Book by Book · New Testament
The first book of the New Testament, written to show that the long-promised king had come.
Matthew writes for readers who knew the Hebrew scriptures well, and he keeps pointing back to them. Again and again he stops to say that something happened to fulfill what the prophets had spoken. The effect is a careful case, laid out for people waiting on an old promise: this Jesus is the king the prophets pointed toward, and the kingdom he announces has quietly arrived.
Much of the book is teaching, gathered into five long stretches. The most famous is the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus describes what life in that kingdom actually looks like. It is plainer and harder than people expect. He is less interested in outward performance than in the heart underneath it, and he keeps pressing past the letter of a rule to the thing it was always meant to protect.
One small example sits in that sermon. People in his day padded their promises with oaths, swearing by heaven or earth or the temple to prove they meant it. Jesus tells them to stop. A person whose word is good does not need the scaffolding.
Let what you say be simply 'Yes' or 'No'; anything more than this comes from evil.
— Matthew 5:37 (ESV)
The point is not a rule about oaths so much as a picture of an honest person. If your plain word can be trusted, you do not need to dress it up. The padding exists to cover for speech that might not hold, and Jesus would rather have the kind of speech that holds.
We think about that line often, because the easiest thing for a tool that speaks is to sound more certain than it is. Most of the technology being aimed at churches answers every question with the same smooth confidence, padding a guess until it sounds like knowledge. That is its own kind of oath-swearing, the scaffolding standing in for a word that might not hold.
So we built ours to keep its yes a yes. It answers only from what your church has actually said, it shows where the answer came from, and when it does not know, it says so plainly rather than reaching for something that sounds sure. We would rather it gave you a small honest no than a confident answer it could not stand behind.
Plain speech turns out to be a high standard, for people and for the things they build.
Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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