dogma: An authoritative principle, belief, or statement of ideas
or opinion, especially one considered to be absolutely true.
See synonyms at DOCTRINE. (italics mine)
doctrine: A principle or body of principles presented for
acceptance or belief, as by a religious, political, scientific,
or philosophic group; DOGMA. (capitalization mine)
. . . . . In the study of the Bible, it is impossible to preclude the intrusion of current church doctrine since, indeed, doctrine or dogma is the basis of the church’s theological stance. Jesus warned the people of His day about the dangers of doctrine, going so far as to say that the people worshipped God in vain because of the doctrine originating with the scribes and Pharisees (footnote 1). For this reason, this study will attempt to focus on what we can learn about God, His Son, (perhaps) the Holy Ghost, and Their will for us, from an investigation mainly of Their Word, left here for us for that purpose.
"He that hath ears to hear, let him hear."
. . . . . . . Words similar to these appear in scripture sixteen times. On eight occasions they are used by "the Spirit"; these instances will be examined later. The other eight times they are uttered by Jesus to emphasize what He has just said. Six times the words, almost exactly these, follow His telling of a parable. One of the other times is in Mark 4:23, used to emphasize the fact that Jesus was revealing things which had been secret. (That these secrets were imparted only to the disciples in private might be particularly significant; that the disciples failed to understand apparently clear Aramaic on occasion (footnote 2) certainly should be considered in studying that portion of the Bible which is their report of Jesus’ time on earth.) The other time was in Matthew 11:15, where He sought to call attention to the importance of John the Baptist’s mission, put so succinctly in Luke 1:17, "to make ready a people prepared for the Lord".
. . . . . . . The first time the words are recorded, in chronological order (according to current church doctrine (footnote 3)), is in Luke 8:8, and refers to the parable of the sowing "of the good seed of the Kingdom"(footnote 4). This gospel, or good news, was proclaimed by prophets of the Old Testament, notably Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Malachi. (The Old Testament contains something like twenty-five references to spiritually deaf people, arguably more like thirty. Let me try to put some perspective on things: The old testament prophets, when addressing spiritual shortcomings, spoke in the present tense: "This people..." (footnote 5) Jesus said the people of His day were the fulfillment of these prophecies, and apparently prophesied today [or tomorrow] since He also said "this generation shall not pass (footnote 6)" until "they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.(footnote 7)" To slip momentarily into the vernacular, folks, it just ain’t happened. To day [with the space is the way Jesus might have put it] the kingdom of heaven is at hand. The people of the world are deaf and blind and, if we are to learn anything from the past, there are none blinder than those who think they see, i.e., [would-be] Christians. He who hath ears to hear, let him hear.) Jesus’ ministry focused on the proclamation of this Kingdom, flatly stating in Matthew, Mark, and Luke that "the kingdom of heaven is at hand (footnote 8)". Repent was the message. Reject materialism and help others was the basis of the method He gave us to show our repentance (footnote 9). We glory in advances in technology; communication and transportation capabilities are astounding. Yet twenty-four thousand people die of hunger every day the Internet reported in 2001 (click here), and three hundred thousand children die every year because they can't even get clean water to drink (footnote 10). And Amerika prides itself on trusting God, even thinks itself to be God's chosen nation of nations. Jesus realized His message (take no thought for tomorrow, you can't serve God and money, love your neighbor as you love yourself, open your eyes and you'll be satisfied with bread, help the poor, obey God, etc.) was rejected, and had very strong warnings about people thinking they were among the chosen. (footnote 11) The rejection of His message was foretold in scripture, but this did not prevent His grief at the outcome (footnote 12).
. . . . . . . The first time in the text that Jesus says "He that hath ears to hear…" is in Matthew 11:15, when Jesus still left open a possibility of the acceptance of John’s preaching by saying "if ye will receive it"(emphasis mine) in verse 14, and clearly the words are a warning regarding the prophecy contained in Malachi 4:5 concerning the coming of Elijah.
. . . . . . . In Matthew 13:11, Jesus quotes for the first time Isaiah’s sad, mad refrain of the Lord found in Isaiah 6, verses 9 and 10: "…Hear ye indeed, but understand not…" and in that chapter for the first time also tells His disciples of the mysteries He is going to reveal to them and them alone.
