17 Jesus answered and said to him, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but My Father who is in heaven. Matthew 16:17
It’s interesting that, when you look at the Gospels, you find that the word church is actually only used twice. And, as I was thinking about this, it occurred to me that Jesus never went to church.
Have you ever thought about that? Maybe Jesus had the church which was in embryo in His disciples as they went around and met together because it says in the scriptures,
20 For where two or three are gathered together in My name, I am there in the midst of them.” Matthew 18:20
There was no formal church which existed at the time of Jesus. In fact, Jesus went to the synagogue as we’ll see in a moment. And, in Matthew’s Gospel, there is one scripture where he does speak about the church. Matthew chapter 16 verse 15, where Jesus asks of the disciples,
15 He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?”
16 Simon Peter answered and said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
17 Jesus answered and said to him, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but My Father who is in heaven. 18 And I also say to you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build My church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it. 19 And I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” Matthew 16:15-19
So, Peter says that in answer the question Who do you say that I am? He says, You are the Messiah the Son of the living God, and Jesus commends him for that answer and says that the Holy Spirit has revealed this to you my Father in Heaven has revealed this to you. And goes on to say I’m going to build my church upon you or upon this revelation.
Which one is it is Jesus going to build this church upon? Peter the man or upon what Peter has just confessed?
If you go to the Roman Catholic Church, it’s built upon Peter. He is considered to be the first Pope and everything else flows from Peter which is not the point of scripture here. In fact, in the Greek the word is Petros you have Peter Petros Πέτρος which means ‘a small pebble’ and on this Petra πέτρᾳ which is ‘a great foundation stone’, I will build my church. So Peter the man is the small pebble but the foundation stone is Peter’s confession of faith that Jesus is the Messiah, the son of the living God.
That’s what Jesus is going to build his church upon: that confession of faith in Jesus the Messiah. He says that the keys of the Kingdom are given to you. Now the keys of the Kingdom, again, if you go to the Roman Catholic Church, you’ll see Peter with the keys and he’s opening the door to Heaven and if you don’t go through Peter’s way, you won’t get into Heaven, which is not the case at all. It is not Peter the man but, again, the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Now, the keys of the Kingdom were committed to Peter and, in fact Peter, has the role of preaching the Gospel first to the Jews in Acts chapter 2 and then to the Gentiles in Acts chapter 10. So, he does open the door to the Jews and then to the Gentiles and he has a privileged position as the leading apostle.
But the keys are not his to open the door to God. The Lord Jesus is able to open the door to Heaven through faith in Him, and he’s the one who opens the keys to the Kingdom, and He’s also the One who gives the doctrine which the apostles were going to bring into bear on the church: whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.
That means that the doctrine of the church was going to be fixed in the time of the apostles. Whatever they bind on earth will be bound in Heaven, whatever they loose on earth will be loosed in Heaven. Which means: ‘What you apostles of mine allow and fix as doctrine will be allowed, and whatever you forbid will be forbidden‘.
This relates to what I said the other week when I was talking about the Apostles’ doctrine. One of the things we have to bear in mind when we’re talking about the building of the church is that the doctrine of the church was fixed by the time the last apostle had died and the writings of the New Testament were completed at that time. The doctrines of the church were to be completed by the time of the end of the writing of the New Testament. So, we talked last time about some of the things which are fixed in the doctrines of the church some of which actually come out in this little hymn in 1 Timothy chapter 4. And by ‘the apostles’ we mean those who saw the Lord, who are witnesses of His life and His resurrection and who fixed the apostles doctrine in the first century church which was not to be changed by any later churches.
You find however, that is exactly what has happened. If you look at church history, you’ll find that people have added things and they’ve taken things away from them. If you then go to the end of the Bible, to the New Testament in the Book of Revelation chapter 22, there’s a verse which says that not to add or to take anything away from the words that are written in this Book, and that if you add or take away, then God is going to add His curses to you and He is going to take away His blessings from you.
18 For I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: If anyone adds to these things, God will add to him the plagues that are written in this book; Revelation 22:18
So, we’re not to add or take away anything from the apostles doctrine. Looking at church history, that’s exactly what has happened. You had the gnostic gospels who added new gospels which actually compromised the position of Jesus Christ, you had the Roman Catholics coming in with all kinds of new doctrines which were fixed much later around about the fifth century. And, after these changing some of the basic principles of the Gospel, the Muslims came in and changed the whole book and gave us a completely new religion which was totally against true Christianity. You also had Protestantism which came in and reformed it but then also went astray with liberal doctrines coming in denying some of the truths of the Gospel.
And so on. Today you have lots of modern cults which have added or taken away from the Gospel truth. We have to go back to the original and the original document is here in the Bible, it’s here in the New Testament and what was fixed by the apostles is not going to be changed that’s one important thing we have to recognize when we’re thinking about building the church. It’s not going to be changed, it’s not going to be added to or taken away from.
If you go back to that little hymn in in 1 Timothy, you see it contains doctrinal truths it says that Jesus is God manifested in the flesh otherwise. He is both Son of God and son of man. It says that the Holy Spirit is going to bear witness to Him. So, the work of the Holy Spirit is primarily or basically to bear witness to Jesus and to bring the truth of the Gospel to those that believe in Him.
