Tackling Tradition (Part 3) - Eunuchs For The Kingdom.

If you’re a Christian like me, you grew up &/or otherwise read, heard, or was otherwise taught that Matthew 19:12 is about “the Blessed Estate of Singleness; but is that what the text means? The answer is “No.”

19:11 (ESV): But he said to them, “Not everyone can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given. 

Who are those people?  They are the eunuchs for the kingdom.  These are people who are set aside for service of some sort.  Some are the sort of eunuchs who receive sound teaching and obey it.  Others are those who are unable to do so for particular reasons. 

Matthew 19:12 (ESV): For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let the one who is able to receive this receive it.” 

He is actually referring to Isaiah 56.  “To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, I will give in my house and within my walls a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.”

Yeshua isn’t commending being single or commenting that some people are destined to never marry on Earth prior to their crossing over, although, via the doctrine of providence we can infer there is truth to that.  Rather, he is commenting that some people just seem to “get it” from an early age in general, and & there others whose lives have been crushed and who never seem to “get it.”  

On the one hand, there are those who require teaching, some of whom understand and obey with little or no problem, and conversely there are people who start out well and whose teachers and role models are horrible, leading their students to become the sort of eunuch forbidden entry into the assembly.   In addition, there those who are autodidacts, and they are self taught.  Some, like Nathaniel, become eunuchs in whom there is no guile, and others go the way of Korah who perished in the rebellion, eg these eunuchs (both commendably and noncommendably) teach themselves. 

Christ’s reply is not a text intended to inform us about the blessed estate of singleness.  It is actually a statement analogous to the parable of the soils.   

God bless us all, every one, & “Go & sin no more.”