Well, I'm pleased to be with you this morning, here at North Shore Church, or as my two-year-old son has come to call you, no show church. Don't take offense with that. He doesn't care much about the endings of words. They're not his concern, but he does wear a daddy-going this morning. He's going to no show church. I know you're not no show church, so when I know of you, I really do value your work in the community here. I'm pleased and privileged to be addressing you this morning, hearing the word of God with you. Thank you so much and joy to approaching God in that worship with you. Especially appreciate that corporate prayer. Thank you. Okay. Well, Matthew chapter 5, the passage about anger, verse 21, I'm going to be reading verse 21 through 26. I'm going to read along. You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, do not murder, anyone who murders will be liable to judgment. But I tell you that anyone who's angry with his brother will be liable to judgment. Again, anyone who says to his brother, Raka is answerable to Sanhedrin, but anyone who says you fool will be liable to the fire of hell. Therefore, if you're offering your gift at the altar and they are remembered that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar, first go and be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift. Settle matters quickly with your adversary who is taking you to court, do it while you're still with him on the way, or he will hand you over to the judge, and the judge over to the officer, and you be thrown into prison. I tell you the truth, it will not get out until you've paid the last penny. This is God's word, Father, help my words be useful to you this morning. Well, the passage is about anger, and it divides easily into three sections of two verses each, so that's how we're going to explore them together this morning. The crime our anger is, the priority of dealing with our anger, and the debt that our anger creates. So, I invite you to keep your bibles open if you have them to refer back to you. Verse 21-22, tell us how our anger is a crime, 23-23-24, how our anger is a priority to be addressed, and 25-26 how our anger is a debt demanding justice. Before we dig into that, let me give you two preliminary to help you understand this passage. First, it's a personal matter. Many of these addresses, we're reading here in the sermon on the Mount, many of the addresses that Jesus gives are in the plural. You are the fault of the earth as a plural. You are the light of the world, second person plural. You have heard it that it was said, plural. But when you get into these little vignettes on the Ten Commandments, Matthew records Jesus as using singular, second person singular. When you are at the altar, you're getting your gift to the altar. So, make friends quickly with your adversary, second person singular. The Jesus is making us a very personal affair. He's saying, this is about you. This is about you. And not all of us is about you. Don't need to worry you with that. This is the way Jesus insists that we think about our anger. And this is a crucial frame of mind for dealing with our anger when we get angry. It's about your personal decisions. The reason I can come and preach on this passage to you today is not because I'm such a great guy, but because I'm not, somebody with whom the Lord has had a lot to do with anger. You can just ask my wife, I didn't bring her with me today. But you could ask her if she would tell you. We've been married not 11 years. And often, ever since we've been married, we've been having a weekly meeting on the nuts and bolts of running the household, balancing the checkbox and so forth. I remember earlier in those years, the first years of our marriage, I would get so angry when she made a mistake balancing the checkbox and something like that. And I would get so angry. She would come to dread those times of the week when we were going to have this meeting. She knew I wasn't going to hit her, but it didn't matter. It was the subtle program I would dispense to her. The condemnation that I would give out to her that just wounded her. And it was over a number of years that I began to see, you know, it wasn't she who had the big problem. It was I. And the Lord used this passage to do it with me. So I had to understand this as a very personal matter, very personal matter. The second thing is there are three main characters involved in all six of these verses. And keeping them distinguished is the key to understanding what's going on here. So let me ask you to try to identify them. Who are there three main characters? Let's just take verse 22. These are framed three different characters. Who's involved there? Anyone tell me? One of them? Well, he's the one telling the story. That's a good answer. Always safe to say Jesus. You've heard about the Sunday school teacher who asked her class. She said, now, what's small and gray with a big fluffy tail and runs around carrying nuts? And a little girl raised her hand in front of her own and said, yes, she said, well, you know, it sure sounds like a squirrel, but I know the answer must be Jesus. So there's a safe answer, but he's the one telling us the story. How about the people in the story? Who is that? Very good. Very good. You nailed them. That's right. There's you who got angry. There's your brother, more a rock a guy. And there's the judge. And in verse 22, there's three different expressions. But behind all of these judgment stands the ultimate judge. God. So it's you, your brother, major