Christ and the Law, Part 1

Matthew 5:17

Turn in your Bible to Matthew 5:17-20, and tonight I want us to share an opening message on one of the most marvelous passages of Scripture that we could ever study.  Let me read it to you so that your thoughts will be set, and tonight, we'll discuss the first verse. 

Our Lord says, "Do not think that I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets.  I did not come to destroy them but to fulfill them.  For assuredly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law till all is fulfilled.  Whoever therefore breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches men to do so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.  For I say to you, that unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven."

Let's pray before we study.  Father, help us tonight to be able to comprehend this deep, profound message from the Lord Jesus Christ.   Open up the eyes of our understanding, enlighten our minds and hearts that we might truly rejoice in the truth of this great word.  We give You the praise, in Christ's name, Amen.

In a recent book entitled The Interaction of Law and Religion, Harold J. Berman, who is a professor of law at Harvard University, and one of the most outstanding professors there, has developed a very significant thesis.  His thesis in the book is that Western culture has had a massive loss of confidence in law and a massive loss of confidence in religion.  He sees that one of the causes is the radical separation of one from the other, and his conclusion is that you cannot have law, or rules for behavior, without religion, because it is religion that provides the absolute base for morality and law. 

The man is not a Christian, but certainly, we would have to agree with his thesis.  He fears that Western culture is doomed to relativism in law because of the loss of an absolute.  We have broken away from religion, from the concept of God, from absolute truth, and therefore we are stuck with existential relativism when it comes to making laws.  He says that law and religion will stand together or law and religion will fall together.  Religion-less law could never command authority; there must be a transcendent value, a super-rational absolute. 

In his book, he quotes professor Thomas Frank of NYU.  Frank says, "Law has become undisguisedly a pragmatic human process.  It is made by men, and it lays no claim to divine origin or eternal validity."  This leads professor Frank to the view that a judge in a court reaching a decision is not propounding a truth but is rather experimenting in the solution of a problem.  If his decision is reversed by a higher court, or if it is subsequently overruled, that doesn't mean it was wrong, only that it was, or became in the course of time, unsatisfactory.

"Having broken away from religion," Frank states, "Law is now characterized by existential relativism.  Indeed, it is now generally recognized that no judicial decision is ever final, that the law follows the event, is not eternal or certain, is made by man and is not divine or true."

Berman goes on to say, "If law is merely an experiment, and if judicial decisions are merely hunches, why should individuals or groups of people observe those legal rules or commands if they do not conform to their own interests?"  He's right.  Why am I quoting all of that?  To tell you this: we are endeavoring, in our society, to have rules without an absolute.  Court after court after court overturns some other ruling.  When you abandon God and theology, you abandon truth.  Trying to make laws without truth or an ultimate value is impossible.  You cannot build a consistent legal system on philosophical humanism, a fluctuating, changing principle of what is right and what is wrong.

In the latest issue of Esquire Magazine, there is an article by a man named Peter Steinfels.  The article is entitled "The Reasonable Right."  He says this, "How can moral principles be grounded and social institutions ultimately legitimated in the absence of a religiously-based culture?"  The answer is that they cannot.  So some people are hinting at the issue, secular people like Steinfels and Berman and others.  The are hinting at this issue: if there is no absolute truth, and no absolute word, and no God who sets the standard, then there can be no real law.  You'll never get people to keep laws that are only judicial guesses.

So we ask ourselves, "What is the absolute source of truth?  What is the absolute standard of morality?  What is the absolute rule of justice?  Where does this evil society, floating on a sea of relativism, find its anchor?"  That's the question.  Is there a standard to live by?  Is there an absolute authority?  Is there an unchanging authority, and inviolable law? 

In the verses I just read to you from Matthew 5:17-20, we find that, indeed, there is.  That law is none other than the law of God.  Jesus said that not one jot or tittle will pass from that law until everything is fulfilled.  He did not come in any whit to set it aside but to fulfill it.  Anyone who teaches another to break the least of those commandments is the least in the Kingdom.  In other words, God has laid down an absolute, eternal, abiding law.  In fact, in John 17:17, Jesus said to the Father, "Thy word is truth." 

