Matthew 5:19-26 Anyone who breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. 20 For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the Scribes, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven. 21 "You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, 'Do not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.' 22 But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to his brother, 'Raca,' is answerable to the Sanhedrin. But anyone who says, 'You fool!' will be in danger of the fire of hell. 23 "Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, 24 leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to your brother; then come and offer your gift. 25 "Settle matters quickly with your adversary who is taking you to court. Do it while you are still with him on the way, or he may hand you over to the judge, and the judge may hand you over to the officer, and you may be thrown into prison. 26 I tell you the truth, you will not get out until you have paid the last penny.
Introduction
In May of 1931, the city of New York, witnessed the capture of one of the most dangerous criminals that that city had known until that time. He was known as Two-gun Crowley. Two-gun Crowley they said would kill at the drop of a hat; he brutally murdered many people, including police. They finally caught up to him in his girlfriend's apartment, and after a long gun battle involving at least a hundred policemen, they captured him. And when they finally got him, they found a bloodstained note that he had written. "Under my coat is a weary heart, but a kind one, one that would do nobody any harm." He thought he was basically a nice guy even though he was a mass-murderer. When people come to me for counseling there is a form we have them fill out and one of the questions is, “Tell me about yourself – what sort of person are you?” And almost every person who fills that out says, “I’m basically a good person.” No matter how severe their problems are, or how immersed they are in sin; they feel that deep down they are basically good. The idea that at the core we are basically good and righteous is one of the most commonly believed lies the devil tells. We are all eager to fall for that one.
But it is a deadly lie. The reason Satan tells it is because he knows that if we fall for it, we cannot be saved. The incredible, fantastic news that God offers us a greater righteousness – a righteousness that is acceptable and pleasing to God – that amazing news is worthless to us until we realize how much we need that righteousness. As long as we think we are basically good and we have a pretty good righteousness already, the offer of a greater righteousness is no big deal. And so in His infinite love Jesus is going to do some painful surgery, and cut out of us that cancerous lie that convinces us that we are basically righteous.
The first word in verse 20 is for. That is a word that means, “Let me explain what I just said.” What did He just say? Well, in the previous verse (19) He talked about breaking the law and keeping the law. Those are the two possible responses when God gives a command. Then Jesus says, “Let me explain…” So the purpose of what follows is for Jesus to explain what it means to obey or disobey God’s Law.
The Inadequate Righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees
And He starts out that section with a very provocative statement.
Matthew 5:20 For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the Scribes, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.
That is provocative because the Pharisees and Scribes were thought to be the most righteous human beings on the planet. According to John MacArthur there was even a saying back then: “If only two people make it to heaven, one will be a Scribe and the other a Pharisee.”
The Scribes were the scholars, who studied every detail of the Law. And the Pharisees were a sect who endeavored to follow every command in the Bible. These people were law-keeping fanatics. The Scribes probably had the entire Old Testament memorized. By all appearances, no one on the planet took the Law of God more seriously than the Scribes and Pharisees. They were so careful about following the tithe law that they would tithe their mint, dill, and cummin (Mt.23:23). They would take their little plants and spices and seeds and count out – “Nine for me, one for God…”
The Law said not to eat out of an unclean dish. So they came up with some guidelines for how to purify a dish, and that section of the Mishnah goes on for thirty chapters.
The Law said rest on the Sabbath, so they wrote volumes and volumes on the definition of rest and the definition of work. God said “Don’t carry a load on the Sabbath,” so they developed formal definitions of a load. "A load is food equal to the weight of a dried fig, enough wine for mixing in a goblet, milk enough for one swallow, honey enough to put on a wound, water enough to moisten an eye salve…" and on and on and on. They said if you carry enough ink to write two letters of the alphabet you are carrying a load and violating the Sabbath. You could not walk around with a false tooth in your mouth because you would be carrying a load.
You could not move a chair on the Sabbath day because you might drag it and cut a little bit of a furrow in the dirt, and that would be technically farming, which is work. You could not take a bath because water might drip off you and land on the floor and that is technically washing the floor. You could not blow out a candle. You could not tie a knot. You could not leave a radish in salt (would become a pickle – food preparation). A woman could not look in mirror (might find a gray hair and pluck it out). The Scribes and Pharisees took the Sabbath law so seriously they had a law against spitting on the ground on the Sabbath. They could spit into a rag, but not on the ground because they would be watering the soil and that is farming. There were volumes and volumes and volumes of those rules, and the Scribes and Pharisees had them all memorized and followed every one of them to the letter.
