MATTHEW 7:7-11 - Sure Looks Like A Snake to Me...

Introduction

A few years ago I read a blog post by a heartbroken woman whose husband had been jailed on horrific crimes that he had carried out in secret over decades. She had started her blog series as her way of trying to reconcile the man she knew with the monster that he had revealed himself to be. One story she related was about their anniversary; their children were excited for her to see the “present” that he had made for her. They excitedly looked on while he presented her with a beautifully wrapped box, which she opened with great anticipation—only to find that it was the skull of a squirrel that the kids had found in the yard a few days earlier, with little flowers stuck in the eye-sockets.

Now, at the time, she responded pretty much like any mom who had young kids growing up in the country— “Ha ha, guys, very funny!” But after her husband (their dad) had been sentenced to prison, she began to wonder if that present wasn’t some kind of warning sign she should have recognized. The shocking nature of that gift caused her to question whether she really knew the man she was married to.

It’s a difficult place to start a sermon from, but I want to start from here because the verses before us this morning from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount will uncover whether we have a similar question in our hearts:

Matthew 7:7–8 (LSB)

“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. “For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened.

This is what the Scripture says. And we are orthodox Christians. We affirm that the Bible is true in everything it affirms about God. We see written here before us in the infallible words of Scripture that everyone who asks receives.

But for some of you here that sounds like a hollow promise, doesn’t it? Because you have been asking and asking and asking and seeking and seeking and knocking and knocking, but it seems as though God is ignoring you. Or worse yet, it seems as though God is treating your prayers the way Jesus describes in verses 9-10: You ask Him for bread, He gives you a stone. You ask for a fish, He gives you a snake.

What do you do at those moments, Christian? I have seen far too many people who have claimed the Name of Christ who have prayed for good from His hand, and when they do not receive what they asked, or receive something different, or seem to receive nothing at all, have simply walked away. They can’t reconcile their belief that God is good with the disappointment they have experienced. They can’t see how God can be a good God and yet answer (or, in their eyes, not answer) their prayers the way He does.

And everyone in this room knows what I am talking about right now. So we don’t come to these verses about prayer as an academic exercise; what Jesus says about prayer and about our Father in Heaven is not a matter of indifference to us—we need to hear from God. And so we have His Word—His powerful, living, active and ever-working Word, wielded in the hand of His Holy Spirit to teach us and mold us this morning. And my prayer for you this morning is that you would be strengthened by these Scriptures this morning to

Cling to the GOODNESS of your FATHER as you CRY to Him in prayer

Jesus has been describing in this Sermon—starting in Chapter 5 and going through the end of Chapter 7—what we have been calling “A New Way of Being Human”. He is describing the way that our New Birth in Christ—the regeneration wrought by His Spirit in us and the union together with Christ that it produces—He is describing the way that New Birth works out in our lives. Last week we saw how that New Birth transforms our relationships with one another so that we do not judge with a selfish, evil heart but judge rightly with grace and humility. And in our text this morning we will see how the New Birth transforms our relationship with God Himself—that we are enabled by that New Birth to see God as a loving Heavenly Father, even when we cannot understand the way He answers our prayers.

This passage divides neatly into three sections—verses 7-8 are grouped together in one thought, verses 9-11 are grouped into a different thought, and verse 12 sums up the entire text (and in fact, the entire chapter to this point!)

Let’s look first at verses 7-8:

Matthew 7:7–8 (LSB)

“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. “For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened.”

The point Jesus is driving home here in these verses is that,

I. God always HEARS and ANSWERS prayer (Matthew 7:7-8)

But right away we have questions, don’t we? Because we can look through the Scriptures and find examples of God not answering prayer, can’t we?

In the beginning of Isaiah’s prophecy, we read:

Isaiah 1:15 (LSB)

“So when you spread out your hands in prayer, I will hide My eyes from you; Indeed, even though you multiply prayers, I will not listen. Your hands are full of blood.

Micah 3:4 (LSB)

Then they will cry out to Yahweh, But He will not answer them. Instead, He will hide His face from them at that time Because they have practiced evil deeds.

Proverbs 1:28–29 (LSB)

“Then they will call on me, but I will not answer; They will seek me earnestly but they will not find me, Because they hated knowledge And did not choose the fear of Yahweh.

