Dennis Tuuri

Matthew 5

We’ll begin reading at verse one. Please stand. Matthew 5, we’ll begin reading at verse one. And seeing the multitudes, he went up into the mountain. And when he was set, his disciples came unto him, and he opened his mouth and taught them, saying, Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God. Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are ye when men shall revile you and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely for my sake.

Rejoice and be exceeding glad, for great is your reward in heaven, for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you. Ye are the salt of the earth. But if the salt have lost his savor, wherewith shall it be salted. It is therefore henceforth good for nothing but to be cast out and to be trodden underfoot of men. You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid.

Neither do men light a candle and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick, and it giveth light unto all that are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your father which is in heaven. Think not that I am come to destroy the law or the prophets. I am not come to destroy but to fulfill. For verily I say unto you that till heaven and earth pass one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law till all be fulfilled.

Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments and shall teach men so he shall be called the least of the kingdom of heaven. But whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I say unto you, that except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven.

Ye have heard that it was said by them of old, thou shalt not kill, and whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgment. But I say unto you, that whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgement. And whosoever shall say to his brother Raca, shall be in danger of the council. But whosoever shall say, thou fool, shall be in danger of hellfire. Therefore, if thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath ought against thee, leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way.

First be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift. Agree with thine adversary quickly, while thou art in the way with him, lest at any time the adversary deliver thee to the judge, and the judge deliver thee to the officer, and thou be cast into prison. Verily, I say unto thee, thou shalt by no means come out then till thou has paid the uttermost farthing.

We pray that God would illuminate his word to us in understanding, and we do so, thanking him for that word.

Please be seated. Okay, I’ll be starting in the book of Acts probably in a couple of weeks. It turns out that Bobby Gupta, who is going to be with us in two weeks—the missionary from Hindustan Bible Institute—is having to go back to India prior to that date now. So he will not be here. So I’ll be preaching in two weeks and I’ll be dealing with Acts, the first eight verses rather of chapter one.

And so today I wanted to speak on something a little bit different, but it is related. If you turn to Acts 1 in your Bibles, you’ll see the very first verse tells us something very important for all of our lives. Another one of these big principles like the one I just stated about thankfulness. This is a tremendous one of the big models in scripture to thank God for all things. In Acts chapter 1, verses 1 and 2, we read the following:

The former treatise have I made, O Theophilus, of all that Jesus began both to do and teach, and until the day in which he was taken up, after that he through the Holy Ghost had given commandments unto the apostles whom he had chosen. Now what he’s doing here in the first verse is to remind Theophilus of the first book that Luke wrote, that is the Gospel of Luke. And he identifies it in verse one as being an account of all that Jesus began both to do and to teach.

And you should know of course that one of the big models in scripture is that we have things that God teaches us. We have an understanding of God’s word, but we also have a practice of God’s word in terms of doing things. So to do and to teach are the two elements of our Christian life. And I want to talk today from Matthew 5 about one of the most important things we are to do relative to each other.

Psalm 15, which we’ve read, is the opening scripture in our worship service for the last month or so. If you’ll notice, it is of course a set of requirements for entrance into God’s holy hill. Who can abide with God? Who gets to worship God? Who gets to come in these doors today in the real sense. Now, anybody can walk in here at Reformation Covenant Church, but only those people who meet the entrance requirements of Psalm 15 have true access to God.

And he will, over time, he tells us that if a church is faithful, he will remove from that church people that don’t meet those entrance requirements. If that church is doing what God says it should do, Psalm 15 is not a set of beliefs ultimately. It’s a set of actions that we’re to do. Those actions, of course, are founded on beliefs—what we do as a result of what we understand God has taught us to do.

But it’s so important to see the relationship between that teaching and that doing in the history of Reformation Covenant Church. This is quite important. We are a church in process and maturing through the trials and tribulations that God brings into our lives. And it’s interesting to think back in our own individual lives, our maturation, our process of growth. I hope you can see it because if you think back on a regular basis and evaluate your life and don’t see growth, it should cause tremendous alarm for you.

And so it’s important for us to evaluate ourselves. Reformation Covenant Church began, I think, with an emphasis upon teaching. We were spawned out of the Christian Reconstruction Movement, which is probably no longer a movement at all. The movement is basically faded. The works have been placed out there, though, and they’re being worked through in many, very many different congregations, much as they’re being worked through in this congregation.

