hardest sin there is

Jesus Teaches about Lust / 5:27–30 / 53

In his teaching about lust, Jesus literally got to the heart of the matter by explaining that sin begins in the heart. With strong language, Jesus described how his followers must rid themselves of sin. While we cannot be sinless until we finally are with Christ, we must keep a watch on our thoughts, motives, and temptations in the meantime. When we find a destructive habit or thought pattern, we need to get rid of it.

5:27–28 Again Jesus quoted one of the Ten Commandments, “Do not commit adultery” (Exodus 20:14). According to the Old Testament law, a person must not have sex with someone other than his or her spouse. Jesus said, “But I say, anyone who even looks at a woman with lust in his eye has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” Even the desire to have sex with someone other than your spouse is mental adultery and thus is sin. Jesus emphasized that if the act is wrong, then so is the desire to do the act. The word lust denotes the desire for an illicit relationship. To be faithful to your spouse with your body but not your mind is to break the trust so vital to a strong marriage. Jesus was condemning the deliberate and repeated filling of one’s mind with fantasies that would be evil, if acted out.

5:29–30 When Jesus said to get rid of your eye or your hand, he was speaking figuratively. He didn’t mean literally to gouge out an eye, because even a blind person can lust. But if that were the only choice, it would be better to go into eternal life with one eye or hand than to go to hell physically intact. This strong language describes how Jesus’ followers should renounce anything that would cause them to sin or turn away from the faith. Believers must get rid of any relationship, practice, or activity that leads to sin. The reason? Jesus explained that “It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.” This is radical discipleship. While none of us will ever be completely free from sin until we get a new glorified body, God wants an attitude that renounces sin instead of one that holds on to it.¹

Jesus Teaches about Divorce / 5:31–32 / 54

Divorce is as hurtful and destructive today as in Jesus’ day. God intends marriage to be a lifetime commitment (Genesis 2:24). People should never consider divorce an option for solving problems or a way out of a relationship that seems dead. In these verses, Jesus was also attacking those who purposefully abused the marriage contract, using divorce to satisfy their lustful desire to marry someone else. Make sure your actions today help your marriage grow stronger rather than tear it apart.

5:31 Jesus again pointed out a law from the Old Testament that his listeners knew well. The law of Moses, in Deuteronomy 24:1–4, said that a man can divorce his wife by merely giving her a letter of divorce. The subject of divorce was hotly debated among the Jews at this time. Some religious leaders took this to mean that a man could divorce his wife for almost any reason. In a culture where husbands viewed their wives as “property,” divorce was fairly easy to obtain. However, other leaders said that divorce could be granted only in cases of adultery.

5:32 “But I say that a man who divorces his wife, unless she has been unfaithful, causes her to commit adultery.” The religious leaders permitted easy divorce, as well as remarriage after divorce. But Jesus said that the sacred union of marriage should not be broken and that to remarry after divorce was committing adultery. However, Jesus here gave one exception regarding divorce: “marital unfaithfulness.” For a man to divorce his wife because she has been unfaithful was simply a recognition that his union with her had been ended by her sexual union with another. It would be possible, then, that adultery would be an exception to the prohibition against remarriage. This does not mean that divorce should automatically occur when a spouse commits adultery. The word translated “unfaithfulness” implies a sexually immoral lifestyle, not a confessed and repented act of adultery. Those who discover that their spouse has been unfaithful should first make every effort to forgive, reconcile, and restore their relationship.

However, Jesus would not stand for men tossing aside their wives. Marriage is so sanctified in God’s eyes that anyone who marries a divorced woman commits adultery. Notice that while the divorced woman would become an adulteress, the man who divorced his wife would be at fault—he causes her to become an adulteress. Jesus will explain his strong words in 19:3–12 on the grounds that God originally intended marriage to be for life.

God created marriage to be a sacred and permanent union and partnership between a man and a woman. When the husband and wife both enter this union with that understanding and commitment, they can provide security for each other, a stable home for their children, and strength to weather life’s storms and stresses.²

esus noted a contrast between the tradition of the rabbis and His own understanding of the law about murder, and we see His same elliptical approach here in the command against adultery. The prohibition against adultery includes within it every aspect that is part of the broader complex of this particular sin. Again Jesus starts out by contrasting the views of tradition with His own: “You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not commit adultery’ ” (v. 27).

