Exegetical and Hermeneutical Commentary of Matthew 16:19

And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.

19. the keys of the kingdom of heaven ] This expression was not altogether new. To a Jew it would convey a definite meaning. He would think of the symbolic key given to a Scribe when admitted to his office, with which he was to open the treasury of the divine oracles. Peter was to be a Scribe in the kingdom of heaven. He has received authority to teach the truths of the kingdom.

whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven ] To bind (cp. ch. Mat 23:4) is to impose an obligation as binding; to loose is to declare a precept not binding. Such expressions as this were common: “The school of Shammai binds it, the school of Hillel looseth it.” The power is over things, not persons. The decisions of Peter as an authorized Scribe of the Kingdom of God will be ratified in heaven.

Fuente: The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges

Mat 16:19

And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven.

The keys

1. The kingdom of heaven does not mean heaven.

2. The kingdom of heaven does not mean the Church. It indicates power:

I. administrative.

II. Didactic. (D. Fraser, D. D.)

I will give unto thee the keys

The Saviour had spoken of an edifice in which Peter was to be a conspicuous foundation-stone. The edifice was a temple. The scene was then varied a little; and the edifice was a city. The scene was varied again; the city is a kingdom. It is the kingdom of heaven. All the representations are significant. They are all appropriate aspects, though varied, of the grand reality. Our Lord promises to Peter the keys of the kingdom of heaven. As the kingdom is a city, keys are needed for the gates. The city is a fortified place, a castle, the palatial residence of the Great King. A steward of the house is required, a major-domo, one who may take charge not only of the keys of the gates, but of the keys of the treasure-house too, and of all the storerooms of the establishment. Our Saviour intimates to Peter that he would be constituted such a steward of the house of God. He was to have great power and authority as the prime minister of the King. Acting according to the commands of his Sovereign, he would have authority to open the gates or to shut them; to open the storehouses or to close them. His power would be, relatively to the King, administrative only. And in discharge of the functions of his high office he would at once be instructed from above by the Divine Spirit, and be assisted from around by other high officials-the other apostles. He and they unitedly would constitute the Kings ministry. He would be premier. Hence it was that on the Day of Pentecost he took the lead and opened the gates of the kingdom to the Jews. Hence too, when he was in Joppa, he was instructed by his Lord to open the gates of the kingdom to the Gentiles; and he did it. Hence also, in all the lists of the apostles, Peter is invariably mentioned first. He has, however, no successor in his premiership, just as he had no successor as a Foundation-Stone. The Foundation-Stone lasts for ever. So do all the living stones. They live for ever. And so the ministry of the apostles continues for ever. The laws of the King are communicated to us for ever through the ministry of his apostolic ministers. (J. Morison, D. D.)

The keys of the kingdom

Every Jewish scribe, when fully trained and authorized to teach his brethren, received from his tutors and superiors a key, to symbolize the knowledge of the Divine will which he possessed, and was about to dedicate to the service of his brethren; many of them either carried a key at their girdle, or had it woven into their robe, as an open sign of the profession to which they had been set apart. When, therefore, Christ put the keys of the kingdom of heaven into the hands of His disciples, they would understand that they were to become scribes in His kingdom; teachers of the truth, expounders of the law they had learned from Him; witnesses and exemplars of the life they had seen Him live. These keys we have authority to use too-keys of righteousness and charity, i.e., keys of kindness and good living, as well as keys of wisdom and knowledge. By our daily conduct, and by the spirit of our whole conduct, no less than by our words, we are saying to our fellows, This, so far as we understand Him, is how Christ would have men live; you have only to live so, and you will be in His kingdom, under His rule and benediction. By our good words, and our good works, we are to constitute ourselves door-keepers in the House of the Lord, and to open the doors to all who would enter in. It is, then, no merely personal salvation, no merely future and distant heaven, no merely selfish and ignoble task, for which we look and to which we are summoned. We are looking for the heaven of being now and always in tune with the will of God, and for a salvation which embraces the whole nature of man, and extends to every race and kindred and tribe. (S. Cox, D. D.)

Binding and loosing

In the language of the Jewish schools, to bind and to loose, meant to prohibit and to permit, to determine what was wrong and must not be done, and what was right and ought to be done. Rabbi Sham-mat, for instance, bound all heathen learning, i.e., he forbade his disciples to acquire it-declared what we should call classical studies to be wrong; while Rabbi Hillel loosed these studies-declared them to be right, that is, and encouraged his disciples to take them up. In addressing this promise to His first disciples, therefore, Christ meant to say that, humble and unlearned as they were, yet, in virtue of the new spiritual life and insight which He had conferred upon them, they should become masters of sentences, and their decisions as to what was right and what wrong, should carry no less authority than they had once attached to the decisions of their rabbis and scribes. This promise also extends to us. We are authorized to make those practical applications of truth to the conditions and needs of the hour, by which the moral life and tone of men will be raised and purified. And we have made use of this power in the following, among other ways:

1. Abolishing slavery.

2. Raising the status of woman.

3. Securing the education of children.

4. Advancing the cause of temperance, thrift, industry.

5. Promoting the growth of freedom, and the fraternity of men and nations.

In these and similar ways, the general teaching of Christ has been applied to the social and moral conditions of men, bringing out new bearings of familiar principles on human conduct and duty. (S. Cox, D. D.)

Church discipline

Once from the pulpit, at an ordination of elders, the late Rev. M. MCheyne made the following declaration. When I first entered upon the work of the ministry among you, I was exceedingly ignorant of the vast importance of church discipline. I thought that my great, and almost only, work was to pray and preach. I saw your souls to be so precious, and the time so short, that I devoted all my time and care and strength to labour in word and doctrine. When cases of discipline were brought before me and the elders, I regarded them with something like abhorrence. It was a duty I shrank from; and I may truly say it nearly drove me from the work of the ministry among you altogether. But it pleased God, who teaches His servants in another way than man teaches, to bless some of the cases of discipline to the manifest and undeniable conversion of the souls of those under our care; and from that hour a new light broke in upon my mind, and I saw that if preaching be an ordinance of Christ, so is church discipline. I now feel very deeply persuaded that both are of God; that two keys are committed to us by Christ-the one the key of doctrine, by means of which we unlock the treasures of the Bible: the other the key of discipline, by which we open or shut the way to the sealing ordinances of the faith. Both are Christs gift, and neither is to be resigned without sin.

The opening and shutting power of the Christian life

Every praying man and every praying woman on the globe that lives in the intelligent knowledge of Christ, and employs the spirit and truth of Christ intelligently, just as much as councils, and synods, and conventions, and churches, has this power of the keys. God gives it to every one that desires to have the living nature of Christ in him. Ah! do you not suppose there have been thousands of men, who have gone down through life arrogating this claim, that never opened the door of heaven to one single soul? And yet there have been hundreds of poor bed-ridden Christians whose key was bright with perpetual using, and who, by faith, and example, and testimony, and clarity of teaching, did bind iniquity in the world, by the golden cords of truth, and did set loose, by the same truth, those that were bound, giving them power of spiritual insight, giving them emancipation, and bringing them into the large light and liberty of the children of God. Emancipators of the soul they were-humble, uncrowned, uncanonical, unordained, God-sanctified souls. They knew Christ, and loved Him, and poured out His spirit upon men. And every man that has that spirit has Gods keys in his hands, and has authority to bind and loose-to bind lies and all iniquity, and to set loose all those that suffer oppression by reason of spiritual despotism. They go forth effulgent messengers of Gods light and the emancipation that goes with it. (H. W. Beecher.)

The responsibility of the key-power

It is no mean prerogative; it is past all estimation, indeed, for honour and for dignity, to have the power to open heaven to any soul. If God were to give you the power to go forth, and, touching the earth, to open its fruitful bosom, so that where-ever you pressed your hand or your foot, out there should pour treasures of grain and treasures of fruit; if God were to give you that power which in ages gone by was attributed to Ceres, when it was supposed that she came to earth and taught men the arts of agriculture-what a power that would be. If God had given you power to touch the hidden treasures of metal; to know where iron lies buried; to know where all the veins of gold and silver are; to open up all the treasures beneath the surface of the earth, men would have supposed that that was a great and sovereign endowment-and it would have been great and sovereign in a lower sphere. But how much more noble is it that God has given men the power to develop, not gold and silver that perish, but riches that never fade, that moth and rust never corrupt, and that thieves do not break through to steal-eternal treasures-the immortal spirits of men. But this is the case. God has given authority to every man that lives in the higher realm of truth, to open the eternal realm to those around about him, as an inspired apostle. For you are a lineal successor of the apostle, every one of you that does the apostles work. And God sends every man that goes forth to carry the Spirit of God to his fellow-men. And it is no small prerogative, no small honour, but a most responsible trust, to have committed to you the keys of life and death; to carry in yourself those influences that shall be a savour of life to some, and a savour of death to others-that shall be a buttress and a wall of defence to some, and a stumbling-stone and rock of offence and destruction to others. How solemn it is that God gives men to be parents in this life, to rear up congregations out of their own loins, to sit in the church of the family, and makes fathers and mothers to be apostles, and gives to them keys, saying, What you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and what you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. It is even so. You cannot free yourself from the obligation. You cannot help it. You are the key-keeper for your children. You are the door-keeper for your own offspring. Take heed, then, how you carry yourselves as parents in your own household-how you administer Gods Word. It depends much upon you whether, at last, your children shall shine as the brightness of the firmament, or whether they shall rise to everlasting shame and contempt. (H. W. Beecher.)

Inspiration carries the keys

When you are inspired you have the keys. In your sublimest moods, when earth fades into a fleck hardly to be seen, and heaven crowds itself in noble fellowship upon your soul, the whole man is lifted up in an ecstasy Divine. In that hour the church holds the keys. You do not hold the keys because of hereditary descent, or ecclesiastical relationship, or mechanical contrivance, or superior patronage-you hold the keys only so long as you realize the inspiration. And no man can take those keys from you; everywhere the inspired man keeps the keys-in merchandise, in statesmanship, in philosophy, in adventure, in religious thinking, in Christian civilization, you cannot keep down the inspired man. (Dr. Parker.)

Fuente: Biblical Illustrator Edited by Joseph S. Exell

Verse 19. The keys of the kingdom] By the kingdom of heaven, we may consider the true Church, that house of God, to be meant; and by the keys, the power of admitting into that house, or of preventing any improper person from coming in. In other words, the doctrine of salvation, and the full declaration of the way in which God will save sinners; and who they are that shall be finally excluded from heaven; and on what account. When the Jews made a man a doctor of the law, they put into his hand the key of the closet in the temple where the sacred books were kept, and also tablets to write upon; signifying, by this, that they gave him authority to teach, and to explain the Scriptures to the people. – Martin. This prophetic declaration of our Lord was literally fulfilled to Peter, as he was made the first instrument of opening, i.e. preaching the doctrines of the kingdom of heaven to the Jews, Ac 2:41; and to the Gentiles, Ac 10:44-47; Ac 11:1; Ac 15:7.

Whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth] This mode of expression was frequent among the Jews: they considered that every thing that was done upon earth, according to the order of God, was at the same time done in heaven: hence they were accustomed to say, that when the priest, on the day of atonement, offered the two goats upon earth, the same were offered in heaven. As one goat therefore is permitted to escape on earth, one is permitted to escape in heaven; and when the priests cast the lots on earth, the priest also casts the lots in heaven. See Sohar. Lev. fol. 26; and see Lightfoot and Schoettgen. These words will receive considerable light from Le 13:3; Le 13:23: The priest shall look upon him (the leper) and pronounce him unclean. Hebrew vetime otho, he shall pollute him, i.e. shall declare him polluted, from the evidences mentioned before. And in Le 13:23: The priest shall pronounce him clean, vetiharo hacohen, the priest shall cleanse him, i.e. declare he is clean, from the evidences mentioned in the verse. In the one case the priest declared the person infected with the leprosy, and unfit for civil society; and, in the other, that the suspected person was clean, and might safely associate with his fellows in civil or religious assemblies. The disciples of our Lord, from having the keys, i.e. the true knowledge of the doctrine of the kingdom of heaven, should be able at all times to distinguish between the clean and the unclean, and pronounce infallible judgment; and this binding and loosing, or pronouncing fit or unfit for fellowship with the members of Christ, being always according to the doctrine of the Gospel of God, should be considered as proceeding immediately from heaven, and consequently as Divinely ratified.

That binding and loosing were terms in frequent use among the Jews, and that they meant bidding and forbidding, granting and refusing, declaring lawful or unlawful, c., Dr. Lightfoot, after having given numerous instances, thus concludes: –

“To these may be added, if need were, the frequent (shall I say?) or infinite use of the phrases, bound and loosed, which we meet with thousands of times over. But from these allegations the reader sees, abundantly enough, both the frequency and the common use of this phrase, and the sense of it also namely, first, that it is used in doctrine, and in judgments, concerning things allowed or not allowed in the law. Secondly, that to bind is the same with, to forbid, or to declare forbidden. To think that Christ, when he used the common phrase, was not understood by his hearers in the common and vulgar sense, shall I call it a matter of laughter, or of madness?

To this, therefore, do these words amount: When the time was come wherein the Mosaic law, as to some part of it, was to be abolished, and left off, and, as to another part of it, was to be continued and to last for ever, he granted Peter here, and to the rest of the apostles, Mt 18:18, a power to abolish or confirm what they thought good, and as they thought good; being taught this, and led by the Holy Spirit: as if he should say, Whatsoever ye shall bind in the law of Moses, that is, forbid, it shall be forbidden, the Divine authority confirming it; and whatsoever ye shall loose, that is, permit, or shall teach that it is permitted and lawful, shall be lawful and permitted. Hence they bound, that is forbade, circumcision to the believers; eating of things offered to idols, of things strangled, and of blood, for a time, to the Gentiles; and that which they bound on earth was confirmed in heaven. They loosed, that is, allowed purification to Paul, and to four other brethren, for the shunning of scandal; Ac 21:24 and, in a word, by these words of Christ it was committed to them, the Holy Spirit directing, that they should make decrees concerning religion, as to the use or rejection of Mosaic rites and judgments, and that either for a time, or for ever.

“Let the words be applied by way of paraphrase to the matter that was transacted at present with Peter: ‘I am about to build a Gentile Church,’ saith Christ, and to thee, O Peter, do I give the keys of the kingdom of heaven, that thou mayest first open the door of faith to them; but if thou askest by what rule that Church is to be governed, when the Mosaic rule may seem so improper for it, thou shalt be so guided by the Holy Spirit, that whatsoever of the law of Moses thou shalt forbid them shall be forbidden; whatsoever thou grantest them shall be granted; and that under a sanction made in heaven.’ Hence, in that instant, when he should use his keys, that is, when he was now ready to open the gate of the Gospel to the Gentiles, Acts 10, he was taught from heaven that the consorting of the Jew with the Gentile, which before had been bound, was now loosed; and the eating of any creature convenient for food was now loosed, which before had been bound; and he in like manner looses both these.

