Route 66: Matthew's Gospel - The King Has Arrived

Given our focus that we've had on Chad and Emily, which I'm really glad we were able to do, I still wanted to stay on schedule with our Route 66 series.

So, for some of us who are new, or perhaps here for the first time, we're going through on Sunday night, a study we called Route 66, which is one look at each book of the Bible.

And so we are finished with the Old Testament.

Last week we had an introduction to the New Testament, in a sense that we saw the bridge between the Old and New Testament as they bind together, talking about them being not only intertwined but interdependent upon one another.

And so now today we're going to go into the book of Matthew.

So, seeing that we finished recently a study on the book of Matthew, I'm just going to truncate this a little bit, but did want to put a marker down in our Route 66 study to put something in about Matthew even here.

One of my desires and designs is for us to be able to take all of these recordings of all of our looks throughout the books and turn it into something more than just for our personal benefit.

I would like, at some point in time, for us to get transcripts of all of these and eventually perhaps put them on a blog or might even, with some good editing and some good editors and some friendly publishers, perhaps even get it into a book and see if we can't have a publication of these things.

Not too many places.

Where you go are you going to be, as a church, getting an overview of every single book of the Bible, but hopefully we can be able to do that and provide a resource for others who are looking for something like that.

So today we're in Matthew and beginning our journey of the New Testament.

We start with what we commonly call the Gospels Matthew, mark, luke and John.

Three of them are more similar to one another.

We call them the synoptic gospels, with John standing out as a portrayal of Christ in a very unique way compared to the other three.

Our English word gospel comes from either God's message, god's spell, god's message or good spell or good message.

But the English derivation doesn't tell us as much as we need to know about this word gospel.

The Greek word Konstantinos is.

There you go.

It means the good news, but it's not just good news.

In the time of Jesus Christ, the word would have meant something specific.

It would have come from the region of the hierarchy of government, from the emperor himself.

It would have been a statement of good news, not just about, hey, I got a 5% raise on my pay.

That kind of good news, or isn't it wonderful?

Porter House is on sale over at the grocery store around the corner.

It's more than that way, way more than that.

The word is an announcement from the king about a victory.

It's that level of good news.

It would be a public service announcement in which the whole country would cheer the news.

So it would be a statement about a victory.

Or it would be a statement about a new emperor.

It would have been that kind of good news.

So when you come to Matthew, mark, luke and John, it's not just like, hey, this is some good news for you, this is an announcement to the world that there's a new king who's just showed up and the kingdom is here.

It's that kind of good news.

So the gospel according to Matthew and Mark and Luke and John is going to portray this new king and this new kingdom that's come now.

When you go into the gospel of Matthew and the others, you might read it the way we often read these things.

We think it's well, it starts with the birth of Jesus Christ and it ends with the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

So I'm going to read it like I would read a biography, or I'm going to read it like some sort of historical fiction that has a plot line where we're introduced to the characters and things are happening that builds a bit of a rising tension and conflict and then we get into sort of the ultimate climax of matters where the tension peaks and there's a resolution and then a fall away.

Well, if you try to read the Gospels that way, you're going to catch not nearly as much as you should, because it's not a biography.

It's not written's not a biography.

It's not written to be a biography like that.

When we read Matthew, mark, luke and John, we find ourselves only given the smallest of details about Jesus' life.

We know a little bit about his birth.

We know hardly anything about his childhood and his teenage years, and it's not until he's a fully flourishing and formed adult that we begin to hear anything about him at all.

We don't know how tall he is, how short he was.

We don't know whether he is muscular or skinny or fat.

We don't know if he liked sports.

We don't know whether he was muscular or skinny or fat.

We don't know if he liked sports.

We don't know what color hair he had.

We don't know if he had a big or small nose.

We don't know any of his features whatsoever.

We don't know much at all even about what kind of dress he had.

So the kind of things that we would typically understand, as we did a portrayal of a person's life are absent.

They're not there.

In fact, if you look at the Gospels and of course they concentrate themselves on the time span of roughly three years and if you look at them carefully, lifted out of that three-year time period is roughly about 30 days In which we get any kind of day-to-day detail of what Jesus did.

There's not much there.

So it's not a biography.

And not only is it not a biography, it is not, as I said a moment ago, a very strict chronological record, our biography.

So when we read about a person, we're expecting the movement to just flow quite smoothly from birth to death.

The gospels don't necessarily do that.

Of course they start with the birth and they end with the resurrection, and there is that sort of movement, but not like we would expect.

For instance, when you read Matthew and you read Mark and Luke.

