Does Jordan Peterson NOT Understand Jesus? | Pastor Reacts

The Sermon on the Mount Is Not About Mere Optimal Living

The central idea in the Sermon on the Mount is that you should aim up and then you should.

Concentrate on the present. Is that what the Sermon on the Mount is about? We're just here for optimal living. We're just here to improve our lives, which is an insufficient answer. We're talking about souls here, ladies and gentlemen.

We're talking about eternal life. We're talking about knowing God. And if you don't take these things seriously, if you reject all of this, there are dire consequences. And people need to know that. That's what gets me so frustrated.

It's not about aiming up and concentrating, you know, on the present or something, right? Those concepts just do not get at the heart of Jesus' teaching. I was so excited to watch Peterson and just came away disappointed.

You know, I wanted a delicious steak dinner, but instead I got a happy meal. Jordan Peterson talks to Sean Ryan and they talk about a lot of cool things. But then Peterson starts talking about the Sermon on the Mount.

Whenever he seeks to explain the That's when I think that we should pay very close attention. Does Peterson really understand the Sermon on the Mount? Does he really understand Jesus either? We're going to compare his comments to what the Scripture actually teaches in just a moment.

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Sacrificing for the future. I personally struggle with this because there's the live in the now, which when I can do it, I feel great. And then there's the sacrifice.

For the future, which we all do through work. The Sermon on the Mount is about that. So the central idea in the Sermon on the Mount is that you should aim up and then you should concentrate on the present.

Then you get to have your cake and eat it too. But the first thing is.

That you aim up. So I've not heard Jordan Peterson's take on the Sermon on the Mount. This is all fresh to me. Okay. So he just said that the thesis of the Sermon on the Mount is about aiming up and concentrating on the present and then, you know, have your cake and eat it too.

Ask yourself, is that what the Sermon on the Mount is about? As good Bible students and followers of Jesus, is that what the central point is of the Sermon on the Mount? If you had to put your finger on a verse or a passage that captures the main thesis, what would that be?

I'm curious to get your thoughts. You know, I definitely have an answer to this question. And we'll certainly go to the scripture later, but let's let Dr. Peterson finish.

So you want to orient yourself so that everything you do is in keeping with an upward aim. Then you can concentrate on the present. And that's the best possible pathway forward. So what does it mean to aim up?

You might ask that. Well, in the final analysis, it means to align yourself with the spirit of God. But if you want to bring it down to earth, it's like, well, there's undoubtedly some things you're doing that you know aren't optimal.

And you could aim at improving those. Well, that's an upward aim. And you can imagine that the sum total of all those incremental improvements is the upward aim. You know, and that as you make an improvement, you get better at seeing the next step upward.

The ultimate upward aim is, what would you say, the heavenly city on the hill. It's something like that. It's existence that would be optimal for you and optimal for everyone else. But that's a that's a receding goal, right?

That's a kind of impossible heaven. But it's the thing that sort of stands behind all your proximal aims. I wonder if Peterson.

Has ever studied the Sermon on the Mount with a seminary professor or a pastor who's spent considerable time in the text, because, man, it's it's hard to hear this. And I think this happens quite a bit with Peterson.

I mean, he's so brilliant, you know. It's just sometimes it's a little frustrating. He just he finds unique ways to describe the teaching of scripture without capturing the fundamental components of the gospel message of sin, of repentance, and of God's redemptive plan throughout history, you know, starting all the way back in Genesis 3 with the euangelion.

Actually, let's go there. Let's take a look at this. Genesis chapter 3, verse 15, I, God, will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and her offspring. He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel.

This is talking about the conflict between Jesus and the devil. In another sense, Paul refers to this as the conflict between all Christians and the devil, actually, right? But this is the promise of the coming one, the Messiah, the seed of the woman who's going to bruise the head of the serpent, and the serpent's going to bruise his heel.

Why, though, is this going to happen? Why is it necessary? Is it because we're going to live optimal lives, as Peterson points out? No, it's because of the curse of sin on mankind. Our relationship with our creator was broken because of our sin.

All of the problems and the trouble with the world and the trouble with ourselves, particularly pain, suffering, and death, it stems from this one central issue. And so what does the Bible say Jesus will do about this?

Hebrews chapter 2, verse 14, since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery.

For surely it is not angels that he helps, but he helps the offspring of Abraham. Therefore he has to be made like his brothers in every respect so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, here it is, to make propitiation for the sins of the people.

