S.O.T.M. Conclusion/The Preacher [Matthew 7:28-29]

Stand for the reading of the word of God [Matthew 7:28-29]

In the last two verses of this chapter we are told by the gospel writer what effect this amazing sermon on the mount produced upon it’s listeners. Therefore, it provides for us at the same time with the opportunity to consider in general what effect this sermon should always produce to those who read and consider it.

These two verses are by no means throw away or useless verses. They are of great importance in any consideration of the Sermon. I have no doubt that that was the reason why the writer was led by the Holy Spirit to record the effect of the Sermon, because we are directed here to the Preacher rather than to the Sermon. We are asked, as it were, having considered the Sermon, to look at the One who delivered it and preached it.

We have spent much time in considering in detail the teaching of the Sermon [June 6,2020], we have been considering the urgent appeal which our Lord addressed to those who had been listening. He urged them to put it into practice. He issued a warning against self-deception, against merely admiring the Sermon and commending certain things in it, and failing to realize that, unless we are indeed practicing it, we are outside the kingdom of God, and shall find that all on which we have been resting will suddenly be taken from us on the day of judgment.

The question that many are tempted to ask is...

Why should we practise the sermon on the mount?

Why should we pay heed to this terrible warning? Why should we believe that, unless we are indeed making our lives conform to this pattern, we shall be without hope as we come face to face with God? The real answer to all that is the subject to which we are directed by these last two verses.

It is the Person Himself, the Preacher who uttered these sayings, the One who has delivered this teaching. In other words, as we consider the Sermon on the Mount as a whole, having gone into its various parts, we must realize that we must not concentrate only upon the beauty of the diction, the perfect structure of the Sermon, the impressive pictures, the striking illustrations and the extraordinary balance which we find in it, both from the standpoint of material and the way in which it is presented.

Indeed, we can go further. When we consider the Sermon on the Mount, we are never to stop even with the moral, ethical, and spiritual teaching; we are to go beyond all these things, wonderful though they are, and vital as they all are, to the Person of the Preacher Himself.

There are two main reasons for saying that. The first is that, ultimately, the authority of the Sermon derives from the Preacher. That is, of course, what makes the New Testament such a unique book, and gives uniqueness to the teaching of our Lord. With all other teachers that the world has ever known, the important thing is the teaching; but here is a case in which the Teacher is more important even than what He taught. There is a sense in which you cannot divide and separate them from one another; but if we are to give priority to one, we must always put the Preacher first. So these two verses coming at the end of the Sermon direct our attention to that fact.

If any one asks: Why should I pay attention to that Sermon, why should I put it into practice, why should I believe that it is the most vital thing in this life? the answer is, because of the Person who preached it. That is the authority, that is the sanction behind the Sermon. If we are in any doubt as to the Person who preached this Sermon, that is obviously going to affect our view of it.

If we are in doubt about His uniqueness, about His deity, about the fact that here was God in the flesh speaking, then our whole attitude towards the Sermon is undermined. But, conversely, if we do believe that the Man who spoke these words was none other than the only begotten Son of God, then that makes it even more solemn and we have an added authority, and we must take the teaching as a whole with all the seriousness which must ever be given to any pronouncement that comes from God Himself. We sometimes take the Bible so casually…it’s the very word from God...

So we have a very good reason for considering it. The ultimate sanction behind every expression in the Sermon is to be found there. When we read it and are tempted perhaps to argue against it or to explain certain things away, we must remember that we are considering the words of the Son of God. The authority and the sanction are derived from the Speaker, from the blessed Person Himself, the second person of the Trinity God the Son.

But even beyond just that general observation. Our Lord Himself insists upon our paying attention to it. He calls attention to Himself in the Sermon. He repeats tests which are obviously designed to focus our attention upon Himself. That is the point at which so much that passes for gospel [false gospel] differs from the real gospel. There is a tendency for some people to create a division between the teaching of the New Testament and the Lord Himself. That is an essential error.

He is always calling attention to Himself, and we find that abundantly illustrated in this particular Sermon. The ultimate trouble with people who emphasize the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount at the expense of doctrine, and at the expense of theology, is that they never realize that point.

