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Jesus says, and people will come from east and west and from north and south and recline at table in the kingdom of God. Amen. You may be seated. In the name of Jesus, Amen.
Dear Saints, Jesus is traveling down to Jerusalem and he’s preaching all along the way. He’s preaching in such a way that someone comes up to him and says, “Hey, Jesus, wait a minute. It seems like with all the things that you’re saying about getting into the kingdom of God, it seems like not many people are going to make it. Will there be few that are saved?” And Jesus says, “Yes. The door is narrow and soon closing for salvation.”
Now, I think, dear saints, that this teaching of Jesus, amongst all the teachings of Jesus that troubles us in our modern world, that this might be the most troubling of all; that there are few who are saved, and that there is one way to come to the kingdom of God. It’s the doctrine of the exclusivity of Jesus, or the exclusivity of the gospel, the teaching of the Scripture, that there is only one way to be saved.
And again, I think of all the doctrines that trouble people, this perhaps is the most troubling. We live in this pluralistic time where there’s to be many roads and many ways to get to heaven, and all lives are supposed to end in bliss. Different doctrines are okay for different people. What works for you works for you and what works for me works for me. But we’re all headed in the same way. After all, aren’t all religions basically the same?
So the claim is made, and so it doesn’t matter who you worship or who you trust. Now it’s important for us to recognize that we live in this pluralistic society, and perhaps we live here in Austin in a particularly pluralistic society—different people, different worldviews, and different beliefs and different gods—but it’s important for us to recognize that this is not a unique situation. We are not the first Christians to find ourselves in this kind of cultural milieu. This is the mix that the church grew up in, and it’s the mix that the church has thrived in. We are not the only ones to face this before. In fact, we can recognize that these words of Jesus were just as troubling when He first preached them as they are now.
The general kind of religious idea of humanity is a pluralistic idea. Many gods, many forms of worship, many ways to get to heaven, and this claim that there is only one—that there is a door—and that door is a skinny, narrow door has always been offensive to our human sensibilities.
So we want to talk about why. We want to talk about how we can hear these words of Jesus and rejoice in them. And to that end, at least here’s the plan. I want to walk through the text and pick up a couple of things on the way, and then when we get to the end, I want to reflect on the exclusive claims of the gospel, and we’ll end with a couple of stories.
As we begin to read the text, I want you to notice something, and this is the first observation. Jesus resists addressing this question as theological speculation. This guy comes to Jesus and he says, “Hey, is it true that there’s only going to be a few that are saved?” as if Jesus was some sort of, I don’t know, theology professor and this was some sort of class. But Jesus takes the question from those who were being saved and drives it right back to the people who were listening to them. He takes it from the third person to the second person. The question is about “they” and His answer is about “you.”
Look at verse 23 and 24. Someone said to him, “Lord, will those who are saved be few?” And Jesus says to them, “You strive to enter the narrow door. For many, I tell you, will seek to enter and will not be able.”
Now this is the first point—Jesus refuses to let us reflect on theology in an abstract way. He brings it right down to the point. And we want to hone in on that because there’s a lot of times, I think, that we or the people that we’re talking to about theology will do something like that. They’ll use theology as a way to sort of become a defensive mechanism to avoid talking about their own spiritual condition.
I mean, remember, for example, the woman at the well. She comes to Jesus and she figures out that Jesus is a prophet, and so she asks Jesus a theological question. You Jews say we’re supposed to worship in Jerusalem; we say on the mountain. Which is it? But what did Jesus do? He says, “Go and bring your husband.” And she says, “I’m not married.” And Jesus says, “Right, you’ve been married four times and the man you’re living with is not your husband.”
Now look at what was going on there. She was using the theological question as a way to avoid repentance, as a way to avoid what God actually has to say to her. Now oftentimes this happens. People will say, “How can we possibly say that there are people who have never heard the gospel and they are going to die and be condemned?” They are so worried about those people who haven’t heard the gospel, what would we say? But what about you? You have heard the gospel.