“Those words of our Saviour, Joh 20:23, Whose sins ye remit, they are remitted to them, for the most part are forced to the same sense with these before us, when they carry quite another sense. Here the business is of doctrine only, not of persons; there of persons, not of doctrine. Here of things lawful or unlawful in religion, to be determined by the apostles; there of persons obstinate or not obstinate, to be punished by them, or not to be punished.

“As to doctrine, the apostles were doubly instructed. 1. So long sitting at the feet of their Master, they had imbibed the evangelical doctrine.

“2. The Holy Spirit directing them, they were to determine concerning the legal doctrine and practice, being completely instructed and enabled in both by the Holy Spirit descending upon them. As to the persons, they were endowed with a peculiar gift, so that, the same Spirit directing them, if they would retain and punish the sins of any, a power was delivered into their hands of delivering to Satan, of punishing with diseases, plagues, yea, death itself, which Peter did to Ananias and Sapphira; Paul to Elymas, Hymeneus, and Philetus, c.”

After all these evidences and proofs of the proper use of these terms, to attempt to press the word, into the service long assigned them by the Church of Rome, would, to use the words of Dr. Lightfoot, be “a matter of laughter or of madness.” No Church can use them in the sense thus imposed upon them, which was done merely to serve secular ends and least of all can that very Church that thus abuses them.

Fuente: Adam Clarke’s Commentary and Critical Notes on the Bible

And I will give unto thee; not unto thee exclusively, that is, to thee and no others; for as we no where read of any such power used by Peter, so our Saviours first question, Whom think you that I am? Letteth us know that his speech, though directed to Peter only, (who in the name of the rest first answered), concerned the rest of the apostles as well as Peter. Besides, as we know that the other apostles had as well as he the key of knowledge and doctrine, and by their preaching opened the kingdom of heaven to men; so the key of discipline also was committed to the rest as well as unto him: Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained, Joh 20:22,23. The keys of the kingdom of heaven; the whole administration of the gospel, both with reference to the publication of the doctrine of it, and the dispensing out the ordinances of it. We read of the key of knowledge, which the scribes and Pharisees took away, Luk 11:52, and the key of government: The key of the house of David will I lay upon his shoulder, Isa 22:21, I will commit thy government into his hand; which is applied to Christ, Rev 3:7. The sense is, Peter, I will betrust thee, and the rest of my apostles, with the whole administration of my gospel; you shall lay the foundation of the Christian church, and administer all the affairs of it, opening the truths of my gospel to the world, and governing those who shall receive the faith of the gospel.

And whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. Some very learned interpreters think that our Saviour here speaketh according to the language then in use amongst the Jews; who by binding understood the determining and declaring a thing unlawful; and by loosing, declaring by doctrine, or determining by judgment, a thing unlawful, that is, such as no mens consciences were bound to do or to avoid. So as by this text an authority was given to these first planters of the gospel, to determine (by virtue of their infallible Spirit, breathed upon them, Joh 20:21) concerning things to be done and to be avoided. Thus Act 15:28,29, they loosed the Gentiles from the observation of the ceremonial law. Some think that by this phrase our Saviour gave to his apostles, and not to them only, but to the succeeding church, to the end of the world, a power of excommunication and absolution, to admit in and to cast out of the church, and promises to ratify what they do of this nature in heaven; and that this text is expounded by Joh 20:23, Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained; and that the power of the church, and of ministers in the church, as to this, is more than declarative. That the church hath a power in a due order and for just causes, to cast persons out of its communion, is plain enough from other texts; but that the church hath a power to remit sins committed against God more than declaratively, that is, declaring that upon mens repentance and faith God hath remitted, I cannot see founded in this text. Certain it is, that Christ doth not here bind himself to confirm the erroneous actions of men, either in excommunications or absolutions; nor to authorize all such actions of this nature that they do. I do therefore rather incline to think that our Saviour by this promise declared his will, that his apostles should settle the affairs of the gospel church, determining what should be lawful and unlawful, and setting rules, according to which all succeeding ministers and officers in his church should act, which our Lord would confirm in heaven. And that the ordinary power of churches in censures is rather to be derived from other texts of Scripture than this, though I will not deny but that in the general it may be here included; but I cannot think that the sense of binding and loosing here is excommunicating and absolving, but a doctrinal or judicial determination of things lawful and unlawful granted to the apostles; the not obeying or living up to whose determinations and decisions may be indeed a just cause of casting persons out of the communion of the church, as the contrary obedience and conformity to them a good ground of receiving them in again. But whether in this text be not granted to the apostles a further power than agrees to any ministers since their age I much doubt, and am very prone to believe that there is.

Fuente: English Annotations on the Holy Bible by Matthew Poole

19. And I will give unto thee thekeys of the kingdom of heaventhe kingdom of God about to beset up on earth

and whatsoever thou shaltbind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shaltloose on earth shall be loosed in heavenWhatever this mean, itwas soon expressly extended to all the apostles (Mt18:18); so that the claim of supreme authority in the Church,made for Peter by the Church of Rome, and then arrogated tothemselves by the popes as the legitimate successors of St. Peter, isbaseless and impudent. As first in confessing Christ, Peter got thiscommission before the rest; and with these “keys,” on theday of Pentecost, he first “opened the door of faith” tothe Jews, and then, in the person of Cornelius, he was honoredto do the same to the Gentiles. Hence, in the lists of theapostles, Peter is always first named. See on Mt18:18. One thing is clear, that not in all the New Testament isthere the vestige of any authority either claimed or exercised byPeter, or conceded to him, above the rest of the apostlesa thingconclusive against the Romish claims in behalf of that apostle.

Fuente: Jamieson, Fausset and Brown’s Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible

And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven,…. By the kingdom of heaven is meant the Gospel, which comes from heaven, declares the king Messiah to be come, speaks of things concerning his kingdom, is the means of setting it up, and enlarging it, displays the riches of his grace, and gives an account of the kingdom of heaven, and of persons’ right unto it, and meetness for it. “The keys” of it are abilities to open and explain the Gospel truths, and a mission and commission from Christ to make use of them; and being said to be given to Peter particularly, denotes his after qualifications, commission, work, and usefulness in opening the door of faith, or preaching the Gospel first to the Jews, Ac 2:1 and then to the Gentiles, Ac 10:1 and who was the first that made use of the keys of evangelical knowledge with respect to both, after he, with the rest of the apostles, had received an enlarged commission to preach the Gospel to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. Otherwise these keys belonged to them all alike; for to the same persons the keys, and the use of them, appertained, on whom the power of binding and loosing was bestowed; and this latter all the disciples had, as is manifest from Mt 18:18 wherefore this does not serve to establish the primacy and power of Peter over the rest of the apostles; nor do keys design any lordly domination or authority; nor did Christ allow of any such among his apostles; nor is it his will that the ministers of his word should lord it over his heritage: he only is king of saints, and head of his church; he has the key of David, with which he opens, and no man shuts, and shuts, and no man opens; and this he keeps in his own hand, and gives it to none. Peter is not the door-keeper of heaven to let in, nor keep out, whom he pleases; nor has his pretended successor the keys of hell and death; these also are only in Christ’s hands: though it has been said of the pope of Rome, that if he sends millions of men to hell, none should say to him, what dost thou? but the keys here mentioned are the keys of the kingdom of heaven; or of the Gospel, which was shut up in the Jewish nation, through the ignorance, malice, and calumnies of the Scribes and Pharisees, who would neither embrace it, or enter into the kingdom of God themselves, nor suffer others that were going to enter into it; and through their taking away the key of knowledge, or the right interpretation of the word of God; and through a judicial blindness, which that nation in general was given up to: and this was shut up to the Gentiles through the natural darkness that was spread over them, and through want of a divine revelation, and persons sent of God to instruct them: but now Christ was about, and in a little time he would (for these words, with what follow, are in the future tense) give his apostles both a commission and gifts, qualifying them to open the sealed book of the Gospel, and unlock the mysteries of it, both to Jews and Gentiles, especially the latter. Keys are the ensigns of treasurers, and of stewards, and such the ministers of the Gospel are; they have the rich treasure of the word under their care, put into their earthen vessels to open and lay before others; and they are stewards of the mysteries and manifold grace of God, and of these things they have the keys. So that these words have nothing to do with church power and government in Peter, nor in the pope, nor in any other man, or set of men whatever; nor to be understood of church censures, excommunications, admissions, or exclusions of members: nor indeed are keys of any such similar use; they serve for locking and unlocking doors, and so for keeping out those that are without, and retaining those that are within, but not for the expulsion of any: but here they are used in a figurative sense, for the opening and explaining the truths of the Gospel, for which Peter had excellent gifts and abilities.

And whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth, shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth, shall be loosed in heaven. This also is not to be understood of binding, or loosing men’s sins, by laying on, or taking off censures, and excommunications; but only of doctrines, or declarations of what is lawful and unlawful, free, or prohibited to be received, or practised; in which sense the words, , “bound and loosed”, are used in the Talmudic writings, times without number, for that which is forbidden and declared to be unlawful, and for that which is free of use, and pronounced to be so: in multitudes of places we read of one Rabbi

, “binding”, and of another , “loosing”; thousands, and ten thousands of instances of this kind might be produced; a whole volume of extracts on this head might be compiled. Dr. Lightfoot has transcribed a great many, sufficient to satisfy any man, and give him the true sense of these phrases; and after him to mention any other is needless; yet give me leave to produce one, as it is short, and full, and explains these phrases, and points at the persons that had this power, explaining Ec 12:11 and that clause in it, “masters of the assemblies”.

“these (say they t) are the disciples of the wise men, who sit in different collections, and study in the law; these pronounce things or persons defiled, and these pronounce things or persons clean,

, “these bind, and these loose”; these reject, or pronounce persons or things profane, and these declare them right.”

And a little after,

“get thyself an heart to hear the words of them that pronounce unclean, and the words of them that pronounce clean; the words of them , that “bind”, and the words of them , that “loose”; the words of them that reject, and the words of them that declare it right”

But Christ gave a greater power of binding and loosing, to his disciples, than these men had, and which they used to better purpose. The sense of the words is this, that Peter, and so the rest of the apostles, should be empowered with authority from him, and so directed by his Holy Spirit, that whatever they bound, that is, declared to be forbidden, and unlawful, should be so: and that whatever they loosed, that is, declared to be lawful, and free of use, should be so; and accordingly they bound some things which before were loosed, and loosed some things which before were bound; for instance, they bound, that is, prohibited, or declared unlawful, the use of circumcision, which before, and until the death of Christ, was enjoined the natural seed of Abraham; but that, and all ceremonies, being abolished by the death of Christ, they declared it to be nothing, and of no avail, yea, hurtful and pernicious; that whoever was circumcised, Christ profited him nothing, and that he was a debtor to do the whole law: they affirmed, that the believing Gentiles were not to be troubled with it; that it was a yoke not fit to be put upon their necks, which they, and their fathers, were not able to bear, Ga 5:1. They bound, or forbid the observance of days, months, times, and years; the keeping holy days, new moons, and sabbaths, which had been used in the Jewish church for ages past; such as the first day of the new year, and of every month, the day of atonement, the feasts of the passover, pentecost, and tabernacles, the jubilee year, the sabbatical year, and seventh day sabbath, Ga 4:9. They loosed, or declared lawful and free, both civil and religious conversation between Jews and Gentiles; whereas, before, the Jews had no dealings with the Gentiles, nor would not enter into their houses, nor keep company with them, would have no conversation with them; neither eat, nor drink with them; but now it was determined and declared, that no man should be called common, or unclean; and that in Christ Jesus, and in his church, there is no distinction of Jew and Gentile, Ac 10:28. They also loosed, or pronounced lawful, the eating of any sort of food, without distinction, even that which was before counted common and unclean, being persuaded by the Lord Jesus Christ, by the words he said,

Mt 15:11. They asserted, that there is nothing unclean of itself; and that the kingdom of God is not meat and drink; or that true religion does not lie in the observance of those things; that every creature of God is good, and fit for food, and nothing to be refused, or abstained from, on a religious account, provided it be received with thanksgiving, Ro 14:14. And these things now being by them bound or loosed, pronounced unlawful or lawful, are confirmed as such by the authority of God, and are so to be considered by us.

t T. Bab. Chagiga, fol. 3. 2.

Fuente: John Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible

The Keys of the kingdom ( ). Here again we have the figure of a building with keys to open from the outside. The question is raised at once if Jesus does not here mean the same thing by “kingdom” that he did by “church” in verse 18. In Rev 1:18; Rev 3:7 Christ the Risen Lord has “the keys of death and of Hades.” He has also “the keys of the kingdom of heaven” which he here hands over to Peter as “gatekeeper” or “steward” () provided we do not understand it as a special and peculiar prerogative belonging to Peter. The same power here given to Peter belongs to every disciple of Jesus in all the ages. Advocates of papal supremacy insist on the primacy of Peter here and the power of Peter to pass on this supposed sovereignty to others. But this is all quite beside the mark. We shall soon see the disciples actually disputing again (Mt 18:1) as to which of them is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven as they will again (20:21) and even on the night before Christ’s death. Clearly neither Peter nor the rest understood Jesus to say here that Peter was to have supreme authority. What is added shows that Peter held the keys precisely as every preacher and teacher does. To “bind” () in rabbinical language is to forbid, to “loose” () is to permit. Peter would be like a rabbi who passes on many points. Rabbis of the school of Hillel “loosed” many things that the school of Schammai “bound.” The teaching of Jesus is the standard for Peter and for all preachers of Christ. Note the future perfect indicative ( , ), a state of completion. All this assumes, of course, that Peter’s use of the keys will be in accord with the teaching and mind of Christ. The binding and loosing is repeated by Jesus to all the disciples (18:18). Later after the Resurrection Christ will use this same language to all the disciples (Joh 20:23), showing that it was not a special prerogative of Peter. He is simply first among equals, primus inter pares, because on this occasion he was spokesman for the faith of all. It is a violent leap in logic to claim power to forgive sins, to pronounce absolution, by reason of the technical rabbinical language that Jesus employed about binding and loosing. Every preacher uses the keys of the kingdom when he proclaims the terms of salvation in Christ. The proclamation of these terms when accepted by faith in Christ has the sanction and approval of God the Father. The more personal we make these great words the nearer we come to the mind of Christ. The more ecclesiastical we make them the further we drift away from him.

Fuente: Robertson’s Word Pictures in the New Testament

Keys [] . The similitude corresponding to build. The church or kingdom is conceived as a house, of which Peter is to be the steward, bearing the keys. “Even as he had been the first to utter the confession of the church, so was he also privileged to be the first to open its hitherto closed gates to the Gentiles, when God made choice of him, that, through his mouth, the Gentiles should first hear the words of the Gospel, and at his bidding first be baptized” (Edersheim, ” Life and Times of Jesus “).

