Who Is an Adulterer? Part 2

God has always been concerned about the heart. Always in the Old Testament, not just the New, God was concerned about a heart relationship. That the issue was always loving the Lord, your God, and your neighbor as yourself. And that the Ten Commandments and the Mosaic Law was only a means for regulating a love relationship. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur.

I'm your host, Phil Johnson. These days, for something to be labeled as wrong in our society, there seems to be only one requirement, and that's this. The people with the loudest and most influential voices have to define that thing as wrong. And rest assured, that standard does not come close to the true biblical standard of what it means to do wrong, to commit sin. So what's the right approach when confronting people with the biblical truth about sin?

When should you risk creating conflict with others, and when should you keep silent? Consider that today on Grace to You as John MacArthur helps take the fear out of using the word sin. It's part of his current study titled, The Sinfulness of Sin.

And with a lesson now, here's John. Matthew chapter 5 verses 27 through 30, let me read them as you follow. Ye have heard that it was said, Thou shalt not commit adultery.

But I say unto you that whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart. And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell. And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off and cast it from thee for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell. Eventually our Lord is talking here about sin. And this is really the topic of His message from verse 21 through verse 48 of chapter 5. It is a message on the divine definition of sin. In Numbers 32 and 23 it says, Be sure your sin will find you out.

Sometime back the New York Times ran the following article. The thief was sure that the church was a safe hideout. Just inside he spied a rope up to the garret. Up he climbed only to hear the church bell ringing his whereabouts. A Mexico City man snatched a woman's purse and ran into a doorway to hide. It turned out to be the doorway of the police station where he was questioned and later identified by his victim. Shoplifting in a department store in Rochester, New York, a man picked up an alarm clock and headed for the nearest exit.

The clock concealed under his coat went off before he could get out of the store and brought the detectives running. A Canadian who had a custom built radio stolen from his automobile advertised in the local paper for a custom built radio. The first person to contact him about the advertisement was the thief. A Glasgow pickpocket got a 60 day prison term after trying his luck on an excursion boat carrying 20 police officers and their wives.

Police in Palo Alto seized a suspect as he stood in a post office admiring his wanted poster. Be sure your sin will find you out. Sin devastates life. In this particular place in Matthew chapter 5, the sin of the Jewish leaders and the sin of the people listening to Christ finds them out. Jesus unmasks their hypocrisy. They're caught. They're trapped. They're unmasked.

They're revealed. They're shown to be exactly what they are, sinful people. And precisely what our Lord is doing in this passage is giving them a true picture of their sinfulness, the things that they had so well concealed He reveals. The righteousness which they had felt was theirs He tears down and leaves them stark naked and sinful.

In fact, what He does is to reveal the truth about the sinful heart of man going deep inside to the real problem. As we've been seeing in our study of Matthew, men inevitably and invariably try to invent religions of human achievement. Men try to invent self-righteous systems based on their own standards.

They try to invent systems that justify themselves. And that is precisely what the Judaism of Jesus' time had done. They had substituted their own system for the truth of God's revelation.

And their own system was a system of external rules, a system of external ritual, a system of behavior with no thought for attitude or motive or the heart. And because they kept certain external rules, because they managed to fulfill certain external ritual, they convinced themselves that thereby they were righteous. But this was inadequate and that's why chapter 5 verse 20 is the key. Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you'll never enter the kingdom. True righteousness is beyond anything you now have. And so Jesus in verses 21 through 48 of the Sermon on the Mount destroys the self-righteous system by tearing down their supposed holiness and revealing the fact that in their hearts they were wretched, vile, evil sinners and the heart is the issue with God. No matter how religious they looked on the outside, the fact is they were sinful on the inside. He presents a standard they can't keep and thus faces them with a sin problem for which they have no remedy. At the end of chapter 5 in verse 48, He says, be therefore perfect even as your Father who is in heaven is perfect. That is the righteousness My kingdom demands.

And obviously they couldn't keep it. Therein lies the frustration. There is no remedy for their sin situation. And of course from there they are driven to a righteousness not their own, a righteousness in fact offered to them in Jesus Christ. And so what He's really doing here as He presents a definition of sin is forcing them to see the need of a Savior knowing full well He will offer Himself as that Savior. They must recognize that in themselves there is no resource to solve the sin problem.

They are desperately in need of someone who can and He is just that someone. Now the key to the way He handles this is in the two-fold phrase that He uses, ye have heard but I say. And in that He is contrasting their system with truth. He is contrasting their definition of sin with God's definition of sin. He is contrasting their standard with the divine standard.

