THE BOOK OF MATTHEW
Lesson 11, Chapters 4 and 5
Our previous lesson in Matthew chapter 4 left off at a time when Christ was
gathering His first disciples. Teachers and Holy Men gathering disciples was
nothing new; in fact John's Gospel says that Andrew was John the Baptist's
disciple before he became one of Yeshua's first two disciples.
An interesting feature about disciples and their Masters in the 1st century was
that it was always the disciples that chose their Masters. There were many
teachers and Holy Men to choose from if a Jewish man wanted to go that route
and choose the lifestyle or cause that one of these many Masters advocated.
That was the case with the disciples of John the Baptist as well. But as we see,
Yeshua (the Master) chose His disciples; they didn't choose Him.
Since it is seems apparent from the writings of the New Testament that the Jews
believed they were living in the End Times, then the belief of Elijah reappearing
and playing a significant role in those turbulent times was ever present. Thus we
see that many hundreds of years earlier, in other turbulent times, that it was
Elijah who spotted and then chose Elishah (the Master chose the disciple) and
not the other way around as it normally was. In 1st Kings we read:
CJB
1 Kings 19:19-21
19
So he (Elijah) left and found Elisha the son of
Shafat. He was plowing with twelve yoke of oxen; he himself was behind
the twelfth. Eliyahu went over to him and threw his cloak on him.
20
He left
the oxen, ran after Eliyahu and said, "Please let me kiss my father and
mother good-bye; then I will follow you." He answered, "Go; but return,
because of what I did to you."
21
Elisha stopped following him. Then he took
the yoke of oxen, slaughtered them, cooked their meat over the wooden
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yokes of the oxen and gave it to the people to eat. Then he got up, went
after Eliyahu and became his servant.
In his Gospel, the Apostle John reiterates the same principle about who does the
choosing when he writes of Yeshua saying to His disciples:
CJB
John 15:16
16
You did not choose me, I chose you; and I have
commissioned you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last; so that whatever
you ask from the Father in my name he may give you.
Let's pause and re-read a section of Matthew 4.
RE-READ MATTHEW CHAPTER 4:18 - end
Before we talk about some other men that Jesus recruited, notice that the
candidates are not recorded as asking "why" they should follow Him. The
wording makes it as though there was immediate acceptance and they just stood
up and left with Him. In fact, what Jesus offered was not an invitation but rather it
was a command. The logical question is: why would these men obey and follow
Him?
The answer to this question centers around just who these soon to be 12
disciples, and the many other Jews who would seek after Him, thought He was or
what it was that He represented to them. In order to try and shed light on this
issue let's take what I think you'll find to be an interesting detour.
In Yeshua's day there was a kind of Jewish man called a Tzadik. While literally it
means "righteous one" or "righteous man", to the Jews of that time it more
indicated a "Holy Man". These Holy Men were miracle workers who, among
other things, healed sicknesses, disabilities and wounds in the name of the God
of Israel. Professor David Flusser has done some excellent research about the
important place of these Holy Men in ancient Jewish society and he points out
Rabbinic literature that says that a few years prior to 70 A.D., before the
destruction of the Temple by Rome, 4 of these Holy Men were well known and
respected in the Holy Land. Interestingly 2 of them were from the Galilee. One
was named Hilkia and the other was Hanina Ben Dosa. It was believed by the
Jewish community that these Tzadikkim were divinely gifted and much closer to
God than the average man.
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Recall that in Christ's day the belief of Jews was that the era of prophets (of the
Old Testament variety) was over. Prophets were the miracle workers of that
bygone era and now around the beginning of the 1st century the miracle workers
were these Tzadikkim (Holy Men). There doesn't seem to have been very many
of them. It is difficult to know, exactly, when this era of the Tzadik arose, but it
must have been at least as early as 65 B.C., because the legend of Honi the
Circle Drawer is from that time. The Babylonian Talmud tells the story of Honi
sleeping for 70 years and then dying soon after he awoke. The story refers to him
as a Tzadik.... literally a righteous man; but to the Jews that meant Honi held the
honored position as a Holy Man. While the story itself is highly unlikely, the point
is that Honi did actually exist at that time and was indeed considered a miracle
working Holy Man.
