Matthew 5:27-32 — Lust & Divorce

FRANK: A man can go to his grave having never touched anyone but his wife... and Jesus would still call him an adulterer.

LINDA: An adulterer! You'd clear a room saying that, Frank. [laughs] Welcome to Dig Deeper, everybody, we are really glad you're here, because he means that sentence, and he's going to have to earn it. We're in Matthew five, verses twenty-seven through thirty-two, the second of those "you have heard it said" contrasts from the Sermon on the Mount.

FRANK: Earn it I will... or rather, the text will. This is a passage in three pieces that look like they have nothing to do with each other: a look, a pair of amputations, and a legal document a man could hand to his wife. By the end I think you'll hear them as one argument. Would you read it for us?

LINDA: Matthew chapter five, starting at verse twenty-seven. "You have heard that it was said, 'Do not commit adultery.' But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman to lust after her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to depart into hell. It has also been said, 'Whoever divorces his wife must give her a certificate of divorce.' But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, brings adultery upon her. And he who marries a divorced woman commits adultery."

FRANK: One sentence, verse twenty-eight, and the seventh commandment turns inside out. So let me put the claim plainly, because everything else today hangs from it. God has never been satisfied with your conduct alone... he claims the desire underneath it. And Jesus isn't inventing that. Listen to the Greek in verse twenty-eight: the man looks at a woman pros to epithymēsai, looking in order to want her, fixing his appetite on her as something to be had. Why does that verb matter? Because epithymeō is the exact word the Greek Old Testament uses in the tenth commandment. "You shall not covet your neighbor's wife." So Jesus takes the seventh commandment, the one about the act, and he quietly welds the tenth one onto it, and what he is telling you is that these were never two separate rules, one for the bedroom and one for the heart, but a single command seen from two sides. Theologians call this the spirituality of the law. It means the law was always aimed at the inner person. Job knew it, centuries before this sermon: "I have made a covenant with my eyes. How then could I gaze with desire at a virgin?" Jesus is not raising the bar. He's showing you where it always was.

LINDA: A half-second on a sidewalk, you notice somebody is attractive, and the next second you're thinking about dinner... is Jesus really calling that adultery? People have eyes, Frank. That's interpreting it too far.

FRANK: Eyes, yes. He made them. And the glance isn't the verb. Go back to the shape of the sentence... looking in order to want. That's the second look, the one you choose, the one you keep going back to and furnish in your imagination. And Scripture has been tracing that path since the garden. Genesis three: the woman "saw that the tree was good for food, and pleasing to the eyes... she took the fruit and ate it." Saw. Desired. Took. That's the anatomy of the very first sin, and it's the anatomy Jesus is describing here. James gives it to us almost like a birth: "each one is tempted when by his own evil desires he is lured away and enticed. Then after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death." So the lingering look is not the harmless warm-up before the real event. It is the conception. The act, if it ever comes, is just the delivery.

LINDA: The look is where the adultery actually starts, and the act is only where it finally shows. That's what you're saying?

FRANK: Starts, and is already real. Jesus says "has already committed adultery with her in his heart." Already. Nobody else sees it, there's no witness, no scandal, no paperwork, and heaven has it on the record anyway. And that's how the man in our opening line can die with a spotless reputation and a guilty heart.

LINDA: Which brings up the part I genuinely have trouble with. If that's the standard, then I'm guilty. What's the point of a law nobody keeps?

FRANK: [short pause] That might be the most important question you could ask of this sermon, because the honest answer is... the point is that nobody keeps it. Jesus pulls the standard up to its true, terrible height so that no one is left standing on a clean record. Not the Pharisee, not the disciple, not you. It was never meant to be a ladder. It's meant to drive you to the one man who actually kept it, whose eye never wandered, whose heart was pure all the way through, and who offers that obedience to sinners as a gift.

LINDA: Then why the surgery instructions? If this is just to show me I fail, why tell me to gouge out my eye and cut off my hand? You don't give someone a battle plan for a war they're supposed to lose.

FRANK: Good... because that's the other half, and it matters that you won't let me skip it. First, the verb for "causes you to sin" is skandalizō, and the picture behind it is the trigger stick of a trap, the little piece of wood that springs it. Your eye, Jesus says, can become the thing that snaps the trap shut on you. Now, nobody in the church has ever taken this literally, and Jesus didn't expect them to. A blind man can still lust. The problem is not the eyeball. But he chooses the most violent language available because of where the trap leads... Gehenna. That's the word translated "hell" here, and it was a real place, the Valley of Hinnom outside Jerusalem, where in Israel's darkest days children were burned as sacrifices to false gods. His hearers could picture that ravine. Sin, he says, is dragging you toward that fire.

