Matthew 5:33-37

³³ “Again you have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not swear falsely, but shall perform to the Lord what you have sworn.’ ³⁴ But I say to you, Do not take an oath at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, ³⁵ or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. ³⁶ And do not take an oath by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. ³⁷ Let what you say be simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything more than this comes from evil.

 

In his book, Culture Shift, Al Mohler points to a report showing “that some half million Americans hold jobs they attained with spurious qualifications” and “that an investigation conducted by the General Accounting Office once revealed twenty-eight senior federal officials who did not actually hold the college degrees they claimed.”[1]  In other words, an alarming number of Americans have the jobs they have because they lied to get them.

Apparently, there are temporal benefits to a strategic lie that are too much for many folks to pass up.  In his novel, Catch-22, Joseph Heller writes about Major Major’s first experience with telling a lie.

Major Major had lied, and it was good.  He was not really surprised that it was good, for he had observed that people who did lie were, on the whole, more resourceful and ambitious and successful than people who did not lie.[2]

Maybe there’s something to that.  Maybe you can “get ahead” by lying.  If so, it’s only temporary, for our sins eventually catch up with us, even if it’s at the throne of God.  But oftentimes they catch up with us well before the throne of God.  In fact, lying usually unleashes an inexhaustible need for continuous lying.  In William Faulkner’s novel, The Reivers, Lucius Priest makes the following commitment not to lie anymore:

I said, and I believed it…I will never lie again.  It’s too much trouble.  It’s too much like trying to prop a feather upright in a saucer of sand.  There’s never any end to it.  You never get any rest.  You’re never finished.  You never even use up the sand so that you can quit trying.[3]

Yes, it is a serious thing to lie.  Lying empties our words of authentic meaning and reduces them to mere verbal impostures.  More generally, we can also say that it is a serious thing when our words lose weight, or when we distort the words we use for selfish means.  Jesus’ words at this point in the Sermon on the Mount are about our words and the ways we distort them or make them weightless for selfish gain.

I. What is in your heart will eventually come out in your speech.

Behind this teaching is a fundamental biblical truth:  what is in your heart will eventually come out in your speech.  In Matthew 15, Jesus said something that offended the Pharisees.

¹⁰ And he called the people to him and said to them, “Hear and understand: ¹¹ it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth; this defiles a person.” ¹² Then the disciples came and said to him, “Do you know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this saying?” ¹³ He answered, “Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be rooted up. ¹⁴ Let them alone; they are blind guides. And if the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit.” ¹⁵ But Peter said to him, “Explain the parable to us.” ¹⁶ And he said, “Are you also still without understanding? ¹⁷ Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth passes into the stomach and is expelled? ¹⁸ But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person. ¹⁹ For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander. ²⁰ These are what defile a person. But to eat with unwashed hands does not defile anyone.”

Yes, we are defiled by our mouths.  More accurately, we are defiled as our mouths reveal what is in our hearts:  “what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person.”  There is a connection between the mouth and the heart.  Your words reveal who you are.  Your mouth is the window to your soul.  This is a daunting thought, for, as James said in James 3, what our tongues reveal about us is not flattering in the least!

¹ Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. ² For we all stumble in many ways. And if anyone does not stumble in what he says, he is a perfect man, able also to bridle his whole body. ³ If we put bits into the mouths of horses so that they obey us, we guide their whole bodies as well. ⁴ Look at the ships also: though they are so large and are driven by strong winds, they are guided by a very small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs. ⁵ So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great things. How great a forest is set ablaze by such a small fire! ⁶ And the tongue is a fire, a world of unrighteousness. The tongue is set among our members, staining the whole body, setting on fire the entire course of life, and set on fire by hell. ⁷ For every kind of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by mankind, ⁸ but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. ⁹ With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God. ¹⁰ From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers, these things ought not to be so. ¹¹ Does a spring pour forth from the same opening both fresh and salt water? ¹² Can a fig tree, my brothers, bear olives, or a grapevine produce figs? Neither can a salt pond yield fresh water.

When James says that the tongue “is a restless evil, full of deadly poison,” what he is really saying is that our tongues reveal the restless evil and deadly poison that has taken root in our hearts.  Put another way, empty speech, filthy speech, dishonest speech, and showy speech demonstrate that our hearts have yet to be fully taken over by Jesus, that we have not yet let Him possess all that we are.

This is the problem with our winking and giggling at profanity, for example.  It is interesting to note the sins we harp on and the sins we excuse.  We rail against abortion and homosexuality.  Are these sins?  Yes, to be sure.  Should we speak against them?  Yes, to be sure.  But what of the “acceptable” sins we view as lesser?  What about profanity?

