Gospel, According to Matthew
Matthew 1:1—28:25
1.Jesus is the messiah prophesied by scripture.
2.Jesus’s teaching are the new law for the church.
3.The kingdom of heaven is both present and future reality.
4.The church is the new community of faith.
Messiah. Doctrinal certitude for a questioning church. Matthew emphasized the fact that Jesus was the expected messiah the Jews had been looking for. The term ‘messiah’ means “anointed one.” It had come to signify the ideal king, David’s descendant, and it would be he who would free the Jews from roman rule and establish an earthly kingdom. Jesus did not accept this understanding of messiah and what messiah meant. He was the messianic king, but He was to take on the role of Isiah’s suffering servant. A great deal of emphasis in Isiah was put on the concept of the suffering servant. From His death, He provides freedom from sin and not from foreign rule. His kingdom is a spiritual one. Matthew uses about 70 quotations from 16 OT books to prove that Jesus had brought the true fulfillment of Jewish messianic hopes.
Lawgiver. Matthew also portrayed Jesus as a law giver; one greater than Moses. He made this role of Jesus especially clear in Jesus’s presentation of the sermon on the mount. Matthew addressed this sermon in great detail. Jesus fulfilled the OT law rather than doing away with the old law. Jesus’s law goes beyond the letter of the OT law to acquire an inner purity and acquire love like that of God Himself. Jewish Christians wondering whether to retain their loyalty to the law would be reassured by the knowledge that Jesus had fulfilled the law that God had intended. The law Jesus gave is the law for life in His kingdom.
Kingdom. In fact, the kingdom of heaven may be considered the theme of Matthew’s gospel since he mentioned it more than 30 times. The kingdom of heaven has the same meaning as ‘kingdom of God.’ The term means “God’s mighty rule.” This refers not to a place but those whom God rules. Jesus’s teaching in Matthew shows that in His, God’s rule or kingdom has already arrived. Those who became His disciples entered His kingdom now are given eternal life. Yet, in another sense, the kingdom’s fulfillment is future and will be realized only when Christ returns at the end of the age. Many of Jesus’s parables in Matthew’s gospel talk about aspects of life and kingdom. Matthew’s readers could rejoice seeing themselves living as present and future citizens of God’s wonderful kingdom.
Church. Only Matthew, of all four gospels, included teachings about the church. He dealt with the basis of this new community of faith, which is just another name for the church, in Matthew 16:17–19 and provided other teachings related to the church in Matt. 18:15–20. What Matthew did was to stress that the call of Jesus’s church to preach His gospel to all the world as seen in Matt. 28:16–20. Throughout the whole record of Matthew, He is not the church but the church’s Lord who is central and needs to be emphasized. The church members who first read Matthew’s gospel would have found themselves challenged to live in obedience to Him.
All scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, reproof, correction, and instruction in righteousness (2 Timothy 3:16).