And I also say to you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build My church, and the forces of Hades will not overpower it. (Matthew 16:18)
From the moment of his advent in public ministry, Jesus proclaimed the impending arrival of the kingdom of God. But it was here, in his groundbreaking, foundation-laying, revelatory conversation with Peter, that he first declared his intention to build a church.
In Greek, the word “church” is ekklesia, a term that denotes a public gathering. In secular society it was used of political gatherings, the equivalent of a citizen’s council or voting bloc. In itself, that linguistic origin suggests an organic connection with the kingdom: God’s kingdom is the realm of his rule, and the church are the citizens of the kingdom, the people who benefit from the kingdom and through whom its rule is enacted.
The Assembly of Yahweh
The passage itself goes deeper, though. Contra the obvious, Matthew 16:18 isn’t the first use of the term ekklesia. Its first use is actually in the Greek Old Testament, where ekklesia identifies the people of God at the foot of Mount Sinai after their deliverance from Egypt, just before they received the law and formally entered their covenant with God:
“The day when you stood before the Lord your God at Horeb, on the day of the assembly [ekklesias], when the Lord said to me, ‘Assemble [Ekklēsiason] the people before me, and let them hear my words, so that they may learn to fear me all the days they live on the earth, and they may teach their children.’” (Deuteronomy 4:10, English from the LXX)
The covenant received on the “day of the assembly” constituted Israel as a nation for the first time. Prior to that Sinai moment, the people of Israel were a collection of related tribes, held together by their ethnic origins, a shared culture, and the condition of slavery. After that moment, they were a people, Yahweh’s people — the nation of Israel.
In declaring his intention to build an ekklesia of his own, Jesus made clear his intention to gather a new people around himself. This would not be simply the congregation of Israel as it had existed in the past; it would be specifically “MY church,” the congregation or assembly of Christ, the citizens of his kingdom.
The Son of Man and the Saints of God
In this respect, Jesus’s opening question, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?” takes us back to Daniel 7 again. As we saw some time ago, the “Son of Man” is an enigmatic figure in Daniel 7. On the one hand, he is an individual who arises amidst the monsters of the world and is presented to God to receive a kingdom. On the other hand, the angel who guides Daniel associates this individual figure with a whole people, the holy people of God:
The kingdom, dominion, and greatness of the kingdoms under all of heaven will be given to the people, the holy ones of the Most High. His kingdom will be an everlasting kingdom, and all rulers will serve and obey Him.’ (Daniel 7:27)
This interpretation is so explicit that it can be fairly debated whether Daniel 7 depicted the coming of an individual king (a Messiah) at all. Jesus’s constant use of the term “Son of Man,” however, strongly suggests that it did. And this makes sense, because every kingdom needs a king; every people has a head. In Daniel 7, there is both a man and a people in view. The “saints of the Most High” are constituted in the Son of Man, who receives everlasting dominion on their behalf.
What is more, Jesus declared to Peter that he would not merely call a church together; he would build it. The ekklesia at Sinai welcomed God into their midst through the medium of the tabernacle, but the ekklesia of Jesus would themselves be built as a temple, the very place where God would dwell in his holiness.
Peter, who was told that he would be a foundation stone of this church, recognized the cornerstone as Christ and the people of God as the materials from which this final temple would be built:
Coming to Him, a living stone — rejected by men but chosen and valuable to God — you yourselves, as living stones, are being built into a spiritual house for a holy priesthood to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. (1 Peter 2:4-5)
Becoming the People of God
Matthew 16 is really the first place we glimpse Jesus’s plan for the future — not only his current work of bringing the kingdom to earth, but his long-term intention for that kingdom. And his intention is us: a holy people, built on sure foundations. The people of Christ will be constituted as a temple for God, built on the person of Christ.
Moreover, this people, this temple, this both-a-human-assembly-and-a-dwelling-place-for-God will be built on individuals like Peter, built on their historic confession of Jesus as Son of the Living God, and built on revelation — on the direct communication of the Father to human beings, through his Spirit, his prophets, and his Scriptures, to our hearts.
Today, we still experience revelation from the Father, through our own experiences with God’s Spirit and more objectively, through the written revelations in the Scriptures and the creeds of the historic, apostolic church. This revelation undergirds our existence as a people, the people of Jesus — the church. It also speaks to our purpose. After all, the purpose of our existence is relationship with God, now and forever. “Glorify Your Son,” Jesus prayed in John 17:1-3, “so that the Son may glorify You, for You gave Him authority over all flesh; so He may give eternal life to all You have given Him. This is eternal life: that they may know You, the only true God, and the One You have sent—Jesus Christ” (emphasis mine).
At the same time, this revelation is not ultimately private, nor is this relationship one that only exists between “me and Jesus.” You and I are not skipping stones, skimming over the surface of some vast eternal lake; we are building stones, intimately connected to one another, finding our final fulfillment in one united body.
Together, we are meant to host the very presence of God, to facilitate worship in the world, and to exercise dominion within his dominion — it is for his glory and our happiness in him that the Son of Man has received “authority over all flesh,” or as Daniel puts it, a “kingdom, dominion, and greatness of the kingdoms under all of heaven,” given not only to the Son, but through him, “to the people, the holy ones of the Most High.”
With the simple words “I will build my church,” Jesus promised all this to Peter and the other apostles at the foot of Mount Hermon in Caesarea Philippi. I don’t know how much of it they grasped at the time. When Jesus came preaching, “the kingdom of heaven has come near,” what did they think that meant? How many echoes of Daniel did they pick up? Did they hear in those words the call — and the promise — of holiness, of becoming saints of the Most High, of constituting a new people and temple in Christ? Did they hear the overcoming of Death and Hell and the promise of eternal life and relationship with God?
Do we hear all of that when we call ourselves “the church”; when we “go to church” on Sundays?
When Jesus made his promise to Peter, the church was still future. From where we sit, she is present — she is us.
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This is Part 246 in a series on the Gospel of Matthew, which you can access here. Unless otherwise marked, quotes are from the Holman Christian Standard Bible.
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