When I was growing up, one of my favorite kinds of television show was the courtroom drama.  I loved Perry Mason, although I think most of the shows I saw were reruns, since it came out three months after I was born, and was off the air before I was ten.  Raymond Burr, as Perry Mason, always had a way of knowing when a witness was lying, and in the end, he would catch the witness in that lie.  I liked Matlock, too, because Andy Griffith portrayed Matlock as a “down home,” “dumb like a fox” attorney, who also found a way to bring out the truth.  This past spring I found Eli Stone to be a great show.  If you watched it, you know that Eli Stone was a ruthless, unprincipled lawyer, until he developed a brain aneurism, after which he developed a conscience. He also saw visions that would tell him, which cases to take, and give him information that would help him win—but always by telling and digging out the truth.  We’ve all probably watched enough courtroom drama to at least have heard a witness place his or her hand on a Bible as this question was asked, “Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God?” 

     Well, in today’s Scripture from the Sermon on the Mount, we’re going to hear Jesus say, “Do not swear at all, just tell the truth.”  After the past few weeks, when we’ve covered the “heavy weight” topics of murder, adultery and divorce, it may seem that the matter of vows and oaths, which we address this morning isn’t all that important by comparison.  But remember this is Jesus’ greatest sermon ever, and there are no “weak points” in it.  Jesus makes it clear in today’s text that telling the truth is also a matter of the heart.  We’ve seen it over and over again in this series, haven’t we?  Jesus takes on the viewpoint of the Pharisees who have pared God’s law down to specific lists of “Do’s” and “Don’ts,’ as if people can just do the things they’re supposed to do and not do the things they’re not supposed to do and God will be pleased.  The problem is that isn’t God’s intention at all.  Do we really think that the God of the universe, the God who created everything we can see and so much we can’t see, created us just so we could do or not do a list of commands?

     God created us to glorify Him and enjoy Him forever.  I borrowed that from a confession of faith written hundreds of years ago, but it’s awfully good.  The question asked in that confession was, “What is the chief end of man?” or we might say, “Why do we exist?”  The answer to the question is:  To glorify God and enjoy Him forever.  Does that sound like following a list of do’s and don’ts?   Certainly, God wants obedience from us.  As we point out so often, Loving God is trusting Him enough to obey Him, but God wants obedience from our hearts, not just obedience to the letter of the law, as we’ve seen in our first seven messages in this series.

     Let’s turn to today’s reading from Matthew 7:33-37, and see what Jesus has to say about oaths or vows, and how they fit into the bigger picture of having our hearts devoted obediently to God.  Would you please stand, and read God’s word with me from the “Sermon on the Mount Daily Bible Study” in your Lifeline?  Today, we’re going to read all five verses in the MOT and then the same passage in the NLT.  (As always if you have your own Bible with you, I’d encourage you to open it to Matthew 5:33-37 as we read.)  Join me:  [Jesus said,] “³³Again you have heard that it was said to the ancients, ‘You (singular) shall not perjure yourself, but you shall repay to the Lord your oaths.’ ³⁴But I myself say to you, ‘Do not swear at all; not by the heaven, because it is the throne of God; ³⁵nor by the earth, because it is the footstool of His feet; nor by Jerusalem, because it is the city of the great King. ³⁶Nor by your head shall you swear, because you do not have the power to make one hair white or black. ³⁷But let your word be, ‘Yes, yes,’ or ‘No, no’; for anything in excess of these is of the evil one.” MOT   Okay, now in the NLT:  [Jesus said,] “³³Again, you have heard that the law of Moses says, ‘Do not break your vows; you must carry out the vows you have made to the Lord.’ ³⁴But I say, don’t make any vows! If you say, ‘By heaven!’ it is a sacred vow because heaven is God’s throne.  ³⁵And if you say, ‘By the earth!’ it is a sacred vow because the earth is his footstool. And don’t swear, ‘By Jerusalem!’ for Jerusalem is the city of the great King.  ³⁶Don’t even swear, ‘By my head!’ for you can’t turn one hair white or black.  ³⁷Just say a simple, “Yes, I will,’ or ‘No, I won’t.’ Your word is enough.  To strengthen your promise with a vow shows that something is wrong.” NLT  Let’s pray………. Amen.  (You may be seated)

