Sermon: 'But I Say to You' (Part Two): Murder and Anger
Defiling Sin Originates in the Heart
#1685
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 17-Dec-22; 81 minutes
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transcript:
I am going to say something to you that probably many of you agree with. Many of you may not know everything about what I am going to say, but this statement is: Tobacco is a thoroughly disgusting plant. God made it for a reason, which I have yet to figure out.
Tobacco is the common name of several plants in the nicotiana genus, named for the stimulant alkaloid nicotine, to which tobacco users become addicted. I do not know if you are aware of this, but tobacco is part of the nightshade family and many of those plants of the nightshade family are poisonous to human beings. Most also are not aware that the drug nicotine is more addictive than cannabis, caffeine, alcohol, cocaine, and heroin. Now, the reason why it is more addictive than those is because nicotine forms a strong and persistent bodily and mental and emotional need. So it is not just that your body craves it, it is also that your mind craves it. And so it makes it very addictive.
Dried and cured tobacco leaves are consumed in cigarettes and cigars, pipes and hookahs, but it also can be consumed as snuff and chewing and dipping tobaccos. Over the last several decades where we have had the medical-technical ability to figure things out like this, we have learned about the carcinogenic properties in smoking tobacco products. Tobacco is known to be a cause of lip, tongue, throat, lung, blood, stomach, kidney, pancreas, colon, bladder, and cervical cancers. It has also been linked to such things as stroke, dementia, Parkinson's disease, blindness, heart disease, hardening of the arteries, asthma, reduced fertility and miscarriages, and various infections and bone density problems, among others. I did not even list them all.
Ten percent of fire deaths in the world are attributed to smoking and a small percentage of deaths around the world are attributed to smoking while driving, that is, motor vehicle deaths. Somewhere in the range of 5-10% of those are distracted driving because somebody is lighting a cigarette or has ash fall on their lap or something that distracts them. They have an accident and kill somebody. Snuff and chewing tobaccos are also deadly in their own ways. I do not have the time to get into all of that.
Now, some tobacco species like nicotiana glauca are invasive weeds. They are like kudzu and they destroy all kinds of arable lands if they are allowed to come in. But all tobacco varieties destroy the soil on which they are grown. This is one of the things that makes it such a thoroughly disgusting plant. In the 1700s, tobacco was the chief crop in many of the Mid-Atlantic and southern states of the colonies at the time, especially in Virginia and North Carolina, and both of those states actually still grow a great deal of tobacco.
Growers of tobacco in the mid-1700s could make a killing by growing, harvesting, and curing it on as large a scale basis as they could. But there were three major problems that they had to overcome. The first is that tobacco crops need a lot of land. They are not small plants and so to get the amount of leaves you need for a commercial enterprise, you need a lot of land.
The second is that farming it at the time, especially before some of the innovations, was very labor intensive. It needed a lot of hands to get it to harvest, not just in plowing and planting, but they had to have laborers pretty much in the fields all the time to take the bugs off of the plants because they would eat the leaves and the leaves were where your cash was. So they had to have people going up and down the rows killing the bugs that were on them. They did not have a whole lot of pesticides at the time.
The third problem was that tobacco extracts more than its share of nutrients from the some of the soil, particularly phosphorus, nitrogen, and potassium. Those are pretty much the big three of what is needed in the soil. And even today, tobacco farms are heavy users of both chemical fertilizers and pesticides because those problems have only been overcome slightly.
Well, undeterred, even though they had to face these problems, tobacco farmers, ones like our illustrious first and third presidents, Washington and Jefferson, allotted large acreages of their plantations to tobacco and they procured indentured servants from England, Ireland, Wales, Scotland, many other places, and later they imported slaves to work the fields. So they purchased, cut, and burned actually, thousands of acres and it kept going westward in Virginia and westward in North Carolina because they needed new lands for this.
So, they would look at and buy forested lands as you approach the mountains in the west of these states and then they would cut the trees down and burn them and plant tobacco on them, as much tobacco as they could fit on these acreages. And you can be sure that they did not keep any of the land Sabbaths once they got tobacco on these pieces of land.
Their first couple of years were usually bumper crops. The soil was virgin. It had all the nutrients that had built up in the soil for hundreds or even thousands of years so it was nutrient rich. But each year after the first two or three, they noticed that they began to receive diminishing returns. And after just a few years of that their crops could no longer cover their costs because they were putting a lot of money into these ventures. Not only buying seed, but the pay and all of the travel that had to be done because, remember, their main plantations were in one part of Virginia and their tobacco fields were far to the west. There was a lot of travel costs for them and for their employees. And then shipping it down to the ports was not easy or inexpensive either.
