Matthew 11

Matthew 11:1-30

Subdivision 3. (Matthew 11:1-30.)The Separation of a Remnant. We have now the separation of a remnant to Himself, while the mass are going on to complete rejection. This we see through all this manifestation of Himself; the snore fully He is manifested, the more this rejection of Him appears: for it is just His divine glory which they refuse most utterly. But it is this also which brings out the faith of those divinely taught, the babes, conscious of their own nothingness, to whom the things of God can be declared. These are wisdom’s children who justify wisdom, even in ways that seem most opposite; while the rest reject alike whatever God may please to use in the way of witness to them. In the Lord’s words to those who listen to Him the coming grace begins to be more distinctly seen.

1. (1) First of all, we have brought before us the sufficiency and unity of the manifestation made. And this is emphasized in a message to the Baptist, who from Herod’s prison in which he is shut up, sends by his disciples to the Lord, to ask if He is indeed the Coming One, the One they had been expecting; or were they still to look for another. It is evident that, in some measure at least, doubt was assailing the mind of the Baptist. Indeed, with regard to such a matter as this, the smallest question unanswered is an agony. No doubt, he had expected in the One to whom he had borne witness, conduct in some way different from that which he had since heard of Him. It is generally and naturally said that he expected, as the mass of the nation certainly did, the Kingdom to be established in power which would put down all opposition; and yet here was he, the messenger to prepare His way, languishing in the power of an immoral usurper of the Kingdom that was Christ’s alone. But John had proclaimed Him as the Lamb of God, and evidently the Lamb of sacrifice, - nay, as taking away the sin of the world (John 1:29). How, but by suffering and death? taking he not have understood, then, that this might involve suffering for His disciples also, even as the Lord had spoken of days to come in which the Bridegroom would be taken away from them, and that then they would fast? Perhaps the reserve the Lord had hitherto maintained as to His Messiahship, and for which we may find reason in the carnal views held by the people as to it, may have, at least, prompted the desire that He would explicitly declare Himself. This seems the simplest account of the question put through his disciples. It was from the Lord Himself he sought the answer: and if he could not put this and that together, the Lord would know how to help him, and to have compassion on him. The Lord answers by referring the messengers to what they heard and saw. The signs spoken of by Isaiah (Isaiah 35:5-6) were being given before them: the blind were receiving sight, and the lame were walking; more than that, the lepers (whose uncleanness cast them out from man and from the house of God, and which only God could heal) were being cleansed, and the deaf heard - a blessed thing, when now there was so much to hear, - these were such things as the prophet had spoken of, to be fulfilled in Messiah’s days. But more, the dead were being raised: - the sign which marked out Christ as “Son of God with power according to the Spirit of holiness.”* For, although prophets had done this before, yet never as the seal of such a testimony as His, that “as the Father raiseth up the dead and quickeneth them, even so the Son quickeneth whom He will” (John 5:21). Thus now there was indeed “good news” for the poor: we may say “gospel,” for it is the same word; only we must understand that the gospel, as we think of it now, is a very different thing. Then it was that “the Son of man had power on earth to forgive sins;” now it is the precious “blood of Jesus Christ His Son” that “cleanseth from all sin” (1 John 1:7). The blood shed was the emphatic sign of His rejection by the world, as it is for us that by which we are brought to God. That death of His was not, therefore, yet preached; He was not preaching it: and though He had indeed spoken to His disciples of taking up their cross, it was only after this that He began to speak to them of His own; to the consternation of all, and to be “rebuked” by Peter for it (Matthew 16:22). When His death came, though they had been then fully warned of it, it seemed the collapse of all their hopes; and when the women declared His resurrection, “their words seemed to them as idle tales, and they believed them not” (Luke 24:11).
   Yet how sweet this gospel preached to them by the Son of God among them, and confirmed by the abundant signs of divine power working far and wide. “To the poor” also - poor in every sense - He proclaimed it; to “publicans and sinners,” as we know: One come to seek and save the “lost” - though that is not quite what we have reached yet, and as yet He is acting as “Minister of the circumcision for the truth of God, to confirm the promises made to the fathers” (Romans 15:8). Israel’s rejection of Him, without being able to destroy this as the final purpose of His love, was soon to bring about the revelation of purposes still more glorious, the display of which would be, characteristically, among sinners of the Gentiles. The Lord adds therefore, as admonition for John, but in the gentlest terms, “And blessed is he who shall not be stumbled by Me.” His reserve as to taking His title as Messiah was already the foreshadow of the blessing passing. in the meantime, from the people with whom all the Scriptures had connected it - to whom belonged “the adoption; and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service, and the promises” (Romans 9:4) - heart-break enough for a Jew, that! And He had already spoken of “days in which the Bridegroom should be taken away from them!” Here was danger, indeed, of stumbling over the stumbling-stone. The exercise as to this John could not escape: it was forced upon him by his own circumstances. But then this new beatitude was to be his also. And every honest exercise, if it be for the time an agony, will be found in the end the travail-pain of a new beatitude. (2) But thus now it is the Lord whom we find bearing witness to John, instead of John bearing witness to Him. His own words are fulfilled, “I receive not testimony from man” (John 5:34). Right and meet it is that He should be His own sufficient witness; and blessed it is to see now how, where John had brought his own testimony into question; the Lord comes forward on his behalf. What was it that the multitudes had gone out into the wilderness to look upon? in fact it was what John was that had largely drawn them out to him. Had they been thus moved by a mere reed, to be shaken by the wind? No, spite of all seeming now, they knew better.

