Forgiveness - God's Grace Initiative, Matthew 18:7-10
Jesus will come a second time to establish His kingdom. In the meantime a new age has entered in, and this age is related to the church. The focal point in this age is to make students. The word that is used in the Scriptures is disciples, a word that is used so much and over used, I think, a lot that people lose the sense of what it means. It means to be students, to be followers, to be willing to give your life to the teaching of the person you are following.
That is not the condition for getting into heaven; that is the condition for spiritual growth and spiritual maturity. Salvation is a free gift. We are to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and trust in Him and Him alone for our salvation; we do nothing to earn or deserve it.
But then Scripture says that in addition to our salvation, which guarantees and eternal destiny in heaven, we are to grow and mature. To the degree that we do there is a incentive that is available and that is related to rewards. Rewards are for those disciples who do well. And the thrust of what Jesus is teaching in this passage is some of the characteristics of a disciple. The teaching aid that He uses is a little child. The issues that are raised in this chapter related to the position in the kingdom are understanding something about little children and comparing that, using that as an analogy.
Where we are going to go in Matthew chapter eighteen is important because as we get into the next section what Jesus is going to focus on is forgiveness. For many people forgiveness is an exceptionally difficult doctrine—the forgiveness of one another. And even understanding God's forgiveness of us is difficult for some people who feel like whatever they have gone through in life is just somehow too great for the grace of God. But nothing that anybody goes through is too great for the grace of God. God's grace is related to His omnipotence. That means He is able to do whatever He wants to do in relation to His plan. He is able to solve the sin problem; He is omniscient, which means He knows every sin everybody has ever committed; and in His grace He imputed that sin to Jesus so that Jesus paid for every sin on the cross. Nothing was dropped; nothing was forgotten; nothing was too great for Christ to pay the penalty for, and it was all paid for on the cross. That is our pattern for understanding forgiveness. Romans 5:8 NASB “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” God was willing to forgive us; God initiated grace, and that becomes a pattern for us. That is what is going to be developed and explained by Jesus in Matthew eighteen.
But for many people they just have problems with forgiveness. It is related to unconditional love. There are some people who say, “Lord you just can't ask me to love that person”. Part of love, as Jesus demonstrates in John 13, is forgiving one another.
In Matthew there are numerous places where this is emphasized—6:9, 14-15; 9:1-18. Forgiveness lies at the heart of much of what Jesus is going to teach in the rest of Matthew.
The easy part for us in terms of forgiveness often are minor infractions, especially somebody we care about. Sometimes we are so willing to forgive someone we care deeply about but if it is somebody we don't care about so much we don't want to forgive them. So we need to learn what it means to forgive because that is inherent in what it means to love.
Just
a reminder of context. The question is on ranking. Who is going to out rank the
others? Who is going to have the best position? Who is going to have personal
status? That is the focal point of their question. The answer that Jesus gives
them is that they need to be humble, just like a little child. The focus on
humility, as we have seen, is that there are two dimensions to humility that
are mentioned in Scripture. One is submission to authority (Philippians 2:7,
8); and it is not asserting our own rights, seeking personal status or position
for its own sake. The analogy with the child is not emphasizing that, and the
second aspect of humility is what is emphasized in Philippians 2:6—“...
although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a
thing to be grasped.” He was not going to assert His rank, privilege or
position, He was going to enter into human history as a human being.
The second point we need to remember in terms of context is the analogy to a child. In the ancient world the child had no position, no ranking whatsoever in society, and the point is that the disciples were to be like little children, not being assertive or focusing on their position of privilege at all.
Matthew 18:5 “And whoever receives one such child ...” Jesus is changing from the little boy that He has taken to be the visual training aid and is now talking about the spiritual little child, the one who has humbled himself. He is no longer talking about little children. A common error in the way this is exposited is that that is missed: that He is no longer talking about children. This is about the spiritual child who humbles himself so that he can enter with fulness into the kingdom of heaven. This is not related to justification because Jesus is talking to disciples who are already justified. He is telling the disciples: Change your mind and act with humility. He is talking about a spiritual life issue, not about a justification/salvation issue.
