What I believe,   part 6

The Five Rules

And so when I understood Christ's law not to be the law of Moses and Christ, and when I understood that what Christ said went clearly against what Moses said, the Gospels as a whole stopped being confusing to me. I found in Matthew 5:21-48, five simple rules from Christ for all people and all times. It is interesting that the Gospels talk over and over about the rules of Christ. And the church talks about the rules of Christ. But before this time I could not have told you what the rules were. We all know that he said to love God and others. But it stops there. And yet even this rule is not Christ's rule. The rule to love God and others comes from the writings of Moses.*

*In John 13:34 Jesus says, "A new rule I give you: That you love one another as I have loved you. That you also love one another." What made the rule new was the words "as I have loved you". The special rules of Christ that Tolstoy talks about teach us how to love one another. Jesus put a whole new meaning into the old rule, and he showed by his life that it was possible to love in this way. D.M.

In Matthew 5:19, before listing his new rules, Christ says, "Anyone who breaks one of these smallest rules, and teaches others to break them, will be called the lowest in the kingdom of heaven." In the past I had thought he was talking about the rules that Moses gave. It never came into my head that he followed that up (in Matthew 5:21-48) with five or six new rules. He starts each of these new rules by saying, "You have heard the old rule says such and such, but my new rule is this."

The first rule goes like this: "You have heard the old rule says you should not kill, and that anyone who kills will be judged for it. But I say that anyone who is angry with his brother without a good reason will be judged for it."

Because I had come to understand the rule about not hitting back it should have been easy to understand this one about not being angry. But there were still words in this rule that made it difficult to understand. The words were "without a good reason". I could not understand why they were there. It seemed that they changed the whole meaning of the rule. If it is wrong to be angry, it is wrong to be angry. Christ tells us to forgive over and over without ever stopping. He tells us not to fight against evil people. He stopped Peter from fighting to protect his Master when Jesus was being taken away to be killed. Could anyone have a better reason to be angry than what Peter had then? Yet here we find Jesus saying, "Do not be angry without a good reason." By putting those other words in, he is saying that anger is okay if you have a good reason. But I have never seen an angry person who did not believe that he or she had a good reason for being angry. Those few words destroy the whole meaning of the rule. It is like changing "love others" to "love people that you like".

Yet the words were there in the Bible, and I could not take them out. A rule that would be very clear without them had for me been destroyed by those added words. In all of the Church writings on this rule it says that people should try to be at peace with others, but that if it is impossible, then it should not stop them from praying for others at the same time that you are angry with them. I had the feeling that if I let myself be angry toward one person I had an open door to be angry with any person. The words did not seem right.

I tried to find some other meaning for the words "without a good reason". I looked up the Greek words that had been used and could see that the meaning was clearly "without a good reason". I looked for other places where the word was used in the Bible, to see if it could be used in a different way, and I found that it was still used to mean "without a good reason". I was forced to agree that Christ said only that we should not be angry when we did not have a good reason to be angry. I must say that, for me to agree to this, was like throwing out the whole Gospel as I understood it. There was one last hope. I looked up the oldest Bibles and I was filled with happiness. Most of the oldest Bibles did not have these words at all. The words that destroy the meaning of this first rule were added a short time after Constantine became a Christian! Someone put the words in, and others agreed with it, and writings from then on encouraged the use of such reasoning. Christ could not and did not say those words, and the simple clear meaning of the rule returned.

After the first rule, the second one was easier to understand. (I have put two rules together here, because they are both about much the same thing, and because Jesus joins them with the word "also".) They are in Matthew 5:27-32. "You have heard that the old rule says adultery is wrong. But I say that it is wrong to want to do this, even if you do not go through with it … You have also heard that the old rule says that if you put your wife away from you, you must say so in writing first. But I say that anyone who puts his wife away, apart from the sin of adultery, is encouraging her toward adultery; and anyone who marries her is guilty of adultery."