If we truly read the Sermon on the Mount, find we‘re being directed continually to this Person, to Christ Himself. And immediately that raises crucial doctrine. In other words, the Sermon on the Mount, as we have seen so many times, is really a kind of basic doctrinal statement out of which everything else comes. It is full of doctrine; and the idea that it is moral, ethical teaching and nothing else, is an idea that is quite foreign to the teaching of the Sermon, and particularly to the point which is emphasized here in these last two verses.

We see that our Lord Himself calls attention to Himself, and, in a sense, there is nothing in the Sermon which is quite so remarkable as the way in which He does that. So, having looked at the whole Sermon, we find that all the instructions He gave become focused together in Him. We look at Him in a special way in the Sermon on the Mount; and any study of it should always lead us to that.

Here in these two verses we have a very wonderful way of doing so. We are told about the reaction of these people who had the great and high privilege of looking at Him and listening to the Sermon. And we are told that their reaction was one of astonishment. ‘It came to pass, when Jesus had ended these sayings, the people were astonished at his doctrine (or at his teaching): for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes.’

Let us try to recapture this if we can, for there is nothing that we should enjoy so much as looking at Christ. There is no value in all other teaching if we are not right about Christ. Essentially the vital point of all teaching, of theology, and of the whole Bible is to bring us to a knowledge of Christ and into relationship with Him. So we look at the blessed Person, and we must try to picture this scene.

Here is a great crowd of people. First of all it was just our Lord and His disciples when He sat down to teach; but by the end it is obvious that there was a great crowd. Here, sitting before all these people on that mountain, is this young Man, apparently just a carpenter from a little place called Nazareth in Galilee, a common, ordinary person.

He had had no training in the schools, He was not a Pharisee, or a scribe; He had not been sitting at the feet of Gamaliel or any of the great authorities or teachers. Apparently He was just a very ordinary person, who had lived a very ordinary life. But suddenly He bursts forth upon the countryside in an extraordinary ministry, and here He sits and begins to teach and to preach and to say the things we have been considering together.

It is not surprising that these people were astonished. It was all so unexpected, so unusual in every way, so different from everything they had ever known. How difficult it is for us, because of our sheer familiarity with these facts and details, to realize that these things actually happened nearly two thousand years ago, and to realize what the effect must have been upon our Lord’s contemporaries. Try to imagine their utter astonishment and amazement as this carpenter from Galilee sits and teaches and expounds the law, and speaks in this extraordinary manner. They were amazed and astonished and dumb-founded.

The thing for us to discover is...

What caused the astonishment?

The first thing, clearly, is the general authority with which He spoke—this Man who talked to them with authority and not as the scribes. That negative is very interesting—that His teaching was not after the manner of the scribes. The characteristic of the teaching of the scribes, you remember, was that they always quoted authorities and never uttered any original thoughts; they were experts, not so much in the law itself, as in various expositions and interpretations of the law which had been put forward since it was first given to Moses.

Then, in turn, they were always quoting the experts on these interpretations. As an illustration of what this means, we have but to think of what so often happens in the Law Courts when a case is being heard. Various authorities are quoted; one authority has said this and another authority has said that; other textbooks are produced and their expositions are given. That was the manner or practice of the scribes, and so they were always arguing; but the chief feature was the endless string of quotations.

It is something that still happens today. People quoting from various famous and sophisticated writings. That kind of thing gives the impression of learning and culture. We are told that the scribes and Pharisees were very proud of their learning. They dismissed our Lord with derision, and said, ‘How has this man learning, never having learned?’ That points to the fact that the outstanding characteristic of His method was the absence of the endless quotations.

In other words, the surprising thing about Him was His originality. He keeps on saying ‘I say unto you’; not ‘So-and-so has said’, but ‘I say unto you’. There was a freshness about His teaching. His whole method was different. His very appearance was different. His whole attitude towards teaching was different. It was characterized by this originality of thought and of manner—the way in which He did it as well as what He did.

But, of course, the most astonishing thing of all was the confidence and certainty with which He spoke. That appeared at the very beginning, even as He was uttering those great Beatitudes. He begins by saying: ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit’ and then, ‘for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’ There is no doubt about it, and no question; just confidence. This extraordinary assurance and authority with which He spoke was something that was manifested from the very beginning.

