Host of THE SERMON argues Pharisees were antinomian hypocrites, not legalists, shrinking God's law to external acts while ignoring internal murderous anger liable to hell. He critiques modern evangelical fear of legalism as a false dichotomy, equating it to America's misplaced dread of fascism rather than communism's actual threat. The speaker asserts that sinful anger stems from disordered loves, citing 70 million abortion victims as evidence of insufficient righteous wrath. He champions Ordo Amoris, prioritizing God, family, and country, rejecting the post-war consensus that equates national love with racism. Ultimately, properly ordered hatred flows from properly ordered love, challenging Reformed divisions over civil government authority and urging Christians to honor ancestors without violating biblical commandments. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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God's Law Applies to the Heart00:11:13
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Matthew, and our text for today is Matthew chapter 5, verses 21 through 26.
Again, our text for today is Matthew chapter 5, verses 21 through 26.
I'll read the text for us in its entirety.
When I finish reading the text, I'm going to say, This is the word of the Lord, at which point I would appreciate very much if you would respond by saying, Thanks be to God.
One final time, our text for today is Matthew chapter 5, verses 21 through 26.
The Bible says this.
You have heard that it was said to those of old, You shall not murder, and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.
But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment.
Whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council, and whoever says you fool will be liable to the hell of fire.
So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go.
First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift.
Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are going with him to court, lest your accuser hand you over to the judge and the judge to the guard and you be put in prison.
Truly, I say to you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny.
This is the word of the Lord.
All right, please be seated.
By way of introduction, I've written the following Jesus has now finished making it abundantly clear, if you were with us last Lord's Day with our text, that not one jot or tittle, not one iota, not one dotted I, not one cross.
Of any of the law of God would pass away until heaven and earth pass away.
So Jesus has finished making it abundantly clear that Moses and the prophets, that is, the law of God, remained authoritative for all people.
Jesus did not come to change that, that the inauguration of the new covenant and the ministry and finished work of Jesus Christ would not abolish the law, but rather Jesus came to fulfill the law.
And so the law of God, Moses and the prophets, remains authoritative and relevant, applicable to all people in all places and all times.
And especially, all the more so, Jesus' disciples.
The law of God does not merely apply to the church, it applies to the world.
I've said it in the past, but it bears repeating that God does not issue his law on the basis of Jesus being the Savior of some.
Rather, God issues his law to humanity on the basis of him being a universal creator of all.
It is on the basis of God's creatorhood that he issues his law to all his image bearers.
In other words, God's law is universally given to humanity.
All people that he has created.
The universal creator gives his law to all his creatures on the basis of him being creator.
It is not the particular savior issuing his law to some people, that is, his people, the church, Christians, but rather the universal creator issuing his law to all image bearers, all of his creation, all mankind.
So, the law of God has not been abolished by the coming and the finished work of Jesus Christ.
He is explicit in our previous text to say that he has come not to abolish the law, but rather to fulfill it.
So, the law remains in play, and not merely in play for Christian people, but for all people.
Not merely some people of whom Jesus is Savior, but all people of whom God is Creator.
Furthermore, Christ's primary principle was to show that the law did not only Prohibit external actions, but its first use was to address the heart.
Jesus demonstrates this overarching principle by expounding upon some specific laws as case studies to make his overarching point.
And he begins in our text today with the sixth commandment.
So, again, as a summary, a bit of an introduction or synopsis to get us to our text today, Jesus has been preaching the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5, 6, and 7.
And so far, one of the big ideas in the immediate preceding text to our text today is that he has not come to abolish the law, but rather to fulfill it.
So the law of God remains in play, not just for Christian people, but for all people, and all the more so for those who would be his disciples.
Furthermore, so the law is still in play, it's not abolished, but Jesus is going to fulfill it.
Now, with that law, Jesus is saying again and again, as we'll see throughout the remainder of this chapter, he'll say, You have heard it was said long ago, but I tell you.
And what Jesus is doing again and again is ultimately not only upholding the law, because he did not come to abolish it, but he's also extending, further extending the law.
So Jesus doesn't abolish the law.
That's what we saw last week.
And if I was to sum it up in a sentence, the big idea for this week in our text today is last week, Jesus says, I have not come to abolish the law.
This week, Jesus is going to say, I have not come to mitigate or shrink or limit the law.
So, the law remains in play, not abolished, and the law remains exhaustive, not limited.
What Jesus is saying is the law of God has not been abolished, and the law of God pertains to far more than you think it does.
The law of God does not only deal with the outward behaviors and actions of mankind, but first and foremost, the law of God addresses sin at the level of desire, at the level of the heart.
And this is what the book of James clearly teaches.
The book of James.
It explicitly outright asks that question.
It says, Why are there divisions and factions among you?
Or why does this happen?
Why does murder take place?
Why does theft take place?
And James clearly answers the question.
It says, Is it not because of your desires within you, your evil desires?
It's at the level first of inward, internal, evil, sinful desires that sin begins to grow.
And then James outright says, He says that.
That desire eventually gives birth to sin.
If desire remains unchecked, if the law of God, if we relegate the law of God to only dealing with outward actions and we carve out absolution for our inward desires and we say, as the Pharisees did, the law of God doesn't apply to the heart, it doesn't apply to the level of desires, it only applies to outward actions.
And what you're ultimately doing morally is you're carving out a space.
For the realm of inward desires, to allow sinful desires to fester and to grow and to go on unchecked.
And what James says is that if we do that, desire, that is sinful desire, eventually gives birth to sin.
And the way that he's using sin in this instance is not to say that sinful desire is not already sin in and of itself, but he's saying sinful desire, which is sin internally, eventually becomes sinful action.
He's using sin to describe actions outward.
So sinful desires eventually become sinful actions.
And then sinful actions, if those aren't eventually held in check, Eventually, lead to death.
Desire gives birth to sin, and sin, when it is fully grown, brings forth death.
And so, the law of God must apply at the level of the heart.
And this is what Jesus is ultimately dealing with the Pharisees about.
The big idea is this I said it last week, I'll say it again, and I'll probably say it multiple times throughout the Sermon on the Mount.
The problem with the Pharisees is not that they were legalists, the problem with the Pharisees is that they were hypocrites.
