You see, the whole point is that their system is substandard. God says you shouldn’t be giving vengeance at all.” Verse 43, “You think it’s enough to love your neighbor and hate your enemy. God says everything you say ought to be true so you wouldn’t even need an oath.” And now in our verse, “You think that it’s enough to give equal vengeance.
You think it’s enough that you put an oath behind your word.
God says you shouldn’t even get a divorce, except for fornication. You think it’s enough to do the paperwork when you get a divorce.
God says you shouldn’t even think it in your heart. You think it’s enough not to commit adultery. It’s this: “You have heard it said, that’s your system, but I say unto you that’s God's.” And he says, “Yours is here, God's is here. All through chapter 5, verses 21 to the end of the chapter, verse 48, he compares their system with God's truth. He shows them the standard to begin with and then tells them they aren’t there, and he has a very significant way of doing it. So Jesus then is endeavoring to destroy their system. They had no contrition, no repentance, no sense of sinfulness, unworthiness, no mournfulness, and they then had to be broken you see to come to that place where they would have the heart of the one in the Beatitudes. See, they were smug and sufficient and prideful and ego-centered and just expecting God to lock arm in arm with them at their own level and go walking into the kingdom. And then Jesus, moving into chapter 5, verse 21, begins to show the disparity between God's standard and the system of religion of his day, to show them that they are substandard and they need to have a Beatitude mentality. It begins with the knowledge that you don’t have the resources to attain God's standard. It begins with an overwhelming sense of inadequacy. In other words, the Sermon on the Mount begins in desperation. They start out with a person who is beggarly in spirit, who is mourning over sin, who is meek before God, who is hungering and thirsting for righteousness. All you have to do basically is read the Beatitudes and you find in the Beatitudes a very obvious recognition of that. So really the Sermon on the Mount has first of all a negative intent, and that is to show people that they come short of God's standard. Jesus then is destroying their confidence in their self-made Judaism and reasserting God's standard. And so Jesus basically in the Sermon on the Mount shows the difference between true religion and their system, between divine truth and human wisdom, between a substandard of human religion achievement and God's religion of divine accomplishment. Before they can be desperate enough to see the need of a Savior, they have to see the inadequacy of their system.
Now as Jesus confronts the society of his day and as he confronts the religion of his religion people, first he wants to knock the props out from under this system. And they believed in their hearts that because they kept these low standards, which they themselves had devised, that they therefore were just before God. They had invented a system of religion that was substandard, sort of a quasi-Biblical one based on human achievement, self-effort and dead works. It is a sermon directly primarily at the Jewish audience on the hillside, most specifically to the Scribes and the Pharisees because they had concocted a human religion. It is a sermon designed to show men that they fall short of the standard for entrance into God's kingdom. To remind you, we are studying the greatest sermon of the New Testament, called the Sermon on the Mount preached by our Lord Jesus Christ. The wonderful, rich study of the Gospel of Matthew has become a joy to many of you, and I trust in God's great grace it will continue to be so as we look this morning and in weeks and months and perhaps years ahead to all that God has for us here. Turn with me in your Bible if you will to Matthew chapter 5, Matthew chapter 5.
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