Bind – loose [] . In a sense common among the Jews, of forbidding or allowing. No other terms were in more constant use in Rabbinic canon – law than those of binding and loosing. They represented the legislative and judicial powers of the Rabbinic office. These powers Christ now transferred, and that not in their pretension, but in their reality, to this apostles; the first, here, to Peter, as their representative, the second, after his resurrection, to the church (Joh 20:23, Edersheim). “This legislative authority conferred upon Peter can only wear an offensive aspect when it is conceived of as possessing an arbitrary character, and as being in no way determined by the ethical influences of the Holy Spirit, and when it is regarded as being of an absolute nature, as independent of any connection with the rest of the apostles. Since the power of binding and loosing, which is here conferred upon Peter, is ascribed (Mt 18:18) to the apostles generally, the power conferred upon the former is set in its proper light, and shown to be of necessity a power of a collegiate nature, so that Peter is not to be regarded as exclusively endowed with it, either in whole or in part, but is simply to be looked upon as first among his equals” (Meyer on Mt 16:19; Mt 18:18).

Fuente: Vincent’s Word Studies in the New Testament

19. And I will give thee the keys Here Christ begins now to speak of the public office, that is, of the Apostleship, which he dignifies with a twofold title. First, he says that the ministers of the Gospel are porters, so to speak, of the kingdom of heaven, because they carry its keys; and, secondly, he adds, that they are invested with a power of binding and loosing, which is ratified in heaven. (440) The comparison of the keys is very properly applied to the office of teaching; as when Christ says (Luk 11:52) that the scribes and Pharisees, in like manner, have the key of the kingdom of heaven, because they are expounders of the law. We know that there is no other way in which the gate of life is opened to us than by the word of God; and hence it follows that the key is placed, as it were, in the hands of the ministers of the word.

Those who think that the word keys is here used in the plural number, because the Apostles received a commission not only to open but also to shut, have some probability on their side; but if any person choose to take a more simple view of the meaning, let him enjoy his own opinion. (441) Here a question arises, Why does the Lord promise that he will give to Peter what he appeared to have formerly given him by making him an Apostle? But this question has been already answered, (442) when I said that the twelve were at first (Mat 10:5) nothing more than temporary preachers, (443) and so, when they returned to Christ, they had executed their commission; but after that Christ had risen from the dead, they then began to be appointed to be ordinary teachers of the Church. It is in this sense that the honor is now bestowed for the future.

Whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth. The second metaphor, or comparison, is intended directly to point out the forgiveness of sins; for Christ, in delivering us, by his Gospel, from the condemnation of eternal death, looses the cords of the curse by which we are held bound. The doctrine of the Gospel is, therefore, declared to be appointed for loosing our bonds, that, being loosed on earth by the voice and testimony of men, we may be actually loosed in heaven. But as there are many who not only are guilty of wickedly rejecting the deliverance that is offered to them, but by their obstinacy bring down on themselves a heavier judgment, the power and authority to bind is likewise granted to the ministers of the Gospel. It must be observed, however, that this does not belong to the nature of the Gospel, but is accidental; as Paul also informs us, when, speaking of the vengeance which he tells us that he has it in his power to execute against all unbelievers and rebels, he immediately adds,

When your obedience shall have been fulfilled, (2Co 10:6.)

For were it not that the reprobate, through their own fault, turn life into death, the Gospel would be to all the power of God to salvation, (Rom 1:16😉 but as many persons no sooner hear it than their impiety openly breaks out, and provokes against them more and more the wrath of God, to such persons its savor must be deadly, (2Co 2:16.)

The substance of this statement is, that Christ intended to assure his followers of the salvation promised to them in the Gospel, that they might expect it as firmly as if he were himself to descend from heaven to bear testimony concerning it; and, on the other hand, to strike despisers with terror, that they might not expect their mockery of the ministers of the word to remain unpunished. Both are exceedingly necessary; for the inestimable treasure of life is exhibited to us in earthen vessels, (2Co 4:7,) and had not the authority of the doctrine been established in this manner, the faith of it would have been, almost every moment, ready to give way. (444) The reason why the ungodly become so daring and presumptuous is, that they imagine they have to deal with men. Christ therefore declares that, by the preaching of the Gospel, is revealed on the earth what will be the heavenly judgment of God, and that the certainty of life or death is not to be obtained from any other source.

This is a great honor, that we are God’s messengers to assure the world of its salvation. It is the highest honor conferred on the Gospel, that it is declared to be the embassy of mutual reconciliation between God and men, (2Co 5:20.) In a word, it is a wonderful consolation to devout minds to know that the message of salvation brought to them by a poor mortal man is ratified before God. Meanwhile, let the ungodly ridicule, as they may think fit, the doctrine which is preached to them by the command of God, they will one day learn with what truth and seriousness God threatened them by the mouth of men. Finally, let pious teachers, resting on this assurance, encourage themselves and others to defend with boldness the life-giving grace of God, and yet let them not the less boldly thunder against the hardened despisers of their doctrine.

Hitherto I have given a plain exposition of the native meaning of the words, so that nothing farther could have been desired, had it not been that the Roman Antichrist, wishing to cloak his tyranny, has wickedly and dishonestly dared to pervert the whole of this passage. The light of the true interpretation which I have stated would be of itself sufficient, one would think, for dispelling his darkness; but that pious readers may feel no uneasiness, I shall briefly refute his disgusting calumnies. First, he alleges that Peter is declared to be the foundation of the Church. But who does not see that what he applies to the person of a man is said in reference to Peter’s faith in Christ? There is no difference of meaning, I acknowledge, between the two Greek words Πέτρος ( Peter) and πέτρα, ( petra, a stone or rock,) (445) except that the former belongs to the Attic, and the latter to the ordinary dialect. But we are not to suppose that Matthew had not a good reason for employing this diversity of expression. On the contrary, the gender of the noun was intentionally changed, to show that he was now speaking of something different. (446) A distinction of the same sort, I have no doubt, was pointed out by Christ in his own language; (447) and therefore Augustine judiciously reminds the reader that it is not πέτρα (petra, a stone or rock) that is derived from Πέτρος, ( Peter,) but Πέτρος ( Peter) that is derived from πέτρα, (petra, a stone or rock )

But not to be tedious, as we must acknowledge the truth and certainty of the declaration of Paul, that the Church can have no other foundation than Christ alone, (1Co 3:11; Eph 2:20,) it can be nothing less than blasphemy and sacrilege when the Pope has contrived another foundation. And certainly no words can express the detestation with which we ought to regard the tyranny of the Papal system on this single account, that, in order to maintain it, the foundation of the Church has been subverted, that the mouth of hell might be opened and swallow up wretched souls. Besides, as I have already hinted, that part does not refer to Peter’s public office, but only assigns to him a distinguished place among the sacred stones of the temple. The commendations that follow relate to the Apostolic office; and hence we conclude that nothing is here said to Peter which does not apply equally to the others who were his companions, for if the rank of apostleship was common to them all, whatever was connected with it must also have been held in common.

But it will be said, Christ addresses Peter alone: he does so, because Peter alone, in the name of all, had confessed Christ to be the Son of God, and to him alone is addressed the discourse, which applies equally to the rest. And the reason adduced by Cyprian and others is not to be despised, that Christ spake to all in the person of one man, in order to recommend the unity of the Church. They reply, (448) that he to whom this privilege was granted in a peculiar manner is preferred to all others. But that is equivalent to saying that he was more an apostle than his companions; for the power to bind and to loose can no more be separated from the office of teaching and the Apostleship than light or heat can be separated from the sun. And even granting that something more was bestowed on Peter than on the rest, that he might hold a distinguished place among the Apostles, it is a foolish inference of the Papists, that he received the primacy, and became the universal head of the whole Church. Rank is a different thing from power, and to be elevated to the highest place of honor among a few persons is a different thing from embracing the whole world under his dominion. And in fact, Christ laid no heavier burden on him than he was able to bear. He is ordered to be the porter of the kingdom of heaven; he is ordered to dispense the grace of God by binding and loosing; that is, as far as the power of a mortal man reaches. All that was given to him, therefore, must be limited to the measure of grace which he received for the edification of the Church; and so that vast dominion, which the Papists claim for him, falls to the ground.

But though there were no strife or controversy about Peter, (449) still this passage would not lend countenance to the tyranny of the Pope. For no man in his senses will admit the principle which the Papists take for granted, that what is here granted to Peter was intended to be transmitted by him to posterity by hereditary right; for he does not receive permission to give any thing to his successors. So then the Papists make him bountiful with what is not his own. Finally, though the uninterrupted succession were fully established, still the Pope will gain nothing by it till he has proved himself to be Peter’s lawful successor. And how does he prove it? Because Peter died at Rome; as if Rome, by the detestable murder of the Apostle, had procured for herself the primacy. But they allege that he was also bishop there. How frivolous (450) that allegation is, I have made abundantly evident in my Institutes, (Book 4, Chapter 6,) to which I would willingly send my reader for a complete discussion of this argument, rather than annoy or weary him by repeating it in this place. Yet I would add a few words. Though the Bishop of Rome had been the lawful successor of Peter, since by his own treachery he has deprived himself of so high an honor, all that Christ bestowed on the successors of Peter avails him nothing. That the Pope’s court resides at Rome is sufficiently known, but no mark of a Church there can be pointed out. As to the pastoral office, his eagerness to shun it is equal to the ardor with which he contends for his own dominion. Certainly, if it were true that Christ has left nothing undone to exalt the heirs of Peter, still he was not so lavish as to part with his own honor to bestow it on apostates.

(440) “ Laquelle est receue et advouee es cieux;” — “which is received and acknowledged in heaven.”

(441) “ Ie n’y contredi point;” — “I do not contradict him in it.”

(442) Harmony, vol. 1, p. 437.

(443) “ Ambassadeurs ou prescheurs temporels;” — “temporary messengers or preachers.”

(444) “ D’heure en heure elle seroit revoquee en doute;” — “from hour to hour it would be called in question.”

(445) “ Ie confesse bien qu’en la langue Grecque il n’y a pas grande difference entre le mot qui signifie une pierre, et celuy qui signifie un homme nomme Pierre;” — “I readily acknowledge that, in the Greek language, there is no great difference between the word that signifies a stone, and that which signifies a man named Peter. ”

(446) “ A fin de monstrer qu’au second lieu il parloit de quelque autre chose que de la personne de Pierre;” — “in order to show that, in the latter clause, he was speaking of something totally different from the person of Peter.”

(447) By Christ’s own language is meant the Syriac — a dialect of Hebrew — which is supposed to have been the vernacular language of Palestine in the time of our Lord, and consequently to have been spoken by him and his apostles. It is enough for our present purpose that CALVIN adopted this hypothesis, whatever may be the result of a controversy in which the claims of the Greek language above the Syriac, as familiarly spoken and written in Syria at that period, have been urged with vast learning and ability. — Ed.

(448) “ Les Romanisques repliquent a l’encontre;” — “the Romanists reply on the other hand.”

(449) “ Mais mettons le cas que ce qu’ils disent de Pierre soit hors de doute;” — “but let us suppose that what they say about Peter were beyond a doubt.”

(450) “ Combien cela est faux et frivole;” — “how false and frivolous it is.”

Fuente: Calvin’s Complete Commentary

(19) I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven.Two distinct trains of figurative thought are blended in the words that follow. (1.) The palace of a great king implied the presence of a chief officer, as treasurer or chamberlain, or to use the old Hebrew phrase, as over the household. And of this, as in the case of Eliakim, the son of Hilkiah (Isa. 22:22), the key of office, the key of the gates and of the treasure, was the recognised symbol. In the highest sense that key of the house of David belonged to Christ Himself as the King. It was He who opened and none could shut, who shut and none could open (Rev. 3:7). But that power was now delegated to the servant whose very name, as an Apostle, marked him out as his Lords representative, and the after history of Peters work, when through him God opened the door of faith unto the Gentiles (Act. 14:27; Act. 15:7), was the proof of his faithful discharge of the office thus assigned to him. (2.) With this there was another thought, which in the latter clause of the verse becomes the dominant one. The scribes of Israel were thought of as stewards of the treasures of divine wisdom (Mat. 13:52). When they were admitted to their office they received, as its symbol, the key of knowledge (Luk. 11:52), which was to admit them to the treasure-chambers of the house of the interpreter, the Beth-Midrash of the Rabbis. For this work the Christ had been training His disciples, and Peters confession had shown that the training had so far done its work. He was qualified to be a scribe instructed unto the kingdom of heaven, and to bring forth out of its treasures things new and old (Mat. 13:52); and now the key was given to him as the token of his admission to that office. It made him not a priest (that office lay altogether outside the range of the symbolism), but a teacher and interpreter. The words that follow as to binding and loosing were the formal confirmation in words of that symbolic act. For they, too, belong to the scribes office and not the priests, and express an entirely different thought from that of retaining and forgiving sins. That power was, it is true, afterwards bestowed on Peter and his brother-apostles (see Note on Joh. 20:23), but it is not in question here. As interpreted by the language which was familiar to the Jews (see Lightfoot, Hor. Hebr., on this verse), the words pointed primarily to legislative or interpretative functions, not to the judicial treatment of individual men. The school of Shammai, e.g., bound when it declared this or that act to be a transgression of the Sabbath law, or forbade divorce on any but the one ground of adultery; the school of Hillel loosed when it set men free from the obligations thus imposed. Here, too, the after-work of Peter was an illustration of the meaning of the words. When he resisted the attempt of the Judaisers to put a yoke upon the neck of the disciples (Act. 15:10), he was loosing what was also loosed in heaven. When he proclaimed, as in his Epistle, the eternal laws of righteousness, and holiness, and love, he was binding those laws on the conscience of Christendom. It must be remembered, lastly, that the power thus bestowed on him was conferred afterward (Mat. 18:18) on the whole company of the Apostles, or, more probably, on the whole body of the disciples in their collective unity, and there with an implied extension to partially judicial functions (see Note on Mat. 18:18).

A few words will, it is believed, be sufficient to set the claims and the controversies which have had their starting point in these words on their right footing. It may be briefly noted (1) that it is at least doubtful (not to claim too much for the interpretation given above) whether the man Peter was the rock on which the Church was to be built; (2) that it is doubtful (though this is not the place to discuss the question) whether Peter was ever in any real sense Bishop of the Church of Rome, or in any way connected with its foundation; (3) that there is not a syllable pointing to the transmission of the power conferred on him to his successors in that supposed Episcopate; (4) as just stated, that the power was not given to him alone, but equally to all the disciples; (5) that the power of the keys, no less than that of binding and loosing, was not sacerdotal, but belonged to the office of a scribe or teacher. As a matter of interpretation, the Romish argument from this verse stands on a level with that which sees the supremacy of the successors of St. Peter in the two great lights of Gen. 1:16, or the two swords of Luk. 22:38. The claims of the Church of Rome rest, such as they are, on the greatness of her history, on her association with the imperial city, on the work done by her as the light of the wide West in ages of darkness, on the imposing aspect of her imagined unity; but to build them upon the promise to Peter is but the idlest of fantastic dreams, fit only to find its place in that Limbo of vanities which contains, among other abortive or morbid growths, the monstrosities of interpretation.

