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Whoever insults his brother or sister will be subject to the court. Whoever says you fool will be subject to hell. Fire. So if you're offering your gift on the altar and there you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar first, go and be reconciled with your brother or sister and then come and offer your gift, reach a settlement quickly with your adversary while you're on the way with him to court, or your adversary will hand you over to the judge and the judge to the officer and you'll be thrown into prison. Truly, I tell you, you'll never get out of there until you have paid the last penny. Lord, we just would ask that you would speak to us through this text. We recognize that some of the material here may come very close to issues of our own hearts and we want to be followers of you, Jesus. We want your kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven. We want you to be the king, not just over an external set of actions or behaviors, but really in our hearts and in our minds. And so Lord, we would pray that you would speak to us this morning through your word and we ask this in Jesus' name, amen.
From verses 21 through 48, Jesus uses a formula to talk about six human experiences. Here's the formula. He starts off the section by saying you have heard that it was said and then he talks, he's going to talk about murder, adultery, divorce, oaths, retaliation and love of neighbor, and he's going to say, here's what that ethical standard actually looks like in my kingdom. Grant Osborne summarizes this section like this. He says six antithesis on murder, adultery, divorce, oves, retaliation, love of neighbor function in two ways. One, they exemplify the better righteousness that Jesus had just demanded. Remember Jesus had said, your righteousness needs to exceed that of the Pharisees and the scribes, and they further explained how Jesus has fulfilled and deepened the law in the new ethics of the kingdom. Another pastor named Timothy Keller says this about this section. There's three slides here, all of which are his from a quote that he gave about this text.
He says the package, and this is a transcript of his sermon. The package is Christianity itself is actually an interconnected set of radically altered relationships. Christianity is an interconnected set of radically altered relationships. Yes, Christianity is a religion, it's a faith. It's many things, but one of the ways to understand it is to think of it as an interconnection or interconnected set of radically altered relationships. This passage shows how they are interconnected. It goes like this. A Christian is someone who has come into a radically new relationship with God because you have come into that new relationship with God. It creates a brand new and unique relationship to yourself, how you relate to yourself because you have come into a brand new relationship and attitude towards yourself. It results in a completely unique and different attitude and relationship to the world and the people around you.
What we're going to see as we go through these six human experiences and as Jesus teaches and brings his kingdom to earth through this teaching, we're going to see that there is this radical new paradigm for interconnected. There's an interconnected radical new take on relationships. So let's look at this. The structure here that I would give to this six verses is that in verse 21 and 22, there's the antithesis between the murder tradition verses Jesus's teaching on anger. In verses 23 and 24, there is this internal illustration where we have the reconciliation with a brother and then in verses 25 and 26 you have an external illustration which is this reconciliation with an adversary. So let's look at these first two verses together. Again, it says you have heard that it was said to our ancestors, do not murder and whoever murders will be subject of the judgment.
He's quoting here from Exodus 20 verse 13. This is the command, this is the sixth command, do not murder, and he references this idea that you'll be subject to the judgment. Back in our verse here he says that you have been told or you have heard that it's said, do not murder and whoever does murder will be subject to the judgment. This is a reference for those Jews at the time who were listening to this. There was due process that a murderer would go through according to Jewish law and the local Jewish court system had a supreme court that would handle capital cases. There were 23 members who would sit and they would adjudicate these serious crimes. And so Jesus is establishing the righteous standard that they were all familiar with. But then in verse 22 he says this, I tell you, everyone who is angry with his brother or sister will be subject to the judgment.
Do you see the repeated phrase here is again subject to the judgment. He's saying, you're familiar with how capital crimes are adjudicated today, but I'm telling you that anger belongs in the same courtroom. That is some strong language. He pairs anger with the same penalty. Now, if you know the Bible at all or you know the life of Jesus right away, there should be some red flags that go up because you know that Jesus himself became angry at points. We know in the Old Testament that there is a term for God's anger burning against not the foreign nations. The anger of God oftentimes burned against his own people. It was literally a metaphor that was used in Hebrew about your nose, his nose getting red hot. That's how the Hebrew would refer to anger or being angry using anthropomorphic language. And so here Jesus is saying, look, anger if you're anyone who is angry belongs in the supreme Court to be judged as a murderer, but yet Jesus himself was angry.
