The Privilege and Responsibility of Hearing the Gospel

Read Matthew 9:35-10:15

      Jesus’ instructions to the Twelve may offend modern sensitives on matters of race.  “Go nowhere among the Gentiles and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” Jesus says (10:5-6).  Does he envision a racially monolithic divine kingdom?  Of course not.  One of Matthew’s major themes is the inclusion of non-Jewish people in God’s Kingdom.    

       But the Kingdom and its Messiah must first be presented to the people to whom they were promised.  It was God’s plan all along for the gospel to come “to the Jew first” (Romans 1:16), and then to the whole world (28:16-20).

      The privilege of hearing the gospel, however, carries with it a great responsibility.  Matthew’s original Jewish readers would be taken aback by Jesus’ instructions to “shake the dust from your feet” upon departing from an unreceptive Jewish home or town (10:14).  They were well-familiar with that symbolic gesture.  They did it whenever leaving Gentile territory – to rid themselves of its pollution and separate themselves from the judgment that was surely coming on it. 

      No one can hear the gospel without consequence.  Either he receives it, and the lavish outpouring of God’s grace in it and the promise of everlasting life to come, or he rejects it, establishing ever more certainly the ground of God’s coming judgment upon his sin and unbelief.  “How shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation?” (Hebrews 2:3). 

      Sometimes people object to the exclusivity of the gospel with the question, “What about those who have never heard?”  It’s a fair question that deserves a careful answer.  But there’s an even more crucial question:  What about you, who has heard?