Worst Club Ever?

Years ago, way back when I was 19 or so and was taking — let’s call it — a mandatory break from college, I worked for my family’s construction company for six months or so.

I had an idea at the time that I might like to do construction as a career. Mind you, I had that thought BEFORE I’d spent the summer pouring concrete in 95-degree heat and digging footers in 98-percent humidity.

But that’s kind of what I thought at the time, and I had a year or so of college (never mind the failing grades) under my belt, so I figured I was already on the fast track for becoming a jobsite superintendent.

So, I connected with one of our company’s superintendents, who was getting ready to start building an elementary school in Gloucester. He had floated the idea of taking me on as a foreman (or maybe assistant — it’s hard for me to remember now). And I asked him what I might need to do to make myself useful as the project got under way.

He suggested I take a month-long course at ODU on construction fundamentals and shadow him as he began the process of laying out the foundations for this huge building.

And so, I took my little class in the fundamentals of construction, and I began to help him with the light surveying that was involved in laying out the school’s footprint.

The process was pretty simple. We’d lay out a long section of wall one day, setting up the batterboards and the strings that were stretched between them to designate the inside and outside of the foundation walls.

Then, during the next day or so, I would lead a team that built the steel rebar cages that would go inside the foundation ditch that another team was digging below the strings we had laid out.

Then, the next morning, the rebar cages would be hauled over and placed inside the foundation ditch that had been dug the previous day. And then the concrete trucks would arrive, and we’d pour a long stretch of concrete footer for the foundation of that particular part of the building.

And while the concrete crew finished that part of the work, the superintendent and I would begin laying out the batterboards and string to mark the next section of foundation that would be poured a couple of days later. In this manner, we leapfrogged our way around the building for a couple of weeks or more.

Finally, one day, he asked me if I thought I was ready to do a section on my own. And, of course I had a whole four-week construction course under my belt and a whole year of unrelated partying at Virginia Tech before that, so there was no doubt in my mind that I was up to the task.

My job was to lay out the three walls that would form the exterior of the school’s library. Once I’d measured and shot my lines and set up my batterboards and tied my strings, the guy on the backhoe would come and dig the foundation ditches and we’d pour the footings the following Friday.

So, that’s what I did. And, since the architect had designed a neat little window wall that cut across the other two walls at a 45-degree angle, I got to use my greatest talent (that’s sarcastic) — math.

And that’s where things fell apart. Somehow, my application of math to the process put that window-wall about two feet inside the position it had been designed to occupy.

Which wouldn’t have been a huge problem if we’d uncovered the mistake on Wednesday, when I made it — or on Thursday, when the footer was dug, or even on Friday, before the concrete trucks had arrived.

Instead, my superintendent discovered my mistake as the concrete dried under the sun of a 100-degree day in August, just as the rest of the crew was preparing to take a break from their morning of hard work.

So, instead of a break, we spent the rest of Friday tearing out the concrete we had poured that morning, And we spent Saturday, which was supposed to have been our day off, pouring the footer where it should have been in the first place.

There are MANY reasons why I never loved construction, but this was certainly one of the top five. I never learned how much that mistake cost our company, but I can tell you that I think of that story every time I pass that school on Route 17 in Gloucester.

I was never allowed to do this kind of work on my own again, and I learned something valuable about foundations, too: If you want your building to last, you’ve got to know where the foundation is, and you’ve got to build on that foundation and not on something else.

And as we begin a new series of messages that’s I’m calling “The Church — Uncovered,” we’re going to start by looking at the foundation of the Church.

We’re going to spend this week looking at this creation of Jesus, who is its architect and its builder, and we’re going to spend a few minutes trying to work out where — or maybe who — its foundation is.

You’ll want to go ahead and turn to Matthew, chapter 16, which is one of the two places in the Gospels where we see the Greek word that’s translated as “church” in your Bibles.

