Sermon Transcript
Good morning, everybody. Merry Christmas to all of you. We can say that that here all throughout the month of December. So, glad to be with you all. We were going to have Laura read a passage of Scripture that we were going to get into here in just a moment, but I just thought, after what we’ve just experienced, I just want to acknowledge that that would be a really, really awkward transition.
And so, you’ll understand why in just a moment. We’re about to deal with some very sensitive material. And so, this is why last week I had said that as we’re going through this Sermon on the Mount, message series that I told parents last week, and I’ll remind you now, parents, that we’re going to be dealing with material that if you’ve got young children here in the room and you’re concerned about whether or not they should be listening to a message like I’m about to share with you all, then we certainly want to give you all the chance as parents to sort of monitor that. But I’ll read the text in just a minute, but I did want to just acknowledge just it’s hard to come out of singing about all of those things and to get into this text. And so it is what it is.
This text is not a typical Christmasy text. This is not when you gather the children around on Christmas Eve and, and read to the children, but there it is. So I thought what I would do— how about this? I’ll read the text in just a moment, so I’m just gonna kind of ad-lib here. Let me open this up.
And we’re going to start with something a little bit more lighthearted. How about some trivia? I love trivia. Some of you who know me fairly well know that I love trivia and Trivial Pursuit and Jeopardy. And so let’s do a little trivia time with Steve this morning before I read the text.
Here’s the question for you people. You ready? How many countries and territories around the world drive on the left side of the road? Hmm, no, more than 5. More than 13.
Keep going.
Well, keep going.
All right, like, we’ll be here all day with you people here. Oh, look at that. Yeah, so I’ll just tell you and we’ll see if this confirms, and then afterwards you can tell the person next to you, oh, that’s what I was thinking. But it’s 78. 78.
Yeah, a total of 78 countries and territories around the world drive on the left. That’s approximately 1/4 of all the world’s roads and about 35% of the world population that drive on the left side of the road. And here’s some more trivia for you people. Over the past century, there have been numerous occasions in which a country has officially decided to switch how they drive. And I would imagine that was just a nightmare.
But when that’s happened, it’s almost always a country that decides to switch from driving on the left side to the right side. But there are at least 3 instances in which a country that was driving on the right said, hey, let’s switch to the left. So that’s happened before. So there you go. That’s your message for this morning.
Let’s pray and we’ll be done.
That’s— yeah, thank you. Thank you. Yeah, preach it. Why bring that up? I heard this as an illustration recently, and I just thought it was brilliant, that if you’ve grown up in a country that drives on the right side of the road, and then you decide to visit one of those countries where you have to drive on the left, and drive from what we in the US would consider to be the passenger side of the front seat, it’s totally disorienting.
And it’s easy to see why. If you’ve been driving for just a few years, you don’t even have to think about it. I didn’t think about it this morning when I came here. You just get into the left side of the front seat and you just drive on the right side of the road. Don’t even have to think about it.
It’s just automatically ingrained in you. But when you’re driving in one of those other countries, countries, or even if you’re a pedestrian who just wants to cross a 2-way street and you’re like, oh, I should probably now look for traffic coming from the right rather than from the left. It just messes you up. It’s like being in some kind of an upside-down world. It’s like— one small way, I think, and this is what makes this an apt description that I heard someone use as an illustration, it’s one small way perhaps, though, that we can begin to better understand what Jesus is in the Sermon on the Mount.
Jesus is introducing us to an entirely new paradigm in the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5, 6, and 7. He’s teaching us a new way of being human, so to speak, and it’s completely counterintuitive. And one of the reasons why it’s so counterintuitive is because the values of the Kingdom of God are totally different from the value system of the kingdom of this world. The Kingdom of God values things like generosity, and peacemaking and serving each other, turning the other cheek when someone serves you— someone wrongs you, humbling yourself, seeking other people’s well-being, whereas the kingdom of this world embraces materialism, greed, comfort, putting yourself before others, being served rather than serving, violence, seeking revenge when wronged, and doing whatever feels best to you in the moment, even when that thing hurts other people, even when it violates the law, even when it violates your conscience, or even whenever it violates what God says is right or wrong. So Jesus is calling us in the Sermon on the Mount to completely retrain how we think and how we live.