Fuente: Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers (Old and New Testaments)

19. Keys The Church is as a fortress, or rather temple, built upon these twelve stones; and the temple has keys. The authority over the whole is conferred upon Peter, and through him on all the apostles, by bestowing upon him and them the keys. This is according to an ancient custom of surrendering the government of a city or fortress by yielding the keys. The ancient Oriental key usually bore not much resemblance to the artistic little metallic instrument which we mean by the word, and which Italian painters pictured in Peter’s hands. It was a wooden apparatus, which would heavily lade a man’s arm. Hence the language in Isa 22:22, which is a suitable parallel to these words of our Lord: “The key of the house of David will I lay upon his shoulder; so he shall open and none shall shut; and he shall shut and none shall open. Bind loose These words, perhaps, carry out the image of the keys. Doors and gates were in ancient times often fastened by tying instead of locking. Our Lord therefore here confers upon the twelve an inspired and miraculous authority and power to found and to govern his Church after his resurrection, by decisions which should be ratified in heaven. Yet the rabbins used the words binding and loosing, to signify affirming or denying a point of the law.

There is no proof whatever that this miraculous power of these twelve apostles ever descended to any successors. As ministers and preachers they have many successors; as apostles, none. Such was the inauguration of his apostolic college by our Saviour preparatory to his departure from the world. Having found them rocks in faith, he makes them foundation rocks of his kingdom. He is now prepared to open a new chapter of his own history. He is not to be a conquering Messiah, as even yet they may be imagining, but a suffering Messiah! He has given them a kingdom, but he is now himself to die.

Fuente: Whedon’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

“I will give to you the keys of the kingly rule of heaven, and whatever you will bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven.” ’

Peter then continues to be honoured for what he has said, but we must remember that the privilege he receives is that of a servant, not of a master. He is to be given ‘the keys of the Kingly Rule of Heaven’ (but not necessarily the only keys). He will be, as it were, ‘a doorkeeper to the house of the Lord’ (Psa 84:10). And what will these enable him to do? Jesus goes on to explain. They will enable him to bind and loose (an ability later given to all the Apostles – Mat 18:18).It is the servant or steward who bears the keys, not the master of the household. And he will open up the door for others, both by determining doctrine, and by establishing the church. This was primarily fulfilled in that Peter was the first preacher to the Jews after the resurrection, in Acts 2, and the first official opener of the doors to Gentiles, in Acts 10-11.

But like all pictures, in interpreting this we must look for examples which explain the point in Scripture. We cannot just interpret it to suit our own viewpoints. That is to make revelation subject to what we think, and that is clearly foolish. Revelation is intended to shape what we think. A clear example of what these words mean is found in chapter 23, where the Scribes are said not to open the truth either to themselves or others. ‘You shut the Kingly Rule of Heaven against men. For you neither enter yourselves, nor allow those who are entering in to enter’ (Mat 23:13). They were using the keys of the Kingly Rule of Heaven wrongly (each Scribe was given a key representing the key of knowledge when he graduated – Luk 11:52), because they resisted the truth as it is found in Jesus. And they sought to prevent others responding to His words. Thus the keys of the Kingly Rule of Heaven are related to the proclamation of the truth, and to the encouraging of men and women to enter under the Kingly Rule of Heaven. These words are highly significant, for they were indicating that ‘the keys’ which belonged to the Scribes had now been taken off them and given to the Apostles on their confession of His Messiahship.

To Peter then, and to the remainder of the Apostles, to the Scribes of the early church (Mat 13:52), and to the later appointees of the early church, and to us, are granted the keys of the Kingly Rule of Heaven. When we proclaim His truth we open the door, when we withhold the truth we close the door. Peter was especially given the keys at this point because he had demonstrated by his words that he had a message to preach. He was the first to receive them because he was the first to declare the truth about Jesus. From now on he could proclaim this new truth, that Jesus is the Christ, the son of the living God, opening the Kingly Rule of Heaven to all who would hear.

But there is no suggestion that these are the only keys, and that they are given to Peter exclusively. He received them first because he was the first to testify of Jesus that He was the son of the living God. And as others began to be aware of the same they too would receive the keys of the Kingly Rule of Heaven.

In the light of the words that follow, it is almost certain that we are to see in these keys a reference to ‘the key of knowledge’ which was solemnly presented to each Rabbi on his successful completion of his probation, whereby he was to open the meaning of the Law to God’s people (compare Luk 11:52). It is true that that was only a single key given to each. But that is the point. Their keys have been taken from them and entrusted to Peter on behalf of all the Apostles. However if Jesus was combining this idea with that of proclamation to both Jew and Gentile then He might well have had in mind two keys, one for opening the truth to the Jews and the other for opening it to the Gentiles, just as He was doing Himself. It should be noted that the use of the key by the Rabbis was to unlock the truth to people in order that they might enter the Kingly Rule of Heaven (Mat 23:13), and that Jesus’ charge is that they failed even to use if for themselves. There was no thought of them actually controlling who could enter (except by failing to reveal the truth to them). They were servants and stewards, not Masters.

‘And whatever you will bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven.’ Here is the prime example of the use of the keys. They are to be used in accordance with heavenly instruction through the Spirit (note the tense of the verb ‘shall have been bound/loosed in Heaven’), as the Spirit reveals to them the deep things of God (1Co 2:9-16). The Rabbis were spoken of as binding the Law when they forbade something, or gave a strict interpretation, and as loosing the Law when they ameliorated it in some way. In the same way then, Peter was to be able to make decisions, along with all the other Apostles (Mat 18:18), which would determine the meaning of Scriptural injunctions for God’s people. They were given the authority to expand and explain. We find this being carried out in the letters of Peter, John and Paul. But we should note that when there was disagreement expounded truth must prevail (e.g. Gal 2:11-17). For this ministry they would be given special and unique enlightenment as they applied the Master’s words (Joh 16:13-14). This power and authority was especially required in the days of the infant church, before there was a New Testament which contained within it that expounded truth.

But we should note here the future perfect tense which whenever it is used is significant. The verb ‘to loose’ is freely used in all its tenses so that when the future perfect is chosen it must be seen as to be given its full force, otherwise it would not have been used. And that force is ‘shall have been’. Thus it is saying here that each decision that the disciples make is to have first been established in Heaven. They are thus to respond to what Heaven says, not make their decisions so that Heaven may concur. Theirs is a great responsibility. It is to receive the mind of Christ on behalf of the infant church (1Co 2:16). They were to be humble servants of the Master, and responsive to His revelation to them.

Note. These keys must not be confused with the key of David (Isa 22:22) for that is clearly still said to be in Jesus’ hands as the One Who ‘opens and shuts’. See Rev 3:7. That is the key of history and of men’s destiny.

Fuente: Commentary Series on the Bible by Peter Pett

A special distinction:

v. 19. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom, of heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.

In recognition of his faith, as expressed in his confession, Christ confers on Peter and on all that believe the keys of the kingdom of heaven. The keys are an emblem of the power which admits into, or prevents any unauthorized person from entering into, a house. Christ, the Son of God, has the key of David, the power to lock and unlock the house or kingdom of God, Rev 3:7. He has earned for all sinners mercy and salvation. And this power and authority He gives to His believing disciples. Whosoever believes, has part in Christ and in all that Christ possesses. Whosoever believes is in the kingdom of heaven, has forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation, and may and shall impart also to others the treasures of the kingdom. “But this is their opinion, that the power of the keys, or the power of the bishops, according to the Gospel, is a power or commandment of God, to preach the Gospel, to remit and retain sins, and to administer Sacraments” (Augsburg Confession, Art..

Fuente: The Popular Commentary on the Bible by Kretzmann

Mat 16:19. And I will give unto thee the keys As stewards of great families, especially of the royal household, bore a key, (probably a golden one, as Lords of the bed-chamber do with us, in token of their office,) the phrase of giving a person the key naturally grew into an expression of raising him to great power. See the note on Isa 22:22. The keys of the kingdom of heaven, which on this occasion are given to Peter, are to be understood metaphorically: for our Lord’s meaning was, that Peter should open the gates of the kingdom of heaven, or Gospel dispensation, both to Jews and Gentiles; that is to say, should be the first who preached the Gospel to them, particularly the latter; and in this sense Peter seems to have understood the matter himself, Act 15:7. Or by the keys, we may understand prayer and authority, which is sometimes the meaning of the metaphor: and according to this interpretation, the power of binding and loosing, added to the power of the keys, maybe considered as explicatory thereof: “After my ascension into heaven, I will give thee, and thy companions in the apostolate, authority to order all the affairs of my church; so that whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth, shall be bound in heaven, &c.” It can be no objection against this interpretation, that it connects the idea of binding and loosing with that of the keys, contrary to the exact propriety of the two metaphors; for all who have studied the Scriptures know, that in many passages the ideas and expressions are accommodated to the subject matter, rather than to the precedent metaphors. The power of binding and loosing now conferred on Peter, and afterwards on all the Apostles, (see ch. Mat 18:18.) was a power of declaring the laws of the Gospel, and the terms of salvation; for in the Jewish nation, to bind and loose are words made use of by the doctors to signify the unlawfulness or lawfulness of things. Wherefore our Lord’s meaning was, “Whatever things thou shalt bind up from men, or declare forbidden on earth, shall be forbidden by heaven; and whatsoever things thou shalt loose to men, or bid to be done, shall be lawful and obligatory in the esteem of heaven.” Accordingly it may be observed, that the gender made use of in both passages agrees to this interpretation: in that under consideration it is , not ; in the other it is , not . This high power of declaring the terms of salvation, and precepts of the Gospel, the Apostles did not enjoy in its full extent till the memorable day of Pentecost, when they received the Holy Ghost in the plenitude of his gifts. After this their decisions on points of doctrine and duty being all given by inspiration, were infallible definitions, and ratified in heaven. Here then was an immense honour conferred on theApostles, and what must yield great consolation to all believers. There is nothing doubtful in the Gospel, much less false; but we may safely rest the salvation of our souls on the discoveries made to us there, since they are all originally derived from God. See Doddridge, Macknight, Lightfoot, Bishop Hoadly, and the other writers on this controverted passage of Scripture.

Fuente: Commentary on the Holy Bible by Thomas Coke

Mat 16:19 . And I will give to thee the keys of the Messianic kingdom , [457] i.e. the power of deciding as to who are to be admitted into or excluded from the future kingdom of the Messiah. For the figurative expression, comp. Luk 11:52 ; Rev 1:18 ; Rev 3:7 ; Rev 9:1 ; Rev 10:1 ; Isa 22:22 ; Ascens. Isa 6:6 .

] The future expresses the idea of a promise (the gift not being, as yet, actually conferred), as in the case of , pointing forward to the time when Christ will no longer administer the affairs of the church in a direct and personal manner. This future already shows that what was meant cannot have been the office of preaching the gospel , which preaching is supposed to lead to admission into the kingdom of heaven, wherever God has prepared men’s hearts for its reception (Dsterdieck, Julius Mller). The similitude of the keys corresponds to the figurative ., Mat 16:18 , in so far as the , Mat 16:18 (which is to be transformed into the . . at the second coming), is conceived of as a house , the doors of which are opened and locked by means of keys (generally , not exactly by two of them). In regard to Peter , however, the figure undergoes some modification , inasmuch as it passes from that of the foundation of rock , not certainly into the lower one of a gate-keeper, but (comp. Luk 12:4 ; 1Co 4:1 ; 1Co 9:17 ; Tit 1:7 ) into that of an ( , Isa 22:15 ff.), from the ordinary relation of a disciple to the church to the place of authority hereafter to be assigned him in virtue of that relation. The authority in question is that of a house-steward , who is empowered to determine who are to belong and who are not to belong to the household over which his master has commissioned him to preside. [458] All this is expressed by means of an old and sacred symbol, according to which the keys of the house are promised to Peter, “that he may open and no man shut, that he may shut and no man open” (Isaiah as above).

For the forms and (as Tischendorf 8, on inadequate testimony) , see Khner, I. p. 357.

. . . ] a necessary adjunct of this power: and whatsoever thou wilt have forbidden upon earth will he forbidden in heaven (by God), so that it will, in consequence, prevent admission into the Messianic kingdom; and whatsoever thou wilt have permitted upon earth (as not proving a hindrance in the way of admission to the future kingdom) will be permitted in heaven . It will depend on thy decision which God will ratify what things, as being forbidden, are to disqualify for the kingdom of the Messiah, and what things, as being allowed, are to be regarded as giving a claim to admission. and are to be traced to the use, so current among the Jews, of and , in the sense of to forbid and to allow . Lightfoot, p. 378 ff.; Schoettgen, II. p. 894 f., and Wetstein on this passage; Lengerke’s note on Dan 6:8 ; Rosenmller, Morgenl . V. 67; Steitz, p. 438 f. Following Lightfoot, Vitringa, Schoettgen, and others, Fritzsche, Ahrens, Steitz, Weizscker, Keim, Gess (I. p. 68), Gottschick in the Stud. u. Krit . 1873, also adopt this interpretation of those figurative expressions. In the face of this common usage, it would be arbitrary and absurd to think of any other explanation. The same may be said not only of the reference to the supreme administrative power in general (Arnoldi and the older Catholics), or to the treasures of grace in the church, which Peter is supposed to be able to withhold or bestow as he may deem proper (Schegg), but likewise of the view which represents the words as intended to indicate the power of admitting into and excluding from the church (Thaddaeus a S. Adamo, Commentat . 1789, Rosenmller, Lange), and in support of which an appeal is made, notwithstanding the , to the ancient practice of tying or untying doors; as well as of that other view which has been so currently adopted, after Chrysostom, Theophylact, Euth. Zigabenus, Erasmus, Luther, Beza, Calvin, Maldonatus, to the effect that what Jesus means is the remission and non-remission of sins . [459] So Grotius, Olshausen, de Wette, Bleek, Neander, Glckler, Baumgarten-Crusius, Dllinger, Julius Mller, Dsterdieck. But to quote in connection with this the different and much later saying of Jesus, after His resurrection, Joh 20:23 , is quite unwarranted; the idea of sin is a pure importation, and although . may properly enough be understood as meaning: to forgive sins (Isa 40:2 ; Isa 3 Esdr. Mat 9:13 ; Sir 28:8 ; and see Kypke on Mat 18:18 ), yet the use of ., in the sense of retaining them, is altogether without example. Exception has been taken to the idea involved in our interpretation; but considering that high degree of faith to which Peter, as their representative, here shows them to have attained, the apostles must be supposed to possess “the moral power of legislation” (objected to by de Wette) as well, if they are to determine the right of admission to the Messiah’s kingdom; see Steitz also, p. 458. This legislative authority, conferred upon Peter, can only wear an offensive aspect when it is conceived of as possessing an arbitrary character, and as being in no way determined by the ethical influences of the Holy Spirit, and when it is regarded as being of an absolute nature, as independent of any connection with the rest of the apostles (but see note on Mat 18:18 ). Comp. Wieseler, Chronol. d. Ap . p. 587 f. Ahrens, likewise, correctly interprets the words in the sense of to forbid and to allow , but supposes the words themselves to be derived from the practice of fastening with a knot vessels containing anything of a valuable nature (Hom. Od . viii. 447). Artificial and far-fetched, but resulting from the reference of the keys to the .

