Matthew 5:33-37

We are going to be in Matthew chapter five.

Matthew chapter five.

Before we read this, let me just kind of set the stage.

Set the stage for the material that's here.

Good culture, whether in a country or a city or a community, is fundamentally built on the pillars of trust, honesty, integrity, and reliability.

These values are the bedrock, the bedrock of a healthy society and thriving relationships.

Yet we often witness the erosion of these values not only globally, but also in our backyard.

If you consider the corruption in government a hallmark of underdeveloped countries, this corruption undermines trust and stability and creates an environment where dishonesty and unreliability flourish.

This isn't just a distant problem, it is a reality we grapple with here in our city in Baltimore, where challenges of integrity, transparency within government have been a long-standing concern.

Without spending the entire morning on the series of scandals that we've experienced, let me just kind of put some names out there for those of you that are maybe new to the city and some of you who've been around the city for a while.

You go back to 2009, you have Sheila Dixon, who was indicted on 13 counts of perjury and misconduct in office.

In 2014, you had Robert Stevenson, a former Baltimore City Public School principal, convicted of racketeering and conspiracy to commit racketeering.

He was taking bribes from vendors in exchange for awarding contracts.

Gary Wells, Daniel Herschel, and Marcus Taylor are some of the three best known names associated with the gun trace task force.

They were all convicted of racketeering, robbery, and conspiracy.

They were a force of plainclothes officers that were tasked with reducing gun violence in the city.

However, the unit was involved in a number of corrupt activities, including robbing drug dealers and stealing money and drugs.

They were sentenced to 14 to 18 years.

In 2019, Catherine Pugh, who was then the mayor, was indicted on 11 federal charges related to her self-dealing book scheme, related to the healthy Hawley children's books that she supposedly sold to the University of Maryland medical system and the Baltimore City Public Schools, and she ended up pleading guilty to tax evasion.

There was Antonio Taylor.

Do you know what Antonio Taylor did?

You know what role he played?

Antonio Taylor was the Baltimore City, he was the head or supervisor of the Baltimore City Department of Public Works and convicted of extortion.

And then you have uh most recently Marilyn Mosby in 2022.

She was indicted on federal charges related to her traveling spending, travel spending, and she was found guilty for those things as well.

All that to say that our society is built around a healthy government and a healthy city needs truth tellers.

It needs integrity, it needs transparency.

And when those things go out the window, you begin to have what is called corruption and the breakdown of trust.

But moving beyond the political realm into culture, we see this in pop culture as well.

Sometimes pop culture contradicts these values.

I was looking at the um Taylor Swift song Blank Space, and she writes in a satirical way.

In 2014, she was uh being mocked for her series of relationships, and so she wrote her song Blank Space to kind of embody this just um brutal, kind of crazy girlfriend mentality.

And at the time it was championed as uh the empowerment of a woman that she was willing to embrace the criticism of her ex-boyfriends and to say, I am crazy, and I've got a blank space, baby.

But the way that that she, in a sense, hero uh heroicizes um total instability and uh dishonesty.

And um she becomes kind of this embodiment of a powerful woman or the empowered woman by saying, Yep, I'm gonna be as crazy as possible and as hard-hearted as possible, you know, sign yourself up basically to be my next boyfriend.

It breaks down, and you in your own life have been the um victim and sometimes maybe the perpetrator of the erosion of a relationship by being inconsistent with your speech, or again, uh being the victim of a person who um was inconsistent or not truthful in their speech.

Jesus is preaching a kingdom, and he's going around the Sea of Galilee and he's talking about the good news of the kingdom, and he's saying, My kingdom is invading, my kingdom has come.

In fact, he he says, Reach out your hand, reach out your arm.

The kingdom is is at an arm's length, and he's introducing through this sermon on the mount just the values of his kingdom, an ideal.

And in essence, he's saying through these three chapters of Matthew 5, 6, and 7, this is what it looks like when my kingdom breaks out in my followers' lives in this world.