I imagine that is what really astonished these people over and above His general authority was what He said, and in particular what He said about Himself. That must have amazed and astonished them. Think again of the things which He said, first of all about His own teaching. He keeps on making remarks which call attention to His teaching, and to His own attitude towards it.

Take, for instance, the frequency with which in the fifth chapter He said something like this: ‘You have heard it said by them of old time … but I say unto you’. He does not hesitate to correct the teaching of the Pharisees and their authorities. ‘They of old time’, you remember we saw, stood for certain Pharisees and their exposition of the Mosaic law. He did not hesitate to put that aside and to correct it. This ordinary carpenter who had never been to the schools, saying: ‘I say unto you’! He claims that authority for Himself and for His teaching.

He does not hesitate to assert in that phrase, that He, and He alone, is able to give a spiritual interpretation of the law that was given through Moses. His whole argument is that the people had never seen the spiritual intent or content of the law given by Moses, they were mis-interpreting it and reducing it to the physical level.

As long as they did not actually commit physical adultery, they thought it did not matter. They did not see that God was concerned about the heart, the desire, the spirit. So He stands before them as the only true interpreter of the law. He says that His interpretation alone brings out the spiritual intent of the law; indeed, He does not hesitate to speak of Himself and to regard Himself as the law giver: ‘I say unto you.’

Then you remember how at the end of the Sermon He puts this in a still more explicit manner. ‘Therefore’, He says, ‘who ever hears these sayings of mine, and does them, …’ You notice the significance He attaches to His own sayings. As He says that, He is saying something about Himself. He is using this picture of the two houses. He has already spoken about judgment, and He puts it all in terms of ‘these sayings of mine’.

He says in effect: ‘I want you to listen to these, and I want you to practise them—“these sayings of mine”; do you realize who I am and the importance of what I say?’ Thus we find that in what He said about His teaching He is making a tremendous pronouncement about Himself. He claims this unique authority…the authority of God!

But we are not left simply with inferences and implications; His references to Himself are not only indirect. Think of all

The direct references to Himself

in this Sermon on the Mount? Let us take them in the order in which they appear. First, in 5:11, when He has just finished the Beatitudes, He goes on to say: ‘Blessed are you, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.’ What an astonishing and amazing thing that is.

He does not say, ‘Blessed are ye when men shall revile and persecute you for the teaching’s sake’, or ‘Ah, blessed are you people if, in your desire to implement this high and exalted teaching, you suffer persecution and perhaps death itself.’ He does not say: ‘If you suffer like this for the name of God your Father in heaven, you are blessed.’ No, He says ‘for my sake’.

[What utter folly it is for people to say that they are interested in the Sermon on the Mount as ethical and moral and social teaching only. Here, before He comes to ‘turning the other cheek’ and the other things they like so much], He tells us that we ought to be ready to suffer for His sake, and that we are to endure persecution for His sake, and that we may even have to be ready to die for His sake. This tremendous claim comes at the very beginning of the Sermon.

Then He goes on to do the same thing by implication immediately afterwards. ‘You are the salt of the earth’, and ‘you are the light of the world’. Do you see the implication of that? He says in effect, ‘You people who are My disciples and My followers, you who have given yourselves to Me even to the extent of enduring persecution for My name’s sake, and if necessary death for My sake, you, who are listening to Me and are going to repeat My teaching and spread it throughout the world, you are the salt of the earth, and the light of the world.’

There is only one real deduction to draw from that, that they are going to be a very special and unique people who, because of their relationship to Him, become the salt of the earth and the light of the world. It is the whole doctrine of the rebirth. They are not just people who listen to teaching and then repeat it and so have the effect of salt and light. No, they themselves are going to become salt and light. We have here the doctrine of the mystical relationship to and union of His people with Him [the church/Christ; bride/bridegroom], Christ dwelling in them and imparting His nature to them. Therefore, they in turn become the light of the world as He is the light of the world. So it is again a tremendous statement about Him. He is here asserting His unique deity and He is the Savior. He is asserting that He is the long expected Messiah.

Who is this Person who talks like this?

Who is this man, this carpenter from Nazareth, who asks us to be ready to suffer for Him, and tells us we shall be blessed indeed of God if we do; who says, ‘Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven’ if you suffer injustice and persecution ‘for my sake’? Who is this? And who is this who says He can make us the salt of the earth and the light of the world?