Recently, people have been questioning this in terms of Christianity, and more particularly, in my own case.  A lady called the other day from a magazine which will be printing another article on whether the Bible ought to be believed in terms of the home.  She said to me, "It seems to me that you don't realize times have changed.  The Bible doesn't fit today anymore."  I said, "That isn't the way it is; the way it is is that today doesn't fit the Bible anymore.  It's today that's wrong, not the Bible." 

Someone else said to me, on a radio program, "That's your interpretation.  Everyone has their own interpretation, and that's the way you interpret it."  The point is this: if the Bible confronts you where you don't want to be confronted, then say, "The Bible is out-of-date," or, "The Bible needs to be reinterpreted."  Don't face the reality that maybe you are out-of-date and need to be reinterpreted.  That's the perspective. 

People today want to reinterpret the Bible, to deny its authority.  Chapters we once believed to be written by God are now said to be written by some rabbi who added it in.  Portions of the Scripture that we don't agree with or abide by, we just shuffle off, out of the picture.  We reinterpret the verses to say what we want them to say; we say, "That's cultural and doesn't relate to today."  Anything at all to evade allowing the Bible to confront us in our time and place in the history of the world.  Jesus is saying that not one jot or tittle will pass from it, every bit of it will be fulfilled.  He did not abrogate or annul one whit of it, and anyone who teaches anyone else to disobey the smallest command in the Bible will be the least in the Kingdom of Heaven.  Nothing ever changes in the Bible, nothing! 

We will see in our study that this is Jesus' view of God's law.  By the way, whatever Jesus thinks of the Bible is what I want to think of it.  Frankly, I get weary of the fact that people are constantly overturning historical interpretations, things that the church has believed for centuries, throwing them out if they conflict with the evil of today.  They want to deny that the Bible is inerrant, they want to say, "There are errors in the Bible and that's one of them," or, "The Bible isn't really all inspired, or it certainly isn't authoritative.  It's just a cultural thing.  You can't take everything it says," so we redefine Scripture to fit our sin. 

That's what's happening in our society today.  The sad thing is, if you think it's tough on a society like ours, a secular society, to find an anchor, it's even tough on so-called Christianity because so-called Christianity is busy about denying the Bible.  Without an absolute base, there will be no standard of behavior, and we will drift along like the world - without an anchor. 

This Scripture is so very important because here, our Lord tells us that we have an absolute, we have an inviolable authority.  "Let it speak," He's saying.  "Let it speak and shatter you, and crush your evil ways.  Let it overturn your disobedient lives, let it make you face God nose-to-nose and either accept or reject His will and take the consequences."  He said, "The Bible is an absolute."  That was His view, and it has to be our view.  To remove the absolute character of the Bible, to say it has errors in it, to say it isn't authoritative, to say it needs to be reinterpreted is simply to drift with the world away from any standard of righteousness. 

In this passage, Jesus presents what He thinks of God's Word.  Of course, for Him, at this time, God's Word really was comprised of the Old Testament.  So this is Jesus' perspective on the Old Testament.  We want to ask some interesting questions.  Jesus said that not one jot or tittle will pass away but that He had come to fulfill it. 

Immediately, we say, "Is the Old Testament binding on the Christian?  How much of it is binding for the Christian?  Is the Old Testament totally commanded of us?  Do we have to fulfill all those things?  How important are all those things?"  These are vital questions, and Bible students and scholars have wrestled with these questions for years and years, and I think that here, Jesus gives us a wonderful answer.  You can understand it, and you'll see it as we move along.

Let me set the scene for you.  Christ had appeared in Israel; He appeared rather suddenly, startlingly, in a dramatic way.  For 30 years, He had been there, but no one really knew about it.  He was in obscurity in Nazareth, but all of a sudden, at His baptism, He hit the scene.  The first 30 years of His life on earth had been lived in privacy outside his own little circle; He had done little traveling and attracted very little attention.  But as soon as He appeared in public and was baptized, the eyes of everyone were fixed on Him.  Even the leaders of Israel had to focus in on Him and look at Him and hear Him and watch Him. 

