Matthew 7:28-29 Amazed By Jesus

In stage productions and plays, producers usually use, at some point, focused light to help highlight certain characters on the stage for dramatic effect. Think, for instance, if you ever went to see, I never have myself, but if you ever went to see a Shakespeare play in the theatre, throughout, you would undoubtedly see light used to draw your full attention to where the show's directors wanted you to look at that time. Here, in Matthew 7 and these concluding verses, Matthew, as the evangelist, having relayed Jesus' teaching on the Sermon on the Mount to us, now pauses to cast a beam of light upon Jesus himself and draws us to consider the man behind the message. Matthew here darkens the theatre and turns on a singular beam of light to highlight Christ. We will see, as the crowds do, the amazing authority of Jesus; it ought to have the effect that we are fully tuned in and obedient to what he has to say.

As we've seen many times, Jesus is not someone that you can hear and learn about and then simply tune out, carrying on with your life as if nothing has really happened. No, indeed, Christ called people to decisive faith and obedience to his word. To obey Jesus is like a builder constructing his house upon a foundation of rock in preparation for the incoming storms. I wonder how many structures, just Thursday a week back, were exposed because of the storms for which they were not prepared. So it is with Jesus' words: to listen to him is like building a house on rock, but to not listen is like building your house on a foundation of sand, which will soon wash away.

Here at the end of Matthew 7, Matthew inserts his own supplementary challenge to any reader of his gospel by recording the responses of the people who first heard Jesus' sermon. This was a message, you see, which came with an authority as people had never heard before, and no one in their right mind would speak like Jesus; yet he spoke truthfully and powerfully, with all the authority inherent to him who is the incarnate Son of God, the Messiah King, as Matthew has shown Jesus to be.

People are always going to ask the question: "By what authority can I trust the teaching of Jesus? Why should I, or why should others, believe the message preached? Why, as Christians insist, should I now surrender my life to this Jesus if I don't know from where he came or who he is?" If I went to Invercargill this afternoon and into the mall, and I tackled a stranger to the ground and told them they are under arrest, at some point someone is going to ask, fairly quickly, "By what authority are you making this arrest?" You see, I have no authority to do such a thing. Many will believe something similar about Jesus; whoever he was, he cannot possibly have the authority to make such exclusive claims as he did. Matthew knows that our thoughts of Jesus himself will directly correspond to our thoughts of Jesus’ teaching; a low view of Christ will lead to a low view of his teaching, a high view of Christ to a high view of his teaching. So Matthew highlights Christ at the conclusion of the sermon.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones put it this way: “When we consider the Sermon on the Mount, we are never to stop with the moral, ethical, spiritual teaching; we are to go beyond all these things, wonderful though they are and vital as they are, to the person of the preacher himself.” That is what Matthew does with his beam of light cast now upon the preacher.

The Amazement Of The Crowds

Let us consider, first of all, the amazement of the crowds in verse twenty-eight. How does Matthew cast this beam of light? He begins by recording the response of the crowds. Who are these crowds that he mentions here? That is a good first question. You may remember at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, we noted that Jesus' primary audience for this sermon is those who already believe in him, it is for Christians. To them, he began to unveil the nature of the kingdom of heaven, instructing them on how to live as citizens with righteousness. Jesus gave the Beatitudes, gave an exposition of the law, and instructed believers in many ways, as we have considered over numerous weeks. So, it is a sermon primarily for those who are already Christians.

Then, especially as we come to its conclusion, Jesus began making appeals; he began making applications of the sermon, and this is where he began to address the crowds, even an unbelieving audience. You remember how we saw those words: "Enter through the narrow gate", a broad appeal to all with ears to hear. So the crowds have amassed together as Jesus taught. In Matthew 4:25, Matthew gave us record of the immense popularity of Jesus: "Large crowds followed him from Galilee and the Decapolis and Jerusalem and Judea and from beyond the Jordan." He was immensely popular, a celebrity-like figure; people would travel from all over and flock to the Lord Jesus to hear him, to see him, to be healed, and so on.

If you look at the start of Matthew 8:1, it says, "When Jesus came down from the mountain, large crowds followed him." Now, in this crowd, there would be many who did not know God, who were not yet believing in Jesus. So it is to the crowds that he said, "Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it." This is the evangelism of the Lord Jesus.