And in a sense, that’s going to require a total reversal of all of our old habits of thinking and doing, sort of like driving on the left side of the road. And as demanding as that sounds, what makes Jesus’ teaching even more audacious is that He’s not telling His followers to go set up a colony somewhere where you can do these things. Things and practice them in isolation from everybody else. That’d be much easier, wouldn’t it? What he’s doing is he’s calling us to embrace and to live out this counterintuitive, upside-down way of thinking in the midst of the kingdom of this world.
And we’re like, that sounds challenging. Won’t that be challenging, Jesus? Won’t that lead to conflict and tension with others? Yes, that’s the idea. There will inevitably be tension anytime the kingdom of God collides with the kingdom of this world, just like a place where people decide, I’ll drive on the left and you drive on the right.
Let’s just see what happens. There’s going to be conflict and tension, but that’s what Jesus is challenging us to do. Now, if you weren’t with us last week, we got to have a little review time. Our students are probably in review mode as they think about finals and all that kind of stuff, so let’s just do a little review. I reminded us that the Sermon on the Mount is answering a question for us, and we— every single week we gather and we talk about the Sermon Mount, we have to ask this question: What does it look like for God’s people to live under the rule and reign of Jesus as King?
That’s the question. What does it look like to live and to think in the Kingdom of God as opposed to the kingdom of this world? What does somebody look like who lives as a citizen in the Kingdom of God? And we talked about what I argue is the most single verse, the most important single verse in the entire 3 chapters of the Sermon on the Mount. This is my personal view, and that is Matthew 5:20.
We’ll put it up here again for you. Again, Matthew 5:20: For I tell you that unless the righteousness— or unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven. Let me read it to you again. I thought we were going to have it up here, but unless I— unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven. And so using that verse, which I contend is the most important verse in the 3 chapters of the Sermon on the Mount, we use that as our launching point and we went about answering different questions.
The first question that we talked about last week was, what exactly is the righteousness of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law? If Jesus is telling us our righteousness has to surpass theirs, let’s start with a baseline. What is the righteousness of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law? And I summed that up with 2 The first statement was, according to the righteousness of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, law is ultimate. Law is ultimate.
And by that, I mean the Old Testament law, not just the 10 Commandments, but the 600-plus laws that God gave to Israel in the first 5 books of the Old Testament. The Pharisees and the teachers of the law in Jesus’ day were hyper-concerned about the actions that those laws required. But I shared about how Jesus was calling them throughout His ministry He was calling them out for pursuing a different kind of a righteousness that was based on observance of the law, as well as to the additional man-made traditions that they came up with along the way, when God was calling them to pursue a different type of a righteousness, a righteousness based on faith alone and trust in God alone.
And Jesus condemned them, we saw last week, for being more focused on doing than on being. They were more concerned about the right outward actions, but not so much about the right inward motives. They were professionals. At spelling out and following the letter of the law while simultaneously ignoring the spirit of the law and the overall principles behind them. So law is ultimate according to the righteousness of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law.
And in addition to that, I shared a second statement, that for them appearances are everything. Appearances are everything. In other words, their intent was to appear righteous before men, but they couldn’t see that they were really hypocrites and that the righteousness was just surface level. And external and superficial. So we then address the second question.
Okay, if that’s the righteousness of the Pharisees and teachers of the law, what’s the righteousness that surpasses theirs that verse 20 is calling us to? And we summarize that righteousness that Jesus is after in 2 statements. First, in a righteousness that surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, God is ultimate, not the law. God is ultimate. And second, in a righteousness that surpasses the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, we said authenticity is everything.
Everything, not appearances, authenticity. Outward actions of obedience, great first step. And Jesus is more concerned, though, with the sources of our actions. He’s more concerned with why we do what we do or don’t do rather than focusing on only our actions themselves. So I shared with you what Jesus is not saying in verse 20 is that, hey, people, you need to do a lot more stuff.
He’s not giving us more laws. He’s not giving us more rules to live by, because that’s far too small of an agenda for Jesus. The sermon is not aiming at your behavior as much as it’s aiming at our hearts. You know, we have all of these kind of surface-level behaviors that others see us do every single day, and Jesus is not simply interested in us modifying our behavior— behavior modification— or in you and I becoming more religious. That’s not what he’s after.
