FCAP

9-Trained for the Kingdom

9- Trained for the Kingdom

We have already studied the last of these parables of the kingdom so perhaps you thought we were through with this passage. But Jesus added a very revealing postscript, or epilogue, which is of extreme importance. Without it our understanding of this great passage would be incomplete. Let's begin with our Lord's words in verse 51. He asks his disciples,

"Have you understood all this?" They said to him, "Yes." And he said to them, "Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old" (Matthew 13:51,52).

Jesus prefaces this most remarkable statement with a question: "Have you understood this?" We are almost startled by the disciples' answer; very naively and ingenuously they simply reply, "Yes." Without any questions, without a word of explanation, without a single reservation on their part they say, "Yes, we have understood you." Our Lord goes on, then, to show them something very remarkable about themselves. And since we also are related to him as disciples, just as they were, what he says applies to us as well.

YOU ARE SCRIBES

The Lord uses a seemingly incongruous term to describe his disciples at this point. He says, "Therefore," that is, because you say you understand this, "every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a householder" He says his disciples are scribes. That is startling, because the scribes were enemies of Jesus! As the gospel accounts reveal, there were three classes of people who opposed our Lord's ministry and who were constantly throwing obstacles in his path. There were the chief priests, and the rulers (members of the Sanhedrin, the ruling council), and the scribes. These three groups continually tried to trap Jesus in his own words in order to get him into trouble with the Roman authorities. The scribes were particularly persistent in coming to him with questions designed to trick him. They were the ones who constantly tried to stir up the people against him. Yet when our Lord comes to the close of this message he says to his disciples, "You are scribes who have been trained for the kingdom of heaven."

We need to reach back into the Old Testament books of Ezra and Nehemiah to find out who the scribes were in history. Ezra was the first of the scribes. He was a leader among the remnant of the Jews who returned to Jerusalem from Babylon after the Captivity. The first arrivals had found the city of Jerusalem in utter ruins; the temple was completely destroyed. The Jews were authorized to rebuild the temple and the city and especially to restore the worship of God in the temple. But first, the spirit of the people had to be built up. To do that Ezra took the Law of Moses and began to teach the people out of the Law. Chapter 8 of Nehemiah records that a pulpit of wood was built for Ezra. (This, by the way, is the first time a pulpit appears in Scripture.) Standing upon it he began to speak to them from the Scriptures, to interpret the Law of Moses, explaining what it meant.

That was the beginning of the ministry of the scribes. At first it was a very helpful ministry. But men soon came in who carried on the form of this ministry but whose words were rigid and narrow and whose interpretive opinions were unsupported by the Scriptures. Thus the scribes, who began as authoritative interpreters of the Law, became a group of legalistic, self-righteous teachers, as our Lord found them in his day.

Nevertheless, Jesus uses this very word and says, "You disciples are scribes. You are to be authoritative interpreters of the word of God. You are like men trained in the kingdom of heaven." In other words, the disciples of Jesus Christ, including all believers everywhere, are men and women who are being taught how God works in the affairs of men. We are learning, gradually, the secrets of the divine activity behind the scenes of history, and behind the personal events in our own lives. That is what a scribe is for. He is to understand, to be trained, and to be discipled in the secrets of the kingdom of heaven.

How desperately such scribes are needed today! I observe people getting into all manner of arguments because they do not understand what God is doing. But it is the business of Christians to understand life. That is what Jesus is saying to his disciples. These are people who are being trained for the kingdom of heaven, which means they are being trained to see what God is doing. The kingdom of heaven is God at work in the affairs of men, and the disciples are being told how to perceive what he is doing and understand it. It is the business of Christians to learn how to live realistically and with increasing success. We are to learn how to cope with life and handle its problems through an increasing understanding of God's processes at work in our lives.

THE WORLD IS WATCHING

I like to stress this because I find so many people who think becoming a Christian is just a way to get to heaven when you die. Thank God, it does include going to heaven. That is kind of a fringe benefit you receive as a Christian, and there is a great future ahead for believers. But that is not why God has called you now to be a Christian. Or, to put it another way, that is not why he has left you here. He has left you to learn how to live. We are given the same sort of struggles and problems common to men and women who are not Christians, but our task is to learn how to solve them. When non-Christians look at our lives they ought to be able to see the problems increasingly being solved. That is what gives them the confidence to believe that the message we preach is a genuine message, a message of reality and truth.