The reality of a mixed multitude in the crowd highlights, I think, a critical point here. Even for a church setting where the gospel is proclaimed repeatedly, there is usually, alongside true disciples of Christ, an unidentified number in the crowd, many who are listening, hearing, perhaps enjoying bible teaching, but they are without faith and without obedience to the word spoken, and they remain in spiritual peril. This is what the crowd so often is in the New Testament; the crowd represents a multitude of people, all with different opinions about who Jesus is and about his teaching. Yet Jesus addresses the crowd, that they through faith may shift from being merely a number in the crowd to a disciple of the Lord.

Dear friends, routinely this is why in my own preaching I do not always address you all as disciples; sometimes I will make addresses as if to a gathered crowd, with a call to exercise faith and obedience to the word preached, to repent of sin, to place your faith in Christ, for I cannot know your hearts’ true condition, and so I must appeal to it with the gospel. I cannot tell whether you truly rest in Christ, and so I appeal with the gospel and pray that God would grant illumination to the soul.

The danger is, you see, that we would be amazed by Jesus but not believing in Jesus. In the prophet Ezekiel's time, many were amazed by his teaching too. In Ezekiel 33:32-33 it says, "Behold, you are to them like a sensual song by one who has a beautiful voice and plays well on an instrument; for they hear your words but they do not practice them." In one ear and out the other. This is the undercurrent in Matthew's mention here of the crowds. Are we simply amazed by Jesus, or are we going to obey and follow Jesus? These are two different things.

The crowds are amazed; they hear the power of persuasion in the Lord's arguments, the ring of truth to it, the radical claims that he made concerning himself. But crowds are the indeterminate multitude, and many will prove to be unbelieving despite recognising Jesus' unique authority. We see such amazement at Christ in many places. In John's gospel, John 7:15 we read, "The Jews then were astonished, saying, 'How has this man become learned, having never been educated?'" The carpenter's son proved himself of such a calibre and wisdom as like anything they had ever seen or heard, a high praise from a learned culture. In Matthew 13, the crowd say, "Is this not the carpenter's son?" In other words, they're in disbelief: how could this one teach the way he does? In John 7:46, Roman officers say of him, "Never has a man spoken the way this man speaks."

People would hang off every word of Jesus in awe and amazement of the teaching they heard from him. Luke 19:47 says, "He was teaching daily in the temple; but the chief priests and the scribes and the leading men among the people were trying to destroy him, and they could not find anything that they might do, for all the people were hanging on to every word he said."

Now, people today, when they hear good preaching, will sometimes speak of it as amazing, and so they get home from church and say to their family, "Well, that was amazing preaching, wasn't it?" We know what this is like, the same phenomenon. But here we need to be stopped in our tracks, lest we become like the fickle crowds.

What was amazing about the preaching? Was it amazing because it had nice illustrations, stories, clever linguistic hooks that drew you in like a great oratory address? People will say, "What an amazing sermon, the way the illustrations came together," and all these things. Now, this in itself is not a bad thing; many godly and gifted preachers are great orators, attractive in their speaking. But if this is what it means to be truly amazed by teaching or preaching, this is a focus on externals and externalities; it is to become like the crowds, who perhaps would not really care about the content or the truth of the message so much as whether it was presented in an appealing way.

The crowds at different times found the words of Christ to wow them and amaze them, but at other times, when his message was not convenient, they took offence at him and ultimately were unmoved and unconformed to the truth.

There is another reason people might find preaching amazing: they will say they were deeply or emotionally moved by it. They hear some preaching and it seems like it strikes at the very heart of who they are; they are moved, perhaps tears well up in the eyes. This too is not always a wrong response, but again, this is common to crowds. Think of the crusades of Billy Graham, who spoke to stadiums full of people night after night. Millions of people heard the gospel and the preaching of Billy Graham. According to one report, some 2.2 million people came forward at Billy Graham gospel crusades to put their faith in Christ when invited to do so, but how many in those crowds do you think were genuinely converted to Christ? Billy himself supposedly said that he would be grateful if just five percent believed in Christ and were truly born again. What about the other ninety-five percent of the 2.2 million? They are the crowds; they are stirred up with emotion, with adrenaline, fuelled by mass psychosis, oh, they are deeply moved, enough to come forward in response to the message, but their profession is empty, it is short-lived. It is like the parable of the soils: seed planted, and then seed uprooted.

