Matthew 7:13-14 — Narrow Gate

Linda Brown: "Most people can't all be wrong." That's the objection, and it's a sensible one. It's exactly how you pick a route into the city at seven-forty in the morning: if the whole highway is going one way, you figure the crowd knows something... and here's Jesus saying the crowded road is the one that ends in ruin. Frank, is he really telling us the majority is headed toward destruction?

Frank Edwards: He is. He says it in two verses, on a hillside, to a crowd, and he doesn't blink. The busy road, the popular road, the road with the traffic on it, is the one that ends badly. And the objection you just quoted? By the end of today I think we'll see that Jesus answers it, though not in the way the objector expects.

Linda Brown: Welcome to Dig Deeper, everybody, I'm Linda Brown, and Frank Edwards is here across the desk with his Bible already open, so we're clearly getting right into it. Today is Matthew chapter seven, verses thirteen and fourteen. Two verses, two gates, two roads, and one of the hardest lines in the whole Sermon on the Mount. Frank, read it for us.

Frank Edwards: Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the way that leads to life, and only a few find it.

Frank Edwards: Picture what his listeners are picturing, because they could see it instantly. Every walled town has a great gate, and through the day it stands wide open, wide enough for carts piled with grain, for herds of goats, for the whole flood of people coming in off the market roads, and you don't decide to go through a gate like that... you just go where everyone is going. But every walled town also has a smaller door. A side entrance. One person at a time, sometimes low enough that you have to stoop, and if you're a merchant with a heavy pack, you set the pack down first or you don't get through. Jesus takes that ordinary sight and hangs eternity on it. And the claim underneath is stark. There are two roads, two ends, and no third option in between: every life is walking toward one gate or the other, and the size of the crowd around you proves nothing about where you're headed.

Linda Brown: "No third option" is where a lot of listeners are going to balk. Think of the people on the platform with you tomorrow morning, coffee in hand, waiting for the eight-oh-five. They aren't choosing destruction. They're just... going to work. Isn't "destruction" a very big word for people who are simply going along?

Frank Edwards: Going along is precisely the picture. Proverbs fourteen twelve: "There is a way which seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death." The broad road doesn't feel like rebellion. It feels reasonable, it's well-lit, it's full of pleasant people, and that is exactly what makes it convincing. Now, the word Matthew uses for destruction is apōleia, and it doesn't mean a fireball. It means ruin, the condition of something that has come to nothing, something gone missing and not recovered. And here's what I love. The verb it comes from is the one Jesus uses for the lost sheep, and for the lost son, and in Luke nineteen when he says he came "to seek and to save that which was lost." Same family of words. So the broad road ends in lostness. Hold on to that, because it matters later... and does it change how "destruction" sounds to you?

Linda Brown: Drifting is still a direction. You don't have to decide anything to end up lost; you just have to stay in the lane. Which forces the next thing: did the people on that hillside hear this as a shocking new idea?

Frank Edwards: Not at all. Two ways was the oldest furniture in their house. Moses stands at the edge of the promised land and says, "I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Therefore choose life." The whole Psalter opens on it... Psalm one, "Yahweh knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked shall perish." Jeremiah says it to a city under siege: "Behold, I set before you the way of life and the way of death." A Jewish child learned right and wrong as directions of travel, roads that took you somewhere whether you were paying attention or not. So when Jesus says "two gates," a devout listener nods. Of course. We know this one. And then he sharpens it to a point and turns it on the very crowd that's nodding.

Linda Brown: Which is this crowd. The two-ways idea is familiar now, and the danger is that familiar things stop cutting. So what did Jesus do to it that the rabbis didn't?

Frank Edwards: A couple of things, and one is hiding in a single word. The English says the way is "narrow," but the second word Matthew uses is tethlimmenē... and it doesn't just mean thin. It means pressed. Squeezed. Hemmed in. It comes from the same root as thlipsis, the word the New Testament uses for affliction, for tribulation, what Jesus means when he says, "In the world you will have tribulation." So the road to life isn't a narrow garden path through the tulips. It's a road with walls that push on you. [short pause] He's telling you, up front, that the way to life will cost something. And I have a feeling you want to argue with me about that?

Linda Brown: I do. Pressed, squeezed, and then in Luke thirteen he says "strive to enter." Put those together and the gate is narrow because only the truly disciplined can squeeze through it. The spiritual athletes. That's a treadmill, Frank, and most people listening already know they're not fast enough for it.

