Luke 13:25 Commentary and Bible Study

But the warning Christ has given is that we can leave it too late; we can fail to take his words seriously. That’s is why we must strive. The obstacles are not in the gate itself, but in us. They come from within, from our failure to grasp how urgent this is. Right now the gate is not locked. It can be opened and you can go through. All you have to do is walk up to it, which means you have to seek the Lord, to trust in his sacrificial death on Calvary for all who come to him, to ask him for pardon, to be willing to repent of all your sin and to leave your old life behind. You need to strive with the obstacles within yourself that hold you back. Why is this so urgent? Because the gate is going to be locked at some point. You mean that although Christ came into this world to be our Saviour, there is coming a time when he will withdraw the offer of forgiveness? Yes, and you do not know when that will happen. By not coming to him immediately, you take a terrible gamble with your soul. Time is precious, and the opportunity that God has given us to respond to the gospel is precious. Perhaps it is the most precious thing we have. The Lord then goes on to tell us when the opportunity will end. It will end because he will do something which will prevent us coming to him. Do we imagine that God is desperate to be worshipped, and somehow needs our worship, and we might just condescend to give him some of our attention in due course? We don’t understand our predicament, and just how desperate it is. The master of the house is the Lord himself. You need to get into his house, into the kingdom of heaven, and you are currently outside. God is within the house, and he has made a way to get in, and without that no sinful son of Adam would ever get in. He is exercising extraordinary patience towards you in prolonging your life while you remain outside, and proudly take your time and prevaricate. What control do you have over when he locks the door? He is certainly going to do that at some point, because the door cannot be left op all night, or the house, as it were, is not secure. You don’t know how close he is to losing patience with you, and since your eternal welfare depends on you getting into that door (the image has changed slightly) then the only wise thing to do is to go through it without delay. If not, what will happen? You will stand outside, knocking on the door. You will realise too late that this is the most important consideration of your whole life. What a terrible thing is regret for lost opportunity! It is the cause of enormous self-recrimination. You have miscalculated and you are not going to be given a second chance. The opportunity was within your grasp, and you did not take it. Surely you will call yourself a fool. The Lord in his kindness takes us to that moment before we actually get there, so that we can see the horror of it and alter our course before it is too late. But warnings have to be heeded. There you are outside the house. Now you know you desperately need to get in. What will you do? You will knock for all you are worth. Yes, but Christ warns you he is not going to answer; he is not going to open the door. In fact he is going to say something that fills you with horror: ‘I know you not whence ye are.’ These words are the death knell to all hope, for that knock is never going to be answered. As he says in a similar parallel passage, ‘I never knew you’ (Matthew 7:23). If the Lord does not know us, then he is certainly not going to admit us to his house. Something else has come to light now, and that has to do with his eternal purposes. Those who are not saved will know that they were never destined to enter that gate, that door, because in their case they were left in their unbelief.