So, many of these plantation owners went into debt to buy new land on the frontier and restart the process. The ruined wasteland that their tobacco crops left behind was useless now for farming anything, much less food crops. And so those great swaths of acreage were left fallow for decades. And in many cases, the forests reclaimed them over time and only then did they get their Sabbath.
George Washington—we owe him a lot, and there are certain things we do not know that we owe him. And this is one of them. See, George Washington was smarter in agricultural matters than Thomas Jefferson. By the way, Thomas Jefferson was one of those who went deeply into debt because of this tobacco process. Washington though, in about the early 1760s, began to see this cycle play out: that he would open up 100, 200, 300 acres of land and only get about seven good years out of it. And actually the last four or so were red. But it was only held up by the first couple or three, which were in the black.
He concluded, after watching this a few times, that tobacco farming was not sustainable. He did not quite use that word. That is a word we use quite a bit now environmentally, but that is in essence what he concluded. Tobacco farming was not sustainable. So in 1767 he quit the practice altogether. He no longer was a tobacco farmer. An article on farm structure from the Mountvernon.org website record what he did next.
Washington transitioned to grains and food crops rather than continuing as a planter locked into a single staple like tobacco. The shift to farming allowed Washington to introduce more innovative practices, such as crop rotation and intensive plowing. By the time he left to take command of the Continental Army in 1775, Mount Vernon was a thriving agricultural enterprise, though Washington's eight year absence during the war interrupted its progress. It was after the Revolutionary War that George Washington began his correspondence with several leading English agronomists. From them he imported not only ideas, but also skilled workers, new crops, and equipment. Not satisfied with the three year crop rotation he had been using, Washington designed complex six and seven year systems. He also experimented tirelessly with various fertilizers and crops. By the end of his life, his enslaved workers had raised or tested nearly 60 different crops.
What we see here is that Washington not only was a good general and a good president, but he also figured out a better way of farming in the Americas. The old Virginia way of farming, focused on tobacco, had its benefits, but ultimately it ended in failure, waste, and ruin, both financial and environmental. Most, like Thomas, Jefferson, our third president, had to find out the hard way that their traditional ways would not succeed in achieving their goals, and Washington's better methods slowly supplanted that older, greedier, more destructive way, even past the end of his life.
Now, that is an illustration. That is my introduction. What Jesus does in His Sermon on the Mount is similar to what George Washington did in improving the agronomy practices in the colonies and later in the States. Jesus announces a better way, just like George Washington did all his experiments and came up with a better way. Jesus' announcement was far better, far greater than what George Washington did. But the process was similar.
The Jews had amassed centuries of traditional understanding, and it simply did not work to produce true godly righteousness. They had all those hundreds of years of experience to see—from God's giving of the law on Mount Sinai all the way to Jesus' time, about 1,450 years, we think. They could see that over that time it had not produced the righteousness God was looking for. It had produced a righteousness. Jesus describes it in Matthew 5 as the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees. But He says that His disciples' righteousness has to be greater than, better than the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees.
So Christ informs them here in the Sermon on the Mount that God's way, followed as He intended from the very beginning, produces better fruit and a more abundant crop. See what I did there, I brought it back around to agriculture.
Now this sermon is Part Two in my series, "But I Say To You." The title is taken from Jesus' use, I think it is six times in this chapter, from verse 21 on, He tells them, "But I say unto you" or "I say to you." Let us go to Matthew 5 and get a running start into this, because I started speaking about what Jesus was doing when I gave my last sermon when I was out in Phoenix. I just want to touch on this again so that we flow into verse 21 through 26 better.
Matthew 5:17-20 "Do not think that I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I did not come to destroy but to fulfill. For assuredly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law till all is fulfilled. Whoever therefore breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I say to you, that unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven."
Just as a summary of what we went over last time, here in this paragraph, Jesus confirms that His way, His teaching does not nullify the law, not by any means. As a matter of fact, He says here very positively that the law will remain until all is fulfilled. And as I said, I think that what Jesus meant there was all of God's purposes, everything that God is doing, so there will not be a need to do away with the law until everything is finished.
You will probably remember that I said that the law is one of His most useful tools that He uses to bring His people to righteousness, guiding them to godliness and holiness, and He does not throw away a useful tool. Any craftsman would be foolish to throw away a tool that he needs in his toolbox or on his tool belt to finish the job. And the law is one of those tools that God uses all the time. Remember Austin's 75 cent screwdriver? Well, the law is worth a lot more than 75 cents, but it is God's go-to tool to help us to understand what right and wrong is, and we will see later on, it is useful in other ways as well. But the law is a vital part of His Kingdom. Remember, that is one of the definitions of a kingdom; that a kingdom not only needs a king, it needs area and all that, but it needs a law, it needs some sort of standards by which it can govern. And so the law is one of those things that is useful in multiple ways. And He is not going to nullify it or do away with it by any means—it is far too valuable.
