NEW TESTAMENT CONTEXTUAL COMMENTARY

by Dr. Robert R. Seyda

GOSPEL OF MATTHEW

CHAPTER SEVEN

Part IV (con’t)

Verse 21: Not everyone who calls me LORD will enter God’s kingdom. The only people who will enter are those who do what My Father in heaven wants.

Now Jesus segues into explaining why those who claim a relationship with Him will not be successful in fooling Him as they did others. The Greek word used here for “LORD” is kurios. In the Greek Septuagint version, kurios is the most common rendering for the Hebrew YaHWeH. Jesus could have used the term Lord that means “master,” but He chose the term that refers to Yahweh, which many Jewish translations render: “ADONAI.” It is not enough to claim a relationship with Christ in order to enter the kingdom of God. You must be invited. Only God the Father sends out the invitations which are delivered by the Holy Spirit. The invitation is to meet Jesus Christ personally, the only One qualified to vouch for you before the Father as having accepted Him as your Lord and Savior. There is no other way.

God gave the prophet Hosea a chilling warning about those making false claims: “Put the trumpet to your lips and give the warning. Be like an eagle over the Lord’s house. The Israelites have broken my agreement. They have not obeyed My law. Yet they yell out at Me, ‘My God, we in Israel know You!’ But Israel refused the good things, so the enemy chases him. The Israelites chose their kings, but they didn’t come to Me for advice. They chose leaders, but they didn’t choose men I knew. The Israelites used their silver and gold to make idols for themselves, so they will be destroyed.”¹ If this was important to God’s people back then, should it not be important to them today?

The prophet Malachi was given the criteria by which God’s own would be identified, “Then the Lord’s followers spoke with each other, and the Lord listened to them. There is a book in front of Him. In that book are the names of His followers. They are the people who honor the Lord’s name. The Lord said, ‘They belong to Me. I will be kind to them. Parents are very kind to their children who obey them. In the same way I will be kind to My followers. You people will come back to Me, and you will learn the difference between good and evil. You will learn the difference between someone who follows God and someone who does not.’”² Israel was also a nation, and therefore it is critical that God’s people be careful in who they choose to lead them as as part of their nation.

The prophet Daniel had a similar scene,³ and we find this scene replicated in John’s Apocalypse.⁴ But this is not a guest book which visitors sign in, they are written there by God’s personal scribe.⁵ The prophet Jeremiah faced a similar situation, and God spoke to him, “I saw the prophets of Samaria doing wrong things. I saw them prophesy in the name of the false god Baal. They led the people of Israel away from Me. I have even seen the prophets of Jerusalem doing sinful things. They are committing adultery and living a life of lies. They support their fellow prophets and never stop doing evil. They have become like Sodom; they are all like Gomorrah.”⁶ But it wasn’t that any miracles or signs and wonders were wrong in themselves, but it was the fact that none of them were done according to God’s will and at His command.

Jeremiah goes on to point this out, “Some of the people hate the real messages from the Lord, so the prophets give them a different message. They say, ‘You will have peace.’ Some of the people are very stubborn. They do only what they want to do. So the prophets say,‘Nothing bad will happen to you!’ But none of these prophets has stood in the heavenly council. None of them has seen or heard the message from the Lord. None of them has paid close attention to His message.”⁷ But even more telling, is that God told Jeremiah, “I did not send those prophets, but they ran to tell their messages. I did not speak to them, but they spoke in My name. If they had stood in my heavenly council, then they would have given My messages to the people of Judah. They would have stopped the people from doing bad things. They would have stopped them from doing evil.”⁸

And finally God says, “I am against the false prophets. They use their own words and pretend that it is a message from Me. I am against the false prophets who share false visions. This message is from the Lord. They mislead my people with their lies and false teachings. I did not send them to teach the people. I never commanded them to do anything for Me. They cannot help the people of Judah at all.”⁹ When Jesus spoke of the last days and the sifting out the good from the bad, this was not new to His Jewish listeners. They knew that such a day of reckoning was coming. How much more should we who are getting closer to that day reverence and pay our respects to what God has to say.

Early church preacher Chrysostom points out an interesting fact in this text. He writes: “Jesus said ‘whoever does the will of My Father’ will enter, not whoever does My will. Why? Nothing is insufficient if they do the will of the Father. What He did say was itself a very difficult thing to accept in view of their weakness. He implied that to do His Father’s will is to do His will. There is no other willing of the Son than the will of the Father. This may apply in particular to those who commit themselves in detail to Law yet take little thought for the actual personification of their better intentions. Elsewhere Paul confronts them directly when he says, ‘What about you? You say you are a Jew. You trust in the law and proudly claim to be close to God,’¹⁰ but in all this you derive no benefit as long as the actual fruit of good living is not present.”¹¹ Today God’s will is represented in His Word, therefore anyone who says they are doing the will of Jesus, but that will does not conform to the will of the Father in the Scriptures is deceiving those who listen.

Verse 22: On that last Day many will call me Lord. They will say, ‘Lord, Lord, by the power of Your name we spoke for God. And by Your name we forced out demons and did many miracles.

In the Jewish teaching on the judgment, especially concerning those of the generation of Noah. One Rabbi had an interesting comment about those who refused to enter Noah’s ark. He said: “Moreover, you will be considered a curse for all future generations, as it is written, their portion is a curse on the earth. You did not follow the way of escape provided:’ this teaches that you did not look for a way out. So they said to Him, if a person posses the power to escape, what prevents him for using it?’ — God replied. ‘I have chosen One dear to Me to lead you out.’”¹² Jewish commentators add this about that dear One as being: “One righteous man who must first die, so that he may not end up with your punishment.”¹³ In this we can clearly see a comparison between Noah and Jesus, both of whom God chose to provide an escape from death and annihilation. In Noah’s case it was the flood; in Jesus’ case it is the fire of Gehenna.

