In less than a year, our podcast has gone from an average of 10,000 downloads a month to 50,000

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review on your favorite podcast platform. Thanks. The kind of swearing that Jesus utterly condemns

is swearing by anything other than swearing upon the Lord, right? Swearing on the temple. And then, you know, really,

you know, the religious rulers of Jesus' day, it was like they were giving their word with

their fingers crossed behind their back, trying to escape their promises, escape their vows.

So they would say, oh, I swore by the temple, but you're not actually bound by your oath unless

you swear by the gold of the temple. Or, oh, I swore by the temple, but you're not actually bound by your oath unless you swear by the

gold of the temple. Or, oh, I swore by the altar, but you're not really bound by your word

unless you swear by the sacrifice that is laid upon the altar. And this is just what the Pharisees and

Sadducees and religious rulers of Jesus Day were doing.

They were constantly taking the commandments of God, and they were meticulously twisting them and making them, well, it's like the IRS in our day.

Right.

If you want to oppress people and you want to find a way to basically hold others bound, but you not be bound yourself,

what you do is you just extrapolate, right? You have a certain law code that's, you know,

1,500 pages long. G.K. Chesterton once famously said,

if man will not have 10 commandments, he will have 10,000 commandments.

And that's what the religious rulers of Jesus' day were doing.

And that's what rulers and tyrants continue to do in our day as well,

is they take simplicity that God speaks to us in his word.

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