Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Matthew · About this commentary
I Never Knew You
Matthew 7:21-23
21 “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. · WEB
The third contrast, and the most frightening paragraph in the sermon — because the people rejected are religious, effective, and sincere.
"Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven" Matthew 7:21.
The doubled address is the language of devotion, and the sermon has already refused to accept correct religious speech as evidence of anything. What is being distinguished is not sincerity from insincerity but saying from doing, which has been the burden of the whole discourse — the light that shines in works, the tree known by fruit, the house that stands because the words were acted on.
"Many will tell me in that day, 'Lord, Lord, didn't we prophesy in your name, in your name cast out demons, and in your name do many mighty works?'" Matthew 7:22.
The astonishing thing about this paragraph is what the rejected people have on their record. Not hypocrisy that failed, not ministry they claimed falsely — prophecy, exorcism and miracles, all of it done in his name, and the answer does not dispute a single item. Nothing in the reply says you did not.
So the sermon has just severed spiritual effectiveness from standing before God, which is a harder cut than severing morality from it. Gifts exercised in his name are not proof of relationship with him, and this Gospel will say the same thing again in the account of a betrayer who was sent out with the Twelve and given the same authority Matthew 10:1–4.
"Then I will tell them, 'I never knew you. Depart from me, you who work iniquity'" Matthew 7:23.
The verdict turns on knowing rather than on doing, and it runs the opposite direction from what a reader expects — not you never knew me but I never knew you. Everything they list was real; the relationship the works were supposed to express was not.
And the phrase you who work iniquity is quoted from a psalm Psalms 6:8, which places the whole scene in a courtroom the psalms already knew about. The word for lawlessness is worth holding beside the sermon's opening insistence that not a stroke of the law would fall Matthew 5:18: the people dismissed here are dismissed as those who never actually did the will of the Father, however much was accomplished in his name.
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