Full Transcript for Jesus Calling Scripture Study: The Book of Matthew with Matt Whitman

page from the Old Testament to the New that people were feeling despair. When will God redeem? What is it going to look like? And can you give us something to make sense of this human chaos and wreckage that is so relatable but also so bleak from the Old Testament. And then you turn the page over to Matthew and it starts with this big, long list of names, indicating an awareness that this is a follow up to the story you just got done reading, and then as soon as you get to the end of that list of names, the hope starts, and the clarification on what you just read starts, and the clarification on the whole arc of history starts, and I feel like this is where the Bible really begins to come into focus. And then you meet Jesus and his personality and his teaching, and you see what he's up to, and it really starts to crystallize, and it gets exciting because it not only makes sense of how the Bible all works and where you're at in the Bible now, but you start to realize this is for me. 00:04:06 Speaker 1: I am a part of this story. 00:04:08 Speaker 3: I am invited into this thing, and I'm getting a sense of where I fit. Matthew was written primarily to a Jewish audience. The original audience would have seen all these names, and almost every name on the list would have reminded them of a chapter in this story. They know like the back of their hand, the way somebody today you say any name from the Star Wars universe or the Marvel universe or whatever you're into, and you're like, ah, that conjures this great moment, and that great scene or this great tragedy, these names. The first time you read the New Testament, you're like, Okay, I know a couple. 00:04:43 Speaker 1: Of those whatever. 00:04:43 Speaker 3: But the original audience would have known all these people, and they would have felt all the pain, all the yearning, all the agony, all the near misses, all the disappointment that goes along with all of these stories, and also all of the little hints at the glory of God and what it looks like when somebody does get it right and by the grace of God is faithful. So that genealogy, it hints at what you're about to get. It hints that Jesus is going to be the completion of this chaotic story. So right there at the front end of Matthew, what we're being told is this is the completion of the story. Jesus is not a new thing. He's not a new God. This is not a new religion replacing a failed old religion. This was always the plan. There's a symmetry to it, there's a math to it. This is more than just the next step in the plan. This is the culminating event in the plans. Skip over to verse twenty three. The Virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Emmanuel, which means God with us. And that's where the hope of Matthew really starts to pop. Finally, this is the thing we've needed, the fullness of God present with humanity. We've had glimpses of it. We've had God appearing in a cloud. We've had God appearing in fire. We've had God manifesting in a burning bush. God occupied one of the two temples. He didn't show up at the dedication of the second temple. God has physically been present in a semi tangible way. But now God is here in the flesh, tabernacling among us, to borrow from John's language, dwelling among us. This is what the whole Old Testament has really been crying out for. We can't solve the problem. We need God to step into the muck and into the mess. If there is any solution to the curse from all the way back in the garden, any solution to the human problem of sin and frailty and the death that comes along with that, inherently, this solution is going to have to come from God. And now here we are just one page into Matthew, and we're being told, Okay, he's here in a new way, in a way that you have not seen before. 00:07:03 Speaker 1: Rejoice, hope. This is the completion of this whole story. 00:07:07 Speaker 3: That all the prophets, that all the law, that all these characters, and all the things they got right and wrong, it's all been pointing to this. And Matthew is saying, let the reader understand. They open your eyes. This is the moment we've all been waiting for. 00:07:19 Speaker 2: Stay tuned for more with Matt Whitman after a brief message. These uncertain times bring anxiety and fear, but Jesus Listens Prayers for Every Season gives you daily prayers of comfort with seasonally inspired illustrations. This beautiful book includes prayers that speak to your situation, whether it's a time of stress or strength. Look for Jesus Listens Prayers for Every Season wherever you buy books. 00:07:56 Speaker 3: So the Book of Matthew is built around five big speeches from Jesus, and they're all hugely important. The first is maybe the most important speech has ever been given by anybody ever, and that's the Sermon on the Mount. And maybe the reason that it is so important is because it's Jesus' big debut. We've had four hundred years of silence biblically, so it's been forever. Think about what you were doing four hundred years ago. I mean, imagine a chunk of time that goes back to Shakespeare, and you've been waiting on a thing as a people group, as a religious promise for that amount of time, and nothing has happened. It's just been quiet. Well, John the Baptist comes along, and people are understandably excited. Some people are pretty interested in what Jesus is going to be about. Rumors are probably starting to circulate. But now it goes big with this Sermon on the Mount, and the Sermon on the Mount is directed at Jesus' disciples, but the other two primary audience members that we see throughout the Book of Matthew or present for this. So you always have the disciples as one group. They're committed therein They maybe don't understand everything about Jesus, but they're there. And then you got the people who don't like Jesus, and eventually they don't like him so much that they conspire to have him killed. And then the majority of people are the