He gives the answer to the question in 5:17, where He says: ‘Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.’ Look for a moment at this extraordinary expression, ‘I am come’. He speaks of Himself and of His life in this world as being different from that of anybody else. He does not say: ‘I have been born, therefore this or that.’ He says: ‘I am come.’

Where Has he come from? He is One who has arrived in this world; He has not only been born, He has come into it from somewhere. He has come from eternity, from heaven, He has come from the bosom of the Father. The law and the prophets had said that He was to come. They said, for instance, ‘The Sun of righteousness (shall) arise with healing in his wings.’ They were always talking of someone who was to come from the outside. And, here, He says of Himself, ‘I am come.’ It is not surprising that these people as they sat and listened said: What does He mean; and who is this man, this carpenter who looks like ourselves?

He is always saying: ‘I am come.’ He is telling them that He does not belong to this realm, but that He has come into this life, and into this world, from glory, from eternity. He is saying: ‘I and the Father are one.’ He is referring to the incarnation. Listen to what He says about Himself: ‘I am come.’ This is no human teacher; this is the Son of God.

But furthermore He says that He has come to fulfil, and not to destroy the law and the prophets; which means that He has come to fulfil and to keep God’s holy law, that He is also the Messiah. He is claiming here that He is sinless, absolutely perfect.

God gave His law to Moses, but not a single human being had ever kept it—‘all the world may become guilty before God’, ‘there is none righteous, no, not one’. All the saints of the Old Testament had broken the law; none had succeeded in observing it. Yet here is One who stands and says: I am going to keep it; not one jot or one title of this law will I break; I am going to fulfil it, I am going to keep and to honour it perfectly. Here is One who claims to be sinless, to be absolutely perfect.

Not only that. He does not hesitate to claim for Himself what Paul puts in the words: ‘Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth.’ In other words, He fulfils the law by carrying it out, He honours it by absolute perfection in His own life. Yes; but He bears the punishment it gives out upon transgressors also. He has satisfied every demand of the law of God, He has fulfilled the law for Himself and others.

But He claims that he is fulfilling the prophets also. He claims that He is the One to whom all the Old Testament prophets pointed. They had been talking about the Messiah; He says, I am this Messiah. He is the One who fulfils in His own Person all the promises. Again the apostle Paul sums it up by putting it like this: ‘For all the promises of God in him are yes, and in him Amen.’ God’s promises are all fulfilled in this wonderful Person who here says of Himself that He is the fulfiller of the law and the prophets.

Everything in the Old Testament points to Him; He is the center of it all. This is the coming One, the One expected. He says all that in the Sermon on the Mount, this Sermon which we are told has no doctrine, and which people like because it is not theological! The whole doctrine of the incarnation of Christ, His Person and His death, is all here. We have seen it as we have gone through the Sermon, and we are looking at it again now.

Another great statement pointing in the same direction is the one we found in 7:21: ‘Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven.’ He does not hesitate to say that people will address Him as Lord, and that means that He is God. He says here quite calmly that people are going to say to Him, ‘Lord, Lord.’ They are saying it now, in a sense, and on that great day they will say, ‘Lord, Lord’, to Him. But the emphasis is upon the fact that they will say that to ‘me’—not to the Father who is in heaven, but to ‘me’, the One speaking there on the mountain. He does not hesitate to ascribe to Himself, and to take to Himself, the highest term used in the whole realm of Scripture for the eternal, absolute, blessed God.

He even went a step further, and announced at the end of the Sermon that He is to be the Judge of the world. ‘Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord,’ etc. Notice the repetition—‘And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.’ Yes, judgment is being committed to the Son. He is claiming that He is to be the Judge of all men, and that what matters is our relationship to Him, His knowledge of us, His concern about us and His interest in us.

As an old puritan once put it very well: ‘The One who sat there on the Mount to teach, is the One who at the end will sit on the throne of His glory and all the nations of the world shall appear before Him, and He will pronounce the judgment upon them.’ Was ever anything more astounding, more astonishing, uttered in this world? Try again to capture the scene. Look at this apparently ordinary Person, this carpenter, sitting there and saying, in effect: ‘As I am sitting here now I shall sit on the throne of eternal glory, and the whole world and the nations and all people will appear before Me, and I will pronounce judgment.’ He is indeed the Judge eternal. That’s astonishing.

