When Jesus told his disciples he’d give them “the keys of the kingdom of heaven” in Matthew 16:19, he included in those keys the statement that “whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”
It was said in the context of Jesus building his church (18), which he based on his disciples’ rock solid belief in him being the Christ (16, 18). To add visual impact to the seriousness of that belief, Jesus stood with his disciples at the Gates of Hell, the cave entrance in that massive rock cliff at Caesarea Philippi that the Gentile pagans believed was the gateway to the gods of the underworld.
It was a watershed moment, because the Israelites of old had never shaken off the influence of the Gentile pagan gods, resulting in this entire region of their land in Jesus’ day being dedicated to the worship of the weird perverted sex god, Pan, whose centre of worship was this cave called – very aptly – the “Gate of Hades,” or the “Gates of Hell.”
It was a watershed moment all right, because Jesus was now saying – and right at this very spot too – that the gates of hell would not overpower his people again (18). The time had come at last when God’s people could resist and reject the enticing, weird gods of the world, neutralizing their power – because they now had the antidote to the virus, the power of “the Son of the living God” (16) – and to Jesus’ delight Peter understood that (17).
And that meant his church would now have the power to bind and loose, which in context (and location) had everything to do with his church having the power to resist the enticement of the “gates of hell” gods in future, and be the light to the world that Jesus himself had come to be. Which fits right in with the purpose of his church in verse 19, to open up the gates of the kingdom of heaven in contrast to the gates of hell, so that people could see what his kingdom was like in his church.
And the key to that was his church “binding” evil and neutralizing it, and letting “loose” the goodness of God in its place, both of which Jesus promised he’d give his church the backing and power of heaven to do (19), Because – as we see in Jesus repeating the binding and loosing scripture in Matthew 18:18 – there is “No compromise” for his church when it comes to good and evil….(next blog)
