When Jesus Occupies Your Space You Can’t Keep Quiet About It.
1. Taxing Matters
The Twelve disciples of Jesus are among the most famous figures in history, yet we know only bits and pieces of what happened to them. The book of Acts follows Peter’s story for several chapters, then he drops from the scene. The last half of Acts is devoted to Paul, who wasn’t one of the Twelve. Luke had a definite plan in writing the book of Acts, and his agenda didn’t include following the careers of the Twelve. He wanted to show how the Gospel spread from the Jewish community in Jerusalem until it penetrated the Mediterranean world, including the imperial city of Rome.
So what of the others? What happened to Andrew, James, Nathaneal, and Matthew?
When I was a teenager, I came across a book by California pastor William Steuart McBirnie entitled What Became of the Twelve Apostles. He related many of the traditions that have descended down to us from the early church. More recently, I’ve been engrossed in newer and better treatment of this topic, a book called Quest for the Historical Apostles by W. Brian Shelton.
For our purposes here, we’re interested in everything we can learn about Matthew. That was his Greek name and it meant “Gift of Yahweh.” But like many others he also had a Hebrew name—Levi, which probably indicates he came from the tribe of Levi. The Levites were to serve the people of Israel in a spiritual capacity. The entire tribe of Levi—the descendants of Jacob’s son by that name—were set aside as the priestly tribe of Israel. Within that tribe, only the descendants of Aaron were the actual priests, but all the Levites were to assist the priests in caring for the spiritual needs of all the people. They had no territory of their own, as the other tribes did. Instead, they were scattered among all the tribes to provide pastoral support.
Matthew Levi wasn’t doing anything akin to that. Instead of blessing the people spiritually, he was fleecing them financially. He had become a reviled, Roman-paid, corrupt internal revenue agent.
According to Shelton, the growth of the Roman Empire required vast amounts of income, and Rome became skilled at taxing the countries they had defeated and occupied. In Israel, three major taxes vexed the population. There was an agricultural tax amounting to ten percent of all harvested grain and twenty percent of all harvested fruit. There was also a poll tax for every adult, and there was an income tax on business income.
But that was far from all. A variety of lesser taxes kept cropping up, including something akin to a sales tax and fees at travel crossings. The Jewish people resented the Roman presence in their land and despised having to cede their produce and money to their pagan occupiers.
The Romans hired local workers, known as publicans or tax-farmers, to collect taxes at the local level, and these publicans lined their own pockets by overcharging people and by cooking the books. They were loathed by their neighbors, but they tended to be among the wealthiest people in their communities.
Matthew Levi was a tax agent and customs official in Capernaum and his tollhouse probably sat right on the major highway that ran through the town. Shelton wrote, “The tax office at Capernaum would have had interest in material entering the territory of Herod Antipas through roadways and through the waters of the Sea of Galilee and the Jordan River.” It’s likely that Peter, Andrew, James, and John had to pay taxes on the fish they exported from Capernaum to the rest of Israel. Some commentators think the reason Peter and Andrew moved from Bethsaida to Capernaum was to avoid this tax every time they sent their fish to the south.
His name, Matthew, meant “Gift of Yahweh,” and his name Levi probably indicated he was from the tribe appointed by Yahweh to minister grace to the rest of the Israelites. But this man was falling far short of his name.
Imagine how surprised Peter, Andrew, James, and John felt when Jesus suddenly invited Matthew Levi to join the team!
2. The Home of Matthew Levi
The story of Matthew Levi is told in three Gospel accounts, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. But since the writer of the first Gospel is Matthew Levi himself, let’s listen to him share his testimony in third person. You’ll find it in Matthew 9:9-13:
9 As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector’s booth. “Follow me,” he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him. 10 While Jesus was having dinner at Matthew’s house, many tax collectors and sinners came and ate with him and his disciples. 11 When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” 12 On hearing this, Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. 13 But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”
In this story, Matthew Levi’s conversion seemed instantaneous, but we can assume the Holy Spirit had been working in his heart in advance. Let me suggest three assumptions.
