Written by Edward T. Welch |
Monday, April 3, 2023
Even his opponents could see this: “Teacher, we know that you are true and teach the way of God truthfully, and you do not care about anyone’s opinion, for you are not swayed by appearances” (Matt. 22:16). Of course, their remarks were a form of flattery by which they hoped to trap Jesus, but they were true remarks nonetheless. Jesus’s imperviousness to the opinions of others was part of his teaching with authority, and it was one of the features that distinguished his ministry from that of all the other Jewish leaders.

It might be encouraging to know that fear of rejection has been a problem for a number of illustrious people throughout history. For example, Moses warned the leaders and judges of Israel about this very thing (Deut. 1:17). He knew that people reverence the opinions of others, show favoritism, and honor some people above others because they fear rejection from those whom they consider important.
This human tendency was an especially important issue for Israel’s judges. For example, if an Israelite had to judge a case involving a prominent metalworker, he might have experienced a certain pressure to make the judgment light or waive the penalty altogether. Otherwise, the metalworker might reject the judge the next time he needed his help. In other words, judges could be controlled by a defendant if the defendant had something that judges wanted. In such situations, people would become big and God’s justice would become small.
I wonder how many of us fear those who have more money, more power, more education, more attractiveness than we do. We could ask this question: Do I single out certain people and groups for their approval and acceptance because they can give me what I think I need? It could be a boss who does my annual review, a neighbor whose friendship enhances my status, a person who could help to make the church budget, or a spouse whose acceptance and approval are all- important.
King Saul is a specific biblical example of someone who experienced fear of rejection. In 1 Samuel 15, God commanded Saul to completely destroy the Amalekites. God then gave the armies of Israel grace to defeat these people, “but Saul and the people spared Agag [the king of the Amalekites] and the best of the sheep and of the oxen and of the fattened calves and the lambs, and all that was good” (1 Sam. 15:9). When the prophet Samuel confronted Saul with his gross disobedience, Saul confessed his sin but also justified it: “I feared the people and obeyed their voice” (1 Sam. 15:24).
Saul may have made this justification for one of two reasons. Perhaps he really did feel pressured by his generals to bring home some of the spoils of war. In that case, his excuse was indefensible in light of God’s endless warnings not to fear people. Or perhaps Saul reasoned that Samuel would accept his excuse because fearing others was such a common, human thing to do. After all, since fear of others is part of our fabric, how can we be held responsible for it? Regardless of which alternative represents Saul’s true motives, his fear of others had catastrophic results: it was the reason Saul lost his kingdom.
The Pharisees in the New Testament shared King Saul’s fear of rejection. They craved acceptance and approval from the people, and they were afraid they wouldn’t get it. Many Pharisees boasted that they didn’t believe in Jesus, and they even accused those who did of living under a delusion (John 7:45–49). Yet some leaders could not ignore Jesus’s authoritative teaching and miracles, and they quietly believed in him. In other words, they believed that Jesus was sent from God and was the Messiah for whom they had hoped and prayed.
You’d think that with such a conviction these leaders would become Jesus’s disciples immediately and seek to persuade the others to believe. Yet that didn’t happen. Their faith quickly withered. Why? They feared confessing their faith because of the possible reactions of those in the synagogue, “for they loved human praise more than praise from God” ( John 12:43 NIV). They felt they needed the praise of people. They feared rejection more than they feared the Lord.
Our Own Fear of Rejection
It sounds all too familiar. Sometimes we would prefer to die for Jesus than to live for him. If someone had the power to kill us for our profession of faith, I imagine that most Christians would say, “Yes, I am a believer in Jesus Christ,” even if it meant death. The threat of torture might make some think twice, but I think most Christians would acknowledge Christ regardless. However, if making a decision for Jesus means possibly spending years being unpopular, ignored, poor, or criticized, then many temporarily put their faith on the shelf. “Death is not imminent, so why hurry into such a rash decision?” “There will be time later to get things straight with God.” In other words, “Kill me, but don’t keep me from being liked, appreciated, or respected.”
Remember that one word: evangelism. I am sure that many teens would rather die than have their friends catch them hanging out with the church youth group or doing Christian drama on the streets. Aren’t the most popular mission trips the ones that take us far from our own neighborhoods? Africa is easy; our own neighborhoods are a constant challenge. Has anyone consistently had the boldness and clarity of Jesus to testify about the gospel? Never. Has anyone consistently avoided the fear of man in evangelism? Certainly not. There is a “foolishness” inherent in the message of the cross. The clear proclamation of the gospel does not make us look good. It doesn’t make us popular.
