Exploring My Strange Bible - Jesus and Sexual Desire - Gospel of Matthew Part 7

Episode Date: June 11, 2018

Today’s particular teaching is about one of the few times that Jesus addresses the topic of sex and sexual desire. He uses a lot of intense language that has really stuck with Jesus’ followers for many thousands of years. The goal is to get inside Jesus’ heart and mind about his vision of what sexuality is and what it is for.

Tim Mackey, Jr. utterly amazing and worth following with everything that you have. On this podcast, I'm putting together the last 10 years worth of lectures and sermons where I've been exploring the strange and wonderful story of the Bible and how it invites us into the mission of Jesus and the journey of faith. And I hope this can be helpful for you too. I also help start this thing called The Bible Project. We make animated videos and podcasts about all kinds of topics in Bible and theology. You can find those resources at thebibleproject.com. With all that said, let's dive into the episode for this week. All right. Well, in this episode, we're going to continue exploring the gospel according to Matthew. This was a teaching series I was a part of many years ago when I was a pastor at Door of Hope.

We just worked through the whole gospel of Matthew, and this teaching is camped out in Matthew chapter 5 in a section called the Sermon on the Mount. It's one of the collection of Jesus' most famous and important teachings, kind of all in one place. of Jesus' most famous and important teachings, kind of all in one place. And the teaching we're looking at today is one of the handful of times that Jesus addressed topics of sex and sexual desire. And it's one of his well-known teachings. It also, he uses a lot of intense language, and just it's arrested the minds and imaginations of Jesus

followers for millennia now. So we're just going to slowly kind of work our way through it. The goal is to get inside of Jesus' own heart and mind about his vision of what human sexuality is and what it's for and the possibilities and the pitfalls that come along with being a sexual human. So there you go. We're just going to let Jesus speak for himself and try and process what it means to be one of his followers and embrace his vision of what sexual desire is all about. So anyway, I hope this is helpful for you. Let's dive in and learn together. Big picture here, we have three sentences, three or four sentences that are going to be our focus today. But big picture, because the meaning of four sentences changes dramatically depending on all of the other sentences that are around them, right? So the big picture is that we're in Matthew. Jesus has been announcing the arrival of the kingdom,

of the rule and the reign of God. And that's the whole story of how God is reclaiming his world from what we have done to the place and to each other here. And so in Jesus, each other here. And so in Jesus, there's a new rule, a new reign, and a new humanity that Jesus is starting around himself. And so he's calling these followers to himself. He's shaping this new environment that he calls the kingdom of all these upside-down values and so on. And so he calls these people to himself. And he is right now, in these sentences here, we're kind of in a six-part little series here within the first great block of his teaching on the kingdom. So we call the Sermon on the Mount, traditionally, Matthew in chapter 4 called it Jesus teaching the good news of the kingdom, and then chapters 5, 6, and 7 come. So this is Jesus announcing the kingdom and what

life in the kingdom looks like when his disciples actually follow him and rediscover their humanity. And we're in a six-part section of it where Jesus is filling out something that he said. Because he quoted from the scriptures. He said, I here am as a rabbi and a teacher, and I'm not here to undermine or set aside Israel's scriptures, right, what they called the law and the prophets or the Torah. He says, I'm not here to set them aside or to undermine them. What I'm here to do is to create a people of the kingdom in whom the purpose of all of God's commands come into their fulfillment. And so he quotes from the Old Testament scriptures, from the laws specifically, about like the famous Ten

Commandments. That's what he's doing right here. And he says, you've heard that this was said, but I say to you. And then he lays down his new teaching, not as a rejection, not even as an explanation, but as a new teaching that calls his disciples to something that's even more radical, right, than the original command even did. And in this way, the command is fulfilled. And so last week, it was about anger and forgiveness. And today, we're exploring Jesus' teaching on sex, sexual desire. Next week, marriage and divorce. So really, nothing substantial.

And nothing intimidating, right, to talk about in a city like ours. So let me just kind of actually head this off at the pass here and just name something. I said a few weeks ago, these are the sections of Jesus' teaching where he will be really getting into our business personally, right? And when the topics, these topics of sex and marriage and Jesus' teaching comes up, this is very, I expect that over the next few Sundays there's going to be an enormous amount of discussion, of debate, of controversy, conversation, and I think that's a good thing. That's a really good thing because we're moving towards what Jesus is saying

and we're engaging with it and we're letting him challenge us. But I just, I want to name something that's going to be happening, right, in our gatherings over the next few Sundays here as we move at this. And it has to do with lots of different kinds of people who are around Door of Hope.

