Dennis Tuuri

# SERMON TRANSCRIPT: EXCOMMUNICATION

that I normally read before. This morning’s talk is on excommunication. Now, those of you who’ve been here for the last two weeks have heard a pronouncement that we would be unless Tim Hansen repented, we’d be excommunicating him this morning. Tim Hansen has come to the church this past week and made a verbal confession of repentance and a confession of his sin. He met certain conditions listed by the church court and several of us got together last night to talk to Tim personally and we’re convinced that at this point in time we should not proceed with excommunication but rather we have a judicial pronouncement relative to Tim that will be a suspension from the table and other conditions we’ll announce at the end of the service today but I wanted to kind of get that out of the way that you wouldn’t be wondering about that and then not hear what we had to say this morning.

I think that this subject is important. The whole subject of church discipline is sorely needed to be addressed more in our churches today. And I thought it’d be good to spend some time this morning going over the basic passage that most people would turn to for consideration of excommunication and look at the context of the passages we’re going to be looking at this morning and try to understand some of the process of excommunication.

The assurance of the efficacy of excommunication or other church action—by the way, efficacy, don’t let that big word throw you. It just means that it really will, it is efficacious, it works, I guess, is the way to think about it. That there’s a correlation between the judicial actions of the court and the court of God’s justice in heaven. We’ll talk about that more in a couple of minutes.

We’ll talk about the authority for the process of church discipline, excommunication, and suspension from the table. And then we’ll talk about the purpose of it. And hopefully I’ll leave myself enough time to talk at a little longer length about the purpose of excommunication than some of these other things that may be commonly known to many of you. But I think it’s good to review these things. It’s the clearest teaching in the scripture about church discipline.

Now when I say that church discipline is taught throughout the scriptures and it’s a clear subject, I think it’s probably one of the most obvious things the scriptures tell us and yet it’s interesting that it’s one of the most avoided things in churches today. And I think there’s a reason for that we’ll get to in a couple of minutes. Now the passage we read this morning has very familiar things in it to most of us.

Most of us are at least familiar with the verses relative to prayer that we read here in verses 19 and 20. “If any two of you shall agree on earth touching anything it shall be done. Where two or three are gathered together in my name there am I in the midst of them.” And we hear that verse used a lot in the context of small churches. We hear it a lot in reference to prayer and those things are proper but it’s important and we’ve talked before about—and I’ve used this illustration several times—but it’s a good one.

I think that when Jay Adams was in town, I don’t know, probably been five or six years ago now, he talked about plosis and how the Christian church is plagued by plosis. We take verses out of their context and put all kinds of meanings in them that may or may not be proper, but we forget the primary meaning of the text, which is determined by the context. And so Reverend Adams said that we really ought to have—he thought about selling context plaques, you know, so you could take these plaques, have verses like “wherever two or three are gathered together, I’m in the midst of them” and put the context around it to show what it really is, primary reference to and help us to understand the text.

So those verses, for instance, we need to understand in the context—and the context is one of discipline, the context of the rest of the verses that we read in that section—and that needs to be understood. So the context of those things that we’re going to talk about now, and the context relates to the process of excommunication first of all. We find beginning at verse 15 a series of statements about the process of church discipline and what are the necessary steps prior to excommunication or church censure or suspension from the table.

And now the first thing we see in here is in verse 15 of course, and it very clearly says that if thy brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone. If he shall hear thee, thou shalt have won thy brother. That talks about the private rebuke then of private sin. And I’ll just mention briefly here and I won’t want to belabor the point—it’s rather obvious that if the sin is public, if it isn’t a private sin, then this part of the process wouldn’t apply.

This part of the process applies to where sins are privately manifested and not known publicly. The church can certainly proceed to immediate admonishment and rebuke of a person if his sin is open and profligate in nature and scandalous. But having said that, normally the sins we’re going to be dealing with in a church situation usually come up in private. They’re privately known by people and not public matters.

And the scriptures are real clear here. This isn’t really difficult to understand. We’re supposed to go to people when they sin, when we know that they’ve sinned and that they’re in trouble in terms of obedience to God’s commands or to go to the sinner. Now, that’s important because frequently our natural response when we see people falling short of the commands of God’s word is to go to somebody else, you know, to go talk to another person about that person’s fault, to go tell somebody else that the guy is sinning. But the scriptures don’t say to do that. It says to go to the sinner. And that may be difficult for us to do. I’m sure that it is in our society where we’re all seen as rugged individuals, you know, and we all have our own lives and there’s not a lot of natural community and our relationships one another. We come to this church in the center of Portland, some from Washington, some from out in Boring, some from Hillsboro, some from Oregon City.

