military forces to spread our religion. But as with Paul's military metaphors, I am pointing out the fact that we are involved in a conflict with the forces of hell, which consist of Satan, demons, and non-Christians. This conflict is spiritual and intellectual in nature, and it is on this level that our aggression applies. Our weapons include earnest petitions toward God and proclamations toward men, and not the superficial and inferior tactics of terrorism, which might cause the flesh to submit but can never change the heart.
Make no mistake about it: We are indeed out to advance our faith and destroy all others. Christ commands us to do this, so that we must call into question the Christian commitment of anyone who denies or disobeys such a formulation of our mission. To convert people to our faith is to convert them away from theirs. To say that we are right is to say that they are wrong. There is no middle ground. But we employ weapons that are far more devastating, effective, and permanent than the physical weapons of any military. According to God's will we wield the very powers of the world to come. We are endued with power by the Spirit of God, conquering nations and peoples by the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. The promise of Christ is to us a safe refuge, but it is a death curse upon all the non-Christian beliefs and efforts of this world.
So we are to be vigilant in our attitude and approach, in our proclamation of the confession of our faith. And just as content is essential when we maintain our confession, it is also necessary that the content of our proclamation be the same as the confession that we maintain for ourselves, and that our presentation be uncompromising, aggressive, and often in effect, offensive (1 Corinthians 1:23). We must speak the truth to all men in love, and that is to say, boldly and plainly, so that they may hear us. We must tell them what the Bible says, that non-Christians are sinful and stupid, and that to change this they require the righteousness and enlightenment that comes only through faith in Jesus Christ.
There are some who distort Scripture to attack those who would speak the truth in this manner, in order to hide their own inadequacies. They are a disgrace to the kingdom of God. It is as if they have made a peace treaty with the devil in their hearts, and they would even tear down their own brothers in order to remain in favor with the realm of darkness. But we must not compromise with the devil in the attitude or in the content of our proclamation of the Christian confession.
We must never permit a synthesis with non-Christian thinking, but many have done this in the name of peace, dialogue, tolerance, discovering common ground, or mutual respect and understanding. Then, there are those who boast that they "press the antithesis," when the truth is that they merely pretend the antithesis by building a different structure upon the common ground of an anti-biblical foundation. They indeed teach people to bow to Christ, but not before they make Christ bow to Satan.
They speak peace to the false intellectual methods and premises of unbelievers, but claim that we cannot account for or make sense of them apart from biblical presuppositions. As if this is not bad enough, they then make these false methods and premises the precondition to knowing the very biblical presuppositions that they claim are necessary to account for these same methods and premises. This is to betray the entire Christian faith to the enemy, and in doing so they reinforce the hold of non-Christian thinking in the minds of men, so that they have joined the very forces of hell that seek to undermine our confession of faith. As for us, we have Christ's promise of survival and victory. Let us be bold to make a clear stand for the Christian faith and confession.
Just as God made the footsteps of four lepers into the sound of a great army in order to fulfill his decree to turn back Israel's enemy (2 Kings 7:1-7), he can devastate the enemy and convert the sinner by making powerful and effective even the most pitiful human effort. Even the most sophisticated philosopher has no defense against the most uneducated and untrained Christian whose plain assertion of the gospel is empowered by the Holy Spirit. Although it is far better to be properly equipped, not by worldly professionalism but by a sound understanding and application of the faith, our overall success and progress is guaranteed by the divine promise. The effect will not always be in proportion to our ability or faithfulness, but to Christ's promise and decree.
The Christian who is not thoroughly taught and trained is at a disadvantage, and he should be diligent and prepare himself in order to show himself approved as a workman for the faith. That said, meanwhile he is far from helpless, because God is on his side, and by his Spirit his testimony for the faith can be as a hammer or a blazing fire to the heart of men. There are indeed sound arguments in favor of the Christian faith, and God sometimes uses them as occasions to humiliate and harden the reprobate, to confirm the elect, and to bring his chosen ones to faith. But he does not have to use these arguments. He can break the enemy and reach the elect with a simple word. He can break through the irrational and immoral defenses of unbelievers with or without arguments. We are obligated to learn and improve, but we do not need to attain perfection before God can work through us to accomplish his will.
