Between paragraphs 1 & 2 in this chapter of teaching on our life together in the church, the link was the child. The link between paragraphs 2 & 3 is the theme of temptation, of incitement to sin.
To 'offend,' to present a stumbling-block to others, brings -
a. Judgment (woe) upon the world (v. 7)
b. Judgment on the offender (vs. 8, 9 - "fire")
What Jesus says here echoes what He has already said in 13:41: "The Son of Man will send His angels and they will gather out of His Kingdom all causes of sin ... and all evildoers." Whether He addressed the crowds in general or His own disciples in particular, the Lord was always severe on those who make faith and obedience hard for others. What that means for our doctrine of the security of the believer is for each of us to work out, but one thing is sure: the believer's security depends on his faith as much as on God's grace, and where faith is dead, not evidenced by works as James says, it is a real question whether he is a believer.
To believers, the Lord here says that for the sake of the world, others and yourself it is better yourself to suffer than to be a stumbling-block.
v. 7 There is more philosophy here than meets the eye.
Jesus is dealing with the question "Why is there temptation in the world?" He says it is 'necessary.' The word means inevitable. Temptation is a sheer, hard fact of life, and has to be reckoned on.
There is in His tone as much sorrow as denunciation. The word 'woe' He uses, ouai, may express grief, as it does in Mark 13:17, "Alas for the world" ... "Alas for those who are with child in those days"; or it may imply condemnation as in Matt. 11:21, "Woe to the world" ... "Woe to you Chorazin," and in Matt. 24:13, "Woe to you, scribes, pharisees, hypocrites." The Lord uses the word here in both senses. "Woe to the world because of temptations to sin." That is a lamentation. But "Woe to that man by whom the temptation comes" is a sentence of judgment.
Campbell Morgan comments, "Christ traced the woes of the world to those from whom they proceed; and gathering up the world's sorrow, He fastened it upon the heads of those who cause it. In it we see the infinite equity and justice of Christ. This is His attitude today ... The man who offends a child is a man who wounds the world. Let there be no softening of these words of Jesus. He talks about the age-abiding fire, the Gehenna of fire, always burning, where refuse is flung. That is the place for the man who lacks the child-heart. He will be treated as outside the city, fit only for the rubbish heap. So there rings through this great utterance of Jesus both His tenderness and His thunder."
Bear in mind that Jesus means, not merely transgression, but incitement to transgression.
1. It is necessary - there is the note of
realism.
2. It is not necessary - there is the note of
responsibility.
You cannot avoid it - but you do not have to be part of it. Evil is real; so is responsibility.
Evil arises because we make the world an alternative to God in our affections: we "worship and serve the creature rather than the Creator." But when we do this, we corrupt it. We make demands upon it God did not create it to meet; we crash barriers God placed around it, and through the breaches there enter evils greater than our own. Satan enters through them and gains the mastery. Now temptations arise from three sources: from the world, from within ourselves, and from Satan. The threat temptation presents is for real, and Christians are a target. There is no use complaining about it.
There is too, incidentally, an element of shrewd observation in what Jesus says here; it is a fact that parents, for example, reproduce children in their own image. You would think that children, being offended by their parents' sins, would avoid them. In fact they repeat them - child-bashing, incest and all the rest. Ask any social worker. We do not learn from the sins and follies of our forbears; we repeat them ... and are the cause of them being further repeated. However we rate the Old Testament saying that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation, it is a fact of life. But in the mind of Jesus, that does not diminish by one degree the responsibility we must bear for it: our responsibility for sin is real.
Jesus here faces the tension we all feel between necessity and freedom. But it was always His way to reduce questions of philosophy to questions of moral responsibility. He could not stand armchair critics. When we challenge Him, "Why is there sin and hurt in the world," He always bids us seek the answer first in our own hearts.
But do note the promise in 13:41 of a final remedy: "The Son of Man will gather out of His kingdom all causes of sin, and all evil-doers."
Having challenged our consciences, the Lord addresses Himself to the practical question of how we deal with the temptations we face; He says there is a price to be paid for victory.
We must hear this. There are no unbloodied victors in the Kingdom of Heaven.
Always, when we are tempted, it is because we believe there is, on the path temptation beckons us to take, a gain to be won or a loss to be avoided. Temptation appeals for a satisfaction, a fulfilment. Jesus says that loss or hurt is better than that sort of gain. There are satisfactions and fulfilments we are better off without.
Of the course righteousness requires we say, "It's a pain." The alternative, Jesus tells us, is a worse pain! It really is better to suffer. It is better to be crippled than condemned. Jesus has used this sort of language before in the Sermon on the Mount, 5:29-30. This time He is addressing it, not to the crowd, but to disciples.
Note: "if the hand of thee offend ..." That means temptation arises, not only from without (from others), but from within. He will not let us point the accusing finger at others until we have pointed it at ourselves.
