Sermon 46 Matthew 10.24-28 Do Not Fear

From our earliest life, it is a very natural impulse for us to imitate others. We imitate others, but ultimately it is man's calling, his creational mandate to imitate God. The moon has no light of its own; though it shines brightly, it reflects the light of another. And so it is for mankind to reflect, to imitate the light of our maker in the world. So Paul exhorts the church at Ephesus in Ephesians 5:1, "Therefore be imitators of God as beloved children." And it is in Jesus Christ that we find perfect humanity, which we as his redeemed are to imitate.

But imitation of Christ is a costly exercise. It comes at a high price. Here in Matthew 10 we can consider such an example of this price. Are we in the church prepared to suffer the ultimate cost for the name of Jesus Christ? That is the question at hand. So Jesus foretells the church's great trial in the world through which his kingdom will advance. And he says, "A disciple is not above his teacher nor a slave above his master." But Christ is a gracious master of his church, dear friends, and he will give us the ultimate help this morning. Jesus shows us that our imitation of him, even through suffering, is worth whatever cost because in the end all that can happen is for the body to die. But we are more than body and flesh. We have a soul that man cannot kill.

The Disciple's Conformity

It says in Matthew 10:24, "A disciple is not above his teacher nor a slave above his master. It is enough for the disciple that he become like his teacher and the slave like his master."

I remember years ago I was talking to a woman from my church who said to me that when we marry someone, we should not set out to change that person. In other words, we should not try to conform them to some image that we have of the perfect spouse; that can only lead to despair and to ruin. And she is of course right, but there is one exception in need of change. As believers, we ought to be encouraging godliness and Christlikeness in each other, and that means change. It is a thriving Christian marriage where both parties are mutually and actively conforming to Christ.

And there are two parts here to consider in what Jesus is saying about this conformity to Christ. First, Christ says here, "A disciple is not above his teacher." What he means here is that his disciple will not be exempt from that which he himself underwent. The church has not been promised to be spared from the sufferings that Christ himself underwent for his people. So he is saying to his disciples, in other words, buckle up. Here are the expected outcomes if you are to come after me. The summary statement perhaps could be found back in Matthew 10:22. "You will be hated by all because of my name."

Now to illustrate this point, there are those kinds of parents, and we all know them, who wrap their kids in cotton wool. They micromanage every part of their kids' lives. They do everything for them. They keep them away from climbing trees lest they fall and break their leg. Now in fact, wrapping your kids in cotton wool in this way can be one of the most inhibiting things that you can do for a child. How will they learn? How will they grow? What advantage would it be for you, Christian, if Christ wrapped you in cotton wool? It would be to no advantage. To have no trials, to have no suffering, to experience no grief, to taste no persecution, we would soon become marshmallow Christians: untested, unrefined, unformed, prayerless, godless even.

No. Instead, the second point here is plain: Jesus says, "It is enough for the disciple that he become like his teacher." Plato surpassed Socrates; Aristotle surpassed Plato. But we will not surpass Christ our master. Christ is not one to imitate in order to advance beyond him. Rather, we are to become like him in mind and heart and thought and deed; to become like him even in his sufferings. And it is to the Christian's advantage for such conformity to be enough.

There is a simple pressing reality here I want to bring before you too. We should sense here that Jesus is not commissioning covert spies as his disciples. You see, friends, Jesus does not want secret agents in the world. He wants public witnesses, public Christians, an open faith. Matthew 5:14-15 says, "You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden." And yes, Christ has taught us to be shrewd as serpents and innocent as doves, but this in no way cancels our responsibility to be known as Christians, as those seeking opportunity to share the hope of Christ with others without concern.

So it begs the question here: are our Christian lives secret lives or are they public lives? The Jewish leaders, the religious leaders of the day, called the Messiah a miracle worker by the power of demons, Beelzebub. So how much more will they malign the members of his household? But have we ever been maligned for Christ? Do people even know that we belong to Christ? Or do we shrink back in case that might happen? You see, respectable Christianity is often a disguise for hidden Christianity, which may even be disguising no Christianity.

R. C. Sproul said, "Everyone experiences animosity from other people at one time or another, but have you experienced animosity because you are a disciple of Christ? If you have not, you should ask yourself, Why? Ask yourself, Am I distancing myself from my master? Am I a secret service Christian?" You see, this persecution that Christ is speaking of cannot come unless we are public Christians. Are we public Christians?

How else can we apply this first heading? Well, I would say we have a resolution to make, and we must resolve not to fear the rejection of men, but rather see it as an opportunity to conform to Jesus Christ in his sufferings. For if it is true that the gospel message will keep others out of hell and instead bring them to Christ and his salvation, what persecution could ever compare with such a thing as the fate of souls?

Thomas à Kempis wrote of what Christ might say to his disciples to help them: "Son, stand firm and trust in me. For what are words but words? They fly through the ear but hurt not a stone. Christian, conform to Christ. Be willing to be hated for his name's sake."

The Disciples' Courage

And so to begin, Christ says, "Therefore, do not fear them." And so courage is what the Christian needs in the world for Jesus: courage to suffer hatred; courage to be willing to be laughed at behind your back; courage to endure family rejection from those who don't know Christ; courage to be rejected by friends even; courage to tell others about the beauties of God and the terrors of hell. To be hated is no small thing after all. We all know that. It is often a normal response to want to be liked, to be hated by no one, to offend no one. But it can never be this way if we want to live godly in Christ Jesus because the message we bear is an offensive message to the natural man. If the world hated and crucified Christ, sooner or later it will rise up and condemn his messengers with the message. We need courage.

The courage that Jesus offers here in these verses is a very peculiar courage. Let us look at that now. This is the reason given. He says, "For there is nothing concealed that will not be revealed or hidden that it will not be known." What is Jesus saying here? Well, the meaning is quite simple. We should never fear being maligned for the name of Christ because in the end the Christian will be entirely vindicated by what they suffered, faced, or lost. Every tear you shed is held in God's bottle. Every abuse received, every flame endured by his martyrs, every prison cell suffered by the members of Christ's household in Christ's name will one day be vindicated. Because all will be known when God's books are opened. The scores will be at last settled on that final day, and God will not forget the pain endured by his people for his name's sake.

As Don Carson said of these verses, "This statement reveals something of Jesus' perception of the nature of his own ministry and of the way the gospel of the kingdom will advance in the world." You see, Christ expected and foretold that his followers would be persecuted throughout this present age. This is the way in which the church would advance.

There is a persecuted church ministry called Open Doors, and you can look it up online. And their latest data available on their website is that one in seven Christians in the world today are persecuted, seriously persecuted, that is, for Christ. One in five Christians are persecuted in Africa, and two in five Christians are persecuted in Asia. Persecution is alive and well. It is not something confined to the past, and Christ foretold it so. And God knows and sees each of his people who have suffered reproach for Jesus, and nothing escapes God in the end.

There was a New Zealand legal case a number of years ago involving a chap named Richard Crawford. He was anonymously ordering pizzas, a sort of prank, a joke. He was ordering these pizzas and sending them to this woman's address without paying as a fictitious way of targeting this woman for whatever reason. And when she complained to the police, the normal means of identifying Richard were not available to the police. And so one of the police officers thought he would be a little bit clever, and he sent a fake text to Crawford at one point saying that he had won movie passes and asking for his name and address. And Crawford immediately replied with his name and address to this fake text. Then they had his name, his identity, and when police visited him and confronted him, he slapped his head and said, "I am so dumb," and confessed everything.

This is just a silly little story to remind us that in the end nothing will remain unaccounted for. Every sin, every persecuted Christian, all of it will be laid bare before God. Nothing will remain unaccounted for. All will be exposed in the end. No one will get away with anything before God. Anyone who has come against God's people will find that they have campaigned against their own maker, and it will be a sorry day. To persecute a Christian after all for their faith is to persecute Jesus himself. As the Lord said to Paul prior to his conversion in Acts 9:4, "Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me?" as he persecuted the church.

What is the application then? The application is Matthew 10:27: "What I tell you in the darkness, speak in the light, and what you hear whispered in your ear, proclaim upon the housetops." It means go forward with this message of the gospel at every available outlet to you, in your time and in your context. If you have social media, make use of social media. If you have opportunity at work, make use of that opportunity. Do the same in your sports clubs and all such settings. Make the most of it. Let it be known from the housetops. And be fully assured that when persecution comes, if it comes, you will not be without final vindication in that day when all secrets are laid open before God. This is what Christ is saying.

The Disciples' Confidence

Look again at this final verse, Matthew 10:28: "Do not fear those who kill the body but are unable to kill the soul. Rather fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell." The church has every reason, as we have already seen, to have courage and to take the gospel into the world. And here from a different angle, Jesus tells us why we can have even more confidence, to the point even of death for Jesus. And it is simply because man can kill the body, but he cannot kill the soul. He cannot steal the inheritance in Christ that the believer has, even by killing the man or the woman.

The Bible is clear, you see, in teaching that we are not creatures of flesh and blood only, as naturalism teaches. God has formed man with an immortal spirit, an immortal soul. And the martyr's reward awaits the believer, and their soul is immediately with the Lord, awaiting that day when God will form new bodies fit for eternity. So says Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:53, "For this perishable, this mortal body that is, must put on the imperishable, and this mortal must put on immortality." So in other words, I need not fear if my enemy cuts me down because my soul belongs to Christ. That is the logic. And he will give me a new body anyway.

2 Corinthians 5:8 says, "We are of good courage, I say, and prefer rather to be absent from the body and to be at home with the Lord." So what can the unbeliever do, even when the ultimate price is paid, but deliver you immediately to Christ?

Now, twice Christ has said here we need not fear man. But there is one whom Jesus says we need to fear instead of man. It is God, God who has the authority not only over the body but over the soul and the authority to cast both into hell. I want to address then the doctrine of hell that Jesus warns us of here, in our remaining time. For the tender hearts among us this morning, of which there will be many, hell is a particularly uncomfortable subject. Yet as the Puritan Christopher Love said, "Sermons of love will win upon soft hearts, so doctrines of terror must be for knotty spirits."

I believe one of the reasons we lack urgency in our evangelism in the church today, and why we are such soft, marshmallow Christians in some ways, is because we do not understand the biblical teaching of the nature and reality of hell. Hell puts Christian persecution and all of life in proper perspective. What is momentary or temporary suffering for the gospel when the enemies and deniers of Christ will suffer for all eternity in their sins? There is perspective. This alone is the reason why martyrs have often prayed in their final moments that God would forgive their tormentors. Because what is momentary, light affliction compared with what their enemies are facing before God? There is no martyr who has ever, even for a moment, experienced what Christ's enemies shall on the day of judgment to come.

The Belgic Confession in article 37 states this: "that evil ones will be convicted by the witness of their own conscience and shall be made immortal, but only to be tormented in the eternal fire." Dear friends, eternal hell is a real place. Though we hide it away in the recesses of our minds, God means great instruction, instruction for the believer and the unbeliever alike, in the doctrine of hell. It is a created realm. It is a terrifying place of eternal destruction for man and their sins with Satan and his angels. In hell, there is no joy. In hell, there is no relief. In hell, there is only anguish. There is only spiritual darkness of every kind for all eternity.

And mankind, as ACDC said, is on a highway to hell unless they are saved by Christ. Divine judicial sentencing awaits our race at the end, you see. If Jesus Christ is not found to be a man or woman's mediator, there remains only a one way ticket to hell. And so you see why it is God, not man, that ought to be feared. Hearts and hands ought to tremble at the doctrine and reality of hell.

The Bible is crystal clear that the damned shall for all eternity be under God's everlasting contempt and eternal conscious torment of body and soul. The word destroy here, used in Matthew 10, does not mean annihilate. It means to be under everlasting destruction. Hell is not a realm where the damned pass through for but a time. This will be their new bodily home for all eternity. In hell, the sinner receives recompense for sins committed in the flesh against God.

You see, hell is what God thinks of your sin and mine. God is a holy, holy, holy being. He is pure. His nature is compelled to punish what is rebellion against the divine. He is opposed to all that is wicked, and there is no darkness that dwells in our God.

In Deuteronomy 32:22, it says, "For a fire is kindled in my anger and burns to the lowest part of Sheol and consumes the earth with its yield and sets on fire the foundation of the mountains." Such is God's anger against sin and sinners. God's holy hatred burns against the unrepentant and the wicked.

In Psalm 5:5, it says, "The boastful shall not stand before your eyes. You hate all who do iniquity." The prophet Isaiah wrote of the eternality of hell in this way in Isaiah 66, "For their worm will not die and their fire will not be quenched and they will be an abhorrence to all mankind."

And what is striking about the doctrine of hell is that no one in the Bible spoke more clearly on hell than the Lord Jesus Christ himself. Christ said in Matthew 3:12 that in a coming day he will gather his wheat into the barn, but he will burn up the chaff with an unquenchable fire. In Matthew 25, he makes a contrast of fates for the righteous, that is, the believer, and the wicked, saying, "These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life."

You see, just as heaven is eternal for the believer, so hell is eternal for the unbeliever. Dear friends, broad is the way that leads to destruction. Broad is the way that leads to hell. Why are we so apathetic about our souls? Have you wondered? Why do we spend weeks and weeks planning our vacations, planning our lives that are but for a short time, but we do not give a second thought to where we shall spend eternity? Why is it true that so many people in society believe hell exists, but simultaneously believe that God would never send them there?

Jonathan Edwards preached, "He is not only able to cast wicked men into hell, but he most easily can do it. Sometimes an earthly prince meets with a great deal of difficulty to subdue a rebel who has found means to fortify himself and has made himself strong by the numbers of his followers. But it is not so with God." He says, "There is no fortress that is any defence from the power of God. He can cast the body and the soul into hell in but a moment."

For you see, every sin, even the smallest sin we have committed, is committed as treason against God. In Matthew 5:22 it says, "And whoever says, You fool, shall be guilty enough to go to the fiery hell." Hell is what God thinks of sin. Every thought, every careless word, every action, every malign intent, every motive that is sinful rings the bowels of hell even louder, awaiting our arrival and damnation. Such is God's holiness; hence the need for resurrection bodies capable of enduring the active presence of his righteous wrath.

In Psalm 75:8 it says, "For a cup is in the hand of the Lord, the wine foams, it is well mixed and he pours out of this. Surely all the wicked of the earth must drain and drink down its dregs." Friends, man's natural condition is even worse than you have ever imagined. True horrors await sinners on the other side of the grave. "Rest in peace" is the greatest lie perpetuated in society that has ever been spoken. How can there be peace if you have died in your sins without the saviour's life and blood to plead?

Thomas à Kempis again, he says, "For if I could shed tears like a sea, yet should I not be worthy of thy comfort since I have deserved nothing but stripes and punishment because I have grievously and often offended thee and in very many things have sinned against thee."

Now the objector cries out, "But God is a God of love. This doctrine of hell makes him a cruel tyrant." This is the objection. On the contrary, Paul says in Romans 9:20, "Who are you, O man? Who answers back to God? The thing moulded will not say to the moulder, Why did you make me like this, will it?" We have nothing to say. We are silenced before God in the doctrine of hell. So we must not spurn what is written. We must acknowledge that if God is so glorified in the just recompense for sins committed, then who are we to speak otherwise? His thoughts are higher than our thoughts. His ways are beyond our own. And is God not just to judge? We long for righteous courts and righteous judges in our human societies, don't we? But would we deny God the same right in the divine court?

To sin, you see, is to commit high treason against the King of Kings. It is to show enmity against God. It is the rejection of God. "Sin", says George Swinnock, "is God murder. Sin dishonours. It dethrones. It defrocks God of his godness, and it robs him of his divine glory."

And so God does not chase the wicked into hell. Rather, they rush there by their own wilful devices. He does not unjustly condemn, for our God is just. He justly condemns, and all are without excuse. When God arises to damn the wicked someday, he will do so by compulsion of righteousness, by justice that it be preserved.

Isaiah 33:10 says, "Now I will arise, says the Lord. Now I will be exalted. Now I will be lifted up." And so God will be glorified both in the salvation of vessels of mercy and in vessels of destruction.

Let God be God when it comes to hell, dear friends. And let every person be silent before their maker. Romans 3:4 says, "Let God be found true, though every man be found a liar. As it is written that you may be justified in your words and prevail when you are judged." In other words, God has the right.

"Hell", said one commentator, "is a litmus test for our souls. Are you God-centred? Hell will test you." In other words, if there is some inkling in your minds, even as I am preaching, that God is unjust in damning man to hell, then we have a man-centred world formed in our mind, and not as it ought to be, a God-centred world, a world centred on God's glory.

The reality of hell is what made Robert Murray McCheyne say, "Oh, how I wish that I had a tongue like thunder, that I might assail all to hear, or that I had a frame like iron that I might visit everyone and say, Escape for thy life."

And you know, dear friends, there is a way to escape hell. There is a way to instead, enter the fullness of the love of God. It is a narrow way, I warn you, and it is an uncomfortable way at times. It is a way whereby we must pick up our cross after Christ. It is a way of repentance of sin. It is a way of God-surrendered obedience. But it is a way that is free of charge. There is no entrance cost to be saved from hell. A poor man can afford it because empty hands are all that God requires.

God is proclaiming through the church to hell-bound sinners, "Come by this narrow way." And it is Jesus Christ who has lived, who has died, who has been raised for such sinners as we. Oh, the love of God that is displayed in the cross of Jesus Christ! How rich a mercy that hell-bound sinners can look upon Jesus Christ on the cross and see that the hell we deserved was endured by him as a man in real time, poured out upon him, and he drank it down to the dregs for us. That is what the gospel teaches. How rich a mercy.

Our only help is Christ's double work on the believer's behalf: his passive obedience when he died for our sins upon the cross, and his active obedience, his perfect life, which gives us the righteousness required for sinners.

Behold Jesus Christ, the saviour from hell.

Jesus says to you and me this morning in this light, John 6: "All that the Father gives me will come to me and the one who comes to me, I will certainly not cast out." If you put your trust in Christ this morning, he will not cast you to hell. He will redeem you. He will save you. And he will bring you into his fold. And you will be with him forever and saved from this fate.

Have you come to Jesus this morning to be saved? Or are you still in your sins? Are you on the highway to hell? To the one who has not yet confessed Jesus Christ as saviour and lord, I say, Why wait? In but a moment you can lay hold of Christ and all his benefits.

And to the believer I say, if our opponents without Christ are awaiting such a fate as this, then what fear is really justified before man? Because it is nothing compared to what awaits them if they die without Christ.

Fear God, not man.