The Deadly Lure of Lust

Matthew 5:27-30

Main Idea: Lust is adultery of the heart and must be passionately guarded against so that it does not lead one to hell.

1. Guard Your Heart (5:27-28).
2. Protect Your Eyes (5:29).
3. Watch Your Hands (5:30).

In Psalm 24:3 King David asks, “Who may ascend the mountain of the Lord? Who may stand in his holy place?” The answer is found in the next verse: “The one who has clean hands and a pure heart, who has not appealed to what is false, and who has not sworn deceitfully” (v. 4). These words can only be applied perfectly to Jesus. But these words also describe the proper pursuit of everyone who calls Jesus “Lord.” In the New Testament there is an echo of these words in the Sermon on the Mount and our Master’s teaching on the deadly lure of lust, a sin that originates in the heart but often expresses itself with the eyes and hands. The prophet Jeremiah reminds us, “The heart is more deceitful than anything else, and incurable—who can understand it?” (Jer 17:9). In Matthew 5:27-30 Jesus shows us how true this statement is in specific and concrete terms. We often reduce sin to what we do. Jesus makes it clear, however, that sin is rooted in who we are. We often sin with our eyes (v. 29) and our hands (v. 30), but Jesus will teach us these are only instruments that do the biddings of an evil, lustful heart.

These verses are the second of six antitheses that conclude Matthew 5. The overarching truth of all these verses will be a call to defeat sin. As D. A. Carson writes,

We are to deal drastically with sin. We must not pamper it, flirt with it, enjoy nibbling a little of it around the edges. We are to hate it, crush it, dig it out . . . sin leads to hell. And that is the ultimate reason why sin must be taken seriously. (Sermon, 44–45)

If lust is not to have its deadly way with us, then we must hear and obey three specific warnings from Matthew 5:27-30.

Guard Your Heart

Matthew 5:27-28

As in 5:21, Jesus begins with the phrase, “You have heard that it was said.” Then he quotes the seventh commandment, which appears both in Exodus 20:14 and in Deuteronomy 5:18. It was a well-known command: “Do not commit adultery.” The admonition is plain and simple. A married person is not to have sexual relationships with anyone other than his or her spouse. The Scriptures take this command so seriously that the act of adultery was punishable by death (Lev 20:10; Deut 22:22). The story of the woman caught in adultery in John’s Gospel (John 7:53–8:11) reveals that the Jews of Jesus’s day continued to view adultery as a serious offense. The fact of the matter is, any culture with a moral conscience will take the sin (and marital betrayal) of adultery very seriously.

In an article titled “Six Reasons Why Adultery Is Very Serious,” author Tim Challies reminds us of the horrible consequences of adultery. He builds on the six reasons adultery is harmful in Married for God and accurately captures its destructive power. He writes,

Adultery is a serious matter. At least, it is a serious matter in the mind and heart of the God who created sex and marriage and who put wise boundaries on them both. But why? Why is adultery such a serious matter? Christopher Ash provides six reasons:

Adultery is a turning away from a promise. . . . It is a turning away from one to whom promises were made in the presence of witnesses. Most importantly, it is a forsaking of promises made in the presence of God and, in that way, a turning away from God himself.

Adultery leads the adulterer from security to chaos. Because the adulterer has turned away, he or she enters into a life of torn loyalties. . . . Even when the adulterer remains loyal to that new partner, there is still the divided life, the divided family, the divided memories.

Adultery is secretive and dishonest. . . . It has to be because no one wants to trumpet that they are breaking a promise. Adultery loves the darkness and flees the light and for as long as it can it tries to remain a secret. “Whereas news of a marriage is broadcast by joyful announcement and invitations, news of adultery leaks out by rumor and under pressure.”

Adultery destroys the adulterer. Adultery does no favors to the adulterer. To the contrary, it undermines and erodes character and integrity. “Like all secret sin, it eats away like some noxious chemical at the integrity of the one who commits it.”

Adultery damages society. “Each act of adultery is like a wrecking ball taking a swing at the secure walls of the social fabric of society. It stirs up hatred and enmity. It encourages a culture which reckons marriage boundaries needn’t really be quite so rigid.” We love to think our sins are our own, that they concern only us. But no, our sin goes far beyond ourselves and impacts others.