So we have a whole bunch of us who we would call ourselves disciples of Jesus. I'm trying to follow Jesus. I look to him, reckon with who he is, what he said, what he did. It's for me. I'm going to follow him. And so his teachings are hard, and they're difficult, but you're all in. There are others of us who we grew up around what I call churchianity, which is just kind of a general religiosity

kind of upbringing, and it's legalistic or it's shallow, and there's always bad music, right? And so there's that. And so some of us grew up around that. You bailed on that. But now, as a young adult or an adult, you're coming back and you're rediscovering Jesus in this whole new way and for yourself as an adult, not a part of your family or whatever. And so there's a whole bunch of us who'd fit into that. And the way Christians make a big

deal out of sex and marriage and all that kind of stuff has always been difficult for you. And what's the big deal? There's quite a number of us who we did not grow up around churchianity at all. And so you, but you're all in for Jesus and you're discovering and you're really processing Jesus's teachings for the first time really ever in your life. And then there's even, it's a smaller group, but there are a number of people among us who they wouldn't even identify themselves as Christians, but their friends dragged them here, whatever, or family members, or you're genuinely interested, you're exploring, but, you know, and the way Christians and sex and media, holy cow, you know, you're just, what a deal. So that whole, we're all here. Here we are.

And we're looking at some of the most difficult teachings of Jesus about some of the most personal issues that are also controversial in our culture. And so let me just kind of frame, at least for me is a helpful way to frame this. Jesus is saying these words to his disciples. He's talking to people who have reckoned with who he is and have chosen to let who he is be true for them, let their identity be shaped by following him and their end. And so if you, that's not you, right? If you wouldn't call yourself a Christian or a disciple of Jesus, there's a sense in which you actually aren't

really the primary audience that's being addressed in Jesus's words or in these messages even. And this, I think, raises at least an important issue, at least for me, is that I think one of the problems or missteps that the church, at least in our setting in Western culture in America, has taken is by making the issues of a Christian view of sex or marriage, making that the front burner issue, and making that the issue that we actually have the first conversations with, with somebody who's not a disciple of Jesus. And it just seems to me that that's kind of like horse, cart, you know, a cart before the horse kind of deal. Because if someone's not a disciple of Jesus, why on earth should they be

compelled to follow his teachings when it comes to all any arena of life, much less marriage or sexuality? So if you're not a Christian, I just invite you to overhear what Jesus is saying to his disciples. But I want to encourage you, I think the most important issue for you to be thinking about is not sex or marriage, it's Jesus and who he is and what he did and what he said and what you're going to do about that. And once you're there, then all of life comes under the microscope of Jesus' teaching, so to speak. Does that make any sense? Okay, so that's my little caveat. Jesus makes us all uncomfortable, though, so let's just say that. Let's just dive in and explore the implications of his teaching here. So verse 27, he begins just like he did. He's going to do this six times.

He says, you have heard that it was said, you shall not commit adultery. What's he quoting? You shall not commit adultery. One of the Ten Commandments. And so he assumes you've heard that it was said. He's Jewish audience through and through, synagogue, you've grown up, we all know the Ten Commandments. You've all heard the Ten Commandments. And he cites it in a way that's very similar to like he did last week.

You have heard that it was said, you shall not murder. And he says, yeah, that's right. That's a reliable indicator of God's will. That's what the laws in the Torah were. They were pointers to God's will for the people of Israel in that covenant. And so that's right. He just cites that. He doesn't say it's bad or stupid or outmoded. He just says, there it is. But then he goes on and he sets his teaching right next to it. But I tell you, anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her. In his heart, he sets it alongside. And he doesn't even say like he's explaining the law. He's just setting his teaching right there as this other authority that takes the point or the purpose of the law, and he says, fulfills it. And this is a big thing in these six weeks, right, is that Jesus is saying that being a part of the kingdom isn't just about modifying

your behavior and, like, you get religion. It's about allowing Jesus himself to begin to work on these core root issues in our lives, the root issues that result in us behaving and doing stuff that fractures our relationships with God and with other people and degrading our humanity and the humanity of other people. Jesus wants to move at those deep-rooted issues of the heart. And look at verse 28. He sets his teaching right there. He says, anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has committed adultery with or where? So here we go. Jesus is fulfilling the purpose of the command. This is an issue. It's an issue of the heart. Now, what do we do when Jesus turns up the heat like this? First of all, let's look at what he's saying here about adultery. Because already this phrase here, Jesus has

