Matthew 7:21-23 — Lord, Lord

FRANK: Near the very end of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus describes some people who, as far as anyone watching could tell, were doing the Christian life extremely well. They prophesied. They cast demons out of people, and they did it in his name. And he tells them to go away. That's today's passage. There's no twist to set up here, just three short verses that deserve to be read slowly and taken seriously, and I'm really glad we get to do that together.

LINDA: Welcome to Dig Deeper, everybody. We're starting on a heavy one today, and honestly I'm happy about that, because this is one of those passages people quote a lot and slow down on very little. Matthew seven, verses twenty-one through twenty-three... Frank, will you read it for us?

FRANK: Matthew chapter seven, beginning at verse twenty-one. "Not everyone who says to Me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me on that day, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?' Then I will tell them plainly, 'I never knew you; depart from Me, you workers of lawlessness!'"

LINDA: Depart. These are people who drove a demon out of somebody, in his name, and they get sent away like strangers knocking at the wrong house. If anybody in the Bible looks safe, it's them. So who are they? Outsiders pretending, or actual insiders?

FRANK: Insiders, all of them. Start with what they call him. "Lord, Lord." In that world, doubling a title wasn't a verbal stumble. It was the way a servant spoke to a master he honored, or the way someone made an urgent, desperate appeal, so these people are using the right name with the right reverence. Then look at the list they bring. Prophecy sat right at the center of Israel's memory of how God dealt with his people, and the person who could drive out an unclean spirit carried real spiritual standing. Jewish sources from the period talk about exorcists doing exactly that kind of work. And, I mean, this is the part that should stop us, Jesus himself sends his own disciples out, three chapters later in Matthew ten, to cast out demons. So these aren't vague spiritual feelings. They're public, verifiable, impressive works done in his name. By every measure a crowd could use... they belonged.

FRANK: Which is why the verdict is so jarring. He doesn't say, "You didn't do enough." He doesn't even say, "Your miracles were fake." He says, [short pause] "I never knew you." If I had to put this passage into one plain sentence, it would be this: Jesus measures belonging by whether he knows you, not by what you've done in his name. Everything else in these verses hangs on that one word, knew. What do you hear in it? Because most people hear something much smaller than what's actually there.

LINDA: Information, honestly. Knowing somebody's name, knowing their face. And that's what bugs me, because he's the Son of God, he knows everybody. He watched them do these things. Saying "I never knew you" to people he obviously saw stretches the meaning, or suggests he's being cold on purpose.

FRANK: Cold would be the wrong word, but you're right that it can't mean information. Matthew writes it in Greek, egnōn, from ginōskō, but Jesus is speaking into a Hebrew world, and the Hebrew idea underneath is yada. Genesis four: "Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived." Nobody reads that as Adam gathering facts about her. Or Amos three, where God says to Israel, "You only have I known of all the families of the earth." Now... did God lack information about Egypt? About Assyria? Of course not. What he means is, I claimed you, I bound myself to you, you are mine in a way the other nations are not. So to know, in that sense, is covenant language, the kind of belonging where knowing starts the bond and sustains it. Put that back into verse twenty-three. Jesus isn't saying he never noticed them. He saw every single miracle. He's saying that bond, that claim of his on them, never existed.

LINDA: Knowing, here, is a claim he makes on a person, not a file he keeps on them. They had his name stamped all over their work, and he never had his name on them.

FRANK: His name on them. That's closer than you might think, and I'd push it one step further, because look at the word "never." People sometimes read this passage as describing Christians who lost their salvation, and the text simply won't let you do that, since he doesn't say "I stopped knowing you," he says "I never knew you," which means nothing was ever there to lose. Theologians have a name for what was missing. They call it union with Christ: being joined to him, so that what is his becomes yours and you become his. These people had proximity without union. They stood right next to the power and were never joined to the person. And turn that over for a second, because there's comfort folded inside it. If "never knew" is what condemns, then someone he has truly known has nothing to fear from this sentence. He does not un-know his own.

LINDA: Verse twenty-one doesn't say "only the one I know," though. It says "only he who does the will of my Father." Doing. We've just spent all this time saying relationship, not résumé, and Jesus draws the entry line at doing. How is that not works?

FRANK: Doing is the line, and I don't want to soften it one bit. Luke records Jesus asking, "Why do you call me 'Lord, Lord,' and don't do the things which I say?" Paul, writing to Titus, says, "They profess that they know God, but by their deeds they deny him." James pictures a man who looks in a mirror, sees his own face plainly, and walks off having forgotten what he looked like. Scripture never lets a confession float free of a life. But now look closely at the charge in verse twenty-three: "workers of lawlessness." The Greek is anomia. Without-law. It describes a life that answers to no one above itself, no will higher than its own. And these people were extraordinarily busy! They weren't short on activity. They were short on surrender, because they saw miracles come out of their own hands and never once bent their knees to the God behind them. So what is the Father's will, then? Jesus actually says it out loud, in John six.

