Contrast (Part 2)

Sermon Transcript
Happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there, let me ask you a question. What makes a perfect dad? Is it someone that never makes a mistake or somebody that is always there for you or always loves you, is always willing to guide you through life’s challenges? Imagine for a moment a father who breaks or who never breaks a promise, who always acts justly without seeking revenge, and always loves unconditionally. Today is a day filled with gratitude and love for our fathers in our lives, including those who are mentors and those who are stepdads and those who are adoptive fathers as well.

But I also recognize that for some of us, today is a hard day to deal with. Father’s Day can be a time of pain and brokenness as well. Perhaps your relationship with your own father strained, or you have an experience of loss of your father in your life. Or maybe you are a father and you have a broken relationship with a child. Whatever it is, we just want to acknowledge that.

And so we are here today to celebrate our earthly fathers. But let’s also reflect today on the fact that we have a perfect example of a heavenly father. And in Jesus Sermon on the Mount, he gives us profound insights into the character of our heavenly Father so that we can then embody those characteristics in our own daily lives. And so these are timeless principles that we learn from Jesus that are not only relevant to all the dads in the room. I can’t think of a better way to be a dad or a husband myself than to reflect the character of God toward my children and toward my life or toward my wife.

But these are principles for everyone to live out as we seek to be children of God, as we seek to live with our Father in heaven as the Lord of our lives, and to live as a part of his kingdom. Jesus said to his disciples, be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. Last week we looked at what many have called the antitheses, the six teachings of Jesus that follow a similar pattern of you’ve heard that it was said, or you’ve heard that it was taught. But I say to you and Jesus would share Old Testament teachings with the common interpretations, and so sometimes the common misinterpretations of his day through the teaching of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, the religious leaders of his day. But Jesus calls us to be perfect.

Now, that’s a pretty high standard to meet. But what he means by that is, following his teaching, his interpretation, his understanding of God’s law and the law of Christ, which is to love others. He calls us to grow in holiness through the spirit. And that’s an imperfect process, that it starts the day that you enter into Christ, into God’s kingdom through Christ. And so we’re going to explore these second set of these three teachings of Jesus from the 6th antithesis.

We’re going to continue to explore these and what Jesus really means by being perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect, and how we can strive to reflect God’s perfection and his character in our own lives. If you want to turn your bibles to Matthew, chapter five, we’re going to start off in verse 33, where Jesus says, again, you’ve heard that it was said to the people long ago, do not break your oath, but fulfill to the Lord the vows you have made. But I tell you, do not swear an oath at all, either by heaven, for it is God’s throne, or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great king. Do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair, white or black. Jesus here refers to Leviticus 1912, which the Lord says, do not swear falsely by my name, and so profane the name of your God.

But why does Jesus tell us not to take an oath, to not take vows at all? Is he serious about that? Can we just literally take that and never swear any vows? The reality is that the Pharisees, the teachers of the law in Jesus day, they had a common practice of swearing oaths in their minds by lesser things. And so if they were to swear by God’s name, then people might actually hold them accountable to that oath that they swore.

So we can’t swear by God’s name because we don’t want to profane God’s name. We don’t want to bring embarrassment to the name of God. But maybe we can swear an oath by, I don’t know, heaven or the earth, or even our own head. I swear on my own life that I will do what I say I’m going to do. That’s essentially what Jesus is saying here.

The problem is that they use these lesser O’s for less accountability for themselves. And Jesus gives these examples in verses 34 through 36 to show how even lesser objects like heaven and earth or Jerusalem are connected to God. According to Jesus, no matter what you swear by, it is all ultimately God’s possession that you’re swearing by. The problem, Carson said, da Carson says in his commentary, was that oaths were being used as occasions for deceitfulness, depending on what they were swearing to Craig Keener adds, people swore by all sorts of things other than God to testify that their word was true. They reasoned that if they broke their oath based on any of these lesser things, at least they were not bringing God’s name into disrepute.

But Jesus demands that people just simply be as good as their word, that we tell the truth. His teaching is actually more strict than the letter of the law, which is what the Pharisees and the sadducees and the teachers of the law wanted to go by. But it gets to the heart of God’s law that God’s people need to be faithful to their word, because God is faithful to his. And so Jesus says, all you need to say is simply yes or no. Anything beyond this comes from the evil one.