underneath it a whole view of marriage and sexuality and so on. He doesn't make it explicit here. He will in 13 chapters. In chapter 19, when people come to him asking him about his views on marriage and divorce and sexuality and so on. And so we can't unpack it here, but at least to say everything for Jesus, his whole view of the world, is shaped, he says, by his scriptures,

and specifically page 1 and two of the scriptures. People come to Jesus asking about marriage and sexuality and the meaning of life and so on, and he always goes to page one and two of the Bible. And so he talks about how you have male and female who reflect the image of God, these beings who are one humanity but yet distinct and different, and they reflect the image of the Creator, and that something powerful and profound happens when those two others make a covenant commitment to one another, and out of that covenant, there's a union of heart and mind and body, and out of that covenant, new life is created and nurtured into families, communities, and

neighborhoods, and so on. That's the vision of pages 1 and 2 about human life and so on. And Jesus cites from that, and he affirms that in Matthew chapter 19. And so here Jesus sees the marriage covenant as so sacred and so beautiful and significant that anything that would threaten it, he sees as a distortion of what it means to be a human made in God's image, anything that would fracture that. And so he cites this command, don't commit adultery, in this case by ending up in bed with someone who's not your covenant partner, right, that you haven't made a covenant with. That's a distortion of what it means to be human. However, for Jesus, that doesn't get near enough to the heart of the issue, right? Because how does someone, before God and a whole bunch of people,

you make these life commitment oaths and promises to be faithful to this covenant partner in this wedding ceremony or something, and then one day, a week, one year, ten years later, they're in bed with somebody who's not their covenant partner. How does that happen, right? And it does. Maybe in one time out of a thousand, it happens because somebody just wakes up and is like, you know what I'm going to do today? You know, like it doesn't, this is, how you end up in this scenario is a slow simmering of heart issues, Jesus says, of root issues going on with that person's story and their mind and their heart that comes to fruition in sleeping with someone

who's not their covenant partner. And what Jesus wants to track is to get upstream, upstream, upstream of this behavior and get to the core, the core issues, which Jesus locates in the heart. get to the core issues, which Jesus locates in the heart. And verse 28 is one of those, you've been around church, you've heard this teaching before, but it's like, I don't know, the teachings of Jesus. They're so simple, and they're a bottomless lake in terms of depth and profound implications. And so we're just going to camp out here on 28, because he's doing three things here that I think are really powerful. So he says it's not just about not ending up in bed with somebody. He locates the issue much earlier upstream, and he says, it's here, he says,

I tell you, than anyone who looks at a woman lustfully. Now what does he mean here? It's fairly clear, but I think we can clarify it even more just to help make his point clear. When he says looks, our English word looks is kind of funny because I can look at you, and the English word look can refer to a glance, or it can refer to a stare. Now in English, does the word look distinguish between looking or staring? No, it can't actually be either. And it's very similar to what Jesus said last week.

He said anyone who's angry with someone else has committed murder in their heart and so on. And so Josh pointed this out. It's the same exact issue here. He's not just talking about the instance. He's talking about an ongoing, sustained look. And in English, we have a perfect word for an ongoing, sustained, awkward look, and that's the word stare.

So stare. So if you write in your Bibles, I would just encourage you to write that in there. So stare. And staring for what? What purpose? With what goal or result? And here I think, I'll just throw this screen up just because I thought it was interesting. Our modern English translations have a lot of variety for what Jesus is getting at here. So he talks, so the New International Version that I read from said looking or staring

lustfully. New American Standard with lust for her, a new revised standard with lust. I think the English standard version, the last one, and that's what Will read from, captures the precise point of what Jesus is getting at. It's about intent and purpose. So my Mackie paraphrase would be anyone who stares at a woman in order to fuel sexual desire for her. So what Jesus, what he's not talking about is looking at and noticing someone who's attractive. That just happens. There's beautiful people in the world, and they reflect God's image, and that is what it is. What he's getting at is the choice that is before you after you notice the attractive person. Do you choose to refocus or whatever, or to look them in the face if you're having a conversation with them, or do you use them for something that's deep and internal inside

of you to foster and fuel sexual desire, which is what the word lust means. Lust is one of those funny words. Do you think it's a religious word? Actually, I thought of that this week. Is it a word religious people use to talk about sexual desire? I leave it to you to figure it out, but I don't actually think very many people use that word except religious people to talk about sexual desire. But that's what Jesus is talking about here. So you guys get, this is not abstract. So if you're a woman, if you've been a victim of this stare, you know exactly what Jesus is talking about. If you're a dude and you have been a victim or a perpetrator of this stare, you know exactly what Jesus is talking about here. This is what he's talking about.