This is what it looks like.

And we we saw that he's elevated scripture.

He said, I didn't come to abolish the law, but I've come to fulfill the law, like his Bible.

He said, the Bible is every jot and tittle, everything that you have inherited in terms of Scripture, that is going to be fulfilled in and through my life.

And your righteousness needs to exceed that of your spiritual leaders today, the Pharisees and the scribes.

And he begins to say, like you've heard it said.

It's this formula, this formula of you have heard it said, but I say to you.

What he's doing in this as we looked at anger being put on the same level, put in the same courtroom as the murderer.

What we saw with lust being put in the same category as the adulterer.

We saw that a divorce, the grounds for divorce are severely narrowed and that the marriage covenant must be honored.

All of these things are going back to the root level of the law and saying, hey, this is the righteousness of my kingdom.

This is the ethical ideal that is that is um makes up my um that composes my kingdom.

So it is the thing that as we're reading this, consider that the Spirit of God wants to take and author these things in our lives.

This is not something where Jesus is like, hey, pull up yourself by your bootstraps.

You know, you ever seen, you ever, when you were a kid, did you ever go to the um fire station and you got to try on the fire a man's outfit?

Remember that?

And it was like the whole outfit was connected to the boots.

You stepped in the boots first and you had to pull yourself into it.

That Jesus is like, no, no, no, no.

I'm gonna give you my spirit, and my spirit is going to author this ideal ethic in your life.

It's gonna make you these types of citizens.

And so this morning we're gonna transition over to truth and language, and he's going to lay out an economy around language.

Let's look at chapter 5, verses 33 through 37.

Again, you have heard that it was said to our ancestors, you must not break your oath, but you must keep your oaths to the Lord.

But I tell you, don't take an oath at all, either by heaven, because it's God's throne, or by the earth, because it's his footstool, or by Jerusalem, because it is the city of the great king.

Do not swear by your head, because you cannot make a single hair white or black, but let your yes mean yes, and your no mean no.

Anything more than this is from the evil one.

Let's pray together.

Lord, we ask that you would take this text and that your spirit would teach us, Lord, that you would teach us about our language.

We're gonna communicate this week in different settings.

Some of us more than others.

Some of us are communicating a lot, and others of us communicate very little, but Lord, we give you permission to invade our speech, and that we would be a people who are truth tellers, truthful.

We pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Amen.

And so let's look at this text.

Let's consider first just the Old Testament context.

So again, using the formula, Jesus says, You have heard that it was said to our ancestors, you must not break your oath, but you must keep your oaths to the Lord.

In your version that you you have there and here on the screen, it may look as if this is a quote, but really what Jesus is doing is he's summarizing the Old Testament's teaching about swearing an oath.

Now there are there are some related words that uh are, or we could say there are similes, right?

These um the word swearing, oath making, and making a vow.

And the Bible does not distinguish between those three very well.

They're fairly interchangeable.

Making a vow and swearing an oath are related concepts and sometimes are interchangeable when a story is retold.

So Jesus says, here is what you've heard from our ancestors, and he's pulling this.

Let me give you some of the settings where this would be found in the Old Testament.

When the law is given, the Ten Commandments, we have uh this said by God to Moses, don't misuse the name of the Lord your God, because the Lord will not leave anyone unpunished who misuses his name.

This is in maybe your translation, it may say, um, do not take the Lord's name in vain.

It's the idea of carrying his name, picking up.

Don't take up God's name, don't associate something with God's name in an abusive way, where you're using God's name in an appropriate way.

This is not like saying, Oh my God, or oh my gosh, or uh like how my grandpa said it.

It's more of like that you're taking up and carrying the name of God, and yet your life and your language are completely other than what God would approve of.

He says, uh, we see in the law in Leviticus 19, and there's a lot in Leviticus 19 about swearing your oaths and making these types of formal um binding um statements.

He says, Do not swear falsely by my name, profaning the name of your God, I am the Lord.

