In this episode of the Born to Win radio program, Ronald L. Dart delves into the complex question of Jesus’ identity as the Messiah and the various misconceptions surrounding His mission. Listeners will journey through pivotal moments in the Gospel of Matthew where Jesus’ disciples grappled with their expectations and the stark reality of His impending sacrifice. Through shared insights, discover the astonishing revelation that challenged the popular Jewish depiction of a militant Messiah.
00:00:03 Introduction: Jesus and His Identity as the Messiah
The CEM Network is pleased to present Ronald L. Dart and Born to Win.
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Would you assume that Jesus wanted everyone to know that he was the Messiah? There was a lot of controversy at the time about who he was. On one particular occasion, he asked his closest disciples, Who do men say that I am? Well, Herod had thought Jesus was John the Baptist who had come back to haunt him. Some thought he was Elijah of Malachi’s prophecy. There were still others who thought he was a latter-day Moses. Some even thought he was a reincarnation of Jeremiah or one of the prophets. But when he asked his disciples who they thought he was, Peter didn’t hesitate for a heartbeat. You are the Messiah, he said. Now, this was saying quite a lot. There was a very widespread notion at the time of a Messiah who was going to come in, throw out the Romans, reestablish the kingdom of Israel, the throne of David, the dynasty of David, and rule in Palestine over the Jewish people. So this is what not only Peter, but an awful lot of people thought the Messiah was going to do. The word Messiah, as it’s used nowadays, really means he who was to come and deliver the Jewish people. But the Hebrew word that’s translated Messiah, or in the Greek comes out to be Christ, merely means anointed. Since every Israelite king was anointed, well, in a sense, every Israelite king, David, Solomon, the whole lot of them, were all Messiahs. So Peter’s confession that Jesus was the Messiah meant to Peter that he was the anointed king who was to come and that king to come would deliver Israel. But out of this exchange came something of a surprise. We’re in Matthew 16 and verse 20. Then charged he his disciples that they should tell no man that he was Jesus the Christ or Jesus the Messiah. Now, this had to confuse Peter and the others. Why would we keep such good news a secret? The Messiah is here. The king is here. The ruler is here. We’re going to throw out the Romans and go forward. Well, part of the reason may be understood in the fact that such a revelation would raise a lot of false expectations in people who did not really understand the true idea of the Messiah. Matthew tells us that from that time forth, began Jesus to show unto his disciples how he had to go into Jerusalem and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes and be killed and raised again the third day. We know now that there were those in the first century who believed that the Messiah to come would suffer and die. But this was not the belief of most people. And it was surely not the belief of Peter. Because in the very next verse, Peter took him and began to rebuke him and saying, Be it far from you, Lord, this shall not be unto you. Now this is a strange reaction from Peter because here he’s declared Jesus to be the Messiah. And Peter thought, well, being the Messiah means he’s anointed as king. He’s going to rule over Israel. He’s going to throw out the Romans. We’re going to overcome. We’re going to conquer. And then Jesus said, no, I’m going to go to Jerusalem. I’m going to be taken. I’m going to be killed. And Peter said, no, no, it just can’t be, Lord. That shall not be unto you. And Peter looked at him and said, Get behind me, Satan. You are an offense unto me, for you don’t savor the things of God, but the things of men. You do not value what God is doing here. You’re valuing the things of men. Your value system is all wrong. He calls him Satan, but the word used basically means adversary. He told Peter flatly, You are an adversary to me. Get behind me. Get out of the way. You’re not thinking about the things of God. They’re not valuing these things. Then Jesus said to the rest of them, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. There is not going to be, he told his disciples, a kingdom in which you fellows are going to be my lieutenants with a great deal of power and rule over people. that in fact we’re going to go through a very, very difficult time. I’m going to die. You guys are going to all be scattered. And if you’re going to come after me, you’re going to have to carry the burden. Whatever the burden is that God lays upon your shoulders, you’re going to have to pick it up and follow me. If you’re looking for the good life, you’ve come to the wrong place. