S.O.T.M. The Golden Rule [Matthew 7:12]

Stand for the reading of the word of God [Matthew 7:12]

Matthew 7:12 is the great statement of our Lord’s that has been known as and called ‘the golden rule’. This again is one of those great verses that typically is taken by itself alone and therefore can lose some of it’s true meaning and power. The first thing we must address is of course the mechanics of the verse in relationship with the rest of the sermon on the mount.

It has been said that this is a detached statement from the rest of the sermon, but the first word says otherwise. “Therefore”, we’ve addressed before, is an attaching word. Therefore always attaches what is about to be said to what has previously been said. So when our Lord says, Therefore, whatever you want men to do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets. He is still dealing with the subject of our judgment of others. He has never left that topic.

In verses 7–11 we are reminded that we need this supply of grace because of this question of judgment. Having shown us how to be blessed and how to help one another, and how to live the Christian life in its fullness, He comes back again to the original subject and says ‘Therefore’, in this matter of judgment, in this whole question of your relationship to other people, let this be the rule. We are still looking at this general subject of our judgment of others. That justifies us in saying that there is this definite unity in this chapter. It is not a detached statement, but part of a great argument which is designed to bring us into this right position with regard to this subject.

But someone may say: ‘If you say that this verse is a continuation of the theme of our judgment of others, why did He not put this statement immediately after verse 6? Why did He introduce the subject of asking, seeking, and knocking?

The answer is again not difficult. The statement at which we are now looking, which is the summing up of this whole matter of judgment, comes with much greater force when we look at it in the light of that brief statement about prayer. It is only after He has reminded us of what God has done for us in spite of our sins, and of God’s attitude towards us and God’s dealings with us, that the tremendous argument of this exhortation really comes home to us.

Here, then, we stand face to face with our Lord’s pronouncement with regard to this matter of judging others and of our relationship to them. Which we refer to as the ‘golden rule’. What an extraordinary and remarkable statement it is. It is nothing, of course, but an example or illustration of the commandments which our Lord has summed up elsewhere in the words, ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’. He is really saying that, if you having trouble as to how you should deal with others, and behave with respect to them, this is how you should act.

You do not start with the other person; you start by asking yourself, ‘What is it I like? What are the things that please me? What are the things that help and encourage me?’ Then you ask yourself: ‘What are the things I dislike? What are the things that upset me, and bring out the worst in me? What are the things that are hurtful and discouraging?’ You make a list of both these things, your likes and dislikes, and you work them out in detail—not only in deeds, but also in thoughts and in speech—with respect to the whole of your life and activities. ‘What do I like people to think about me? What is it that tends to hurt me?’

Having drawn up this list of all our likes and dislikes, when we come to deal with other people and what we have to do is say quite simply: ‘That other person is exactly as I am in these matters’. We must put ourselves constantly in their position. In our conduct and behaviour with respect to them we must be careful to do, and not to do, all the things which we have found to be pleasing or displeasing to ourselves.

‘Therefore, whatever you want men to do to you, do also to them.’ If you only do that, says our Lord, you can never go wrong.

You do not like unkind things said about you? Well, do not say them about others.

You do not like people who are difficult, and who make your life difficult, and bring problems into your life, and constantly put you on edge? Well; in exactly the same way, do not let your behaviour be such that you become like that to them.

It is quite as simple as that, according to our Lord. All the problems of human relationships in the modern world can really be reduced to that.

This is something which is of urgent importance at the present time. I think we’d agree that the great problem of the 21st century is after all the problem of relationships. Sometimes we foolishly tend to think that our national, international and other problems are economic, social or political; but in reality they all come down to this, our relationships with people.

It is a question of what I myself want, and what the other person wants; ultimately all the clashes and disturbances and unhappiness in life are due to this. And our Lord here in this statement puts the whole truth concerning this matter: ‘whatever you want men to do to you, do also to them.’ That is the final statement about this question. If only we approached it like that, starting with self and then applying it to others, the entire problem would be solved.

But unfortunately we cannot leave it at that. There are people who seem to think that this is all that is necessary. There are still people (and it is amazing that there can be such, but there are) who believe that all you have to do is just to hold up a standard before people and they will say: ‘That is perfectly right; now we will proceed to do this.’ But the world today is proving clearly that that is not the case, people will say, “all we have to do is treat people right” but yet we go on treating people wrong…if we know all we must do is treat people right and we don’t there must be more... so we must go on with our consideration.

