The Sending of the Twelve

I can't think of anything in this world more terrifying than the thought of going to hell. Lord, it's Your righteousness and Your righteousness alone that can bring me safely into Your kingdom.

I have nothing in my hand that I can bring. There's nothing I can do to earn my way into heaven. And if You were to exercise Your justice on me, You would send me to hell forever. After calling and commissioning the twelve apostles, directing them to preach and to heal the sick, Jesus ended with a hard saying that it would be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment than for those who would not receive and hear their words. This is the Sunday edition of Renewing Your Mind.

I'm Nathan W. Bingham and I'm glad you're with us. The thought of hell is terrifying, but do we really believe in hell? Are our lives and our zeal for evangelism reflective of us having a deep conviction of the seriousness of an eternity under the wrath of God?

That will be R.C. Sproul's topic as we continue his short sermon series in the Gospel of Matthew. Remember, if you'd like to spend time in the entirety of Matthew's Gospel, you can request Dr. Sproul's hardcover commentary at renewingyourmind.org with your donation of any amount in support of the Gospel outreach of Renewing Your Mind and Ligonier Ministries. Well, here's Dr. Sproul on the sending of the Twelve and the reality of future judgment. Alright, we continue this morning with our study of the Gospel of Matthew, and I will be reading from chapter 10, verses 5 through 15. These twelve Jesus sent out and commanded them, saying, Do not go into the way of the Gentiles, and do not enter a city of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. And as you go, preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand.

Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out demons. Freely you have received, freely give. Provide neither gold nor silver nor copper in your money belts, nor bag for your journey, nor two tunics, nor sandals, nor staffs.

For a worker is worthy of his food. Now whatever city or town you enter, inquire who in it is worthy, and stay there till you go out. And when you go into a household, greet it. If the household is worthy, let your peace come upon it. But if it is not worthy, let your peace return to you.

And whoever will not receive you, nor hear your words, when you depart from that house or city, shake off the dust from your feet. Assuredly, I say to you, it will be more tolerable for the land of Solomon and Gomorrah in the day of judgment than for that city. Here we have the record of Jesus sending out the twelve apostles whom He had just commissioned. First of all, Jesus tells His apostles where they should not go. They are at the time that this commission is given in the northern region of Palestine that we know as Galilee. They are told not to go north, not to go south, and not to go east, because all there is on the north are Gentiles, all there is on the east are Gentiles, all there is on the south are Samaritans and some Gentiles, and all there is on the west is the Mediterranean Sea.

So they're not going to go there. So Jesus is saying, I want you to focus your missionary activity right now in Galilee because I am sending you to seek the lost sheep of the house of Israel. The first apostolic mission here is a mission to the Jews. We see that echoed later in the Apostle Paul's teaching to the Romans when he says that we are called to teach and proclaim the gospel to the Jew first and then to the Gentiles. The Jews have the priority here of receiving the kingdom of God.

Why is that? Why does Jesus restrict the missionary enterprise initially to Israel? Well, He doesn't really tell us, and so to answer that question involves some measure of speculation. But even to this day there must be a priority of concern in Christian evangelism to reach the lost sheep of Israel. Many of you are familiar with Luther's serious and strong at times vehement attacks against the Jews in Germany in his later years, but earlier Luther had written a magnificent treatise on the Jews in which he reminded the people of the Christian church that we as Gentiles are the wild olive branch that has been grafted in to the root of the tree and that biblically salvation is of the Jews. It is through Israel that God called a people to Himself to be a blessing to all of the people in the world so that there is absolutely no foundation in biblical truth for anti-Semitic feelings. Our Lord Himself was a Jew, and He saw a priority of coming to His own people. We are also told He came to His own, and His own received Him not. That's generally true, but for the most part, the vast majority of the early converts to Christianity upon which the Christian church was established were Jewish people, people who had waited for the coming of the Messiah. And Jesus said, you go to these people, to the lost sheep of Israel, and you preach saying, the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

Does that message sound familiar? Was that not the message of John the Baptist when he began his earthly ministry? Was that not the same message preached by Jesus when He inaugurated His earthly ministry? Now He's saying, I want you to go and preach to My people the same message that I've been preaching, that the time is at hand that the supreme crisis of history is upon us.

And that crisis is the breakthrough of the kingdom of God. And the One whom the Father has anointed King is in your midst. So that's the message I want you to give, and when you give it, I want you to heal the sick, raise the dead, get rid of the demons, do everything that I do to support the proclamation of the kingdom.

