October 10th, 2014. LIFE IN ITS FINENESS But I say to you that whoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment. And whoever says to his brother, Raca! shall be in danger of the council. But whoever says, You fool! shall be in danger of hell fire. Matthew 5:22 If we are genuinely experiencing the Lords transcendent life in us, we cannot say things that are incompatible with that life without retracing our steps in the Spirit and making it right. We cannot live in an insensitive way. We find ourselves saying, Im sorry. That was too much. We may apologize not just for what we said, but for where it came from. It came from the source of the self in the form of a fixed attitude that wrote someone off as a fool. When the transcendent life operates in our being, God begins touching our source about everything. Who is relating to people? You or the Lord? So life operates in us in a detailed way, checking our words by the Spirit. This is what it means to deal with the Lord and to be dealt with by Him. It is learning to know Him as He reproduces His life in us. Matthew 5:21- 22 tells us that in His transcendent life we will have dealings over our speaking, not in a general way but in a fine way, even over one extra word. Just Raca or Moreh is enough to produce an uncomfortable feeling within you. Do you know why you feel uncomfortable? It is because you are wearing the wrong clothing. You are not wearing Christ. At that moment you have not put Him on. When you put Him on, you find that He is a heart of compassion, He is longsuffering, and He is kindness. When we put on the disposition of Christ, we feel comfortable. It is like feeling comfortable with clothing that fits and matches. When we say words that do not fit and match Christ in us, we feel uncomfortable within. We realize that we are wearing the wrong words, that is, we are making Christ wear them (1 Cor. 6:15). This discomfort is the fineness of His life operating to bring us up to a higher, transcendent level, where He is. In these kinds of dealings we discover that His life is transcendent in its fineness. But I say unto you, That whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment: and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council: but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire [Matthew 5:22]. Raca is an Aramaic expression, according to Dummelow, and means empty head! There are numerous epithets of similar import in constant use by many who fancy themselves to be Christians. Although there are definite gradations in the crimes and penalties here enumerated by Jesus, it would be a mistake to suppose greater or lesser blame for insults answering to Raca or Thou fool. The expressions are essentially the same, and the plain teaching of our Lord in this context is that ALL insults of every kind are sinful and that all our derogatory and deprecatory expressions against ones fellow human beings are murderous. Those who resort to the use of such expressions are guilty in the eyes of the Lord. This is true because such expressions find their origin in a heart full of hatred and enmity. In the light of this, who could use such a term as nigger to set at naught a fellow creature, made like ourselves in the image of God? The penalties arranged in precise order to correspond with the insults mentioned above are not to be understood as graduated penalties or punishments against crimes of more and more serious import; rather, they are to be understood as a three-fold reiteration of one overwhelming truth. They constitute three equivalent statements for the sake of emphasis, all of them dealing with a principle men find it very convenient to ignore. It is at this very juncture, relations with fellow humans, that the Christian is different from others. He is even denied by his Lord the right of worship, if his brother has anything against him!
Posted on: Fri, 10 Oct 2014 04:13:05 +0000
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