angry, and God the judge, okay? Keep them straight through this. Okay, let's look at verses 21-22, the crime of anger. Now you might look at that. First thing, you know, these are about three liabilities that are getting more and more serious. That you're getting more and more guilty in the three things. But actually, they're all about really being guilty of death. Okay, this being subject to judgment in verse 22, you know, it's the same expression that Jesus used in verse 21 about murder. That you've heard of and said that if you murder, you're subject to judgment. And we know that and then death. These are liabilities for death. You're guilty of death. If you murder, that was the law that it produced was by. So that's what it must mean in the next verse, too. Jesus says you get angry with your brother, you're guilty of death. Okay, the second situation is really the same judgment next time before a higher court, the Sanhedrin. And the third one, you know, really in Jesus' mind there isn't a whole lot of difference between what sends you to death and what would send you to hell. These are sins that that would cause both. The really Jesus is saying the same thing, three pronouncements of death, death, death, double death for this murder in our heart. So you got to keep that in mind. It sounds very harsh, doesn't it? You know, just for getting angry, it's maybe expressing that anger, dismissing our brother, it sounds very harsh. So some commentators in trying to understand what Jesus was saying here saying, well, you know, maybe Jesus means exorbitant anger. And maybe he means when you get really angry, that's what he's talking about. But the problem with that idea is that there are a number of words in colonial Greek for expressing anger, different degrees of anger, just like in English. Now you could say, God got angry, or the guy got angry, or the guy got livid, they're the same in English. And the writer of this gospel is a skilled literary craftsman, and he could have chosen other words to express what Jesus was saying here. He could have used, you know, stronger words, be a preamine, a stronger word for anger, and mind on mind. Okay, sumahero, you know, or brookah, tooth, adonthus, you know, gnashing the teeth. But Matthew doesn't choose any of those. Why? Because Matthew intended to convey that Jesus means, just what your phrasing means, that any kind of expression of anger that would dismiss your brother. That would disparage your brother, your sister. Any kind of denigrating, the image of God in your brother is a horrific crime. You're not the only one who doesn't really want to think that, okay. In fact, right at this point there's an interesting textual variant. You know, we have a lot of, one of the reasons why the New Testament is so reliable, because we have so many ancient documents, ancient Greek texts, copies of the manuscript. And here, right at this point, there's a variant reading in some of the texts that says, get angry with your brother without cause. Like, if you're reading an old King James Version, it would have that reading. He was angry with his brother without cause. And some of your modern translations might put that in the margin, if you look, and you say, at the bottom of the page, it might say, some manuscript ad without cause. Well, where does that come from? Well, it's true that from the second century, second, third century onward, there are many Greek manuscripts that have that reading in it. The earliest ones do not. The papyrite version of this gospel doesn't have that. So you could see what happened, actually, as the scribes were copying this, they were trying to explain what Jesus meant, clarify what he meant for their readers. They're really having the same impulse that you're having right now, desire to soften what he's saying a little bit. So they add this as a clarification that, you know, he can't mean that. He can't mean that for calling my husband a fool on where the hell can't mean that. But he does. These are trying to convey that something much less than murder makes the guilty of death. Much less. You see, let me try to show you how. If Jesus said one of those other things, if he said anger without cause, or he said an inordinate anger, then, you know, we could justify ourselves every time we got angry. There's always a cause. When do you get angry, and there's no cause. Anybody here get angry when we're no reason at all? There's always a cause. That's not a clarification. That's an excuse. Similarly, if you say inordinate anger, you know, when you're angry, it never seems like you're inordinately angry, doesn't it? It never feels like it's over the top to you. But Jesus knows that. He doesn't give us that out. He knows that even if it's a rightful or righteous anger, very quickly enough to turn into something unrighteous. It doesn't respond to the glory of God. It doesn't respond to the benefit of our brother, the benefit of our sister. It's uncontrolled. So if you're not responding to God in your anger, and it leads you in some way to devalue your brother, the image of God and your brother, you're in serious trouble. That's what he's saying. And that's really what he's trying to get at. The sin of murder is really start out in our hearts. He desired a crush that which crosses us. It's a desire for revenge sometimes to extract pain and sometimes that expressing contempt to somebody.
