Hello there! Hello guy! I don't mean to be rude, but this is not as easy as it looks, so I'd appreciate it if you were to stream to me. Sorry. I don't suppose you're gonna speed things up! Look, if you're in such a hurry, you could lower a rope or a tree branch or find something useful to do. You could do that. I have some robots here. But I don't think you would accept my help, since I am only waiting around to kill you. That does put a temper on our relationship. But I promise I will not kill you until you reach the top. That's very comforting. I'm afraid you'll just have to wait. I hate the waiting. I could give you my word as a Spaniard. No good. I've known too many Spaniards. Not that anyway you'll trust me? Nothing comes to mind. I swear on the soul of my father, Domingo Montoya, you will reach the top alive. Throw me the rope.
SPEAKER_00Why does that seem funny? It's not hard, right? It's because everybody's always used to getting lied to. And what scenario would you be more likely to lie to someone in than about helping them up a cliff so that you can then fight them to the death in a sword fight? It'd be far easier to just send them further down the cliff. This the whole scenario is really funny there in The Princess Pride, too, because surely Inigo could just find some rocks or something and throw them down at Wesley's head while he's trying to climb the wall, but he doesn't. They're having this civilized discussion, and what should be a serious debate about life and death instead is really a little commentary on oaths and swearing and when you can believe somebody and when you can't in society. And the first two oaths are pretty hollow and the joker ring's true about that. But then the third one is like all super serious. I swear on the soul of my dead father. Whoa, okay, all right, fine. Throw me the rope. Let's do it. This guy really does want to have a sword fight, not just kill me more easily. And so, you know, he helps them up and then they do have a sword fight, and the movie's really fun and it all works out. Well, this is something that it works because it squares with reality for you and me. We get lied to all the time. I mean, disappointingly, maybe we aren't as honest as we could be ourselves all the time. You got politicians, you got advertisers. I don't know who else I could throw on the list, but it seems like everybody's got an agenda for you, whether it's to separate you from your old ideas or to separate you from your money or to separate you from your vote. And people will work all kinds of angles to do whatever it takes. And so just saying, no, I promise. Eh, that's like a level one kind of thing. I need something better than I promise. I super promise. Whoa. That's better, but still no. I guarantee. Whoa, a guarantee. But then you read the fine print and you're like, uh, but then nothing happens if the promise doesn't come through. They just said the word guarantee, like genuine leather, which isn't even actually leather at all. No, you got to take it to like the super next level of trust. You got to put things on the line, you got to really put it out there for promises to mean anything in this day and age. And I think it was the same deal in the first century, both from stuff that I've read and reading between the lines of where the Bible, Jesus in particular, pushes back on this weird oath-giving phenomenon. Now, here's what I understand was going on in the first century with Jesus' original audience. There was this hierarchy of oaths, like triple stamp and then triple stamp a double stamp, and then quadruple stamp, and like this time, no, I really actually meant it this time. And you could do oaths of differing levels, some of which really effectively apparently meant, yeah, I'm totally not going to do that at all. But this is the socially nice thing to say in this situation. And then you could take that up to the next level, and all the different swearing almost had a different kind of mental rank for people. So they knew when you actually meant it. And the whole thing was a joke, and it kind of made a mockery of integrity. And again, lest we get on our high historical horse and point fingers at people from the first century and imagine we're all better, and we have our own little quirky ways of doing things too, or jokes like what was carried out there in The Princess Bride wouldn't ring true for us. So Jesus is going to push back once again on something where the original audience would have been able to say, oh no, I'm very righteous. I'm righteous, like to the level of the Pharisees, because I don't murder anybody, I don't commit adultery, all of my divorces have the proper paperwork, so that's not technically sleeping around. And further, I never ever lie. I keep all of my oaths that are actual oaths that are ranked properly to actually be carried out. The ones that are just like sort of oaths, I don't have to do those. So Jesus, pointing once again at how he is the fulfillment of the moral law, the behavioral law, and pointing out how everyone falls short of it, says the following. Again, you've heard that it was said to the people long ago, don't break your oath, but keep your oaths that you've made to the Lord. But I tell you, don't swear at all, either by heaven, for it's God's throne, or by the earth, for it's his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great king. And don't swear by your head, for you can't make even one hair white or black. Simply let well, some of us can't make any hair any color at all. Simply let your yes be yes and your no be no, and anything beyond this comes from the evil one. Ha. Okay, well, there's a whole lot of extra Bible. And my guess is that a lot of the people on the hill were like, I don't know. I've read this document, and I remember some of this stuff in there, and I'm not sure exactly what to make of what you're saying. So, um, Bible time. And I actually marked them this time, so it's gonna go quicker. Exodus chapter 20, verse 7. You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name. Oh, okay, well, that seems to support what Jesus is saying. Uh oh, but they would say, well, we weren't really swearing exactly by God. It was by his throne. So that that's allowed. Or earth or by Jerusalem. So, okay, so yeah, you can see the the vows that Jesus is pushing back on. God's throne, earth, Jerusalem, all of those things aren't quite swearing to God or by God. So it looks like he's calling out this little technicality that people were using to do these not so honest versions of oaths that were really effectively just lies. And even the Mishnah and some of the different rabbinical arguments of the time seem to support the idea that swearing actually diminishes your credibility the same way we might think that using the phrase, look, I'm gonna tell you the truth here, diminishes our credibility today. Why'd you have to clarify that you're gonna tell the truth? Were you lying? All the stuff that you're saying before that? I'm gonna be honest. Let me be honest. Why were you lying before? I swear by this, that, and God's footstool in Jerusalem. Well, wait a minute. What were you doing before you started swearing about things? Were you