     You may have noticed that there are some noticeable differences in the two translations this week.  The original Greek commands us INDIVIDUALLY not to perjure ourselves, but to fulfill our oaths to the Lord, while the NLT reads:  Do not break your vows; you must carry out the vows you have made to the Lord.  The intent IS the same.  It’s just that “perjure” sounds much stronger than “break” doesn’t it?  The interesting thing is that the command as Jesus offered it doesn’t occur in the Old Testament Law.  No where in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, or Deuteronomy do we find the statement:  ‘You (singular) shall not perjure yourself, but you shall repay to the Lord your oaths.’  So what are we to conclude?  That Jesus didn’t know the Bible?  By no means!  Jesus’ statement addresses the intent of the Mosaic Law when it comes to vows or oaths, and if any Pharisees were present up there on the mountain, and it’s likely there were, since the Pharisees seemed to follow Jesus everywhere, they would have known that He was on to them once again.  Here’s what the Law of Moses does say:  “You shall not take the name of the Lord, Your God in vain.”  Exodus 20:7a NKJV  (That’s the Third Commandment.)  Deuteronomy 6:13 says, “You shall fear the Lord, your God, and serve Him, and shall swear by His name.”  Leviticus 19:12 reads, “And you shall not swear by My name falsely, neither shall you profane the name of Your God. I am the Lord.”  The Pharisees knew the Law, and from verses such as the ones I just read had extracted the command that Jesus offered them.  That’s why Jesus said, “you have heard that it was said to the ancients, and not You have heard that it WAS WRITTEN, as He says in other places in the Sermon on the Mount.

     The interesting thing here is that Jesus is teaching His disciples.  The Sermon on the Mount was directed at His followers and yet the comments Jesus makes here, in particular, seem to be directed to the Pharisees.  The Pharisees stood adamantly against perjury or breaking one’s oaths to the Lord, and yet, as they so often found a way to do, they had found a way around the intent of the Mosaic Law, so they could actually keep their oaths OR break them and still be found “righteous.”  That’s why Jesus told them in another place that they “strained gnats and swallowed camels,” when it came to the Law.  (That’s a vivid image, isn’t it?  Jesus used such great illustrations!)

     In order to see what Jesus was getting at in today’s text, we have to understand something about the Pharisees’ way of getting around vows or oaths.  What they had done is to set up a series of situations where an oath was either binding or non-binding based on what one “swore upon” when taking the oath.  For example, if a Pharisee took an oath and swore on the altar at the Temple in Jerusalem, the oath wasn’t really binding, but if they took an oath in the name of the gift that was on the altar the oath WAS binding.  They had dozens of different nuances to their oaths, so that if you didn’t know what was going on a Pharisee could tell you whatever you wanted to hear, knowing full well that he was never going to do what he said he would do.  Does that sound familiar to anyone?  We find that kind of thing going on all over the place in our world today, don’t we?  Politicians make promises everyone knows they can’t keep.  Companies tell us their products are better than everyone else’s and they have the statistics to prove it.  The funny thing is competing companies, selling similar products all tell us that they’re the best and have the statistics to prove it.  How can that be?

     Jesus cut through it all, when He said, “You all have heard that it was said to the ancients, ‘You shall not perjure yourself, but you shall repay to the Lord your oaths.’ ³⁴But I myself say to you, ‘Do not swear at all…”  Jesus goes on to give examples of things we are not to swear by, and we’ll get to that in a minute, but really we could just put a period after His statement, “Do not swear at all.”  If you and I tell the truth when we speak, we don’t need to say, “So help me God,” after we say it. Or “No lie.”  Or “Cross my heart and hope to die.”  If we tell the truth when we speak, we don’t need oaths or vows.  That’s Jesus’ point!  We follow the Son of God, who said this about Himself:  “I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.”  As His followers we’re called to show others the Way—Jesus, to live; and to speak the Truth—His Truth, and to share the Life He has given us, which is truly life!  So many times it seems that the challenges of following Jesus are so big, and so hard that we’re bound to fail—and as we’ve said time and again during this series—we ARE bound to fail apart from the Holy Spirit’s work in our lives.  But here, today, Jesus tells us something simple:  Just tell the truth.  Sounds easy enough, doesn’t it?  But it ISN’T easy, is it?  We all know how tough it can be to tell the simple truth when we’re asked.

     I remember growing up my Mom would ask, “Who did that?” about some broken item in the house, or some mess in the kitchen.  My brother Kenn and I would immediately respond, “He did it!” Or if we had time to rehearse, “Fritz did it!”  (Fritz was our miniature Dachshund, who if he could actually have done any of the stuff Kenn and I accused him of over the years, would have been on television for sure!)  Telling the truth does NOT come naturally.  We’re born with a propensity for lying, for “stretching the truth,” for finding ways to place blame on others instead of ourselves.  Jesus said, “No. Just own up to the reality—you did it, or you didn’t.  You don’t need swear, take an oath and you certainly don’t need to lie!”