He’s aiming at all of this stuff under the surface. Of our behaviors, why we do what we do. The Kingdom of God is about allowing Jesus to come into all of these sort of core root issues and to do His work in our lives and to change us, because those are the things that result in us fracturing our relationship with God and our relationship with people. It’s about allowing Jesus to change our hearts, to renovate us, and to make us into the kinds of people from whom the deeds of the law, righteousness, naturally flow. Because when the inner life is transformed, formed, then behavior naturally and easily follows.
And that led us to one more question that we’re going to focus on more this week. What does the righteousness that surpasses the Pharisees and the teachers of the law look like in action? And because we naturally have a tendency to either think legalistically or superficially or both about righteousness, we saw how Jesus began painting a picture of what God’s standard of righteousness looks like in every category of life. And we took a closer look at just by taking a principle in verse 20 and then illustrating it beginning in verse 21 with a topic everybody here can relate to, which is anger. We talked about that last week— anger.
He shows us what it looks like for a person to live with unrighteous anger, helping us to see why unrighteous anger is so destructive and how it leads us to degrade others with our words and our actions and to justify some of the worst sins imaginable. And we talked about how the consequences of unrighteous anger anger. We talked about how God equates unrighteous anger with murder. And we talked about how unrighteous anger at its core is really self-righteousness. It’s the righteousness of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law.
And so Jesus is showing us that, yes, murder is a problem. Can we all agree on that? It’s a problem. It’s really only a symptom of a much larger, much more serious issue within us. For most of us, physically murdering somebody is not and will not ever be our issue.
But there’s a higher righteousness to which Jesus is pointing that is so much more than simply refraining from the unlawful taking of one’s life. So Jesus is calling us to rethink righteousness, to rethink what it means to be righteous in God’s eyes. And I should point out, He’s not simply picking on these people. He’s not picking on the Pharisees and the teachers of the law. He’s calling out every single one of us, you and me, who pursue justification and being made right with God by our outward behaviors and thinking that that’s going to do the job.
He’s calling us to more than external religion. He’s calling us to an inward righteousness that comes about from a changed heart that he brings about, a changed heart that trusts and lives under the rule and reign of Jesus as King. So that’s the review. Let’s continue answering the question we started looking at last week: what does the righteousness that surpasses the Pharisees and teaches that the law look like in action? And Jesus is going to give us 3 categories of life to consider, in addition to anger we looked at last week.
And He goes about it much the same way that He did when He talked about anger. He answers 2 questions. He shows us what is the righteousness of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, and He shows us what is the righteousness that surpasses the Pharisees and the teachers of the law. In each of these topics, that’s what He does. And with each new application of verse 20, He’s quoting from the Old Testament Scriptures.
Scriptures. And that’s important because he had said in verse 17, we looked at last week, that Jesus didn’t come to undermine the Old Testament Scriptures or to set aside the Old Testament Scriptures, despite what his audience might have been thinking. And so what he would do is after he would quote from the Old Testament, usually by saying something like, you have heard that it was said, and then he would quote from the Old Testament, but then he would follow that with, but I say to you, and then he lays out a new teaching, not as a rejection of the Old Testament, Not as a new teaching— or excuse me, not as a, like, an explanation, but as a new teaching that calls His followers to an expanded understanding of the original spirit of the command, the original spirit that God intended with the command. So Jesus uses that pattern in verse 27. Let me just read these verses, starting in verse 27 of chapter 5.
You have heard that it was said— there it is. He’s going to quote from the Old Testament. You have heard that it was It has been said, you shall not commit adultery. But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away.
It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go to hell. Verse 31. Said, anyone who divorces his wife must give her a certificate of divorce.
But I tell you, anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, makes her the victim of adultery, and anyone who marries a divorced woman commits adultery. Verse 33. Again, you have heard that it was said— he’s quoting from the Old Testament— it was said to the people long ago, do not break your oath, but fulfill to the Lord the vows you have made. But I tell you, don’t even swear an oath at all, either by heaven, for it is God’s throne, or by the earth, for for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black.
All you need to say is simply yes or no. Anything else comes from the evil one. You can see why we didn’t just transition right out of that beautiful song into that scripture passage. But those are the scriptures we’re looking at today as we continue our series in the Sermon on the Mount. And so Jesus is again answering the question, what does it look like for a follower of Jesus to be righteous in particular areas, and let’s start with this area of sexual desire.