squishy middle we're in that as first time readers of Matthew, I don't know quite what to make of Jesus yet. And the first stuff that Jesus teaches publicly is the beloved Beatitude section. It's an articulation of the values. 00:09:38 Speaker 1: Of the Kingdom. 00:09:39 Speaker 3: And what we discover is all these values are beautiful and the stuff that deep down everybody wants and knows are right, but also they're backwards from the world. The stuff the world celebrates is informed by world values. It's informed by you're born, you eat and drink and get old and make kids and have a job, and then you die. World values are informed by that naturalistic, godless arc to. 00:10:10 Speaker 1: Life that can result in a soft nihilism. 00:10:13 Speaker 3: But the values Jesus articulates in the Sermon on the Mount, in the Beatitudes, they are forward looking, they're bigger, they're eternally informed. They flow out of the idea of a timeless king and a timeless kingdom and his character, and they're absolutely beautiful. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed or the meek you've heard this one before, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. That's how Jesus starts it. He throws down this gauntlet and is saying, right out of the gate, Yeah, I'm a king. There is a kingdom, and the rules of my kingdom are different than world kingdom stuff. Then at the end of the Sermon on the Mount, at the end of Matthew chapter seven, it says when Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowd were amazed at his teaching, because he taught as one who had authority and not as their teachers. 00:11:08 Speaker 1: Of the law. Then, over the next few chapters after the Sermon on the. 00:11:12 Speaker 3: Mount, the question is, well, what does this look like when you do it? 00:11:16 Speaker 1: Jesus, do you actually live this out? And what does it. 00:11:19 Speaker 3: Look like to live out these values of the kingdom? And he answers both of those questions just in how he does business over the next few chapters. 00:11:28 Speaker 1: Really, over the rest. 00:11:28 Speaker 3: Of Matthew, he demonstrates power over everything, the death, distance, disease, nature. He demonstrates the ability to navigate seemingly impossible social situations. He navigates challenges from people who don't like him very much and are threatened by the stuff that he's saying that is true. And then he sends out his disciples who are barely even equipped yet with this message just repent for the Kingdom of God is at hand. They don't have a Bible or anything to take with them, not a New Testament at least, and yet he says that somehow they're ready, and so out they go. And so we've learned a lot in just a couple of chapters about Jesus' character. But then we get this great moment of tenderness from Jesus at the end of chapter eleven. 00:12:19 Speaker 1: We've seen Jesus repeatedly point out that. 00:12:23 Speaker 3: He is soft hearted towards the lost, that this isn't the day of the Lord that comes with great judgment, that how he acts is an expression of the softness and long sufferingness of God. And then we get this great line from him at the end of chapter eleven. He's demonstrated power of life death distance. I mean, he seems like he should be so completely other, that he would be detached from humanity and indifferent because he's so much better and so much more powerful. But instead he says this in verse twenty eight. Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I'll give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, from gentle and humble and heart, and you'll find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. Saying it to a religiously weary people who we're trying a new way to please God, Jesus is saying that he is not coming to heap more things upon people. Rather, the point has been made. The load is very heavy, the load of sin, the load of human frailty, the shortcomings of the flesh. And the answer to this is Christ. It is his life, his death, his teachings, perfect sacrifice, his resurrection. That is where hope is to be found. And it's not really something that you go and earn so that nobody can boast. It's through Christ that we have this life. And that is in profound contrast to the religious sensibilities of the day, and it demonstrates the tenderness that flows out of these values of the kingdom. The more people start to figure out and connect the dots so that he might be the promised Messiah. The more two things occur, people get really excited and want to follow him, but other people get really threatened and upset by that possibility, and Jesus seems to indicate that that's okay, that's just how the things work. Jesus goes through a personal tragedy. John the Baptist is executed somewhere in the mix with all of this, and he doesn't even get a moment to go and think about it. He's immediately followed by all these people who are starting to suspect that he is the promised Messiah. And he feeds them and meets their needs miraculously and takes care of them. But despite all of that good stuff, his enemies keep nipping at his heels, and Jesus starts to pivot his attention toward a reality he knows is coming. 00:14:46 Speaker 1: He knows he's headed to the cross. 00:14:50 Speaker 3: And he starts to put more and more energy into this inner circle of disciples who've been with him. But when we get to chapter sixteen, Jesus has decided to looks like take a little road trip with the guys up north. Jesus knows he doesn't have a ton of time left, and he also knows that the big elephant in the room hasn't been dealt with. So here they are sitting in the region of cesarea Philippi, and Jesus asks his disciples, who do people. 00:15:15 Speaker 1: Say the son of Man is? 00:15:17 Speaker 3: And some of them reply John the