And actually what he's saying is this is yet another behavior. Ending up in bed with somebody is not your covenant partner. That's an action that's just a symptom of some deeper issue. And even this, the look, the sustained stare in order to fuel and generate the little movie in your head, that is also just a symptom. And that the deepest issue is this issue of committing adultery with others in our hearts. So what Jesus is getting at here, this is so intense, he's getting at the fact that there is something going on inside of us that no one sees. If you do the awkward stare, right, you notice people doing the awkward stare. It's fairly easy to detect once the secret's out if you end up in bed with somebody. If somebody's

doing the awkward stare, like following, you know, down the sidewalk, that kind of thing, like that's kind of noticeable and you're a little embarrassed, but whatever. But what he's getting at is there's a movie that plays in our minds that we choose to generate and no one knows. No one knows if you're doing that. You can't police that. You can't detect it. It is an utterly private matter.

And Jesus says the issue's there, not with the noticing, but with the choice and what you do with that choice. Martin Luther, just because this is such an amazing line, he summarizes exactly what Jesus is getting at here. He says, we should not make the bowstring of Jesus's teaching too taut here, as if anyone who's merely tempted to look at another with lust is eternally damned. And he says this. I cannot keep a bird from flying over my head. But I can certainly keep it from making a nest in my hair.

Or from biting off my nose. So there you go. Did you get it? You get it. Yeah. So it's not, it's about the choice to let something take root and you fuel it. That's what Jesus is moving. And he says that's a matter that actually no one else can see or know. You can't enforce a law against that. And so he's going, right, this is so extreme. How on earth? Like, what a high bar. This is so crazy. For some, it might seem like utopian or completely unrealistic in some way,

like how Jesus would make this demand of his disciples in the kingdom. But he says that's where the issue really, really is. Why is he so extreme about this? And I mean, if it's private, really, just think about this. And this would be a response that maybe some of you have, and certainly many in our culture would have. It's private. The whole point is you don't act on it. Nobody knows. You don't do anything about it. It's just a movie in your head, and it's, you know, maximize pleasure, minimize pain. It's what humans do. Why is it such a big deal? And clearly for Jesus, it is a big deal, because we would say ending up in bed or the awkward stare, like that's the action. This is just a thought. And Jesus says, no,

this is an action. This is an action. This is a deed, an action that you do towards somebody. They don't know about it. Nobody else knows about it, but it's still happening. It's a real action and a choice, and a choice that you're making. Why is Jesus being, and why is he going to commend self-mutilation as a solution to this? What is going on? Why does he take this so seriously, and why does he make it such a big deal? And so here I think we need to pause and to fill out why sex is a big deal to Jesus, and why the overhauling and the renovating of our hearts and minds when it comes to sex is a big theme throughout the New Testament and what it means to be a community of Jesus's disciples. Sex is important and a big deal to human beings, and it's a big part of the kingdom.

Why is that? And I think there's a number of reasons why this gets such an extreme response out of Jesus and why he moves right towards it. And the first one actually is in something that's assumed. It comes out in his teachings later on, but it's something that's assumed. And that's the vision of sex and of the body that Jesus inherited from the Hebrew Scriptures that he believed expressed the will of God. And it's what he repeated in his own teachings. And the reason Jesus cares about this issue so much is not that he's prude. Jesus isn't prude, and he's certainly not guilty of somehow teaching people in an unhealthy way

to repress their sexual desire or something like that. It was actually Christian teachers who later began to misunderstand, I think, the Jewish context and the Hebrew Bible roots of Jesus and Paul's teaching on sex, that they began to develop a Christian version that was like, the body is second rate, and your sexual desire is actually evil, and do it in the dark, and it's dirty, or something like that. That's a deep distortion, because if you look at pages one and two of your Bible, which was Jesus' Bible, you see God surveying the landscape of all that he's made, and he sees humans and their bodies, and their gendered bodies as male and female, and sex that's

connected to their gendered bodies, and God saw all that he made, and he said that it was not good. The seventh time that he says it, it's very good. Our bodies are good. Sex is good. Sexual desire, it's good. There's an entire book of Jesus's Bible whose sole purpose is to celebrate and explore the goodness of sexual desire and of sex as a consummation of lovers who are moving towards covenant commitment. And what is the name of that book of the Bible? It's a book of the Bible about sexual passion, you guys. And for many people, they don't know what to do with it, so they turn it into a book about something else. But it's not. It's about sexual passion. And don't read it if you blush, right? One. And two, no, but in Jewish tradition, this book is read in synagogue annually during the days of Passover.