Even when you see Jesus' ministry and movements, it's largely around the area of Galilee.

And then when he comes to Jerusalem, it feels in those three gospels as if it was the first time he ever showed up there.

But when you read John, you find that there were at least three visits to Jerusalem that Jesus took that aren't even mentioned in Matthew, mark and Luke.

So it's definitely not chronological in that sense at all.

It's loosely chronological.

It is more what I would call episodic.

There are episodes that are clustered together in small little groups, and we saw that when we were going through Matthew.

There are clusters of miracles, there are clusters of discourses and they're put together for particular purposes and they may or may not be done in chronological order at all.

They're there for the purposes of telling us something about Jesus, taken from the real life of Christ, but put in a framework where they're clustered together, not necessarily chronologically exact and precise.

So when we read Matthew and when we read Mark and when we read Luke and even John, we have to understand what are we dealing with?

A very unique kind of literature that's largely unknown to us, just like when you read the book of Daniel and the book of Revelation and parts of the book of Ezekiel and Zechariah, and you come walking into apocalyptic literature and some of you are doing that right now and your head spins right and you're trying to figure out, like who is the fifth horn on the third beast?

And you know all of that stuff.

It's bewildering.

Why is it bewildering?

Not because the Bible wants it to be bewildering to you, but because it's a type of literature that we're unfamiliar with and we think we know what Matthew, mark and Luke are like, but we actually don't.

So I was listening to a guy, stephen Fry, and he was talking about someone who said do you know how to eat chocolate?

And he said of course I know how to eat chocolate.

And he said of course I know how to eat chocolate.

And then he stopped and he said maybe I don't.

How do I eat chocolate?

And you know, if you eat chocolate like I do, you're like chomp, chomp, chomp, chomp, chomp Tastes pretty good.

Give me another one, please.

He was taught to just let the chocolate sit on his tongue and let the heat of the mouth melt the chocolate A lot of self-discipline there, more than I've got and just feel the texture and the flavor of the chocolate as it covers and coats the inside of your mouth and your palate.

Right, that's how you eat chocolate.

How do you read a gospel?

Don't walk into it thinking you know how to crunch down on it.

Let it tell you what the texture and the flavor of it is.

What the texture and the flavor of it is.

Just sit with it for a while and let it sort of permeate your mind and your heart as it talks to you the way God intended it to talk to you.

So what do we look for in the gospel?

Well, that one's a clear one.

It's the good news about the king and his kingdom.

It's about Jesus Christ.

He is the constant in all of the gospels, and so the events and the discourses and the dialogues all center on him.

And so, whether we're reading the discourses of Christ in which he's proclaiming the message, or we're listening to the parables about the kingdom, or we're reading these accounts of his miraculous activity, or we're discovering how people heard him and responded to him, in every way we're learning something about Jesus Christ, about his person, his work and what he intends to accomplish by his presence here on earth.

So it not only tells us who Jesus is, why he came, but it also particularly the gospel of Matthew tells us how Christ comes as the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy and expectation.

You remember last week, when we talked about the Old Testament, that the Old Testament is designed in such a way that it has this built-in tension within it that as the people of Israel moved through their history and as they came into the time of the kings and with the ministry of the prophets, there was statements about their disobedience and coming judgment, intermingled with comments about God's wondrous activity to restore the people and to bring them into an experience in a kingdom far beyond what they've ever experienced.

And when the Old Testament ends, none of that has been actualized.

400 years of silence, questions still time and again Are the promises going to be fulfilled?

Are the expectations going to be realized?

Is the tension going to be released?

And when you enter into the gospel of Matthew, those promises, those expectations and that tension, they're palpable, they're there.

And so when Jesus comes in and here we have a statement about his lineage in chapter 1.

When we hear the voice of the forerunner coming onto the scene and speaking of one who's about to come, the people are ready.

They're ready to hear something about the Messiah, but intermingled with their religious teachers are some false notions of what the Messiah is going to accomplish, and so there's a dividing line between the people.

Are they expecting a nationalistic Messiah who will be a warrior, who will free them from the bondage of the overlords of Rome and where they can take prominence?

Are they going to seek a Messiah that deals with the spiritual domination of their sin and the freedom and release through the forgiveness of that and not just the repetitiveness of the sacrificial system?

So when Matthew's gospel unfolds, it unfolds in such a way as it tells us how the old covenant gives way to the new.

It tells us how the sacrifices of the temple give way to the fulfillment of that in Christ.

It talks about how the law of Moses is circumvented by the message of Christ, the law of Christ as Paul spoke about.

