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...
Jesus does not warn only against wholesale rejection of Scripture. He warns against relaxing even the least commandment. The word ‘relax’ is telling. Nobody announces that they are abandoning the Bible. The drift is quieter than that. It happens one small...
The precision of Jesus’ language here is striking. An iota is the smallest letter in the Greek alphabet, corresponding to the Hebrew yod, the tiniest mark in the Hebrew script. A ‘dot’ refers to the small decorative stroke that distinguishes one...