. . . . . . . Jesus not only tells the disciples, but the people as well (footnote 13), that God so abhors the ways of the world that He doesn’t feel the people deserve salvation. (The result of His ministry, though foretold, remains today that "the nation did not repent; therefore Malachi 4:5 still awaits its literal fulfillment, and they ‘who have ears to hear’ will understand.(footnote 14)" [emphasis mine])
. . . . . . . Malachi’s promise that the hearts of the children will be turned to the father’s and vice versa ("lest I come and smite the earth with a curse", in Malachi 4:6) portend the fulfillment of the prophecy in Jeremiah 31:34, that "they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them". This is the great and new "covenant", which, we should remember, is an agreement which indicates obligations by two parties. The Israelites disregarded the first covenant and "I regarded them not, saith the Lord" (footnote 15). They wandered in the wilderness for forty years as a result, most of them denied even sight of the promised land. Notice how easy it is to disregard the obligation of man in what today's scribes and Pharisees call the new dispensation, which includes Jeremiah 32:40: "And I will make an everlasting covenant with them, that I will not turn away from them, to do them good; but I will put my fear in their hearts, that they shall not depart from me.(emphasis mine)"
. . . . . . . We shall all know the Lord, that is the prophecy. Knowing God "lies at the foundation of everything, . . . (and) is why we have the written Word and the living ‘Word’.(footnote 16)" (If we glance back at Jeremiah 9:24, we have the opportunity to glimpse The God Who Is There: "I am the Lord Which exercise lovingkindness, judgment, and righteousness..." Judgment, we should note, translates from the Greek, according to The Companion Bible, to "justice to the oppressed". [Would-be] Christians today are a very exclusive lot, not just excluding most of the world’s population from any heavenly access by their narrow, legalistic interpretation of small parts of the Bible, but also assuming that people in ameriKa living oppressed, even desperate lives must surely not be on what these self-professed Christians might call "good terms" with the Lord. "Where is the Lord of judgment?" Malachi asks in 2:17, then promises in the next two verses that "He shall come . . . But who may abide the day of His coming?" More perspective: [Would-be] Christians today place a huge emphasis on "knowing" their fate; "Do you know you’d go to heaven if you died today?" is probably the major approach used by evangelists, missionaries, and other would-be do-gooders. I don’t know how many times I’ve said or people I’ve told that this approach does more harm than good. I wish it were true that my soul could be saved by just believing to some degree that Jesus died for my sins, etc. Strong delusion indeed, folks. (footnote 17) Actually this would seem an intuitive matter if we search the scriptures and see, in particular, Jesus’ admonitions about people thinking that they are what we might call God-fearing. We even are given simple, explicit instruction to not glory in ourselves. (footnote 18))
. . . . . . . Back to the subject: One time Jesus said "who hath ears to hear, let him hear" was in Matthew 13:9. This is just before He tells His disciples of the mysteries He is about to reveal to them. This chapter also is the one to which my Bible opened about ten years ago (in the sanctuary of the church we were attending) at the beginning of an impromptu Bible study I started to conduct with some kids who seemed to be attempting to communicate, as it were. Hear ye therefore the parable of the sower, was what I saw when I opened my Bible and maybe all that I read to the kids; certainly what I read was all that I said. Those were strange days indeed.
. . . . . . . My thoughts then and now regarding this great and dreadful Matthew 13 basically were and are that the people horribly failed and continue to fail at understanding what the kingdom Jesus repeatedly referred to was about. Verse 51 in the King James says "Jesus saith unto them, ‘Have ye understood all these things?’ They say unto him, ‘Yea, Lord.’" The Companion Bible says that all the original texts omit the clause "Jesus saith unto them", and that they all omit the word "Lord" as well. This is, I think, instructive.
. . . . . . . When one reads the commentaries it is quite possible to encounter the claim (call it speculation) that the "Kingdom of God" (which is encountered in Mark, Luke and John in parallel references to passages in Matthew) addresses the sovereignty of God and is not of this world. However, an investigation of occurrences yields interesting possibilities regarding the hidden message the disciples apparently hoped to convey. "Kingdom of heaven" is rendered thirty-two times in the Bible, and all of its occurrences are in Matthew. This kingdom is "from heaven; and under the heavens upon the earth"(footnote 19) (emphasis the author's) The kingdom Jesus referred to is upon the earth. Why make such a bold statement on so little evidence? Here's more: "kingdom of God" is rendered only in the New Testament, five times in Matthew, fifteen times outside the gospels, and forty-nine times in Mark, Luke and John. So what?, you ask. So, the literal interpretation of these sixty-nine verses is "kingdom of heaven"(footnote 20). The kingdom Jesus referred to is upon the earth.