Well, at first glance in this passage, you might look and you might think as well that he's talking about three increasing crimes. Now let's take a look at what he's actually saying here in these crimes. He's actually doing just the opposite. But what he's really doing here is opposing the casus tree of the rabbi. The Pharisees at the time, they would think and think and they would try to come up with these rules to assign varying degrees of guilt for a sin, for a behavior. The various degrees of sinning and a behavior. If you swear about a temple itself and break your vow, well, yeah, that's not so serious. If you swear about a goal of the temple, now, that's serious. It's stuff like that. So what I want to read to you is that it's a quotation from the Babylonian Talmud to show you the kind of teaching that they were getting at the time. Here's a quote from the Talmud. The Talmud says that if a man calls his neighbor a slave, he could be excommunicated. If he calls him a bastard, he has to receive 40 strikes. If he calls him a male factor, this is the cost of his life. This is the didactic milieu into which Jesus came. This is what he's setting his teaching about again. Actually, Jesus is being sarcastic here. He's using the form of the teaching at the time to make fun of the form. He's trying to point out that, you know, they try to assign different degrees of guilt to a sin of anger. It's worse than unhelpful because it distracts you from the real problem, which is murder in your heart, at which, you know, to which your vilification at times testifies. And you can see how he's making fun. He appears in the abuse of terms that he chooses. Raka from the Aramaic Recha. It means empty or worthless. So he used as a derogatory of the time with a common term. It's not uncommon in a rabbinic writing to express disparagement. Many do consider this a harmless derogatory. But more as, the next one, that he says, it means pretty much the same thing. More as, from which we get the English word, what? More on. I mean, philologically, he can't really distinguish something getting worse and going from numstall to moron, you know. He's doing that on purpose. He's just common terms of the program at the time. There's no crescendo sin here. It's going on. He's using the form to make fun of the form, you see. And in fact, he includes the first indictment of just getting angry, not saying anything even. Because he knows that, if he didn't, we would all become very skillful, fair, sayable, rabbis. And Clayna, since we didn't use the word numstall, we didn't use the word moron, and we're innocent, you know. And he also knows that expressing the anger of unrighteous anger, it come up enough. They come out differently in different individuals. They come out in different cultures, different families. It comes out differently. Now, you might, I don't know, maybe you grew up in a household where it went something like this. Oh, Paisan, you didn't take out the garbage again. God, are you giving me a whistle of sun? But he's just trying to say, you know, that's not kind of a worse thing than if you were raised in the household where the raising of the left eyebrow, eight tenths of the centimeter, following two clearly indicated, clearly indicated. If you had dishonored, all our ancestors, you are unworthy to breathe the air in the vicinity of this pagoda. So it's all a problem, it's all condemnation, but rather it's all murder in the heart of what Jesus is trying to say. So that's what's going on. I can't hide that this contradicts the modern take on anger. If you go to therapy, you're liable to be told that your emotions are not good or bad, they just are. Anger is a neutral thing. I can't hide that Jesus is contradicting that. Because in the biblical view, anger is neither neutral nor a thing. It's always good or bad or a mixture of both. And it's not a thing, it's an action that we perform as our whole selves. In the biblical view, we were made to get angry, but very often what we see in ourselves is a twisted form of that good, not responding for God's purposes in our anger. So you know, the only thing I could say to you, when your therapist gave you that baseball bat and told you to hit the pillow like it was your mother, did that really help you get over your anger with your mother? I mean, sure, it felt good at the time. It feels so good to then our anger. It's kind of like scratching in a fetal bite. But did it really help you in the long run? Get over anger with your mother. In the Bible view, you know, that's not going to solve your problem. Anger's not there's things to be said. It's a moral act. The Jesus teaching us that murder comes into our lives because it comes into our heart more often. Then we think, okay, we got that. Move to the next two verses. Okay. The priorities that Jesus assigned to managing our anger. Now verse 21 to 22 implies that my brother has wronged me or at least failed my expectation. You get that impression. That's why you're mad. But notice the verse 23 to 24, the pagals don't turn. Therefore, I said therefore there, same subject, remember, same three characters. Anger me, God, blockhead brother. Thank people involved here. But now we're talking about his brother having something against me. Against me. That's no fair. What does me do the stupid thing? What does me who failed? My brother. Jesus, how could you say my brother had something against me? Do you know what he's done to me? Do you know how many times he has done it? He has years as a genius here. He never tells us what the brother has done. He doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. But murder says because of this fault, I feel that