LINDA: John six is awfully convenient. "This is the will of him who sent me, that everyone who sees the Son and believes in him should have eternal life." You're trading a hard word, doing, for a softer one, believing. Isn't that just semantics?

FRANK: Semantics, if believing were soft. In John it isn't. Believing there means coming to him and staying, feeding on him, abiding in him, a faith that keeps its face in the mirror and lets the word remake it, day after day. And it matters because it changes which direction the arrow points. The miracle-workers' doing was aimed toward standing: look what we did, now let us in. The doing Jesus asks for flows out of being known. You obey because you are his; you are not his because you obey. That's what the church has always called justification by faith, and it isn't a dodge around verse twenty-one... it's the only thing that makes verse twenty-one survivable. Does that answer it?

LINDA: Many. That's the word I'm stuck on now. Many will say. And they're confident, they argue with him at the door. They thought they were his. So how would I know I'm not doing the same thing, just less impressively?

FRANK: Confident, and arguing. Fair. But listen to how they argue: "Did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons, and perform many miracles?" In the Greek it is three times, "in your name." And every sentence has "we" as the one doing the work. You ask them, "Are you his?" and they answer, "Look what we did." Not one word about his mercy. Nobody says, "I have nothing but you." First Samuel sixteen puts it perfectly, "Man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart," and their entire defense is outward appearance. So the person who is lying awake afraid she might be a stranger to him, and whose only move is to run toward him with empty hands... she isn't in this scene. Frightened people who cling aren't the ones described here. Confident people who list are.

LINDA: The list is the tell. They answer a question about belonging with a résumé. I'll grant you that much. It doesn't make the fear go away just because you've explained where it comes from, though.

FRANK: It shouldn't vanish entirely, and I don't think Jesus wants it to. He is giving this warning now. In Matthew twenty-five the foolish virgins arrive late and cry, "Lord, Lord, open to us," and the bridegroom answers, "I don't know you." Same doubled title. Same verdict. Same door. And he tells that story, like he says these words, before the door shuts. A warning spoken early is a mercy.

FRANK: There's one more layer I don't want us to miss. "Depart from me, you workers of lawlessness" isn't a line Jesus invents on the spot. It's Psalm six, verse eight: "Depart from me, all you workers of iniquity, for the Lord has heard the voice of my weeping." David prays that as the sufferer, driving off his enemies because God has heard him cry. Jesus speaks it as the Judge, which means he is standing right where the Lord stood in that psalm, searching hearts and unable to be fooled by how close someone merely looks. That's sobering. But the same psalm is a man weeping and being heard. The Judge who can't be impressed by a résumé is the same one who bends down to listen to tears.

LINDA: It's late, everyone's gone to bed, and you're wiping down the table after having the small group over, and you catch yourself counting. I hosted. I made the soup. I led the prayer at the end. Nobody asked me to do the dishes and I'm doing them anyway. Is that the résumé? Because that looks more like being a pretty decent Christian than lawlessness.

FRANK: The soup isn't the problem. [laughs] Hosting people and feeding them is good, and it's part of the Father's will. The real question is what the counting is for. Paul says if he speaks in tongues, prophesies, has faith to move mountains, even gives his body to be burned, and has no love, it's all nothing, and he's describing exactly the gap Jesus exposes: gifts and works that can impress everyone in the room and leave the heart untouched. So standing at that table, the question isn't "did I serve?" It's "is this what I'm planning to hand him at the door?" Would you still wipe that table if nobody ever knew?

LINDA: [quietly] What that costs is the counting itself. Scrubbing the pot nobody will ever know you scrubbed, and letting it be his... and if he asked for the hosting, the leading, the being-the-reliable-one, handing that over too.

FRANK: That changes the next question. At the sink, with the house quiet, the question stops being "have I done enough" and becomes "am I his?" And nobody answers that by adding one more line to the list. You answer it the way anyone answers a question inside a relationship, by talking to him, not reciting what you did but telling him one true thing, standing there with your hands in the dishwater. That's what a faith looks like when it clings to a person rather than to a record.

LINDA: If he claimed me before I did a single thing for him, then the dishes aren't my case for getting in. They're just dishes, done by somebody who's already his.

FRANK: If that's right, and it is, then the dishes become free, and so does everything else you do for him. It also protects the other side of the verse, because Jesus is not saying works don't matter. Right before this he says a tree is known by its fruit, and right after it he says anyone who hears his words and does them builds his house on rock. Fruit is real, and he expects it. It just grows out of the root; it never manufactures one. Anyone who does the Father's will is only ever someone Christ first drew to himself.

LINDA: If verse twenty-three is ringing in your head and you're not sure, what do you say to yourself?

FRANK: You. He's saying this to you now, while the door is open, and he isn't asking what you've done in his name. He's asking whether you'll come to him with nothing in your hands and be his. And the ones he truly knows... he never lets go. Never. The same word that undid the confident protects the ones who cling.

LINDA: He isn't asking for your list; he's asking for you, and the door is still open.

FRANK: This conversation is part of the Dig Deeper app, and if you're new here, you can find Dig Deeper in your app store.