The traditional rabbinic system said only the external matters. If you don't murder and you don't commit adultery, you're all right. Jesus said, but I say unto you, if you're angry or if you even think about it, you're just as guilty because God is interested in the inside. And thus does He contrast Himself and the view that God laid down with the system that existed in their minds. Always in the Old Testament, not just the New, God was concerned about a heart relationship. That the issue was always loving the Lord your God and your neighbor as yourself.

That there was always the relationship. And that the Ten Commandments and the Mosaic Law was only a means for regulating a love relationship. God has always been concerned about the heart. And that is the case in this particular sermon as Jesus goes right to their hearts and unbears the evil, vile sinfulness that is there behind the façade of their religious activity. Psalm 119.96 says, Thy commandment is very broad. And the commandment of God was a lot broader than they thought. They had narrowed it down only to the external and our Lord drives it into the internal.

Now let me remind you of this. Jesus in His sermon began with a message about blessedness. Blessed, blessed, blessed, blessed from verses 3 to 12. But in order for one to know that blessedness.

And by the way, this is a good format for presenting the gospel. You start with the promise of blessedness. But in order to know that blessedness, you must know the proper definition of sin. Because sin stands in the way of blessing. And sin has to be dealt with and removed. And so from blessedness to a doctrine of sin, the Lord makes a transition. And as I said in verse 21, He begins to talk about sin. And let me just say in general before we look at the passage itself that we learn from this that it's essential to deal with sin. You cannot preach Christ, you cannot present the gospel unless you deal with sin. Unless you give a definition of sin. Because that is the barrier. That is the issue. And if we do not properly understand sin, mark this, we will not understand anything else that God does.

For example, I'll give you three illustrations of that. Unless one understands the truth about sin, he can never understand the truth about salvation. You cannot understand the meaning of salvation unless you understand the meaning of sin. You see, the Pharisees and the scribes, now mark this, had such a superficial view of sin that they were able to accommodate it with a superficial view of salvation. They saw sin as simply a matter of what we do, therefore salvation was a matter of what we do. So in their minimal definition of sin, they were left with a minimal requirement for salvation which they then assumed they themselves could accomplish. Now, had they seen sin as a deep down heart problem, they would have known that that was far beyond theirs to change. They couldn't do it if they'd understood that. And so it is that the more we comprehend the heinousness of sin, the more we understand the meaning of salvation.

The deeper the disease, the greater the remedy. That's the point. And as long as people think of sin superficially, as long as they think of sin minimally, as long as they make light of sin, then salvation is a minor thing too. But when you understand, as our Lord is saying, that sin is something heinous, sin is something deep, sin is something so penetrating that it reaches down into the warp and woof of a man's being so deeply that it's absolutely unchangeable except by the miracle of God, then you'll understand that only God can bring salvation.

And that is what our Lord wants them to understand. You will never understand the meaning of the cross. You will never understand why Jesus had to die. You will never understand why when He had legions of angels who could have come to His aid, He never used them. You will never understand why He said, I must fulfill all righteousness.

You will never understand what His death means until you understand how evil sin is and how deeply stained is the heart of every man that He would have to go to that extreme to accomplish salvation. Someone has written there was no other good enough to pay the price of sin. He only could unlock the gate of heaven and let us in. Sin is so powerful and so deep that only Jesus Christ can change it.

Only Jesus Christ can alter it. That, in fact, is the message of Romans chapter 3 through chapter 6. A second thought, unless you understand the truth about sin, you will never understand the right approach to proclamation. Not only salvation, but proclamation. Now what I mean by that is this, and this is a great concern to me, and I've preached on this off and on, but if you do not understand the depth of sin, then you do not know how to proclaim the gospel.

Now what we have in our Christian culture today is we have very superficial gospel presentations. It's almost methodological. It's almost pie in the sky. It's almost how would you like to have a happy time? It's so very shallow in many cases.

Not always, but in many cases. Some call it easy believism. Others call it cheap grace. People running around saying, come to Jesus. Get born again. Self-centered appeals. Emotional appeals. All kinds of superficial approaches to evangelism. And I really feel that behind this is a failure to grapple with the reality of the heinousness of sin. Because if we know the power of sin, then we know it isn't enough to tell somebody, well, why don't you just accept Jesus and He'll make your life happy? It isn't enough to say to somebody, wouldn't you like to go to heaven and wouldn't you like to be happy and have peace and joy and everything just sign on the dotted line and say you believe in Jesus and pray a little prayer. You see, if we really understood how deep and stained men's hearts are with sin, if we understood how powerful the hold of sin is, so powerful that it casts men into an eternal hell, if we understood that, then our evangelism would be more directed at the damning character of sin first of all before it comes to the point of inviting them to make a decision.

