Welcome to The MHB Podcast. This is Michael Baun. And welcome to my 190th episode. In this episode we’re going to continue our study in the gospel of Matthew. We are in chapter 5. This chapter marks the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount and so far we’ve covered the beatitudes, we’ve talked about what it means to be salt and light, how Christ came to fulfill the law, in the previous episode we discussed anger, and in this episode we’re going to look at lust, divorce, and oaths. So let’s begin with verses 27-32:
Mat 5:27 “You have heard that it was said, ‘YOU SHALL NOT COMMIT ADULTERY’;
Mat 5:28 but I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
Mat 5:29 “If your right eye makes you stumble, tear it out and throw it from you; for it is better for you to lose one of the parts of your body, than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.
Mat 5:30 “If your right hand makes you stumble, cut it off and throw it from you; for it is better for you to lose one of the parts of your body, than for your whole body to go into hell.
Mat 5:31 “It was said, ‘WHOEVER SENDS HIS WIFE AWAY, LET HIM GIVE HER A CERTIFICATE OF DIVORCE’;
Mat 5:32 but I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except for the reason of unchastity, makes her commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.
In this passage Christ provides exposition of the seventh commandment which forbids adultery. It makes sense that His teaching on lust would follow His teaching on anger since both commandments are concerned with putting a restraint on sinful passions. Jesus is teaching us that such passions, while part of being human, should always remain under the governance of reason and conscience. If we mindlessly indulge passions like anger and lust they become destructive to our spiritual health. As before, here we’re seeing Jesus hone in on the spirit of the law so that His listeners could understand the reason for the law to begin with. We know His exposition is trustworthy because He is the the author of the law to begin with.
When the Pharisees considered the seventh commandment, they determined it extended no further than the act of adultery itself. They rationalized that if they didn’t physically commit the act, then they could harbor adulterous lust in their hearts and God wouldn’t know about it. Such misunderstandings were a major feature of their self-righteousness: they believed public observance of the law made them righteous regardless of the condition of their hearts. But as we’ll see right now, Jesus was always primarily concerned with the effect an adulterous disposition has on your heart.
This same protection against defiling the heart motivated the Old Testament laws concerning ceremonial uncleanness. Before entering a holy space the Israelites had to wash their clothes and bathe themselves in water. This practice carried the benefit of good hygiene and protected against contagion, but it also fostered a holy fear of God and a spirit of reverence. As Christians, we should want to recognize God’s love, His easy burden, and His immeasurable grace. We should find rest in Him and be comforted by Him. But we should never become so comfortable with God that we lose respect for Him. That kind of comfort is what these laws protected the Israelites from indulging.
Jesus sends an arrow of conviction into the hearts of virtually all men when He says, “everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” This command is often cited in discussions of the impossibility of satisfying God by your own righteousness through living a perfectly sinless life. You just can’t do it. It’s certainly possible that every heterosexual male who has ever lived has broken this commandment. Jesus is pointing out how sin doesn’t begin with the act itself, it begins with lusting after the forbidden object. James says that lust conceived gives birth to sin and when sin is accomplished it brings forth death.
When lust is dwelt upon and approved by the heart then the only missing piece is a convenient opportunity to act out the sin. Lust is an interesting phenomenon for a couple of reasons. First is how extremely effective it is at undermining rational thought. A person captivated by lust is unable to think straight concerning the object of his or her lust. It’s not uncommon for a person to give up his or her entire life and everything they’ve worked for only to indulge their lust for a few minutes. Second is how lust anesthetizes your conscience against conviction – at least while in the grips of it. You see this numbing-effect in action when a person has an affair and then feels terrible about it, only to repeat the affair over and over each time lust takes hold. The rational part of their mind knows they will be crushed by guilt in the aftermath, yet they continuously repeat it because lust blinds their conscience to the incoming guilt each time it takes hold.
Phenomenologically lust is tightly associated with the eye. Potiphar’s wife began to lust after Joseph once she looked upon him with desire. Samson laid with the harlot in Gaza after seeing her. David’s adultery with Bathsheba followed his watching her bathe from his rooftop. So what’s the alternative to fastening our eyes to the objects of our lust in a culture dominated by it? Job makes an interesting claim when he says we must make a covenant with our eyes. The idea here is that we commit to focusing on the works of God instead of on anything that might occasion impure imaginations or desires.
