The Internal Affairs of the Kingdom
Introduction: The Religion of the Low Bar
We live in an age that majors in the minors and minors in the majors. Our modern evangelicalism, in its desperate quest to be winsome and palatable, has often treated sin like a minor accounting error instead of high treason. We have become experts at polishing the outside of the cup, content with a righteousness that consists of not doing the really bad things that would get us noticed. So long as we haven't embezzled from the company, or run off with the neighbor's wife, or murdered anyone in broad daylight, we consider ourselves to be in pretty good standing. We have set the bar of righteousness on the floor, and we congratulate ourselves for stepping over it.
This is the ancient religion of the Pharisees, dressed up in modern attire. It is the religion of externalism. It is a checklist faith that is concerned with outward appearances and manageable rules. But when King Jesus begins to lay out the constitution of His kingdom in this Sermon on the Mount, He takes a sledgehammer to this entire flimsy structure. He is not interested in our carefully curated public image. He is concerned with the internal affairs of the heart. He tells us that His standard of righteousness is not just higher than the Pharisees'; it is of a completely different kind. It is a righteousness that goes all the way down.
In our passage today, Jesus takes up the seventh commandment, a commandment that most respectable people feel they have a pretty good handle on. But He immediately pushes past the external act and drives straight to the root, to the desire, to the glance. He teaches us that the kingdom of God is not a place for men who have merely restrained their hands; it is a kingdom for men whose hearts have been fundamentally rewired. And He teaches that the war against sin is not a polite negotiation. It is a brutal, bloody business that requires radical surgery.
The Text
"You have heard that it was said, 'YOU SHALL NOT COMMIT ADULTERY'; but I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. But if your right eye makes you stumble, tear it out and throw it from you; for it is better for you to lose one of the parts of your body, than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand makes you stumble, cut it off and throw it from you; for it is better for you to lose one of the parts of your body, than for your whole body to go into hell."
(Matthew 5:27-30 LSB)
The Pharisee's Fence (v. 27)
Jesus begins with the baseline, the accepted standard of the day.
"You have heard that it was said, 'YOU SHALL NOT COMMIT ADULTERY' " (Matthew 5:27 LSB)
This is the seventh commandment, found in Exodus 20:14. No one was arguing with this. The scribes and Pharisees taught this. They built what they called "fences" around the law, adding extra-biblical rules to prevent people from even getting close to breaking the actual command. But in doing so, they reduced the law to a set of external, physical actions. For them, righteousness was about successfully navigating a behavioral obstacle course. As long as you did not physically lie with a woman who was not your wife, you could check the box. You were clean. You were righteous.
This approach to God's law is profoundly dangerous because it breeds a particular kind of pride. It allows a man to have a heart full of filth, a mind teeming with adulterous fantasies, and still stand in the temple and thank God that he is not like other men. It creates a disconnect between the inner man and the outer man, which is the very definition of hypocrisy. It turns the law of God, which was meant to be a mirror to show us our sin and drive us to God, into a tool for self-justification.
The King's Standard (v. 28)
Then Jesus demolishes their entire system with a single authoritative statement.
"but I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart." (Matthew 5:28 LSB)
Notice the authority. "But I say to you." Jesus is not offering a new interpretation or a helpful suggestion. He is the Lawgiver, explaining the true and original intent of His own law. He is peeling back the layers of rabbinic tradition and revealing the heart of the matter. The law was never just about the body; it was always about the heart.
Let's be precise here. The sin is not "looking at a woman." God made beauty, and it is not a sin to notice it. The sin is to look "to lust for her." The Greek here indicates a look with a purpose, a look with the intent to desire, to covet, to possess what is not yours. It is to look at a woman, an image-bearer of the living God, and reduce her in your mind to an object for your own gratification. It is to mentally undress her, to use her in your imagination, to commit the act in the theater of your heart.
Jesus says this is not "almost adultery" or "pre-adultery." He says it is adultery. The sin is consummated in the heart the moment the will consents to the desire. God, who judges the heart, sees the treasonous thought as the act itself. Why? Because the act is simply the fruit. The sin is in the root. This is where all the trouble begins. Before the bed is defiled, the heart is defiled.
