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Hey surprise, Jesus of Nazareth is against murder. We learned that by reading Matthew 5 21 the other day, but in case you forgot, it goes like this. You've heard that it was said to people long ago, don't murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment. And then he goes on to basically say, Yep, that's true, and here's some other stuff. So that's pretty good. I mean, I guess if anybody who's there listening to Jesus in this moment is listening to him talk about like the law and how that's all gonna fit in and that he's the fulfillment of it, I guess the big obvious question will be like, Well, what about killing people? Well, thankfully, he answers that right off the bat. Nope, killing people is still gonna be wrong in the kingdom. We're gonna go with not murder. But the stunning thing is that then he flips it around at some stuff that really gets into our business, into our invisible business, the stuff that other people don't see, the stuff that happens in our brain, in our heart, in our essence, in our core, whatever you want to call it. And that creates a conundrum for you and me, my friends, because the whole deal here socially with the podcast thing is that I don't tell you what to do. And there are a few reasons that I don't tell you what to do. One is because of how often I've been wrong. And so if I go around telling people what to do all the time and have the continued track record I've had in the past of rightness versus wrongness ratio, I would be very concerned about bearing the moral culpability of that because I get things wrong sometimes. I kind of want to be smart about how often I go trotting things out. I'm like, everybody needs to do everything my way because I don't know, I might need to land somewhere else. Another reason that I try to be smart about that is because it would make me a complete and total hypocrite most of the time. Because even though it's fun to do the fake humble thing where you're like, hey, everybody has problems. I have problems too, but you don't mean it. I can't do that. I have problems too. And in fact, I've got a pretty good ledger list of a bunch of red writing that says I shouldn't have done that and I shouldn't have done that, and I hurt people there, and I shouldn't have said those things. And so I just have enough in my backstory that I'd honestly like to be careful about how bossy I get about other people's behavior, especially on stuff like this where it's kind of mingled with what God is purported to be saying about things. I kind of like to leave those words in his mouth and be pretty smart about painting myself into a corner with my dumb bad behavior and my history and my flaws that make me into the biggest hypocrite of them all. So there's a reason that we're going for a healthy dose of me not telling you what to do here, but there's a problem, and that is that the Bible at times does. And most of the time, it really doesn't. Most of the time, the Bible is just, I mean, here's God, here's the circumstance, here's what he does in the circumstance, and now you know more things about how God is and how he responds to stuff. And the more you do it, the more you can kind of triangulate what his values are, what he's into, what he thinks about stuff. And the more you get a sense of those values and that agenda that he has to redeem and bring glory to himself, the more you can be like, I don't like that, and I would prefer not to associate myself with that God. Okay, like that's one response. Or the more you get familiar with that stuff, the more you might be like, I like that. That seems truer and realer. And I would not only like to associate myself with that God, I would like to imitate his values and implement that stuff into my decision making and my priority. I really think that's most of how the Bible is supposed to affect people, but there is some very direct stuff in here about what you actually do and what you don't, and there's just no getting around the fact that it is held out as being, in this case, from Jesus himself, God in the flesh, that the text is purported to be inspired by God and accurate and useful for teaching and correcting or proof and training in righteousness and all of that stuff. And so what that means is at times, and it is the the great minority of the text, but at times Jesus is on screen saying, here is right stuff and here is wrong stuff. And what's crazy is that most of that is not really about obvious, measurable external things. When Jesus is talking about right and wrong, he always seems to drive down to the level of the deeply personal, deeply uncomfortable in your business. And I think that's why he's off-putting to some people is that he he does presume to get in your business. He really does think that he is king of everything and that there is a kingdom, and that he's in charge of it, and that what he's laying out in this kingdom manifesto is real, and that this is the best kingdom to be a part of, and that these are the values of the kingdom, and that everybody who's hearing this needs to change and adjust to be on board with what he's about. Again, please do not mishear that as everybody needs to adjust to whatever I think. Who cares what I think? But Jesus is speaking with that level of authority. And in fact, I mean, that's that's exactly how the Sermon on the Mount ends, remember? I mean, they get done listening to all of this stuff that he says so boldly. And then it says, when Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were amazed at his teaching because he taught as one who had authority and not as their teachers of the law. So, yeah, the original audience took it this way too, my friend. They're like, that, that, that is, that is in my grill, that is in my wheelhouse, and is challenging and frustrating and maybe humbling, and maybe something I really need to hear, and maybe something I don't want to hear, and it's meant to cause you to wrestle. So as we dig deeper into this whole series of you've heard it said, but then I tell you kind of statements that we're looking at right now. Um, I'm just gonna try to break down the text and you do with it what you need to, and I'm gonna try to do the same thing, and we land in the same place. Cool, we can high five over that. If we don't, cool, we can high five over that too. Let's just game the thing out together and do with it what we need to. Okay. Everybody can agree that murder is wrong. I think most of us can agree that you don't really score points by not murdering people. I mean, really, isn't that just pretty much a base level expectation for all humans who we can encounter? I mean, the mailman comes by and you don't even really think to yourself, like, I bet that guy never murdered anybody. You just pretty much assume that if you're interacting with a person, they're not murdering people, which is great. And part of the reason that it's a baseline expectation is because it's heinous and horrible and awful. Even if we don't have this verse in the Bible, it's awful. But part of the reason that murder is something that we don't do goes beyond the moral uh horrificness of it and right into the fact that, well, it's very hard to murder. Like you might think, no, it's not that all right, you