Of course, His meekness and beautiful humility made Him easily distinguishable from the rest of the leaders in Israel who were proud, boastful, hypocritical, always looking for some way to lift themselves up, some way to aggrandize themselves.  His call to repentance and His proclamation of the Gospel and His announcement of a Kingdom made people listen, and made them wonder, "What kind of a ruler is this?  What kind of a prophet is this?"  Was He a revolutionary?  He was so different.  What was His attitude toward the Mosaic Law? 

You see, the issue is that Jesus didn't sound like the Pharisees, and He didn't sound like the scribes.  He didn't sound like anyone they were hearing in their day, and their natural reaction was to wonder whether He was really and Old Testament prophet or not.  He didn't echo the prevailing theology of His day; He refused to identify Himself with any of the sects of His time.  His preaching was so different from that of the Pharisees and scribes that people were inclined to think that He intended to subvert the authority of the Word of God and substitute His own.  He threw over all the traditions of men; all the extraneous, legalistic rules, He disregarded.  He kept putting an emphasis on inward morality.  He was a friend of publicans and sinners and all the worst riffraff in the society. 

He proclaimed grace and dispensed mercy, and their natural reaction was, "Is this a revolutionary new thing?  I mean, He doesn't sound like the rest of the people we hear, like the scribes and Pharisees," so they were wondering, "Is He tearing down the Old Testament?  Is He destroying all the absolutes of the Mosaic Law?  Is He removing the foundations for some new thing?"  After all, it is the way of most revolutionary leaders to sever all ties with the past and do everything they can to completely repudiate the traditions that have gone before.

By the way, for a long time in Israel, there were certain people who believed the Messiah would do just that.  There were some who believed the Messiah would radically overturn the Old Testament.  These were sort of the anti-Pharisees.  They were somewhat sickened by the Pharisees, and they were looking for a time when Messiah came and threw out all that law stuff.  They were thinking, "Maybe this is the one.  Maybe He'll come in with radical changes, overthrow the ancient order of legalistic religion."  So they were wondering, and rightly so - we can understand that.  "Does this teacher believe in the Holy Writings?  Does He believe in Moses?  Does He believe in the prophets and the law in all of its fullness?" 

After all, where all the scribes and Pharisees were always expounding the law, Jesus wouldn't do that.  He was busy talking about grace and mercy.  Where the Pharisees and Scribes were binding the law on people, He was busy forgiving people.  Where they were always talking about the outside, He was always talking about the inside.  He even blasted away at some of the most sacred of their traditions.  Is this a new theology? 

Right here, Jesus puts it all into perspective.  What He says, in effect, is this, "This is nothing new at all.  I am going to reiterate to you and I'm going to fulfill the whole Old Testament law.  I will not set aside one jot or one tittle of that law until all of it is fulfilled."  So the amazing manifesto of the King is in direct confrontation to their thinking.  He wouldn't lower the standard, He would raise it where it belonged. 

What had happened was this: their thinking was that the standard was so high, someone would have to lower it.  His thinking was that it had been dragged down so low, someone had to raise it again.  Why?  They had turned an internal law into an external thing.  He was going to drive it back inside where it belonged.  In fact, He had a greater commitment to the law of God than the most scrupulous scribe or Pharisee.  So He proceeds in this passage to support the authority of the whole Old Testament.

It bothers me when people don't read, study, or know the Old Testament.  It is the foundation of the New Testament.  It is very important, and Jesus is supporting that Old Testament.  In fact, He says, "I am not the one denying the Old Testament, the Jewish leaders are."  That's the historical scene.  First of all, I gave you a theme to look for in this, the establishing of an absolute law.  Then I gave you some historical setting, now let me put you into the context of Matthew 5.

In a sense, these verses flow out of what has gone before.  In verses 3-12, we have the Beatitudes.  You'll remember that is a list of the characteristics of a son of God, characteristics of one who lives in the Kingdom, characteristics of a believer.  So in verses 3-12, we have what we are as Kingdom sons; this is what we are.  In verses 13-16, we are told how we are to live; this is who we are, this is how we live.  In other words, in one sense, we have a very doctrinal definition, in another one, a very practical issue of how we live. 

So Jesus comes on the scene and in His first sermon, He says, "If you're in My Kingdom, this is who you are, this is how you act."  Immediately, the question comes up in my mind, "I read the Beatitudes, and isn't easy to be like that.  I've read verses 13-16 about being salt and light, and it isn't easy to live like that.  How can we be that?  How can we live that way?"  The answer comes immediately in verse 17, "You must uphold the word of God." 