So true disciples don’t need to swear oaths or to make vows in order to be trusted by others. Instead, their faithfulness should bear testimony to their character that’s rooted in Christ. And so what we learn is that the antidote for this poison, this cancer of sin in our lives, as far as being untrustworthy, the antidote for being untrustworthy is to be truthful with your words and faithful in your actions, just like God is. Just like God our father wants us to be. Let’s look at one more lesson that Jesus taught his disciples.

He says in verse 38, you’ve heard that it was said, eye for eye and tooth for tooth, but I tell you, do not resist an evil person. This eye for eye principle that you’ve probably heard of before, eye for eye, and the whole world goes blind, right? Tooth for tooth, and the whole world has toothy grins. I don’t know. I don’t know how you follow up with that, but you’ve probably heard that before.

And it’s actually an ancient near eastern cultural law, kind of a common law in many ancient near eastern cultures like Israel. It’s called the lex talionis, or the law of retaliation. And in reality, it wasn’t meant to say, well, if somebody takes out your eye, you need to take out their eye. The idea was not to cause retaliation, to make people retaliate. The idea was actually to limit their retaliation.

In other words. I mean, no one literally took an eye for an eye. That’s not the point of the law. But in a jewish court, for example, the punishment for wrongdoing. So let’s say if someone assaults you and you go to a jewish court and they decide to convict the person that you claimed assaulted you, then the punishment for that crime could not go beyond what that person did.

You couldn’t take their life, for example, for an assault.

But throughout the Old Testament law, personal vengeance, revenge is prohibited. For example, Leviticus 24 prohibits revenge except for one instance, and that is when a relative is murdered. That’s the only exception when God says life for life. And so when we look at Matthew 538 39, in its context, Jesus is prohibiting retaliation for wrongs that we experience. He’s not saying to give in to evil, nor do we see Jesus anywhere in his ministry give in to evil in his life.

In fact, James commands that his readers resist the devil. And if we do, he says, the devil will flee from us. So, to clarify, Jesus gives examples to illustrate his teaching, to show his disciples how to do more than what their enemies or their oppressors ask of them. In verse 39, second half of verse 39, Jesus says, if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And so here, a backhanded slap by a person presumed to be right handed in their culture was a common jewish insult, often from a superior to an inferior to a subordinate.

And it wasn’t necessarily an act of aggression toward a stranger, but it was a grievous insult to be slapped in the face. So grievous, in fact, that if it was done improperly, that some jewish laws created punishment. Many cultures listed a slap in the face alongside an eye for an eye. And those laws that permitted prosecution for offense that allowed people to be prosecuted included a slap in the face. But Jesus disciples follow a king who the world hates, even though he created it.

And so his disciples, they may endure such ill treatment. In fact, the early christians, including the apostles Peter and James and John and Paul, they certainly did. All of the apostles certainly did face these disgraceful treatings from other people. Jesus continues, he says, if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. Now, what Jesus is talking about here is the outer garment when he says, most poor people in Jesus time would have had two really two pieces of clothing to their name.

That would have been kind of an undershirt, an underdress. Well, we would kind of think of, like a toga underneath and then an overcoat that they would actually use as protection and as warmth at night in the desert. And jewish courts were actually prohibited in Exodus 22, for example, from taking that outer cloak. And part of that is because if you took both the shirt and the cloak, the person would be standing there naked before the court, and it would disgrace the court. Right.

You’re literally, Jesus is saying, give them everything that you have in your possession if they ask for it. Now, we’ve said this before that Jesus is probably speaking in hyperbole here. So what’s he saying? He’s saying, it’s worth losing even your own clothing and therefore your dignity to avoid these disputes, these unnecessary disputes that affect you and other people. And finally, Jesus gives a third example, verse 41.

He says, if anyone forces you to go 1 mile, go with them 2 miles. In Jesus example here, he’s using a roman law, a common roman law that allowed roman soldiers to conscript common people into carrying their possessions. So the law in Rome was that a Roman soldier could walk up to, a Jewish person, could walk up to really anybody, any citizen or not, and make them carry their stuff for a mile. Or if that person had a donkey, they could take their donkey and they would have to make, they would have to put the roman soldiers stuff on that donkey, and that donkey would carry their stuff for a Mile. And that was the law, kind of like our idea of imminent domain.

And so there was no way around this law. But the jewish people hated it, right? They were being oppressed by the Romans, and so they didn’t appreciate being occupied and oppressed. But Jesus says, go the extra mile. And so in all of these examples, Jesus isn’t countering the Old Testament law.