Jesus uses two phrases to refer to the judgment we face:
1. v. 8 The eternal Fire: to pur to
aiwnion, the fire 'of the ages.'
2. v. 9 The Gehenna of Fire: tjn geenan tou
puroß
As in the phrase 'eternal life,' the word 'eternal' implies quality rather than quantity, kind rather than duration.
To think of the word 'eternal' as meaning no more than time-duration is quite false. Time, as we experience it, is determined by such things as the path of the world round the sun which produces the seasons, the rate of its own rotation which gives us day and night, and our own body rhythms. But in the realms of both heaven and hell time cannot be generated by these things. Both realms are not of this world. Whether in heaven or in hell, eternity cannot be understood merely as an endless succession of days and nights.
William Barclay quotes a Rabbinic tale of Jochanan ben Zaccai, who wept bitterly at the prospect of death. Asked why, he said, "All the more I weep now that they are about to lead me before the King of Kings, the Holy One, Blessed be He, Who lives and abides for ever and for ever and for ever; Whose wrath, if He be wrathful, is an eternal wrath; and if He bind me His binding is an eternal binding; and if He kill me, His killing is an eternal killing; Whom I cannot placate with words, nor bribe with wealth." There is far more in this than simply a description of something that has no end. It means 'the sort of punishment it befits God to give,' and that places the emphasis, not on its timescale but on its nature. *
Gehenna, the word our Lord uses in v. 9, was the name for the Valley of Hinnom on the south side of Jerusalem which was used as the city's incinerator. That is where the city's rubbish, and the bodies of those who died in its streets and were too poor to be buried, were flung. The putrefaction of what was flung there, and the burning, never ceased ("their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched"). Gehenna was the city tip-cum-crematorium.
We may be thrown on God's tip. What qualifies us to be thrown there is that we hold life back instead of urging it on, that we drag people down instead of building them up, that we are a handicap to others instead of an inspiration to them. This puts the ministry of encouragement high on the priority list for Christians. We must surgically excise from our lives those things that handicap both our own discipleship, and that of others. The language is metaphorical, no doubt. But the metaphor is there to make a point that the consequence of refusing to accept responsibility for each other is worse than anything that may be seen in a hospital burns unit.
Observe also that because it is a metaphor, the language may sustain more than one meaning:
1. The usual one - applied to the individual
in isolation: what you do to yourself.
2. The neglected one - applied to the individual in community: what
you do to the church ... in which case, the meaning is, "You should
be turfed out."
William Barclay comments: "The whole passage is about children of the faith. It is saying, 'If in your church there is someone who is an evil influence, if there is someone who is a bad example to those who are young in their faith, if there is someone whose speech and conduct is damaging the Body of the Church, he must be rooted out, excised, and cast away. The Church is the Body of Christ; if then that body is to be healthy and health-giving, whatever in it has seeds of cancerous and poisonous infection must be surgically removed." ((William Barclay, 'Gospel of Matthew Vol. 2' [St Andrew Press] p. 201))
A little further on in v. 17, Jesus will say of a brother who has offended, has been faced with his fault, and refuses to admit or repent of it, "Let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector"; i.e. you are to treat him as an outsider (to be won back in, of course ... but only when repentance makes that possible).
"After you ..." is the spirit of the Lord's disciples. That means:
1. Self-renunciation, for our own sake
2. Self-renunciation, for the sake of others.
3. Discipline, for the sake of the Church which is the Lord's body.
Accepted loss is the only path to real gain. Accepted pain is the only path to real health. This is the paradox of life Jesus was for ever presenting. "He that would save his life shall lose it, and he who loses his life for My sake and the Gospel's shall find it."
Our society today makes personal fulfilment the highest good. Nothing must stand in the way of my personal fulfilment; it is the most sacred of all obligations. Everything in me must come to its full flowering; whether it is good or bad is not a consideration. What we have here is our Lord's attitude to personal fulfilment. He does endorse it - but long term, not short term. Some folk must not touch alcohol; some folk must not see films or read books containing scenes of explicit sex or violence. There are things we have to be ruthless about with ourselves. In the interests of our full development in worthy ways, we must deny ourselves fulfilment in unworthy ways. It is a nonsense that we must taste all of life's possibilities. We can't. It is a myth. You cannot experience both promiscuity and faithfulness - you have to choose. Jesus is talking plain downright commonsense when He tells us we have to deny ourselves some things to realise other things.
We do have to die to live.
* In Matthew's Gospel the Kingdom of Heaven = the Spirit = God. The Biblical antitheses of the 'World v. God', 'Flesh v. Spirit', is paralleled by 'This Life v. The Kingdom of Heaven'. The Jew-ish reluctance to speak God's Name directly made it preferable to speak of the Kingdom of Heaven rather than the Kingdom of God, so the Kingdom of Heaven is God's Realm = the Spirit. Heaven as Jesus spoke of it is not the remote pie-in-the-sky of Communist mockery, but the real alternative to the world now.
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