Today, I am reading and commenting on Matthew 15-17.

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OK, I have some thoughts about how a couple of things in this passage fit together.  First, after Peter declared that Jesus was the Christ, Jesus told him that He would build His church and the gates of hell would not prevail against it.  Actually, He said that the gates of the land of the dead would not stand against it.  I have often heard people interpret this as saying that the Church can withstand whatever attack Satan sends against it.  While I believe it is true that the Church can indeed withstand any attack Satan sends against it, I don’t think that’s what Jesus meant here.  I mean the thing about gates is that one does not have a gate to attack, one has a gate to defend.  So, Jesus says here that the Church will be on the offensive, it will be conquering for the kingdom of God, and not even death will be able to stand against it.  A little later in the passage Jesus tells us that we must deny ourselves and take up our cross.  We must deny our worldly desires and allow our physical bodies to be killed, if that is what it takes, in order to show God’s love in this world.  We shall not fear death because Jesus has already conquered death.  Death is not the end for us, but just the beginning.  Finally, Jesus tells us that we need to increase our faith, and that as we exercise our faith it will grow.  With just a small amount of faith, faith the size of a mustard seed, we can tell a mountain to move and it will move.  I have long looked at that and thought that part of what Jesus is saying is that if we believe a mountain needs to move in order for God’s will to be accomplished, we will begin the work of moving it.  And if we begin the work of moving it, trusting that God desires it moved, others will join in with us to do so…and sometimes once we start, the mountain itself will just get up and move.  The key fact being that we begin acting in faith that the mountain will get out of our way while we do God’s will.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.