From Matthew 28:16-20 / The Final Word

This is our last look into the Gospel according to Matthew. And it ends so wonderfully with Jesus’ appearance, and His commission to the disciples.

Note first: The very first thing Jesus does, is fulfill a promise. On the night of His passion, after the “last supper”, He told the disciples that they would all fall away because of Him that night and that the “Shepherd” would be struck. “But after I am raised up, I will go before you into Galilee.” (26:32) They had no idea what that meant at the time, but now, after the women leaving Jesus’ tomb carried the same message to them – it made some sense.

Now this is the way it is with so much of the Lord’s dealings with us. He often uses promises as proof. It is a dynamic we see throughout the Old Testament and it remains to this day. Why? Because it is the foundation of faith – believing what He has said is true, and acting accordingly. We see this most pointedly in Gen. 15, containing that most famous phrase: “he believed the Lord, and he counted it to him as righteousness.”

When, in Gen. 15:8 Abraham asks how he is to know for sure that he will possess the land God had promised him – God has him offer a particular sacrifice and then presents him with – a promise: “Then the LORD said to Abram, “Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four hundred years. But I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions. As for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you shall be buried in a good old age. And they shall come back here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.”

That’s it! A solemn promise. No more “proof” is offered. Faith grasps the promise, trusting the promisor. And this is the very same basis upon which the Gospel rests. We believe the promise that those who trust the words and works of Christ and rest the whole of our confidence in Him and His saving work on Calvary. We trust His substitution. That His sacrifice for sin on our behalf is alone sufficient to reconcile us to the Father. That He would send the Holy Spirit after His ascension and that He will come again to take us to Himself. We believe Him – and we are saved from the wrath of God. And we live in such a way as to demonstrate these promises to be the truth.

Following that earliest of patterns, Jesus promised them He would meet them in Galilee after He had risen, and so He did.

We can trust Him to fulfill EVERY promise.

Note second: While some of the Disciples immediately worshiped Him, some also had some doubts.

Just what those doubts may have been, the text does not make clear, and speculation is fruitless. What is wonderfully clear is that in simple obedience to go out and meet Him according to His promise, irrespective of their doubts – He still met them there.

Genuine Believers are not without their doubts. Sometimes we are confused. Faith can be weak, and yet be genuine faith. Listen to the words of John Rogers penned in 1634 – “Weak faith is true faith,—as precious, though not so great as strong faith: the same Holy Ghost the Author, the same Gospel the instrument…“If it never proves great, yet weak faith shall save; for it interests us in Christ, and makes Him and all His benefits ours. For it is not the strength of our faith that saves, but truth of our faith,—nor weakness of our faith that condemns, but the [lack] of faith; for the least faith lay[s] hold on Christ, and so will save us. Neither are we saved by the worth or quantity of our faith, but by Christ, who is laid hold on by a weak faith as well as a strong. Just as a weak hand that can put meat into the mouth shall feed and nourish the body as well as if it were a strong hand; seeing the body is not nourished by the strength of the hand, but by the goodness of the meat.” Ryle, J. C. Holiness: Its Nature, Hindrances, Difficulties and Roots. William Hunt and Company, 1889, p. 182.

Don Carson supplies a most useful illustration regarding this principle.

“Supposing at the time of the first Passover, on Passover night, you have two Jews with the remarkable names Smith and Brown. Smith says to Brown, “Have you killed a Passover lamb yet and daubed your two doorposts and lintel with the blood of the Passover lamb?”

“Of course,” Brown says. “Moses has declared that the angel of death is going through the land tonight and anybody who doesn’t have the blood from the Passover lamb daubed on the doorposts and the lintel is going to lose their firstborn.” Smith says, “I know what Moses has said. I’ve daubed the blood as well, but you got to admit, there have been a lot of strange things that have gone on here the last little while.

Flies, frogs, water to blood, and all of that. I’ve only got one son. This is pretty shocking stuff. How is the angel going to tell that he shouldn’t take out my son?” Brown says, “Well, you have to trust what God has said through Moses. What God has said through Moses is if you kill a Passover lamb and put the blood on the doorposts and on the lintel then the angel will pass over. That’s why we call it a Passover lamb, for goodness’ sake. So don’t worry! If you’ve done what Moses said, don’t worry.”

Smith says, “That’s all right for you to say. You’ve got six kids already. You can afford to lose one. But in my case, it’s the only one. I’m really worried.” That night, the angel of the Lord passes through the land. Which one loses his son? The answer, of course, is neither. Because the condition is not made on the tenacity of the faith or the intensity of the faith or the sincerity of the faith or the maturity of the faith but on the object of the faith. _{Carson, D. A. 2016. “Revelation—Questions & Answers.” In D. A. Carson Sermon Library. Bellingham, WA: Faithlife.}

Yes, the faith of some of those was weak at first – but they still came. And so they still saw the resurrected Christ and still received the same commission to carry His gospel to the nations.

Praise God for His mercy toward us even in our weaknesses!

Note third: The wonder, clarity, simplicity and specificity of the Gospel commission.