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it, and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it. For what is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? I don’t know what Peter thought about this. It must have set him back on his heels and caused him to do some thinking. At least I certainly would hope so. Because what Jesus is saying here is that you’re going to have a burden to bear. And this is not going to be fun. And if in any aspect of this your purpose or your goal is to save your wretched hide or your wretched life, the life that you hope to live ahead of you, if that’s your objective, you’re going to lose it. And those of you who are willing to lose your life for my sake, and one of the other gospel accounts says, lose your life for my sake and the gospel’s, you’ll find it. Real life. Worthwhile life. Something really worth doing. And I will tell you, fellows, that there is no profit to you in gaining the whole world if you lose your own soul. For the Son of Man shall come in the glory of his Father with his angels, and he shall reward every man according to his works. Verily I say unto you, there be some standing here which shall not taste of death until they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom. Now right here we run across a very troubling scripture. Jesus said, there are some of you standing here who are not going to die before you see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom. Well, that would suggest to us that the kingdom of God should have come about in the first century, right? Before the death of Peter and James and John and the rest of them who were assembled around Christ. Well, now this little passage is a problem. We’ll talk about that when I come back after these words.
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So Jesus told the men assembled around him there that there were some of them standing there who were going to, in their lifetime, see him come in his kingdom. What did he mean by that? Well, the story continues in Matthew 17 in verse 1. After six days, Jesus takes Peter, James, and John, his brother, and takes them up into a mountain apart. These are the three that are going to actually see this event. And Jesus was transfigured before them, and his face did shine like the sun, and his raiment was as white as the light. There’s a very close resemblance in this description to the way he appears in the book of Revelation as he appears to John in vision as the risen glorified Christ. And behold, there appeared unto them Moses and Elijah talking with him. Now, when Peter saw all this, he was overwhelmed by it, and he said, Lord, it’s good for us to be here. If you will, let us make here three tabernacles, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah. And then while he spoke, there was a bright cloud overshadowed them. And behold, a voice out of the cloud which says, This is my beloved Son. Hear you Him. It was almost as though Peter had put Jesus on the plane with Moses and Elijah. And the voice from heaven corrects that misconception and said, No, this is my beloved Son. You hear Him. And when the disciples heard that voice, they fell on their face and were sore afraid, which I can certainly believe. And Jesus came and touched them and said, Arise, don’t be afraid. And when they lifted up their eyes, they saw no one except Jesus. And as they came down the mountain, Jesus charged them, saying, Here comes the solution to this whole mysterious thing. He said, Tell the vision to no man until the Son of Man be risen again from the dead. What they had experienced on the mountaintop was a vision. And so earlier when he told them, There are those of you standing here who will not see death until they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom, he was talking about what these men were going to see, in vision. So it wasn’t that Moses and Elijah were necessarily really there. They were only there in vision. And having seen this, the disciples asked him, they were puzzled, they said, well, why then did the scribes say that Elijah has to come first before the Messiah? And Jesus answered and said, Elijah truly shall come first and restore all things. But I say unto you that Elijah is come already, and they didn’t know him. There wasn’t Elijah before I came. They have done to him whatever they wanted. They killed him. Likewise shall the Son of Man suffer of the same people. The disciples finally understood that he was speaking to them of John the Baptist. And when they had returned back to the crowd that were standing nearby, there came to him a certain man kneeling down to him and saying, Lord, have mercy on my son, for he is a lunatic and sore vexed, and he oftentimes falls into the fire and sometimes into the water. And I besought your disciples, and they could not cure him. That’s really rather interesting. These people had gone to the disciples when Jesus apparently was not there. And they said, please heal this boy. He’s a pitiful state. He’s terrible condition. And they couldn’t do a thing in the world about it. In one sense of the word, that might be as you would expect. But listen to Jesus’ response. Then Jesus answered and said, O faithless and