As we began the final 10 verses of The Gospel According to Matthew, we first looked at The Great Deception. As the women were going to tell Jesus’ eleven disciples that He had risen from the dead, some of the Roman guards who had fallen down like dead men quickly traveled into Jerusalem to inform the chief priests of all that had taken place: the cosmic upheaval of the earth, the angel with his brilliant clothes and radiance descending from heaven, the moving of the gravestone, and the emptiness of the tomb. Jesus was no longer there!
Presented with such shocking news, these priests gathered the elders and counseled together with them on how they could spin such a predicament. They came up with the story that Jesus’ disciples had stolen His body from the tomb while the soldiers were sleeping. Because such a story seemed hardly plausible and because it demonstrated the worst possible dereliction of duty by the soldiers, the chief priests and elders gave a sizeable amount of money to these soldiers to satisfy any protests they might have and to buy their support of perpetuating such a conspiracy. The religious leaders promised to intervene with Pilate on the soldiers’ behalf, if need be; and so, the hatched plan was enacted … to the point that such a story was still being told in Jewish circles even at the time that Matthew wrote his gospel.
Matthew then transitions from the Great Deception to the final narrative of his gospel: the Great Commission. Matthew 28:16 begins with the eleven disciples obediently traveling to Galilee to a mountain that Jesus had directed them to go (yet another mountaintop experience). This event was a fulfillment of Matthew 26:32 when Jesus had told His disciples that after He was raised up, He would go before them into Galilee. In the presence of Jesus at this mountain in Galilee, the response of these eleven disciples was similar to that of the women in that they fell down and worshiped Jesus, acknowledging Him as God, even though some of them hesitated or wavered.
Matthew records words from Jesus to His disciples as He stands in their midst, words that are commonly referred to as the Great Commission. First, Jesus told them that all authority in heaven and earth had given to Him. In a certain sense, this can be viewed from the perspective that even though the Son, the second person of the Trinity, has always been omnipotent over all things, that now because of His triumph through the cross and resurrection, that all authority had been invested in Him … the successful, obedient God-man. This reality of Jesus’ universal authority would serve as the basis and confidence in the commands that He would now give to the Eleven.
The first of Jesus’ commands was to Go. No longer was the disciples’ mission to be constrained to Israel only, but now they were to pass from place to place. And as they traveled from place to place, the second command (the chief focus of Jesus’ words) was to make disciples … not simply to convert people to Christianity but to make disciples of ALL nations (Jews and Gentiles). Jesus gave them further direction on what that disciple-making looked like, commanding that they were to baptize believers, immersing them in water in the name of the triune God (Father, Son, and Spirit), and that they were to teach these new disciples to obey all that Jesus had taught the Eleven. New believers’ baptism and obedience to the word of God would demonstrate the trustworthiness of their conversion.
As a final means of assuring His disciples in their new mission, Jesus promised them something that would fill their hearts with great confidence: the promise that He would be with them in this gospel mission forever, even to the end of the age. Of course, Jesus is the one to conclude this age when He returns in power and great glory, for it is then that Christ will consummate His kingdom. Until then, His people have a commission to fulfill!
Listen to this teaching on Matthew 28:11-20 by clicking on the link below:
