Two Gates, Two Trees, Two Houses

Where we are (7:1–6)

Matthew 7 is the third and last chapter of the Sermon on the Mount, the first and longest of the five great blocks of teaching in Matthew's Gospel (chapters 5–7). Jesus has been seated on a Galilean hillside. In chapter 5 he blessed the empty-handed and pressed the commandments past the hand into the heart; in chapter 6 he set our giving, praying and fasting before a single hidden Audience. Now he stops describing the kingdom and asks us to decide about it.

So the chapter arrives in pairs. A speck and a log. Two gates and two roads. Two trees. Two confessions of the same name. Two houses in the same storm. Each pair is a fork, and the sermon will not let us off the mountain without choosing.

“Do not judge, so that you will not be judged” (7:1).

Almost everyone knows this verse, and almost everyone misreads it. D. A. Carson, the New Testament scholar whose commentary on Matthew is one of the standard works, lays out the range of the verb krinō — to judge judicially, to condemn, to discern — and shows that none of the wider senses fits. “It cannot here refer to the law courts,” any more than 5:33–37 abolished judicial oaths. It cannot forbid discernment either, since five verses later Jesus calls some people dogs and pigs, and ten verses after that tells us to watch for false prophets: “All this presupposes that some kinds of judging are not only legitimate but mandated.” What is forbidden is narrower and more familiar — to be “judgmental and censorious,” which is to take the bench. Carson gives the Greek its full force: “Do not assume the place of God by deciding you have the right to stand in judgment over all.”^*

John Calvin, the Geneva reformer, said it more briefly four centuries earlier. These words of Christ “do not contain an absolute prohibition from judging, but are intended to cure a disease, which appears to be natural to us all.”^*

Then the measure. “With the measure you use, it will be measured to you” (7:2). The ruler we hold up to other people is the ruler heaven will hold up to us. Carson draws it out: whoever poses as judge can hardly plead ignorance of the law, and “he who insists on unalloyed justice for others is scarcely open to mercy himself.” He borrows a summary from John Stott, the English pastor whose exposition of the sermon has been the standard evangelical one for half a century: “the command to judge not is not a requirement to be blind but rather a plea to be generous.”^*

And then the cartoon. A man with a plank in his own eye, squinting to tweeze a speck out of his brother's. Carson insists on the exact shape of the rebuke: Jesus does not say it is wrong to help with the speck, but that it is wrong for a man with a log in his eye to offer. Once the log is out the duty remains — “when a brother in a meek and self-judging spirit removes the log from his own eye, he still has the responsibility of helping his brother remove his speck.” The prophet Nathan walking into David's palace with a story about a stolen lamb is the Old Testament's version of the scene (2 Samuel 12:1–12). The plank comes out for the sake of the speck, not instead of it. John Chrysostom, the fourth-century preacher of Antioch, had pressed the same point: what Christ forbids is not the naming of sin but the taking of the judge's place.

Then, abruptly, the opposite danger. “Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs” (7:6).

Readers have found this verse hard for eighteen centuries, and the earliest surviving use of it is not the obvious one: the Didache, a Christian manual from perhaps the late first century, quoted it to fence the Lord's Table against the unbaptized. Carson thinks that reading, however ancient, is not the purpose of the saying. He takes “what is sacred” as Matthew takes it everywhere, the gospel of the kingdom, and reads the line as a warning against going on announcing it to people who have made their contempt plain. It is emphatically “not a directive against evangelizing the Gentiles” — the book ends by commanding exactly that (28:18–20). Dogs and pigs, he says, naming Calvin as the one who saw it rightly, cannot mean Gentiles but “persons of any race who have given clear evidences of rejecting the gospel with vicious scorn and hardened contempt.”^*

Calvin built a wall around the verse so it could not be used to ration the gospel. Ministers cannot tell God's children from swine, so “it is their duty to present the doctrine of salvation indiscriminately to all”; and though some hearers look hardened at first, “charity forbids that such persons should be immediately pronounced to be desperate.”^*

So 7:1 and 7:6 are two ditches on one road. Demands for perfection breed the judge; demands for love breed the gullible. Jesus forbids both.

Ask, seek, knock (7:7–11)

Having taken us off the bench, Jesus turns us toward the only seat that is safely occupied.

“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.”

Carson notes that all three imperatives are present tense, which is the tense of keeping on: keep asking, keep seeking, keep knocking. And he reads the placement as the answer to a problem the sermon has created. Jesus has just laid out a righteousness, sincerity, humility and love that no hearer can manufacture — “far from demanding the impossible, he is providing the means for the otherwise impossible.” He quotes the nineteenth-century commentator John Broadus: “one cannot be a truly praying man, and yet poor in spiritual things.”^*

Calvin reads the triple command the same way and puts his finger on why we pray so little: “Nothing is better adapted to excite us to prayer than a full conviction that we shall be heard. Those who doubt can only pray in an indifferent manner; and prayer, unaccompanied by faith, is an idle and unmeaning ceremony.”^*

Then the argument from the lesser to the greater. No father hands a boy a stone when he asked for bread, or a snake when he asked for fish. “If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!”

Notice that Jesus says you are evil, not we are evil. Carson points out that he assumes the sinfulness and quietly exempts himself from it — and that the verse does not make us as bad as we could be, since evil parents demonstrably give their children good things. What is really at stake, he says, is a picture of God. He is not “a reluctant stranger who can be cajoled or bullied into bestowing his gifts,” nor a malicious tyrant enjoying his tricks, nor “an indulgent grandfather who provides everything requested of him.” He is a Father. And the asking is not for his information but for our training: “if Jacob prevails with God, it is Jacob who is wounded.”^*

The rule the Law and the Prophets arrive at (7:12)

“So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.”

Jesus did not invent the rule, and the house should say so. Around AD 20 Rabbi Hillel, challenged by a Gentile to summarize the law in the time the man could stand on one leg, answered: what is hateful to you, do not do to anyone else. Carson's observation is the one that matters: “Apparently only Jesus phrased the rule positively.” The difference is not decorative. The negative form catches sins of commission; the positive form catches the ones we commit by sitting still — so the goats of 25:31–46, condemned for what they never did for the hungry and the imprisoned, “would be acquitted under the negative form of the rule but not under the form attributed to Jesus.” And then Jesus hangs the whole Old Testament on it. Carson reads the “therefore” as reaching back over the entire sermon, since this is the second time we have heard “the Law and the Prophets” — the first was 5:17 — so the two verses are an envelope around everything between. Which also means the rule is no piece of prudence like “honesty pays.” We do it because it is where the Scriptures were going all along.^*

Calvin saw where we actually fail it, and the sentence is uncomfortably exact: perfect justice would prevail among us “if we were as faithful in learning active charity... as we are skillful in teaching passive charity.”^* We are all excellent at explaining to other people what they owe us.

Two gates, two roads (7:13–14)

“Enter through the narrow gate… small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”

Two words are doing the work, and they are not the same word. The gate is stenēs, narrow. The road is tethlimmenē, and that is the participle of the verb thlibō, to press — cognate with thlipsis, which in the New Testament almost always means persecution. So Carson reads the narrowness as a prediction rather than a mood: “the way of discipleship is 'narrow,' restricting, because it is the way of persecution and opposition.” The broad road, he adds, is not the “easy” road; it is the spacious one, with room for the crowd and all its baggage.^*

This is also the place to retire a phrase. “The straight and narrow” is not in the Bible. The King James “strait” is the Latin word strictum, narrow — the same word as in a strait of water — and, as Carson says, “nothing is said about this gate or road being 'straight.'” The road is not geometrically direct. It is tight. Readers also ask whether we go through the gate first and then walk the road, or walk the road and arrive at a gate; Carson argues for the first, and draws the pastoral conclusion that entry begins now and the narrow road of pressure runs from here to the consummated kingdom. “Here is no funnel that progressively narrows down but a decisive break.”^*

Which would be crushing, except that Chrysostom catches the trick of perspective Jesus is using. Christ's own point, he says, is “look not to this, that it is rough and narrow, but where it ends; nor that the opposite is wide and spacious, but where it issues.”^* A gate is worth what it opens into.

Two trees (7:15–20)

The roads have impostors, so Jesus posts a guard. “Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves.”

What are they teaching? Jesus does not say, but Carson reads the flow of the sermon and the Old Testament behind it and suggests they “neither acknowledge nor teach the narrow way” of life under pressure — the prophets of Jeremiah and Ezekiel who cry “Peace!” when there is no peace (Jeremiah 8:11; Ezekiel 13).

How is a disguise that good ever seen through? By waiting. “By their fruit you will recognize them.” Carson keeps the illustration concrete: from a distance the little blackberries on the buckthorn can be mistaken for grapes, and the flowers on some thistles for figs. The test is “certain but not necessarily easy or quick.” Living by kingdom norms can be faked for a season, but “however guarded one's words, they will finally betray him.” And he adds the guardrail that ties this paragraph back to 7:1: “censoriousness over minutiae must be avoided.”^*

Calvin reads the test differently, and the disagreement is worth leaving open. Those who confine the fruits to a man's life are, he says, “in my opinion, mistaken,” because a counterfeit holiness is exactly what the worst impostors put on display. He grants that “nothing is more difficult than to counterfeit virtue,” but holds that what Jesus chiefly puts on trial is the teaching: “Under the fruits the manner of teaching is itself” included.^* Carson weighs the conduct; Calvin weighs the doctrine. The text says “fruit” and does not divide them, and a reader is probably meant to watch both.

Augustine, the fifth-century bishop of Hippo who gave these chapters the name we still use, watched the exact moment a mask slips. The wolf is unmasked not by inspection but by loss: it happens when “by temptations of any kind those very things begin to be withdrawn” that he was after under the sheepskin all along.^* Take away the money or the standing, and the teeth come out.

Tim Keller, who pastored Redeemer Presbyterian in Manhattan, preached this passage and refused the flattering reading of it. The two trees are not a good person and a bad person; both have fruit on them, and one set is poison. And his sentence on where fruit comes from is worth keeping: “The fruit on the tree does not give the tree life.” It is the other way round — “the fruit is a result of the life.”^*

Two confessions (7:21–23)

Now the fork cuts through the church.

“Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.”

Then the most frightening sentences in the sermon. On the last day many will read out their credentials — we prophesied in your name, drove out demons, performed many miracles — and hear four words back: “I never knew you.”

Weigh carefully what fails to save them, because Carson will not let us take the cheap exit. These are not people whose miracles were fraudulent. “There is no reason to judge their claims false; their claims are not false but insufficient.”^* What is missing is not profession and not power but a person actually known — which, Carson notes, shows “how close to spiritual reality one may come while knowing nothing of its fundamental reality.”

Keller heard the fervency in the doubled word. “He doesn't say just Lord, he says Lord Lord which means he's emotionally engaged.”^* Nothing here is lukewarm. That is what makes it terrifying.

And here a careful distinction has to be held, or the paragraph turns into despair. Carson notes that Matthew “strongly stresses grace,” and then asks the exact question the verse raises: is obedience to the Father's will presented “as the ground or as the requirement” of entering the kingdom? He answers that it is the requirement, and that Paul would insist on that “no less than Matthew would.”^* So the doing is not what purchases the kingdom; it is what a life inside the kingdom looks like.

That is where we land, though the verse can be pressed harder. “Only he who does the will of my Father” is a flat sentence, and faithful readers have heard a warning in it that no distinction between ground and requirement will soften. Hold both: the kingdom is a gift to the empty-handed (5:3), and a life that never does the Father's will has no claim on it. Matthew says both, in one sermon, and does not relieve the pressure. Calvin, reading the same verses, observes that Christ is summoning hypocrites to his judgment seat, and that the warning is aimed first at teachers who “deny by their actions and life what they profess with the mouth.”^*

Two houses (7:24–27)

So the last pair, the one the sermon has been building toward.

“Everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock.”

Both men hear the same words. That is the whole point. The only difference is the doing — and for a long time the two houses look identical, because a foundation is the one part of a house nobody sees from the street. Carson notes the verb is a future: whoever does these words will become like that man, on the day the storm arrives. “Only storms reveal the quality of the work of the two builders.” And he names the three who build on sand without meaning to: “those who pretend to have faith, who have a merely intellectual commitment, or who enjoy Jesus in small doses.”^*

Augustine put the reason for the doing in a single line: “no one confirms what he hears or understands, unless by doing.” And he would not leave the rock impersonal, since “Christ is the rock, as many Scripture testimonies proclaim.”^*

Chrysostom read the weather plainly. By “rain” and “floods” and “winds,” he said, Christ “is expressing metaphorically the calamities and afflictions that befall men” — and he listed them: false accusations, plots, bereavements, the ordinary ruin of a life. The rock, he said, is Christ's own teaching: “He calls the stedfastness of His doctrine a rock; because in truth His commands are stronger than any rock.”^*

He had a picture for the two foundations as well. The apostles, few and in chains, “exhibited the steadfastness of the rock”; their accusers, many and armed, showed “the weakness of the sand.”^*

The flood does not choose. It only shows.

Where the sermon leaves us (7:28–29)

“When Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were amazed at his teaching, because he taught as one who had authority, and not as their teachers of the law.”

Carson notes that this sentence is the first of five formulaic conclusions in Matthew, one at the end of each great discourse — “a self-conscious stylistic device that establishes a structural turning point.”^* It is also the point of everything before it. Only one kind of person can finish a sermon by making his own words the rock a life stands or falls on. Not a scribe citing the tradition. The King.

And that is where the chapter stops being a cliff edge and becomes good news, because the demand is one no honest hearer has met. We have judged from a bench we had no warrant to sit on. We have worn our own sheep's clothing. We have said “Lord, Lord” over corners of our lives our Lord would not recognize.

Now look at what Jesus has quietly done. The rock is not a principle; it is “these words of mine” (7:24), his own teaching made the foundation a life is built on. And the sentence that settles everything, “I never knew you,” is his to say — borrowed from a psalm where a vindicated sufferer dismisses his persecutors (Psalm 6:8), and spoken here by the one who admits or refuses at the door. The sermon ends with a man claiming both the foundation and the verdict.

So the chapter does not finally ask us to locate a narrow road on our own. It puts us in front of the person standing at the gate — the one who says, in John's Gospel, “I am the door. If anyone enters in by me, he will be saved” (John 10:9).

And he did every word of this sermon. He never judged falsely. His fruit matched his leaves to the very end. He built his whole life on his Father's will and on nothing else, and when the weather came — betrayal, false accusation, abandonment, a cross — that life did not fall. It was killed, and on the third day it stood up again.

Which means the verdict we had earned, “I never knew you,” is not the last word available to us. The gospel is that the Judge came to be known, and to know us — and to build people who are speck-eyed and sand-founded and late to every good into the one house the flood cannot take.