He’s not denying justice. Justice is as much a theme of Jesus teaching as it was in the Old Testament. What he’s pointing to is the destructiveness of sin in the lives of people. And he says that it must be kept in check and even punished. And so as Jesus goes to the cross, he shows that he is for justice, and he will take on the punishment of sin for himself.

He will be the ultimate payment for the penalty of sin. And the reality is that the law of retaliation was being misused in Jesus day as an excuse for sin, which is not the dwell of Jesus. Instead of seeking vengeance, Jesus true disciples are to be so secure, to be so transformed in their hearts through their kingdom identity, that when they are wronged, when we are wronged, that we use every opportunity to serve others, even those who have wronged us. We have hope that the reality of God’s grace in our lives becomes a living reality for those who have not entered the kingdom of heaven as well. Then Jesus adds verse 42, probably for us in our modern context, the hardest part of this passage to apply.

He says, give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you. Now, I know some of us probably read this and we just groan, right? Like, ugh, I have to give to that person, right? That friend that’s always broke and they always want to borrow money, or that person, that family member that never returns what they’ve borrowed. You know what I’m talking about, right?

And yet Jesus says, give to the one who asked you and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you. But this isn’t a new teaching from Jesus. Deuteronomy 15 encourages generous giving to those in need, and God promises that he will take care of those who help the poor. But Jesus goes even further in his teaching. Again, this language is partly hyperbole, but the hyperbole was meant to provoke Jesus listeners to considering the radical nature of his teaching and how they should apply it to his life, to their lives.

He emphasizes unselfish giving, and he’s quite literally calling us to value our relationships and regard our possessions as nothing for ourselves. He’s teaching absolute unselfishness, motivated by love. And that is the goal of servanthood. For Jesus disciples, that means not thinking first about our own harm when we’re dealing with even those who would consider themselves our enemies, or we would consider our enemies. But instead we’re considering the good that we can do to others.

Jesus doesn’t say exactly what to give, and sometimes what a person really needs is not what they ask for from us. And so we have to have the discernment, we have to have the wisdom from the spirit that God has given us to discern what that person really truly needs. The principle that Jesus is encouraging here is a spirit of generosity that outweighs our spirit of selfishness. And we’re to give to that person, even our enemy, what is needed for his or her good. As Jesus says in Luke 635, love your enemies, do good to them and lend to them without expecting to get anything back.

Then your reward will be great and you will be children of the most high. Do you hear that? Jesus links God being our father, us being the children of God, to our generosity, even to our enemies, the way that we love those who don’t love us. He links that to our being children of God. And finally, 6th antithesis, Jesus said, you’ve heard that it was said, love your neighbor and hate your enemy.

But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your father in heaven. Now, there’s no commandment in the Old Testament to hate your enemies. I’m sorry if you were looking for that. Okay. That’s not a commandment of God.

But Jesus commandment to love our enemies is directly taken from the law. In fact, Jesus commands us to love our neighbors. And he says that Leviticus 1918, that loving our neighbor is the second greatest commandment. When he was asked what the greatest commandment was, that’s what he was quoting there. Da Carson says that this 6th antithesis, or antitheses, loving our enemies, has the least jewish precedent.

Some jewish groups, like the Essenes, emphasized hatred toward outsiders. Craig Keener adds that prayer for one’s persecutors, except that God would strike them dead, had not generally been characterized even of the most pious in the Old Testament. But loving your enemies was not unprecedented in the law. Exodus 23, for example, says, to return your enemies wandering animals. And proverbs 25 21 says, if your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat, and if he is thirsty, give him water to drink.

And those are just two examples. Loving your enemy is based in the idea that everyone is created in God’s image, even those who don’t love us, even those who are hard to love. And Jesus teaches that loving only your friends are those who reciprocate. Good to you. That won’t get you very far with God.

In fact, it makes you no better than a complete pagan, somebody who doesn’t even believe in God. Jesus says he causes God, causes his son to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteousness. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others?

Do not even pagans do that? And so the antidote, the cure for this disease, this poison of sin, this cancer of sin, this retribution that we seek, this retaliation and revenge that we seek, is to forgive and to serve and unconditionally love others just like Jesus. If we take these last three antitheses of Jesus into consideration, what we can learn about living in the kingdom of God, about becoming children of God, is that our character as God’s children need to reflect his character as our father in heaven. And I want to break this down specifically in three ways that we’ve already discussed. But I want to make these more specific for us.