But Christian Reconstruction came out of Presbyterianism in terms of the original writers: R.J. Rushdoony, James B. Jordan, and Gary North. These were men who were raised, or rather who had come to participate in, Presbyterian churches. Presbyterian churches have been known for their scholarship. I heard a guy—I think it was during the sermon at Clinton’s inauguration—the man said that a Presbyterian is an educated Baptist and an Episcopalian is a rich Presbyterian.

That’s the way that kind of works. But in any event, Presbyterianism is known for its scholarship and scholarship is quite important. You know, I was thinking. I went down to San Jose; my brother Mike lives in Livermore, California. And before I went, I met with Jim Makavoy a week before that. And we were talking about the technologies available.

And I was commenting about how we have tremendous technology in our day and age. We don’t have the wisdom to know how to apply it. There are many things now that we can do technologically in the field of medicine for instance, but should we do these things? That’s a tough question. When should we do them? The wisdom to apply the technology is tough. Well, I was sharing this with my brother Mike and he said that perhaps one reason why we’ve had this disproportionate knowledge or technology apart from wisdom and maturation—we’ve had this emphasis on teaching and intellectual attainment by our culture and not the wisdom of how to apply that.

Maybe one reason is because we have a culture that’s essentially been built on debt. The technologies we have would not be ours, probably in the providence of God, if we had not entered into, as a culture, over the last hundred years, a tremendous amount of debt capitalization. So we stand at the end of a cycle in which men have rejected God’s principles relative to debt, and we have then this disproportionate head knowledge in our culture and a very diminished ability to understand and apply that knowledge correctly and wisely.

And I think he may well be right. The technology then becomes a curse, as it were, to us. Now, I think that God redeems that over time. You can look at the use of music, the development of music by the ungodly line, but God then brings it into the house of God and he matures his people in a correct way to use it. So I’m sure that God will mature us in the correct way to use word processing, data communication, the various technologies we have.

This relates to the history of Reformation Covenant Church and the Reconstruction Movement, and what I want to talk on today because I think you can say in the same way: a church, or a movement, or a person who intellectualizes the faith and tends to study things out in isolation from the context of God’s primary method of applying it ends up with a lot more knowledge than can be applied in life. I went to Bible school about twenty years ago, something like that, for a year, and then I dropped out because I wanted to get married and I didn’t think my wife should support me in school.

And I remember thinking at the time—one of the lessons that God impressed upon me then was this tremendous amount of knowledge I’d attained in one year of Bible school, and yet it was primarily—in my case I was involved in a local church; I was given an exception to the rule (at that time they had to stay at the college). But for most of the kids there, that knowledge is being given to them in a vacuum in terms of the institutional church, where God says all this stuff is to be worked out. That’s where you do this stuff: in the terms of the church community.

Well, if people abstract themselves away from that covenant community, physically leave it for the sake of development of their writings and theology, then you can see where it’s much the same as this debt culture that produces technology without wisdom to apply it. And what Reconstruction so far has given to the church in America is a tremendous amount of information that, in the providence of God, will be used for great blessing in the decades to come. But it can be a trap for people who see it, and so many in the Reconstruction Movement have, and use it as a way to distance themselves from institutional churches.

Many people affected by Christian Reconstruction are not part of an institutional church anymore. What do they do? They end up with far more knowledge than they’re able to apply. Well, I think that God is maturing Reformation Covenant Church in the application of the knowledge that he has given to us—not just in terms of political action or economic growth, etc., but in the context of the most important element of the application of the faith, and that is the church, the covenant community. And I want to talk today then on Matthew 5 and its relationship to theonomy.

The relationship of theonomy to your brother and to God. So let’s look at Matthew 5 a little bit here. Now I read the entire context to remind us that this is Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. This can be seen as somewhat analogous to the giving of the law to Moses in the Old Testament. This is a restatement of the law, a correction of the law, if you will, and a restatement of it with its full implications.

I remember hearing a fellow involved in the Reformation that went on in Seventh-day Adventism several years ago. Brimsme was his name. He came and said that in the Sermon on the Mount, Christ pushed out the law. Moses gave a law that was kind of restricted, but Christ pushes it out to its implications. I don’t think that’s really true. I think that all Christ is doing here is repeating what the law had inherently in it when Moses gave it.