You see, the theology question is a way to push off the real question, or we’re trained to ask, you know, the college kids always have these lists of questions like this, like, “Can God make a rock so big that he can’t lift it?” I think Luther gave the answer; he can make a hell for people who invent such questions. But oftentimes the questions like that are ways of avoiding the real question, which is, does God have a legitimate claim to judge you when you die? That’s the real question.
So we engage in theology as sort of an abstraction to avoid repentance, and Jesus just won’t let it happen. That’s the first point.
Now the second point on the text, and that is that Jesus says there is a narrow door, but more than that—it’s not just that the door is narrow—but that the door will one day be closed. And this is referring to the day of judgment. The door of salvation will be closed, and it occurs with each one of us on the day that we die, or it occurs for all of us on the last day.
Here’s verse 25, 26, and 27. Jesus says, “When once the master of the house has risen and shut the door, you begin to stand outside and to knock at the door, saying, ‘Lord, open to us,’ and he will answer you, ‘I do not know where you come from.’ Then you will begin to say, ‘We ate and drank in your presence, and you taught in our streets,’ but he will say, ‘I tell you, I do not know where you come from. Depart from me, all you workers of evil.'”
There will be a day coming, and this, dear saints, is a frightful sort of thing, but it’s just what Jesus is teaching. There is a day coming when the door to salvation will be closed. Now that is a frightful preaching, and that is a frightful day. But there is comfort for us, and the comfort is this: If the door will one day be closed, then we know that the door is right now open. The door to salvation is opened. The Scriptures call today the day of salvation, so that while there will be a closing of the door, we rejoice that the door stands right at this very moment, the door stands open.
By the death and resurrection of Jesus, the way into the kingdom of God, the narrow way is open. It’s open to us, to our family, to our friends, even to our enemies, to all the world—the door is open—which leads to the third point which is to say that even though the door is narrow, there is plenty of space inside.
I don’t know if you’ve been to a place like this before; it seems to me—I was trying to remember a specific time when I visited a place like this, but I couldn’t remember a specific thing. But if you go to a restaurant or something, and it just has like a little bitty front wall, a little door, and you think it’s this tiny little hole-in-the-wall place—that’s the language we use, right? Hole in the wall—but you go into it and it just keeps opening up and it keeps going and going and going, and there’s courtyards and balconies and tables and plenty of places to eat.
This is the picture of the kingdom that Jesus gives. He says the door is narrow; the way in is small, but once you come in it opens up to this great expanse. Maybe you can imagine the narthex and the nave of our church. It’s narrow when you come in, and then you come in and it opens up like this. So it is with the kingdom of God.
And Jesus says that there’s plenty of space. It’s never going to fill up; it’s never going to reach capacity. Jesus says, this is picking up at verse 28, “On the outside, in that place, there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth when you see on the inside Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God, and you yourselves cast out; and people will come from the east and from the west and from the north and from the south and all recline at table in the kingdom of God.”
It’s true that the door is narrow, but there are tables set for people to come from every direction to dine at the Lord’s table. There’s plenty of room. Remember Jesus will tell the parable of the one who goes out to find the people and bring them into the wedding feast, and he says, “There is still room, there is still room.” There is always room in the Lord’s kingdom.
And that gets to the fourth point, that the people who are there—the people who are reclining with Jesus are a surprise. The people that we think would be there in the feast are not there; they are on the outside looking in. And the people that we think should be on the outside in fact make it into the feast. That’s really the warning of the text.
There are the people who think that they should sit and dine in the Kingdom of God—the Pharisees, the good workists, those who have accomplished some good things in their lives so that they deserve this sort of thing. Those are the people who think they should be able to sit in the Kingdom of God and rejoice in His goodness and His mercy, but they are the ones who are on the outside looking in.