This is really about restoring what was once broken in the Garden of Eden all those years ago with our ancestors. This is about putting the world back together again with God's peace, with his shalom, but it trades on sin.

We have to understand sin. We have to understand that it's a central component of the story of the Bible, because if we don't, then we're not getting at what the Bible is teaching. And Peter's sin, for some reason, he just never brings it up.

Upward, and then you can concentrate on the present. You know, so what I'm trying to do in this discussion, as I'm sure you are, is what are you trying to do in this discussion? You're trying to have an honest discussion.

Okay. Why? Why? I want to learn from you. Why? I want to improve my life. Okay. And you're bringing other people along on that trip. Why is it useful to bring other people along? Because it improves their life.

Okay. And is there something meaningful in that? Absolutely. Okay. So that's a mystery. I talked to Jocko Willick. Well, okay. This is very revealing.

You know, we can pose the same questions to the reading of scripture, by the way, sort of just to prove a point here. Why read the scripture? Right? If someone says to improve my life, that is an insufficient answer.

To live optimally, right? As Peterson said, that's insufficient. The answer to why you read the Bible is because you want to know God. Now, wait a second. Watch this. Why are you here on this earth? That's one of the fundamental philosophical questions that everybody should be asking, right?

And by the way, many have, you know, down through the millennia, right? Folks have asked that question. Guess what the answer is? It's the same answer. To know God. The same answer to why you should read your Bible is the same answer as to why you're even here on this planet.

We're here to know God. At a fundamental level. That's why we exist. Now, let me say the same thing using different words. We're here to have eternal life. That's why we exist. Eternal life is to know God.

To know God is to have eternal life. That's John 17 three. Amen. So what I'm getting at is the stakes are incredibly high. When you identify and articulate what the Bible is really saying, the stakes are super high because now you're, you're faced with a dichotomy.

In a sense, you either are going to have eternal life and know God or not. But when you don't identify and articulate what's really at stake, well, then it just sounds like, you know, we're just here for optimal living.

We're just here to improve our lives, which is an insufficient answer. Will knowing God improve your life? 150 million percent it will, but not in the way the world thinks it will, right? It will absolutely improve your life.

But improving your life, if you just leave it there, is an incredibly misleading concept and people import all kinds of their own definitions of what that means into that concept. And it gives people the wrong impression because why you didn't communicate what was truly at stake.

Do you see what I'm getting? Like, we're talking about souls here, ladies and gentlemen, we're talking about eternal life. We're talking about knowing God. And if you don't take these things seriously, if you reject all of this, there are dire consequences.

That's at stake as well. And people need to know that. That's what gets me so frustrated. Why not bring all of that up when you have a conversation about something biblical, like the Sermon on the.

The Gospel Promise in Genesis 3 and the Work of Christ

Mount. Jocko wanted to be a soldier from the time he was like three. And he's a complete bloody monster. You know, he's four feet thick and rampaging. And he said he could have easily been a criminal.

He's a disagreeable militaristic guy. He went off to train and he found that it was he really liked mentoring young men. That was way better than being a criminal. He found a better pathway. You know, in these discussions that you're having with the people you bring on here, like you said, you're trying to learn.

So you're trying to shed your stupidity and move uphill. But at the same time you're doing that, you're engaged in a communal endeavor, right? Because you're helping other people do that, too. And so then you've got this great alignment between what's good for you and what's also good for everyone else.

That's a good deal.

You know, what's interesting is a moment ago, Peterson made a point by asking a series of questions, right? Like, why are we talking today? Right? Why are we discussing these ideas? Why, why, why? Trying to get at the heart of the matter, right?

I just think he stopped too short. He, so if you go back and watch it again, like he stopped when he heard the phrase to improve my life. But really the same question could be asked, well, why should you improve your life?

Why should you find a better path and help others? Why should you do anything? You see how the word should is a moral term. It's part of the language that we use when we discuss morality. And that's what we're discussing right now, right?

We're talking about moral obligation, but wait a second. Where does moral obligation come from? It comes from God. God is the ground for objective moral obligations. So the reason anyone should do anything is because we have an obligation that comes from our creator.

That means we better know what our creator wants us to do, friends. That's why, again, it comes back to, we just have to read the Bible. We have to read our Bibles to know God, to understand him and his desires for us.

And when we read our Bibles, we also see warnings that to not know God, to reject him and his desires leads to all kinds of deleterious effects. It's not just hell, it's spiritual blindness. It's inflicting damage and harm on those around us and even ourselves, which by the way, explains what's going on all around us right now in our society today.

