Step back this morning and look at the whole passage as one piece. Jesus calls his disciples to a standard so high that it should crush us. Let your yes be yes. Let your no be no. The very existence of contracts, witnesses, and notaries is, as Dale put it on Sunday, a...
After Jesus dismantles every escape route, he gives the kingdom standard in a single sentence: let what you say be simply yes or no. Osborne notes that the construction here is meant to be striking. Yes, yes. No, no. Nothing more. The Pharisees asked which oath...
When Jesus dismantles the Pharisees’ oath formulas in Matthew 5:34-36, he is doing something quietly devastating. He walks through their carefully labeled boxes and shows that each one contains the same thing: God. Heaven is his throne. Earth is his footstool....
Paul Tripp writes that our willingness to gossip, to live in anger, and to trim the truth reveals something deeper than a lack of love for people. It exposes a lack of love for God. Trimming the truth, he says, is a love problem, not a technique problem. That single...
By the time Jesus arrived in Galilee, the religious leaders had built a sophisticated system of graded oaths on top of the Old Testament foundation. Some oaths were binding, some were not, and the rules depended on which formula you used and which way you were facing....