Look at John two 13 through 16. I don't have it here. I'll get to that quote in a second. In John two 13 through 16, we have the story of Jesus cleansing the temple and it talks about Jesus justifies his act literally of turning over tables and making a court whipping these money changers. ACEs, the zeal of your house has eaten me up. We would say that Jesus in that instance that he was angry and there are other times in the New Testament where it talks about in your anger do not sin. And so the question is how do we nuance this? How do we take what Jesus is teaching about anger and understand it as an ethic that doesn't have any small print? We're not going to excuse or try to write away or write out of the sermon on the Mount what Jesus is teaching, but how do we understand it within the context, the broader context of scripture?
What we're going to see is that Jesus is saying anger used improperly, anger that is violating a relationship is what he's talking about. My dad wrote a book about anger in kids and one of the things that he was famous for saying is that anger is good at identifying problems but it's not good at solving problems and this is the idea that Jesus is talking about. We live in a culture that deals extensively with anger and there's at least eight or nine things that I wrote down here on what causes the emotion of anger in us. You have frustration when people feel blocked from achieving their goals or meeting their needs. It can lead to a frustration which can escalate into anger. There's the perceived injustice. Experiencing unfair treatment or witnessing someone else. Being treated unfairly can evoke a strong feeling of anger, a sense of threat, feeling threatened either physically or emotionally can activate the body's fight or flight response which can manifest in anger.
Pain, both physical and emotional. Pain can trigger anger. Underlying mental health conditions, certain mental health conditions such as anxiety or depression can increase a person's susceptibility to anger and irritability. Genetics and personality factors. Some people may have a genetic predisposition to experience anger more intensely or frequently than others. External stressors, this would be calling hangry when you're, or environmental factors such as traffic jams, financial problems or being hungry. Work-related stress can contribute to increased anger levels, lack of sleep or proper nutrition. Our guess that one's more hangry, right? When people are sleep deprived or not eating well, they may be more prone to irritability and anger. Substance abuse, alcohol and drug use can impair judgment, increase aggression, making it more likely for people to express anger in an unhealthy way and learned behaviors, observing anger and aggression in others. So you're as a child, you may watch a parent use anger to achieve means, and so particularly during childhood, it can increase the likelihood of adopting these behaviors for oneself.
So anger is something that we're deeply familiar with. There are a lot of contributing factors on what may cause it and what Jesus here is specifically talking about is this idea of using anger in a way where a relationship is violated. So I think even in that list of different contributing factors, it's important to differentiate between the emotion of anger and the behaviors that flow out of it, which is exactly what Jesus talks about next because he says whoever insults his brother or sister will be subject to the court. Whoever says you fool will be subject of hell. Fire where it says whoever insults his brother, your translation may say, whoever says to his brother Raha, his brother or sister Raha will be subject of the court. That's literally the Aramaic word that's in your original text and it was a condescending or contemptuous or slanderous phrase that was used and it literally means nothingness.
You empty headed person is kind of how he was used, but culturally it was used kind of to say you're a dummy, you are just a nothing on earth. Sky ney who wrote a book on the sermon on the Mount says this, Jesus spoke about a different even more virulent form of anger, which is contempt. His warning about insulting off others is often passed over by modern readers as unimportant. That is a serious mistake. The insulting word he uses was racha, a dismissive term of contempt in his culture that is derived from the sound of clearing your spit from one's throat. This kind of contempt is different from mere anger, contempt sinks to diminish the inherent value of the other person.
So the language that is used, this insulting language, and then he adds to that, he says, the third thing is somebody who says, you fool, this is the Greek word that we get our word moron from you moron will be subject to hell. Fire. So again, Jesus is saying, here's what you've grown up listening to the 10 commandments that say do not murder and you know how that's handled in a judicial way in our culture, but I'm telling you when it comes to my kingdom, anger belongs in that courtroom language that's bringing contempt or slander where you're calling a person a fool that belongs in that same courtroom. The anger Jesus speaks against is that which is harbored in the heart leading to contempt and the dehumanization of others.