Do you realize that when a man claims to be a child of God and swears, what he is really saying is that the Lord Jesus does not fully occupy his heart.  It reveals a divided heart!  “From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers, these things ought not to be so” (James 3:10).  We should grieve over that.  We should mourn over that, in others and in ourselves.  Our speech reveals our hearts.

II. A heart governed by Jesus will result in pure language that does not need the aid of supporting oaths and reassurances.

If the reality of our hearts manifests itself in our speech, that means that a heart governed by Jesus must result in pure language that does not need the aid of supporting oaths and reassurances.  This fact helps us understand what Jesus is doing in this section.

³³ “Again you have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not swear falsely, but shall perform to the Lord what you have sworn.’ ³⁴ But I say to you, Do not take an oath at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, ³⁵ or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. ³⁶ And do not take an oath by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. ³⁷ Let what you say be simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything more than this comes from evil.

Tragically, many Christians have sought to reduce these words to a simple rule or law.  For instance, Quakers take this to mean that a believer should never swear an oath in court or take a military oath.  To do this, however, is to fall into the trap of the scribes, who were always seeking to reduce divine truth to the technical bottom line.  But I would like to suggest that that to do this is to miss the point of this passage.

William Barclay has noted that, in the time of Jesus, the Jews had developed two unhealthy patterns when it came to taking oaths:  frivolous swearing and evasive swearing.  Frivolous swearing refers to the casual voicing of oaths.  Barclay mentions the Jewish oaths, “By thy life,” “By my head,” or, “May I never see the comfort of Israel if…”  These had become casual and petty prefaces to declarations made, and they had no weight whatsoever.

By evasive swearing, Barclay meant that the Jews had two classes of oaths, “those which were absolutely binding and those which were not.”  A binding oath had the name of God in it.  A non-binding oath did not.  The result, he says, was that “if a man swore by the name of God in any form, he would rigidly keep that oath; but if he swore by heaven, or by earth, or by Jerusalem, or by his head, he felt quite free to break that oath.”[4]

In other words, truth had been reduced to a word game.  Even more so, as we have seen time and again in the Sermon on the Mount, righteousness had been finely tuned to refer only to technical adherence to man-made rules.  That is the particular, specific situation that Jesus is addressing.  His point in this passage has less to do with what specific oaths can and cannot be said than with the fact that we should be the type of people whose hearts are so pure and whose speech is so honest that oaths are not necessary at all.

You’ll notice, for instance, that Jesus mentions the specific oaths of the Jews in our passage:

³⁴ But I say to you, Do not take an oath at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, ³⁵ or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. ³⁶ And do not take an oath by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black.

In saying this, Jesus was obliterating the little word games the Jews were playing with oaths by revealing that there is no reality upon which you can base an oath that does not belong to God.    The mere fact that God is not mentioned in your oath does not mean He is absent from it, or that you need not be accountable for the words you say.  Heaven is God’s throne.  The Earth is His footstool.  Jerusalem is His city.  And your head belongs to Him, not you.

In other words, we are responsible for every single word we say because we say every single word we say in the presence of a holy God before whom we will one day give account.  Our words should therefore reflect the divine presence of our King.  And, as citizens of the Kingdom, our words should reveal the values of the Kingdom of our citizenship.

“Do not take an oath at all,” means, in essence, “Do not be the type of person whose words are so weightless that they need contrived oaths and swearing to make them appear valid.  Do not be the type of person who has to play games with words.  Let your words be simple and pure just as your heart is.”

Do you see?  Citizens of the Kingdom of God should have speech seasoned with Kingdom simplicity, Kingdom truth, and Kingdom purity.  You should not need oaths.  You should not need verbal dressings.  You should not need word games.  You should not need verbal posturing.

As we approach the Lord’s Table, I am particularly struck by the relevance of this passage to our gathering today.  Just think about it:  when you take the bread and the juice today, these symbols of the body and blood of Jesus, you will place them on your tongues.  We will eat and drink in remembrance of Him.  Specifically, we will eat and drink in remembrance of the redemption He has won for us on the cross.  We will eat and drink in remembrance of the fact that our hearts and minds and tongues are now made whole and new through the blood of Jesus.

What a wonderful occasion this is to think deeply and well on the issue of the purity of our tongues.  As you place the symbols on your tongue, ask yourself this:  does my tongue reveal a redeemed heart?  Has my tongue been made new?