Ask Pastor Mike Live

Pastor Mike: All right, let's go to Jane. Jane, you're on the air with Pastor Mike. How can I help?

Jane: Hey, Pastor Mike. You were just talking a few minutes ago to someone about Matthew 11, about the Elijah comparison with John the Baptist. And I opened it up and was looking at it, and verse 12 says, "From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven has been subjected to violence, and violent people have been raiding it." What in the world does that mean?

Pastor Mike: Yeah, that's a great question. Let me pull up—I preached on this once, and there's a couple ways to take this. Let me see if I have my notes still open here. Matthew 11:12. Here's a couple ways to look at this; here's what I've come down to.

The word here that is translated "suffers violence," I won't bore you with all the language study here, but it certainly has a sense of a hard-fought struggle. I'm going to see this after all my study of this passage, at least the way I've taught this, and I think this is the case.

When it says "the violent take it forcefully," there's a repeat of this one word twice: "suffers violence" and "the violent take it by force." Obviously, all of these things have this struggle to it. Go back in your mind, for instance, to Matthew 16:18: "I tell you, you're Peter. On this rock I'll build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." Even that sets us up for this concept.

The gates of hell aren't going to prevail against the church. Well, the gates of hell are gates. If they're gates, that means they're stationary, and the church is advancing. So if the kingdom of heaven is violently being taken by force, it seems like, certainly in the context of talking about John the Baptist—John the Baptist is a strange character to start with—it seems like this idea of a revolutionary thing.

Even when I use the word "revolutionary," you think of all the parables Jesus told about wineskins—old wineskins, new wine. There's something about a revolutionary sense of something inciting a strong opposition where the Pharisees couldn't handle it, and the institution of Judaism couldn't handle it. They were envious of Jesus, and here were these fishermen who didn't have any formal training and couldn't handle it.

The kingdom of God that everyone talked about in the seminaries and the synagogues now, all of a sudden, was being had by not only the fishermen and the tax collectors and the zealots that were following in the apostolic band but by the crowds and the tax collectors and the former prostitutes. I just think this is a picture of the strange and motley crew that were now genuinely aligned with Christ and the King.

That is my best interpretation of the Greek word "biadzo" here that is used. I think John the Baptist becomes the typified figure of what that means. It's an overthrow of the status quo of the expected, respectable Pharisee, scribe, second-temple period Judaism that all of a sudden now we've got all kinds of strange characters that are in step with the one who has nowhere to lay his head, that is actually the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. That's my understanding of this text, as strange as it is, Matthew 11:12. I'll admit it's a hard passage.

Jane: It's kind of like Jesus hung around with the prostitutes and the thieves and all that?

Pastor Mike: But they were hearing His word and repenting. Think about it. Remember, here was a gal washing His feet with her hair and her tears, and they were saying stuff like, "If He knew what kind of woman she was, He would never let her touch Him." Well, wait a minute. Yeah, she had been a prostitute.

It's like 1 Corinthians 6: "Such were some of you." You were like that, but you were washed, you were justified, you were sanctified. God has changed your hearts. Here were repentant people, and they were radically changed.

That was the thing. When Jesus tells the story of the prodigal son, the real point of it was the older brother wouldn't rejoice. He wouldn't rejoice in the fact that sinners were coming to faith, and therefore they were excluded. Jesus made a lot of statements like that. It's like the sons of the kingdom are going to be cast out, they're going to be locked out.

All these other people are going to come from the east and the west, and they're going to dine at the table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. You're going to be blown away at the kind of people that are going to be sitting around the table with the patriarchs. I think that's what Jesus is getting at by that statement.

Jane: So the kingdom of heaven is a euphemism for "this is the kind of people that are going to be saved"?

Pastor Mike: That are being saved. It is now. You have the tables being tipped over. All the people you would expect, like the rich young ruler—you'd expect him, but no, he's walking away. Who do you have? Peter, James, and John, smell of fish, they have a Galilean accent—they're the hicks, and yet they're in.

The political zealots in the crowd, and the former tax collector Matthew's in the crowd. People you would never expect. Look at the kingdom of heaven: it's suffering violence, and the violent are taking it by force. They want it; they're all about it.

But the people you'd expect are walking away. They're turning their nose up at it. They don't want it. And they're scribes; they know this book better than anybody else. They're walking away from it. But who wants it bad? These people that you would never expect: Peter, James, and John, and Nathaniel, and Philip, and all these other people.

I think that's what's going on in this text, including John the Baptist, who wouldn't even near the temple, who some people think were in Qumran, out there in the desert where the Dead Sea Scrolls were being collected, because they didn't even agree with what was going on in Jerusalem.

Jane: Interesting. That helps a lot. Thanks a lot.

Pastor Mike: Okay. Well, that is a hard passage, one of the hardest ones in the Gospels, for sure.