As in the first rule, where Jesus looked at anger as the root from which killing grows, so here he looks at the thoughts that lead to adultery. One thought is wanting a woman who is not your wife, and the other thought is not wanting the woman who is your wife.

But this rule, too, had words in it that had been used to make it of no effect. They were the words "apart from the sin of adultery". I had always been told that the meaning of these words was that a man was free to leave his wife if she was guilty of adultery. But from my understanding of the other rules, these words again seemed to be out of place. They were much like the earlier words "without a good reason". The whole thought of the rule was that husbands should not be looking for reasons to leave their wives, so why does Jesus give a reason along with the rule?

I turned to the Church experts and they all said that adultery on the part of the wife is a good reason for a husband to leave his wife. But I did not feel right about this. So I studied all the places where Jesus said words to this effect. In Luke 16:18 he gives the rule as I would think it should be, without a word about adultery being a reason for breaking it. In Mark 10:5-12 he does the same thing, and adds that it is wrong for the wife to leave the husband as well. But in Matthew 19:4-9 he again uses the words "apart from adultery".

Christ's whole teaching was that we should forgive all; so how is it that we can break this rule when a wife is guilty of adultery? Everyone teaches that this is what he was saying, and a look at the oldest Bibles showed that these words were in them. I had no answer, but I did have the feeling that something was wrong.

For one thing, if putting a wife away forces her into adultery, and if adultery is a good reason to put her away, then you have a circle; all a husband must do who wants to leave his wife is encourage her toward adultery. Putting away a wife who is guilty of adultery will clearly not stop her from sinning; it will only push her more in that direction. Surely this is all opposite to the whole spirit of what Christ was trying to say. It is no better than the old law, where a man can leave his wife for any reason, so long as he puts it in writing first.

I had a problem, too, with the wording of the rule. If you cut the rule down to who is doing what, you have "anyone" "encouraging" his wife toward adultery. "Anyone" is the person doing the action, and "encouraging" is the action. (The words "who puts his wife away" are only telling us which "anyone" we are talking about.) So "apart from adultery" is telling us something about the action of the husband, and not something about the wife. Let us change the wording a little to make a new rule with the same word pattern, to help us understand what is being said here. Let us say: "Anyone who does not give food to his son, apart from being cruel, encourages his son to be cruel." If we had this rule, we would not say that "apart from being cruel" is telling us that a father is free to stop feeding a son who is cruel. It can only be saying that on top of encouraging his son to be cruel, the father is also being cruel himself. And what happens if we put the same meaning on the rule as Christ said it? We would understand that any husband who puts away his wife not only encourages her toward adultery, but also becomes guilty of adultery himself.

But what of the husband who is not planning at the time to marry another woman when he puts his wife away? Can it be said that he is guilty of adultery? I looked at the Greek word for "adultery" that is used in this rule (porneia) and learned that it was a general word for one being in a wrong spirit about sex. It does not mean adultery as such, but just a spirit that can lead to adultery or any number of other sex sins.

Now look at what was happening when Christ was giving this rule, to see if my understanding fits. He was talking to people who believed that it was okay for a man to leave one wife and marry another, that such a man was not guilty of doing anything wrong. And Christ said that, not only does such an action lead to sin on the part of the wife who has been left on her own, but it also leads to sin on the part of the husband, because even marrying another woman is, in the eyes of God, a sin after he has left his first wife. The meaning is clear. And it fits with a good understanding of English, a good understanding of the spirit of Christ's teachings, a good understanding of the beliefs of the Jewish people, and a good understanding of the laws of reason.

Again I was left believing that what Christ had said was very clear and simple, but that it has been made confusing by people who do not want to change their lives to live them in the way that he wants us to live. The rule about not leaving wives (or husbands) for any reason is not one that the world wants to hear, and because the Church does not want to lose people, it makes the rules say what the people want it to say.

I then came to the third rule: "You have heard that the old rule says your promises should be made before God. But I say that you should not make promises at all. … When you say yes, that should be enough. And when you say no, that should be enough. Anything more than that comes from the evil one."