In Mark chapter nine we have the same kind of context. Jesus is talking about the same thing: causing little ones to stumble. And He adds something. For example, verse 43, “into the unquenchable fire.” Cf. Jeremiah 17:4 NASB “... For you have kindled a fire in My anger Which will burn forever.” Does that mean God is still mad at them? No, because He brought them back into the land in 538BC. So forever doesn't mean forever in some contexts, it just means for a long time. Mark 9:44 NASB “[where THEIR WORM DOES NOT DIE, AND THE FIRE IS NOT QUENCHED.]” It is important to understand that this is a quote from the Old Testament, Isaiah 66:24 NASB “Then they [who have entered into the kingdom] will go forth and look on the corpses of the men Who have transgressed against Me. For their worm will not die And their fire will not be quenched; And they will be an abhorrence to all mankind.”
Look at the context. Isaiah 66:22 NASB “For just as the new heavens and the new earth Which I make will endure before Me,” declares the LORD, “So your offspring and your name will endure. [23] And it shall be from new moon to new moon And from sabbath to sabbath, All mankind will come to bow down before Me,” says the LORD.
I bet that if I took a pole everybody would say, new heaven and new earth, that is after the millennium, after the great white throne, where Revelation 21 says God is going to create a new heaven and new earth. Wrong! Look at context. The new heavens and new earth in Isaiah isn't the new heavens and new earth of Revelation 21, it is the millennial kingdom. We know that because in Isaiah 65:17 it defines the term and it is clear there that it is talking about the millennial kingdom. So this is talking about what happens at the end of the Tribulation when there is the assault on Jerusalem. The Lord Jesus Christ returns to the earth and destroys the armies of the Antichrist and the false prophet, and Jerusalem and Israel is just filled with the corpses.
That is another key word in Isaiah 66:24. In the new heavens and the new earth in Revelation 21 the present heavens and earth are completely destroyed. After the satanic rebellion against God that occurs at the end of the Tribulation God is just going to incinerate their bodies with fire and brimstone. How many corpses will be left after God incinerates? Not much! So if God has incinerated all of the enemies at the end of the millennial kingdom, how are they going to look at the corpses? Second, corpses are not going to survive throughout eternity in the lake of fire. Corpses belong to this world. When a present corpse goes into the ground it is going to rot, it is not what is going to go into the lake of fire. It is obvious that Isaiah 66:24 can't be talking about what happens at the end of the millennium when the new heavens and the new earth comes and everything in this present universe is completely decimated and destroyed.
According
to Isaiah 65:17, because Israel has been restored to the land and God restores
the kingdom—it is new and it is a new world for Israel who entered into this
final redemptive relationship with their Messiah who will reign in
Jerusalem—all of these dead bodies are around. This is consistent with Ezekiel
39:11-16, which refers to a seven-month period when the dead are going to be
buried. It is going to take that long to clean up all of the corpses after the
victory that the Lord Jesus Christ has over the armies of the Antichrist and
his false prophet. These corpses are going to be rotting, and this is the focal
point of the imagery of the worms and the maggots that are consuming the
rotting flesh. So the point of this passage isn't that this is going to go on
forever but that this is going to go on, like the other passages, for a very
long time.
Mark 9:49 NASB “For everyone will be salted with fire [purification]. [50] Salt is good; but if the salt becomes unsalty, with what will you make it salty [season it] {again?} Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.”
Most of us if we are reading through our Bible are going to put a question mark next to that verse. What in the world is Jesus talking about? If we don't understand the time in which this was written and how salt was used then we are going to miss this. We covered this back where Jesus said “you are to be the salt of the earth.”
“Salt is good but if the salt loses its
flavor”—ANALON [saltless]. There it
really means “if it becomes foolish”. He is using an idiom meaning it is
useless because some of the properties of the salt don't seem to be there
anymore. … “how will you season it”—ARTUO.
NKJV – “how shall it me seasoned?”
NASB95—“if the salt has become tasteless how can it be made salty again?”
Darby--“You are the salt of the earth, but if the salt has become insipid wherewith shall it be salted?”
NET--“but if salt loses its flavor, how can it be made salty again?”