lying? So even the rabbinical teachers had a few questions about this that we can find on record. But Jesus' teaching gets a little bit tricky because what kind of vows is he actually talking about here? Because as we look around further in the New Testament, we see that, well, he answers a question under oath in Matthew 26. The high priest said to him, I charge you under oath by the living God, tell us if you are the Christ, the Son of God. Well, if you're not supposed to say anything under oath, Jesus would remain quiet. But the next letters are read. Yes, it is as you say, Jesus replied. By the way, dang, that's him just owning the I am Christ, the Son of God. So Jesus answered a question under oath. That raises questions. All right, and 2 Corinthians 1, 23 says the following. This is Paul. I call God as my witness that it was in order to spare you that I did not return to Corinth. Wow, he's calling God as his witness over something that? Well, maybe he didn't hear the Sermon on the Mount or didn't know what Jesus was talking about there. This is a little bit tricky. And then let me see, James, no, Hebrews 6, 13 through 17. When God made his promise to Abraham, since there was no one greater for him to swear by, he swore by himself, and then it goes on to flesh that idea out a little bit. Huh. Well, then we run over here to James 5 and verse 12, and this seems to flip around saying, Above all, my brothers, don't swear, not by heaven or by earth or by anything else. Let your yes be yes and your no be no, or you will be condemned. I'm baffled. Which one is it, right? This is where the Bible is frustrating and tricky. Because if you read one verse at a time, sometimes it really does seem like it's saying conflicting things. But again, let's go back to the little hints that we're getting here. The Bible says, the Old Testament, that everybody would have been reading at this time, says don't swear by God. And so Jesus then is calling out oaths that are just tiptoeing right up to the edge of swearing by God, but technically not swearing by God. It looks like he's calling out these paltry little oaths that were really some kind of smokescreen for dishonesty that apparently people had just accepted and were part of the deal. And is James actually quoting from Matthew in that particular verse? Simply let your yes be yes and your no be no. Anything beyond this comes from the evil one? That's kind of crazy. Just a side note, thinking about the implications of that. That would mean that James had Matthew in circulation. Well, Matthew or some other part of what we now call the Bible that gives us this quote from Jesus. Interesting. So I guess there are a few ways we could read this. The obviously worst read on the text would be to say, oh, swearing. Oh, that's like the F-word and stuff. We're totally against that. And so he's saying, don't use dirty words. That is the worst reading imaginable. There's no way that's what he's actually saying here. But I have sat through youth group lessons where that was the take-home from this passage. No, that's absolutely absurd. It can't possibly mean that. The second one, somebody might say that he's forbidding all oaths in any context, but we just looked at him giving a testimony under oath. We just heard how God the Father, I mean, Jesus is part of the Trinity. We just turned out God the Father swore an oath by his own name and his own credibility. I don't think it can be an out and out prohibition on oaths here. Some people would say that he is keeping the Old Testament law in place, but he's telling people to swear better, like target it better, make sure you get it right, and use your language a little bit more precisely in terms of what you swear by. Seems like he's going for something bigger than just tweaking their behavior here. Some people would say that he's completing the principle of the Old Testament teaching not to swear by God, especially as a cover for dishonesty, and that he's applying this to all the bogus things that are going on right now. So if that's the case, then what he's doing here is the same thing that he did with the whole divorce thing and the adultery thing and the murder and reconciliation thing. He's saying your dumb fake sense of righteousness is a complete fraud, and it's actually just a smokescreen for doing things that are actually evil. And a hint of those four options, it's it's actually definitely the last one. And part of the reason I'm so confident in that interpretation is that in the larger context of these series of statements in Matthew chapter five, there's just no other read that makes sense. We're getting a pattern here. And you think about this, what's really interesting is that Jesus is saying, you're doing this outward thing that looks like obedience, but it's a smokescreen for total crap that you're trying to pull and stuff that you're trying to get away with, but you pat each other on the back for being technically good and righteous and obedient, but the whole thing is a fraud. Well, that's really clear in this one on oaths, which is very helpful when we go back and read the more confusing one on the law of divorce, or the also confusing one on the law of adultery. Because we're getting all of these examples, we have a pattern so that each of these can cross-pollinate and help us to understand with more and more confidence as we move along what he meant by the last one, what he meant by the one before that. And as we move into the next couple of these, we're going to be able to have an even clearer sense of what he meant in terms of what we're looking at right now with the law of oaths. This is the interpretive principle of always interpret the less clear in light of the more clear. And in this case, all of the context is lending clarity to all of the rest of the context. Bottom line is tell the truth. The truth is a kingdom value. This stuff all happens in the light, unlike everything else, where you got to lie and manipulate to make it work, to make it legal, to make it sell, you got to hide the unattractive parts of what's going on. Jesus is putting everything in front of everybody. Remember, right up front, he disclosed, hey, sign up for my kingdom or you'll get persecuted, just like the people did in the past, where people who are poor and beat up, these things might happen, but don't worry, they're valued in my kingdom. He didn't hide any of that stuff. For the same reason that the joke with the dialogue between Inigo and Wesley at the cliffs of insanity and the princess bride hits because we're used to increasing levels of ramping up oath taking to finally get toward where people tell truth. So it hits here for this original audience, too. There would have been a whole lot of people sitting there nodding and being like, you know what? It would be a lot easier if we just said the things that we thought and then didn't say the things that we didn't think, and then our yes was yes and our no was no. And I bet a whole lot of people sitting there, just like a whole lot of people sitting here today, were like, that's refreshing. That sounds like a wonderful kingdom. That sounds better than the way we do it, and I would like to sign up for that.