It's not that they taught that the law of God, it's not that the Pharisees, Jesus doesn't come and condemn the Pharisees because they were stretching the law of God too far.
He doesn't say, hey, you're getting far too much application out of the law of God.
You're making the law of God regulate too many facets of human life and society.
And that's burdensome and a bit legalistic.
And I've come.
To say that it's really just about grace and outward behaviors and holiness and these kinds of things, law don't really matter.
That's not the message of Jesus.
Instead, what Jesus is actually condemning and criticizing the Pharisees for is he says, You've actually, you have not expanded the law too far, you've shrunk it down too small.
You have taken the entirety of the law of God, Moses and all the prophets, and And you've exclusively applied it to the outward life.
And you've carved out a complete immunity to the heart and inward desires.
You've allowed for yourselves and others to look clean on the outside while harboring and maintaining and fostering sin on the inside.
Is that not exactly what Jesus says?
You're like whitewashed tombs.
Meaning what?
The outside is bleached and squeaky clean, but on the inside there's a rotting corpse that smells like death.
Or he says, you're guys who wash the outside of the cup, but meanwhile, the inside of the cup, the part where you actually put liquid into that goes into your mouth that you're going to drink and consume, the inside of the cup remains a petri dish.
But the outside, that looks nice.
And shining.
That's Jesus' message to the Pharisees again and again.
His message is not, you legalist, stop caring so much about holiness, give people a break.
That's not his message.
His message instead is, you hypocrites, you've actually not overextended the law, but you've actually shrunk it down too small.
Shrinking the Law of God00:15:35
You've made the law of God only apply to outward actions while maintaining a full immunity and absolution for yourselves for inward malice.
Inward sinful desires.
You're like whitewashed tombs.
You look good on the outside, but it's death on the inside.
You are like cups that are cleansed on the outside but filled with germs and viruses and disease on the inside.
You are not legalists, you are hypocrites.
Here's a quote from Matthew Henry that illustrates this point as he commentates on our text today.
Matthew Henry says this The exposition of this command, namely the sixth commandment, which is the case study that Jesus utilizes in our text today, thou shalt not murder.
The exposition of this commandment, which the Jewish teachers of Jesus' day contended themselves with, their comment upon it was Whoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgment.
This was all they had to say upon it.
That willful murderers were liable to the sword of justice, and casual ones to the judgment of the city of refuge.
For the instance, just for the record, there is a bifurcation of two categories when it comes to murder in the Bible.
In our case law system today, we've ended up with three or even four different categories of murder, but in biblical times there were two.
There was manslaughter, and then there was murder.
Manslaughter and murder.
For instance, like first and second degree murder within our system, that would be the idea of first degree, would be premeditated, it was planned.
So it's something that you thought about for a very long time.
There was intent.
Whereas second degree murder is not manslaughter, meaning it's not an accident.
But it also was not premeditated and strategized and plotted out for months or perhaps even years, but rather it was a crime of passion.
So there was intent, it wasn't an accident, it's something that you did on purpose, but it's not something that you wanted to do for a very long time.
It was just in a moment, in the heat of passion, you discovered something or someone did something to you, and you were so overcome by anger that you killed this individual.
It would be really what we consider to be second degree murder, a crime of passion, would be very similar to what Cain did with Abel.
It's not as though Cain had always planned to kill his brother Abel.
It's not as though he was making plans from his youth or as a child, but one particular instance took place, and in that instance, sin was crouching at his door.
Instead of mastering sin, he allowed sin to master him, first at the inward level of desire, as we've been discussing thus far, and in a crime of passion, namely jealousy.
Toward God, accepting his brother's sacrifice and not his own, he allowed that passion to get the better of his judgment and he struck his brother Cain and his brother Abel and killed him.
So it wasn't an accident, not manslaughter, but it also wasn't premeditated for months or years.
It was this crime of passion.
But in biblical times, there really are only two categories because whether you plan a murder for months or years, Or whether it is still intent, it's intentional, but an intent that came in a moment, in either case, it's still intentional murder.
And in that case, the punishment remains the same.
Whether it be first degree or second degree, the punishment is life for life.
The punishment is that if you take the life of another willfully, right, because both are willful, whether the will was there for months or years or whether the will was there for 15 minutes.
Either way, if it's willful and intentional, taking of another person's life.
Without justification, this isn't just war or something like that, then it is murder.
It's intentional murder, and the penalty is capital punishment that you forfeit your own life.
However, there is, in terms of consequence, in terms of the penalties, there is an actual category difference for an accident.
And in biblical times, that person would be permitted to flee to a city of refuge.
So they could go and they would be a refugee.
They would have to remain in that city of refuge.
If they were outside the bounds of that city of refuge, then the avenger of blood, that would usually be the closest of kin to the person who was married, the closest male of kin, so maybe a brother or an uncle or whatever it may be.
They would be fully within their rights to avenge their loved one that you had even accidentally killed if you were outside of the city of refuge.
But so long as you remained within the city of refuge, then you had protection.
Now, notice the city of refuge was not a prison like our system today.
In the city of refuge, there's a few things that you would have to do.
For instance, you would have to get a job in that city and you would have to work.
So, you committing a crime didn't punish everybody else.
By now subjecting them through taxes to pay for your room and board.
But instead, you committing a crime actually punished yourself.
You actually, how crazy is that, right?
The guy who commits the crime, he gets punished and not everybody else.
So it's not like, hey, you're going to get some outside activities and we're going to put you on a weightlifting regimen and you'll do some community service and here's some free food and here's some free AC and here's.
It didn't work like that.
You had to go not to a prison where other people pay for your crime through their hard work and taxes.
But instead, you went to a city where you had to get a job and pay for yourself.
And you would stay in that city until the high priest died.
And there were multiple cities of refuge.
They were all geographically plotted out to where it would be one day travel.
So if you accidentally killed someone within one day, you could get to anywhere in Israel.
There would be a city of refuge within one day's travel of any place in Israel so that you could get there in a day to escape the Avenger of Blood.
If you killed someone, it was truly an accident.
And the only way that your sentence would end.
And you were free to go back into society, was if the high priest in Israel died.
The moment that the high priest in Israel died, then all of the refugees who were restrained to cities of refuge would be freed from that, and the avenger of blood, even if he was still living, could no longer avenge that blood.
It was done.