But that’s what he does here. He begins, interestingly enough, with the blessings of God. And God’s law is always a blessing first to his people. It’s a blessing because we’ve been placed in relationship to God through the work of Christ. It’s not something to be attained. We’re placed in the blessing by God in his election and calling of us. So Christ begins with a series of blessings and then he moves on to talk about the importance of those blessings being worked out in our lives, then become a light to the world and the salt of the world, and it changes the world from a bad place to a good place, and the whole eschatological optimism is just sketched out in these first few verses.

And then, having set that all up, that we’re in a position of blessing from God and that blessing will become blessing to the whole world, Christ then goes specifically to the restatement of the law. Matthew 5:17, which has meant so much to Christian Reconstruction and those who would call themselves theonomists. Matthew 5:17 is the pillar verse here for us, isn’t it? In terms of an understanding of God’s law. Greg Bahnsen’s book, Theonomy and Christian Ethics, was essentially simply an exposition of Matthew 5:17 and 18. The abiding validity of God’s law is sketched out in these verses.

We all know that. We’ve heard a lot about that. Some of us have read that book or at least abridgments or synopses of it, and we know about that, so it’s important to us. But it’s important to see the context for that and what he goes on to say about it.

In verses 19 and 20, we’ve always used these verses as proof texts, rightly so, that our interpretation of verse 17 is correct. Verse 17 says all of God’s law stays in effect. If God doesn’t change it, then it’s still in effect for us today. It’s the model for us. Now, that’s got to be fleshed out a little bit. You got to understand that the law is one whole word—all sixty-six books. But essentially there’s continuity of ethic in the scriptures, and we know that. Our interpretation is what we believe verse 17 says. We know that’s right because in verses 19 and 20 he says to do these things, and he says that our righteousness has to exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees.

So in his application advice he’s telling them now what to do, as well as teaching them in verses 17 and 18. To teach and to do is what the gospels are about, and that’s what he’s doing here. So we know our interpretation of 17 is right because he tells us in 19 and 20 to do these things, and to do them even better than the scribes and the Pharisees.

Then he moves to a specific series of corrections, if you will, or restatements of the law. He begins in the section that I read for you—the section I’m going to talk on primarily today—in terms of interpersonal relationships with your brother. If your brother’s angry, if you’re angry at your brother, he takes the commandment “thou shalt not murder,” a second tablet command. It begins to expound that and its full implications.

The next section after this he’ll talk about adultery, and I believe the divorce teaching that he teaches after adultery is linked to that adultery passage. Then he talks about vows. So in these first three big chunks of the Sermon on the Mount in terms of the law, he talks to them about the second tablet relative to what they do with their fellow man. Then he talks about adultery, and adultery is always linked in the scriptures to idolatry. Again, it’s a second tablet violation, but it reflects their violation of their relationship against God. Spiritual adultery is what primarily leads to physical adultery.

And then he talks about vows, and he ends up by saying, “Let your yes be yes and no be no.” He doesn’t say it’s wrong to take a vow. He’s saying, “Oh, your life is supposed to be a vow as a Christian. Your words are important, exceedingly important.” And so you’re supposed to keep your word. That’s all you’ve got as a Christian in one way to think of it—your good name, which is based upon your word.

And your word reflects your covenants with men. Your word to men, which is your covenant with men, reflects and flows from your covenant with God. So our Savior uses second tablet stuff to remind them of their obligations to love God. That’s the first commandment, right? Why doesn’t he start with that? Because he’s talking to a group of people who are seen as their models the scribes and the Pharisees, who profess a great love for God.

But when the light is shined upon their relationships to men, their love for God is seen to be what it is: a lie. So I’m convinced that Matthew 5 tells us the primary, the first application that he gives us here in terms of theonomy. Then for us today, as Christian reconstructionists, transformationists, theonomists, or whatever you want to call us, the first application for us has to be to examine our relationship to our brothers. That’s a little different twist, isn’t it? We want to take that law and immediately apply it to some impersonal civil magistrate or some impersonal economist.

But God says where you’re really going to—where the test of your adherence to the abiding validity of God’s law is seen—is in your relationship to your brother, and whether you follow the prescriptions that God gives us in verses 21 and following relative to your brother.