The Christian faith is indestructible because our Father is greater than all. The church is invincible because Christ promises to build his church and that the forces of hell will not overcome it. Christianity is a permanent religion, and Christ's church a permanent institution. For this reason, our work is not a matter of survival, but a matter of responsibility imposed by God's command to maintain and proclaim the confession that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God. In the light of Christ's promise, the forces of the devil and the unbelievers are pathetic and impotent. They are defenseless against us, for greater is he who is in us than he who is in the world (1 John 4:4). Therefore, resting on the divine promise of an invincible church, we warn all men with great sincerity and confidence: Join him, or be crushed by him (Matthew 21:44).
First, we must maintain the confession. As Hebrews 10:23 says, "Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful" (ESV; also 4:14). Jesus promises to construct and to continue his church. The fulfillment of this promise depends only on himself, and not on human desire or ability. He is faithful to fulfill his promise even when we are unfaithful. And even when we are weak, he is strong. In fact, whenever he chooses to accomplish his will through willing human instruments, he would create the needed desire and ability in those vessels that he uses.
That said, his promise in Matthew 16:18 is made about a church that he will build upon the confession that Jesus of Nazareth is "the Christ, the Son of the living God." His promise guarantees that there will always be a community of people who affirm this confession. In other words, there will always be Christians in this world, and the Christian faith will remain forever regardless of what the forces of hell do to attack it.
However, it does not mean that every individual who claims to be a Christian is among this group of people. Or, to say this another way, the promise is made concerning the church, and the church consists of individuals, but not every individual who claims to be a part of the church is indeed a part of the church.
There will always be individuals who are Christians, who are a part of the church that Christ builds, but whether a particular person is a Christian is another question. Paul writes, "Examine yourselves to see whether you are in the faith; test yourselves" (2 Corinthians 13:5). In the context of Matthew 16, everything depends on the confession. Jesus promises nothing other than damnation to a community or an individual that is placed on any other foundation. He does not promise to build or to protect it, or to give it victory. He will always preserve a church that maintains this confession, and again, since the church consists of individuals, this means that he will always preserve a group of people that hold fast to the confession. And whether a particular individual belongs to this church that Christ is building is determined by whether he maintains this same confession.
There is a bishop who said, "Christianity must change or die," referring to some of our central theological and ethical teachings. The moment he said that, he had become an agent of hell. Only someone who has in mind the things of man and not the things of God can make such a statement (Matthew 16:23). He does not have in mind the promise, but he has in mind what he thinks it will take for the "Christianity" to survive apart from any divine power to preserve it. His solution is to preserve the name but to destroy the substance. But then Christianity would already be dead. No, Jesus makes no promise to build or to protect a "Christianity" that has some other foundation. If Christianity changes, then it will die, if for no other reason than that the change is the death.
Any individual who makes a confession that is different from or contrary to Peter's confession becomes an enemy of the church. Christ's promise is then not for him but against him. In fact, Christ promises that this person will not succeed in his opposition to or disagreement with the confession. He could call himself a Christian, but if his confession differs, Christ does not promise to protect this person, but rather to protect his church from this person.
Jesus makes the promise about a church that is well-defined in its faith and doctrine. This is why I did not begin with verse 18, with the promise itself, to make the point that the church is invincible. I had to first define the church toward which the promise is made. And the church is defined by Peter's confession, which as we have noted, asserts and implies several major and nonnegotiable doctrines, including the Christian God, the Trinity, a fully divine and fully human Christ, who is no other than the Jesus of Nazareth of the Gospel of Matthew.
Anyone who compromises this confession removes himself from the guarantee of Christ's promise. Of course this confession, along with all its theological and ethical implications, is offensive and unpopular. But according to Christ, this is also the most protected place, or the place of promise. What appears to be the most dangerous position is in fact the place of safety and of power. And what appears to man as the safest position, the position of peace and of no conflict, is in fact the most dangerous position. As Hebrews 10:38-39 says, "But my righteous one will live by faith. And if he shrinks back, I will not be pleased with him. But we are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed, but of those who believe and are saved."
Of course, it is wrong to offend over something that is only a matter of preference, but when the issue pertains to a doctrine or a principle, then that which is most offensive to human rebellion is also that which is most subject to divine deliverance. On the other hand, when a person tries to deliver himself from human rejection through compromise, then he will become a common thing, so that there is really no point in hearing him or agreeing with him over any other person. Or, since divine deliverance no longer accompanies him, he will crumble under any human persecution that remains. And the even more pressing question is, who will deliver him from the divine judgment to come?
Let us, therefore, first maintain our confession of faith. Let us pray, study, and build up one another through mutual instruction and encouragement, so that we may become convinced and established in the faith, and thus remain under the invincible promise of Christ.