We have this metaphor where some properties of salt are being used as an analogy to understand something about a disciple. There is a point of comparison. Most of what would apply to salt doesn't apply. The interesting thing is studying metaphors is that you can have twenty characteristics of something and only one of them is the point of the analogy; the other nineteen are irrelevant and don't apply. What we see here as we try to interpret this salt metaphor is that salt is designed to create thirst. If you as a believer are salty you are going to create a thirst for the Word of God among people around you. To season food would be a kitchen metaphor. So is the point of this going to be a kitchen metaphor, or is it going to be an agricultural farming metaphor? That is the big question. It was used to preserve food, and that would also be a kitchen metaphor. It was used as fertilizer. It was used as an ingredient in fertilizer as a weed killer, it was not just pure salt. The rabbis talked about salt as being analogous to wisdom. Salt was used for purification, and sometimes salt was put on a lamps wick so that it would burn a little brighter.
These are just seven ways in which salt is used metaphorically, so how are we supposed to figure this out? Jesus is talking to them and He says, “You are the salt of the earth. The way most of us think of that when we hear it is that Jesus is saying “You are the salt of the world”, the world being the populated cosmos, the world around us that God loved and sent His Son to die for. But the Greek word there (John 3:16) for earth is KOSMOS, it doesn't say God so loved the earth. The word in Matthew is the Greek word GE and means land or soil or physical earth, it is not talking about the world and it is never used as a synonym for KOSMOS. So the idea that we are the salt of the earth and means that somehow we are to impact culture and society around us doesn't fit, because GE isn't used that way. GE is used 39 times in Matthew, 92 times in the Gospels, and it is never used as a synonym with world.
Option two is that the earth—meaning land, soil ground, earth—refers to the land. In a couple of places it refers to the planet in contrast to the heavens, talking about the physical planet, not the inhabitants. So salt of the earth probably means salt for the land, which means fertilizer. So if salt of the earth is understood as salt for the earth then Jesus is not using a kitchen metaphor, He is using an agricultural metaphor, and this is significant because that is how Luke seems to use it as he expands on this in Luke 14:34, 35. “Therefore, salt is good; but if even salt has become tasteless, with what will it be seasoned? It is useless either for the soil [GE] or for the manure pile; it is thrown out. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”
In the ancient world salt wasn't pure. Salt is an extremely stable compound. Sodium chloride doesn't deteriorate. But they would take lumps of what was mostly salt from the Dead Sea and other areas and the salt would sort of leech out into the dung pile and develop into a sort of weed killer aspect of that dung. That is what fits here. Jesus said it is not fit for the land, to put it out into the soil, and nor is it fit for the dunghill. That is where they would put salt, on the dunghill, and it would become part of the compost that would later be put on the earth. So it is useless now, and you throw it out. That is the point of this analogy. It changes the whole perspective of what Jesus is talking about here.
He is talking about creating a thirst for truth, for the Word of God. He is talking about the fact that as disciples you are to be the salt for the soil. You are to generate productiveness. As disciples you are to go make disciples who are to be fruitful. That is the focal point of the analogy. It is to create spiritual productivity in other believers. So when Jesus said, “You are the salt of the earth, but if the salt becomes saltless/foolish how shall it be seasoned. It is then good for nothing but to be thrown out and trampled under foot”, this is divine discipline on a believer who is a failure because he is not being used to challenge and encourage other believers to grow and mature in the spiritual life.
Salt doesn't decay, so it doesn't lose its saltiness. So something else has to be going on here, and that has to do with the fact that the salt could leech out--because it comes in this compound with all these other elements—over time and what is left is useless, it is not going to do anything to produce fruitfulness in the soil. What Jesus is doing is using an agricultural method that emphasizes that a disciple should be productive rather than nonproductive. And that fits the context in Matthew chapter five of rewards and good works.
Going back to Mark 9:50, “Salt is good; but if the salt becomes unsalty, with what will you make it salty {again?} Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.” You have to be productive, have salt in yourselves. In other words, as disciples you need to be productive and you are to challenge and encourage other believers to be productive.
But what goes with that? You just can't be aggravating everybody around you. You have to have peace with one another. That peace and forgiveness go together in the New Testament. This statement isn't included in Matthew but it is the same context, the same conversation. And what that shows us is that all of this warning about the stumbling block, about severe divine discipline, is pointing to challenge the disciples to learn what it means to have peace with one another and to forgive one another—which is what is about to be the discussion point in Matthew chapter eighteen, when Peter says, “What if somebody sins?” And then you go to them with one witness, then two, and then if they are non-responsive you take it to the church.
