We're going to talk about things in this episode that those of you who listen with children are in delicate situations. Like you just want to listen to it first to make sure it doesn't get weird and ruin their childhood. Thanks. I think it was Jimmy Carter, who's one of the nicest people ever, I think. I don't know for sure what to think about his politics or his legacy. It's kind of a non-legacy, a sort of an odd presidency for him. He's far enough back that it doesn't feel super loaded with modern political issues to just talk candidly about that. So I'll say Carter in my brain is like in the C minus, D plus, half soggy, frosted, mini weets, mediocre range of things as a president. But he said something that he got really grilled for politically. But I appreciate what he was trying to communicate. He was trying to communicate a kingdom value from right here in Matthew chapter five. I've looked at a lot of women with lust and I've committed adultery in my heart with them, or something like that. And I don't know if at that point in history that phrase had kind of gone out of the modern mind and that brought it back in, or if everybody knew exactly what he was talking about. But certainly, this is a passage that a lot of people who've been alive a little longer will associate with Jimmy Carter and a campaign trail gaffe. But I think there's more going on here as we get yet another one of these statements of Jesus, where he's talking about what it is for him to be the fulfillment of the law, and he's going piece by piece through it. He's talking about how everyone really effectively has guilt and is insufficient in their behavior through the law. He's making another one of these, you have heard that it was said, but I tell you statements. And this one goes like this verse 27 of Matthew 5. You've heard that it was said, don't commit adultery. But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully 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's 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's better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell. Let's work backwards on this one, because I'm guessing there are a lot of people, including me, who are kind of hung up on the hell thing. Is Jesus really saying that there's a hell and people might go there? Okay, well, a few schools of thought on this, and let's just cover them real quick so that we can talk about the adultery thing. Adultery and hell in one day. Oh my goodness. This one's gonna get a ton of downloads. We're having a great time. I should have a promotional giveaway at the end of like fruit snacks or something, so we got something to look forward to, but you're not getting fruit snacks. Okay, so here's the deal. Uh, the hell thing. Some people would say it's a myth, it's a metaphor, it's a holdover from the Septuagint word for Hades, and it's kind of lost in translation, conjuring the idea of some sort of general underworld that maybe would involve some sort of separation from God, or maybe is more as uh is more of a Greek idea that we don't get in our modern English translation. There are other people who look at the language about hell in the New Testament, and they would say uh this is a description of an ultimate destruction of the soul. This position is called annihilationism. And when someone dies out of fellowship with God outside the covering grace of Jesus, they experience a destruction, an obliteration, an annihilation of their soul. They do not go on suffering, they simply cease to be. Then there are other people who would say that there is some kind of punishment or permanent separation from God that occurs, and still others would say that permanent separation is not only conscious, but they would take it a step further and say that permanent separation also involves some kind of like punishment and pain, whether that pain would be just being apart from God forever, or there's actual like an added element of some kind of physical or spiritual pain that goes along with it. Now, when you think about the equation of hell and what to do with it, you're probably just gonna sub in whichever one of those versions has been most drilled into your head through pop culture or Looney Tunes cartoons with pitchforks and you know, pointy tails and all of that stuff, or an angry street preacher who you heard yelling about things, or or who knows what. What I do know is this whatever you bring to the table on that topic, it's going to really inform how you read a passage like this, and it's gonna tempt you to check out on Jesus prematurely because of assumptions other people have thrown out. I mean, one of the biggest places where we get our assumptions about hell is from Dante's Inferno, which was meant to be a little bit of a uh satire, a parody, a takedown. So it's kind of crazy that we draw some of our cues on it from that. I would say this I think the right play for the moment is to acknowledge that Jesus is at least giving a nod to the notion that the religious expectation is that there is some kind of sorting out that happens at the end of all of this. Now it's become fashionable in recent years to suggest that there is no sorting out at the end of this, that Jesus came and he did all this stuff, and I guess it was for his health. I don't know, I've always struggled with this position, and that in the end, it doesn't matter if people ever know about who he is or what he did. Uh, it's all just kind of, you know, comes out in the wash. And in the end, there is no sorting out of what happened with who we were and how we lived and how that interacts with the grace of Jesus and what he did on the cross. Uh it could be. I'm really not able to sort that all out right now, but it looks like the text indicates that Jesus has a conception of a reckoning that happens after death, that judgment is part of the deal, and that what he's doing with all of this redemption stuff and the inauguration of this kingdom is talking about this thing that he's building that is the antithesis of that judgment and that separation from God. What the kingdom is fellowship and union with God and being in it kind of is the gospel of Jesus. Man, was that a minefield? I don't even know if I got it right. I hope you still like me, and if you don't, I hope it's for good reasons and not just that. So Jesus acknowledges in some way the notion of a judgment here by his use of the word hell, but how metaphorical is he being with talking about people maiming themselves? We're working backward through the passage if you haven't figured it out. There's a guy named Origen. He did most of his work in Alexandria. I feel like maybe later in life he was in Caesarea. I could be wrong on that. Whatever the case, he's uh one of the church fathers. I've read a decent amount of the stuff that he said. He doesn't really line up with anybody fully. I mean, Catholics definitely claim him, but not everything that he said. Lutherans like to quote a bunch of stuff from Origen, because at times it looks like he supports them, but they don't claim everything he said. And one of the places where I would just like to personally distance myself from one