Matthew 5:1-2 - May 19, 2024

The Sermon on the Mount as a Major Teaching Section

So maybe this is the moment that we've all been waiting for, but not quite, because we are getting ready to look at the Sermon on the Mount, which is just a tremendous, tremendous section of scripture.

And I mentioned that briefly last week that we're gonna start getting into this now, because this really is, it's probably one of the most well-known and well-loved teachings that Jesus has. But because it's so significant, I think that it would be helpful for us to spend our time today setting the stage for what we're about to look at, sort of setting ourselves up, getting our hearts and our minds right for the things that we're about to read and the things that we're about to see in the Sermon on the Mount.

And part of the reason for this is to consider how we approach the teachings of Jesus, and to consider how we apply these teachings to our lives, because there are just almost infinite approaches and applications to the things that are listed here, in the Beatitudes, in the other moral teachings.

And it seems like no two groups of people will agree exactly on how these are to be applied to our lives. So we'll have to take a look at some of those things. We'll also just look briefly at the setting of the Sermon on the Mount, who was being addressed, and take a minute to consider the overall structure of the sermon itself, because the text that we're gonna be looking at over the coming weeks and probably months is gonna cover three chapters.

It's Matthew 5, 6, and 7. Now one of the first things we wanna acknowledge is that there are a lot of parallels between what we see here in Matthew 5 through 7 and the sermon that's found in Luke 6. And it's been suggested that these might not actually be the same sermon.

Luke might not be writing about the Sermon on the Mount the way Matthew is writing on it. And part of the reason for that is the way that these things are translated, or just the way they use the language in the Greek.

Because Matthew says, as we look at verses, chapter five, or chapter five, verses one and two, it says, now when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on the mountain, and after he sat down, his disciples came to him, and he opened his mouth and began to teach them.

So we see Matthew wrote that Jesus went up on a mountain. But Luke wrote something a little different. He said that he stood on a level place, leading people to believe that these aren't the same teachings.

But if you dig into the Greek, which we're not gonna do right this second today, this suggests that a level plain could be kind of a plateau on a mountain, right? So if they're going up on a mountain, Luke is just saying that he found a flat place where he could sit and where the disciples could join him.

So we're pretty sure that these are still the same teachings. So the mountain in Matthew's gospel and the level place in Luke's gospel are the same. So that's just a little bit of trivia for you, right?

Matthew's Gospel, Moses, and the Mountain

Now we've got some trivia out of the way. I wanna talk a little bit about the context and the setting that Matthew uses to give us a lead up to the gospel, or the servant on the mountain. So in chapter four, we see two mentions of Jesus preaching, but we don't get any details.

The first is verse 17, chapter four, verse 17, it says, from that time, Jesus began to preach, saying, repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. And not that long ago, we read chapter four, verse 23, which said, and Jesus was going throughout all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and preaching the gospel of the kingdom and healing every kind of disease and every kind of sickness among the people.

So we know that Jesus has been preaching. We know that Jesus has been talking about the kingdom of God, but we haven't heard that many specific words from Jesus until now, until what we're getting into.

So what Matthew is doing, is he's basically flowing directly. He's built this entire scenario, from the birth of Jesus, to his baptism, to the start of his ministry, to choosing the first four disciples.

And now, the sermon on the mount gets straight into some of the actual teaching itself. Now, just a second ago, we had a little discussion about the idea of the mountain, and Matthew writing that Jesus went up to a mountain to give this sermon.

And I wanna draw attention to the reason that's significant again, because I wanted to talk about how this is the same place that Luke is talking about. Because Matthew's drawing attention to something very specific with the idea of a mountain potentially.

And when we remember that he's talking to a Jewish audience that would have been hopefully very familiar with the Old Testament, we realize, and some commentators suggest that Matthew is drawing a parallel with Moses here.

So he's using a type, that typology that we talked about a while back with Jesus and Moses. Because in Exodus 19, we see God himself, Yahweh, calling Moses up to Mount Sinai. And he's calling him up to Mount Sinai to receive some of the most important teaching that God had for the Jewish people at the time, for the people of Israel there.