Now in the next section, verse 23, Jesus gives an illustration, an internal illustration about what this looks like. So he talks about a worship setting. He says, if you're offering your gift on the altar, think about these disciples they're familiar with, not the Sabbath day and going to their local gathering, but they're talking about literally the festival setting where you would come up to Jerusalem and you'd offer your gift in the temple. You're there worshiping God with your burnt offering. He says in that setting you remember that your brother or sister has something against you. There's a breach in the relationship and no doubt it's felt internally. There's either bitterness or anger that's being harbored in your heart. Leave your gift there in front of the altar first go and be reconciled with your brother or sister and then come and offer your gift. The scenario again is it's temple worship and you remember there in that place of worship that you have a broken relationship and here's the king, the one who deserves all the worship in the world saying, stop worshiping me for a second.
Go and reconcile yourself in this relationship and then come back and resume the worship. Isn't that amazing What's going on? He says, what's going on in your heart is not good. You have social open wounds, you have just brokenness in your relationship with others and that's grounds for putting a pause on your own worship and you need to go and repair that. I want to put in front of you a hypothesis. I'm happy for you to push back on this not in the middle of my preaching, but this is my hypothesis, okay? Because this is little, this statement's pretty far out there and I'm working through this one. God has designed interpersonal relationships to be the primary place for our obedience and worship. Could you chew on that this week? Could you think about that? Because here Jesus is saying, I want you to stop worshiping me and go and get this relationship that's broken from your community, your brothers and sisters.
You've got this broken relationship. I want you to go and get that reconciled. God has designed interpersonal relationships to be the primary place for our obedience and worship. Let me kind of give you a few scriptures to support this idea. Again, I'm not 100% on this. I want you to wrestle with this. Let's have a conversation about it if you want, but here's some other places where this idea is put forward. In John the apostles, he writes some epistles. Here's what he says. If anyone says I love God and yet hates his brother or sister, he's a liar. For the person who does not love his brother or sister whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen, John writes with very stark, it's like a logic that's, I can't think of the word, but he's using a logic where it's just like this.
You can almost write it out as an equation. You can't say that you love God but you hate your brother. You just haven't even seen whom you haven't seen. Verse 21, and we have this command from him. The one who loves God must also love his brother and sister. It's like you don't get to say you can't break up the first and second command that Jesus has loved the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind. The second is like it. Love your neighbor as yourself. You can't separate that the practice of your worship of God is the love for others around you. In the Old Testament, I got to show you this. This is fascinating. In the Old Testament, you have the nation of Israel, right? You have Jewish people who are worshiping God. They're abstaining from food, which you think that's very religious, right?
To literally interrupt your dietary rituals and to fast that person must be really spiritual and that's what the Jewish people are doing at the time of Isaiah and God speaks to Isaiah and this is what he says. They seek me day after day to delight to know my ways. These people are seeking God like a nation that does what is right and does not abandon the justice of their God. They ask me for righteous judgments. They delight in the nearness of God. Those sound like very religious and spiritual people. They say, why have we fasted but you have not seen. We've denied ourself, but you haven't noticed. Here's God's reply. Look, you do as you please on the day of your fast and you oppress all your workers uhoh. You're oppressing all of your workers. In other words, you're not giving due wages to your workers.
You fast with contention. So he's playing with them. He's saying, well, yeah, the way that you're fasting is actually you've got contention and strife to strike viciously with your fist. You're in these fights. You cannot fast as you do today hoping to make your voice heard on high. Will the fast I choose be like this a day for a person to deny himself, to bow his head like a reed and to spread out sackcloth and ashes, will you call this fast a day that is acceptable to the Lord? And he goes on and he says, basically stop it. Stop fasting and go and fix the social ills that exist. Stop oppressing people. Go and defend the weak and the poor. Go and fix what is unjust in society. That's the fast that I have called you to. So again, I put before you just this idea that God is designed interpersonal relationships to be a primary place for obedience and worship.
