In a single verse, Jesus mentions three courtrooms: the local judgment, the Sanhedrin, and Gehenna, the place of final judgment. Some readers try to chart these as three levels of sin, with name-calling being worse than anger and calling someone a fool being the worst...
Jesus moves from the act to the attitude in a single sentence. Everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment. The same courtroom that waits for the murderer waits for the person whose heart is full of unrighteous anger. This is not a softening of...
Jesus opens this section of the Sermon on the Mount with a phrase that should arrest us immediately: “You have heard that it was said.” He is not quoting a rabbinical error. He is quoting the law of God rightly, specifically the sixth commandment from Exodus 20:13....
Looking back across the whole passage, Matthew 5:17-20 is a corridor between two ditches. On the left is the ditch of the happy moralist, who treats God’s Word as optional and quietly edits out whatever does not fit the life they want to live. On the right is...
Verse 20 is one of the most shocking statements in the Sermon on the Mount. To grasp its force, you have to understand what the scribes and Pharisees represented to the people listening to Jesus. Morris notes that they had catalogued 613 commandments in the Torah, 248...