Now I’m not naive and I know upholding such practice consistently is so difficult it borders on absurdity. I also think it’s wise to remember your pastors and spiritual authorities are mere humans and you should not be surprised if and when they themselves deal with lust. They key here is remaining penitent in the aftermath of lust – never attempting to justify it and instead repenting of it and beseeching God that He might sanctify you and help you grow past it. Such penitence might sound trite and effortlessly repetitive – but I actually think it’s the main bulwark which defends against sexual revolution.
The best way to resist lust is to focus on other things and this includes avoiding the use of our other senses to stir up lust. Many affairs have began with the simple indulgence of inappropriate conversation. Spending a lot of alone time with a person of the opposite sex who is not your spouse is unwise and leaves you vulnerable to the temptation to cheat. I know pastors who take this so seriously that they refuse to be behind closed doors with any woman who is not their wife. I think these kinds of practices can be taken to an extreme and there’s something to be said for training your own self-control – but you should never trust entirely in your own self-control.
There’s also something to be said about being on the receiving end of another person’s lust. This kind of thing can happen even when it’s no fault of your own, but you should always be mindful of whether or not you are dressing or conducting yourself in a way designed to stir up lust in someone else. Take an inventory of your own heart and your own motivations to discern whether you are seeking this kind of attention. If you are, you should repent because acting out these motivations is destructive to your spiritual health. If you’re not, but you just like to dress a certain way for your own reasons, then I would advise you nothing more than to be careful – there are predators everywhere.
What Jesus says next is a very severe warning and it’s meant to drive home the danger of entertaining things like lust lightly. He says if your eye makes you stumble you should tear it out and throw it from you, for it’s better to lose one of the parts of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. He says the same thing about your hand – that if your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it from you. Is he advocating surgery here as a remediation for sin? I don’t think so. He’s telling us our own faculties cannot be trusted in matters concerning lust or covetousness. Using reason is not enough to pull you away from lust without depending on the fear of God. While obviously not perfect, fear of the consequences is a rather effective prohibition against lustful sins and many other kinds of sins.
Ultimately Christ is making a value comparison between the physical body and the eternal soul. By God’s grace we don’t actually need to dismember ourselves in order to avoid sin – but if that were our only option Jesus is saying that would be better than allowing sin to corrupt the soul. At this point I want to reiterate how you should always remember that when discussing sin and temptations to sin you should assume the teacher or pastor is at some level failing to live in congruence with what he’s teaching. Jesus is the only one who meets the mark perfectly.
The best way to avoid sin is to recognize sin before it matures. So you look for the earliest possible signs of temptation and see them for what they are. Sometimes this means rejecting the company of other people who might be a snare to you. This is hard to do because there are all manner of ways to reason out why you shouldn’t turn away from someone. Also such rejection is usually painful and keeping the person’s company (especially if their brand of sin matches yours) can be remarkably pleasing. Part of growth in anything means putting to death the former version of yourself. This process is not pleasant and there are those who make it into the twilight of their life without ever maturing past adolescence.
Forest fires are a natural part of maintaining wild habitats. It sounds counterintuitive, but each time there is a naturally-caused forest fire it tends to burn off all the dead wood which creates a better environment for life in the aftermath. Forest fires are not pleasant and when viewed from a certain light they look tragic. But what happens if you labor to prevent forest fires from ever taking place? The dead wood begins to accumulate. All this fuel begins to stack up over time and then one day, despite your best efforts, there will be a spark. The fire will burn so hot that it will destroy everything all the way down to the bedrock and make it very difficult for life to rebound. Your growth process is the same way. It’s painful to burn off your dead wood, but if you refuse to make this sacrifice then you’re setting yourself up for the kind of disaster you may not recover from.
There are some pastors and teachers who avoid teaching about hell. It’s possible they avoid it because they don’t know how to deliver positivity while also keeping such a terrifying concept in mind. But we have to figure out a way to do it because Christ Himself did it. Jesus warned His disciples about the wrath to come and so should we. Part of the reason why we should not shy away from teaching God’s wrath is because (like we said earlier) fear is the most reliable deterrent for some kinds of sin. After the Fall when Adam and Eve lost paradise, God stationed cherubim with flaming swords in front of the Tree of Life to prevent them from accessing it. Some things God just doesn’t trust us with and we should take His cues and learn when we shouldn’t trust ourselves.
Classic fire-and-brimstone preachers would say fear of eternal flame should motivate you to avoid gratifying the flesh. But I don’t even think you need to appeal to the metaphysical hell in order to tap into this motivation. It’s certainly possible to generate so much misery in your own life that it begins to approximate hell in this moment. If you’re a young guy, it might be pleasant to jump from one woman to another and build your entire life around gratifying lust as a singular entity. But what happens when you get older and the women abandon you for younger, fitter men?
