Righteous from the Heart—Matthew 5.17-32
Every kingdom has laws. So it should not surprise us that, when Jesus came to earth and said, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand," he went on to say what sort of laws that kingdom has.
But, as we will see, the laws of the kingdom of heaven are very different from the laws of other lands. The laws of other lands deal with things that can be seen. They have to deal with specific and observable actions, or they can never be enforced.
But the laws of the kingdom of heaven deal with things that cannot be seen by man. They are laws of the heart. And rightly so, because God can see the heart.
Now, I would not want to live in an earthly kingdom that tried to make laws about the heart. First, I don't trust any earthly ruler or government to make perfect laws for the heart. And second, I don't believe any ruler or government can truly see the heart. So, as far as I'm concerned, our government can stick to governing the things that can be seen.
That said, it is even scarier to think of God requiring a righteousness of the heart. The problem now is that he can see the heart. What if I am not righteous from the heart? Can I enter the kingdom of heaven?
The Bible has an answer for this question. It begins with the King of heaven himself. Jesus Christ was the first and only man to be perfectly righteous from the inside out. So when he talks about a righteousness of the heart, he knows what he's talking about.
Now this same Jesus gave up his life for sinners, to give us a right standing with God, so that sinners who have sinned from the heart can enter the presence of God.
But more than that, this same Jesus rose from the dead, and he has sent his Spirit to live inside his people, so that he provides what he himself demands: righteousness from the heart. Although Jesus' disciples never become perfect in this life, we do really have changed hearts. These changed hearts are, you might say, the subtle uniform of heaven's soldiers. Every true citizen of heaven has one.
So, what I want to show you from Matthew 5:17-32 is this: Jesus' disciples will be like him, righteous from the heart.
In Matthew 5:17-20, Jesus introduces the topic of the righteousness of the kingdom of heaven in relation to the Old Testament law and prophets. Then he gives specific examples of what this righteousness is like. We won't cover all those examples now, just the ones having to do with anger, lust, and divorce. That should keep us busy.
The Law, the Prophets, and the Righteousness of the Kingdom
First, he says clearly that he has not come to abolish the law and the prophets. He hasn't come to tear down what God started in the old covenant under Moses, but rather to fulfill it, to bring it to completion. Nothing in the law or the prophets will lose its significance with the coming of Christ. Jesus has to go out of his way to say this because some of his teachings are going to sound like major departures from the Old Testament law. And, in a sense, they are. But his point is that he is moving his people forward to the destination God always intended for them. He does not disagree with a single point of the Old Testament law. But he is going to so radically transform God's people that the way that law is applied will also be quite different.
Let me give you an example. A father tells his children that they are not allowed to say the word "stupid." And the children respond in two different ways. They all stop using the word "stupid," but half of them start calling each other "dumb," "idiots," and "airheads." The other half follow the spirit as well as the letter of the law, and stop using the word stupid without introducing a synonym. Then, a few years later, the father comes along and says, "You are all old enough to know when to use the word 'stupid.' I'm not going to tell you what word to use or not use, but be kind to each other." Is he relaxing his rules? Actually, he is making them more strict. "Be kind" is really a higher standard than "don't use the word stupid," and it fulfills the intent of the original rule.
Jesus is doing something like that. The laws of the old covenant all had a purpose, he says, every one of them. Not a dot of them will pass away. Keep doing them and teaching them. But if you want to enter the kingdom of heaven, you will need a greater righteousness than that of the Pharisees.
Who were the Pharisees? They were like children who, when they heard that they were not allowed to say "stupid," agreed with each other not to say "stupid," and, just to be safe, not to say any word that started with "s." They added rules of their own to put a hedge around the law, so that they wouldn't get close to breaking it. But they were like the children who still called each other "dumb," "idiots," and "airheads." They didn't have a righteousness from the heart.
Jesus says, you need a righteousness from the heart. And what does that look like? He starts by talking about anger, lust, and divorce.