What does it look like for an individual to be righteous in the area of sexual desire? And Jesus quotes from the Old Testament, from the 10 Commandments specifically. You shall not commit adultery. And Jesus is affirming the Old Testament law, is He not? He’s agreeing it was, and it still is today, a reliable indicator of God’s will for the people of Israel and for us today.
Today. Just as unrighteous anger is not to be indicative of a follower of Jesus, neither is adultery, Jesus is saying. Notice that he doesn’t say that it’s a stupid law. He doesn’t say that it’s outmoded or a bad law. He doesn’t scoff at it.
I’ve had a couple conversations with Christian parents, some even from this church, who have told me that they feel that it’s unreasonable to expect young people or single people today to not have sex outside of marriage. That’s not what Jesus does here. There is no gray area. The line has not moved. He doesn’t equivocate.
What he does is he affirms the law as God’s will. He just says, there it is. But then he goes on and he sets his teaching down right next to it. And by so doing, he moves this issue further upstream than simply not going to bed with somebody outside of the covenant commitment of marriage. He’s aiming at the core issue underneath the physical act of adultery, the issues that would lead someone to make that decision in the first place.
And Jesus is saying that the righteousness of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law draws the line at adultery. Hey, I’ve never physically committed adultery. Yay for me, I’m righteous. But Jesus is trying to paint a picture of life not just without adultery, but actually without lust, which I know just sounds ludicrous to most people, especially in our overly stimulated culture. And we’re like, is Jesus really being serious here?
So we need to lock in, I think, on 2 key phrases in these verses. The first is the phrase, quote, anyone who looks at a woman lustfully. Depending upon your particular translation of a Bible, it might say something like, looking at a woman with lustful intent, or looking in order to lust. Now, this is my own personal opinion. This is Steve talking to you here.
I personally feel that this particular concept has historically often, not always, but often been taught in ways, I feel, by Christians and by the church that have been incredibly detrimental to young people and to the body of Christ, causing people to carry around burdens of guilt and condemnation that can be almost insufferable. The message of the culture has largely been, when it comes to sexuality, if it feels or it seems right, then just do it. And that’s not been helpful. And the message, by and large, of the church historically when it has come to sexuality has largely been, don’t.
No. The reality is that Jesus is not trying to guilt anyone. He’s not saying that temptation is the key issue here. The Greek for the phrase, anyone who looks at a woman lustfully, describes someone who looks at another person with the intent of looking and desiring them sexually. In other words, there is a sense of intention.
You’re not just looking at the other person. He’s not referring to an instantaneous look. He’s referring to an ongoing, sustained look. And for Jesus, it’s all about intent and purpose. And he’s speaking about anyone who stares at a woman in order to fuel sexual desire for her.
And if you’ve ever been on the receiving end of that kind of look, you know exactly what Jesus is talking about. If you’ve ever been a perpetrator of that kind of look, you know precisely what Jesus is talking about. He’s not talking about looking at and noticing somebody who’s attractive. That’s going to happen. You’re going to notice people every day who are attractive.
I’m looking at a room of attractive people today. What Jesus is getting at, though, is the choice that is before you after you notice the attractive person. Do you choose to refocus or to go on about whatever it was that you were doing, or do you use that person for something that’s inside of you to foster and to fuel sexual desire? So, again, temptation, not the issue for Jesus here. He himself was tempted in all ways, was he not?
Yet he did not fall into sin. So it would be completely illogical for us to think that in all of the various places Jesus went, he never once was tempted to sexually desire another person. That, that wouldn’t make sense. So then, if temptation is not the issue that Jesus is after, what is? It’s not the desire, but it’s the indulgence of the desire.
It’s taking the desires that pop up and just running with them. Them. Looking at someone with lustful intent means we’re not looking at them as a person created in the image of God, or as a person who is someone’s wife or sister or daughter, but rather as an object by which we can fulfill our own sexual desires at the moment. So Jesus is equating that kind of lustful intent for someone outside of the covenant commitment of marriage with actually physically sleeping with someone to whom you’re not married. And Jesus calls that adultery of the heart.
