In this episode of Born to Win, Ronald L. Dart explores the profound responsibility Jesus laid upon Peter with the keys of the kingdom of heaven. How do theologians interpret the authority of binding and loosing? Dart delves into historical perspectives, contrasting Catholic and Protestant views, and connects Old Testament practices with New Covenant teachings. Gain insights into the role of community and church administration as Dart unwinds the implications of Jesus’s teachings for today’s faithful.
The CEM Network is pleased to present Ronald L. Dart and Born to Win.
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Jesus told Peter that he was giving him the keys of the kingdom of heaven and that whatever he bound on earth would be bound in heaven and whatever he loosed on earth would be loosed in heaven. Now, in the face of it, that’s a lot of responsibility. It seems to imply an absolute authority by a human being, one human being, over the entire church universally, wherever and whenever, through all time. At least, that’s the way Catholic theologians have taken it. They consider that that authority has been passed on down through generations to the Pope, and that he holds that kind of authority over the church universal. If their interpretation of Matthew’s gospel is correct, then all other churches are in rebellion against the Mother Church. And all other religions are simply off the radar scope. Now, I’m sure I’m not going to surprise you when I tell you that Protestant theologians don’t see it quite that way. They approach this passage a little differently. They look carefully at the Greek tenses, and they translate the passage along these lines. Quote, “‘Whatsoever you bind on earth shall be what has already been bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be what has already been loosed in heaven.'” The idea being that whoever the religious leaders are in the Christian church on this earth don’t have the authority to bind and loose things differently from what God would bind and loose them in heaven. In other words, the initiative comes from heaven, and then they follow through, as opposed to the initiative coming from the apostle, whoever he may be, and then God saying, well, whatever he binds, I bind. Whatever he looses, I loose. The French call it carte blanche, and that kind of authority is a little scary when it comes to men. So who’s right? It doesn’t take a lot of thought to realize that this is pretty important. Who today has the authority to tell you what to do about your faith and your obedience to God? Who can bind and loose matters related to you and your church? Now, I think people make two mistakes in analyzing this idea. The first mistake they make is they disconnect two passages in Matthew, and those two passages need to be taken together. On the first place, they take Matthew 16, where he gives to Peter the keys to the kingdom of heaven, and they do the narrow explanation of this. Both Protestants and Catholics do this. That passage, Matthew 16, 19, speaks of Jesus building his church upon a rock, giving the keys of the kingdom to Peter, and then grants binding and loosing authority. But he’s not through with the question at that point. In Matthew 18, he discusses it once again, and this time it comes in context, and the grand context is a context of church administration. And also, here, Jesus is speaking to all the disciples when he grants this authority, not just to Peter. So this binding and loosing business is granted to the disciples. It is not merely granted to one of them who could then lord it over or rule over all the rest of them. So this authority is passed down not merely to one person, but to the group. Now when you take these two passages together, you get a lot clearer idea about what Jesus is saying. The second mistake they make is is that they have so disconnected Christianity from the Old Testament that they overlook the significance of what Jesus is doing here. There was a precedent, in fact, in the Old Testament as to the way in which, what shall we call it, church administration was carried out. There was a way in which judgments were rendered for Old Testament Israel, which, oddly enough, you may be surprised, forms the basis for for New Testament decision-making. We’ll talk about this and reconnect these ideas when I come back after these words.