Adultery hurts children. Adultery does grievous harm to an innocent party—children. . . . Children are harmed when adultery brings chaos and conflict and disunity. . . . No wonder, then, that the Bible contains such serious, repeated warnings against it: “Can a man carry fire next to his chest and his clothes not be burned? Or can one walk on hot coals and his feet not be scorched? So is he who goes in to his neighbor’s wife; none who touches her will go unpunished” (Proverbs 6:27-29). “He who commits adultery lacks sense; he who does it destroys himself” (Proverbs 6:32). “Let marriage be held in honor among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled, for God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous” (Hebrews 13:4). (Challies, “Six Reasons”)

Challies and Ash convincingly prove that the act of adultery is a sinful and serious act. But this is where Jesus drops a devastating spiritual bomb on us. Setting his words again in contrast to the ancients, who stuck doggedly to the letter of the law, Jesus says, “But I tell you, everyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (v. 28). Jesus carries us to a place that we never saw coming but that was intended by God all along. Once more we are confronted with an unavoidable and undeniable truth: the heart of the matter is the matter of the heart. Do you conceal lust in your heart but count yourself righteous because you have never followed through with the act? Jesus says, Not on your life! Adultery is not limited to the act. It includes the gazing and lingering look that objectifies another person to whom you are not married in a covenant relationship. This is a gaze, not a glance (“looks” is a present participle and could be translated “keeps on looking”). The gaze excites sexual imaginations in the heart, and you mentally engage in an act reserved for your spouse and the marriage bed. David Dockery and David Garland are blunt but accurate in their assessment:

The man “lusts her” and “adulterates her.” . . . The woman is made into an object. Lust is completely self-centered, interested only in sexual gratification. It treats other persons as things to be exploited. It adulterates them. When the lust is sated, the object of the lust is discarded (see 2 Sam 13:1-22) and another object is sought out. (Seeking the Kingdom, 55)

We desperately need men today like Job who said, “I have made a covenant with my eyes. How then could I look at a young woman?” (Job 31:1). So beware. Be on guard against a lingering look of sexual gratification. It could lead to marital disaster. It could lead, as we are about to see, to eternal destruction.

Protect Your Eyes

Matthew 5:29

You can have lust in your heart without your eyes, but your eyes make sinful lust easier. Jesus addresses in stark and shocking terms the intimate relationship between the lust, the heart, and the eyes. We must resist the temptation to water down what Jesus says and thereby miss the impact he intends to make.

Jesus uses two powerful and vivid illustrations in verses 29-30. He ends both with a warning about hell. The main idea is this: sinful lust will lead you down a dead-end road. It will not deliver what it promises. You think it will make you happy. Jesus says it will lead you to hell. So if necessary, take whatever steps you must to deal with sinful lust. As Sinclair Ferguson says, “Act decisively, immediately, even if it is painful. . . . [T]­he drastic nature of the remedy is simply the index of the radical danger of the sin. It is not a situation for negotiation” (Sermon, 90).

So “if your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away.” The phrase “causes you to sin” is literally “causes you to stumble” in Greek. It is the Greek word skandalon. It is in the present tense. So the idea is, if your eye keeps on causing you to stumble into lustful sin, which can lead you to hell, you would be wise and better off to “gouge it out and throw it away.” It is far better, Jesus says, to throw an eye away than it is to have your whole body thrown into hell.

This famous text, along with Matthew 19:12, moved the church father Origen (ca. AD 185–254) to roll naked over sharp briars. However, when this failed to cure him of sexual lust, he took the drastic step of castrating himself. He would later regret this decision and conclude that he may have misinterpreted what Jesus meant (Quarles, Sermon, 119–20).

Origen did misunderstand the text. The real problem lay not with his eye (or male genitals). The real problem lay within his heart. The eyes can certainly entice the heart. But you can have lust in your heart without your eyes. The key to spiritual victory over lust is not a mutilated eye. The key to spiritual victory is a circumcised heart (Deut 10:16; 30:6). A new-covenant heart has God’s law written on it (Jer 31:31-34). It is a new heart gained by faith in Jesus and being born again (John 3:3-16).

