The Sermon on the Mount, Obeyed

In its strongest form, the claim is stated like this: “Anyone who thinks we can keep the commandments Yeshua gave is ignorant or foolish. The commandments of the New Testament are harder than those of the Old. He said that if your eye makes you sin, tear it out.”

Anyone who has read the Sermon on the Mount slowly has felt the force of this. Anger is treated like murder, and a look is treated like adultery, and then comes the line about the eye. Surely, people say, no one is going to do that. Yeshua must therefore have set the bar impossibly high on purpose, to show us that we can never reach it, so that we would stop trying and simply rest in grace.

It is a sincere reading, but it runs straight into the rest of the Bible, beginning with the very sermon from which it is taken.

How the Sermon Ends

The Sermon on the Mount does not close with a sigh that nobody can do this. It closes with a house:

Matthew 7:24 Therefore everyone who hears these logos λόγος log'-os(words) of Mine and acts on them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on the rock.

The words in question are “these logos(words) of Mine,” the ones He has just spoken, including the words about anger, lust, and the eye. And the one who hears them and acts on them, He likens to a wise man. The word is homoioo ὁμοιόω hom-oy-o'-o, to liken or to compare: “I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on the rock.”

The claim calls foolish the one who thinks these commandments can be kept. Yeshua calls wise the one who does them. Both cannot be right.

People Who Actually Did

Nor does the Bible treat the doing of God’s commandments as a theory that no one has ever lived out. In Chapter 1 we met Zacharias and Elizabeth, “walking blamelessly in all the commandments and dikaioma δικαίωμα dik-ah'-yo-mah(ordinances) of the Lord” (Luke 1:6). Luke did not write that about angels. He wrote it about an old priest and his wife.

John goes further. Right after saying that God’s commandments are not burdensome, a verse we read in the last chapter, he adds:

1 John 5:4 For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world; and this is the victory that has overcome the world — our faith.

The word for overcomes is nikao νικάω nik-ah'-o, to win or to prevail. The one who has been born of God is not described as someone who is always losing. He overcomes.

Paul, for his part, wrote to a church full of people with real pasts:

1 Corinthians 6:9-11 Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor the soft ones, nor males who lie with males, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And some of you were these things; but you were washed, but you were made hagio(holy), but you were justified in the name of the Lord Yeshua and in the pneuma πνεῦμα pnyoo'-mah(spirit) of our God.

The key word is “were.” Paul does not say that some of them are these things. These were people who had really lived in sexual immorality, idolatry, and theft, and who had turned from them: “but you were washed, but you were made hagio(holy), but you were justified.” If walking away from such things were impossible, Paul would be describing people who never existed. He was describing people in the church to which he was writing.

The Eye

Now we come to the verse at the center of the claim. It should be read with the verses before it and the verse after:

Matthew 5:27-30 You have heard that it was said: 'You shall not commit adultery.' But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman to epithymesai(lust after) her has already committed adultery with her in his kardia καρδία kar-dee'-ah(heart, soul-domain). And if your right eye skandalizo σκανδαλίζω skan-dal-id'-zo(causes-you-to-stumble), tear it out and throw it from you, for it is better for you that one of your members perish than for your whole body to be thrown into Gehenna(valley of Hinnom, place of fiery judgment). And if your right hand skandalizo(causes-you-to-stumble), cut it off and throw it from you, for it is better for you that one of your members perish than for your whole body to go into Gehenna(valley of Hinnom, place of fiery judgment).

Verse 27 quotes “You shall not commit adultery,” the seventh of the Ten Commandments. Yeshua is not inventing a new law of which Moses never heard. He takes the seventh commandment and carries it into the heart.

The word for heart is kardia (καρδία), the inner person, where desires are formed. Whoever looks with lust “has already committed adultery with her in his kardia(heart, soul-domain).” The commandment never meant only that a man should keep his body out of the wrong bed. It reaches down to the place where the act begins.

Then come the eye and the hand. The word in the YLV is skandalizo, “causes-you-to-stumble.” The point is not that the standard is so impossible that we should give up. The point is the opposite: sin is not to be treated lightly, but cut off, as one would cut off a limb.

Think of a surgeon looking at a leg with spreading gangrene. He does not say, “Healthy legs are an impossible standard, so we will leave it and hope.” That would be no kindness at all. He says, “It has to come off, now, or it will take your life.” His hard words do not mean that health cannot be had. They mean that he intends to save the patient.

That is the force of Yeshua’s words about the eye and the hand: “it is better for you that one of your members perish than for your whole body to be thrown into Gehenna(valley of Hinnom, place of fiery judgment).” They call for decisive action against sin. They are not a sign that action is pointless.

A Claim That Cancels Itself

The claim also has a problem of logic.

Two sayings can be set side by side. The first is often heard: “Returning to the Torah is a burden. Those old commandments are too heavy for us.” The second is the claim of this chapter: “The New Testament commandments are even harder than the Old, and we follow them by grace.”

A simple question follows. If the commandments of the New Testament are harder than those of the Old, and grace enables us to follow them, why could the same grace not carry the easier commandments of the Torah?

No one can say that the Torah is too heavy to lift and in the same breath say that a heavier load can be carried by grace. If grace can carry the heavier load, it can carry the lighter one, and the two sayings cannot both stand.

And this is where the argument has led. Yeshua’s word about the eye was not a new and harder law set against Moses. It was the seventh commandment of Moses, taken all the way into the heart. The commandments of Yeshua and the commandments of the Torah are not two rival loads, one heavy and the other heavier.

Everything in this part of the book so far has asked whether the commandments can be kept, and at every turn Scripture has given the same answer. John, however, goes further. He does not stop at saying that the commandments can be kept. He has a word for the person who says that he knows God and does not keep them, and it is a hard word.