And this book is read in synagogue annually during the days of Passover. Jesus would have grown up hearing the poem, this ancient Israelite love poetry, some of it almost erotic love poetry, read in synagogue every single year as he grew up. One of the concluding paragraphs is a unique poem that kind of surveys all the poetry that comes before it. It's all this poetry, these two young lovers, a shepherd and a young woman, and they're excited about each other's bodies and they talk about it. And then this is the concluding paragraph. It says, Love is as strong as death.

Its passion unyielding is the grave. It burns like a blazing fire, like a mighty flame. Many waters cannot quench love. Rivers cannot sweep it away. If one were to give all the wealth of one's house for love, it would be utterly, utterly scorned. And the romantics here, we swoon. You know, this is so, it's a beautiful reflection on the power of sexual passion, of desire. It's good. It's not bad. It's, well, actually, here, let me say it this way, and actually, let me just use the metaphor that the poem uses. God surveyed all they had made. It's very, very good, including this right here. Now, there are some, the greatest goods in, I think, human experience are complex goods.

And they cannot be reduced to just are they bad or are they good. And what is the metaphor being used right here for sexual passion and desire? Fire. Fire. Is fire bad or is fire good and often i will do that and then say yes and we all laugh or something like that but i think actually this is a this is a time where just that's not even the right question to ask that's the it's inappropriate to really getting to the heart of the issue. Because it can become good. It can become a great good when it's in an environment where its power can be channeled towards positive

life-giving purposes, right? So right here, this is good, just because it creates an ambiance. You know, it's a little romantic. I would put it on the table if I was on a date with my wife or something. And so it brings light into darkness. That's good. When you put this and stoke it with some other fuel and so on, you put it in an oven and then it can make food for you and a bunch of other people. That's good. It can put it in a furnace and ignite whatever natural gas or something like that. And it can heat your house. And that's a great good. But it's good when it when it's in the environment that harnesses its power and makes it towards human life and flourishing and so on but that same exact power can can wreak incredible

destruction incredible destruction and whether it's you're like at the campfire and the spark jumps out and burns a hole in your new rain jacket, right? So the 10 of you, who that's happened? It sucks when that happens, right? It's like, dang it, I just got it. So there's that. Or it can like come out of your fireplace or whatever and like burn, melt a huge thing in your polyester rug or whatever, or it engulfs your polyester rug and then the walls in your apartments up in flames. It burns your hand when you violate this barrier of like the fire pit in your backyard, and it just consumes your flesh and burns it or whatever, and so on. So the point is, is it good or is it bad? That's not the right question. The point is, is it's a power, and it is a great complex good. And when the purpose of love within the biblical vision, within the covenant

commitment vision, sexual desire and passion has the ability to become an expression of that covenant commitment that's unparalleled. Because it's not just about saying these vows in front of witnesses. It's not just about signing a piece piece of paper or marriage certificate. It's a unifying and binding of heart and mind and body. And out of that passion and power, new life is generated and created. That's the vision of pages one and two. It is a great good. But the moment the protective environment of the covenant is absent, then all of a sudden this power can weld two human beings together and then one pieces out, and it's the deepest emotional scarring that humans undergo

is the remorse and the regret of bad sexual decisions. I don't even need to talk about the power and the scarring of sexual abuse and the way it wounds human beings when it's not contained within the environment, the safe haven of the covenant commitment. And so Jesus isn't stupid. I would argue that Jesus and the scriptures

have the highest view of sex and the body as utterly sacred and utterly beautiful, and that it's our culture that treats our bodies as something less, as it's just a mere animal appetite or whatever, and it's just kind of what you do. We're just the selfish gene, right? Richard Dawkins, we're just DNA carriers, just propagate the stuff, you know, and just go for it. And in Jesus' mind, it's the highest view of sex in the body that you can possibly imagine. And so Jesus gets tweaked when the issue, when this issue comes up. He gets forceful and real about it because he knows that there's something core to us that's

