The Beginning Of The End – Part 2
The Real Cost of Discipleship Revisited
Matthew 16:21-28
If you knew that your time on earth was short – say, just a few months left. How would that change the way you lived? What would you do or say differently?
Most of us would probably put our affairs in order, making sure that the burden of our passing was as close to not being a burden on our loved ones as we could possibly make it. We would try to make sure that all of the loose ends were taken care of. We would probably have some things to say to the people in our lives as well.
We would probably speak very openly and honestly to those we love about the things we want them to know – how much we love them, how sorry we are for the things that we have done or said were wrong or hurtful, how thankful we are for them and how important it has been for them to be in our lives. We would probably try to reconcile with those we have had broken relationships with, especially family members. And, those of us sitting here today would also most likely share with everyone we came in contact with just how important it is for them to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
Several years ago, I was on staff with a fellow pastor who had been suffering with diabetes and its ill effects for most of his life. He was a single dad with two sons who were the same ages as two of my boys. His name was Mike, and we were close in age.
Mike had lost an eye and was undergoing kidney dialysis once a week. That eventually became almost twice a week. After a couple years of that, the dialysis treatments needed to be more frequent. Mike was getting pretty worn down – dialysis is extremely hard on the whole person and it is harder and herder to bounce back after each successive treatment. It would not be long before the dialysis team would be telling Mike that continuing the treatments was no longer ethical.
One day Mike started letting the people in his life know that he had told his doctors that he would not be back in for dialysis again. He had prayerfully considered everything and he decided that being lucid and dying quickly would be far better for everyone concerned than a prolonged deterioration that would be grim and painful all the way around.
Mike spent a lot of time with his boys, with his folks, and with his sisters and brother. He also invested a lot of time with different members of the church staff, and especially with different ones of the teens. See, Mike was also the Youth Pastor, and the kids loved him.
When we would do lock-ins at the church for the youth, Mike would play in the all-night Monopoly marathon game. He always used his false eye as his game piece – the kids thought it was wonderful that he could be so real and so accepting of his infirmities. It was just a part of the humble and gentle spirit that made him a good pastor and a great Christian man.
Mike’s last two weeks on this earth taught me a lot about death and dying – how to do it, how to minister in the midst of it, and what a godly end to a life could look like. He spoke very clear and honest things into people’s lives, and he did so with a real heart of love and a desire for whomever he was speaking to know that, as well as he knew them and as much as he loved them, the Lord knew them so much better and loved them so much more.
As we read through and study these last dozen or so chapters of Matthew, we need to do so with this in mind – Jesus knew the end was coming, knew that it was near, knew what that end was going to require, and was deeply interested in completing His work for the Father and preparing His disciples to carry on after He was gone.
There were important things for them to learn and to know if this little band of inconsequential men was going to shatter the darkness of the world with the marvelous light of the Gospel.
Let’s read the text again, only this time, let’s do so with what we just talked about in mind.
Jesus very clearly tells His disciples that He is going to be crucified, and then (after Peter’s little run of interference) He goes on to repeat something to them that He has said before – only this time, it has a greater depth of meaning to them.
Before we get into the meat of this passage, I would like to deal with a bit of controversy first. I believe that, taken in the context of the passage, what I am going to say makes the most sense.
Matthew 16:28 has been part of a great deal of the controversy about end times teaching in recent years. Some have taken this verse and used it to say that this proves that what John lays out in the book of Revelation took place in 70 AD and that there is no future fulfillment to come.
We know from our study in Matthew 10 of who these twelve men were that Jesus chose to be His inner circle that most of them were martyred. I believe that we are given a picture of how this verse could best be understood if we look at the martyrdom of Stephen in Acts 7:54-60.
Look specifically at verses 55-56: “But being full of the Holy Spirit, he gazed intently into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God; and he said, "Behold, I see the heavens opened up and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God."
There are those who contend that this refers to the Transfiguration which follows immediately after this. We saw a hint of that last time when we went through this section without the chapter break that we have in our modern translations.
There are others that say that Jesus was mistaken about when He was going to return to earth, that this was an indication of the struggle that went on in Him between His divine nature and attributes and His human nature and weaknesses.