In other words, to make a promise, to swear falsely and basically lie and associate God's name with that lie, would be to profane the name of God.

Then if we go over to Numbers 30, verse 2, we see this.

Numbers 30:2

When a man makes a vow to the Lord, do you see this?

He makes a vow to the Lord or swears an oath to put himself under an obligation, he must not break his word, he must do whatever he promised.

Do you see the um idea here was like, look, if you swear an oath, you say you're gonna do it, you need to keep your word.

In Proverbs, I don't have it here to put up on the street screen, but there is a proverb, and in my preparation I forgot until just this moment, but there's this beautiful proverb that says brings a blessing to the person who swears to their own hurt.

It's this idea that you are willing to keep your word even to the point where you're being injured and you're getting the raw end of the deal by being a person who keeps their word.

That that is the Old Testament ethic of how sacred language is, how important it is to speak and to not break your word.

Look at last one here out of Deuteronomy 23, uh twenty one through twenty-three.

If you make a vow to the Lord your God, do not be slow to keep it, because he will require it of you, and it will be counted against you as sin.

But if you refrain from making a vow, it will not be counted against you as sin.

Be careful to do whatever comes from your lips, because you have freely vowed what you have promised to the Lord your God.

For the Hebrew mind, language was sacred.

There was this idea that is rooted in Genesis 1, because the creation account occurred through God speaking and things coming into existence.

There was a sacredness that our culture doesn't necessarily have.

Well, it really doesn't have.

There is a sacredness in Hebrew culture around what you say.

That man, you're gonna speak, and that just that act of speaking brings about reality.

And you've felt that, right?

There's that um there's that dumb saying, uh, sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me.

And that is an attempt to harden the heart and not be affected by words spoken over us, which there's got to be some healthy way of processing bad language.

But the reality is for many of us, we bear scars from names that were supposedly supposed to never hurt us.

For me, when I was in ninth grade, for some reason, and I haven't heard this much since I was in set set uh ninth grade, but I was teased for the tone of my voice.

And so it was um I was around kids my age and uh in a high school setting, and people would walk up behind me and they would make this noise, because they said that my voice sounded like a duck.

Now, I was self-conscious about that, so much so that fast forward 25 years later, when I was invited to host a national radio program, I felt like I'm not the guy to do that because I have a voice that sounds like a duck.

It's amazing how just the things that are spoken over us can bring about a sense of realness in our lives in the same way that God spoke and the world became.

And so the Hebrew mind found um just a, they really took language seriously, and then on top of that, they had this real idea around swearing oaths.

And so by the time we get to Jesus' day, there was this um, there were these customs where the um the scribes and the um rabbis had found all these cute little ways to swear, but to kind of hold their, to hold their fingers crossed behind their back in their oath making, right?

Did you ever do that when you were a kid?

Right?

You like say something, but you got your fingers crossed behind your back or you got your toes crossed, like, hey, you can come to my birthday party, right?

And you got your fingers crossed.

These were adults that were finding those kind of loopholes by swearing, not according to God's name, but things that were sacred.

And so Jesus says, but I tell you, don't take an oath at all, either by heaven, because it's God's throne, or by earth, because it's his footstool, or by Jerusalem, because it's the city of the great king.

Do not swear by your head because you cannot make a single hair white or black.

Jesus is identifying their current customs around oath making.

Swearing by God's name was seen as invoking the divine presence as a witness, making the oath highly solemn and serious.

And so the thought was we're gonna make these second class oaths.

This commentator says this.

Jesus goes on to repudiate the use of second-class oaths, which avoid the name of God and therefore are not binding.

First, they do not in fact exclude God as heaven and earth and Jerusalem are inseparably linked with God, as Jesus shows by reference to Isaiah 66, 1 in Psalm 48, 2, and even your head is God's creation and under his control.

It is, it's very much like that idea of, you know, cross my heart, um, spit to death, hope to die, type language.