Was it a soft luxurious man that they saw in the wilderness? It was the wrong place in which to find such. Had they not rather believed him to be a prophet? And they were not mistaken: he was that and more. For, indeed, among those merely born of women; there had not arisen a greater than this man with his strange baptism; and yet, the Lord adds emphatically, “the one comparatively little in the Kingdom of heaven is greater than he.” He does not say, “the least,” nor does the expression seem the equivalent of this and we must first of all consider in what this greatness which the Lord ascribes to John consists, before we can properly estimate the force of His words. Plainly, it cannot be that even the little one in the Kingdom of heaven can be greater morally than. John the Baptist; but then it can hardly be thought that John himself was greater in this respect than all the men that had preceded him. That is not the point of comparison: it is in the place given to him as the predicted messenger who was to prepare the way before Messiah. Certainly spiritual greatness could not be wanting in one put in such a position; but that is another thing. “All the prophets and the law prophesied until John:” they all pointed onward to the time of which John was able to say, “It is just at hand.” It was for him to change the whole character of testimony hitherto, and to sound the note of Jubilee which announced a Kingdom not of earth but of heaven, and the King Himself even at the door. And, this being his greatness, it is easy to understand that he would be in the greater position, who was in the Kingdom itself, and could say in the language of the psalmist anticipating,. this, “As we have heard, so have we seen, in the city of Jehovah of hosts, in the city of our God” (Psalms 48:8). The Lord’s words are commonly taken indeed to refer to the Kingdom in its present Christian and parenthetic character; and no one would deny that such an application could be made. But the testimony as to this was not that given by the Baptist, nor was it yet given when these words were spoken. The Kingdom in this form only began to be spoken of, and in parabolic utterance, when once it was clear that Israel had indeed rejected Him. And that time was now close at hand, and of course foreseen by the Speaker here, but not yet made definitely plain, even to disciples. Every thing would indicate to us that the Lord is declaring the blessedness of that of which all the prophets prophesied, and which John himself had announced, and when Israel will be lifted up to a greatness, which has never yet been paralleled in all the history of that favored nation. That they then put it away from them does not in the least affect this application which relieves all difficulties at once, and yet leaves room for another application. This must, however, as I believe, be a secondary one. The next words of the Lord have more real difficulty than those preceding them. They have been taken in opposite ways: the “violent,” who seize upon the Kingdom having been thought to refer to the opposition of the scribes and Pharisees, as if they were forcibly taking possession of it but this is hardly possible as the meaning of the words. “Seize upon it” they could not, though they could obstruct the way of those who were seeking to enter. But their opposition compelled men to violence who would possess themselves of it. As yet, indeed, it was only preached, or presented in the person of the King, and not set up; but the adversaries and those who laid hold of it as thus proclaimed were being distinguished. Until John there had only been the prophesying of what was yet at a distance; John was in fact, if men would receive him, the Elias who was to come. Elias then had come and gone: his “days” could be spoken of as past already. So urgent was the call, then: he that had ears at all must now give ear. 2. The Lord goes on to speak of the way in which, in fact, the senseless generation to which God had thus been speaking had treated the divine appeal that had been made to them. They were merely like children in the midst of the serious business going on around them, idling away their time in mocking the realities of life. They trifled in their pleasure, they trifled with sorrow, even with that which was upon man for his sins, and carried him away from both his pleasures and his sorrows. They would have had John dance to their piping, and Jesus and his disciples beat their breasts to their idle dirge. The ways of God never suited them; if John came in the way of righteousness and so with his call to repentance, they said he had a demon - would drive us among the tombs.