Watch Your Hands

Matthew 5:30

Verse 30 reinforces verse 29. As Dockery and Garland note, “Sin is serious business. We are to perform radical surgery on anything that would cause us to be cut off from eternal life” (Seeking the Kingdom, 55). Jesus moves his warning from the right eye to the right hand. This warning parallels the warning in verse 29. If your right hand becomes a skandalon, a spiritual stumbling block, it is better to take the drastic measure and “cut it off and throw it away” (v. 30). Why? The reasoning is the same. “For it is better that you lose one of the parts of your body than for your whole body to go into hell,” into gehenna. It is better to lose a physical part than a spiritual whole. It is better to experience a temporal loss than an eternal loss. The stakes are high! So much is on the line.

All of what Jesus is saying is a package deal with the heart as the key. The eyes can certainly entice the heart, but the heart, enticed by the eyes, directs the hands. The hand acts in response to the attitude and direction of the heart. That is why Jesus says in Matthew 5:8 that we need to gain and pursue a pure heart. We can only receive this pure heart, however, as a gift of grace from God by faith in Christ.

The path to purity requires a pure heart and the mortification of the flesh, illustrated in our text by the eye and the hand. The words of John Owen return to my mind: “Be killing sin or [sin will] be killing you” (Works, 6:9). Jesus would add, Sin will be killing you and sending you to hell. What then are some wise and practical steps we can take to walk the path of purity and the halls of holiness? Sinclair Ferguson gives us four:

• Realize where yielding to sinful lust will lead you. Hell! Plant that in your mind and recall it again and again.
• Deal with the real cause of your sin. It is an impure heart that settles for God substitutes. This is simply idolatry. What is there in your life that you are putting in the place of God? That you desire and long for more than anything?
• Act decisively, immediately, even if it must be painful. And remember, “Obedience cannot be negotiated, nor can heaven and hell.” Now is always the right time to do the right thing.
• Realize your lust is not the whole of your life, even the main or most important part of your life. Think and understand what you gain by abandoning it. You get Christ and heaven thrown in! Sin is a cruel taskmaster and lust is one of its favorite instruments to keep you enslaved and in bondage. Jesus came to rescue you, to set you free from this never satisfied tyrant. Treasure Him above all else. What you gain will put to shame what you give up. You will wonder why you stayed so long at Vanity Fair in the first place. (Ferguson, Sermon, 89–90)

Conclusion

When we are in Christ, we are able to guard our hearts from temptation. When we are drawn to him like a totally devoted lover, the attractions fueled by lust lose their luster. They find no room in our hearts. Now, in our hearts, in that innermost sanctuary, there is a place reserved only for Christ. Jesus certainly wants to lead and guide our behavior, but first and most importantly, he wants our hearts. He bought them (1 Cor 6:19). He owns them. What he bought, we should gladly and freely give to him. Treasure Christ above all in your heart, and the eye, the hand, and the rest of the body will happily follow its lead.

Reflect and Discuss

1. Why do we commit adultery and gaze lustfully? Is this an act only committed by men?
2. This chapter teaches that adultery is a serious matter that is not limited to the act. What damages can committing adultery in the heart create?
3. Has the gospel set you free in the past from a pattern of adultery/lust? What is your story?
4. How do we know when we have committed adultery in our hearts? Can we ever satisfy the desires of lust?
5. Have you ever noticed a difference in what you look at and how you act when you are close to the Lord in reading and prayer? Why do you think this is so?
6. What does Jesus’s strong language about gouging out the eye and cutting off the hand tell us about the danger of hell?
7. How can believers help one another fight the sin of lust?
8. Because we may live in a highly sexualized culture, we cannot always prevent our eyes from seeing sexual images. How then do we protect our eyes?
9. Sinclair Ferguson says to think about what you gain by abandoning lust. How is Jesus a better reward than what is gained from adultery and lust?
10. What is the difference between fighting sinful lust with our own effort and fighting it with the power of the gospel?