.] Observe how that is spoken of as already done , which is to take place and be realized immediately on the back of the . Comp. Buttmann, neut. Gr . p. 267 [E. T. 311]; Khner, II. 1, p. 35. To such a degree will the two things really harmonize with one another.

[457] See Ahrens, d. Amt. Schlssel , 1864; Steitz in the Stud. u. Krit . 1866, p. 436 ff.; likewise the reviews of the first-mentioned work in the Erlang. Zeitschr . 1865, 3, p. 137 ff.; and that of Dsterdieck in the Stud. u. Krit . 1865, p. 743; Julius Mller, dogm. Abh . p. 496 ff.

[458] There is no force in the objection that this would be to confound the keys of the house-steward with those of the porter (Ahrens). The keys of the house are entrusted to the steward for the purpose of opening and locking it; this is all that the figure implies. Whether lie opens and locks in his own person , or has it done through the medium of a porter , is of no consequence whatever, and makes no difference as far as the thing intended to be symbolized is concerned. The power of the keys belongs, in any case, to the , and not to the . The view of Ahrens, that the keys are to be regarded as those of the rooms, and of the place in which the family provisions are stored, the , the contents of which it is supposed to be the duty of the steward to distribute (so also Dllinger, Christenth. u. Kirche , p. 31), is in opposition to the fact that the thing which is to be opened and locked must be understood to be that which is expressed by the genitive immediately after (accordingly, in this instance, the kingdom , not the ), comp. note on Luk 11:52 , likewise Isaiah as above. Moreover, according to the explanation of Ahrens, those, on whose behalf the uses his keys, would have to be regarded as already within the kingdom and participating in its blessings, so that there would be no further room for the idea of exclusion , which is not in keeping with the contrast which follows.

[459] In which case the result of apostolic preaching generally , i.e. its efficacy in judging men by the spiritual power of the word (Julius Mller, comp. Neander and Dsterdieck), ceases to have any significance other than that of a vague abstraction, by no means in keeping with the specific expression of the text, and leaving no room for assigning to Peter any special prerogative. This also in answer to Weiss, bibl. Theol. p. 99, 2d ed., who holds that, originally, the words were intended to indicate merely that general commission which was given to the apostles to publish among men the call to the kingdom of God.

Fuente: Heinrich August Wilhelm Meyer’s New Testament Commentary

19 And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.

Ver. 19. And I will give unto thee the keys ] i.e. I will make thee and all my ministers stewards in my house, 1Co 4:1 , such as Obadiah was in Ahab’s house, as Eliakim in Hezekiah’s, upon whose shoulder God laid the key of the house of David, so that he opened and none shut, and shut and none opened, Isa 22:22 . Now let a man so think of us ministers, how mean soever, and we shall not lack respect.

Fuente: John Trapp’s Complete Commentary (Old and New Testaments)

19. ] Another personal promise to Peter, remarkably fulfilled in his being the first to admit both Jews and Gentiles into the Church; thus using the power of the keys to open the door of salvation. As an instance of his shutting it also, witness his speech to Simon Magus, , Act 8:21 . Those who deny the reference of Mat 16:18 to St. Peter, will find it very difficult to persuade any unbiassed Greek scholar, that the , with thus lying unemphatically behind the verb, is not a continuation of a previous address, but a change of address altogether.

. . .] This same promise is repeated in ch. Mat 18:18 , to all the disciples generally , and to any two or three gathered together in Christ’s name . It was first however verified, and in a remarkable and prominent way, to Peter. Of the binding , the case of Ananias and Sapphira may serve as an eminent example: of the loosing , the , , to the lame man at the Beautiful gate of the Temple. But strictly considered, the binding and loosing belong to the power of legislation in the Church committed to the Apostles, in accordance with the Jewish way of using the words and for prohibuit and licitum fecit . They cannot relate to the remission and retention of sins , for (as Meyer observes) though certainly appears (reff. LXX) to mean to forgive sins , . for retaining them would be altogether without example, and, I may add, would bear no meaning in the interpretation: it is not the sin , but the sinner , that is bound , ( Mar 3:29 ). Nor can the ancient custom of fastening doors by means of cord be alluded to; for the expressions, , , clearly indicate something bound and something loosed , and not merely the power of the keys just conferred. The meaning in Joh 20:23 , though an expansion of this in one particular direction (see note there), is not to be confounded with this.

Fuente: Henry Alford’s Greek Testament

the keys. Put by Figure of speech Metonymy (of Cause), App-6, for the power to open. Christ has the keys of Hades; Peter had the keys of the kingdom. See next note.

the kingdom of heaven = the kingdom of the heavens. See App-112, and App-114. This power Peter exercised in Acts 2 in Israel, and Acts 10 among the Gentiles. Not the “Church” of the mystery (Eph 3).

thou shalt bind, &c. This power was given to the others (Mat 18:18. Joh 20:23), and exercised in Act 5:1-11, Act 5:12-16. Whatever authority is implied, no power was given to communicate it to others, or to them in perpetuity. Binding and loosing is a Hebrew idiom for exercising authority. To bind = to declare what shall be binding (e.g. laws and precepts) and what shall be not binding.

on. Greek. epi. App-104.

Fuente: Companion Bible Notes, Appendices and Graphics

19.] Another personal promise to Peter, remarkably fulfilled in his being the first to admit both Jews and Gentiles into the Church; thus using the power of the keys to open the door of salvation. As an instance of his shutting it also, witness his speech to Simon Magus,- , Act 8:21. Those who deny the reference of Mat 16:18 to St. Peter, will find it very difficult to persuade any unbiassed Greek scholar, that the , with thus lying unemphatically behind the verb, is not a continuation of a previous address, but a change of address altogether.

…] This same promise is repeated in ch. Mat 18:18, to all the disciples generally, and to any two or three gathered together in Christs name. It was first however verified, and in a remarkable and prominent way, to Peter. Of the binding, the case of Ananias and Sapphira may serve as an eminent example: of the loosing, the , , to the lame man at the Beautiful gate of the Temple. But strictly considered, the binding and loosing belong to the power of legislation in the Church committed to the Apostles, in accordance with the Jewish way of using the words and for prohibuit and licitum fecit. They cannot relate to the remission and retention of sins, for (as Meyer observes) though certainly appears (reff. LXX) to mean to forgive sins, . for retaining them would be altogether without example, and, I may add, would bear no meaning in the interpretation: it is not the sin, but the sinner, that is bound, (Mar 3:29). Nor can the ancient custom of fastening doors by means of cord be alluded to; for the expressions, , , clearly indicate something bound and something loosed, and not merely the power of the keys just conferred. The meaning in Joh 20:23, though an expansion of this in one particular direction (see note there), is not to be confounded with this.

Fuente: The Greek Testament

Mat 16:19. ,[746] I will give thee) The future tense. Christ Himself, after His glorification, received the keys economically.[747] See Rev 1:18, and German exposition of the Apocalypse. Our Lord afterwards gave the keys, which He here promised, to Peter, not alone, but first in order of time (cf. Luk 5:10); since Peter was the first who, after the resurrection of Christ, exercised the apostolical office; see Act 1:15; Act 2:14. If the keys had been given exclusively to Peter, and the Bishop of Rome after him, and not to the other apostles also, even after the death of Peter, the Bishop of Rome should have acted as pastor to the other apostles.- , the keys) Keys denote authority. Tertullian, in his work on fasting, ch. 15, says, Apostolus claves macelli tibi tradidit: the apostle[748] has given thee the keys of the meat market, where he alludes to 1Co 10:25. The keys are available for two purposes, to close and to open; the keys themselves are not said to be two.[749] One and the same key closes and opens in Rev 3:7. The Jews declare that a thousand keys were given to Enoch. See James Altings Hist. promot. acad. Hebr. p. 107.- , of the kingdom of heaven) He does not say of the Church, nor of the kingdoms of the world.-, , thou shalt bind-thou shalt loose) The keys denote the whole office of Peter. By the expressions, therefore, of binding and loosing,[750] are comprehended all those things which Peter performed in virtue of the name of Jesus Christ, and through faith in that name, by his apostolic authority, by teaching, convincing, exhorting, forbidding, permitting (see Tertullian, already quoted), consoling, remitting (see Mat 18:18; Mat 18:15; Joh 20:23); by healing, as in Act 3:7; Act 9:34; by raising from the dead, as in Act 9:41 (cf. ibid. Act 2:24); by punishing, ibid. Mat 5:5; cf. 1Co 5:5; he himself records, in Act 15:8, an instance of a matter performed on earth and sanctioned in heaven. It is advisable to compare with this passage that in Mat 18:18, and with both of them the third in Joh 20:23. In this passage, to Peter alone, after uttering his confession concerning Jesus Christ, the authority is promised, first of binding, and secondly of loosing sins, and whatsoever is included under that authority; and this is done as it were enigmatically, it not being expressed what things were to be bound and loosed, because the disciples were not yet capable of understanding so wonderful a matter; see Luk 9:54. In chapter 18, after our Lords transfiguration, the disciples, who had made some progress in faith, are invested in common with the authority, first of binding, and secondly of loosing, the offences of their brethren, but most especially of loosing them by prayers in the name of Christ. In John 20, after His resurrection, our Lord having breathed upon His disciples, gives them the authority, firstly of remitting, and secondly of retaining sins; for thus are the words and their order[751] changed after the opening of the gate of salvation. The greatest part of the apostolic authority regards sins (cf. Hos 13:12). The remaining particulars are contained in this discourse by synecdoche. It is not foreign to our present purpose to compare a passage of Aristophanes as to the use of the verb -Frogs; Act ii. scene 6, Epirrhema[752] [Ed. Dindorf, 691],- , ()-i.e. we ought to forgive (or remit) the faults of those who explain the cause of them.

[746] The margin of Ed. 2 makes the reading equal in authority to .-E. B.

[747] i.e. As Christ, without any derogation to His proper Divinity.-(I. B.)

[748] Sc. St Paul.-(I. B.)

[749] More keys, in fact, may be accounted to have been delivered to Peter. Hence it was that with so great efficacy he opened the entrance into the kingdom of heaven to the Jews and Gentiles. Comp. the opposite case [of the Pharisees, who shut up the kingdom of heaven against men], ch. Mat 23:4; Mat 23:13; Luk 11:52.-V. g.

[750] These words as to binding and loosing do not properly apply to the keys, but yet have a close connection with the use of the keys.-V. g.

[751] The order before had been-1. Binding (answering to retaining); 2. Loosing (answering to remitting). The order is now reversed.-ED.

[752] In old comedy, a speech, usually of Trochaic tetrameters, spoken by the Coryphus after the Parabasis. Liddell and Scott, q. v.-(I. B.)

The keys of the market, i.e. the free use of authority to buy and eat whatever meat is sold in it.-ED.

conomice, in conformity with the Mediatorial economy, which appertains to Him.-ED.

Ba, Rec. Text, Origen 3,525a, 529d, 530a, support . Dbc Vulg. Cypr. support -ED.

Fuente: Gnomon of the New Testament

keys of the kingdom

Not the keys of the church, but of the kingdom of heaven in the sense of Matthew 13, i.e. the sphere of Christian profession. A key is a badge of power or authority (cf) Isa 22:22; Rev 3:7. The apostolic history explains and limits this trust, for it was Peter who opened the door of Christian opportunity to Israel on the day of Pentecost Act 2:38-42 and to Gentiles in the house of Cornelius. Act 10:34-46. There was no assumption by Peter of any other authority Act 15:7-11. In the council James, not Peter, seems to have presided; Act 15:19; Gal 2:11-15. Peter claimed no more for himself than to be an apostle by gift 1Pe 1:1 and an elder by office 1Pe 5:1.

The power of binding and loosing was shared Mat 18:18; Joh 20:23 by the other disciples. That it did not involve the determination of the eternal destiny of souls is clear from Rev 1:18. The keys of death and the place of departed spirits are held by Christ alone.

kingdom (See Scofield “Mat 3:2”)

Fuente: Scofield Reference Bible Notes

The Keys of the Kingdom

I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.Mat 16:19.

When this promise was given the little Galilean company was standing on one of the lower spurs of the Lebanon, amidst the pleasant rush and music of its countless brooks, with the grey walls of the Roman castle at Csarea Philippi in the distance. Peter had just made his great confession, and by his swift and far-reaching intuition had established his place as foremost man of the Twelve. It was under these circumstances that this peculiar form of expression was first used by our Lord. After speaking of the supernatural knowledge that Peter had received from the Father, Christ goes on to announce the important relation of Peter, as the first possessor and witness of such knowledge, to the Church of the future. And then He advances a step, and speaks of a future gift of light and power and dominion to Peter which the Apostle should receive from His hand: And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven.

I

The Keys

I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven.

Keys are the emblems of authority, and this language was addressed to Peter because of the power that was to be conferred on him. He was to arrange and toil, determine and order, in the affairs of Christs Kingdom, not, of course, absolutely, but under Christ, for Christ is the Head. Peters authority was to be real, but none the less derived from and dependent upon Christs will. Now, as Peters power was not to be absolute, so it was not to be solitary. It was to be shared by the other Apostles. That is not brought out in the text, for here Christ is dealing only with His servant who had so grandly confessed Him. But later on Christ conferred on the entire company of the disciples the same wonderful power and privilege as He had conferred on Peter, when He said, not to any Apostle in particular but to the entire Church, Receive ye the Holy Ghost: Whose soever sins ye forgive, they are forgiven unto them; whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained. One outcome of the authority was that Peter, like the others, could bind and unloose, could forbid or enjoin, what should be done in the Kingdom of Christ. Through the Apostle Christ was to express His will. Through him the Master was to carry on and carry out His purposes. What Peter ordered would be what Christ desired. What Peter forbade would be the things Christ disapproved, and herein was the reality of the power, herein the vastness of the privilege, that Christ was to work in and through him, for that is loftier and grander than for any man to devise and determine unaided and unguided of the Spirit of God. And it is in virtue of this real and true guiding Spirit that we have the Epistles of Paul, and Peter, and John, and others developing the doctrine of the cross of Christ, and setting forth the source of and the power of the Christian life.