So God calls Moses up to a mountain, and then Moses proceeds to teach the people as well, and he proceeds to teach them the 10 Commandments. But within the comparison, there's also a lot of contrast. So we're drawing a little bit of a comparison with Moses, but obviously with Jesus, the perfect fulfillment of all these things, there's a difference.

So one commentator I read said this, the Mount of the Beatitudes has often been compared and contrasted with Mount Sinai, where Moses received the law from God. On one hand, Mount Sinai, cold, bleak, barren, almost inaccessible, situated in the midst of a howling wilderness with its fiery serpents.

And on the other hand, the Mount of the Beatitudes, with its smiling landscapes and grassy slopes, as it were extending a hearty welcome to all, and spreading delight by means of its lilies, daisies, hyacinths, and anemones.

At Sinai, God appearing in thunder and lightning, and the people overcome with fear. In Galilee, Emmanuel, grace and truth proceeding from his lips, sitting down in the midst of his disciples who listened without fear or trembling.

Yet we must be careful. Although it's true that from Mount Sinai, Jehovah revealed his greatness and his glory, nevertheless, the law was given in a context of love. Also, what was proclaimed at Sinai is not set aside, but is given its deeply spiritual interpretation by Jesus Christ.

Those contrasts are where people draw out the idea that God is harsh, God is mean, God is wrathful, and Jesus is love, and Jesus has wiped out all the things that have come from the Old Testament. But as we look at what he's about to teach, we see that that's not true, because we see Jesus fulfilling the law, and in fact, the Old Testament law is gonna be worked so deeply into what's in the Sermon on the Mount that there's no way that you can separate them.

So all that to say, Matthew is highlighting a connection with Moses, just once again, to emphasize who Jesus is, to emphasize that Jesus is the fulfillment of prophecy, that Jesus is the coming Messiah.

We see another contrast here, too, and that's the fact that Jesus didn't have to receive this teaching from anyone. Moses received the law from God himself. Jesus didn't have to get his teaching from anyone.

Toward the end of this, we see, and in Mark 27, we see people say this about Jesus, what is this, a new teaching with authority? They recognize that what Jesus was telling them and what Jesus was doing was different from the Pharisees and the other people, the religious leaders at the time.

But that's jumping ahead just a little bit to verse two. So there's a couple more things worth noting in verse one. And the first thing that we see is that when he gets to the mountain in preparation to teach, he sits down.

So that might seem odd to us, because we're pretty much used to coming to church and somebody standing in front of us and teaching. And that's just the way we're accustomed to doing things. But that was actually a traditional posture for a rabbi to take.

But it was a traditional posture for a rabbi to take when he was gonna do any kind of serious teaching. So if a rabbi was standing, that was usually reserved for things that were more informal or lessons that were more unofficial in nature.

But when a rabbi sat down, that implied that this was a formal teaching, it was an authoritative teaching. So even down to the smallest mannerisms that people would have understood at the time, Jesus is drawing attention to who he is and how important the things that he was talking about were, how important the things that he was sharing were going to be.

And the other thing from verse one that we can take note of is who the audience was. So Matthew specifically says that after Jesus sat down, his disciples came to him. And this is pretty interesting given the fact that we just talked not long ago about how Jesus was drawing huge crowds.

He was drawing all these people. Miracles were causing people to come from long distances away to come and see him. And we can be sure that the 12 disciples, and while Matthew is only detailed calling of the first, if you were to look at what happens to Luke before this, you see that they've named all 12 apostles.

So I'm gonna say the 12. But the reason we can be sure that the 12 were not the only ones to hear the lessons from the Sermon on the Mount is because there were huge crowds. So most people give this image of Jesus teaching in one spot with the disciples around him, his closest disciples.

And then maybe a little farther back from that were the other followers of Jesus. These people are disciples as well. They aren't the inner circle, but they're true followers of Christ. And then outside that a little further, we see the huge crowds.

And these are just people who are probably curious about what's going on. They've heard about the miracles. They've heard about this Jesus. And they just wanna see what it is that he's doing. So they're not really followers.

They're not really disciples. They're just curious onlookers, seeing what other people are interested in. Because you know, as people, when we see people interested in something, it makes us interested in it because we wanna know why those people are interested.

