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If your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off, and cast it from you: for it is profitable for you that one of your members should perish, and not your whole body be cast into Gehenna.
Verse Takeaways
1
A Call for Spiritual Surgery
Commentators are unanimous that Jesus is not commanding literal self-mutilation. Instead, He uses the shocking image of cutting off a hand to teach a vital spiritual principle: we must deal radically and decisively with anything in our lives that causes us to sin. This requires what one scholar calls "painful exertions" and a "clean sweep" of the temptation, no matter how valuable or useful it seems.
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Matthew
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8
19th Century
Anglican
If your right hand offends you — The repetition of the same warning has, in part, the emphasis of iteration, but it also points to a disti…
Baptist
The cause of offense may be active like the hand rather than intellectual like the eye, but we had better be hindered in our work …
The radical treatment of parts of the body that cause one to sin has led some (notoriously the church father Origen) to castrate themselves. But th…
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17th Century
Reformed Baptist
And if your right hand offend you Or "cause you to offend"; that is, is the means of ensnaring your heart; and of dr…
Presbyterian
Victory over the desires of the heart must be accompanied by painful exertions. But it must be done.
Everything is bestowed to save us from …
13th Century
Catholic
You have heard that it was said to them of old: You shall not commit adultery. Above, the Lord fulfilled the Law regardin…
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