They must understand the problem. That's why biblically speaking, and mark this, biblically speaking evangelism always begins by presenting the law before grace. You must preach law. You must preach judgment. You must preach condemnation.

And so Romans begins this way. For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all unrighteousness and ungodliness of men. Paul starts out by condemning. Chapter 2 condemns again.

Chapter 3 condemns again so that every mouth is stopped. And then he says the righteousness of Christ is available to you. So there must be a preaching of the divine standard. There must be preaching of the holy law. There must be preaching of that which God says is right.

And then there can be the message of how we come to know the relationship that makes that possible. I believe our evangelism must confront people with the holiness of God. It must reveal His demands for an inner heart righteousness. I believe our evangelism must focus on man's inability to meet God's standard. And we must make men desperate like Jesus wanted to make the Pharisees, the scribes and the multitude desperate so that they stand in fear of the doom of judgment ready to be cast into hell. And they cry out for a Savior who can deliver them from a problem too deep for them to handle. Now that was Jesus' approach.

And as I said it was basically designed to drive men to desperation. More than anybody else in the whole Bible, Jesus preached hell. He preached hell.

People don't like to even talk about it. He preached that sin sends people to an eternal hell where the worm never dies and the fire's not quenched, where there's gnashing of teeth and weeping and wailing. Jesus preached it because that's where it all had to begin. And so evangelism and proclamation must start with the holiness of God as over against the sinfulness of man. And then the demands of that holy God and the hopeless and helpless man who can't fulfill them is then driven to the inevitability of punishment, the ultimate reality of hell.

And the only escape is someone else to come along and change his vile heart. And at that point Jesus Christ moves in to offer the deliverance that He alone can give. Martin Lloyd-Jones, the great preacher of England said, you can have a psychological belief in the Lord Jesus Christ, but a true belief sees in Him one who delivers us from the curse of the law. True evangelism starts like that and obviously is primarily a call to repentance, end quote. The apostle Paul said that we are to call men to repentance toward God and then faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ. And what Jesus is saying to these people is you may not have killed anybody and you may not have committed adultery, but in your hearts you have been angry and in your hearts you have hated and in your hearts you have lusted and you are as vile as a murderer and as an adulterer. And in desperation they are driven to the need of an outside savior who can change their evil hearts. Men can modify their behavior, believe it, they can. Peer pressure, pride, all of those things, piosity, a fear of rejection can force people to behave in a certain way, but only God can change a heart.

There's a third thought I had on this. Unless we understand the truth about sin, we can never really understand salvation, we can never really understand proclamation and we can never really understand sanctification. Unless we understand the meaning of sin, we don't know what it is to be made holy in Christ, do we? We don't understand the magnanimity of the change. You don't understand what God has made you in Christ unless you know what you were. You can't be thanking and praising Him for the glory of the transformation unless you know what it involved. We've not only suffered from superficial evangelism and such, but we've suffered from very, very shallow concepts of holiness and sanctification.

Really it goes like this. We think we're holy because of the things we do or don't do. We don't go to certain places. We don't say certain things.

We don't do the things the world does. And we feel that because we don't say or do things or go places, that we're all right. And really it's the ugly head of self-righteousness because God is always concerned not so much with what we do and what we say and where we go, though He is concerned with that, but He's more concerned with what's behind it, what we think in our minds and hearts. There are the pious and the self-satisfied and the smug who think that because they don't do certain things and they do other things that they're justified and that's because they never really examine the evil of their hearts. And that's what the Lord Jesus is forcing men to do is He preaches this great sermon. Holiness, listen, for God is always a matter of the heart. Proverbs 23, 7, as a man thinketh in his heart, what?

So is he. That's where the divine evaluation takes place. In Matthew's gospel further on in chapter 15 and verse 16, we read this, And Jesus said, Are you also yet without understanding? You haven't figured it out. You don't know God's standard yet.