First, Matthew Levi had undoubtedly heard about Jesus and listened to him before this moment, because Capernaum wasn’t that large, and Jesus had moved into town and made it the headquarters for His ministry. For weeks or months, Matthew Levi listened at his tollbooth as reports came from every passerby. Perhaps he had lingered at the edge of the crowds, listening to Jesus’ words. The Lord Jesus, who doesn’t miss a thing, saw the tax collector trying to hide behind the crowds or the shrubbery or the corners of the building. But the words of Jesus were finding a target in the man’s heart.
It’s important to remember that few people make an instantaneous decision to follow Christ the first time they’re exposed to the Gospel. Just as in a human birth, the new birth requires a period of gestation. In Bible college, my professor called this “prevenient grace,” the grace of God that prepares a person to make a conscious decision to follow Christ.
Many years ago, I had an appointment with a young man named David who managed a local Christian bookstore. He told me grew up attending a liberal where the Bible was seldom taught and the Gospel was never heard. One Sunday when David was a teenager, his Sunday School teacher surprisingly shared the plan of salvation. It was a crystal clear presentation of the Gospel. David heard it clearly but it didn’t have much of an effect on him.
Several years passed, and one night David was watching a television program that touched on religion. Somehow at that moment, David became conscious of the reality of spiritual things. The plan of salvation came back to him, the one he had heard years before. He recalled it almost word for word. That night David knelt down and responded by inviting Christ to be his Savior, and he had made an appointment with me because he was considering going to seminary.
That’s why we shouldn’t be discouraged when we share the Gospel and the other person doesn’t immediately receive it. The apostle Paul said, “I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God has been making it grow” (1 Corinthians 3:6).
The second assumption is that just as Matthew Levi was finding himself attracted to the person and message of Jesus Christ, he was growing tired of the way he was living. We know something about Matthew. He knew the Scriptures. He knew the Old Testament. In his Gospel, Matthew quoted directly from the Old Testament 53 times, and if you include allusions the number is nearly one hundred times. He has more references to the Old Testament than any of the other Gospels.
Based on that, we can assume Matthew knew he should be building a better life than the one he was living. He knew he wasn’t living as he should. He was successful in some ways, but he felt a rising tide of failure on the inside.
Perhaps you feel that way too.
It took only two words to totally change Matthew’s life: Follow Me!
As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector’s booth. “Follow me,” he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him.
And that brings us to our primary lesson—when Jesus occupies your space, you can’t keep quiet about it. Matthew wasn’t embarrassed about his decision to follow the Messiah. He didn’t whisper the news to people. He didn’t try to hide or hedge the change that came over him. Instead he threw a party. He threw a party for Jesus. And the only people who attended were Matthew’s friends, who were the worst people of Galilee.
10 While Jesus was having dinner at Matthew’s house, many tax collectors and sinners came and ate with him and his disciples. 11 When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” 12 On hearing this, Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. 13 But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”
This is the only time in the Gospels that Jesus calls Himself a physician, and He is using the term as a metaphor. But isn’t it wonderful? There’s an old Gospel song that says, “The Great Physician now is near, the sympathizing Jesus; / He speaks the drooping heart to cheer, oh, hear the voice of Jesus.”
If the doctor called you or me today and told us our blood work revealed a terrible and deadly illness, the news would hit us like an anvil falling from the sky. But the Bible tells us we’re sick and dying on the inside and only the Great Physician can help us. We need spiritual healing, emotional healing, psychological healing, and eternal healing. Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick… I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”
I don’t know how Peter, Andrew, James, and John felt, but I think Jesus was perfectly at home at this party. He wasn’t there to live it up. He was there as Matthew’s honored guest to celebrate Matthew’s conversion and to spread the message to publicans and sinners and the rest of the motley crew.