Then He goes on and says that only those who grow beyond the Pharisees' legalistic righteousness will enter His Kingdom. And that is exactly what the Pharisees taught, legalistic righteousness, a legalistic way of looking at things. There was the law and there was the law, and there was only one way to interpret the law, which was by its letter. That is the only way to look at it. They did not go beyond the bounds at all of what the very literal interpretation of the law was, which is actually the reason I am giving this sermon, because that is what Jesus opened up, something beyond that very legalistic look at the law. They taught and observed a very rigid system, letter of the law, as I said. Their approach was based only on what was written and later on they added their traditional understanding of the sages, and it was all put into their oral law and it was passed down from generation to generation.
But Jesus is here telling us, getting the first inklings of it in verse 20, that that is not enough, that is only baby babble in terms of what the law actually contains. There is a lot more to the law than just simply what is written. It stands for a whole lot. We talk about God only has ten laws. That is true in its own sense, those were the ones the Jews put their focus on, but He has a whole book here of instruction, as commentary on those ten laws. There is a lot more in there plus all the spiritual application that can come from rightly dividing the Word of truth that we can get out of the law. And it opens the law's scope so far that it reaches into our very innards and strangles us, actually. The law is not benign in many ways because it shows us what wrong is and the curse of the law, of course, is death. And so we have to, as Christ's disciples, look much more broadly at the law than the Jews, the Pharisees, and the scribes, and all those people back then ever did.
So God's people not only follow the letter (that is still there, that is definitely there), but also the law's spiritual intent and the spiritual intent involves inner attitudes and foundational spiritual principles. Those are the things that the Pharisees left out.
Now, the rest of Matthew 5, from verse 21 all the way through verse 48 (that is the whole remainder of the chapter), consists of six major examples. What we saw here in verses 17 through 20 was a preamble, it was an introduction. Jesus is just warming up to His subject when we get to verse 21, because here in verse 21 all the way through verse 48, He gives us examples of what He means by our righteousness exceeding that of the scribes and the Pharisees. What kind of thinking do we need to have to go beyond the strict legalistic "letter of the law" approach that the scribes and the Pharisees had.
And so the easiest way to teach people is by giving them examples. And that is what He does. He gives us six illustrations of how to apply right spiritual thinking guided by the Holy Spirit in various scenarios, situations that might come up throughout our lives. So here we have, then, six ways that we can learn to approach a question of law and what it covers, what it entails. Jesus uses the examples of murder, adultery, divorce, making oaths, revenge, and loving one's neighbor. It is a big one, right at the end, and leaves everybody with their tongues hanging out of their mouth. And He does this, He uses these six examples to point out how limited and even harmful the "letter of the law" approach is compared to the spirit. That the spirit of the law approach is not by any means harmful or limited, it is actually very expansive and it also produces growth, spiritual growth particularly.
So in these six examples, in nearly every case (there is one or two that do not follow this), Jesus explains that the spiritual approach requires more sacrifice, more understanding, more compassion, more commitment, higher standards, and a broader and long term approach to life and goodness than the letter of the law approach. Everything is elevated, everything is more spiritual, everything requires more from us. We can see this in His summary statement that He gives after the six examples are finished. Let us look in verse 48. This tells you the height of the standard that He is trying to get across.
Matthew 5:48 "Therefore you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect."
That is what He is aiming for. Talk about high standards! He is saying, "If you want to get to the goal, perfect, holy, righteous character of the Father, this is how you do it." You learn from these examples how to divide the Scriptures and pull out the spirit of the law and what you are supposed to do in every situation. He covers what He felt was necessary. This is the whole gamut of ways of looking at things differently than the ways of the scribes and the Pharisees, and more like what He did when He was approaching making a judgment on a certain point of law or even an aspect of life.
And so He gives us in these six examples enough for us to go on, perhaps not to become perfect—that will only happen in the resurrection—but at least be oriented and moving in that direction by the time our time is over in this life. So the goal, as it says here in verse 48, is perfection. Like I said, the perfect, holy, righteous character of God Himself.
The word "perfect" here, as you may know in your studies is telios. That is Strong's #5046 and this word in other places it is translated "complete" or "full grown" or "mature." But right here, the translation of perfect is "perfect." It is absolutely necessary here because you cannot describe God as anything less than perfect. And Jesus is saying here that our goal is to be perfect like He is. So since God Himself is perfection, we can say then that His perfect nature is our standard and our goal.
Now, Jesus' six examples that He gives here all follow a common format. It starts with, "You have heard" X and X is a statement of law and then He says, it is followed by, "But I say to you," Y. Not why the question, why as a letter here. "Y" is an explanation of God's intent. So you start with the law and then Jesus says, "But I say to you," this is God's intent. And then He gives an illustration or two. That is how each one of these six examples go. He gives us a starting point by telling us "You have heard" this, and then He says, But I am telling you that this other thing is better. And then He says, "I'll give you some examples so you know how to apply this." That is the formula here. He uses it pretty much that way throughout.