Now, it appears that Jesus is specifically singling out males here. I want to talk about this for a moment. There’s no reason that we should presume that there were not females in the crowd as well. We saw in chapter 5, like, verse 1, the context of the Sermon on the Mount is that there were— Jesus is speaking to his disciples, not the original 12, they hadn’t even been formed yet, but a larger collection of his followers. And we know from elsewhere in the Gospels Gospels, women made up a large number of his followers.
So why does Jesus only seem to mention men in verse 28? Does he think that women are incapable of an appropriate sexual desire? That wouldn’t make sense. So what is he doing then? And perhaps it’s helpful then to ask a different question to try to figure this out.
In the— let me ask you all, in the history of the human race, which gender has most often turned sexual desire into a tool of violence, oppression, and subjugation of the other gender? Let’s think about that. Hmm. It’s males. So think about it.
Jesus isn’t just teaching individual morality here. He’s launching the Kingdom. He’s inaugurating a new humanity, an alternate society, and He’s challenging the men who live in the Kingdom that if we really want to follow Jesus, we need to let Him work on this area of our hearts as men so that His Kingdom is a place that is safe and honoring to women. Amen? A place where women are safe from being treated as less than what they really are, which is image-bearing human beings.
Now, there’s a second phrase that Jesus introduces here when he talks about gouging out your eye or cutting off your hand, and it’s like, Jesus, are you prescribing self-mutilation? Like, what are you doing here? But as Jesus does so many times, he’s using a bit of exaggerated language in order to make a larger point. He’s making a larger point about how utterly serious misdirected sexual desire is. And He’s also making a larger point about the sheer absurdity of only trying to think of adultery in a physical sense.
Jesus knows. He knows that ripping out your eye or chopping off your hand or whatever doesn’t have any effect on your heart. You could pluck out your eye. I think we’d probably still figure out a way to lust.
And I would also personally add here, guys, can I just— again, this is Steve talking to the guys. Here. The problem is also not the women of the world. Let’s please not blame women when we sin in this particular area.
No, Jesus has already pointed out the primary issue. The real core issue is within us, is it not? It’s our hearts. And so what Jesus is suggesting is, if there is something in your life that seems indispensable to you, but it’s destroying you by constantly leading you to ruin in the areas of your heart, and specifically in the area of sexual desire, then get rid of that thing. Don’t mess with it.
Don’t wait. Take decisive action. Now, I suspect here today that there’s a whole bunch of people for whom it’s not your eye or your hand that’s the problem in this area, but it’s your phone, or it’s your computer, or it’s whatever other device you use to look at and engage with the outside world. And Jesus is saying, by all means necessary, guard your eyes, guard your minds, guard your hearts.
Hearts. This is such a high bar, is it not? But that’s the kind of righteousness that surpasses the Pharisees and the teachers of the law. Now, we obviously don’t like it when Jesus or someone gets into our business personally, and we’re like, hey, back off. That’s what Jesus is doing here.
He continues to get into our business. And so, hey Jesus, let’s talk about something else. All right, let’s talk about divorce. You know, just the light, easy topics here. At any rate, I want to acknowledge that there are likely some people here today who feel like Jesus and anyone else who teaches or talks about this topic of divorce is not only throwing stones at you, but they’re hurling them.
A passage like this can be incredibly hurtful, and I want to say that that is certainly not my intent as a teacher, and I don’t believe that it’s Jesus’ primary intent either. That said, we do need to try to figure out what Jesus is saying here. And I think it’s helpful to take what he says and to pair it with what he says about divorce in Matthew chapter 19. You don’t have to turn there. We’ll hopefully put it up here where, where we’ll see the following scenario.
Matthew chapter 19: Some Pharisees came to him, Jesus, to test him. They asked, is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason? And Jesus said, haven’t you read? He’s like, haven’t you read the Bible? Haven’t you read that at the beginning the Creator made them male and female, and he said, for this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the 2 will become one flesh?
So they’re no longer 2, but they’re one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, let no one separate. Why then, the Pharisees wanted to know, did Moses command that a man give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away? And Jesus replied, Moses permitted you to divorce your wife, wife because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning.
I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife except for sexual immorality and marries another woman commits adultery. He says the same thing in chapter 5. The disciples said to him, well, if this is the situation between a husband and a wife, it’s better to not marry, right? I, I— it’s quite humorous if you think about it. But Jesus replies, not everyone can accept this word, but only those to whom it has been given.
