2. The danger of a merely intellectual knowledge (24–27)
A Christian’s commitment: the radical choice
(Matthew 7:21–27)
Whether or not we were right in thinking that Jesus began his conclusion with verse 13, he certainly comes to it now. At this point he is not concerned to add further instruction, but rather to ensure a proper response to the instruction he has already given. ‘The Lord Jesus winds up the Sermon on the Mount’, writes J. C. Ryle, ‘by a passage of heart-piercing application. He turns from false prophets to false professors, from unsound teachers to unsound hearers.’ R. V. G. Tasker’s comment is similar: ‘It is not only false teachers who make the narrow way difficult to find and still harder to tread. A man may also be grievously self-deceived.’
So Jesus confronts us with himself, sets before us the radical choice between obedience and disobedience, and calls us to an unconditional commitment of mind, will and life to his teaching. The way he does it is to warn us of two unacceptable alternatives, first a merely verbal profession (21–23) and secondly a merely intellectual knowledge (24–27). Neither can be a substitute for obedience; indeed each may be a camouflage for disobedience. Jesus emphasizes with great solemnity that on a thoroughgoing obedience our eternal destiny depends.
In this respect the two final paragraphs of the Sermon are very similar. Both contrast the wrong and the right responses to Christ’s teaching. Both show that neutrality is impossible and that a definite decision has to be made. Both stress that nothing can take the place of an active, practical obedience. And both teach that the issue of life and death on the day of judgment will be determined by our moral response to Christ and his teaching in this life. The only difference between the paragraphs is that in the first people offer a profession of their lips as an alternative to obedience, and in the second a hearing with their ears.
1. The danger of a merely verbal profession (21–23)
The people Jesus is describing here are relying for salvation on a credal affirmation, on what they ‘say’ to or about Christ. ‘Not every one who says to me’ (21). ‘On that day many will say to me’ (22). But our final destiny will be settled, Jesus insists, neither by what we are saying to him today, nor by what we shall say to him on the last day, but by whether we do what we say, whether our verbal profession is accompanied by moral obedience.
Now a verbal profession of Christ is indispensable. In order to be saved, wrote Paul, we have to confess with our lips and believe in our hearts. And a true profession of Jesus as Lord is impossible without the Holy Spirit. Moreover, the kind of Christian profession Jesus describes at the end of the Sermon appears—at least on the surface—to be wholly admirable. To begin with, it is polite. It addresses him as ‘Lord’, just as today the most respectful and courteous way of referring to Jesus is still to say ‘our Lord’. Next, the profession is orthodox. Although to call Jesus ‘Lord’ may mean no more than ‘Sir’, the present context contains allusions both to God as his Father and to himself as the Judge, and therefore seems to imply more. Certainly after his death and resurrection the early Christians knew what they were doing when they called him ‘Lord’. It was a divine title, a rendering in the Greek Old Testament of the Hebrew for ‘Jehovah’. So from our later perspective we may say that this is an accurate, an orthodox confession of Jesus Christ. Thirdly, it is fervent, for it is not a cold or formal ‘Lord’ but an enthusiastic ‘Lord, Lord’, as if the speaker wishes to draw attention to the strength and zeal of his devotion.
The fourth point is that it is a public confession. This is no private and personal protestation of allegiance to Jesus. Some have even ‘prophesied’ in Christ’s name, daring to claim as they preach on some public occasion the authority and the inspiration of Jesus himself. More than this, the profession is even at times spectacular. In order to make his point, Jesus cites the most extreme examples of verbal profession, namely the exercise of a supernatural ministry involving prophecy, exorcism and miracles. What these people stress as they speak to Christ on judgment day is the name in which they have ministered. Three times they use it, and each time they put it first for emphasis. They claim that in the name of Christ, openly and publicly confessed, they have prophesied, cast out demons and done many mighty works. And there is no need to doubt the truth of their claim, for ‘great signs and wonders’ will be performed even by false Christs and false prophets.
What better Christian profession could be given? Here are people who call Jesus ‘Lord’ with courtesy, orthodoxy and enthusiasm, in private devotion and in public ministry. What can be wrong with this? In itself nothing. And yet everything is wrong because it is talk without truth, profession without reality. It will not save them on the day of judgment. So Jesus moves on from what they are saying and will say to him to what he will say to them. He too will make a solemn profession. The word used in verse 23 is homologēsō, ‘I will confess’. Christ’s confession to them will be like theirs in being public, but unlike theirs in being true. He will address to them the terrible words: I never knew you; depart from me, you evildoers. For although they had used his name freely, their name was unknown to him.
The reason for their rejection by him is that their profession was verbal, not moral. It concerned their lips only, and not their life. They called Jesus ‘Lord, Lord’, but never submitted to his lordship, or obeyed the will of his heavenly Father. Luke’s version of this saying is if anything stronger still: ‘Why do you call me “Lord, Lord”, and not do what I tell you?’ The vital difference is between ‘saying’ and ‘doing’. The reason Christ the Judge will banish them from him is that they are evildoers. They may claim to do mighty works in their ministry; but in their everyday behaviour the works they do are not good, but evil. Of what value is it for such people to take Christ’s name on their lips? As Paul expressed it some years later: ‘Let every one who names the name of the Lord depart from iniquity’.
We who claim to be Christians in our day have made a profession of faith in Jesus privately in conversion and publicly in baptism and/or confirmation. We appear to honour Jesus by referring to him as ‘the Lord’ or ‘our Lord’. We recite the creed in church, and sing hymns expressive of devotion to Christ. We even exercise a variety of ministries in his name. But he is not impressed by our pious and orthodox words. He still asks for evidence of our sincerity in good works of obedience.