Now, we’re going to pick up in verse 13 in a few moments, but let me give you some background about the Gospel of Matthew before we do.

Matthew’s Gospel was written from a Jewish perspective and for an original audience that was Jewish.

His purpose in the Gospel of Matthew was to show that Jesus was the Messiah whom God had promised in the Old Testament, and to show that this Messiah was also the king whom God had promised would reign on the throne of David forever.

So, there’s a lot of Kingdom terminology in the Gospel of Matthew. Perhaps you remember that from our study of the Sermon on the Mount.

Maybe you recall that I presented that sermon as being something like the King’s manifesto. It was His statement of what kind of people He expects His subjects to be.

So there’s this whole focus on the Kingdom of Heaven in Matthew, and there’s the related focus on Jesus as King of that kingdom.

But the first part of the Gospel of Matthew ends with Jesus facing opposition from the Jews, God’s chosen people, and beginning then to turn His attention to the Gentiles, instead.

Until this time, Jesus has been conducting His ministry, calling for the Jewish people to “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.”

But the vast majority of them — and especially the religious leaders who SHOULD have recognized who He was — did not respond. In fact, they had been hostile to their King’s message.

So, now, He would begin to set His sights on Jerusalem and on the cross that would mark the end of that journey.

But in this hinge passage, something important happens.

Let’s read it together.

Matthew 16:13–20 NASB95

Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, He was asking His disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” And they said, “Some say John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; but still others, Jeremiah, or one of the prophets.” He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter answered, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” And Jesus said to him, “Blessed are you, Simon Barjona, because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but My Father who is in heaven. “I also say to you that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of Hades will not overpower it. “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; and whatever you bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven.” Then He warned the disciples that they should tell no one that He was the Christ.

Jesus and His disciples had left the area around the Sea of Galilee, where He had conducted so much of His ministry. They were now 25 miles north, in Caesarea Philippi, a town at the base of Mount Hermon. You might remember that as the place where Israel now has a ski resort.

This was before the time of the ski resort, of course, and at that time, it was an area of Gentile influence. In fact, there’s a good chance that the place where He took them was at or near a cave where a shrine had been erected to Pan, one of the Greek gods.

Wherever they were, the Jewish crowds had not followed them, and it was probably just Jesus and the 12 disciples who were present for this exchange.

There had long been questions about just who Jesus was. The disciples had asked “What kind of man is this?” when He had stilled the Sea of Galilee on their little fishing boat.

John the Baptist, while he was in prison before being beheaded, had asked “Are you the one who was to come?”

The crowds had wondered, “Could this be the Son of David?” when He had healed the demon-possessed man who was blind and mute, but the Pharisees present there had said He was casting out demons through the power of the devil.

Now, in order to introduce the question He had for His disciples, Jesus asked who the people said He was?

And the disciples answered that some thought he was John the Baptist, raised from the dead. Some thought He was Elijah or Jeremiah, raised from the dead. And others thought He was some other prophet.

In other words, the vast majority of those who were curious about Jesus and His teaching thought He was a man of God, but they did not recognize Him for who He really was.

They had rejected the thought that He might be whom He had presented Himself to be: the true Hope of Israel, the King who would usher in His eternal Kingdom.

And so, after all this time with Jesus, all this time in which they had heard His teaching, both recorded and unrecorded, what did the disciples think about Jesus?

Indeed, not just what did they THINK about Jesus, but what were they willing to SAY about Him? “Who do you (plural) say that I am?”

And in verse 16, we see that Peter had been paying attention, even if he didn’t understand everything he’d heard.

“You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

By using the word “Christ” here, Peter demonstrated that He believed and was willing to confess publicly that Jesus was the Messiah promised to Israel. He was confessing that Jesus was the rightful king promised to reign forever on David’s throne.

He was the Savior who had been promised for Israel and the whole world, the one who would forgive sins and replace hearts of stone with hearts of flesh.

