Sermon for MHBC (7 August 2022). You can watch on our website or on Facebook or YouTube.
We live in a world where words like misinformation and disinformation have become part of our common vocabulary. “Just the facts” seems to be a thing of the past—if it ever was a reality in the first place. So we are left wondering what is true, and when it comes to relationships with others we may wonder if we can trust anyone. Jesus shows us in our passage the importance of truth-telling. In a world of deception, his teaching is distinctive, and, as we will see, it is rooted in who God is and what God has done for us.
Let’s start in v. 33: “Again you have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not swear falsely, but shall perform your oaths to the Lord.’
One thing we need to make sure we get right from the beginning is that this language of swearing isn’t a reference to cursing. We are talking about making promises.
It’s not entirely clear what portion of the OT law Jesus is referring to specifically. But one place is especially important. There’s Lev 19:12: And you shall not swear by My name falsely, nor shall you profane the name of your God: I am the LORD.
The surrounding context of that verse concerns dealing properly with others. For example, v. 11 is about stealing and lying, and v. 13 is about cheating and robbing. So the idea of swearing falsely by the Lord’s name is using the Lord to justify deception and manipulation. Here’s an example. Has anyone ever come to you to get you to do something, and then they say, “God is telling you to do this”? I had this experience when I was in college. I met a guy who told me about his company and how they train leaders, so I decided to meet him to see if I could make some extra money. When I met him, it turned out it was just a pyramid scheme. But when I told him I wasn’t interested, he said, “God is telling you to do this.”
That’s a funny example, but we do this in church as well. We use the language of “God told me” to justify all sorts of things. Sometimes we even use it to justify things God has explicitly prohibited in Scripture. We should exercise extreme caution before using God to control or manipulate others. In fact, this is much nearer to the sense of the third commandment, “You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain” (Exod 20:7), than the idea that we wouldn’t say the word “God” wrongly.
Here’s the point that I’m afraid is often missed. We run the risk of missing the point of Jesus’s teaching if we just focus on rigid rule-keeping such as, “Well I won’t make any oaths.” That’s too individualistic to understand what Jesus is saying.
All of Jesus’s teaching in chapter five concerns how we relate to other people. Two weeks ago we talked about anger toward others. Last week we talked about desire toward others. Next week we will talk about revenge. So we should expect that this section on truth-telling also concerns others. That’s also clear in Leviticus 19.
It’s also helpful to consider vv. 31–32, which immediately precede this section. Those verses concern divorce. Marriage is one of the clearest examples of making an oath or a promise. We swear in our vows. Unfortunately, the culture we live in, even among Christians, is that such vows can be easily dissolved if we say, “fall out of love.”
I tell every couple I do premarital counseling with that the person you are sitting beside will not be the same person in three years or ten years. We are always changing. And what you are committing to is not some fuzzy feeling you have today. You are making a covenant, an oath, to be with the other person. And if you’re willing to do that, then you’ve got the foundation for marriage.
Now as we’ve seen in the past few weeks, the human heart is skilled in finding workarounds. In Jesus’s day, using the divine name would have been mostly prohibited, so in order to avoid using the Lord’s name and also to avoid being bound in that way, people would take oaths by other sacred things like the temple or the earth or Jerusalem or their own head. It’s similar to the way we try to convince people we are telling the truth when we say something like, “I swear on my grandmother’s life.”
But as always, Jesus is concerned with the heart. He doesn’t play games with this sort of manipulation. Look at vv. 34–36: But I say to you, do not swear at all: neither by heaven, for it is God’s throne; nor by the earth, for it is His footstool; nor by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. Nor shall you swear by your head, because you cannot make one hair white or black.
Jesus is pointing out that swearing by these things is still bound up in promises that God sees. Heaven is God’s throne. The earth is God’s footstool. Jerusalem is the city of God’s King. And even the hair on our head belongs to God because we have no control over it.[1]
All of these things concern God’s government of the universe. Everything belongs to God and God is sovereign over the universe. But manipulation of the truth whether through deception and lying or trying to manipulate people to serve our purposes are all rejections of God’s sovereignty. Think about it. Why do we twist the truth? It’s about control. We want to control the situation for our benefit. In our attempt to control, we are refusing to recognize who is actually in control. And this is the issue Jesus is addressing.
Look at v. 37: But let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No.’ For whatever is more than these is from the evil one.