So he begins with the second tablet. In the Numeric Bible, the writer, the author of the Numeric Bible, says this: “Now the Lord proceeds to develop the righteousness that he requires in contrast with that of the scribes and Pharisees—those zealots for the external. The second tablet of the law is here pressed rather than the first, evidently because on this side, man is most accessible. His conscience is most easily roused by looking at second tablet violations. Man can invent all sorts of coverings to hide from themselves their state godward. But if they be tested by their conduct toward men made in his image, it is not so possible to conceal from oneself the truth.”

First John chapter 4 tells us: “No man can love God whom he has not seen if he doesn’t love his brother whom he has seen.” God points us to second tablet violations because that is the evaluator of our first tablet requirements to love God. If you love God whom you have not seen, it will flow from that love a love for your brother whom you have seen.

We can say we love God. We can make reference to a covenant we have with God and then deny the covenants we have with men, not act in loving ways toward our brother as defined by the scriptures—not by the common culture we live in or by our own internal definitions of what love is. If we break God’s word relative to love of the brother, it shows us—it’s God’s gracious way of showing us—we’ve got a problem, not ultimately with our brother, but with God.

You see, we don’t want to maximize personal relationships. We’re not humanists. Christ isn’t showing us the application of the law relative to people because people are most important. People are relatively unimportant to God. Remember when God—when Paul talks about the ox and the Old Testament law about “don’t muzzle the ox while he’s threshing out the grain”—Paul says, “Does God care for ox?” No, he’s talking about the ministers of the gospel who thresh out the grain of God’s word. The word is made visible in the scriptures as well as in the word made visible in that bread, that is the process of threshing at communion.

Paul says God doesn’t care about oxen. Relatively speaking, does God care about oxen? Yeah, he commands us to be kind to animals. But relatively speaking, it’s of far less significance to God than our relationship to men, because men are God’s image bearers. In the same way, God doesn’t say men are so important because they’re men. Men are important because they reflect God’s image. They’re made in God’s image.

Men are as relatively unimportant to God as his own glory is, as oxen are to man by Paul’s analogy. And so we don’t want to maximize our personal relationships, but they are seen as indicators or evaluators of our relationship to God. And that’s what Matthew 5 is all about, I believe. And that’s why it’s important for us to consider our theonomic credentials in light of these particular words.

Well, let’s look at these words a little bit. Okay, verse 21: “You’ve heard it said, ‘You shall not commit murder,’ and whoever commits murder shall be liable to the court. But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be guilty before the court. And whoever shall say to his brother Raca shall be guilty before the Supreme Court. And whoever shall say, ‘You fool,’ shall be guilty enough to go into the hell of fire.”

Now what Jesus is saying here—some people have seen this as three stages of anger. I don’t believe it’s that, really. He talks about being angry with your brother without cause. He talks about calling him Raca and calling him fool, and to be angry without it must be seen as in its qualified sense “without cause,” because we know that Jesus was angry. We know the Psalms talk about a righteous anger for God. We know that Raca, which means a vain or an empty person, also must be qualified in a sense here because we know that the apostles later would use a term that was similar to Raca.

They would call people empty or vain or having vain in their thinking. Paul himself, or Jesus rather, refers to men as fools, which is the word that’s used here to say don’t call your brother this. So this is not some sort of thing saying “if you avoid the use of these words you’re okay, and if these words come up in your dialogue you’re not okay.” That’s not the point Jesus is making here.

What he’s saying is if you do these things without cause, and if you refer to men in this way without proper understanding of what you’re saying, then indeed you’re guilty of enough sin to cause you to be cast into hellfire. Now again, you can see in the relationship of the punishments for this—people have seen a relationship to the Jewish court system where you had a local court, and then you’d have a supreme council, and then you’d be cast into the pit of eternal fire or the valley of Hinnom, Gehenna, what we would call hell.

There was a pit there that was a garbage dump essentially, and it’s a picture of hell. And you can see a correlation here in terms of these punishments. But I don’t really think that the process is what Jesus is talking about—some sort of gradation. He’s lumping all these things together. And it’s important instruction for us who are so prone to use our anger in an unrighteous sense and to lash out at men with our tongues.

And Jesus says when we lash out at men with our tongues, it’s equivalent to murder of our fellow man, which is equivalent to a complete denial of the God whom we have not seen. And that is enough to send us into hell.