You see how, what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to fill in the discussion. All of that stuff is lacking up until this point. And again, I mean, it's just, I guess I'm showing my frustration. Peterson is so brilliant.

He really is. And it seems like in so many different ways, he seems to be on the right track and affirming things that we know to be true from our biblical convictions. I just wish that he would fully embrace the Bible's.

Teaching on these things. God comes to Abraham as the voice of adventure. So Abraham is rich and he's 70 years old. When the story starts, he spent his whole life in his father's tent, just living a hedonistic and secure life.

And there's no reason for him to do anything else because his parents are rich, but God comes along and says, get the hell out of your zone of security. Leave your parents, leave your tent, leave your community, go out into the world.

And Abraham agrees. He commits to it. And he makes the sacrifices along the way that are necessary in expanding each sacrifice that marks his pathway forward requires a greater giving up. It culminates in the offering of his son.

God tells him to sacrifice his son to God. And so that's the culmination of the sacrificial process. But God makes Abraham a deal. It's such a cool deal. This is such a wonderful thing to understand. So imagine there's an instinct in your child that causes that child to push himself beyond his limits and to develop, to become mature, to become independent.

Imagine that you foster that as a father, right? So you'll challenge your child because you want him to be able to bear the weight of existence by himself, but more than bear it, to bear it in an adventuresome manner.

God comes to Abraham as the call of the spirit of adventure, and he makes it Abraham a deal. The call to the spirit of adventure.

Um, no, I mean, I guess that's a way that you could describe that. But man, again, here it is. Here we are again. That just drastically reduces down what was really.

Going on when God called Abraham. He said, if you abide by the spirit of adventure wholeheartedly and you make the sacrifices that are necessary, no matter what they are, you'll be a blessing to yourself.

Your name will become renowned. So you'll have a reputation. You'll establish something permanent. That's good. And you'll do it in a way that's good for everyone else. And that that's all aligned with that spirit of adventure.

Now that's a good.

Deal. If that's, I think it's once again, we left out the biggest, most fundamental component of the relationship between God and Abraham. It's the fulfillment of the promise that God made in Genesis chapter three, God's redemptive plan that he announced back in Genesis chapter three, the UN Gillian, the, the, the gospel promise of one day, reversing the damage of the sin in the garden of Eden of restoring right relationship between God and mankind again, through the person and work of Jesus Christ.

Um, which by the way, if you, you know, so if you go to the gospels and you look at the, uh, uh, the genealogy there, Jesus is of the line of Abraham. So, so God was calling a person to create a people so that through this people, the incarnation of God could take place and through the incarnation, the death and resurrection of the son of God.

So the relationship that God had with Abraham, um, boy, it just, it teaches us so much more than the call to adventure. Does God like people who takes risks, uh, who has chutzpah, you know? Uh, absolutely.

But man, can we not stop there? Can, can we actually get to what the, the actual thread that runs through the entire Bible? Can we identify that, pull that out and identify it for everyone who desperately needs to hear the gospel message?

Right? Because if we do that, then man, we, we actually learn a lot more, uh, than what, uh, Peterson is offering. Now we can, uh, learn about what the nature of faith looks like, right? Uh, because of Abraham's with God and that's touched on in Romans and the book of Hebrews, right?

Now we learn about the nature of redemption and we learn about the Messiah and his work to restore relationship between God and mankind. Like let's just, let's treat the Bible in its fullest, most robust sense.

If it's not true, it would mean that what calls us to develop is not in alignment with communal life, society, or with what's good for other people. It could easily be the case that if you treated yourself properly in the highest sense, that that would align perfectly with the deepest needs of other people.

And that's that divine harmony that is offer on offer on the religious side of things that's associated with what's good. And it seems to me, it's, it seems to me true. You know, I would say for your friend who committed this terrible sin is that his pathway forward is to swear to do what's good.

And I don't know how deeply he has to swear that it would be commensurate with his error. No one. And that could be of great benefit to him to some degree, because it's a very rare person who becomes good without, you know, running into Satan at the crossroads.

You're not serious enough before then, right? You don't take yourself seriously enough. I think, well, what does it matter? What does it matter what I do? I'm just one dust speck among 8 billion. No, it's like, no, if you start to see yourself as what would you say the author of all evil, that's a good one.

You might just start taking yourself with a certain degree of seriousness, and then you can do a lot of good. A moment ago, Peterson talked.