become distorted. The second thing I think of whyesus gets so worked up here is actually something that he does bring up elsewhere in his teachings and it's about his vision of what human beings are here for and what life in the kingdom is supposed to look like and i'll throw a passage up here just because we've come to before we're going to come to it 20 more times before we actually get to matthew chapter 22 but it's jesus vision of what human existence is about and of what we're here for. Hearing that Jesus silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. One of them, an expert in the law, in Torah, questioned, tested him with this question, teacher, what's the greatest commandment in the law? Jesus replied, and he was only asked for one commandment, and he gives two.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul with all your mind. One of the fundamental, we're asking, what's the greatest command? What's God's will that brings human existence to its fruition and purpose? And the first one is to know and be known by your creator in loving relationship, and to know the grace and the generosity and the responsibility that he's given to us as human beings. But then he goes, that's the first, and then here's the second greatest command. Love your neighbor as yourself. Everything. Law and prophets hang right here. So on pages one and two, humans are images of God.

On pages one and two, humans are images of God. It's like C.S. Lewis said, the closest you will ever be to the likeness of God is the person sitting next to you on the bus, right? That's Lewis's clever way of saying it. There's something utterly unique and sacred about human beings and that we reflect and are images of God. And so to love God is to love those who reflect his image. It's totally inextricably woven together here. And so the love ethic is the core of the kingdom.

The core of the remaking of humanity is about this restoring of our relationships on all levels, with those closest to me, with my round of acquaintances, with those in my community and city that I don't know, but they are also image-bearing human beings and I need to be in right relationship. It's this vision of the total restoring of all levels of human relationship. And it seems to me why Jesus gets so tweaked when this issue of lust comes up is because what is lust? What is happening in your heart when you stare and you fuel that sexual desire for another person against their will? They don't even know that it's happening. And Jesus says it's a huge

deal because it tells of what you think other humans exist for. That action, whether you would say it like this or not, what that action speaks is that other people exist to play a role in my story of maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. Other people exist so that I can gain pleasure from their body parts. That's what other people are for. Because that's what's happening when you stare and you generate the little movie. It's a degradation of their humanity, of that other person.

And it dehumanizes you, and it dehumanizes that other person. And so this, what Jesus is describing, the stare and the choice, and what you think about that person in that moment, is a violation of the greatest ethic of the kingdom. Because love elevates others love protects others and it honors them and it honors their dignity and it seeks their well-being as important or even more important than my own and so to whatever in my in my mind to to treat them as a body as an, is to degrade their humanity. And it ticks Jesus off when we do that to each other. Whether it's sex, whether it's anger, whether it's Jesus is intolerant

of behavior that fractures relationships and abuses other human beings. Because love is what we're made for. And what sexual desire, like nothing else, and I don't need to say this except just to say what we all can agree on, there's something that happens in sexual desire and it's how we're wiring, and it's good when that passion is directed in a positive direction,

but there's something about misdirected sexual desire that turns human beings into animals, absolute animals, And our consciences go out the window. Everything that we say we believe goes totally out the window. And we just act in these impulsive, often destructive and abusive ways towards each other, towards ourselves. And it's the most saddest degradation of our own image-bearing humanity in the view of the scriptures. And so Jesus goes right towards it. He says it's a crime against humanity to objectify them

and degrade their humanity in your mind and in your heart. And that moves to the last thing of why Jesus makes it such a big deal. And it's actually something I didn't notice before reflecting on this here. Look at verse 28. Look at verse 28. Just think about this. He says, I tell you, anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has committed adultery with her

in his heart. To what gender is Jesus talking in verse 28? Look at the actual words he uses. What's going on here? So clearly, his heart, he's talking about men. Now, who's he talking to right now?

He's talking to his disciples. And it's not the 12 disciples. They don't exist yet as a circle. That's chapter 10, right? So we talked about this a week ago. It's these huge crowds who are coming from Jerusalem and Galilee, all these different regions, and it's sick, poor, hurting people. There's no indication whatsoever that Jesus is only addressing a large crowd of men, just the opposite. And we know from Luke and from other women made up a large number of his disciples along with men as well. What is Jesus doing? He's addressing a huge group of men and women who are his disciples, but he addresses men. Why does he do that? Does he think that women never have inappropriate sexual desires?

You know, so I don't think Jesus is that stupid, right? What's he doing right here? And I think it's very intentional and it's profound because the movie, here's the movie that we generate in, that men generate in their heads when they perpetuate the gaze and the stare. For some, it stays a private internal matter. But I don't even need to tell the stories. I mean, just in the history of the human race, which gender has turned sexual desire into a tool of violence, subjugation, and oppression of the other gender? Do we need to take a vote on that, right? Do we need to take a vote on that, right? And this is why Jesus, he's not just teaching individual morality here.