A lot of diverse places. We don’t have natural relationships one with another friendships. And it’s difficult then besides normal problems of difficulty in admonishing somebody. It’s difficult to take this commandment seriously and to do it. But it’s important I think it’s important that the church teach the necessity of admonishment and private admonishment of people falling short. Remember we talked in Acts 20 about the responsibility of the eldership.

We talked then about the fact that Paul said that he was free of the guilt of men, free of the blood rather of men’s guiltiness because he had admonished them of many errors and trials. And he uses language from Ezekiel where it says that if the person sees somebody sinning and fails to tell him of his sin, then the blood guiltiness is upon his head as well. He’s culpable for his actions. Paul recognized that biblical knowledge of an activity brings with it a responsibility to act in the best of your abilities that you have to act in relationship to solving that problem.

That’s a general principle that’s really important for the Christian life. If you see a problem, then it’s likely that God has shown you that problem, revealed it to you, so that you’re part of the solution and you shouldn’t back away and think somebody else will take care of it. Frequently, you’re the only one that will understand that problem the way you’ve seen it and it’s necessary for you to come forward and try to work it out and resolve it.

And that’s certainly true of private sin as well. Paul instructs the eldership to be careful that they do admonish people privately and when that means that we all should have an openness one to another for that kind of admonishment and we should be ready if a brother comes to us and says, you know, this seems like it’s not proper on your part to be breaking this law of God. We should be open to that.

We should be open to hear that and we shouldn’t be quick to get defensive about it. We should as much as possible do that thing. Now sometimes we don’t. We say that you know, well God, you know, we’ll forgive this person anyway apart from working it through. We’re going to talk about forgiveness specifically two weeks hence from today. Next week we’ll talk about repentance and the following week about forgiveness.

And I’ll mention this several times this morning but forgiveness is in scripture related to actions of the individual. It’s improper, the example that comes to mind is when the man tried to assassinate the pope and the pope went to his hospital and said, “Well, he forgave him.” Or I’ve heard instances in the last few weeks of people, you know, where children were killed by people unknown and the guy says, “Well, you know, I forgive those people whoever they are.” That is really not a biblical method of forgiveness.

How can we grant forgiveness? It’s a judicial act of freedom before God and forgiveness before God apart from God’s requirements of forgiveness. See, God says that he doesn’t just blanket give forgiveness to anybody and everybody. If he did that, there’d be no such place as hell. He says that his forgiveness is conditioned upon repentance and a demonstration to God of that repentance. We’ll talk more about that later, but it’s important to see that don’t think of forgiveness here as an alternative to talking to people about their specific sins.

The scriptures are clear: where to go to them, that we have knowledge that knowledge brings with it responsibility. Another thing—people think that well maybe I don’t want to go to that person because I just want to love that person. I want to—it says in the scriptures and it does say in 1 Peter 4:8 that love covers a multitude of sins. I want to just kind of forget about that one and overlook it and not worry about it.

Well, think of a couple of things there. First of all, does that really help the person you’re dealing with? Does it help the person you’re dealing with to leave him in his sin and maybe he doesn’t understand a sin. Maybe he needs that exhortation or encouragement from you to break with that sinful habit he’s involved with. You have a responsibility if you really love that person not to leave him there with the judgment of God hanging over his head for a sin he’s involved with.

You have responsibility toward that person to go and help him out of that problem. Don’t you? Sure you do. And plus, 1 Peter 4:8, that love covers a multitude of sins, should be understood in relationship to James 5:20 which says this: “My brother, if any among you strays from the truth and one turns him back, let him know that he who turns a sinner from the error of his ways will save his soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins.”

You see, he is telling us there what love according to those passages and covering sins refers to. And love for your brother, seeking his best, or a sister who falls, that you know of their sin, love will go to that person, will bring that sinful action to his awareness, will save his soul from death. And that’s how a multitude of sins that individual is covered over. It’s not the, you know, whitewash that we’re talking about that so often we mean when we talk about covering over sins.

It means to help that person deal with it and to recognize only the blood of Jesus Christ can cover that sin. And if the person remains unrepentant and stubborn in his sin, the blood is not efficacious for that individual. It’s evidence that he’s not repentant. Now, also notice in this we should go to the sinner if we see sin. And I said that it’s if it’s a private sin, it must have a private rebuke.