Now, this X statement that I talked about, the one that is a statement of law, the first thing that He he says in each one of these examples, what He says there in that statement is what first century Jews commonly believed and what the Pharisees and the scribes taught their disciples and preached in the synagogues. It was what we might call common religious knowledge of the time. It is pretty much what every Jew believed because that is what they have been taught from the time they were little.
Many of these statements that He made to start out these six examples are straight from the Torah. It is actually quotations from the Pentateuch or some other part of the Old Testament. So it was part of God's instruction in the Book and people recognized that, "Oh yeah, that's one of the commandments obviously." Like this first one, "You shall not murder." Commandment number six that came directly out of the Torah. And everybody would nod sagely, stroke their beards, and say, "Yes, yes, that's true." So Jesus would hit them with something that everybody knew. It was like some teenagers saying, "No duh, Jesus, everybody knows that."
On top of that, after that in a couple of these, He also gives perhaps some commentary from the sages. Now we do not have quotation marks on these because they do not come out of the Bible, but they are commonly thought expressions or something that the sages would have said after saying the obvious thing, the quotation from Torah.
So, here in verse 21 it says, "You have heard that it was said to those of old, 'You shall not murder.' That is our quotation from the law, from Torah. "And whoever murders will be in danger of the judgment." Many commentators believe that that second statement is what would follow in the preaching of "You shall not murder." That it was commonly expressed that if a murderer was found out, he would be in danger of the judgment. Obviously there are things in the Old Testament that expand on what is said there in Exodus 20:13, the commandment against murder. And so you have various judgments about whether if a murder or a killing was accidental or not, or all the commentary about going to a city of refuge and what could happen there and all those different things that that apply. But the summary statement of all of those things, including the punishment of a murderer, would be included in this summary statement. Whoever murders will be in danger of the judgment.
Jesus gives here two elements, not just the law as spoken from Sinai, but He also gives a summary that the Pharisees would have used about that law. Both are true. As a matter of fact, this summary is kind of like another "no duh." If there is a murderer, that person has come under judgment whether they catch him or not. A murderer needs to be found and brought to punishment, made to pay.
So, what I am trying to get out here in my long roundabout way is that these are statements that everybody would have agreed on. Every Jew that would have been maybe standing there listening to Jesus would agree both with the quotation from the commandments and with the summary of what happens to such a person, or what should happen to such a person. Something like this also comes up in verse 43, where it says, "You have heard that it was said, you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy." (We will get to that one sometime later, not today though.) But this one is a little bit different because God never tells us to hate our enemies. But this was a conclusion, if you will, that if you are supposed to love your neighbor you could hate your enemy. But that is generally what is happening here in these six examples.
The second part of that is, He says, "But I say to you" and this is radical, entirely radical because Jesus has just told them something they all nodded and said, "Yeah, yeah that's right. You preach it, Jesus." You know that sort of thing. But He comes right forward at that point and says, "But no, I say," Y. He says something different, He contradicts the common knowledge. And a religious Jew of the time would immediately think once He said, "But I say to you," that He is changing the law. He is putting Himself and His teaching above Torah, above the sages, above tradition. You can just see Tevye condemning Him for not following the Torah on this.
Many of them would say, thinking about it for a few seconds, "He's claiming to be greater than God!" or "He's claiming to be God because He's contradicting the law given by God." And you know what, that is exactly what He was doing. He was not contradicting the law. That was their perspective. But He was returning it to its original intent by His own authority. How could He do that? Because He was the same one who gave it from Mount Sinai! He was the same Creator God, the Lawgiver, that had thundered these words from Mount Sinai and only He and the Father had the right and the authority to say anything different.
And so anybody who was spiritually in tune would recognize that that is exactly what He was doing. That He was claiming the authority and prerogatives of God to make a change, even in a positive sense in the law. He is putting Himself right in front of the line of those who had the ability to make a statement about the law that they had never heard before, which made Him God.
So He is using here, in the Sermon on the Mount, His divine authority to set the record straight and teach His disciples the correct orientation toward the law at the same time. So He sets the record straight publicly and then He also teaches His disciples how they should approach the law.
By the way, remember this is being said in the Sermon on the Mount. The chapter starts with Him going up into a mountain, gathering His disciples around Him, and He sits down and opens His mouth and says. He becomes the teacher of His disciples. He is sitting there in a position of authority and He is teaching them—His disciples. This is not the Sermon on the Plain as Luke in Luke 6 records. And what do you know? These six examples, as a matter of fact, this whole thing about the law, is absent from Luke 6 because He was not teaching this to the people at large. He was not teaching this to the multitudes. This was going directly to His disciples. Can you imagine if He had said this publicly? How many times do we see in the gospels where it says, "and they took up stones to stone Him"?
