(Genesis 9:5-6, Exodus 20:13; Matthew 5:21-26)
In seminary, I was trained in an approach to counseling called family systems theory. It’s a deep and complex field of study, but it rests on a few profoundly simple insights. Most basic of all: people don’t exist as isolated individuals, but within networks of relationships—family, work, school, friends, church, and so on—that function as systems. As a result, everything that happens to each person ripples across all those webs, affecting all the relational systems to which that person belongs. It’s like when you touch a mobile: the whole thing moves, not just the piece you touched.
When something is wrong in a family, or a workplace, the stresses get transmitted all over the place, the whole system gets messed up, and the person who ends up showing the problem—the one who cracks first under all those stresses—is often not the person who actually has the problem. Think of angina: the first warning many people have of an oncoming heart attack isn’t heart pain, but arm pain. So it often is in families, or churches, or other organizations: one person or a group of people shows the symptoms and takes the blame for all the problems, when the real problem is somewhere and something else entirely. What you see is not what you get.
The danger, then, is that if you focus on the surface issues—if you just try to treat what physicians call the “presenting problem”—you can miss what’s really going on; you can pour all your time and energy into trying to fix one person and get nowhere, because the real sickness isn’t there at all, but outside them. They’re just the one who’s broken first (or most obviously) under the stress of their dysfunctional family; as long as that doesn’t change, neither will they.
You have to look below the surface if you want to understand the truth; you have to look below the surface if you want to see what matters. Even when the problem you see on the surface is the primary problem, there’s always more you need to know. This is true in counseling, it’s true in leadership, and it’s true in teaching the word of God; and Jesus comes down like a rockslide on the scribes and Pharisees because they wouldn’t do it. They would not look into the commands of the Law, past mere obedience to the letter, to understand their deeper meaning and purpose. I’ve said before that the Law can’t change the human heart, and that’s true; but the way the Pharisees taught it, they didn’t even challenge the human heart.
The law against murder, for instance, is uncontroversial on its face. There aren’t any truly universal laws in human history, but that probably comes as close as any. I expect we’ll all be able to go to bed tonight and say, “Well, I didn’t murder anyone today.” But does that mean we’ve kept the sixth commandment? Not necessarily. Why didn’t you murder anyone today? If you knew you’d get away with it, would you have been tempted? Was it just that no one happened to irritate you? Or was it honestly because of the love and grace of God in your life?
Obedience is not enough. Results are not all that matters. The reasons why you do what you do, and the process you use to get your results, are also profoundly important, because they’re what endures; you can’t keep getting the right result the wrong way very long. I learned that from math class, but even more, I learned it from baseball. If a young hitter goes up to the plate every time and just swings at everything that moves, he may hit .300 for a while, he may hit 30 home runs his first year, but he won’t keep it up. His results may look good, but he’s not really playing as well as they would make you think. Give the pitchers time, they’ll figure out they don’t have to throw him strikes, and pretty soon he’ll be back in the minors.
Sin is like that. It isn’t just about doing or not doing certain things, and living a life pleasing to God isn’t just about controlling specific behaviors. Sin is a weed, and as anyone who’s ever tried to deal with weeds knows, you can mow them down and tear them up all you want, but as long as the root is still in the ground, they’ll keep coming back. You have to kill the root or dig it out if you want to get rid of the weed. We have yucca plants along the south side of our house—you might not consider them weeds, but Sara does; and we have yucca despite the fact that the last couple years, she has declared total war on them. I’m not sure how many pounds of yucca root she’s dug up, except for this: it hasn’t been quite enough. Just a little bit of yucca root still alive in the ground, and back come the yucca. Sin is like that. You can’t deal with it just by changing your behavior—that’s just the branches; you have to go after the root.
And understand this: sin always roots itself in something good in us, or something that ought to be good. Sin is parasitic, because the devil can’t create—he can only twist what God has created. Anger isn’t evil in and of itself; it’s a necessary and appropriate response to sin and injustice. Some things absolutely should make us angry. But—our hearts aren’t pure, and so our anger is never truly pure; our fears and our pride and our selfish desires have a way of hitching a ride on our anger, multiplying and tainting it. Even when our anger is justified, it can very easily become a root for sin in our lives, and the enemy is doing everything he can to make sure that it does.
If we hold on to anger against others (especially against other believers), that will tend to fester and breed bitterness—or worse, contempt, which is the coldest and most poisonous of the passions, and along with despair the deadliest of sins; more, it feeds an attitude of self-righteousness, convincing us that we have the right to punish those who have angered us. We may not choose to express that by physically killing them, but we will in other ways. We may insult them to their face, or we may insult them behind their back; we may complain about them, undermine them, turn people against them, or try to stir up conflict. Jesus doesn’t say that’s as bad as murder, but he does make clear that anyone who lives this way toward others still deserves eternal judgment.
Of course, we all deserve eternal judgment, and it’s only by the grace of God in Christ Jesus that we don’t all get it; but that’s part of the point. We don’t have the right to hold anger in our hearts, because our anger is impure, and we aren’t pure. Only God can say otherwise, and so only he has the right to stay angry forever—and here’s the kicker: God, who alone would be fully justified in turning his anger loose, instead consistently chooses to hold it back to give us time to repent.
God’s chief concern isn’t to satisfy his anger, it’s to reconcile us to himself, which in part means reconciling us to each other. The true purpose of his law, then, isn’t just to stop us from killing each other—which is to say, to hold back the power of death—but to point us to the way of life. The question for us as we consider his law, and as we consider our hearts, is whether there’s anything driving a wedge between us and God, or between us and a fellow Christian, or a member of our family, or someone with whom we work, or whomever it may be.