Another response people have when they claim to be amazed by preaching is a more noble-sounding response: they might say, "It was a beautiful biblical message, rich in truth." Now, again, this is not always a bad thing. I have experienced this response on numerous occasions elsewhere. I recall one time, many years ago, having preached, and within three minutes of the service closing, had three older women right by my seat telling me how wonderful a message it was and how "biblical" it was, was their language. Now, I am sure these were genuine, dear believers, but as a principle, this might just be another typical response of the fickle crowd.

In Luke 5:1 it says, "The crowd was pressing around him and listening to the word of God," but would all the crowd go on to believe in Jesus and follow him? Presented with such weighty biblical truth, and they recognise it, but did they go on to respond in belief and in faith? You see, recognition of something as being true and good and accurate is not enough; the demons can recognise such.

The question is: has the truth changed you? That is the question, not simply did it exist in a sermon, but are you changed? People, you see, can be wowed by the mere presentation of information that they perceive as true, yet remain totally unaffected by the truth. Day after day, Sunday after Sunday, always wowed, always amazed, but never changed.

Matthew is warning us, friends, as he speaks of the crowds and their amazement at the authority with which Jesus spoke, that a noble reaction is not enough.

So we have to ask the question: did this teaching amaze you? Not just because the stories and illustrations were great, not just because the emotional weight of the teaching momentarily stirred you, not simply because you appreciated that these were profound and biblical truths being presented, did they transform you, is the question. Was it truth internalised and changing the very fibres of your being? Are you now a different person than you were an hour ago, when you heard this amazing truth of Jesus Christ and the word of God?

This is exactly what James, in James 1:22, means; he says, "But prove yourselves doers of the word, and not merely hearers who delude themselves."

The Authority Of Jesus

So, the amazement of the crowds is a first heading. A second heading is this: the authority of Jesus. Verse twenty-nine, read that again, it says, "For he was teaching them as one having authority, and not as their scribes." There was something about Christ's teaching that was markedly different from anything anyone at that time, or indeed in any age, has ever heard. I'm sure that hearing the great philosophers of times past such as Aristotle or Socrates or Plato was quite a remarkable thing. We think of a more modern-day orator such as Winston Churchill, apparently, he could give a good speech. To hear Charles Spurgeon preach would have been quite the oratory experience, but even they had nothing on the authority with which Jesus Christ spoke. His message and preaching exist in a category all alone. Why? Because Christ was no ordinary man, even the crowds could detect this in the Lord Jesus; whether it changed them or not is a different thing, but they could detect that Christ taught with an authority not common to man.

This amazement at Jesus' authority is Matthew's beam of light down upon the man of the message, for this is precisely the reason why we ought to surrender, to worship, and give ourselves wholly to Christ, for rightly does every ounce and more of authority ascribed to Christ truly belong to him.

Even the scribes of Jesus' day were no match for the Lord Jesus. You see how it says at the end there that he was teaching as "one having authority and not as their scribes." The work of the scribes was to study, to interpret, and apply Jewish law to contemporary situations, typically. In Jewish tradition, scribes were essentially parrots of other people; novelty was not highly valued. Their whole teaching philosophy was based on, "Rabbi so-and-so said this, and Rabbi so-and-so said that." One author says of the scribes, "The credibility of a saying or a piece of teaching depends upon the genealogy of its tradition." How different was Christ, who cut straight through that type of thinking and instead spoke as if all the authority in the world belonged to him, which it did.

Jesus would say, "You have heard that it was said," in other words, you've heard what the scribes and Pharisees have said, "but I say to you." He didn't need to quote Rabbi so-and-so; he spoke with his own authority.

If we look again at a few points of the Sermon on the Mount, we can see powerful examples of this authority that the people detected and that we too need to recognise.

The first obvious example of the authority of Christ seen in the Sermon on the Mount is Matthew 5:11: "Blessed are you when people insult you and persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me." Here, in just a word, Jesus claims that he will be so central at the level of identity to his followers that their suffering for righteousness’ sake will be a suffering for his name’s sake. We almost miss that on first reading, don't we? This is an incredible claim and such authority, that he says these sorts of things. What a remarkable, radical claim. Jesus repeats the idea in Matthew 10:22: "You will be hated by all because of my name, but it is the one who has endured to the end who will be saved." He assumes that there will be a people who will follow him, both in his own time and in the future, who will even suffer for his name, and he calls them blessed. What authority the Lord Jesus has.