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When Jesus told Peter he was handing over the keys of the kingdom, he left an awful lot unsaid about the administration of his church. He did so because he intended to come back to it later. He had plenty of time to discuss these matters with Peter and with the others. He comes back to it in Matthew 18 and verse 15 when he starts discussing the normal give and take and the problems that will arise once people start living and working together in a community. He says in verse 15, Moreover, if your brother shall trespass against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he shall hear you, you have gained your brother. Oh, boy. You know, it’s true that if we have a church, we meet every week. Sometimes we meet Sunday morning, Saturday morning, Saturday evening, Friday evening, Wednesday evening, whatever it is. We see each other a lot. And in the process of seeing each other, we get on one another’s nerves. But I do think this has a little more to do with more serious things than merely getting on one another’s nerves. If he has trespassed against you, if he’s caused you some harm, go talk to him about it. And normally, most circumstances, you’ll be able to work it out. But if he won’t listen to you, then take a couple of witnesses, that in the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may be established. And if he won’t hear them, the witnesses, then tell it to the church. Now, this is a simple procedure of settling grievances. Talk to the guy, take some witnesses with you, and talk to him again. And if that fails, you take it to the church. If he neglects to hear the church, well, then just treat him like he’s not a church member, like a heathen man or a publican. In other words, as an outsider, like you’d treat the public. Now, earlier Jesus had said, I will build my church, and I’m going to give to you the keys to the kingdom of heaven, and so forth. This passage assumes that the church exists as an administrative unit. In other words, here is a unit, a body of people. We call them the church. Now, the first thing you should do if you have conflicts in your church is to try to work out your own problem. If you can’t take witnesses, if that doesn’t work, then you have recourse to the community. Only when you have failed to sort out your differences did you need to involve the community. Now then he makes this statement, the statement that’s in question in this whole discussion we’re talking about. Verily I say unto you, whatsoever you shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatsoever you shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. Now, that statement can’t be taken in isolation, folks. It has to be taken in connection with what Jesus is talking about, which is a trespass between brother and brother. What shall we say? Let’s say that two brothers in the church have gone into a business deal together, and one of them thinks that the other guy has welshed on him, has defrauded him in some way. He goes to him and says, look, you handled this in such a way that it cost me $10,000. I think you should make that good to me. He refuses to do so. Well, you don’t necessarily rush right out and get a lawyer. You get a couple of witnesses. You go talk to them again, and you establish the facts of the situation in front of these witnesses, and you urge the guy to settle with you and get this thing straightened out. If that doesn’t work, then you go to the church, and you present the case with your witnesses that show you have established the facts before the whole church. Then he says, concerning the church… Whatever you shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven. In other words, whatever kind of decision you arrive at as a community, I will back it up. Bind it, loose it, make a decision, and whatever it is, that authority will stand. You’ve got to have that in any type of physical community on the face of this earth. Otherwise, said communities will fragment and pull themselves apart. Paul will later talk about such disputes in 1 Corinthians when he says, I don’t understand you people. He said, you are going to law with one another. You’re taking one another to court and that before the courts of this world. Why can’t you judge these things in the church? For the church is able to engage in this type of judgment. In a sense, it’s sort of like binding arbitration. The two of you agree to go before the church, the church renders a decision, and you agree to abide by the decision. Whatever’s bound on earth is bound in heaven. This passage is important because it’s clear here that the power to bind and loose was not merely given to Peter. It was given to him, but it was given to him along with a lot of other people. It was actually given to all the apostles, and if you look at it in this context, in a way, it is given to the church. the assembly, the community of God’s people. Now, I said the other mistake that people made was in losing the connection with the Old Testament, because the Old Testament conveys a surprising amount of understanding about this situation. Let me draw a comparison for you between the Old Covenant and the New Covenant, which I think makes this a lot clearer. The Old Covenant, you know, was not really just a set of laws. It was an administration of laws. Now, the distinction may be lost on some people, but it’s important. There is a difference between law and administration. Congress passes laws. The administration administers those laws. The Justice Department enforces those laws. The new covenant is a new administration of the same laws, basically the same underlying principles that govern man’s conduct. Think of the laws of the Old Testament as a picture, and think of the covenant as a frame around the picture. What the New Covenant does is simply reframe the picture. What Jesus is doing here is to reframe an Old Covenant administrative practice. If you’ll take a look in your Bible when you get a chance, at Deuteronomy chapter 1, along about verse 12, there’s this passage where Moses is addressing Israel, and he says this, How can I myself alone bear your cumbrance and your burden and your strife? When you’ve got a bunch of people wandering around the desert, camping out sometimes in different locations every night, you do know that there are going to be burdens and strifes and arguments and bickerings and so forth. And Moses said, How am I supposed to handle all this? I’ll tell you what you do. You take wise men and understanding and known among your tribes, and I will make them rulers over you. And you answered me and said, What you’ve spoken is good for us to do. So Moses continues to say, I took the chief of your tribes, wise men and known, and I made them heads over you, captains of thousands, captains of a hundred, captains of fifties, captains of tens, and officers among your tribes. He created an administration A structured administration, actually much like a pyramid structure of administration, because it would work. And I charged your judges at that time. Ah, so we have an administration, and in that administration we have judges. And I told them, “‘Hear the causes between your brethren, and judge righteously between every man and his brother, and the stranger that’s dwelling among you as well.’ He tells them, you shall not respect persons in judgment. You’re not to make these decisions based upon who your brother-in-law is. You’re to hear the small as well as the great. You’re not supposed to dismiss the little charges. You have to deal with them too. And you’re not to be afraid of the face of man, for the judgment is God’s. Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven. And the cause that is too hard for you, you bring it to me and I will hear it. Now that’s really interesting what Moses is doing here. He’s creating an administration. He’s charging the people in it and giving them really sound judgment and wisdom on this that don’t respect persons, don’t be afraid of anybody. The judgment belongs to God. He’ll back it up. Now, a servant of God who lived away from the community had to make his own judgments, still does, about how to observe the law of God. And he won’t have any conflicts with his brethren because he doesn’t have any of his brethren around, right? So he hardly needs an administration. But as soon as we have a community of believers, we will begin to have questions about and we will begin to have differences of opinion, the sort of thing that Moses called, quote, your cumbrance, your burdens, and your strife. That’s easy to understand. Any religious community, be it synagogue or church, must have some system of administration. Under the old covenant, there was a system of elders, judges, and leaders who performed precisely this function. Now, here is where the connection comes between Old Covenant and New Covenant is in the idea of an administration of a community. Here is the way things were set up in the Old Covenant community. The passage is in Deuteronomy 17 and verse 8, in case you want to make a note of it and look at it later. Now, before I go on, I want to stop just for a moment to clear up a couple of points. One is, he says immediately, if this is a matter that is too hard for you, Now, who would make the decision as to whether it was too hard for you? Well, you would, of course, that if you were facing a difficult question and you felt you knew the answer, you could make it on your own. You didn’t have to ask anybody. And if this became a question between you and a brother and you tried to work it out and it was too hard for you to work it out, then you and your brother basically had to realize we’ve got to go somewhere else with this thing. We’ve got to have a judgment made between blood and blood, plea and plea, stroke and stroke. You hit me and I haven’t hit you back yet. So you go to the place which the Lord your God shall choose, and you come to the priests and the Levites and the judge that shall be in those days, and you shall inquire, and then they will show you the sentence of judgment. That’s real simple. Binding arbitration, or it’s like going to court, but it’s a friendly court. It’s in your own country. It’s your own people, and you’re bringing a dispute voluntarily before them that you didn’t have to bring. Right? Easy. Then he says this, and you shall do according to the sentence which they of that place, which the Lord shall choose, shall show you. And you shall observe to do according to all that they inform you. In other words, once you have taken it there, you didn’t have to, by the way. You could have settled it at home. But once you take it there and they hand down a judgment, you are bound by that judgment. It is echoes of whatever you bind on earth. shall be bound in heaven. Well, just how binding was this? Well, he says, you shall observe to do according to all that they inform you, according to the sentence of the law which they shall teach you. Oh, well, then they didn’t have the right to just make this decision in midair. This decision had to be made based on existing law. It’s not that different from going to court today. The judge can’t hand down a decision completely contrary to the law. He has to show you what the law is that actually has to do with the circumstances that you and your friend are going to court over. And the judge will show you the law. The jury will evaluate the evidence and tell you the facts of the case and make a decision as to who’s right and who’s wrong. And the judge will pass the judgment down according to the law. Well, that’s what they did. He would give you the sentence of the law. He would teach it to you. And then according to the judgment which they would tell you, you’re to do it. It says you shall not decline from the sentence which they shall show you to the right hand or to the left. Now, just how serious was this? Well, verse 12 says this. And the man… that will do presumptuously, and will not hearken to the priest that stands to minister there before the Lord your God, or to the judge, whether he’s a priest or not, even that man shall die, and you shall put away the evil from Israel. Hmm. That’s tough stuff. You didn’t have to go in the first place. And then when you went and turned your back on what they told you, You died for it. Do you realize that that actually elevates the judgment of the court that was handed down to the level of the Ten Commandments as far as God binding it? Whatever those judges bound on earth was bound in heaven. Not contrary to the law, of course, but according to the law. He then says, and all the people shall hear and fear and do no more presumptuously. Presumptuous sin in the Old Testament was dealt with much more severely by God than were the ignorant sins, the weak sins, the stumbling over something sins. The sins where you knew better and you were told better and you just said, nuts to you, I’m going to do what I want to do anyway, that’s a presumptuous sin. And it was dealt with very severely. So here you have… a little glimpse, as it were, through a window, of an administrative structure within the Old Covenant in which the community were able to resolve their problems. And there were problems that simply wouldn’t exist if there were no community. In other words, if you’re living out here all by yourself, you do not have a problem. It is only when you are in the community of believers of God that the problems that emerge among you have got to be dealt with inside your own community in some manner and in some way. Now, what Jesus seems to be doing with the apostles is he is acknowledging the fact that you – and remember he said the first time around on this, ìI will build my church, and I will give you the keys to the kingdom, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.î So it was church-oriented. Once again, he comes back and he says, this is a matter of how things are to work in the Christian community. If brother has got a problem with brother, let them bring it to the church, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven. What Jesus has done has moved the administration of the new covenant away from the priests and the Levites and the Israelite judges. into the offices and administration of the church. In the new covenant, there was going to be a need for helping people with difficult decisions, just like there was under the old covenant, and some sort of administrative structure to handle the cumbrances, burdens, and strifes, as Moses called them, that are inevitable when people try to work together, live together, alongside of one another, associate together. The first time Jesus made this statement in Matthew 16, it followed right on the heels of the statement, “‘Upon this rock I will build my church.'” To whatever extent the church forms a community, it has to have an administration, and that administration needs to have some legitimacy. And it’s this kind of decision made by the leadership of the church that Jesus is endorsing. It is not an absolute authority of a monarch to run the lives of people of the church. Now, this becomes a lot clearer in the next verse in Matthew 18, one which has been very widely misunderstood. We’ll talk about that when I come back in just a moment.
