The Christian and Lust - Matthew 5:27-30
This
past year, Tom Magliozzi of Car Talk fame passed away (Nov. 3, 2014). Although the Magliozzi brothers stopped
airing new shows back in 2012, Tom’s passing sounds the end of an era. I used to really enjoy listening to their
radio show on Saturday mornings on the NPR station in which they would give
advice – often really funny advice – to callers who were having problems with
their cars. I’ll never forget one show
in particular. As far as I can remember
it, here’s how the call went. A young
lady called in about her father’s car that had died years ago – and as the call
progressed, it became obvious that she wanted to know if she was the one
responsible for that. You see, she had
taken her father’s car on a road trip, and during the trip the check engine
light came on. Since the car still
seemed to be working, she just ignored it.
Later, when sounds began to emerge from the engine, she decided she
would fix the problem by putting some tape over the light so it wouldn’t bother
her anymore. She made it home, but the
next morning when her father got in the car to go to work, the car’s engine
basically blew up. Evidently, her father
never suspected her, and years later she was calling Click and Clack, probably hoping
they would tell her, no, she had nothing to do with it.
If
that was her hope, she was grievously disappointed. Not only did they tell her it was her fault,
they actually were able to coax her father’s work number from her and then called
him up at work, told him what had really happened, and then got her – she was
still on the line – to apologize to her father for basically destroying his
car.
Sin
in the life can be a lot like engine trouble.
It doesn’t usually start out with smoke billowing out of the
engine. It usually starts small, but our
conscience, like the check engine light, warns us that if we don’t correct
ourselves and repent, there will be consequences to follow. It is tragic when, like the young lady in her
father’s car, we ignore our conscience, when we put Band-Aids over sin, when we
refuse to follow the sin to the ground and root it out of our lives. It is tragic because it is inevitable that
serious consequences will inevitably follow upon ignored sin, no matter how
small, how invisible to others, how seemingly insignificant the sin started
out.
Unfortunately,
all too often we just put tape over our conscience and keep on sinning. And the reason we do so is often because what
our conscience is warning us about is a sin that only we can see or know
about. That is to say, the sin is in our
hearts and nobody can see into our hearts, and as long as it stays that way, we
think we are all right.
There
are two problems with that reasoning.
First, it is not true that nobody else sees our sin. God sees our sin: “The eyes of the Lord are
in every place, beholding the evil and the good” (Prov. 15:3). “The heart is deceitful above all things and
desperately wicked: who can know it? I
the LORD search the heart, I try the reins, even to give every man according to
his ways, and according to the fruit of his doings” (Jer. 17:9-10). Of all those who might know our sin, we
really shouldn’t be concerned about other people: we ought to be concerned that
God knows and sees our sin. But the fact
is that he sees every sin, no matter how hidden away we keep it.
And
that leads to the second problem with thinking that secret sin is okay as long
as it stays hidden: God will always deal with sin, either in the present in the
form of discipline or in the future in the form of eternal punishment. And since he sees all sin, there is no sin
that will not be dealt with. And in this
connection the words of Hebrews 10:30-31 are significant: “For we know him that
hath said, Vengeance belongeth unto me, I will recompense, saith the Lord. And again, The Lord will judge his
people. It is a fearful thing to fall
into the hands of the living God.”
However,
the fact of the matter is that we all have the tendency to externalize our
obedience to God and be happy with ourselves as long as the way we are living
appears righteous on the outside. It is
a strange thing that although religion has to do primarily with God, we tend
practically to make it primarily about other people.
And
that’s precisely what had led to the false interpretation of Exodus 20:14. Just as the scribes had misinterpreted the
prohibition against murder in a way that ignored the attitudes of the heart
that lead to murder, such as unrighteous anger, even so they had misinterpreted
the prohibition against adultery in a way that ignored the lusts of the heart
that lead to adultery. As John Stott has
put it, “They thus gave a conveniently narrow definition of sexual sin and a
conveniently broad definition of sexual purity.”[1] Thus, Jesus says, “Ye had heart that it was
said [to] them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: But I say unto you,
That whosoever looketh upon a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery
with her already in his heart.” In other
words, “Any and every sexual practice which is immoral in deed is immoral also
in look and in thought.”[2]
A
couple of points need to be made with reference to Jesus’ words in verses 27-28.
First,
the prohibition against adultery and the lust that leads to it is not to be
narrowly restricted to instances of men cheating on their wives or vice
versa. It is a prohibition against all
sexual relations outside of marriage.
Nor is the prohibition directed only against men. Women are not off the hook, as the rest of
the Law demonstrates. Under the Mosaic
covenant, both men and women were punished for breaking the seventh
commandment. So we must not think of
Jesus’ words as applicable only to men.
To define the terms of these verses in such narrow ways is to be guilty
of the very sophistry that Jesus was seeking to correct.