There are others who say that this is a metaphorical reference to His death and the breaking of the power of sin on the cross, to His resurrection and the breaking of the power of death when that occurred, to the Day of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit descended, or to the destruction of Jerusalem and what would take place for believers who were trapped in that event.
When we realize that the type of vision seen at the point of Stephen’s martyrdom has been repeated throughout the centuries at the moment of death of hundreds of Christian martyrs, it seems in my mind at least, that it is most likely that that is what Jesus means here. And, when we apply that in the context of what we are going to learn in our study of the rest of this passage, I believe it makes the most sense.
Right after Jesus rebukes Peter for his earnest but deluded assertion that Jesus won’t have to suffer and die, Jesus reapplies something He taught His disciples before – the real cost of discipleship.
Back in Matthew 10:24-42, there is a long discourse on the cost of discipleship that we studied at length. This was at the end of the commissioning and first sending out of the Twelve.
During that two-part study, we saw that Jesus gave them a clear picture of what they would face as His followers. The picture was not an encouraging one. Perhaps you remember: sheep among wolves, hated and despised, betrayed by family and loved ones, sold-out for convenience and self-preservation, falsely accused and punished, even tortured and killed. All this they had to look forward to, and they were to greet it all with joy and a sense of blessedness. They were to count it a privilege to have been found worthy to share in His sufferings.
But wait – there’s more!
Remember those lessons?
Here we have Christ again speaking these truths into His disciples’ lives – and ours, if we pay attention.
The honor to be found in the world is not to be found by those who follow Christ – that is the gist of the message here and of the Gospel itself, really. The Apostle Paul speaks of this in several places, one of which is the major doctrinal teaching of 1 Corinthians 1:18-2:5.
The key to that whole section is found in verse 18: For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.
The cross is the central point to the Bible, to the Gospel, to salvation, even to history itself. You have heard the phrase, “That’s the crux of the matter,” have you not? That word crux in that context means “heart, root, bottom-line, nitty-gritty”. In its original form, though, crux is the Latin word for “cross”. So you see, even in our own bastardization of the language, the underlying message is still there – the cross is the crux of everything.
This teaching of Jesus’ is recorded with slight variances in Mark 8:34-9:1, and Luke 9:23-27. Remember the maxim: “He says it once pay attention; he says it twice, sit up and take note; he says it a third time, don’t miss it! So what that tells us is that this is another of the central teachings of the kingdom of God.
Now, in the literal use of the word cross, Jesus was speaking of the device used so effectively by the Romans to inflict the most long-lasting and excruciatingly painful death on a human being that had yet been devised by mankind.
Yet, in this context and the others that it is used throughout the New Testament, the use of the term cross is symbolic not only of the act of crucifixion itself, but of what the Romans did as a precursor to that act in order to add to the pain, the sense of desperation and hopelessness and the disgrace of the condemned. The person condemned to be crucified had to carry the heavy cross beam to which they would be lashed or nailed to the place of execution. It was big, it was heavy, and it was humiliating.
Imagine, if you will, that you were sentenced to die by hanging and you were required to build the gallows with your own two hands that would be used to carry out that sentence. Added to that, you had to do so in the middle of the downtown transit mall and you did so half-naked, beaten bloody, and guards stood close by, beating you with a lash every time they thought you moved wrong or too slowly or for some other unknown reason.
Getting the picture? Jesus is telling His disciples, just as he is telling us, that in order to truly be considered an authentic follower of Jesus Christ, we are to daily be willing to bear any burden, any disgrace, any ridicule, any embarrassment, any hurt feelings or any painful relationship in order to follow Christ. No cost is to be considered to great to pay.
You can see why a lot of people abandoned Him as time drew near for His betrayal and execution.
But wait – there’s more!
Jesus goes on to shed a bright light on this by showing us more of the economy of the kingdom of God in the next two verses. Verses 25-26 say, "For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?”
Jesus is speaking of “life” in two ways here – the temporal life here on earth and the everlasting life that all true believers will one day enjoy with Him in heaven.
Life is a series of choices – and the greatest personal power God has given every human being is the power to choose. Adam and Eve got to choose obedience or rebellion, eternal life on earth or bringing death and destruction invading creation. We know what they chose.
We make the same kinds of choices every day – from whether or not we are going to invest time with God, what kind of attitude we are going to have throughout the day, how we are going to react to irascible people, and the list goes on.