Well, that would have happened if He had said this in the Sermon on the Plain. He would have put Himself and His disciples in danger of their lives if He had said this publicly but He said it to His disciples. And think about it. Frankly, only His disciples with access to the Holy Spirit can understand actually what He is saying and put them into practice. It would have just fallen on deaf ears to the multitudes, if they had not rioted or somehow tried to kill Jesus for what He said.
Matthew 5:21-22 "You have heard that it was said to those of old, 'You shall not murder, and whoever murders will be in danger of the judgment.' But I say to you that whoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment. And whoever says to his brother, 'Raca!' shall be in danger of the council. But whoever says, "You fool!' shall be in danger of hell fire [or Gehenna fire]."
We will get the rest of this in a bit. But Jesus here recites the sixth commandment from Exodus 20:13 and He follows it with the conventional logical conclusion, as I mentioned before, that a person who is a murderer should be judged for it. No society can let murderers run free. I do not know that there is any society in the world where murderers are allowed to run free. Maybe when there is anarchy going on in a society, when there is no law around, will murderers be able to get away with it so much. But as soon as law and order come back, they round up the murderers and judge them. That is just how functioning society works. It is one of the major laws that every society has to have.
So those who kill their fellow human beings, when apprehended, will be tried, judged, and punished. That is what this extra statement means. And by putting it this way, "You shall not murder" and those "who murder will be in danger of the judgment" Jesus is intimating that this common understanding is the whole law against murder in most people's minds. That is the extent of what they think about about murder in terms of law. That murder is bad and that murderers should be judged. That is a very simple way of putting it but it is essentially what most people think, what they believe. And they normally, unless they are in some sort of law enforcement or judicial job, they do not think much more about it than this. Or unless they have been affected by murder themselves one way or the other.
In this way, we can look at it as 1) the common way of thinking about murder, and 2) a slight put down by Jesus that this is all that most people think about in terms of this law. Generally people do not think it through is one thing that we can pull from this by reading between the lines. Because frankly, what He is doing here is pointing out people's shallowness on these subjects, particularly the Jews. He is saying, "Look, guys, you've had 1,400 or so years to come up with good explanations, deep explanations of this particular law and how not only to enforce it and judge it, but also to avoid it. And what have you come up with? Something that I can summarize in a few words. But don't you think that it's a lot more complex than just this? I mean, this is a serious, really life and death subject, and all you have is the original, very brief law and murderers should be judged."
I mean, that is very shallow. Now Jesus, the God of the Old Testament, the Author of the Ten Commandments can never be accused of being a shallow thinker. I mean really, did the Israelites, later the Jews, think that all God thought about the subject of murder was, "You shall not murder"? I mean, really, what did they think of their God? That He had the mind of a six year old? We teach our kids the Ten Commandments and by the time they are in their early elementary school years, they know what murder is. When you teach them the Ten Commandments and they recite the sixth one, they know they are not supposed to kill another person, and that is about as far as the Jews, who were supposed to be caretakers and teachers of the law, had taken it. Jesus is saying, "You guys are still thinking like little children!"
And so He has to contradict them. He has to correct their shallowness—"But I say to you!" He could have been pounding on their heads, think, think, think! Where does murder come from? Why do people murder? All you guys think about is when the knife comes out of the body or the bullet goes through the brain or whatever it is. You did not think that something else was happening before the blow was struck and all you do is take care of the aftermath by catching the guy and bringing them before the judge.
He is teaching His disciples, not just the apostles, you and me, that we have to think more deeply, and particularly we have to think about causes, sources, beginnings, reasons, motivations, and all of those things—attitudes—that come before an actual physical act that breaks the letter. Do not be dumb bunnies like the Jews of the time were. Be wise as serpents! Understand everything about this. If we do not have the background of understanding the full gamut of this law against murder, we cannot judge, not righteously. We do not understand, we do not have the mind of Christ on this. Because there is a lot more going on under the umbrella of the sixth commandment than meets the eye. It takes a lot of thought.
Jesus has to contradict this very general and childish way of looking at the commandment. So He severely undercuts this common belief by what He says. "But I say to you that whoever is angry with his brother without a cause . . ." Actually that "without a cause" is probably not in the original. It seems to have been put in several centuries later to make what Jesus said less caustic. So let us read that again.
Matthew 5:22-23 ". . . whoever is angry with his brother shall be in danger of the judgment. And whoever says to his brother, 'Raca!' shall be in danger of the council [Raca means something like "you idiot!" "you knucklehead!"]. And whoever says, 'You fool!' [that is moron, that sort of thing] to his brother shall be in danger of hellfire."