Righteousness is keeping the Law of God. And most people probably thought, I do my best at keeping the Law, but I could never take it to the extremes the Pharisees and Scribes take it. That level of righteousness is just out of my reach. And so when Jesus said, “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the Pharisees and Scribes you will not even enter the kingdom of heaven, provocative is an understatement. Jesus spoke of the great ones in the kingdom and the lesser ones in the kingdom – the top rank and the bottom rank. And then He says, “But unless you are a better law keeper than the Pharisees and Scribes, you don’t even make the bottom rank. You are not even in!”
At this point I think Jesus has their attention. He is going to go through a few different examples to illustrate first what the Pharisees’ kind of law keeping looks like with a particular command from the Law, and then what real law keeping looks like with regard to that command. First He will say, “You have heard it was said,” and then give the Pharisees’ way of law keeping, and then, “But I say unto you,” and give the greater righteousness.
The Greater Righteousness
Greater Depth
So what was wrong with the Pharisees’ righteousness? If ours has to be greater than theirs, we need to know what was wrong with theirs. What was wrong with theirs, if you want to boil it down to a single word, is that it was external. Their law keeping was skin deep. To them, law keeping meant - Do not ever do the wrong thing. But that is as far as it went. They were not concerned about thinking the wrong thing or feeling the wrong thing or loving the wrong thing or desiring the wrong thing – just doing the wrong thing. They would steer clear of actions like murder and adultery breaking legal contracts, but all the time they had sinful feelings of anger and sinful desires of lust and every kind of internal wickedness. And so the righteousness Jesus is showing us in this chapter is greater in the sense that it has greater depth. It is not just skin deep – it goes clear to the heart.
God can command whatever He wants
Some people chafe under any authority. They do not even want God telling them what to do. But there are other people who are fine with God telling them what to do – just as long as He does not try to tell them how to feel or what to think or what to desire or who to love. There are many Christians today who think that those things are off limits even to God’s authority. And they say that not because they are against authority per se, but because they feel it would be unreasonable for God to command us to feel a certain way because we do not have immediate control over our feelings. That is why so many people always want to define agape love in terms that do not involve emotion. They figure God would never command us to feel a certain emotion, but He does command us to love, therefore love must not be an emotion. That philosophy comes from a philosopher by the name of Kant – “… love … does not mean emotional love (for others cannot oblige us to have feelings).” God can command your actions, but not your feelings.
William Hendriksen: “I can be ordered to seek … someone’s good. … I cannot be ordered to have affection for a person. … Emotions do not permit themselves to be ‘ordered around’.”
C.H. Dodd: “[Love] is not primarily an emotion or an affection; it is primarily an active determination of the will. That is why it can be commanded as feelings cannot.”
Davies and Allison: “Love…is not firstly an attitude or affection….This is why, unlike an emotion, it can be commanded.”
Erwin Lutzer: “Clearly, if [divine] love were a feeling, God would be putting a burden on us that we could not bear.”
John MacArthur: agape “is not a feeling but a determined act of will”
Beth Moore: “In contrast to philos, agape is not a feeling …We will discover that God commands us to agape. He is not commanding us toward a feeling.”
I mention those names not to disparage those people in any way. All of those people are scholars or Bible teachers for whom I have the highest regard. My only purpose is to show you how deeply into evangelical thought Kant’s philosophies have penetrated. Back in the Fifties a man by the name of Anders Nygren published a book titled “Agape and Eros” that popularized this idea, and it seems like no matter where you read it, it eventually traces back to that book.
It was an easy idea to popularize because there is something in the human soul that wants to believe it. We want to believe that we are only answerable for our actions – not our feelings or desires. We feel like we have some measure of control of our actions, but changing the beast on the inside just seems out of reach.
