Jesus's Sermon on the Mount and His Confrontation with the World by D.A. Carson

A Study of Matthew 5-10

I will say right at the beginning, I have not read the whole book, but it's going to take me awhile to get through it and I wanted to get a review posted before another couple months go by.

D. A. Carson takes these chapters from Matthew section by section, sometimes verse by verse and really expounds on them and what he thinks they mean.  He has some really good things to say. I really liked what he had to say on the Beatitudes and how they build on each other. We need to first be poor in spirit before any of the other Beatitudes will even be able to be applied to us.

I haven't agreed with everything I have read in this book. As a person of Anabaptist faith, some of our principles don't jive with his, let's put it like that.

However, that being said, I was reading yesterday his explanation of Matthew 6:1 and it was so good. It's the verse that says, in the KJV, "Take heed that ye do not your alms before men to be seen of them..." But some of the other translations say "acts of righteousness" instead of alms. They broaden the idea. And here is what D.A. says about that verse, linking it back to the last verse in chapter 5 that talks about being perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect.

"We human beings are a strange lot. We hear high moral injunctions and glimpse just a little the genuine beauty of perfect holiness, and then prostitute the vision by dreaming about the way others would hold us in high esteem if we were like that. The demand for genuine perfection loses itself in the lesser goal of external piety; the goal of pleasing the Father is traded for its shrunken cousin, the goal of pleasing men. It almost seems as if the greater the demand for holiness, the greater the opportunity for hypocrisy."

I received this book from Baker Books and was not required to write a positive review.