But that’s not all. This was just the beginning of Matthew Levi’s new career of sharing Jesus. His job as a tax collector required intelligence and rigorous record keeping. He knew how to work with books and records and documents of all kinds. We believe he was very adept at taking notes. If we could go back and see him during the three years of our Lord’s ministry, I think we would see him scribbling away in his tablet, perhaps using his own form of shorthand to record the sermons of Jesus. Sheldon wrote, “Scholars have suggested that a tax collector would have been skilled in note taking as part of his responsibilities.”
My mother taught shorthand in high school. It’s the one course she taught that I didn’t take, but I wish I had. It would have proved very useful over the years. My executive assistant, Sherry Anderson, knows shorthand. With today’s digital technology, that’s a dying art. But historians tell us that shorthand goes back to at least the first century before Christ. A form of shorthand was used in the days of Jesus, and Matthew, whose business depended on large amounts of records, probably knew a form of it.
His records probably formed the basis of his Gospel, which records five major sermons by Jesus, along with many other actions and sayings of our Lord.
Matthew wrote his Gospel especially to present Jesus as Messiah for the Jewish people. He wrote especially to the Jews. As I said, he quoted extensively from the Old Testament, and that’s the reason his Gospel comes first. It links up with the Old Testament like the engine of a train.
The earliest church fathers and historians tell us that Matthew originally wrote his Gospel in the Hebrew dialect, which could have meant Aramaic. He wrote it while he was still in Judea. Shelton wrote, “A plausible conclusion is that Matthew wrote the Gospel we know for Jewish Christians during the decades of 50-70.” It’s also likely that having written his Gospel in Aramaic or Hebrew, he translated himself into Greek, since he would have been proficient in both languages.
When we read Matthew’s Gospel, we’re struck by the way he ends his Gospel. He doesn’t end it with our Lord’s ascension back into heaven. He ends it, in effect, by telling us to go everywhere throwing dinner parties with publicans and sinners to introduce them to Christ. In other words, He ends his Gospel with the Great Commission:
16 Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. 17 When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. 18 Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
From everything we can learn from early Christian history, Matthew did exactly that! We believe he stayed in Palestine and Syria until about the middle of the first century, sharing his Gospel and writing his Gospel. And then he went to a place called Ethiopia, but probably not the nation in East Africa that bears that name. Ethiopia was also the name of a region in Parthia [northeastern Iran]. It was called “Second Ethiopia” because of the Ethiopian immigrants that had settled there.
In the book of the Acts of the Apostles, Luke primarily tells the story of how the Gospel spread westward across Europe through Peter and Paul, but we know that many of the other apostles went eastward into the lands we know today as Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, and India.
One early authority about Matthew says, “Matthew wrote the Gospel in the Hebrew tongue, and published it in Jerusalem, and fell asleep in Hierees, a town in Parthia. Another says HE first preached the Gospel in Judea, and after that in Macedonia, and he suffered martyrdom in Persia. He has his final resting place in the mountains in the land of the Parthians.” That would place him somewhere east of the city of Tehran, southeast of the Caspian Sea.
So let’s sum up.
The first thing Matthew did after deciding to follow Christ was to invite his friends to meet Jesus at a dinner party. He ended his Gospel by telling us to invite our friends to become disciples and to do so to the end of the age. And he gave his life taking the Gospel to his Jewish audience in Judea, then eastward into Asia.
He is living proof that when Jesus occupies your space, you can’t keep quiet about it. And remember the words Jesus spoke under the roof of Matthew Levi, tax collector turned disciple: It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.
3. Try This at Home
Until I was nineteen years old, I had no interest in sharing my faith with someone else in a personal conversation. I went to church and I was even beginning to teach and preach a little bit in my church. But I’m an introvert, and the thought of telling someone about Jesus petrified me. And then I opened the door of my life as fully to Christ as I knew how, and suddenly I couldn’t wait to share with someone else what had happened to me.