Anger
The first example of kingdom righteousness is the example of anger. We should note how Jesus introduces this section. He says, "You have heard that it was said to those of old," and then he goes on to say, "But I say to you." These words, "You have heard that it was said to those of old," are not the words he used when speaking to the devil, "It is written." These words don't exclude the possibility that Jesus will quote Scripture, and in some cases he does. But he is dealing here not so much with Scripture itself as with what his disciples and the crowds have been taught about Scripture by the Pharisees and the like.
"You shall not murder" is certainly in Scripture, and Jesus does not water it down one bit. On the contrary, he increases the intensity of the command. Not only shall you not murder: you shall not even get angry with your brother or insult him. In the kingdom of heaven, even these offenses which we might think of as small are capital offenses, even eternal-capital offenses: they lead to hell. But notice that Jesus' conclusion is not that you should be horribly afraid that you might slip into one of these sins. No, his conclusion is simply that if you sin, you should repent: "Be reconciled to your brother." On the one hand, the kingdom of heaven demands the deepest sort of righteousness. On the other hand, the kingdom of heaven is a place of grace for those who repent of their sin.
It's also worth noting that Jesus assumes here that we are talking about brothers dealing with brothers, about fellow members of the covenant community, not about Gentile unbelievers in his day or non-Christians in our day. This doesn't give us a right to mistreat outsiders: Jesus is going to go on to say just the opposite later in the chapter: "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." But it does provide important context for these verses. For instance, when Jesus talks about being reconciled to your brother and coming to terms with your accuser, he assumes that this fellow citizen of the kingdom of heaven will be willing to be reconciled to you.
Lust
Jesus now turns from the subject of anger to the subject of lust. Again, the words he quotes are words of Scripture: "You shall not commit adultery." And again, far from relaxing the old command, he intensifies it by demanding a righteousness of the heart: "Whoever looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart."
Now, I think there are two ways to misinterpret this command. One would be to think that Jesus condemns sexual desire itself. This is definitely not the case. We know from the book of Genesis that God created marriage. Jesus, in this same book of Matthew, is later going to quote what Genesis says about a man and a woman becoming one flesh, and he will add, "What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate" (Matthew 19:6). That would be a pretty clumsy way to forbid sexual desire in itself.
But I fear that many people may be prone to misinterpret this command in another way, and to say that it is OK for an unmarried person to indulge in sexual desire for another unmarried person, because this would not count as adultery. The unspoken assumption here is that if she doesn't belong to another man, I can treat her as though she belongs to me, at least in my imagination. But the teaching of Scripture throughout is that she doesn't belong to you unless and until God joins her to you in marriage. This doesn't mean that you can't admire her beauty. There is a real distinction between admiring a woman's beauty and lusting after her, and if you can't grasp the distinction, you probably need to turn your head away or put down your phone.
Or, as Jesus says, tear out your right eye and throw it away. What do you think? Should you literally tear out your eye or cut off your hand? It's worth noting that none of Jesus' disciples did this, as far as we know, even though they were tempted by the same kinds of sin as we are.
Then is Jesus exaggerating? Is this hyperbole? Is sin not as serious as he makes it out to be? No, sin is every bit as serious as he makes it out to be. The truth is, I think, that he is not speaking hyperbolically but hypothetically. If -- hypothetically -- you could escape sin by tearing out your eye or cutting off your hand, then it would be worth it. But the reason Jesus never told anyone to do this is that you can't escape sin in this way. You would, in fact, be adding sin to sin, but that's almost beside the point. The point is that sin is so bad that it's worth giving up anything you have to escape it. That won't mean cutting off your right hand, but it might mean taking a hammer to your phone or computer, if your problem is pornography. If your temptation is a person in your life, escaping sin might mean changing the coffee shop you frequent, the friend group you hang out with, or the college you attend. Drastic times call for drastic measures. You'll be glad you took them if you get to heaven.