We should see how utter folly it is to believe that the Sermon on the Mount is merely scattered moral principles that can be sprinkled over your life to enhance it and that is all. No, this is a radical sermon that focuses and points us towards, and circles us back around onto, the person behind the teaching: the Lord Jesus. It is him that we need.

A second way that Jesus inserts himself into the sermon, as a show of his authority, is Matthew 5:17: "Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfil." Many might miss the shocking claim here. The question is, who have you ever met in your life who spoke like this? "I have come...", it's ludicrous, isn't it, if it's not true? That's why we say that Jesus is either a liar, a lunatic, or he is Lord. Who else do you know that said, "I have come as a fulfilment to ancient prophecy"? Not me. If Jesus were an ordinary man, we would think he is utterly mad to be speaking of himself in this way. He was speaking as one who is not just born but whose whole life is a commissioned life, a sent life, a given life, a life, he says, that occurs in relation to the law and the prophets. In other words, Old Testament revelation had as its goal and trajectory to focus on him, and he is going to fulfil it.

Others, such as the scribes, would try to expound upon the law and the prophets, and often falsely so. Jesus says that both were about him and pointed to him. In simple terms, here is a straightforward claim to himself as the Messiah, the promised Son of God.

A third way we see the authority of Christ in the Sermon on the Mount, though there are others, would be Matthew 7:21-23. In one of the applications of the sermon, he says, "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven will enter. Many will say to me on that day, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name cast out demons, and in your name perform many miracles?' And then I will declare to them, 'I never knew you; depart from me, you who practise lawlessness.'" Again, it can be easy for us to miss what is happening here. Jesus has just made himself out as the one who stands at the eternal drafting gates, as it were, for the eternal destiny of all men and women at that day of judgement that is coming. "It is me," Christ says, "that you will stand before." He is the appointed judge. He says, "Many will say to me," and he says, "I will declare to them," and then he will say, "Depart from me, you who practise lawlessness."

What is the picture that Matthew paints for us here that we need to be aware of? Let us answer this as a way of conclusion. What point of authority are we to recognise about Christ, that we this morning would not only be amazed by him as the crowd, but obedient to him as a disciple?

The point is that Jesus' authority is derived by virtue of his divinity and his Messiahship. The Old Testament scriptures, friend, are there to tell the story of the creator’s promise that he himself was going to come to save, that he might dwell with his people in a new world to come.

In Jesus, God has come in the form of a man, born of a woman, so that we can say of him: truly God, truly man. When Jesus speaks, he never offered opinions; he speaks with a divine, incontestable authority, and the same power that made even the worlds. We are to be amazed at these words of God. All that Jesus says and does reveals the word of God, and in him God himself does speak. Colossians 1:19 says, "For it was the Father's good pleasure for all the fullness to dwell in him." All throughout the gospels, we see Jesus showing us his inherent divine authority by which, in his person, he performed the works of God.

When he exercised control over the tempest storm on the sea, as I was reading the other day, with just a word, in his sovereignty, his power, and his authority is known, the tempest calms. We are to see and worship him who is God in flesh. When he said to the paralytic man, "Son, your sins are forgiven," and then miraculously healed him, he was showing his divine power and authority to forgive even sins, as only God can. When he said that the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath, he was claiming deity, for the Sabbath was ordained by God, who can exercise sovereignty over the Sabbath but the one who gave it in the first place? When he claimed that the Father had given all judgement to the Son, that the Son would be honoured as the Father, he showed us his deity. When he raised Lazarus from the dead by his own power, he showed himself to be God, who alone has authority over life and death.

Friends, when he died on a cross as our sin substitute, and he rose again on the third day, he showed us that he was the divine man. For who else could pass through death and into new life and be raised again, but that they were who they said they were?

Conclusion

So, the question I have in conclusion is: Are you amazed at Jesus? Are you amazed at Jesus? If so, be not amazed as the crowds are amazed; be amazed as a disciple ought to be amazed, which is to respond with belief and faith and obedience to him.