Written by Amy K. Hall |
Thursday, July 28, 2022
He’s saying his authority is backing them in their judgment, something that God promised in the Mosaic Law. So does this apply to us today? Yes! When church discipline is done, Jesus still backs the authority of those he has put in place to judge, and no one in that position should forget who they’re representing and the gravity of their judgments.

Since we have spoken in the past here at Stand to Reason about the fact that not every promise made in the Bible applies to us today, I received a question about whether the promise Jesus made to his disciples in Matthew 18:19–20 is a promise we can claim. Here are Jesus’ words:
Again I say to you, that if two of you agree on earth about anything that they may ask, it shall be done for them by My Father who is in heaven. For where two or three have gathered together in My name, I am there in their midst.
Since this seems to be a confusing passage for many (and it’s also an important one since—see below—it’s likely an example of Jesus claiming to be divine), I thought it would be worth sharing my response here.
The Context for Matthew 18:19–20
As always, when we’re trying to understand the meaning of a verse, we need to start with the context around that verse, and what we find here is that these verses are in a passage about church discipline. Here they are in context:
If your brother sins, go and show him his fault in private; if he listens to you, you have won your brother. But if he does not listen to you, take one or two more with you, so that by the mouth of two or three witnesses every fact may be confirmed. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. Truly I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven.
Again I say to you, that if two of you agree on earth about anything that they may ask, it shall be done for them by My Father who is in heaven. For where two or three have gathered together in My name, I am there in their midst.
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The point of Abraham as a father figure in Scripture is that he is a father of the faith and an example to us all of believing in the Lord Jesus Christ. So then we who believe in Christ are following in the path of that father in the faith and the very fulfillment of the promise to Abraham more than 4,000 years ago that in him all nations of the earth would be blessed. We who believe in Christ are the promised children of Abraham who are like the stars of the sky in number. But notice, Abraham is an example of faith, but Abraham is not the author or the object of faith.

And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.
Galatians 3:29 *
Premise
All those Jews and Gentiles who put their trust in Jesus Christ alone for salvation are the children of Abraham, the Israel of God, and members of the body of Christ.
Background
Since college one of the most common questions I have experienced Christians wrestling with is the relationship between blood relatives of Abraham (Jews) and Christians. Is God saving the Jews differently than non-Jews? Should Christians think of Jews as closer to God than anyone else? What is the relationship between the people of God in the Old Testament and the people of God in the New Testament? Do Jews go to Heaven by nature of their being Jews? Are any of the promises to Abraham helpful for us today?
The goal of this short article is not to critique my brothers and sisters in Christ who hold to a dispensationalist view. The goal rather is to demonstrate to Christians that the answer is not as complicated or mysterious as it may sometimes appear to be. That which God would have us to know about ourselves and our brothers and sisters in Christ through history is set down very clearly in Scripture so that we can rejoice in the Lord who brings all His elect to salvation by faith.
Abraham
A discussion of the children of Abraham naturally begins with Abraham. Abraham’s name was not always Abraham as history generally remembers him but for the first ninety-nine years of his life he was named “Abram “(Genesis 11:26). Then in Genesis 17, God changed Abraham’s name from Abram to Abraham for a specific purpose:
No longer shall your name be called Abram, but your name shall be Abraham; for I have made you a father of many nations.
Genesis 17:5
From the introduction of Abraham’s name to history, God tells us that his name is significant because it reminds us that Abraham was never to be the father of just one nation but many nations. The children who would have the Lord as their God (Genesis 17:7-8) would be children not limited to one nation but a multitude of nations united by one faith in one Lord Jesus Christ.
From the beginning of Scripture, the Lord helps us to discern the children of Abraham with the very name of Abraham. Whenever we hear the name Abraham we should think “Father of many nations.”
Abraham’s Faith in Christ
Abraham believed God and His promises. Hebrews 11 ties together the Old Testament church and the New Testament church by the Hall of Faith telling us that as of old so now we live by Faith. Even Abraham obeyed God not by his own will but “By faith” (Hebrews 11:1). Abraham didn’t look for God to fulfill His promises in an earthly kingdom in the Middle East but “waited for the city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God” (11:10).
