Jan. 13
Asking, Seeking, Knocking
Background: Matthew 7:7-14; Isaiah 45:19.
The joke is told of the rich man who died and insisted he be allowed to take some of his gold to heaven. After much protesting and arguing, God let him into heaven with his gold. When he gets there, Peter walks over to him and asks, “Why did you bring pavement up here?”
This could never happen of course, but it does show the folly of seeking God on our own terms. The best thing we could take to heaven would be only as valuable as pavement, or even less.
Jesus had been exposing the hypocrisy of trying to find ways to prove oneself good enough for God, and now he turns his attention to what we should do instead. Instead of trying to bring pavement to heaven, we should trust God who will get us there by His goodness.
1.
Finding God our own way.
The whole emphasis of the Bible is God seeking us, or God reaching out to us. But, as Mark Twain was reported to have said, “In the beginning God created man in his image, and man has been creating God in his image ever since.”
From the beginning of time, man has tried to create religion on his own terms, to find his own way to God. This affected the Jews and affects Christianity today.
In Jesus’ day, the Pharisees and other Jews were creating all kinds of elaborate ways of getting to God. They had created a think they called the Mishna, which was a set of extra laws. Originally, the Mishna might have been a good idea, because its purpose was to put up additional fences that would keep people from getting to the edge of breaking the law of God. They reasoned that if some rules were good, more would be better.
But by the time Jesus walked the Earth, the Mishna had become more important than the actual law written by God.
Jesus came to break this pattern of man trying to earn his way to Heaven, and to give us his life and his righteousness. While the Jews were putting burdens of rules and regulations on people, Jesus came offering freedom.
Through Chapter 6 of Matthew, he had exposed the Jews’ hypocrisy in things such as prayer, fasting and giving. Jesus also takes on the idea that material wealth is a sign of God’s blessing, saying that they should seek the Kingdom of God first, and then those extra things would be added.
In Chapter 7, he makes the offer that God makes to us. Jesus says if we ask, seek and knock, we will find God. Instead of obeying endless rules and trying to measure up to some impossible standard, just seek God.
While the Jews were concentrating on outward religion, Jesus was calling his followers to an inward transformation. One can perhaps follow a rigorous set of rules, but even if successful, it will not make you righteous. However, if one is changed from the inside, then the outward changes that naturally follow will be real and lasting.
After having shown the hypocrisy of the formal religion of the day, Jesus then makes the offer that is from God. He says simply to ask to receive, to seek in order to find, and to knock, to get the door to open. In the original language, a more literal translation would be, “keep on asking, keep on seeking, keep on knocking.”
The Jews of Jesus’ day, and even some Christians of today, try to make it hard to find God, or hard to get to God.
3. God isn’t hard to find.
But, Jesus says, God wants us to find him. Even in the Old Testament God said the same thing in Isaiah 45:19, which says “I have not spoken in secret, in a dark place of the earth: I said not unto the seed of Jacob, Seek ye me in vain.”
While people have always tried to make it difficult to get in touch with God, it seems God has always tried to make it easy for us to get in touch with Him.
We do not have to beat our bodies, obey a lot of rules, or in anyway prove that we are somehow worthy of getting God’s attention. The truth is, none of us are worthy of getting God’s attention. This is the beautiful thing of the gospel, that, while we were sinners Jesus died for us, and before we loved him, He first loved us.
For this reason, Jesus invited the people of his day, to Seek, Ask, Knock, to find the Father.
Jesus compares his father to earthly fathers. Just as earthly fathers enjoy doing good things for their children, so God enjoys doing good things for his children. Just as a parent might like a child to ask for something, God likes us to ask Him for things.
This concept is easy to misinterpret, and it may have caused some to not believe. The “name it and claim it” doctrine is a teaching from man, and that is not what this passage is teaching. Even while God invites us to ask him, and He said he delights in giving to us, that does not mean we can manipulate God. We cannot tell God what to do. He is not a celestial servant at our disposal.
However, God has promised to meet our needs, if we follow Him. He has never promised to meet our wants, or even the things that we think we need. God knows best what we need, and at times that can be a bitter pill to swallow. Just as earthly parents know the needs of their children better than the children do, God knows our needs better than we do. It is a matter of faith to accept that God knows best, especially when he appears to not be meeting our needs.
Our primary need, as a fallen creature, is to have a relationship with God the Father. This can be done through Christ Jesus, and often our other needs cannot really be met until we get the primary one taken care of.
While the Jews were saying that there were many steps involved in having a relationship with God, Jesus was saying the only things necessary was to have faith and to seek God.
In addition, in the passage, persistence seems to be tied to finding God. Often people will say a prayer one time, and nothing happens, so they decide that it did not work. But, when people pursue God on a consistent basis, eventually they will receive what they are looking for, which is a deep relationship with God.
Without endless rules though, would this not lead to lawlessness and a proliferation of unrighteousness? Jesus answers the question before it arises, by summing up the law in the simple statement, that we should treat others the way we want to be treated. If we truly did this, we would not break any of the commandments, as most of the commandments have to do with how we treat each other and ourselves.
Often the problem we have in finding God, or in having a deep relationship with God, is that we want to do it on our own terms. We want to somehow, find a way to deserve God’s attention.
Adam and Eve fell partly for this very reason. One of the temptations the Devil threw at Eve, was that if she ate the fruit she would be like God, knowing good from evil. It could be argued that this was an attempt by early man to be like God, to be able to know all things and be in complete control.
We have not lost that temptation by any means, and most of the world’s religions are built upon the idea that we can find our way to God, or that we can somehow earn God’s approval.
This is the narrow gate that Jesus speaks of in the passage, the fact that we must be willing to admit we are totally helpless spiritually and that we in no way deserve anything good from God. The broad gate involves trying to earn one’s salvation or relationship with God. The narrow gate is one of total surrender to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. Few find it because the price is giving up one’s life.