And when we see Jesus interacting with people, we are brought ourselves into the place of decision.

When people hear him and wonder who he is, we're told to ask ourselves like do you know who he is?

When people hear him and are astonished and attach themselves quickly to him, punished and attached themselves quickly to him, we have to ask ourselves why am I attached to Jesus?

Is it simply because, well, he fed those people, he'll take care of my earthly needs?

Will I follow him simply because of what I can get from him?

Or do people say, depart from me, I'm a sinful man, I don't belong to be in your presence, as Peter did when he recognized the Lord?

Do we see him as one who is holy and righteous in light of our sinfulness and our disobedience?

So these episodes in which Christ brings himself into the life of a person, it's not just that person put into the place of judgment, it's us, every one of us, and we are being asked what do you say about Jesus?

What do you say about him?

So Matthew, as he unfolds this glorious message, is going to bring the message largely to the Jewish people, and time doesn't allow me to unpack this.

We did it a lot in our study on Matthew, but there are so many different ways that Matthew shows Jesus as the Messiah, in even the smallest of things, that only a Jewish person who understood their Old Testament would be able to pick up.

You might remember some of those that we talked about.

There is this statement about Jesus moving to Nazareth and he will be called a Nazarene.

And there's a little bit of confusion among us because we think, well, a Nazarene was a person who took a vow, which meant that they couldn't drink wine and they couldn't shave their head until the vow was over, and all of that.

Jesus is called a Nazarene, but we don't see him ever taking that kind of vow and we see him living in Nazareth.

And, as some said, can any good thing come out of Nazareth?

There's that question about, well, the prophets don't speak about Nazareth, so how could the scriptures say that he shall be called a Nazarene?

Well, when you read the gospels, in light of the book of Isaiah and other places in the Old Testament, you see this other word called the branch, and it's notzer, and it is a word that sounds like Nazareth when you know Aramaic, and those words are connective words in which the sound of one and the sound of the other is helping us to identify that Matthew is actually saying this is the branch that was talked about in Isaiah.

This is the branch that was talked about in Isaiah.

This is the branch that was talked about in Zechariah.

This is the root out of the stump of David.

This is the king.

Mind you, this is the one that's coming, the one that was promised.

Or you might read in Matthew, where it talks about out of Egypt.

I've called my son and there is this statement out of Hosea that talks about this sort of brought into exile and out of exile with motifs that remind us even a bit of the Exodus.

And so there's the representative head of the promise, abraham, going into Egypt and coming out of Egypt.

And then there's the representative head of the promise, abraham, going into Egypt and coming out of Egypt.

And then there's others doing the same thing and the nation goes down to Egypt and comes out of Egypt.

And Christ, who is the representative of his people, goes down to Egypt and comes up out of Egypt.

He is the son of all of those sons, individuals and nations that went into Egypt and came up out of Egypt.

But this time he brings not only himself out of there, but he brings all of us who believe on him out of the bondage that is typified in the Exodus event.

We are part of the true freedom and the true movement away from slavery and bondage.

So Matthew's gospel, a wonderful, wonderful book filled with Jewish parallelisms and vocabulary and allusions and insights, as it moves from Jesus, the record of who he is, to the resurrection and the life that comes through the gospel to all nations who believe on him.

As you walk through Matthew, you will find yourself introduced to three major areas, and we've talked about them.

We've talked about the discourses of Christ.

Much of what you read about Jesus is done in his preaching in Matthew.

And then you also see little clusters, like I said, these episodes clustered together, of his activity, which present him and demonstrate him as the Messiah.

And then you will come into little clusters of people responding to those things, to what he says and what he does, and those are moments of decision, which are moments of decision for us, for us In every way.

We learn about Jesus through Matthew's skillful, christ-centered focus.

He is the promised one and in Christ, all of the hopes and all the expectations and all the dreams of freedom from slavery to sin and brought into the glorious renewal of the kingdom, are ours by faith.

Let's pray together.

Father, we thank you for the word of God, we thank you for this brief introduction, or oversight, or even recollection of Matthew for those of us who have been a part of that study.

And, lord, what a wonder it is that you communicated to us in your written word these things that were designed and crafted for our understanding, so that there might not be any question whatsoever about who Christ is, father.

We thank you that in him is life, and in him is liberty, and in him is the wondrous love that you have for undeserving people like us.

Lord, may we find ourselves caught up in him, who is everything and from whom all things, and to whom all things have been made and for whom they are.

And so we pray now may be to Christ all the glory and the honor, to him and to him alone, in Christ's name, amen.