Two ways to discard the law
It is fascinating the way Jesus does this, because up to this point it has sounded like He has been blasting the enemies of the Pharisees – the Sadducees. The Pharisees were the conservatives that took such meticulous care about every letter in the Bible. The Sadducees were the liberals who did the same thing the liberals do today – they threw out all the parts of the Bible they did not like. So the whole time Jesus was saying all that about not one letter or the least stroke of the pen will disappear from the Law – that would have been music to the Pharisees’ ears. They were saying, “Yeah, Sadducees – you guys need to stop setting aside the Law of God!” But then Jesus says, “Let me give you a few examples of how people set aside God’s Law…” and He goes on to give examples of how the Pharisees operated!
You see, there is more than one way to set aside God’s Law. You can do it like the liberals, who just sit in judgment on the Bible and reject whatever they find hard to believe. Or you can do it like the Pharisees, who are so busy honoring every word in the Bible that they honor only the words and not the meaning. The first way is antinomianism – which says “Do as you please – there is no law. The other way is legalism, which reduces God’s Law down to a list of rules.
Paul
One of the top Pharisees in the nation at that time once wrote a description of the things that a Pharisee regarded as righteousness.
Philippians 3:5 circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; 6 as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for legalistic righteousness, faultless.
Notice no virtues are listed – nothing about the heart – just adherence to the rules of the traditions. Compare that to the beatitudes - poor in spirit, pure in heart, hunger and thirst for righteousness, meekness, etc. That is the greater righteousness.
Greater Standard
One of the results of legalism is that it tends to give birth to a system of tradition. They develop a bunch of human rules around one of God’s commands, and eventually those rules become a tradition that is more important than the actual command.
Legalism
For example, someone reads the command in 1 John 2:15 Do not love the world or anything in the world, and he is trying to obey that command, so he starts thinking about how watching TV really tends to draw his heart toward earthly things. The commercials make him tend toward materialism and loving stuff, and the TV shows and movies tend to bend his affections toward really craving earthly things and they kind of throw cold water on his desires for spiritual things – so that after watching a couple hours of TV, his affections for eternal things are reduced and he decides, “I need to put that TV in the garbage can.” So he gets rid of his TV, and he starts filling his evenings with other things – positive interactions with his family, reading good books, edifying fellowship with friends, getting his work done, etc. And after about a year of that he finds that there has been a dramatic change in his heart and his desires, and his walk with the Lord is ten times better than it used to be.
So far so good. That is the right way to obey a command of God. But just as an untended garden tends to become full of weeds, so our hearts tend to naturally degenerate into legalism. And so over time his resolve to not love the world or the things in the world becomes little more than a rule: no TV. So now he just has this no TV rule, and as long as he keeps following his rule, he thinks he is doing OK. So he does not watch TV, but he starts doing other things that entice his heart toward love for this world. He becomes immersed in the Internet, or the way he walks through the mall or reads the ads in the Sunday paper feed his love for the things in this world. And the next thing you know, he is just as in love with the world as ever. He is still following his no TV rule (although it is starting to become burdensome), and he looks down on everyone else who watches TV. In fact, watching or not watching TV becomes his measure for a person’s godliness, until pretty soon he is looking down his nose at a brother who watches TV, even though that brother has no love for the world at all and the no TV guy’s heart is full of love for the world.
At first the no TV rule was a wonderful thing, because he was using it to help him obey the actual command in Scripture. But over time the focus shifted from the command itself to the rule, and now he is keeping the rule while breaking the command. He is not watching TV, but his heart is ravenous for this world. That is legalism and it is exactly the kind of thing the Pharisees were doing.
Tradition
And notice what Jesus calls their rules – traditions of men. Where you have legalism it is only a matter of time before all those little rules that replace the commands of God become the main focus. That is exactly what happened with the Scribes. All their rules became the oral tradition. They finally put it all together in one, giant work called the Mishnah. For about $450 you can buy the entire Mishnah in twenty-one volumes – it is massive.