And the reason why that blood could no longer be avenged is because the high priest was a type ultimately of the true and final high priest, who is Jesus Christ, and by his death, when Jesus died, All avengers of blood ultimately are satisfied.
The true avenger of blood, who is God Himself, He's the one who truly has rights and justice to avenge those who do wrong.
God's wrath was satisfied by the death of the true high priest, Jesus Christ.
And so, too, in Israel under the Old Covenant, when the human high priest would die, the avenger of blood had to be satisfied at that point with the death of the high priest and could no longer gain vengeance for himself.
And all those who were refugees would be set free.
It was a picture, even the Old Covenant.
Of the gospel, as many old covenant signs and symbols and shadows are.
So, all that being said, back to the text.
Matthew Henry says this this was all they had to say upon it.
So, the Pharisees and Sadducees and religious rulers and scribes, all they had to say about the sixth commandment in the Decalogue, Exodus 20, the law of Moses, was that willful murderers were liable to the sword of justice and casual ones, that's manslaughters, the manslayer, to the judgment of the city of refuge.
The courts of judgment sat in the gate of their principal cities, and the judges ordinarily were in number 23.
These tried, condemned, and executed murderers so that whoever killed was in danger of their judgment.
Now, this gloss of theirs upon this commandment was faulty.
This is what Jesus is getting at.
There was a problem with their exegesis and application of the sixth commandment.
It was faulty, for it intimated that the law of the sixth commandment was only external and it forbade no more than the act of murder.
Right?
That you could hate your brother in your heart.
And you could want to murder him, and you could even fantasize every single afternoon for 20 years about all the different ways that if you could, you would kill your brother.
And that would be perfectly fine, perfectly allowed, so long as you did not externally act upon it.
That's the way that the Pharisees and the Sadducees, the religious rulers, exegeted and applied the sixth commandment.
So, Jesus, again, this is a case study.
He's using the sixth commandment as just a singular example.
To make his overarching larger point, which is the principle.
The sixth commandment is Jesus' case study in our text today.
The principle, though, remember, the principle is that Jesus is coming in and he's not saying to the religious rulers of the day, you guys care too much about the law of God, but I don't because I'm easygoing.
That's what evangelicals preach today.
You know that, right?
That is not what Jesus is saying.
Jesus is using the sixth commandment as his case study to make his overarching principle.
And what's the overarching principle?
He's saying, You guys have actually made the law of God smaller.
Your fault is that you've made the law of God too insignificant.
You have minimized its application.
The law of God does not just say capital punishment for the one who externally murders his brother, but the law of God also says there will be eternal judgment and hell's fire for the one who inwardly hates his brother.
That murderous anger of the heart.
May not be murder in action.
And so, in terms of human courts, in human courts, temporal earthly courts, that person has not committed a crime and therefore should not be treated as a criminal.
But internally in his heart, he has committed not a crime temporally, but a sin eternally.
And there is an eternal judgment that's far worse than capital punishment here in this life.
The eternal judgment is that he would be underneath the white hot wrath of God in hell forever.
And that too is an application and an exegesis, so an interpretation and then an application of the sixth commandment.
So, you Pharisees, you Sadducees, you religious rulers of the day, your problem is not that you stretch the law too far as legalists, but that you have made the law too small as antinomians.
Antinomians simply meaning against law.
The problem with the Pharisees is that they were lawless, they boasted in caring much for the law of God.
But remember, Jesus' number one label for the Pharisees is not legalists, it's hypocrites.
They boasted of how much they cared for the law of God.
But Jesus exposes them and says, You care for the law of God far too little.
So Jesus, on one hand, he also criticizes the Pharisees for neglecting the greater matters of, but here's the thing the law.
So he says, He does condemn the Pharisees for not being gracious, for not being merciful, but even these Jesus puts in the category of the law.
Jesus says, You've neglected the weightier matters of the law by not being merciful, by putting heavy burdens on others that you yourselves, as hypocrites, are not willing to lift with one finger.
So, Jesus does criticize the Pharisees for not being gracious, for not being merciful, but he also criticizes them for being lawless.
What evangelicals want to preach today is they want to say, well, Jesus' real problem with the Pharisees and the Sadducees was that they neglected the weightier things, and they won't say the weightier things of the law.
They'll just leave that out because they want to ultimately juxtapose mercy against the law.
They want to make mercy as something that is against the law, and that you basically create a false.
A dichotomy where you have to choose one or the other.
And so then they put words, evangelicals, modern evangelicals today, put words into the mouth of Jesus and say, His big problem with the Pharisees is that they neglected the weightier things and mercy is one of those chief things, and that is true.
Instead, they cared about the law and they were legalistic.
That's not what Jesus says.
He says, You neglected the weightier things, and these weightier things are weightier things of the law because it is actually commanded to exercise mercy, to show mercy.
Mercy is a commandment.
It is part of God's law, and it is a weightier part of the law.
And the Pharisees and Sadducees did neglect that.
Christ absolutely had that against them.
And in addition to that, he's basically saying it's both and, not either or.
You should be more merciful, and also you should be more righteous, more lawful.
More merciful and more lawful.
With the law, you need to apply it not externally only or temporally only, but also internally and eternally.
I'll say that again.
Jesus is saying, You shrunk the law too small.
You're not legalists.
You're antinomians.
You don't care too much for the law.
You care too little.
You've made the law external and temporal, but it's actually internal and eternal.
So it's not temporal, but eternal.
And it's not merely external, but external and internal.
It's both and.
The law applies temporally and also eternally, and it applies eternally.
Externally and internally.
So you've got, you're functioning with half of the law.
So you need more law and more mercy.
More mercy.
And that's what I've noticed.
I don't know if you've noticed this, because again, we're operating as evangelicals in 2024.
You may not even know it, but subconsciously, I'd be willing to bet that just about everyone in the room here this morning, you have been operating under this subconscious dichotomy.
That your evangelical pastor worked very hard for decades to etch into your brain, and he was probably very successful in doing so.
The dichotomy is that there's law and there's grace, there's law and there's grace.
When the reality is that Jesus is actually condemning the religious rulers of his day on both accounts you need more law and more mercy, and mercy and holiness are not opposed to one another.
There is a way.
To care immensely about the law of God and those things which He says are righteous and pursue holiness, for without which no one will see the Lord, and to exercise mercy and grace and kindness.
