Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-Minute Bible Hour Podcast. And you are joining me in the middle of a multi-day arc where we are exploring the concept of apostolic authority, church authority in the New Testament. And there is one passage that is just a granddaddy of them all for the beginning of this conversation that we're going to be talking about today. And my little disclaimer on the front end is that this is one that people can be sensitive about because this is still a passage that is debated between different expressions of Christianity. And my goal is to just call it down the middle and try to just be fair to what I see in the text. But I'm me, and it's not going to be perfect. So thanks in advance for the benefit of the doubt as we go and dig into Matthew 16 and what Jesus and Peter and the others said there. All right, I'm gonna have Jeff play some music and then we're just gonna jump right into it. There's a difference of opinion on how that authority is handed down and what gives a church authority today. I don't have the bandwidth nor the competence to solve that right this second. What I do want to do is go and look at just a little bit of stuff around the New Testament that would help us understand why Paul would make a comment like this and why there would be an assumption of apostolic authority in New Testament times. Okay, well, let's go to one of the most obvious ones of all of the obvious ones, that being Matthew 16. Now, in Matthew 16, especially for those of you who are just picking this stuff up and learning about the great wide world of Christian faith and the Bible, this is a very important passage from one of the four Gospels. These are the books of the Bible that tell the story of Jesus, his life, teaching, death, and resurrection. And in Matthew, you get a scene where Jesus kind of gets away from it all with his disciples. He knows that the end is coming up and he's really starting to invest in his disciples. And Jesus still hasn't, he hasn't gone up on like a hill and yelled, I am God in the flesh, I am the Messiah. He hasn't done it that way. He has indicated several times up to this point that who he is is pretty dang obvious, and y'all ought to be able to see what the weather is. Y'all ought to be able to see what time it is. It's really obvious. So in this scene, Jesus is finally alone. The noise and the clutter is away, they're way up north out of the hubbub and everything. I imagine I'm sitting around a campfire here, and Jesus says to his disciples, Hey, who do people say the Son of Man is? And they replied, Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and still others Jeremiah, or one of the prophets. But what about you? He asked. Who do you say I am? And then Simon Peter answered, You are the Christ, the Son of the living God. And Jesus replied, Blessed are you, Simon, son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven. And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. Then he warned his disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Christ. Now look, let's just go right through the front door with how this gets read. Catholics, who have their headquarters in Rome, look at this passage and they're like, ah, Peter is the rock, and Jesus is giving Peter unique authority over all the other disciples. And Peter is going to have this unique ability to speak into things that involve heaven and earth, like maybe even matters of salvation or speaking authoritatively for God. Catholics believe that Peter took those metaphorical keys with him to Rome. We know he went there, and he handed off those metaphorical keys of authority to the next leader of the church in Rome, called the Bishop of Rome. And then that guy had the authority for a while until he died, and then he handed it off to the next guy, and so on and so forth. And in doing so, Rome is where the ultimate custody of these metaphorical keys of the authority of Christ reside all the way to this day. And when you see the Pope today, you are seeing the holder, the keeper of those keys that Jesus gave here in Matthew 16. Now, the Eastern Orthodox Church does not agree with that. They see this as a commissioning of Peter, yes, but also of the other disciples, and they also would lump Paul in with being a recipient of this commissioning, even though they would say, you know, obviously based on the biblical story, that Paul received that commissioning later on. The Orthodox Church, which is largely eastern half of the Mediterranean and further east historically, they do not think that this power resides uniquely in Rome. And really, next to no one outside of Rome thought that for quite a while after the New Testament. So historically, everyone but Catholics associated with Rome looks at this passage and would say, well, Jesus is talking to all of the disciples, and look at how the rest of the Bible plays out, and look at how history plays out. Clearly, this is an authority that is being imparted to the church, that is made up of what's going to flow out of Jesus and all of these disciples. And therefore, any church that is teaching the true gospel of Christ, that is teaching scripture, that is professing Christ, that is conveying the message that was handed down to us, that Paul references as well. That's the real, true, visible church. And it isn't about it being headquartered where Peter died. That is secondary. I am doing my best right now to be absolutely charitable and fair with everyone. I understand that there's just no way for me to talk about that, especially efficiently, without stumbling over something and sounding harsher than I mean to, or it's going to strike some of your ears and it's going to frustrate some of you. Uh forgive me. I'm just doing my very best to quickly convey what is going on there. No one, however, who read the book of Matthew when it came out, no one in the original audience, no one who was at this campfire when this event actually happened, heard this and thought, oh, we got a controversy here. Man, this Matthew 16, that is not a happy passage. That is one that should be fought over and not celebrated. That is uh something really contentious happened here. No, everybody was there. Everybody in the original audience was like, all right, so this is gonna, it's gonna be this way for a while. Jesus, because the very next thing he explains is that, you know, from this time on, this is the very next verse. From this time on, Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem to suffer many things at the hands of the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and then he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life. The very next thing is Jesus saying, and I'm going away. Like I'm I'm going to be killed and raised to life. How would they have received this? Well, what they would have heard is we better get our act together because we're going to carry this thing forward. I mean, we are going to have a role that involves the heavenly and the earthly, and Jesus' kingdom on earth, what he's doing, what he's building here, the story of Jesus, the message of Jesus, the gospel, the message of life and redemption. This is going to go beyond the next few months, the next year or so. This is the forever story. No, Matthew 16 is a wildly exciting moment. And there's only one guy at this campfire who doesn't get it and completely fumbles the moment. And that's Peter. Peter took Jesus aside and began to rebuke him. Never, Lord, he said, This shall never happen to you. Jesus turned and said to Peter, Get behind me, Satan. You are a stumbling block to me. You do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men. Then Jesus said to his disciples, basically, uh, this is going to be tough, but it's worth it. I mean, I'm summarizing a lot of what Jesus said in the coming chapters for the sake of efficiency there. So what do we take from this very important passage about apostolic authority? Well, one of the big things is it clearly wasn't predicated on Peter being right about everything or the disciples being right about everything. The wrongest disciple in the book of Matthew is Peter. He also takes a lot of big swings, and it seems like he's kind of the archetype. Like, hey, go try. You have the safety net, the grace of Christ in place if you shank it and don't get it exactly right. So Peter is to be esteemed. Peter is to, he's our point of view character, he's relatable. I'm not trying to criticize Peter. What I'm saying is that the immediate context of this very important passage about apostolic authority tells me that one, this authority was being handed on to the disciples and whoever they would disciple. And further, that this is part of good news. They would have taken heart at everything other than Jesus is going to die and we love him and we will miss him. Even if he is raised back to life, he's gonna die, and we're about to watch that happen. And we can't talk him out of it. We're not supposed to stop it. I mean, that's the real heart of the story. The fights and the debates come later as people argue about whose Christian town should get to wield the most authority. And I know that's probably the hardest toe step of anything I've done so far. But if you go and read the church history, well, it got squabbly over that. I mean, people are people, these things happen. Ultimately, however you interpret that passage in light of whose church is what and how the things ought to be, you gotta come away with this observation, though. It is a supreme empowering of and commissioning of generation one of the disciples. And everything about that language makes it clear that that is going to be carried forward. Now, at this point in our conversation, I am wanting to mentally roll right into more stuff from Matthew and the Gospels that deals with this material, but time is what time is, and we can get to that tomorrow. So I'm just going to abruptly halt here after having considered Matthew 16. And then tomorrow we'll go and look at more passages from the Gospels that deal with this exact same topic of Jesus imparting his authority to the disciples. And then what happens after the disciples? Do they get to impart it to others? How does all of that work? More on all of that tomorrow. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.