On the Golden Rule

What to make of Matthew 7:12:

I was recently asked about the so-called Golden Rule. The person was quite right to ask a question regarding it, namely: Are we simply to do for others whatever they want to be done? A good question, and one that deserves a closer look. And the context of this passage, and the way it is written, should help us to rightly understand it.

Let me first share our brief social media exchange:

Her: Hey Bill, Aren’t we meant to treat people how we would like to be treated? I heard today it was treat people how they wanted to be treated???

 

Me: Well, the “Golden Rule” says that we should “do to others what you would have them do to you” (Matthew 7:12) – although there is more to the Christian life than just that.

 

Her: Yes but if we treat people how they want to be treated we could end up condoning things we don’t want to?

 

Me: Sure, the teaching of Jesus presumes we want to be treated rightly, properly and in a godly manner, so we are to treat others that way. But as I say, all the other teachings of Jesus also need to be considered, not just this one. It is similar to when he said we should love our neighbour as ourselves. But it is a good question you are asking. Maybe I will write an article on this!

And thus this piece. Note first of all what the passage (found in two of the four gospels) actually says:

Matthew 7:12 “So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.”

Luke 6:31 “And as you wish that others would do to you, do so to them.”

In both cases we are not to do for others whatever it is that they want done to them. For example, they might want you to lie or steal or kill for them. They might want you to supply them with illicit drugs. They might want to do something immoral with you.

Obviously Jesus did not have those sorts of things in mind. He refers to how you want to be treated. Most folks want to be treated kindly, fairly, honestly, decently and with respect. And that of course is how we should treat others. So the whole point of the Golden Rule is the good we want done to us is what we should extend to others.

And by bracketing this with the words “Law and the prophets” Jesus makes it clear that good, holy and righteous things are what we should want for ourselves, and for others. As I said above, this really is not unlike what Jesus said about the great commandments: loving God with all of our being, and loving our neighbour as ourself (Matthew 22:36-40; Mark 12:28-32; Luke 10:25-28).

In loving ourselves, Jesus does not mean living a selfish, carnal and sinful life. We should want the very best for ourselves, and that means walking in accord with God’s will for our lives. It means keeping his commandments. And this is what we should want for others. As Scot McKnight comments:

Twice Jesus probes into the essence of the Torah by appealing to self-love: here and in the Jesus Creed (22:34 – 40). As his followers were to love their neighbors as they loved themselves, so they as disciples were to do to others what they would want others to do to them. This principle is neither selfish nor narcissistic but expansive — we are to extend our self-care to others.

A few other things can be said about this. The term we now use, “Golden Rule,” is not biblical of course. It seems to have first been used of this portion of Scripture back in the Middle Ages. Also, this states in a positive form what others had already stated in a negative form. So the thought is not completely unique.

However, taken in context, it is very unique. The main theme of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7; Luke 6:20-49) is not just to show us how to live. Trying to meet the moral injunctions found there is not something that natural man can ever hope to attain. That is why this is also about God giving us the ability to live out these moral truths.

When we come to Christ in faith and repentance, we are given the Holy Spirit to live within us and help us start to live lives pleasing to him. On our own, the moral demands of the Sermon on the Mount are simply unobtainable. We need the Spirit of God in order to live up to these high moral demands.

So something like the Golden Rule is not some generic moral maxim that we can expect anyone and everyone to live up to. As with everything else we find in the Sermon on the Mount, what God commands, God empowers. The Christian can begin to live up to these lofty ethical obligations because God helps us to live them out.

In his expository commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, based on 60 sermons he preached on this portion of Scripture. Martyn Lloyd-Jones repeatedly speaks to this matter. This in part is what he says when discussing Matt. 7:12:

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. And, 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….

 

Why is this so? It is just at this point that theology comes in. 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. The moment it is applied to them they dislike it and resent it….

 

The whole thing can be brought down to one word, ‘self’. Our Lord expresses it by saying that we should ‘love our neighbour 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-centred. 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-centred. 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-centredness and independence. Man likes to think of himself as completely autonomous, but here is Someone who 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….

As I say, the good news of something like the Golden Rule in particular and the Sermon on the Mount in general is that they not only tell us what God expects of us, but God empowers us to live the way that we ought to live. They are not just pleasant and inspiring moral precepts that we can nod our heads at, but they are the commands of God which, by means of his Spirit in us, he helps us to live out.

That is the good news of the gospel.

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