perverse generation, how long will I be with you? How long will I suffer? You bring him here to me. Now, there seems really to have been, even on Jesus’ part, an expectation that the disciples should have healed him. Listen to how it follows up in the account. And Jesus rebuked the devil, and he departed out of him, and the child was cured from that very hour. And the disciples came, very understandably, having apparently tried to cast this demon out and failed. And they said, why could we not cast him out? And Jesus said to them, Because of your unbelief. For verily I say unto you, If you have faith, what shall we say? Like a grain of mustard seed, you shall say to this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place, and it will move, and nothing shall be impossible to you. What’s interesting to me about this and other places where Jesus rather gets after these fellows because of their lack of belief is is that belief seems to be something that Jesus feels he has a right to expect of these men. So belief has something to do with the way you respond. It is not something that is automatic. It’s not something that just appears miraculously inside of you. It has to do with what goes on in your mind. Believe it or not, it even has to do with decisions that you make. For example, if you’re sitting on a jury in court, You’ll be presented with evidence, physical evidence. You will have testimony linking the physical evidence to the crime. You will have eyewitness evidence. And when all is said and done at the end of the trial, when you go into the jury room, you’re going to be asked to decide what you believe about this case. Do you believe witness A or do you believe witness B? Do you believe the police officer who made certain testimony about the blood that was here and there on the crime scene and on the defendant? Or are you going to believe the defendant when he says he didn’t do it? You’ve got a certain amount of evidence that you have heard, and you are being called upon to render a decision based upon what you believe. And so it is with the New Testament. You read through the New Testament. You read the testimony of Matthew, which we’re going through systematically on this broadcast. And you decide, do I believe Matthew or don’t I believe Matthew? Do I believe Jesus or don’t I believe Jesus? And here were the disciples being called upon to say whether they believed Jesus or not. When he gave them power over unclean spirits, did they believe him? Did they believe in his name? Did they trust him? Again and again, he challenges their belief system. He challenges what they believe and don’t believe, and he really expects more of them than they actually gave. And I expect the same thing is true of you and me, that he expects of us more belief than we have. In verse 21, he makes this statement. He says, however, this kind goes not out but by prayer and fasting. And Matthew doesn’t really make it clear whether he’s talking about this kind of faith doesn’t come about except by prayer and fasting or whether you can’t get rid of this kind of a demon except by prayer and fasting. I think we just need to perhaps understand that there’s not a lot of difference between the two. Well, while they stayed in Galilee, Jesus said to them, the Son of Man shall be betrayed into the hands of men. And they will kill him, and the third day he shall be raised again. And they were exceeding sorry. They didn’t want to hear that. It was not the news that they had in mind. Now, I don’t know why, in a way, they were sorry to hear that. They said he would be killed. Now, I’d be sorry for that, yes. But when he told them he was going to be killed, he also told them he would be raised again. And what, from our perspective, after all these generations later looking back, it seems astonishing that they didn’t believe him. But the fact is, if we had been there, we probably wouldn’t have either. We have the fact of the resurrection attested to by these witnesses already. We know that. And so for us, we say, well, why didn’t they see that? Well, that’s easy for you to say. A little later, they came down to Capernaum. And when they got there, the people who received the temple tax came to Peter and says, Does not your master pay the temple tax? And Peter, without thinking, said, Well, yes, of course, because everybody did. And when he was coming to the house, Jesus stopped him and saying, What do you think, Simon? Of whom do the kings of the earth take taxes or tribute? Do they take it of their own children or strangers? Now, you see, by and large, what was done was you went out and conquered another city, and you put that city under tribute, and they had to pay taxes. And you brought that money home, and your own people didn’t have to pay taxes. Not a bad idea, right? Well, Peter said to him, well, it’s strangers. And Jesus said to him, well, then the children are free. Now, what he’s implying by that is that the temple tax, which was his father’s tax upon the temple for the support of the temple, was something