Scribes being the chiefs and main authorities of the Synagogue system (the elite
of the Pharisees), they were highly revered. As such they had egos and so
tended to see an itinerant Holy Man as competition because the common folks
flocked to a Tzadik in hopes of being healing of their various ailments (something
the Scribes certainly couldn't do); so there was a natural tension between the
two.
It is further known of these few Holy Men that they practiced poverty. This was a
refreshing difference between them and the aristocratic Sadducees or the well to
do Scribes; so of course the common Jew (who was generally anything but rich)
felt more of a connection to these Holy Men who had no possessions and held no
pretenses. It was also more or less the norm that these Tzadikkim would
perform their healing miracles in private, and often in secret, in order not to glorify
themselves. I ask you now to think; who might this sound like in the New
Testament? Of course: it sounds like Christ. We see Him characterized in the
Gospels as a Jewish Holy Man (acknowledging that He was far more than that in
reality). We read of Yeshua constantly healing the sick, exorcizing demons, and
generally hanging out with the ordinary, the poor, and the lame. In fact, it was
His deeds of miracle working that attracted people to Him by the hundreds and
that gained Him such a following among the common folk. But it also brought Him
the ire of the religious authorities who couldn't do what He could do and therefore
they saw Him as a threat.
These miracle workers are described by later Rabbis as being viewed as "sons of
God". Not "son of God" in the Christian sense that we think of Jesus Christ as a
literal God-on-earth Son of God, but more in the Jewish cultural sense of this rare
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person having a mysterious closeness to God that the average Jew could never
hope to attain. It is not unlike how some will refer to pastors or priests as "men of
God". We don't mean that they are part human and part God; we merely mean
that they have devoted their lives to God and He has responded by giving them a
special relationship, ability and position to do God's work on earth. So the term
"sons of God" was a sort of honorary title meant to explain the otherwise
inexplicable about how and why they were able to perform the miraculous
healings that they did.
Only in the later part of the 20th century did we discover that these
enigmatic Tzadikkim of Jesus's day and earlier had a personal awareness that
the extraordinary powers of healing they had been gifted with were because for
some unknown reason God had chosen them and made them "sons of God".
We read Jesus saying this in Matthew 11:
CJB
Matthew 11:25-27
25
It was at that time that Yeshua said, "I thank you,
Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you concealed these things from the
sophisticated and educated and revealed them to ordinary folks.
26
Yes,
Father, I thank you that it pleased you to do this.
27
"My Father has handed
over everything to me. Indeed, no one fully knows the Son except the
Father, and no one fully knows the Father except the Son and those to
whom the Son wishes to reveal him.
This seems to us like an extraordinary proclamation by Yeshua who here
announces His self-awareness of just who He is and because of that He has
been given revelations concerning the mysteries of God, some of which He
passes along to ordinary folks. And yet, upon the discovery of the Dead Sea
Scrolls, we find that the underlying premise of an especially righteous man, a
Holy Man, being given a glimpse into the mysteries and power of The Father was
not new. So Christ's pronouncement had the effect upon most Jews of confirming
their view of Him that he was a Holy Man. Found among the several so-named
Thanksgiving Hymns of that incredible treasure trove of scrolls we find several
Essene hymns. The preface to this particular hymn says: "his message will be
prudence to the simple". That is, the message of this hymn speaks of
a Tzadik saying something profound, but it is meant for the ears of the ordinary
person and not the elite. Listen closely, because it very nearly sounds like the
passage I just quoted to you from Matthew 11 that came from the mouth of Our
Messiah. I'll repeat: what I'm about to recite to you comes not from Scripture, Old
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or New Testaments, but rather from an anonymous writer of the Dead Sea
Scrolls who can only be writing from the position of being a Holy Man.
Through me Thou has illuminated the face of many, and has shown Thy
infinite power. For Thou has given me knowledge of Thy marvelous
mysteries, and hast shown Thyself mighty with me through Thy
marvels. Thou has done wonders before many for the sake of Thy
glory, that they may make known Thy mighty deeds to all the living.
Here is the point: this Essene hymn speaks of the attribute of God working
wonders (miracles) through this especially righteous man, a Holy Man, a son of
God. And this Holy Man is giving thanks to God and glorifying Him for the divine
knowledge of heavenly mysteries, and for the gift of wielding the ability to do
mighty deeds that comes from God's power and not his own. To the Jewish mind
and culture Yeshua fit the identity of an authentic Tzadik like a glove; He was a
Holy Man who worked miracles. The phenomenon of a Holy Man was not new,
but rather something wonderful that seemed to come around only occasionally,
unexpectedly, at God's will. And when a Holy Man appeared, people of course
understood that the proof of his credentials was his miracle powers of healing.
