Strait Is the Gate

Three Pictures, One Doctrine

The sermon ends with three pairs: two gates and two ways, two trees and two fruits, two builders and two houses. They are not three closing illustrations on three subjects. They are one doctrine told three times, and it is the oldest structure in the Torah.

The Two Ways

“Enter ye in at the strait gate… because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it” (Matthew 7:13-14). Moses put the same two roads in front of the nation at the end of his life: “I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life” (Deuteronomy 30:19), and the choosing is defined four verses earlier as keeping the commandments (Deuteronomy 30:15-16). Jeremiah repeated it to a doomed city: “Behold, I set before you the way of life, and the way of death” (Jeremiah 21:8). The Psalter opens on it, with the righteous man defined by his delight in the Law and the ungodly ending in a way that perishes (Psalm 1:2, 6).

The Fruit Test Is a Torah Test

“Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing… Ye shall know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:15-16). The Law had already handed down the test, and it is sharper than the modern use of the word fruit allows. In Deuteronomy 13 a prophet gives a sign, the sign comes to pass, and he is still to be rejected, because he said, “Let us go after other gods.” The verdict: “ye shall walk after Yahuah your God, and fear him, and keep his commandments” (Deuteronomy 13:1-4). A second test follows in Deuteronomy 18:20-22, on the word that does not come to pass.

So the fruit is not crowd size, sincerity, warmth, or wonders. A false prophet in Deuteronomy 13 has working wonders. The fruit is where a man’s teaching sends you: toward the commandments, or away from them.

The Two Builders

“Whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock” (Matthew 7:24). Both men hear. Both houses take the same storm. The rain, the floods, and the winds are identical in each account. The only variable in the whole picture is doing.

That is Deuteronomy’s cadence, repeated until it cannot be missed: “Hear, O Israel, the statutes and judgments which I speak in your ears this day, that ye may learn them, and keep, and do them” (Deuteronomy 5:1). Hear and do, hear and do, all the way through the book (Deuteronomy 6:3; 7:12; 30:8).

And the sayings the wise man is doing are not a general call to be sincere. They are the three chapters that just finished: anger under murder, lust under adultery, oaths kept, enemies fed, alms in secret, treasure moved, the mote handled after the beam, and not one jot passing from the Law.

What Sits in the Middle

Between the trees and the builders stands the verdict already examined elsewhere in this investigation: many will say Lord, Lord, having prophesied and cast out devils, and will be sent away as workers of lawlessness (Matthew 7:21-23). Placed where it is, it identifies the bad tree and the sand foundation by name, so that neither picture can be read as a warning about unbelievers on the outside. Every man in the passage is inside the assembly.

How the Crowd Took It

“The people were astonished at his doctrine: for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes” (Matthew 7:28-29). The scribes taught by stacking the rulings of earlier men. Yahushua had just spent three chapters going directly to what Yahuah said and stripping off what had been hung on it. The astonishment was not at novelty. It was at hearing the Law taught without a hedge around it.

Where the Pulpit Buried It

The narrow gate is preached as a single moment of decision, entered by a prayer, after which the way is no longer narrow. Fruit is preached as temperament or as converts counted. The two builders become believing versus not believing, with doing quietly dropped out of a sentence that has doing as its only variable.

Read as written, all three pictures test the same thing, and the sermon closes exactly where it opened. At the front, not one jot passes from the Law. At the back, the man who hears these sayings and does them is the only one whose house is standing when the water goes down.

One of ten witnesses to a single sermon. This one is the chosen — two ways, and the Torah test for the men who point down them. The Law and the Prophets are named at both ends of the mountain, and the case they close is set out in the nucleus study, The Mountain Message Christianity Never Preached.