Today we are going to make our way to the end of Matthew chapter 5. But what have we learned on our way here so far? The chapter started with the beatitudes, this list and progression of character traits that one of God’s people or a Kingdom Citizen should have. We talked through that study about how we are supposed to be the Salt and Light. Flavor and light in a bland and dark world. We moved on to the next week and saw how people were missing the very heart of God’s law. We saw that Jesus came to fulfill all of the law and now was really exemplifying the heart of it to a people that hadn’t really understood it up to that point.
They tried to turn it into culture of petty rule following when the heart of God through the law was so much greater than that. And seeing that heart, that God’s heart for the law was different than what these people were seeing, will hopefully now affect our heart as we seek to be obedient to God’s standards. And that’s what we looked at least week. How it wasn’t just about following the letter and details of the law, it was about our heart in following the Lord and our heart towards other people. Jesus took the time to teach a lesson that dealt with His concerns for the condition of our hearts. Because it’s possible to follow the letter of the law, but still have a heart extremely polluted with sin.
So last week through Jesus’ teaching we looked at that contrast, we considered what it means to have a healthy heart towards the Lord and towards other people. And we move into this week, in light of all of that. Jesus is going to be giving us some practical examples of how a Kingdom Citizen with a changed heart should be living, and maybe living and acting differently than the society around us. So, let’s read our passage for today together.
Read Matthew 5:31-48
As we look through the examples that Jesus is giving us in this sermon. I want to look at each of these as kind of a continuation from the earlier part of His teaching on salt and light. We as salt and light are intended to contrast the world’s blandness and darkness. And in each of these areas we have an opportunity to choose a path that is perhaps different than the general way of society. But we’re not choosing different simply to be different or to be “better” than anyone else. We’re choosing different, because it honors our God, it lines up with His standards, and hopefully it might even bring the opportunity to talk about Him to others that don’t know Him yet.
And so, looking at our passage, Jesus’ first opportunity for difference this morning, is in marriage. And mind you, marriage isn’t some prerequisite for following Jesus, it’s just one of the examples that Jesus chose for this teaching. In fact, the bible talks plenty about leveraging singleness for serving the Lord. The simple reality is that a single person without the responsibilities of marriage has more time and opportunity by default to serve the Lord with their life. The Apostle Paul actually talked to the Corinthian church about this in 1 Corinthians 7. But for us today, Jesus is using the example of marriage as one of His teaching points.
And why marriage? What was going on in the culture that brought this topic into Jesus’ teaching at that moment?
You see God has always taken marriage seriously, but unfortunately as people we haven’t always viewed it with the same seriousness that He does, and we definitely as a culture are still that way today. Back in those times you had various different Rabbis or teachers of the Jewish people and many of these guys would look at the Old Testament scriptures, they would look at what it said, and some of these guys would land on completely different interpretations of the scripture. And the topic of marriage was one of these places. You had some Rabbi schools teaching essentially what Jesus is teaching here, that a marriage should never be broken with the one exception being when some sexual sin is committed by one of the spouses. This is one of only two exceptions actually written into the Bible, but mind you the goal is never divorce, and it’s still possible for grace and mercy and love and the very power of God to override even terrible sinful situations.
But for these people you had some schools that basically just took one statement that Moses made, without any real consideration of the rest of scripture, or the heart of God in the law. And they took this one statement that “whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce”, and they ran with it. They basically ended up saying that whatever reason that I feel like that we need to divorce over, I simply need to give a certificate of divorce, and everything is going to be ok in the eyes of God. These guys literally went so far as to say, that it was just fine to divorce over something as little as my wife burning a meal. As long as I just provided her with a certificate of divorce of course. And how people could make all of these leaps of logic to end up in these ridiculous places is just crazy to me. And it’s not like the scripture at that point didn’t have hard words to say about divorce already. It was there, they just must not have been paying attention to it. Let’s go to Malachi 2.
Read Malachi 2:13-16
God was already speaking towards this issue at this point, and Malachi was written over 400 years before Jesus got here, and obviously the sad fact is that nothing had really changed. Jesus is talking about the same issue, because people hadn’t learned the lesson yet. Malachi speaks of the covenant or promise of marriage being made before God, it talks about how God, by His hand, causes the true union and makes two people one, it talks about how the Spirit of God is brought into the marriage. And this passage says that God is witnessing treachery in these marriages. He speaks to the men here and talks about dealing “treacherously with the wife of his youth”.