These two things are not against one another.
Holiness and Mercy Together00:13:26
And so, what I've found in my experience is that oftentimes the person who is very upset about what they perceive to be as legalism and the person who prides themselves in grace tends to be the least gracious person you can find.
They're actually not very gracious.
What they'll do is they actually, what typically is the case is they have a facade of grace, a manufactured, man made, generic, fake grace, and they apply it to whatever they think, whatever laws they just don't like.
So they'll be very gracious, for instance, towards, well, I mean, in a nutshell, let's be honest.
They'll be gracious to anything.
On the left, politically, culturally, morally, anything on the left.
So, homosexuality, sexual sin outside of marriage, abortion, right?
But, I mean, these poor women, they're the second victim.
Like, sure, there's a dead baby, but, you know, there's a second victim and it's the mother, and we're just being gracious towards her.
And, you know, don't think about it too long because you might begin to realize that we're being incredibly demeaning.
Because we all know that women are too stupid at the end of the day to know that a baby inside of their wombs is actually a baby.
That's why we can't hold the mother responsible morally, is because she's just intellectually, in the same way that you couldn't hold someone who's mentally challenged accountable in a court of law, that's how we as leftists view all women.
They are so mentally challenged that we can't possibly hold them morally culpable for abortion as murder because they can't connect those two dots together.
Killing the unborn child would even be murder.
And so it's actually on our view of women and their limits and their intellectual capacity that we exercise our grace towards women and say that they're the second victim when it comes to abortion.
That is, just so you know, that is the Rhino, Republican in name only, or the Sino, Christian in name only.
That is their position.
That is absolutely Brent Leatherwood's position of the ERLC, the Southern Baptist Convention.
Their whole ethics and religious foundation of the largest Protestant denomination in these United States.
That is his position.
And it's wrapped in a thin veneer of mercy and grace, just like the Pharisees would do.
It's wrapped in this thin veneer of mercy, but it's actually, my point is, it's shrinking the law of God to where the sixth commandment, thou shalt not murder, somehow doesn't apply to mothers who murder their unborn children.
So it's shrinking the law.
And at the same time, it's also shrinking mercy and grace.
Because in order to do it, he'll never outright admit it.
But in order to do that, what he essentially has to say is we can't hold women responsible because we all know women are dumb.
That is his position.
Ironically, believe it or not, the internet would probably try to convince you otherwise.
But I actually think much more highly of women.
In fact, I think women are so intelligent as image bearers of the living God, human beings made in God's image.
That they instinctively, both intellectually and morally, with conscience and the law of God written on their hearts, know that when they murder their unborn child, that actually is a human being, it's actually murder, and they should be treated as a murder because I respect them.
I respect women so much that I believe that they deserve capital punishment if they murder their child.
That's how much I respect women.
Brent Leatherwood doesn't.
He doesn't respect women.
He hates women and he hates babies.
And ultimately, it's because he hates both God's law and he hates.
what would truly be God's mercy.
He hates both.
And what you do when you shrink the law of God, here's the point.
When you shrink the law of God, you minimize the sin of men, the sin of mankind.
And when you minimize the sin of mankind, you ultimately minimize the gospel.
You minimize God's mercy.
Because if man, if God is only this holy and man is only this sinful, then the gap between a holy God and sinful man is really just, it's not that wide.
It's not that big.
And so the cross that fills this gap doesn't really have to be a big cross.
It's not really an impressive thing that Jesus did at the end of the day.
Come to think of it, you know, I mean, we still kind of appreciate his sacrifice and all, but.
But at the end of the day, you know, God is over here, and we got pretty far on our own.
You know, God is holy, but we're also not that bad.
And Jesus is bridging the gap, but it's a pretty small gap.
And we appreciate the work of Christ, but the work of Christ is not insurmountable.
The work of Christ isn't infinite.
The work of Christ is, you know, it's just filling a gap that if I really got a running start, I might have been able to make the jump all on my own.
I don't even know if I needed the cross at all.
Or, alternatively, you can believe this that God is holy, holy, holy, and that man is totally depraved in and of himself apart from saving grace, and that the gap between God and his holy nature and his holy law and man in his sinful nature and all his sinful desires and sinful deeds is infinite,
and that the cross of Jesus Christ and what he accomplished at Calvary is no small deed.
But that the gospel is as wide as the east is far from the west.
That the gospel and what Jesus accomplished in his life and death and resurrection is as big as the distance between a thrice holy God and sinful man.
The point is this when you minimize the law of God, you minimize mercy.
When you truncate the law of God to only deal with that which is temporal and external, then you ultimately.
You mitigate and minimize the sinfulness of man in such a way that the mercy that God has shown through his son Jesus Christ towards sinners is no longer a mercy that takes your breath away.
It's no longer a mercy that's new every morning, that's astounding and surprising and overwhelming.
It's a mercy that begins to make sense.
It's a mercy that we begin to understand on human terms.
It's a mercy that's Calculated, mitigated, measured, and at the end of the day, just not really that impressive.
The Pharisees failed in both regards, is my point.
They were not legalists, they were hypocrites.
They didn't stretch the law too far, they shrunk it too small, and in doing so, they were both lawless and without mercy.
They were lacking righteous desire and love.
For the law of God as it truly stands in an eternal sense, and that caused them to also lack a love of mercy and the weightier matters of the law mercy and grace and justice and the like.
That was the problem with the Pharisees.
And to make this, you know, as I often do, you guys are probably used to it by now, but to make it relevant and timely, and I like to put our moment into the larger equation of church history and where we're at.
And where we've been and where we're going, and what might need to happen if God is in his mercy and kindness to right the ship.
Here's the big idea.
Everything that I just espoused, none of this was high level, ivory tower, you know, PhD in theology, you know, or MDiv at Oxford or Princeton or Harvard.
All of this was, these were Sunday school catechism questions for four and five year olds.
For centuries.
What I'm saying is, for centuries, what I've just espoused up to this point in the sermon was basic knowledge for children.
In America, in England, in France, in Spain, all over Western civilization, for hundreds of years, everything I've just said so far was basic knowledge.
At this point of the sermon, if it was a hundred years ago, all the people, all of you sitting right now in the chairs, you would actually feel demeaned by me.