“Peer Pressure” and the Praise of God
The praise of others—that wisp of a breeze that lasts for a moment—can seem more glorious to us than the praise of God. Jesus himself told the Jewish leaders, “How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?” ( John 5:44).
Today we might call the Pharisees people pleasers. We would say they “struggled with peer pressure.” Since all of us are affected by it at one time or another, we are almost sympathetic toward such behavior. But people pleasing is perhaps the most tragic form of the fear of man. Teenagers constantly make unwise decisions because of it. Adults, too, look to other people for their cues. We wait for others to take initiatives of love. We spend too much time wondering what others may have thought about our outfits or the comments we made in the small-group meeting. We see opportunities to testify about Christ, but we avoid them. We are ruled by our own reputations. As we follow these Old Testament stories, the problem feels as though it is other people, but, in truth, the problem lies within us.
Jesus stood in stark contrast to this Pharisaic concern. He did not show favoritism; instead, he reached out to male and female, rich and poor, and people of all races and ages. He did not take a poll of what was popular before he began to teach; instead, he spoke truth that was often unpopular but could penetrate the heart. “I do not receive glory from people,” he said ( John 5:41). Even his opponents could see this: “Teacher, we know that you are true and teach the way of God truthfully, and you do not care about anyone’s opinion, for you are not swayed by appearances” (Matt. 22:16). Of course, their remarks were a form of flattery by which they hoped to trap Jesus, but they were true remarks nonetheless. Jesus’s imperviousness to the opinions of others was part of his teaching with authority, and it was one of the features that distinguished his ministry from that of all the other Jewish leaders.
This attitude also characterized the ministry of the apostle Paul. He exhorted his churches to be imitators of him as he was an imitator of Christ (1 Cor. 4:16; 1 Thess. 1:6). By this, he was encouraging his disciples to imitate his life and doctrine, an imitation that included seeking the praise of God rather than men (1 Thess. 2:4). Paul was not a people pleaser. He was a people lover, and because of that he did not change his message according to what others might think. Only people lovers are able to confront. Only people lovers are not controlled by other people. Paul even indicated to the Galatians that if he were still trying to please man, he would not be a servant of God (Gal. 1:10). That is how seriously he took the fear of man.
Not that this came naturally. Paul had the same fleshly instincts we do, and he knew it. As a result, he beseeched the churches to pray for him: “[Make supplication] also for me, that words may be given to me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel . . . that I may declare it boldly, as I ought to speak” (Eph. 6:19–20).
Excerpt taken from Chapter 2: “People Will Reject Me”, When People Are Big and God Is Small: Overcoming Peer Pressure, Codependency, and the Fear of Man by Edward T. Welch. Used with permission
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Like the generation whose dead bodies lined the wilderness floor, the generation who killed God’s Son would be shut out of God’s New Covenant kingdom and would pay mightily for their crimes. That is the context we must understand if we are going to understand Matthew 24, which is one of the most misunderstood chapters in all of the Bible.

The Confusing of Curses
As a child who grew up on Disney, I learned that curses came from magic spells, brought to boil in a big black cauldron, were wielded by wicked witches in shadowy towers, and cast upon unsuspecting innocents. These evil potions turned princes into frogs and princesses into ogres, that would be locked away in castles. But, should a hero arise, discovering the magical power of eroticism, and other such things that will make you gag, then the curse would be broken by the power of love and all would turn out right again.
Perhaps nonsense like this is why I had so much trouble understanding curses in the Bible and why God was the one putting people under them.
I was never told that God invented blessings and curses as a feature of covenantal relationships and not as a weapon against the innocent. You see, a covenant is a terms-based relationship between God and man. It is a relationship where a holy God makes promises to dwell with a sinful people. To do that, laws must be instituted to limit human sin and sacrifices must be given to atone for that sin. Without that there would be no relationship.
Then, once the relationship has been codified, God gives a sign to the people to remember their commitment to God and His commitment to them. For those who obey God’s covenant, great blessings and favor end up coming upon the people. The greatest and best blessing of course is being near to and knowing God. But, for all those who hate God, spurn His commands, and live in opposition to His covenant, God would rain down curses upon them.