And that's probably what they were doing. So this tells us that while there could certainly be evangelistic elements to the context of the Sermon on the Mount, the primary purpose and the primary target for the information that he's preaching is committed Christians, committed followers of Jesus.

The Kingdom of God and the Sermon’s Structure

So what is the content? What's the theme of the teaching? And again, this is just an overview this week, kind of an intro. So I just wanna talk briefly about how the sermon is structured and generally what kind of content we're gonna see.

So we see that in verse two, he opened his mouth and began to teach them. And the overarching theme of the message, the thing that dominates everything that he's gonna talk about is the concept of the kingdom of God.

And we saw this before. That was one of the first things we saw him say, repent for the kingdom of God is at hand. So when we talked about that in the first part of chapter four, we talked about some elements that make up the kingdom of God.

And just as a brief review, those elements were God's sovereignty, complete salvation for the people in the kingdom of God, the church as a representative of the kingdom of God and the redeemed universe.

So the content relates to the kingdom of God and we can break it down just a little bit further. So one way to look at it is the first section, chapter five, verses three through 16. These are the blessings of the kingdom of God.

When we get into chapter five, verse 17, all the way through chapter seven, verse 12, we see what it means to be righteous. This is the righteousness of the kingdom. And then in chapter seven, verse 13 through 27, this is to the end of the Sermon on the Mount, we see the two alternatives.

For example, the narrow gate and the broad way. These are two alternatives that we have. Now, another way we can look at it is chapter five, 13 through 16 is the introduction to the Sermon and chapter seven, 13 through 27 is the conclusion.

But then we have a big chunk in the middle and the middle can break down a little bit like this. Chapter five, verses 17 through 48. And if you're taking notes, sorry, I'm going so fast, don't worry. We'll talk about all this stuff just in overview.

Or you can go back to YouTube and slow it down, pause it. So chapter five, verse 17 through 48 details the relationship of the law to the new covenant. This is how the Old Testament teachings will relate to what Jesus is now giving his followers.

Chapter six, verse one through 18, these are good verses as well. This is about true versus false piety. Some of the things that we see here are praying in public to be seen by people or doing your giving or your charity in public so that people will know what you're doing, true and false piety.

And then chapter six, verse 19 through chapter seven, verse 12 can be classified as social ethics. But that's just a lot of words to say that basically what Jesus is doing here is giving a discipleship class.

He's given a class on what it looks like to live as a Christian, what it means to be one of his disciples. However, the nature of what Jesus teaches and what we'll be looking at in the coming weeks is actually not easy to process.

And honestly, as we look closely at what the Sermon on the Mount tells us and what the Sermon on the Mount teaches us, it should really cause us to think about ourselves a lot. And we can tell that these concepts are challenging to interpret and they're challenging to process through because over the course of history, a lot of different groups have come up with a lot of different ways to handle the Sermon on the Mount, whether it's to rationalize part of it away or just ways to live it out.

In fact, as I was reading through commentaries, some of them, or most of them said that you could probably come up with as many as 36 different individual interpretations of how to live out the Sermon on the Mount.

Now, these really boil down to eight major classifications. And this is just so we can see how people have approached the Sermon on the Mount in the past. So first is the medieval view. So a long time ago, a couple thousand years ago, the medieval view was that the behaviors listed here were mostly a code of ethics that applied to clergy and applied to monastic life, so the life of monks, right?

Well, that's very convenient for you. Now, second is Martin Luther's view. Martin Luther looked at this, and Martin Luther was a monk for everybody who doesn't know a little bit about his background. He started the Reformation because he started to realize that the things that he was learning just didn't make sense.

And his conversion story is amazing, which you'll have to look at it another time. So Martin Luther's view was that the Sermon on the Mount represents just an impossible demand on people, just like the Old Testament law, a perfection that we can't attain.

A third view is the Anabaptist view. Now, what these groups did was they took the teachings, some of the teachings, and they applied them literally, extremely literally, and this is why Anabaptist groups often are pacifists, right?

