The True Test of Divine Relationship: Matthew 7.15-23

Jesus’ logic is brutal and relentless. Good trees produce ‘good fruit’, bad trees produce ‘bad fruit’. Therefore, if you find a person who, while obviously not perfect (who is!), produces consistently ‘good fruit’ you will have found a person who is on the narrow way and one who is living in the state of ‘eternal life’. Here this state of ‘eternal life’ is not based on any believing in or commitment to Christ, but is the direct outcome of a life that seeks those things that are ‘dearest to the heart of God’. What is it that sums up this great heart-beat of God? It is nothing other than "Do to others what you would have them do to you"!

Jesus goes further and says something that still sends disturbing shivers down the theological spines of evangelicals. He declares that not everyone who confesses the Lordship of Jesus Christ and can claim success in prophecy and demonic deliverance in Christ’s name will automatically enter the kingdom of God. Evangelical consternation arises because Jesus’ declaration appears to radically fly in the face of what Paul would later assert in Romans 10.9, “That if you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”

But Jesus is quite specific. Only those who do "the will of my Father in Heaven" qualify for the kingdom. And what is the will of the Father? Once again Jesus spells it out. ‘The will of the Father’ in this Matthew 7 teaching, is not ‘faith in Christ’. It is nothing other than the ‘Golden Rule’. These ‘good trees’ are, to change the metaphor (7.24-27), those whose lives are ‘built on the rock’ of the golden rule. These are the wise men and women who survive the storms of life.

How to ‘inherit eternal life’, according to Jesus: Luke 10.25-37

A Jewish lawyer comes to Jesus and tests him with the question, "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" Once again the reply Jesus gives is not the sort of answer that either the early church Apostles or later evangelicals would ever offer. Jesus unequivocally states that the keeping of the great commandment, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength and mind and your neighbour as yourself," will ensure that a person inherits eternal life. "Do this and you will live," are his exact words.
Such radical simplicity was immensely threatening to the established Jewish religious system of the day. With this one statement, Jesus had dropped an ‘atomic bomb’ into the midst of hundreds of years of accumulated ecclesiastical Jewish baggage, burning to the heart of what the great commandment had always taught – a simple yet radically costly way of living in right relationship with God and with one another. What obviously scandalised the Jewish authorities was that what Jesus was saying undermined the need for Torah, priesthood, Temple and perhaps even the sacrificial system itself.

Divine relationship, Jesus reiterates, is all to do with the state of a person’s heart. Their treatment of others will be an accurate reflection of that heart state. In saying what he did, all Jesus was doing was repeating what the Great Commandment had said all along, and what the prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah and others had thundered at Israel hundreds of years earlier. But Jesus hadn’t finished, and his ensuing story about the ‘Good Samaritan’ would have hit his audience like atomic explosion number two!

In this famous story Jesus makes the hero a man from the hated Samaritan sect. In his wonderful book Desire of the Everlasting Hills, biblical historian Thomas Cahill writes of the Jew’s hatred of the Samaritans:

“There is no hatred so intense as odium theologicum - hatred for those nearby who are religiously similar to oneself but nevertheless different. For them [Samaritans] the Jews reserved a contempt they did not display even towards gentiles." (1)

It would have been impossible for any Jew in the listening crowd that day not to have realised instantly the unmistakable and none too subtle inference of his story. Jesus was making the monstrous claim that a despised Samaritan heretic had ‘eternal life’, by virtue of the fact that he had kept the commandment to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’. Even worse, if that were possible, was Jesus’ clear message that members of the Jewish religious élite did not have eternal life, because they had chosen to break the same great commandment!