Then there are the key choices, the pivotal choices that we make in life – will we follow Jesus Christ and be obedient to His Word, will we live lives that bring the love of Christ and the light of the Gospel into the lives of those within our sphere of influence, will we obey the laws of the land as a general way of life and be uncompromising in our faith.
From large to small, seemingly trivial to enormously significant, life is a series of choices. Jesus here is telling us all that the most important decision we can make is whether or not we are going to follow Him. And remember – when it comes to making decisions for God, there are always only two choices on the menu.
Back in the ninth century, the very powerful Roman emperor Charlemagne made an unusual request with regard to his burial. He asked to be buried sitting upright on his throne with his crown on his head, his scepter in his hand, his royal cape draped around his shoulders and with an open book placed on his lap.
That was in 814 AD. Nearly two hundred years later, Emperor Otto III wanted to see if Charlemagne’s burial requests had indeed been carried out. He ordered that the tomb be opened. They found the body just as Charlemagne had requested. Only now, nearly two centuries later, the scene was gruesome. The crown was tilted on the skeletal head. The scepter was tarnished. The mantle was moth-eaten. The body disfigured.
But, there on his lap was the book Charlemagne had requested to be placed there – the Bible. The one bony skeletal index finger of his left hand pointed to Matthew 16:26: "For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?”
How about us? What are we willing to give up for the sake of Christ and His kingdom, for the sake of eternal life in heaven? Are we really willing to give up all? Those are really tough questions that we have been asking a lot of ourselves lately. In our mid-week discipleship study, we have been learning just what that really entails in this day and age and in this culture that we live in.
It is no small order, that. What are you willing to exchange for your soul? The answer might surprise you. Anything that cools our affections for God, anything that serves to dilute our love for Him and our passion for seeing the lost saved and the damned redeemed, anything that violates the purity and holiness that we are called to live in this life as devoted followers of Jesus Christ, puts us in peril of not being obedient to this mandate of Christ’s. And, as we have learned before, disobedience is unbelief (John 3:36: "He who believes in the Son has eternal life; but he who does not obey the Son will not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him.").
Hard truth? Yes – indeed, it is. But remember how Jesus said this back in Matthew 10:37-39: "He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; and he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me. He who has found his life will lose it, and he who has lost his life for My sake will find it.”
The first word of Matthew 16:27 is a significant word: for. It assigns a reason, a “because”, if you will, to what Jesus has just said. And that “because” is? "For the Son of Man is going to come in the glory of His Father with His angels, and WILL THEN RECOMPENSE EVERY MAN ACCORDING TO HIS DEEDS.”
This is a quote from Psalm 62:12, which is a psalm about God being a refuge from treachery and oppression. For those of you who make notes, these are two places to ask your Jehovah’s Witness friends about. They contend that Jesus is not God – you can’t look at Psalm 62 and Matthew 16:27-28 in context with each other and hold to that theology.
At any rate, Jesus says this here as a way of warning – Jesus is going to one day return and repay all of mankind according to whether or not they have obeyed this command. This is part of what we as disciples of Jesus Christ are required to teach those that we are discipling.
When we take all of this in context, I think all of us can see that Jesus is serving up admonition and reassurance on the same platter. Jesus is calling all of mankind to choose discipleship and eternal life or non-discipleship and eternal punishment. He is promising eternal reward for those who chose the first, eternal penalty for those who chose the second. He is also promising those who will be required to take their choosing the path of discipleship all the way to the ultimate end that is martyrdom, that they will see Him in His glory at that moment.
What have you chosen? What are you choosing every day? See, life is a series of choices, and for us the choice really comes down to: Will I be a disciple of Jesus Christ or will I not? What have I chosen for the path of my life, and what will I chose today? How will I live; for whom will I live; will Jesus and His way of life and ministry be the model that I follow in every aspect of my life or will I do only what is comfortable and convenient? As you can see, there is a lot to consider, a lot to think about, a lot to decide on.
As we go to prayer, I say to each of us: make a choice; take a stand – with Him or against Him, those are the two choices on the menu. You also need to consider this: you may have only moments left on this earth – how are you going to live them? Will you live them like my friend Mike, making sure all of the loose ends are tied up? Will you be like Jesus and make sure that the Father’s mission for you has been completed?
Let’s pray.