And um yet the rabbis found it, well, yeah, it adds flair to the language.

It's extra like um, you know, gives seriousness to the language, but it's not binding.

Jesus confronts this again as he is just railing on the Pharisees, right?

So if you go further to Matthew 23, Jesus brings up this whole thing again.

It's this is amazing.

Look at in in Matthew 23, uh, he speaks to the custom.

He says, Woe to you, blind guides, who say, and he's speaking here to the Pharisees, he's calling them blind guides, who takes an oath by the temple, it means nothing, but whoever takes an oath by the gold of the temple is bound by his oath, right?

Blind fools.

For which is greater, the gold of the temple that sanctified uh or the temple that sanctified the gold.

Also, whoever takes an oath by the altar, it means nothing, but then whoever takes an oath by the gift that's on it is bound by his oath.

Do you seeing kind of the culture there?

Supposedly you could say, Well, you know, I promise, according to the the altar that's in the temple, I promise.

And that person wouldn't be bound to that oath.

It sounded good.

It sounded like modern day squaring, right?

But it Wasn't actually binding, but if you swear by the sacrifice on the altar, oh wow, you can't break that.

You can't break your word then.

Blind people.

For which is greater, the gift or the altar that sanctifies the gift?

Therefore, therefore, the one who takes an oath by the altar takes an oath by it and by everything on it.

Jesus is like, it's inseparable.

The one who takes the oath by the temple takes an oath by it and the one who dwells in it.

And the one who takes an oath by heaven takes an oath by God's throne and by him who sits on it.

You can't do this whole like game.

We might say, if we were to live in that culture and be able to somehow live in the culture where these goofy oaths were being made, and then also being familiar with our own culture, we might liken it to like political spin, right?

Where you're running for office and you're saying the things that get you the votes, but it's like if we really press into that, we know that you're from the federal, you're running for the federal branch of the government, and what you're, or you're running for the executive branch of the government, and what you're talking about really falls to the judicial branch, right?

And you will not have power to affect it, but it sure sounds good.

You're sure spinning it well.

That's that's the culture that Jesus is is living in and interacting with where oaths are being abused.

And so what's Jesus' take?

What's Jesus' take on this whole thing?

He says in verse 37, let your yes mean yes, and your no mean no.

Anything more than this is from the evil one.

Now, Jesus is saying basically, you don't need the extra fluff.

You don't need to go and like swear by heaven that you're telling the truth.

Your yes ought to mean yes, and your no ought to mean no.

You don't need the extra work or the effort, extra language.

Now, there was a stream within Christianity that took Jesus' words here very literally as a prohibition against binding yourself by an oath.

The Anabaptist tradition would used to forbid, you know, you go do jury duty and you have to swear that you will abide by and follow the Constitution or whatever, right?

Jesus is not necessarily forbidding that.

There are three times in the epistles where Paul calls upon God to witness his language.

He calls upon God to basically bear witness to what he's saying, that it is true, which is a similar idea to saying, I swear by heaven that this is true.

So he's he's what Jesus here is emphasizing is not the absence of swearing an oath.

We're not cussing, we're talking about swearing an oath.

He's not talking about the absence so much as he's saying, let us be a community of people that tell the truth.

And when we say something, we mean what we say.

And and so sometimes that means it's like, shut up, stop, stop talking because you are not being honest.

You can't proceed with this conversation and be honest without really blowing up this relationship.

Just be quiet or redirect the conversation, you know?

And then other times it means you need to take a risk in the relationship and you need to tell the truth.

But the community, this kingdom that Jesus is inaugurating and welcoming people into is a community where truth is spoken and words have meaning, and they're not just this interchangeable thing that kind of play a short game and get their way?

Isn't that the kind of kingdom you want to be in?

How much difference does that make in relationships?

How much difference does that make in business dealings?

How much difference does that make in an academic atmosphere?

How much difference does that make in a governance, in a government where there is political speak if you could just tell the truth and you could be known as a person that you mean what you say?

