I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth is already bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth is already loosed in heaven. (Matthew 16:19)
Since the time of Moses, (the days of Yahweh’s Old Covenant ekklesia), the people of God had possessed both the Torah and individuals with the authority to teach the Torah and judge based on it, just as Moses had done in his own day. These activities were fundamentally interpretive, not generative: nobody made up the Law, they just applied it. But they applied it with real authority. The Law had come to them and to them only. Of all the peoples in the world, they were the place where truth was found.
In the early days of the Old Testament, these individuals were mostly Levites, priests, and elders. Judges and kings arose to take their own place as well. The highest authorities in the land, they were nevertheless subordinate to God’s Torah, responsible to keep it themselves and to judge by it with justice and mercy.
The kingdom of Israel was always meant to function as an earthly manifestation of the kingdom of God. What it did was done in heaven; what it forbade was forbidden in heaven. The two corresponded, with the earthly kingdom imaging the heavenly and the heavenly empowering the earthly.
As the centuries wore on, many prophets joined the ranks, giving voice to fresh revelation alongside the old Law — the living voice of the Holy Spirit spoke through them, always in harmony with what was spoken in the past, until the Scriptures expanded to encompass “the Law and the Prophets.”
Binding and Loosing
By Jesus’s time, many of these old interpreters were gone. The judges and kings had been replaced by pagan rulers and puppet kings like the Herods. The Levitical priesthood had become hopelessly corrupt. Prophets were few and far between and usually murdered by the people anyway; no prophet had written Scripture in the last 400 years.
The power to interpret the law passed into the hands of a class of devout, learned men, who lacked pedigree but had something more important — the authority that comes from a life steeped in the Scriptures. We meet these men, the early rabbis of Israel, often in the New Testament. They are called scribes and Pharisees.
The traditional language applied to the work of these rabbis was “binding and loosing.” It may help us to understand this language if we observe that these words are still used in this sense in English today. We might say that a certain rule is “binding,” or that someone is “loosed” (or “freed”) from a particular commitment.
As custodians of the Torah, the scribes and Pharisees held the “key of knowledge” (Luke 11:52). It was in their power to open the doors of the kingdom and usher people in through the truth they taught and the lifestyles they enjoined. On the flip side, this authority also extended to excluding repeat offenders from the worshiping community, just as it had in earlier ages, when lawbreakers could be “cut off” from the people of Israel.
The Changing of the Guard
Jesus himself acknowledged the authority these men had to teach: “The scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat. Therefore whatever they tell you to observe, that observe and do” (Matthew 23:2-3, NKV). But in the next breath, he harshly condemned their hypocrisy and the oppressive nature of their teaching. They had the power to bind and loose, yes, but they abused it — and so abused the people they were supposed to help.
“But do not do according to their works; for they say, and do not do. For they bind heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on men’s shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers … woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut up the kingdom of heaven against men; for you neither go in yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in.” (Matthew 23:3-4, 13, NKJV)
In a parallel passage in Luke, the language of binding and loosing is explicitly tied into the idea of keys, which are used to lock and unlock:
“Woe also to you experts in the law! You load people with burdens that are hard to carry, yet you yourselves don’t touch these burdens with one of your fingers … You have taken away the key of knowledge! You didn’t go in yourselves, and you hindered those who were going in.” (Luke 11:46, 52)
In some ways, these must have been hard words for Jesus’s disciples to hear. As devout Israelites, Peter and the other disciples had grown up looking to the rabbis, the “experts in the law,” as their teachers in living a holy life. It was the scribes and Pharisees who taught the common people how to please God, be faithful to the covenant, and worship appropriately. At least, that was the theory. All too often, the reality was that these spiritual leaders became oppressors of their own people, building their personal wealth and reputations on the backs of others.
This, of course, is not a new story — or an old and obsolete one, unfortunately. Plenty of gurus do the same today. But in Jesus’s day, a fundamental shift was taking place — an ecclesiastical sea change. God had borne with the hypocrisy of the religious leaders for a long time, but that time was coming to an end. A change of the guard was about to take place.
As Jesus founded a new ekklesia upon the rock of Peter, the role of teaching would inhere in that new people. This was not some sort of rejection of the Jewish people over against the church (which, in its first iteration, was entirely Jewish); rather, it was about faith. Those who were unfaithful to God and rejected his Messiah would lose their role and authority as teachers, while those who were built upon the rock of Christ would gain it.
Indeed, in the New Covenant, the church would image the kingdom of God on earth, and its teachings and judgments would correspond with the wisdom and the will of heaven.
The Spirit of Truth
If you’ve spent any time reading the New Testament, you’ve probably noticed that Jesus frequently warned his disciples that they would be rejected and even persecuted by the religious authorities of their day.