We don’t do that in a context of a crowded group of people, for instance. Note here also that it says it refers to the person that has sinned against you as your brother. Okay? And you’ll notice that term brother continues through these verses until the person refuses to hear the church. Now, that’s important to recognize in the text here because what that means is that presumptively when we see a person in a sin, we don’t doubt their salvation.

Okay? What we believe is in the context of the church, and that’s the context we’re talking about here, is that person is falling short of the righteous requirements of God’s law, not completely disregarding, and we’re walking in rebellion to the teaching of God. They’re trying and falling short like an arrow falls short of a target if we’re not strong enough to shoot it good enough. Well, that’s what we’re to believe about the person who’s actually going to sin here.

And you’ll notice that it says we’re to believe that about that person, even if he doesn’t hear us. It doesn’t change the terminology. Jesus doesn’t tell us here to consciously change our perception of that person’s relationship to God to one of being a heathen and a publican until—until when?—until he fails to hear the church. Until such time as the church excommunicates a person. Okay? Until such time as an official action of the church court declares the public assembly of God’s people excommunicate somebody.

Until that point in time, he [is] to be considered as an erring brother, a brother falling short of the truth. Okay, now that’s important. You may not think it’s important, but we should realize that’s important in this church. We realize more than most churches the importance of presuppositions that we bring to the text of God’s word or to situations we’re involved with. And we should recognize that if we allow an alien presupposition that a brother is not a brother, that he’s in fact a wolf and not a sheep, if we allow that in our minds, it’s going to affect how we relate to the problem.

God tells us here specifically to relate to him as a brother. That’s an act of your will. Now I’m talking about. Okay? Don’t let those thoughts creep in. Okay? So I want you just to make sure you understand what I’m saying there. When we announce a church action of suspension of an individual from the table of our Lord, okay, a suspension and not full excommunication, then what we’re telling you is that person has fallen short, but they’re a brother or a sister.

We’re not telling you to treat them—we’re not telling you to presuppose them to be a pagan or an infidel. We’re not telling you that. We’re telling you you’re to treat them as a brother who’s fallen short. And we’re praying that they will through the fruits of their repentance demonstrate that is actually the case and we know that long term they’ll demonstrate one or the other that they really are or that instead the church will then move toward excommunication if the person fails to meet the criteria set down to the church court.

Okay. I want you to keep that in your minds. Okay. If that process fails, if the person doesn’t hear you individually, then it says in the next verse, you’re supposed to go back to him with two or three, one or two more. So you’d have two or three of you now talking to the individual. Why is that? “By the mouth of two or three witnesses, every word may be established.” It calls for judicial action here.

You’re supposed to understand that the nature of judicial cases in the scriptures is what you’re now moving toward. You’re in the process of [something that] requires a confirmation of witnesses. And this is a specific citation back to the case law of Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy 19 and Deuteronomy 17 both have specific verses that says that by the mouths of two or three all things must be confirmed. On part of a single witness, you cannot convict a person.

And so you go back with two or three. By the way, as long as we’re referencing Deuteronomy 17, which is one of the passages of scripture that is talked about here, I want to just mention for a minute something that I think is real easy to explain, but we probably glossed over it several times in this church without taking an adequate time to pause and consider it and kind of drive it home. In Deuteronomy 17, where this one of the places where this requirement of two or three witnesses comes up, in Deuteronomy 17 verse 6 it says, “At the mouth of two witnesses or three witnesses shall he that is worthy of death be put to death. But at the mouth of one witness thou shalt not put him to death.”

Now that’s in the context of sin obviously and it goes on later in Deuteronomy 17 to talk about the implications of a person who doesn’t hear the court, the court systems that God has set up in his nation and in his church. Verse 11: “According to the sentence of the law which they shall teach thee and according to the judgment which they shall tell thee, thou shalt do. Thou shalt not decline from the sentence which they shall show thee to the right hand or to the left. And the man that will do presumptuously, and will not hearken unto the priest, that standeth to minister therefore the Lord thy God, or unto the judge, even that man shall die, and thou shalt put away the evil from Israel, and all the people shall hear and fear and do no more presumptuously.”

Now, I bring that in at this point in time because that’s important to understand also the process of church discipline. We will—we talk about contumacy. Contumacy is contempt of church court and it’s a technical term that comes right from the usage of contempt of church court in this passage. What this passage says in so many words is that there are court systems. There’s a civil court system. There’s an ecclesiastical court system. You have your priest and a judge. A civil judge and an ecclesiastical judge. And if the person comes to those judges that God has established and the judges then declare stipulations for that person and the people say, “Well, no, I’m not going to do that anyway,” and acts presumptuously and doesn’t hearken unto the voice of the judge and does what he wants to do anyway.

