If your right eye offends you, pluck it out and cast it from you! For it is better for you that one of the members of your body should perish than for your whole body to be cast into hell.
— Matthew 5:29; cf. v.30, also Matthew 18:8–9, Mark 9:43-47

These verses have caused Bible-believing Christians a good deal of trouble through the years. Some Bible skeptics will challenge them, saying, “If you believe the Bible but you sin, then, according to Jesus, you should dismember yourself!” Others who claim to believe the Bible try downplay the Lord’s word here, and respond by saying that Jesus doesn’t really mean we should do that, but is only speaking here in hyperbole, to stress the seriousness of sin.

In fact, Jesus did mean exactly what He said, but we have to carefully read exactly what He said to get His actual meaning.

The key is the little word, “If.”

He is saying that the problem of sin is so serious that, if we could deal with it by plucking out our eye or chopping off our hand, it would indeed be worth it; that is something serious indeed!

Yet, the Lord knows the members of our body are not the real problem; they are not really what is causing us to sin, and thus chopping them off will not save us from sin; so He is not, after all, saying we should do that. Rather, the problem is that we have the very nature of sin in our entire being (Rom. 7:14-21), and so the real way, in fact the only way, to deal with the problem of sin is by dying to ourselves in Christ and then living with Him in the power of His resurrection life (e.g., Rom. 6:1-10, 7:24-8:4). That, and not dismemberment, is the way God has provided for us to be free from sin and its dominion over us.

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—  31 March 2026 —