Because there's, you know, turn the other cheek. Don't repay evil for evil. So they took these things in the most literal sense possible. Now, then there's sort of the liberal theological position. This has led to the social gospel and ideas like Jesus is a socialist, those kind of things that you'll hear from some people.

Then there's the existentialist view that the Sermon on the Mount is not an absolute standard, but it's just a challenge to you and I. Here's something you can shoot for, but it's not an absolute standard.

And there's another scholar named Albert Schweitzer. His view is that the Sermon on the Mount represents just a temporary moral code only to be used before the time when God's kingdom returns. Another view is the classic dispensationalist view, and dispensationalism is the idea that the church will be caught up in a pre-tribulation rapture.

So before Jesus comes back, the believers will be taken up to heaven and then they'll return with him, and then that will inaugurate the millennium. So the dispensationalist view is that the Sermon on the Mount, those behaviors are only for us when we come back in the millennium.

And then finally, there's just the view that the Sermon on the Mount is the ideal standard to be strived for or pursued, but something that we can't totally achieve in this life. And that view probably makes the most sense for us.

And as we get into this, we'll see why. But the interesting thing about a lot of these positions, and maybe not all of them, but a lot of them, is that what they do is they represent a way to avoid the full ramification of these things that Jesus is saying.

But we balance this out by looking at the rest of the ministry that Jesus has. Because so often, and we all can be guilty of this, so often we wanna take just one word or one phrase or one verse, and we wanna take it out of context and apply it to our lives.

Or if it's something that we're not crazy about, we might still wanna take it and apply it to other people. So this is how we get these views. Because frankly, a lot of the things that we will see in the Sermon on the Mount will be offensive to us.

Because they'll be directly confrontational to us. Because there will be something that isn't the way that we would wanna live our life, but Jesus says it's supposed to be. So this is why we have scholarship dedicated to explaining away these things.

But Craig Keener said something I thought was really interesting and very insightful about it. And he said this, he said, to capture the offensiveness of his message in his milieu, which is just the setting that the message, I don't know why he used that word, the setting that his message developed in, modern interpreters must let Jesus's radical demands confront us with all the unnerving ferocity with which they would have struck their first hearers.

At the same time, the rest of the gospel narrative where Jesus does not repudiate disciples who miserably fail, yet repent, does season his teachings with grace. But the kingdom grace Jesus proclaimed was not the workless grace of much of Western Christendom.

In the gospels, the kingdom message transforms those who meekly embrace it, just as it crushes the arrogant, the religiously and socially satisfied. And I think that's a pretty compelling idea because what he's saying is Jesus puts this out as an absolute standard.

But when he sees disciples who are striving for the standard, yet failing because we all fail, he doesn't, you know, go blast them. When people meekly embrace this, yet still fall short, Jesus shows them grace.

But then he used this phrase, workless grace of Western Christendom. And what I believe that that relates to is this idea that some churches have. The idea that because Jesus died for everyone, that we can do whatever we want because grace covers it.

Grace covers our sins. And grace does cover our sins. But grace doesn't cover your intentional sins until you repent from them. So that's one of those things that we have to be really, really careful of.

And people who are truly born again, they can't live that way anyway. You wouldn't be capable of living that way because it's so dishonoring to God to sin in whatever way you want and say, but Jesus died for my sin.

If you're born again, you can't do that. Now, I was trying to think of a way to illustrate this, but any illustration that we have of this is gonna fall short because there's nothing that can be given to us that's the same as the grace that we were shown by Jesus and by God to forgive us of our sins.

But we can try, right? So there's 109 acres for sale right at the end of the road down there, $1 .1 million. I would love it. Can I afford it? Absolutely not. I can't even come close to affording part of it.

And even if I could, I'd have to live in a tent. But what if the owner of that came up to me and he said, Matty, I wanna give you this land. And I would just be so, so grateful. And I would say, well, why?

Well, what do I need to do? And he'd say, nothing. Just take it. Well, how do you think I would respond to that person? I would probably love them like my own family at that point because I would be so grateful, right?

But I wouldn't say, well, do you think you could give me like a 50 acres that's next to it too? Or I just treat it however I wanted. So anyway, that's a terrible illustration to show that you can't truly understand God's grace and then take advantage of it.