And that tradition of the elders was considered the ultimate rule for life. It was a system that was very similar to the present day Roman Catholic religion. The Catechism: “the Church…does not derive her certainty about all revealed truths from the holy Scriptures alone. Both Scripture and Tradition must be accepted and honored with equal sentiments of devotion and reverence. … The task of interpreting the Word of God authentically has been entrusted solely to the Magesterium of the Church, that is, to the Pope and to the bishops in communion with him.” So the Catholics come right out and admit that is what they are doing – they place tradition right up there with the Bible. But in the Evangelical world we tend to be a little more subtle about it. We come up with authoritative traditions too, but they are usually unwritten rules. In a legalistic church there is no official document that says, “These traditions are just as authoritative as the Bible,” but that is exactly what is going on. You wear jeans to church or you have a tattoo or you smoke or violate whatever taboos that church has picked up over the years, and you are considered unspiritual. And you are looked down upon by people who think they are righteous by following all those traditions, when in reality they are in disfavor with God because at the same time they are following all their traditions, they are breaking the Law of God.
So the righteousness Christ is talking about here is greater in depth – penetrating to the heart and greater in that it is based on a greater standard – the Word of God as opposed to human traditions.
The Inadequate Righteousness
So in the rest of chapter 5 Jesus is going to take six examples of that sort of thing and show us the right way and the wrong way to approach God’s commands. These are six examples of the Pharisees’ inadequate righteousness. And all six of these examples have to do in one way or another with relationships with people. Do not be angry, do not commit sexual sin, do not divorce, do not lie, do not take revenge, and love your enemies.
The fifty-one percent theory
The Pharisees of Jesus’ day mostly held to the same view of salvation as most people today. I call it the fifty-one percent view. You get to Judgment Day, God counts up all your good deeds and puts them on one side of the scale, and all your sins and puts them on the other side, and if your life had more good deeds than bad deeds, you go to heaven. So as long as you can hit at least fifty-one percent good deeds, you are fine. And most people think they easily hit fifty-one percent. This comes from the theory that good deeds cancel out bad deeds. You commit a sin, but then you turn around and do something good, and that somehow cancels out the sin from your record in heaven.
This is probably the most common religious belief in the world – not because there is any evidence that it is actually true, but because people want to believe it. There is no evidence that it is true. In fact there is compelling evidence that it is not true. But people know that they sin, and so they want to come up with a belief system where they can still come out OK on Judgment Day even though they have committed millions of sins. So they buy into the fifty-one percent theory.
And if you asked the people back then, they would say the Pharisees are shoo-in’s for going to heaven because they are way up there close to one hundred percent good deeds. They followed every single rule in the whole religion. (You can do that when your religion is all rules that govern behavior but not the heart.) So they were safe because their sins were well below fifty percent.
Their righteousness is the problem
Now, you might think Jesus would go after them by showing them that “no, your sins are not below fifty percent. They are way up there at eighty percent or so.” But Jesus does not go after the sin side of the ledger. He goes after the other side. He goes after their “righteousness.” Jesus is going to condemn them not so much for their lawbreaking but for their law keeping (or what they thought was law keeping). They had so much confidence in their righteousness; so Jesus is going to show them that their righteousness is the whole problem. It is the reason they are going to hell. The way they keep the no murder law, the no adultery law, the “keep your vows” law – the way they keep those laws is going to send them to hell. So if you are convinced you are basically a good person, and you have only twenty percent evil and eighty percent righteousness – that eighty percent will send you to hell just as fast as the twenty percent.
Isaiah 57:12 I will expose your righteousness and your works, and they will not benefit you.
That is exactly what Jesus is doing in the Sermon on the Mount. And so by the time we get to the end of chapter 5 the Scribes and Pharisees will be convicted on six counts of bad righteousness and sentenced to life in hell without possibility of parole – or appeal.
Count 1: Murder
So, let’s take a look at count 1. In the first count the defendants are found guilty of inadequate keeping of the “no murder” law. We just have time to introduce it this morning, and we will plan on going into depth next time.
5:21 "You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, 'Do not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.'
The faulty, inadequate, bogus human “righteousness” that Jesus is going to condemn here is their “do not murder” rule. The way they kept that law earns them the death penalty.
“Wait a second! Do not murder? That is not a worthless human tradition – that is right out of the Ten Commandments. Commandment #6 – Do not murder (Ex.20:13). It is a direct quotation from Scripture – how can Jesus say anything is wrong with that?”
