The Book Of Matthew

God, knowing from the beginning that the Messiah would be rejected by His own people, had a plan of salvation He would extend to all of His creation. The 12 Apostles were Jews who accepted the Messiah and through their written account we have access to that plan from the beginning in the Old Testament to the end in the New Testament. With that knowledge comes the power of the Holy Spirit to do what we ourselves cannot do. He would use the Gentile Church to spread the Gospel of Hope to all men so that all would have the opportunity for everlasting life with Him in His heavenly kingdom. Go tell it on the mountains......Jesus Christ is King!

The Book of Matthew

One purpose of the book is to outline the characteristics of the kingdom of God, both for Israel and the church. Orthodox Jews would typically scoff at any assertion that Jesus is their Messiah, let alone their King. They would retort, “If Jesus is King, where is the promised restoration of the kingdom of Israel?” Many Jews of Jesus’ day rejected Him as Messiah, even though both Jesus and John the Baptist continually preached that the kingdom was “at hand”. This rejection of Jesus by the Jews is a dominant theme of Matthew. Because of this rejection, God postponed the fulfillment of His promises to Israel and subsequently extended His blessings to both Jew and Gentile in the church.

Matthew is the only Gospel writer who speaks directly of the church . He points to the Gentile composition of this church by including several stories of the Gentiles’ faith in Jesus: the wise men, the centurion, and the Canaanite woman. He records Jesus’ prediction that the gospel will be preached to all nations , and the commission to the disciples to “make disciples of all the nations”. Jesus’ teaching pointed to the blessings of the kingdom being extended to Gentiles. But one day, Israel will be restored to its place of blessing.

A final purpose of Matthew is to instruct the church. An obvious clue to this is in the Great Commission: “teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you” . The discipling process involves instruction in the words of Christ, and the Gospel of Matthew revolves around five of Jesus’ discourses. Instead of emphasizing a narrative of Jesus’ life as Mark does, Matthew uses the narrative elements in his Gospel as a setting for Jesus’ sermons.