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Who’s the audience, is this a way of doing right by God or doing right by other people or maybe those two are tied together and the way you treat people in need is the way you do right by God. It’s the roots of that concept, Proverbs 14:31, an expression of this mindset, the one who oppresses...

Religious practices are meant to align ourselves with the heart of God and in doing so, make all of our relationships better, but Jesus saw that religious practices of his day were sometimes doing the opposite, that people were doing religion in order to promote themselves to seek honor and...

Matthew 5:43-48, the first phrase comes from Leviticus 19:17-18, you should love your neighbor as yourself, but this second phrase, you shall hate your enemy raises an interesting ambiguity in the original verse that Jesus is quoting from Leviticus 19:17-18. If somebody wrongs you, go tell them...

A lost history of humanity, hidden in plain sight, because for centuries we’ve been told to read the first two chapters of Genesis as a single seamless story, but what if they aren’t, what if they are two separate accounts describing two different events? Genesis 1:27, so God created man in his...

If someone slaps you on the right cheek, offer them the other, one thing we know is that slapping is more about insulting someone’s honor or dignity, than it is about actually trying to take them out. Nothing has changed, slapping throughout the Bible, Old and New Testaments, it’s always about...

Matthew 5:38-42, the law of retaliation, this was actually an ancient law already to Jesus, not just because it was in the Torah, but because it was ancient even in the time of Moses. So most likely, even though the literal reading of the law is you poke out my eye, so I get to poke out your...

Coercion, responding to people and how I relate to people when our wills are cross purposes or we have different visions of reality in some way. What happens when we’re in conflict, how am I going to treat you or you hurt me, how am I going to treat you or you and I hate each other, how I’m...

Matthew 5:33-37, Jesus is addressing a pretty specific issue in Israelite culture, Israelite oath swearing. A vow in the Bible in ancient Israel, this is when people make promises to God, God, if you do this for me, then here’s what I’ll do for you. Vows are between people and God and then...

Matthew 5:31-32, these words of Jesus about marriage and divorce and remarriage, they have had a huge huge influence on the course of millions of people’s lives over the last 2,000 years and there is a diversity of views on the implications of what Jesus is saying, there’s a diversity of views...

What’s the greater good, that’s actually more appealing then the mental fantasy underneath this extreme response that Jesus says, which is to deal with it, but just dealing with it, cultivating lust, you have to have some greater vision that is even more fulfilling than the thing that I’m after...

Jesus’ claim that the long story of God’s covenant with Israel is coming to fulfillment, that God’s Heavenly Kingdom that’s touched down here on earth through him and these communities that he’s beginning, that this is what he calls the fulfillment of the Torah and prophets and he calls his...

Gehenna, this is the first appearance of this word in the New Testament, gehenna is the Greek word Jesus uses, it’s consistently translated as hell, but hell is not entirely helpful, because the word hell has had attached to it lots of meanings and associations that have come from later...

But what does it mean to fulfill the will of God that’s revealed in that command, it’s not just to end somebody’s life, it’s about weaning yourself off of this habit that we have to evaluate other people’s worth. This gets very personal very quickly, the ease with which I’ll be more flippant...

What Jesus said he was going to do was offer teaching about how the Torah is fulfilled and so if you have something that’s fulfilled, you have something that’s real, but also it’s pointing to some greater, more full reality, realized in some way. Jesus used the commands as pointing to some way...

There’s a status to be attained in this new reality, but where Jesus is getting the status language is from the least, the idea of the least and the greatest commands and so if you undo the least of the greatest commands, what you have done will be done to you, you’ll become least in the Kingdom...

Jesus makes two points to underscore that he’s not here to dismantle the Torah, because Jesus views the Torah as so valuable, here’s how he would describe its divine authority, not one little tiny detail, the little squiggles of Hebrew letters, this got translated in King James as jot and title...

Matthew 5:17-21, don’t suppose that I have come to dismantle the Torah or the prophets, I have not come to dismantle, but to fill them full. So Jesus, I’ve heard that there are some people saying, that you are kind of loose with the Sabbath, are you really here to honor the Torah and the...

Justice in a later poem in Isaiah 49, we get a speech from the servant who repeats all these images, God has called me from the womb to be his servant. The servant says later on, God told me I will make you a light to the nations, so that my salvation “salvation is the word Yeshua, it’s Jesus...

The last line of this opening poem is the prophet now talking to Israel saying, come house of Jacob, “Jacob is Israel’s ancestor,” let us walk in the light of Yahweh, the or and Torah word play. God is shining a light on Israel, whose capital city is the city on the hill, Jerusalem and that...

Matthew 5:13-16, key point is that God’s light and God’s instruction shine out to the world to show the way to true life and Jesus is assuming and building on Isaiah’s word play and that’s going to play a key role in understanding what he means. Jesus calls his followers the salt of the land...