In the Bible, curses do not come from the hand of a malevolent tyrant but a merciful God. They are not applied to good people who need to be rescued, but to deplorable people who must be destroyed. And the way these curses are avoided is not through the triumph of a love-sick, dragon-slaying, hero but by the loving obedience of the dragon-slaying LORD.
By the time we get to Matthew 23, the people have hated God so ferociously and lived in opposition to His covenant for so long, that the cup of His bitter curses was about to tip and drown them in His suffocating wrath.
The Need for Curse
God was gracious to outline all of the stipulations, laws, and requirements in the Mosaic covenant. He gave them explicit and specific commands to obey, feasts to attend, and sacrifices to offer whenever they sinned. He gave them priests to represent them before God and to mediate reconciliation on their behalf. The point of the law was not perfect obedience lest a lightning bolt will be slammed on top of your head. The covenant was a relationship of grace with a thousand mercies for sinners to be reconciled to God. Only those with the hardest of hearts toward God would experience the curses laid out in chapters like Deuteronomy 28.
In that passage, God warns the ones who persist in covenant rebellion, that they will be brought under a total and unrelenting curse (Dt. 28:14). This curse would impact their food supply, it would poison their produce, and would kill all the livestock in their possession. It would cause the nation to be plunged into insanity, confusion, and chaos. It would doom their children, infect their citizens with incurable illnesses and diseases, rain down plagues upon the population, and leave their soldiers dead and roasting in the sun.
If the people did not repent after the first round of seven curses, an additional seven curses would be poured out onto the people with terrifying and increasing intensity. This would culminate in a bitter exile where the people would be violently removed from their ancestral lands and mistreated in a place that was not their home. If they still did not repent, even after all of that, a terrifying nation would overwhelm them, besieging them in their cities, cutting off their food supply, raping and killing them, leaving them so hungry for food that they would willingly roast their children in the fire (Dt 28:15-68). As revolting as all of this sounds, this was precisely the kind of disasters that befell Judah during the Roman invasions of AD 70.
In Malachi-like fashion, Jesus came to Jerusalem to forecast their destruction. The culmination of all of God’s covenantal fury was soon to descend upon them, destroying the root and branch of Jesse through covenantal cursing. In Matthew 21-22, Jesus came into the city with the prophetic fire (Mal. 4:1-2) but the people refused to repent. Now, in Matthew 23, His righteous indignation is boiling over and the hard-hearted people will be left to their demise.
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Written by Keith A. Mathison |
Tuesday, September 28, 2021
Many [evangelicals] are looking to the culture for direction on ethical questions. A century ago, Christian liberalism did the same thing. It looked to culture for its categories, its definitions, its standards. Liberalism did this because it self-consciously rejected biblical authority. Antinomian evangelicalism is doing this inadvertently because its hermeneutical principles effectively render four-fifths of the Bible ethically irrelevant.

I recently watched a short video of a lecture by my mentor and former pastor Dr. R.C. Sproul. In it, he explained that his ministry from the early 70s to the early 90s had been focused on addressing the catholic questions of Christianity—the doctrine of God, the doctrine of the Person and work of Christ, the doctrine of Scripture, and such. During those first twenty years, he wanted to minister to broad evangelicalism, and these were the foundational doctrines under attack everywhere. But having addressed all those issues over the course of twenty years, Dr. Sproul says in his lecture that he wants to begin focusing on the distinctives of Reformed theology. He believed that the broad evangelical church could never be truly healthy until it was Reformed. He made the point that “Unreformed Christianity has failed.”
One of the things he said in this lecture especially caught my attention. He said that the broad evangelical church has been “pervasively antinomian.” I’ve been thinking about this comment a lot since watching the video, and I believe it makes a point that we need to seriously consider, namely, the fact that there is a radical difference between broadly evangelical ethics and distinctively Reformed ethics. There is a difference in the way each addresses ethical questions, and there is a difference in the sources used to answer those questions.
One of the doctrinal issues that separates broadly evangelical theology from confessional Reformed theology is covenant theology. The majority of evangelicals reject Reformed covenant theology, often because of its implications for our understanding of the sacraments. Among those evangelicals who are dispensationalists, the differences are even greater. Why is this significant? Because a rejection of Reformed covenant theology results in a very different hermeneutical approach to the Bible. The impact of those covenantal and hermeneutical differences is evident when it comes to how each handles the Old Testament in general and biblical law in particular. And how we approach biblical law is enormously important for our approach to Christian ethics. This is where Dr. Sproul’s charge of “pervasive antinomianism” arises.
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