Preaching the Kingdom β Matthew Life of a Follower of Christ β Matthew Salt and Light β Matthew Murder and Hatred β Matthew How to Live in Purity β Matthew And seeing the multitudes, He went up on a mountain, and when He was seated His disciples came to Him.
And seeing the multitudes : The previous section mentioned that great multitudes followed Him , coming from many different regions Matthew In response to this, Jesus went up on a mountain. It is wrong to think that Jesus went up on a mountain to remove Himself from the multitudes. It is true that Jesus gave this teaching to His disciples, but this use of the term is probably broad, including many among the great multitudes that followed Him mentioned in Matthew By the end of the Sermon on the Mount, people in general heard His message and were amazed Matthew Luke says that this same basic material was, on a different occasion, spoken to a crowd of His disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea and Jerusalem, and from the seacoast of Tyre and Sidon, who came to hear Him and be healed of their diseases Luke Yet, in the beginning of the teaching, Luke writes: Then He lifted up His eyes toward His disciples, and said Luke The sense of this is much the same as in Matthew; that this sermon was spoken to the disciples of Jesus, but disciples in a broad sense of those who had followed Him and heard Him; not in the narrow sense of only the Twelve.
His highest teachingβ¦was meant for the millions. When He was seated : This was the common posture for teaching in that culture. It was customary for the teacher to sit and the hearers to stand. Matthew ; ; His disciples came to Him : This again probably has in mind a group much larger than the Twelve, who to this point have not been introduced as a group in this Gospel.
Others may not be excluded, but the disciples are the audience proper. Then He opened His mouth : This means that Jesus used his voice in a strong way to teach this crowd. He spoke with energy, projecting His thoughts with earnestness. He lifted up his voice like a trumpet, and published salvation far and wide, like a man who had something to say which he desired his audience to hear and feel. It was used, for instance, of the saying of an oracle.
It is the natural preface to a most weighty saying. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells us how to live. It has been said if you took all the good advice for how to live ever uttered by any philosopher or psychiatrist or counselor, took out the foolishness and boiled it all down to the real essentials, you would be left with a poor imitation of this great message by Jesus. Karl Marx had his Communist Manifesto. With this message, Jesus declared what His Kingdom is all about.