And this is not necessarily a Father’s Day sermon. These are things that apply to all of us. When I think about how I can be a good dad, when I think about how I can be a good husband, these principles of being faithful to my word, of seeking justice, but not revenge and loving unconditionally. These are at the heart of what it means to be a good father like our heavenly Father is. But again, these are principles that we can all apply to our lives.

So here’s what they are. First of all, we are to be worthy of trust by being faithful to our word. A true disciple of Jesus keeps their word. We have no need to invoke God as our witness. Do you realize what’s at risk when we deceive other people as christians?

When we don’t stick to our word? It’s not just our character that comes into question. It’s not just our trustworthiness that’s ruined. People tend to question God based on our lack of trustworthiness. It’s more than just standing for us before others that’s at risk.

We could potentially make others look down on God, even when in reality we’re just demonstrating that we don’t know God as well as we claim if we’re not trustworthy. Now, that may sound harsh, but Jesus says that what we speak comes from our hearts. And if deceit comes out of our mouths, then that means that there is deceit in our hearts, and we’ll speak it, and we’ll have truth in our hearts when we speak it from our lips. And when we do that, we’ll have the freedom to trust one another. But when we can’t trust one another, when we have to protect ourselves from being deceived by one another, that’s what destroys the character of God’s people.

That’s what brings the church down and what cheats us of the reward that we’re supposed to be experiencing together in God’s kingdom. It’s not that taking an oath is wrong. People are going to take oaths. People should take oaths of office, and they should actually stand by the words that they say from that paper.

People are going to make vows. If you’re ever testifying in court and you’re swearing that you’re going to tell the truth, you better tell the truth.

But God’s people should be so trustworthy that o’s are completely unnecessary, merely a formality in otherwise trustworthy relationships. And if we want to be trusted by other people, we don’t need a new strategy for negotiating or courses on how to be perceived as a more believable person. We need Jesus in our hearts. We need Jesus to transform our hearts so we can become children of God and always speak the truth and be relied upon when we say that we’ll show up. I think of the example of our wedding vows.

If you stood at the altar of marriage and you’ve made vows, those words that you speak at the altar, they better not be the only thing that keep you in that relationship. They should be a reflection of the reality that is already there, the love that you have for life with that person that you’re marrying. And if it’s only your vows that keep you faithful to your spouse, then what good are they anyway? They’re not truthful. But God is just, and he wants us to tell the truth.

God is just, so we’re to seek justice, not retaliation. It’s right for us to want to see justice prevailing. But we cross a line whenever our ego gets in the way, and we retaliate to prove ourselves right. When we’re wronged or stronger than others or superior to others, we’re not God’s moral police. That’s not our job.

Retaliation of your own insecurities shows that we have to prove ourselves and that we don’t trust God. And again, that may sound harsh to say that you don’t trust God if you must retaliate. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t defend ourselves or our families, as some people wrongfully interpret. Turning the other cheek to say that you can’t defend yourself. According to God’s law, which is eternal, we have the right to defend ourselves from harm, and evil should be punished.

But we aren’t required to seek retribution, as some in Jesus day taught. Nor should we escalate an offense to take vengeance for ourselves. As Paul the apostle writes in romans 12 17 19, do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everyone, if it is possible, as far as it depends on you. Live at peace with everyone.

Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath. For it is written, it is mine to avenge, and I will repay, says the Lord. It can be hard to maintain a balance between justice and vengeance. It requires once again, that we rely on the Holy Spirit and discernment from the word of God to help make our value judgments about what is right and what is wrong from God’s perspective, not from our own perspective, and not necessarily even from the civil law or from popular opinion. For example, the apostles and Jesus followers who went on to start the church, they were ready to disobey the jewish governing authorities when they were ordered to quit preaching the gospel.

As Peter said in acts 529, we must obey God rather than human beings. But Peter also wrote in one, Peter two. To this you recalled, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example that you should follow in his steps. When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate. When he suffered, he made no threats.

Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly. He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed. There are times when it is right in God’s eyes for us to avoid harm, to seek justice in times, to not allow people to walk all over us. But it’s also possible at times that we’re being called to suffer for our faith.

