Daily Devotional
"You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart."
Matthew 5:27-28
The seventh commandment looked so clean from the outside. “You shall not commit adultery.” For the Pharisees of Jesus’ day, it was easy to measure. Either you had lain in another man’s bed, or you had not. Keep the line, keep the law. The commandment was understood largely through the grid of property rights, the violation of taking another man’s wife. Osborne observes that the moral and spiritual dimensions were present in their thinking, but they had been overshadowed by the legal and the social.
Jesus walks into that tidy arrangement and pulls the roof off of it. He does not lower the bar; he exposes how high it always was. The commandment was never only about the act. It was always about the heart. The look with lustful intent, Jesus says, is already adultery in the heart of the one who looks.
This is not Jesus tightening Moses; it is Jesus recovering Moses. The tenth commandment was given alongside the seventh for a reason. “You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife” was never meant to be a separate category from “you shall not commit adultery.” They are the same command at two different levels, one at the level of the act, the other at the level of the desire. France puts it plainly: Jesus is not revising the commandment; he is restoring its full scope. The Pharisees had shrunk the law to fit their lives. Jesus will not let them.
If that lands as threat, keep reading; the whole sermon is also a door into grace. But let it land as conviction first. God is not grading on a curve, and he does not measure us by our outward record. He sees the heart, and the heart is where the battle always was.
Today's Challenge
Where have you been quietly grading yourself by behavior alone, confident you are doing fine because you have not crossed a certain line? What might Jesus be asking you to see in the heart beneath that line?
Prayer
Father, thank you for a law that is not easier than I thought but deeper than I thought, because a deeper law has driven me to a greater Savior. I have spent too much energy managing my outward life while hiding from what is happening inside me. Search me. Show me where I have shrunk your word to fit me. Give me the honesty to see what you see, and the faith to trust that what you see is also what Jesus already covered at the cross. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