Jesus sets forth the idea that his disciples should be basic tellers of the truth. More than this muddies the truth and carries with it some ulterior motive. That motive may well be a lack of humility in trying to control a world governed by God. Or, it may be an attempt to manipulate and harm others as the larger context addresses.
In the earlier Scripture reading, we saw that James 5 has almost identical language. What’s so interesting is that James is addressing the prideful sense of control well-to-do people have. This results in all sorts of attempts to control and manipulate people and situations. But James’s corrective is to wait on the Lord.
DIVINE SIMPLICITY AND TRUTHFULNESS
Truthfulness is grounded in God’s essential nature. Theologians refer to a concept known as divine simplicity. Divine simplicity is the idea that what God is, he is without any deviation. Put another way, there are not parts of God as in a loving part and a holy part. To say that God is loving is to say that he is always loving without any variation. So God is simple, not in the sense of not complex, but in the sense of undivided.
God is not just truthful. He is the source of truth. Everything that is true derives its truthfulness from him. The concept of divine simplicity means that what God is he always is without any variation or possibility of change (Jas 1:18).
The problem is that we are not simple. We are divided people. We have warring affections inside of us. Our heart is deceitfully wicked, and it is impossible to understand its divisions.
Becoming more conformed to the image of God means becoming less divided. One of the most practical ways we become less divided is by practicing rigorous honesty. We let our yes be yes and our no be no without all the complexities and contingencies. Our whole life is to be laid bare before Almighty God.[2]
THE CROSS AND TRUTHFULNESS
And we can do so because of God’s unbreakable commitment to us in Christ.[3] See the good news of the gospel is not that we pile up good works in order to please God. The good news of the gospel is that we are indeed untruthful and full of deceit. Our hearts are in disordered chaos. And yet, God acts powerfully through the perfect righteousness of Christ to make us holy. In Jesus’s death, resurrection, and ascension God has made an unbreakable commitment to us.
Listen to how Paul explains this in Romans 8:
What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things? Who shall bring a charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is he who condemns? It is Christ who died, and furthermore is also risen, who is even at the right hand of God, who also makes intercession for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?…
Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
God’s unbreakable commitment to us in the gospel enables us to be honest in at least two ways.
First, there is the supernatural empowerment of the Holy Spirit. When we trust Christ, we are united to him in his death and resurrection. We are entirely purified and we receive the promise of his own Holy Spirit. The Spirit works in our hearts to transform our disordered hearts. This is different than just adhering to rigid honesty. We are empowered by the Spirit to want and desire new things and to overcome the disarray in our deceitful hearts.
Second, there is God’s unshakable commitment to us in Christ. On the cross our sin is exposed because it is laid on Christ. There’s no hiding it anymore. We see our sinfulness in the greatest act of evil in human history—God incarnate is crucified by those whom he created. There’s no hiding it anymore. But on the cross God is also making the first move toward us in spite of our sinfulness. On the cross, God is not abandoning the world, but confronting it in all of its evil. And when we see God’s grace in this, we no longer need to hide.
Bonhoeffer writes, “The cross is God’s truth about us, and therefore it is the only power which can make us truthful. When we know the cross we are no longer afraid of the truth.”[4]
We don’t need to prove anything to anyone about our righteousness because the obedience of Christ is counted as our righteousness.[5] Christ was obedient on our behalf. When the Presbyterian leader J. Gresham Machen was on his deathbed, he sent a telegram to a friend that said, “I’m so thankful for the active obedience of Christ. No hope without it.”[6] Christ not only paid the penalty for sin, his perfect obedience secures our standing as children of God forever.
This gives us the boldness to rest in God’s control, to treat others honestly and without deception, and to be honest about ourselves. We may be afraid to be honest about certain things, but if we are in Christ, our sin has been nailed to the cross and we have been clothed in his righteousness. We have nothing to fear about the truth. Because Christ himself says, “I am the truth.” And in him we are truly free and truly secure.[7]
[1] See a related point in Matt 6:19–34.
[2] Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, p. 138.
[3] See 2 Cor 1:20.
[4] The Cost of Discipleship, pp. 138–39.
[5] Rom 5:15–19; 1 Cor 1:30; 2 Cor 5:21; Eph 2:6–8; Phil 3:9; also see the helpful article by G. K. Beale, “The Twofold Obedience of Christ,” available at https://tabletalkmagazine.com/article/2019/04/twofold-obedience-christ/
[6] https://www.opc.org/nh.html?article_id=383
[7] John 1:14, 17; 8:31–47; 14:6.