I have every right to disparage, every right to condemn, every right to dismiss, every right to express some contempt. Even if it's subtle. These are keepers ignorant of the brother's act because it's the nature of murder to justify yourself, to justify itself, especially incapable people, especially people from natural counties. Because we know how to do things here. We do things right. We have integrity. We get our gift to the altar. Now, we're the ones here at the altar with our gift. Not this. More on. We despise those who don't. But Jesus says, you know, this is not just a little fault in an otherwise nice life. This is deep fault. If we spend in our anger, ours is probably the worst thing. And the activity that he picks to contrast this is service to God. He contrasts reconciliation with service to God. You see that? He picks something that the listeners would consider extremely important not to interrupt. To translate it into your life, you got to think of some activity that you would just not interrupt. So this is just too important. I got to get this done. Hold all calls. In Matthew's audience and in Jesus's audience, that would be, you know, religious worship. Actually, accomplishing something for God, feeling something for God. Here's his argument. If you should interrupt this highest priority activity, actually accomplishing something for God to be reconciled to your brother, then it must mean that activities of a lesser priority take a back seat to this reconciliation. You see that? This must mean that our other work, all our other work, our income producing work, our leisure, you know, our home maintenance, our schooling. It all takes a back seat. These chooses the most extreme activity so everything else falls up underneath. Jesus demanding that if you have an issue to be reconciled with your brother, that means your whole life should stop. Turn off that machine, put your laptop into send mode, and you go do what you need to do to be reconciled. So in doing that, you see, he's assaulting the other justification that we use in our anger. We justify it by thinking, well, you know, I'm right. And I have this, I've done well. And this brother has interfered with this important thing getting done. And he's saying at that moment, your relationship with your brother is more important. It can't be dismissed at that moment. So the sake of some higher cause, which is just what our anger would try to do. Because in the kingdom of heaven, relationship preempts accomplishment. So he's saying relationship predominates accomplishment.
Now, this should hit you hard. Not if it hasn't, you know, perhaps we should go on to the last two verses. It gets worse, actually.
In these next two verses, Jesus or Matthew in his arrangement, you read these by themselves and you might think, oh, you know, he's just packing on an unrelated couplet here. Make friends while you're in the way before litigation. It sounds like he might be just adding a nice proverb here. It sounds like one of the problems doesn't it? You know, don't go hastily to court. Or it sounds like something you might get at the end of a new program, right? Oh, and by the way, if you're ever involved in a lawsuit, try to avoid litigation. Lawyers are expensive and you never know how it may turn out. And this has been another tips for living brought to you by Jesus. Is that what he's doing? No, that's not what he's doing. See, you might think that if you lose the three characters, but look, same three characters involved. You're talking about the same stuff, talking about judges and judgment and reconciliation and punishment. Do we know? Same three characters, same stuff. If he's changing the metaphor just slightly, again, to show us that our anger is not only a crime, it's not only a priority to be addressed, but it's a debt. It's a debt that must be paid to the last penny. The last could be drawn to it. Now, you should be figuring out what Jesus's point is by this time. Guess who's on trial? Is it the brother? Yeah, it's me. It's angry me. I'm still on trial. And this is always the struggle of anger. You know, when we're angry in a relationship, we must always turn the tables and realize that we're the one on trial. The art will be the worst thing if we kill our brother by cutting the sensitive words, by dismissive attitude, by putting a damning spin on his action. If you get angry with the close one in your relationship, you're already on the way to court at the Jews that are trying to say, we are the accused. We need to be reconciled with our brother before we sin or else we'll come into judgment at God's hand, because there is justice. And if you're despising weakness, you're on the wrong side of it in God's kingdom. Now, I don't know why it's NIV, so many of you are reading the NIV. I don't know why it makes it on verse 25 on 13. In a Greek, it says that you will be thrown into prison. And Jesus' energy in verse 26 emphasizes that. What is he saying? Your opponent will hand you right over to the judge who will hand you right over to the officer who will throw you right into jail and throw away the keys. That's the point he's trying to make. He just means that the judge will take one look at this case and he won't think twice. Do you call your brother a blackhead? Off with you. Now, are there any attorneys here? Now, be honest. If you're a lawyer, you should have been, okay, this is Math Law County, sure. Okay, well, you should be able to identify with what's going on there. If you ever go in as a young attorney, going