And then He gives some rather strange instructions here. He said, Freely you have received, freely you give. Jesus said, You have received Me. You have received the kingdom. You have received salvation.

Freely. You didn't buy it. You didn't steal it. You didn't earn it. You didn't achieve it. It has been a gift.

Now let's stop right there. What was true of the disciples and of the apostles at that time in redemptive history is as true today as it was then. If you are a Christian, if you have received the greatest benefit that a human being can ever receive, you need to know and you need never to forget that the gift of salvation that you possessed, you didn't earn. You didn't merit. You didn't buy.

You didn't achieve it. But it was given to you by the grace of God, freely. And so Jesus reminds His apostles that just as they have received the kingdom and its benefits freely, so they should go out and give with the same kind of free giving that they have received. Freely you have received, freely give.

Now you go on this mission. I don't want you to take any gold or silver or copper in your purse, nor bag for your journey, nor two tunics, sandals, or staffs, for a worker is worthy of his food. I don't want you being weighed down with the burden of finances.

I don't want you to have heavy suitcases to be dragging around across the landscape, and I don't want you to have to take all kinds of food provisions to take care of yourselves. I'm sending you out, yes, as sheep among wolves, but I'm sending you out, and I want you to go traveling light because My people will meet your needs. My people will provide you with the finances you need. My people will provide you with the shelter that you need. My people will provide you with the food that you will need.

Now Jesus goes on and He says, the worker's worthy of his food. So when you go into a city or town, inquire about who in that city or town is worthy and stay there until you go out. And when you go into a household, greet it. And if the household is worthy, let your peace be upon it. That is, if you enter into a household that follows the principles set forth in the Word of God about hospitality, if they are going to take care of you as strangers, if they are going to feed you and house you and support you while you're on this mission, let your peace be upon that house. Because basically Jesus is saying His, if you put your peace upon that house, if you put your benediction on that house, you'll be putting My benediction on that house. But if it's not worthy, let your peace return to you.

Don't speak My benediction on those people who are not worthy. But whoever will not receive you, whoever will not hear your words, when you depart from that house or that city, shake off the dust from your feet. There was a custom among the Jewish people that, for example, they understood from their perspective that Gentiles were unclean. And that uncleanness extended not only to the people of the Gentiles but to the homes of the Gentiles and beyond that to the land of the Gentiles. So if Jews had to travel through Gentile territory or travel through Samaria provinces, when they came out of those provinces and back into Israel, it was their custom to shake their clothes and shake their feet to get rid of the dirt that clung to them from the ground of unclean places. And that was a symbolic gesture of repudiation of everything that was unclean.

And so Jesus said, if you go into a town, if you go into a house and you proclaim My gospel and the people won't hear it, when you come out of there, before you get back on the road, shake the dust off of your feet. Why? Why such a seemingly harsh symbol of repudiation? Well, wait, there's more.

It gets worse. Here's the real hard saying, for assuredly I say to you, it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment than for that city. Now is Jesus just speaking hyperbolically here to make a point? Maybe.

But I don't think so. The towns of Sodom and Gomorrah represent the nadir of corruption and of human sin. We look in the Old Testament, Sodom and Gomorrah were the most wicked cities that we ever see in all of biblical history, and they met with the unbridled judgment of God. And now Jesus is making a contrast or a comparison. He says, look, if these towns to which you go and preach the gospel do not hear My Word, do not receive this message of the gospel of the kingdom of God, you shake the dust off your feet because it's going to be more tolerable on the day of judgment for Sodom and Gomorrah than for these cities.

Now two things I want you to learn from this passage. First of all, contrary to many people's thoughts, on the day of judgment there will be various degrees and gradations of sin. Some will receive great punishment. Some will receive lesser punishment. The popular idea is at the end you either go to heaven or you go to hell, and there's nothing in between.

There's no significant difference. Everybody in hell has the same punishment. Everybody in heaven has the same reward. There are at least twenty-five passages in the New Testament that tell us that there will be different levels of rewards in heaven and different levels of punishment in hell. To be sure, the difference between heaven and hell is an unbridgeable chasm, and the person who has the lowest position in heaven is almost infinitely better off than the person in the highest level of hell. And so to get into heaven, even if it's by the skin of your teeth, is the greatest blessing you can ever hope for. And even though we get into heaven by faith and by faith alone, you can't earn your way into heaven, you can't merit your way into heaven.

We've gone over that. You can't buy your way into heaven, buy your way into heaven, but your place in heaven will be determined by your works. Justifications by faith alone, but your place in heaven will be determined by your level of obedience, not because whatever obedience you render in your Christian life earns you a higher place in heaven. Rather, God in His grace has appointed it to be so that He will distribute His rewards according to your works, not because those works merit anything, but nevertheless that is the standard by which He will distribute His rewards.

