Godsloveandlaw's Blog

“Question No. 95:

Please explain Matthew 16:15-19. Why did Christ give the Keys to Peter? Why not to another, or to all?

Answer:

Peter was the only one who gave the right answer to the question, “But whom say ye that I am?” Therefore to Peter and to none other, Jesus said, “I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven,” having first assured him that “flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto” him but His Father which is in heaven.

When God makes man to understand something which is beyond finite knowledge, the Bible terms the act, Inspiration. Hence, Jesus pronounced Peter inspired. This Inspiration and Jesus’ testimony, therefore, were the Keys to the central theme of man’s salvation–knowledge of the Son of God. This is the truth, the gospel, that had to be proclaimed. It was the Present Truth–an inspired message direct from God. Thus possessed of a revelation by which every man was to be judged either for salvation or for condemnation, Peter and his associates became responsible either to lock or to unlock salvation to every living soul under heaven.

Consequently, when Christ gave the Keys to Peter, He gave him the gospel and a divine commission to preach it. And so long as Peter and his co-workers were true to this charge, just so long did they possess the Keys to lock or to unlock to men the kingdom of God, and to have sanctioned in heaven whatever they bound or loosed on earth. Accordingly, with Inspiration and progressive revelation, Present Truth, go the Keys.

Obviously, therefore, a message from heaven, proclaimed by God’s chosen servants, is all-powerful, and by it man’s eternal destiny is decided.

Plainly, then, the Keys are not the church herself, but are in the message which she proclaims. So no man or set of men has power to loose or bind with Heaven’s approval save at the instance of a message vouchsafed directly from Heaven for them to bear for the time then present: “Different periods in the history of the church have each been marked by the development of some special truth, adapted to the necessities of God’s people at that time.”–The Great Controversy, p. 609. It has been so from time immemorial.

Noah, too, had the Keys, and was thus able to loose or bind both in heaven and on earth. The fact that even “the gates of hell” could not prevail against the ark, bears witness to this.

And God’s promise to Abraham, “I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed” (Gen. 12:3), shows that he, too, had the Keys of heaven.

Also, in the Providentially controlled hand of Moses, the Keys swung open the gates of the kingdom to the freedom and salvation of the righteous, and closed them in doom upon the wicked. Thus “Moses said, Hereby ye shall know that the Lord hath sent me to do all these works; for I have not done them of mine own mind. If these men die the common death of all men, or if they be visited after the visitation of all men; then the Lord hath not sent me. But if the Lord make a new thing, and the earth open her mouth, and swallow them up, with all the appertain unto them, and they go down quick into the pit; then ye shall understand that these men have provoked the Lord. And it came to pass as he had made an end of speaking all these words, that the ground clave asunder that was under them: and the earth opened her mouth, and swallowed them up, and their houses, and all the men that appertained unto Korah, and all their goods.” Num. 16:28-32.

Through Moses God committed the Keys to the Hebrew host, and withdrew them in Christ’s day when the Jews rejected Him. Then He transferred the Keys to the founders of the Christian church.

But notwithstanding the example of the past the adherents of the apostles eventually also repeated the mistakes of Moses’ followers. Yet throughout the Dark Ages, and especially during the Reformation period, God continued to entrust messenger after messenger, and Movement after Movement, with the Divine legacy. But again and again down through the Reformation to the call of William Miller, each successive group repeated the folly of becoming satisfied with a static message, until finally when all the Protestant churches of Miller’s day rejected the message for that time, they, too, unwittingly refused to be any longer the custodians of the sacred Keys.

Thus Miller and his associates possessed them until the time of God’s next message, the judgment of the dead, when the sacred Keys passed from the Millerite Movement to the Seventh-day Adventist denomination. But if it now rejects God’s pleadings to anoint its eyes with the eyesalve which He is offering to it, it too, will let the Keys slip from its grasp and pass into the hands of those who are to proclaim the additional message, the judgment of the living, the message of the Loud Cry. (See Early Writings, pp. 277-279). And, tragedy of tragedies! this very thing the Laodiceans are in their blindness doing, thereby repeating the history of God’s people through the ages.” (Answer Book, vol. 4, p.37-41)

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