Okay? If he does that, then he has now committed a capital offense. He’s committed a crime of contumacy. Now, what this means is that although it’s true, and we’ll talk about we mentioned this before last week specifically, that there are different gradations of sin in God’s economy, we know that all sins are worthy of death from God’s hand. But there are different penalties that he prescribes. There are differences of how people sin and that’s important in terms of church discipline.

What it means though is that any small sin can become a capital crime. If a person for instance steals from another person in the church or outside the church and the ecclesiastical court says, “Well, you’re supposed to make restitution and we’re not going to—one of the stipulations of this court is that you go and pay back twofold what you stole to that individual.” And the person we tell that to says, “Well, I’m not going to do that,” and refuses to do it.

Or he says he’s going to do it and then doesn’t do it and doesn’t do it and doesn’t do it. What does that say about that guy? He’s acting presumptuously and sinning against God by not hearkening unto the voice of the church court. And so that man now has taken a crime that originally only had restitution involved in the working out or demonstrating that he was really repentant for that act. He’s now escalated that crime up to a capital crime because he’s now contumacious or contemptuous to the court of God’s church.

That’s an important one to keep in your own mind for several reasons. One, because it’s one that has implications for you when a verdict of the church court is read to you and when you are part of the stipulations of that verdict or part of that sentence or the stipulations. If you’re part of that, then you have obligations that are spelled out to the congregation on the part of that. And if you willfully and presumptuously say, “No, I’m not going to do that,” the Bible says you’re guilty of contempt of court.

Contempt of God’s authority and you’ve now even though there was no sin originally involved for you perhaps—you’ve now escalated yourself to a position of contempt before God into a capital crime. If you have—what I’m saying is that again, if you have problems with stipulations that a church court might make upon you as an individual or you as a member of the congregation to which a stipulation is read—you had better come to the court to work it out. Don’t just say I’m not going to do it. Okay? So it’s important because it’s going to have immediate implications for you and your lives.

It’s also important because we live in a generation where the civil courts—well, as an illustration, you know, we’ve been working for some time now. It’s my fault, I suppose it’s been some time, with Denny on a pamphlet about Christian reconstruction, trying to kind of—I was going to say dumb it down—cartoons. We’re going to use a lot of cartoons. And we’re kind of bouncing back and forth on one specific cartoon that was drawn by Bob Parsons up in Alaska about a civil judge who tells a guy that because he stole from this guy, he has to do this and that and he gets in his decision—he completely perverts true justice.

And the way Bob originally drew the cartoon, the judge had Mickey Mouse ears on, right? It’s a Mickey Mouse judge. Well, see, that’s funny. And when I saw that cartoon, I thought that’s great. And then I started to think, I wonder how Judge Beerus would have reacted to that cartoon. Now, he knew—and he knows now from heaven—that many of the judges in Oregon that are supposed to represent God’s justice in the civil arena could probably be depicted as jackasses as well as mice.

But the point is that you want to be careful because what happens then is you transfer over that contempt—which is correct contempt aimed at an individual’s contemptual actions in terms of his judicial [role]—you translate over to the authority of the position itself and you begin to develop this attitude where the authorities that God has established are Mickey Mouse and no good and stupid and I’m telling you that’s a sin we all have to be, you know, be careful to guard against. When the justices in our land are so contemptuous of right and wrong and there is no justice in the land because of these improper justices, it’s easy to fall into a contempt for the authorities that God has ordained.

But God has ordained them. He has ordained civil authorities and ecclesiastical authorities. And he wants us to hearken unto the voice of those judges, even when they’re wrong, even when their justice won’t mean perfect justice in God’s sight. Now, you all recognize, and I’ve said this many times, you know, it’s certainly part of the other half side of this coin is that if they tell you to do something against the word of God or cause you to violate your conscience before God, you cannot do that thing. And you should probably let the judge know that’s the case.

What I’m trying to say here is that contumacy or contempt of church court is an important thing to consider in the context of church discipline. It will affect you. And we all, I think, could go through a corrective rethinking of our attitude to the God’s ordained authorities in the land. That’s certainly true in terms of ecclesiastical justices. There’s no such notion even in most churches we’ve come out of.

And so it’s foreign to us. And I wanted to take a little divergence there and deal with that for a couple of minutes. Okay? “By the mouth of two or three witnesses, all things are confirmed.” You go back to the individual with two or three. If he still fails to hear you, the next thing is admonishment by the church. Okay? It says that if you want to hear them then if you should like to hear them tell it to the church.