The Word of God, then, becomes the standard of righteousness.  The Word of God give the guidelines, the principles, the requirements.  How can we really live out a righteous life, how can we live out the Beatitudes, how can we be salt and light?  Certainly not by lowering the standard.  Certainly not by dropping the law of God and saying that it isn't binding anymore.  We can't say that we'll just love each other and waltz along, doing our thing.  No, the standard stays where it was.

How can we live as salt and light?  How can we be all we have to be?  By keeping God's principles of absolute obedience to an absolutely authoritative Word of God.  In contrast, by the way, to the theology of the day, which only obeyed what it wanted to obey. 

So the Lord introduces that thought here.  And it is a powerful thought, that the key to a righteous life is keeping the Word of God.  That's why He says in verse 20 that the kind of righteousness the Pharisees have will never cut it, unless your righteousness exceeds theirs.  Why?  Theirs was external and based on the traditions of men.  "Mine," He says, "Is internal, based on the eternal law of God."  That's the difference. 

So if we're to be salt and light, we must be righteous, truly righteous.  The only way to have a true righteousness is to go beyond the phony externalism of the scribes and Pharisees to an inward righteousness that is only wrought in you by the power and authority of the Word of God.  So the Word of God is the basis for a righteous standard, and God never changed it.  When Jesus came, He didn't abrogate the Old Testament, He just restated its absolute, binding character. 

People say, "What about later on in the chapter, where He says, 'You have heard it said, but I say,' isn't He adding to the Old Testament?  Isn't He changing the Old Testament?"  No.  What He is doing is simply restating God's original intention because the rabbis had so perverted the Old Testament that He has to raise the standard back up to where God put it in the first place. 

Look at the text; I want you to see here Jesus laying down the law.  Jesus is saying, "Here is the absolute, here is the standard for righteousness," and there are four points.  We're only going to look at the first one tonight, but I want to give them to you.  Jesus says these four things about the law: the preeminence of the law, the permanence of the law, the pertinence of the law, and the purpose of the law. 

As I said this morning, theses verses are so loaded that it's like trying to drink out of a fire hose.  They are just absolutely loaded with truth, filled with truth.  There is no conceivable way that our minds can even handle one one-hundredth of what is in these words, but I want to us to take a leap in the dark and see if we can't land on something exciting.

This is Jesus' view of Scripture, and that settles it for me; whatever Jesus thought of the Bible, that's what I think.  Point one will be all for tonight - the preeminence of the law in verse 17.  "Think not that I have come to destroy the law and the prophets.  I have not come to destroy, but to fulfill."  To Jesus, God's law, God's Scripture, the Word of God was absolutely preeminent, first-place, unequaled. 

     Notice He begins by saying, "Think not," and that's exactly what they were doing.  They were thinking, "Oh, well, He's here.  He'll set the laws aside and all of those things aside."  He's saying, "On the contrary; I will not lower the standard one whit."

We know from some Jewish writings that are available to us that many of the Jews expected the Messiah to annul the law.  They misinterpreted Jeremiah 31:31, where it says, "Behold I will make a new covenant," and they thought the new covenant would nullify everything that God had established in the old, but they were wrong. 

Jesus came along and said, "I am introducing a new order."  He told them even to disregard the Sabbath; He violated many of their traditions, and it was natural for them to think of that.  He rather ruthlessly swept away their traditions and tithings of minuscule things; He mocked their constant washings.  He disregarded their oral and scribal law; He interpreted the written law in a totally different way than they did.  He spoke as one having authority, but in no way was He revolting from the Old Testament; in no way was His gospel a gospel of indulgence. 

Let me tell you, if you're a Christian today, God has not set aside His principles.  There are still the same.  In fact, Jesus lifted up the law and the Old Testament so high that He wound up exposing all the Pharisees and the scribes as hypocrites, didn't He?