The gospel of Jesus Christ starts on the very basis of this, that it is not enough to merely tell people the right way. That’s not the problem, it’s much deeper than that. This is how our Lord puts it...

The Golden Rule is a summary of the Law and Prophets

What does He mean by putting it like that? It is just another example of the way in which He calls attention, as He has done so frequently in this Sermon on the Mount, to the tragic manner in which God’s law has been misunderstood. He still probably has His eye on the Pharisees and the scribes, and teachers of the law and the instructors of the people. You remember how at great length in the fifth chapter He took up many points of which He could say, ‘You have heard that it was said by them of old time … but I say unto you’.

His great concern there was to give these people the right view of the law; and He comes back to it here once more. Half our troubles are due to the fact that we do not understand the meaning of God’s law, its true character and intent. We tend to think that it is just a number of rules and regulations which we are supposed to keep; we constantly forget the spirit. We think of a law as something which is to be observed mechanically, as something which is detached and almost impersonal; we regard it very much as if it were a series of regulations issued mechanically.

You get your rules and regulations and all you have to do is to carry them out. Our whole tendency is to regard God’s law with respect to life in some such way as that. Or, to put it in another form, the danger always is to regard the law as a thing in and of itself, and to think that all we have to do is to keep those regulations and that, if we do so and never deviate from them, or go beyond or stop short of them, all will be well. Now all those are entirely false views of the law.

Perhaps we can go further and say that our danger is to think of the law as being something only negative and prohibitive. Of course there are aspects of the law which are negative and prohibitive; but what our Lord is emphasizing here is—as He has said at great length in the fifth chapter—that the law which God gave to the children of Israel through the angels and Moses is a very positive thing, is a spiritual thing.

It was never meant to be mechanical, and the whole fallacy of the Pharisees and the scribes, and all who followed them, was that they reduced something that was essentially spiritual and living to the realm of the mechanical, to something that was an end in itself. They thought that as long as they had actually not murdered somebody they had kept the law concerning murder, and that as long as they had not committed physical adultery they were all right in a moral sense. They were guilty of complete failure to see the spiritual intent, to see the spiritual character of the law, and above all to see the great end and object for which the law had been given.

Here, our Lord puts all that in this perfect summary. Why does the law tell us not to covet our neighbor’s goods and possessions, or his wife, or anything else? Why does the law tell us ‘not kill’; ‘not steal’; ‘not commit adultery’? What does it mean by all this? Is it designed simply that you and I should uphold these things as rules and regulations, and control us and keep us within certain limits? No, that is not the object at all. The whole purpose and the real spirit behind the law is this, that we are to love our neighbour as ourselves, that we are to love one another.

Being the creatures that we are, however, it is not enough just to tell us to love one another; the matter has to be broken up for us. As the result of the Fall we are sinful; so it is not enough just to say, ‘Love one another’. Our Lord breaks it up, therefore, and says: As you yourself value your life, remember that the other man also values his life, and that if your attitude towards that man is right, you will not kill that man, because you know he values his life as you do yours.

The vital thing, after all, is that you love that man, that you understand him and desire the well-being of your neighbor even as you desire your own well-being. That is the law and the prophets. It all comes to that.

All the detailed regulations given in the law in the Old Testament—what it tells you to do, for example, if you see your neighbor’s ox straying, how you are to bring it back to him, or if you see anything going wrong in his farm, how you are to inform him at once and do your utmost to help him—are not just meant to lead you to say: ‘The law says that if I see my neighbor’s ox straying I am to take it back, therefore I must do so’. Not at all; it is rather that you may say to yourself: ‘This man is like myself, and it will be a great loss to him if he is going to lose that ox.

Well, he is a man like myself, and how grateful I would be if someone returned my ox to me. Therefore I will do that for him.’ In other words, you are to be interested in your neighbor, you are to love him, and to desire to help him, and to be concerned about his happiness. The object of the law is to bring us to that, and these detailed regulations are nothing but illustrations of that great central principle. The moment we cease to realize that that is the spirit of the law and the purpose of the law, we go hopelessly astray.

That, then, is our Lord’s own exposition of it. It was very necessary in His own day; it is very necessary today. We so constantly forget the spirit of the law and of life as God meant us to live it.

