“I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will have been bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will have been loosed in heaven.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Over the last few Fridays (last Friday, of course, being an exception), we have been taking a long look at Jesus’ response to Peter’s confession of Him as Messiah in Matthew 16. Jesus’ response to Peter is the first mention of the church we encounter in the Scriptures, and the two verses here are perhaps the most important foundation statement on the church in the Scriptures. In our Wednesday night Bible study group, we’ve spent a total of nearly eight weeks talking about these two verses and exploring their implications for the church today as thoroughly as we can. Needless to say, there’s a lot here. This past week, we finally finished the section. Since we’ve touched on all the rest of it here as well over the last few weeks, I thought we would take a look at the last part of it too. Let’s reflect for a few minutes today on what Jesus meant by binding and loosing things on earth and in heaven.

The last thing Jesus said about the revolutionary gathering of His followers He was calling out specifically for the purposes of advancing His kingdom on earth was that “whatever you bind on earth will have been bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will have been loosed in heaven.” This is another one of those sayings of Jesus that garners many opinions as to exactly what He meant. Some point to spiritual warfare. Others to church discipline. For my money, the best understanding of Jesus’ intent here is that He has given His called out followers – that is, the church – the authority to interpret and advance His teachings, declaring along the way which things are in sync with those teachings and which things are not.

Now, however someone understands what Jesus is saying here, their answer to the question is going to come prepackaged with challenges. Mostly these all center around the idea that Jesus was giving this level of authority to His church, that is, to people. The very idea that God told a group of people they were going to be able to exercise some level of authority over others is not a terribly popular one nowadays.

That being said, I remain far from convinced that Jesus’ giving the church the authority to declare something in line or out of line with His teachings is all gloom and doom. This authority given to the church prevents (in theory anyway) individuals from “discovering” new doctrine on their own. If professed followers of Jesus had just gotten this one thing right over the course of the history of the church entire heretical movements like Mormonism and the Jehovah’s Witnesses would have never formed.

Another protection of this authority is that if honored it would keep charismatic leaders from deciding doctrine based on their own personal preferences. For example, let’s imagine a charismatic pastor of a large church who decided that he didn’t like some habit or practice or behavior any longer and because of that announced to his church that it was no longer right for Christians to do or participate in whatever it was. He used this prohibition rooted in personal preference rather than Scripture to draw lines dividing his church from others and even believers within his church from one another.

Both of these kinds of spiritual abuses have existed over the history of the church, and they exist in the church still today. There’s really no point in trying to hide from that fact. But properly understanding what Jesus is saying here helps us see that anytime some leader or church or even whole denomination has walked down this path they have done that in opposition to what Jesus said. That is, they were in the wrong. They weren’t following Jesus anymore. They were doing their own thing and slapping the label “Christian” on it. That was an illegitimate use of a God-given authority, and we can rest assured that God will hold all such individuals to account.

He’ll hold them to account because the potential dangers of the misuse of this authority are enormous. Consider just two. The church can bind – that is, disallows – something on earth that God doesn’t have any interest or intention of seeing bound. Many have done this and began exercising church discipline against members who engage with it. This can be and indeed has been disastrous for the life and faith of believers. If you have been on the receiving end of such an abuse, I am sorry you had to go through that. That wasn’t the church being the church. That was a group of people claiming to be the church acting outside the bounds of the authority Jesus gave the church.

On the other side of things here, some churches have misused their authority to declare something to be morally in bounds that the Scriptures make clear is out of bounds. These churches give people leave to pursue behaviors that will necessarily distance themselves from God, or even to walk away from a relationship with God entirely in pursuit of their own desires, all the while imagining themselves to be on good terms with Him. When the church gives people license to sin, something has indeed gone very wrong.

Having explored a bit both the potential benefits and dangers of this authority, let’s take a quick look at an example of it pursued wrongly and rightly. First the former. In the late-19th and early-20th centuries, alcohol consumption was a big problem in our country. Everyone drank, and most of them drank too much. Alcoholism was everywhere. In reaction to this, a group of ministers and women whose lives had been impacted by it began crusading against alcohol. Out of their efforts, the temperance movement was born. Over time, as the obvious problems with alcoholism were manifesting themselves more frequently across the country, the movement began gaining steam. You may not have agreed with their teetotaling aims, but you couldn’t argue very well against the fact that they had a point: Too much alcohol was becoming a problem nationwide.

Now, if they had simply crusaded against drunkenness and alcoholism, that would have been one thing. But people who get a bit of culture wind at their back don’t tend to settle for small, measured goals. The temperance warriors began arguing from an explicitly Christian standpoint that alcohol itself was the problem. It was immoral. It was sinful on its face. And in a godly nation such as ours aspired and imagined itself to be, no self-respecting Christian could drink or support those who did in good conscience. Their efforts finally reached peak success with the passage of the 18th Amendment to the Constitution which essentially outlawed alcohol entirely.

Well, while their aims were understandable from a cultural standpoint, from a Scriptural standpoint, the whole thing was a bad plan from the start. Scripture does not prohibit the consumption of alcohol. The New Testament authors are clear on the sinfulness of drunkenness, but the problem isn’t alcohol per se, but rather the giving over of control of ourselves to something other than God. For the church to use its authority to denounce the consumption of all alcohol was an abuse of that authority that caused at least as many problems as it aimed to solve. And indeed, the Prohibition Era came to an end just 14 years later with the passage of the 21st Amendment which repealed the 18th. In abusing its God-given authority, while the church may have scored some limited wins, the reputational damage it suffered has caused more problems in the long run than operating within the limits of its authority would have allowed.