The news of the advent of a Holy Man would spread quickly and Jews would
come clamoring to him for relief of every kind of malady. Holy Men were men of
the common people, not men of the elite. The Gospels paint Jesus in exactly this
role; but of course the Gospel writers also extol the joy that He was so much
more than this: He was also the long awaited Deliverer. He was God's promised
Messiah. So even Yeshua's claims to being the Son of God were not denied by
the people at large, nor did those claims seem strange, because it was believed
that every Holy Man who came and went was a son of God. It's only that they
didn't understand that for Christ, being the Son of God was unique and fully literal
as opposed to being an honorary title.
Now back to the question I posed before we started this detour: why would these
fishermen and later others (who don't seem to have had any prior contact with
Him) just jump up and follow Yeshua because He commanded them to? It was
because they recognized Him as a Tzadik; a miracle worker; a son of God. A
Holy Man whose persona and attributes were known, welcome and understood
within Jewish society. They had probably heard of Him because Luke's Gospel
says that after the 3 temptations Yeshua returned to the Galilee, began teaching
in synagogues and His reputation began to spread BEFORE He started
appointing disciples. Notice how in our Essene Hymn, this Holy Man would pass
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on the mysteries of Heaven that He learned by teaching them to the ordinary folk.
I suspect that the people sensed He was something more than a typical Holy
Man but even if He wasn't, being a Holy Man was exciting enough. They weren't
about to question this Tzadik's motives for wanting them as His followers. So it
would be an indescribable honor to be in His inner circle and it would probably
bring them some kind of benefit or higher status. Understand: as of this time
these disciples had little idea who Yeshua really was and what their discipleship
would eventually mean or lead to.
After choosing Andrew and Peter, Yeshua also found another pair of fisherman
brothers, and chose them. So the first 4 disciples were fishermen. Let's pause for
a second: how far should we spiritualize or make application about the first 4
disciples being fishermen? I say not as far as it is often taken. Remember:
Yeshua was now living in Capernaum, a seaside town. Fishing was one of the
main, if not the main, industries for the residents of Capernaum. And we find
Yeshua walking along the seashore so He was bound to run into some
fishermen.
Fishermen, despite what you might have heard, were not uneducated and
illiterate. Fishing was not an occupation of last resort. Fishing was what today
we'd call a blue collar job. These were generally happy family men making a
simple but sufficient living. They could read and write, and probably speak and
understand at least two languages: Hebrew and Aramaic. Some also had a
working knowledge of Greek (even if they weren't fluent), because Capernaum
lay on the important Via Maris trade route and knowing some Greek was
necessary to do business. They and their families ate some of their catch but
sold most of it at the local markets. They attended synagogues, made the journey
to Jerusalem for some of the biblical festivals, and had a modest level of
Scriptural knowledge. But.... and this is important..... like all of the non-elite Jews
the main religious knowledge and understanding that they possessed came from
Tradition because their place of learning was the synagogue where Pharisee-
driven Tradition flourished. Yeshua was known to have been raised and lived in
the same environment, went to the same synagogues, and had not received any
formal religious training. So His ability to teach the Torah and the Prophets at an
astounding level merely added to His reputation and mystique as a Holy Man par
excellence.
That second pair of brothers that Yeshua commanded to become His disciples
were Ya'akov and Yochanan, sons of Zavdai. Our English Bibles will call these
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two men James and John. James is a terrible translation because Ya'akov
translates to Jacob, not James (although to eliminate confusion, I'll use his
traditional Christian name). It is widely held that this odd translation came about
in honor of King James who had ordered and sponsored the creation of the King
James Bible. John, decades later, became the writer of Revelation, the Gospel of
John, and the three epistles 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John (not bad for a former
fisherman!). Just as Andrew and Peter immediately left their nets and boats at
Messiah's command so did James and John. So does this mean that they literally
abandoned their valuable nets and fishing boats and walked off with Yeshua?
