There will be some places to which they go where no one is worthy, where no one will receive them or hear them. They will be rejected on account of their message, which the people will not want to hear, and they will not even tolerate their presence among them.
The shaking of the dust from the feet was a symbolic act understood by the Jews in New Testament times. We are not literally to do that today. The thing to do today is to be sure that we've made it clear to people that this is a matter of eternal life, and a matter of heaven and hell, and rejection means forfeiture of all those things. Rejection of the Christian message and the gospel, rejection of Christ, isn't just something that will displease God for the moment, but we will still all go to heaven in the end. That is what people imagine. Oh no, it’s a very terrible and a very final thing to reject the living God. So those things have to be made plain. We have a ministry of soul winning, but it's also a ministry of judgement.
Let no one deceive themselves by concluding that because judgment does not come immediately on a rebellious world, God is never going to judge it. Let the rebellious not test his resolve; let them not imagine that he does not care or does not know what the world does with his message. He will not allow the gospel, which has been procured at such cost to himself, to be despised by an ungrateful and unrepentant world. This quiet symbolic act of the disciples should have caused the rejectors to tremble. The apostles knew what was coming even though nothing could be seen yet. This symbolic act is a lesson for all times of the danger of rejecting the only message of salvation.
No true believer can sit down with ecumenists when the disciples were taught to rebuke and go away from those who did not receive their teaching. The message does not belong to us and we are not at liberty to negotiate with those who will not accept it. Do we think we can skilfully find a way through our differences when the Lord has already given us our directions and told us that either our hearers receive the message of Scripture or they are to be rejected? The task of the church is to make known the consequences of rejecting God’s message, not to form friendships with those whose dust Christ has told us to shake off. We are thinking of the offence of the cross which will come even if we are entirely harmless; it cannot be avoided.