We learn a very important lesson from this about Bible interpretation. Jesus is showing us that it is possible to follow the exact wording of Scripture while violating the true meaning. Their tradition was that, “Do not murder” just means don’t kill people, and if you avoid killing people you are keeping that commandment. But Jesus was about to show them that it is possible to break that commandment without killing anybody.
The purpose of a passage of Scripture (Herm)
Remember, the Law of God is a lot more than just a penal code. It is a portrait of true righteousness. And so if you do not commit murder, but you do something else that is just like murder, you have broken the command. If you tell your kids, “No coloring on the walls,” does that mean it is OK if they go put their crayons away and get their paints out and paint on the walls – because technically you just mentioned coloring and not painting? No, if they avoid doing the exact thing you forbade, but instead they do something just like it, then they are still being disobedient.
And that is exactly what the Pharisees were doing with the Sixth Commandment. They were not murdering anybody, but there were doing something else that was just like murder. “What was that?” Anger.
Anger = murder (same DNA)
22 But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment.
Anger is just like murder. If you do not kill anyone, but you are angry, you are breaking the command because you are doing something just like murder.
So that brings up the question – in what way is anger like murder? Are they the same in every way? Are they the same in severity? No – murder is much more severe.
Are anger and murder the same in consequences? No. If you kill one of my family members you bring devastation into my life that is far worse than if you are angry at them. You commit murder and you go to prison; you get angry and you get over it – people might not even know about it.
So there are some real differences between literal murder and anger. In what way are they the same? Let’s go back to the very first murder ever committed. The very first murderer and murder victim were brothers – Cain and Abel. In Genesis 4:8 Cain murdered Abel. But God confronted Cain with his sin in Genesis.4:6 , two verses before the murder actually took place. Listen to what God said:
Genesis 4:6 Then the LORD said to Cain, "Why are you angry?
Same in kind
The sin was anger and hostility in his heart. It started out as anger in the heart and ended up in murder, but it was the same sin all along. So in what way is anger and murder the same? They are not the same in severity, they are not the same in consequences, they are not the same in every way – but they are the same in kind. It is the same sin in the heart – both sins are made from the same stuff – they are just in different stages of development. It is like the difference between a baby in the womb and an old man. Are a baby and an old man exactly the same in every way? Of course not. But they are the same in kind – they are both human beings. They are just in different stages of development. We see Cain’s sin in an early stage of development in verse 6 where he was angry, and a later stage in verse 8 where he murdered, but it is the same sin all the way through. Just as a human being is still a human being whether he is ten or forty or ninety.
A blow against the image of God
There are people who would deny that a baby and a grown man are the same in kind – especially a baby in the womb. And their argument is that in the very early stages of development, that baby is so small that it does not look like a grown man at all. It is just too small to be considered in the same category as a human being. That is what the abortionists say.
And that is exactly the same logic people use with the sin of anger. How do we know that babies and old men belong to the same species? We know it by their genetic makeup – their DNA. They both have human DNA. What about anger and murder? What is the DNA that defines that sin? The answer to that question is in Genesis 9 and James 3. Genesis 9 tells us why it is that murder is bad, and James 3 tells us why it is that anger is bad, and it turns out they are exactly the same reason. Those two sins have the exact same DNA.
Genesis 9:6 "Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for…
(OK – here comes the reason why murder is so bad…)
in the image of God has God made man.
Murder is evil because it is an assault on the image of God. There is nothing inherently evil in ending life. You can kill some bacteria, and no one will object. You can kill a germ, or a mosquito, and most would agree you are doing a good thing. But murder a human being and it is a very serious matter, because human beings bear the image of God.
What about anger? What is it about anger and verbal hostility that makes it so evil?
James 3:8-9 …the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. 9 With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse men, who have been made in God's likeness.
You cannot say you love God if you hate His image. Try that on your wife. Tell your wife she is beautiful, but the image your eyes see when you look at her is hideous and see how it goes over.
Proverbs 14:31 He who oppresses the poor shows contempt for their Maker, but whoever is kind to the needy honors God.
The way you treat people reflects your attitude toward their Creator. I read a story this week about a guy who was mocking some guy by calling him ugly. He said, “Are all men of your town as ugly as you?” “That I do not know,” the man answered, “But go and tell the Maker who created me how ugly is the creature He had made.”
