But Some Doubted

He found it at thirty-two and he has never once heard it said out loud by anybody else.

It is the last paragraph of Matthew. The very end. Eleven of them go to a mountain in Galilee because they have been told to, and He is there, and they worship Him.

And then three words.

But some doubted.

And then, in the next sentence, without a pause and without anybody being sent home, He gives them the commission. All of it. The whole thing. To that room, in that condition.

He was thirty-two when he noticed it and he is forty-three now and in eleven years he has heard hundreds of talks about the end of Matthew, and he has never heard one person say those three words out loud.

They get skipped. Not dishonestly. The eye goes from the worship to the commission because that is the shape people expect and the clause sits in between doing nothing that anybody knows what to do with.

He has needed it for eleven years.

He would not say that to anybody in his building. He teaches. He is the one who is asked to explain things and he explains them well and he is not, in any way anybody would recognize, a man in difficulty.

And there is a clause in the last paragraph of Matthew that he has gone back to at intervals for a decade, the way a person goes back to a photograph, and he has never told a soul that he does it.

The commission is given to that room, in that condition

Let me say the plain thing about the skipping first, because it is not a scandal and it is worth understanding.

People skip it because it does not do a job. A talk about the end of Matthew is going somewhere, and that clause does not help it get there, and it is not that anybody is hiding it. It sits in the sentence being awkward, and awkward material gets read past by everybody, in every field, all the time.

That is why you have needed it and never heard it. The very quality that makes it get skipped is what makes it load-bearing for the person who needs it.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as a private consolation: it is there, and the commission is given after it. That is not my kind reading of eleven years, it is what stands written at the end of Matthew's twenty-eighth chapter, and the same Holy Spirit who preserved it has been with a man going back to a clause like a photograph for a decade.

Read both verses together, because they are one movement.

Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. When they saw Him, they worshipped Him; but some doubted.Matthew 28:16-17

Two things in one sentence, joined by but.

They worshipped. Some doubted. The same group, on the same mountain, at the same moment, and the writer does not separate them out and does not tell you which were which.

And the next verse begins: Then Jesus came to them and said, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go.

He does not address the doubt. He does not divide the room. He does not ask anybody to resolve anything before He hands over the work.

So this is yours right now rather than pending a settledness you have been waiting eleven years for: you are already inside the commission, because the written word records the doubt and the sending in consecutive sentences with nothing in between, and the Spirit of God is the one who saw to it that the awkward clause stayed in the final paragraph.

And the honest boundary, because this house does not overclaim. That is not an argument for the truth of the account, though it is one more instance of a record keeping material that does it no favors. What it does is tell you what kind of room He works with, which is the thing you have actually been going back for.