You'd be like, what did we do?
Why is he going on about this?
Did we do something?
Why is he treating us like children?
Why is he preaching the most elementary milk you could possibly imagine?
This is what Paul would consider milk.
This is basic theology, basic Christian theology.
Law of God, good.
Mercy, also good.
The two of these things, not opposed.
The law of God applies both outwardly and inwardly, eternally and temporally.
The problem with the Pharisees is they were hypocrites, not legalists.
But you need to understand.
Because sometimes we just think that we're doing the Christian life in a vacuum.
You're not.
You're not, brothers and sisters.
I'm not.
You're not special.
I'm not special.
We are not coming to the table in a vacuum, apart from any context, apart from any culture, apart from any history.
You and I, what we are doing today, The reason why this sermon is necessary is because we are doing theology on the heels of 80 years of an intense psyop and indoctrination from the church to get people to hate the law of God.
That's why this sermon feels like upper echelon, ivory tower, we're getting into the deep theology kind of stuff.
Because something, here's my point something happened.
You need to know that.
Something happened.
In the church in the last 80 years, something happened in America and in Europe, something happened in Christianity, something happened in church history, something happened to take people who were intelligent and courageous and moral and to ultimately brainwash them, break them,
deceive them to the point where.
They all of a sudden began as a basic premise, subconsciously even, to operate with a false dichotomy that biblically has never existed.
Law against grace.
I mean, still to this day, it's 2024, they're transing kids.
And the average evangelical thinks, still in 2024, that the big problem with the church is that it's legalistic.
Oh my goodness.
To miss the plot by that much.
Is just, that's like, that would be like a major media company remaking the Lord of the Rings series and saying that, you know, maybe we should be more sympathetic to the orcs because they had families and were just trying to survive.
Right?
You'd have to miss the plot that much.
Now, certainly that would never happen.
For those of you who don't know, that's literally just happened in the last month.
Amazon has remade Lord of the Rings.
And one of the major themes is that the orcs just want to have families and just want to be left alone, you know, and they don't really like Saruman either, you know, or Sauron either.
That's where we're at right now.
If you're one, again, we don't do the Christian life in a vacuum.
We're not doing theology with a blank slate.
We're all products of culture and we're certainly all products of time and history.
But none of that, here's the good news none of that is ever an accident.
God is infinitely wise, He is sovereign over all things and in His providence.
He has caused you and I to be born in this time and in this place for an hour such as this, for a time such as this, to come and to dust off the books of old, starting with the scripture and then beyond the scripture, the confessions, the creeds, to work from old books written by old men who actually understood the word of God before things were truncated,
The Purpose of Righteous Anger00:15:43
before things were twisted, before things were.
Got off course and got off the rails.
So, Jesus is using the sixth commandment as his example, his case study, to make his larger principle ring true.
The larger principle is I have not come to abolish the law, but fulfill it.
Not one jot, not one tittle, not one iota will be done away with.
The law of God is good.
Mercy is also good.
The two are not in contradiction to one another.
And your problem is.
The thing I have against you, you religious teachers in Israel, is not that you care too much about the law and too little about grace, but rather you care too little about grace because you care too little about the law.
You need to be more lawful, not more lawless, more lawful in your interpretation of the law, in your application of the law, that it's not just a temporal and external application, but also internal and eternal application.
So, better exegesis of the law, better application, primarily a broader, more exhaustive application of the law.
And in so doing, you also need to have a greater appreciation of mercy.
And when the law is bigger, then it highlights and reveals bigger sin.
And when the sin of man is bigger, then the grace and mercy of God is also bigger.
That's basic Christianity.
Basic Christianity.
And you should ask that question.
A lot of people right now are saying that's not good to ask questions.
It is.
Those people are wrong.
It is good to ask questions.
And one of the questions you should ask is what happened over the last 80 years to where the church is so afraid of being called legalistic?
To where the church wants to basically take every universal truth, anything that would be viewed as dogmatic, transcendent truth, And get rid of it because it might be dangerous.
And instead, lower the bar and say that our biggest concern is legalism.
Okay, I'll just say it a little bit.
I won't say it much, I will be careful, but I'll just say it a little bit.
The evangelical church in 2024, its biggest concern being legalism, is equivalent to America as a nation, its biggest concern being fascism.
America is under threat of fascism to about the same degree as the evangelical church is under the threat of legalism.
That is to say, not at all.
Not at all.
The country is far more under threat from communism.
And the church is far more under threat from antinomianism.
And I do think that these two things, I'm just giving it as an example, this is kind of like that.
I would encourage you to perhaps just wonder and beg the question are these two things somehow related?
I don't think they're entirely related, but I do believe that there is some overlap.
That what has happened to the church theologically also happens to have a little bit to do with what has happened to our nation historically.
Okay, last point that I'm going to make today.
I have three points in your notes, but I'm just going to make one last point defining murderous anger.
This is key.
Okay, so we've already established last week Jesus didn't come to abolish the law but uphold it.
Jesus loves the law.
Now, this week we're saying, and in loving the law, Jesus doesn't want to limit the law, but he wants to apply it, exegete it thoroughly, and apply it exhaustively in every realm, externally and internally, temporally and eternally.
Now, all that being said, Getting specific with the sixth commandment now, if the sixth commandment applies to the heart and not merely actions, and it applies to anger, which is what Jesus says in our text, I tell you that even if you call your brother a fool, you are in danger of hell's fire.
If this is true, then what constitutes murderous anger that would make us liable to hell's fire?
That seems like an important thing to know.
One of my goals in life is to not go to hell.
I don't know about you, I think it's a decent goal.
I would.
You know, suggest that all of you have that goal as well.
I'd like to not go to hell.
Now, ultimately, the way to not go to hell is to believe upon the Lord Jesus Christ, his sufficient work, and to repent of your sins.
But in believing in Christ's sacrifice and repenting of our sins, it is helpful to know what things are actually sins and how to define properly these sins so that we understand what it is we're repenting of and what it is that Jesus actually paid for.
Those things are important and valuable.
So, Matthew Henry, now again commentating on our text and fleshing out for us a working definition, a helpful, I think, and simple definition of murderous anger.
The kind of anger that is sinful.
Because not all anger is.
As you guys know elsewhere in the scripture, the Bible says, be angry, but do not sin.
