"Again, you have heard that it was said to the people long ago, 'Do not break your oath, but keep the oaths you have made to the Lord.' But I tell you, Do not swear at all: either by heaven, for it is God's throne; or by the earth, for it is His footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. Simply let your 'Yes' be 'Yes', and your 'No', 'No'; anything beyond this comes from the evil one."
- Matthew 5:33-37 NIV
This passage is often misinterpreted to mean several different things. First of all, some people mistakenly think that Jesus is referring to what we call “cussing” or “cursing,” depending on where you live. However, He wasn’t speaking of cussing or cursing at all, but rather the actual taking of oaths.
God set up the standards for oaths in the Old Testament. Here are a couple of the statements that God makes in the Old Testament where it concerns oath-taking:
Leviticus 19:12 says, “Do not swear falsely by my name and so profane the name of your God. I am the LORD.”
Deuteronomy 23:21 says, “If you make a vow to the LORD your God, do not be slow to pay it, for the LORD your God will certainly demand it of you and you will be guilty of sin.”
Now, if God set up this standard for oaths, then why would Jesus say that we are never to take an oath? The answer lies in what the Jews, once again, had done to pervert the word of God. By the time of Christ, the Jews had an incredibly elaborate system of oath-taking. It was so convoluted and elaborate that it formed the basis of actually lying, rather than telling the truth! There were “stages” of truth, and also “stages” of telling falsehoods within that elaborate system! So Jesus was telling the people that if they were habitually truthful, they had no reason to take an oath, because others could depend upon their “yes” to mean “yes”, and their “no” to mean “no”. For a truthful person, there was no need for taking an oath, under any set of circumstances.
