God Without Religion_ Can It Really Be This Simple_ - Andrew Farley [23]
Now, that mountain won’t disappear until heaven and earth disappear with it (Matt. 5:18). And we should respect the mountain (Rom. 7:12). We should gaze up at its peak in admiration. But we have no business trying to survive its treacherous slopes:
One covenant is from Mount Sinai and bears children who are to be slaves. . . . But the Jerusalem that is above is free, and she is our mother. (Gal. 4:24, 26)
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I recently watched a 3-D film on the big screen. Sure, you pay a little extra and you have to wear those glasses. But the experience is definitely worth it. When you enter the theater and the film starts rolling, you get curious. You know, curious about what everything looks like without the glasses. So I started lifting and lowering my glasses to compare the scenery with and without the techy shades.
What’s it like without the glasses? Well, let me tell you—it’s not pretty. When you remove the 3-D glasses, you end up seeing the same film but with blurred lines. Nothing lines up correctly, and you don’t get that high-resolution, in-your-face experience. But once you put the glasses back on, there it is again. Same film, same theater, but the glasses change everything.
That’s exactly what it’s like to read your Bible without a new covenant lens. Things just don’t line up quite right. Yeah, we might understand the basic gospel message, but things still remain blurry. Once we see Jesus’s death as the dividing line of human history, we begin to place the teaching and events in the Bible in proper context. We begin to see the gospel for what it really is—a beautiful, high-resolution, in-your-face experience of God’s grace.
The cross provides a whole new perspective on the law of Moses and on Jesus’s harsh teachings, Moses 2.0. But if we don’t see Jesus’s death as the dividing line of human history, we’re left with two options for interpreting his difficult teachings—either we interpret them as literal and for us today, or we relegate them to the realm of hyperbole and seek to obey some lesser, more palatable version of his teaching.
Let’s examine those options.
Option 1: The Literal, Applicable Approach
First, if Jesus’s harsh teachings are to be taken literally and as applicable for us today, then there should be a lot of amputees in our churches. I don’t mean to be flippant, but that is the literal interpretation of his words. Jesus also literally said that we should try to be perfect just like God, that we should sell all of our belongings and give to the poor, and that (as it says in the Lord’s Prayer) we will only receive the same quantity and quality of forgiveness from God that we have first doled out to others (see Matt. 6:12, 14–15).
Ouch! If we are to apply these harsh teachings to our lives today, we quickly arrive at a couple of depressing conclusions. First, there are no Christians living this out! Second, we’re all doomed to be “thrown into hell” (Matt. 5:22, 29–30) since we’re not “sons of the Father in heaven” (Matt. 5:45). In addition, if we take Jesus’s harsh teachings as literal, then Matthew 5 becomes a works salvation passage. After all, salvation itself—heaven or hell—is clearly on the line (Matt. 5:22, 30).
Option 2: The Hyperbole Approach
Some have tried to explain the stringency of Jesus’s harsh teachings by claiming that they are hyperbole (exaggeration). “Jesus just meant for us to do our best, with his help,” they might say.
Again, consider what’s on the line in this teaching—if you don’t live up to these commands, you will encounter “judgment” and be “thrown into hell” (Matt. 5:20–22, 29–30). If you don’t love your enemies, you aren’t even given the right to be “sons of your Father in heaven” (Matt. 5:45). So if we decide that Jesus didn’t really mean what he said about meeting this higher standard