At first look, the most surprising thing about this rule was how easy it is to obey. I don't make many promises anyway, and when I do, I do not call on God as my judge or do any other such thing. So what little change I needed to make in my life was very easy to make.

But to be safe, I read what the Church experts had to say about this rule, and I found some interesting things. First, they tried to make it say the same thing as the third of Moses' Ten Rules – a rule against saying God's name when we are angry, or when we are not serious about what we are saying. And then they argued that it should not be used to stop a person from making a promise to follow a king or queen or to obey the laws of a country. Here we were again, with Christ saying something that seemed very easy to understand, and, for this rule, very easy to do, and the Church fathers were arguing against it, saying that we should not obey it. And the reason for the arguments was because they believed that what Jesus had said could lead people to act in a way that would show that their love for God was greater than their love for the government.

The rule had only seemed easy to me because I had not been thinking about the promises that people make to the leaders of their country when they take jobs as soldiers, police, judges, or law makers.

Here in Russia we even call our soldiers "the promisers" because of the promise they must make. The promise is most often made on a Bible. Such a promise is so important for the running of government that even in France, where Christianity is no longer said to be the country's religion, they still make a holy promise to the government and country. That soldier who had told me that he obeyed the Army Rules more than the rules of Christ, could see nothing wrong in it because he had made a holy promise that he would obey the Army Rules. In this one simple act, the empty idol takes on the blessing of God in the eyes of people making the promise. I could now see that this rule that had, at first, not looked so important, was in truth very important. It is these holy promises in the name of God that confuse people about the difference between the kingdoms of man and the kingdom of God.

The rule from Christ is to "not make promises at all". Like "do not judge at all", the rule is very clear. And to make it even more clear, he says that any teaching that encourages us to make promises is coming from the evil one. Really, if Christ teaches that we should always obey God, how can we promise that we will always obey the leader of our country? What do we do if the will of God is not the same as the will of the leader of our country?

James, in his letter in the Bible, said near the end of it, "Above all things, do not make a promise, but let your yes be yes and your no be no, so that you will not be judged."

…promises people make to the leaders of their country whenthey take jobs as soldiers, police, judges, or law makers.

James tells us why we should not make the promise that our country asks for from us. The promise by itself does not seem to hurt anyone. But from it, people are judged. So he says, "Do not make any promise at all."

Nothing could be clearer. So how is it that in a so-called Christian country we still make promises, and that we even put our hand on a Bible when doing it? By now the answer should be very clear. The church leaders did with this rule what they have done with all of the rules. They have taught people to act in a way that is perfectly opposite to what Christ clearly taught. People do not want to change; and Christ asks them to change. So the Church tells them in one way or another that they do not need to change. Where it says not to be angry, they say that it is okay if you have a good reason. Where it says not to put away your wife, they say it is okay if you can get her to have sex with another person. And where it says not to judge or not to make a promise, they simply say the opposite and tell people that they are teaching what Christ taught. And they do it with such confidence that no one thinks to question them!

I was becoming less and less surprised by the stand that the Church took on each of the rules of Christ. It was becoming clearer to me as time went on where they were coming from and where they would stand on almost anything that Christ said. The teaching was right there in with the rule. Christ said that any teaching that encourages us to make promises is coming from the evil one.

The fourth rule is one that I have already talked about. It goes like this: "You have heard that the old rules say "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth', but I say that you should not fight against the evil person. If anyone hits you on the right cheek, you should turn and let him hit you on the other cheek also."

This was the first rule of Christ that I had understood, and it was the one that had helped me to understand all of the others. It simply says that the way to destroy evil is not to hit back, but to return good for evil instead. When I had started to believe that Christ was serious about asking us to obey this rule, it had changed my understanding of everything else that Christ said.*

*It is our belief that Tolstoy could have started with seriously believing any of the teachings of Christ and the effect would have been the same. D.M.