And then there are people in the kingdom who you don’t expect to be there: the sinners and the Gentiles from the north and south and east and west, those who are far off. It’s the last who end up being the first and the first who end up being the last, and that’s the point of the sermon that Jesus is preaching.
See there in verse 30 where He says, “Behold, some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last.” So we have to simply say, what do we think gets us there? What do we think leads to salvation? What do you think earns us a spot at the table with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob? I mean, what did the people listening to Jesus think? That being Jewish was what would earn them a place? That being a Pharisee? That having a righteousness according to the law? None of these things work, no.
Well, if you trust in these things, you end up being on the outside. It is only those who know the kindness of God and Christ that come into the kingdom. Those who do not trust themselves, but rather those who trust Jesus. It’s sinners who have a Savior that find themselves in the kingdom. Jesus says that the sick at the well have no need of a doctor but only the sick, and so His kingdom is a kingdom of those who are sick, of those who know their sin, of those who know that they cannot save themselves and know that they need a Savior, and this is the narrow door.
This is why His kingdom is exclusive. Now I want to spend a little bit of time thinking then about this exclusivity of the gospel. And we’ll start with the Scriptures, just a couple of Scriptures to make sure we’re on the same page. Peter preaches in Acts chapter 4, verse 12. He says, “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.”
And the first commandment says you shall have no other gods. Or perhaps clearest of all, Jesus says in John 14, verse 6, these words. Now this verse—this is an amazing verse to me because I don’t know of another verse like this that is so cutting. This verse, John 14, verse 6, is a divisive verse because in my own experience, this verse causes so much joy and delight for Christians and so much consternation and anger for unbelievers.
It’s an amazing thing how the reaction to this particular verse is so different depending on if you have faith in Christ or not. Jesus says in John 14, verse 6, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but by Me.” So says Jesus. And there’s no getting around it. There’s no softening this; there’s no making it say something different.
No one comes to the Father except through Me and three or four other different options. No. Jesus is not a way. He is the way. He is not a truth. He is the truth. He is not a life. He is the life and the only way to God. The Gospel is exclusive.
And I want to put into your minds anyways at least three reasons why. The Gospel is exclusive and salvation is exclusive because it is a historical reality and not a future possibility. The Gospel is exclusive, second, because it is a person and not a process. And third, the Gospel is exclusive because it is a gift and not an achievement.
First, the Gospel is exclusive because it is a historical reality and not a future possibility. The future has a lot of different possibilities. There’s a lot of different ways tomorrow could be, but there was only one way that yesterday was. You have a lot of different options for what you’ll eat for dinner tonight, but there’s only one thing that you ate for breakfast. Now look, if salvation were a future possibility, there might be a lot of different ways to accomplish it, but our salvation is not a future possibility. It is a historical reality. It’s a thing of the past. It’s happened already. It’s an accomplished event, and it specifically is the history of the suffering and the death and the three-day-later resurrection of Jesus. It happened. That’s how God decided to save us, and because it’s a historical reality, it is singular and exclusive.
First point. Second point: salvation is exclusive because salvation is a person and not a process. Salvation is not based on our moral progress. If salvation were a system that were put in place and we would follow it to be saved, then there would probably be a lot of different ways for each of us to attain that salvation, to plug ourselves into the system. But salvation is not found in a process or a system. Salvation is found in a person, in Jesus, and in Jesus alone.
So the exclusiveness of Christianity is bound up to the individuality of Jesus. There is, simply said, nobody else like Him. Jesus alone is God in the flesh, in our flesh. Jesus alone bears the sins of the world and carries them to the cross. Jesus alone is the sacrifice for sinners. Jesus alone is the Savior of the world. Jesus alone is risen from the dead and lives and reigns to all eternity at the right hand of God the Father. Jesus is alone in these things, and because of this, because salvation is found in the person of Jesus, it is exclusive.