Perhaps this Rabbi’s listeners were thinking of someone such as Methuselah, but the Holy Spirit gave this utterance in reference to someone else. Also, in a copy of the earliest version of the verbal traditions we find this interesting discussion about standing trial before the LORD: “Ordinarily someone who knows he is on trial wears black and wraps himself in black and lets his beard grow, since he does not know how his trial will turn out. But that is not how it is with Israel. Rather, on the day of their trial they wear white and wrap themselves in white and shave their bears and eat, drink, and rejoice, for they know that the Holy One blessed be He does miracles for them.”¹⁴ To paraphrase this with New Testament insight, when you show up before the Lord, He will know right away you don’t belong to Him because the robe you wear is still black with sin’s stains, not white like those of the redeemed that have had their robes washed in the cleansing blood of the Lamb.

Verse 23: Jesus then tells His followers that based on this, Then I will tell those people clearly, “Get away from me, you people who do wrong. I never claimed you as being Mine.”

The Aramaic Version reads: “And then I will profess to them that from everlasting I have not known you.” Today we might word it, “I didn’t authorize what you did from the very start.” It is used in this same sense in the Babylonian Talmud where a Rabbis were in dispute over how a person is reprimanded for saying or doing something wrong. So one of the Rabbis told another Rabbi to take it to their leader Rabbi Judah. But this Rabbi was not too happy. He said, “‘And what, may I ask, can Rabbi Judah have to say on this?’ So he went and repeated what he was told to do to his father, but his father did not know what to tell him. So when this Rabbi presented himself before Rabbi Judah, Judah said to him: ‘Shimon son of Kappara, I never knew you!’”¹⁵

Commentators tell us that the literal interpretation of this phrase I never knew you was: “I don’t (want to) know you, stay away from me, or I have never been able to understand your attitude towards me.”¹⁶ This same Rabbi clashed with Rabbis on several occasions. The cause, it seems, was not personal, but rather due to the different schools to which they each belonged. So here, Christ declares, He knew them not; that is, He did not recognize their teachings as His. Therefore, He would not admit them into His presence and kingdom.

How many today claim to be doing the works Christ encouraged them to do, yet they have never gotten to know the Master Himself personally? There is a way of “knowing” Him intellectually simply by being cognizant of His existence. But there is another way of “knowing” Him by a personal and individual encounter, and that is by having Him live in our hearts. Today we would call these people “party crashers.” They are not on the invitation list and they are neither friends or relatives of the host.

Those of you who are interested in European and Near East history know that when one royal family deposed the ruling royal family, they either incarcerated or killed off any remaining children or relatives of the former monarch. I saw a documentary on television about the story of one such deposed family whose only remaining child was a young lad in his teens. He was imprisoned and treated horribly. But then he suddenly disappeared and no one seemed to know where he went. Many years later a man living in Canada claimed to be this young man. He told the story of how he escaped and how he was able to resettle with the help of some supporters. He produced documents and personal accounts that led to his being accepted as the only survivor of this royal family. He even wrote a book on the subject and was accepted everywhere as this exiled prince. But modern science was able to extract some DNA from that royal family, and when his was tested it proved not to be a match. That’s when the man confessed that he made it all up.

Jesus is saying here, that unless His spiritual DNA can be found in those who claim to be His followers, He will expose them and send them off into oblivion. David attested to this when he wrote, “God, you don’t want evil people near You. They cannot stay in Your presence. Fools cannot come near You. You hate those who do evil. You destroy those who tell lies. Lord, you hate those who make secret plans to hurt others.”¹⁷ In case anyone was not getting the point He was making, our Lord will offer another illustration to make it even clearer.

The Early Church apologist from Alexandria in Egypt had something to say about such a dismissal from the presence of Christ. He writes: “There may be some who, in the beginning, believed correctly and diligently labored at moral excellence. They may have even worked miracles and prophesied and cast out demons. And yet later they are found turning aside to evil, to self-assertive deception and desire. Of these Jesus remarks that He “never knew them.” He ranks them as equivalent to those who were never known by Him at all. Even if they at the outset had lived virtuously, they ended up condemned. God knows those whom He loves, and He loves those who single-mindedly believe in Him and do the things that please Him.”¹⁸ If that’s what the Church preached back in 380 AD, they should preach the same today.

While Bishop Cyril gives us the conventional interpretation of what Jesus meant when He said, “I never knew you,” there is another factor that we should consider. First of all, it is incompatible to suggest that the all-knowing Son of God did not recognize them or knew who they were or where they were from. So we must look more closely at the word “knew.” In some cases it certainly reflects the presence of sufficient information to have perceived or to understand. It also allows for the understanding of having been acquainted or familiar with a person, place or thing. On some occasions it is employed as a way of saying that a man was intimate with his wife.

So out of these it appears that Jesus certainly could have been saying, that when such people claim an association with Him in their effort to carry out His will in their ministry, He has the right to say: “I don’t recognize you as one of those whom I authorized or approved as a representative of My Kingdom.” This is why it was so important for our Lord after His ascension in to heaven to request the Father send the Holy Spirit as an insignia upon the soul of every believer who was truly authorized to carry out the mission He left for His church to finish so it would allow Him to return and set up His kingdom here on earth.