The last of these five rules of Christ says: "You have heard that the old rules say you should love your neighbours and hate your enemies, but I say that you should love your enemies, bless them that say evil things against you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that use you wrongly and try to hurt you, that you may be the children of your Father in heaven. For he makes his sun to come up on the evil and the good, and sends rain down on the good and the bad."

These words seem to follow on nicely from the rule about not hitting back. But I found one problem with this last rule. Before each of the other rules, Christ had told us rightly what the law of Moses taught. But here he said that the old rules taught us to "hate our enemies". Anyone who knows the Jewish law would agree that this was not true. The law of Moses said to love your neighbour; but it did not say to hate your enemies. Why would Jesus say something that was not true?

I believed that the reason for the rule being worded in this way might be found by understanding the difference between "neighbours" and "enemies" in the Jewish way of thinking, so I studied these words.

I came to understand that "neighbour" when used by a Jew always and only means another Jew. That understanding of neighbour is what Jesus was questioning in his story of the Good Samaritan. When the Jewish lawyer asked Jesus, "Who is my neighbour?" he understood that a Samaritan could not be a "neighbour". But in the story, Jesus gave him a new understanding of the word.

So if Jesus knew the Jewish people understood the word "neighbour" from the Law of Moses to mean a person from their own country, how was he using the word "enemy"? I had a strong feeling that I knew what I would find when I went looking, and I was right. The word "enemy" is almost always used in the Gospels, not about a person who is fighting against me, but about a person who is against my country, or a danger to the people in general. (Luke 1:71-74; Matthew 22:44) With this in mind, I understood why Christ used words ("hate your enemies") that were not written in the law of Moses. He was talking about how, in the law of Moses, they were told to act toward enemies of their country. All of the stories about how they killed men, women, children, and even the animals of their political enemies were covered by Christ with the word "hate".

They killed men, women, children, and even the animals of their political enemies.

Under the old rules they had been taught to "hate" their "enemies" (by killing them), but now Christ was teaching them not to draw lines between "neighbours" and "enemies". Even in times of war, it is not right to say that the difference between the good people and the bad people rests in which country they come from.

God does not look at the borders between one country and another when he sends the rain, and we should not think of people as part of one country or another either. Love for, and pride in, one's country is the spirit behind war, that makes it all sound so good and holy. But from start to finish Christ was teaching against this kind of reasoning in all of his rules.

It was clear to the first Christians that they were not to be a part of the world's wars. These words from Origen, one of the first Christians, to Celsus, show the spirit of the first Christians:

"Celsus asks us to help the King by fighting for him and, if needed, fighting under him or even leading an army with him. Our answer is that, as we are able, we will help kings with the strength of God, and we will do it because we have been told to pray for kings and other leaders. We believe that the more we follow God, the more we will be helping the king. Our help will be even better than the help of soldiers who go out to kill the enemy. But to those enemies of the faith who ask us to take weapons and kill people, we say: Don't the priests of your religion stay home from war so that they can keep their hands free from blood? So why shouldn't we also?"

Origen finished his argument, that Christians are of more good to the country by living in peace than by fighting in wars, with these words: "No one fights better for the king than we do. But we will not fight under him, even if he tells us to."

This was the spirit of the first Christians, and their teachers had the confidence to say it to the leaders of the world at a time when hundreds and thousands of them were dying because of their faith. How different it was then to what it is now!

I had in past years believed that if everyone in the world were to be Christians it would make little difference to the way that people lived their lives here on earth. The churches would be much fuller, but life for the most part would go on the same. But now, after reading the law of Christ, and understanding that a Christian is one who obeys Christ, I could see that if we were to all obey Christ we would have nothing less than the kingdom of heaven here on earth.

All that Christ said in his teachings was trying to get people to understand this. He called on people to "Turn around! For the kingdom of heaven is here!" Over and over he would say "The kingdom of heaven is like…" and he would give a story or a teaching to help them understand. But we will never see it if we are not willing to obey him.

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