     Jesus pointed out the futility of basing vows on various places or things.  He said, “³⁴But I myself say to you, ‘Do not swear at all; not by the heaven, because it is the throne of God; ³⁵nor by the earth, because it is the footstool of His feet; nor by Jerusalem, because it is the city of the great King. ³⁶Nor by your head shall you swear, because you do not have the power to make one hair white or black.  If the Pharisees had thought of a place or situation they could use to make a vow binding or not binding, Jesus could show how any vow was superfluous, because God was there or in it anyway.  We can’t swear by heaven—that’s God’s throne.  We can’t swear by the earth—that’s God’s footstool.  We can’t swear by Jerusalem, which most of us would probably never think of doing, but in Jesus’ day it was quite common.  Again, Jerusalem was the city of the great King.  Here’s one that doesn’t seem to be so majestic as the rest:  “Don’t swear by your head because you don’t have the power to make one hair white or black.”  (Most of you, unless you’re brand new to New Life today, have probably noticed that my hair isn’t the color of my hair today.) I thought this illustration could prove the point of Jesus’ statement in a way that none of you is likely to soon forget.  The reason my hair is this color, a color it hasn’t been naturally for a long time (actually, it’s never been quite this color before!), is because Wendy Kovach knows how to do “magic” with hair.  In fact, we tested this out a couple weeks ago to make sure that when I go home and shower  my hair will go back to the “beautiful” gray-white that God intends it to be.  Jesus said, we don’t have the power to make one hair white or black.  You may say, “Oh, yes we do.  Look at Pastor Chris. When he got up this morning, his hair was close to white, and now it’s close to black.”  But you see, the color of my hair is a lie.  It’s not black. It’s tweed—various grays and white.  I can hide the color for a day or week or even indefinitely, but my hair is gray and white.  Please understand. I’m not saying that people shouldn’t color their hair.  I’m simply saying that Jesus is right as usual—we don’t have the power to make one hair on our heads white or black.

     The truth is all that Jesus requires, but it IS what Jesus requires.  If we’re going to be His disciples, we must understand the final statement Jesus made about vows and oaths:  “³⁷But let your word be, ‘Yes, yes,’ or ‘No, no’; for anything in excess of these is of the evil one.”  When someone asks us a question, as a follower of Jesus, that person ought to be able to know that if we say, “Yes,” the answer’s “YES.”  It isn’t, “Maybe,” or “I hope so,” and it certainly isn’t, “No.”  Jesus tells us that anything in excess of these is of the evil one.  That’s quite different than the NLT isn’t it?  The NLT reads, “³⁷Just say a simple, “Yes, I will,’ or ‘No, I won’t.’ Your word is enough.  To strengthen your promise with a vow shows that something is wrong.”  Jesus understood better than anyone that the source of all lies is Satan.  He’s called the “Father of Lies,” by Jesus in John 8:44.  When we start adding anything to our, “Yes,” or our “No,” when we want a little “wiggle room,” we are moving out of the realm of truth, and into the realm of the evil one.  One of the hardest things any of us ever does is to answer with the simple truth, when it would be so much easier to respond with a simple lie.  Mark Twain said it well, though, when he said, There are no degrees of honesty.  Either you are honest or you aren’t.”  Jesus was the first one to say that.  My parents grew up in a world where a person’s word was “good enough.”  If someone told you they’d do something, they did it.  I grew up in a world where a president who kept telling us, “I am not a crook,” resigned, because in point of fact he was.  I grew up in a world where those entrusted with the spiritual care of others, abused that trust and brought mistrust all around.  My children have grown up in a world where the majority of people don’t even believe that there is absolute truth, where politicians are expected to lie, or at least twist the truth, where trust is something hard to give, because it’s been broken so many times.  What kind of world will their children grow up in, if Jesus tarries?

     We have a say in that, you know.  Tomorrow my hair will be gray and white again.  It’s actually gray and white right now.  It’s just hiding behind an illusion.  A more important reality awaits in my life tomorrow:  Will my words be true? Will my “Yes,” mean “Yes!”?  Or will I hide behind some excuse, or blame or will I passively stand by and watch as lies are passed off as truth?  Will you?  It was said a long time ago that all that’s necessary for evil to triumph, is for good people to do nothing.  I realized a long time ago that apart from the presence of Jesus Christ in our lives there are no good people, but when He IS present in our lives, when we’re abiding in Him and He in us through His Holy Spirit our “Yes,” can be “Yes,” and our “No,” can be “No.” 

     The Apostle Paul made a helpful addition to Jesus’ words in Ephesians 4:14-15 when he wrote, “¹⁴Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of men in their deceitful scheming. ¹⁵Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ.”  Ephesians 4:14-15 NIV  Speaking the clear, simple truth is vital.  Speaking the truth in love makes the truth just and good.  It makes it “Jesus-like.”  Speaking the truth in love means that we don’t speak the truth to hurt others, but to strengthen them, to encourage them, to challenge them to be all that God created them to be.  Speaking the truth in love raises us above the pettiness of crossing our fingers and not meaning it at one extreme, and finding it necessary to swear an oath at the other.

     Here’s TODAY’S CHALLENGE:  I will speak the clear, simple truth in love to everyone, that everyone may experience Jesus through me.  That’s bold, isn’t it?  Not really.  It’s just doing what Jesus calls us to do.  By now we surely know that we can only do what Jesus calls us to do by abiding in Him and being empowered by the Holy Spirit.  Please stand with me.  If today’s challenge is the desire of your heart say it with me, and remember whatever we say, God is always listening. He’s always our witness.  TODAY’S CHALLENGE:  I will speak the clear, simple truth in love to everyone, that everyone may experience Jesus through me.  Let’s pray…. Amen.