Yet it's not as simple either as just the mindless following of the words of Jesus as if everything here is an absolute rule to be taken literally. But this is where things get so complicated. And this is a huge part of the reason that I say we have to read the whole Bible and not just individual items out of context.

But even then, sometimes the context comes from the life of Jesus, like we're talking about here. He says these things and then we watch how he lives and we watch how he lives out these expectations. Sometimes context in the Bible comes from the scriptures that are around the verse that you're looking at.

Sometimes context comes from the cultural situation in which these things occur. And then some things are literal. Some things are figurative or metaphorical. And we have to be wise enough to figure out the difference.

We have to be discerning enough to understand the difference. Otherwise, we can run off just completely in the wrong direction into something like legalism, which I know a lot of us are familiar with.

Legalism is the idea that we can earn our salvation just by following the rules. So if we look at these things as a rule and we follow it, then God will love us and that's not how grace works. And this is where we get the idea that we have to use the King James translation.

And women can't wear pants. And men can't ever have long hair. You know, those are like legalistic standards that come from literal interpretations of certain parts of the Bible without looking at them in context of the whole.

Now, there's nothing in the Bible about the King James version of the Bible, so that's a little bit of a different illustration. So there's that. But then we can also take these principles and run off in the other direction.

Now, that's called antinomianism. And there's a big word for you in case you ever wanna throw it around. But what it means is that the law is no longer something that has an effect on us and we can behave any way we want because grace.

We can do anything we want because of grace. And that's wrong in the complete opposite way that legalism is also wrong. So again, we have to be wise. And this is why scripture is full of commands to be wise.

For example, Proverbs 3 .13 says, how blessed is the man who finds wisdom and the man who obtains discernment. And of course, Solomon is writing to his son and he mentions wisdom over and over and over and over again in the Proverbs.

But it's in other places too. James 1 .5 says this, if any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God who gives to all generously and without reproach and it will be given to him. And one of my favorite verses that's kind of related to this topic is Romans 12 .2.

And that says, and do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind so that you may approve what the will of God is, that which is good and pleasing and perfect. That's wisdom.

The Sermon’s Demands, Grace, and the Need for Wisdom

So that brings me into some principles that I wanna share regarding these teachings that we're about to jump into. Because again, I said, we're gonna be confronted and we have to be ready for this. And we have to have a way to think about how to process these things.

So the first principle for the Sermon on the Mount is this. And that's that the Sermon on the Mount, the principles contained within it are absolutely standards for believers today. And they should guide our lives and our behaviors.

So I mentioned earlier that people have tried to explain away a lot of these teachings. They try to explain away as only for a certain time in the future because they're hard to live out now. Or other people take just the parts that they want to at literal face value and make legalistic rules out of them.

And both of these approaches ultimately missed the mark, even though there's a little bit of truth in each of them. There's a little bit of truth in both of those things, even though they ultimately wind up in error.

But we have to understand that all of these teachings, like it or not, and we'll talk about that in just a second, are the standards that are expected of a Christian, of a disciple of Christ. John MacArthur says, the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount are for believers today, marking the distinctive lifestyle that should characterize the direction, if not the perfection, of the lives of Christians of every age.

So for that reason, we have to understand. So we have to read and understand. We have to internalize so that we can externalize the principles. And that's for the sake of our lives. That's for our own sake.

But not only for that, it's for the sake of the church, and ultimately for the glory of God. And an interesting distinction here is that these principles are for believers. They're not for the unconverted.

They're not for non-Christians. Because if people aren't saved, they're not gonna be able to live up to these standards. It's hard enough to live up to them if you are. Because I mean, if we think that this is difficult, and I know some of you might be looking at me thinking, well, these are the teachings of Jesus.

Of course I love them. Of course I'm gonna live my life that way. We'll get into it and we'll start talking about it. And I hope you feel the same way at the end, but we'll see. But if it's hard for us, imagine how hard it is for those who've never known anything about Jesus.

And besides, we have enough issues inside of our own churches and inside of our own hearts that we don't need to spend time necessarily worrying about what other people are doing. We don't need to spend time trying to force people that don't believe in Jesus to live up to a certain standard.