of the stories surrounding Origen is that apparently some people believe or had reason to suppose that he emasculated himself in response to this passage, reading this as something literal. I got a problem with a part of my body that causes me to fail, it'd be better to just make that go away. Yikes. Kind of in keeping with Origen's possible read on this passage. I think there are a lot of people, certainly this was the deal in my youth group at times growing up, who would read this as, oh, if your right eye causes you to sin and your right hand causes you, ah, we're talking about pornography and masturbation. Got it. Yeah, I mean, maybe I could see what Jesus might be driving at here. That is what he's driving at. He's going with a very euphemistic approach to speaking to it. And whether he's specifically talking about that stuff or not, what he does seem to be driving at is like, look, your body, which has understandable natural, biological, sexual urges, part of the deal. Jesus knows that he fully participated in creation. He knows that that's hardwired into people. It's part of the deal. It's how the proliferation of humanity is carried out. And Jesus himself is part of the Trinity, the triune Godhead, ordered humanity to proliferate and populate the earth and cultivate things. So like the sexy thing is part of the deal. It's supposed to be part of the deal. So let's settle down a little bit on the anti-sexy thing. But at the same time, it looks like it's supposed to be targeted in a certain direction. And well, this is another one of those things where maybe the social pressure of the day, the prudishness of the day, the expectations, the risk of getting caught, the risk of getting a disease would keep some people from committing adultery and then being able to say, look what I never did. So not only have I never murdered, I have also never committed adultery. So I will take my second cookie now, please, because that's two naughts that I haven't committed. So clearly the formula, first and foremost here, what we need to take from it is the larger context. Formula is just, yeah, okay, you don't actually get your cookie. Nope. No anti-adultery cookie. I mean, that's good that you haven't committed adultery. Jesus is affirming that law, but he's taking it deeper by saying, but all of you think like you're good and better than everybody else. I mean, why does adultery happen? And what happens with your eyes? What happens with your body? There's a whole bunch of little decisions that get made before you make that bigger decision. And there are decisions of the heart, and there's stuff that you choose to nurture there. And I am so not lecturing any of you on this at all. I'm just trying to paraphrase what Jesus is saying here. And if you're uncomfortable, well, guess what? I'm uncomfortable too. I think this is the first time I've ever actually awkwardly fidgeted with my hands while I'm recording this stuff. I'm just messing with the little thing here that comes out of my Bible and moving my phone around. Because this is a weird thing to talk about. And you need some podcaster telling you what to do or what to think or what to do if, like, you accidentally look at somebody and you're like, ah, look at them, look at the way they're shaped. I'm trying to be vague. That's attractive to me. It makes me feel things inside. I don't know what to tell you to do about that. There are people who write books and they're like, you should look for one 1000 and then look away. And if you look twice, then that was naughty. Really? I don't see that in the text. I don't know. It's hard. I can tell you this for sure. It is clearly saying to take stock of what happens at the level of the heart, and then somehow, at some level, that seems to matter. And that somehow, at some level, any sense of sanctimoniousness or self-righteousness or betterness than everybody else that you or I might feel is kind of burst when we think about the most primitive urges of the self. One being the primitive urge to procreate, the other being the primitive urge to take what we want from other people. Well, that's adultery and that's murder. And Jesus is saying again, just not doing the actual action is not what it means to live in keeping with the values of the kingdom. To really truly have this law fulfilled is to demonstrate that there's something much deeper going on that is proactively right. But I'm gonna take one more minute and I'm gonna steal my thunder from where we're going with this whole thing. I think it's just time because this was awkward. What's Jesus really driving at with all of this? Is there any way for you to not hate somebody? I mean, you can nurture something that's better and right, but you're gonna get it wrong. You're gonna say mean stuff. And if you don't, you're gonna think mean stuff. I just I don't know what to tell you. You're gonna get it wrong. Is there really any way to not look at somebody else and be like they are sexually attractive? That is hot. I don't know. If you know, email me. I would be very interested in that. Nope. People find other people attractive, sometimes in ways that maybe aren't even totally appropriate or healthy to think about. But you're not gonna get that perfectly 100% right. And so for me, getting past the murder and reconciliation thing and the adultery thing, I'm feeling one real strong impulse at this point as a reader. No, two. One is discomfort, and the other is, oh wait, no, they're both discomfort. And the other is I can't do this. I can do better, I can care, I can be cognizant, I can try, I can confess, I can desire to get it right, but I can't do this. And even if I got it right from here on out, I still didn't always get it right. So I guess my righteousness cannot surpass those of the Pharisees, the teachers of the law. I think that's what you're supposed to take from it. I think this is a systematic takedown of your imagined righteousness and mine. I don't think it is designed to make us despair or to cause us to start evaluating the quality or health of our relationship with God by what thought we thought in passing in that moment or that moment. I don't think that's the game, and unfortunately, that too often is how these passages actually play out in the heads of Christians. You get this like weird system of good and bad rankings, and you're trying to score points by not thinking this, and you make yourself crazy with that kind of stuff. No, I think he's saying embrace kingdom values, but also you can't apart from me. You're not supposed to despair because you realize that you can't get this right. What you're supposed to do instead is finally feel the full weight of the law that even if you behaved better than anybody ever and you never physically did any of the naughty things, you are still broken, you are still in need of a savior in order to have access into this truest realist thing, which is the kingdom. And we gotta flesh that idea out a whole bunch more as we go along. This was hard. Thank you for hanging with me through it. Thanks for thinking about it truthfully with me too. I'm Matt. That's a 10 minute Bible hour. Let's do it again soon.