We are meant to apply the golden rule to our lives

People hear this golden rule and they praise it as marvellous and wonderful, and as a perfect summary of a great and involved subject. But the tragedy is that, having praised it, they do not implement it. After all the law was not meant to be praised, it was meant to be practised. Our Lord did not preach the Sermon on the Mount in order that you and I might comment upon it, but in order that we might carry it out.

That will be impressed upon us later on when He says that the man who hears these sayings and does them is like a person who builds his house upon a rock, but the other man who ‘hears and does not’ is like one who builds his house upon the sand. The modern world is like that; it admires these wonderful statements of Christ but it does not put them into practice.

That brings us to the crucial question. Why do men forsake this golden rule? Why do they not keep it? Why do they not live their lives in this way? Why are there troubles and disputes not only between nations, but also in families; in churches, yes, even between two people? Why is it that there is any dispute or quarrelling or unhappiness? Why do we ever hear of two persons who do not speak to each other, and who avoid looking at each other? Why is there jealousy and backbiting, and all the other things which we know to be so true of life?

The answer is theological and biblical. While mankind has been confronted with the golden rule for a long time but we still fail to obey it.

Why do we not practice the golden rule?

The gospel of Jesus Christ addresses this head on. The first statement of the gospel is that man is sinful and perverted. He is a creature that is so bound and governed by evil that he cannot keep to the golden rule. The gospel always starts with that. The first principle in theology is the Fall of man and the sin of man. It can be put like this. Man does not implement the golden rule, which is a summary of the law and the prophets, because his whole attitude towards the law is wrong.

He does not like the law; in fact he hates it. ‘The carnal (natural) mind is enmity against God: it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be’ (Romans 8:7). So it is useless to hold the law before such people. They hate the law, they do not want it. Of course, when they sit back and listen to an abstract statement about life as it should be, they say that they like it. But if you apply the law to them, they immediately hate it and react against it.

According to the Bible we are all like this by nature because, prior to our dislike of the law, and prior to our wrong attitude to the law, is our wrong attitude towards God Himself who has given the law. The law is an expression of God’s holy will; it is an expression in a sense of God’s own person and character. Man’s will is in bondage to sin and man dislikes the law of God because he is a natural hater of God. That is the New Testament argument: ‘The natural mind is enmity against God’. The natural man, man as he is as the result of the Fall, is an enemy, an alien from God. He is ‘without God in the world’; he dislikes God, and hates Him and everything that comes from Him. And man’s attitude towards himself is wrong. That is why all men do not by instinct and by nature hurry to carry out this golden rule.

The whole thing can be brought down to one word, ‘self’. Our Lord expresses it by saying that we should ‘love our neighbor as ourselves’. But that is the one thing we do not do, and do not want to do, because we love self so much in a wrong way. We do not do unto others as we would wish them to do unto us, because the whole time we are thinking only about ourselves, and we never transfer our thought to the other person.

That is the condition of man in sin as the result of the Fall. He is entirely self-centered. He thinks of nothing and no-one but himself, he is concerned about nothing but his own well-being. This is not my thought; it is the truth, the simple, literal truth about everybody in the world who is not a Christian; and it very often remains true even of Christians. Instinctively we are all self-centered. We are resentful of what is said and thought of us, but we never seem to realize that other people are the same, because we never think of the other person. The whole time we are thinking of self, and we dislike God because God is Someone who interferes with this self-centeredness and independence. Man likes to think of himself as completely autonomous, but God challenges that, and man by nature dislikes Him.

So the failure of man to live by, and to keep, the golden rule is due to the fact that he is self-centered. Self is in the forefront the whole time, for man wants everything for himself. Is that not the real cause of the trouble our disputes? It all really comes to that.

One side says: ‘I am entitled to have more’. The other side says, ‘Well, if he has more, I shall have less’. And so they both object to each other and there is a quarrel, because each one is thinking only of himself. If we were only honest enough to analyse our attitude towards all these things, whether political, social, economic, national or international, we should find that it all comes back to self.

You see it in the nations. Two nations want the same thing, so each one is watching the other. All nations try to see themselves simply as the guardians and the custodians of the general peace of the world. There is an element of selfishness in patriotism always. It is ‘my country’, ‘my right’; and the other nation says the same; and because we are all so self-centered there are wars.