Divorce
Lust leads to the subject of marriage, and marriage to the subject of divorce. In this last section we will look at here, Jesus says, "It was also said, 'Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.'" This is not a quotation from Scripture, but an inference that someone probably made from Deuteronomy 24:1-4, which deals with a very specific question: If a man divorces a woman, and she marries another man, can the first man ever marry her again? The answer given is no. But the conclusion that some people seem to have made from the passage is that a man is free to divorce his wife as long as he gives her a written certificate of divorce, which would probably state that she is free to remarry.
Jesus challenges this statement in very strong terms. "But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery."
This statement deserves careful attention. The first thing to say is that Jesus is not trying here to say everything that can be said about the subject of divorce. He himself will say more about it in chapter 19, and other passages of Scripture, such as 1 Corinthians 7, say even more. So we should be careful not to try to solve every question about divorce by looking at these verses alone. Jesus' intention is to set up the ethics of the kingdom of heaven on the basic principle that divorce, like lust, falls under the 7th-commandment prohibition, "You shall not commit adultery."
Jesus' statement contains two main parts. The first is, "everyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery." His basic purpose here is to set a baseline standard that under normal circumstances, it is a sin for a man to divorce his wife. When he says that, by divorcing his wife, the man makes her commit adultery, he assumes, I think, that the woman is put in a position where it is very likely that she will remarry, and indeed it might be very hard for her not to do so. And his point is to stress that the husband who divorced her is guilty for putting her in this position of entering into a second marriage and thereby finally severing the marriage bond that she had with him. You might say that the husband who divorced her, even if he never remarries, is vicariously guilty of adultery.
Unless she was first guilty of sexual immorality, which can refer to prostitution, adultery, or other forms of sexual sin. If this is the case, she herself has broken the marriage bond, and he has a right to divorce her, although Jesus does not say that the man must exercise this right.
In the second part of the statement, Jesus says, "Whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery." As I said earlier, it is important for us to understand that Jesus is speaking very succinctly. His goal is to instruct his disciples to see the deeper and broader implications of God's commandments, including the command not to commit adultery. His goal is not to give legislation for every possible scenario. So we should not be surprised to find that Paul in 1 Corinthians 7 says that a woman who is deserted or divorced by an unbelieving husband is free to remarry. In that same passage, Paul says that two believers who separate should remain unmarried, or be reconciled to one another. As we have already seen, Jesus is speaking in this section of the Sermon on the Mount about relationships between his disciples. To make it concrete, if Bill and Kate get divorced for no good reason, but they are both still Christians, then Sam is not allowed to come along and scoop up Kate. On the contrary, their friends should pray for their reconciliation until it becomes clear either that one of them is not really a Christian, or that one of them has been unfaithful, or both.
The King’s Righteousness
Well, that's a lot. And the danger is that we could get bogged down in the details and miss Jesus' very point, which is that his people will have a righteousness that is deeper than the details, a righteousness of the heart. "Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven."
You might think that with a requirement like that, no one would ever enter the kingdom of heaven. But Jesus did not come to earth to shut people out of his kingdom. He came to bring them in. And here's how.
First, he lived a life of perfect righteousness himself. He was never angry when he shouldn't have been, he never insulted his brother, he never lusted after a woman. Then, he took the guild of all his people's unrighteousness on himself, and he died on the cross in our place. At the same time, he credited his righteousness to our account, putting us in a place of right standing with God. And finally, of great importance for this passage in Matthew, he gave us new hearts. He is forming us, not from the outside in, like the laws of our country form our habits, but from the inside out, beginning with the heart, with a righteousness from the heart that imitates his own heart-righteousness.
So when you hear the laws of the kingdom of heaven, which cut to the heart, and you look at your record, or you look at your inner resources, and you are tempted either to pride or to despair, look instead to Christ. It is from him, heaven's King, and only from him, that you can receive the righteousness that marks the citizens of heaven's kingdom.
Pastor Nate Jeffries