that he, as the son of the father, should not have to pay. But then he says, notwithstanding, lest we should offend them. Now, that’s interesting, because generally speaking, Jesus doesn’t really worry that much about offending people. Well, I’d better correct myself on that. In particular, he didn’t worry about offending the scribes and the Pharisees. I think on this occasion, though, he did not want to cause offense among people who were innocent. They were just doing their job, and he didn’t want to cause a problem for them. So he said, let’s don’t offend them. You go to the sea and cast a hook and take the fish that first comes up. Open up his mouth, and you’ll find a piece of money. You take that and give it to them for me and you. So in the end, Jesus, being the son of the great king himself, decided he wouldn’t pay the tax. It was paid for him, miraculously. So he avoided offense, and at the same time, he avoided compromising something that he didn’t think he should do. He was the son. He was exempt. About the same time, the disciples came to him with a question. Kind of a troubling question to even think that the disciples were thinking this way, but I guess it was natural. They wanted to know, okay, who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven? Who’s going to be really great up there or down here? And Jesus called a little child unto him and set this little child in the midst of them. And he said, Verily I say unto you, I’m going to tell you the truth. Unless you are changed and converted and become like little children, you’re not even going to enter the kingdom of heaven. So let’s don’t talk yet about who’s going to be the greatest in the kingdom. Unless you actually humble yourselves, you’re changed, you have a different attitude, a different approach, and you’re like this little child, you’re not even going to be there. So whoever shall humble himself as this little child, the same is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. It’s funny, you know, it’s not a matter of the great complex thought of theologians. It’s not a matter of the study of the Bible and the development of intricate systems of doctrine. It is a simple faith of a child that makes all the difference in the world. I heard somebody say long ago, and I think it’s true, that it’s a lot easier to believe and trust God as a child than it is once life becomes very complicated. Because as a child, you’re used to trusting. You’re used to trusting your parents. You realize that you’ve got to be taken care of. You come to the meal or to the table at mealtime, and food is there. You get ready to go to bed at night, and there is a bed with clean sheets. You know, you get used to these type of things as a child, and you know that you’re taken care of. And so having the idea that God will take care of you comes naturally. But when you get to be an adult, you have to work like a dog to put the food on the table. And sometimes you sleep in a dirty bed because you haven’t got time to get it cleaned up or what have you. Well, faith comes with a little more difficulty. But this idea that that faith and that trust in God has got to be like that of a little child is very simple. He goes on to say, “…whoever shall receive such a little child in my name receives me.” But whoever shall offend one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for him that a millstone were hung around his neck and he were drowned in the depth of the sea. Woe to the world because of offenses. You can’t get away from offenses, but I tell you, woe to that man by whom the offense comes. So pay a little bit of attention to these little children. God looks upon them. He cares about them. He loves them. And for you to offend one of them, to turn them off against God, or somehow cause them to stumble in their faith in God, is an offense that God will not overlook. And once again, Jesus says, if your hand or your foot offends you, cut it off. Cast it from you. It’s better to end into life halt or maimed than having two hands and two feet to be cast into everlasting fire. If your eye offends you, pluck it out. It’s better to enter into life with one eye rather than having two eyes to be cast into hellfire. He doesn’t mean you to take that literally. He wants you to take it figuratively and realize that there is nothing so close to you that if it’s offensive, should not be cut off. And he concludes this thought by saying, take heed that you don’t despise, don’t look down on one of these little ones. For I say unto you that in heaven their angels have constant access to the face of my Father which is in heaven. And there’s the idea, the old idea, I should say, of a guardian angel. that a child apparently has an angel because he actually attaches the angel to the child. He says their angels have instant access all the time to the Father who is in heaven. So be careful about children. We’ll be back in just a moment, but get a pencil and take down the phone number and the address that we’re going to give you in just a moment.