The rest of the context in the chapter deals with the issue of forgiveness, which is inherent to love, Jesus' new commandment that we are to love one another as He loved us. As we have seen in John chapter thirteen when He is celebrating the Passover meal with the disciples before He goes to the cross, He is demonstrating forgiveness and cleansing for one another. He says, “By this all men will know that you are my disciples.” He doesn't say this is how all men will know you are a believer because this is discipleship material. This is how you know you are growing and maturing as a believer.
Here is the warning. Jesus is saying whoever receives a little child like this in my name receives me.” This is talking about family relationships. You as a disciple need to receive other disciples in Jesus' name because they are believers.
Matthew 18:7 NASB “Woe to the world because of {its} stumbling blocks! [SKANDALON] ...” – false teaching, distracting somebody in their spiritual life. The word is used three times in verse 7 & 8. “... For it is inevitable that stumbling blocks come; but woe to that man through whom the stumbling block comes! [8] “If your hand or your foot causes you to stumble [fall into apostasy], cut it off and throw it from you; it is better for you to enter life crippled or lame, than to have two hands or two feet and be cast into the eternal fire [extreme divine discipline].”
Matthew 18:10 NASB “See that you do not despise one of these little ones ...” So don't react. If somebody messes up and they are a new believer, but they really want to grow—they are young, they are going to mess up—don't react to them and despise them because of the mistakes they make, because they have offended you. “... for I say to you that their angels in heaven continually see the face of My Father who is in heaven.”
This is a verse that is typically used and frequently cited as a verse that says every little child has a guardian angel. Do you think that is what that means? He is not talking about physical infants anymore, He is talking about believers who have humbled themselves and want to grow to maturity, and the fact that they have a representative angel. This angel is an advocate for them in heaven--“see the face of My Father who is in heaven”.
This relates to the other verse on guardian angels, which is Hebrews 1:14 NASB “Are they not all ministering spirits, sent out to render service for the sake of those who will inherit salvation? That is not talking about justification. What is the key word there? It is “inheriting”. That is those disciples who are going to be rewarded at the judgment seat of Christ, those who have grown and matured. So who gets a guardian angels? Believers who are pursuing spiritual growth.
What is all this doing? It is setting us up to understand exactly what is going to take place in the coming illustration of the lost sheep. Matthew 18:11 NASB [“For the Son of Man has come to save that which was lost.]”
Some translations will not have verse 11 in there. It is not in some MSS. It is in the Majority Text. I think it was probably borrowed from another context in Luke. I don't think it really fits the context here. The word “saved” isn't talking about justification because the context is a little different. It is similar to the context in Luke 15 where we do have the parable of the shepherd seeking the sheep.
Matthew 18:12 NASB “What do you think? If any man has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go and search for the one that is straying?”
The man is a shepherd, he owns the sheep. This isn't talking about getting into the flock, which would be justification. You are already in the flock. The man owns the sheep. When you look at the parallel in Matthew 15 it talks about a lost sheep, a lost coin, and the lost [prodigal] son. In each of those cases they are not lost, like unsaved, because the sheep originally belonged to the shepherd, the coin originally belonged to the woman, and the son is already in the family of the man. This is talking about forgiveness; it is talking about restoration when someone sins. So if a man has a hundred sheep and one of them goes astray—you start sinning and you're out of fellowship and going into carnality—does he not leave the ninety-nine and go to the mountains to seek the one that has strayed. This just picks up the thread we have been seeing already. This is the initiative of God's grace and forgiveness. He goes looking to bring us back.
Matthew 18:13 NASB “If it turns out that he finds it, truly I say to you, he rejoices over it more than over the ninety-nine which have not gone astray.” That is the picture of the father of the prodigal son. When the son comes back he throws a big party.
Matthew 18:14 NASB “So it is not {the} will of your Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones perish.” This is not talking about something physical happening to a little child but about a believer who goes out of fellowship and destroys his life. God is going to seek to work in the life of the rebellious believer to bring him back in grace to experience forgiveness so that he can grow and continue.
We
always have to make sure to distinguish between the passages of Scripture that
are talking about how to be justified and those that are talking about how a
believer is to live, to grow, forgiving one another, loving one another, and
how they are going to be forgiven by the Lord no matter what happens. And God's
initiating grace is going to seek to bring us back. He wants to forgive us and
restore us and there is nothing that we can do that is too great for the grace
of God.