You see, if you're a scriber pharisee, it's easy to look at the 10 commandments, that sixth command and say, do not murder. And you go through seven days and you get back to church on Sunday. You check the box and you're like, well, I didn't murder anybody and I'm good to go. And he's saying, well, that's the behavior and what Jesus is going to do on these six areas, he's going to take it to a heart level where things bubble up, where things start, where the beginning of words are formulated in the heart. He's going to say, this is not just about the behavior, this is about what's going on in your heart. This idea of just being angry, of saying to somebody, you empty minded Guinea or whatever you would say, it's like you fool or you moron. All of that stuff belongs in this courtroom.
So he goes to verse 25 and 26, verse 25 and 26 is this external, this external illustration of similar ideas. He says, reach a settlement quickly with your adversary while you're on the way with him to the court or your adversary will hand you over to the judge and the judge to the officer and you'll be thrown into prison. Truly, I tell you, you'll never get out of there until you have paid the last penny. There is in this case here an implicit guilt. Jesus is telling the story not as if this court case were going to happen, and it's in question who was right or wrong? You're on your way to this court case and he's already saying the outcome of the court case is that you are going to be thrown in prison. You're not going to get out until you pay the last penny.
Why not settle? Why doesn't this person in this scenario settle the court case? Why don't people around us? Why don't we settle the case early? Why don't we humble out anger in our hearts, pride, resentment. Luke tells the same parable, the same teaching in Luke 12. Here's what it says. Why don't you judge for yourself what is right as you are going with your adversary to the ruler, make an effort to settle with him on the way. Then he won't drag you before the judge, the judge hand you over to the bailiff and the bailiff throw you into prison. I tell you, you will never get out of there until you have paid the last penny. The part that is added here by Luke is this question at the top. Why don't you judge for yourself? It's this appeal to self-awareness. Why don't you judge yourself?
There is with this whole idea of anger. There are occasions where people go through this foolish exercise and are guilty. They don't settle the case. Even if you apply this into more a social setting where there's just a conflict, they don't humble out and settle the case because of a cognitive bias or a cognitive distortion. You remember in the psalm that Marvin read, it's a psalm that David wrote after he had Uriah murdered because he had already slept with Uriah's wife and impregnated her. And then David goes on for a year without repenting to God. He justifies himself, he shut down and God sends to David a prophet and that prophet tells David a parable. And the parable is about a man who has one little lonely lamb who is stolen by a rich man. And the prophet asks David, what should be done to that rich man who steals the poor man's lamb?
And you remember David's expression. David is like, kill the guy, take off his head severe judgment. And the fascinating thing is that the law, the law, the law did not even require that form of judgment to occur. David's judgment, the man was even more severe. It's almost as if there's a cognitive bias or a cognitive distortion where David's feeling the weight of his own guilt, but he's projecting it onto this parable that's told to him and he just goes off. In 2022, there was a study, or lemme just before I go to the study in 2022, he prays this prayer. So the prophet comes to David and says, here's this story and David's response, David's response is, or the prophet's response to David is you are the guy, you are the rich man who stole the little lamb from the poor guy. And David responds in the right way to that sense of conviction.
And he writes Psalm 51 where he just repents. If you ever feel convicted by God of something that you've done wrong, Psalm 51 is there for you as a gift on how to verbalize your repentance. And it's a beautiful psalm. It expresses this just statement of just God, I'm sorry, cleanse me. Make me clean all the way inside you value a broken and a contrite spirit. But one thing it says in there, I think it's verse six, but I am not entirely sure. It says You desire truth in the inward parts. You want a self-awareness. You want me to have a conversation with my self based on truth, not given over to a cognitive bias or a cognitive distortion. The study in 2022 on anger and aggression found that anger is associated with a number of cognitive biases such as attentional biases and hostile attribution biases.