You don't know where the real problem is. Do not ye yet understand, Matthew 15, 17, that whatsoever enterth in at the mouth goeth into the stomach and is cast out into the draft. In other words, it goes through the process of elimination. But those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart and they defile the man. In other words, it isn't what you take in that defiles you. It's what comes up and goes out. For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, and blasphemies.

Where do those all originate? In the heart. Listen, before you ever murder, you think it in your heart. Before you ever commit adultery, you think it in your heart. Before you ever fornicate, you think it in your heart. Before you ever steal, you think it in your heart. It is the heart that spews out the garbage that defiles man because the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked and who can know it, said Jeremiah.

And so it isn't the external. Our Lord is saying it's the heart and He unbears the heart. He rips off the façade of the super religious who would glorify themselves as if they stand absolved and shows that the only thing that He's concerned about is the heart.

So both the Old Testament and the New Testament preach the same good news. Man is a sinner. That sin is deep down in his heart, in his nature.

Man is powerless to change that. God comes along and offers a relationship by which he and he alone will change that man's heart. It was clear back in Ezekiel, wasn't it, that God said, I will give you a new heart. I will take away the stony heart and give you a heart of flesh. A new heart is what a man needs. That's what Jesus wants those who listen to hear. No amount of self-reform can put you in a right relationship with God.

Only a new heart can do that. A critical message from John MacArthur today on Grace to You in his study titled The Sinfulness of Sin. Now, John, the Beatitudes here give us an unflinching look at sin.

You wouldn't think this would be an easy study to hear. I mean, in your experience, does anyone like being told that he's empty and spiritually bankrupt and responsible for his own guilty condition? No, and that is the offense of the gospel. The gospel announces to the sinner that not only has the sinner willfully, purposefully violated the law of God, but he has nothing in himself that can remedy that. He can't alter his own nature.

He can't pull himself up by his own bootstraps. He can't do anything, even religiously, morally, to put himself in a better position with God. So the gospel is the most offensive message the world has ever heard initially. Therein lies the rejection of the gospel. The sinner's basic self-defense is pride and a sense of goodness.

That is the illusion. That is the deception which sinners deal with. So the gospel comes at the self-deceived, proud sinner and attempts to crush him under the weight of his own sin and guilt.

That is so hard for people to be able to accept. But that is what our Lord did in the Beatitudes. That was the nature of his ministry, but that also came from the Old Testament.

In our Lord's announcing his arrival as the Messiah, he said he came to the poor prisoners who were blind and oppressed. The despondent and disastrous condition of the human heart as regards its sinfulness and its inevitable judgment was the opening salvo in the preaching of the gospel. So the Beatitudes did just that, and it was fired at the most religiously self-satisfied, Pharisaical hypocrites on the planet. And therein lies the conflict that ultimately caused them to execute the Son of God. So this is where the gospel has to start, and the brilliance of the Beatitudes is that at the same time they unmask sin, they offer the kingdom. They offer the kingdom, and there's a beauty and a grace in these Beatitudes, as well as an unmasking. I would just encourage people—I've written a book that deals with this issue of sin and confronting the sinner. It's called The Vanishing Conscience.

It unmasks the sinner at the very basic level and then brings to him the good news of the gospel. Here's one thing that's good news, we'll send you a free copy—that's right, free copy of The Vanishing Conscience if you've never contacted us before. It's over 250 pages.

Request it today. Right, and I love this book. It shows you how better to recognize sin, and also how you can defeat it. To pick up The Vanishing Conscience, and it's free if you've never contacted us before, get in touch today.

Our number here is 855grace, and our website, 855grace.org. The Vanishing Conscience has chapters on handling temptation, keeping your mind pure, and how to stop sin from silencing your conscience. It's an ideal resource for a new believer.

Again, The Vanishing Conscience is our gift to you if you have never contacted us before. And if you'd like extra copies to give to friends or to your Bible study, you can purchase those as well. Just call our toll-free number, 800-55-GRACE, or go to our website, GTY.org. Also, while you're at the website, don't forget about the Study Bible app. It is preloaded with the English Standard, New American Standard, and King James versions of Scripture. And for a reasonable price, you can unlock the footnotes from the MacArthur Study Bible. These 25,000 detailed explanations will help you study Scripture more effectively, and they explain nearly every passage. The app and thousands of free Bible study tools, all available at GTY.org. Now for John MacArthur and the entire Grace to You staff, I'm Phil Johnson. Be here tomorrow when John shows you how to view sin the way God does. John is continuing his study on the sinfulness of sin. Don't miss the next half hour of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Wednesday's Grace to You.