So, there is a way of having righteous indignation, a righteous anger.
But there's also a way of having murderous anger.
And that's the kind of anger that Jesus is tying to the sixth commandment.
The sixth commandment is not just murder in deed, but also murder in heart.
There is a murderous anger.
That anger is a sin.
And apart from his finished work at Calvary, that anger, that kind of anger of the heart, will send you to hell.
So, what is it?
Matthew Henry says the following Christ tells them that rash anger is heart murder.
Whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause breaks the sixth commandment.
So, there's your first clue.
What is murderous, sinful anger?
It's not just being angry with your brother, period.
But, first thing that Matthew Henry says is this it's being angry with your brother without a cause.
He breaks the sixth commandment.
Now, in this context, by our brother, there are other contexts where brother explicitly refers to the household of faith.
In this context, Matthew Henry, and I agree with him, and other Puritans and other reformers in this particular scriptural context agree with him as well, that brother is a little bit broader here than simply referring to the household of faith.
So, not just a brother or sister in Christ, but in this sense, it's fellow human being.
My brother, mankind.
Mankind, okay?
So, by our brother here, we are to understand.
Any person, though ever so much our inferior as a child or a servant, for we are all made of one blood.
So, a murderous anger is an anger without cause, and it's an anger towards our brother.
And in this context, brother would refer to a child, a servant, a believer, especially, or an unbeliever, someone in your country, or someone in another.
It would be any human being made in the image of God.
In this sense, it's a universal mankind brotherhood.
That is in reference.
And any anger towards any person, that is, now that we've established that, brother simply means person, any anger towards any person that is an anger without cause, an unmerited anger, an unjustifiable anger, is a murderous anger.
And therefore, a sinful anger.
Because there is such a thing as righteous anger, but this would be a sinful anger.
So it's without cause, and it's towards another person, and this other person doesn't have to be our peer.
Or our superior.
It could be an inferior, it could be a child, it could be a servant, an employee, whatever it might be.
For we are all made of one blood.
Anger, Matthew Henry continues, is a natural passion.
There are causes in which it is lawful and even laudable, commendable.
But it is then sinful when we are angry without cause, so we've already established that, without any good effect, so not just without cause, but also we could argue without purpose.
There needs to be a reason that you're angry, and there needs to be something productive that you intend to do with that anger.
Notice this.
The Bible does not condemn all forms of anger, but some things that the Bible very clearly condemns is this.
The Bible condemns longstanding anger.
So it condemns not all anger in a general sense, not every regard, but it condemns quick anger.
You should come to anger slowly, not quickly.
So it condemns quick anger.
It condemns, which we could call rash anger.
It condemns unjustifiable anger, anger without cause, without reason.
And it also condemns not just anger that springs up quickly, but also anger that continues longly.
Anger that comes fast, bad.
Anger that lasts a long time, also bad.
The Bible puts a very short shelf life, we could say, on anger.
Do not let the sun go down on your anger.
Or in our text today, so that's a daily time limit.
In our text today, we could say there's a weekly time limit.
Where's that in the text?
Well, you should be reconciled with your brother before giving your gift at the altar, which is something that we all do each Lord's Day in worship once a week.
So, in both instances, whether it's not letting the sun go down or whether it's being prepared to offer your gift on the altar in weekly worship, in both instances, the big idea is this anger shouldn't spring up quickly.
And when we do have anger, we should come to it slowly and we should also deal with it quickly.
Come to it not quickly and deal with it slowly, but come to it slowly and deal with it quickly.
And in dealing with that anger, it needs to have a cause.
There's a reason, a justifiable reason for that anger, but also it needs to have a good effect.
There's actually a purpose for our anger.
Our anger, therefore, is going to drive us to some kind of effect, some kind of action, not a sinful action, but a righteous one.
There is a cause for our anger and a purpose.
And it needs to be with moderation.
So you could say it like this Righteous anger, an anger that is not murderous or sinful, is an anger that comes at the right time and it comes slowly.
It's an anger for the right things, not things that are petty or small, but the right things, the things that matter.
And it's an anger that comes in the right amount, so we're not too angry, or you can also sin by not being angry enough, brothers and sisters.
So, not too much anger or too little anger.
Like, for instance, you'll see people from time to time, they'll say, You don't hate journalists enough.
And that is true.
That is absolutely true.
You really can't in 2024 hate journalists enough.
But more than that, here's an even better example.
You and I, none of us in this room, none of us hate abortion enough.
We are all probably in some measure of sin.
Just a sliding spectrum.
It's not even if, it's just how much in sin are we?
For our apathy towards the murder of 70 million children in the last 50 years and counting.
None of us hate abortion enough.
None of us are angry enough.
So you can sin by being too angry or having too little anger.
So anger at the right time, come to it slowly and at the right time.
Anger for the right things, not just anger because I'm in traffic.
Right?
We'll get this angry about traffic and this angry about abortion.
That's a problem.
And we all, at times, have fallen into that temptation.
I'm this angry about some petty thing, and I'm this angry about 70 million babies murdered.
That's a problem.
So, angry at the right time, and slowly, as we come into it, angry for the right things, not more angry than we should be, or less, so then angry at the right amount.
Right time, right thing, right amount.
How do we avoid murderous, sinful anger?
Have anger at the right time for the right thing and the right amount.
Now, how do you do that?
Here's the trick, and I'll land the plane here.
The way to ultimately what I'm basically espousing here is how to properly order your hate.
We need properly ordered hate, righteous hatred.
God hates things, you know that, right?
God is holy, holy, holy.
He's perfectly righteous, He has never sinned, and He maintains hatred.
So, we in following His example, we want to be like God, right?
That's a pretty big idea of the Christian faith.
It's being like Jesus.
Jesus hates things, so we need to rightly order our hates, and here's the secret.
Don't focus on the hate.
The way to rightly order your hatreds is to rightly order your loves.
The reason you and I don't hate properly, we don't have anger properly, is because we don't love properly.
We don't hate abortion enough because we don't love children enough.
And we hate the petty little grievances and ways that people offend us.
Too much because we love ourselves too much.
So, there are some things we don't hate enough because we don't love others enough.
And there are some things that we hate too much because we love ourselves too much.
At every level, whenever the order of our hatreds is out of whack, it's because the order of our loves is out of whack.