About the Sermon on the Mount, but did he accurately capture what it was about its central thesis? I don't think so. There is a way to determine what the main idea or the theme of the Sermon on the Mount is.

It's by understanding the various literary devices that Jesus and the gospel authors utilized in their teaching and writing. And this is where, you know, you have to try to understand the Bible the way the original audience would have.

One of my mentors said a long time ago, you know, the way to understand the Bible is to read it as if you were looking over the shoulder of a Jew. If you do that, then you start realizing, well, wait a minute, Jesus was a Jewish rabbi.

He used Jewish rabbinical methods of teaching. He spoke in the language the Jews understood, and he even used idiomatic expressions that the Jews knew. So what does this mean with regard to the Sermon on the Mount?

Well, I mean, if you look at the entire sermon, right, so it's chapters, the Gospel of Matthew chapters five through seven, you'll notice a couple of things. First, you'll notice a phrase that Jesus repeats quite a bit throughout the whole sermon is the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of heaven, right?

This makes sense because right before the sermon, Jesus had gathered large crowds by going around proclaiming that the kingdom of heaven is at hand. And we talked about what the kingdom of heaven is in the Dave Ramsey video, if you haven't seen that one already.

So the focus of the Sermon on the Mount is the kingdom of heaven or the kingdom of God, right? But what is its thesis or theme? Did you know this, that the Sermon on the Mount is written in a chiasm? A chiasm is a literary way of writing or a way of speaking, communicating, that forces the reader or the hearer to look at the center of the chiasm, because the center is the theme.

Did you know that? I've talked about this before. So, okay, what is the center of the chiasm in the Sermon on the Mount? Because now we're getting to the answer to the question. Boy, thank you so much for watching this video.

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I greatly appreciate it. Are you ready for this? It's out. Take a look at this. Matthew chapter 6 verses 9 through 13 is the big idea at the center of Jesus' sermon. So the whole thing is focused on God's kingdom, and the big idea surrounds praying this particular prayer.

And guess what? I don't know if you know this, but the prayer itself, the Lord's prayer, appears to be a chiasm as well. This is how much of a genius Jesus is. He preached a sermon that is a chiasm and then placed a chiasm within his chiasm in order to get to the big idea of the whole thing.

So what's at the center of the chiasm in the Lord's prayer? Guess what? It's this phrase right here. Verse 10, on earth as it is in heaven. The big idea of the Sermon on the Mount is turning earth into a mirror of heaven.

It's about welcoming the will of God as it is being accomplished on earth as it is in heaven. And we, as God's image bearers, as the ones who bear the image of our creator, we are the means by which this planet becomes a mirror of what is taking place in heaven.

That means our attitudes, our behaviors must align to the character of God. That's the Beatitudes, by the way. So if you go all the way up to chapter 5, verses 2 through, I think it's like 11 or 12, right?

That means that we also have to interpret God's commandments properly. You know, that's what Jesus meant when he said he came to fulfill the law in chapter 5, verse 17, right? Don't think I came to abolish the law, I came to fulfill it.

We must be complete as our heavenly father is complete. That's chapter 5, verse 48, right? Like it's all here. All of these pieces are throughout the entire sermon and it's all connected, okay? It also means that, you know, as image bearers of our creator, as we are mirroring what's going on in heaven, on this earth, that means we need to seek first God's kingdom and establish his kingdom.

And all of these other things will be added to us, right? That's chapter 6, verse 33. So anyway, a lot of this is fresh because my Patreon community and I, we just read through the Sermon on the Mount together.

And, you know, so again, just a quick plug, that is a free feature that you can access when you sign up for my Patreon. Totally for free. You can just go there and read along with us. I share my notes every morning when we go through the Gospel of Matthew.

But that's what the Sermon on the Mount is all about. That's what the central thesis is. It's not about aiming up and concentrating, you know, on the present or something, right? Those concepts just do not get at the heart of Jesus' teaching.

And when you tell people that, and you don't suss out the gospel-oriented themes, the imaging God here on earth themes that the sermon is teaching, a lot of people will not understand what the Lord is really saying and what's really.

At stake. Let's go back to post-traumatic stress. I've done three and a half years of therapy, twice a week. I've done psychedelics, treatments, therapies. I've explored all kinds of different ways to overcome post-traumatic stress, TBI, but let's just concentrate on post-traumatic stress.