So when you look at murder and then look at anger at first glance they do not seem to be the same – like an old man and an infant. But when you put them under a microscope you can see they are made from the exact same DNA. It is the exact same sin in the core – an assault on the image of God. And that is why…
1 John 3:15 Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer
If you really believe in the sanctity of human life you will never nurse a grudge against someone.
You know what I mean
This is where legalism starts to become really tempting. We can all deal with pointing to the murderers and saying they deserve to die. But just…getting mad? Everything in us wants to react against that. “What about righteous anger? And what about Jesus – He got angry? And what about this and what about that?”
Are there exceptions to this? Yes. We have talked about this before. When Jesus makes statements like this very often it is like a father telling his kids, “No yelling.” And he does not mean you cannot raise your voice if there is a fire or an emergency – he is just talking about not fighting. But he does not give every conceivable exception to his rule because he does not want the focus to be on the exceptions; he wants it to be on the rule.
So how are we to discern what exceptions there might be? I could give you a long lecture on hermeneutics and how to determine intended meaning and all that, but a lot of times I think you can bypass all that if you just try one quick rule of thumb. Try this – imagine yourself there when Jesus said this, and you immediately chime in with a barrage of questions, “Well what about this, and what about this, and You got angry and what about that…” and Jesus looks at you and says – “You know what I mean.” Have you ever had someone do that – when they say something and you are nitpicking all the literal definitions of words and technical meaning and picking it all apart and thinking up exceptions and finally they just say, “Look, you know what I meant”? And at that moment you realize, “Yeah, I know what he meant. I was just being argumentative because I didn’t want to deal with what he really meant.”
Is Jesus including righteous anger here? Of course not; He is talking about sinful anger. He is talking about selfish anger – when you are angry not because God’s name was dishonored, but because you were dishonored - or inconvenienced or delayed or disrespected or mocked or hurt or abused or ignored or whatever.
It is a present participle, so the idea is of ongoing anger –willful hostility in your heart toward a brother. It might take the form of quiet resentment, it might explode in yelling or even violence, it might come out in calm, calculated words designed to hurt – there is no end to the different ways anger is expressed. But the issue here is not the expression of it, but the existence of it.
Somebody does something dumb, or inconsiderate, or they hurt you or insult you, or they just behave in a way that irritates you; and you allow your heart to turn and harden against that person.
Sometimes people pride themselves on the fact that they never express their anger at people. They keep it hidden, so no one knows. And they congratulate themselves for controlling their anger and not taking any revenge or hurting the person in any way. But in reality they are hurting the person. They are doing what Joseph’s brothers did when they threw him down into a pit that he could not get out of. In your heart you drop that person into a pit that is impossible to escape from. It is impossible to escape because now that your heart has turned sour against that person, whatever that person does or says will be interpreted in a negative way. They do something good; you ignore it. But whenever they do something bad, your heart jumps up and says, “See, I was right about him!” And he can never get out of the doghouse with you because when he does do anything good, or if he does start to change, your heart either ignores that, or writes it off as an anomaly, or even interprets in a negative way – assuming he must have done it with some bad motive. He asks an honest question, you read into it all the bad stuff you just know is in his heart.
When there is resentment in your heart toward someone, you get so you do not want to see what is good about that person, and you savor what is bad about them. Every time you see them make another mistake or you remember something they did in the past, you just roll it around in your mind like candy in your mouth. And you dwell on their ugliness and fix your gaze on everything that is bad about them. When we do that we are like Noah’s son Ham, when Noah got drunk and was naked and exposed in his tent. Ham looked at him and told others about his shame. But Shem and Japheth walked into the tent backward with a garment and covered up their father’s shame. Love covers over a multitude of sins and weaknesses and foolishness and folly. But anger gazes upon the person’s shame and exploits it and makes much of it. We pat ourselves on the back for not gossiping, and keeping our mouths shut – but if it is going on in the heart then the sin is there.
There is a little bit of Pharisee in all of us. We want the command to govern our actions, but not our hearts. The Pharisees pushed it all the way out to murder – as long as you do not kill the person you are OK. We may not push it that far – we say as long as you do not yell you are OK. Or as long as you do not gossip. Or as long as you are cordial to the person, you are OK. But Jesus takes it all the way back to conception and says, “No. No matter what stage of development – if that sin is in you, you deserve to die.”