Before we look specifically at what Jesus says, we should note the authority by which He says it. Elsewhere our Lord declares, “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth” (Matt. 28:18), and, “I have not spoken on My own authority; but the Father who sent Me gave Me a command, what I should say and what I should speak” (John 12:49). Therefore, the pronouncement that Jesus makes here in Matthew 5 is nothing less than the pronouncement of God Himself.

A Promiscuous Age

We are living in an age in which God’s opinion is considered merely that—a solitary opinion easily cancelled out by a majority report that contradicts His opinion. Our culture has undergone a moral revolution, which originated with the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Many factors were involved in that particular cultural revolution. Gael Greene, in her book Sex and the College Girl, stated that she had discovered a radical shift in the mores or the behavioral pattern of the coeds. Her findings indicated a change in conscience among college girls. In the 1950s, Green noted, if a single girl was known to be active sexually, it destroyed her reputation, but when the sexual revolution of the 1960s came along, everything reversed so that a woman feared that her reputation would be destroyed as a result of not being sexually active. Virginity had become the great shame of the unmarried young woman.

When I taught 1 Corinthians to college students, I reminded them of the rationale their parents had given them about sexual ethics: they were to be chaste in order to avoid venereal disease or unwanted pregnancy or cultural shame. But in a short time all that changed. Modern medicine can effectively treat sexually transmitted diseases, and there are a variety of birth control methods to prevent unwanted pregnancy, and, if those fail, abortion is readily available. Additionally, the fear of cultural shame is no longer a factor. So, I asked them, what is left to keep them from engaging in premarital sex? The only thing is that it is an offense against the holiness of God, and that God, who has the eternal authority to command our obedience, prohibits this behavior. That discussion was like a lightning bolt hitting the classroom. My student counseling load multiplied significantly afterward.

Like no other time in the history of Western culture, people today are bombarded with erotic stimuli. Where can we go and not be exposed to sexually suggestive, erotic literature and images? Certainly not to Hollywood movies, television, modern novels, or the Internet. The church today must deal with the pervasive problem of addiction to pornography. The problem is prevalent not just in the secular culture but also in the church. Paul taught that biological urges are strong and intense. The natural passions with which we have been created can be so intense that it feels like we are set aflame. If the sexual urge was burning in the first century, how much more have the incendiary influences of our culture intensified it?

As a pastor, I have to skate carefully between two things. On the one hand, it is my duty to make clear to everyone in my flock what God commands with respect to premarital and extramarital sexual relationships. At the same time, I have to be acutely conscious of people’s frailty and the difficulty of the battle for chastity—a battle, it seems, that more Christians are losing than winning. We must hold to the biblical standard while at the same time administering the mercy of God to fallen people.

One student, a senior who was engaged to be married, came to talk to me. She told me she was overwhelmed with guilt because she had been sexually involved with her fiancé before their marriage. She had spoken to the college chaplain about it, but he told her that her guilt sprang from trying to live by an outdated, puritanical ethic. She would be free from guilt, he said, if she would accept that her sexual activity was simply an expression of mature adulthood. Despite what the chaplain told her, she still felt guilty, which is why she had come to me. I told her, “It is possible, as the chaplain indicated, to have a false sense of guilt. However, the reason that you feel guilty is that you are guilty.” The solution for guilt is not to deny it or rationalize it. The only solution for real guilt is real forgiveness, and the necessary condition for real forgiveness is real repentance. This young woman needed to repent and seek the forgiveness of God.

Radical Commitment

“But I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (v. 28). Jesus is not saying that it is just as evil to lust as it is to actually commit adultery, but He is saying that even if you have refrained from actual adultery, you haven’t necessarily fulfilled the full dimension of God’s law.

This is where Jesus gets radical: “If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell” (v. 29). Jesus focuses here on the offending eye, because He understands how adultery begins. It usually begins with a glance, a look. King David, a man after God’s own heart, just happened to be walking outside on his roof when he looked over and saw the nude Bathsheba on an adjacent roof. From that look came lust, and from lust came adultery. The visual aspect of erotic stimulation must not be minimized.