Now, one of the first things I think we should consider is that Jesus is saying these words about divorce in Matthew 5 and in Matthew 19 in a culture that was dominated by men who tended to get rid of women at will. And there were 2 main schools of thought about it at the time. The conservative school of thinking, which was connected to Rabbi Shammai, basically said you really shouldn’t divorce, but that you could in the case of marital infidelity. Adultery. And then there was the more liberal school of thought, which was connected to a guy named Rabbi Hillel, which held that men were permitted to divorce for anything that the husband viewed the wife as doing that was displeasing to him.
And that could include seemingly minor offenses like your wife messing up a meal or something like that. So it was similar to the idea of no-fault divorce. Those are the 2 schools of thought. In either case, in either school of thought, thought giving your wife a certificate of divorce was considered righteous because that was the letter of the law. Now, of the 2 primary camps in Jesus’ day, can you guess which one was more popular?
It was the more liberal, open-ended view. And it should also be pointed out, women did not have the same rights as men in that culture and could not take similar actions against their husbands. But the larger question on people’s minds is, Jesus, where do you fall? Fall? Where do you weigh in on this debate?
Which school of thought do you endorse? That’s what the Pharisees and teachers of the law wanted to know. And so Jesus responds that he only permits divorce in the case of sexual immorality. But notice that Jesus never commends divorce. He permits it, he allows it, but he doesn’t endorse it.
What he does do is what he frequently did. What Jesus frequently did is he takes us back to the beginning, to Genesis chapter and Genesis chapter 2 to reflect on the original meaning of marriage and the meaning of human existence. He affirms that all people, men and women, are made in the image of God. And Jesus affirms that marriage was created by God to be a sacred and mysterious union of men and women so that the two become one. In other words, marriage, Jesus is saying, is not some cultural phenomenon.
God invented it. He originated it. And marriage is so sacred that it involves deep commitment. And so Jesus is calling out the Pharisees and the teachers of the law by taking such a flippant, arbitrary, and ultimately selfish view of marriage that treats the other person like some object or piece of property. Jesus reminds them the ultimate purpose of marriage is not to please men.
And if that doesn’t happen, then you just end the marriage. That’s not the purpose. Marriage is ultimately intended to be a picture of selflessness and of the relationship between Jesus and his followers, the church. So one of the reasons why Jesus says what he does here was because divorce tears that apart. He tears apart what God had intended and put together at creation.
Another reason why Jesus said it was because in Jesus’ day, when a woman was divorced, she basically had 3 options. One, you move in with relatives. 2, you remarry, although in that day, let’s be honest, there weren’t exactly a lot of Jewish men eagerly volunteering to marry a woman who’d been married before. And then 3, she could earn or she could sell her herself to earn a living. She could sell herself.
So Jesus says what he does in part because the external righteousness of the Pharisees and teachers of the law— they, they cared about the letter of the law, did they not? Presenting a certificate of divorce, they cared more about that than they did about the actual fate of the woman. But notice how the Pharisees responded to Jesus in Matthew 19. They focused more on Moses’s exception than on God’s intent. They asserted Moses commanded And Jesus is like, did Moses— did not command divorce.
He permitted divorce and only did so because of our hard hearts and selfish natures. Divorce does not represent God’s moral ideal. What was and what is God’s moral ideal? Genesis 1 and 2. But God gave Israel the laws about divorce to help minimize the fallout, so to speak, of a culture of polygamous marriage and divorce.
He gave them the laws so that if a husband did acquire a second wife, he couldn’t just neglect or abuse or deprive his first wife. So what Jesus is doing here, He’s reaffirming the purpose of marriage while also reinforcing that we need to beware the righteousness of the Pharisees and teachers of the law, which are like, hey, is divorce allowable? Under what circumstances? Tell me where the line is. What is the letter of the law?
How do I get around this issue? Tell me exactly where the line is. Line is so that I know where I’m safe and so that I know that I’m okay. That’s the righteousness of the Pharisees and teachers of the law. And Jesus is exposing that kind of external righteousness that would so casually say, let’s just call it off.
He’s saying, don’t look to Moses for God’s preferred vision for humanity. Go back to what God established in the beginning— what human beings are, what marriage is, its definition, its purpose, and the sacred commitments that are involved. Jesus is meddling in our business once again. And then he takes us in verse 33 into what— yet one more area of life that we’ll look at as, again, an illustration of what it looks like to live as a citizen under the rule and reign of God, a righteousness that surpasses that of the Pharisees and teachers of the law. And he does so by talking about, specifically in verse 33, making oaths.