Psalm 66:18 (LSB)

If I see wickedness in my heart, The Lord will not hear;

So what is going on here? What does Jesus mean when He says everyone who asks will receive? The key to understanding this verse is the context of the Sermon on the Mount. Down in verse 11, Jesus is making it clear that God always hears and answers prayer

As a FATHER to His CHILDREN (cp. v. 11; cp. Matt. 5:1-2)

“… your Father in Heaven gives good gifts to those who ask Him...” This also becomes clear when we consider again who Jesus is addressing this sermon to:

Matthew 5:1–2 (LSB)

Now when Jesus saw the crowds, He went up on the mountain; and after He sat down, His disciples came to Him. And He opened His mouth and began to teach them, saying,

The crowds were listening, but the disciples were the particular listeners Jesus was addressing. When you belong to Jesus Christ by faith and have experienced the New Birth, you enter into a relationship with God that you did not have before—He becomes your Father. And because He is your Father, you have this assurance that when you ask, it will be given. When you seek, you will find, when you knock, it will be opened to you. You can cling to the goodness of God when you cry out to Him in prayer because He promises to hear and answer.

Now right away we realize that there is a very wicked way to take this verse. There is a dangerous and insidious false teaching that is known as the “Word of Faith” movement (the so-called “name-it-and-claim-it” style of prayer), that takes these words of our Savior and twists them into something that He never said.

This teaching claims that because you are a Christian, God will always answer every prayer that you pray with health, wealth and prosperity. And Matthew 7:7-8 is usually quoted as one of the proofs of this heresy. But the rest of the testimony of Scripture is plain that, while God will always hear and answer our prayers,

He will not INDULGE our WICKEDNESS (cp. James 4:1-4)

The epistle of James was written to churches that were being torn apart by greed and envy and backbiting. Chapter 4 of James opens with these verses:

James 4:1–2 (LSB)

What is the source of quarrels and conflicts among you? Is not the source your pleasures that wage war in your members? You lust and do not have, so you murder. You are envious and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel...

And then he goes on to address their habits of prayer:

James 4:2–3 (LSB)

...You do not have because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasures.

When His children ask for things from God in prayer that are only meant to satisfy their own pleasures, James says, God does not give them what they ask for. Back in Matthew 6:24, Jesus said that it is impossible to serve God and wealth. If you are obsessed with “newer, better, bigger, faster”, God is not going to answer your prayers with things that you can make an idol out of! He is not going to help you love other things more than Him; He is not going to aid you in the sinful pursuit of your own desires and lusts and greed. Do not expect Him to help His child erect an idol to compete with Him for their allegiance.

God always hears and answers prayer, as a Father hears and answers the requests of His children. But He will not indulge the wickedness of your selfish, greedy or envious desires.

And so much, I think, we can understand. We can understand that God loves us in Christ as a Father loves His child. We can understand that God is not going to answer our prayers to grant us the means to sin against Him.

But that’s not where our concern lies, is it? No one here has ever been disappointed in prayer because God has not given us the means to satisfy our selfishness—we can often look back on something we have asked of God and realized in hindsight that it was a foolish or sinful or selfish prayer, or that God’s answer “no” was actually the most loving answer He could have given us.

The real difficulty—the real sore spot—is in the times when we have made a good, God-honoring, honest prayer before God and He seems to give us the opposite from what we asked. This is what Jesus is addressing in verses 9-11, and He is making it very clear to us that

II. God always ANSWERS our prayers with GOOD (Matthew 7:9-11)

Look with me at verses 9-10:

Matthew 7:9–10 (LSB)

“Or what man is there among you who, when his son asks for a loaf, will give him a stone? “Or if he asks for a fish, he will not give him a snake, will he?

The parallel passage in Luke’s gospel adds one more description:

Luke 11:12 (LSB)

“Or, if his son asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion?

These verses are another example of Jesus’ use of the rabbinical teaching method kal-va-chomer, “mild and severe”, or what we would call an argument from the lesser to the greater. He asks a question—a kind of silly question, actually—about how a father gives to his child. A father whose child is hungry doesn’t give him a stone; he gives him bread! And so from here, Jesus argues from the lesser to the greater:

Matthew 7:11 (LSB)

“If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give what is good to those who ask Him!

Jesus says here that we can know that God’s answers to prayers are always good,

Because His HOLINESS is beyond our REACH (vv. 9-10)

Consider the point Jesus is making: Even in our wicked, fallen state as unredeemed men and women, we still know how to do some kind of good to our children. The most selfish, thoughtless, screwed-up dad is still capable of giving his kid a present at Christmas, right? Even if it’s out of guilt or a desire to fix his messed-up parenting, he will still try to find a nice birthday present, right? A hungry child living in the remains of a home wrecked by a broken marriage covenant is not going to ask for dippy eggs and toast for breakfast and get a plate full of rocks crawling with scorpions, right?