In verse 20, He goes right after them.  "Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter into My Kingdom"  In chapter 6, He says essentially the same thing in verse 1, "Take heed that you do not do your alms before men to be seen by them."  Verse 5, "When you pray, you shouldn't pray as the hypocrites, who love to pray standing in the synagogues and the corner of the street, that they may be seen of men."  Verse 16, "When you fast, don't be like the hypocrites, of a sad countenance."  In other words, "Whatever your righteousness is, it should be on the inside, and not on the outside.  Not the phony hypocrisy of an external religion."

In Matthew 15:1, He essentially says the very same thing; in fact, He goes through the whole book of Matthew saying it.  "Then came to Jesus scribes and Pharisees," and down in verse 7, He talks to them.  "You hypocrites, well that Isaiah prophesied of you, saying, 'This people draws near to me with their mouths, honoring me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.'  You hypocrites," He said. 

Matthew 16:1, "The Pharisees and Sadducees came, testing Him, desiring that He would show them a sign."  Verse 3, "You hypocrites," He says again.  Matthew 22:18, Jesus fills out Matthew's thought, "Jesus perceived their wickedness and said, 'Why do you test me, you hypocrites?'"  Finally, in chapter 23, He goes through the entire chapter, and I can't read it all to you, calling them hypocrites in verses 13, 14, 15, 25, 27, and 29.  I mean, He was really after them.

Every once in a while, someone will come along and say, "Brother MacArthur, sometimes you come across negatively."  You'd better believe I come across negatively!  I'm in good company.  Sometimes you have to come across negatively.  If you're going to lift the standard of God high, then you're going to expose everything that is phony, right?  That's what Jesus did.

So He arrives and opens up His sermon by saying, "Here's my standard of righteousness, and here's how you live in the world, and the base of it all is to be obedient to God's inviolable and unchanging law."  Anyone who doesn't live by God's standards, who substitutes a man-made system, is no more than a spiritual phony. 

Let's go back to verse 17.  "Think not that I have come to destroy the law."  He says, "I didn't come to destroy it."  The word is kataluo and it means 'abrogate, destroy, nullify.'  In a physical sense, the word is used of pulling down a wall or smashing a house to the ground.  He didn't come to smash down the Old Testament or pull it to pieces.  By the way, that word is applied to the temple, and it is applied, in II Corinthians 5, to the body.  It is used in a physical sense of the breaking down, or destruction, of a building or a body.  Here, in the spiritual sense, He didn't come to destroy the law.

Figuratively, the word kataluo is used in Romans 14:20 and again in Acts 5:38 to mean 'come to naught, to render useless, to nullify, to annul, to disallow.'  Jesus said, "I didn't come to do that, but I came to fulfill the law."  People, if you can just get a little bit of what I'm going to say now, I think it will crack open a whole comprehension of the Old Testament that you may never have had in your life. 

     To our Lord Jesus Christ, the new covenant did not throw away the old covenant; it did not annul everything.  It was fulfilled, and that's different.  He didn't come to tear it down, He came to fulfill it.  That's very different, and what our Lord is saying is that the law is preeminent; nothing surpasses it or takes its place, and He gives three reasons in this verse.

Reason number one is that it is authored by God.  "Think not that I have come to destroy the law," and He uses the definite article 'the.'  They knew which law He meant, He meant the law of God.  It goes without saying, and they knew what He was talking about.  He was talking about the law of God, the law which was authored by God.  In Exodus, where God first laid down the Decalogue, The 10 Commandments, listen to how it begins.  "And God spoke all these words, saying, 'I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.'"  That's the way He begins, "I am the author of law, and I am the Lord your God."  The law is inviolable, the law is binding because God is the author of that law. 

In fact, in verse 3, He says, "You will have no other gods before me," in other words, "This law will be the only law because I am the only God."  Listen, beloved, He said of Himself, "I am the Lord, I change not."  So the law of God is not some kind of changing mode of human opinion, designed to fit the whims of every society.  The law of God is not something you just adjust and adapt to whatever sin is going on in your day. 

The law of God never changes.  They are God's standards, and the first commandment is this: I am the Lord your God, and you will have no other gods before me.  This is an uncompromising standard based on the fact that He is the absolute sovereign and only God.  This is not an obscure idol or remote deity, this is the holy, only God of the universe.  He has created all things and all laws to govern them, so they are binding.  By the way, God is still alive, right?  His rules are still the same; His nature is unchanged and His laws remain. 

Let's be spec