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....
Before we can hear what Jesus says about oaths in Matthew 5, we have to feel what God has always said about them. The Old Testament does not treat oaths as a small matter. Leviticus 19:12 sits in the middle of a long string of holiness commands, and the warning is...
Step back and take in the whole week. Jesus has not been making the law harder; he has been making it honest. He has restored the seventh commandment to its full scope: not only the act, but the heart. He has named the lingering gaze for what it is. He has called us...
