Dever The Message of the New Testament

Promises Kept
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-4335-9930-9
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 648 Seiten

A Biblical Overview of Each New Testament Book in Light of the Old  The New Testament is the story of how all the promises made by God in the Old Testament were kept-and what that means for us today. The nation of Israel had many hopes: hope for a deliverer, hope for restored fellowship with God, and hope for the world to be put right. The New Testament explains how those promises were kept and how, if we are Christians, they are kept in us as well. Based on 28 sermons in the early years of Mark Dever's ministry at Capitol Hill Baptist Church, The Message of the New Testament surveys the historical context, organization, and theology of each New Testament book, in light of God's Old Testament promises. Dever's message echoes that of the New Testament-one of fulfilled hope. - Big-Picture Analysis: Covers each book of the New Testament concisely and accurately  - Appeals to Pastors and Laypeople Alike: A helpful resource for gaining a deeper understanding of the Bible or preaching an overview sermon to a congregation  - Written by Mark Dever: Based on 28 sermons taught at Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, DC - Replaces ISBN 978-1-58134-716-6

Mark Dever (PhD, Cambridge University) is the senior pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, DC, and president of 9Marks (9Marks.org). Dever has authored over a dozen books and speaks at conferences nationwide. He lives in Washington, DC, with his wife, Connie, and they have two adult children.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Dever, Mark

Leseproben

1

The Message of Matthew

Jesus, the Son of David

Why Are There So Many Gospel Accounts?1

This month, the world population is projected to reach 6 billion people for the first time ever. Out of that 6 billion, about 14 million people claim to be Jews, 22 million claim to be Sikhs, and 350 million claim to be Buddhists. Various new religions claim around 100 million adherents, and about 250 million people are adherents of various tribal religions. There are also supposed to be about 150 million atheists. Everyone I have mentioned so far, then, totals about 900 million people.

The statisticians who compiled these figures describe about 800 million people as nonreligious. They do not explain how they compiled that category. If these particular researchers have defined mild Confucianism and Shintoism not as religions but as life customs, the great bulk of these “nonreligious” must be Chinese and Japanese.

Of those that are left, about 800 million are Hindu, a little more than one billion are Muslim, and about two billion are professing Christians.

I wonder how you react to such statistics. Those of us who are professing Christians may see something of the great challenge still before us for reaching the unreached. Some less spiritual types may feel a vague reassurance, a strangely satisfied feeling that “our team is on top!” Some may feel a despair of ever knowing the truth for themselves. Such a great variety of perceptions of ultimate reality seals their case—that the whole world is as confused and divided as they are.

An inquiring historian appearing on the scene might well ask, where did this largest of all the world’s religions come from? Perhaps knowing a bit about religion, the historian realizes that Christianity is not a political or military movement like Islam that can expand by the sword. (The Crusades were a failed error on the part of a minority.) Nor is Christianity simply the life customs and mythology of a populous culture, emerging slowly out of the mists of common practice and lore, like Hinduism.

Christianity burst onto the scene, like Minerva emerging fully formed from Zeus’s head. True, our understanding of various doctrines has developed through the church’s history, but we trace them all back to our one teacher, Jesus Christ. His life and teaching, his death and his victory over death are together the exploding nucleus which has propelled this faith across Asia, Europe, Africa, and the globe. It all began in him.

It is this One, easily the most influential figure ever to live, who will be the subject for our studies in Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts—the section we have called “The Truth About Jesus.” To learn this truth, we will display one of the strange riches of the Christian faith: the accounts of four men who were contemporaries of Jesus—John, the disciple; Luke, the historian friend of the apostles; Mark, the young, well-placed friend in Jerusalem; and perhaps the strangest one of the lot, Matthew, the bureaucrat, the tax-collecting, pencil-pushing scribbler. Matthew was a tortured combination—Jewish by birth and Roman by employment. More important, he was one of the twelve disciples called by Jesus.

All four authors include in their accounts the same basic themes about the mission and message of Jesus, and you will find no disagreement between them. For example, our discussion of Mark is titled “Jesus, the Son of Man” because this is a title Jesus uses to refer to himself that is very prominent in Mark’s Gospel. But we should not conclude that “Son of Man” is not used in Matthew. Indeed, it is used about thirty times in Matthew.2 And just one more example: where would an experienced Bible reader guess the following verse is from? “All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.” An experienced Bible reader may think this sounds like John’s Gospel, but it is Matthew 11:27.