FRANK: So, to your question. The church has a name for this, mortification, from the Latin for putting to death, and Paul uses the same language in Colossians: "put to death... sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires." The Puritans who wrote on it said there is no truce available. A sin you tolerate is a sin gaining ground. But you're right that it isn't a war you're meant to lose, and here's why. This command is only ever spoken to people Christ intends to save. He walked toward the real Gehenna in your place. He was cut off, forsaken on the cross, so that you never will be. Which means the cutting he asks of you is not the price of your rescue. It's what rescued people do, with his Spirit in them, in a war whose ending he's already secured.

LINDA: I'll give you half of it. The text really is doing both, it drops everyone and then it arms them. But a surgeon doesn't take a limb for a bruise. He takes it when the scan comes back and the thing is spreading, and I think most of us believe the mirror more than the scan. The face in the mirror looks fine. Nothing shows.

FRANK: Nothing shows... and that's exactly why he talks about "your whole body." He's not being otherworldly about the body; he's saying the body is precious and the stakes are the body. Paul picks it up in first Corinthians six: "flee sexual immorality," because your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, "you were bought with a price." And notice he names the right eye and the right hand, the good ones, the useful ones. The thing that springs the trap is often not something ugly you'd be glad to lose. It's something you value.

LINDA: What it costs, then, is the precious thing, the actual doorway, not some vague resolution. And maybe worse than that, it costs the mirror. If this is in the heart and nobody sees it, the only way to cut it off might be to let one person see it. Say the true sentence out loud to someone who thinks well of you, and watch their face change.

FRANK: Your image, yes. That's a real amputation. And secrecy feels safer than shame, but a sin you keep secret is a sin you keep feeding. You don't confess to earn Christ's welcome, though. He saw the whole of you before you said a word, and he went to the cross anyway. And the very next verses show Jesus doing to a whole culture what he's just done to the individual heart.

LINDA: The certificate. Why does divorce show up right after lust? That feels like a different subject entirely.

FRANK: A different subject on the surface, the same disease underneath. A first-century Jewish husband could end his marriage with one document. He wrote it out, handed it to her, and it was over. Deuteronomy twenty-four permitted divorce if he found "some indecency" in her, and in Jesus' day two rabbinic schools fought over those words. The school of Shammai read it narrowly, sexual sin only. The school of Hillel read it so broadly that a man could dismiss his wife for burning his dinner, and a generation later Rabbi Akiva went further, for finding another woman prettier... and in practice that reading won. Now, the certificate was originally a mercy. It gave her legal proof that she was free, rather than leaving her hanging on his word. But it had become the paperwork of a hard heart. Jesus says it himself later, in chapter nineteen: Moses allowed it "because of your hardness of heart. But it was not this way from the beginning." So what's going on? It's the lust problem again, in legal form. A man keeps a perfectly clean record, every form filed correctly, and his heart is discarding a human being.

LINDA: The paperwork was his clean record, the same trick as the look... spotless on the outside, hard as stone behind it.

FRANK: Same trick, and Jesus refuses it in both places. He isn't picking a side in a scholarly debate. He reaches behind Moses, back to the beginning, to what God designed marriage to be.

LINDA: "Brings adultery upon her," though. That's the line that makes me bristle. She's the one handed the paper, she's the one put out of the house, and she's the one labeled?

FRANK: Read the grammar closely and it's the reverse. The Greek verb there is passive... he causes her to be made an adulteress. He is the one acting. It's something done to her. And think about what waited for her. A woman in Galilee had almost no economic footing of her own. She couldn't readily own property, couldn't enter most trades, couldn't just rent a room and support herself. If her father was dead and her brothers unwilling, she was pushed toward a second marriage she never chose, or charity, or worse. So when Jesus says the man "brings adultery upon her," he's putting the guilt squarely on whoever signed the paper. This isn't cold marriage law. It's Christ standing between a powerful man and a defenseless woman.

LINDA: Some of you listening have that paper, or the modern version of it, in a file somewhere, and you didn't choose it. What does this passage say to that person?

FRANK: [quietly] It says Jesus is standing next to you in this text, not across from you. The exception he names, sexual immorality, the word porneia, recognizes that unfaithfulness can break a marriage, and I don't want to build a full doctrine of divorce in five minutes. But this passage was never a club for those sent away. Matthew Henry, the old commentator, put it well: "There is tender mercy under all the Divine requirements, and the grace and consolations of the Spirit will enable us to attend to them."

LINDA: Tender mercy even under "cut it off"?

FRANK: Under that most of all. It's the same Jesus in both halves, looking past a spotless reputation into the heart, and looking past a legal certificate to the woman holding it. He sees what nobody else sees. That's terrifying in verse twenty-eight, and it's her rescue in verse thirty-two. The man in our opening line never touched anyone, and Jesus called him guilty, because Jesus reads hearts. And a woman with nothing but a piece of paper had someone finally reading hers.

LINDA: Then the question is his, really, and it's yours to answer: what is your right eye... the good, useful, precious thing that keeps springing the trap, and what would it actually mean to throw it away from you?

FRANK: Dig Deeper is free, and you can find it at dig deeper dot A I.

LINDA: Thanks for staying with a hard one today. Until next time.