Matthew Henry gave some excellent comments on these particular forms of speech and some correlaries to them in the scriptures. Henry says that without cause—it says in the received text that you should not be angry with your brother without cause. “Without cause” means, according to Matthew Henry, without any cause, or it could mean without any good effect and without moderation. In other words, there’s no just provocation in one sense. Sometimes we get mad at people and there’s no reason really—there’s not a just reason or a just provocation to be angry with them.

If men lash out at God, it is proper to portray a righteous indignation to them. But usually there’s not a just provocation for our anger. Another use of this term “without cause” in the scriptures means that there is without any good end aimed at—merely to show our own displeasure. When we get angry at people in a righteous sense, it is toward a good end. And if it’s not toward an end, the display of our anger, then it is an unrighteous or an improper anger—anger without proper cause.

And then finally, anger can exceed due bounds. Even righteous indignation can become fleshly indignation. I always joke about this when I go down to Salem. You know, some people like to go to Salem, testify before hearings, and you know, give vent to the flesh. But it’s true—it’s not really a joking matter. There’s righteous indignation we can feel against sort of people that testified against our abstinence bill, for instance, last week—the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and a pro-homosexual group. They all thought it was just terrible that we’d want to teach abstinence alongside of the other sexual education courses of the public schools.

And there’s certainly a righteous indignation one can have against such people who are really wicked and who are really depraved and insane in a sense, when they want to stop the very kind of education that would help homosexuals, for instance, avoid the curse of God in terms of AIDS. But that’s what God turns them over to—an insanity, a blindness. There’s a righteous indignation we can feel. But we can go beyond that indignation, can’t we? “Ah, let’s shoot those guys!” in our anger. We can say those kinds of things. And that’s the kind of thing Christ is talking about here.

You don’t want to do those things. You don’t want to get angry at your brother without just provocation. You don’t want to get angry unless it’s to a specific, good, godly end. And you don’t want to in your anger go beyond the bounds of what God’s anger would have us go to.

So these are the things that God tells us. And again, it’s the apostle James who says at one point in his epistle, “Oh vain men,” which is equivalent to Raca. Peter himself, or Paul rather, calls men a fool. Christ says there are fools and slow of heart. We’ll look at those verses in a couple of minutes. So it’s not those terms—Raca means empty or vain person; fool has the idea of our own anger at them again being displayed. It’s not those specific terms; it’s rather the attitude with which we bring them and our particular use of them.

Usually they’re wrong. Usually they’re in the flesh, and so to avoid them. Matthew Henry again is instructive in the use of these terms. Raca, he said, is a scornful word and it comes from pride. Usually it’s our own godless pride that regards other men as being vain or empty, and so refers to them as Raca—”You vain person, you.” And when it’s an exhibit of pride, “You empty fellow,” would be another way to put it in our own particular language today.

Matthew Henry says that fool is a spiteful word and it comes from hatred. And so usually it’s the sin of hatred that would cause us to call somebody a fool. And it’s the sin of pride that would cause us to call somebody vain or empty. And we’re warned against that by our Savior very strongly in these verses.

But he goes on from there to give more explicit instruction. “If therefore,” and now here it’s worth pointing out, important to point out, that in the Greek, we now have a difference in the audience being addressed. In verses 21 and 22, he’s talking about you in the general sense. He’s talking to a large group of people giving a sermon. But in verse 23, he says, “If therefore you are presenting your offering at the altar and there remember that your brother is something against you, leave your offering there before the altar. Go your way and be reconciled to your brother.”

And in these two verses, he gets extremely personal in the use of the different form of the verb or the pronoun you. It’s a personal second person singular. It’s as if I’d be preaching to you and then I would say, “And you, Tom, if you don’t do this, then you’re in big trouble,” or “You, Dave.” It’s that kind of personal use here. And so when we read this in the scriptures, we want to take it personal to ourselves. We want to say he’s given us some general teaching here in terms of the carefulness of our speech against our brother.

And now we want to take very personally a personal admonition from our Savior. And he tells us that if we’re presenting our offering and remember that our brother has ought against us, leave your offering and go and be reconciled, and then come back and fulfill your service.

Now, these are, you know, we know we’re familiar with these words, but think of the implication of this. Worship is a big deal. The offering he’s talking about here is a sacrificial offering at the altar at the temple. Now, it’s correlary to us coming to worship today, of course, but see, it’s very important, and it really drives home this point I was saying earlier about the relationship to First John 4, where men are used as an evaluatory tool to tell us the relationship to God.