And then we find in verse 16 a very serious statement. It says: “For the Lord God of Israel says, that He hates divorce” and that it “covers one’s garment with violence”. I think we would do well to pay attention, when God says that He hates something, and this is one of those times. The problem that Malachi was dealing with and the problem that Jesus is still teaching on is that people were getting divorced over stupid things all of the time. And that happening undermined big time the gravity of what it meant for God to unite people together in marriage. The union of marriage was made to look cheap, when anything could be used as a reason to break it. But it’s not cheap to God, it’s a very serious and sacred thing, and Jesus back in Matthew 5 even took it a step further for these people and says that if you divorce over anything but sexual sin then both of your next relationships will be adultery. And remember divorce still isn’t the goal but let me read this verse again.
Read Matthew 5:32
And we could be like, how is that adultery still in this case? Aren’t they divorced and separated now? But when we take into account how serious God takes these things, how serious God takes marriage, then we need to realize that just because we may divorce in the eyes of our human law, doesn’t mean that God sees the divorce as official under His law. He’s like you can’t just do what you want to do and ignore the standards that I have set. God takes marriage very seriously and unfortunately through much of society and even in the church, the divorce rate statistics say that we still aren’t taking it seriously enough.
And so, here’s how this becomes a salt and light issue for us as followers of Jesus Christ. If society is going to take the stance that divorce isn’t a big deal, and whatever, just get divorced if you feel like it, maybe even get divorced over a burnt meal like some of the Rabbis were teaching. Then we have a responsibility in honor of God to be the difference, to bring the flavor, to shine the light, to just bring a view of marriage back to the table that is true to the gravity that God gives it. Ephesians 5 compares marriage to Jesus’ relationship with the church, that our marriages should be a living, breathing testimony of His love that He has for His people, and this is a really big deal, but how would we ever do that if we downplay marriage, or we’re quick to divorce. It shouldn’t be this way, it needs to change, for God’s glory specifically.
And let me just say on the topic of marriage still, before we move on to others, that the heart of this, is all for the testimony of God’s love through marriage and being different than the world’s perspective on that point. If you have been divorced, or if you are having problems right now, there’s a lot more questions, and answers, and topics that we can talk about. But they aren’t within the main point for today, but for today, please know that God is gracious and forgiving, know that from wherever you are right now, whatever lies behind you, even divorce, that He cares about your heart, and maybe we need to go Him and maybe we need to take care of some things, but He cares about your heart and He still very much cares about your future. Maybe there’s some things that we can’t change, but we can get headed in the right direction right now.
So, marriage, was Jesus’ first example where we can live differently than the world. But then Jesus continues into His next subject, let me read verses 33 to 37 again.
Read Matthew 5:33-37
And this one is really pretty straight forward, so we won’t spend nearly as much time here. But Jesus is telling us to be people of integrity. People who when we say “Yes” or we say “No”, we mean it, and we live in a such a way that people would come to trust that to be the case. Integrity seems to be a lost value in this day and age. People don’t seem to care if their word is really worth much. They don’t seem to care that much if people find them trustworthy. It seems at times that people are willing to stab everyone in the back or say literally anything at all if it will get them ahead or put more into their pockets.
The reality is, that the internet and social media probably hasn’t helped us much, as people, on this front. The internet has created a platform for people to say literally anything at all and not really face the consequences of what they are saying. It might be different if you were having to say these same things out loud to people. But unfortunately, I think some of that mindset is perhaps spilling over into regular culture now. It seems pretty welcome in this day and age for people to say anything at all, even knowing full well that it’s not true, or just not caring if it is or not.
So again, we have an opportunity to be the contrast in this area. We can value truth, we can be careful with our words, we can be people of integrity and hopefully have a reputation of integrity. Jesus says don’t make oaths here, but He is saying this in a general sense leading up to that last statement about our yes being yes and our no being no. Again, in a weird cultural issue in those days, there was teaching that you could swear an oath on all sorts of things that didn’t really matter and so you didn’t really need to follow through with what you swore. But Jesus is like, just stop making these oaths at all and just live with integrity. You don’t really need to swear to convince people if your integrity and your reputation already says that you are a person of your word.
And so, just like we can be a light through the marriage relationship, we can also be a light by living with integrity. Again, perhaps going against the grain of culture, but for the purposes of Christ.
