by Erica Fitzgerald
(Note: While this article was written with elders’ wives and other Christian women in mind, we hope all of our readers will enjoy it and share it with others who might benefit from it.)
“You have heard it said . . . But I say to you . . .” Six times in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus repeats this phrase—not to discard the Old Testament laws (Matt. 5:17) but to bid people to rethink their superficial interpretations of them. They had been saturated with religious teaching that focused only on outward behavior. He wanted their hearts.
When Jesus came on the scene, the religious atmosphere in Israel was charged with legalism and hypocrisy. In the roughly 400 years between the Old and New Testaments (known as “the silent years”), there was no writing prophet in Israel, and people drifted ever further from the spirit of God’s laws as they endured life under the control of successive world powers: Persia, Greece, and finally Rome. Against this backdrop of political turmoil and silence from God, the Pharisees emerged and gained traction. They elevated oral tradition with Scripture, piling heaps of manmade rules on top of those in the Torah. Jesus vehemently denounced them: “Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites . . . You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men” (Mark 7:6, 8).
It’s one thing to steer clear of unclean foods
and another thing entirely to rid ourselves of the uncleanness in our hearts.
But wait—isn’t Jesus’ teaching more stringent than that of the Pharisees? How could he accuse them of legalism when he was taking the law of Moses to a whole new level, comparing “everyday” sins like anger and lust with murder and adultery? How could he denounce them for loading people down with unbearable burdens (Matt. 23:4) while himself raising the standard of conduct so impossibly high?
The answer? It’s all about the heart. Jesus’ problem with the Pharisees was that they “neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness” (Matt. 23:23). God’s law boiled down to two things: loving him and loving others (Matt. 22:37-40).
It’s simpler to just love God and others than to adhere to hundreds of “do’s” and “don’ts.” But it’s not easier. It’s one thing to steer clear of unclean foods and another thing entirely to rid ourselves of the uncleanness in our hearts—especially when it comes to conflict with others.
Jesus’ bar-raising in the Sermon on the Mount points to two realities: one, God cares about our thoughts and motives, not just our outward actions. And two, his standard of righteousness is so high that we couldn’t dream of meeting it by our own merit. We desperately need the forgiveness and grace of the one who is “just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus” (Rom. 3:26).
J. Gresham Machen wrote, “The Sermon on the Mount, rightly interpreted, then, makes man a seeker after some divine means of salvation by which entrance into the Kingdom can be obtained. Even Moses was too high for us; but before this higher law of Jesus who shall stand without being condemned? The Sermon on the Mount, like all the rest of the New Testament, really leads a man straight to the foot of the Cross.”
Applying a higher law to human conflict
When Jesus speaks of murder in the Sermon on the Mount, he’s talking about an outward action that reveals an inward problem—one we all have. If getting through life without killing anyone were God’s standard, we might be tempted to think we can earn our own righteousness. But it’s not so easy to make it through life—or even a single week—without getting angry.
If anyone knows how to deal with conflict, it’s Jesus, who was falsely accused, wrongly rebuked, deserted by friends, betrayed by an enemy, beaten, mocked, and killed—all the while, praying, “Father, forgive them” (Luke 23:34). In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus lays out several principles for dealing with our people problems and the sinful tendencies they arouse in us. And the common thread that binds them all together is love.
- To harbor unresolved anger against someone is to sin against them—even if we don’t act on it.
Jesus said, “Everyone who is angry with his brother or sister will be subject to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council” (Matt. 5:22). “The council” was the highest Jewish court, which dealt with the gravest offenses and harshest penalties. It’s not that anger and murder are equally bad; it’s that they are both sinful—and, in God’s book, punishable by death. Thankfully for us, it was the death of his Son in our place.
Furthermore, Warren Wiersbe explains, “[A]nger gives the devil a foothold in our lives, and Satan is a murderer (Jn 8:44). Satan hates God and God’s people, and when he finds a believer with the sparks of anger in his heart, he fans those sparks, adds fuel to the fire, and does a great deal of damage to God’s people and God’s church.”
The same is true in our homes. Anger is a common struggle for parents, for when our children disobey, inconvenience us with their needs, and test our patience with their noise and messes, we easily lose our composure. H. Clay Trumbull offers us wise advice: “If the parent is tempted to speak rapidly, or to multiply words without stopping to weigh them, or to show an excited state of feeling, the parent’s first duty is to gain entire self-control. Until that control is secured, there is no use of the parent’s trying to attempt any measure of child training. The loss of self-control is for the time being an utter loss of power for the control of others.”
“It’s what we choose to do with anger and what we choose to do because of anger
that makes it sinful.”
Anger itself is not a sin—even God gets angry. Chip Bell writes on Bible.org, “Anger is initially a response, not a choice. We probably respond with anger so often because we’re fallen—so in that sense even that initial anger is sinful. But it’s not a sin in the sense of a choice I make to disobey God. When it first strikes, I think anger is more of a temptation than a sin. It’s what we choose to do with anger and what we choose to do because of anger that makes it sinful.”
The key to dealing with anger properly is to extinguish it swiftly rather than let it simmer, even if it is justifiable. John Eadie said anger “is to be but a brief emotion, slowly excited and very soon dismissed.”
- Make things right with others—quickly!
Our reconciliation with others matters even more to God than our worship (Matt. 5:23-24)—perhaps because it’s hard to worship when we’re angry with someone.
G.C. Morgan wrote, “God seeks and values the gifts we bring Him—gifts of praise, thanksgiving, service, and material offerings . . . But the gift is acceptable to God in the measure to which the one who offers it is in fellowship with Him in character and conduct; and the test of this is in our relationships with our fellow men . . . Could the neglect of this be the explanation of the barrenness of our worship?”
- Don’t retaliate against those who offend you; love and bless them instead.
Getting slapped on the cheek, sued for your clothes, asked to go a mile, or hit up for money (Matt. 5:39-42) are first-century examples of everyday offenses. Jesus’ instructions to turn the other cheek, give away your shirt and your coat, go the second mile, and give to the one who asks are his way of telling us that the right way to handle an insult is not to retaliate or even to be passive, but to actively bless our offender.
On Bible.org, Dr. James Davis ties this principle back to the beatitudes: “[W]hen we are insulted, we have two choices: we can escalate the conflict with retaliation, or we can de-escalate the conflict. We can be a ‘warmaker’ or a peacemaker. Jesus said in the beatitudes, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God’ (Matt. 5:9). We are peacemakers when we de-escalate these situations of conflict and extend a blessing instead.”
Paul Carter of The Gospel Coalition says Jesus’ command to love our enemies is “arguably the most uniquely Christian teaching in all the Bible”—no one had ever said it before. Loving our enemies might look like praying for someone who has slandered us (it’s hard to hate someone and pray for their genuine good at the same time!). It might look like overlooking a fault, or taking the first step to reconcile with someone who hurt us. It might look like doing another favor for someone who’s always ungrateful. And it might even look like praying for the salvation, well-being, and leadership of the folks in government whose policies we despise.
It’s not hard to love the people who love us; we get no brownie points for that. But God takes notice when we love and pray for those who hate us and persecute us—and we can be sure that he will reward us (Matt. 5:46).
[…] Faces Matter … a good meditation on the verse I mentioned yesterday in our call to worship. Conflict Resolution from the Sermon on the Mount … good points that everyone can use. “The church is like a river. If it gets wider […]