2. The danger of a merely intellectual knowledge (24–27)
Whereas the contrast in the previous paragraph was between ‘saying’ and ‘doing’, the contrast now is between ‘hearing’ and ‘doing’. On the one hand, Jesus says, there is the person who hears these words of mine and does them (24), and on the other the person who hears these words of mine and does not do them (26). He then illustrates the contrast between his obedient and disobedient hearers by his well-known parable of the two builders, the wise man who ‘dug deep’ and constructed his house on rock, and the fool who could not be bothered with foundations and was content to build on sand. As both got on with their building, a casual observer would not have noticed any difference between them. For the difference was in the foundations, and foundations are not seen. Only when a storm broke, and battered both houses with great ferocity—‘rain on roof, river on foundation, wind on walls’—was the fundamental and fatal difference revealed. For the house on the rock withstood the gale, while the house on the sand collapsed in irreparable ruin.
In the same way professing Christians (both the genuine and the spurious) often look alike. You cannot easily tell which is which. Both appear to be building Christian lives. For Jesus is not contrasting professing Christians with non-Christians who make no profession. On the contrary, what is common to both spiritual housebuilders is that they hear these words of mine. So both are members of the visible Christian community. Both read the Bible, go to church, listen to sermons and buy Christian literature. The reason you often cannot tell the difference between them is that the deep foundations of their lives are hidden from view. The real question is not whether they hear Christ’s teaching (nor even whether they respect or believe it), but whether they do what they hear. Only a storm will reveal the truth. Sometimes a storm of crisis or calamity betrays what manner of person we are, for ‘true piety is not fully distinguished from its counterfeit till it comes to the trial’. If not, the storm of the day of judgment will certainly do so.
The truth on which Jesus is insisting in these final two paragraphs of the Sermon is that neither an intellectual knowledge of him nor a verbal profession, though both are essential in themselves, can ever be a substitute for obedience. The question is not whether we say nice, polite, orthodox, enthusiastic things to or about Jesus; nor whether we hear his words, listening, studying, pondering and memorizing until our minds are stuffed with his teaching; but whether we do what we say and do what we know, in other words whether the lordship of Jesus which we profess is one of our life’s major realities.
This is not, of course, to teach that the way of salvation, or the way to enter the kingdom of heaven (21), is by good works of obedience, for the whole New Testament offers salvation only by the sheer grace of God through faith. What Jesus is stressing, however, is that those who truly hear the gospel and profess faith will always obey him, expressing their faith in their works. The apostles of Jesus never forgot this teaching. It is prominent in their letters. The first letter of John, for example, is full of the perils of a verbal profession: ‘If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie … He who says “I know him” but disobeys his commandments is a liar.’ The letter of James, on the other hand, is full of the perils of an intellectual knowledge. An arid orthodoxy cannot save, he writes, but only a faith which issues in good works; so we have to be ‘doers of the word, and not hearers only’.
In applying this teaching to ourselves, we need to consider that the Bible is a dangerous book to read, and that the church is a dangerous society to join. For in reading the Bible we hear the words of Christ, and in joining the church we say we believe in Christ. As a result, we belong to the company described by Jesus as both hearing his teaching and calling him Lord. Our membership therefore lays upon us the serious responsibility of ensuring that what we know and what we say is translated into what we do.
Thus the Sermon ends on the same note of radical choice of which we have been aware throughout. Jesus does not set before his followers a string of easy ethical rules, so much as a set of values and ideals which is entirely distinctive from the way of the world. He summons us to renounce the prevailing secular culture in favour of the Christian counter-culture. Repeatedly during our study we have heard his call to his people to be different from everybody else. The first time this became clear was in his commission to us to be both ‘the salt of the earth’ and ‘the light of the world’. For these metaphors set the Christian and non-Christian communities over against each other as recognizably, indeed fundamentally, distinct. The world is like rotting food, full of the bacteria which cause its disintegration; Jesus’ followers are to be its salt, arresting its decay. The world is a dark and dismal place, lacking sunshine, living in shadow; Jesus’ followers are to be its light, dispelling its darkness and its gloom.
From then on the opposing standards are graphically described, and the way of Jesus commended. Our righteousness is to be deeper because it reaches even our hearts, and our love broader because it embraces even our enemies. In piety we are to avoid the ostentation of hypocrites and in prayer the verbosity of pagans. Instead our giving, praying and fasting are to be real, with no compromise of our Christian integrity. For our treasure we are to choose what endures through eternity, not what disintegrates on earth, and for our master God, not money or possessions. As for our ambition (what preoccupies our mind) this must not be our own material security, but the spread of God’s rule and righteousness in the world.
Instead of conforming to this world—whether in the form of religious Pharisees or of irreligious pagans—we are called by Jesus to imitate our heavenly Father. He is a peacemaker. And he loves even the ungrateful and selfish. So we must copy him, not men. Only then shall we show that we are truly his sons and daughters (5:9, 44–48). Here then is the alternative, either to follow the crowd or to follow our Father in heaven, either to be a reed swayed by the winds of public opinion or to be ruled by God’s word, the revelation of his character and will. And the overriding purpose of the Sermon on the Mount is to present us with this alternative, and so to face us with the indispensable necessity of choice.
That is why the Sermon’s conclusion is so appropriate, as Jesus sketches the two ways (narrow and broad) and the two buildings (on rock and sand). It would be impossible to exaggerate the importance of the choice between them, since one way leads to life while the other ends in destruction, and one building is secure while the other is overwhelmed with disaster. Far more momentous than the choice even of a life-work or of a life-partner is the choice about life itself. Which road are we going to travel? On which foundation are we going to build?