Jesus said in Matthew 18:18, that whatever we bind on earth will be bound in heaven and that whatever we loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. The common idea that we get when talking about binding and loosing is the concept of spiritual warfare. Is that bad? No, of course not. From a rabbi's perspective, binding and loosing had nothing to do with demons. Let's step back a second and unroll the whole carpet before we start walking on it.
First off, as I have said before, Jesus was a rabbi. Every Jewish boy was sent to rabbi school. If at some point it was determined that he was not able to complete the training, he was told to go earn a living at his family's trade. Jesus went to school to be a rabbi and finished when He was 30 years old. Which is also when He began His ministry. You had to be top notch to finish that kind of training. They had to have the entire Torah (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy) MEMORIZED by age 12. I dont even have Leviticus memorized. If you do, good on ya! So anyway, if you did finish rabbi school, there was one decision left to make. Were you a rabbi that deserved SCHMEKA or authority. Jesus was one of these rabbis. Matthew 7:9 says that people looked at Him and said that taught not as one of the scribes but as one having authority. This authority meant that He could make up His own yoke. A yoke is basically a rabbi's way of living life and interpreting Scripture. "My yoke is easy, my burden is light" ring any bells?
Inside a rabbi's yoke, those that followed Him were allowed to do certain things and forbidden to do others. You could say it this way, their followers were loosed to do certain things, and bound from doing others. That is the basis of the concept of Binding and Loosing.
What does this mean for us? It means A WHOLE BUNCH! To understand it fully, you have to understand that we are followers of a rabbi. That being said, we must operate inside His yoke. To know what was contained inside His yoke, we need only look in The Word. The people that Jesus got to follow Him, who were they? Tax collectors, cowards, fishermen, etc. All of them were considered to be dirty and crooked by the general public. The obvious question is: WHY? Because, in Jesus' yoke, the first would be the last and the last first. Those that thought that they were better than everyone else were the ones that always got on Jesus' "bad side" and the ones that he got a little verbally rough with. (Parable of the rich man and Lazarus Luke 16:19-31, Jesus was sitting in the house of a Pharisee who turned poor people away from his house with no food because they were "beneath him".)
Now for personal application in our day and age. We do follow a rabbi. He has certain things that we have been loosed to do. There are also things that we are bound from doing. There are actually many things on both of those lists, I am only going to cover a few.
1. Love one another. This encompasses so much, it would take me months to cover it all. You'd get sick of reading before I finished it all. When you see someone down and out, help them if you can. You want to spread the Word of God? Help someone less fortunate, then you have a leg to stand on when trying to preach the Gospel.
2. If there is someone that looks a little different than you, chill out, there's no reason to make them feel inferior. There was a teenager that got their braces off. I asked them how they felt after getting them off. THeir only reply was the word, "Prettier". What in the world made them think that they were not pretty to begin with? Instead of obeying the binding of us to fulfill the teaching of Jesus to build up other people, society has put such a dark cloud over stuff like that. Watch a movie aimed at teenagers/older children and you will most likely see some girl getting self conscious about her retainer around people. Cut the crap and build up those around you, bring out their strengths, and you will see miracles happen through them.
3. Preach the Gospel everywhere you go, and if you have to, use words. Whoa! How do you do that? Simple, live His yoke. Dig into the Gospels, find how Jesus dealt with certain situations and apply it to your life. There is some imagery that goes along with this from back then. A rabbi would take his disciples on walks. The disciples would have to walk in a straight line behind their rabbi. Sometimes they would even have to hold a rope. The best student of the day got to walk right behind his rabbi. Because they lived in a desert region, that disciple would get covered in dust from the ground. It was not dust that they wanted to wash off but that they wanted to show off.
I bless you once again to know that you serve a God who believes in you more than you believe in Him. He has given us the blueprint for the best kind of life. Through that life, we will be blessed and have the ability to bless others.
Grace and Peace be with you ALWAYS!
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