The Keys That Heaven Already Turned

The Text

Before Jesus ever mentions keys, He tells Peter what He is building.

Then straightaway comes verse 19, and I will give unto thee the keys, so the keys are not handed to Peter off in a corner by himself, they are handed to him standing right in front of the church that hell will come against, and that changes everything we read next.

Look at how Jesus says it, the gates of hell shall not prevail. And here is what I make of the word gates, and the making is mine. A gate is a thing a city stands behind, so I read hell as the one on defense here, and not the church, and the church is moving forward while hell’s gates cannot hold the door, and the keys are how the church keeps pressing in. This is Christ letting Peter in on it, this is the authority I am trusting to My body, so My church keeps standing and hell keeps losing.

It sounds like heavy power dropped into a man’s hands. Watch what the word itself says about that.

The Word

The Greek for key is kleis, and a key is a simple thing, it does not make the door, it does not own the house, it only opens what someone else already built, and that one small word carries the whole lesson, for a key is trusted, not owned.

Then look at bind and loose. Bind is deo, loose is luo. Now some who read the Greek say the tense there carries the sense of what has already been bound and already been loosed, and others read it the plain way the King James gives it, and I will not settle that for you. And since I have just told you the Greek is disputed, I am not going to turn round and hand you my reading as the plain meaning of the verse. So here is what I hold, from the whole of Scripture and not from a tense, and it is mine to be weighed. I do not see heaven waiting on earth to decide. I read Peter as a herald and not a gatekeeper with a say of his own.

The Point

The keys were given, and the authority stayed with Christ.

The Proof

Scripture never leaves us guessing who holds the keys.

The steward in that verse is Eliakim, and the key is laid upon his shoulder, it is carried, it is handed to a servant to steward, yet the opening and the shutting still answer to the Master, and this very picture points straight to Christ.

Here is where every key finally rests, in the pierced hands of the risen Christ, for He holds the keys of hell and of death, and the One who holds those keys holds them all.

And the promise that hell’s gate cannot hold reaches back much further than Peter, all the way to an oath God swore to Abraham.

Through Christ we are counted Abraham’s seed, and Paul says so. Now here is the step that is mine. When Jesus says the gates of hell shall not prevail, I hear the oath sworn to Abraham underneath it, the seed possessing the enemy’s gate. Matthew does not say Jesus was quoting Genesis, so take that as my hearing and not His statement.

And the Hebrew word behind possess is yarash, and it carries the sense of taking possession, and of dispossessing the one who held it. That the taking is not a quiet sitting back is what I read in it, so the promise was never an empty field handed to us, it was the gate taken off the enemy who holds it, and that is the church on the move, hell on its heels, from Abraham’s altar all the way to Peter.

And Jesus says these same words a second time, and this time not to Peter alone but to the whole gathered body.

The first time He said thou, here He says ye, so the binding and the loosing are said to more than one man. Note what He does not repeat there. He does not say keys. That the keys go with it is my joining, and Matthew 18 does not make it.

The Meaning

And here is where we must be honest, for this is a verse we handle loosely in the church, we take the whatsoever, the whatever you bind and whatever you loose, and we swing it like a blank check, I bind this, I loose that, whatever we please, and then we wonder why it falls flat and carries no weight, and the reason is simple, we put the key to the wrong door, for a key is useless on the wrong door, and useless in a hand that will not use it, so the whatsoever was never ours to fill however we like, it only turns on the door the King has already opened, it only says on earth what heaven has already said, and used any other way it is a loud word with nothing behind it.

So the keys of the kingdom are real, and they are given, yet they were never given for us to rule as if the house were ours, and here is what I take from the two passages together, and the taking is mine. I do not read this as one man lifted up on a throne. I read it as the believers, you and me, the body of Christ carrying what belongs to Him.

And notice where Jesus places these words the second time, right in the middle of teaching us to deal with a brother who has sinned.

Now I am going to turn a corner here, and I want you to see me turn it. What follows is not what Matthew tells me the keys mean. It is what I draw out of the picture of a trust being carried, and I am setting it beside the verse rather than pulling it out of the verse. Weigh it as that.

Here I must speak plainly, for the offender, knowing right from wrong or standing in a position, should never wait to throw the body of Christ into such unquietness, they should go before God and settle it there before it is ever allowed to escalate, and here is the hard word, the one who knows to go before God and will not, the one who lets the trouble spread instead, has themselves become the one sowing discord in the church. And the Lord rebuked a church for letting ruin work from the inside, though the thing He named there was not a quarrel left to spread. Hear it for yourself.

Read what He actually charges there, teaching and seducing, and I am not going to say a quarrel left to spread is the same thing. What I am taking from it is the other half. He did not only charge her, He charged the church that allowed her to keep working. And God hates what tears His people apart.

It is set down among the very things His soul hates, so this is not a small quarrel to shrug off, it is the enemy’s work done through a hand that should have been guarding the gate.

And do not think that standing still is safe, for the Word gives the consequence plainly.

So the sin is not only in the chaos the offender stirs, it is also in the one who saw, who knew to do good, who knew to go before God, and chose to stay silent and leave the gate standing open, for a gate left unguarded is simply how the enemy walks in, and Scripture lays a real weight on the one who will not guard.

The watchman answers for what he saw and did not sound. That is a weight, and Ezekiel names it.

And I will not soften this, for authority placed in a hand that no longer feels the pain, a hand so used to the needle it no longer flinches at the shot, is a dangerous hand in the kingdom, it is like handing a gun and a bullet to a renegade officer, and the house will always fall, look at Eli.

Eli held the highest trust in Israel, he was the priest, yet his own sons made the house vile and he knew it and would not restrain them, and hear the charge God laid on him.

He knew, and he restrained them not, that was the whole of it, so the ark was carried off, his sons fell in a single day, and Eli fell with them and his house came down. Samuel says God judged his house for the iniquity which he knoweth. It does not weigh Eli against his sons and I will not weigh them either. What it does say is that knowing and not restraining brought a house down.

The Heart

Beloved, the keys were never about control, they were always about trust, so today, if He has placed a key in your hand, do not clutch it as power, carry it as worship, and turn it only on the door He points you to, for the church is not perfect, yet one day Christ is returning for one without spots and wrinkles, so we carry the keys clean, we keep His body clean, and we press on in worship until the King who trusted us comes for a bride made ready.

Not having spot, or wrinkle, alive for evermore, worthy of all our praise.