Jesus says that if an evil, fallen, selfish, faithless father can manage not to serve his little boy scorpions and rocks for breakfast, what makes you think that your infinitely holy Father in Heaven would do so? Jesus cannot make His point more forcefully here: Your Father in Heaven does not answer your good prayers with evil. He does not because He cannot. That father in the opening illustration? I knew him personally—he was a good dad to his kids. How much more then, is your Heavenly Father capable of not giving you evil gifts?

Beloved, you need to hear what Jesus is saying here: God NEVER gives evil gifts to His children. NEVER. And the reason you need to hear this is because sometimes, God’s answer to your prayer for bread really looks like a stone. Sometimes your prayer for a fish really looks like a serpent. You ask Him for a spouse, He responds with loneliness. You ask Him for healing, He responds with a bad pathology report. You ask Him for a job, He responds with the unemployment line. You ask Him for deliverance from danger, He responds with a hurricane.

Dear saints, the reason that God’s answers to your prayers are sometimes as disappointing as getting a stone instead of bread or as frightening as getting a scorpion instead of an egg is

Because His GOODNESS is beyond our RECKONING (v. 11; cp. Rom. 8:28)

This is a hard saying, but it is exactly what Jesus is expressing in these verses—if even your rotten loser of a step-father wouldn’t give you a snake, then how could your holy and good Heavenly Father do such a thing? When you have prayed for God to sustain you or rescue you or preserve you and He seems to respond with something profoundly disappointing or even actively frightening, the immediate temptation is to believe that He is not Who He says He is. That He is capriciously cruel, or randomly inflicts people with suffering or pain for no good reason. That He is just sitting back and watching us suffer without intending to do anything about it and let us fend for ourselves. He puts a snake in our lunchbox and then hides behind the cafeteria door because He gets a kick out of watching us scream when we open it.

But Jesus is telling you here, beloved—your Heavenly Father’s gifts to you are always good, because HE IS ALWAYS GOOD. He cannot be otherwise; He cannot be unholy, He cannot be evil. And so He cannot give evil gifts. Be assured, Christian, that your Heavenly Father’s answers to your prayers are filled with far more good than your prayers ever are.

His goodness to you may be of such a magnitude that you cannot really see it for what it is—you can only see the disappointment, the heartache and bewilderment of receiving what seems to be the opposite of your prayers. But in Christ, you have the promise that all of those disappointing or shocking answers to your prayers will redound to your good—whether in this life or the next:

Romans 8:28 (LSB)

And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to His purpose.

His love for you is so great that He will never turn His hand from doing you less good than He is able to do. His love for you is such that He will always do the maximum good for you in every answer to every prayer you can ever utter, even if you cannot understand how good it is. He loves you too much to cheat you out of good because your feeble mind cannot grasp how good He is.

Christian, are you struggling with the desperation of having turned to God to deliver you from the pit, only to feel as though He has shoved you into it instead? Have you cried out to Him to rescue you from your terrors, and it seems for all the world that He has become one of those terrors to you?

Then hear what your Savior says in these verses: Your Heavenly Father is always good in His answers to your prayers. He has never answered one of your prayers with evil, and He never will. And never forget, Christian, that these words to assure you of God’s unassailable goodness came from the same lips that cried out on the Cross “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” No Man has ever received an answer to prayer less like His request. Matthew’s Gospel tells us in Chapter 26 that the night before His crucifixion Jesus prayed three times that He be spared the Cross, that the “cup would pass from Him”. If any Son was ever asking His Father for a good, it was Jesus in the Garden. But what His Father gave Him that night was not the bread of deliverance, but the stone of execution. It was not the egg of sustenance but the scorpion-sting of the Roman lash. It was not the fish of provision; it was the Serpent of Eden to bruise His heel with the venom of death on the Cross.

Beloved, this is the Man that assures you of the goodness of your Heavenly Father’s shocking answers to your prayers. Jesus asked for mercy and suffered wrath; He pled for life and was stricken with death. And even here, in what seems like the most evil answer to the most righteous prayer ever prayed, God was working the greatest most eternal good ever given.