. . . . . . . (Our job, our only job, is to prepare for His return. And what if the prophet we might expect to precede Him has already been here, and the message has been ignored [again]? There have been plenty of voices in the wilderness, so to speak. We have no reasonable recourse but to change it all; the alternative is unthinkable.)
. . . . . . . If we look for the next occurrence of "Who hath ears to hear, let him hear" we go to Matthew 13:43. In this verse Jesus prophesies that, upon His return, "then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun" and we see another instance of a singular instance of a rendering in all of the Bible, in this case the Greek word "eklampo", translated "shine forth". Note (again) that this is prophecy regarding His return, and virtually coincides ("Who knoweth the interpretation of a thing?" [Ecclesiastes 8:1]) with His angels separating from the earth "all things that offend, and them which do iniquity"(footnote 21) and casting them into the fiery pit.
. . . . . . . If we go to Mark 4:9 we discover another instance of His saying "Who hath ears to hear, let him hear". This is a third time in the gospels that the disciples relate the parable of the the seed (see also Matthew 13:9 and Luke 8:8). A close reading of these three instances is interesting. In Matthew 13 the account veers from multitudes to disciples and then back to multitudes. In Mark and Luke we see Jesus adding to His elucidation of the parable, saying that nothing is secret which shall not be known. In truth, His explanations of the parables to the disciples are not particularly revealing; taken with all the talk of mysteries, it would seem no great leap of logic to think (as I've hypothesized before) that there were revelations to the disciples still not revealed to humanity.
. . . . . . . The final time in the Gospels Jesus utters His . . . warning . . . occurs in Luke 14:35. (There are eight other occasions in the Bible where these words appear, all in Revelation where this warning occurs four times in chapter 2 [verses 7, 11, 17, and 29], three times in chapter 3 [verses 6, 13 and 22], and once in chapter 13:9. Though Revelation deserves a separate study and chapter 13 should be required reading, it will be mentioned that the first seven references all regard what "the Spirit" [sometimes rendered "Christ" elsewhere in the Bible] says about the church; the final reference regards "the beast", a word occurring thirty-eight times in Revelation and rendered in this fashion thirty-seven times. Chapter 7 of Daniel addresses this beast (footnote 22), which he says "will devour the whole earth" [in verse 23]. Perhaps these pages will convince others that this beast is, and has been, ordinary mind. It boils down to doctrine, as I've said before (e.g., see here). [The word "doctrine" is rendered eleven times in the gospels, and ten of those reference Jesus' doctrine, of which He said in John 7:16-17 "My doctrine is not mine, but his that sent me. If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself."]) This fourteenth chapter of Luke finds Jesus with "great multitudes" following Him, and being told they couldn't be His disciples if they didn't hate father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, or if they "forsaketh not all that (they) hath". There was nothing easy about His doctrine, easy yoke and light burden notwithstanding. "Who hath ears to hear, let him hear."
1. Matthew 15:9 and Mark 7:7
2. Luke 18:31-34
3. The Companion Bible, Kregel Publications, Appendix 142.
4. Ibid.
5. e.g., Psalm 12:2, Proverbs 24:2, Isaiah 29:13, Jeremiah 5:29 and 9:3
6. Matthew 24:34
7. Ibid.; vv.. 31-33
8. Matthew 3:2, 4:17, and 10:7; Mark 1:15, and Luke 21:31.
9. see, for example, The Sermon On The Mount
10. "U.S.News & World Report", January 6, 1997, page 69 and Matthew 10:42.
11. e.g., Matthew 7:23 and 25:41, and Luke 13:27
12.e.g., Matthew 23:37 and Luke 13:34
13. Mark 7:6 (since the scribes and the Pharisees were "prominent" among the
people, they are numbered among them here)
14. Companion, Appendix 142.2
15. see Hebrews 8:8-12
16. Companion, page 1031 (note on Jeremiah 9:24)
17a. e.g. Isaiah 66:4-5, Jeremiah 5:31, and 2 Thessalonians 2:11
18. I Corinthians 1:31
19. Companion, Appendix 114
20. Ibid.
21. Matthew 13:41
22. Companion, page 1892.
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