And by calling Him the Son of the living God, Peter was confessing that this man Jesus was also a deity. He is the God who exists as a Trinity, though it’s likely Peter didn’t quite understand the concept of the Trinity at this point.

And Jesus was the Son of the LIVING God, the one true God, as opposed to the dead, false gods of Caesarea Philippi. Peter was saying that Jesus was the Messiah and that He was God.

This was a great confession of faith, and it probably was shared by most, if not all of the disciples at this time. Matthew often presents Peter as the spokesman for the disciples.

And it’s pretty clear that the disciples were growing in their understanding and awareness and conviction of the reality of Jesus right throughout their time with Him, even if they sometimes said really dumb things in response to His questions.

And so, Jesus says in verse 17 that Peter is blessed. But the blessing isn’t some special treatment because of what he’d said. Instead, the blessing was the very fact that Peter could say what he did.

God had blessed Peter by revealing to him the truth about Jesus. Peter didn’t come to this understanding because he’d worked it all out in his own mind. This was a revelation that God had chosen to give him. And that, in itself, was a blessing.

And here’s where we come to the hinge. Up until now, Jesus has been talking about the Kingdom of Heaven, giving the Jews the chance to respond to Him positively and in the manner that would be correct to respond to this King of righteousness.

And what would have been the correct way for them to have responded?

The correct way for them to have responded would have been for them to repent. “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”

They were faced with the reality that the king of righteousness, that the very God of righteousness had appeared to them, ready to inaugurate His eternal kingdom here on earth.

And the only proper response would be for them to have repented of their sins and turned to Him in faith.

If they had done so, Jesus would have gone to the cross and died for their sins. And He would have been raised again on the third day. And He would have begun His reign on earth right then. Everything that was needed for this to happen was already in place.

But instead, the people had rejected their King. And so, what we see in verse 18 is that Jesus now puts the kingdom — the hope that Israel had held for a thousand years — on hold.

And He would now build something entirely new, something the Old Testament never even mentioned. He would build His church, and its focus would be primarily — though not exclusively — on the Gentiles.

Now, this doesn’t mean that He has turned His back on the Old Testament promises to the Jewish people or on the kingdom of heaven. The kingdom will be His focus when He returns with the church for His millennial reign after the Rapture and the Tribulation.

But the church is the focus of God’s work through Jesus now and until that time. And note whose church it is. It belongs to Jesus. He is the one who initiated it. He is the one who builds it. It belongs to Him. In fact, Scripture describes it as His bride.

Now, let me tell you that there is more disagreement among Bible scholars over the meaning of verses 18 and 19 than over anything else in the Gospel of Matthew.

Who or what is the rock upon which Jesus will build His church? What are the keys of the kingdom of heaven? What sort of authority did Jesus have in mind when He spoke of the binding and loosing?

And I’m going to tell you that nearly every theory that’s been put forward to answer those questions has its strengths and its weaknesses.

We just don’t know enough about the cultural context, or whether Jesus was gesturing as He spoke or if there was something else He might have said at some other time that would have clarified what is unclear to us.

And so, I’m not going to be dogmatic about what I say here. I hold my interpretation loosely.

What’s clear is that Jesus was using a play on words in verse 18. “Peter” means small rock, and the word that’s translated as “rock” means either large rock or bedrock. So, we might translate a portion of the verse like this: “You are Rocky, and upon this bedrock, I will build my church.”

And I think that what Jesus was saying was that Peter’s confession of faith was the bedrock upon which Jesus’ church would be built.

That fits with what we know about the church. The church isn’t just some voluntary association of believers.

“The church [as one commentator puts it,] does not exist because some religiously enlightened people have decided to voluntarily associate with one another to advance the study of Jesus. . . . The church begins, like faith itself, not with pious individuals, but with God, a God who chooses to deal with us as a people, a family, a nation.” [William Willimon, What’s Right with the Church?]