What happens when you finally do meet a woman who you want to spend the rest of your life with but your past behavior has caused you to become so numb that you can’t experience love anymore? What happens when you’ve burned all of your other bridges in order to indulge in lustful pursuit only to encounter the void when you realize you remain unsatisfied? This is just one example of how you might turn your present life into hell on earth. Whatever your sin is, you should spend a lot of time in honest contemplation of how terrifying your life will become if you thoughtlessly indulge in it at the expense of everything else you hold dear.
When it comes to the process of sanctification there’s really only one thing you can be certain of and you should derive a sense of peace from this thing: it is that in all of sanctification God is aimed at the best possible outcome for you. He hasn’t asked us to do anything that’s not for our own advantage. He doesn’t need us to dance around like puppets on a string for no purpose but His own amusement. That’s not the God of the Bible. The God of the Bible is Jesus and Jesus loves you, Jesus cares about your outcome, and Jesus has unsearchable grace at His disposal to help get you there.
The Jews of ancient Israel had protocols in place for facilitating divorce. They had to write a bill of divorce which meant they weren’t allowed to do it verbally in the heat of passion. At one point in their history the ability to write was uncommon so divorce may have been more rare. But this didn’t last and some scholars believe divorce in the ancient world became much more common than it is even in modern western culture today. Jesus spoke out against this trend by saying that men divorcing their wives for any other reason besides adultery violated the seventh commandment. He also suggested that whimsical decisions to divorce made the divorced ex-wife guilty of adultery, as well as the the next man who took her, and also the original husband who sent her away. He’s really pointing out here how divorce sets off a hand grenade of deleterious effects for the spiritual well-being of all parties involved.
God hates divorce and divorce should not be considered as an option outside of infidelity. But this doesn’t mean God doesn’t have grace sufficient to forgive those who divorce. It just means you should take it seriously for the damaging thing that it is. To help us understand this, God reduced the ordinance of marriage to its primitive institution by reminding us that in marriage, two become one flesh and are not easily separated. To divorce freely and easily is tantamount to committing adultery. Let’s read verses 33-37:
Mat 5:33 “Again, you have heard that the ancients were told, ‘YOU SHALL NOT MAKE FALSE VOWS, BUT SHALL FULFILL YOUR VOWS TO THE LORD.’
Mat 5:34 “But I say to you, make no oath at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God,
Mat 5:35 or by the earth, for it is the footstool of His feet, or by Jerusalem, for it is THE CITY OF THE GREAT KING.
Mat 5:36 “Nor shall you make an oath by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black.
Mat 5:37 “But let your statement be, ‘Yes, yes’ or ‘No, no’; anything beyond these is of evil.
In this passage Jesus further explains the purpose of the third commandment which forbids taking the Lord’s name in vain. It was already agreed upon that you shouldn’t use the authority of God’s name to ratify an oath you didn’t intend to keep. It was also forbidden to use His name to lend credibility to a lie. The Jews already had laws against perjury because these kinds of deceptions were universally recognized as ethically wrong. To swear falsehoods demonstrated impiety towards God and injustice towards man. The scriptures and the Jewish tradition placed great emphasis on satisfying whatever promise you happened to make especially if you called on God to be a witness to it. So if you made a promise to a fellow man and then said something like, so help me God, then you better follow-through because failing to keep that promise meant not only lying to men but also lying to God.
It was common decency not to lie under oath, but Jesus took it a step further by saying you shouldn’t swear the oath to begin with. He can’t be saying that making vows is inherently sinful – far from it. Marriage involves godly vows. Scripture itself instructs us to swear by God’s name. Paul confirmed this instruction when he swore by God’s name to the church in Corinth. So why did Jesus forbid us from taking oaths here? The spirit of His commandment is that we shouldn’t be making vows flippantly. Jesus was adding the gravity back into the significance of swearing by God’s name in the same way He did concerning divorce in the previous passage. You might be the kind of person from whom God’s name rolls effortlessly off your tongue every time you make a promise – but this just means you are ignorant to the seriousness of what you’re doing.
God’s name is the highest authority in the universe. Using God’s name carelessly doesn’t cheapen His name, rather it cheapens your own speech and destroys the credibility of your own word. But it gets worse than that. The more you call on God’s name to ratify your broken promises the more you begin to lose faith in Him. The more you depend on the authority of God’s name to lend credibility to your lies the more you begin to lose trust in Him. Taking the Lord’s name in vain doesn’t hurt the name of the Lord – it hurts your own ability to perceive the power of the Lord’s name. The more you abuse God’s name the more you’ll deceive yourself into losing respect for Him. Scripture teaches that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom so to lose this fear means to lose all wisdom as well.