“You mean if my spouse is cruel to me and cusses me out and mistreats me and I have anger in my heart toward him I deserve to die for that?” That is what Jesus said. It is a high standard.
We stand and watch Jesus in verse 19 condemn the Pharisees. And we all applaud that – we are all for hypocrites like the Pharisees being condemned. But as we are standing there watching Jesus slip the noose over their heads with the first indictment here in verse 21, we say, “Uh, Jesus, You made the noose kind of big. It’s around my neck too!” And we find ourselves condemned right alongside the Scribes and Pharisees.
The King James Version says “anyone who is angry with his brother without cause.” But that phrase “without cause” is not in the earliest manuscripts – it was added in later by some copyist, and you can see why. Anything to soften this up a little! It is a hard command – get angry and you are committing a murder-like sin and you deserve to die.
Conclusion
It has been an amazing thing these past several weeks to see how the Lord has provided us with everything we have needed for moving into the new church building. Carpenters, an electrician, a plumber, a roofer – just one example after another of God’s obvious provisions. But God does not just provide for His people in material ways. Much more important than that are His spiritual provisions. It is wonderful, I think, that in His providence He arranged for us to arrive at this section on anger right when we are about to make this move. The reason I say that is because anything that involves significant change ends up being a test of a church in the area of anger. And the same goes for any project that involves a lot of decisions on how to spend money. Or any project that involves safety issues; Or any project that requires a lot of people working together. Or anything that involves making decisions about the aesthetics of the church; Or anything that requires a lot of clear communication between a number of different people. And this project involves all of those. So it would be natural for there to be all kinds of rifts in relationships in a project like this even if it were just some building we did not even care about and were just hired to work on. But it is not – it is the place that will be the central hub of our fellowship as our church home for years to come. And since worship and fellowship are important to people, the physical things that facilitate worship and fellowship are important. And so people feel passionately about all these things, so when the inevitable disagreements arise – we are going to be tempted with anger. In fact, to my shame I have to admit some of us have stumbled into some of that already, just in the last several weeks of getting the place ready to move in. And so it is not hard to guess what God is up to in providentially arranging things such that we would come to this passage right at the time we are making this move.
We need to realize that that building over there could destroy Agape Bible Church – which is why it is so comforting to know we have a Father in heaven who is looking out for us. He knows what is coming, and He anticipates our spiritual needs and prepares us for the road ahead. And that takes what may seem like a condemning passage and makes it a glorious source of hope. I realize this probably is not the most uplifting sermon you have ever heard. I had to be faithful to the text, and the text was a message of condemnation. Jesus is condemning anyone guilty of murder-like anger. And that is how it will be for the rest of the chapter – condemnation for count after count of inadequate righteousness.
But under girding all that condemnation is a message of great hope. And that light of hope comes from verse 20. In verse 20 Jesus spoke of a righteousness that exceeds that of the Pharisees. The purpose of exposing our inadequate righteousness is not to just condemn us, but to point our attention to the greater righteousness. And it is that greater righteousness that will not only keep us from condemnation on Judgment Day, but it will show us God’s way even now and guard us from all the threats and pitfalls that we are going to face as a church and as individuals.
So don’t walk out of here today feeling condemned and hopeless. If the noose went around your neck in Jesus’ indictment, set your hope on that greater righteousness. We will see next time what that greater righteousness is when it comes to anger. And I will just let the cat out of the bag and tell you that the greater righteousness that Jesus is going to show us next time is reconciled relationships for the purpose of unhindered worship. It is a delightful and beautiful righteousness that is available to citizens of this kingdom, and it will make the difference between this church being destroyed by the new building or this church using that place to raise up generations of worshippers who will bring glory to the name of the Lord Jesus Christ throughout all eternity.
Benediction: Colossians 3:12-14 Therefore, as God's chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. 13 Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. 14 And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.
Summary
The Pharisees’ righteousness was inadequate because it was external (God can and does command us to feel, desire, and love in a certain way). The greater righteousness (which is required for entry into the kingdom) is greater in depth and comes from a greater standard (Scripture rather than tradition). Jesus indicts them on six counts of inadequate righteousness. Count one is murder (they were angry).