Okay. So you tell it to the church and the church then is to admonish the individual. The church gets involved. You have the individual going to him saying, “Hey, you’re screwing up. Repent or you’ll be in trouble.” Doesn’t hear it. “Forget it. I don’t care.” Go back in with two or three people. “Repent. You’re in trouble.” “I don’t care.” You go back then with the church with the authority of the church to admonish that individual.

And that’s what we’ve done for the last two weeks. We made a public pronouncement to people of the specific sins that Tim was involved in trying to get you all to see you have an obligation to pray for and intercede as much as possible with Tim. The voice of the church eldership should be admonishing Tim certainly representing the church. But I think that the term here used includes that and it also includes the voices of the church, the congregation itself calling to the person to repent of his sin in the matter and be made right to God. Again, you see what I’m saying? You have an obligation in those cases to go to those people to admonish them. Okay? The church as a whole unit that should be praying and trying to get involved in the situation, trying to save that person’s soul and trying to turn him from his sin.

So, that’s the third process in the process of excommunication. And then finally, if he doesn’t hear that—and if after two weeks Tim had not hearken unto the voice of the church court or the church’s congregation itself—then you would proceed with a declaration of excommunication.

Now the time frame in that of course varies depending on the offense and what the individual is doing but it is certainly appropriate that you move fairly quickly from step to step to make the person realize that things have to be dealt with. And if you refuse to tell it to the church or refuse to hear the church, rather, neglect to hear the church, in verse 17 let him be unto thee as an heathen man and a publican.

He is excommunicated. He is cut off from the fellowship of God’s people. He’s cut off obviously from the table. He’s probably been suspended before this point even by the church because they want to guard the table, which we’ll talk about in a minute. And then he also is removed from, and presuppositionally now seen as a heathen and as a tax gatherer. And when it says that, it means that the way those people were perceived in those days and tax gatherers weren’t good people. I thought of Brad this morning being here and how, you know, maybe today we could say, you know, treat him as a repossessor of cars.

I suppose you’ve been treated pretty poorly by some people in the past. He’s not doing that anymore. I hope I didn’t embarrass you, Brad. But it seems [like] a good illustration. You see, there are positions that are necessary in society that still people don’t like and feel at ease with. I suppose tax gatherers is still a good one in our society. IRS agents. I consider him as an IRS agent, I suppose, is one way to look at it.

Although, I’m sure there are godly men in the IRS. Well, anyway, the point is that there’s now official declaration by the church of excommunication. And there’s a consideration of the person as a heathen. Okay. So, that’s the process, plain simple, really obviously stated here in other portions of scripture. Second thing I want us to see out of this verse, though, is to see that there’s now a twofold assurance of the efficacy—that this will actually have effect in the person’s life.

Okay? Because he goes on to say, and this is the context of those verses we were talking about earlier with plosis. And then it says in verse 18, “Verily I say unto you, whatsoever you shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven. Whatsoever you shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. Again, I say unto you that if two of you shall agree on earth as touching anything that they shall ask, it shall be done for them by my Father which is in heaven.” Those two verses are a twofold witness to the correctness and to the efficacy of the action involved.

What it’s saying is that if you go through this process correctly and you’ve done what God requires of you as a church court and as an assembled congregation that it accurately reflects the justice of God’s bar of justice in heaven. Okay? “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” And that’s what excommunication is. It’s a declaration that what we’re affecting now in terms of the visible church is also affected by God at his bar of justice. And so it’s a warning to that individual that if he continues in the path he’s in and doesn’t repent that he’s headed for hell. Okay.

Paul said, you know, I turned the guy over to Satan for the mortification of his flesh that his soul might be saved. In other words, through physical torment leading possibly to death so that the person might at some part of that process repent of his sins that his soul might be saved. Okay. So the scriptures tell us here. Jesus tells us, first of all, there is a binding or loosing that the church does that is coterminous with God’s binding and loosing. Okay? You’re not supposed to say, “Well, yeah, we did that, but we don’t know what God does.” No, no. You’re to consider that the actions of the church, if they’ve been fulfilled according to the biblical mandates of correct church [discipline], you’re to consider that those actions are efficacious.

