Matthew

Purpose & theme

Matthew opens the New Testament by answering the question the whole Old Testament has been asking: where is the promised King? His Gospel presents Jesus as the long-awaited Messiah, the Son of David and Son of Abraham, in whom every promise of the Scriptures finds its “Yes.” Written especially with a Jewish audience in mind, Matthew again and again shows how the life of Jesus fulfilled the prophets — “All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet” — from His virgin birth and His flight to Egypt to His riding into Jerusalem on a donkey and His death for sinners. Jesus is the true Israel, the new and greater Moses, the Immanuel (“God with us”) who has come to save His people from their sins.

At the center of Matthew’s Gospel stands “the kingdom of heaven,” the reign of God that has broken into the world in the person of the King. Matthew gathers Jesus’ teaching into five great discourses — the Sermon on the Mount, the mission charge, the parables of the kingdom, the teaching on the church, and the sermon on the last things — that unfold the character, demands, and destiny of that kingdom. The Gospel moves steadily toward the cross and the empty tomb, where the King lays down His life as “a ransom for many” and rises victorious, and it ends not with a period but with a commission: the risen Christ, given “all authority in heaven and on earth,” sends His people to make disciples of all nations, promising, “I am with you always, to the end of the age.”