into court, and you had a case on your hand, and you were going in there thinking, boy, you know, this is subtle. There are mitigating factors here. There are complex factors that are going to determine how this case is going to turn out. But it's going to be a hard one to judge. This is complex. You got into court as a nice green attorney there, and the judge took one look at you and said, get a clue. You know, I hear about 50 of these types of cases a month, and you are out of here. You know, go read the case, you're done. And he sent you out faster than revolving to work. Jesus is saying the same thing here. He's saying, you got angry with your brother. Then shut case. You're done. And you have no chance to plead. I was like your honor in mitigating circumstances. You don't know what he did. You shut up. You're out of here. You see what he's saying here for justice in God's eyes. This is a no brainer. That's what he's saying. Well, if that was all Jesus said, I could end the sermon there. I could send you off a thoroughly taught and thoroughly depressed people. There's one more sentence which we better read, the most important, really. He said, you'll be put in this prison, and you'll have to stay there until this day. To the last cadrant is the last tiny pen. That's what he's saying. The only thing missing from that sentence is a sinister laugh. Do you sense that? It's like, and here you will say in this dungeon Mr Bond, dangling from these chains with aggregators nipping at your toes, for the rest of your natural life. Is that what it sounds like? You're going to stay until the last tiny. Isn't this fear sweet Jesus? What a savior. What a friend. Rubbing my nose in the dirt here. Is that what he's doing? No. You know, Jesus is no idiot. Give me a favor. When you read your Bible, don't read the gospel like Jesus is an idiot. You know, it's during certain well that this is not a debt that you can pay. You could never pay this debt. You could never make restitution for this crime. You could never fix this priority enough. You could never do it. I mean, the realization should have been dawning on you while I've been talking to that. You're the guilty of death, guilty of hell. Ten of thousands of times over. You've devalued, you've written off, you've denigrated your close ones, you've nagged or jived or emotionally manipulated your adversary. You've just tens of thousands of times in your life if you add them up. And each one of them has to be paid in full to the last penny with death. You should be realizing that you cannot pay this debt. How could you? So why is Jesus saying that when it's a debt I cannot pay? Well, let me tell you, he is using what theologians call the second use of the law. And we could see it on the text different horizons. If you were in Jesus' audience there, preaching this open air sermon, he's trying to bring people to him to their needs for forgiveness. And Matthew in this gospel, he's editing many years later, he's framing this whole sermon in something we call the gospel. The apostles who wrote about Jesus really invented a new genre of literature when they wrote. They invented this thing called the gospel, which they were very careful not to separate the teachings of Jesus from the life of Jesus. And sometimes you read in biblical studies, you get scholars who postulate their existence of other documents, queues that the apostles put out. And just with the teachings of Jesus, don't you believe that? The apostles would never separate the teachings of Jesus from the life of Jesus. Why? Because they know how you feel right now. They know that if that was ever separated, you'd be crushed. Imagine if you've got the sermon in the mail without any other accompanying revelations. You just got that in your mailbox one day. Dear reader, here is how God looks at your life, the end. Would you be overjoyed if that would be happy? You would be crushed if you read it and understood it. These are God's standards. So Matthew is very careful to frame what he's saying here that Jesus' words are in the context of this gospel. Because what he's saying is, remember, this is Jesus talking, and there's very ones who's bringing you this word, is the one who has paid this debt for you. This is a debt that you could not pay, but someone else has paid it for you. It's very one who's teaching you through these words. Jesus took this debt of your anger completely upon himself and bore it. He paid the last penny with the last drop of his blood for you. So he ends this discourse with a hint of that judgment. He's really talking about the final judgment there, that debt that must be paid. If you reject this teaching or reject him, then you do have to pay that debt. But if you believe in him and if you trust in him, then you already have payment for that debt of thousands of times because he pays it for you. If you believe in him, then he already has paid it for you. Let's pray. Jesus, you are the one, you are the surgeon who cuts the heel. You lay open our sins so that we would come before you for forgiveness. What I pray that that happens here this morning in a renewed way from many of us. Your wisdom is so deep, Jesus. Your teaching is not only a clarifier of what is true for our worldview, not only a lamp for our feet to guide us in our behavior, but your words are so good and so true to be a comfort to us that our souls need desperately in their efforts. Amen. Would you please stand with us. The last two come now found of every blessing. One of the beautiful illustrations.