And third, salvation is exclusive because it is a gift and not an achievement. It is not by works so that none can boast; it is the gift of God. If salvation, you see, if salvation were something that we were doing—something that we were achieving—then there might be various different ways to accomplish it, but it is not something that we are doing or achieving; it is the gift of God. The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
So that God has given to us, He has decided in His wisdom and mercy, He has decided to give to us His kingdom and His salvation through Jesus and in Jesus alone. So that the Gospel is exclusive because it is historical, because it is a person, and because it is a gift, and because of this, it must be exclusive. The claims of Christianity must be exclusive. The door to salvation must be narrow.
But, be it narrow, be it few that find it, it is for us still open, and that is our joy. And that is what we want to finish on. I want to just meditate a little bit on why this exclusivity of the gospel is the joy of some people and the despair of others.
I want to tell you a story about a man; he was well-to-do; he kind of liked to run his own life; he was kind of proud of himself. And one day he was hungry, so he decided he would go to the restaurant and find himself something nice to eat. So he went out and sat down at the table at this nice fancy restaurant, and the waiter brings him a menu, and he looks at the menu, and much to his despair, the menu only has one thing on it.
What kind of place is this? And not only was the problem that the menu had only one thing on it, but the thing that it had on it was really terrible. It said the only thing we offer is a pill, an orange pill, a burnt orange pill. And this meal, this pill of a meal is described like this: it says, “You probably won’t like the taste of it. There will most likely be disastrous side effects. You’re going to need to drink a lot of water, and the price is outrageous.”
The man looks at the menu and he says, “This is the worst restaurant I’ve ever been to. One thing on the menu? What?” And he throws it down and he storms out, no doubt finding a better place to eat, which afterward he goes to the doctor. And this man visits the doctor who, he feels fine; it’s a regular checkup. But the doctor runs a few tests and comes back to meet with him in the room, and he says, “Sir, I’m very sorry to tell you this; I’ve got some very bad news; you are terribly sick. In fact, you might not even know how sick you are, but you are so sick that you’re dying. In fact, I think that you’re going to live for only a couple of hours.”
The man can’t believe it. He kind of panics and he says, “Isn’t there something I can do? Isn’t there a treatment? Do you want to take me to the ER? Is there surgery or medicine or something that can heal me?” And the doctor says, “Well, there’s not a lot of options. In fact, there’s only one medicine that we know of that can heal your particularly bad condition. It’s a little pill, an orange pill, a burnt orange pill. And you’re not going to like the taste of it, and the side effects are probably going to be pretty bad, and you’re going to be drinking water all day. It’s ridiculously expensive, and I heard earlier that you didn’t want it.”
But the man doesn’t hesitate, you see. The man does not hesitate; he says, “Give me the pill.” And he’ll endure the side effects and he’ll drink the water and he’ll pay the price because this is the one way to live, the one way to survive. Now, what is the difference? What is the difference between the man at the restaurant and the man in the doctor’s office?
The man in the restaurant thought that this was simply a matter of taste, a matter of choice, a matter of making life better. But the man in the doctor’s office knew that it was the difference between life and death. Our faith, our worship, our belief, our going to church is not simply a matter of convenience. Jesus is not offered—and may God forbid that any preaching like that would ever be found in this place or in our own ears. Jesus has not offered to us to make our lives better, to make things go smoother for us.
Jesus comes to save us from the wrath of God that we deserve, from the death that we deserve, from the punishment from sin that we deserve. And the fact that there is only one hope doesn’t matter to us because there is one hope. The fact that there is only one solution doesn’t matter because there is a solution. The fact that there is one Savior does not matter because there is a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who has rescued and redeemed us by His death and His resurrection. And we rejoice in Him.
The way is narrow, but Jesus has brought us through that narrow way. He’s carried us through from death to life so that we are among those who will recline at table with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. In fact, dear saints, in just a few minutes, you’re going to recline at the table with Jesus himself. The way is narrow, but Jesus has brought us through that way to life everlasting. God be praised, Amen.
And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, guard your hearts and your minds through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.