Jesus isn’t saying that your relationship to men in and of themselves is more important than your relationship and your requirements of worship to God. That’s not what he’s saying. But he’s saying if you come and worship not being reconciled to your brother, making a good faith effort to do that, then see, you’re loving God and despising or counting of little effect your brother. That’s what your confession is if you come and worship in that manner. And Jesus says in the totality of scripture, no, you’re not loving God. You’re here to worship for some other reason.

You know, motivation is an extremely important thing for us. People come to church for lots of different reasons. And here we know, because we know that the tendency of us as individuals, that our Savior has to go out of his way to personally address us and warn us against our tendency to use worship as some sort of salve or balm for our conscience, when in reality what God wants out of us is that doing portion—that says go and be reconciled to your brother whom you have seen and who bears the image of his Creator, the Lord God of the universe. And when you’re reconciled to him, when you act correctly toward him, then God knows that your worship is acceptable and the doors will then open and you can enter into that holy hill in Psalm 15.

See, Psalm 15 is a good reminder too, of telling us that it’s not these relationships themselves (and I keep saying this, but it needs to be repeated) that are important in and of themselves. It’s that they reflect the relationship to God. This doesn’t mean you have to be at peace with every man in the world before you come and worship. What does Psalm 15 tell us?

It says two things relative to your interactions with men. Psalm 15, which we’ve read for several weeks here now: You’re supposed to hold in low esteem vile men, but you’re supposed to honor those who love God and please him. See, so that’s a warning against us, against maximizing our personal interpersonal relationships in the context of our lives. But having said that, to fail to make the effort to clean up our own sin, to humble ourselves to our brother, to go to our brothers and seek reconciliation, to seek to be at one—if we fail to do that, then we reflect a scorning of the One whose image is borne with that person: God himself.

And that’s why God says, “If you hate your brother, if you’re angry, you don’t get reconciled to your brother, if you count him a vain and empty person, not worthwhile to be reconciled to, whatever reason you may come up with, if by that action you demonstrate your scorn for the God whose image he bears, you’re in danger of hellfire.”

Hellfire is what he uses at the end of verse 22. So he gets very personal and he tells us that don’t come to worship unless you’ve done this attempt.

Now the word “be reconciled” to your brother here is an interesting word too. It’s not the normal word for reconciliation. This is the only place in all the New Testament where it’s used, which is interesting to me. I’m always interested in seeing how God uses specific words. Every word, you know, is inspired by God. And this word, dialasso, has an—it’s not really exactly what it means. It has the connotation though of bringing about a relationship between two people, bringing them together, but it’s as if both people don’t really want to be brought together. That seems to be the implication of what’s going on here in our natural state. That’s how we are. We don’t really want to be reconciled for lots of reasons.

And this word tells us to go ahead and work through that separation. That’s the two parts of the word: dia, through, and then the allo, from alasso, a separation or breakage. You’re to work through that with people.

Okay, and if you want to, you know, that Lamento or that Spanish stuff on the radio, you know, you can think of this word for reconciliation as dialasso—dia red alasso. Lasso, you know, lariat, roping two people together. And people are roped together through that red rope, which is the blood of Christ. Dialasso—you can think of it that way. I don’t know maybe not, but the point is that God commands us here to attempt, make every attempt to become reconciled, and he gives us this instruction and a personal admonition because so often it’s the last thing we want to do is work something through with somebody else.

And yet our Savior tells us this is of utmost importance. This is a test of our theonomic credentials. He goes on to emphasize this point, the admonition part of it.

“Make friends quickly with your opponent at law while you’re on your way, in order that your opponent may not deliver you to the judge, and the judge to the officer, and you be thrown into prison. Truly I say unto you, you will not come out of there until you’ve paid up the last cent.”

The point there is you can’t pay the last cent. It’s not as if you’re going to be in there a long time. He’s saying you’re going to be in there forever. The last cent that he uses is the tiniest little bit of currency, smaller than a cent actually in our currency—the debt you have to your brother you can never really repay through prison. That’s what our Savior is saying. That’s why he’s going back and warning us here of hell. Only the satisfaction offered through Jesus Christ is able to pay that amount.