I think it’s easy to miss how confusing and heartbreaking that must have been for them — enough to risk scaring them away from Christ. Imagine that you found a new teacher, one you trusted and believed in so intensely that you left everything to follow him — but then every pastor you grew up with, every TV evangelist you respected, every Christian author you had read began to denounce him and to declare that you, as his follower, risked being disfellowshipped from the church.
If you are healthy, you would start to question yourself and your new teacher — to wonder if you had been deceived! In some ways, this was like the situation the disciples faced. They were faithful Jews, worshippers at the temple and synagogue, respectful of those who taught the Torah. Yet they were denounced by those teachers for following Jesus.
In order to understand and endure this heartbreaking turn of events, the disciples needed the assurance Jesus gave here in Matthew 16 — the understanding that the kingdom was being taken away from the corrupt religious leaders they had once followed and entrusted to them instead.
In John 16, Jesus assured his followers that those who would persecute them did not know the truth; despite their claims, they neither knew nor loved God:
“I have told you these things to keep you from stumbling. They will ban you from the synagogues. In fact, a time is coming when anyone who kills you will think he is offering service to God. They will do these things because they haven’t known the Father or Me.” (John 16:1-3)
In the same passage, Jesus assured them of the power of binding and loosing that would be part of their community, and he named its source:
“When the Spirit of truth comes, He will guide you into all the truth. For He will not speak on His own, but He will speak whatever He hears. He will also declare to you what is to come. He will glorify Me, because He will take from what is Mine and declare it to you. Everything the Father has is Mine. This is why I told you that He takes from what is Mine and will declare it to you.” (John 16:13-15)
Earlier in the chapter, Jesus described the work of the Spirit: “When He comes, He will convict the world about sin, righteousness, and judgment: about sin, because they do not believe in Me; about righteousness, because I am going to the Father and you will no longer see Me; and about judgment, because the ruler of this world has been judged” (John 16:8-11).
The coming of Jesus changed the very basis of binding and loosing; that is, of properly understanding and applying truth. Because God had become incarnate in the world, sin and righteousness would have to be defined in terms of response to him.
Jesus embodied the Torah, the Law and the Prophets; no one could properly understand the Torah, much less teach and apply it, without reference to him. Paul says as much in his second letter to the Corinthians:
For to this day, at the reading of the old covenant, the same veil remains; it is not lifted, because it is set aside only in Christ. Even to this day, whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their hearts, but whenever a person turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. (2 Corinthians 14-16)
Where Truth Is Found
“I am the Truth,” Jesus told his disciples in John 14:6. Because he is the Word of God through whom the world was made and the New Adam through whom the human race is reconstituted, there is no truth outside of Christ. In a sense, ever since the time of Christ, all truth is Christian truth. In another place where Jesus’s teaching seemed “hard” to many, people who had once followed him abandoned him in droves. Peter voiced the non-choice he saw in this: “To whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68).
With the coming of Christ, a new age began. The power that had once been entrusted to the religious establishment of the Old Covenant was born anew in the people of the New Covenant, sealed and empowered by the Holy Spirit.
In Matthew 16, Jesus promised that his ekklesia, this temple made of human stones which he was building, would be the place where truth was found on earth. Of course, the church would have its share of wolves, hypocrites, and Pharisees, which Jesus also took pains to point out — imperfection and even corruption would not negate the truth entrusted to the church, even if they put stumbling blocks in its way. (Though I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that it’s only the unconverted Pharisees who are a problem; the apostle Paul, who was a Pharisee, wrote most of the New Testament.)
And just like the scribes, Levites, and kings of old, the church wouldn’t invent truth; it would simply pass it along, interpret it, and apply it, over and anew for every age. Nevertheless, the truth would always be found where Jesus instilled it — in his disciples, by his Holy Spirit.
Jesus’s people do hold the keys of the kingdom: the knowledge of God in Christ, the Scriptures, the word of the gospel. To varying degrees, we “sit in Moses’s seat,” handling the word of God and striving it to do so rightly.
Leaders in the church even have a responsibility to judge, calling sin what it is, and at times cutting some off from fellowship until they repent. But this is only the negative side of the coin. Let us, who hold these keys, never be found using them to lock the door against seekers, refusing to go in ourselves and barring the door to those who want to enter. Let us never be found binding heavy burdens and refusing to help lift them. Truth has been given to us as light and life; let that be our gift to the world.
The Law and the Prophets, embodied now in the Incarnate Lord, are above all a message of righteousness, peace, and joy — the kingdom of God. To bind and loose, to use the keys of the kingdom, is to manifest the goodness of God in the world and fling open the doors so that all who will may enter.
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This is Part 248 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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