Verses 25, 26.  The third part is a further exhortation to the same swiftness in casting out anger from the heart, thrown into a parabolic form.  When you quarrel with a man, says Christ in effect, prudence enjoins to make it up as soon as possible, before he sets the law in motion.  If once he, as plaintiff, has brought you before the judge, the law will go on mechanically through the stages of trial, condemnation, surrender to the prison authorities, and confinement till the last farthing has been paid.  So, if you are conscious that you have an adversary,—­and any man that you hate is your adversary, for he will appear against you at that solemn judgment to come,—­agree with him, put away the anger out of your heart at once.  In the special case in hand, the ‘adversary’ is the man with whom we are angry.  In the general application of the precept to the whole series of offences against the law, the adversary may be regarded as the law itself.  In either interpretation, the stages of appearing before the judge and so on up till the shutting up in prison are the stages of the judgment before the tribunal, not of earth, but of the kingdom of heaven.  They point to the same dread realities as are presented in the previous verses under the imagery of the Jewish courts and the foul fires of the valley of Hinnom.  Christ closes the grave parable with His solemn ’Verily I say unto thee’—­as looking on the future judgment, and telling us what His eyes saw.  The words have no bearing on the question of the duration of the imprisonment, for He does not tell us whether the last farthing could ever be paid or not; but they do teach this lesson, that, if once we fall under the punishments of the kingdom, there is no end to them until the last tittle of the consequences of our breach of its law has been paid.  To delay obedience, and still more to delay abandoning disobedience, is madness, in view of the storm that may at any moment burst on the heads of the rebels.

Thus He deepens and fulfils one precept of the old law by extending the sweep of its prohibition from acts to thoughts, by setting obedience to it above sacrifice and worship, and by picturing in solemn tones of parabolic warning the consequences of having the disobeyed precept as our unreconciled adversary.  In this one case we have a specimen of His mode of dealing with the whole law, every jot of which He expanded in His teaching, and perfectly observed in His life.

A gospel is hidden even in these warnings, for it is distinctly taught that the offended law may cease to be our adversary, and that we may be reconciled with it, ere yet it has accused us to the judge.  It was not yet time to proclaim that the King ‘fulfilled’ the law, not only by life, but by death, and that therefore all His believing subjects ’are justified from all things, from which ye could not be justified by the law,’ as well as endowed with the righteousness by which they fulfil that law in deeper reality, and fairer completeness, than did those ’of old time,’ who loved it most.