And that is only applied to our account. Its demonstration that it is indeed imputed to our account is whether or not we follow through with these admonitions to be reconciled to our brother.

Okay, so that’s what the text tells us to do. It says it’s real important. It says that there is no diminution of penalty in the new covenant. God’s law is not somehow now easier to keep. He says you got to exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees. But in a way, it is easier. What did the scribes and Pharisees do in this regard? They would not humble themselves to each other. And that’s what’s required, isn’t it? When you go to try to reconcile with somebody, a humility, a humbling yourself to the other person.

Particularly in this particular case where the case, the direct case stated, has implications for other cases. The direct case is the brother has ought against you. Well, he may be right. Even if he isn’t, you’re going to have to demonstrate to him that he isn’t. Either way you cut it, you’re going to have to be humble as you go to beseech that brother who has ought against you. And that’s the last thing the scribes and Pharisees wanted to do.

Remember the illustration, you got the Pharisee and the publican praying before God—as the example of the correct attitude in prayer. The Pharisee is standing upright and he says, “I thank you, Lord God, that I’m not like other men.” And the publican is down at his knees saying, “Forgive me, I’m a sinner.” See, the Pharisee compared himself to other men, found them wanting, saw them as Raca—empty vain people—and he would not humble himself. So it’s fairly easy actually, when you get right down to it, in terms of knowledge of what we have to do here, but it’s difficult in application to humble ourselves the way that the Pharisees didn’t, in the way our Savior instructs us to do.

Okay. Let’s talk a little bit about how we go about doing this, how we go about making this effort. Now that we’ve seen that our Savior commands it of us, we’ve seen the correlation to a demonstration that this is indeed our love for our Savior at work as we move to reconcile ourselves with other men, we’ve seen the importance of this—let’s talk a little bit about how we’re to accomplish this.

You know, I mentioned the trip that I took to Sacramento. I keep saying Sacramento. It was really Livermore, but Frank’s car broke down in Sacramento, so that made a bigger impression in my mind, I guess. But in any event, I keep mentioning that there were several lessons that God was using on that trip. God used that trip, rather, to reinforce in my mind, particularly as I thought about this particular sermon—I’ve been thinking about these verses for the last three or four weeks—their application to our place at RCC right now in particular.

And I think one of the most important things in terms of how to go about doing this is to remember first of all that we’re dealing with people. And I’ve said this before. You remember Joshua 22, that sermon where I talked about the four modes of communication we have with each other? That applies to this particular talk as well.

Remember Joshua 22 where Joshua dismisses the tribes that go back across the river. They build an altar or a testimony. There comes a—the other tribes come out to make war against them. Remember that whole thing and the four modes of speech. Do you remember what they were? The first one was commendation. Joshua commended people for what their actions were. The next was exhortation. He exhorted them to keep the law. The next was confrontation. The tribes on Canaan proper confronted the tribe on the other side of the Jordan correctly. And the fourth step was humiliation.

Commendation. I talked about it then: men are made in the image of God. They want glory. They want to be heard. They want to be understood. And I think that they do want to be understood, more so even sometimes—excuse me—they want to be heard, even more so sometimes than they want to be understood. I was speaking with one of my brothers, Rick, at my trip to California, and he manages people. That’s what he does for a living. And he was saying that yeah, people want to be understood. I was talking about Joshua 22 to him and he said, “Yeah, they want to be understood. They want to have weight to their opinions, but they also want to be heard. They want their words to be heard.”

And we don’t live in a culture today that does much of that with each other. We’re impatient, and even particularly in the circles we occupy, we have such an emphasis upon the constructs, the doctrinal constructs of our faith, which are quite important, but we forget that these are personal people. These are real people, persons that we’re dealing with.

What brother Rick was saying is correct. Man is made in the image of God. God’s word is God-breathed, is what it tells us in Timothy. It’s a God-breathed word. It’s the breath of God and his very voice coming out. It’s interesting how in this Sermon on the Mount it says that Jesus opened his mouth and began to teach them. And when people that you talk to, when you go to be reconciled to your brother, you want to let him open his mouth.