On the other side, we recently passed the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea which most importantly culminated in the Nicene Creed. This was the first and most significant churchwide declaration of the essentially orthodox nature of the doctrine of the full divinity of Christ. As the church was growing and expanding in those early centuries, there were a growing number of debates about the nature of Jesus, His relationship to God the Father, and the precise identity of the Holy Spirit. These debates were mostly all minority reports, but they were growing. In particular, a priest in Alexandria, one of the major intellectual centers of the early church, named Arius had been teaching that Jesus was not fully God as well as fully man. He was a created being, and God was a unitary God, not a triune one.

Emperor Constantine had recently legalized the church and consolidated his grip on both the Western and the Eastern halves of the Roman Empire. He knew that his continued hold on power depended in part on the unity of the church. So, he invited all the church leaders from all over the Empire to come to Nicaea where they would hold a great council to clarify what the church’s position on these key doctrinal questions was. Of the hundreds of bishops and church leaders who were invited, a little over 300 showed up including Arius and Alexander, the Bishop of Alexandria who was a staunch defender of the broadly accepted orthodox position of the full divinity of Christ.

Now, you may have read or watched The Da Vinci Code from Dan Brown or something influenced by it and heard about this vote. You will have perhaps also encountered the accusation and criticism that church doctrine seems to have come down to a majority vote. The goal of this criticism is to make it seem like Christian were always just “making it up as they went.”

If our doctrine was decided by a purportedly close vote, it could have just as easily gone the other way. And if this is the case, how do we really have any idea what is actually true? This is all a pretty wild distortion of the actual events. The truth is that the full divinity of Christ and a broadly trinitarian theology was already widely accepted and taught throughout the church in the 3rd century. There were very few who doubted that Jesus and God the Father were of the same substance. When it come to the actual vote at the Council, after all the factions made their case the final tally saw just two votes for Arius’ unitarian position. In other words, practically nobody supported the notion that Jesus wasn’t fully God.

Where this matters for our question of the church’s positively exercising the authority given to it here by Jesus to bind or loose things on earth is that the Council not only produced the Nicene Creed which has ever since outlined the broadest basic contours of Christian orthodoxy, it also declared that anyone teaching any other doctrine was to be anathematized, that is, kicked out of the church and declared to be not following Jesus. Further councils in the future clarified these points and committed the church even more fully to trinitarianism. That is, the church used its God-given authority to loose the full divinity of Christ and to bind any rejections of that doctrine.

This declaration wasn’t based on any kind of personal preference. It was a full group decision. It was furthermore deeply rooted in the Scriptures properly taught and understood. This was the church rightly doing what Jesus said we could and should do as His called out gathering of followers dedicated to advancing His kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. Ever since, any movement claiming to be a part of the church that has rejected the doctrine of the Trinity (Unitarians of all stripes, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Christadelphians, and etc.) have been identified by the broader church body as heretical and not Christian.

So then, is this a lot of authority that has been given to the church? Absolutely. Has the church always gotten its exercise right? Not even close. Has this done lots of damage to the church’s witness and reputation? You bet it has. In spite of this, is there any evidence God has withdrawn the authority because of its poor exercise? Not a shred.

Still, let me offer an observation that may seem to contradict that last statement. Personally, I don’t think the church is in the position any longer of declaring something bound or loosed in heaven or on earth in the ways Jesus envisioned, and we have seen demonstrated both rightly and wrongly. The first reason for this is that we have long since clarified all the major doctrines that such an exercise of authority would be necessary to affirm or deny. The kinds of issues the church might need to speak to with that level of authority have already been spoken to. All that remains is to carefully think through and apply old doctrines to new situations.

The second reason is that with as doctrinally fractured as the church has become, there is no longer a body that could rightly claim to speak for the church as a whole. That’s one of the things that have been lost in the chaos of denominationalism. That doesn’t mean the presence of many denominations is necessarily a bad thing. I’ve declared before that I don’t think that to be the case, and I meant that. God can and indeed has redeemed the reality of the manifold of denominations scattered across the country and world. But the kind of broad ranging exercise of authority that could speak with the kind of power and influence Jesus seems here to imagine the church would have is one of the great casualties of where we have arrived. Maybe this will change in the future, but for now, it is where we are.

This doesn’t mean that individual churches can’t still call their members to particular standards, habits, and behaviors, and even to declare someone to no longer be a member in extreme cases if the church as a body determines that to be the direction God is leading them, and if such a step is consistent with the teachings of the Scriptures to the best of their collective ability to understand and apply them. But such declarations must not be viewed as somehow binding on all believers everywhere and for all time such that they can legitimately declare anyone who doesn’t think and act like them not to fall under the historically established broad umbrella of Christian orthodoxy because of it. That is, churches must be exceedingly humble in their exercise of their God-given authority. This has always been the case, of course, but it is all the more vital today. Anything less than that risks their running out into territory God never gave them to inhabit. If the church seeks to wield more authority than God gave them in Christ, He will indeed judge them for that.

Jesus gave His church incredible authority to advance His kingdom. He gave them leave to speak and act as if He Himself were the one doing the speaking and acting. That is power beyond what we can easily wrap our hearts and minds around. But Uncle Ben was right. With great power comes great responsibility. If we drift from following Him in even the tiniest amount, the potential for abuse and harm is incalculable. With the utmost of humility and a passionate commitment to the Scriptures, we move forward in pursuit of His kingdom using the means of His character. Nothing less will do. Nothing less will offer the world the hope it needs. Let’s be the church.