Matthew 3:9 Commentary and Bible Study

This was the confidence of so many of the Jewish people who did not understand the purpose of the national side of the Abrahamic covenant, and of the Mosaic covenant which followed. They believed they were a people favoured by God. They saw themselves as superior to the Gentile nations and looked down on them. God had chosen them in preference to many others. By birth they belonged to the covenant God made with Abraham’s physical descendants, and this, they believed, gave them not only privileges that God had given to no other nation. That was true indeed, but none of those privileges amounted to personal favour with God unless they individually exercised faith. But most did not, and they assumed that, because they were Jews by birth, they were in the kingdom of God, and they would be blessed on earth and in the afterlife. Christ told the Jews that if they continued in his word, they would know the truth, and the truth would set them free. But this implied something they could not accept and were offended at, and they answered, ‘We be Abraham’s seed, and were never in bondage to any man: how sayest thou, Ye shall be made free?’ (John 8:33). Here is the point: in their view, their physical birth which made them descendants of Abraham was all that mattered. To add any further condition in order to obtain the blessing of God was unnecessary and damaging. It called into question the advantage which their descent from Abraham gave them. But Christ and the apostles constantly distinguished between membership of the national covenant by physical birth, and membership of the kingdom of heaven by the new birth – ‘Ye must be born again’ (John 3:7). This was what caused so much offence to the Jewish leaders, who saw the gospel as taking away all that they had assumed was safely theirs.John warns them that they must not trust anymore in what they had been trusting in all their lives. If Abraham had really been their father then they would have had the faith of Abraham, and they would have worked the works of Abraham, but they rested content with the most superficial connection with Abraham based on physical descent alone. That is not the sense in which John uses the word father here. John is saying that the new age has come when it is no longer sufficient to follow the externals of the law. Not only must every Jew now repent sincerely and make real the pictures which have been taught to the nation, but the Gentiles also are about to come in. They too will come to God by repentance and faith, for God can bring in anyone into his kingdom. The Gentiles would completely bypass the requirement to be born a Jew, and would enter the kingdom by the new birth, overtaking many ethnic Jews. John refers to the stones around him which he uses as a figure for the apparent deadness and hardness of the Gentiles. Once the Spirit of God chooses to work in them, even they can be brought to life. The conversion of many Gentiles ought to have been a source of wonder and encouragement to the Jews, but instead their religion was based on national pride. It is easy for men to trust in something earthly; it is not within their power to trust in the cross of Christ.