Well, this teaching of Jesus really took hold.

This instruction is included in the end of James.

So James is the brother of Jesus, and he talks about this.

He literally quotes this idea from Jesus in his letter.

His instruction, this instruction here, um falls in between a command to live your life with patient endurance and to be a people of intense fervent prayer.

So he's wrapping up his letter.

He's like, live where you're just patiently enduring suffering and be a people that pray intensely.

Between that, here's what I want.

Brothers and sisters, do not swear by heaven or by earth with any other oath, but let your yes mean yes and your no mean no, so that you won't fall under judgment.

One of my favorite examples of this concept, yes meaning yes, and no meaning no, is in 2 Corinthians.

I've shared this before because it's just a great story.

Paul planted the church in Corinth.

He left Corinth to keep doing ministry.

And after he left, some other leaders came along and were talking smack about Paul.

And they were saying that Paul was less than a legitimate apostle, that he was a second-class apostle.

He was like a B-string quarterback, right?

Um, he was a bench warmer of an apostle that God happened to use with the Gentiles, but they were saying, we're the true apostles, right?

Paul's not around.

And so Paul is writing back into the mess that is Corinth, and he is correcting them on what they've done wrong, but he's also trying to maintain what he believed to be his spiritual authority and influence in this church.

And he threads a needle through all of 2 Corinthians as he does this, because he's not there to really push back actively against these superior apostles.

He has to appeal to them.

And so one of the accusations that's made against Paul is like that Paul had said, Hey, I'm coming back to Corinth, and yet he wasn't there yet.

And so this group of people who were against Paul was saying, look, Paul doesn't keep his word.

He's changed his plan.

So he says, Because of this confidence, I planned to come to you first so that you could have a second benefit, and to visit you on my way to Macedonia, and then come to you again from Macedonia and be helped by you on my journey to Judea.

The key thing here is that he said, I planned.

Do you see that there?

Do you make plans in your life?

Look at how Paul makes plans in his life.

He said, I had this plan.

That's the first thing.

You make a plan.

You have a plan.

Now, when I planned this, did I have two minds, or was I of two minds?

Or what I plan, do I plan in a purely human way so that then I communicate, yes, yes, and then I say, no, no, at the same time.

In other words, do I speak out of two sides of my mouth?

And then he says, he says, as God is faithful.

That's not just, you know, like a quaint old saying that like a knight in the dark ages would have said, as God is faithful.

No, as God is faithful, the character of God is that God is faithful, he's consistent with his word.

As God is faithful, our message to you is not yes and no.

For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, whom we proclaim among you, Sylvanus, Timothy, and I, did not become yes and no.

On the contrary, in him it's always yes.

For every one of God's promises is yes in him.

Therefore, through him we also say, Amen to the glory of God.

You see, he says, look, it our language to you was not yes and then no.

It's just as consistent as the message, right?

If you're making plans and then backing up on your plans, how can somebody trust you to communicate about God?

You're the representative of God's message.

Why would anybody trust you?

Why would anybody trust you about the gospel if your life is utterly inconsistent?

I had this uh acquaintance that I was for that was foisteced upon me years ago.

I was working at a Bible college, and the somehow this guy got hired who was a friend of a friend.

It was kind of like a buddy deal.

We're gonna like put him here.

He's gonna work there.

And uh he's great, you know.

And so he would come and you know, he would pop into the office after we had all been there for a couple of hours, and his hair was like slicked back.

He had been at the beach surfing, and you know, hey, how you doing?

He would talk you up, you know, hey, we gotta get coffees.

I really want to get to know you, you know.

Super slick talker.

Like, and and initially he was like, wow, this guy's really like when you first meet somebody like they're like, wow, that person is really positive, that they're like an encourager.

They really got like this way to really be friendly, really friendly.

And then um, I'd be like, Yeah, that sounds good.

Like, let me know when you're available, right?