1. If we refer to another occasion upon which Christ used this metaphor of the keys, we shall find that Christ was accustomed to associate with the expression knowledge and the specific power that comes from knowledge. To the lawyers He said, Ye took away the key of knowledge. The reference here can only be to the knowledge that unlocks the gates leading into the Kingdom of Heaven. That was Christs future gift to Peter. Putting this side by side with the fact that Christ has just been speaking of a knowledge of His own person and character that had been given to Peter, what can the knowledge that Christ would by and by give be but the knowledge of the Father, of which He was the one only spring and channel amongst men? It was through that knowledge that Peter was to open the way for men into the Kingdom of Heaven. To bind and to loose was to teach and to rule in the Kingdom of Heaven, in harmony with the knowledge received from the Father. We observe that the promise deals more immediately with things, not persons; with truths and duties, not with human souls. The Apostles dealt with souls as all other disciples of Christ deal with them, intermediately, through the truths and precepts on which the salvation of souls turned. The power of the keys, of binding and loosing, was in reality the power of knowing the essential truths of Gods character and will.

(1) It is the power of a teacher. Among the Jews, when a scribe was admitted to his office a key was given to him as the symbol of the duties which he was expected to perform. He was set apart to study with diligence the Book of the Law, and to read and explain it to the people. Jesus Christ reproved the Rabbis and Pharisees of His day for having taken away the key of knowledge, and for shutting up the Kingdom of Heaven against men, that is, trying to lock good men out. They knew little of the spirit of the law which they taught, and their teaching produced evil fruits in the lives of their countrymen.

There is a sense in which all who faithfully preach the word of the Kingdom hold the keys. When we say that we have got the key to a difficulty, or that an army holds the key to a position, we mean that, however long it may be before the proof of the power is manifested, yet it is there. So with those who proclaim the truth as it is in Jesus. Their word may be derided, their warnings scorned, their entreaties mocked at; yet as the word they speak is not their own but the word of God, so shall that word loose or bind, shut up or set free. But it is the Lord who does this; man is but His agent for declaring His message. Every command or threat is heard by conscience, but the thing that is declared may be long a-coming. It will come, however. So with every word of the gospel: the truth in Jesus is the key of the Kingdom: the decisive proof we may be long in discovering, but early or late every one must find a barred or an abundant entrance, according as he has given heed to or neglected the word of life.

When Luther opened the long-closed Bible in the Gospels and Epistles, he was bringing forth out of his treasury things new and old. He was binding and loosing the consciences of men. When Andrew Melville, in Scottish history, took King James by the sleeve as that pedant was arrogating to himself a spiritual power which was his neither by law nor by grace, and called him Gods silly vassal, reminding him that there were two kings and two kingdoms in Scotland, he may have been lacking in courtesy, but he was proving himself a scribe of the Kingdom. When John Brown of Harpers Ferry stooped to kiss the negro child in its slave mothers arms as he passed to his death, men of vision might have seen the keys of the Kingdom at his girdle. All men now realize that in his own rude way he taught the things of Christ to his own generation. Wherever and whenever the Christian Church, through its ministers and people and its inspired saints, shall stand to proclaim some high duty or to renounce some hoary wrong, they shall bind and they shall loose, and they shall fulfil the function of the Church in the Kingdom of God.1 [Note: W. M. Clow, The Secret of the Lord, 65.]

(2) Again, we are reminded that knowledge is necessary to life; we believe and then do. The great principle is taught that the morality of Christianity flows directly from its theology, and that whoever, like Peter, grasps firmly the cardinal truth of Christs nature, and all which flows therefrom, will have his insight so cleared that his judgments on what is permitted or forbidden to a Christian man will correspond with the decisions of heaven, in the measure of his hold upon the truth which underlies all religion and all morality, namely, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God. These are gifts to Peter indeed, but only as possessor of that faith, and are much more truly understood as belonging to all who possess like precious faith (as Peter says) than as the prerogative of any individual or class.

In a chapter of reminiscences which is given at the end of the second volume of the Letters of Erskine of Linlathen, Principal Shairp writes: Mr. Erskine utterly repudiated the character which Renans Vie de Jsus drew of our Lord, and almost resented the fatuity which could separate with a sharp line the morality of the Gospels from their doctrinal teaching as to Christ Himself. He used to say, As you see in many English churches the Apostles Creed placed on one side of the altar, on the other the Ten Commandments, so Renan would divide as with a knife the moral precepts of the Gospels from their doctrines. Those he would retain, these he would throw away. Can anything be more blind? As well might you expect the stem and leaves of a flower to flourish when you had cut away the root, as to retain the morality of the Gospels when you have discarded its doctrinal basis. Faith in Christ, and God in Christ, is the only root from which true Christian morality can grow. 1 [Note: Letters of Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, 18401870, p. 375.]

2. The history of St. Peter, as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, reveals the facts that the lofty promise contained in the text was fulfilled in three important particulars.

(1) He is first in the first election to the vacant apostolate. He is first in the first great conversion of souls. His word rolls like the storm. It cuts and pierces like the sword. We do not require to have the imagination exalted by the vast gilded letters round the cupola of St. Peters at Rome. This is truly to hold the keys, and to roll back the doors of the Kingdom!

My mothers death was the second epoch in my fathers life; and for a man so self-reliant, so poised upon a centre of his own, it is wonderful the extent of change it made. He went home, preached her funeral sermon, every one in the church in tears, himself outwardly unmoved. But from that time dates an entire, though always deepening, alteration in his manner of preaching, because an entire change in his way of dealing with Gods Word. Not that his abiding religious views and convictions were then originated or even alteredI doubt not that from a child he not only knew the Holy Scriptures, but was wise unto salvationbut it strengthened and clarified, quickened and gave permanent direction to, his sense of God as revealed in His Word. He took as it were to subsoil ploughing; he got a new and adamantine point to the instrument with which he bored, and with a fresh powerwith his whole might, he sunk it right down into the living rock, to the virgin gold. His entire nature had got a shock, and his blood was drawn inwards, his surface was chilled, but fuel was heaped all the more on the inner fires, and his zeal, that , burned with a new ardour; indeed had he not found an outlet for his pent-up energy, his brain must have given way, and his faculties have either consumed themselves in wild, wasteful splendour and combustion or dwindled into lethargy. From being elegant, rhetorical, and ambitious in his preaching, he became concentrated, urgent, moving (being himself moved), keen, searching, unswerving, authoritative to fierceness, full of the terrors of the Lord, if he could but persuade men. The truth of the words of God had shone out upon him with an immediateness and infinity of meaning and power which made them, though the same words he had looked on from childhood, other and greater and deeper words. He then left the ordinary commentators, and men who write about meanings and flutter around the circumference and corners; he was bent on the centre, on touching with his own fingers, on seeing with his own eyes, the pearl of great price. Then it was that he began to dig into the depths, into the primary and auriferous rock of Scripture, and take nothing at anothers hand: then he took up with the word apprehend; he had laid hold of the truth,there it was, with its evidence, in his hand; and every one who knew him must remember well how, in speaking with earnestness of the meaning of a passage, he, in his ardent, hesitating way, looked into the palm of his hand, as if he actually saw there the truth he was going to utter.1 [Note: Dr. John Brown, Hor Subseciv, ii. 9.]

(2) But the great promise to Peter is fulfilled in a second way. Spiritual sin would steal into the Church; it would glide in under a haze of profession and pretence, as Milton tells us that Satan passed in mist into Paradise. It is Peter who speaks with such awful power. Simon makes an attempt to buy the gift of God with money, and brands upon his own name for ever its ill-omened connexion with the foul offence (far from obsolete) of buying spiritual offices. Peters voice pronounces his condemnation. All men, says the Koran, are commanded by the saint. All men know, if only by instinct, that this priesthood of goodness has been won at the cross, in blood, the crimson of which gives a living hue to all form, all history, all life. Let us no longer lose our purchase of this mighty term, through fear of its sacerdotal connotations. Dissociated from the institution, as it has been well pointed out, the true priest makes good his claims to mediatorship in the heart of his fellows, solely by the possession of those spiritual qualities which create and confirm the impression that he is nearer to God than they.

Francis of Assisi is pre-eminently the saint of the Middle Ages. Owing nothing to church or school, he was truly theodidact, and if he perhaps did not perceive the revolutionary bearing of his preaching, he at least always refused to be ordained priest. He divined the superiority of the spiritual priesthood. The charm of his life is that, thanks to reliable documents, we find the man behind the wonder worker. We find in him not merely noble actions, we find in him a life in the true meaning of the word; I mean, we feel in him both development and struggle. How mistaken are the annals of the Saints in representing him as from the very cradle surrounded with aureole and nimbus! As if the finest and most manly of spectacles were not that of the man who conquers his soul hour after hour, fighting against himself, against the suggestions of egoism, idleness, discouragement, then at the moment when he might believe himself victorious, finding in the champions attracted by his ideal those who are destined if not to bring about its complete ruin, at least to give it its most terrible blows. Poor Francis! The last years of his life were indeed a via dolorosa as painful as that where his Master sank down under the weight of the cross; for it is still a joy to die for ones ideal, but what bitter pain to look on in advance at the apotheosis of ones body, while seeing ones soulI would say his thoughtmisunderstood and frustrated.1 [Note: P. Sabatier, Life of St. Francis of Assisi, p. xv.]

(3) But there is exhibited yet another fulfilment to the great promise. Peter is also the first to divine the secret of God, to follow the mind of the Spirit. He climbs rapidly to the highest peak, and is the first herald of the dawn. The old is, no doubt, very dear to him; he clings to all that is devout and venerable with the tenacious loyalty of a true Hebrew churchman. He goes up into the temple at the hour of prayer, being the ninth hour. He ascends the house-top to pray at the sixth hour. The services of the Temple and of the synagogue go on upon a parallel line with the first eucharists. But this Hebraic Christianity, or Christian Hebraism, cannot continue indefinitely. There are souls among the Gentiles longing for forgiveness, for rest and purity. They are not to dwell in the shadow, to tarry disappointed in the vestibule for ever. It is for Peter to fling back the doors once again. He receives the vision in the house of Simon, the tanner, by the seaside.

Far oer the glowing western main

His wistful brow was upward raised,

Where, like an angels burning train,

The burnished waters blazed.

And now his part as founder and rock is almost over. The reception of Cornelius is his last great act. The last mention of his name in St. Lukes narrative is in these sentences: There rose up certain of the sect of the Pharisees which believed, saying, That it was needful to circumcise them, and to command them to keep the law of Moses. And the apostles and elders came together for to consider of this matter. And when there had been much disputing, Peter rose up and said unto themhis last words are characteristicBut we believe that through the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ we shall be saved, even as they.

II

The Power of the Keys

Whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.

Although the notion of opening and shutting shades off into that of binding and loosing, it is obvious that the less familiar expression would not have been substituted for the more familiar without some specific reason, which reason is in this case supplied by the well-known meaning of the words themselves. The figure of binding and loosing, for allowing as lawful, or forbidding as unlawful, is so simple and obvious that no language has been wholly without it. Twice besides the expression is used: Verily I say unto you, Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven (Mat 18:18); and Whose soever sins ye forgive, they are forgiven unto them; whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained (Joh 20:23). On these occasions the words are spoken to others besides St. Peter, and on each occasion the sense is substantially the same: So great shall be the authority of your decisions, that, unlike those of the ordinary schools or Rabbis, whatsoever you shall declare lawful shall be held lawful, whatsoever you shall declare unlawful shall be held unlawful, in the highest tribunal in heaven.

1. It is, as it were, the solemn inauguration of the right of the Christians conscience to judge with a discernment of good and evil, to which up to this time the world had seen no parallel. In that age, when the foundations of all ancient belief were shaken, when acts which up to that time had been regarded as lawful or praiseworthy were now condemned as sinful, or which before had been regarded as sinful were now enjoined as just and holy, it was no slight comfort to have it declared, by the one authority which all Christians acknowledged as Divine, that there were those living on the earth on whose judgment in these disputed matters the Church might rely with implicit confidence. In the highest sense of all, doubtless, this judgment was exercised by Him alone who taught as one having authority, and not as the scribes, and who on the Mount of the new law drew the line between His own commandments and what was said by them of old time. In a lower sense it was exercised, and has ever since been exercised, by all those who by their teaching or their lives, by their words or their example, have impressed the world more deeply with a sense of what is Christian holiness and what is Christian liberty. In an intermediate sense, it has been exercised by those whose special gifts or opportunities have made them in a more than ordinary degree the oracles and lawgivers of the moral and spiritual society in which they have been placed. Such, above all, were the Apostles. By their own lives and teaching, by their Divinely sanctioned judgments on individual cases (as St. Paul on Elymas or the incestuous Corinthian) or on general principles (as in their Epistles), they have, in a far higher sense than any other human beings, bound and loosed the consciences, remitted and retained the sins, of the whole human race for ever.

The Jewish scribe kept the treasury of knowledge. His keys were his powers of reading and understanding and applying the law of God. He was the expositor of Gods word, the interpreter of Gods mind, the commentator on Gods counsels, the teacher of the truth made known to him by God. He bound the things of GodHis laws, His ideals of life and duty, His lawful sanctions, His sacred and mystic revelation of Himselfupon mens hearts and consciences. He loosed mens minds and wills from any bondage, or any tyranny of unrighteous laws, and he enabled them to refrain from indulging in things forbidden. What the Jewish scribe with the keys of knowledge and truth and duty was to the Law, the Christian Church should be to the Kingdom of God. Every scribe which is instructed unto the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is an householder, which bringeth forth out of his treasure things new and old. That describes both Christs own office as the Master and His disciples as His Church.

Go into an observatory, and watch some astronomer as he is following the transit of a star. His telescope is so adjusted that an ingenious arrangement of clock-work is made to shift it with the transit of the star. His instrument is moving in obedience to the movement of the star in the heavens. But the clock-work does not move the star. The astronomer has made his faultless calculations; the mechanic has adjusted his cranks and pendulums and wheels and springs with unerring nicety, and every movement in the telescope answers to the movement of the star in the far-off heavens. The correspondence rests on knowledge. And so when the things that are bound on earth are bound in heaven. Every legislative counsel and decree and movement in a truly apostolic and inspired Church answers to some counsel and decree and movement in the heavens. But then the power of discerning and forecasting the movements of the Divine will and government rests upon the power of interpreting the Divine character and applying its principles of action, as that character is communicated to us by Jesus Christ.1 [Note: T. G. Selby, The Imperfect Angel, 266.]

Over thirty years ago Scotland was overwhelmed by a great commercial disaster through the failure of one of its leading banks. It was a calamity that could not stand alone, and day after day the strongest business houses were compelled to suspend payment. The distress brought upon the shareholders, many of them widows and orphans brought in a single morning to poverty, was so great that a gigantic lottery of six millions sterling was proposed. One half of these millions was to be given to subscribers. The other half was to be given to relieve the distress of those who were impoverished. The object seemed so praiseworthy, and the misery was so widespread and so extreme, that many of the wisest and clearest minds in Scotland gave it their support. Suddenly Principal Rainy, the foremost Christian minister of this land in his day, raised his voice. In a letter full of invincible argument, couched in courteous and appealing terms, he protested against this appeal to the very passions and follies, the greed and the gambling, which had produced the ruin. The scheme was dropped in a day. He had bound and loosed the consciences of men. All Scotland understood, for one moment at least, the true meaning of the power of the keys.2 [Note: W. M. Clow, The Secret of the Lord, 64.]