I love these because I can relate to them. Attentional bias is a tendency to automatically focus on certain types of information such as threats or negative stimuli. This can be helpful in some situations such as when we need to be aware of danger. However, attentional bias also can be problematic. It leads us to focus on negative information at the expense of positive information, just how our brain is interacting with reality. And this can lead us to a place of anger and harboring anger because we're not processing life in a healthy way. A hostile attribution bias is a tendency to interpret ambiguous situations. That's a key word there. Ambiguous situations as hostile, even when there is no evidence to support this interpretation. This can lead to anger, aggression, and conflict.
Jesus is appealing to the people in his kingdom to not be factories of anger, not just to stay away from physically murdering people, but to be a people that at the depths of their soul are not holding onto anger and not trying to be the judge that then executes and solves the problem from the place of anger. This week as I was preparing this sermon, I was listening to to another sermon about this text and I had just come from the Compassion Center and as is the case of the Compassion Center, we get all kinds of people that are there and I was working, I had been working with a woman who was being rude and picky about the food she had just received.
This woman was not an intimidating figure, but instead of being direct with my correction of her and giving her boundaries, I had instead treated her with contempt. I had fun. And this is what I was realizing as I was listening to this teaching. I had had fun using my authority to belittle her and not just shut her down. And again, it's like where's my heart in my dealing with a person who was in the wrong, who is behaving poorly? My something not good was going on in my heart. As I was listening to this pastor teach in the text, I felt so convicted because I knew that my heart was messed up. I was not operating from the right framework even though what she was doing was inappropriate. Culturally, we give a pass to anger. We take and we turn anger into forms of entertainment.
If you watched, there's a documentary that I actually haven't watched. I've just heard the summary of it, but it's about the algorithms of social media that they're dialed in to elevate posts that cause feelings of anger and animosity rather than happy feeling. Now, whether that's the case or not, I don't fully know, probably should go, should watch the documentary, but it is the case that those posts that cause anger are the ones that get shared and they get the responses and they get the engagement. And that is beneficial to the company because people stick around and they brew and they get more angry and they stay there on Facebook or Twitter or TikTok or wherever it is. And then the Facebook gets to show that person more ads and they make more dollars. So it is advantageous to stir up those feelings of entertainment. We are a culture that gives anger a pass.
We make movies about vengeance. We expect good patriots to be enraged at particular social ills. We have as a culture, we decide which ones of these ethics to give a pass to and which ones were like, yeah, Jesus, preach it. And this is not one that we like a whole lot. Chronic anger can have significant impacts on our physical and mental health. Here are some of the potential long-term effects of being angry. There is a study done in 2017. The study was called The Relationship Between Anger and cardiovascular Health. A meta-analysis of long-term studies found that anger was associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, including coronary heart, coronary heart disease, stroke in sudden cardiac death, a weakened immune system. This is a study in 2009, the effects of anger on immune function found that anger can suppress the immune system, making people more susceptible to illness and infection, digestive problems. This is a study from 2005, found that anger can exacerbate digestive problems such as heartburn, ulcers, irritable bowel syndrome, and headaches. This is a 2018 study found that anger and hostility were associated with increased risk of chronic headaches.
Anger is not human flourishing. You and I were not designed to live as angry people. Jesus is bringing his kingdom standard not to condemn, but to give us life. We're not condemned. This teaching collides with our life and taken properly exposes our need for grace. The grace of God is poured into our deficiency. This is where God goes to work on us. Jesus wants for us to enjoy his kingdom benefits and it is a kingdom where anger is not harbored. In closing, this is the question I want you to consider. Are you willing to let God deal with your anger? Are you willing to let God's kingdom come on earth in your heart as it is in heaven? Us pray. Lord, we thank you for your word and for Jesus's teaching, we confess to you our own anger and just how our hearts can respond improperly to life. And Lord, we know that we cannot control our emotions, but we can control the way in which we respond to
These registering emotions. And we ask for your help in our hearts that we would not harbor or hold on to these things that are not even healthy for us physically. God, we pray that you would work through us and that this idea of your kingdom coming on earth would be a reality in our hearts. Lord, would you find in us this growth, this spiritual growth that leads us to look more and more like Jesus? Thank you for not being angry with us. Thank you for demonstrating mercy upon us when you looked at us, when you looked at us this morning. We're grateful for that. We ask that you would help and go with us this week. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.