Every marketer in America understands that sex sells, which is why seductive women are used as props to sell everything from automobiles to Eskimo Pies. That is why there is so much focus on erotic images on television and in the movies, and nowhere is this more prevalent than on the Internet. Jesus says we have a problem here—a radical problem that requires a radical solution: “If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out.” There are few, however, who are so committed to chastity that they inflict themselves with blindness to ensure it. Jesus is speaking hyperbolically here. He is not saying that if we have a lustful look, it is time for eye surgery. Rather, He is saying that preserving chastity is so important that we must do whatever it takes to accomplish it.

Odysseus, traveling in his ship on the way home from Troy, had himself lashed to the ship’s mast to avoid the temptation of the sirens’ song. He knew how easily he could veer off course and sail his ship into ruin. Sometimes that sort of radical action is necessary.

If you are addicted to pornography, find a way to keep it off your computer, but if you cannot, throw the computer in the garbage. Do not think that you cannot live in the twenty-first century without a computer. Sometimes the benefits of technology can offer as much peril as blessing. Jesus is saying that we must do a self-evaluation and consider which is more important: our soul or our computer? Our sanctity or our erotica? We cannot have both. Today we have become jaded. Our consciences have been seared. We have experienced what Jeremiah said to the people of Israel: “Were they ashamed when they had committed abomination? No! They were not at all ashamed; nor did they know how to blush” (Jer. 6:15; 8:12).

Luther, who was every bit a man, admitted that he struggled with lust, but he dealt with it, saying, “I cannot help it if birds fly around my head, but I can keep them from nesting in my hair.” Just so, Jesus says we are to take every opportunity to keep our chastity before and after marriage. “If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell” (v. 30). Better to go through life maimed than to have your soul delivered into hell. One theologian said it is better to limp into heaven than to leap into hell. One of the greatest enticements to sexual sin is that everyone else is doing it. Another is the cultural acceptability of such sin. It takes moral courage to march against the tide, but Jesus is the one who calls us to this, and He never rescinded that call.

In the second century the apologist Justin Martyr defended Christianity before the emperor Antoninus Pius, and in his apology he said, “If you want to see visible proof of the truth of Christianity, observe our chastity.” He pointed to the Christian ethic of chastity as proof of the power of the gospel. No apologist today could ask critics of Christianity to examine our sexual behavior as proof of the gospel.

If the Word of God reveals that you have been in sin, get it cleansed. Young women, if you are not married, yet you are no longer a virgin, you can become a virgin again in the sight of God, because when He forgives us our sins He makes us clean.³

5:27, 28. Thou shalt not commit adultery was the demand of the Old Testament Law (Ex. 20:14). Jesus goes beyond this outward command to reveal that its act is the result of an inner attitude of lust. Whosoever looketh characterizes the man whose glance is not checked by holy restraint and results in an impure lusting after women. The act would follow if the opportunity were to occur. By taking His listener beyond the outward statement of the law to its real intention, Jesus was trying to get the listener’s attention off the physical and onto the spiritual.

5:29, 30. The statement of cutting off one’s hand or plucking out one’s eye definitely is not to be taken literally. What Jesus implies is that if thy right eye offend thee, then the logical thing to do would be to pluck it out. His point is not that one should literally pluck out his eye, but that one should recognize that the source of lust comes from within the mind and heart of man, not from the physical organ itself. The right eye is not the source of sin; the heart of man is that source. The seriousness of the sin of lusting is thus illustrated by this graphic comparison. Ultimately, it would be better for a person to be physically maimed than to go to hell forever. However, doing physical damage to oneself does not in any way guarantee entrance into heaven. Jesus is simply teaching that man must bring the passions of his heart under the control of the Spirit of God.⁴

5:27 adultery. Sexual infidelity to one’s spouse violates the seventh commandment (Exod 20:14), and adultery can even be committed in one’s “heart” (v. 28). The two are not equally bad, but they are both sinful. YES THEY ARE BOTH THE SAME BAD. SIN IS SIN.

5:27 Adultery was considered an extremely serious offense (cf. Ex. 20:14) because, in addition to violating another person, it broke the marriage covenant (Mal. 2:14) that was a reflection of the relationship between God and his people.

5:28 with lustful intent (Gk. pros to epithymēsai autēn, lit., “for the purpose of lusting for her”). Lust begins in the heart, the center of a person’s identity and will. It is not enough to maintain physical purity alone; one must also guard against engaging mentally in an act of unfaithfulness. Jesus is not adding to OT law but correctly interpreting it, for even in the Ten Commandments God had required purity of heart (Ex. 20:17; cf. 1 Sam. 16:7; Ps. 19:14; 24:4).