If, on the other hand, as has been happening so much in the last decade, non-Christians looking at Christians see nothing but the same miserable set of problems that they themselves are struggling with, but unsolved, they have a right to wonder what difference Christianity makes. If they see Christian homes torn with strife and bickering, quarreling and fighting, if they see marriages split right down the middle and Christians getting divorces, if they see sexual immorality prevailing in Christian lives as much as in non-Christian, then they are quite justified to ask us, "What is your message for? What does it do? Why should we be interested ? You're not doing any better than we are."

That is why the Scriptures always stress that Christianity consists of far more than merely believing a set of doctrines or creeds; it is demonstrating a life. Anything short of that is an abortive and distorted picture of Christian life, and the world is constantly watching. What Jesus is teaching his disciples here at the close of this great message is that this transformation of life is not a single act of magic. It is not accomplished immediately upon the conversion of an individual. It begins there, but that is only the beginning. It is not accomplished, for example, by going forward at a Billy Graham Crusade and receiving Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. That is the way to begin, and your life will undoubtedly show an immediate change for the better in some ways. You will indeed experience a kind of peace and forgiveness that you have never known before, which is a real cause for rejoicing and thanksgiving. But that is not the end; it is just the beginning!

This is what so few Christians seem to understand. When you become a Christian, you are introduced into a continual transforming process which ought to exhibit increasingly the healing and the wholeness of life. We are all in that process. Nobody ever arrives at the end of it in this life. But it ought to be evident that visible and continual progress is being made.

When the Lord speaks to his disciples after revealing to them the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, the question he asks them is very important because it marks the beginning of that process. He asks them, "Do you understand what I've been saying?" Obviously, this is the place to begin. How can we hope to know what life is all about unless we understand something about it?

Everyone of us has experienced the fact that life is filled with much confusion and delusion. Many times we cannot distinguish what is true from what is false. We are offered many things which we consider to be filled with promise, and we hope they will do something for us. The world around us is constantly urging us to try them, telling us that we will be denying ourselves if we don't. So we try them and discover that the promises are empty. They do not deliver. We have grasped cobwebs. Life is a continual process of trying things which seem to offer success and help only to find out that they are absolutely phony promises. And so we end up disenchanted and disillusioned with life.

What we need, obviously, is understanding. We need a way to find out about these things without having to try everyone of them. We need a way to know the difference between the true and the false, the phony and the real, without investing most of our lives in the process. That is exactly what our Lord came to give us. In his First Letter John says, "And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding" (1 John 5:20). That is the great theme of the good news of the gospel! It is a faithful revelation to us of the way things really are. God has set life up on the foundation of the truth as it is in Jesus. And it is going to be that way whether we accept it or reject it, whether we like it or not. Those facts are going to stand unshakeable. That is what Jesus meant when he said, "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my word shall never pass away." Why? Because his word is fact, it is utter reality.

You know how facts are. You can attack them and ignore them and skirt around them and try to forget them. But when you get all through, there they are staring you right in the face. No matter how you have tried to deceive yourself about them, you cannot get by with it forever. Ultimately, you must turn around, after going down many and many a blind alley, and come back and look the facts squarely in the face and agree, "Yes, that is the way things are. I can't change it." That is what Jesus has come to tell us. That is what the Word of God is all about. It is the revelation of things the way they really are. To me the glory of being a Christian is that I do not have to go through all the agonizing pain of trying out everything that comes along. I can find out about it by the Word.

UNDERSTANDING THE DEFINITIONS

That is why Jesus says, "Do you understand these things?" That is where it begins. There must be a clear understanding that what God is saying is true and that you know what he means. And the disciples answer very naively, "Yes." I don't think they were being dishonest. They were just like we are. They meant that they had an intellectual apprehension of the words that he used. They knew the meaning of the symbols he employed. So they said, as perhaps you are now saying after studying through these parables with me, "Yes, we understand them. We know what you meant. We know that when you were talking about the pearl of great price, you were referring to the church. When you were talking about the hidden treasure, you meant the nation Israel. We know that the mustard seed represents the whole enterprise of Christendom in the world today, growing into power and splendor and prestige among men. Yes, we understand these things. "

But as you watch these disciples, they reveal that they do not understand what he meant. Their actions soon show that they have only a very limited and shallow understanding of what he was talking about, just as we do. We can easily identify with them. Suppose somebody asked you, "Do you understand beauty?" How foolish you would be to say, "Yes." Who understands beauty or love or death or life? These are but words. We may understand the definitions of the words, but who really understands the subjects? None of us.