stab somebody or something. But really, think about that. The social consequences, the fact that the whole world's populated with people, that we're all connected, somebody's gonna know that you did it. Even nobody else does know that you did it, you're going to know that you did it. That isn't going away. And man, what if the murder goes wrong? And you're like, oh, I'm just gonna knock one out here tonight. I mean, surely it's gonna cross your mind that they might murder you back, that they might be a better potential murderer than you, and when you unleash the beast, you might be the one who gets dead. So there's kind of this self-preservation element to why we don't murder as well. This is better to live in a society where nobody murders anybody, and we don't take the risk of settling things that way, because all it takes is flipping tails once, and all of a sudden you are out of the game because you got murdered in another murder contest. That's why dueling has largely gone away as well. But beyond just the social consequences and the fact that it's morally horrific and we can conceptualize that, beyond the religious consequences that you know, we see something that holds itself out as being from God saying, don't do it, there's also something I alluded to real quickly, and that is the human, individual, um, universal cosmic sense of right and wrong aspect of murder that makes us not do it. So I've told you this before, I'm gonna tell you again. My first year of college, my first class at Trinity College in Chicago was with Professor Cliff Williams. It was an intro philosophy course, changed my life in more ways than one. But one of the ways is I walked in, and there's this beautiful brown-haired lady sitting right there with these piercing blue eyes, and her hair is just like this explosion of curls. Just beautiful, smiley, friendly, warm, inviting. And my brain goes right to, well, no way, I'm getting invited to sit by her. And then she did, patted the chair right next to her, and clearly was pointing at me. And I was like, and yes. I went and sat down next to her, and obviously it's gonna be my wife because you can't say it with this much enthusiasm if it turns out to be like, yeah, and then we dated for a couple weeks, and I met my wife, and she was pretty good too. No, as it just turns out to be my wife. I sat down, I'm feeling all good, and she's like, Yeah, some weird guy that's trying to sit by me. If you sit here, he won't. I'm like, oh, I wanted it to be because I'm hot. But okay, whatever. So I sat in that class and I got to sit by her a lot, and I remember that one of the things that she and I and the rest of the class gamed out together was an exercise that the professor put in front of us. He said, All right, imagine the ring, and even though there's no camera, I just took it off of my finger. I don't know why. I'm holding it up like Boromir did now. Imagine the ring from the Lord of the Rings, and it's a ring that can, you know, turn you invisible and nobody can see you and you can get away with stuff, probably. But imagine now that instead of making you physically invisible, the ring makes you morally invisible. And when you put it on, nothing you do counts. There are no social consequences, there are no moral consequences, there is no individual guilt. You don't have to feel any of that if you don't want to. God doesn't see it, nobody sees it. You know, so I get to thinking about it and I'm like, hmm, would I put on that ring? And then I thought a little bit more and I was like, no, because I am an 18-year-old super Christian who only does the things that are right. I wouldn't put it on because I don't want to say the F-word, and I don't want to vote for the bad political party, and I am more interested in spending my time seeing what other people do wrong so I can notify them of their bad behavior and eventually get everybody up to my level. I honestly thought that in my head. I fortunately didn't say it out loud, or I wouldn't have probably got to marry that girl. But in my brain, I was like, why would I need a moral ring? I'm already right about everything. I do everything right. I read the Bible, you know, once, and maybe part of twice. I was a pastor's kid, and um, I worked at a Christian bookstore selling audio adrenaline CDs, so I am good. So no, I don't want your dirty moral ring, and this whole exercise is dumb and it's for bad people. And then I went and screwed stuff up, just you know, maybe not calamitous stuff, but somewhere after there, I just started making mistakes and became an adult. And it was like, oh, I shouldn't have said that to those people. I shouldn't have done that. Well, I really hurt them, didn't I? And I wouldn't say I ever became like a scoundrel or anything, but you just get out from under your parents' roof a little bit, and the consequences of them stopping you or the them catching you doing bad things are gone. I don't know, and you just it's easier to make mistakes. I made mistakes and I felt bad about it. And some years later I went and revisited that and I thought, wow, you know what? I think I probably would put that ring on. I might not wear it for very long, I might just put that thing on real quick just to try something out, or you know, help get myself out of a difficult situation. But pretty soon I'd be wearing that ring a lot more because I think there'd be something really appealing about not having any moral accountability. You know, think about that exercise. Hopefully you're thinking about that exercise as I talk about it. And it really does raise some questions. But I wonder, would you ever really be able to escape, regardless of what your view of the world and God and human life is, would you ever really be able to escape that sense of I did something really, really screwed up there? I think that if you're religious, obviously there's there's a being to whom you're accountable. If you're a person who's not a sociopath and you care about others at all, there are people, there's society to whom you're accountable. Even if you're the closest thing in the world to a nihilist, and I don't believe that there are any actual nihilists, or they would be dead. Anyone who is alive values something and believes there's meaning in something at some level. No, I think whatever your thought system is, there would be this uh implicit thing within you that says I shouldn't have done those things, like for example, murder, but the most obvious of things not to do. So I think what Jesus is doing here is saying you get no credit for not murdering people. None. In any scenario that we run, murdering people is an active step of aggression and action that it only takes someone who's afraid or lazy or just doesn't want to deal with the consequences, or someone who doesn't want to risk exposing themselves to the possibility of being murdered back. That's all it takes for you to not murder. So y'all are gonna get no credit with God for points to get into the kingdom of heaven for your righteousness by not murdering. Instead, we're gonna talk about this flip side of the coin, which is the proactive one, and I've already gone over, so we're gonna talk about it tomorrow. I'm Matt, this is a 10 minute Bible hour podcast. We'll pick it up right where we left off, Munyana.