Rooted first and foremost in Jesus’ cosmic authority – all authority in Heaven and on Earth –

1 – Go! Do not keep this to yourselves. Call upon everyone everywhere to become my Disciples.

2 – Make Disciples. Do not just tell them the good news of salvation wrought at Calvary – call them to give themselves to Me, to bow to My authority, to bring their lives into line with My eternal plans and purposes – to serve Me as Lord and love me as Savior. To come to know Me. To listen to My teaching. To trust Me. Don’t make them your disciples. Don’t bring them into a movement. Make them MY disciples.

3 – Make disciples of ALL nations. This is a global Gospel. The Gospel call is as broad as the human race.

Alexander MacLaren preaching on Eph. 3 writes: “What, Then, Is The Breadth Of That Love It is as broad as humanity. As all the stars lie in the firmament, so all creatures rest in the heaven of Hi-love. Mankind has many common characteristics. We all suffer, we all sin, we all hunger, we all aspire, hope, and die; and, blessed be God! we all occupy precisely the same relation to the divine love which lies in Jesus Christ. There are no step-children in God’s great family, and none of them receives a more grudging or a less ample share of His love and goodness than every other. Far-stretching as the race, and curtaining it over as some great tent may enclose on a festal day a whole tribe, the breadth of Christ’s love is the breadth of humanity.

And it is universal because it is divine. No human mind can be stretched so as to comprehend the whole of the members of mankind, and no human heart can be so emptied of self as to be capable of this absolute universality and impartiality of affection. But the intellectual difficulties which stand in the way of the width of our affections, and the moral difficulties which stand still more frowningly and forbiddingly in the way, have no power over that love of Christ’s which is close and tender, and clinging with all the tenderness and closeness and clingingness of a human affection, and lofty and universal and passionless and perpetual, with all the height and breadth and calmness and eternity of a divine heart.

And this broad love, broad as humanity, is not shallow because it is broad. Our love is too often like the estuary of some great stream which runs deep and mighty as long as it is held within narrow banks, but as soon as it widens becomes slow and powerless and shallow. The intensity of human affection varies inversely as its extension. A universal philanthropy is a passionless sentiment. But Christ’s love is deep though it is wide, and suffers no diminution because it is shared amongst a multitude. It is like the great feast that He Himself spread for five thousand men, women, and children, all seated on the grass, ‘and they did all eat and were filled.’

The whole love is the property of each recipient of it. He does not love as we do, who give a part of our heart to this one and a part to that one, and share the treasure of our affections amongst a multitude. All this gift belongs to every one, just as all the sunshine comes to every eye, and as every beholder sees the moon’s path across the dark waters, stretching from the place where He stands to the centre of light.

This broad love, universal as humanity, and deep as it is broad, is universal because it is individual. You and I have to generalise, as we say, when we try to extend our affections beyond the limits of household and family and personal friends, and the generalising is a sign of weakness and limitation. Nobody can love an abstraction, but God’s love and Christ’s love do not proceed in that fashion. He individualises, loving each and therefore loving all. It is because every man has a space in His heart singly and separately and conspicuously, that all men have a place there. So our task is to individualise this broad, universal love, and to say, in the simplicity of a glad faith, ‘He loved me and gave Himself for me.’ The breadth is world-wide, and the whole breadth is condensed into, if I may so say, a shaft of light which may find its way through the narrowest chink of a single soul. There are two ways of arguing about the love of Christ, both of them valid, and both of them needing to be employed by us. We have a right to say, ‘He loves all, therefore He loves me.’ And we have a right to say, ‘He loves me, therefore He loves all.’ For surely the love that has stooped to me can never pass by any human soul.

What is the breadth of the love of Christ? It is broad as mankind, it is narrow as myself.”  _{MacLaren, Alexander. 2009. Expositions of Holy Scripture: Ephesians. Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software.}

4 – Baptizing them with the full authority of the triune Godhead. Baptizing for the purpose of identifying oneself as a disciple of Christ. And beware – using the Triune “Father, Son and Holy Spirit” is not some magic formula, as though the words somehow confer something. The idea is that the Triune God is giving His Church His own full authority to make disciples and baptize accordingly.

5 – Teaching them. Teaching them what? Not our opinions, ideas and pet concepts – teaching them to order their lives in accordance with all the JESUS has commanded. What He has spoken. And where do we find that? Only in His Word. Only in the Bible. Because He alone has all authority, it is His Word which conveys that authority, we do not. We have no authority but to call men to obey Christ’s Word. How this principle would protect the Church from abusers of all kinds. No man’s conscience is ever to be bound by us – only by Christ and His Word.

6 – Never forget, I am with you – as long as this time before my return lasts. Christ abides in and with His Church. In all places, at all times and in every generation. So we see Him in the Revelation, walking in the midst of His Churches, however flawed and in need of correction. We are not freelancers free-wheeling it. He is with us. Both to comfort, guide and discipline as needed.

All this being said – now go.

Holy Spirit, fill us and illumine us as we do. God your Gospel success in the hearts and minds of men everywhere. To God in Christ be all the glory, both now and forever more. Amen.