You don’t just want to understand what his thinking is. You want him to exercise his calling as an image bearer of God to speak words. And he wants you to let him do that. You see what I’m saying? He’s not a set of ideas. He’s a person. And people use words, not thoughts. We don’t communicate with thoughts. We communicate with words. That’s how God communicates to us. And we want to give our brother—when we’re trying to bring two parties that are not together and neither really want to be together (we’re going to do it because God says so)—we want to in that process do whatever we can to bring grace into the situation by acknowledging the humanity, the image-bearing capability of the person we’re talking to, and we want to hear their words out.

Okay, we don’t want to just understand their ideas because they’re not a set of ideas. They’re a person with words.

So one of the first things we do in terms of this reconciliation process is remembering that we’re dealing with real people. Another illustration that I thought of on this trip: we, at this church, have taught in the past, and haven’t taught it a whole lot in the last few years, but you know that the scriptures tell us that God’s currency is gold and silver, and that was the currency of most cultures that survived throughout the history of the world. And when cultures began to decline, it’s usually there usually was accompanied by a debasement of currency.

Men move away from God. His image is found in the coins. The gold that is glorious, it’s shiny, it has weight to it like God has weight, et cetera, et cetera. They move away from that. And in our culture, we’ve seen this progression. We had gold and silver, and then we had silver certificates. Remember, it was only when I was in high school that the silver certificates went away, were replaced by Federal Reserve notes.

Silver certificates were payable in silver, but they were a step away from it. Then we moved a giant step away with Federal Reserve notes, pieces of paper. And then you can write checks reflecting Federal Reserve notes, which is another step away from this whole progression. Then you got plastic cards, and you end up with electronic blips. All financial transactions today essentially are electronic blips.

Now there’s not even paper really that’s behind it anymore—whether it’s the paper of a Federal Reserve note, nice paper, or the common paper of a check. These things mean something. They mean the whole culture has become totally insane relative to what value is in terms of money. And believe me, folks, that will not go on forever. This is a world not created by men. This is a world created by God. And he says, if you move away from this, you move toward judgment.

And we’re about as far out as you can get when we have currency represented with electronic blips now. Well, we do the same thing in the depersonalization of our culture. I said that men want their voices to be heard, and they do. One step—we can’t do that always though. So sometimes we write things out in our own hand. That’s a step removed from the speaking of the word. And remember that God’s word is God-breathed.

It’s as if this is speaking to us. God’s speaking to us through the scripture, not so our writing. Our writing is a step removed from our words. Then we go to mechanical type and typewriters. Now it’s black and white. Now it’s really stark. You don’t see the shaky hand—perhaps whatever the hand reflects of your personality. You see now cold, mechanical type. And who could have typed? Anybody could have typed that.

Then we go one step out from that. We got to data processing, word processors, fax machines. And we’re about what are we out to? Electronic blips, again. We’re as far removed from voice as we can get.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I think faxes and computers are great. They have their value, but they have a tremendous downside. And that downside is we forget that when we go to be reconciled to a brother, this is a real person we’re talking to. Look at the world in which we live. You go to the grocery store two, three times a week, maybe more if you’re so moved. You go to the gas station. You have all these transactions with people. Do you deal with them as people? Usually not. We move through life quickly.

Well, I probably should remember the point. But the point is just that the first thing you want to do when you go to your brother is remember that our Savior is telling us here something about—he’s using second tablet to teach us about first tablet. He’s using our relationship to our brother to teach us about his relationship to God. Why? Because our brother is made in God’s image. And that’s the first thing you want to do when you go to be reconciled: remember that. And you’re not going to remember it usually.

So what you want to do is you want to stop and you want to pray. James tells us to pray for one another, confess your sins to one another, and to support each other in prayer. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much. That isn’t talking about physical healing only. It’s talking about our entire system of working things through with people. And you can pray when you’re going to go try to attempt to reconcile with somebody. You know it’s going to be difficult. Pray, “God, help me remember this is a person who bears your image. Help me be slow to speak, quick to hear, okay? And hear them out.”

It’s one of the first things you should try to do. Notice here too that there’s no system that’s taught here about how this is accomplished. It just says that the end of the process is you’re lassoed together, okay? Through the blood of Christ, you’re brought together. Matthew 18 is the other side of this. When you know somebody sinned against you, you’re supposed to go to him. And there is a process laid out, but there’s no specific order. I mean, what am I trying to say? There is a process that’s described here, but it doesn’t give us all the specifics of how it works out. It doesn’t tell us what to say.