All That Jesus Taught : Bible Study Part 19 | Zac Poonen

We are going to look in to God’s word again to see ‘All that Jesus taught’. That is our theme for these studies and it’s because we got this burden which we receive from Matthew 28:19-20 to go to every nation, make disciples, and to teach them what Jesus said, every thing that I have commanded. Teach them how to do it. That means we got to do it ourselves first and then teach others to do not just a few important things but the word Jesus used was all that I commanded. What a phrase that is, every single thing that I have taught and commanded. It is your responsibility to go in to every nation and proclaim that. The early apostles did that but through the centuries Christian preachers, teachers have slowly compromised on that and they have left out major sections of what Jesus taught. So we are looking at Matthew 5 now and we go today to Matthew 5:33.

I was mentioning that this whole section is an expansion of what Jesus said in Matthew 5:20, your righteousness must surpass or exceed the quality of the righteousness of the Pharisees which is external. Yours must be internal as well. Jesus was expanding the understanding of the 10 Commandments. He was saying murder means more than murder. It means anger in the heart. His adultery means more than adultery. It means lusting after a woman in your heart. It means divorcing your wife. That is adultery. Now he goes on to the matter of making vows. He said in verse 33, in the Old Testament, the law was you shall not make false vows but shall fulfill your vows to the Lord. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. In other words a vow is something like we say today swearing something under oath. People put their hand on a Bible and say from now I am going to speak the truth. What they mean is “most of the time I tell you are lies but now I’m going to speak the truth”. That’s the meaning of a vow or when you put your hand on your Bible and swear. That’s why it changed to don’t swear. You should be speaking the truth all the time. That’s what Jesus said here, I say to you, don’t make an oath by heaven or by the throne of God or by the bible, don’t swear, the heaven is the Bible of god and the earth is his foot stool, Jerusalem is the City of the great king and you must not make an oath by your head because you cannot make on hair white or black in your head but let your statement be yes or no because anything beyond is of evil. That is quite a strong word. Anything beyond these is from the evil one. What he was saying in the summon substance of these 5 verses is that we should always be truthful not only with our words. We must not be ingenuous or clever and subtle with our words and say legally I spoke the truth as it were in the court of law.

We must be basically known as the truthful people and not tell lies to people in anything. Our yes must be yes and our no must be no. Anything other than that is evil. If I have to say in a devious way yes or no. there is something wrong about there. it leads ultimately to hypocrisy. By the way there was no commandment that said you shall not tell lies if you read the 10 Commandments. The commandment in Exodus 20 was not you shall not tell lies. The Commandment was you shall not bear false witness. The 9th Commandment was you shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. That’s basically referring to a court of law. That in a court of law you don’t tell a lie. In other words you swear to something, you must speak the truth when you are in court of law. That was the standard in the Old Testament because God knew that nobody can keep a command that say, you shall not tell lies. There was no Commandment in the Old Testament that says ‘You shall not loose your temper’ because God knew that nobody could not keep it.