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You may have heard people talk about agreeing together in prayer. The idea is that you have a problem and you tell it to me, and I say, I’ll tell you what, let’s agree together to pray and ask God to take care of this. Because God has promised that if two of us shall agree on earth as touching anything that we ask, it will be done for them by our Father in heaven. I’ve actually gotten some letters from time to time, because I like to keep track of what people are doing, from some evangelists on television and elsewhere who are raising money. And they offer in their fundraising letter to agree together with you regarding your prayer request. And they have a little form, and you fill in your prayer request on the form. It says, Dear Brother So-and-So, let’s agree together to pray about this. And then you list your things. And then at the bottom of the form, there’s a place to fill in that says, enclosed, please find my freewill offering of, and X number of dollars is suggested, which, in my opinion, comes perilously close to marketing prayer. Is that what Jesus is talking about? Is he saying that if two or three of you get together and say, we’re going to pray and ask God for this, we’re going to agree together that God has to do it? Is that what the context is? Now this is found in Matthew 18, verse 19, the scripture I just read. And again I say unto you, that if two of you shall agree on earth as touching anything they will ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven. But you see, this comes right on the heels of verse 18, which says this, “…verily I say unto you, that whatsoever you shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatsoever you shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. Again I say unto you, that if two of you shall agree on earth as touching anything you shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven.” For whether two or three are gathered together in my name, which tends to mean by my authority, there I am in the midst of them. What is often overlooked in this is that it really is a continuation of the idea of church administration as it carries on through, that I want two or three of you together when you make this decision, and when two or three of you agree on the decision, I will be there and I will back it up. Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven. So when you take this thing in context with the verses coming before, this passage is really about church administrative policy, how the church is going to administer things. You know, I think, that in the Bible there are always required for anybody to be condemned two or three witnesses. In the mouth of two or three witnesses, every word has to be established. What is interesting here is where the church is concerned, Jesus requires two or three judges, right? He doesn’t really want one person handing down from on high decisions that affect the church. He wants more than one person to be involved because one person can sometimes go off the deep end. So when you take all this in context and you connect the Old Testament to the New Testament and understand the procedures, and really when you understand the needs of religious communities, and you put also together Matthew 16 and Matthew 18, and you put the whole context of the thing together, You can see that religious communities need administrations. They need fairness. They need checks and balances. And Jesus suggests or commands, in a sense, how this is going to be done for the church as opposed to how it was done for Israel. Now, the idea of conflict resolution, which is also some of what this whole passage is about, was a troubling one, and Peter was still struggling with this idea. Peter came to Jesus privately and said, Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Seven times? How many times do I have to go through this procedure with some person who’s just being hard to get along with in the church? Do I have to do it seven times? Is that what I need? And Jesus said to him, no, not seven times, until 70 times seven. And what Peter understood by that was that Jesus was saying, I’m sorry, Peter, there is no limit. You can’t say I’ve just forgiven this guy one time too many. It’s over. I really don’t know how you’d ever get to time number 491 in one day, but it doesn’t matter. That’s not what Jesus is talking about. he moves right on into, to explain this, still another kingdom parable. He says, Therefore is the kingdom of heaven likened unto a certain king who had decided the time had come to take account of his servants. And when he had begun to reckon, one was brought to him that owed him 10,000 talents. That’s a lot of money. But for as much as he had not to pay, his Lord commanded him to be sold and his wife and children and all that he had and payment to be made. Now this parable is going to develop a very troubling theme and address a very troubling question. If you have committed a sin and God has forgiven you of that sin, it’s over, it’s passed, it’s gone. Is it possible for you to lose your forgiveness? This parable is going to suggest that it is possible that if you refuse to forgive others, Your own forgiveness can be revoked. But that will have to wait until next time. Until then, this is Ronald Dart reminding you,
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