Don't use God to benefit your lies !

Matthew 5:33-37

Empty Promises
33-34 “Again, you have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not break your oath, but fulfill to the Lord the vows you have made.’ 34 But I tell you, do not swear an oath at all: either by heaven, for it is God’s throne;

We have always been commanded not to lie. They knew from the ten commandments that telling the truth was a good thing.

But they would often solemnize that truth by swearing an oath. By swearing that oath, they allowed the people who heard them to have much more confidence that what they were saying was true: If I told you I would pay you for a field, you might believe me, but you might doubt: he wasn’t being serious. He was lying. He wasn’t paying attention to what he was saying. He was speaking hypothetically.

But if I made an oath to pay you a certain amount of money for a field, you would know I meant what I was saying, that I wasn’t joking, that I wasn’t lying, because I would swear by the name of God and I would have him to deal with if I broke my oath.

In Deuteronomy 10:20, God had even told people to swear oaths by his name “20 You shall fear the Lord your God. You shall serve him and hold fast to him, and by his name you shall swear.”

And that law was designed to encourage truthfulness.

But people did what sinner will do: they used the fact that oaths existed as an excuse to lie when they did not swear an oath. “O, I said I’d buy that field for that amount, but I didn’t swear an oath so my word was not binding.”

Do not swear by your mouth, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. Simply let your
‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No’; anything beyond this comes from the evil one.”

We have similar oaths to swear we’re telling the truth:
a. Cross my heart and hope to die (stick a needle in my eye)
--Oops, sorry. I had my fingers crossed

b. I swear on a stack of Bibles

c. If I’m lyin’, I’m dyin’!

d. May lightening strike me if I’m not telling the truth

e. I swear by my mother’s grave….

f. With God as my witness…

g. “If you know you’re lying, and the Lord knows you’re lying, it’s the same as telling
the truth.”

4. Jesus said in Matthew 34-35 – “But I tell you, Do not swear at all: either by heaven, for it is God’s throne;
or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King.”
a. Some groups have declared this passage to mean that Christians cannot take oaths in courts or
anywhere else
1). The Old Testament records that Abraham, Issac, Jacob, Joseph and Jonathan all took oaths

2). Jesus swore an oath in His trial by the Sanhedrin

3). Several times in the New Testament, followers of Christ swore oaths

b. What Jesus is wanting is truthfulness. all the way around
1). If you’re one of God’s people, then whatever you do reflects on God

-John Stott, Christian Counter-Culture: - “However hard you try, Jesus said, you cannot avoid
some reference to God, for the whole world is God’s world and you cannot eliminate him from
any of it.”

Jesus faced the gut-wrenching choice of keeping a costly promise.
God had been promising for thousands of years to send His Son to save the world
through His death and resurrection.
But when the moment of truth came in the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus felt the
weight of the difficulty of keeping this promise.

In fact, He asked His Father, “If there is any other way, please let this cup pass
from me.”
--Jesus knows what it’s like to face a promise you don’t want to keep

But in that moment of truth, when He realized there was no other way to save us,
Jesus became the ultimate promise-keeper.
--Jesus kept His word to die in our place, to absorb all of our sin, to be cut off from
the Father, so that we could live and be forgiven and be reconciled to the Father.

If we are lying to people then we're also lying to God.

0 members like this