They really do put the person outside of the church of Jesus Christ. And they recognize that he clearly never was part of the elect community of God anyway and that he’s on the road to hell and damnation. Okay, that’s what excommunication does. And Jesus says here, you bind and loose. Now, this is the use of the keys of the kingdom. I just wanted to mention one thing there. The keys of the kingdom—that phrase is used several times or the phrases binding and loosing, opening and closing, locking and unlocking. And another part of the scriptures refer to the keys of the kingdom as the preaching of the word.

And the Reformers held correctly that the proper use of the keys involved involves both the teaching of the word and the use of church discipline or excommunication. Okay? To preach the gospel to people is to use the keys of the kingdom to either open or close heaven to them because it’s the preaching of the gospel that brings them to repentance.

And that’s proper and that’s important. Remember in a disciplinary process that the word of God must permeate a lot of these conversations. You just don’t go to a guy and say, “I don’t like what you did.” You go to the scriptures, okay? And there’s a binding or loosing. There’s an opening or closing that occurs in relationship to the preaching of the word of God. But then there’s a binding or loosing also that is referred to here in terms of the disciplinary action of the church court itself.

And so the church actually does bind and loose here. You know, well, I’ve got a used station wagon. If you want to buy it, you can buy it. I tried to sell this used station wagon we have. We bought one for Roy several months ago and this week I finally got around—after three months—putting an ad in the paper and I got a call Saturday morning and wanted to come out and see it. I thought, “Gee, where are those keys?”

You know, when are the things still starts or anything? We’ve been trying for the last couple of weeks to find them, we lose them, find them, but they’re not important to us because we don’t ever use them, you know. Well, it’s kind of that way with the use of the keys of the kingdom in God’s church today. They’ve been misplaced, lost. It’s hard to find them. It’s hard to dust them off, make sure we’re using the right key.

You know, it’s the same thing in the churches today. And same thing in both of those aspects in preaching of the word itself. What binds or looses? Tell me which action—the preaching of which gospel would open or close the door of the kingdom of heaven to man that you, that you preach to, would teach a man a truncated gospel: “Fire insurance”—is that opening the door to heaven to this individual? Or is the preaching of the gospel of the ascension of the Savior King Jesus to the throne and the implications of that for a person’s whole life, his whole world and life view, everything that he is?

Which of those is opening or closing or locking up the kingdom of heaven? Now, you know, the preaching of a truncated gospel is to not use the keys that God has given to us to open up heaven and the blessings of heaven to individuals. And so, the church has failed in that respect. And the church has also failed, of course, in the respect of using the keys of discipline and excommunication. Occasionally, it happens, but very rarely. And then the only other case I know locally where it has [been used] was used improperly and so also didn’t reflect God’s court of justice.

There’s really nothing very mystical about this. I’m not saying the church forces God into an action relative to an individual. The church images God’s action. And he wants us to consider those actions as one action. Okay? A binding and a loosing. So there’s first that witness and the second the witness of “wherever two or three shall ask anything in my name, it’ll be done.” And he says that prayer also then and the judicial actions of the court when they’re assembled are a second witness.

And God says that’s an additional witness to the efficacy of the action. Okay, after he does that, after those two verses, he gives us the efficacy of the action taught in the next verse—the very next verse—he gives us the source of the procedure and the authority itself. He says, uh, in verse 20, for relating back to those two evidences of the efficacy of the action, “for where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”

And so what he gives us here in this verse is the source of the process, the source of the efficacy, and the source of the whole procedure. Okay? And Christ says that I’m in the midst of them and all this stuff has been carried out. The church isn’t speaking for itself. It’s speaking for Jesus Christ. When we do that correctly, he is in the midst of the church proclaiming that action. Okay? This is not primarily a verse relative to small churches.

It’s a verse relative to church discipline and it’s an affirmation by Christ that church discipline is affected because He’s the source of that judicial decision itself. He’s in the midst of them. But that terminology should remind us of Revelation 2 and 3 where Christ is said to walk in the midst of the lampstands and then gives messages to those lampstands. And what does he do in those in those messages?

He tells the individual churches of their actions. He judges them. He evaluates them. He sifts out good and bad things they’re doing. And there’s frequent condemnation in those in those two chapters of Revelation 2 and 3 that give us those letters to the churches. And there’s references to the stumbling blocks those who teach the doctrine of Balaam or those who practice the acts of idolatrous relationships with Jezebel.

Okay, those two things again, improper use of the kingdom—not teaching correctly and so closing up the kingdom of God to men through the preaching of Balaam—and then the false deeds and the necessity of the church acting in terms of disciplining people both for false teaching and for false actions and immoral actions. And Jesus says, “If you don’t do it, I’m going to do it. And if you don’t do it, I’m going to take the lampstand out of your church.