Because a lot of times what we're doing there is we're just turning our focus on the culture so that it can take the focus off of our own shortcomings. I think that we all have enough to work on that we don't need to necessarily go policing other people who are not even part of this body.

And none of that is to say that the culture is good. Obviously it's not.

It's horrible.

Our society is completely lost. But part of the problem is that we've allowed certain elements of that culture and that lostness to infect our church. And that's why we have that verse from Romans 12 that tells us not to be conformed to this world.

So how do we know if we've been conformed to this world? Well, we can tell that we've been conformed to the world in some way when we take offense to the plain meaning of Scripture. So this is point number two.

Reading things like the Sermon on the Mount reveals the true state of your heart. So there's an interesting quote that I read and I was trying to find who said it, but so many people have claimed it that it was really hard to determine.

But basically it boils down to this. Someone said, the Bible is the only book that reads you as you read it. So the Bible is a living document. And it reads you more than you read it. And here's how I interpret what that means.

You'll know just how committed you are to the things of God as you hear or read things in the Bible. Because again, for all of us, there are things in Scripture that will directly confront our thoughts and our feelings and our opinions.

They're gonna be things that we hear or that we read and we say, well, there's no way God meant that. Now here's one example. In the time that I've been in ministry, I heard somebody say this. They said, I don't believe in a God that would send people to hell.

That's not my God. Well, you may not believe in a God that would send people to hell, but it's very much impossible to reconcile that idea with the God in the Bible and with the words of Jesus, with the clear teaching of Jesus in the Bible.

And if you have reached the point where you say that that's not your God, well, you do have a God that you're worshiping, but it's a God with a small g and it's certainly not the God of the Bible. And when you do this, we call this idolatry.

You've created your own God and now you're worshiping it. You don't like what the Bible says, so you create a God that would never send anyone to hell and worship it, sending yourself to hell in the process, worshiping a false God, not the one true God.

And this is also why people just twist themselves and twist scripture into all kinds of knots in order to defend something they wanna do. This is something that happens, for example, with homosexuality right now or with female pastors.

People will take anything but the clear reading of scripture in those cases, and then they'll turn around and they'll say something like, well, do you wear clothes with polyester in it? Do you eat shellfish?

That's in the Old Testament. But these things ignore the context, the larger context of what's happening in scripture and throughout the whole narrative of the Bible. But guess what? Well, it's easy for me to stand up here and pick on people that I disagree with that are clearly in opposition to the Bible.

We do it all the time ourselves. We do it just in a different direction. Because again, picking on people is easier than facing our own issues. Like we might take a verse out of context or twist a concept around, particularly something like Christian liberty, in order to defend regular trips to the winery or to justify being involved in an enterprise that requires being at a place like that on a regular basis.

That's not a biographical example, by the way. I'm not calling any of you out. Hopefully, it'll happen on its own. But this is what we do. We take a concept like Christian liberty and we twist it around so that we can do the thing we wanna do.

And the point of all this is your true position on scripture and your true feelings about what the Bible says are revealed by what you pick and choose, by what you take or leave from scripture. But make no mistake, that's not the way it works.

2 Timothy 3 .16 says, all scripture is God-breathed and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness. And God-breathed means it came from God. And if it came from God, it means it's perfect.

If it came from God, it contains no error. None of that applies to us. We're not perfect. We've been tainted by sin, which means it's not up to us to judge what is right or wrong about scripture. It's up to us to judge what is right and wrong about ourselves in light of scripture, which leads me to my third point, which is you can't live the Christian life halfway.

So being a Christian is literally all or nothing. And here's the reason why. Jesus Christ is our Savior. But Jesus Christ is also our Lord. And he's Lord over everything. 1 Corinthians 8 .6 says, yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things, and we exist for him.

And one Lord, Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we exist through him. In Matthew 28 .18, Jesus says, all authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. And in Mark 9 .40, Jesus says, for he who is not for us is against us.

And don't forget that Jesus, as kind as he was, as loving as he was, was unflinching in his demands of the people who followed him. We see this in places like Luke 9 .62. He says, no one, after putting his hand to the plow and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.