Even more, does this mean that they also left their wives and children (assuming
they weren't single men) to fend for themselves, meaning these women and
children would have become impoverished and mere survival would have
become challenging? While I can't answer those questions with any definitive
evidence, I think I can give you an educated guess. And my guess is that the
boats and nets were retained and taken over by family members. And for those
new disciples who had immediate families they would not have done such a thing
as to simply walk off and leave them helpless. Yeshua would not have expected
them to because it would have violated the most basic of commandments to love
your fellow man as you do yourself.
Since these disciples would operate almost completely within the Holy Land for
the next several years, they wouldn't have been listened to or respected if they
had done such a thing as to make homeless beggars of their wives and children
in order to gain the prestige of following a Holy Man. So the statement that they
left nets and boats at once must be taken as a very general and abbreviated
statement about their instant connection with Yeshua and their immediate
obedience to His command. It more indicates that without hesitation or
reservation they put their occupation and their life second to following Christ. No
doubt even this would have had serious consequences and put a great strain on
their families, if for no other reason than they would soon be traveling on a
regular basis. But this matter is never directly addressed in the Gospels so we
really don't know the details or anything about their families.
Nevertheless I want to take this opportunity to comment about this because I get
regular emails, usually from men who feel a call to serve in full time ministry; and
yet they have wives and children and good jobs and to make this change would
involve sacrifice and acceptance on the part of his entire family. There is no
perfect, one-size-fits-all answer to this dilemma. But my advice is this: remember
that this is not the 1st century. Our modern society is not ancient Jewish society
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and so the consequences and challenges are different now than then. Ideally a
man or woman will be open to God's call to service in full time ministry before
they are married and start a family. Or perhaps a man and women will marry with
the understanding that full time ministry is their shared destiny and so organize
their lives to fulfill it at some point. It could be that a man has already started a
family, and hears the calling later in life, but his wife is willing to whole-heartedly
support his calling, join him, and accept the necessary sacrifices to achieve it. No
one's story will be identical to another's.
However in cases where a man has a wife and family, with all its obligations, and
the wife is firmly not on board with such a profound change, then it should not be
done. If a person has a debt load that would not permit him or her to pay their
debts on the likely lesser amount of income ministry work would generate, then it
should not be done until the debts are paid. We can serve God in ministry in so
very many important and indispensable ways without completely abandoning our
jobs, turning our backs on our bills and debts, and uprooting an unwilling and
unhappy family.
The calling that Christ has for us to be His disciples is, just like with the first 12,
about committing our lives to Him just as we are. For many if not most of us that
is a radical change in and of itself and requires a time of learning and adapting.
Our new found faith in Him also means that we must follow Him even if our
spouses, parents, children, friends, and bosses don't accept it. Does this mean
that our spouses might leave us simply because we change, repent, and become
disciples of Christ and worshippers of the God of Israel? Might it be that we can
lose our jobs over it? Yes it does, and I personally know of cases that it has
happened. Especially if one is a Jew in our time, it very likely will mean that your
family will shun you and you'll be considered a traitor to them and to Judaism. But
as Yeshua said:
CJB
Luke 14:26
26
"If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father, his
mother, his wife, his children, his brothers and his sisters, yes, and his own
life besides, he cannot be my talmid.
So many people hear what they want to hear in this verse, and too often they
overlook the key phrase "and his own life besides". They think of this verse as a
severe Jesus actually suggesting that a new Believer ought to be ready to turn
against his family and despise them for Messiah's sake. That is in no way what
is being commanded. This is about understanding the cost of following Yeshua
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and that you may face tremendous opposition. It is about giving up one's own life
such that nothing is to rank higher than love for God and His Son, and obedience
to them. Loyalty to God comes first; all else necessarily is secondary. Paul has
much to say about marriage and family for the person who comes to faith and
now has some of these dilemmas to deal with. But in every case he suggests that
before forsaking all to enter full time ministry that one is to fulfill their obligations,
marital and otherwise, and to carefully count the cost. You can read some of his
comments on this in 1Corinthian 7 for starters.
One final note on this matter. Verse 22 says that the two brothers "left their
boat and their father" and went with Yeshua. This does not mean that they
broke their relationship with their father. It means that the father was fishing with
his 2 sons on their family owned boat when Yeshua approached them and
commanded his sons to become disciples. It is simply that their father was there
at the time; we're not told what the father's reaction was to this sudden turn of
events.