It always seems to go back to childhood. Everybody I've talked to, the therapist, starts in my childhood. I started at childhood. Then when I got into, when I started researching the psychedelic therapy, and I started interviewing people about it, a lot of the visual experiences that they relive is not wartime.

A lot of it is, I would say, more than not.

Are childhood memories. Why? The psychoanalysts would have called that a complex. Well, imagine that. It's the same as a portal into hell, I suppose. That's another way of thinking about it. All things you haven't dealt with are the same thing.

Why? Well, all things you haven't dealt with are things you don't understand. Well, how can you classify things that you don't understand? Because you don't understand them. Well, you classify them with negative emotion.

That's the class. The class of all things that produce negative emotion. Okay, what's at the core of that? The deepest hell you've managed to fall into. What's associated with that? Everything you haven't dealt with in your life.

Right? So that, if you encountered something particularly traumatic, it would aggregate everything that was partially traumatic around it. It's something like that. Because it's the same thing. It's all those places in your life you did not traverse properly.

Right? And those all have to be mapped, because otherwise they're pitfalls. And that's how your psyche responds to them. There are dragons there. Look out. Do you have to sort that all out? You do if you don't want to carry it with you.

You have to sort everything out that you don't want to carry with.

You. So again, I don't want to take away from, I mean, there is benefit to the things that Peterson is saying here. On, you know, on this earth now, there is a benefit to the principles that he's espousing.

It's just that, you know, when you sort of interpolate Christian terms and concepts and principles into your language, it makes somebody like me, who was a pastor and a Bible teacher, want you to go even deeper than that.

Because once we start sort of bringing and introducing those things into the conversation, you open the door to the full biblical view of the human being, which again, should incorporate things that Peterson is leaving out.

Where is God in this discussion? Where is sin in this discussion? Where is the broken relationship that must be restored between God and man? Right? That's the gospel. Where is that in this discussion?

And then you hear a word like hell. That's what I mean, right? But it's devoid of all those other Christian concepts, the connotation that surrounds that term, clearly taught by Jesus and the Bible. And then when you do that, what does hell become?

Things you don't understand. Things you haven't dealt with and thus attribute negative emotion to. The things that you carry with you as unresolved issues because you didn't deal with them properly. That's hell.

That's not hell, friends. That's not what Jesus was talking about in the gospels. Hell is an eternal separation from God because you rejected him in his ways. Matthew chapter 13, verse 49 says, so it will be at the end of the age.

This is Jesus speaking. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the fiery furnace. In that place, there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. This is what Revelation chapter 21 characterizes as a lake that burns with fire and sulfur.

That is the second death, which refers to eternal separation from the father, which again, I think I mentioned this, but it makes the dichotomy abundantly clear in the Bible. It comes down to either life or eternal separation.

This is Matthew 25, verse 46. These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life. This is the reality for those who choose to reject their creator in this life. And if we're not careful, rejecting your creator looks an awful lot like doing a lot of things that have no ultimate significance.

What was it? D .L. Moody said, our greatest fear should not be a failure, but of succeeding at things that don't matter. What does it ultimately matter if you explore the things you don't understand in this life?

I mean, is there benefit to those things? Absolutely. So again, I don't want to discount those kinds of things, but what does it ultimately matter? If you strive to deal with all the unresolved issues you're carrying with you, how does that heal the broken relationship you have with God?

It doesn't. There are no serious spiritual stakes in this conversation at all. And I, man, I just suspect that this whole thing leaves a lot of still thoroughly confused about what it truly means to be a human being and live our lives on this planet.

I wonder if it makes people think that Christianity is really a very effective way of dealing with psychological trauma. Like it just, you know what I mean? People should be asking deeper questions. I think they should be wrestling with things on a much deeper level, recognizing that the stakes are much higher than that.

We need to know what it means to be a human being. We need to know how to properly diagnose ourselves, but both in a physical and a spiritual sense. We need to know what's actually wrong with this world, and we need to know how to make it right what is wrong.

Boy, what a wonderful opportunity to present a biblical framework that is given to us in the pages of scripture, because it is within that robust framework that we understand God, the world he has made, and ourselves completely, and how we fit into the story that God is telling.

But this is not the first time that, you know, I was just, I was so excited to watch Peterson and just came away disappointed. You know, I wanted a delicious steak dinner, but instead I got a happy meal.

It's just, it's a shame. Well anyway, those are my thoughts. What do you think about Peterson's characterization of the Sermon on the Mount? Does he understand the Bible? Does he understand Jesus? Is he doing something that I'm just missing?

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