Baptist, others say Elijah, still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets. 00:15:24 Speaker 1: But what about you, Jesus asks, who do you say that I am? Simon? 00:15:29 Speaker 3: Peter answered, you are the Christ, the son of the Living God. Remember, Jesus gets executed like ten pages later for people suspecting that what Peter just said is true. This was a high risk thing for Peter to say, yet he says it in the moment when everybody else is kind of tiptoeing around the obvious thing. So when you read this text, pause for a moment and let the tensions sit. Maybe cover the next verse with your pinky, and just imagine the baited breath, the nerves of everybody else in that circle around that campfire. It's not just the silence of that one storytelling beat, It's the silence of all of the Book of Matthew. 00:16:17 Speaker 1: Finally, here's the payoff. 00:16:20 Speaker 3: Jesus replied, blessed or you Simon's son of Jonah. For this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in Heaven. And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it. 00:16:34 Speaker 1: I will give you the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven. 00:16:36 Speaker 3: Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. 00:16:41 Speaker 1: Jesus say, yes, you're right. 00:16:43 Speaker 3: I am the Christ, the Messiah, the one who's promised to reign on the throne of David forever, the son of the Living God. It's a beautiful scene with massive theological historic ramifications, but it's also a personal scene. I mean, imagine yourself sitting around that campfire and you get asked that question. 00:17:00 Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, but what about. 00:17:01 Speaker 3: You, Mike? What about you, Matt? What about you Carol? What about any of us? Who do you say that I am? The answer is pretty evident. This is the Christ, This is the one who's promised, This is God in the flesh. This passage is. 00:17:17 Speaker 1: One that is meant to be celebratory. 00:17:19 Speaker 3: It is meant to be one of the most exciting moments in the entire Bible, because if you're reading straight through with open eyes and you're really starting to get it, you get to this point you're like, man, there's only this much Bible left before I get to the maps. 00:17:32 Speaker 1: We got to get to the answer here at some point. 00:17:34 Speaker 3: And finally somebody says it, and what Simon gets right, Jesus affirms, you didn't figure that out with theology math. 00:17:42 Speaker 1: Your eyes were opened by God. And the very next thing. 00:17:45 Speaker 3: Jesus does is he says, great, you get it, and now I'm going to go to Jerusalem and die, and they all rightly freak out. Peter tries to talk him out of it, and Jesus, who just praised Peter five sentences earlier, now says you do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men. What we see throughout the rest of the Book of Matthew is Jesus demonstrating again and again that he is indeed what Peter said he is, and then he backs it up in the most ultimate way, going to the cross voluntarily and being raised on the third day. Matthew sixteen on toward the end of the chapter, exactly what Jesus predicted is what happens. They move towards Jerusalem, right into the hive of scum and villainy, where the bad guys get their midst on Jesus. They find him guilty. They're not allowed to execute him, but their buddy buddy with the government, so they have ponscious Pilot do that for them. Pilot doesn't exactly know what to make of it either. Ultimately, Jesus goes to the cross basically alone. He dies and agonizing death on the cross, and as predicted, he's raised back to life on the third day, and it fully manifests and is present with the disciples and everything about him, everything that he's done, everything that he said, that he's taught, the whole story you and I have been following, not just through Matthew, but through the entire Old Testament. It's all vindicated, it's all true. Death is defeated. The story finds its symmetry, and we feel great about it, but even better when we realize we are in this story. There's a final commissioning that happens at the very end of Matthew. In Matthew twenty eight, where Jesus gets the disciples together in Galilee. When they saw him, they worshiped him. But some doubt it. Doubt and wobbling is part of the human condition. Maybe some of you have the gift of faith. Your eyes have been open to the reality of who Christ is, and you just see it in ways some people might see it the hand in front of their face. You see the reality of God and his presence, the work of Christ, the work of the Holy Spirit. That's an amazing blessing from God. But I know there's some of you who are part of this conversation who that isn't the case. It's up and down, and some of the troughs and dips in there are tough. There's so many different ways that our hearts get dinged up, and that the barnacles of the ick of life attached to the whole of our ship as we sail through life. Even these guys who had seen all of this with their eyes touched it with their hands, they still wobbled. Jesus knew that he knew everything. He knew who he was dealing with. You're not just sons and daughters, you are heirs and agents of this Kingdom disciples, and you listening to this conversation. If you're in Christ, you're not just in by the skinny your teeth. You are an honored son or daughter of the King. You are an agent, You are an heir. And if that feels intimidating and like too much, and like you're going to screw it up and embarrass God or not get it right all the time, well guess what. Surely He is with you always to the very end of the age. That promise wasn't just for the disciples, It's for you and me as well. 00:21:03 Speaker 2: Thank you for listening to the special scripture focused bonus episode. To learn more about Matt, please visit the TMBH dot com and be sure to check out his book, The Lightning Fast Feel Guide to the Bible, your compact companion for exploring the best book ever available at your favorite retailer. Enjoy our entire series of scripture studies, each with different Bible teachers and experts guiding us through specific books, topics, and people in the Bible on the Jesus Calling YouTube channel. To discover more inspiring stories of faith, visit Jesus Calling dot com slash podcast. Thanks for listening to the Jesus Calling Stories of Faith podcast on the Life Audio Network. Every week, we'll bring you stories from people who share their journeys of faith and how prayer and a relationship with God transformed their lives. Be sure to follow us on Apple, Spotify, iHeart, or wherever you listen to podcasts, and leave us a review so others can be inspired weekly by these stories of faith. Finally, you can find encouragement resources and more on the Jesus Calling website at Jesuscalling dot com.