5:29–30 right eye … right hand. The right side often stood for the more powerful or important. The eye is the medium through which one is tempted to lust, and the hand represents the physical actions that result from lusting. cut it off. Jesus uses deliberate overstatement to emphasize the importance of maintaining exclusive devotion to one’s spouse. Even things of great value should be given up if they are leading a person to sin. See note on Mark 9:43–48.

5:31–32 A certificate of divorce in the ancient world gave a woman the right to remarry (e.g., Mishnah, Gittin 9.3: “The essential formula in the bill of divorce is ‘Lo, thou art free to marry any man’ ”) and reflects the fact that divorce and remarriage were widely accepted and practiced in the first century world. But I say to you indicates that Jesus does not accept the practice of easy divorce represented in v. 31. Because divorce was widespread in ancient times, God had instituted a regulation through Moses that was intended to uphold the sanctity of marriage and to protect women from being divorced for no reason. (See notes on Deut. 24:1–4; Matt. 19:8.) Here and in 19:3–9, Jesus bases his teaching on God’s original intention that marriage should be a permanent union of a man and woman as “one flesh” (Mark 10:8). Divorce breaks that union. Sexual immorality (Gk. porneia) can refer to adultery (Jer. 3:9; see also the use of the term in Sir. 23:23), prostitution (Nah. 3:4; 1 Cor. 6:13, 18), incest (1 Cor. 5:1), or fornication (Gen. 38:24; John 8:41). Scripture prohibits any kind of sexual intercourse outside of marriage (thus forbidding the practice of homosexuality and bestiality as well). Except on the ground of sexual immorality. This implies that when a divorce is obtained (by the injured party) because of the sexual immorality of one’s spouse, then such a divorce is not morally wrong. But when a man divorces his wife wrongly (i.e., when his wife has not been sexually immoral), the husband thus makes her commit adultery. Even though some female Jewish divorcees would have gone back to live with their parents in shame, many would have sought to remarry (which seems to be the typical situation that Jesus is addressing here). Jesus is thus indicating that such second marriages begin with committing adultery, since the divorce would not have been valid in God’s eyes. (On whether the adultery is onetime or continual, see note on Matt. 19:9.) But Jesus places primary blame on the husband who has wrongly divorced his wife, by stating that he (the husband) “makes her commit adultery.” Whoever marries a divorced woman is not an isolated statement that applies to all divorced women, or it would contradict the “except” clause that Jesus had just given (as well as the further exception in 1 Cor. 7:15). The statement rather continues the same subject that Jesus had mentioned earlier in the sentence, and thus means, “whoever marries such a wrongly divorced woman commits adultery.” See also the notes on Matt. 19:3–9; Mark 10:2–12; Luke 16:18; 1 Cor. 7:15; and Divorce and Remarriage

5:28 to lust for her: A man who gazes at a woman with the purpose of wanting her sexually has mentally committed adultery.

5:29, 30 The hyperbole (exaggerated saying) about tearing out one’s eye is similar to the phrase in Prov. 23:2, “put a knife to your throat if you are a man given to appetite.” In striking overstatement, Jesus advises removing every temptation to evil, no matter what the cost. The warning of hell (v. 22) indicates that those whose lifestyle is characterized by uncontrolled immorality are not heirs of the kingdom (see 1 Cor. 6:9, 10).

5:31, 32 Sexual immorality is a general term that includes premarital sex, extramarital infidelity, homosexuality, and bestiality (19:3–12).⁵

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1 Barton, B., Comfort, P., Osborne, G., Taylor, L. K., & Veerman, D. (2001). Life Application New Testament Commentary (p. 27). Wheaton, IL: Tyndale.

2 Barton, B., Comfort, P., Osborne, G., Taylor, L. K., & Veerman, D. (2001). Life Application New Testament Commentary (pp. 27–28). Wheaton, IL: Tyndale.

3 Sproul, R. C. (2013). Matthew (pp. 111–115). Wheaton, IL: Crossway.

4 King James Version study Bible . (1997). (electronic ed., Mt 5:27–29). Nashville: Thomas Nelson.

5 Radmacher, E. D., Allen, R. B., & House, H. W. (1997). The Nelson Study Bible: New King James Version (Mt 5:28–32). Nashville: T. Nelson Publishers.