2. The power given by these words perhaps goes further still, and implies, under certain extraordinary conditions, fitness and qualification to pronounce an unerring spiritual judgment upon the souls relation to God. And this leads us to ask the question, Upon what conditions does this power of opening and closing the Kingdom of Heaven, and of retaining and remitting the sin of men, rest? We observe, in the first case, that nothing whatever was promised to Peter, except so far as he was already the subject of a teaching inspiration, and was to become so in a yet richer degree in future days. He held the keys, and could bind and loose in so far as the Son was revealed to him by the Father and the Father by the Son, and not one iota beyond. He could not open the gates of the Kingdom by any private authority and apart from the possession of these truths. Then we come to the promise of this same power to the whole congregation of the disciples. There is no power of binding and loosing apart from Christs indwelling presence within the Church. And then we come to the last case. Christ connected the power of absolution with a symbolic act, in which He made the disciples recipients of His own life, and partakers and instruments of the Holy Ghost by that fellowship. But it will be observed that there is no valid retention or remission of sin that can be pronounced to men, except by the lips of which the Holy Ghost is the unceasing breath. Given that condition in the case of either priest or layman, one may safely extend to him the power of absolution.

As the doctor takes the key of his drug-store and selects from the specifics that are arranged around him, he kills or makes alive. His key means a power of absolution. When it is first put into his hand he is instructed with as solemn a responsibility as the Judge who pronounces death-sentences. When he selects this drug, or looks upon that as hopeless to apply under the conditions into which the patient has fallen, he is dealing with questions of life and death. And so Christ in His closing admonitions to the disciples teaches that they are not dealing with speculative truth only. The doctrine they are set forth to disseminate is not, like the curious and trivial questions discussed by some of the Rabbis, a matter that cannot possibly affect the spiritual well-being of a single human soul in the slightest degree. They are not following out questions that have a hypothetical value only. It is not for some idle debate in the groves that they are setting forth in the scanty outfit of couriers. They are commissioned to deal with grave, spiritual destinies. Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained.1 [Note: T. G. Selby, The Imperfect Angel, 268.]

We are told that, throughout the strain of the civil war in America, Abraham Lincoln found a true priest in the godly and much-suffering woman who had charge of his children. He, who became more powerful than any monarch of modern times through the reverence of his countrymen for the man he was, tells us how he was sustained in that awful crisis of national calamity and personal sorrow by the prayers in his behalf of this stricken, yet believing woman. She knew God, Lincoln felt, so she became Gods priest to Lincoln. He resorted to her for intercession on his behalfhe who would, as one truly remarks, have treated with courteous and civil incredulity a proffer of sacerdotal good offices from Cardinal Gibbons.2 [Note: A. Shepherd, Bible Studies in Living Subjects, 231.]

3. Yet the responsibility is always with the man himself. To each soul personally God gives the keys of his own destiny and bids him unlock lifes closed doors; puts in his hands the rudder and bids him steer his bark; gives him the tools and bids him model his own character. This is the most solemn fact of all, for this is an undivided and unshared responsibility. I may throw on others the blame for the failure of the State and the sins of the Church; but for my decisions respecting my own life I am alone responsible. In vain the reluctant receiver protests against taking the key of his own life; in vain he endeavours to pass it to some other one; in vain he seeks to avoid the necessity of deciding lifes problems and making lifes choice. Sometimes he seeks a father-confessor and asks him to take the key and bind and loose his life for him; and the father-confessor may accept the trust. But it is in vain. Every one of us shall give account of himself to God. Whether the father-confessor sits in a priests chair, or in a Protestant ministers chair, or in a religious editors chair, he can take no responsibility; he can give counsel, but that is all. To each soul God has given the keys; each soul must bind and loose for itself.

A father whose wealth is in ships and warehouses and railroads, but who has an acre garden attached to the country homestead, summons his boys one spring, as he is going to Europe, and says to them, I put this garden in your charge; spend what you will; cultivate according to your own best judgment; send the product to the market; and account to me for sales and expenditures when I get home. But, Father, say the boys, what shall we sow? I cannot tell you; you must judge for yourselves. Where shall we sell? Find out for yourselves. What prices ought we to get? Learn for yourselves. But, Father, we know nothing about gardening; we shall make dreadful mistakes. No doubt you will, replies the father, and you will learn by your mistakes; and it is your learning, not the gardening, I care for. But, Father, we are afraid we shall bankrupt you. The father laughs and replies. You cannot bankrupt me, if you try, with a summers gardening on an acre plot. But, Father, finally protest the boys, we are afraid that when you come back and see how poorly we have done you will find fault with us and be sorry that you gave us such a trust. And the father catches up a piece of paper and writes upon it: Know all men by these presents that I hereby appoint my boys, James and John, my true and lawful attorneys, to do all things that may be necessary in the cultivation and charge of my acre garden, and I hereby ratify and confirm beforehand whatever they may do. And he signs it, hands it to them, and goes his way. So God gives to us, His children, in this summer day out of eternity which we call life, and on this little acre plot of ground out of the universe which we call the world, the responsibility and the liberty involved in the charge of our own destinies, and with this He gives power of attorney promising beforehand to ratify and confirm whatever we do in loyal service to Him and in loyal allegiance to His name and honour.1 [Note: L. Abbott, Signs of Promise, 187.]

Whatever may have been the influences which concurred in effecting this fundamental transformation in Dr. Martineaus philosophical system, there can be little doubt that when he preached the striking sermon on The Christian View of Moral Evil the process was virtually completed. That discourse gives expression in the most emphatic terms to the doctrine of Ethical Individualism, which forms the keynote of his moral philosophy. This sense, he says, of individual accountabilitynotwithstanding the ingenuity of orthodox divines on the one hand, and necessarian philosophers on the otheris impaired by all reference of the evil that is in us to any source beyond ourselves. There is no persuasion more indispensable to this state of mind, and consequently no impression which Christianity more profoundly leaves upon the heart, than that of the personal origin and personal identity of sin,its individual incommunicable character. Hence it appears impossible to defend the doctrines of Philosophical Necessitywhich presents God to us as the author of sin and sufferingfrom the charge of invading the sense of personal responsibility.1 [Note: The Life and Letters of James Martineau, ii. 271.]

The Keys of the Kingdom

Literature

Abbott (L.), Signs of Promise, 175.

Book (W. H.), The Columbus Tabernacle Sermons, 71.

Burrell (D. J.), The Spirit of the Age, 306.

Clow (W. M.), The Secret of the Lord, 57.

Fraser (J.), Parochial and Other Sermons, 302.

Howatt (J. R.), Jesus the Poet, 151.

Jerdan (C.), Gospel Milk and Honey, 54.

Lewis (L. H.), Petros, 65.

Norton (J. W.), Golden Truths, 326.

Selby (T. G.), The Imperfect Angel, 261.

Wright (W. B.), The World to Come, 45.

Church of England Pulpit, lxii. 376 (F. R. M. Hitchcock).

Church Family Newspaper, Feb. 17, 1911 (F. S. Webster).

Fuente: The Great Texts of the Bible

give: Act 2:14-42, Act 10:34-43, Act 15:7

the keys: Isa 22:22, Rev 1:18, Rev 3:7, Rev 9:1, Rev 20:1-3

and whatsoever: Mat 18:18, Joh 20:23, 1Co 5:4, 1Co 5:5, 2Co 2:10, 1Th 4:8, Rev 11:6

Reciprocal: Lev 13:3 – pronounce Mar 13:34 – the porter Luk 9:1 – gave 1Ti 3:15 – the pillar

Fuente: The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge

6:19

Keys is from KLEIS which Thayer defines, “a key. Since the keeper of the keys has the power to open and to shut, the word is figura- tively used in the New Testament to denote power and authority of various kinds.” There is -nothing significant about the plural form of the word, but it is a part of the same figure that Thayer uses in his definition. The man who has charge of a building carries a group of keys, hence the word is used in the plural form; literally there is but one key to the kingdom of heaven and that is obedience to the requirements of the Gospel. Jesus was speaking directly to Peter because he was the spokesmen for all the rest. We know it was not meant that Peter alone was to have the keys, for Jesus said virtually the same thing in Joh 20:21-23 and he was talking to all of the apostles. Whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, etc. This is Christ’s own comment on the keys of the kingdom. He intended to send the Spirit upon the apostles to “guide them into all truth” (Joh 16:13), so that they would make no mistake in telling men what they must do to be saved. Being thus inspired, their teaching to men would be according to the will of heaven and hence it would be ratified there. Whatsoever thou shalt loose, etc., means the like thought on the negative side of the subject. No one has the right to bind any doctrine on men that was not required by the apostles. While on this verse it should be observed that in this conversation with the apostles, Jesus speaks of the church and the kingdom of heaven in the same sense, showing that no distinction is to be made today, for the kingdom is afterwards spoken of as being in existence (Mat 26:29; Rom 14:17; Col 1:13; Col 4:11; 1Th 2:12; Heb 12:28; Rev 1:9).

Fuente: Combined Bible Commentary

And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.

[And I will give thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven.] That is, Thou shalt first open the door of faith to the Gentiles. He had said that he would build his church to endure for ever, against which “the gates of hell should not prevail”… “and to thee, O Peter (saith he), I will give the keys of the kingdom of heaven, that thou mayest open a door for the bringing in the gospel to that church.” Which was performed by Peter in that remarkable story concerning Cornelius, Acts_10. And I make no doubt that those words of Peter respect these words of Christ, Act 15:7; A good while ago God made choice among us, that the Gentiles should hear the word of the gospel by my mouth, and believe.

[And whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth etc. And whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth, etc.] I. We believe the keys were committed to Peter alone, but the power of binding and loosing to the other apostles also, Mat 18:18.

II. It is necessary to suppose that Christ here spake according to the common people, or he could not be understood without a particular commentary, which is nowhere to be found.

III. But now to bind and loose; a very usual phrase in the Jewish schools, was spoken of things; not of persons; which is here also to be observed in the articles what and whatsoever; Matthew_18.

One might produce thousands of examples out of their writings: we will only offer a double decad; the first, whence the frequent use of this word may appear; the second, whence the sense may:

1. “R. Jochanan said [to those of Tiberias], ‘Why have ye brought this elder to me? Whatsoever I loose, he binds; whatsoever I bind, he looseth.’ ”

2. Thou shalt neither bind nor loose.

3. “Nachum, the brother of R. Illa, asked R. Jochanan concerning a certain matter. To whom he answered, Thou shalt neither bind nor loose.”

4. This man binds, but the other looseth.

5. “R. Chaija said, Whatsoever I have bound to you elsewhere, I will loose to you here.”

6. He asked one wise man, and he bound: Do not ask another wise man, lest perhaps he loose.

7. The mouth that bindeth is the mouth that looseth.

8. “Although of the disciples of Shammai, and those of Hillel, the one bound, and the other loosed; yet they forbade not but that these might make purifications according to the others.”

9. A wise man that judgeth judgment, defileth and cleanseth [that is, he declares defiled or clean]; he looseth and bindeth. The same also is in Maimonides.

10. Whether it is lawful to go into the necessary-house with the phylacteries only to piss? Rabbena looseth, and Rabh Ada bindeth. The mystical doctor, who neither bindeth nor looseth.

The other decad shall show the phrase applied to things:

1. “In Judea they did [servile] works on the Passover-eve” (that is, on the day going before the Passover), “until noon, but in Galilee not. But that which the school of Shammai binds until the night, the school of Hillel looseth until the rising of the sun.”

2. “A festival-day may teach us this, in which they loosed by the notion of a [servile] work;” killing and boiling, etc., as the Gloss notes. But in which they bound by the notion of a sabbatism; that is, as the same Gloss speaks, ‘The bringing in some food from without the limits of the sabbath.’

3. “They do not send letters by the hand of a heathen on the eve of a sabbath, no, nor on the fifth day of the week. Yea, the school of Shammai binds it, even on the fourth day of the week; but the school of Hillel looseth it.”

4. “They do not begin a voyage in the great sea on the eve of the sabbath, no, nor on the fifth day of the week. Yea, the school of Shammai binds it, even on the fourth day of the week; but the school of Hillel looses it.”

5. “To them that bathe in the hot-baths in the sabbath-day, they bind washing, and they loose sweating.”

6. “Women may not look into a looking-glass on the sabbath-day, if it be fixed to a wall, Rabbi loosed it, but the wise men bound it.”

7. “Concerning the moving of empty vessels [on the sabbath-day], of the filling of which there is no intention; the school of Shammai binds it, the school of Hillel looseth it.”

8. “Concerning gathering wood on a feast-day scattered about a field, the school of Shammai binds it, the school of Hillel looseth it.”

9. They never loosed to us a crow, nor bound to us a pigeon.

10. “Doth a seah of unclean Truma fall into a hundred seahs of clean Truma? The school of Shammai binds it, the school of Hillel looseth it.” There are infinite examples of this nature.

Let a third decad also be added (that nothing may be left unsaid in this matter), giving examples of the parts of the phrase distinctly and by themselves:

1. “The things which they bound not, that they might have a hedge to the law.”

2. “The scribes bound the leaven.”

3. They neither punished nor bound, unless concerning the leaven itself.

4. “The wise men bound the eating of leaven from the beginning of the sixth hour,” of the day of the Passover.

5. “R. Abhu saith, R. Gamaliel Ben Rabbi asked me. What if I should go into the market? and I bound it him.”

1. The Sanhedrim, which looseth two things, let it not hasten to loose three.

2. “R. Jochanan saith, They necessarily loose saluting on the sabbath.”

3. The wise men loose all oils; or all fat things.

4. “The school of Shammai saith, They do not steep ink, colours, and vetches” on the eve of the sabbath, “unless they be steeped before the day be ended: but the school of Hillel looseth it.” Many more such like instances occur there.

5. “R. Meir loosed the mixing of wine and oil, to anoint a sick man on the sabbath.”

To these may be added, if need were, the frequent (shall I say?) or infinite use of the phrases, bound and loosed; which we meet with thousands of times over. But from these allegations, the reader sees abundantly enough both the frequency and the common use of this phrase, and the sense of it also; namely, first, that it is used in doctrine, and in judgments, concerning things allowed or not allowed in the law. Secondly, That to bind is the same with to forbid; or to declare forbidden. To think that Christ, when he used the common phrase, was not understood by his hearers in the common and vulgar sense, shall I call it a matter of laughter or of madness?