Second,
the emphasis of Jesus’ words is on the desires of the heart, on the imagination
of the mind. According to our Lord’s words here, fantasizing about sin is
sin. The reason is clear: you don’t
usually act out a sin that you haven’t already played and replayed in your
mind. That doesn’t mean that the act of
adultery is not bad; it is. Our Lord
doesn’t repeal the seventh commandment and replace it with something else. The point is that we shouldn’t think that
we’re okay as long as we haven’t committed the act. Rather, we are truly obeying the seventh
commandment if we are fighting the sin on the heart level so that it never
reaches the physical level.
Our
Lord then goes on to in the next two verses (29-30) to apply and motivate the
command of verse 28. “And if thy right
eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for
thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that they whole body should
be cast into hell. And if thy right hand
offend thee, cut is off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee
that one of thy members should perish, and not that they whole body be cast
into hell.”
Here
is how it is applied: if sin begins in
the heart, then we should be very careful about the inlets to the heart. The eye is an obvious one. Lusting is generally preceded by
looking. Eve looked at the forbidden
fruit before she ate it. David looked at
Bathsheba before he sinned with her. So
if your eye causes you to sin by becoming an inlet for sin in the mind, then
you need to pluck it out. Job learned
this: “I made a covenant with my eyes; why then should I look on a maid?” (Job
30:1). Then he goes on to speak of his
heart: “If . . . mine heart walked after mine eyes. . . . If mine heart have
been deceived [enticed] by a woman, or if I have laid wait at my neighbor’s
door” (v. 7, 9). The same is true of our
hands or feet (cf. Mt. 18:8). We need to
be careful about anything that might cause us to sin, that would introduce
sin’s deceitful lies into our mind so that it begins to wrap itself around our
hearts. Jesus is saying what Paul would
later say to the Romans, “Make no provision for the flesh to fulfill the lusts
thereof” (Rom. 13:14).
Now,
it should be pointed out that Jesus was making his point by the use of
hyperbole. He didn’t mean for us to
actually cut off our hands or pluck out our eyes. Unfortunately, some early Christians – like
Origin – took our Lord literally here and mutilated themselves. However, that is a gross misapplication of
our Lord’s words. It should be obvious
that our Lord is not calling for physical mutilation. After all, his whole point is that sin is a
thing of the heart and is to be dealt with on the heart level, and anyone
should be able to see that even if you literally pluck out your eye or cut off
your hand, that doesn’t root sin out of the heart. A blind man can still sin in his
imagination. So mutilation doesn’t fix
what Jesus meant to fix: sin in the heart.
What
was Jesus doing? He was simply putting
in as gripping language as possible the utter necessity of dealing with sin on
the heart level and removing anything that might tempt us to sin in the heart. He is telling us that nothing should be more
precious to us than obedience to God. A
book, a magazine, a movie, a place, a friendship, a job – if it causes you to
stumble into sin, if it provides an opportunity for sin to find a place in your
heart, then root it out, no matter how much it hurts to do so.
With
these words, our Lord is not only helping us apply his command, he is also
motivating us to do so. You see that in
the words, “it is profitable for thee. . . .”
Here is the amazing thing: as bad as plucking out an eye is, as bad as
cutting off a hand is, it is still better for you to do that than to go before
God with an eye that had let sin go into the heart or with a hand that has
become an occasion for sin against God.
Hear
what Jesus is saying. To profit in this
connection is to escape being cast into hell.
Jesus is helping us to put things into perspective. Sin can offer you no sweetness that will make
it worth being cast into hell for it. I
can assure you, on the authority of God’s word, that there is no person in hell
who thinks that the life they lived is worth suffering under the wrath of God
for it.
There
was a man who came up to a pastor and told him that he was in the grip of lust
and was going to commit adultery. The
pastor said something that a lot of pastors would never say, but in light of
Jesus’ words here, I think was entirely appropriate. He grabbed him by the collars, got up in his
face, and told him, “If you do it, you’ll go to hell. Don’t do it.”
Now this pastor believed that all God’s people will be saved and not one
of them will be lost. But he also
believed, and rightly so, that no one can say that they are one of God’s people
if they are living in such blatant sin.
He also knew that warnings like the one in our text are meant to act,
under God, as motivators to obedience so that the saints will persevere. Now I’m not sure that I would have been as
straightforward he was, but it is clear from Jesus’ words here and from his
words in verses 21-26, that those who give themselves to such sin are clearly
in danger of hell-fire. The only way we
can make our calling and election sure is if we are repenting of sin and
walking in obedience to our Lord, if we are becoming the Beatitudes.
Now,
I think at this moment, it’s important for us to stand back and survey what our
Lord has told us about sin in verses 21-30.
We need to hear what our Lord says about sin because otherwise we are
going to be programmed to think about it in the way the culture wants us to
think about it. And of course our
culture wants to either to ignore sin or to make light of it, especially things
like anger and lust.
First
of all, our text tells us something about the
nature of sin. Sin defiles and
pollutes the heart before it ever gets to the surface in overt acts. As Jesus put it in other place, “A good man
out of the good treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is good; and an
evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is evil:
for of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaketh” (Luke 6:45). That is why he hammers things like anger and
lust. Many, if not most, instances of
murder wouldn’t happen if anger didn’t already exist in the heart of the
murderer. No one would commit sexual sin
if it weren’t for lust.