Making oaths. Now, we tend to not swear oaths a lot these days, right? It was very, very common to do that in Jesus’ day, though. When people swore oaths back then, they would often bring God’s name into it, sort of like how we say, I swear to God. Because by associating God’s name with a statement, it was thought that it would somehow make the oath seem more important or more legitimate or more serious.
And by taking oaths in this way, meaning using God’s name to try to add credence to one’s statement, is taking God’s name in vain. It is taking God’s goodness and his righteousness and his holiness and associating it with your own statement or claim. And anytime we associate God’s name with our dishonesty or bending of the truth, it defiles and it profanes it. It’s an abuse of God’s reputation. And because of this, laws were developed for the Jewish people to follow in order to regulate this practice.
So people did stop using God’s name in their oaths, but by the time Jesus came came onto the scene, they developed a new cultural practice of using other words and phrases that were sort of associated with the name of God. Let’s get, you know, like, let’s try to find some loopholes here. They thought to themselves, now what can we swear by without specifically using God’s name? Again, letter of the law here. Well, I didn’t mention God’s name, so what did you mention?
What they came up with, and Jesus mentions this, this is verses 34, 35, 36. They would swear by heaven, they would swear by earth, they would swear by Jerusalem, swear by their head. I don’t know, it’s probably not an exhaustive list. Those are just the examples that Jesus gave. And the Pharisees and teachers of the law took this to ridiculous extremes when they made oaths, so much so that it was difficult to keep up with all of the nuances and the rules of the different words that they would use.
That’s the righteousness of the Pharisees and teachers of the law. It’s looking for loopholes. Goals to fudge the truth a bit. It’s evasive, it’s dishonest, it’s manipulative, and Jesus says it’s evil. Instead of honoring and loving others with truthfulness, what we do is we spin words and phrases to try to get our way.
But people who are citizens of the kingdom don’t do this. Lying, exaggerating, using our words to manipulate truth in any way is incongruous with citizens of the kingdom. And in the kingdom, it’s about simple, honest, truthful sharing and relationships. I know that’s not how the kingdom of the world works. I totally get that.
But it’s how God’s people are to operate. The issue that is at root for you and me is not the making of oaths so much, but that we are endeavoring to present ourselves falsely to others. We embellish the truth. And it’s all a smokescreen. It’s like airbrushing over our flaws.
Laws. It’s putting on a show. I find that sometimes when I meet people outside of the church, the moment they find out I’m a pastor is they start presenting a version of themselves that they think, I guess that will make me more impressed, I think.
And I think we also sometimes do this when we tell another Christian about how maybe we feel like the Holy Spirit has been laying something on our hearts. Or, quote, I’m not going to make this particular decision because I just don’t have a peace about it. Those may be very accurate statements. All I’m suggesting is we’re really, really adept at using certain phraseology and vocabulary like that to try to add credence or weight to what we’re saying. We’ll sometimes use God or the Holy Spirit as a way to somehow make our own agendas and our own decisions sound more spiritual or sanctified than they really are.
Sounds good on the surface. But it’s also a bit manipulative. Well, if God said this, well, then I guess, you know. Sometimes it’s subtle, sometimes it’s a little bit more obvious, and sometimes we’re not even consciously aware of the fact that we’re doing it when we’re doing it. But how can we be salt and light, Jesus is asking, if we’re continually trying to deceive one another about who we really are?
So Jesus summarizes a kingdom heart when it comes to oaths. He says, all you need to say is simply yes or no. Say what you mean, and mean what you say, period. Don’t use your words to hide from others or to deceive them. When you fail to follow through on something that you promised you would do for someone else, don’t launch into spin control.
When you blow it and you discover that you’ve wounded another person, don’t launch into spin control. Don’t make excuses. Don’t hide or try to cover it up. Don’t pretend you don’t have security or flaws. Don’t blame God.
It’s not honoring to others, and it’s not honoring to God. Our words should not be used to manipulate or to control at the expense of having a heart of integrity. So where does all this leave us? In each of these issues we’ve looked at today— sexual desire, marriage, divorce, speaking the truth— and we’ll see other examples in the weeks to come. We’re going to see the righteousness of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, which was essentially, don’t do fill in the blank, because fill in the blank is a sin.