One thing throughout all of that is constant, and that’s the final thing that we’re to love even our enemies unconditionally, just as God loves us. Our ultimate example is Jesus himself. The reality of the kingdom is that Jesus gave his life to save the entire world, including us. Even while we were still enemies of God, Jesus gave his life. God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

Michael Wilkins says, the key to understanding that kind of love is the word gave. God’s generosity as our father means that he gave his son, and the son freely gave his life so that we might live. As Jesus was prepared to go to the cross, the apostle John tells us, having loved his own who are in the world, he loved them to the end. Another translation of that reads that he now showed them the full extent of his love, and the full extent of Jesus love meant giving his life for us on the cross. And that’s the profound nature of Jesus’s unconditional love toward us.

And it becomes not only his love toward us, it becomes our example of what our love should look like toward others, including our enemies. As Paul writes in romans five, God demonstrates his own love for us in this while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. For if while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life? True disciples of Jesus love what God loves, and they have a renewed heart to love sinners, even those who sin against them. Loving your enemies doesn’t condone their behavior, but it engages them so that God can reconcile them through the gospel.

What we learn in all of this, and what you should take away from today’s message, if you’re gonna take anything away. It should be this, that God’s children are trustworthy, just, and they love unconditionally like their perfect father. God’s children are trustworthy, just, and they love unconditionally like their perfect father. So how can we put this teaching of Jesus into practice? I think first of all, we need to ask ourselves, we need to ask ourselves regularly, every single day, if we need to, if our lives align with the teaching of God’s son, if we want to be children of God, if we want God to be our father, then we need to live as his son lived.

And so we need to reflect on that question. Do our lives align with the teachings of Jesus and the life of Jesus? And wherever we find that our lives are out of alignment with Jesus, it means that we need to go to God and we need to seek forgiveness. And we need to seek help from the Holy Spirit to make the necessary adjustments that we need in our lives. Last week we talked about the bill of rights in the sermon on the mount being these antitheses, right?

The beatitudes is kind of the preamble. And so if we have anything that helps us understand all of the sermon on the mount, it’s this so called bill of rights. Not that these are our rights that we assert, but these are things that Jesus teach us how we can live in his kingdom. Last week we said that we need to treat others with dignity that the image of God deserves. We need to remain pure and devoted to our spouses as God designed.

And from Jesus teaching this week, we learn that we need to speak the truth and remain faithful to our word. We need to be honest and transparent in all of our interactions, at home, at work, at school, online, right in our professional and academic lives. We need to be reliable and responsible. We need to keep a high ethical standard in our work and our studies. We need to avoid shortcuts and strive for excellence.

We need to avoid a false image that we’ve created for ourselves in deceitful behavior, whether that be in person or, like I said, online as well. You can’t post things on social media that are contrary to your life in Christ and then come to church and worship and have it be okay. Jesus wants our lives to change.

We need to seek to forgive, to serve and love others unconditionally, to resolve conflicts peacefully and quickly if possible. We need to avoid escalating situations, to seek and seek to understand others from their perspective. We need to practice forgiveness, even when it’s difficult. Today may be the perfect day to practice that forgiveness, to let go of grudges, to seek reconciliation, to respond with grace and leave room for God to seek justice. Speaking of justice, we need to advocate for it.

We need to get involved in causes that promote justice and fairness, as God would have us do by volunteering, by supporting organizations that fight for the oppressed. We need to stand up for those who can’t stand up for themselves, including the poor, the marginalized, those who are treated unjustly, all the while doing that. We need to avoid personal vengeance. We need to not hesitate to defend ourselves and others from harm. But we also need to not hesitate in showing kindness to everyone that we meet, regardless of how they treat us or if they’re difficult to love.

And finally, we need to learn from and emulate the perfect life of Jesus in all of our relationships. We need to strive to emulate Jesus sacrificial love to all people, to put others needs before our own, to love them unconditionally, to ask God to help us love those who are hard to love as he loves them. We need to teach and model all of these values to our children and our family members and our homes. We need to show them what it means to be trustworthy and just and loving. And we need to get involved in serving both inside the church and out in the community and use those opportunities to practice and demonstrate these values to mentor others in the community and in the church, guiding them on how they can live these principles out in their lives as well.

We’re all in this together as the church. We find accountability and we help each other stay true to the values that were taught by Christ. And we can share in these struggles together. But we can also celebrate together as God’s children. When we get this right.