This verse is a direct broadside against the entire modern pornography industry. Pornography is the industrialization and commodification of this very sin. It is a business built on training men to look at women precisely in this way: as disembodied objects for consumption. It is a curriculum in heart-adultery. And any man who thinks he can dabble in this filth and still be clean before God is deceiving himself with the same lie as the Pharisees.
Radical Surgery Required (v. 29-30)
Given the profound seriousness of heart-adultery, Jesus prescribes a correspondingly serious and violent remedy.
"But if your right eye makes you stumble, tear it out and throw it from you... And if your right hand makes you stumble, cut it off and throw it from you..." (Matthew 5:29-30 LSB)
Now, this is obviously hyperbole. Jesus is not commanding literal self-mutilation. A blind man can still lust in his imagination, and a man with no hands can still covet. The problem is not the physical organ; the problem is the sinful heart that uses the organ as its instrument. The eye is the gate through which the temptation enters, and the hand is the instrument by which the sin is often carried out.
The principle is this: you must have a wartime mentality toward your sin. You are to be utterly ruthless with anything that leads you into temptation. The language is violent: tear it out, cut it off, throw it from you. This is not a casual negotiation. This is not making a pinky promise to do better next time. This is radical amputation. We are to hate our sin so much that we are willing to take drastic, painful measures to kill it.
What is your "right eye" or "right hand"? It is whatever you value that has become an occasion for your sin. It is your smartphone with its unfiltered internet access. It is the cable subscription that pipes filth into your living room. It might be a particular friendship, a certain job, a specific route you take home from work. If that precious thing, that "right hand," is the instrument of your stumbling, then in the economy of the kingdom, it must go. The cost of discipleship is real.
The Eternal Stakes
Jesus is not being melodramatic. He grounds this radical command in an eternal reality.
"for it is better for you to lose one of the parts of your body, than for your whole body to be thrown into hell." (Matthew 5:29 LSB)
The logic is inescapable. It is better to go through life maimed but saved, than to go into eternity whole but damned. Jesus, in His love, is performing spiritual triage. He is telling us that the temporary, fleeting pleasure of a pet sin is not worth an eternity in hell. We are playing with hellfire when we coddle our lusts. The stakes could not be higher.
This is a terrifying warning, and it is meant to be. It is meant to wake us up from our spiritual slumber. We treat sin so casually. We entertain it, manage it, and make excuses for it. Jesus tells us to kill it. He tells us that unmortified sin, unrepented-of sin, is a soul-damning poison. The man who refuses to cut off his sin is demonstrating that he loves his sin more than he loves God, and that is the very definition of a man who is headed for hell.
The Divine Surgeon
So where does this leave us? If this is the standard, who can be saved? If a lustful look is adultery, then we are all adulterers. If a hateful thought is murder, we are all murderers. And that is precisely the point. The unvarnished law of God, in its full spiritual intent, is meant to crush us. It is meant to strip us of all our self-righteousness and leave us utterly bankrupt before a holy God.
This high and holy standard is designed to make us cry out for a savior. We cannot perform this radical surgery on ourselves. We need more than a new set of rules; we need a new heart. And that is exactly what the gospel provides.
Jesus Christ lived a life of perfect heart-purity. He never once committed adultery, not even in His heart. He fulfilled this righteous requirement of the law perfectly, on our behalf. And when we, by faith, are united to Him, His perfect righteousness is counted as ours. That is our justification.
But it doesn't stop there. He does not just give us a pardon; He gives us power. Through the Holy Spirit, He begins the work of sanctification. He becomes the Divine Surgeon who cuts the cancer of sin out of our hearts. Our role is to cooperate with Him. We are the ones who must tear out the eye and cut off the hand, but we do so in the power that He supplies. We put to death the deeds of the body by the Spirit (Rom. 8:13). We install the filter, we confess our sin to a brother, we flee temptation, we starve the flesh and feed the spirit on the Word of God. We do this not to earn our salvation, but because we have been saved.
The King's standard is impossibly high, but the King's grace is gloriously sufficient. He demands a righteousness that exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, and then He provides that very righteousness as a free gift. Let this high calling drive you not to despair, but to the cross. Let it drive you to a daily, ruthless war against your own sin, all in the joyful confidence that the Divine Surgeon who began this good work in you will bring it to completion on the day of Christ Jesus.