And by the way, all of these punishments are the same. It is not increasing in severity or anything. They all mean that if you are angry with your brother, you face the death penalty. If you call your brother a knucklehead, you face the death penalty. If you call your brother a fool or a moron or an idiot, you face the death penalty. That is what He said. Because what is the wages of sin? It does not matter what the sin is. The wages of sin is death. So whether it is just calling your brother a fool is just as bad in this way, in terms of ultimate punishment, as bad as being angry with him or killing him outright.
So the Jews thought murder began with the violent act of taking another's life. But Jesus says, "Hold on, you've totally ignored the greater part of the process of murder. It begins with anger. It begins with contempt. It begins with condemnation. It begins with belittling your brother. It begins with undervaluing the other person, making them less than you." Murder begins inside in the head, in the heart, in the mind, with wrong attitudes, unchecked negative emotions, pride, and poor judgment.
Let us go to Mark the seventh chapter, verses 17 through 23. This is where He had told the Jews that it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles, but what comes out of the mouth. Here again, notice how this is introduced. He is teaching His disciples privately.
Mark 7:17-23 And when He had entered a house away from the crowd, His disciples asked Him concerning the parable. So He said to them, "Are you thus without understanding also? Do you not perceive that whatever enters a man from outside cannot defile him, because it does not enter his heart but his stomach, and is eliminated, purifying all foods [meaning purging them, taking all the defilement out, as it were, through the elimination system]?"
And He said, "What comes out of a man, that defiles a man. For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fortifications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, an evil eye [looking at another person in an odd way, like you have some sort of sorcery], blasphemy, pride, foolishness. [I mean He covers a lot of territory with all these, all of them come from inside] All these evil things come from within and defile a man."
He says here, just using the example of murder, murder does not come out of nowhere. It just does not suddenly come into a person's mind and they stab the person sitting next to them on the bus. It does not happen that way. It starts long before and inside of that person. Its source is the heart, the mind, the attitudes, the emotions, that interior immaterial spiritual core that makes us human. Jesus says that core, what we call human nature, is defiled and produces selfish, defiling, violent, evil acts. Every one of those acts comes from inside. There is nothing that comes from outside that defiles the man. It is what he does and comes out of him that defiles him. Another person, in other words, cannot make us sin. We do it ourselves. It is from what comes from inside us.
So all the judgment in the world after the fact of the murder, let us say, as Jesus was talking about that in chapter 5, verse 21, will never produce righteousness. It is too late. The act has been done. What can you do? Because under God's judgment, once the act is done, the person is guilty of death and so he comes under the curse. So if that sentence is carried out, the person dies. That just cuts the sinner off from any further evil acts. It also cuts him off from any kind of repentance. So the Jews' solution to murder did nothing to change the character of the person to keep him from doing more evil acts. All it did was punish the infraction; it did not change the heart.
Now, maybe for some people looking on, it perhaps could change their hearts, but the person who is actually guilty of the murder, it is done, it is finished. There is no change possible if you apply what the Jews did. A person is guilty of murder, he comes under judgment. There is no learning from it. There is no growth. It is a done deed. All done. There is no hope.
But Jesus brings a better way, a way in which there is hope, the way the law should be used, the way it should be thought about. Not as a way of punishment and cutting somebody off—from life, from change. But Jesus wants us to use the law as a way to bring redemption, change, repentance, and righteousness. That is what the law does, looking at it in a positive sense. We all look at it so negatively, that it brings a curse and we are going to die. But if we use it in the right way, to keep us from doing any of these things, then it becomes a force for good, so that we do not do those things and we work backwards from that toward purifying the core. Jesus says, "You Jews never thought of it this way. It was just a sword to you to get rid of evildoers." It was not in any way a tool for improvement.
So the only true solution to murder or any other sinful behavior. . . Notice how I put that: The only true solution to murder or any other sinful behavior is changing the human core in each individual. That is the only way that there is going to be righteousness produced. It has to be in each individual's inside—in the mind, in the heart. The defilement that Jesus talks about there in Mark 7 must be purged, it must be cleansed, it must be repented of through metanoia. Remember I made a big deal of that a while back. Metanoia, the changing or transforming of the mind (Romans 12:1-2).
We have to make sacrifices. We have to be sacrifices. We have to become a human sacrifice so that we do not conform to the world, but we are transformed in our minds so that we can understand what God really wants us to do, wants us to be. It is what Paul calls putting off the old man and putting on the new. That is what Jesus is just beginning to explain in these examples. Paul made a big deal of it, but the origin of that idea is right here in the book of Matthew in the Sermon on the Mount.