You will be no church of mine if you don’t use those keys of teaching and church discipline effectively. God’s in the midst of the lampstands that Jesus Christ is and he tells us he’s in the midst of the church and their judicial actions. And there’s stumbling blocks talked about in this passage, too, because now we’ve filled in the context of that last verse there with a little bigger context. And now let’s look at a little bigger context itself and see what the rest of Matthew 18 is all about.

And lo and behold, it relates to the same topic as well. There’s a larger context plaque we have to put around the context plaque around that single verse we had before. Okay? And that larger context plaque is at the first part of Matthew 18 and I won’t have time to read it but suffice it to say that he talks in there about little ones who might stumble and if somebody causes a little one to stumble it’s better for that person if a millstone be wrapped around his neck and he’d be thrown and drowned in the ocean. What’s he talking about? He goes on to say that the body—if your body, if your eye or your hand causes you to offend—cut it off, pluck your eye out. Don’t let it offend. And he talks about sheep: 100 sheep, 99 of the fold, one wandering off, and he goes after the one that’s to be found.

What’s he talking about in those things? There’s a common thing he’s talking about there relative to the action of these verses, which is the context of this verse in terms of church discipline. What he’s saying is that if we don’t exercise the proper use of the kingdom, just like the teachers of Balaam in Revelation 2 and 3 and the followers of Jezebel caused people to stumble, they were identified by Christ as stumbling blocks to the church.

So God says, if we allow people in our church who are idolatrous and who profane the table, we put stumbling blocks in the way of people who are prone to sin by their old nature and we cause them little ones to stumble. What he’s saying is there’s two kinds of people here. There are people who are little children who can be dragged off into sin and there are people who are stumbling blocks to them. And those people who are stumbling blocks are those who are eventually excommunicated, cast out of the church. Don’t repent and they have a millstone wrapped around their neck.

Now the millstone used there is a huge millstone. It’s the kind the donkeys had to use to make the thing turn to grind what they were grinding there. Now remember the millstone around the neck here should bring to mind all the references in the scriptures to the head wound that Satan would receive. Millstones were used in the Old Testament to demonstrate God’s wrath against Satan. And when a person becomes a stumbling block, when by his evil deeds he becomes a stumbling block to the sheep who are prone to stray and to wander, then the scriptures give him the same penalty that’s assigned to Satan himself because they’ve now proved themselves [to be] followers of Satan.

There are strayers in terms of sheep and there are slayers in terms of wolves in the fold who will eat up those sheep who stray off and who will cause them to stumble and who will, if left in the body as an eye or in hand, will cause the whole body harm. Those people are to be plucked out, excommunicated. They’re to be thrown as it were into the deepest ocean if they don’t repent. They’re to be seen as wolves and you’re to guard the sheep by getting rid of them.

That’s what’s being talked about here. That’s the bigger context of this whole process. There are two types of sins: straying and slaying. And this is just what we talked about last week in terms of the Psalms. Two kinds of people, good and bad—not totally righteous people, people who fall short, and people who don’t fall short, but who reject God’s truth and God’s law. And those people are fit only for judgment.

The differences of these sins are evident from this passage then in its applications. Paul [turned] a man to Satan for the mortification of his flesh that he might be brought to repentance. Any sin unrepented of before the church court can become then contumacy or a capital crime and then fall into the condemnation of the man with millstone around his neck. People will either move closer toward or further away from God by their actions.

And the church is to look for those actions in cases where there’s been blatant sin. Okay, so that’s the larger context, the source, the procedure and authority being Christ. Then the larger context being that division that goes on with the sorting out—the Christ in Revelation 2 and 3 in terms of sheep and wolves. And then finally, we’re going to talk about the purpose of the action. And obviously here, one of the purposes of the action is either the repentance or damnation of the individual affected.

Either a person is brought to repentance and so is ushered back into the kingdom of God through their whole process or he’s put to damnation. And so you can say that one of the purposes of excommunication is to help the person who sinned. It’s to help him repent so that he could have eternal blessing in heaven. That’s good and proper. Another use of excommunication is for the good of the people—we said before—might stumble through a lack of discipline in the church.

Those people are to be preserved and kept from stumbling because of the actions of the church court. And that’s good and proper. Calvin himself said that those were two of the reasons specifically for church actions. He said number one, that the good not be corrupted by the bad. Okay, which is what we’ve talked about in terms of the sheep and the wolves. Number two, that shame might affect the repentance of the ungodly or further encourage those penitence under suspension to continue to demonstrate their fruits of repentance.