That leaves us with only one more question...

What is our reaction to it all?

We are told that these people ‘were astonished at his doctrine: for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes’. We are not told that their reaction went any further than that; but we are told that they were astonished and amazed because of His manner, because of the very form of His teaching, and because of the astounding teaching itself, and especially some of these things which He said about Himself.

There are many people who are not even astonished by this Sermon. God forbid that that should be true of any of us. But it is not enough that we should merely be astonished; our reaction must go beyond astonishment. Surely our reaction as He speaks to us should be to recognize that this is none other than the Son of God Himself who has been speaking to us in the words we have considered; the very incarnate Son of God.

Our first reaction should be that we recognize again the central truth of the gospel, that God’s only begotten Son has entered into this world of time. We are not concerned here with a mere philosophy or outlook upon life, but with the fact that the preacher of this sermon was the Son of God Almighty here in the flesh.

Why did He come, why did He preach the Sermon? He has not just come to give another law. He was not merely telling people how to live, because the Sermon on the Mount is infinitely more impossible to practise than even the law of Moses, and we have already seen that there had not been a single human being who had been able to keep that. What then is the message?

It must be this. In this Sermon our Lord condemns once and for ever all trust in human endeavour and natural ability in the matter of salvation. He is telling us, in other words, that we all have come short of the glory of God, and that however great our efforts and striving from now until our death, they will never make us righteous, or fit us to stand in the presence of God.

He says that the Pharisees have been reducing the real meaning of the law, but that the law itself is spiritual. He is saying what Paul came to see and to say later: ‘I was alive without the law once; but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died’ (Romans 7:9). In other words, He is saying that we are all condemned sinners in the sight of God, and that we cannot save ourselves.

Then He goes on to say that we all need a new birth, a new nature, and a new life. We cannot live a life like this as we are by nature; we must be made anew. And what He is saying in this Sermon is that He has come in order to give us this new life.

Yes, in relationship to Him, we become the salt of the earth and the light of the world. He has come not merely to outline the teaching. He has come to make it possible. In this Sermon, beginning with the Beatitudes, He has given an account of His people. He has stated what they will be like in general, and given a more detailed account of how they will act.

The Sermon is a description of Christian people, people who have received the Holy Spirit; not of natural man striving to make himself right with God, but of God making His people anew. He has given us the gift of the Holy Spirit, the promise made to Abraham, ‘the promise of the Father’, and having received this promise, we become people conformable to this pattern.

The Beatitudes are true of all who are living the Sermon on the Mount, of all who are Christian. That does not mean that we are sinless or perfect; it means that if we look at the general tenor of our life it corresponds to this, or as John puts it in his first Epistle: ‘He that is born of God does not continue the practices of sin.’ There is this difference.

Look at a person’s life in general. As you look at the believer he conforms to the Sermon on the Mount. He wants to live it and he does his utmost to do so. He realizes his failure, but prays to be filled with the Spirit; he hungers and thirsts after righteousness, and he has the blessed experience of the promises being realized in his daily life.

This is the true reaction to the Sermon on the Mount. We realize that this was none other than the Son of God, and that in the Sermon He has been saying that He has come to start a new humanity. He is ‘the first born among many brethren’; He is ‘the last Adam’; He is God’s new Man, and all who belong to Him are going to be like Him.

It is astounding and amazing doctrine; but, thank God, we know it is the truth. We know that He died for our sins, that our sins are forgiven when we repent and believe; ‘we know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren’; we know that we belong to Him, because we do indeed hunger and thirst after righteousness.

We are conscious of the fact that He is dealing with us, that His Spirit is working within us, revealing to us our shortcomings and imperfections, creating longings and aspirations within us, ‘working in us both to will and to do of his good pleasure’.

Above all, in the midst of life, with all its trials and problems and tests, indeed amidst all the uncertainties of life and the certain fact of death and the final judgment, we can say with the apostle Paul, ‘For the which cause I also suffer these things: nevertheless I am not ashamed: for I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day’ (2 Timothy 1:12).

We can sing with confidence what the old hymns says, “On Christ the solid Rock I stand; all other ground is sinking sand.”

Friends have you committed your life to Christ?