It is a fundamental teaching of Jesus Christ. We need to change from the heart out. So every year, what is the first thing we do? We keep the Passover and the Days of Unleavened Bread. And what is the theme of the Days of Unleavened Bread? Putting out sin and putting in righteousness, living an unleavened life. Paul said in I Corinthians 5, I believe it is, that it is purging the old leaven and becoming a new loaf, a new lump of bread. It is what we call sanctification, becoming holy, putting on the righteousness of God, transforming into the character of Jesus Christ.
That is what He begins with in the Sermon on the Mount. "Hey guys, let's start working on our attitudes. I've got eight of them here for you: blessed are the poor in Spirit," etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Then He says, "You are the salt of the earth. Don't lose what you've been given because if you lose what you've been given, well, the only thing after that is to be trampled. You don't want that, so be a light of the world, be a light in the house, be a witness of God's way. And do not think that the law is unnecessary. Oh no, it's not. It's here to stay. It's a vital tool. But understand, you know, those Pharisees, they are really big on the law. Well, you've got to be more righteous than them and here is how you do it. I've got six examples."
This is how we purge out leaven and we become unleavened and be those witnesses, the light to the world that God wants us to be.
So in His first example, back in Matthew 5, of the spiritual intent of the law, Jesus is intent on showing that the law's function is more than just what Paul says in Romans 3:20 and 7:7; that it gives us the knowledge of sin. He says, I would not have known what covetousness was except that the law told me. It gives us the knowledge of sin. It is a standard of right and wrong. But Jesus is saying that view—perfectly good, perfectly true—is limited because the law is to Jesus both gauge and guide. Yes, it tells us what the law is, but it also guides us into righteousness. It is a help.
Why do you think the psalmist wrote all those verses on the law in Psalm 119? Look at the law from that perspective and you could see that it is so much broader than the Big Ten. The Big Ten are just summaries of all the other parts of the law, all the other parts of the instruction. That is what Torah means, all the parts of the instruction that God has given us in His Word. So it not only tells us what sin is, but it also leads us to find causes and sources so that we can root out all that defiles us and what remains in us. After a lifetime of such rooting out, after a lifetime of what we in this age call self-improvement, after a lifetime of sanctification, what is left is the righteous character of Jesus Christ.
Let us go back to Matthew 5 and just quickly look at these examples that Jesus gave.
Matthew 5:22-26 "But I say to you that whoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment. And whoever says to his brother, 'Raca!' shall be in danger of the council. But whoever says, "You fool!' shall be in danger of hellfire. Therefore if you bring your gift to the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar, and go your way. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift to God.
Agree with your adversary quickly, while you are on the way with him, lest your adversary deliver you to the judge, the judge hand you over to the officer, and you be thrown into prison. Assuredly, I say to you [When He says that, underline it, because He is making something very clear, very strong. He is saying a very strong point.], you will by no means get out of there till you have paid the last penny."
Very strong words.
Now, like I said, we do not need to go into the technicalities of the words there in verse 22, as I mentioned before. The gist here is that murder, anger, contempt, offense, and mean-spirited ridicule are equally condemnable. They all fall under the larger umbrella of the law against murder, the sixth commandment. They are all evils. Now, sometimes we think, 'oh, ridicule, that's not evil.' Or like I mentioned before, undervaluing somebody. That is not evil, that is kind of petty maybe, but not evil. Well, talk to Jesus Christ about that because that is what He said. Each one of them puts a person under judgment if we do them.
Remember He, that is, our Judge, sees the heart. There is more behind ridicule and undervaluing somebody than just that. There is a whole history, usually, of feelings and attitudes and sins and other things that makes a person ridicule another, or undervalue. So we have to understand that the Judge knows what is in men. It says that very clearly in John 2:25, that Jesus knows what is in human beings. He is our judge and He says that the spirit of murder is found in each of these things. Yes, actual murder, but also anger, contempt, offense, mean-spirited ridicule, and so forth.
The spirit or the underlying attitudes that come out in murder are also present in these other things that we think are not so bad, but they are bad because they can lead ultimately to murder. And we have got to nip it in the bud, as it were. Otherwise, it may just come out as murder. Beth mentioned on the way here something that happens all the time on the Internet, and we call it murder, although we do not think of it as murder: character assassination. That is murder, right in the term. What do assassins do, slap him lightly on the cheek? No, assassins kill. That is their job. Character assassination is murder. Even though the person is not physically killed, his character is.
What about doxing? What about cancelation? They are all forms of murder under the spirit of the law. Maybe you did not think about that, but we live in a society guided by the one who was a "murderer from the beginning" and his attitudes infiltrate into every part of life and even into the church. Be careful what you say on social media. If you are character assassinating you are murdering and you have come under judgment. Just think about it.
So He advises here in verse 23, rather than exist in a state of murderous contempt and disunity, solve the problem. You do not want to have the spirit of murder like a dark cloud over a relationship with anyone. So if you know that your brother has evil thoughts against you, you are involved in this whether you like it or not. Because you are the object of the offense. Right? If there, remember that your brother has something against you. It is his problem but you are involved.