Okay, shame is another aspect of this that leads to the well-being of the person involved. I thought about this last week when we had that story in the news about the child molester and he [has] put the sign on his door of his room, the boarding room, and has to put a sign on his car, too, I think. And I saw Stevie Remington of the ACLU on TV saying, “Well, we of society have certainly got past the place [where] we use shame as a judgment against people. We don’t want to shame people.”

That’s completely—it may sound good to you. Why would you want to make some poor person shamed? But it’s completely contrary to the teaching of this passage. One of the purposes that scripture tells us for excommunication is to shame the person. We shouldn’t feel bad about that. We want that guy to be ashamed. We want that woman to be ashamed because we want them to be brought back to repentance.

We want them to feel guilty over what they’ve done. And if we don’t do that, then we shut the door to heaven to them as it were. And we don’t know if they’re going to repent or not. Only God knows if [they are part of] his elect. The point is the judicial actions of the church are to affect shame and repentance. First and 2 Thessalonians 3:14 says specifically that they’re to take note of contentious brethren that they might be put to [shame]. Okay, that’s as plain as can be.

2 Thessalonians 3:14 that’s to be one of the reasons. Okay. Cotton Mather writing in his Magnalia Christi Americana gives five purposes of excommunication. And it’s interesting that he basically gives the five reasons here. The Westminster Confession in chapter 30, the Westminster Confession, gives these same five reasons. The first Mather phrases as preventing, removing, and healing of offenses. The Westminster Confession says it’s for the reclaiming and gaining of offending brethren, which is what we’ve talked about.

Another reason is to deter others from sin. Another reason is to purge out infectious leaven. And it’s also to prevent God’s wrath against the church. If the church fails to exercise discipline correctly, the whole church can come under the condemnation of God. Now, these things are all good and proper—these things are all good and proper. But I want us to kind of take one step further now into the context of what all the Bible tells us about excommunication and what we’re doing as a church and what the Lord’s table is all about.

It’s good and proper to seek the well-being of the offender. It’s good and proper to seek the well-being of weak people in the church. And it’s good and proper to seek the well-being of the church, all of us individuals who don’t suffer the judgment of God. But if we end there and don’t take it another step further, all we are is good Christian humanists. You see, all we’re looking for is the well-being of the individuals involved.

But there’s a larger dimension to this that necessitates excommunication and suspension if repentance must be demonstrated by people. That larger consideration though is what I want us to think about for a couple of minutes. It’s kind of like the scriptures talk about how you shouldn’t breed two different types of animals together. We know if you take a horse and you take a donkey, you get a mule. I know that because I made sure [of it] driving in this morning my wife that was what happened and she said yes.

I made sure, for you, the illustration. The mule cannot propagate itself. Okay, we know that there’s bad results of that. We know—I think maybe you’re not sure yet, but we know—I think that AIDS is a judgment by God against homosexuality. Okay. Well, if all you want to do is get to the place where you remove the unproductiveness of mixing animals together, or if all you want to do is prevent the person from getting AIDS, then you’ve missed the point.

God doesn’t come into a world that somehow got here autonomously from him and say, and because he has superior knowledge that these things won’t be able to reproduce, say don’t mix different species together because they’re not going to reproduce. He doesn’t do that. He created them so they don’t reproduce together. You understand? He creates the situation that he references in the scriptures. He doesn’t do it to prevent us from doing something that’s kind of stupid.

He—what I’m trying to say is he puts the curse on those things because he doesn’t want us to do them in the first place. He doesn’t want us to avoid them because first and foremost of the curse he places upon them. See the difference? AIDS. God doesn’t want the threat of AIDS to create safe sex in America. That’s not the purpose. God’s purpose ultimately even isn’t even to create monogamous sex. Okay? And it’s not even God’s purpose with the threat of AIDS to create celibacy.

That’s not what God wants. What God wants is for people to turn back to the word that they’re despising by their actions, to turn back to him in obedience, to honor him with all of their lives. Not so that they can live a better life apart from him. That’s not his intent. God is not a humanist. We are not here because God was lonely. We are here because God decided to create us to give worship and praise to him.

Okay? And all these bad effects and sins that we can see are never the primary reasons why he wants us to avoid certain actions. And it’s true of communion. It would be improper. It would be hurting to the wicked. It would be hurting to the fall sheep, the straying sheep. And it would be hurting to the church of God if we didn’t exercise communion or excommunication in reference to communion. But that’s not the primary reason.

That’s a result of something else.