Saint Augustine put it this way, that in giving the rewards to His people, God will be crowning His own gifts. And so the difference in rewards in heaven will still be gracious, whereas the difference in punishment in hell will be strictly meted out according to justice. If you murder one person in this life, you will receive the just punishment for that in hell. If you murder five, if you murder five, your judgment will be five times as bad. I had a professor in seminary who made the observation that the sinner in hell would do everything that he could and give everything that he had to make the number of his sins during his lifetime one less.

Now that's a hard saying. Well, it's not a hard saying for people who don't believe in hell, who don't believe in hell, and that's most of us, because if we really believed in hell, our zeal for mission would be a thousand times greater than it is. We say, oh God wouldn't send anybody to hell.

I heard that just the other day. Somebody said to me, isn't it true that God doesn't send people to hell? They send themselves to hell. Nobody ever sent themselves to hell. The person who sends people to hell is God.

It's His judgment. He created hell, and He created it for judgment. Now what that person was getting at is that it's our own decisions. It's our own behavior that ends up sending us into hell. Yes, but we don't have the authority to send ourselves to hell or anywhere else. That's God's decision, and I can't think of anything in this world more terrifying than the thought of going to hell. I know I've told you this before, but did I remember once I was walking through a hallway, and there was a mirror there, and I just saw my reflection in the mirror, and I stopped, and I looked at myself in the mirror, and I said, I said, what if I've deceived myself all these years?

What if I'm not regenerate? What if my profession of faith is a false profession of faith? What if my destiny is eternity in hell? And I was terrified. And the only thing I could do at that time was to flee to the cross again and to cling to Christ, saying, Lord, it's Your righteousness and Your righteousness alone that can bring me safely into Your kingdom.

I have nothing in my hand that I can bring. There's nothing I can do to earn my way into heaven. And if You were to exercise Your justice on me, You would send me to hell forever.

I know that. Now, the second part, the last part. Why would Jesus say that it would be more tolerable on the day of judgment for Sodom and Gomorrah than upon these homes and these villages there in Galilee? He gives the answer because they rejected the gospel. And in doing that rejecting of the message of the kingdom of God, they were rejecting Jesus. You know, if people think that the gospel is an invitation offered to people that they can RSVP at their pleasure, they can accept it, they can reject it with impunity.

No. The Bible does not invite anybody to come to Christ. God commands you to come to Jesus.

And if you refuse that command, you have committed… Listen to me. If you're not a Christian, you know you're a sinner. Everybody knows that. Nobody's perfect, we say. I know I'm a sinner. You know you're a sinner. But you don't have a clue as to the gravity of sin, the seriousness of it. And do you realize that the most serious sin you can ever commit in this world is to reject Jesus, to reject the Son of God whom the Father sent to die for His people? You say, well wait a minute, unless I'm elect, unless the Holy Spirit gives me that grace, I'll never come to Jesus. I don't want Jesus. I don't want Him in my mind. It's not my fault. It's the Father's fault.

No. God doesn't owe you a bit of grace, and He will judge you justly. And if you refuse to submit to His appointed King, then you justly deserve a punishment worse than that meted out to Sodom and Gomorrah.

Please think about that. If you're not a Christian, I can't bring you into the kingdom of God. I hope I can scare you into it, if no other way, that you will rush to the cross and plead to the Savior to save you.

That's hard. But I believe with my heart, my mind, and my soul that it is the truth, and it's the truth Jesus instructed His apostles to teach. God grant you the grace to receive this truth today. Thank you, Dr. Sproul's free booklet, What is the Gospel?, at renewingyourmind.org slash gospel. You can clearly hear Dr. Sproul's pastoral care and evangelistic heart in today's sermon, and you'll find that same tone in his expositional commentary on Matthew, which is based on his complete sermon series. We'd love to send you the hardcover edition as our way of saying thank you for your donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org in support of this daily program and all of the gospel proclaiming efforts of Ligonier Ministries, the ministry that Dr. Sproul founded all the way back in 1971. Visit renewingyourmind.org or use the link in the podcast show notes to give your gift today and spend time this year reading Dr. Sproul's notes and commentary on Matthew. Thank you. After Jesus sent the Twelve, did He promise them health and prosperity? What would their mission look like? Well, join us next time as Jesus warns them of the persecution that would follow. That's next Sunday here on Renewing Your Mind.