Sometimes we are tempted like the Jews in John 8 to think that Abraham didn’t know anything about Jesus 2,000 years before Jesus was born. But we find in Scripture something very different. Abraham had faith in the promised Messiah to come. Jesus tells us in John 8:56, “Your father Abraham rejoiced to see My day, and he saw it and was glad.” Two thousand years before Christ, Abraham believed in and was looking for the coming of the Messiah, the Christ! Jesus who was before Abraham tells us, and Abraham saw Christ’s coming by faith! Abraham is remembered above all as a man who had faith in Christ alone for salvation – a faith that God calls all men, Jews and Gentiles, to share.
And he [Philippian jailor] brought them out and said, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” So they said, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved, you and your household.”
Acts 16:30-31
The Promise of God to Abraham
God’s promise to Abraham to be his God and the God of his seed after him, to justify him, to give him eternal life, was not through the law or by blood but by faith. From the beginning, the promise was through the righteousness of faith.
Does this blessedness then come upon the circumcised only, or upon the uncircumcised also? For we say that faith was accounted to Abraham for righteousness. How then was it accounted? While he was circumcised, or uncircumcised? 
Romans 4:9-10,13
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If ‘Defenders of the West’ is our new, Christian ‘Plutarch’s Lives’, then let us recognize the truth of our ancestors’ greatness, and piety and let us validate their sacrifices and imitate them. The Crusades were good and right. The myths have been rewritten with our people as the villains because the powers of the air fear a Christendom with muscle. At some point, we must all decide if we will believe the stories about our ancestors from people who hate us and our King, Jesus, or if we will believe what our ancestors said about themselves.

Western Christians have forgotten the meaning of the word persecution. They have also forgotten that once upon a time Christians, when they had the power, prestige and wealth to put a stop to persecution, resisted persecution with violent, military force. Raymond Ibrahim is on a quest to remind us of both of these forgotten truths. 
In his book Defenders of the West, Ibrahim continues the work he started in his previous book, Sword and Scimitar. In Sword and Scimitar, Ibrahim chose to focus on events, specifically on battles that shaped the Crusades and the conflict that he believes must be continuous between Muslims and Christians. In Defenders of the West, he has chosen to go a different route by focusing on the men themselves. Each chapter is a succinct biography of one of the heroes of the Crusades.
After a very good forward by Victor Davis Hanson (whom Ibrahim studied under), Ibrahim gets into his introduction to set the stage for his work. His introduction takes a militant stance right away and sets out to right the wrong of intentionally misrepresenting the Crusades, Crusaders and their Islamic counterparts. Ibrahim has already established himself as a historical and contemporary expert on Islam. In Defenders, he lays out the true historical account of the misdeeds of the Muslims of the era in order to clarify the stakes and motivations of the Crusaders. He also has a secondary goal of clarifying actual Islamic beliefs about how non-Muslims are to be treated according to their writings. The misunderstandings of the modern media regarding Islamic doctrine are so ubiquitous that even some self-professing Muslims believe they are a “religion of peace,” clearly in opposition to their history and teachings.
Ibrahim has a strong desire to get a complete picture of each man he is highlighting in his book and so he considers sources both friendly to and opposed to each subject. This pays dividends later on when seemingly outlandish historical claims are made about the appearance, piety or fighting prowess of one of the Crusaders, only to then have those hyperbolic claims be confirmed begrudgingly by their enemies in private communiques or official records. 
The Great Men
Ibrahim’s work is like a medieval, Christian version of Plutarch’s Lives. A book in which Plutarch set out to strengthen the Roman ethos by linking the heroes of Rome to a heroic Greek counterpart. Americans understand this in a way because of the hackneyed trope in politics of appealing to the founders. Sometimes this is warranted and accurate and sometimes it is absolutely false. A reversal of this is to accuse enemies of being “nazis” or “literally hitlooor.” These things are nearly universal in the way they are regarded. Most Americans give at least lip service to agreeing with the Founders or regarding Hitler as a villain. To connect a cause with them is to have instant ethos. This is the way many of the Romans viewed their Greek predecessors. Plutarch set out to write the definitive biographies of these men and show why Romans were equal to and surpassed their exploits.