We're angry at the wrong time about the wrong things with the wrong amount of anger.
We're loving at the wrong time and loving the wrong things and exercising the wrong amount of love.
And this is why, and I know, it really does, I'm not saying, just saying this, it really does break my heart.
Because I feel like the reformed camp is like the pro life camp.
They just want to split the penny a million ways and never, and I feel like the reformed camp, It's just fracturing and fracturing and fracturing.
It's like every six months we're dividing on a new thing.
And then a new thing.
And then a new thing.
And I understand when it's Gideon's army and God supernaturally does it because he wants to show off his glory.
But there's a difference in God whittling you down to 300 through a divine commandment given to Gideon so that he would produce the victory and show off his glory versus us whittling ourselves down because we keep shooting each other in the face.
Without a divine commandment from the Lord, but just because we're jerks.
Loving Countrymen Without Hate00:13:12
That doesn't seem very strategic to me.
And so the reform camp, we keep splitting the penny again and again and again.
And here's the deal this is one of the divisions that I've found.
And it's sad.
But one of the divisions that I have found in the reform camp as we split, right, in 2022, it was like, if I could sum it up as succinctly as possible, one of the big divides was this Does the civil magistrate, human governments, national governments, Are they morally obligated to be distinctly Christian?
And if so, if they should be Christian, Christian nations, does being a Christian civil magistrate, a Christian government, does that necessarily morally obligate the government to legislating the second table of the law only, or both the first and second table of the law?
Meaning, should governments be Christian?
And if so, if the answer is yes to that first question, should they just legislate Christianly with commandments 5 through 10?
Like, don't steal, don't kill, or also Christianly, like, no high places and no altars to false gods and no blaspheming the triune God.
Those kinds of things.
First table of the law.
Not just legislating Christian laws as it pertains to love for neighbor, but also love for God.
And that was a big dividing line.
If you guys saw that in 2021 and 2022, some people were on one side of the aisle and some people were on the other.
And then, you know, it's like, man, there are fewer of us than I thought there were, and that's a little bit depressing.
And so, Everybody got together and decided, well, what should we do?
Well, there's already a few of us.
What if we made it even fewer?
You know, stupidest idea ever, but that was the idea, and we're dead set on doing it, and so here we are.
And so the next dividing line became this it's like, well, we've got everybody who's down for Christian nationalism or whatever you want to call it, theonomy or Christendom, or, you know, Christian nations, Christian governments, and to be Christian, that means.
You can't just take arbitrarily half of the law of God and leave the other half off.
It needs to be the whole law of God.
Both tables.
All right, so we're on the same page.
Here's the new dividing line, the new aisle it's nature.
And that's a big one.
I'll be honest, I'm having to play catch up and reading a lot of books and learning a lot of things that I should have learned after the last 15 years, having to learn them in the last 15 months.
But this is what it comes down to it turns out that there are different kinds of Christian nationalists, go figure.
And that you could both agree on both tables of the law of God being legislated by a Christian nation, a Christian government.
But you could still strongly disagree when it comes to natural affections.
Ultimately, when it comes to theologically, within the Reformed tradition and even longer than that, within the entire Christian tradition for 2,000 years, it has been known as the Ordo Amoris.
And the Ordo Amoris, brothers and sisters, just means order of loves.
And that's how it pertains to our text today.
Our text today is about avoiding sinful anger of the heart, murderous anger.
How do you do that?
You set a hedge against murderous anger of the heart by reorienting the heart, working on love.
You guard against sinful anger and sinful hatred by giving yourself to righteous love.
And to have properly ordered anger, good anger, but not bad anger, you need to have properly ordered loves.
And to have properly ordered loves, you need the Ordo Amoris, the order of loves.
Which turns out, Stephen Wolfe didn't come up with that.
Turns out that that's been around for 2,000 years.
And that all Stephen Wolfe did was.
Honestly, I think a case could be made against him for plagiarizing because he literally just copy and pasted 2,000 years of theologians.
But then everybody born after 1945 pretended like it was novel and shocking and terrible.
How could he verbatim repeat John Calvin exactly?
The guy that we claim to love.
How could he?
I can't believe it.
How could he dare?
Post World War II, be so audacious to think like every single Christian that preceded World War II.
How could he do that?
And so that has become the new dividing line, which is really sad because it, as A.D. Robles would say in his reasonable Latino way, it didn't have to be this way.
It didn't have to be this way.
He keeps saying that, and I appreciate it.
And he's right, it didn't have to be this way.
That does not have to be a dividing line, you don't have to divide over that.
But apparently we do.
I don't think we should, but apparently we do.
The idea that Jesus is getting at in our text is that there is a way of having hatred without cause that springs up quickly, that is without not only cause but without effect.
It doesn't have a purpose, it doesn't have an aim, so it's long lasting.
The sun doesn't go down on it.
It's a perpetual, unjustifiable, non productive, murderous hatred towards your brother.
And that church is a sin.
And apart from repentance and apart from grace that is found in Christ alone, it will send you to hell, whether you ever act on it or not.
But the solution is to rightly order your loves.
You start with God, and then you look to the family.
You love your mother and father, your wife, your children.
Then you go out from that and from that and further and further.
And that does involve nations.
It does mean that it is biblical and right.
To love your countrymen more than people on the other side of the world.
It means that if your fellow citizens are drowning in a hurricane and your current governing officials are working on how can we send a trillion more dollars to Israel, then you as a Christian have a moral obligation to say, that's dumb.
Please stop that.
If FEMA can't help because they've already spent all their cash on illegal immigrants, that's wicked.
That's wrong.
And as Christians, we can hate that.
And that is not an unjustifiable anger, a murderous anger that sends you to hell.
It's a righteous anger because, again, here's my point it stems from righteous loves.
You're loving your people more than those who are not your people.
And those who are not your people, By recognizing them as not your people does not require you to hate them.
That is a false dichotomy.
That's the post war consensus, and I reject it.
Loving Americans as an American more than I love Ukrainians or citizens of Israel does not require me, by loving my people more, to wish the worst upon others.
And anyone who says that, Is not arguing in good faith, but is actually muddying the waters.
And ironically, while hedging against globalism, it's maintaining the theological framework that allowed globalism to come in in the first place.