All disputes and quarrelling and unhappiness, whether between individuals, or between divisions of society, or between nations or groups of nations, all in the end come down to just that. The solution for the problems of the world today is essentially theological. All the ideas and all the proposals about peace and happiness and everything else will come to nothing while there is sin in the human heart controlling individuals and groups and nations. The failure to implement the golden rule is due solely to the Fall and to sin.

So then...

How is it possible for anyone to implement the golden rule?

The question really is, how can our attitude and conduct ever conform to what our Lord says here? The answer of the gospel is that you must start with God. What is the greatest commandment? It is this: ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength.’ And the second is like unto it: ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself’.

You notice the order. You do not start with your neighbor, you start with God. And relationships in this world will never be right, whether between individuals, or groups of nations, until we all start with God. You cannot love your neighbor as yourself until you love God. You will never see yourself or your neighbor aright until you have first of all seen both in the sight of God. We have to take these things in the right order. We must start with God. We were made by God and for God, and we can only truly function properly in relationship to God.

So then we start with God. We turn from all the quarrelling and disputes and problems and we look into His face. We begin to see Him in all His holiness and almightiness, and power, and we humble ourselves before Him. He is worthy to be praised, and He alone. And, knowing that in His sight even nations are but as grasshoppers and like ‘dust’, we soon begin to realize that all the glory of man becomes as nothing when we truly see God.

And, in addition, we begin to see ourselves as sinners. We see ourselves as such vile sinners that we forget that we ever had any right. We certainly see that we have no rights at all before God. We are wretched, foul and ugly. That is not only the teaching of Scripture; it is amply confirmed by the experiences of all who have come to know God in any real sense. No man can really come into the presence of God without saying, ‘I am unclean’. We are all unclean. The knowledge of God humbles us to the dust; and in that position you do not think about your rights and your dignity. You have no need any longer to protect yourselves, because you feel you are unworthy of everything.

But there’s a positive in that, in turn, it also helps us to see others as we should see them. We see them now, no longer as people who are trying to rob us of our rights, or trying to beat us in the race for money, or position or fame; we see them, as we see ourselves, as the victims of sin and of Satan, and as in bondage to ‘the god of this world’, as fellow-creatures who are under the wrath of God and hell-bound apart from Christ.

We have an entirely new view of them. We see them to be exactly as we are ourselves, and we are both in a terrible predicament. And we can do nothing; but run to Christ and fall on His wonderful grace. We begin to enjoy it and we want to share it. That is how it works. It is the only way we can ever do unto others as we would that they should do unto us. It is when we are really loving our neighbor as ourselves because we have been delivered from the trap of self, that we begin to enjoy ‘the glorious liberty of the children of God’.

And of course, finally, it works like this. When we look to God and realize something of the truth about Him, and ourselves in our relationship to Him, the one thing we are conscious of is that God doesn’t deal with us according to what we deserve. That is not His method. That is what our Lord was saying in the previous verses: ‘What man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone? Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?’

God does not give us what we deserve; God gives us His good things in spite of our being what we are. He does not merely look at us as we are. Were He to do so we should all be condemned. If God saw us only as we are, every one of us would be utterly condemned for ever. But He is interested in us in spite of these externals; He sees us as a loving Father. He looks upon us in His grace and mercy. So He does not deal with us merely as we are. He deals with us in grace.

That is why our Lord kept back this argument and put it after that wonderful prayer. That is how God deals with us. ‘Now’, He says in effect, ‘you deal like that with your fellow men. Do not merely see the offensive and the difficult and the ugly. See behind all that’. Let us then observe human beings in their relationship to God, destined for eternity.

Let us learn to look at others in this new way, in this divine way. ‘Look at them’, says Christ in effect, ‘as I have looked upon you, and in the light of the thing that brought Me from heaven to earth for you, to give My life for you.’ Look at them like that. The moment you do so you will find that it is not difficult to implement the golden rule, because at that point you are delivered from self and its terrible tyranny, and you are seeing men and women with a new eye and in a different way.

You will be able to see people as Paul, You see everybody in a spiritual way. It is only when we come to this, after having started with God and sin and self and others, that we shall indeed be able to implement this amazing summary of the law and the prophets: ‘whatever you want men to do to you, do also to them’. That is the thing to which we are called in Christ Jesus. We are to implement it, we are to practise it. And as we do so we shall be showing the world the only way in which its problems can be solved. Then we will be acting as true missionaries and ambassadors for Christ.