These disciples remind me of the boy who was not paying much attention in his physics class. Noticing this, his professor suddenly asked him a question: "Jack, will you tell me what electricity is?" The boy, caught unaware, did not even hear the question. But trying to seem sharp, he said, "Well, sir, I'm sorry. I had the answer on the tip of my tongue just a moment ago but it has escaped me right now." And the professor said, "What a pity. What a pity! The only man in the history of the world who has ever known what electricity is, and he's forgotten it already!" That is the position the disciples are in.

But Jesus goes on to show them that a deeper process is necessary for real understanding. He says that this process consists of two elements. Everyone who is being trained in the kingdom of heaven, man or woman, boy or girl, whoever is learning to recognize how God works in human life, is going to have to go through this process. He will be like a householder, a home owner, who takes new and old things out of his treasury. That sounds very much like the description of a garage sale, but that is not what our Lord has in mind. The householder is the head of the house. He is an authoritative figure. Jesus is the only one in the Scriptures who ever uses this term for a householder. In Greek the word is oikodespotes--house-despot, house director. He says that every disciple who is learning the process of life is like a man who is the head of a home and who is constantly taking out of his resources two kinds of things--new things and old things--and putting them together.

WHAT'S NEW?

What are these new and old things? Well, since Jesus is talking about life, as he always does, you can see immediately what they are. The things that are new are the constantly changing experiences of our lives. Everyone of us comes each day into new and fresh experiences. Right now I am experiencing certain things that I have never experienced before because I have never before been the age I am now.

And you are running into new experiences. Perhaps you are starting out right now with the experience of marriage. You have never had that relationship before; it is brand new. Or you are beginning parenthood. You have never had a child before, and no matter how many millions have gone through it before you, it is all fresh and new to you. If you are recent graduates of school, you are starting out in a new relationship with the world which you have never had before. Life is made up of new things.

Ah, yes, but there are also old things. The old things are the abiding things, the eternal, unalterable principles, the unchanging relationships which never have varied for all of human time but remain the same forever. There are things like that. The nature of God is one. Human nature never changes either. Basic family relationships--fathers with children, brothers with sisters--never change. There are issues that never change. Evil and good remain the same. Laws of morality and physics never change; they abide forever.

Perhaps you have heard the story of a man who went to see an old music teacher who was a friend of his. When he knocked on the door, his old friend greeted him. And the man, in the flippant way we moderns often do, said, "Hi! What's the good news for today?" The old music teacher didn't say a word. He just went back into the room, picked up a little rubber hammer, and struck a tuning fork that was hanging there. As the note sounded throughout the room, he said, "That is 'A'. Now, that was 'A' five thousand years ago and that will be 'A' five thousand years in the future. The soprano across the hall sings off-key. The piano downstairs is out of tune. The baritone upstairs flats his high notes. But," he said, striking the tuning fork again, "that is 'A', and that, my friend, is the good news for today!"

And that is true, isn't it? There are fundamental things which have never changed. One of the satanic lies that is being foisted upon our searching, deeply feeling generation is that there is nothing which remains unchanged, that everything is relative. That is a lie! There are great things which never have changed and never will change. As long as the universe is here, and even beyond that time, as long as God exists, there are things that never will change-things old. And the business of life, the process which will make you an authoritative interpreter of life so that people will listen to your words and heed what you say, is constantly to discover how to take the things old and the things new--the changing experiences of your life and the unchanging, eternal truth of God--and bring them together.

PUTTING THEM TOGETHER

Life itself will teach you some of the old things. You do not need a Bible to discover some of them. But the great place where the revelation of things old is found is in the Word of God. There you can learn what is real and what you can count on, what will not disappear or fold under you when you put your weight upon it. The business of life is to understand these things. Jesus is saying that you can start with an intellectual grasp of them, but you will never understand them until you put the two together-things new and things old. Then you will understand life. Then you will be trained for the kingdom of heaven.

You know how this can happen. Perhaps the order may vary. Sometimes it is the new which illustrates and explains the old. Sometimes, right in the middle of some kind of experience or after we have emerged from it, we suddenly realize that a passage of Scripture is being illuminated so that for the first time we understand what the old has said. It has come alive to us. And we never forget that lesson. We may have read that passage repeatedly for years, but it didn't seem to say anything much to us until our experience, the new thing, explained the old thing.

