Declare Your Authority to Bind and Loose
Sir Godfrey Gregg
It is a known fact that the true meaning of bind and loose is the authority to declare what God’s mind is on a matter of doctrine or practice. This is what the early church did in Acts 15. To bind means to forbid or be unlawful and to loose is to allow or be lawful. The future tense (shall having been bound or loose) shows that this authority is only valid when used in submission to Christ’s word or teaching. It does not give the church the authority to make up new teachings later in church history. Binding in this context has absolutely nothing to do with speaking words to Satan or demons.
Of course, the crucial issue is whether this is what Jesus meant by these teachings. What did He mean by the terms bind and loose? These words were commonly used by Jewish rabbis to permit and prohibit and so New Testament scholars agree that binding and loosing when used in this way, still retain the same basic meaning that they had in the Jewish culture of the first century.