Verse 23 adds so much context to Yeshua's ministry if we'll just accept it. It says
that Yeshua went around speaking in synagogues because that's where common
Jews met for worship, learning, fellowship and information. We're told that He
proclaimed the Good News (or Gospel) of the Kingdom. And what is that Good
News? Typically a Christian's mind says that preaching the Good News must
mean that Jesus told them that He was the Messiah and that they should put
their trust in Him; but that is not the case at this point in His ministry. We must
think back to what John the Baptist proclaimed, and then the same message that
Jesus also proclaimed as the Good News just a few verses earlier. It is not that
He is the Messiah and can Himself provide for forgiveness of sins, but rather that
it was time for people to repent because the Kingdom of Heaven is near. To the
Jews of that era, the meaning of Jesus's message was that the culmination of the
End Times with all its horrors and deprivations was about to happen, and the
arrival of the joyful, promised restoration was imminent. God was about to kick
the Romans out of the Holy Land and to establish His rule on earth as it is in
Heaven.
Now notice the next part of verse 23: Christ went about healing people from
disease. That is, He continued to live and project the persona of a Tzadik..... a
Holy Man. For the moment that is how the Jewish people were permitted to
perceive Him. Because (hallelujah) a Holy Man had appeared, news of Him
began spreading all over Syria and people began streaming to Him even from
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there with every imaginable kind of ailment and lameness including those who
were held under the power of demons. Why the mention of Syria? Syria at this
time had a huge Jewish population. Syria was on the Galilee's northern border
and the point of mentioning it is to show how far and wide news of this miracle
worker spread even to the not-too-distant Jewish Diaspora. It also highlights what
I told you earlier; the appearance of a Holy Man was rare and when one did
appear, news of him spread like wildfire so the opportunity to be made well might
not be missed.
But what we must also notice is what is not said by Matthew. In verse 25 we're
told that all these people were coming from places like the Galilee, the Ten
Towns (the Decapolis), the capital city of Jerusalem, the province of Judea to the
south, and even areas to the east of the Jordan River. Galilee is mentioned in the
list as is Judea; but why not Samaria that lay in between them? Why no mention
of the prominent Tyre and Sidon? It is because Samaria was a mostly gentile and
mixed blood province, as were the major cities of Tyre and Sidon. The gentiles
living there wouldn't have understood the nature and importance of a Tzadik,
which was a purely Hebrew construct. Besides: Yeshua said that He only came
for the lost sheep of Israel and Matthew seems intent on making that point by
using the list of places these thousands of Jews came from. Gentiles were
beyond Yeshua's scope for the time being. Thus those multitudes who came to
be healed and to hear a message of hope consisted almost entirely of Jews.
What we have been reading in the last couple of verses about the huge crowds
coming to Yeshua for healing and hope are the preface for what comes next: The
Sermon on the Mount. Who did they think they were coming to see and for what
purpose did they come? They came to see the miracle working Tzadik. Some
came for physical healing, others came because of His message that tells them
of hope in the End Times, and (so very importantly) the only way to get right with
God in preparation for it.
Let's move on to Matthew chapter 5.
READ MATTHEW CHAPTER 5 all
This chapter is but the beginning of Matthew's 3 chapter long treatise on what
happened and what Christ said in His seminal speech atop a hill in the Galilee,
addressed to a wide spectrum of His people, the Jews. Why is this so important
to Matthew that he'd spend so much time with it? It is because for the Jewish
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Believer Matthew everything that Yeshua speaks has to do with the Torah and
the Law of Moses.
The first 10 verses are, in Christian tradition, called the Beatitudes. I find it
interesting that while they are but the first few verses of the extensive Sermon on
the Mount, Christianity has them separated away as though they are an
unrelated matter from what follows. It is not unlike what Christian Tradition has
also done with the 10 Commandments that, even though they are but the first of
hundreds of other commandments that God gave through Moses, Christianity
has also separated them away as though they have no connection to what
follows. Clearly such a separation and distinction was not God's, Moses's,
Christ's or Matthew's intent, nor should Believers take it that way. Rather, these
first verses of chapter 5 represent Yeshua's opening words... a sort of
preamble.... which like any good leader or speaker does, gives recognition to
exactly who His audience is. No doubt if He was speaking to the elite among the
Jews, to the Temple Sadducees and to the synagogue Scribes for instance, that
these would not have been the descriptive words He would have chosen.
We'll start peeling back the layers of this Sermon on the Mount next week.
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