Our family has been discussing certain family needs, including the needs of children to be loved and accepted and given a sense of self-appreciation, a sense of their own value. These must be supplied by parents. Children are designed to learn from their parents the need for responding to love and the need for evaluating their lives and seeing themselves as persons of worth who have a place in God's program. It is the parents' task to make this known to their children, to help them to see themselves as appreciated and loved. This kind of relationship between parents and children is designed to lead the children on to God, so they come to know and trust him as an unseen Father because they have come to know and trust the father they see.

As we were discussing this, someone asked, "Well, what if this doesn't happen? What if fathers and mothers don't show this kind of love? Or what if an accident occurs and they are gone and the child is left homeless, an orphan, and no one is there to teach him; then what? Can he learn it directly from God?" And immediately there came flashing into my mind a verse from Psalm 27: "When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up." I understood something about that which I have never understood before. God does not intend to teach children about himself directly when they have fathers and mothers who can teach them about him. His business is to work out this relationship with the fathers and mothers so that the children can learn through them. It is unlikely that a child will really learn how to trust and love God as long as his parents are there and could teach him about God but are not doing so. This passage came clear to me, then, and along with it all the great promises of his concern which God gives throughout the Old Testament. He promises to be a father to the fatherless, a husband to the widow, and to meet such needs where there is no human person to do so.

TURN TO THE OLD

But more often it is the old which unveils and unravels the new. You encounter an experience in which you don't know what to do. You are under pressure, being torn, and everything is going wrong, so you begin to ask, "What's wrong? What should I do?" That is the time to turn to the old, to let the old explain the new, to apply to life the great principles and teachings of the Scriptures and, as the old begins to unravel the new, that problem will begin to be solved.

As a pastor, I have seen this work so frequently. So many times I have heard someone say, "I don't know what's wrong with my marriage!" But then, as the husband learns from the Scriptures that a husband's role is to give himself to his wife, to communicate with her, to talk to her, to open up his life and let her in, to let her see what his needs and responses are, to share with her, the marriage begins to heal. That is because the principles undergirding the relationship of marriage are fundamental and unchanging.

Or I have seen the wife begin to understand from the Scriptures that her role is to stop trying to manipulate and maneuver behind the scenes, to stop forcing her husband to do things by means of those subtle, quiet little ways which husbands call nagging. She is to begin to trust her husband--not in everything, that cannot be done at first--but in some things, and in little ways she is to begin to trust her husband's leadership and follow him. And suddenly she discovers that the marriage begins to heal. Why? Because the old has solved the problem of the new.

This happens in quarrels. Jesus' fundamental law for handling quarrels between human beings is that you must begin with yourself. "First, first, remove the beam that is in your own eye, then you will see clearly how to help your brother." Yet we always try to turn it around, don't we? We want them to change. "If they'll do this, then I'll do that." But it will never work on that basis, never. For all eternity, if you try to work out a difficult relationship on that basis, it will never work. But let the old reveal the new, and things begin to work out.

Fears: How many people are afraid today! The answer to fear is faith. But it begins small, in little ventures, not in big, sudden leaps into an unknown future. Rather, the building of faith begins in little testings of the reality of God, trying him out and seeing that he can be depended upon, and then moving on further. Gradually fear begins to fade as faith takes over, and love is born, for perfect love casts out fear.

That is what Christianity is all about. It is a life-healing process. It is designed to change us and make us whole. Apart from visible evidence of that wholeness, we have nothing to say to the world around. They must see this healing taking place in our midst. Jesus says that you can never speak with authority, you can never be a scribe, interpreting the law, merely by having a "head knowledge" of the doctrine of Scripture. Authority will come only as you have undergone the process of taking things old and things new and putting them together. Out of that experience you can say, "Let me share with you a lesson God has taught me. I got the clue from the Word; I began to apply it to my situation, and this is what happened. God has healed, and I want to share this with you." That is the kind of Christianity to which the world listens and responds.

Prayer: Our heavenly Father, we ask you to teach us from your Word in such a way that we gain not only a mental understanding of the doctrine but the actual manifestation of it in practice in our lives. Heal us, Lord, by your marvelous, powerful Word which will always accomplish that purpose for which you have sent it. Help us to take these great things that are old and put them together rightly with the things that are new, and thus learn how to be true scribes in the kingdom of heaven. We ask in your name, Amen.

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