What's he doing? He's launching the kingdom. He's inaugurating a new humanity, an alternate society, and he challenges the men who live in this kingdom that if we really want to follow Jesus, we need to let him work on this area of our heart so that the kingdom is a place that is safe for women. What other implication is there of verse 28? He addresses men in the kingdom, and he says,

In this kingdom, women are safe. They need to be safe from being victimized by the gays and being treated by less than what they are, image-bearing human beings. It's very profound. And Jesus clearly thinks it's a huge, huge issue. How are you guys doing? Some of us are feeling really horrible about ourselves right now. And that's not the worst thing in the world,

as long as it's not the end of the story. And with Jesus, it's never the end of the story. Let's consider his response. If it's your right eye that's the problem, yeah, get rid of it, yeah, gouge it out, throw it away. Better to lose one part of your body than for the whole to be thrown into hell. Your right hand, yeah, get rid of that thing. It's better to lose that body part than for the whole body to go into hell.

Okay, all resolved? Here we go. So this is typical of Jesus. He will use shocking, attention-getting images that jolt you awake. I mean, half of this is surely to just get us to say, dude, this is so serious. You don't even know how serious this is. Is Jesus actually commending self-mutilation as a way forward here, right? And I think if we could have him in a chair, we would ask him questions,

and he would ask a whole bunch at us and never answer our question, right? That's kind of how he usually operates. But let's say he would cooperate or whatever, we could really ask him what he thought. In my mind, I think it's clear that self-mutilation is not a legitimate resolution to this issue. Where is the core issue?

He already said, where is the core issue? In the heart. Does he actually think tearing out your right eye, you know that right eye, that's really the problem. This is ridiculous, right? And so that right hand, or whatever. So he's using right as this image of the predominant amount of human beings, right-handed and so on.

I actually think he's just poetically matching the eye to the hand, but the eye, the hand, and the foot in the Psalms and in the Proverbs of Israel's scriptures, they're images of how you see the world, how you act in the world, and your life path in the world. And so you,

if there is something in your life that seems indispensable to you, it seems like it's actually a part of you, and it brings pleasure, it makes things work, our hands are extremely useful, we do most of our things with our hands and seeing with our eyes, but if there is something so closely,

you think it's so closely woven into your being and how you live in the world, but it's ruining you, it's destroying you by constantly leading you into ruin in this area of your heart and sexual desire. Jesus says, get rid of that thing. Swift, decisive, don't think a second time about it, get rid of that thing, kill it, dead, gone. Don't mess with this. It'll consume you. It's a monster that will eat you alive. Sexual desire is not bad. But when it is not in the safe environment that creates and generates life, it's a monster that will consume you whole.

And it will ruin all of your relationships. And some of you know exactly what I'm talking about here. And so just elephant in the room, let's just move right towards it. And in modern Western culture, it's like asking a fish to look at the murky water that it's swimming in. We don't even see it anymore. We live in a culture, it anymore. We live in a culture, the first culture in the human race, that has made a huge, huge percentage of our nation's economy, multi, multi, multi, multi-billion dollar industry in our economy, whose sole purpose is to lure human beings into degrading themselves and their own humanity, not to mention the millions of human beings

that are involved in the production of this layer of our economy, and they may not think they're degrading their humanity, but actually they are. What am I talking about? And it's like we don't even see it, we push it out of our minds, but the elevation of porn in our sexualized culture, it's unbelievable, and it's unequaled in the history of the human race, the degree to which our America has taken it in the last 200 years.

It's flabbergasting, and we don't even think about it, or we think it's just what humans do, or whatever. It's a blight, you guys, and it traps men and women, and it's trapped a whole bunch of us. I know it. Right here in our community. And Jesus, he doesn't hate you. Well, he's here. He's here announcing the kingdom to rescue and to bring freedom.

But he names it for what it is. It's a monster that will eat your soul, dude. It will eat you alive. And it will begin to rewire your brain in ways that brain scientists are just now beginning to understand what porn does to the human brain, right? When those actions get repeated over and over and over again, and those synapse tunnels in the brain get fired through with dopamine and oxytocin and all, it's unreal the way that we get hooked on this. And sexual desire like nothing else.