14 These things I write to you, though I hope to come to you shortly; 15 but if I am delayed, I write so that you may know how you ought to conduct yourself in the house of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth. 16 And without controversy great is the mystery of godliness:
God was manifested in the flesh,
Justified in the Spirit,
Seen by angels,
Preached among the Gentiles,
Believed on in the world,
Received up in glory. 1 Timothy 3:14-16
It says that angels have seen Him. You see that in the New Testament angels were messengers from God, they ministered to Jesus during His time. Angels appeared at His birth, after His temptation, at Gethsemane, at the resurrection all bringing God’s comfort and God’s strength to the Lord Jesus.
It also speaks about the Gospel being preached. Philippians also talks to us about the Gospel being preached to the ends of the earth and that, in itself, is a sign of the truth of this message. The fact that, here we are, thousands of miles away from the event when the event happened and nearly 2,000 years after it happened believing the same things as the early church believed, it’s a testimony to the truth of what we have in Jesus Christ.
So the Gospel’s preached salvation message to Jews and Gentiles and that Jesus is now received up into glory, glorified in Heaven from where He will return at the last day.
Now in this passage in 1 Timothy Paul says I write so that you may know how you ought to conduct yourself in the house of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth. ‘Conduct yourself’ would mean something like ‘how you should behave in the church of God’. So, the question is: ‘How should we behave in the church of the living God?
Obviously, if it’s just a kind of organization, a kind of social club if you like, I guess you can do your own thing up to a point, behave how you like, just behave within the rules of that club. But if it’s indeed a place where you meet with the living God and the people who belong to the living God then, there are certain principles which have to govern our conduct and our beliefs.
If you look in Paul’s epistles, he outlines how we should behave and indeed that’s actually why Paul was chosen, because Paul was a very gifted and learned person, and able to write these things down and to preserve them for posterity.
As I said earlier, when Jesus was on the earth, the church as such did not exist. In fact, Jesus never went to church, and the Gospels themselves don’t contain any teaching on how to run churches. They contain wonderful teaching from Jesus about how to live and how to behave in the Kingdom of God, but they don’t contain instructions on how to run a church because Jesus was speaking to Jewish people at the time before the church had come into being. So, He’s going to leave it till after His resurrection to give these instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles, and particularly to the Apostle Paul but also to others who wrote the epistles in the New Testament on how we should behave in the church of God.
And we say Jesus actually functioned within a Jewish context and didn’t go to church. He did go to synagogue, He participated in Jewish festivals, He even affirmed Moses and the Prophets and we have some interesting examples of how what happened when Jesus went to synagogue. One of them is in Luke chapter 4 starting at verse 16
16 So He came to Nazareth, where He had been brought up. And as His custom was, He went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and stood up to read. 17 And He was handed the book of the prophet Isaiah. And when He had opened the book, He found the place where it was written:
18 “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me,
Because He has anointed Me
To preach the gospel to the poor;
He has sent Me to heal the broken-hearted,
To proclaim liberty to the captives
And recovery of sight to the blind,
To set at liberty those who are oppressed;
19 To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.”20 Then He closed the book, and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes of all who were in the synagogue were fixed on Him. 21 And He began to say to them, “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” 22 So all bore witness to Him, and marvelled at the gracious words which proceeded out of His mouth. And they said, “Is this not Joseph’s son?” Luke 4:16-22
There are a couple of interesting things you can deduce from that passage. One is that in a synagogue service they would read from the scriptures like we do. So there were similarities. Additionally, it would be likely that the person who read from the scriptures would give some kind of explanation about it like we do. Obviously, there were parallels and there were similarities.
Now, Jesus here gives a explanation to the passage He read which was quite out of the ordinary. He says, ‘What I’ve just read to you is about me. I’m the One who is spoken of. I’m the Messiah. I’m the One who’s come to bring you the message of Good News. I’m fulfilling this scripture which is taken from Isaiah chapter 61.‘ He’s saying ‘It’s all about me, and I’m the One‘, and he says, “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”
“The Spirit of the Lord God is upon Me,
Because the Lord has anointed Me
To preach good tidings to the poor;
He has sent Me to heal the broken-hearted,
To proclaim liberty to the captives,
And the opening of the prison to those who are bound;
2 To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord,
And the day of vengeance of our God;
To comfort all who mourn,
3 To console those who mourn in Zion,
To give them beauty for ashes,
The oil of joy for mourning,
The garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness;
That they may be called trees of righteousness,
The planting of the Lord, that He may be glorified.” Isaiah 61:1-3
That caused a bit of a stir because as a Christian isn’t this Joseph’s son we know him he was brought up in here, we we know Him, we know his family. He’s claiming to be someone more than he is. But he is the Messiah and He’s actually declaring here the truth. He’s coming out if you like as the Messiah, the One of whom the prophets speak.
So, that little passage is interesting because it tells you that, although Jesus didn’t go to church, He did go to synagogue and there are certain similarities in what happened in a synagogue to what happened today in services like this one.