I think we all have a little bit of Matthew Levi inside of us.
Recently I read about a man named Wales Goebel, who was a successful residential contractor. When he was thirty-nine years old, he developed a burden for high school and college students, and he developed ministries designed to reach them. He spoke at sports events, youth events, and athletic camps. The more I read about this man, the more I’m amazed.
The years passed, and Wales Goebel grew old. At the age of 92, he wondered what he could do for the Lord. Every day he took a little walk through the park alongside a lake, and one day he became tired and sat down on a bench. The Lord gave him an idea. Why not sit on that bench every day and ask the Lord to bring someone who needed the Gospel. So at the age of 92, Mr. Goebel began his bench-sitting ministry.
People would come and sit down. Some would seem weary and worried. Mr. Goebel would chat with them and gently begin to talk about the Lord. As soon as he led someone to Christ, he enrolled them in a Bible study. He is 98 years old now, and as of my last report of him, he is still doing it.
Let me tell you about another man. I recently had supper with a young missionary couple who serve in Bulgaria, and they gave me a copy of a book entitled, Tortured for His Faith by Haralan Popov. This man was initially an atheist who became a Christian when he was a teenager. He traveled to London to attend Bible college, and while he was there he married a Swedish woman named Ruth. They returned to Bulgaria just before the outbreak of World War II.
When the Soviet Union gained control of Bulgaria, Popov was arrested and sentenced to fifteen years in prison for his faith. He was tortured. He was placed on starvation diets. He was thrown into punishment cells designed to break the strongest men. For years, he didn’t see his family. His children grew up without him, while he sometimes suffered horribly in near-freezing conditions.
But God gave him strength, and he learned creative ways to lead other prisoners to Christ. One of the most astonishing stories I’ve ever read is how the prisoners developed what they called the Prison Telegraph. It was a sort of crude version of the Morse Code. One tap on the wall stood for the letter A. Two taps stood for the letter B. Three taps was a C.
One day Popov took his tin drinking cup and began tapping on the wall. In a few minutes there was a tapping sound from the other side. Popov tapped out, “What is your name?” The man’s name was Mitchev. Popov asked about his condition, how long he had been there, and so forth.
You can imagine how long it took to communicate each solitary word.
At length, Popov asked the man if he knew about the Lord Jesus. The man said that he only knew a little he had learned in the Orthodox church when he was a boy. Popov began tapping out each word of the plan of salvation explaining it as best he could using that primitive Prison Telegraph. For three days, interrupted only by sleep, Popov preached to Mitchev and explained the Gospel. At the end of the third day, Mitchev asked, “But, Pastor, how can my sins be gone? I don’t understand.”
Popov answered his questions, and by the fourth day the man tapped back, “I am ready now to believe in Jesus, pray for me. I am ready to accept Christ.”
Popov told him to get on his knees in his cell and Popov did the same in his cell. They prayed together, as it were, and the man was wonderfully brought into the Lord’s family and into eternal life.
Popov later wrote, “All of this occurred by tapping a tin cup. Not one audible word was ever said.”
Matthew Levi would have been delighted with that story. The entire focus of his life was letting others know that when Jesus occupies your space, you can’t keep quiet.
Here’s the key takeaway. Learn to initiate Gospel conversations. Find gentle ways of turning any conversation toward something having to do with the Lord or with the church or with the Bible or with your testimony. If the other person seems responsive, go as far as the Holy Spirit leads you. Sometimes you’ll be planting a seed. Sometimes you’ll be watering. And sometimes the Lord will give you the privilege of seeing the harvest.
Invite people to church and to Gospel-centered events. Support evangelistic ministries with your finances. Keep some Christian books or New Testaments nearby to give away as the occasion allows. And remember the words spoken by Jesus of Nazareth under the roof of the house of Matthew Levi of Capernaum: It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.