(2.) When He reaches the house, minstrels were there, and people, making a noise: the expression, if of woe, certainly of impotent despair. All shall reach heaven, and all shall receive what I promise to the faithful. Yet it shall not be so among you; but whoever desires to become great among you, let him be your servant. He therefore, 1. We have here. 8, could not deny what was done in the case of the leper, who showed himself duly, and brought his offering, according to the law, to the altar. Jesus thought about how He would fulfill the will of His Father in the future. He gives sight to the blind. Now He brings out not the kingdom merely, but His Church; and this not merely in view of hopeless unbelief in the mass, but of the confession of His own intrinsic glory as the Son of God by the chosen witness. II. Thus, in the scene of the leper, we have Jesus presented as "Jehovah that healeth Israel," as man here below, and in Jewish relationships, still maintaining the law. What Jesus calls upon his followers to do he himself did. The Gospels And about the eleventh hour, [five in the evening] he went out, and found others standing idle, and said unto them, Why do you stand here idle all day? The Spirit of God has been pleased to cull and class facts otherwise unconnected; for here follow conversations that took place a long time after any of the events we have been occupied with. When it gets to where I have to sneak in the back door at the last minute, and sneak out before things are over, then I need to find something else to do, when you can no longer take time to minister to individuals.Now these men of course do give to us a very beautiful picture of people who are blind in sin, and there is the spiritualizing of the text, crying out for Jesus. If, amid the multitude of Christians, I choose to signalize such men as Paul, and Martyn, and Brainerd, and Spencer, and Summerfield - to appoint some of them to short labor but to wide usefulness, and raise them to signal rewards, I injure not the great multitude of others who live long lives less useful and less rewarded. Matthew Henry's Concise Commentary. All of this takes the simple picture Jesus gave too far. What could be said of her intelligence then? To lose all for heavenly treasure, to come and follow the despised Nazarene here below what was it to compare with that which had brought Jesus to earth? To you, be all praise and honor and power and glory, both now and forever. C. G. Montefiore calls this parable "one of the greatest and most glorious of all." May we not go even further with this thought of comfort? The money was paid by the overseer, but he was standing by enjoying the scene. (Bruce). The faithful and true witness, it was His to display that power in goodness which shall be put forth fully in the world to come, the great day when the Lord will manifest Himself to every eye as Son of David, and Son of man too. Peter answers, "Of strangers." The man's walk before them testifies to the reality of his forgiveness before God. "This man blasphemeth." So, when more is added, He says, "All things are delivered unto me of my Father: and no man knoweth the Son, but the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him. "According to your faith be it done unto you.". Next is the one pearl of great price, the unity and beauty of that which was so dear to the merchantman. "I will have mercy, and not sacrifice." These words of Jesus gave rise to an old and complicated theological question: to whom did Jesus pay the ransom? Article Images Copyright 2023 Getty Images unless otherwise indicated. As for the Gentile, the Lord's proffer to go and heal his servant brought out the singular strength of his faith. There is such tremendous reward just in being able to minister to people, the feedback that comes from it is so rewarding. My last word to Gods children is this: what does it matter, after all, whether we are first or whether we are last? Peter goes forth, but losing sight of the Lord in the presence of the troubled waves, and yielding to his ordinary experience, he fears the strong wind, and is only saved by the outstretched hand of Jesus, who rebukes his doubt. They used their waiting time in considering their own superiority to the latecomers. (Spurgeon). Possibly the first felt their vanity wounded by being paid after the others. That many who begin last, and promise little in religion, sometimes, by the blessing of God, arrive at greater attainments in knowledge, grace, and usefulness, than others whose entrance was more early, and who promised fairer. To the end the events are put together, just as in Matthew 8:1-34, without regard to the point of time when they occurred. It does not say, that " then there came a leper," or " immediately there came a leper." Poetical Books And He was in the hinder part of the ship, asleep on a pillow: and they awake Him, and say unto Him, Master, carest thou not that we perish? 11 And when they had received it, they murmured against the goodman of the house, 12 Saying, These last have wrought but one hour, and thou hast made them equal unto us, which have borne the burden and heat of the day. Not so. The system of law is easy to figure out: you get what you deserve. 748.]. 16So the last will be first, and the first will be last.(A), 17Now Jesus was going up to Jerusalem. And behold, two blind men sitting by the road, when they heard that Jesus was passing by, cried out, saying, Have mercy on us, O Lord, Son of David! Then the multitude warned them that they should be quiet; but they cried out all the more, saying, Have mercy on us, O Lord, Son of David!. (Ken Chumbley, The Gospel of Matthew, commentary, p.#351). on the spot or they will never be taken. And yet He takes time still to minister to the needs of others. If it was His rejection, these scornful men were themselves rejected in the very act. This he said in the hearing of the disciple who would act the traitor: did no compunction visit his base heart? (Spurgeon), ii. But Jesus answered and said, You do not know what you ask. It is simply designed to teach that in the church, among the multitudes who will be saved, Christ makes a difference. Now they no doubt had heard of the fame of Jesus. [6.] And she came worshiping him, and desiring a favor from him. The deity of Christ was the hook; his flesh was the bait; the bait was dangled before leviathan; he swallowed it and was taken. 