God says, Jesus says, our God says, before you worship God, before you serve God, before you give Him some sort of a gift of yourself, solve the problem. Reconcile with your brother. Even though the problem is with him, do not let that linger in your relationship. Because why? He does not say it here, but it is affecting your relationship with God. Clean up your physical relationship and then come back and be pure and wholesome and holy before God having cleansed that sin, even if it is not your sin. Do you see the extent of Jesus' thinking about this on how responsible we are?
Now, I put my 50 cents out there in saying that the reason why the brother is offended is because of something we have done. And it might not even be something that we have done purposely, but we have somehow caused the offense and the brother has something against us. That is why we are involved. But He says, you remember that your brother has something against you. It comes to mind that, "oh yeah, I shouldn't have done that, he probably hates me."
Well, first take care of that relationship problem, make sure you restore a relationship of love between the two of you before you come back before God, because it is important. These relationships are linked: the relationship we have with a brother and the relationship we have with God are one, because He is the third party in both of our relationships. He is mostly talking about within the church, He is talking to His disciples, the disciples' brothers were their fellow disciples. So He is starting here in His Family and He is saying, "Better be careful of that spirit of murder because it's going to affect your relationship with God if you have or your brother has any of these murderous thoughts or murderous attitudes towards you or you toward them. Work it out!"
This should not exist in the church. If you are really with it, clean up your relationships. If you really want to be in God's Kingdom, reconcile with your brother.
The second illustration or example here that Jesus gives is more general advice about preventing disputes that cause ill will and relationship problems. "Agree with your adversary quickly" presupposes that in this life human beings will disagree about things. We will have different perspectives about things. We will think we have done something and the other person says, no, you still owe me whatever. There are things that we just do not get along on simply because we are human and we are selfish and we make mistakes and many other factors besides.
So we will have situations, circumstances where we disagree with one another. It is bound to happen, but it is up to the Christian to ensure that 1) he is not disagreeable, that he is willing to work on something, 2) that he is not the problem, and 3) that he is willing to do his best to work out a solution. So the responsibility comes upon the Christian in any dispute to make sure that it does not escalate any further. That it is solved as immediately as possible. He charges us here to make sure no disagreements escalate into major crises, especially if they could go to the point in which the authorities are called in to adjudicate the matter. He says avoid that at all costs! Pay the debt, do whatever you have to do to solve the problem, to appease the other person, if you will.
To avoid these kind of disputes, He says, the Christian, the one who is thinking most like Jesus Christ, must be the one to sacrifice, to give in, to take the loss, because it is the lesser of the outcomes. It would be far better to take a loss, to give in, to lose face, whatever it is, than to destroy a relationship and all the other negative outcomes that would come out of that. I mean, look what Paul says in I Corinthians 6.
I Corinthians 6:1 Dare any of you, having a matter against another, go to law before the unrighteous, and not before the saints?
Why did you not handle this internally? Why take it out into the people who do not know any better; more than just if you are a murderer, you are going to come under judgment.
I Corinthians 6:2 Do you not know that the saints will judge the world? [Do you not know you need to be developing your ability to judge these matters?] And if the world will be judged by you, are you unworthy to judge the smallest matters?
I Corinthians 6:4-5 If then you have judgments concerning things pertaining to this life, do you appoint those who are least esteemed by the church to judge? I say this to your shame. Is it so, that there is not a wise man among you, not even one, who will be able to judge between his brethren?
If you have a dispute with someone who is a brother, take it to somebody wise and in the church and make reconciliation. That is what Paul is saying here.
I Corinthians 6:6-9 But [he is saying this to the Corinthians' shame] brother goes to law against brother, and that before unbelievers! Now therefore, it is already an utter failure for you that you go to law against one another. [He is saying you have already taken this the wrong direction and too far. It is already a sin to you.] Why do you not rather accept wrong? Why do you not rather let yourselves be defrauded? [That is the Christian way to give in and stop the argument, stop the the terrible relationship right there and reconcile.] No, you yourselves do wrong and defraud, and you do these things to your brethren! Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God?
Paul is pretty tough. If you have gotten to the point where you cannot reconcile with your brother, it is a shame. You have already failed, he said. So it becomes first priority that you reconcile.
So, in this first example that we have seen in Matthew 5:21-26, Jesus hits Pharisaical righteousness between the eyes. The law is a matter of the heart, the mind, the attitudes, and emotions. They all must be governed by the righteousness of God, which is defined in His Torah, His instruction, His law. It is not enough just to avoid the physical act of murder. Jesus' disciples must root out even the smallest inclination towards hating and harming another individual.
But, as we will see in later examples, they have to go even farther and love even their worst enemies, because that is the standard we have been called to.
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