I am a Jesus pusher!!! We must continually realize Jesus never added to the Scriptures, and He did not complement the instructions of Moses. He fulfilled the Scriptures, and in doing so, He returned us to the reality of the nature of God as revealed in the Scriptures. The revelation of God’s image is the righteousness that exceeded the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees (Matthew 5:20). The scribes and Pharisees revealed a fundamental tendency of self-centeredness and self-sourcing. How could “self” live out the Law or the Prophets? Rather than live in constant guilt, they trivialized the Scriptures. The six hundred and thirteen oral traditions attempted to achieve a livable standard of the Scriptures. Many Bible scholars use a wrong approach to explain this verse: “But I say to you that whoever is angry with his brother shall be in danger of the judgment. And who says to his brother, ‘Raca’ shall be in danger of the council. But whoever says, ‘You fool!’ shall be in danger of hell fire” (Matthew 5:22). They trivialize what Jesus said, arranging the penalties to correspond precisely to the anger and insults mentioned in our passage. They propose graduated penalties or punishments to match the crimes.
The context must determine our interpretation. The Greek word “krisis,” translated as judgment, is the same word used in the previous verse related to murder (Matthew 5:21). The warning for murder being punished by death holds for anger. Therefore, the three phrases contained in our passage do not refer to three different courts: the local, the supreme, and the divine (hell). They are three expressions for the death penalty in a kind of crescendo. The outside action results from the inside spiritual state and will receive the same effect, death! My only chance is Jesus. I am a Jesus pusher!