God Without Religion_ Can It Really Be This Simple_ - Andrew Farley [24]
Personally, I’m uncomfortable recasting the words of Jesus as exaggeration to make his teachings more palatable. His harsh teachings don’t appear to be mere suggestions for a bit of holy living. This is life and death. If you’re going to attempt to live by the teachings of Jesus in Matthew 5, you’d better have more willpower than anyone in human history! But the reality is that most of us Christians have chosen to retain our limbs, our eyes, and our possessions. We also admit that we’re not perfectly behaved like our heavenly Father. Every day, our lives prove that Jesus’s harsh teachings are impossible on any practical level.
It’s easy to see why Jesus-as-hyperbole is a popular interpretation. To the verses about severing body parts and selling everything, we might say, “He just meant that we should take sin seriously. And he didn’t literally mean to sell everything. He just meant that we shouldn’t love money.” Fair enough. But consider how Jesus’s audience of that day responded to his harsh teachings: by being confused and discouraged (Mark 10:22). Whatever our interpretation today, there’s no doubt that Jesus’s listeners believed he meant those statements literally.
Option 3: Wearing the Glasses
Maybe you’re not comfortable saying Jesus’s harsh teachings are to be taken literally and are applicable to us today. But maybe you don’t like the idea of watering them down as hyperbole either. Well, there is a third option. Here it is: we can interpret Jesus’s teachings as literal but contextualize them as being directed at people who were still under the law (Gal. 4:4–5).
The only interpretation that seems to make sense is that Jesus meant what he said, literally and actually. However, there’s a historical setting, a spiritual context, and an audience to factor in when we read Jesus’s radical statements.
Remember my experience watching the 3-D movie without my glasses on? Things were pretty blurry. Similarly, have you been trying to make sense of Jesus’s harsh teachings without a clear understanding of the dividing line of the cross? In other words, are you looking at Scripture, life, and your relationship with God through new covenant glasses?
If not, everything will remain fuzzy.
An Ancient Infomercial
Sometimes I’ll be flipping through the channels late at night and land on one of those mesmerizing infomercials. What impresses me the most is the “before and after” pictures they show you. The person on the left always looks so depressed. Then in the photo on the right, the same person looks amazingly different! (Sometimes I wonder if they literally use someone else’s picture as the “after” photo.)
Which person would you rather be like? The “after” person, of course! That’s their sales pitch: if you feel like “before,” sad and out of shape, just send in a check for $19.95 plus shipping and handling, and we’ll turn you into that “after” picture.
That’s exactly what God offers, but without the spin. In contrast to infomercial products, God’s new way is 100 percent guaranteed to turn us into a different person. Not only that, it’s free of charge—or at least someone else paid for it.
Just like those infomercials, Jesus and the authors of the New Testament paint a compelling “before and after” picture for us. First, they show how hopeless things were “before,” under the law. And boy, was it an ugly picture—exhaustion and a crippling sense of failure. But then they paint a vivid picture of the “after” life. Under God’s new way, we obtain a closeness with God those under the old only dreamed of. We’re born a second time (John 3:3–7) with a new human spirit and God’s Spirit living in us (Ezek. 36:26–27). We belong to God no matter what (2 Tim. 2:13; 1 Pet. 2:9). And while the old way left Israel torn and tattered in their attempts to obey, the new way causes us to want what God wants (Phil. 2:13; Heb. 8:10).
Through this new way, God fixed every problem we had under the law. As a free gift, he makes