Because His Heavenly Father answered Christ’s plea for mercy with wrath, you now freely receive mercy instead of wrath. When you come by faith to Jesus Christ so that His blood shed on that Cross washes away the stain of your sin, He unites you with Himself in that New Birth, that “new way of being human”. And that means that in Christ, you will never receive evil from the hand of your Heavenly Father. He may send you what sure looks like a snake, but His aim is not to do you harm, but to do you good that you could never see otherwise. He is aiming at a good that you cannot now comprehend, but a good that will be revealed on the Day when Christ returns to claim His own:

1 Peter 1:3–8 (LSB)

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His great mercy has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to obtain an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled and unfading, having been kept in heaven for you, who are protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. In this you greatly rejoice, even though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, so that the proof of your faith, being more precious than gold which is perishable, even though tested by fire, may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. And though you have not seen Him, you love Him, and though you do not see Him now, but believe in Him, you rejoice with joy inexpressible and full of glory,

He is aiming at your inexpressible, glorious eternal joy—and if that means He answers your prayer for a job with unemployment or your prayer for health with a cancer diagnosis or your prayer for a spouse with singleness or your prayer for protection with tragedy, it will be worth it. Just as your Savior endured the Cross for the joy that was set before Him, so Christian, you can endure the appalling good with which God answers your prayers so that you may shine with the imperishable gold wrought in the crucible of suffering.

And so, Christian, cling to the goodness of God as you cry out to Him in prayer. Jesus tells you the parable of the widow who never gave up praying; the Greek grammar of verses 7-8 are better rendered “KEEP ON ASKING, and it will be given to you, KEEP ON SEEKING, and you will find, KEEP ON KNOCKING and it will be opened to you...” Clinging to the goodness of God as you cry out to Him in prayer means that you do not stop praying. There are some wicked false teachers out there who will try to tell you that asking God for something more than once is to exercise “unbelief”—that you have to have “enough faith” to ask once and simply believe. But their blasphemy is exposed the moment you look back to Jesus in that Garden, when He prayed over and over again for mercy from His Heavenly Father. He prayed continually that darkest of all nights; you pray continually in the darkness of your troubles.

Cling to the goodness of God as you cry out to Him in prayer. Do not give up in disgust because you want something “better” than the good He is giving you. To turn away from Him because you are disappointed with what you think is a stone instead of bread is to turn away from the Only Source of Good you will ever find. Sure, there may be other promises of good out there that want to compete with the Good God gives—some that may even claim that the “good” they offer is better than the Good God offers. But the “good” this fallen world offers you in place of God may look a lot more like bread but will taste much more like a stone.

It is a good that may seem a lot more like a fish but in the end will strike you like a serpent. Even the genuine good that comes by God’s common grace to us all—home, family, friendships, health, finances—Jesus has already told us that those things will rust, corrode and fall apart. Whatever good is in them is temporary; don’t walk away from eternal good won by faith-filled hardship and tears to embrace fading, rusting, failing good found in this sorry world.

The only Good you can cling to is the goodness of God as your Heavenly Father. But if you are here apart from Christ this morning, can’t you see that there is no good that you can expect from your prayers? Apart from the New Birth of regeneration wrought by God’s Spirit that brings repentance and faith in Christ for salvation, you have neither the ability to ask for good things from God, nor the ability to receive good things from Him. By definition, you can have no prayers that are not selfish or idolatrous. Asking for good things from God while rejecting God Himself is like asking for the Sun but refusing the light. It is to love roses but hate flowers; it is to ask Him for a loaf of bread but hate food—it makes no sense.

Friend, if you do not know Christ as Savior; if you do not know for sure where you stand in your relationship to Him, then there is one prayer that has been granted you to pray; there is one request that you can make of God that He will always promise to answer with the greatest Good imaginable:

Romans 10:9–11 (LSB)

that if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved; for with the heart a person believes, leading to righteousness, and with the mouth he confesses, leading to salvation. For the Scripture says, “Whoever believes upon Him will not be put to shame.”

Do you want to know for sure that you belong to Jesus Christ by faith? Do you want to know that you know that you know that God is your Heavenly Father, and that everything He sends you is good beyond your wildest reckoning? Come and find me after the service, come to one of the elders, come and talk to one of us or to another member of Bethel—let us help you find that assurance that you will forever be the recipient of the greatest lovingkindnesses, the greatest mercies, the greatest good that anyone can ever receive, given by the nail-scarred hand of your Good Savior, Jesus Christ!

BENEDICTION

Ephesians 3:20–21 (LSB)

Now to Him who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or understand, according to the power that works within us, to Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations forever and ever. Amen.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION:

Write down something you learned from this morning’s message that is new to you, or an insight that you had for the first time about the text? ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ Write down a question that you have about the passage that you want to study further or ask for help with: ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ Write down something that you need to do in your life this week in response to what God has shown you from His Word today: ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________

Additional Notes: ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________