If the grace of God in Christ came among them as not shunning contact, but eating and drinking even with the sinners whom it had come after to win them to the Giver of all good they knew not, then they reviled it as licentiousness, and the Saviour as fit company for those whose need had brought Him to their help. No way would suit them that divine love could take; while wisdom’s children justified her in all her ways. So then they but turned the mercies shown them into occasions of judgment and self degradation. Tyre and Sidon would have repented, had they seen the glorious things which Chorazin and Bethsaida had beheld unmoved. Sodom would have remained to that day, if it had had the privileges of favored Capernaum. But therefore the judgment of Tyre and Sidon and of Sodom would be lighter in the day of judgment, than that of Israel’s cities. Capernaum, the city of His choice, had come near to heaven by the Presence which indeed makes heaven for those that have received His grace. It would sink down under the weight of its rejection of Him to a mere abode of death and desolation.* And such it has long been; whether the identification of its site be correct or not.
3. The Lord turns from it all, to approve, spite of the sorrow that filled His heart, the Father’s perfect ways. It was right to hide from the world’s wise and prudent what to babes He could reveal. This is not hiding anything from men as men, but from men that cleave to their own wisdom, - are wise enough to judge God, but not to judge themselves. In that condition it is impossible that He and they should come together. It is a first necessity that God should have His place - should be God; and therefore man be the puny creature that he is, a babe indeed before Him. If there be true wisdom, he will find it no hardship to take his place as this before the Lord of heaven and earth: and here is the condition of all true blessing. Here, then, was the Son of the Father; Himself the Repository of all blessing: all things in His hand, whose very Person was to man an inscrutable mystery, before which all the pride of man must humble itself; but a mystery of grace in which as nowhere else God is revealed. The Son makes known the Father, - He, and He alone. We find here, beyond all that had been predicted as to Messiah, the glory which is not, so to speak, officially, but personally His. It passes knowledge, and yet it is for us to know: it is not God shrouded in the darkness, but the glory of the Light; inaccessible, though most accessible; an infinite fullness, in which we are filled up. Here we need but capacity to receive; emptiness in ourselves, not fullness; the “babe’s” capacity to draw from and live upon Another, and to such need it is that He wills to reveal Himself, and in revealing Himself to reveal God - Lord of heaven and earth, and yet the Father, for the “babe” to call upon as such. Practically rejected already by the people to whom He came, He appeals, then; to these needy ones wherever they may be - to those who have found the world but a weary place, in which those laboring" after satisfaction only find, in proportion to the eagerness of search, the heavier weight of disappointment - He appeals to these to come away from this fruitless labor to Himself for rest. He will give rest. The responsibility of fully satisfying them shall be His own. In this way, He is practically outside of Israel: for wants of this kind are not the birth-right privileges of the chosen nation. He, too, is more and higher than a mere King of the Jews; as His call and offer show, by the character of those invited and by the freeness of the gift, that it is not law but grace that He is declaring. But He is a King; and in submission to Him all hope for man is found. He gives rest, but not to those going on in rebellion. Seeking and following one’s own will, no rest is practicable it would be rest in sin. “Take My yoke upon you,” He says, “and learn of Me, for I am meek and lowly in heart; and ye shall find rest unto your souls.” What an example for our imitation! When God raised up a leader for His people of old, to bring them out of Egypt and into the land, He gave them one after this pattern: “the man Moses was very meek above all men that were on the face of the earth” (Numbers 12:3). That was God’s choice for a ruler of His people. But now here is the One to whom all things are delivered, and how perfectly does He exemplify this character! Maker and Lord of all, He has come down among men as one that serveth: doing, throughout, His Father’s will, and learning what obedience is, in a strange path of human suffering. Well may we learn such a lesson from such a Teacher! and, submitting ourselves to such a yoke as He will impose, find rest from the unrest of our own self-will! Some think of His yoke here, as if it were a yoke He had borne that He gave us, or as if we shared it with Him. But the “red heifer” is His picture, “upon which never came yoke” (Numbers 19:2): the doing of His Father’s will was never that to Him. For a yoke implies restraint; and then there must be something to be restrained: and this for us is true, as for Him it could not be. He speaks both of a yoke and of a burden; but the yoke is not that of the law, but a gentle as well as salutary one; and His burden is light.