To this, therefore, do these words amount: When the time was come, wherein the Mosaic law, as to some part of it, was to be abolished and left off; and as to another part of it, was to be continued, and to last for ever: he granted Peter here, and to the rest of the apostles, Mat 18:18, a power to abolish or confirm what they thought good, and as they thought good, being taught this and led by the Holy Spirit: as if he should say, “Whatsoever ye shall bind in the law of Moses, that is, forbid; it shall be forbidden; the Divine authority confirming it; and whatsoever ye shall loose; that is, permit; or shall teach; that it is permitted and lawful; shall be lawful and permitted.”

Hence they bound; that is, forbade; circumcision to the believers; eating of things offered to idols, of things strangled, and of blood for a time to the Gentiles; and that which they bound on earth was confirmed in heaven. They loosed; that is, allowed purification to Paul, and to four other brethren, for the shunning of scandal, Act 21:24; and in a word, by these words of Christ it was committed to them, the Holy Spirit directing that they should make decrees concerning religion, as to the use or rejection of Mosaic rite and judgments, and that either for a time or for ever.

Let the words be applied, by way of paraphrase, to the matter that was transacted at present with Peter: “I am about to build a Gentile church (saith Christ); and to thee, O Peter, do I give the keys of the kingdom of heaven, that thou mayest first open the door of faith to them; but if thou askest, by what rule that church is to be governed, when the Mosaic rule may seem so improper for it, thou shalt be so guided by the Holy Spirit, that whatsoever of the law of Moses thou shalt forbid them shall be forbidden; whatsoever thou grantest them shall be granted; and that under a sanction made in heaven.”

Hence in that instant, when he should use his keys, that is, when he was now ready to open the gate of the gospel to the Gentiles, Act 10:28; he was taught from heaven, that the consorting of the Jew with the Gentile, which before had been bound; was now loosed; and the eating of any creature convenient for food was now loosed; which before had been bound; and he, in like manner, looses both these.

Those words of our Saviour, Joh 20:23; “Whose sins ye remit, they are remitted to them,” for the most part are forced to the same sense with these before us; when they carry quite another sense. Here the business is of doctrine only, not of persons; there of persons; not of doctrine; here of things lawful or unlawful in religion to be determined by the apostles; there of persons obstinate or not obstinate, to be punished by them, or not to be punished.

As to doctrine, the apostles were doubly instructed: 1. So long sitting at the feet of their Master, they had imbibed the evangelical doctrine. 2. The Holy Spirit directing them, they were to determine concerning the legal doctrine and practice; being completely instructed and enabled in both by the Holy Spirit descending upon them. As to their persons, they were endowed with a peculiar gift, so that the same Spirit directing them, if they would retain and punish the sins of any, a power was delivered into their hands of delivering to Satan, of punishing with diseases, plagues, yea, death itself; which Peter did to Ananias and Sapphira; Paul to Elymas, Hymeneus, and Philetus, etc.

Fuente: Lightfoot Commentary Gospels

Mat 16:19. Unto thee. To Peter, who is addressed throughout; but as chap. Mat 18:18 includes the other Apostles in the second promise of this verse, they are probably included here also.

The keys of the kingdom of heaven. Power to open and shut Peter first admitted Jews (on the day of Pentecost) and Gentiles(Cornelius) to the Church; and first excluded (Ananias and Sapphira; Simon Magus). This promise in its full sense does not extend beyond the Apostles, who needed special power for their foundation work; for the keys are not the keys of the Church but of the kingdom of heaven. It is applicable to the Christian ministry, only in the subordinate sense of proclaiming the word and exercising prudential (not punitive) discipline.

And whatsoever thou shalt bind, etc. Jewish usage would explain: bind and loose, as equivalent to forbid and permit; the reference therefore is to the power of legislation in the Church (on earth) in the case of the Apostles, Peter being their representative; this was in accordance with heavenly design (in heaven). Things are probably referred to here; in the previous clause persons (admitted or excluded). The power seems to be judicial also (comp. chap. Mat 18:17-18). This promise also is, in its full sense, applicable only to the Apostles. Most of the difficulties connected with the interpretation of this passage are obviated by considering that the full gospel could not be preached until after the Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension of our Lord; the Apostles, who had to lay the foundation and be the foundation, must therefore have knowledge and authority which no one after them needs or can rightly claim. The foundation thus laid, the Church enters upon a conflict in which final victory, though long delayed, is assured. Church authorities must indeed legislate and exercise judicial power, etc., but not as having final and supreme power nor with any assurance of infallibility. For such binding and loosing on earth they may implore, but cannot assert, heavenly direction and sanction.

Fuente: A Popular Commentary on the New Testament

Observe here, 1. The person to whom this promise is made, namely to Peter, with the rest of the apostles; the confession being made by him in the name of the rest. Elsewhere we find the same authority and power given to them all, which is here committed unto Peter; Whose sins soever ye remit, they are remitted. Joh 20:23. Although there might be a priority of order among the apostles, yet no superiority of power was founded in any one of them over and above the rest.

Observe, 2. The power promised; I will give thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven; that is, the key of doctrine, and the key of discipline, or full power and authority to preach the gospel, to administer sacraments, and execute church censures. The speech is metaphorical, and alludes to stewards and officers in great houses, to whose trust the keys of the household are committed. Christ’s ministers are the stewards of his house, into whose hands the keys of his church are committed by Christ; the pope would snatch them out of all hands, and keep them in his own; he snatches at Peter’s keys, but makes shipwreck faith, arrogating Peter’s power, but abrogating his holy profession.

Learn, 1. That the authority and power which the ministers of the gospel do exercise and execute it from Christ; I will give thee the keys of the kingdom.

2. That this power of the keys Christ dispensed promiscuously to all his apostles, and never designed it as a peculiar for St. Peter. As they all made the same profession of faith by Peter, so they all received the same authority and power with Peter. And accordingly, the apostles exercised their office independently upon Peter, in converting those of the circumcision as well as he.

And St. Paul who was the apostle of the Gentiles, opened the kingdom of heaven to far more Gentiles than ever Peter did; and therefore had this key of the kingdom of heaven given to him, as much as to St. Peter.

Fuente: Expository Notes with Practical Observations on the New Testament

Mat 16:19. I will give thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven This expression is metaphorical. As stewards of great families, especially of the royal household, bore a key or keys in token of their office, the phrase of giving a person the keys naturally grew into use, as an expression significative of raising him to great authority and power. See note on Isa 22:22. The meaning of the promise here is, that Christ would give Peter, (but not to him alone, for similar promises are made to all the apostles,) power to open the gospel dispensation, (which he did, both to Jews and Gentiles; see Act 3:14; Act 10:34; being the first who preached the gospel to them;) and to declare authoritatively the laws thereof, and the terms of salvation, as also to exercise discipline in the Christian Church, namely, to refuse admission into it to all those who did not comply with those terms, and to exclude from it all such as should violate those laws. According to this sense of the words, the power of binding and loosing, added to the power of the keys, may be considered as partly explicatory thereof. It can be no objection, says Dr. Macknight, against this interpretation, that it connects the idea of binding and loosing with that of the keys, contrary to the exact propriety of the two metaphors; for all who have studied the Scriptures know, that in many passages the ideas and expressions are accommodated to the subject matter, rather than to the precedent metaphor. In further proof that the power of binding and loosing, now conferred on Peter, and afterward on all the apostles, chap. Mat 18:18, included a power of declaring the laws of the gospel and the terms of salvation, as well as all those acts of discipline which Peter and his brethren performed as apostles, it may be observed, that in the Jewish language, to bind and loose were words made use of by the doctors, to signify the unlawfulness or lawfulness of things, as Seldon, Buxtorf, and Lightfoot have proved. Wherefore our Lords meaning, at least in part, was, Whatever things thou shalt bind up from men, or declare to be forbidden to them, on earth, shall be forbidden by Heaven; and whatever things thou shalt loose to men, or permit to be done, shall be lawful and obligatory in the esteem of Heaven. Accordingly the gender made use of in both passages agrees to this interpretation. There are some, however, who by the power of binding and loosing understand the power of actually remitting and retaining mens sins; and in support of their opinion they quote Joh 20:22. But it may be justly doubted whether our Lord ever bestowed on his apostles, or any other of his ministers, any other power of remitting or retaining mens sins, than, 1st, the power of declaring with authority the Christian terms of pardon, that is, whose sins are remitted and whose are retained; as is done in the form of absolution contained in the Liturgy: and, 2d, a power of inflicting and remitting ecclesiastical censures, that is, of excluding from and readmitting into a Christian congregation; together with a particular power of remitting and retaining, in certain instances, the temporal punishment of mens sins, which it is evident from some passages of the Acts and the Epistles, the apostles occasionally exercised. This high power of declaring the terms of salvation and precepts of the gospel, the apostles did not enjoy in its full extent till the memorable day of pentecost, when they received the Holy Ghost in the plenitude of his gifts. After this their decisions, in points of doctrine and duty, being all given by inspiration, were infallible definitions, and ratified in heaven. Here then was an immense honour conferred on the apostles, and what must yield great consolation to the pious. There is nothing doubtful in the gospel, much less false: but we may safely rest the salvation of our souls on the discoveries there made to us, since they have all come originally from God.

Fuente: Joseph Bensons Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

16:19 {6} And I will give unto thee the {n} keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt {o} bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.

(6) The authority of the Church is from God.

(n) A metaphor taken from stewards who carry the keys: and here is set forth the power of the ministers of the word, as Isa 22:22 says, and that power is common to all ministers, as Mat 18:18 says, and therefore the ministry of the gospel may rightly be called the key of the kingdom of heaven.

(o) They are bound whose sins are retained; heaven is shut against them, because they do not receive Christ by faith: on the other hand, how happy are they to whom heaven is open, who embrace Christ and are delivered by him, and become fellow heirs with him!

Fuente: Geneva Bible Notes

Jesus resumed talking about the kingdom. In Mat 16:18 His promise looked into the future when the messianic kingdom would exist on earth. He continued this perspective in Mat 16:19. When Peter first heard these words he probably thought that when Jesus established His kingdom he would receive an important position of authority in it. That is indeed what Jesus promised. The kingdom in view is the same messianic (millennial) kingdom that Jesus had been talking about since he began His public ministry. It is not the church. Peter did receive a reward for his confession of Jesus as the divine Messiah. It was not superiority in the church but a position of authority in the kingdom (cf. Mat 19:27-28). Jesus’ reintroduction of the subject of the kingdom here helped the disciples understand that the church would not replace the kingdom.

"We must . . . be careful not to identify the ekklesia with the kingdom. There is nothing here to suggest such identification. . . . To S. Peter were to be given the keys of the kingdom. The kingdom is here, as elsewhere in this Gospel, the kingdom to be inaugurated when the Son of Man came upon the clouds of heaven. . . . The ekklesia, on the other hand, was the society of Christ’s disciples, who were to wait for it, and who would enter into it when it came. The Church was built upon the truth of the divine Sonship. It was to proclaim the coming kingdom. In that kingdom Peter should hold the keys which conferred authority." [Note: Allen, p. 177.]

The Roman Catholic Church, following Augustine, equates the (Roman Catholic) church with the kingdom. Protestants who follow Augustine in this matter, namely, amillennialists, as well as many premillennialists (covenant or historic premillennialists and progressive dispensationalists) also equate the church and the kingdom, at least to some extent. Most normative dispensationalists acknowledge that there is presently a mystery form of the kingdom of which the church is a part, but that is not the messianic millennial kingdom.

The "keys" in view probably represent Peter’s authority to admit or refuse admission to the kingdom. They may also signify his authority to make appropriate provision for the household. [Note: U. Luz, Matthew 8-20, p. 364.] In Acts we see him opening the door to the church for Jews (Acts 2), Samaritans (Acts 8), and Gentiles (Acts 10). All who enter the church will eventually enter the messianic kingdom, so Peter began to exercise this authority when the church came into existence. However the church is not the kingdom. Jesus’ prerogative as Judge is in view here (cf. Mat 3:11-12; Joh 5:22; Joh 5:30; Rev 19:21). Probably the keys stand for the judicial authority that chief stewards of monarchs exercised in the ancient world (Isa 22:15; Isa 22:22; cf. Rev 1:18; Rev 3:7). [Note: Vincent, 1:96.] They could permit people to enter the monarch’s presence or give them access to certain areas and privileges. As the Judge of all humanity, Jesus gave this authority to Peter. Of course, some of the other Apostles exercised it too (Mat 18:18; Act 14:27).

"The traditional portrayal of Peter as porter at the pearly gates depends on misunderstanding ’the kingdom of heaven’ here as a designation of the afterlife rather than denoting God’s rule among his people on earth." [Note: France, The Gospel . . ., p. 625.]

The next problem in this verse is the binding and loosing. First, what is the proper translation of the Greek text? The best evidence points to the NASB translation: "Whatever you shall bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven, and whatever you shall loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven." [Note: See Carson, "Matthew," pp. 370-72; or Toussaint, Behold the . . ., pp. 206-7; for explanation of the syntactical arguments leading to this conclusion.] The "whatever" seems to include people and privileges in view of how the Old Testament described the stewards’ use of keys.

The rabbis of Jesus’ day often spoke of binding and loosing in the sense of forbidding and permitting. [Note: Edersheim, The Life . . ., 2:85; Wiersbe, 1:59.] So Jesus could have meant that whatever Peter forbade to be done on earth would have already have been forbidden in heaven, because Peter would be speaking for God and announcing God’s will. Whatever he permitted to be done on earth would have already been permitted in heaven for the same reason. The problem with this view is that hereafter Peter did not always say and do the right thing (Gal 2:11). Roman Catholics appeal to this interpretation to argue that when Peter, and his supposed successors, the popes, speak ex cathedra they are using the keys of the kingdom.

"These two powers-the legislative [i.e., binding and loosing] and judicial [i.e., remitting and retaining]-which belonged to the Rabbinic office, Christ now transferred, and that not in their pretension, but in their reality, to His Apostles: the first here to Peter as their Representative, the second after His Resurrection to the Church [Joh 20:23]." [Note: Edersheim, The Life . . ., 2:85.]

Another less likely view is that this was a promise that Peter will fulfill only in the messianic kingdom.

". . . the verse is a promise to Peter of a place of authority in the future earthly kingdom. With this promise the Lord gives Peter the basis of the decisions which he shall make. Peter is to discern what is the mind of God and then judge accordingly." [Note: Toussaint, Behold the . . ., p. 207.]

Peter may determine God’s will in particular instances of rendering judgment in the messianic kingdom. Perhaps he will consult the Scriptures or get a direct word from Jesus who will be on earth reigning then. Then he will announce his decision. With his announcement Peter will give or withhold whatever may be involved in the judgment, but he will really be announcing what the divine authority has already decided. Peter did some of this in the early history of the church (cf. Act 5:1-11; Act 8:20-24). All the disciples will have similar judicial functions in the kingdom (Mat 19:27-28). Furthermore all Christians will have some judicial function in the kingdom (1Co 6:2-3).

Fuente: Expository Notes of Dr. Constable (Old and New Testaments)