Ibrahim doesn’t seek to pair each Crusader to another or to a predecessor in such a direct way. But many comparisons are easy to make within the book among the men he has chosen to write about and in some cases their Islamic adversaries. They are able to be grouped by region and temporal proximity for the useful purpose of comparing and contrasting and offering a wide range of personalities and physical types. If Ibrahim set out to present the men in the book as figures worthy of imitation, he has succeeded brilliantly. If he did not set out with that goal in mind, then these larger-than-life figures have overshadowed whatever other goals he had. Unlike the Romans who appealed to the greatness of their civilizational forebears the Hellenists, when the Crusaders walked the Earth, they considered all the great men of their day to have already bowed the knee to the Cross of Christ. They were of one Kingdom. They sought to imitate biblical warrior kings, pious ancestors, and Christ Himself. 
After telling my 5-year-old son a few anecdotes about Richard the Lionheart, he laid siege to our sofa and started ordering his stuffed animals to convert to Christianity. (Ongoing discussions of Soteriology are clearly necessary.) It is very difficult for a man to read this book and not find himself inspired by the men within. He wants to have a Crusader birthday party. He found a snapping turtle shell near the creek and was hoping I could make him a shield out of it with a lion on it.
Ibrahim knows that the study of the lives of great men is recalling a former way of studying history that has been neglected. Classically trained and educated people are generally more aware of the historiography of the individual because of exposure to older historical works (like Plutarch) which are focused on people’s lives, not merely a series of events. A dry history of mere events can be interesting enough if you find the period compelling, but there is a reason why our best stories have characters in them. To enter history, you must do so through the life of a character who lived it. In that way, even boring periods of history have proved quite captivating to readers.
Surveying the Field
Each chapter, except the introduction and the conclusion, covers a specific Crusader. Ibrahim chooses to highlight Crusaders from each of the major fronts of war with Islam in the Middle Ages and they are presented in chronological order, some overlap each other. The Holy Land in the war with the Saracens and Egyptians, Spain and the war with the Moroccan Moors, and the Balkans in the war with the Ottoman Empire. The crusaders featured are Godfrey of Boullion (French/Frankish), Rodrigo “El Cid” de Vivar (Spanish), Richard the Lionheart (English), Ferdinand III (Spanish), Louis IX (French), John Hunyadi (Hungarian), George “Skanderbeg” Castrioti (Albanian), and Vlad Dracula (Yes, that one. Romanian).
The chapters have a formula that does not get old even though it is routine. First, the situation is explained. In virtually all cases, Muslims have achieved the upper hand politically and are using their power to extort Christians, enslave them, steal their children and murder them. This is a dark part of each chapter. The atrocities committed by the Muslims against their Christian subjects are nearly too heinous to mention. Mass murder, enslavement, brainwashing, forced conversion and forced circumcision, mass pedophilic rape, routine covenant breaking, destruction of churches and holy sites, and forcing captives to fight against their own people. This is an important chronology to understand. The Christian Crusaders always set out to recapture Christian lands and put a stop to the abuse and persecution of other Christians, or to actively defend lands under threat of Muslim invasion. The Crusaders did not invade Muslim lands unprovoked.
As an aside here, this realization is probably a revolution to some people on its own. All of us, even friends of mine who were homeschooled by based parents and myself (private Christian school educated), believe that, at best, the Crusades were a conventional land war meant to expand the control of Islam or the Roman Church. They believe that the Pope dispatched troops to the Holy Lands to expand his personal influence and if the Christians didn’t go then they got excommunicated or deposed. While there is no doubt some questionable doctrines being bandied about at this time in history, such as indulgences for Crusaders, that is not the reality. The Pope requested Christian kings to help in response to outrages beyond count.
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