Category: Bible
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Raca, Respect, and the Agape Love of God, Part 3
Jesus says those who treat others with contempt are subject to hellfire. It’s easy to think we know exactly what that means, but we may miss a lot if we just skim over this. Let’s take a closer look. When Jesus talks about anger, he takes it in levels, and he gives levels of judgment…
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Raca, Respect, and the Agape Love of God – Part 2
This should not be shocking to any Christian, but to me it was when I discovered it: God respects, values, and esteems people. All people, simply because they are human beings, created in his image and created with worth. For the last several weeks we’ve been exploring Jesus’s moral teaching on anger, which he equates…
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Raca, Respect, and the Agape Love of God – Part 1
Anger is not a victimless crime. Anger is aggressive. To have someone’s anger turned on you—especially when it’s “without cause,” not your fault or out of proportion to your fault—is emotionally and physically traumatizing. At first glance, Jesus’s moral teachings in Matthew 5 can look almost trite or arbitrary. Given a chance to address…
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Why Sin Is Serious
Most of us can justify anger pretty easily. It’s bad, but not that bad. Anger isn’t murder. Except that it is. In Jesus’s first moral teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus makes the outrageous equivocation of anger with murder. You have heard that it was said to our ancestors, Do not murder, and…
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Exploring the Gospel of Matthew: Index of Posts
This series is an ongoing journey through the gospel of Matthew, the kingdom gospel. Whenever possible, I post a new article every three weeks. When I began this work, I had no idea how much it would grow. Thank you for coming along with me. Part 1: Anointed One: Is This the Jesus YOU Know?…
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What’s So Bad About Anger and How Jesus Calls Us to Freedom
According to Jesus, people don’t make you angry. You do. And if you want to be free, you have to take responsibility for it. Last post, I talked about the three principles of morality as Jesus teaches it: it’s transcendent and therefore absolute; it’s internal; and it’s individual. As such, it’s demanding. Jesus doesn’t pull…
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Higher Vision: Why Jesus’s Morality Is Better Than Ours
“Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual,” Friedrich Nietzche wrote. Einstein said, “A man’s ethical behaviour should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs.” Morality, in other words, is determined by our surroundings: by the needs, expectations, and ties of the people around us. MORALITY IS … Nietzche and Einstein got…
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Good-bye, Frustration: How the Spirit Sets Us Free
Jesus came to change our lives in an actual, practical, daily sense. This doesn’t happen without our participation. But it doesn’t happen by our own power, either. The story so far is this: Jesus came to give us a kingdom. He didn’t come to destroy the law of Moses, but to accomplish what it couldn’t.…
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The Law of the Spirit and How You Can Learn to Live Like God
What does the law of God have to do with being a Christian? This might be one of the biggest points of confusion in Christendom today. Do we need rules? If not, why did Jesus give us rules? Was it just to teach us that we can’t keep rules? Will the law free us? Judge…
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God Is Not a Legalist (And Righteousness Isn’t What You Thought It Was) – Part 2
Righteousness is not what you think it is. When it comes to righteousness, most of us think like Pharisees. We see it as a position we must earn or else a quality we must create within ourselves through our actions. We’re wrong on both counts. (Explore this further in Part 1 of this discussion here.)…