Frank Edwards: "Strive" is a real word, and it's a strong one. In Luke it's agōnizomai, the verb for a competitor in the games, every muscle straining in the contest. I won't soften it. But ask what you're straining toward. You're straining toward a gate, and Jesus tells us who the gate is. John ten: "I am the door. If anyone enters in by me, he will be saved." John fourteen: "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father, except through me." The narrow gate has a face. Theologians call this solus Christus, Christ alone: salvation runs through one Person and there is no wider path around him. And think about the larger story. Since Eden the road back to God has been shut, an angel with a flaming sword at the entrance. There is one opening in that wall now, and it was cut by the body of Christ broken on a cross. A gate is narrow because it admits one thing and refuses everything else. What it refuses is every other way in.

Linda Brown: You've moved the problem, you haven't solved it. If the gate is Jesus, and grace is free, then why tell me to strive? Nobody strains to walk through an open door. Either it's free and I relax, or it's a contest and I'm back on the treadmill. Pick one.

Frank Edwards: Go back to the merchant at the side gate. The door is open. Nobody is charging him a toll. And he still can't get through, because of what's on his back. The straining isn't paying for entry... it's setting the pack down, and turning out of a current that is pulling the other direction. That's the effort. And the pack, for most of us, is our own respectability, the sense that we're decent people who don't really need rescuing. Grace offends the self-sufficient precisely by being free. The reason few find the gate isn't that the gate is stingy. It's that the crowd keeps looking for a wider door than a crucified Savior. Does that answer it, or only half?

Linda Brown: Half. I'll give you the pack, because setting it down is honestly harder than running laps. Running laps at least lets you keep your dignity. But the word "few" still makes me flinch. God built a system where most people lose, and the objection we opened with is still standing there on the platform.

Frank Edwards: "Few." Watch what Jesus does with it in Luke thirteen, because this is his answer to that objection. Someone asks him straight out, "Lord, are only a few saved?" It's a census question. A statistics question. And Jesus refuses to hand over a number. He answers, "Strive to enter by the narrow door." He takes a question about everybody else and hands it back as a question about you. So the objection says, "Most people can't all be wrong," but Jesus won't engage the headcount either way. He simply says the headcount is no guide. The crowd can't tell you where the road ends.

Frank Edwards: And don't miss the mercy folded inside it. Remember apōleia, destruction, lostness? The same Jesus who says few find the gate came "to seek and to save that which was lost." The shepherd goes out after the one sheep. Few find it, yes... and the finding starts from his side. You don't locate the gate by being clever. You're found by the gate itself.

Linda Brown: The traffic, then. Same road, same hour, three lanes all flowing one direction, and the question isn't how many cars there are. It's which exit you're taking. And it costs something to take it. Tomorrow morning in the carpool, when everybody agrees that faith is a private hobby you keep to yourself and the jokes drift somewhere you know Christ isn't, staying agreeable costs you nothing. Speaking up costs you the easy ride.

Frank Edwards: The station stairs, at rush hour. Everybody pouring down toward the platform, and you're the one person walking up against them, turning your shoulder, saying "excuse me" every third step. That's what tethlimmenē feels like from the inside. Pressed. And it's usually small. You decline to laugh at the thing that isn't funny, or you say, quietly, "I actually don't see it that way," and you let the pause just hang there. One commentator was direct: "If we would serve God, we must be firm in our religion." Firm, notice. Not loud. Not contrarian. Being different from the crowd isn't the narrow way; plenty of people are different from the crowd and still nowhere near Christ.

Linda Brown: Most mornings, though, nobody's mocking anything. The pull is quieter than that. It's autopilot... the same road at the same hour until you arrive and can't remember a single turn you made. Is autopilot the broad road?

Frank Edwards: Autopilot is the broad road's natural habitat. Jesus's first word here is a command, "Enter," and you cannot enter a gate by accident. It's a deliberate step through a door. And Proverbs four describes what the two roads feel like to walk: "The path of the righteous is like the dawning light that shines more and more until the perfect day. The way of the wicked is like darkness. They don't know what they stumble over." One road keeps brightening. The other one gropes. People on the broad road are often not doing anything dramatic at all. They just can't see what they're tripping over.

Linda Brown: Now the harder question. You hear "few," you hear "pressed," and you're not sure which road you're on, driving to work with a knot in your stomach. What do you say to that?

Frank Edwards: I'd say the gate is narrow, but it's open. It is open right now. Nobody is standing in that doorway checking your résumé. The one standing there is Christ, and he walked the hard road first... all the way to a cross, deserted by every friend, so that you would never walk this one alone. The narrow way is narrow only because one man's arms, stretched out on a cross, are all the room a sinner will ever need. [quietly] You don't have to be one of the spiritual athletes. You have to come to him.

Linda Brown: Then it comes down to the pack.

Frank Edwards: It does. The crowd is loud, the road is wide, and the gate is a Person standing open with his hands held out. Which leaves just one question, and nobody on the platform can answer it for you: what would you have to set down to walk through?

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