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For a free copy of this radio program that you can share with friends and others, write or call this week only and request the program titled Matthew number 27. So what do you think Jesus wanted to know? If a man has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone out and gotten lost, doesn’t he leave the ninety and nine,
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that are already safe, and go into the mountains and look for the one that has gone astray. And if it happens that he find it, don’t I say to you, he rejoices more of that sheep than of the ninety and nine that didn’t go astray. Well, of course. I mean, the other is just what you would normally expect. The ninety and nine were there. We gathered them up. We put them in the pen. We counted them up, and we said, uh-oh, we’re one short. Well, they’re safe. There’s nothing exciting about that. So you go looking for the one that’s lost, and when you find it, oh, terrific. And you bring it home rejoicing, and you’re happy about that. That’s not hard to understand. Then he says something important. Even so, it is not the will of your Father which is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish. That is not what God wants. Now, I look around at the world. at the number of little ones that perish, and a lot of people look at it and say, well, why is God allowing that? Why is God doing that? Well, I will tell you, God’s not doing that. Men are doing that, and God hates it. Why doesn’t He stop it, you may wonder? Well, God has given us the time to make our own decisions, to run or run our own lives as we see fit, and He’s not interfering with it. But I will tell you, that’s what Jesus was saying when he said it would be better for you to have a millstone hung around your neck and be cast into the sea than that you should hurt one of these children. There are going to be a lot of millstones and a lot of people tied to them as a result of what’s happening to children in our country and around this world today. It’s something we all ought to give a little thought to. He goes on to say, or he actually began this session by saying, For the Son of Man is come to save what was lost. And so here’s a little child that he sat down there and he said, It’s not the will of your father that one of these little ones should perish. Now I want to go beyond that and tell you this, that if your brother shall trespass against you, no, that never happens, does it? You go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he will hear you, you’ve gained your brother. If he will not hear you, take with you one or two more. Then in the mouth of two or three witnesses, every word shall be established. Now this is dealing with a conflict that involves a little more than just you and him, I think. It goes on to say then, if he neglects to hear them, then tell it to the church. And if he neglects to hear the church, let him be unto you as a heathen man and a publican. Now, that sounds very bad, but what it means is this, that if he won’t listen to you, and he won’t listen to you and a couple of witnesses, and he won’t listen to the church, then you’ve got to treat him as though he were unconverted. And, you know, you don’t insult or do bad things to people who are unconverted. They’re just people who don’t know God yet. And you just finally had to own up to the fact that this guy here who simply will not listen to admonition doesn’t know God yet. even though he may have professed to do so. And then he returns to this statement that has troubled so many. 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 this passage is really important because it is clear here that that the power that Jesus seemed to give to Peter in Matthew 16, he now gives to all of those men who were his apostles and disciples, who he was sending out to do his work. He then says to them, all of them, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, whatsoever you shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. And the question is, what exactly does that mean? Does it imply some sort of authoritarian structure in the church where one person sitting in, let’s say, Peter’s chair is able to unilaterally make decisions that affect the lives of dozens or hundreds or thousands of people strictly on his own say-so? Does it mean that you can have one man who is the pastor of the church, say? and who has the final say on everything that takes place in the church, that he can bind and loose whatever it is that comes up that members of the church are going to do? Or can it mean that someone or some group even that are in that position can make unilateral or even bilateral decisions that impose on the lives of the members of their congregation or of their church? What does this rather problematic scripture mean? Frankly, if you just take it in this one location and try to interpret it all by itself, you’re probably going to come to the wrong conclusion on it. The truth is, this statement of Jesus has roots that go all the way back to the Old Testament. I’ll explain that next time. Until then, this is Ronald Dart reminding you…
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You were born to win. The Born to Win radio program with Ronald L. Dart is sponsored by Christian Educational Ministries and made possible by donations from listeners like you. If you can help, please send your donation to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560 White House, Texas 75791. You may call us at… 1-888-BIBLE44 and visit us online at borntowin.net.
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