These four verbal portraits of Jesus clearly present a unified picture. They are talking about the same person. And yet the Bible provides four separate accounts for a reason. The Lord did not leave just one testimony. Each Gospel writer emphasizes slightly different themes, and we can learn something fresh about Jesus from each one. Ultimately, all four will enrich our understanding of Jesus himself.

Introducing Matthew

We begin where the New Testament begins, with Matthew, who presents the new with an understanding of its rootedness in the past. Everyone agrees that Matthew’s Gospel was written in the decades immediately following the life of Jesus. Matthew’s name is at the top of the book, but nowhere is Matthew named in the text itself. Nevertheless, it seems likely that the apostle Matthew was the author. From the earliest history of the church, other writers quoting from the text cite him as the author. And nothing in the book would lead us to think he did not write it. The book is written in fairly good Greek, which a tax collector and scribal official such as Matthew would be trained in. No other name has been closely associated with the book. And, honestly, there would be little reason for an anonymous writer to ascribe anything to Matthew. Matthew’s background was not prestigious. A number of books were written right after the New Testament period under the assumed identity of someone famous. But these pseudonymous writers picked Peter, or Paul, or John. Nobody would have picked Matthew.

Pulling down Matthew’s document from the shelf of history, what do we find? What does Matthew tell us about Jesus?

Some people expect to find the religious inventor par excellence. Jesus, they like to imagine, really knew how to make up a religion. He discovered the key to the human psyche and could market himself, or let himself be marketed, better than anyone ever.

Other people expect to find a Horatio Alger story, some self-made hero who has pulled himself up by his own bootstraps.

But if either group were to take up Matthew’s Gospel and begin reading it carefully, they would not find someone who was a religious innovator with a product to sell or a self-made man, though Jesus certainly did teach some new things. Rather, they would find someone who thought and taught—indeed, who embodied and personified—what people had been taught not just for decades or centuries but for millennia before him. It was as if history itself had been prepared for him.

Matthew provides a deeply textured portrait of Christ. What does this portrait portray? Was Jesus about something new? That is what the religious leaders at the time thought. We must go back two thousand years and listen to Matthew tell us what caused this startling phenomenon of Christ-ianity. Specifically, we want to ask three questions: 1) What does this book say? 2) Was Jesus more new or more Jew? 3) Who is Jesus?

What Does This Book Say?

First, what does this book say? When you read Matthew’s Gospel, which took me two hours to read aloud, you encounter many familiar things. You find the Golden Rule and the Lord’s Prayer, the Sermon on the Mount and the Great Commission, the baby Jesus and Peter’s declaration that Jesus is the Christ. You find Jesus’s teaching on the church, discipline, and divorce.

Matthew presents Jesus’s ministry in seven sections. The first four chapters provide an introduction. They include a genealogy and an account of Jesus’s infancy, his baptism, and his preparation for ministry. The three concluding chapters in Matthew, chapters 26 to 28, recount his suffering, his death on the cross, and his resurrection.

The great bulk of the book is the middle section, chapters 5 though 25, which comprises the body of Jesus’s ministry. These middle chapters easily divide into five sections. Each of these sections begins with a long teaching block, followed by narrative. Matthew is the only Gospel with this structure. We get the longest sermons of Jesus in this book.

Let me take you through those five sections. The first covers chapters 5–9, and comprises the Sermon on the Mount and accounts of a number of Jesus’s healings. In this first section, Matthew appears to be establishing Jesus’s authority as a teacher and healer. Jesus is someone we are supposed to hear, trust, and obey.

Chapters 10–12 make up the second section, which shows a rising opposition to Jesus’s ministry. In chapter 10 Jesus prepares his disciples for this opposition, some of which they experience in chapters 11 and 12. This section is helpful for the Christian who is experiencing opposition to his or her faith.

From chapter 13 through the middle of chapter 16, this opposition leads to the formation of two camps—those who are beginning to see that Jesus is the Christ, as Peter acknowledges, and those who do not. Jesus teaches in the block of parables in chapter 13 that a polarization happens when the kingdom of heaven comes. This polarization is then acted out in the remaining chapters. This section is helpful for reorienting us outward for evangelism. God has a concern that is going to push us out even amid people who may disagree with us about who Jesus is.

The fourth section begins at what people say is the turning point in the Gospel. The hinge of Matthew is Peter’s confession of Jesus as the Messiah, which ends the previous section. We then read,

From that time on, Jesus began...