Another reason why Jesus admonishes His followers against taking oaths is because if a Christian is acting properly, then his or her word should be quite reliable as is. When compared to the world, a Christian’s integrity should be so consistent that his regular words should be as sacred as his solemn oaths. Obviously life happens and you can’t be perfect which is why Jesus is warning you against overusing promises because He knows your own infirmity will result in you breaking them.
So you might say, “Well if I shouldn’t swear by God’s name maybe I can swear by something lesser like by heaven or by earth.” But Jesus speaks out against this kind of oath as well because all of these seemingly lesser things are still sourced in God Himself. In this passage heaven is called the throne of God and earth is called His footstool. Heaven is where God resides and in a specific sense it is the place where He manifests His glory. Because of the inseparable dignity of the upper world, you cannot swear by heaven without also swearing by God Himself. You can’t really separate earth from God either because He governs all of its movements and it belongs to Him as His possession. Psalm 24 says, “The earth is the Lord’s and all it contains, the world, and those who dwell in it.”
In the ancient world the Jews considered the city Jerusalem with great veneration. For many people this is still true today – it is the Holy City. Jesus affirms this status by calling it the city of the Great King. In scripture it is sometimes referred to as the city of God. Because of the city’s spiritual significance it became a common object to swear by, and that’s why Jesus specifically names it as something you shouldn’t take as leverage for your own promises. He even forbids you from taking an oath by your own body because He reminds you that your body doesn’t belong to you. You didn’t make it, you didn’t design it, and you can’t do much to change or preserve it. Your body belongs to Him who is the source of life and the giver of life, so to swear by your body (in an ultimate sense) is also to swear by God.
So we know that oath taking and promise making is both good and acceptable when it comes to matters of great significance. These are things like marriage and other situations which may have a deterministic impact on your spiritual condition. In these special instances it is both good and wise to swear by God’s name because the subject matter befits the seriousness of His authority. But now we also know that this exact kind of oath taking and promise making is not a good idea in normal everyday discourse. So what are we supposed to do with standard conversation? Jesus said we should let our yes be our yes and our no be our no. But notice how He doubles it up and says. “Yes, yes or no, no.” I think this is an expression of permission to take common situations seriously even when we stop short of taking an oath. When Jesus spoke to people He often said things like, “Truly I tell you.” or, “Verily, verily.”
At the end of this passage Jesus says something curious. He says anything beyond the basic seriousness of conversation is of evil. He’s implying that the overuse of promises and oaths is motivated by evil. And it makes a lot of sense when you reflect on it. The only reason we need to sign contracts and make promises to each other in daily occurrence is because we aren’t trustworthy. Human beings have a penchant for lying. In this manner most promise making is trying to function as an antidote for the venom of deception. All Jesus is saying here is that you should live with such integrity that you render the use of promises obsolete.
You’ve heard it said colloquially that a person is only as good as his or her word. The point of that saying is to deliver the importance of your own consistency when it comes to the health of your relationships. You should strive to be the kind of person who is so consistent that doubt never really enters the minds of those around you. There’s a gas station and convenience store chain in my part of the world called Sheetz. Sheetz is always open, 24 hours per day 7 days per week. They don’t even list their hours anymore – there’s just a sign that says always open. After the COVID-19 pandemic a lot of the other 24 hour establishments began closing after regular hours. But Sheetz never stopped being always open. They are so consistent with their always open policy that people who live by a Sheetz are able to structure their lives around the fact that Sheetz will always be there. I saw a guy buying groceries on Christmas day at a Sheetz. Whatever the ethics of asking employees to work on Christmas, it’s just the truth that life is a lot easier because Sheetz is always open.
You should do everything you can to become like Sheetz in the lives of those around you. Their lives should be easier because you exist. They should be able to breathe easier because they know they can depend on you. To demonstrate this kind of integrity, consistency, and stability is to be Christlike. Jesus is the Rock of your salvation and He is perfectly consistent in His grace. You can breathe easier because He lives. When Jesus steers you away from making promises, it’s not because He’s trying to make you walk on eggshells in your speech. It’s because He wants your entire life to become a promise. He wants your entire being to reflect the promise of salvation He has made to you. And the sooner we begin doing that the sooner we’ll all be able to trust each other again. And a community which takes trust seriously is a community which reflects the light of the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth.
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