The church — the true church — encompasses only those who have come to Jesus in faith. That’s why we restrict church membership only to those who have made a confession of faith and been baptized.

Those are the only people who can legitimately claim to be part of the family of God. Those are the people described in 1 Peter, chapter 2, as

1 Peter 2:5 NASB95

you also, as living stones, are being built up as a spiritual house for a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.

And we living stones have, as Paul put it in Ephesians, chapter 2:

Ephesians 2:20 NASB95

having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the corner stone,

Jesus is the cornerstone around which the foundation of the apostles and their teaching was built. And their teaching is the foundation upon which Jesus builds His church.

Just as we could not build that school in Gloucester upon the wrong foundation I caused us to pour, Jesus’ church cannot be built on any foundation other than the teaching of His apostles, as revealed in His Word.

This is an important concept in lots of practical ways. From church doctrine to church governance to the way the church interacts with the fallen world and its fallen morality and sinful values, we are called to be a church that is built on the solid rock of God’s Word, rather than the sinking sands of our culture.

And as we move through this study of the church during the next few months, we’ll be looking at all of those things to see how we can practically allow Jesus to build His church on His solid foundation.

This is His church, and to the extent that we allow it to be built on His solid foundation, we can know that the gates of Hades will not overpower it.

That means that death itself will not destroy Jesus’ church. Not even His own death on Calvary’s cross, for He is alive and waiting to return to take His church to heaven for the great wedding feast.

And, having introduced the subject of the church, having planted this seed in the minds of His disciples, Jesus then returned to the subject of the kingdom of heaven in verse 19.

Please understand that the church and the kingdom are related, but they are not the same. The church hasn’t replaced the kingdom that was promised to Israel.

I think that’s what Jesus was doing in verse 19. He was making sure the disciples knew that God had neither forgotten nor turned away from His promises about that kingdom.

And I think He was telling Peter, specifically, that he would have an important position in that kingdom, one in which he will bind or forbid the things that God forbids and one in which he will loose or allow the things that God allows.

“The kingdom is here, as elsewhere in this Gospel, the kingdom to be inaugurated when the Son of Man [comes] upon the clouds of heaven. . . . The [church], on the other hand, [is] the society of Christ’s disciples, who [are] to wait for it, and who [will] enter into it when it [comes]. The Church was built upon the truth of the divine Sonship. It [is] to proclaim the coming kingdom. In that kingdom Peter [will] hold the keys which [confer] authority.” [Tom Constable, Tom Constable’s Expository Notes on the Bible (Galaxie Software, 2003), Mt 16:19, quoting Allen.]

Now, I know that’s complicated and maybe hard to understand, especially at the end of an unusually long sermon.

The main thing I want you to remember is the idea that these two verses are a hinge. Jesus has shifted from talking about the Kingdom of Heaven, because that kingdom has been put on hold as a result of the unbelief of the Jews.

Now, He has brought forth the idea of the Church as His new creation and the means by which His name will be proclaimed throughout the earth.

The church hasn’t replaced the Kingdom, but building it on the true foundation has become His work for the time being.

I’m going to close here today by reminding you what the church is not and what it is.

It is NOT a club composed of people who have decided to get together to study Jesus. It IS a community — a family — that GOD has brought together to glorify His Son in unity and love.

This has great implications for us as we consider everything from whether to participate in the work of the church or even to attend services to whether we move from one church to another in search of better programs or more dynamic speakers or music that better fits our tastes.

I want to propose to you that if God has placed you in this church, it is because He has a plan for you here. He has work for you here. We’ll talk more about this in the future, but it’s a concept I want you thinking about.

If Jesus is building His church from the living stones of those who have followed Him in faith, can we not assume that He knows where those stones should be placed?

Can we not assume that He has a plan for how each stone will be placed upon another, supporting and strengthening all around it?

You are here for a reason, brothers and sisters. Let’s discover that reason together.