And if those things are going against the grain of culture, then these last parts will be even more. Jesus now brings up these topics of retribution and how we treat our enemies.
And so, how should we as a Kingdom citizen deal with these issues? Let me read the first section.
Read Matthew 5:38-42
This is an interesting point. Jesus is like previously you were told that every action got an equal and opposite reaction. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. But He’s telling us that it doesn’t need to be that way any longer. And He’s not saying, just let people beat up on you, and really that phrase “slap on the right cheek” was more of a phrase used to talk about a serious insult than it was an actual physical slap on the cheek. It’s like when we say, when someone’s insulting, “that’s like a slap in the face”. But Jesus is like, let’s think about these things differently. We’re not just trying to get back at people, we’re not just trying to claim all of our personal rights, we’re living hopefully to make a difference for the cause of Christ. And that should be our motivating factor to consider and follow these things.
And Jesus gives an example here, that comes from the people that He is talking to living under a truly oppressive government.
Read Matthew 5:41
Rome was the ultimate governing authority at this time, and they happily taxed and oppressed these people in various ways. One such way and it’s likely the example that Jesus was using here, is that a Roman soldier was given the authority to force a Jewish person to carry their pack for one mile, but no more than that. And now I don’t think there was any limitation saying that they couldn’t grab another person for the next mile. But it was limited to one mile per person.
And now Jesus in a radical change of world view was like we can take that act of oppression, them forcing you to carry their pack, and own the moment, by saying, you know what, you can force me legally to carry this pack for one mile, but I’m going turn this into an act of love and blessing and carry it even further by my own choice. This is going way out of bounds against our natural instincts and against the way of the culture, but Jesus keeps raising the bar even higher and higher and goes even further in the next verses.
Read Matthew 5:43-48
Love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, pray for those that use you, and persecute you. Jesus has been escalating the requirements of our character throughout this entire passage. Again, this goes entirely against anything that we would probably do naturally. People are going to treat you wrong at times, people treated Jesus wrong too, and He left us an incredible example in His wake. Let me read you this passage from 1 Peter 2.
Read 1 Peter 2:21-25
Peter says that Jesus was called to a really hard path. He suffered for us, and Peter says that we should follow in His steps. And now this isn’t some weird like we’re trying to be persecuted and go through pain type of thing. This is just a realization that if we really follow after Him, if we really want to try to follow in His steps, that road will likely have some hard elements. Elements that maybe aren’t natural to accept in society, but perhaps we face them for the sake of Jesus. Maybe we will work towards keeping the marriage together that is really rough right now, because that marriage staying together can bring honor to the Lord. Maybe we maintain our integrity when it would be really easy to cut some corners or lie or cheat and get ahead a lot faster. Maybe we go that extra mile of our own will, when someone isn’t treating us right, to take ownership of the situation in love, rather than retaliate against them. Maybe we begin to look at the world a little bit differently and stop just seeing a bunch of enemies and start looking for the opportunities. Opportunities to bless, to do good, to pray for, and to love for the sake of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Jesus did all of that for us. The Bible says that we were born enemies of God because of sin, and that didn’t stop Him from taking our sin on Himself and dying to save us. He did that because He loves us, He did that because like Peter said in verse 25 that we were like sheep lost and going astray and He shepherded us back into His care. That’s how Jesus treated His enemies.
He was the perfect example of all of these things, it says that when people spoke bad of Him that He didn’t speak bad in return, when He suffered, He didn’t threaten the people that were causing His suffering. Instead, He had His eye on the prize. Hebrews 12:2 tells us that for the joy that Jesus saw before Him, He chose to go forward and endure the cross.
Do you know what that joy was, that was so compelling, that He would endure the cross for it? It was His joy in being able to save us. And you know what’s crazy and what should be compelling enough for us to listen to Jesus’ teaching and live different in these areas? That we have the opportunity through our lives, our testimony, our actions, our words, to now be part of the very process that Jesus set in motion to save His people. We can’t do the saving, but we can be the salt and the light and share the good news of Jesus to those around us.
Jesus asks some rhetorical questions at the end of this chapter. He’s basically like, why would we just do things like everyone else is doing them? Wouldn’t we just look like everyone else in the world at that point? And like I said earlier, this isn’t some “oh look how righteous we are deal”, this is about following Jesus, this is loving others enough to live differently, and by doing so, hopefully making a difference for His cause. So, let’s be about that.