20 Then the mother of James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came to Jesus with her sons. "Then began he to upbraid the cities wherein most of his mighty works were done, because they repented not: Woe unto thee, Chorazin! Beyond the curtain of suffering lay the revelation of glory; beyond the Cross was the Crown; beyond the defeat was triumph; and beyond death was life. The Gospels a. The order of payment was important. My object, of course, is to point out as clearly as possible the structure of the gospel, and to explain according to my measure why there are these strong differences between the gospels of Matthew and the rest, as compared with one another. But at the same time it is plain, although He bore the consciousness of the vast change He was introducing, and expressed it thus fully and early in the history, nothing turned away His heart from Israel. The householder had every right to have cut them off with a trifle instead of a whole day's pay. They did not see why they should be allowed to stake their claims to preeminence. Such was and is man. None the less does the Lord uphold it, purged of what accretions had come in to obscure its original and proper character. Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Joseph, and the. The Blue Letter Bible ministry and the BLB Institute hold to the historical, Next, we find Him confessed by the centurion, no longer as the Messiah, when actually with them, confessed according to a faith which saw the deeper glory of His person as supreme, competent to heal, no matter where, or whom, or what, by a word; and this the Lord Himself hails as the foreshadowing of a rich incoming of many multitudes to the praise of His name, when the Jews should be cast out. The first is, as it has been said, "All service ranks the same with God." Thus man's badness takes occasion from God's goodness to be more exceedingly sinful. And as they stood there with those clouds over their eyes, Jesus said, "What do you want?" To my mind, the depth of such grace only enhances the beauty of Jesus, and is the very last possible ground that justifies man in thinking lightly of the Saviour. Here, too, these Pharisees question and reproach His grace, when they see the Lord sitting at ease in the presence of publicans and sinners, who came and sat down with Him in Matthew's house. A man came there first thing in the morning, carrying his tools, and waited until someone hired him. God could not be limited by a question of place; His word was enough. Jesus said that among the Gentiles there is this desire to exercise lordship and dominion over people. They said to His disciples, "Why eateth your Master with publicans and sinners?" Surely not by inaccuracy; surely not by indifference to order, but contrariwise by divine wisdom that arranged the facts with a view to a purpose worthy of itself: God's arrangement of all things more particularly in this part of Matthew to give us an adequate manifestation of the Messiah; and, as we have seen, first, what He was to the appeal of the Jew; next, what He was and would be to Gentile faith, in still richer form and fulness. how is it that ye have no faith? This furnishes occasion to the Pharisees to vent their unbelief: to them nothing is so offensive as grace, either in doctrine or in practice. Jesus emphasized that both the calling and the choosing of God is based on His grace especially His choosing. Instead of giving her at once a reply, He leads her on step by step; for so He can stoop. PREVIOUS Matthew 20:15 NEXT Matthew 20:17. It does not seem exactly as a pictorial view of what the Lord was doing, or going to do, but rather the repeated pledge, that they were not to suppose that the evil He had judged in the elders of Jerusalem, or the grace freely going out to the Gentiles, in any way led Him. Then follows another incident, which equally proves that the Spirit of God is not here reciting the facts in their natural succession; for it is assuredly not at this moment historically that the Lord goes into the house of Peter, sees there his wife's mother laid sick of a fever, touches her hand, and raises her up, so that she ministers unto them at once. Help us purchase electrical generators for churches. iv. In immediate juxtaposition to this stands the Gentile centurion, who seeks healing for his servant. So little old Jewish mama coming to Jesus with her two sons. After this our Lord sees great multitudes following Him, and gives commandment to go to the other side. In this work we must not be slothful, not loiterers, but labourers, working, and working out our own salvation. 45. The world knows quite well that a good man is a man who serves his fellow-men. They put upon Him a scarlet robe, and they begin to say unto Him, "Hail king of the Jews," and they mocked Him. The men who stood in the market-place were waiting for work, and the fact that some of them stood on until even five o'clock in the evening is the proof of how desperately they wanted it. He "went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every sickness and every disease among the people." It is a short time; the reward is for eternity, the work is but for a day; man is said to accomplish, as a hireling, his day,Job 14:6. . "Then," said the Lord, "are the children free. 2. Pentateuch Considerable time, it is true, elapsed between the two facts; but this only makes it the more sure and plain, that they are grouped together with a divine purpose. Peter asks a word from his Master, and leaves the ship to join Him on the water. Probably thisto teach us that men who have wrought in Christ's service all their days may, by the spirit which they manifest at the last, make it too evident that, as between God and their own souls, they never were chosen workmen at all. 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