So then, you know, the next week comes by that he hasn't been at work all week and he comes back in, you know, wow, the surf's great out there, man.

Love what you're doing, love the work you're doing.

You're just amazing.

I could learn so much from you, you know.

And then we gotta connect, we gotta get together sometime.

Let's get coffee.

All right, yeah, that sounds good, man.

Let's do it, let's get together.

You know, another week goes by, the guy's not anywhere to be found.

This goes on for like a long time because he's like buddies, buddies with the president.

And and pretty soon there's this like grumbling, right?

Because he's getting paid exactly what all the rest of us are getting paid.

And he has the same privileges and rights that all the rest of us have.

And you know what that wouldn't be like, right?

If you in your workplace, if that kind of person was there, you're like, this guy is utterly inconsistent.

It's amazing the cancer of somebody like that, just how it just demoralizes because it makes all the rest of us feel like who are we?

You know, who are we that this guy's got some sweet deal?

He's totally a phony getting this sweet setup from the president, and he's just pulling a fast one over.

I changed departments, and this was two years in like a year and a half, two years of this guy working at the Bible college, and nobody liked him.

And we put him in, my new boss put him in our department, and he was assigned.

Like the the the director was like done with the guy, but didn't want to fire him himself.

So we basically put him with my new boss, and he was required to attend the staff meeting every week.

And my my boss was an excellent team lead.

He would take good notes in the staff meeting, he'd put names at the end of every action item, and then every week we'd do a debrief, right?

You've been in good meetings like that, and at the we'd go through what did you accomplish?

And everybody's name would come up.

We'd go through the notes, and there's his name.

What'd you view?

You know, nothing.

We did that for a couple weeks.

The guy went into the president's office, he fired himself.

He said, I don't fit here anymore.

I can see I'm not really getting the job done.

I'm not, and um, I don't know where he's at now.

But it's funny, this the accountability that's needed for a person like that.

That's not the kingdom of heaven.

And if you've been hurt by somebody like that, I'm so sorry.

What's what I mean, there's people that maybe don't follow Jesus and they're like that.

Okay, all right.

So maybe, maybe they're not reigned and ruled over by Christ, but we're a people that are governed by Jesus, like he's our king.

And so we don't get to get away with just talking however we want.

We need to be a people of honesty, integrity, authenticity, simplicity, and reliability.

Let me just finish with this.

In Mark 14 at the crucifixion story, Peter is there warming himself by the fire, and he's being told, You're a follower of this guy, Jesus.

And he started to curse and swear.

I don't know this man that you're talking about.

He's not just denying his knowing Jesus, but he's cursing and swearing.

He's enhancing his speech as in the midst of being dishonest.

This is this is the um brokenness that Jesus is calling us out of, is this enhancement of language to try to make a dishonest point.

And then he's calling us to this in Hebrews 7.21.

He, being God, or Jesus, became a priest with an oath made by the one who said to him, The Lord has sworn and will not change his mind.

You are a priest forever.

All throughout Hebrews 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7.

The language of oath-making and swearing and promising is pervasive, and it says that God can swear by no one greater.

And so he swore by himself.

God uses an oath and secures the eternal priesthood of Jesus for us.

That's the right place for an oath to be made.

That's that covenant-making God who speaks and swears and says, this is the reliable speech.

This is what you can rely upon.

That's what secures for us our priest Jesus.

Let's pray together.

Lord, we thank you for your word.

Thank you for being a God that is reliable and trustworthy.

That we can base our lives on your word, that we can stand upon your promises and know that you will never fail us.

God, we confess the looseness of our lips, and we ask that more and more your spirit would come and author in us a carefulness about our language, and that we would be trustworthy people, that we would say things and we would follow through, even to our own hurt.

Lord, we ask that we would have that type of character, that type of integrity in our lives.

We want to be the recipients of that kind of culture.

We want to to live off the fruit of people that talk like that.

We pray that you would help us to contribute to that kind of kingdom.

And we pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.