And that is a problem.
And unfortunately, although I didn't decide this, it has been decided by others that that will be a dividing line.
So, not just will we have Christian governments, but also.
How much of natural affections in the order of morals will we allow Christians in 2024 to embrace before we call them racist?
Essentially.
Turns out that that one's going to have to be a dividing line, too.
I didn't think it would.
I certainly don't think it should.
But it's above my pay grade, and that decision was made by higher ups.
So, what's the solution?
Love God first.
Rightly order your loves so that you will righteously order your angers.
Love God first.
Love your family second.
Beyond that, extended family.
Beyond that, love your country, your citizens.
Before your country, love your state, love your county, and work your way out.
And in doing so, here's the cool thing I know it's crazy, absolutely crazy, but you can love at different degrees and not actually end up having to hate anyone.
You don't.
Not in a general overarching sense.
You don't have to hate an entire country, an entire people.
But you do have to hate wickedness, and you do have to hate wicked people.
And in my experience, very rarely, when we say wicked people, does that involve, in a general sense, an entire people group.
It's not the case.
It involves wicked people who do wicked things, tends to involve individuals.
And not just making the world black and white and oversimplifying and overgeneralizing, but able to say, I love these people.
I love my people more because I'm commanded to.
But I also love these people.
And within my people, there are some wicked guys, bad actors.
And I hate what they're doing.
And until they repent, there's a sense in which God hates not just the sin, but sinners.
And as David said, do I not hate those, not things, but those who hate you?
And so there are people of my own country that I hate as they do hateful things.
And over here, I love these people less in terms of priority because God commands me.
Because I'm finite, I can't give all my resources equally to everyone.
He commands me to prioritize and love my people, but I still love these people.
It doesn't require me to hate these people, but individuals, I'm able to think in categories of individuals and then collectives, and at the individual level, some are wicked over here, just like there are some individuals who are wicked in my own home.
And I'm able to think about all these things like an adult.
And I can have righteous anger.
Because I've rightly prioritized righteous loves, and then even with my righteous anger, I'm not going to go overboard, I'm going to have it at the right measure for the right things at the right time.
And if I start to have too much anger, I'm going to repent and call that a sin.
And if I start to have mistargeted anger for the wrong thing, I'm going to repent and call that a sin.
And if I have untimely anger that springs about quickly and is lasting too long and not going away, and Causing me temptation to go off into dangerous places, I'm going to repent and call that a sin.
I'm going to have righteous actions because it'll be the overflow of righteous desires.
And I'm going to guard against unrighteous anger by fostering righteous love.
And because I'm a finite creature and I'm not the infinite triune God, I'm a finite creature, I cannot love everyone perfectly, fully, to the fullest extent.
I have to choose.
I can't feed every child, but by God's grace I can feed my child.
I can't love every woman, but I can love my woman, my wife.
I'm going to prioritize like that.
And we do that with our day-to-day, our work, our priorities, our focus.
We do that with our vote.
I'm not telling you what you have to do, but for me, as for me in my house, I have become a one-issue voter.
I've always been a one issue voter, and it was always the issue of life.
But when both candidates want to kill pretty much as much babies as they possibly can, and in terms of raw numbers, it's negligible and awash, then I have become a one issue voter, except this time it's a different issue.
Honoring Fathers and Life00:05:08
And the issue this time is which candidate hates Americans?
And wants our people to drown and not be able to afford groceries.
And then, which candidate says, you know what, we should deport millions of illegal immigrants and criminals who are murdering natural citizens?
That's where I'm at.
I'm not even super excited about that.
I wish the country would.
I mean, that's pretty sad and pathetic that's where we are.
It's like, hey, who doesn't hate?
You know, which person running for local office doesn't hate the very people who are voting for them?
You know, it's like the lowest bar you could possibly imagine.
That's where we are.
But even that, even with the election, these things are so tense.
Part of it's because it's 2024.
It's an election year.
But even with that, it comes down to the order of amores.
It comes down to natural affections, natural loves.
And these are categories that Christians have always had for a very, very long time.
But we lost them over the last century.
We lost them.
And we started to feel guilty for certain things that the Bible doesn't actually condemn.
We were blessed by God.
These United States with much prosperity, much success, much strength and victory.
And instead of offering to the Lord as a response for all his blessing, offering him gratitude, instead we chose to respond with guilt.
And so, out of guilt for all the blessing that he gave us, we decided that we should just give all the blessing away.
And instead of it belonging to us and our posterity, that is our children, we decided to give it to strangers.
We have spit on the graves of our fathers.
We've broken the fifth commandment.
Our fathers, read, read the founders and their writings.
They bled out and died and sacrificed.
They didn't do it for India.
And that doesn't mean they hated India, but they did it for us and our posterity.
And for you, the children of your fathers, who died for you as their children, to say, Dad died for me and the kids.
And we're going to take it and give it to strangers.
That is dishonoring dad.
That is a breaking of the fifth commandment.
And you have to be able to talk about that without being called a racist.
And apparently, very few people can.
God help us.
Let's pray.
Father, please help us.
Help us to retrieve old, better, more robust, more biblical theology.
And help us to be able to retrieve it while also not overreacting and becoming actual racist.
It's one thing to be slandered, but it's another to make your slanderers and opponents to prove their point.
By saying, well, hey, if everybody's going to think this, I might as well just be it.
Lord, help us to be better men and women than that.
Because at the end of the day, we're not living for what people think.
If that's what we were living for and people were falsely accusing us, if everybody called us a thief and we were being righteous and choosing not to steal, but the opinions of man were all we were living for, then we might as well start stealing.
But we're not living for the opinions of men.
We're living for you.
It's your opinion that matters.
Let God be true, although every man a liar.
And so, Lord, help us to be bold enough to be called a racist by half the country, but righteous enough to know that we really aren't and to know that we're pleasing to you.
That we're upholding your law, the fifth commandment, and honoring our fathers, but also upholding your law, the sixth commandment, and not having murderous anger towards our brother, which includes not only our country.
But the whole world.
This used to be easy for Christians back when we were well read and well disciplined, but it's become exceedingly difficult now.
We need your grace.
We've dug a pit for ourselves by believing lies, and it's only your supernatural power that will be able to get us out.
Toward that end, Lord, we beg and plead that you might help us.