So as long as I’m not doing fill in the blank, then I’m righteous. I’ve not committed adultery with anyone today physically. And guess what? I, I’ve not murdered anybody today. High five!
I hope that you’ve seen, though, that Jesus’ call to obedience is utterly different. From that type of righteousness. Our righteousness is to be more than superficial, more than skin deep, more than strict adherence to the letter of the law. In short, he calls us to a righteousness that surpasses the Pharisees and teachers of the law. And as I shared last week, the only hope, the only hope, the only way that you or I can obtain this kind of righteousness is in trusting that Jesus completely— not partially, but completely— fulfilled the law for us.
He said this in verse 17. We looked at it last week. Do not think that I’ve come to abolish the Law or the Prophets. I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. That keyword there, fulfill.
Jesus fulfilled the righteous requirements of the Law because we were and we are, I said last week, incapable on our own of doing that on our own. Even on our best days, I can’t do it. He fulfilled the moral and the legal demands of the Law and the Prophets, and that He fully and perfectly obeyed them. He also fulfilled the penalty of the law by taking the penalty that you and I deserve. So Jesus became what we are so that we might become what he is.
And because of what Jesus did on our behalf, we can enter into relationship with him and receive a new status before God. Instead of finding us guilty as lawbreakers, which I am, I’m a lawbreaker, which we are, God declares that a person who follows him and puts their faith alone and Jesus is in a right relationship with him and is forgiven. So you enter the kingdom of God, we said, by trusting the King, and you live in the kingdom of God by trusting the King. That’s the one and only way you and I can obtain the kind of righteousness that surpasses the Pharisees and the teachers of the law. I can’t earn it.
You can’t earn it. And we can’t just go out and try to do it either. If you or I had to earn our acceptance acceptance by God by our behavior. Would that be good news to anybody?
No. Righteousness must be given to us by God himself. Jesus isn’t telling you to ratchet up your observance of the written laws. What he’s saying is your right status with God is going to be connected to Jesus fulfilling the law and accomplishing everything that he pointed towards. So you obtain the righteousness of God by putting your trust in your hope in Jesus, the righteous one.
We trust him in his life. We trust him in his death. We trust him in his resurrection. We exchange our sin and our inner badness for his perfect record and his true inner goodness. And it is interesting that Jesus fulfilled the law for us, that he begins to make us into the kind of people who will more naturally obey him and do the things he’s talking about here in the Sermon on the Mount.
Just because we can’t do them on our own shouldn’t mean that we It’s not that we shouldn’t try. It’s just that those things don’t make us righteous. And when we trust that Jesus fulfilled the law, it naturally makes us into the more— the kinds of people who would more naturally obey him. So obedience and righteousness will naturally flow out of a heart that has been changed and is submitted to the rule and righteousness of God, which calls us to just say every day, God, change my heart. Change my heart.
Change my heart. Change my heart. How many times do we have to pray that?
Change my heart. It’s just constant.
Rule, rule in my life, God. How many times do we have to pray that? Every day, every moment. So we end the message today the exact same way that I ended it last week, with a question: in whose righteousness are you trusting today? Your own righteousness, the righteousness of the Pharisees and teachers of the law, or in Jesus, the righteousness.
Let’s pray. God, we thank you for your word, the clarity that you bring. It shines a spotlight on our inner badness and our sin and depravity. And even though we are made in your image, we have twisted that by running after things that the kingdom of this world puts before us. And just, Lord, we’re a mess.
We need your Would you give us the righteousness that surpasses the Pharisees and teachers of the law, not because of us being better than them, but because of looking to Jesus as the one who fulfilled that righteous requirement for us? We thank you for that. We do pray that we would be people of sexual purity. We do pray, God, that our marriages would be honoring to you and that we would not treat those who are divorced as if that’s the unpardonable sin. I pray that we would be people of grace.
I also pray, God, we’d be people of our word with simple yeses and nos.
Thank you, Father, that Jesus took the penalty for us. May we walk these things out and wrestle with the things that you’ve given us today. These are not— just may I get out of the way. May you rule over us and over our hearts. We pray in Jesus’ name.