It's not just another bodily appetite. I really am flabbergasted by the naivety that say it's just a private matter that people should just deal with on their own. It's like it's not a private matter, dude. How does somebody end up in bed with somebody else's covenant partner? How does somebody end up thinking that it's a sensible thing to do to sexually abuse a child? That's a symptom. That's the surface stirrings of deep, deep issues that in our culture we revel in it as a culture.

It's unbelievable. And so I don't normally get so worked up, but I've just seen so many friends and loved ones fall prey to this demon of misdirected sexual desire. And the reason Jesus is so worked up about it is because it is such a beautiful, good thing. Not because it's horrible, but because it has the potential to be the most awesome thing. And so it doesn't seem to me that cutting off your body parts is the issue. And if it was the issue, he's forgot something. I'll just leave it there, right? Really. And I'm not just trying to be crass. I'm being completely serious.

completely serious. If he actually, you get the point. You get the point. The point is that misdirected sexual desire becomes a black hole. And instead of the human heart, as the proverb says, becoming a wellspring of life, so that a glorious image-bearing human being, their heart, when it's remade by Jesus and, you know, in the new creation, when our full being is transformed, the heart of a human becomes a wellspring of life to other people, to protect and to honor and to elevate and to seek the well-being of others. And there's something about this particular issue that turns what's meant to be a wellspring into a black hole. And we just suck everybody in. We suck others and our perceptions of their bodies in. And it becomes a bottomless pit.

Which is why Jesus uses the strong language of hell right here. He's not saying that lust is the unforgivable sin. What he's saying is there's something about this issue, if it goes unchecked, and if you don't come to Jesus and to the community of his disciples and find a way forward by turning towards Jesus, it will consume you. It will turn you into a bottomless pit. And for those of you who have ever been hooked into porn,

you know exactly what he's talking about. It's a black hole of the human heart. And whether it comes to fruition in porn or sexual abuse or adultery or whatever, it's a way of viewing human beings as bit players that can be objectified and become a role in my story and my pleasure and my fantasies. And it's a degradation of your humanity. You're better than that. And God made you to become more than that. And you can become more than that because of the one who loves you, who's utterly committed to you. He lived for you. He died for you. And he's committed to remaking you as a human if you will just turn to him and to his love. And so that's where this lands us,

at the love of Jesus. Because I don't know how to remake this part of the human heart. I really, it takes, it's a million decisions. It's a bunch of small decisions that begin with just standing up the white flag and just telling somebody, right? There's a whole bunch of us here for whom it's not your hand or your eye, it's this thing right here, right? And what you need to

do is get a stupid phone. That's what you need to do. And it's inconvenient. Dude, it will be so inconvenient, it will be so lame. Let's just name it right now. But dude, if it's leading you on a path towards you becoming a black hole, and if it's beginning to spill out and making your relationships toxic and you don't actually know how to even think about and relate to the opposite sex, or your own same sex in the appropriate way, dude. It's leading you on a path that it will be virtually impossible to turn from. And so Jesus says, the moment is now. Take swift, decisive action. Jesus loves you. And he can do it. And he can do that in you. And so this is a perfect point.

I'm not going to sugarcoat it. I'm just going to say the issue, it's dire, and the stakes are high. And we're a community of Jesus' disciples. None of us is without our own issues and baggage and sin. For some of us, this is our issue, and you need to find freedom and healing. And a community of Jesus is the place where we can do that together. And so right now, I think the most appropriate thing to do is for me to pray in conclusion,

and for us to have a time where you just are really honest with Jesus. And where if you're a disciple of Jesus, where you move to taking the bread and the cup, and you're reenacting the story of his utter commitment to you despite your own sin and brokenness. And the story that you're retelling is not just the story of his death, his broken body, and shed blood. It's the story of his conquering of death, because Jesus' love, it's stronger than the grave. Many waters cannot quench the passion and the commitment that Jesus has for broken people,

and that includes you. And that's the story, and that's the love and the presence of Jesus that we celebrate at the bread, at the bread and the cup. And I just challenge you, if you need to make a decision in this next 20 minutes of our being together about who you're going to talk with, and if you don't have anybody to talk with, I know I'm opening the floodgates right here, but dude, if you don't have anybody to talk with, please, please send me an email. And I'm almost certainly, it won't be me that you end up meeting with, but it will be with somebody that I trust and who I know has journeyed through this into freedom and who can walk with you through this.

Make a decision about what you're going to do and do it now. Make a decision about what you're going to do and do it now. All right. Thanks for listening to Exploring My Strange Bible. We have more episodes exploring the Gospel of Matthew coming out to follow. So, cheers. See you next time. Thank you.