It
also tells us something about the power of sin in the heart. An angry person at first does not suspect
that what they are feeling could very well end up in murder. But how often has it done just that? We must not fool ourselves that we are not
like such people, that we would never commit murder. To say such a thing is just to set you up to
do the very thing. If King David – a man
after God’s own heart – was complicit in the murder of Uriah in order to cover
up adultery with his wife, any of us could do it. Or how often has a hidden sin like
pornography led eventually to enslavement to lust and then unfaithfulness in
marriage? We need therefore to take sin
seriously, not just after it breaks out in sinful acts, but long before when it
is first stirring in the heart.
The
second thing our text tells us about sin is the
seriousness of sin. Sin is not
primarily serious because of the consequences in the here and now. Jesus does not exhort us to steer away from
anger problems because we might lose a job or alienate our loved one – or even
because it might cause us to commit murder.
He warns us against it because sin brings people under the judgment of
God – it exposes them to the danger of hell-fire. The same with lust. Why should you guard your heart? He doesn’t tell us to do so because otherwise
you might commit adultery and ruin your marriage. He tells us to guard against sin in the heart
because a failure to do so exposes us to hell.
We
must never forget that though salvation is all of grace, damnation is all of
man. People go to hell not because of
what God has done but because of what they have done. According to our Lord’s words in John 5:29,
those who will receive the resurrection of damnation are precisely those “that
have done evil.” We must never forget
that “when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is
finished, bringeth forth death” (Jam. 1:15).
We must never forget that whereas “the gift of God is eternal life
through Jesus Christ our Lord”, nevertheless it is equally true that “the wages
of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23). Note that
the death in Rom. 6:23 is contrasted with eternal life. The implication is that the death under
consideration is eternal death.
The
third thing this text tells us about sin is that we need to mortify the sin in our lives. This follows from the seriousness of
sin. If it as bad as our Lord tells us
it is, then we need to mortify it.
“Mortification” is an old word that means “to put to death.” The KJV uses it in Rom. 8:13 to translate thanatao: “For if ye live after the flesh
ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye
shall live.”
There
is a school of thought in the Christian community that teaches that growing in
holiness is the easiest thing in the world, as long as you have enough faith or
believe the right things. But Paul’s
words, and our Lord’s words, should forever put that thought out of our
minds. To deal with sin is to put it to
death. It is to cut off a hand or pluck
out an eye. It can be at times a very
painful experience. You see a picture of
it in Isaiah 6, when after he had confessed the uncleanness of his lips, an
angle takes a hot, burning coal from off the alter and touches his lips with it
to purge the uncleanness. What a painful
experience that must have been! And yet
that is what must be done when it comes to the sin in our lives.
If
you take this passage seriously, you are going to have to amputate anything in
your life that is a temptation to sin.
The thing may be innocent in itself, but if it is for you an occasion to
sin, then you must cut it off.
That
is why it is useless to try to lay down man-made rules at to what a person can
see or where you should go or what you can do.
What may be a temptation to one person may not be a temptation to
another. People have different
temperaments and react to things differently.
What may be a cause of sin to one person may not be to another. However, that being said, we should not take
Christian freedom as an excuse to sin.
Far from it. Our Lord tells us
that we should put to death anything
in our lives that is a stumbling block to us.
If something causes you to sin – no matter what it is – cut it off! As Christians, there are going to be places
that we cannot go because to go there would be to make provision for the
flesh. There are going to be books that
we cannot read or movies that we cannot watch because to do so would be to give
sin an opportunity to gain mastery over our affections and imagination. It is true that some people may not
understand. Some Christians may not
understand! But it is more important to
obey Christ, even if it means plucking out an eye, than it is to avoid being
thought of as a cultural Philistine.
So
put sin to death! Think of this: the sin
that you are toying with in your mind and heart is the very kind of thing that
nailed Christ to the cross. Jesus didn’t
just die for murderers and adulterers.
He died for people who have problems with anger and lust. He bore the wrath of God upon those sins just
as much as he did the wrath of God upon the more open sins like murder and
adultery. God can no more have
fellowship with a man whose heart is full of lust than he can with a man who
has been unfaithful to his wife. God can
no more have fellowship with an angry person than he can with a murderer. All sin is rebellion against God, no matter
what its consequences are for those around us, and God cannot have fellowship
with rebels. That’s why it took the
death of Jesus on our behalf to bring us to God, because all of us are guilty
of breaking the sixth and seventh commandments in our heart and therefore all
of us are exposed to God’s wrath. We
should put our sin to death, because our sin put Jesus to death. If we really believe that, we cannot have a
kind of lazy attitude towards sin.
May
God give us such a heart for holiness, and such a love for his Son, that we
make no bargains with the sin in our heart, but mortify it and put it to death.
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